Adrian Johnston
speaker
618 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Jan 2020
Adrian Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I think that Zizek's intuition that we've just been talking about, that he tends to articulate in a very big picture, very broad fashion, I think works even better if you zero in on the interface between a theory of subjectivity
as both he and I are after philosophically, and neurobiology in particular, with the brain as, you know, you might say the part of physical reality, you know, or nature is dealt with by the natural sciences, most directly relevant to ourselves as subjects.
And, you know, here, you know, I think that, you know, the idea that we often have is that, oh, well, you know, as living beings, we're organisms.
And of course, even the etymology of the word organism has to do with organization.
And that means that our bodies are these elegantly designed, even if not by an intelligent designer, only by, you know, the forces of evolution working over the arc of natural history.
That ourselves, including our central nervous systems, these are organic in the sense of they're wholes or totalities where all of the parts work together smoothly and in a synchronized manner to create a functional whole.
And for me, one thing that is important about especially psychoanalysis is that when it comes to our mindedness, to our psychical subjectivity, one of the fundamental features of Freud's perspective that is bequeathed to everyone after him in analysis, including Lacan,
is that we are, as you might say, creatures of conflict, that our psyches are structured around various antagonisms and that clashes between different emotions, motivations, and cognitions, that these sorts of conflicts that we have are really the fault lines around which our mindedness or our subjectivity even takes shape.
And I think that when you look at what neurobiology for the past few decades has been doing is that whether, you know, self-consciously or not, and it varies depending on, you know, the particular neurobiologist you're dealing with, that there's an awareness that, you know, not only is the brain not really all that unified, that it consists of a diverse array of systems and subsystems, but that these things can often come into conflict with each other, can be very mismatched and out of sync.
I mean, the most glaring example would be
the tensions between evolutionarily archaic brain stems and evolutionarily very recent neocortices.
but there are other versions of this too.
And that evolution doesn't demand that we have, for instance, optimally integrated and maximally functional central nervous systems.
It has a relatively low bar to clear, which is basically good enough to survive long enough to reproduce.
But that can allow for, so long as it's not detrimental to
population level uh reproduction numbers you know that can allow all of these you know you might say bugs glitches uh you know uh suboptimal uh you know kluge like uh you know arrangements of elements of even our bodily being to persist and so i'm interested in in a way looking at how
it might be that certain features of our minded subjectivity are dependent upon the suboptimal glitch ridden configuration of our bodies as biology and especially neurobiology portrayed them.
And so drawing this link between the psychoanalytic emphasis on conflict or dysfunction generated by tensions between incompatible elements
Being something which we see show up even on the side of the underlying bodily basis for all of this in the guise of the human central nervous system.
Well, here, interestingly, drive theory cuts both ways and in a way that's appropriate because for Freud,
Showing 561–580 of 618 · page 29 of 31
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