Ernest Dickerson’s Never Die Alone, from the novel by the great Donald Goines, is a first-rate genre picture. DMX is ice cold charismatic as “King” David, a nasty, sadistic drug dealer who is shot dead just as he is about to repent and seek redemption. The direction is taut and concise, with economical naration, a complex temporal scheme, powerful (but carefully restrained) use of noir lighting and tilts and odd angles, and violent action sequences which pack a punch without being dwelt on (a la Mel Gibson) or inflated (a la Quentin Tarantino). On the evidence of not only this film, but all his work, Dickerson seems to me every bit the peer and equal of Don Siegel and Walter Hill, as far as action genre directors are concerned.
But of course, there’s more to Never Die Alone than just a genre picture. Because of Dickerson’s ambitions as a director; because of what it means to bring Donald Goines to film; and, subsuming both of the above, because this is an African American themed film.
Never Die Alone, to a certain extent, tries to have things both ways. It solicits (male) viewers with its gangsta cool at the same time that it claims to provide an edifying lesson on how wrongdoing and crime don’t pay.
Now in fact the film’s less guilty of this than many other films are, not to mention hip hop lyrics; overall, it’s a pretty grim movie, and its relentless speed doesn’t allow any time to revel either in bloodshed or in the glories of acquiring “money and pussy,” the only two things that matter according to one ganglord character. I really didn’t see this film as selling a minstrelized version of ghetto pimp cool blackness to white suburban kids, the way so many commercial enterprises do these days. (This is probably the reason for its relatively poor box office showing).
Indeed, the relation of the black/ghetto story to its white voyeurs and consumers is explicitly, and rather oddly, taken up within the film itself; David Arquette plays Paul, a white guy, a writer, who’s slumming (as his bourgeois black girlfriend tells him in no uncertain terms) in Harlem, ostensibly to find material for the novel he hopes to write. He gets this material. in the form of audio tapes that King David leaves behind. The film starts with DMX/David narrating from the grave; its flashbacks to his earlier career are motivated by Paul’s listening to the tapes. And the film’s penultimate scene has Paul producing the novel Never Die Alone, that was actually written by Donald Goines, and of which we are now watching the cinematic adaptation. Paul is told by the publisher that it’s too incredible a story to be believed; the irony resonates, even as genre conditions are fulfilled. While the film never quite resolves just what sort of jouissance Paul gets from witnessing (and identifying with, from a position of safety) King David’s career, we can’t doubt that something fairly unpleasant is at work here.
Nonetheless, there is one crucial respect in which the film treads on dubious ground, and does revel in its own nastiness. Its treatment of its protagonist’s misogyny is unpleasantly double-edged. The only thing that DMX’s nearly affectless character seems to get off on is reducing strong women (and especially strong black women) to abject misery and dependency, by hooking them on heroin and then cutting off the supply (and finally killing them, with a deliberately doctored dose). And although this is thematized (with an additional Oedipal twist) as the main reason why King David is brought low, this doesn’t negate a certain pleasure that the film takes in the process (i.e., that it proposes for the delectation of the viewer).
I suppose all this is not unfaithful to Donald Goines, a writer certainly not free of conventional misogyny, but whose power comes from his relentlessly horrific and dystopian view of the life of pimping and drug dealing in the ghetto. (The only exception to this downbeat vision being the black power fantasies of his final four “Kenyatta” novels). Goines, like hip hop artists of the 1990s and since, gained a cult following on the razor’s edge between proclaiming coolness and unsparingly “keeping it real”; but his negativity has never been matched by Biggie, Tupac, or anybody else. This is probably why so few films have been made from his novels, despite the way their genre aspects and ghetto settings seem to cry out for cinematic treatment. (I’ve never seen Crime Partners, the only one ever made prior to Never Die Alone, but it sounds like a stinker, and unfaithful to the novel to boot). Adapting Goines to the screen is much more difficult than it might at first appear to be; and though Dickerson hasn’t entirely succeeded in capturing the full measure of Goines’ bleak and disturbing vision — at once naturalistic and almost apocalyptic — he’s at least gone beyond blaxploitation cliches to make a largely compelling film.
Ernest Dickerson’s Never Die Alone, from the novel by the great Donald Goines, is a first-rate genre picture. DMX is ice cold charismatic as “King” David, a nasty, sadistic drug dealer who is shot dead just as he is about to repent and seek redemption. The direction is taut and concise, with economical naration, a complex temporal scheme, powerful (but carefully restrained) use of noir lighting and tilts and odd angles, and violent action sequences which pack a punch without being dwelt on (a la Mel Gibson) or inflated (a la Quentin Tarantino). On the evidence of not only this film, but all his work, Dickerson seems to me every bit the peer and equal of Don Siegel and Walter Hill, as far as action genre directors are concerned.
But of course, there’s more to Never Die Alone than just a genre picture. Because of Dickerson’s ambitions as a director; because of what it means to bring Donald Goines to film; and, subsuming both of the above, because this is an African American themed film.
Never Die Alone, to a certain extent, tries to have things both ways. It solicits (male) viewers with its gangsta cool at the same time that it claims to provide an edifying lesson on how wrongdoing and crime don’t pay.
Now in fact the film’s less guilty of this than many other films are, not to mention hip hop lyrics; overall, it’s a pretty grim movie, and its relentless speed doesn’t allow any time to revel either in bloodshed or in the glories of acquiring “money and pussy,” the only two things that matter according to one ganglord character. I really didn’t see this film as selling a minstrelized version of ghetto pimp cool blackness to white suburban kids, the way so many commercial enterprises do these days. (This is probably the reason for its relatively poor box office showing).
Indeed, the relation of the black/ghetto story to its white voyeurs and consumers is explicitly, and rather oddly, taken up within the film itself; David Arquette plays Paul, a white guy, a writer, who’s slumming (as his bourgeois black girlfriend tells him in no uncertain terms) in Harlem, ostensibly to find material for the novel he hopes to write. He gets this material. in the form of audio tapes that King David leaves behind. The film starts with DMX/David narrating from the grave; its flashbacks to his earlier career are motivated by Paul’s listening to the tapes. And the film’s penultimate scene has Paul producing the novel Never Die Alone, that was actually written by Donald Goines, and of which we are now watching the cinematic adaptation. Paul is told by the publisher that it’s too incredible a story to be believed; the irony resonates, even as genre conditions are fulfilled. While the film never quite resolves just what sort of jouissance Paul gets from witnessing (and identifying with, from a position of safety) King David’s career, we can’t doubt that something fairly unpleasant is at work here.
Nonetheless, there is one crucial respect in which the film treads on dubious ground, and does revel in its own nastiness. Its treatment of its protagonist’s misogyny is unpleasantly double-edged. The only thing that DMX’s nearly affectless character seems to get off on is reducing strong women (and especially strong black women) to abject misery and dependency, by hooking them on heroin and then cutting off the supply (and finally killing them, with a deliberately doctored dose). And although this is thematized (with an additional Oedipal twist) as the main reason why King David is brought low, this doesn’t negate a certain pleasure that the film takes in the process (i.e., that it proposes for the delectation of the viewer).
I suppose all this is not unfaithful to Donald Goines, a writer certainly not free of conventional misogyny, but whose power comes from his relentlessly horrific and dystopian view of the life of pimping and drug dealing in the ghetto. (The only exception to this downbeat vision being the black power fantasies of his final four “Kenyatta” novels). Goines, like hip hop artists of the 1990s and since, gained a cult following on the razor’s edge between proclaiming coolness and unsparingly “keeping it real”; but his negativity has never been matched by Biggie, Tupac, or anybody else. This is probably why so few films have been made from his novels, despite the way their genre aspects and ghetto settings seem to cry out for cinematic treatment. (I’ve never seen Crime Partners, the only one ever made prior to Never Die Alone, but it sounds like a stinker, and unfaithful to the novel to boot). Adapting Goines to the screen is much more difficult than it might at first appear to be; and though Dickerson hasn’t entirely succeeded in capturing the full measure of Goines’ bleak and disturbing vision — at once naturalistic and almost apocalyptic — he’s at least gone beyond blaxploitation cliches to make a largely compelling film.
Negri on Negri is a book of interviews that gives a gentle introduction to Toni Negri’s thought. It’s worth reading because Negri is one of the few contemporary thinkers who is really trying to work out radical alternatives to our current regime of postmodernity and globalization. Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire is clearly one of the key texts of the new century, something that anyone interested in political change needs to come to terms with — even if I find much of it problematic.
Negri on Negri is a much “lighter” book than Empire, but that makes it good as an introduction. Negri goes into his life and political career — his work as a political activist in Italy, the disturbances at the time of the Red Brigades, with whom he had a certain sympathy but which he was falsely accused of supporting and even masterminding, his years in jail, his years in exile in France, his ultimate return to Italy and more time in jail. This all provides a background to a thought that remains, in spite of everything, incredibly cheerful and optimistic.
Negri’s current thought is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a “knowledge economy,” and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. This metamorphosis is what doomed the radical movements — left of the Communist Party — to which Negri devoted his life in the 1960s and 1970s.
For Negri, traditional Marxism, with its traditional notion of the “working class,” no longer makes any sense under these changed conditions. But this does not mean that he capitulates to the idea that the worldwide capitalist marketplace is the ultimate horizon of possibility, the only thinkable social arrangement. Instead, Negri seeks to reinvent Marxism for these changed conditions, for the changed (but still quite horrible) new configurations of capitalism.
Basically, Negri argues that capitalist “production” is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the “base,” in comparison to which everything else would be a mere “superstructure.” Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere — and quite directly so. It’s brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions.
This is the situation foreseen by Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, who presaged a state of society in which all independence would be exterminated, and everything would be subjected to the “laws” of capitalism, commodification, and instrumental reason.
But the situation that Adorno viewed with unalloyed horror is seen by Negri as a source of hope — seen with an almost insane optimism. For Negri, such a condition means that oppression is really in its last extremity: if globalized, informational capitalism seems to have appropriated everything, with no remainder, it’s because this “everything” is now something that we are all directly involved in, and that we can therefore reappropriate. Indeed, for Negri, the conditions have never been so propitious. Capitalism’s own mechanisms and technologies have made the overcoming of alienation, and of scarcity, possible for the very first time. Negri thus rejects the forms and categories of old-fashioned Marxism, in order the better to establish Marxism’s oldest utopian premise and promise, that of universal “communism.” Global capitalist oppression has ironically created the conditions for global freedom to be almost within our grasp.
Now, all this is so wildly, insanely optimistic that I don’t believe it for a second. Nonetheless, I can’t help finding Negri’s ideas beautiful and inspiring. For they rest on a sense of life as a joyous, ongoing process of creation and collaboration, of what Negri calls the “common,” or “the liberty of being-together”: the amassing of multiple “singularities” without them ever fusing into a fixed identity. These pages are filled with paeans (I can’t believe that I am actually using this word) to “the pleasure of singularity” (149), or to “the moment when the arrow of Being is shot, the moment of opening, the invention of Being on the edge of time. We live at each instant on this margin of Being that is endlessly being constructed” (104). I feel enlivened by Negri’s celebration of singularity, plurality, invention, and imagination, even if I am unable to share his materialist and (post)humanist faith.
I can’t remember who it was who said that the great thing about Negri was how he countered the self-deluding voluntarism of Gramsci’s “pessmism of the intellect, optimism of the will” with an attitude of “optimism of the intellect,” even in the face of an inevitable (given the history of how revolutions have been defeated, or turned into something worse when they succeeded) “pessimism of the will.”
Negri on Negri is a book of interviews that gives a gentle introduction to Toni Negri’s thought. It’s worth reading because Negri is one of the few contemporary thinkers who is really trying to work out radical alternatives to our current regime of postmodernity and globalization. Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire is clearly one of the key texts of the new century, something that anyone interested in political change needs to come to terms with — even if I find much of it problematic.
Negri on Negri is a much “lighter” book than Empire, but that makes it good as an introduction. Negri goes into his life and political career — his work as a political activist in Italy, the disturbances at the time of the Red Brigades, with whom he had a certain sympathy but which he was falsely accused of supporting and even masterminding, his years in jail, his years in exile in France, his ultimate return to Italy and more time in jail. This all provides a background to a thought that remains, in spite of everything, incredibly cheerful and optimistic.
Negri’s current thought is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a “knowledge economy,” and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. This metamorphosis is what doomed the radical movements — left of the Communist Party — to which Negri devoted his life in the 1960s and 1970s.
For Negri, traditional Marxism, with its traditional notion of the “working class,” no longer makes any sense under these changed conditions. But this does not mean that he capitulates to the idea that the worldwide capitalist marketplace is the ultimate horizon of possibility, the only thinkable social arrangement. Instead, Negri seeks to reinvent Marxism for these changed conditions, for the changed (but still quite horrible) new configurations of capitalism.
Basically, Negri argues that capitalist “production” is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the “base,” in comparison to which everything else would be a mere “superstructure.” Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere — and quite directly so. It’s brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions.
This is the situation foreseen by Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, who presaged a state of society in which all independence would be exterminated, and everything would be subjected to the “laws” of capitalism, commodification, and instrumental reason.
But the situation that Adorno viewed with unalloyed horror is seen by Negri as a source of hope — seen with an almost insane optimism. For Negri, such a condition means that oppression is really in its last extremity: if globalized, informational capitalism seems to have appropriated everything, with no remainder, it’s because this “everything” is now something that we are all directly involved in, and that we can therefore reappropriate. Indeed, for Negri, the conditions have never been so propitious. Capitalism’s own mechanisms and technologies have made the overcoming of alienation, and of scarcity, possible for the very first time. Negri thus rejects the forms and categories of old-fashioned Marxism, in order the better to establish Marxism’s oldest utopian premise and promise, that of universal “communism.” Global capitalist oppression has ironically created the conditions for global freedom to be almost within our grasp.
Now, all this is so wildly, insanely optimistic that I don’t believe it for a second. Nonetheless, I can’t help finding Negri’s ideas beautiful and inspiring. For they rest on a sense of life as a joyous, ongoing process of creation and collaboration, of what Negri calls the “common,” or “the liberty of being-together”: the amassing of multiple “singularities” without them ever fusing into a fixed identity. These pages are filled with paeans (I can’t believe that I am actually using this word) to “the pleasure of singularity” (149), or to “the moment when the arrow of Being is shot, the moment of opening, the invention of Being on the edge of time. We live at each instant on this margin of Being that is endlessly being constructed” (104). I feel enlivened by Negri’s celebration of singularity, plurality, invention, and imagination, even if I am unable to share his materialist and (post)humanist faith.
I can’t remember who it was who said that the great thing about Negri was how he countered the self-deluding voluntarism of Gramsci’s “pessmism of the intellect, optimism of the will” with an attitude of “optimism of the intellect,” even in the face of an inevitable (given the history of how revolutions have been defeated, or turned into something worse when they succeeded) “pessimism of the will.”
Rhythm Science is the new, and first, book by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.
DJ Spooky’s albums (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Viral Sonata) and mixtapes (Under the Influence, Modern Mantra) are powerfully sharp and complex works. What’s great about these CDs is how they manage to be, at the same time, wildly eclectic and yet tightly focused and singular. Miller/Spooky is on the cutting edge of true, radical hybridity: his work is about citation/sampling/cutting-up as tools of innovation and metamorphosis.
Spooky’s music thus stands as a sharp reproach both to the superstitious reverence for “roots” (which usually means white people idolizing and exhuming a long-ago musical form pioneered by people of color, while ignoring or scorning what said people of color are doing now, in the present) and to the shallow, faux rainbow hybridity that corporations love (We Are the World, United Colors of Benetton). In contrast to both these trends (which have more in common than either of them would want to admit) DJ Spooky insists on making it new: breaking with modernist forms and categories, embracing the flux of postmodern commodity culture, is the only way to be true to that radical modernist imperative.
Rhythm Science, the book, is Miller/Spooky’s explication of, and meditation upon, his artistic methods and goals. The book’s motto could be the sentence of Emerson’s that is quoted on page 68: “It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.” Miller doesn’t make a linear, philosophical argument, so much as he mixes theory, history, anecdote, autobiography and scientific research, all of these flowing in and out and free associating from one page to the next.
What Rhythm Science really is, is a manifesto: the first important avant-garde artistic manifesto of the twenty-first century. It’s a utopian book, in that it focuses, with hope, on the maximal potentialities of the remix in postmodern, network culture. I find it bracing and refreshing, because of how it provides a corrective to my own tendencies to be pessimistic about how those potentialities will most likely be captured, co-opted, and crushed by giant corporations before they have had a chance even to blossom. In his writing as in his music, Paul Miller works to “keep hope alive,” something we desperately need right now, in these horrendous times of George W. Bush and Mel Gibson.
The design of the Rhythm Science book also needs to be mentioned, because it is both innovative and beautiful. The book is designed to mimic both a vinyl record and a CD, with a hole in the center; pages of collage (abstract images, vector graphics, and quotations sampled from the text) alternate with pages of actual text, and the pages themselves differ in texture, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth. There’s also a CD that comes along with the book, in which Spooky/Miller mixes electronic sounds with voice recordings of great modernist authors (Tzara, Artaud, Joyce, and Stein, among others).
As an object, therefore, the book eschews linearity and embraces the audio-tactile aesthetic that Marshall McLuhan identified with electronic media. And this design itself really is something new, rather than being (as too many recent hip media projects have tended to be) an imitation of the style that Marshall McLuhan pioneered in the 1960s in collaboration with Quentin Fiore (in books like The Medium is the Massage).
Rhythm Science is the new, and first, book by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.
DJ Spooky’s albums (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Viral Sonata) and mixtapes (Under the Influence, Modern Mantra) are powerfully sharp and complex works. What’s great about these CDs is how they manage to be, at the same time, wildly eclectic and yet tightly focused and singular. Miller/Spooky is on the cutting edge of true, radical hybridity: his work is about citation/sampling/cutting-up as tools of innovation and metamorphosis.
Spooky’s music thus stands as a sharp reproach both to the superstitious reverence for “roots” (which usually means white people idolizing and exhuming a long-ago musical form pioneered by people of color, while ignoring or scorning what said people of color are doing now, in the present) and to the shallow, faux rainbow hybridity that corporations love (We Are the World, United Colors of Benetton). In contrast to both these trends (which have more in common than either of them would want to admit) DJ Spooky insists on making it new: breaking with modernist forms and categories, embracing the flux of postmodern commodity culture, is the only way to be true to that radical modernist imperative.
Rhythm Science, the book, is Miller/Spooky’s explication of, and meditation upon, his artistic methods and goals. The book’s motto could be the sentence of Emerson’s that is quoted on page 68: “It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.” Miller doesn’t make a linear, philosophical argument, so much as he mixes theory, history, anecdote, autobiography and scientific research, all of these flowing in and out and free associating from one page to the next.
What Rhythm Science really is, is a manifesto: the first important avant-garde artistic manifesto of the twenty-first century. It’s a utopian book, in that it focuses, with hope, on the maximal potentialities of the remix in postmodern, network culture. I find it bracing and refreshing, because of how it provides a corrective to my own tendencies to be pessimistic about how those potentialities will most likely be captured, co-opted, and crushed by giant corporations before they have had a chance even to blossom. In his writing as in his music, Paul Miller works to “keep hope alive,” something we desperately need right now, in these horrendous times of George W. Bush and Mel Gibson.
The design of the Rhythm Science book also needs to be mentioned, because it is both innovative and beautiful. The book is designed to mimic both a vinyl record and a CD, with a hole in the center; pages of collage (abstract images, vector graphics, and quotations sampled from the text) alternate with pages of actual text, and the pages themselves differ in texture, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth. There’s also a CD that comes along with the book, in which Spooky/Miller mixes electronic sounds with voice recordings of great modernist authors (Tzara, Artaud, Joyce, and Stein, among others).
As an object, therefore, the book eschews linearity and embraces the audio-tactile aesthetic that Marshall McLuhan identified with electronic media. And this design itself really is something new, rather than being (as too many recent hip media projects have tended to be) an imitation of the style that Marshall McLuhan pioneered in the 1960s in collaboration with Quentin Fiore (in books like The Medium is the Massage).
Wider Than the Sky is Gerald Edelman‘s summary/overview of his work on the neural basis of consciousness. (Parts of this work have been explained, in greater detail, in a number of Edelman’s earlier books; the ones I have previously read are Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and The Remembered Present).
Edelman has a peculiar position in neuroscience, from what I have been able to gather: he is disliked by many because of his egocentric insistence on reinventing the wheel. That is to say, he insists so unilaterally on his own theories that he ignores work by others that in many ways is parallel to his, and that his own work would benefit by communicating with.
Be that as it may, Edelman offers an interesting and plausible (albeit largely unproven) theory about how consciousness is generated, and how it works, in the brain. His basic thesis is the hypothesis of “neural Darwinism”: he argues that both the growth and “wiring” of neurons during fetal and childhood development, and the activation of neurons in memory and in response to the environment are governed by a process analogous to Darwinian natural selection. (Edelman previously won the Nobel Prize for his work showing that such selection mechanisms were at work in the mammalian immune system, as populations of antibodies mutate and grow in response to infections). Groups of neurons are selected on the basis of their effectiveness in responding to multiple stimuli from the outside world, and in classifying and responding to these stimuli in terms of categories derived from previous, remembered experiences (what Edelman calls “value-category memory”). Consciousness arises as a result of “reentry”, a kind of hyper-feedback among groups of neurons allowing for coordination among, and unification of, what would otherwise be disconnected percepts. (Edelman defines reentry as “the dynamic ongoing process of recursive signaling across massively parallel reciprocal fibers…” Such a process “allows coherent and synchronous events to emerge in the brain.” These events are the contents of consciousness, and processes of reentry explain how consciousness can be both unified, and yet extremely diverse and continually changing).
There are many more details, involving such things attention, emotion, and the difference between “primary consciousness,” which presumably all mammals and birds have, and “higher-order consciousness” (or what I would call reflexive consciousness, or self-consciousness) which only really emerges with language (though Edelman allows for the possibility that cruder, emergent versions of it may exist among the great apes).
A lot of this would seem to be speculation; a lot of it isn’t really experimentally grounded (at least so far), and some of it may in fact not be ‘scientific’ at all, because not empirically testable or falsifiable.
But to my mind, this is not necessarily a deficiency. Though Edelman throughout expresses his admiration for, and frequent agreement with, the psychology of William James, he begins the book by disclaiming any metaphysical intent, and by expressing puzzlement over James’ claim that, when consciousness finally is explained, “the necessities of the case will make [these explanations] ‘metaphysical'” (Edelman quoting James in his Preface, page xii).
It seems to me that, even in spite of himself, Edelman proves James right, by giving a theory of consciousness that is to some extent unavoidably metaphysical. Edelman shies away from such a term because he insists, rightly, that in any explanation of consciousness “principles of physics must be strictly obeyed and that the world defined by physics is causally closed. No spooky forces that contravene thermodynamics can be included” (page 114). –But I think that James himself would have entirely accepted this qualification, and that what he meant by “metaphysical” is something else. A theory of consciousness can’t help being “metaphysical,” because it’s impossible to “translate” between first-person phenomenal sensation, and third-person, scientifically objective observation. The point, precisely, is to do “metaphysical” justice to first-person consciousness, without thereby positing its objective existence as a phenomenon in the world (which would mean believing in “spooky forces” like “spirit” or “mind energy” or something else extra-physical).
Edelman’s theory of consciousness is “metaphysical” in what I consider the good, Jamesian sense, because his way of finessing the difference between observable-from-outside neural states and inside-only conscious feeling is to reject both those theories that would give causal efficacy to consciousness and will and those theories that dismiss consciousness as “merely” epiphenomenal. In effect, Edelman is saying that consciousness is indeed epiphenomenal rather than actually causal, but that there is nothing “mere” about such epiphenomenality. This latter because consciousness is “entailed” by neural processes that are themselves causal (which could perhaps be read — though I am unsure that this is right — as a weak version of Spinoza’s mind/body parallelism).
So far I’ve left out what is perhaps the most important part of Edelman’s theory: the assertion that neural processes are massively “degenerate” (a better word, in terms of vocabularies that I am familiar with, would be “redundant”). (Edelman defines “degeneracy” as “the ability of different structures to carry out the same function or yield the same output”). This is something that does seem to be empirically valid (different neural pathways can result in the same emotion or memory or other conscious perception; if one particular brain system or sub-system breaks down, another one can ‘cover’ for it or adaptively take its place), and that is logically coherent with (and indeed necessitated by) the assumption of “neural Darwinism” (if mind states are the result of statistical selection among large populations of neurons, then there cannot be one and only one uniquely privileged pathway to generate a given result).
What’s crucial here is that, if we accept the “degeneracy”/redundancy of the brain operating by this sort of “selection,” then “much of cognitive science is ill-founded” (page 111): the brain does not operate algorithmically (as Daniel Dennett claims), or by a process of computation analogous to what goes on in digital computers. Thought is not a process of taking symbolic representations and performing calculations, or logical operations, upon them. There is no “language of thought” (page 105), of which actual language would merely be a “translation.”
Thus, though Edelman shows no signs of being aware of the anti-representationalist arguments in recent continental philosophy and “theory”, he comes to many of the same conclusions, in opposition to the reigning (in American psychology and computer science, at least) ideology of cognitivism. And he does this by being a better Darwinian than all those loudly and explicitly Darwinian “evolutionary psychologists” who are so willfully dismissive of neuroscience.
Wider Than the Sky is Gerald Edelman‘s summary/overview of his work on the neural basis of consciousness. (Parts of this work have been explained, in greater detail, in a number of Edelman’s earlier books; the ones I have previously read are Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and The Remembered Present).
Edelman has a peculiar position in neuroscience, from what I have been able to gather: he is disliked by many because of his egocentric insistence on reinventing the wheel. That is to say, he insists so unilaterally on his own theories that he ignores work by others that in many ways is parallel to his, and that his own work would benefit by communicating with.
Be that as it may, Edelman offers an interesting and plausible (albeit largely unproven) theory about how consciousness is generated, and how it works, in the brain. His basic thesis is the hypothesis of “neural Darwinism”: he argues that both the growth and “wiring” of neurons during fetal and childhood development, and the activation of neurons in memory and in response to the environment are governed by a process analogous to Darwinian natural selection. (Edelman previously won the Nobel Prize for his work showing that such selection mechanisms were at work in the mammalian immune system, as populations of antibodies mutate and grow in response to infections). Groups of neurons are selected on the basis of their effectiveness in responding to multiple stimuli from the outside world, and in classifying and responding to these stimuli in terms of categories derived from previous, remembered experiences (what Edelman calls “value-category memory”). Consciousness arises as a result of “reentry”, a kind of hyper-feedback among groups of neurons allowing for coordination among, and unification of, what would otherwise be disconnected percepts. (Edelman defines reentry as “the dynamic ongoing process of recursive signaling across massively parallel reciprocal fibers…” Such a process “allows coherent and synchronous events to emerge in the brain.” These events are the contents of consciousness, and processes of reentry explain how consciousness can be both unified, and yet extremely diverse and continually changing).
There are many more details, involving such things attention, emotion, and the difference between “primary consciousness,” which presumably all mammals and birds have, and “higher-order consciousness” (or what I would call reflexive consciousness, or self-consciousness) which only really emerges with language (though Edelman allows for the possibility that cruder, emergent versions of it may exist among the great apes).
A lot of this would seem to be speculation; a lot of it isn’t really experimentally grounded (at least so far), and some of it may in fact not be ‘scientific’ at all, because not empirically testable or falsifiable.
But to my mind, this is not necessarily a deficiency. Though Edelman throughout expresses his admiration for, and frequent agreement with, the psychology of William James, he begins the book by disclaiming any metaphysical intent, and by expressing puzzlement over James’ claim that, when consciousness finally is explained, “the necessities of the case will make [these explanations] ‘metaphysical'” (Edelman quoting James in his Preface, page xii).
It seems to me that, even in spite of himself, Edelman proves James right, by giving a theory of consciousness that is to some extent unavoidably metaphysical. Edelman shies away from such a term because he insists, rightly, that in any explanation of consciousness “principles of physics must be strictly obeyed and that the world defined by physics is causally closed. No spooky forces that contravene thermodynamics can be included” (page 114). –But I think that James himself would have entirely accepted this qualification, and that what he meant by “metaphysical” is something else. A theory of consciousness can’t help being “metaphysical,” because it’s impossible to “translate” between first-person phenomenal sensation, and third-person, scientifically objective observation. The point, precisely, is to do “metaphysical” justice to first-person consciousness, without thereby positing its objective existence as a phenomenon in the world (which would mean believing in “spooky forces” like “spirit” or “mind energy” or something else extra-physical).
Edelman’s theory of consciousness is “metaphysical” in what I consider the good, Jamesian sense, because his way of finessing the difference between observable-from-outside neural states and inside-only conscious feeling is to reject both those theories that would give causal efficacy to consciousness and will and those theories that dismiss consciousness as “merely” epiphenomenal. In effect, Edelman is saying that consciousness is indeed epiphenomenal rather than actually causal, but that there is nothing “mere” about such epiphenomenality. This latter because consciousness is “entailed” by neural processes that are themselves causal (which could perhaps be read — though I am unsure that this is right — as a weak version of Spinoza’s mind/body parallelism).
So far I’ve left out what is perhaps the most important part of Edelman’s theory: the assertion that neural processes are massively “degenerate” (a better word, in terms of vocabularies that I am familiar with, would be “redundant”). (Edelman defines “degeneracy” as “the ability of different structures to carry out the same function or yield the same output”). This is something that does seem to be empirically valid (different neural pathways can result in the same emotion or memory or other conscious perception; if one particular brain system or sub-system breaks down, another one can ‘cover’ for it or adaptively take its place), and that is logically coherent with (and indeed necessitated by) the assumption of “neural Darwinism” (if mind states are the result of statistical selection among large populations of neurons, then there cannot be one and only one uniquely privileged pathway to generate a given result).
What’s crucial here is that, if we accept the “degeneracy”/redundancy of the brain operating by this sort of “selection,” then “much of cognitive science is ill-founded” (page 111): the brain does not operate algorithmically (as Daniel Dennett claims), or by a process of computation analogous to what goes on in digital computers. Thought is not a process of taking symbolic representations and performing calculations, or logical operations, upon them. There is no “language of thought” (page 105), of which actual language would merely be a “translation.”
Thus, though Edelman shows no signs of being aware of the anti-representationalist arguments in recent continental philosophy and “theory”, he comes to many of the same conclusions, in opposition to the reigning (in American psychology and computer science, at least) ideology of cognitivism. And he does this by being a better Darwinian than all those loudly and explicitly Darwinian “evolutionary psychologists” who are so willfully dismissive of neuroscience.
Geoffrey O’Brien’s Sonata for Jukebox does for (popular, recorded) music what his previous books, The Phantom Empire and The Browser’s Ecstasy, did for movies and books respectively. That is to say, Sonata for Jukebox is a wide-ranging meditation on the uses and meanings of music: how we make sense of it, what it means to us, and what role it plays in our lives.
I’ve perhaps used the pronouns we/us/our too freely in the last paragraph. For part of what distinguishes O’Brien’s writing is the way he moves so carefully (but also fluidly) between the singular and the general: that is to say, between the personal and autobiographical, on the one hand, and cultural and generational commonalities on the other.
Sonata for Jukebox contains brilliant essays on Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. It also contains beautiful stories about O’Brien’s bandleader maternal grandfather, his radio-DJ father, and his own adolescence and young manhood, including reminiscences of friends who committed suicide. What brings all these discussions together is a subtle and ever-ramifying discussion of how music organizes (here I go again) our lives: our memories, our relationships, and our senses of ourselves.
This is great for several reasons: the elegance of O’Brien’s prose; the wide range of his musical (and more generally) cultural citations; his thoughtfulness about the effects of recording technologies, and more recently, digital technologies, on the texture of everyday experience; his uncanny ability to evoke and anatomize a Zeitgeist (that of the 1960s, for example).
O’Brien doesn’t have any easily summarizable theories: he’s an essayist and poet, not a philosopher. But his writing is informed equally by theoretical speculation and by empirical concreteness; which means that it is both intellectual and cosmopolitan, in the best senses of both these words.
Sonata for Jukebox is most valuable to me because of how it offers a way to think about music; my own sensibility is very different from O’Brien’s, but I am inspired by his ability to move between what the music sounds like and the circumstances (at once technological and social and personal) in which it is listened to, and on from there to what it stands for, what it is associated with, how it is woven into memory and desire and fantasy and hope and dread.
O’Brien was born in 1948, which makes him six years older than me. He concentrates on the music he listened to in his youth; though he is clearly very knowledgeable about more recent developments, his emotional allegiances are to the songs from back then. Of course he is right that, in our lifetimes, much more than was the case earlier in the 20th century, popular music has primarily been marketed to the young. Still, this means that O’Brien gives more importance to nostalgia, and to temps perdu, than I myself would be willing to do; or, to put it in inverse terms, this means that I (still) connect music more to the future (instead of the past) than O’Brien does; I would want to emphasize (as he does not) the role of (popular, recorded) music as a kind of ongoing exploration of “possibility space” or of the “virtual.”
Geoffrey O’Brien’s Sonata for Jukebox does for (popular, recorded) music what his previous books, The Phantom Empire and The Browser’s Ecstasy, did for movies and books respectively. That is to say, Sonata for Jukebox is a wide-ranging meditation on the uses and meanings of music: how we make sense of it, what it means to us, and what role it plays in our lives.
I’ve perhaps used the pronouns we/us/our too freely in the last paragraph. For part of what distinguishes O’Brien’s writing is the way he moves so carefully (but also fluidly) between the singular and the general: that is to say, between the personal and autobiographical, on the one hand, and cultural and generational commonalities on the other.
Sonata for Jukebox contains brilliant essays on Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. It also contains beautiful stories about O’Brien’s bandleader maternal grandfather, his radio-DJ father, and his own adolescence and young manhood, including reminiscences of friends who committed suicide. What brings all these discussions together is a subtle and ever-ramifying discussion of how music organizes (here I go again) our lives: our memories, our relationships, and our senses of ourselves.
This is great for several reasons: the elegance of O’Brien’s prose; the wide range of his musical (and more generally) cultural citations; his thoughtfulness about the effects of recording technologies, and more recently, digital technologies, on the texture of everyday experience; his uncanny ability to evoke and anatomize a Zeitgeist (that of the 1960s, for example).
O’Brien doesn’t have any easily summarizable theories: he’s an essayist and poet, not a philosopher. But his writing is informed equally by theoretical speculation and by empirical concreteness; which means that it is both intellectual and cosmopolitan, in the best senses of both these words.
Sonata for Jukebox is most valuable to me because of how it offers a way to think about music; my own sensibility is very different from O’Brien’s, but I am inspired by his ability to move between what the music sounds like and the circumstances (at once technological and social and personal) in which it is listened to, and on from there to what it stands for, what it is associated with, how it is woven into memory and desire and fantasy and hope and dread.
O’Brien was born in 1948, which makes him six years older than me. He concentrates on the music he listened to in his youth; though he is clearly very knowledgeable about more recent developments, his emotional allegiances are to the songs from back then. Of course he is right that, in our lifetimes, much more than was the case earlier in the 20th century, popular music has primarily been marketed to the young. Still, this means that O’Brien gives more importance to nostalgia, and to temps perdu, than I myself would be willing to do; or, to put it in inverse terms, this means that I (still) connect music more to the future (instead of the past) than O’Brien does; I would want to emphasize (as he does not) the role of (popular, recorded) music as a kind of ongoing exploration of “possibility space” or of the “virtual.”