L2. Engraphy & Ecphory: No Brain Required

In order to explain his theory of the ‘phylo-psyche’ in the 1920s, Eugene Bleuler would borrow generously from the late eighteenth-century theory of ‘organic memory’ or ‘mnemic psychology’. Prior to the emergence of a proper genetic theory or mechanism of inheritance, this briefly influential school of thought had attempted to explain instinctual behaviour by simply collapsing biographical memory into biological heredity: casting both as modalities of matter’s universal tendency toward inscription. Given the view of temporality lurking behind Spinal Catastrophism, movement in time is understandable primarily in terms of divergence in precocity or belatedness, differentia of tempo, and variant complexes of remembrance and forgetfulness. This inevitably lends itself to a vision of nature as a great system of retention. In particular, however, nervous systems were singled out and studied as the prime medium for nature’s processes of inscription and memorization. Indeed, the idea that autonomic processing and reflexive behaviours could be accounted for as a type of inherited, nonconscious memory formed the common backdrop against which Freud, Ferenczi, and Jung would develop their theories on the matter. Envisioning a ‘physiology of the unconscious’, the Viennese physiologist Ewald Hering (1834–1918) first postulated that neuroanatomy and nervous functioning is a question of memory-traces in an 1870 lecture entitled ‘Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter’.1 Later crossing paths with Freud, Hering condensed his outlook into the apothegm ‘Instinct is the memory of the species’.2

Writing a few decades after Hering’s innovations, the German biologist Richard Semon (1859–1918), who had studied alongside Haeckel, inherited and formalized Hering’s work. Inventing a technical vocabulary for the study of organic memory, he called Hering’s memory-traces ‘mnemes’ and ‘engrams’, also introducing the terms ‘engraphy’ for their study and ‘ecphory’ for their recall.3 (Semon’s work exerted a direct influence on many of the figures discussed above, from Jung, who cites Semon approvingly, to Burroughs, who diagnosed engrams as ‘living viruses’; Reich’s library also contained works by Semon.)4 Semon spoke of memories being laid down as physiological micro-alterations to the CNS, deposited via ‘chronologic stratification’.5 With Semon having thus paved the way for a generalized physiology of memory, scientists were soon raving about how spinal cords are endowed with memory—indeed, are nothing but ossified memory—deposited lamina upon delicate lamina. One such researcher, Théodule-Armand Ribot, claimed that ‘memory is essentially a biological fact, accidentally a psychological fact’.6 Another proclaimed that, ‘[l]ike the brain, the spinal-cord has, so to speak, its memory’.7 Yet another proclaimed that, given these premises, it would be wrong to presume that the amphioxus, a small marine animal that possesses a spinal cord but no head, ‘has no consciousness because it has no brain’, and that, if it thus ‘be admitted that the little ganglia of the invertebrate can form a consciousness, the same may hold good for [our] spinal cord’.8 Which allows us to finally give an answer to the question ‘What Is it Like to Be a Back?’: it is like being an amphioxus—which, indeed, is just another way of saying that we all have a lancelet lodged in our lumbar spine.

Ernst Haeckel, that master of recapitulatory reverie, wrote in his Die Welträtsel (The World-Riddle) of 1899 of the various memory deposits compacted throughout our bodies as various forms of ‘plasm’. In an essay on the ‘protoplasmania’ rife in scientific culture during the period, Robert Michael Brain notes that ‘protoplasm served as a kind of graphical recording apparatus, a medium for the inscription of forces acting in the organic world’.9 Haeckel took this protoplasmania to its limits. Citing Hering as inspiration, he claimed that the ‘chief difference between the organic and inorganic worlds’ lies in the former’s capacity for active engraphy and ecphory. Haeckel therefore spoke of the ‘psychoplasm’ of the nervous system and of the ‘neuroplasm’ of the ‘ganglionic cells and their fibres’ as the chief medium of inscription. The ganglionic cells of the spinal cord were ‘soul-cells’ or ‘cytopsyches’ which inscribe and recall unconscious mnemonic material (these cells were further taxonomized into afferent ‘sensitive cells’ and efferent ‘will cells’). These ‘innumerable social cells’ make up the ‘cell-community’ of the nervous system. Memory, however, isn’t only neurological but also, Haeckel thought, histological. (He even spoke of ‘molecular memory’.) Living is nothing but recollecting. The whole life-system is a system of mnemonics—where ‘even in the simplest unicellular protist sensations may leave a permanent trace in the psychoplasm’—and where cell communities knit themselves together precisely so they can better remember.10 Haeckel claimed that only such a schema could explain ‘the origin of the “a priori ideas” of man’: they were ‘originally formed empirically by his predecessors’, through various alterations and perturbations to the inherited plasm-nexus. This was, for Haeckel, the ‘embryology of the soul’.11

Like Haeckel, Samuel Butler (1835–1902), who translated Hering, championed engraphy as putting ‘the backbone [into] the theory of evolution’.12 In his Unconscious Memory (1880), Butler talked enthusiastically of the ‘memory of the nervous system’, averring that the recollections contained within even the ‘sympathetic ganglionic system [are] no less rich than [those] of the brain and spinal marrow’.13 Within Butler’s grand engraphic vision, the innervated organism is nothing but a compacted memeplex of nature’s universal past, expressed physically via stacked ganglion laminae. A body is nothing but glaciated time, the CNS its read/write (engraphy/ecphory) relay.

Writing on retrograde amnesia, Ribot noted that, in increasingly severe cases of the illness, the final memories to disappear were those belonging ‘to that inferior order of memory having its seat in the cerebral ganglia, the medulla, and the spinal cord’.14 With such thinking rife among the scientific community, it was entirely inevitable that the spine should come, contemporaneously, to be considered as the physiological seat of the unconscious. The fascinating figure of Eduard von Hartmann (who, along with Hering, is also treated in Butler’s Unconscious Memory) exemplifies this position. Progenitor of Schelling and Goethe as well as terminarch of their grand metaphysical tradition, Hartmann—though now largely forgotten—was a titanic figure within nineteenth-century German intellectual life. Post-Schopenhauerian nihilism and pre-Freudian depth psychology form the poles around which von Hartmann’s embracing metaphysic revolves, and his hulking multi-volume Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious), released in 1869, was read widely and singlehandedly triggered a ‘pessimism controversy’ in Germany.15 (From this controversy we gain the word ‘Weltschmerz’—literally, ‘world-pain’—which was minted to denote a nihilistic world-weariness characteristic of the day.) At one point in time, Hartmann was even mentioned in the same breath as Hegel; it is Nietzsche who is largely responsible for writing Hartmann out of history, describing his account of the upswell of consciousness—from its ‘first throb’ to its bitter end—as one ‘huge joke’.16 Joke or not, Hartmann’s philosophical opus stages the impressive and sweeping evolutionary drama of a cosmic unconscious blindly assembling itself, from protoplasm to primate, from somnolence to sapience. Kapp rightly called it a ‘panentheism of the unconscious’. Yet despite its staggering speculative grandeur, Hartmann was keen to ground his system in contemporary empirical findings. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that neurology played a significant role (there is a lengthy appendix, for example, on ‘The Physiology of the Nerve-Centres’).

Utilizing his impressive knowledge of neuroanatomy, Hartmann rallied the engraphic ideas of the time to argue that spines—as mnemonic ladders—provide pathways into the prehistory of the cosmogonic unconscious. Following contemporary physiological understanding, Hartmann stressed the ontogenetic and phylogenetic parallelisms of the development of centripetalizing cephalization: ‘the whole nervous system arises [both] phylogenetically and embryogenetically’ from peripheralized and decentralized nervous nets toward consolidation upon the encephalizing brain, he observed.17 In both the development of individuals and of the species, Hartmann saw successive waves of centralization—threading ‘ganglionic cells’ upward through the rising ‘spinal centres’ into the brain—as heralding oncoming intensifications of ‘individuation’.18 Accordingly, to travel down one’s nervous system, as Ballard would later have his pioneer of neuronics suggest, is to travel into the past of the species. Spinal katabasis is temporal recidivus. For Hartmann, indeed, somnambulism represented a temporary regression toward more ancient, less centralized, life form19—precisely the same idea that lies behind Ferenczi’s later intimation of ‘spinal sleep’.

Sleepwalking and adjacent states had long been freighted with such connotations: preceding the mid-nineteenth-century development of hypnotherapy (via the combination of the extant mesmerism with more modern neurology, in what one Scottish surgeon dubbed ‘neurypnology’), practitioners of the earlier eighteenth century had recorded inducing various ‘inner body experiences’ in themselves or their subjects whereby the somnambulist’s conscious sensorium would sink from the head down toward the solar plexus—from the CNS’s encephalon to the trunk’s ANS (Ballard’s ‘thoracic drop’).20 This notion of sacral sensoria was popular amongst magnetists and mesmerists, and there are numerous accounts of somnambulant subjects seeing, feeling, and thinking within their trunks rather than their skulls.21 Schopenhauer, speaking of the ‘complete removal of the brain’s power’ in such states, recorded how practitioners reported that their executive function was entirely transplanted into the ‘plexus solaris’. This epigastric nerve centre, as a delegate sensorium, thereafter acts as a ‘deputy’ and takes ‘over the function of the brain’. On this matter, Schopenhauer relays the

statements of all clairvoyant somnambulists that their consciousness now has its seat entirely in the pit of the stomach where their thinking and perceiving are carried on as they were previously in the head.22

Despite remaining incredulous regarding this phenomenon of what he called the ‘cerebrum abdominale’, Schopenhauer himself had theorized that dreams are caused when the sleeping brain, starved of external stimuli and input from the sensory organs, makes up for this by intercepting interoceptive messaging from the lower spinal regions and converting such signal into the brain’s own native language—that of a spatiotemporally extended, three-dimensional world. In other words, when we dream, we literally inhabit a spinal landscape.23 Oneirology is orthopaedics. Hartmann (who was, of course, greatly inspired by Schopenhauer) similarly attributed a distinct kind of proto-cognitive autonomy to the spine. He explained his position in a long footnote:

The functions of the spinal cord in the higher animals may be likened to the performances of a man who is prevented by his servitude to a strict master from working out his many-sided tendencies, and is obliged to constantly devote himself to a well-defined and limited sphere of labour. The spinal cord of the higher animals is, as it were, simplified by its constant necessitation to hodman’s services for the behoof of the brain; but the inference is illogical that it has lost consciousness and will (which it manifestly possesses in lower animals), since indeed in the sphere of activity reserved to it displays distinct intelligence, and in abnormal pathological cases is wont to take part also in the vicarious execution of more independent tasks.24

Hartmann thus compared the brain to a mere factory foreman atop a grand assemblage that, more or less, runs itself. One cannot but think here of ailments such as Alien Hand Syndrome, where limbs appear to manifest a will of their own, entirely separate from—and even antagonistic to—the brain’s executive processing. Hartmann’s physiophilosophy clearly makes room for the conceptual possibility of Alien Spine Syndrome, just as the nineteenth-century institution of the factory simultaneously made possible the strike and labour militancy. And, as Lawrence of course would later announce, revolutions roll upwards from the oldest, salamandrine portions of the spine.

The context for all this speculation was the emergence of a unified theory of cerebrospinal function around 1800. As far back as Galen, curious medics had observed that paralyses were often localized to the area beneath the level of spinal injury (with attenuating severity, the lower down the damage), yet spinal function remained obscure until the Enlightenment.25 Studying continuing coordination in decapitated frogs, scientists such as Robert Whytt (1714–1766) began postulating, in the mid-eighteenth century, a separate ‘sentient principle’ autochthonous to the backbone, thereby initiating a parade of laboratory acephali: carving open the spines of vivisected puppies and pricking each nerve sequentially, subsequent neurophysiologists such as Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) and François Magendie (1783–1855), during the opening decades of the nineteenth century, mapped the separate sensory and motor pathways—or afferent and efferent neurons—of the backbone. (Magendie, in particular, was ‘the exemplar of the evil scientist’, known for his extremely gruesome and cruel methodologies of vivisection.)26 Sensory and motor pathways evince different ‘directions of fit’ for nervous function: the former allow us to feel the world, the latter allow us to effect change upon it. Spinal function was beginning to be unveiled, and, so too, the private life of the backbone. It was Marshall Hall (1790–1857) who, performing experiments on decapitated eels and snakes, provided a view of this autonomous spinal life by successfully providing a cartography of the reflex arcs: integrative sensory-motor responses, spinally native, and requiring no functional participation from the brain. Hall found that many processes—from respiration to vomiting—work in this way. No brain is required. One could now witness the body as a nested congerie of integrated—yet modular—subroutines, stacked vertebrally in a spinal hierarchy.27 Each paraxial juncture of reflex-signal could operate autonomously (‘reflexively’) without cerebral-passthrough or brain-arbitrage. Hall’s reflex theory, in other words, led to a devolution, decerebration, and decentralization of conscious function.28 This then is the background for what Lewis, almost a century later, would decry as eroding of autarchy for the ‘subject’ of Western history. It is the neurophysiological root of Freud’s later notion that we are not masters in our own home. Our own bodies have a rich private life—or indeed social life, since the nervous system is already legion. As later celebrated by Haeckel’s cell-communitarianism, the CNS here became a synergetic colony of individual ‘proto-minds’ (like ‘zooids’ within a compound superorganism), all infinitesimally graded from unconscious to apperceptive (each perhaps generating different tempos, time-tolerances, and chronoceptive granularities). From Butler to Nietzsche, Bleuler to Velikovsky, many excitedly seized on this model, postulating various types of ‘spinal soul’ psychically separate from the encephalon. This is precisely what Ferenczi later alluded to when he asserted, just as Hartmann had, that the sleeper ‘has only a “spinal soul”’.29 Ultimately, one need not look to the outside to ‘roll from the centre toward X’, one need only look inside.

After the consilience of this model of nervous function in the early 1800s, reflex movements and involuntary movements—now understood as requiring no cerebral sanction—became legible as our inner lancelet reawakening and rattling its cage. Such actions are phyletic revenants. This is what enabled Bataille to see spasmodic laughter and its evolutionarily regressive cancellation of cranial perpendicularity as a return to amphioxus-being. Indeed, presaging Bataille, Schopenhauer would write that he was ‘surprised that Marshall Hall does not include laughing and weeping among the reflex movements’.30 Such convulsions, he noted, roll like thunder from the spine, not the brain. These theories, moreover, were precisely the context for Hartmann’s conviction that the brain is largely superfluous. With enthusiastic reference to experiments on decapitated frogs, to cases of anencephalic children, and to the fact that the dismembered parts of a single insect wage internecine war upon each other, he surmised that there are as many ‘independent centres [of will] in the spinal cord as there are pairs of spinal nerves issuing therefrom’.31 Hartmann’s promulgation of this idea would, of course, earn him Lewis’s later ire: across the distance of half a century, the inveterate modernist would rail against Hartmann’s belief that for ‘the exercise of the Will (or of the Unconscious) no brain at all is required’. Lewis vituperated that, delivered from the impositions of a cerebral central authority, a disaggregated and disintermediated ‘swarm’ of spinal ‘wills’ provides a perfect ‘picture of the Schopenhauer-von-Hartmann world-picture’.32 Accusing his enemies of spinal separatism and secession, the anti-democratic Lewis would see in this picture a dirty deputation of mental autocracy, and duly complained that such Tarzan philosophers promote the backbone to an ‘egalitarian and self-sufficient commonwealth’.33

Such a ‘commonwealth’ of proto-minds was also a part of the Nietzschean ‘world-picture’. ‘Person’ and ‘subject’, Nietzsche wrote, are ‘delusion’:

A controlled community. At the guide of the body.34

The brain a jumped-up bureaucrat, a parvenu. Talking of the synthetic ‘ego’ (that ‘apparent unity that encloses everything like a horizon’), Nietzsche recommended that muscularism was a better guide than legalism.35 ‘The evidence of the body reveals a tremendous multiplicity’, he commended, and it is better ‘to employ the more easily studied, richer phenomena as evidence for the understanding of the poorer’. And so,

[f]ollowing the guiding thread of the body, we know man as a plurality of animated beings that partly fight each other mutually, and partly, being ordered and subordinated to each other, also assert the whole involuntarily, through the assertion of their individual beings.36

Contemporary neurology’s model of consciousness as a nested congeries of modular wills, of course, provided the meat for the bones of Nietzsche’s notion. (Elsewhere enjoining that ‘philosophy, physiology and medicine’ must enter a ‘most cordial and fruitful exchange’, Nietzsche would certainly have relished the notion of a ‘cerebrum abdominale’, insofar as he also declared that ‘“spirit” resembles a stomach more than anything’.)37 ‘There have been innumerable modi cogitandi’, he announced, clearly following neurology’s modular schema: and there ‘is thus in man as many “consciousnesses” as there are beings—in every moment of his existence—which constitute his body’. 38

Thus the agonism of logical games (the process of sifting legal from illegal that individuates subjects for Kant, insofar as two people can hold contradictory beliefs but one person cannot) is replaced with intestine antagonism and agonistic muscle pairings (those biomechanical duos whose conflicting forces cancel out into one smooth motion). Rather than emerging from deliberative governance, subjecthood emerges from somatic strife. To be an individual is to be a warring multitude (like Hartmann’s squabbling earwig offcuts). The bacchanalian revel of Hegel’s Phenomenology preface, where a chaos of opposing motions mutually cancel out into placid repose, is here brought down to earth. Correctness is more a question of equilibrioception than ratiocination. Yet it is only through waging war—part against part—that a synthetic unity emerges. Subjectivity as sinew and subjugation. The pipeline of personhood isn’t a legal run in a logical game (the mutually bolstering and bureaucratic pitter patter of ‘I think’ and ‘You think’) so much as it is a noisy parliament of proto-brains, strung down the spine—Nietzsche’s guiding thread.

Schopenhauer had already described Kant’s illusory ‘unity of apperception’ as the ‘thread of the string of pearls’ upon which ‘all representations are ranged’.39 Nietzsche simply drew out the semantic potential of such a phrase. He proclaimed, that is, that ‘logic’ itself is a ‘kind of spinal cord for vertebrates’.40 A spine, a logical syntax: both provide bulwarks against which the lava of thought is forced to flow, like a piston pushed by pressure. Yet it is not legalism that comes first, as the pump in the pipeline, but the backbone’s synapsing, self-conflicting strife. For Nietzsche, then, we thread ourselves together not by way of regulative rules but along the wilful arcs of the segmental spine. We should search for the hydraulic behind synthetic unity first, then, through this ‘guiding thread of the body’.

[O]ur life is possible through the interaction of many intelligences highly unequal in value, and thus only through a continual thousandfold obeying and ordering—stated in moral terms: through the uninterrupted exercise of many virtues. And how could one stop speaking morally!41

To speak morally is to speak belatedly and inertially, however, even if one cannot help doing so: for Nietzsche, there is something already superseded in talking in this way. When talking of morality it is the illusions of the pallid and hieratic past that speak through us, a past already outstaying its welcome, already outmoded by some inevitable point of future disillusion. (Nietzsche’s thought is self-consciously a prelude to the philosophy of the future, after all.) In line with this, Nietzsche noticed that the ‘nervous system has a much broader domain: the world of consciousness is appended’, and that, in ‘the systematization and overarching process of adaptation, it does not matter’:

Consciousness, in the second role, just about indifferent, superfluous, perhaps destined to disappear, and a perfected automatism to take its place—42

Appropriately, Nietzsche seems to have met his demise by way of syphilitic infection of the CNS, his muscular agonism lapsing into the agony of dementia, his ‘consciousness’—superfluous as it was by his own lights—‘destined to disappear’. Indeed, as new nervous maladies and neuroses began proliferating during the late nineteenth century, it may well have seemed that consciousness was at the end of its tether.