The History of ConscIousness: Brother Joculum Explains It All for You (New Series), part two

Part one of this post, which has had an unnecessarily dramatic history, is now public after a spate of being rewritten and edited for public consumption. Sorry.

and now for part two:

Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain is reviewed by Steven Mithen in the January 24 ’08 London Review of Books. It is one of those volumes that sheds light on all the topics I have been discussing on joculum for the past year and a half, even if half its hypotheses turn out to be wrong.

Basically, Smail sets out to map the changing courses of history in terms of the interaction between biology and culture: not the formation of culture by biology as the sociobiologists would have it, and not the supplanting of biology by culture as the orthodox Marxists or the captain-of-my-fate free-marketers would have it, and not even the shaping of the environment by culture as the critics of globalization, theorists of global migration, and limits-of-the-earth population biologists would have it.

No, Smail’s theory is that the operations of human history—not a redundancy; there are histories of any set of linked chronological circumstances that can be arranged in a sensibly mappable order: there are possible histories of polar bear populations and/or any other changing aspect of the planet—that the operations of human history, as I say, reflect the ways in which human beings figured out how best to operate their own brains and modify the brains of others in terms of neurochemistry.

This does not mean, as the many folks I have discussed on the joculum blog would have it, psychotropic drugs, other than the mild ones of caffeine-containing substances and other everyday modifiers of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin in our bloodstreams.

It means that social structures are based on brain physiology.

Smail suggests that the first sedentary communities resulted in a return to “a primate-like social structure, with dominance hierarchies often maintained by random acts of violence against subordinates to maintain them in a constant state of stress.”

Hunter-gatherers didn’t have this device; as Mithen summarizes Smail, “These societies are egalitarian, employing various social mechanisms—joking and teasing would be instances—to prevent individuals gaining dominance over others.”

This adaptation to Ice Age conditions was succeeded, says Smail, by the Neolithic revolution’s return to a long-dormant primate neurophysiology. Settled communities provided situations in which individuals could maintain dominance by random violence. “The control of agricultural surpluses or trade routes was not enough to maintain their power base: they also needed to control the brains and bodies of their subordinates by manipulating their neurochemistry. The political elites, Small argues, were not aware that they were engaging in such biological interventions; they were simply repeating what had seemed to work in gaining them power. Random violence is a winner every time.”

And so we get “religion, sport, monumental architecture, alcohol, legitimized violence—and sex for fun. These emerge independently … for the good reason that they are most effective in moulding and manipulating our body chemistry. As Small argues, it is not the diversity of human civilizations that we should find most startling but their profound similarities, which remind us of our common Palaeolithic heritage.”

So (and here I stop summarizing the review) we finally have the possibility of overcoming the one-sided readings of Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape fighting it out with whomsoever’s insistence that culture trumps biology every time versus whoever’s insistence that culture is just one more way that genes plot to produce more genes.

Smail still hasn’t got hold of the whole problem, any more than E. O. Wilson’s Consilience had hold of it, but until we see the physiological understructure that has been manipulated throughout our species’ history, we can’t begin to make sense of phenomena to which Small refers, but refers with excessive reductionism. Apparently (I return to the review here) he writes of church liturgies as “comforting to listen to, to alleviate stress and anxiety,” and thus as advantageous in the generation of oxytocin as, say, sexual arousal. But of course the alleviation of stress can be manipulated as much as the creation of it. (I am still taking off from the reviewer’s observation of this, but expanding upon the topic here.)

As anybody knows who has been reading the newspapers, the good cop-bad cop strategy is another repetitive form of manipulation throughout history: create fear and anxiety, relieve it, return to the creation of fear, repeat until the desired outcome is achieved in the suspect or the employee.

There are so many other possible examples, and examples that Smail actually cites, such as the knowledge that “gossip is as much a means for alleviating stress as for exchanging information,” so its denigration “emerges as another means to prevent the self-alleviation of stress. It is far better for those in power to be in control of their subordinates’ body chemistry than to leave it to the subordinates themselves.”

We could, as Smail does not so far as I know from the review, go back into the history of storytelling and the history of mystical practice and the history of ever so many other topics to which I return repeatedly in this journal. And, as I have written repeatedly, the relations of power are the same regardless of the real structure of the world within which the power is exercised.

The nature of the real world is a separate topic altogether. Power is only one of the many stories, but it is a story that is told by any adequate theory of the world at large.

Someone could do an analysis of the actual relations of power and means of stress reduction versus and/or inclusive of the relationship of intellectual inquiry to personal biochemistry. I can think of theorists whose biographies and published works would be productive examples to consider in terms of working out this analysis.

I can think of myself, too, but keep your filthy hands off my biographical data. I’m gonna joke and tease my way right through this one.

The History of Consciousness: Brother Joculum Explains It all for You (new series), part one

This post originally began with an examination of the History of Consciousness program at University of California Santa Cruz as itself a moment in the history of consciousness that would be worthy of analysis. But the opinions expressed therein were excessively half-baked.

The opinions on aesthetics here are also half-baked, but less inedibly so than I thought when I restricted this post to the Friends-Only category. It is now unrestrictedly public, and here it is, more or less as I originally wrote this part of the post a couple of days ago:

I am astounded to realize that with all we now know about social construction of realities and the neurobiology underlying them, we also still operate on a primitive level of conversation about art and aesthetics that might as well be the ancient De gustibus non disputandum est. Except that it is disputed, endlessly and ignorantly despite the sophisticated terminology employed, and “taste” is denounced in favor of many other options.

I realized, listening yesterday to a show-juror’s talk on photography, that my recent fatuous remarks on painting and photography were even more simplistic than I thought them to be in the four-in-the-morning when I wrote them.

The remarks describe pretty well how the vast majority of painters and photographers I know of actually operate, but of course the new generation of photography is coming from whole different sets of skills and mental habits. And yet those who are manipulating computer programs to create scenes that never existed anywhere in the physical landscape, those who are setting up the equivalent of cinematic stage sets for the sake of a single unmanipulated color image, those who photograph their hand-drawn copies of Old Masters and daguerrotypes, done with string or chocolate syrup (Fontcuberta, Crewdson, Vik Muniz’s older work) are all using the mix of the mind’s eye and acute observation of previous art and the world around them. They’re just throwing more of the imagination into the mix, and sneering at calling it “the imagination” doesn’t change the equation much.

When ordinary language has been denigrated long enough, it becomes useful to put things in ordinary language and see what percentage of the conditions as we now understand them were encoded in ordinary language in the first place. But as long as they were encrusted with outdated assumptions about the world, nobody noticed that the users of the words understood more than they understood they understood. Which is what Socrates used to like to show folks about themselves, incidentally.

Which is why I make a distinction in my art-critical practice that I sum up as “I can defend X’s work until the cows come home, because I think it is important. But I don’t like X’s work. I just think it is breaking ground that needs to be broken, or it is an excellent example of something that is being done and that, in this case, is being done exceptionally well. The fact that it makes me physically ill is not germane to the task at hand.”

This is also what distinguishes the critic from the reviewer, and most of what I do is reviewing, not criticism. Reviewing is a more or less sophisticated way of saying, “If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing that you will like,” putting it in downhome terms that the folks reading onscreen at work, or at the breakfast table before eight in the morning, can take in quickly.

Then they decide whether they want to spend a weekend afternoon looking at the stuff, or would rather garden or catch up on the academic journals or play with Photoshop or straighten up the back bedroom or go horseback riding or browse around YouTube instead.

And I now have the point to which all of this is coming, but because I have the feeling that people decide whether they want to read my posts about halfway through them, I am going to separate the theoretical part of my post out, and make it Part Two. Which follows, “above” if you are reading this in my LiveJournal instead of in someone’s printout or download into a different format. [utopyr points out that part two is now "below," because I completely deleted a longer version of this post and substituted this edited version.]

part three

The Martiniquan poet-intellectual Aimé Césaire's indictment of colonialism (quoted in a January 24 08 London Review of Books review of a new book by Vijay Prashad) could be taken as a summary of the forces of history at least from the Enlightenment onward (previous civilizations had other explanations):

"They talk to me about progress, about 'achievements,' diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraorfdinary possibilities wiped out."

part four

The simultaneous arrival of the January 24 London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books is psychologically dismaying. I had decided that the not-quite-right approach of the LRB review of John Crowley's Ægypt cycle (even if the books were then added to the LRB Bookshop) justified cancelling my trial subscription, but the two journals provide a pattern of interference (in more ways than one) that gives a much more three-dimensional view of contemporary reality when they are read together, the one correcting some of the quirky omissions and obsessions of the other.

They also contain internal interactions between reviews, as I have noted often with NYRB. This time it is Terry Eagleton's remarks on Peter Conrad's Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins that glosses Andrew O'Hagan's pithy observations on war novels and video games elsewhere in the LRB issue. "'The creative imagination' is one of those phrases that almost everyone on the planet seems to find unequivocally positive, like 'sustainable growth' or 'putting the children first.' But the imagination is capable of projecting all kinds of dark and diseased scenarios as well as life-embracing ones."

Cf. O'Hagan's quotations from and remarks on various books, games, and very recent historical circumstances that I do not wish to discuss for previously mentioned reasons. (Or maybe I deleted those reasons from my public post, too...think Oswald Croll and the seller of that book.)