Black Hole Materialism

Gamble, Christopher N.; Nail, Thomas

doi:10.20415/rhiz/036.e08

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The image, once the function of the brain scanner and its effect on the scanned, enacts in the body the same reciprocal, generative movement that Bataille suggests animates the form of all things. As Neil Gamble and Nail (2020) say when peering into outer space, "black holes are neither passive matter nor empty voids but active processes" (v). Or, as Bataille says: the anus is a volcano of the earth (7).…”

Section: The Scanner As a Sex Pistonmentioning

confidence: 99%

The brain is a blinding light: How neuroscience (re)plays a parody of The Solar Anus

Gruber¹

2021

Rhizomes

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This essay turns to Georges Bataille's The Solar Anus to expose the brain of the contemporary neurosciences as a parody. The brain plays the light of consciousness illuminated in the penetrating glow of the brain scanner but cannot recognize itself in the brightly colored image. Bataille's critique of Western philosophy and its pursuit of totality amid helpless partiality and mindless materiality proves fitting to today's "neuroeverything." The essay ends with the suggestion, following Bataille, that scholars and artists can perform the parody to push neuroscience to pore over its repressions and re-gear its penetrative pistons on transformative action, pursuing a creative study of bodily generativity, the only visible alternative to the solar anus of blinding light.Anyone familiar with Georges Bataille's (1931) work The Solar Anus can immediately venture a guess as to the title. The brain as a blinding light signals a brain over-exposed and parodying itself when illuminating its flesh as the light of consciousness in the brightly colored image constructed by the suffocating black hole of the brain scanner. The brain begs for more real and ever greater exposure of a processural existence in static representations of itself. The brain searches for some connection between the body and experience while yet claiming to be both one and the same. In this, the brain calls up from the grave Bataille's insistence that philosophers and artists alike "slavishly invert" their own ideas and "their power is turned upon itself as selfdestruction" (Grindon, 2010, 306). Neuroscience seems a good example as the motive is to explain the totality of human experience through only what is seeable and countable, but the practice ends up always looking around for something else to count, demanding the light of physicalism while never illuminating the first-person experiences of brain states. Mentalizing makes a mockery of microscopic neuronal mapping. Affective outbursts exceed the analytical lens. Consequently, although upheld as the disciplinary embodiment of objective data, the neuroscientific brain, as "The Brain" of authority, winds up being composed as Man, a mirror, an addict, and a psychopath.The inescapable reflex of intellectual reversals gestures toward a bodily condition that parallels the brain's assertion of superiority and independence from the body. That is to say, the trap of the academic parody that Bataille highlights in The Solar Anus also exposes a body fashioned by environments while walking about the earth as if independent. The walking itself, the mechanics of the animal, the tromping around the mucky pond, and the eating and the breathing, of course, undermine the delusion of independence. The body seems to absorb this broader parodic situation when it opines to open and expose itself to an outside while simultaneously clinging to its own fleshy repressions that seal it off and allow it to protect an experience of cohesion and definition.

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Section: The Scanner As a Sex Pistonmentioning

confidence: 99%