hgorback Annotations

My interdisciplinary constitution screamed through most of this piece, which was both exciting and frustrating as a fan of Wilson's other work. 

Nearly every page had at least one, usually more, comments in the margins, crying, "This is evolutionary psychology...Yes, this is literally what evolutionary psychology posits...Why aren't you citing Derrida's Sign & Play, différance? Where are the references to Deleuze, lines of flight and the plane of consistency, the body without organs? I know she knows these guys!" What about Cull's differential presence as the encounter of difference, "forcing thought through rupture, rather than communicating meanings through sameness" published two years prior? (Cull, 2009, How Do You Make Yourself a Theater Without Organs?).

Why aren't people reading outside their field? One good Buss or Kenrick/Schaller/Neuberg article could have substantiated the entire discussion of the link between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

I also don't understand why she uses the term 'incompatibilities' when referring to neuroscience and psychoanalysis - this is a rather dualistic, dichotomous, exclusive way of thinking of these two sciences. Are they really incompatible if they are ultimately combinable in the new way she proposes? What exactly is incompatible between them? What is wrong with a core compatibility between them? 

So, a question for Mike, am I reading Wilson the way I initially read Derrida? Critiquing and (dis)rearticulating others but not really saying anything new? Is that the point? Am I reacting to the exact intent of the writing, to make me mad about what I thought I already knew?! Ha.

So much of this dialogue mirrors the conceptual un-framework of A Thousand Plateaus, she is clearly in agreement with much of those concepts but I just don't understand how she is saying anything different or new:

• [149] "the lines of fissue, the inconsistencies, flaws, and fractures that such alchemy must inevitably generate" - - lines of flight, différance
• [150] "but of being somewhat undone in the presence of the other...capable of tolerating, even enjoying and promoting, the process of being unbottoned." - - this, again, feels more or less like...well...actually I think what I'm remembering here is from Wiegman and Wilson, so maybe this belongs elsewhere in my response, ha!
• [165] "stimulus, body, and emotion...already psychosomatically entangled...coterminous (simultaneous) events?" - - Is this not rhizomatics? 
• [166] "The play of differing–and indeed conflicting–perspectives is a necessary condition for the emergence of new ideas and practices in any field." Barbabra Herrnstein Smith, 2006 - - is this not just différance or lines of flight along the plane of consistency?

And is evocative of Lacan (obviously):

• "If we think of the unconscious as a 'second text' it is one that is personal for sure, but at the same time is a kind of lost, censored, or crossed-out discourse. It won't fit our view of a first-person narrative in a way that can be articulated with a wish. This second text is inscribed, but we need to look for its inscription in strange places, which he says may range from the body, memories, distortions of memories, semantic evolution, and cultural traditions." (Ecrits, 259, cited in Hewitson, 2017)

I neglected to write about this in my Hewitson annotations, but the discussion of those LoF type moments - "small, discreet failures and compromise formations (garbled words, slip-ups, contradictory ideas, and so on) that emerge in what Laplanche calls certain 'load-bearing points'" - really grabbed me as well. I think because this is essentially what I look for in my everyday interactions with others as well as subjects of my anthropological and research interests. The Freudian slips, if you will, that allow, for a split second, a glimpse behind the facade of composure and intentionality most individuals attempt to express. These slips, garbles, lines of flight, load-bearing points, what have you, are the most interesting moments, the ones in which the unconscious slips through and reminds us that despite our attempts, meaning is not fixed, thought is not exact. 

• "it is not the effect of meaning that is operative in interpretation, but rather the articulation in the symptom [or dream] of signifiers (without meaning at all) that have gotten caught up in it" (Lacan, cited in Hewitson, 2017)

I did enjoy the bottom of 163:

• "The unconscious (or the state of being unconscious) is a plastic system of neurological traces that have been rearranged into networks that are not anatomically locatable...and are cut off from external reality. Cognitive behavioral therapies won't work on these networks because they don't bear any direct relation to the conscious experiences that initially provoked them...the experience has gotten lost and forms an unconscious internal reality...another neurological scene: it is part of the general play...but it is not directly mapable with them."

Which seems to track with the Hewitson's LaPlanche-Lacan-Freud combinatorial conclusions about the distinct (un)reality of the unconscious. 

Wilson's final thought was, in my opinion, actually quite delicious:

• [166] "we need to keep in mind that the more things correspond in a linear fashion, the more they line up, match up, and ratify each other, the less we have moved from the place where we began."

For this articulation, I can give Wilson a higher mark. This feels like a new interpretation of the plane of consistency, a different way of imagining the opposite of différance or lines of flight. But also more or less confirmation bias, no? The more we identify 'things' with 'things' we were looking for or already believe, 'things' which fit the narrative we are trying to assert, the less we actually know, discover, progress, or can say is true.