In light of the promising strides we have taken of late toward a synthetic grammar encompassing the characteristic operations common to classical symbological narrative, "weak" symbological narrative, and neurosymb(-p)ological discourse, I would like to propose a formula whose resemblance to what Prandleforth recently identified as "the main aporia of neurosymbology" will be obvious. I will call this the First Antinomy of Symb(-p)ological Reason, and phrase it as follows:
Thesis: The predictive models of behavior permitted by the presumption of VED as the basic substrate of human motivation render the subject transparent to himself* and to others.
Antithesis: The presumption of VED as the mechanism underlying all human behavior implies a concealed substrate unavailable to the subject through through mere introspection or observation of the phenomenal stratum of his behavior. Therefore, it renders the subject no longer transparent to himself.
In other words, VED is universally used, across the political spectrum, as the basis of policy arguments and marketing strategies alike, and provides the unquestioned basis of most pop sociology and economics. It is therefore understood to provide and widely accepted as providing a sufficient account of human experience and motivation, and in certain spheres this is acknowledged publicly and openly with no apparent discomfort or shame. On the other hand, VED appears in many areas of discourse as a crafty secret sharer, providing the dark, unacknowledged truth of our actions, altruistic or unselfish as they may seem. For example, opponents of everything from vaccines to abortion tend to impute VED motives to their purveyors in order to unmask the secret, craven motives underlying their participation in an allegedly sinister practice. The resonance of such arguments, as indicated by their prevalence, suggests that VED requires a logic of supplementarity: it is taken by the collective social imaginary as as both sufficient and complete, and in need of a supplement, which would be identical with precisely that which is absent in the motives of those we stigmatize with the accusation of VED, even as we unquestioningly proceed as though we assume VED as the unproblematic explanans of all behavior.
At this point, I would like to pause and preface my further considerations with the following hypothesis: symb(-p)ological discourse consists in the elaboration of imaginary resolutions of the aporia deriving from the First Antinomy.
David Brooks's hot-off-the-press essay "Social Animal" provides us with a helpfully succinct illustration of the operation I am attempting to map out. Since Prandleforth has already provided us with an incisive rhetorical analysis of this veritable concrete universal of neurosymb(-p)ological discourse, I would only like to add the following: Brooks's early twenty-first century bourgeois everyman, Harold, recognizes himself as the subject of VED, understands his motives to be fully transparent to introspection, and is distressed by the resulting sense of being "shallower than [he] need[s] to be" because he perceives acquisition of wealth and consumption as the be all and end all of his existence qua homo economicus. "His superhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety" because he "is inarticulate about the things that matter most." This is precisely the scenario that demands, here as throughout the body of discourse whose many forms we have been characterizing on this blog, what we might call the symbological supplement: the unveiling of an allegedly previously concealed realm of values, experiences, and motivations that, in fact, result in the reinstatement of the unsatisfactory realm of experience they were supposed to supplant, now understood as necessary and transcendent rather than contingent and accidental. Harold's enlightenment proceeds through the pedagogical project of neuroscience, conceived and presented by Brooks purely in its ideological dimension (that is, what is of value about neuroscience and related areas of research is that they provide the possibility of suturing the gap between the experience of VED as transparency and autonomy and the experience of VED as "shallowness" and mystification). After his conversion at the hands of the motorcycle-riding Russian folk dance enthusiast neuroscientist, Harold can resume being what he has already been. In becoming transparent to himself (through neurosymbology's account of why the things he was doing already constitute the natural and necessary form of his existence, as programmed by evolution and early neurological development), he learns how he may again take satisfaction in his non-transparency to himself (in "situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, and tasks," a.k.a. late capitalism's endless varieties of consumption). The symbological supplement, then, furnishes the subject of late capitalism with a form of imaginary self-transparency adequate to and consistent with his continued acceptance of the sufficiency and normativity of VED.
A further way of explaining the symbological resolution of the First Antinomy proceeds via Prandleforth's recent narrative analyses of the bifurcation of the subject of late capitalism, as represented and interpellated by symbological discourse, into the "subject of symbology" and the "subject of fun." To summarize Prandleforth's conclusions, the "subject of symbology" is, precisely, the subject of VED conceived as entirely transparent to him- or herself**, while the "subject of fun" is the subject of VED for whom the "fun" consists precisely in a supposed temporary suspension of the imperatives of VED and a concomitant loss of the sense of self-transparency continuous with the assumption of VED. It would be tempting to propose that the subject of symbology stands as the desired product of the interpellation carried out by symbological narrative, that is, it serves as the point of identification for the subject in its attempt to fully assume the superego injunction to enjoy, while the subject of fun serves merely as the vehicle for this operation (and this is certainly an important part of the story, as Prandleforth's most recent posts have suggested); and yet, it is important to emphasize that symb-pological discourse, at least in what I have called its (A) iteration, proceeds in precisely the opposite direction, enjoining the reader/viewer to fully abandon the fantasy of transcendent subjectivity known as Orthognosis (whose underlying identity with the self-transparency of the subject of VED I demonstrated with regard to Avatar), and effectively reassume the position of the "subject of fun" who ceases to require of himself the introspective self-transparency at precisely the point at which he remarks: "who cares about all that New Age/conspiracy theory/dream nonsense, it was a good read/entertaining movie." The point here, though, is that VED is revealed to be the truth of OG, just as OG is revealed to be the truth of VED in a kind of mutual transfiguration nicely concretized in the closing scene of Avatar, in which we witness, as I argued previously, the apotheosis of the "deracinated, 'wired' subject of late technoscientific capitalism" in the form of the Na'vi ritualistic mind-meld.
Now, we have already established elsewhere that the symb-pologist's primary task is to articulate the cop-out's implication of strong irrelevance and oblige the reader to adopt the appropriately indifférant (in other words, "fun-loving") stance. The viewer/reader's resumption of his prior position as subject of fun through narrative identification with the subject of symbology, of course, leaves him conveniently ripe for the consumption of more symbological discourse, in which the structuring dialectic of self-transparency and self-opacity can be rehearsed once again. The foregoing has suggested that this "movement of spirit" can proceed by several different and equally effective paths. If, as we have already asserted previously, weak symbological narrative is distinguished in part by the fact that some explicit form of VED retains an explicit presence in the narrative, it allows the reconciliation of the "subject of fun" (unselfaware subject of VED) with the "subject of symbology" (self-transparent subject of VED) to be accomplished efficiently and with a minimum of risk that the concluding OG position be perceived as anything other than the truth of VED. Strong symbological narrative, on the other hand, enacts a more capacious supplementation of VED in its proliferation of idiotic pseudo-knowledge and therefore achieves a more decisive recontainment at the probably worthwhile cost of an increased risk (hence, it is worth noting, the greater potential for strong symbology to generate symb-pology [B], and the greater necessity for particularly strident statements of symb-pology [A]).
I will close, then with the following propositions:
1) Weak symbology, like most instances of (neuro-)symb-pology, interpellates the subject of symbology through identification with the subject of fun. In other words, it functions by engaging with the supposed introspective self-awareness of the reader/viewer in order to instruct him to enjoy, and presents this "fun"/"immersion directly in the river" as the necessary consequence of the fuller awareness provided by the symbological supplement.
2) Strong symbology interpellates the subject of fun through identification with the subject of symbology. That is to say, the reader/viewer's "fun" consists in his fusion with the fantasy of transcendent subjectivity (distributed in some form along the MGCGOG continuum) pursued in the narrative, a fantasy which he ideally concludes by identifying with the given facts of his existence qua VED subject of late capitalism.
3) These operations are mutually complementary and mutually reinforcing. Indeed, as I believe we are beginning to substantiate, they both form (essential components of) a system of meaning (synchronically) and constitute and deliver forms of experience that require a potentially endless stream of further supplementation via related cultural products drawn from the constellation to which they belong.
In the name of advancing the systematicity of our inquiries, I hope to comment soon on the impressive recent contribution of my colleague Twinglebrook-Hastings to the elaboration of the long-neglected area of paragnosis, particularly in relation to our productive ongoing interrogation of VED.
*I use the masculine pronoun in reference to the subject of fun/symbology advisedly, as the discourse in question makes explicit that the female subject position we have O(f) by definition cannot experience a traumatic gap between her awareness of VED and her assumption of VED. Tom Martin's Kingdom and Julia Navarro's The Bible of Clay are, of course, the most daring treatments to date of the problem of feminine indifférance in symbological discourse.
**On the other hand, I am being gender neutral here because the position O(f) may, in fact, stand in for the subject of symbology qua subject fully transparent to introspection. The O(f), on the other hand, may not respond to the radical gap between this transparency and its concomitant opacity with anything but a sigh of indifférance, and therefore her perspective cannot constitute the point of departure of any symbological discourse (thus, in Kingdom, despite Nancy Kelly's apparent position as protagonist and primary site of readerly identification, I would propose that she must finally be understood as Anton Herzog's symptom [cf. Lacan: "Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father"]).
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