Some of the most persistent, and thus classical, examples of emergence are concepts like consciousness, love, and life itself, and it is surely obvious how those are easily romanticised as being something unexplainable beyond the lifeless, materialist explanatory powers of hard science, because they are somehow too ethereal and delicate to be grasped by the coarse rationalist tools and theories. Here I fully agree with the critique: Such ontological patch ups are not worthy of philosophy. But is it the concept of emergence in itself that is wrong? Or is there perhaps a kind of false dichotomy at play here between childish fairytale comfort and adult, realist hard science? The latter holds the position that love, for instance, is ultimately just chemicals released in the brain. Against this, the classical notion of emergence offers the chance to occupy the counter position, claiming there is some inexplicable more that cannot be described or predicted by hard science: An emergence. An addition to the cosmos, as it were.

But is that really the basis of love? A beautiful albeit superfluous appendix to a well functioning partnership? What if what we get in love is precisely not the magical appearance of something countably new, something more, but rather the profound appearance of a lack, something that immediately sets desire in motion; the appearance of a “less than” in the seemingly balanced cosmic system. The deceptive feat of reality is not that it is hiding the true forces which ultimately makes it whole, but rather that it is appearing whole to us in order to avoid the traumatically productive forces of its lack.

If we try to account for love as simply some new addition to an already functioning life, then it is surely not love, but some form of mutual partnership (This is Badiou’s stance, which likely serves as an inspiration for my own.[i]) Against this “contractual” view, the resort to emergence would classically, or according to the history of the concept, tell us that a hitherto inexistent entity has arisen. But I think the temporal order of things is reversed here. This view would entail that a kind of surplus now exists. That I am capable of all the same things as before with the addition of this new emergence. And if you subtract the new addition from the old life you get the old life back. To hold such a position is to take a phenomenon such as love to be no different from a simple form of contract. But the counter argument is precisely not romantic; a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. To get the temporal order right would be to inscribe the lack precisely at the moment of emergence. What any proper emergence, such as love, introduces into the world, is not the enjoyable plus one of the company, but, just as any proper philosophical stance, the inescapable vortex of the incomprehensible problem that I now sit with: That life was not what I thought it was. That some fundamental lack has occurred in which I am now less myself, not even half a person without this significant other. I become vulnerable, willing to risk it all and so forth. If there is an emergent quality of love it is surely negative. But do not mistake this for a kind of willfully dark point of view. It’s meant as a praise of love, but when we don’t simply romanticize this incredible phenomenon, the only serious account of it is as the inscription of something in our lives that force us to confront a fundamental non-belonging to ourselves; an impossibility of self-sufficiency, which is none the less not covered by this other who introduces the lack to begin with. In effect, we end up with a larger hole, a larger vulnerability, a more sensitive emotional system than before. And still, we’d trade this lack for nothing. Having kids leave you with more problems, undoubtedly, and the price we pay in the trouble and concerns of having kids is not balanced out by them being an incredible addition to our lives, but by them holding ajar the very same space of openness to the world that their rupture in our existence introduces. In this sense, not even the birth of a child, the literal emergence of a new being, can be properly theorized as an emergence. If we want to be precise with the use of our concepts, the birth of a child is ultimately an example of a negative emergence.

Likewise, proper philosophy does not give us more than we had before, but rather points to what we spontaneously consider a whole and shows the way we construct these continuities and causalities all the time and patch up their lacks and cracks with a kind of “everyday emergence.” It is precisely science itself that introduces emergence all the time to generate its necessary, axiomatic starting points, and the real mark of philosophy is that it shows how the world is somehow less than we think. It’s not as coherent, it’s not as self-explanatory, it’s not as complete as it looks at face value. Right from the birthplace of (Western) philosophy, Socrates really ruined the daily, spontaneous understanding of the Athenians. With what? Questions, lack, an attitude that poked holes in the edifice of knowledge. Even Plato and Aristotle did not give us “more,” say a whole new world with the introduction of metaphysics. Rather, the real introduction (even as a Lacanian Real) of Plato was not the world of ideas, but precisely the world of phenomena, which was not a concept before, because it was self-evident. We cannot start from what is simply real (reality) without the inscription of a lack into it. What is born with the Platonic idea is not an exciting new dimension, but the inescapable idea of a lack in this one.

We could go all the way up to Kant here; the thing in itself is not a plus one of the world of phenomena, but Kant has to arrive at the world of phenomena which is lacking because representations must be representations of something. That verge is the thing in itself, nothing more. Kant ultimately gives us a rift in the apparent, even if scientifically dissected world. The thing in itself does not give us something to finally understand everything, but rather forces us to see that what we thought was self-evident (the conditions of that which supposedly creates the emergence) comes with its own lack. You could say something parallel about Hegel. Spirit, even absolute knowing, is not in any sense the incredible “synthesis” (a term associated with Hegel by anyone but Hegel,) but in effect nothing but the introduction of a permanent process of self-othering to keep finding the ways in which identity is less-than. Spirit is not an edifying, maybe not even a constructive process, but rather a spiraling into a perpetual negative emergence: A is not even equal to itself[ii].

But this could sound like a speculative argument or discussion about ontology, which to be fair, it surely is, but I don’t think the case for negative emergence hinges on complicated philosophical debates about Hegelian dialectics at all. In fact, I think we encounter it all the time (which is of course exactly what one could claim to be the case with Hegelian dialectics, but none the less.) If the classical notion of emergence gives explanatory power to consciousness, negative emergence would instead be a model for the presence of the unconscious. In other words; emergence is supposed to explain the reality of the “end results,” say life, consciousness, feelings and so forth, but negative emergence instead describes why something comes about which is not just an extra potency or hidden quality of a system or relation, but instead the very break with the continuum of causal reality, without introducing a “downward causation.” [iii] 

In this sense, a negative emergence comes about, emerges, within a certain order - as the truth of its constitution which cannot ground itself. It is in this manner of course not an entity that we can count independent of this system or order, but it none the less has very real effects. And this is where negativity is not a simple thing, not a simple subtraction of a positive, but a change in the very relation between the positives; the relation that gives them their meaning. As such, a negative emergence must be connected to the universal, precisely in the way it does not relate to one entity or quality, but to the very positing of such. Following that line, we could say that there is no clearer negative emergence than a question. A question can only be posed within a certain established frame in which it must make sense. But is this not where we can see the cut then? In the making of sense versus the emergence of something new - through the force of negativity. These are two different kinds of questions then. A sense making question; “Would you like a carrot?” makes a lot of sense within a universe with a fixed amount of energy. Work is carried out, carbohydrates are repurposed, energy moves about, hunger arises. The question addresses these changes in the system, but the universe holds, nothing emerges. Meanwhile, let us imagine a different kind of question; one that does not just address the components of the system, but something about the system itself. Like when you innocently ask; what if space and time can only really be consistently thought of as one thing? Then the total number things in the universe starts to shake. The order itself must change in the effort to address the change. Do you still love me? How can one seriously consider the world to be the same after such a question?

What is it that we are approaching here? There are questions that are clarifications, and then there are questions that are a form of negative emergence. Not a new thing that builds on the others, but rather one that ruins them. The question itself pokes holes in the frame within which it’s being posed.

But this form of language use, the question, despite being perhaps the base building block of philosophy, is itself not the only form of negative emergence in language. In fact, any good conversation is hinging on this invention; can we find a way to a truly productive place in this exchange of words. And if so, then it must occur in the way these words reshape the language they are a part of through their very use. You do not leave an important conversation unchanged, and this change is not simply new knowledge. Just like any important philosophical breakthrough is not. Any important psychoanalytical insight is not. True emergence cannot be simply positive, and if this dimension of the breakthrough is missed by the critics of emergence then of course the discussion seems to locate within the naively positivist world where emergence then sure enough would be some kind of unaccountable magic appearance or addition to nature ex nihilo[iv]