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Brainfood: rationality, aesthetics and economies of affect

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360500091477

1470-1308

Maria Angel,

Neuroscience, Education and Cognitive Function

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Donna J. Haraway, 'A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s', Socialist Review 80 (1985), pp. 65–108. 2 In one of the few exceptions to the rule of the exclusion of biological systems from contemporary cultural analysis, Elizabeth A. Wilson, in her study of neurology from a feminist cultural studies perspective, explains the lack of interest in biological systems in terms of an 'anti-essentialist turn' where in order to argue critically for the possibility of change, critical movements have latched on to the concept of discursive construction. Within this context, there is an exclusionary disregard for the human body taken as a biological system. Wilson writes that 'cultural, social, linguistic, literary and historical analyses that now dominate the scene of feminist theory typically seek to seal themselves off from – or constitute themselves against – the domain of the biological' ('Somatic compliance: feminism, biology, and science', Australian Feminist Studies 14: 29 (April 1999), pp. 7–18, p. 16). 3 Thomas Harris, Hannibal (London: Arrow Books, 2000); A. Wachowski and L. Wachowski, The Matrix [Videorecording] (Silver Pictures Production, Village Roadshow, 1999); J-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (1884; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979). Further references to these texts are included in the body of the text. 4 Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 49. Further references are included in the body of the text. 5 Richard Gregory, Mirrors in Mind (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. ix. 6 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and other Writings, trans. S.E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 100. Further references are included in the body of the text. 7 Cited in T. Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 8 Peter Unger, Ignorance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 9 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 3. Further references are included in the body of the text. 10 N. Katherine Hayles, 'Flesh and metal: reconfiguring the mindbody in virtual environments'. Configurations 10: 2 (2002), pp. 297–320, p. 300. Further references are included in the body of the text. 11 Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Quill/HarperCollins), 1994; Joseph Le Doux, The Emotional Brain (New York: Touchstone Books, 1998); Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994); Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Further references to these texts are included in the body of the text. 12 Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, trans. Robert Paolucci (Boston and London: Shambala, 1998). Further references are included in the body of the text. 13 He writes that 'Cognitions coassembled with affects become hot and urgent. Affects coassembled with cognitions become better informed and smarter. The major distinction … is that between amplification by the motivational system and transformation by the cognitive system. But the amplified information of the motivational system can be and must be transformed by the cognitive system, and the transformed information of the cognitive system can be and must be amplified by the motivational system. Amplification without transformation would be blind; transformation without amplification would be weak. The blind mechanisms must be given sight; the weak mechanisms must be given strength. All information is at once biased and informed.' Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, Vol. IV: Cognitions (New York: Springer Publishing Company Inc, 1963), p. 7. 14 Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Vol. II: The Negative Affects (New York: Springer Publishing Company Inc, 1963), p. 128. Further references are included in the body of the text. 15 Niklas Luhmann, Art as Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 15. 16 Lyall Watson, Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Sense of Smell (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 13. Further references are included in the body of the text. 17 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987). Further references are included in the body of the text. 18 An interesting disorder that attests to the importance of neurological function to the process of knowing is Capgras syndrome. The neurologist V.S. Ramachandran recounts the case of 'Arthur', a 30-year-old man with this syndrome caused by brain damage which severed the neurological relation between image processing and the regulation of emotion. On returning home, Arthur believed that his parents had been replaced with impostors (some accounts from those suffering the syndrome are embellished with ideas of kidnapping and alien abduction). Ramachandran explains this belief by referring to the importance of the neurological regulation of emotion. While Arthur could still recognize his mother's face it was not accompanied by the usual 'warm glow' associated with it. Ramachandran writes that 'his only escape from this dilemma – the only sensible interpretation he could make given the peculiar disconnection between the two regions of his brain – is to assume that this woman merely resembles Mom. She must be an impostor' (with Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (London: Fourth Estate), p. 162). 19 Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004). Further references are included in the body of the text. 20 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 36. Further references are included in the body of the text. 21 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G.C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 182. 22 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (London: Phoenix, 1999), p. 376. 23 For evidence of these elements see: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A.M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977). 24 An example of the occlusion of dynamic biological presence may be seen in the archaeological nature of Foucault's work. Because Foucault is dealing with pastness, with traces and habits of a former existence, he views objects through what Francisco Varela calls 'the visual extraction of features' (Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 14). This has at its core the idea that 'perception is fundamentally the truthful reconstruction of a portion of the visible world through a registering of existing environmental information' (p. 13). Rather than engaging with the conditions for visibility itself, philosophy poses the question of the origin of visible features in an undecidable manner. On the other hand, for Varela, a cognitive scientist, objects are not primarily 'known' through the representation of visible patterning but through the primary 'visual guidance of action' that later becomes habituated into this extractable pattern. He writes that '[t]he basic idea is that embodied (sensorimotor) structures are the substance of experience', and further, experiential structures 'motivate conceptual understanding and rational thought …. [C]ognitive structures emerge from recurrent patterns of sensorimotor activity …. [E]xperience both makes possible and constrains conceptual understanding across a multitude of cognitive domains' (p. 16). It seems to me that this is the case with both individual human development (e.g. the developmental stages of childhood) and more 'adult' activities like scholarly understanding amassed through the activities of reading and writing. 25 Anna Gibbs, 'Disaffected', Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16: 3 (2002), pp. 335–341. Further references are included in the body of the text. 26 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 1–16. 27 Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York and London: Routledge), p. 135. Further references are included in the body of the text. 28 Nicholas Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000). Further references are included in the body of the text. 29 Eugene Thacker, 'Data made flesh: biotechnology and the discourse of the posthuman', Cultural Critique 53 (2003), pp. 72–97. Further references are included in the body of the text. 30 Brian Massumi, 'The autonomy of affect', in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. P. Patton (Oxford, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 231. 31 Virginia Nightingale, 'Are media cyborgs?', in Cyberpsychology, ed. A. J. Gordo-Lopez and I. Parker (London: Macmillan, 1999). Further references are included in the body of the text. 32 Barbara Creed, Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003). Further references are included in the body of the text.