Like that a lot. Yes, "counterfactual" (different from our existing conscious understandings) and "counterintuitive" (different from our existing unconscious understandings) ... "but not dismissable". And therefore openings to futures yet to be conceived.
"This is what change looks like" ... Barack Obama, 12:17 am, March 22, 2010.
I just learned that William Kentridge is the Artistic Director for Shostakovich's opera, The Nose, now playing at the Met. The opera is based on Nikolai Gogol’s story of the same title, published in 1837, about the adventures of a man who wakes up one day to find that his nose has left his face and gone walking around St Petersburg.
In his interpretation of Gogol and Shostakovich, Kentridge projects the story forward to the 1917 Russian Revolution, then Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. But he also looks backward: to Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote, both of which have influenced Gogol. And he uses excerpts from Russian newspapers, clips from Russian films of the twenties and thirties, pages from Russian encyclopedias, and parts of the transcript from a 1937 meeting of the Russian Communist Party, in which Nikolai Bukharin was interrogated -- all inflected by the history of South Africa.
For me, this counts as an exemplary instance of world lit -- with texts commingling with music and the visual arts, and each benefiting from being analyzed on the lowest common denominator they share: the neuroscience of brain activity, both in the assembling of this material, and in our multi-sensory experience of its effects.
Paul Grobstein, March 27, 2010 (21)
In principal, certainly. In practice, perhaps. I've haven't seen
The Nose but the account of it makes me think of plays by Tom Stoppard. Some of them (particularly
Arcadia) work for me at a gut level, the "lowest common denominator." Others (eg
The Coast of Utopia) ... don't. The assembling of the material seems labored, a product of the conscious rather than the unconscious, and so accessible (to me at least) only through a prior activation of the conscious via the reading of extended historical program notes.
Its interesting to think about this in light of the conversation during Wai Chee's visit to our Evolving Systems project (
/exchange/evolsys/dimock). Historical events can be brought into the present by a conscious "folding of time" on the part of the playwright and the audience. Alternatively, they can be part of the present because of their existence in the timeless unconscious of one or both. Maybe its the conscious folding of time that gives the labored feeling to some of Stoppard's plays? And its that that in turn requires extensive program notes for an audience to "get" them?
A literature of the unconscious is one in which the assemblies can be both put together and appreciated in the absence of explicit reference to time in terms other than simply present, no longer present, not yet present?
Wai Chee Dimock, March 30, 2010 (22)
Yes, the conscious folding of time can give a labored feeling, but when it works -- as I think it does in Stoppard's Rock 'n Roll -- the effect can be quite wonderful. In this play, Cambridge, England and Prague are woven into the same fabric by the poetry of Sappho, the music of Pink Floyd and the Czech rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe, with the "cognitive unconscious" of aging and dying being recycled and reaffirmed as the conscious (and fragile) birth of democracy. The no-longer-present and the not-yet-present seem to be experienced directly by the senses, as bodily decay and also as durable sounds, without time being explicitly calibrated...
Alice Lesnick, March 30, 2010 (23)
"Back to frog brain writing, and what we expect of it, how we identify it. That's a set of questions where I'm hoping neurobiology could learn something from world literature as well as vice versa. Yes, I think "syntactical structures and rhythmic repetitions" are relevant. But my guess would be that "thematics" is not irrelevant, that one can identity themes like, perhaps, temporal persistance and things grading into one another." (
Paul)
I appreciate this rich dialogue and the invitation to join it, which I do here, wading . . .
Things grading into one another, via processes and with results not readily or fully articulable, in a context where things (i.e., species, eras) are not distinct as they are in consciousness: Is this a definition of change? With such a definition in hand, could people more usefully prompt and explore changes? More easily live without defending against them?
I'm interested in possible reciprocal learning between neurobiology and world literature. What would happen if we called it "language" or "writing and speaking" instead of world literature? I'm wondering about how words themselves are free agents, dancing shadows (to use Wai Chee's term above) -- continuous with our frog lives, baby lives, animal lives . . . , and with the sounds of others. In a sense, all writing is frog brain writing. Every word a metaphor, every metaphor a toy, every pun an opening of space between. In the space is everything and everyone -- and the cognitive unconscious is alert to this?
Paul Grobstein, March 30, 2010 (24)
Interesting issue posed by Alice
above. Yes, in one sense "all writing is frog brain writing." There is no way to write (or speak or paint or ... anything else) without doing so via the frog brain (the cognitive unconscious). The story teller (consciousness) has no direct access to means of action, ie muscles, and so must work through the frog brain, which does. So all writing (all acting) necessarily bears frog brain traces. Similarly, there is no way to read (or view or ... anything else) except via the frog brain. All sensory inputs must pass through the frog brain to reach the story teller/consciousness. In this sense, indeed "Every word a metaphor, every metaphor a toy, every pun an opening of the space between." We can look for the frog brain (in ourselves and others) in anything written/painted/etc and we reveal some aspect of it in everything we write/paint/perform.
That said, there is clearly more of the frog brain in some writings (or paintings or etc) than in others, and some writings/paintings/etc are of more interest to frog brains than others. Indeed, one might make an argument that "world literature" (or any other named literature) has a tendency to favor that which is less "frog brained" over that which is more so. Things that bear names are things that are similar across individuals and/or across time. The frog brain is not only timeless but also idiosyncratic and solipsistic, so it is less likely by itself to create things that fit into social/cultural categories.
On the other hand, maybe a recognition of frog brain writing would over time lead to a redefinition of world literature so it includes more of "writing and speaking"?
Wai Chee Dimock, April 1, 2010 (25)
Your comments make me think that there should be more lyricism in our method: since our arguments can never be as exact or as logical as we hope, some tolerance for fuzziness -- how things grade into one another -- might be one way to give maximum play to the frog brain, which is probably also to say, one way to make allowances for our cognitive limits, making room in our working hypotheses for not fully predictable outcomes.
I 'm not sure, though (going back to Alice's earlier point) if I'm ready to jettison "world literature" altogether. What I like about the term is that, while it's a deliberate rejoinder to the established practice of "national literature," it remains an unknown quantum to a large extent, its nature, scope, and theaters of action still in the process of being tried out, not fully knowable to us at this point. So I'd like to think that "world literature" is a frog-brained concept, unavoidably fuzzy, and that maybe some of its heuristic value lies in just that fuzziness?
Paul Grobstein, April 1, 2010 (26)
I heard "world literature" as you describe it, a frog brain "rejoinder to the established practice" and so indeed "still in the process of being tried out ... fuzzy." Maybe that's a generally important notion. By listening to the frog brain, one creates new ideas/categories, not out of an aspiration to reach a final description but rather as a way of opening new spaces to be explored by, in part, the frog brain. Once the ideas/categories have ceased to be fuzzy, they have served their heuristic value and its time to discard them, replace them with new ones?
Alice Lesnick, April 1, 2010 (27)
Wai Chee, I appreciate the idea that "world literature" is an unknown quantum and greatly respect your willingness to study something in the process of being tried out. As a scholar and teacher of educational studies, I find that resonant with my sense of teaching and learning, as well. I'm not sure I would identify the core contrast as between fuzziness and precision. When I think of the lyrical -- music, dance, poetry -- I think of motion, dynamism in contrast to stillness, verb over noun. Paul, I don't know if you'd agree with this, but my sense of the frog brain is that it does not so much "jettison" or "discard" as simply drift or dive or shimmy on.
Wai Chee Dimock, April 1, 2010 (28)
This is a great way to put it: world literature is fuzzy because it is a verb rather than a noun, in transit, its contours deformed and re-formed by motion. To any stationary observer (such as ourselves), it's always going to look like a blur, a spectrum of variants not resolvable to a fixed and definable set of attributes. If it ever becomes an entrenched concept (I bet this would never happen during our lifetime!), it would probably need to cede its analytic primacy to another term, though still hovering in the vicinity as a baseline condition...
Anne Dalke, April 1, 2010 (29)
This morning (April 1, 2010) The New York Times ran an article by Patricia Cohen, "Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know that You Know":
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/books/01lit.html
reporting that the brain is the Next Big Thing in literary studies: "Getting to the root of people's fascination with fiction....is like 'mapping wonderland.'"
Most of the research reported on in the article focuses not on what we've been exploring here, the construction of a "literature of the unconscious," but rather on how the human brain perceives and processes literature. Nonetheless, it's clear that there are other laborers in the vineyard, who think that "fiction gives us insight into evolution."
So back to the task @ hand. Wai Chee, I'm confused. "World literature" is a noun phrase, and it's (to me) quite a ponderous one, which explicitly refuses national borders (while searching for bridges among them). Alice's suggested alternative--'writing and speaking'--now those are verbs that seem in motion....
I think they seem so resonant to me because we're now quite deep into negotiations, in our neck of the woods, about the construction and relation of our various language and literature departments. "World literature" is perceived as a threat to them all, as they dig into the specialness of each of their particular locations.
I've also been meaning to ask how that concept--or the more general notion of literature as not necessarily anchored in place or time, but more open to motion--has been received by scholars in the Native traditions, which seem so (increasingly?) place-based, so insistent on nation-building...?
Wai Chee Dimock, April 2, 2010 (30)
I don't think we're talking about a "literature of the unconscious" in the Freudian sense, but a literature of the frog brain -- the "cognitive unconscious" -- which I take to be the "primitive," low-common-denominator, generative conditions for thought, rather than the propositional contents of specific acts of thinking.
These low-common-denominator brain activities would cast light on any human action. And I think "action" is really what literature is, or what it starts out being. Our mistake is to ossify it, turning it into a solid object, a finalized product. So, in emphasizing the "verb" aspect rather than the "noun" aspect -- both of the composed text and of our reading experience -- we're just restoring the original and ongoing dynamicism. This doesn't mean that a text is not anchored to a place; it just means that we can't fix it permanently to that place, since it does move around in time...
Paul Grobstein, April 5, 2010 (31)
"dynamism in contrast to stillness, verb over noun" (
Alice, 1 April)
"more open to motion" (
Anne, 1 April)
"If it ever becomes an entrenched concept ... it would probably need to cede its analytic primacy to another term, though still hovering in the vicinity as a baseline condition" (
Wai Chee, 1 April)
Strikes me that our World Literature and Neurobiology branch from
Evolving Systems and World Literature has has, among other things, looped back towards the trunk, to the question of what defines projects like Evolving Systems and Rethinking World Literature. An interest in "dynamism," the "less entrenched," "more open to motion" ? It would be worth thinking more about that. The "various language and literature departments" (as exemplars of disciplines generally) would of course express a feeling that they are quite "open to motion". What's different about that motion from the motion that Evolving Systems/Rethinking World Literature aspires to? What makes some things at some times "baseline" and others "verbs" instead of "nouns"? Will put a note in the trunk conversation to encourage further thought about this issue there.
In the meanwhile, I'm intrigued by verbs rather than nouns, by fuzziness, by "a spectrum of events not resolvable to a fixed and definable set of attributes" as characteristics of the frog brain/cognitive unconscious, and hence of a literature reflecting it. Where such a "literature" actually originates in "action" (
Alice's "writing and speaking") and only subsequently becomes "ossified," converted to nouns, objects, "finalized products."
This set of ideas helps me think more not only about the frog brain but also about its relation to consciousness. Ossifications ("categories") can indeed be problematic and get in the way of some kinds of motion, but they can also be generative, creating a platform from which new kinds of motion can occur. What this suggests to me is that consciousness can play two roles, one as aid to the fluidity of the unconscious and the other as an inhibitor of that fluidity. Yes, as per Alice above, this has interesting implications for education. And, as per
/exchange/node/6655#comment-117301 and
/exchange/grobstein/drexel10#comment-117188, implications for social/cultural life in general?
Maybe the trick here is to insist on continual looping between the frog brain and the conscious? Not to valorize either but instead to use the frog brain as the antidote to ossification and consciousness as a tool for conceiving new directions of motion that the frog brain wouldn't have noticed?
Alice Lesnick, April 6, 2010 (32)
I agree that the frog brain notices, and doesn't notice, differently than consciousness does. The frog brain is oddly non-selective and can be slow to move -- maybe because it is so commodious, it can't be counted on to turn easily or quickly, though sometimes it does. Sometimes it's like an agile swimmer, sometimes a scaffold holding up a constellation of spent stars. Consciousness notices and doesn't notice differently from this -- less commodious and more susceptible to other consciousnesses, more able to try to move or shift focus and offer the frog brain new inputs (which it may or may not notice).
Wai Chee Dimock, April 7, 2010 (33)
I really like this account of the frog brain as commodious, slow-moving, and non-selective. Something like this does seem evolutionarily robust, but also needing the additional supplement of consciousness, in order to make quick, focused decisions. If this is indeed how the mind works, we might have two different distributional maps for what we notice and fail to notice -- not so much the left and right sides of the brain, but two orders of receptivity, two different patterns of attention. I wonder what kind of literary theory could be built on this landscape?
Alice Lesnick, April 7, 2010 (34)
Yeah, maybe what I am thinking of as the frog brain can be pictured as an enormous frog! -- one that can stay still for a long while, then move suddenly and swiftly. I'm wondering if quickness and focus might actually be characteristics the frog brain sometimes shares with consciousness -- at least some of the time. Sometimes, the unconscious is very sharply focused, but on something only it can "see." And sometimes it apprehends things very quickly.
For me, the experience of reading novels and poetry, like the experience of certain conversations, feels like being in a space where consciousness and the cognitive unconscious, and shared subjectivities, meet and play, tease each other out, or off their accustomed dimes. This has something to do with the way in which language is both mine/inside and not mind/outside, and the way literature works in this bothness.
Wai Chee Dimock, April 11, 2010 (35)
Yes, quickness and focus are not necessarily incompatible with commodiousness, a combination that might turn out to be maximized in literature (probably because of the alternation of scale possible here). And I'd like to think that these brain activities are not strictly anthropocentric, not strictly revolving around the concept of the "human," as Wallace Stevens suggests:
The palm at the end of the mind.
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
Anne Dalke, April 13, 2010 (36)
Wai Chee speaks movingly, above, of "two orders of receptivity, two different patterns of attention," and wonders "what kind of literary theory could be built on this landscape?" I'd say one that does not revolve strictly around "the literary."
I've just finished an essay by Mark Hansen, a professor of "literature and the arts of the moving image" @ Duke, who is coming to speak to the Faculty Working Group in American Studies @ Haverford this week. In this piece, "Ubiquitous Sensation or the Autonomy of the Peripheral," Hansen describes the work of a series of artists who are making what might well be prototypical--even exemplary--of the sorts of "arts of the unconscious" we've been imagining here. He includes Natalie Jeremijenko's "Dangling String" (beautifully articulated by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, in Designing Calm Technology,
http://nano.xerox.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm , as a design that moves us from periphery to center and back again; Warren Neidich's art,
http://www.warrenneidich.com/ , which tunes sensory material to the requirements of the nervous system; and Olafur Eliasson's panoramic color installations
http://www.olafureliasson.net/ that play conscious and unconscious temporalities against one another.
All these aim, Hansen argues, "beneath the threshold of conscious perception" catalyzing sensations of which we are not aware: such media activates sensing that is "proximately ecstatic, out-of-sync, and out-of-scale with conscious experience." Hansen is not just suggesting that we might be more effectively "reached" subconsciously by visual images rather than by words, but rather that artists such as Jeremijenko, Neidich and Eliasson actually activate pre-conscious sensations, those which are by definition "imperceptible," prior to perception.
My head is swimming as I try to think about this order of receptivity, not really a pattern of attention, but that which happens peripherally, without my attention....
Wai Chee Dimock, April 16, 2010 (37)
Mark Hansen's essay sounds very interesting-- yes, the brain activity that is "proximately ecstatic, out-of-sync, and out-of-scale with conscious experience" is not solely literary; it can be called forth by a variety of art forms. And it could be that visual images and music are actually more evocative than words. But I suspect all three are on the same continuum, offering sense data that can be mapped (or housed) by two different orders of receptivity: read either as random or as patterned, either as articulate shapes in the foreground, or as an amorphous pool, unfocused and unresolved, on the peripheries of our attention.
In fact, a cross-media approach seems one of the unexpected implications of neurobiology: the fact that literature, the visual arts, and music are on the same continuum -- that they share the same oscillation across the threshold of the perceived and the unperceived -- suggests that there is a common basis of research here, that there might be even some elemental connection between the literary and the non-literary...
I've added images by Jeremijenko and Eliasson to our group photos.
Paul Grobstein, April 23, 2010 (38)
Like a lot an "oscillation across the threshold of the perceived and unperceived." And do think we will find more similarities among literature, visual arts, music (and, for that matter, both the non-literary and science) when we look at them more from the perspective of the unconscious. But, some cautionary notes, as per discussions above.
One doesn't want to valorize the unconscious/frog brain in the interests of devalorize the conscious. They are both valuable parts of how we interact with/think about the world; each draws from and feeds the other whether we are aware of it or not.
One also ought not to expect that the differences between the frog brain and the conscious will map easily onto the dichotomies our conscious most readily uses. The frog brain is almost certainly less "anthropocentric" than is conscious but anthropocentrism derives from the frog brain (as does all conscious experience) and so there are likely to be some elements of it there.
Finally (for the moment) we should probably be cautious about the very notion of a dichotomy, itself probably more a construction of consciousness than of the frog brain. The frog brain consists of a lot of different elements (it is a "society of mind" in Marvin Minsky's terms) and displays substantially less of a concern for internal consistency/coherence than does consciousness. So there may well be more than just "two orders of receptivity."
Wai Chee Dimock, May 2, 2010 (39)
Just want to follow up on your last point about Marvin Minsky's "society of mind." Minsky theorizes that the phenomenon of "mind" emerges out of the internal diversities and interactions within the physical brain, that intelligence comes not from discrete component parts, but from the networks -- the nodes and links -- connecting them. This "society" paradigm does seem to move us away from any conscious/ unconscious dichotomy. It points to interactive pathways that are self-multiplying and self-updating, with no fixed center, varying in their field strengths and their orders of receptivity from one node to another, unconstrained by the need for consistency.
This also seems a great analogy for world literature, highlighting the network-dependency of this phenomenon, and moving us away from the local /global,, metropolitan/peripheral dichotomies...
Paul Grobstein, May 2, 2010 (40)
"no fixed center ... unconstrained by the need for consistency" is indeed a good characterization of Minsky, the frog brain, and probably in those respects a good metaphor for World Literature as well.
The human brain though is, Minsky notwithstanding, in an important way more than a "society of mind." It includes a "story teller" or "fuschia dot" (cf
http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/98/92) as well. Consciousness, understood in these terms, is very much concerned with, among other things, "consistency" and is constantly attempting to make sense of things in terms of "fixed centers." It is in fact just another node in the society of mind but it means that the human mind/brain can't be fully made sense of in terms solely of a fully diffuse/emergent system. There are significant elements of focus, coherence, and intentionality involved as well. And since World Literature is (I presume) the product of brains, one won't be able to fully appreciate it either without some attention to these matters. Its because of this that there may be a useful distinction to be drawn between "frog brain" literature (in which coherence/focus/intentionality are less evident) and other literature.
There is an interesting cross connect between this conversation and an exploration of "Chance" in which it is emerging that "consistency" is an important element of some mind/brain/inquiry processes and a less important part of others. Cf.
/exchange/evolsys/chance10#comment-118382.
Comments
greetings, appreciations, words
"Back to frog brain writing, and what we expect of it, how we identify it. That's a set of questions where I'm hoping neurobiology could learn something from world literature as well as vice versa. Yes, I think "syntactical structures and rhythmic repetitions" are relevant. But my guess would be that "thematics" is not irrelevant, that one can identity themes like, perhaps, temporal persistance and things grading into one another."
I appreciate this rich dialogue and the invitation to join it, which I do here, wading . . .
Things grading into one another, via processes and with results not readily or fully articulable, in a context where things (i.e., species, eras) are not distinct as they are in consciousness: Is this a definition of change? With such a definition in hand, could people more usefully prompt and explore changes? More easily live without defending against them?
I'm interested in possible reciprocal learning between neurobiology and world literature. What would happen if we called it "language" or "writing and speaking" instead of world literature? I'm wondering about how words themselves are free agents, dancing shadows (to use Wai Chee's term above) -- continuous with our frog lives, baby lives, animal lives . . . , and with the sounds of others. that in a sense, all writing is frog brain writing. Every word a metaphor, every metaphor a toy, every pun an opening of space between. In the space is everything and everyone -- and the cognitive unconscious is alert to this?
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