The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, is one of those books, proposing a radical new thesis, that had an enormous impact when it was first published (1976), but has since fallen into the backwaters of intellectual fashion. Today it still has an ardent cult following, but otherwise it is not so much rejected as it is not taken seriously in the first place, and thereby, it is almost totally ignored.
This neglect is somewhat unfortunate. While I don’t think there is any scientific “proof” for Jaynes’ argument, and while certain of his assertions are almost certainly wrong, his book remains intellectually provocative; it opens up some very important questions, even if we are not ready to follow its conclusions.
Basically, Jaynes argues that consciousness, as we understand it today, has only been possessed by human beings for the last four thousand years or so. (By “consciousness” he means, not the primary perceptual awareness that all mammals, and perhaps many other ‘lower’ organisms as well, seem to possess, but what I would prefer to call self-consciousness, or second-order consciousness: the ability to reflect upon oneself, to introspect, to narrate one’s existence). Jaynes proposes that, in the second millennium BC and before, human beings were not self-conscious, and did not reflect upon what they did; rather, people heard voices instructing them in what to do, and they obeyed these voices immediately and unreflectively. These voices were believed (to the extent that “belief” is a relevant category in such circumstances) to be the voices of gods; their neurological cause was probably language issuing from the right hemisphere of the brain, and experienced hallucinatorily, and obeyed, by the left hemisphere (which is where speech is localized today).
This is why Jaynes calls the archaic mind a non-conscious, “bicameral” one. Thought was linguistic, but it did not have any correlates in consciousness; people didn’t make decisions, but instead the decisions were made automatically, and conveyed by the voices. One half of the brain commanded the other, so that decision-making and action were entirely separate functions. Neither of these hemispheres was “conscious” in the modern sense.
It was only as the result of catastrophic events in the second millennium BC that these voices fell silent, and were replaced by a new invention, that which we now know as self-conscious, reflective thought.
Jaynes introduces his theory by making reference to the Iliad, in which there is almost no description of interiority and subjectivity, or of conscious decision-making; instead, all the characters act at the promptings of the gods, who give them commands that they obey without question. Jaynes suggests that we take these descriptions literally, that this was the way the mind worked for thousands of years of human history. After the opening section of the book, where he quite interestingly discusses a range of philosophical issues having to do with the nature of consciousness and its relation to language, Jaynes supports his argument almost entirely through an analysis of ancient texts and of archaeological discoveries.
Where to begin in discussing such a suggestive, even if overly simple and overly totalizing, thesis? First of all, Jaynes argues that language is a prerequisite for consciousness, rather than the (common-sensical) reverse. This seems to me to be unarguably true, if we mean reflexive, or second-order consciousness. His arguments for this thesis, coming out of the tradition of Anglo-American empirically-grounded psychology, are interesting precisely in their difference from deconstructionist, and other Continental philosophical, arguments to much the same effect. This is useful because Jaynes thereby is able to point to the (relative) primacy of language in the human mind, without getting lost in those rather silly skeptical paradoxes that the deconstructionists are partial to.
Second, I find incredibly valuable the way Jaynes presents his picture of the schizophrenic, pre-conscious “bicameral mind” as a mechanism of social control. The bicameral mind arises, according to Jaynes, in tandem with the development of agriculture and the creation of the first cities (i.e. the first stirrings of “civilization” in Mesopotamia, and perhaps also Egypt, the Indus River Valley, and the Yellow River Valley, at around 9000 BC). Its purpose is to ensure obedience and social harmony; it entails, and enables, the creation of vast, rigid, theocratic hierarchies, such as existed in ancient Sumeria and Egypt (and also, much later, in the Mayan cities of the Western Hemisphere, and in other civilizations around the world). This is the aspect of Jaynes that interested William Burroughs, with his investigations into language as a form of social control and as a virus infecting, even as it created, the human mind.
In describing the passage from bicamerality to self-consciousness, Jaynes is really proposing a genealogy of different regimes of language and subjectivity, in a manner that resonates with ideas proposed by Deleuze and Guattari at around the same time (see especially the chapter “On Several Regimes of Signs” in A Thousand Plateaus). For Jaynes as for Deleuze/Guattari (I assume that Jaynes was unacquainted with D&G’s work, and vice versa), a “despotic” regime is displaced and replaced by a passional, subjectifying one. (I need to be a bit careful here, because I don’t want to merely translate Jaynes’ terms and arguments into deleuzoguattarian ones. The specific interest of Jaynes’ book is how he defamiliarizes the bicameral mindset, shows how it cannot be reduced to the categories that we, subjective people, take for granted).
The latter parts of Jaynes’ book, where he gives massive evidence for his thesis, are somewhat disappointing; in part because the readings of the historical and literary record are so obviously so tendentious, and in part because Jaynes seems content just to reiterate his big idea, rather than really exploring its potential ramifications and implications. He does have a short and interesting discussion about how so many aspects of our world today, from scientists’ search for a “theory of everything” to the worldwide fundamentalist backlash, can be seen as continuing responses to the collapse of the bicameral mind, which still casts its considerable shadow, thousands of years after it happened. But all this is sketchy in the extreme. I note that Jaynes never published (hence, probably, was unable to complete) a promised second volume, devoted to The Consequences of Consciousness, in the twenty years he lived after publishing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
How “true” is Jaynes’ theory, however? Some of Jaynes’ speculations on neurobiology clearly need to be revised, in the light of our far greater knowledge of the subject today compared to 1976. And I don’t know enough about classical texts to pass any judgment on his readings of the Iliad or Babylonian cuneiform.
But on a larger scale, Jaynes’ theory is pretty much like those of psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology, and like Terence McKenna’s speculations on the psychedelic origins of consciousness: all of these are stories that cannot be backed up or “proven” scientifically, but that also can’t be simply dismissed, because they refer to issues that themselves demand some sort of self-conscious narrativization, that cannot be resolved by positivist means alone. Empirical investigation can disconfirm particular theories, but it can never succeed in getting rid of our need for such unprovable, metaphorical “just-so stories.”
(The weakness of sociobiological, or evolutionary psychological explanations, in comparison to those of Freud, McKenna, or Jaynes, is that the evolutionary psychologists lay claim to a positivistic grounding that they do not really have, as well as that these theories are totally reductive and unimaginative to boot. Evolutionary psychology theorists generally cannot see beyond their own noses; they fail to realize how tautological they are, in their repetitions of the cliches of our own culture, especially in matters of sex and gender. For all their differences, Freud, McKenna, and Jaynes, at least, are trying to think beyond the narrow prejudices of their own cultural situations; for they are all profoundly aware, as Steven Pinker is not, that their own perspectives are culturally constrained).
As an unprovable but tantalizing “just-so” story of how consciousness came to be, then, Jaynes’ book is valuable precisely for its sense of the contingency of what we take most for granted, of the ways that very deep parts of our mentality are culturally specific and variably, rather than being inscribed “in the genes.” (Or more precisely, how we are genetically endowed, precisely, with such a wide and weird range of mental potentialities). Jaynes’ observations on the neural substrate of bicamerality, on the one hand, and subjective self-consciousness, on the other, suggest new and as yet unfollowed possibilities of research, even if his particular formulation proves to be (as it probably is) incorrect.
The biggest flaw in Jaynes’ scheme, I think, is his failure to consider in any adequate way what might have come before the great bicameral despotisms. Though he only looks at a very narrow sample of ancient history — that of the Middle East, Greece, and Egypt — he claims results that are universally valid. (He suggests, for instance, that similar events took place in China, though he says that he cannot pursue the investigation himself, since he does not know Chinese). But even if we accept that the bicameral model applies to China, and to the Maya, Aztec, and Inca empires, this says nothing about all the so-called “primitive” peoples around the world, who never experienced the bicameral despotic state. He is right to suggest that such peoples are by no means outside of history, and that today they are as fully self-conscious as people anywhere else: the idea of “noble savages,” untainted by contact with “civilization,” is nothing but a racist and imperialist myth. Still, Jaynes seems to assume that all the peoples of the earth went through a period of bicamerality, that the pre-bicameral mind is not a fully linguistic one, and that “hunter-gatherer groups” have either already “been a part of a bicameral theocracy” in the past, or else were “like other primates, being neither bicameral nor conscious,” until learning consciousness by contact with other groups. But this is obviously wrong; Jaynes wants to locate the origin of language as recently as 12,000 years ago, when it certainly has to be much earlier, before the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens spread out from Africa. A major expansion of Jaynes’ theory is therefore needed, one that would consider the mentality of gift societies (Mauss), stateless societies (Pierre Clastres), etc, societies that know nothing of (and might even actively “ward off”) bicameral despotism.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, is one of those books, proposing a radical new thesis, that had an enormous impact when it was first published (1976), but has since fallen into the backwaters of intellectual fashion. Today it still has an ardent cult following, but otherwise it is not so much rejected as it is not taken seriously in the first place, and thereby, it is almost totally ignored.
This neglect is somewhat unfortunate. While I don’t think there is any scientific “proof” for Jaynes’ argument, and while certain of his assertions are almost certainly wrong, his book remains intellectually provocative; it opens up some very important questions, even if we are not ready to follow its conclusions.
Basically, Jaynes argues that consciousness, as we understand it today, has only been possessed by human beings for the last four thousand years or so. (By “consciousness” he means, not the primary perceptual awareness that all mammals, and perhaps many other ‘lower’ organisms as well, seem to possess, but what I would prefer to call self-consciousness, or second-order consciousness: the ability to reflect upon oneself, to introspect, to narrate one’s existence). Jaynes proposes that, in the second millennium BC and before, human beings were not self-conscious, and did not reflect upon what they did; rather, people heard voices instructing them in what to do, and they obeyed these voices immediately and unreflectively. These voices were believed (to the extent that “belief” is a relevant category in such circumstances) to be the voices of gods; their neurological cause was probably language issuing from the right hemisphere of the brain, and experienced hallucinatorily, and obeyed, by the left hemisphere (which is where speech is localized today).
This is why Jaynes calls the archaic mind a non-conscious, “bicameral” one. Thought was linguistic, but it did not have any correlates in consciousness; people didn’t make decisions, but instead the decisions were made automatically, and conveyed by the voices. One half of the brain commanded the other, so that decision-making and action were entirely separate functions. Neither of these hemispheres was “conscious” in the modern sense.
It was only as the result of catastrophic events in the second millennium BC that these voices fell silent, and were replaced by a new invention, that which we now know as self-conscious, reflective thought.
Jaynes introduces his theory by making reference to the Iliad, in which there is almost no description of interiority and subjectivity, or of conscious decision-making; instead, all the characters act at the promptings of the gods, who give them commands that they obey without question. Jaynes suggests that we take these descriptions literally, that this was the way the mind worked for thousands of years of human history. After the opening section of the book, where he quite interestingly discusses a range of philosophical issues having to do with the nature of consciousness and its relation to language, Jaynes supports his argument almost entirely through an analysis of ancient texts and of archaeological discoveries.
Where to begin in discussing such a suggestive, even if overly simple and overly totalizing, thesis? First of all, Jaynes argues that language is a prerequisite for consciousness, rather than the (common-sensical) reverse. This seems to me to be unarguably true, if we mean reflexive, or second-order consciousness. His arguments for this thesis, coming out of the tradition of Anglo-American empirically-grounded psychology, are interesting precisely in their difference from deconstructionist, and other Continental philosophical, arguments to much the same effect. This is useful because Jaynes thereby is able to point to the (relative) primacy of language in the human mind, without getting lost in those rather silly skeptical paradoxes that the deconstructionists are partial to.
Second, I find incredibly valuable the way Jaynes presents his picture of the schizophrenic, pre-conscious “bicameral mind” as a mechanism of social control. The bicameral mind arises, according to Jaynes, in tandem with the development of agriculture and the creation of the first cities (i.e. the first stirrings of “civilization” in Mesopotamia, and perhaps also Egypt, the Indus River Valley, and the Yellow River Valley, at around 9000 BC). Its purpose is to ensure obedience and social harmony; it entails, and enables, the creation of vast, rigid, theocratic hierarchies, such as existed in ancient Sumeria and Egypt (and also, much later, in the Mayan cities of the Western Hemisphere, and in other civilizations around the world). This is the aspect of Jaynes that interested William Burroughs, with his investigations into language as a form of social control and as a virus infecting, even as it created, the human mind.
In describing the passage from bicamerality to self-consciousness, Jaynes is really proposing a genealogy of different regimes of language and subjectivity, in a manner that resonates with ideas proposed by Deleuze and Guattari at around the same time (see especially the chapter “On Several Regimes of Signs” in A Thousand Plateaus). For Jaynes as for Deleuze/Guattari (I assume that Jaynes was unacquainted with D&G’s work, and vice versa), a “despotic” regime is displaced and replaced by a passional, subjectifying one. (I need to be a bit careful here, because I don’t want to merely translate Jaynes’ terms and arguments into deleuzoguattarian ones. The specific interest of Jaynes’ book is how he defamiliarizes the bicameral mindset, shows how it cannot be reduced to the categories that we, subjective people, take for granted).
The latter parts of Jaynes’ book, where he gives massive evidence for his thesis, are somewhat disappointing; in part because the readings of the historical and literary record are so obviously so tendentious, and in part because Jaynes seems content just to reiterate his big idea, rather than really exploring its potential ramifications and implications. He does have a short and interesting discussion about how so many aspects of our world today, from scientists’ search for a “theory of everything” to the worldwide fundamentalist backlash, can be seen as continuing responses to the collapse of the bicameral mind, which still casts its considerable shadow, thousands of years after it happened. But all this is sketchy in the extreme. I note that Jaynes never published (hence, probably, was unable to complete) a promised second volume, devoted to The Consequences of Consciousness, in the twenty years he lived after publishing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
How “true” is Jaynes’ theory, however? Some of Jaynes’ speculations on neurobiology clearly need to be revised, in the light of our far greater knowledge of the subject today compared to 1976. And I don’t know enough about classical texts to pass any judgment on his readings of the Iliad or Babylonian cuneiform.
But on a larger scale, Jaynes’ theory is pretty much like those of psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology, and like Terence McKenna’s speculations on the psychedelic origins of consciousness: all of these are stories that cannot be backed up or “proven” scientifically, but that also can’t be simply dismissed, because they refer to issues that themselves demand some sort of self-conscious narrativization, that cannot be resolved by positivist means alone. Empirical investigation can disconfirm particular theories, but it can never succeed in getting rid of our need for such unprovable, metaphorical “just-so stories.”
(The weakness of sociobiological, or evolutionary psychological explanations, in comparison to those of Freud, McKenna, or Jaynes, is that the evolutionary psychologists lay claim to a positivistic grounding that they do not really have, as well as that these theories are totally reductive and unimaginative to boot. Evolutionary psychology theorists generally cannot see beyond their own noses; they fail to realize how tautological they are, in their repetitions of the cliches of our own culture, especially in matters of sex and gender. For all their differences, Freud, McKenna, and Jaynes, at least, are trying to think beyond the narrow prejudices of their own cultural situations; for they are all profoundly aware, as Steven Pinker is not, that their own perspectives are culturally constrained).
As an unprovable but tantalizing “just-so” story of how consciousness came to be, then, Jaynes’ book is valuable precisely for its sense of the contingency of what we take most for granted, of the ways that very deep parts of our mentality are culturally specific and variably, rather than being inscribed “in the genes.” (Or more precisely, how we are genetically endowed, precisely, with such a wide and weird range of mental potentialities). Jaynes’ observations on the neural substrate of bicamerality, on the one hand, and subjective self-consciousness, on the other, suggest new and as yet unfollowed possibilities of research, even if his particular formulation proves to be (as it probably is) incorrect.
The biggest flaw in Jaynes’ scheme, I think, is his failure to consider in any adequate way what might have come before the great bicameral despotisms. Though he only looks at a very narrow sample of ancient history — that of the Middle East, Greece, and Egypt — he claims results that are universally valid. (He suggests, for instance, that similar events took place in China, though he says that he cannot pursue the investigation himself, since he does not know Chinese). But even if we accept that the bicameral model applies to China, and to the Maya, Aztec, and Inca empires, this says nothing about all the so-called “primitive” peoples around the world, who never experienced the bicameral despotic state. He is right to suggest that such peoples are by no means outside of history, and that today they are as fully self-conscious as people anywhere else: the idea of “noble savages,” untainted by contact with “civilization,” is nothing but a racist and imperialist myth. Still, Jaynes seems to assume that all the peoples of the earth went through a period of bicamerality, that the pre-bicameral mind is not a fully linguistic one, and that “hunter-gatherer groups” have either already “been a part of a bicameral theocracy” in the past, or else were “like other primates, being neither bicameral nor conscious,” until learning consciousness by contact with other groups. But this is obviously wrong; Jaynes wants to locate the origin of language as recently as 12,000 years ago, when it certainly has to be much earlier, before the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens spread out from Africa. A major expansion of Jaynes’ theory is therefore needed, one that would consider the mentality of gift societies (Mauss), stateless societies (Pierre Clastres), etc, societies that know nothing of (and might even actively “ward off”) bicameral despotism.
Cory Doctorow‘s latest SF novel, Eastern Standard Tribe (also available for free download), doesn’t reimagine utopia as Disneyland, as his previous novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, did. Eastern Standard Tribes is more mundane, and set closer to the present.
Indeed, the only even slightly futuristic technology in EST is the “comms”: an integrated mobile phone and PDA with extreme ease of use, desktop-worthy memory and storage, and ubiquitous fast wireless access to both the phone system and the Net. Something, in other words, that has already been conceptualized clearly, though with details that haven’t been worked out yet in practice.
In essence, therefore, EST is a novel of the almost-present, and it reads well as a light, zippy satire on the high-tech yuppie culture of techno-savvy “road warriors.” The book is funny and ultimately upbeat: I don’t really see any irony in its celebration of user-friendly tech and entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, the plot does turn upon betrayal, something that clues us in to the naivete and limited understanding of its likable narrator/protagonist.
Doctorow, like William Gibson and Sofia Coppola, sees jet lag as emblematic of the postmodern, globalized condition. The novel’s title refers to the fact that the narrator’s associations and allegiances, for both work and leisure, are with people in eastern North America (New York, Toronto, Boston). This means that he has to keep himself and his schedule on Eastern Standard time (GMT-5), so that he can remain in real-time touch with his friends (through phone and online chat on his comms) even when he is somewhere else in the world entirely (like London, where much of the book’s action unfolds). The resulting clash between local time and Eastern Time wreaks havoc on his circadian rhythms, and he stumbles through most of the novel in a kind of haze, oscillating unsteadily between excessive alertness and extreme fatigue.
What makes the book work overall is Doctorow’s sly sensibility. He throws out ideas with a prodigality that is only matched by their understatedness. It’s easy to read right through the novel’s suggestions and scenarios, and only realize retrospectively (if at all) how clever and crazy they were. And that’s what gives this book (like Doctorow’s other fiction) its alluring and refreshing affective tone: things often seem ever so slightly off, or empty, or not quite real, but in a pleasing, displaced sort of way. Eastern Standard Tribes does not have any overt references (unless I missed them, which is a possibility) to Disney and Disneyland (objects of Doctorow’s self-confessed obsession), but the feel of the book conveys a strange hint of what it might be like if a Disneyesque, blandly feelgood sensibility were deployed in the service of offbeat eccentricity, instead of (the Disney Corp.’s actual) normative values.
Cory Doctorow‘s latest SF novel, Eastern Standard Tribe (also available for free download), doesn’t reimagine utopia as Disneyland, as his previous novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, did. Eastern Standard Tribes is more mundane, and set closer to the present.
Indeed, the only even slightly futuristic technology in EST is the “comms”: an integrated mobile phone and PDA with extreme ease of use, desktop-worthy memory and storage, and ubiquitous fast wireless access to both the phone system and the Net. Something, in other words, that has already been conceptualized clearly, though with details that haven’t been worked out yet in practice.
In essence, therefore, EST is a novel of the almost-present, and it reads well as a light, zippy satire on the high-tech yuppie culture of techno-savvy “road warriors.” The book is funny and ultimately upbeat: I don’t really see any irony in its celebration of user-friendly tech and entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, the plot does turn upon betrayal, something that clues us in to the naivete and limited understanding of its likable narrator/protagonist.
Doctorow, like William Gibson and Sofia Coppola, sees jet lag as emblematic of the postmodern, globalized condition. The novel’s title refers to the fact that the narrator’s associations and allegiances, for both work and leisure, are with people in eastern North America (New York, Toronto, Boston). This means that he has to keep himself and his schedule on Eastern Standard time (GMT-5), so that he can remain in real-time touch with his friends (through phone and online chat on his comms) even when he is somewhere else in the world entirely (like London, where much of the book’s action unfolds). The resulting clash between local time and Eastern Time wreaks havoc on his circadian rhythms, and he stumbles through most of the novel in a kind of haze, oscillating unsteadily between excessive alertness and extreme fatigue.
What makes the book work overall is Doctorow’s sly sensibility. He throws out ideas with a prodigality that is only matched by their understatedness. It’s easy to read right through the novel’s suggestions and scenarios, and only realize retrospectively (if at all) how clever and crazy they were. And that’s what gives this book (like Doctorow’s other fiction) its alluring and refreshing affective tone: things often seem ever so slightly off, or empty, or not quite real, but in a pleasing, displaced sort of way. Eastern Standard Tribes does not have any overt references (unless I missed them, which is a possibility) to Disney and Disneyland (objects of Doctorow’s self-confessed obsession), but the feel of the book conveys a strange hint of what it might be like if a Disneyesque, blandly feelgood sensibility were deployed in the service of offbeat eccentricity, instead of (the Disney Corp.’s actual) normative values.
Richard C. Francis’ Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions is a powerful critique of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that makes its points almost entirely in carefully worked-out scientific terms. That is to say, it doesn’t spend much time asking why, for instance, the evolutionary psychologists are so obsessed with tracking down supposed gender differences that are allegedly “in the genes”, as opposed to many other equally plausible research programs and subjects of interest. (This is an important question, but one that cultural critics can handle well enough by themselves). Instead, Francis gives a detailed and devastating critique of the (pseudo-)science behind all too many sociobiological claims.
Francis spends most of the book considering instances of sexual differentiation in vertebrate species other than human beings; this establishes a baseline for considering claims about the “innate” differences between men and women. He compares cases in which the differences between the males and females of a given species can convincingly be argued to be a direct result of natural selection and/or sexual selection, from those in which other, more proximate, explanations seem to fit the facts better.
Francis’ real target is extreme adaptationism: the doctrine that every observable characteristic of any organism needs to be understood as a direct adaptation of some sort. Of course, Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen Jay Gould started criticizing adaptationism way back in the 1960s. They introduced the ideas of exaptation (the transfer of a characteristic that evolved for one purpose, or in one context, to another context or purpose) and spandrels (features that have no adaptive purpose of their own, but exist as unavoidable side-effects of other features that did arise adaptively). Gould also famously criticized sociobiologists for their “just-so stories”: their tendency to argue on the basis of narratives of what primordial human conditions might or should have been like, even in the absence of any hard evidence for the truth of these narratives.
But Francis goes beyond Lewontin and Gould, to mount a more general attack on the teleological bias of adaptationist explanations: in asking “why-questions” (what is a particular feature of an organism for? what purposes does it serve?) at the expense of “how-questions” (how could a particular feature actually have arisen historically? what role does it have, given the previously-existing constraints that the organism faces?), adaptationist biology (and even more, its offshoot evolutionary psychology) has in effect reinstated the “argument from design” of pre-Darwinian “natural theology.”
In ignoring “how-questions,” adaptationists assert meaning and purpose without any ability to explain in causal and material terms how such meanings and purposes could possibly have come about. They separate the logic of adaptation from its material causation, just as cognitive scientists divorce “information” from its physical instantiation. For all their talk about “optimization” under ecological “constraints,” adaptationists ignore how the contingencies of history, and the constraints arising from how organisms are already “locked-in” to particular mechanisms and patterns of development, limit and channel evolutionary possibilities. (A parallel could be made, as well, to the way “free-market” economists ignore history, not to mention patterns of unequal power and distribution, in their quest to reduce everything to “efficiency”).
If extreme adaptationism is so problematic when it comes to discussing spotted hyenas and marsh tits and cichlids, how much more so is it when we come to consider human beings? Unlike certain “humanist”, idealizing opponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Francis doesn’t make his argument depend upon the supposed uniqueness of the human species. It is precisely on the grounds of recognizing human beings as biological organisms that we have to reject all this simplistic “biologizing.” Francis is devastating, for instance, in discussing how evolutionary psychologists make so much of sexual dimorphisms between men and women that are minute (if they exist at all) in comparison to such dimorphisms in other vertebrate species. And he underscores the importance of looking for social causes of physiological and psychological differences, not in defiance of biology, but precisely because of it. The largest irony here is that, not only do the adaptationists in effect replace Darwin with theology; they also ignore the basic facts of neurophysiology and endocrinology, in their efforts to proclaim essential, “hard-wired”, and transhistorical differences between men and women.
Richard C. Francis’ Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions is a powerful critique of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that makes its points almost entirely in carefully worked-out scientific terms. That is to say, it doesn’t spend much time asking why, for instance, the evolutionary psychologists are so obsessed with tracking down supposed gender differences that are allegedly “in the genes”, as opposed to many other equally plausible research programs and subjects of interest. (This is an important question, but one that cultural critics can handle well enough by themselves). Instead, Francis gives a detailed and devastating critique of the (pseudo-)science behind all too many sociobiological claims.
Francis spends most of the book considering instances of sexual differentiation in vertebrate species other than human beings; this establishes a baseline for considering claims about the “innate” differences between men and women. He compares cases in which the differences between the males and females of a given species can convincingly be argued to be a direct result of natural selection and/or sexual selection, from those in which other, more proximate, explanations seem to fit the facts better.
Francis’ real target is extreme adaptationism: the doctrine that every observable characteristic of any organism needs to be understood as a direct adaptation of some sort. Of course, Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen Jay Gould started criticizing adaptationism way back in the 1960s. They introduced the ideas of exaptation (the transfer of a characteristic that evolved for one purpose, or in one context, to another context or purpose) and spandrels (features that have no adaptive purpose of their own, but exist as unavoidable side-effects of other features that did arise adaptively). Gould also famously criticized sociobiologists for their “just-so stories”: their tendency to argue on the basis of narratives of what primordial human conditions might or should have been like, even in the absence of any hard evidence for the truth of these narratives.
But Francis goes beyond Lewontin and Gould, to mount a more general attack on the teleological bias of adaptationist explanations: in asking “why-questions” (what is a particular feature of an organism for? what purposes does it serve?) at the expense of “how-questions” (how could a particular feature actually have arisen historically? what role does it have, given the previously-existing constraints that the organism faces?), adaptationist biology (and even more, its offshoot evolutionary psychology) has in effect reinstated the “argument from design” of pre-Darwinian “natural theology.”
In ignoring “how-questions,” adaptationists assert meaning and purpose without any ability to explain in causal and material terms how such meanings and purposes could possibly have come about. They separate the logic of adaptation from its material causation, just as cognitive scientists divorce “information” from its physical instantiation. For all their talk about “optimization” under ecological “constraints,” adaptationists ignore how the contingencies of history, and the constraints arising from how organisms are already “locked-in” to particular mechanisms and patterns of development, limit and channel evolutionary possibilities. (A parallel could be made, as well, to the way “free-market” economists ignore history, not to mention patterns of unequal power and distribution, in their quest to reduce everything to “efficiency”).
If extreme adaptationism is so problematic when it comes to discussing spotted hyenas and marsh tits and cichlids, how much more so is it when we come to consider human beings? Unlike certain “humanist”, idealizing opponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Francis doesn’t make his argument depend upon the supposed uniqueness of the human species. It is precisely on the grounds of recognizing human beings as biological organisms that we have to reject all this simplistic “biologizing.” Francis is devastating, for instance, in discussing how evolutionary psychologists make so much of sexual dimorphisms between men and women that are minute (if they exist at all) in comparison to such dimorphisms in other vertebrate species. And he underscores the importance of looking for social causes of physiological and psychological differences, not in defiance of biology, but precisely because of it. The largest irony here is that, not only do the adaptationists in effect replace Darwin with theology; they also ignore the basic facts of neurophysiology and endocrinology, in their efforts to proclaim essential, “hard-wired”, and transhistorical differences between men and women.
Karloff’s Circus is the fourth (and presumably last) novel in Steve Aylett‘s “Accomplice” series. Aylett is one of my favorite writers, but his books are so singular that they are extremely difficult to describe. They don’t fit into any known categories.
It’s sort of like Aylett is writing old-fashioned British farce, except that it is taking place somewhere that is considerably weirder than anything any of the Surrealists ever imagined. Bits and pieces of pulp fiction of various sorts pop up now and again, somehow rearranged by a crazed anatomist into grotesque new patterns. The books are hilarious, but with a humor that seems to be equal parts P. G. Wodehouse and William Burroughs (an impossible combination if there ever was one — Monty Python is the nearest analogue I can think of, but it doesn’t really come close).
Aylett creates imaginary worlds as rigorously and capaciously imagined as those of any of the great works of fantasy; but he does this comically, satirically, and sarcastically — qualities not usually associated with fantasy literature.
Aylett’s prose is unbelievably careful and precise. There are no wasted words; every sentence glistens with a hard, epigrammatic luster; every last detail is meaningful and carefully placed; and the books are all plotted out with the rigor of an Agatha Christie novel. Their nonsense, like that of Lewis Carrol, is rigorously logical, even if based on ridiculous premises.
Aylett’s novels have to be read very carefully, because details are never repeated to make things easy for the unattentive reader. In this way, Aylett’s books have a certain puzzle- and play-like aspect, in the manner of many modernist (Joyce, Faulkner) and postmodernist (Calvino, Perec) writers before him.
The Accomplice series is more difficult to get a handle on than Aylett’s “Beerlight” series, set in a futuristic American city where crime is the only occupation of the citizens, and the only art form (The Crime Studio, Slaughtermatic, and Atom), but not as dense and impenetrable as The Inflatable Volunteer, a book that could be described as sort of a punk version of Raymond Roussel.
The Accomplice books feature insectoid demons and corrupt politicians and guileless innocents who take venomous snakes out for walks because they just love animals. There are also battling religious sects (one worships guns, the other venerates porcelain dolls), and evil clowns, and “floor lobsters” (sort of like two-foot-long cockroaches). Amidst all this, the demented characters exchange pithy epigrams, in nasty exchanges and asides, as if they were at a Noel Coward tea party.
Karloff’s Circus is the fourth (and presumably last) novel in Steve Aylett‘s “Accomplice” series. Aylett is one of my favorite writers, but his books are so singular that they are extremely difficult to describe. They don’t fit into any known categories.
It’s sort of like Aylett is writing old-fashioned British farce, except that it is taking place somewhere that is considerably weirder than anything any of the Surrealists ever imagined. Bits and pieces of pulp fiction of various sorts pop up now and again, somehow rearranged by a crazed anatomist into grotesque new patterns. The books are hilarious, but with a humor that seems to be equal parts P. G. Wodehouse and William Burroughs (an impossible combination if there ever was one — Monty Python is the nearest analogue I can think of, but it doesn’t really come close).
Aylett creates imaginary worlds as rigorously and capaciously imagined as those of any of the great works of fantasy; but he does this comically, satirically, and sarcastically — qualities not usually associated with fantasy literature.
Aylett’s prose is unbelievably careful and precise. There are no wasted words; every sentence glistens with a hard, epigrammatic luster; every last detail is meaningful and carefully placed; and the books are all plotted out with the rigor of an Agatha Christie novel. Their nonsense, like that of Lewis Carrol, is rigorously logical, even if based on ridiculous premises.
Aylett’s novels have to be read very carefully, because details are never repeated to make things easy for the unattentive reader. In this way, Aylett’s books have a certain puzzle- and play-like aspect, in the manner of many modernist (Joyce, Faulkner) and postmodernist (Calvino, Perec) writers before him.
The Accomplice series is more difficult to get a handle on than Aylett’s “Beerlight” series, set in a futuristic American city where crime is the only occupation of the citizens, and the only art form (The Crime Studio, Slaughtermatic, and Atom), but not as dense and impenetrable as The Inflatable Volunteer, a book that could be described as sort of a punk version of Raymond Roussel.
The Accomplice books feature insectoid demons and corrupt politicians and guileless innocents who take venomous snakes out for walks because they just love animals. There are also battling religious sects (one worships guns, the other venerates porcelain dolls), and evil clowns, and “floor lobsters” (sort of like two-foot-long cockroaches). Amidst all this, the demented characters exchange pithy epigrams, in nasty exchanges and asides, as if they were at a Noel Coward tea party.
Vilem Flusser (1920-1991) was, after Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important media theorists of the late 20th century. He’s still not very well known in North America; but I find him far more profound and rewarding than, say, Baudrillard or Virilio (let alone Neil Postman or Paul Levinson).
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, originally published in 1983, is a brief and trenchant discussion of how photography (even before it became digital) serves as the prototype for a fully programmed, post-industrial, post-historical, informationcentric world. Flusser is less sentimental and melancholy than Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and more concise and rigorous than Susan Sontag (On Photography). He argues that photography represents a higher degree of abstraction than the writing which it has to a great degree supplanted, even as writing represents a higher degree of abstraction than the painted and drawn images that it supplanted several thousand years ago. Photographs do not render the real; rather they transform it into a highly codified sort of “information.” A photograph doesn’t represent the scene, person, or object being photographed, so much as it represents, and fulfills, the program of the photographic apparatus itself, a program that (like any entity under conditions of Darwinian competition) seeks nothing more than its own perpetuation and extension. Where handmade images promoted magical thinking, and writing promoted conceptual and historical thought, photography and all the technical forms of reproduction that have arisen in its wake actually work to program thought, to anticipate it ,and to mimic and contain it in advance. To simulate thought, in sum.
But unlike other critics of the rule of simulacra, Flusser evidences no nostalgia. He has no Baudrillardian yearning for a “real” that would have supposedly existed prior to photographic reproduction. And he explicitly criticizes the Frankfurt School, for the humanist nostalgia behind its attempts “to unmask the [class] interests behind the apparatuses.” Such approaches merely seek to reinstate the humanistic subject that photography and other post-industrial technical apparatuses have destroyed once and for all.
For Flusser — and this is part of what is so great about him — the only way out is the way through. “A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed, and programming apparatuses, in order finally [italics mine] to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.” It is only possible to invent a new practice of freedom, in other words, when we plumb technical programming (starting with photography, and moving on, today, to digital computing and communications) to the depths; when we take the full measure of what it has accomplished; when we give up our illusions of recovering a supposed pre-photographic, pre-technological mode of being.
Vilem Flusser (1920-1991) was, after Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important media theorists of the late 20th century. He’s still not very well known in North America; but I find him far more profound and rewarding than, say, Baudrillard or Virilio (let alone Neil Postman or Paul Levinson).
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, originally published in 1983, is a brief and trenchant discussion of how photography (even before it became digital) serves as the prototype for a fully programmed, post-industrial, post-historical, informationcentric world. Flusser is less sentimental and melancholy than Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and more concise and rigorous than Susan Sontag (On Photography). He argues that photography represents a higher degree of abstraction than the writing which it has to a great degree supplanted, even as writing represents a higher degree of abstraction than the painted and drawn images that it supplanted several thousand years ago. Photographs do not render the real; rather they transform it into a highly codified sort of “information.” A photograph doesn’t represent the scene, person, or object being photographed, so much as it represents, and fulfills, the program of the photographic apparatus itself, a program that (like any entity under conditions of Darwinian competition) seeks nothing more than its own perpetuation and extension. Where handmade images promoted magical thinking, and writing promoted conceptual and historical thought, photography and all the technical forms of reproduction that have arisen in its wake actually work to program thought, to anticipate it ,and to mimic and contain it in advance. To simulate thought, in sum.
But unlike other critics of the rule of simulacra, Flusser evidences no nostalgia. He has no Baudrillardian yearning for a “real” that would have supposedly existed prior to photographic reproduction. And he explicitly criticizes the Frankfurt School, for the humanist nostalgia behind its attempts “to unmask the [class] interests behind the apparatuses.” Such approaches merely seek to reinstate the humanistic subject that photography and other post-industrial technical apparatuses have destroyed once and for all.
For Flusser — and this is part of what is so great about him — the only way out is the way through. “A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed, and programming apparatuses, in order finally [italics mine] to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.” It is only possible to invent a new practice of freedom, in other words, when we plumb technical programming (starting with photography, and moving on, today, to digital computing and communications) to the depths; when we take the full measure of what it has accomplished; when we give up our illusions of recovering a supposed pre-photographic, pre-technological mode of being.
I’ve long felt a bit ambivalent about Bruno Latour, and I feel all the more that way after reading his book Pandora’s Hope. (I’ve previously read We Have Never Been Modern, plus a good number of essays).
I like the way Latour focuses on the details of actual scientific practice, and how he uses these details to argue for a complex set of mediations and links in the course of which humans are bound together with nonhumans – a model that he cogently argues is far preferable to the common one that simply confronts a linguistic statement, or a mental model, with a state of affairs in the world, and asks whether the statement representationally corresponds with, or accurately points to, the state of affairs. Latour is right to say that this dualistic, correspondence theory of truth (or its inversion, the deconstructionist abyss of language that cannot reach out beyond itself to the world) ignores the way that things like scientific theories, statements, and models are themselves actions or events or performances in the world. Latour is not the first thinker to resituate language in the world in this way, but he is the one who has applied it to the understanding of science, and specifically scientific practice.
Latour thus cuts the Gordian knot of the dispute between realism (‘the facts of science exist independently of us’) and constructionism (scientific entities are “socially constructed”). He says that the fallacy shared by both sides to this dispute is to think that “constructed” and “real” are opposites, when in fact they go in tandem: the more something is “constructed” (socially or otherwise) the realer it is, because the more it is interconnected with other things, the more it operates with and upon, and affects, other things, and so on. This seems to me exactly right
(It’s also a point that is consonant with Ian Hacking’s arguments, in The Social Construction of What, about the use of the phrase “social construction.” Hacking shows how many different meanings this phrase has; he suggests that it really functions as a marker of difference. We say that gender is “socially constructed” in order to argue against claims that it is entirely “in the genes”; we do not say that a bridge is “socially constructed,” because nobody argues that the Golden Gate Bridge somehow arose by itself).
Nonetheless, I am enough of a realist that I am made uneasy when Latour says, for instance, that yeast did not cause lactic acid fermentation until 1864, when Pasteur established this action in the laboratory. I agree that Pasteur’s experiments did not just reveal an always-existing truth; since those experiments mobilized the yeast, made it interact with human interests, both by establishing new scientific doctrine, and by making the commercial exploitation of the fermentation process possible on a scale and in a manner that it was not before. In pragmatist terms, Pasteur’s experiments, and his theoretical extrapolation from those experiments, made it possible for us to predict and control the fermentation process, and the life history of yeast, for the first time.
But it still seems disingenuous to me for Latour to say that it was only after 1864 that the process took place, or (to put his point as precisely as possible) that it is only after 1864 that the process of fermentation by the action of yeast (rather than fermentation as a byproduct of organic decay, as was previously believed) can be said to have taken place before 1864. In one sense, Latour’s statement is a tautology; but I think that Latour is trying to pull a fast one, by using this tautology to insinuate a deeper meaning, according to which the change in the world that took place in 1864 affected something more than certain instrumental activities of human beings with yeast.
Latour says that he is simply including yeast as well as human beings in history, rather than seeing yeast as unchanging and ahistorical “in and of itself.” But this begs the question of how the actions of yeast in fact affected human beings well before Pasteur mobilized yeast into what Latour calls the “collective.”
Latour’s sleight-of-hand becomes a still more serious matter when he presents his grand view of science and politics. He wants to repeal what he calls the modern “settlement” that radically separated subject from object, as well as Truth from Opinion, Knowledge from Power, Right from Might. He cleverly suggests that the Platonic and Cartesian dictatorship of Reason shares common assumptions with the view of the Sophists, of Hobbes, and of Nietzsche, that would seek to deconstruct it. He suggests that both Socrates and his opponents, and more recently both the scientific rationalists and Nietzsche, both the positivists and Foucault, distrust the “people” or the “mob”, and disagree only on whether the violent imposition to reign in this “mob” should be that of a hypostasized Reason or that of a more naked Power.
It’s not that I would want to defend a renewed elitism against Latour’s populism here. But Latour idealizes what a fully engaged politics (as opposed to one governed from without by the forceful imposition of scientific reason) would actually be. He idealizes and sentimentalizes the civility and consensus of a “body politic” uninfected by the dictatorship of an abstract Reason. One can observe the intractability of many human disputes and political conflicts (having to do with such things as class and other forms of privilege, wealth, and prestige, or with the control of the regime of productivity and the distribution of whatever social surplus there may be) without believing, as Latour accuses defenders of rationalism from Socrates to Steven Weinberg of doing, that “scientific” objectivity is the one thing that saves humankind from descending into barbarity and a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” One can agree that the rage of modernist iconoclasm often produces the very dehumanizing phenomena that it claims to be waging war against, without sharing Latour’s piety towards “fetishes” and “icons.”
In making “modernism” and its “settlement” his enemy, Latour can’t help reproducing modernity’s own logic, in the form of an idealized depiction of that which preceded the modern. Although he rightly says that the unalienated “pre-modern” is nothing but a modernist fantasy, he himself reproduces the very same fantasy, in his picture of a world uninfected by modernism, as well as in his assertion that “we have never been modern,” that modernity has only given greater scope to nonmodern “mixtures” in practice, by refusing them admission into theory.
In short: we must add to Latour’s account the additional awareness that we have never not been modern, that we have never been free of modernist divisions and impositions.
(This is a more Derridean conclusion than I wanted to get to; I think the way out is to ask different sorts of questions, and indeed this is what Latour says we should do; but Latour doesn’t ask the right different questions. He doesn’t quite succeed in pointing the way to his self-confessed goal, a Whiteheadean account that does justice both to science and to other modes of human experience of the world).
I’ve long felt a bit ambivalent about Bruno Latour, and I feel all the more that way after reading his book Pandora’s Hope. (I’ve previously read We Have Never Been Modern, plus a good number of essays).
I like the way Latour focuses on the details of actual scientific practice, and how he uses these details to argue for a complex set of mediations and links in the course of which humans are bound together with nonhumans – a model that he cogently argues is far preferable to the common one that simply confronts a linguistic statement, or a mental model, with a state of affairs in the world, and asks whether the statement representationally corresponds with, or accurately points to, the state of affairs. Latour is right to say that this dualistic, correspondence theory of truth (or its inversion, the deconstructionist abyss of language that cannot reach out beyond itself to the world) ignores the way that things like scientific theories, statements, and models are themselves actions or events or performances in the world. Latour is not the first thinker to resituate language in the world in this way, but he is the one who has applied it to the understanding of science, and specifically scientific practice.
Latour thus cuts the Gordian knot of the dispute between realism (‘the facts of science exist independently of us’) and constructionism (scientific entities are “socially constructed”). He says that the fallacy shared by both sides to this dispute is to think that “constructed” and “real” are opposites, when in fact they go in tandem: the more something is “constructed” (socially or otherwise) the realer it is, because the more it is interconnected with other things, the more it operates with and upon, and affects, other things, and so on. This seems to me exactly right
(It’s also a point that is consonant with Ian Hacking’s arguments, in The Social Construction of What, about the use of the phrase “social construction.” Hacking shows how many different meanings this phrase has; he suggests that it really functions as a marker of difference. We say that gender is “socially constructed” in order to argue against claims that it is entirely “in the genes”; we do not say that a bridge is “socially constructed,” because nobody argues that the Golden Gate Bridge somehow arose by itself).
Nonetheless, I am enough of a realist that I am made uneasy when Latour says, for instance, that yeast did not cause lactic acid fermentation until 1864, when Pasteur established this action in the laboratory. I agree that Pasteur’s experiments did not just reveal an always-existing truth; since those experiments mobilized the yeast, made it interact with human interests, both by establishing new scientific doctrine, and by making the commercial exploitation of the fermentation process possible on a scale and in a manner that it was not before. In pragmatist terms, Pasteur’s experiments, and his theoretical extrapolation from those experiments, made it possible for us to predict and control the fermentation process, and the life history of yeast, for the first time.
But it still seems disingenuous to me for Latour to say that it was only after 1864 that the process took place, or (to put his point as precisely as possible) that it is only after 1864 that the process of fermentation by the action of yeast (rather than fermentation as a byproduct of organic decay, as was previously believed) can be said to have taken place before 1864. In one sense, Latour’s statement is a tautology; but I think that Latour is trying to pull a fast one, by using this tautology to insinuate a deeper meaning, according to which the change in the world that took place in 1864 affected something more than certain instrumental activities of human beings with yeast.
Latour says that he is simply including yeast as well as human beings in history, rather than seeing yeast as unchanging and ahistorical “in and of itself.” But this begs the question of how the actions of yeast in fact affected human beings well before Pasteur mobilized yeast into what Latour calls the “collective.”
Latour’s sleight-of-hand becomes a still more serious matter when he presents his grand view of science and politics. He wants to repeal what he calls the modern “settlement” that radically separated subject from object, as well as Truth from Opinion, Knowledge from Power, Right from Might. He cleverly suggests that the Platonic and Cartesian dictatorship of Reason shares common assumptions with the view of the Sophists, of Hobbes, and of Nietzsche, that would seek to deconstruct it. He suggests that both Socrates and his opponents, and more recently both the scientific rationalists and Nietzsche, both the positivists and Foucault, distrust the “people” or the “mob”, and disagree only on whether the violent imposition to reign in this “mob” should be that of a hypostasized Reason or that of a more naked Power.
It’s not that I would want to defend a renewed elitism against Latour’s populism here. But Latour idealizes what a fully engaged politics (as opposed to one governed from without by the forceful imposition of scientific reason) would actually be. He idealizes and sentimentalizes the civility and consensus of a “body politic” uninfected by the dictatorship of an abstract Reason. One can observe the intractability of many human disputes and political conflicts (having to do with such things as class and other forms of privilege, wealth, and prestige, or with the control of the regime of productivity and the distribution of whatever social surplus there may be) without believing, as Latour accuses defenders of rationalism from Socrates to Steven Weinberg of doing, that “scientific” objectivity is the one thing that saves humankind from descending into barbarity and a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” One can agree that the rage of modernist iconoclasm often produces the very dehumanizing phenomena that it claims to be waging war against, without sharing Latour’s piety towards “fetishes” and “icons.”
In making “modernism” and its “settlement” his enemy, Latour can’t help reproducing modernity’s own logic, in the form of an idealized depiction of that which preceded the modern. Although he rightly says that the unalienated “pre-modern” is nothing but a modernist fantasy, he himself reproduces the very same fantasy, in his picture of a world uninfected by modernism, as well as in his assertion that “we have never been modern,” that modernity has only given greater scope to nonmodern “mixtures” in practice, by refusing them admission into theory.
In short: we must add to Latour’s account the additional awareness that we have never not been modern, that we have never been free of modernist divisions and impositions.
(This is a more Derridean conclusion than I wanted to get to; I think the way out is to ask different sorts of questions, and indeed this is what Latour says we should do; but Latour doesn’t ask the right different questions. He doesn’t quite succeed in pointing the way to his self-confessed goal, a Whiteheadean account that does justice both to science and to other modes of human experience of the world).
Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.
Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.
Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. Three of her books have been translated into English: the short story collection Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, which consists of two novellas, and the one I just reread, The Embroidered Shoes, which contains ten short stories and a novella. (As far as I know, Can Xue has published a lot more in Chinese, but these are the only texts of hers that have been translated into a language I understand).
It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it.
Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. Three of her books have been translated into English: the short story collection Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, which consists of two novellas, and the one I just reread, The Embroidered Shoes, which contains ten short stories and a novella. (As far as I know, Can Xue has published a lot more in Chinese, but these are the only texts of hers that have been translated into a language I understand).
It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it.
William J. Mitchell‘s new book ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City is an extremely useful survey and discussion of new technologies, but (how do I put this) not an inspiring one. The book makes a powerful and exhaustive inventory of new network technologies, particularly wireless ones, and discusses how these technologies are changing everything from our sense of self to the way power works in our society. Mitchell is careful not to get too carried away, in the manner of so many futurologists: the devices and techniques he is writing about are not all commonly available yet today, but they are all grounded in current practices. That is to say, Mitchell extrapolates only to the extent that he describes the situation in which today’s bleeding-edge technology has become the norm, an everyday experience within the price range and technical know-how of the average consumer. (By this, he seems to mean anyone at the economic level of the inhabitants of North America, Western Europe, and Japan).
What’s especially good about Mitchell’s account is the way that he embeds his accounts of cell-phone texting or RFID chips or GPS systems in the history of human culture, technology, and architecture. Goggles that display hyperlinked data are not anything radically new, so much as they are continuous with a whole series of inventions, or of human tweakings of the environment, from the mastery of fire, to various forms of clothing, various means of writing (making symbolic marks), and various architectural programs. New technology is thereby demystified, and even its “virtual,” delocalizing components are grounded in a dialectic between the body and its surroundings. Mitchell is also frank and thoughtful about the dangers, as well as the advantages, of the new wireless digital technologies: he spends as much time talking about their potentials for surveillance and control, as he does about the new forms of freedom that they might open up. Rejecting both utopian fantasies and dystopian prophecies, Mitchell offers instead a sober calculus of possibilities and dangers.
Why, then, am I ultimately disappointed with this book (which is what I meant when I said I didn’t find it inspiring)? I think it is because Mitchell remains on the level of the catalogue, or listing of separate observations. He fails to do (and probably has no interest in doing) what Deleuze and Guattari define as the task of the philosopher, theorist, or intellectual: to create new concepts. He shows us how new conditions and new forms of life are emerging, conditions and forms for which our current patterns of thought are no longer adequate; but he doesn’t take cognizance of this inadequacy (not even in his own language) and he doesn’t even begin to think about how it might be remedied. The result is a kind of enforced blandness. I suppose that is better than your typical “gee-whiz” celebratory attitude, but it leaves me dissatisfied. Mitchell avoids corporate hucksterism over the effects of new media and new technologies, but only at the price of substituting a kind of bureaucratic, policy-wonk mentality.
William J. Mitchell‘s new book ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City is an extremely useful survey and discussion of new technologies, but (how do I put this) not an inspiring one. The book makes a powerful and exhaustive inventory of new network technologies, particularly wireless ones, and discusses how these technologies are changing everything from our sense of self to the way power works in our society. Mitchell is careful not to get too carried away, in the manner of so many futurologists: the devices and techniques he is writing about are not all commonly available yet today, but they are all grounded in current practices. That is to say, Mitchell extrapolates only to the extent that he describes the situation in which today’s bleeding-edge technology has become the norm, an everyday experience within the price range and technical know-how of the average consumer. (By this, he seems to mean anyone at the economic level of the inhabitants of North America, Western Europe, and Japan).
What’s especially good about Mitchell’s account is the way that he embeds his accounts of cell-phone texting or RFID chips or GPS systems in the history of human culture, technology, and architecture. Goggles that display hyperlinked data are not anything radically new, so much as they are continuous with a whole series of inventions, or of human tweakings of the environment, from the mastery of fire, to various forms of clothing, various means of writing (making symbolic marks), and various architectural programs. New technology is thereby demystified, and even its “virtual,” delocalizing components are grounded in a dialectic between the body and its surroundings. Mitchell is also frank and thoughtful about the dangers, as well as the advantages, of the new wireless digital technologies: he spends as much time talking about their potentials for surveillance and control, as he does about the new forms of freedom that they might open up. Rejecting both utopian fantasies and dystopian prophecies, Mitchell offers instead a sober calculus of possibilities and dangers.
Why, then, am I ultimately disappointed with this book (which is what I meant when I said I didn’t find it inspiring)? I think it is because Mitchell remains on the level of the catalogue, or listing of separate observations. He fails to do (and probably has no interest in doing) what Deleuze and Guattari define as the task of the philosopher, theorist, or intellectual: to create new concepts. He shows us how new conditions and new forms of life are emerging, conditions and forms for which our current patterns of thought are no longer adequate; but he doesn’t take cognizance of this inadequacy (not even in his own language) and he doesn’t even begin to think about how it might be remedied. The result is a kind of enforced blandness. I suppose that is better than your typical “gee-whiz” celebratory attitude, but it leaves me dissatisfied. Mitchell avoids corporate hucksterism over the effects of new media and new technologies, but only at the price of substituting a kind of bureaucratic, policy-wonk mentality.
Bruce Sterling’s short story collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future offers seven vignettes of the near future, with an emphasis on globalization and mobile stealth technologies. The stories – originally published between 1993 and 1998 – manage to be (for the most part) dystopian yet anti-apocalyptic, as well as wildly hilarious, and to throw out new ideas with a profligacy that more than makes up for their occasionally corny plot lines. The promiscuous, postmodern mixing-and-matching of cultures is accompanied by new forms of mutating sociality, from the Japanese “network gift economy” of “Maneki Neko” to the Wende (a sort of chaotic convergence of temporary anarchy, involving simultaneous rioting by all sorts of groups from artist-anarchists to Moral Majority bigots to soccer hooligans) that convulses Dusseldorf in “Deep Eddy.” In addition to the usual subcultural types muddling through bizarre circumstances which to them are utterly mundane, there are also characters like The Cultural Critic, a sort of hyper-Friedrich Kittler figure on the far side of postmodernity (he has the best quotes in the book: “the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception… every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational”). Not to mention the hack Bollywood film director who is shooting pictures in Britain to take advantage of the depressed economy there, in the wake of a Mad Cow epidemic that wiped out most of the population. There’s no “cyberpunk” attitude here, only Sterling’s gift for making the wildest scenarios seem alarmingly plausible.
Bruce Sterling’s short story collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future offers seven vignettes of the near future, with an emphasis on globalization and mobile stealth technologies. The stories – originally published between 1993 and 1998 – manage to be (for the most part) dystopian yet anti-apocalyptic, as well as wildly hilarious, and to throw out new ideas with a profligacy that more than makes up for their occasionally corny plot lines. The promiscuous, postmodern mixing-and-matching of cultures is accompanied by new forms of mutating sociality, from the Japanese “network gift economy” of “Maneki Neko” to the Wende (a sort of chaotic convergence of temporary anarchy, involving simultaneous rioting by all sorts of groups from artist-anarchists to Moral Majority bigots to soccer hooligans) that convulses Dusseldorf in “Deep Eddy.” In addition to the usual subcultural types muddling through bizarre circumstances which to them are utterly mundane, there are also characters like The Cultural Critic, a sort of hyper-Friedrich Kittler figure on the far side of postmodernity (he has the best quotes in the book: “the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception… every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational”). Not to mention the hack Bollywood film director who is shooting pictures in Britain to take advantage of the depressed economy there, in the wake of a Mad Cow epidemic that wiped out most of the population. There’s no “cyberpunk” attitude here, only Sterling’s gift for making the wildest scenarios seem alarmingly plausible.