John Protevi's Blog

Notes on Ideology, loosely tied to Eric Swanson's "Slurs and Ideologies"

I recently met Eric Swanson at the conference on Jason Stanley's work in Valladolid (where I presented this paper). We had some very nice discussions about the paper he presented there entitled "Slurs and Ideologies" (latest version here [in PDF]).

I've spent some time since then thinking about the paper and realized that, despite some desultory reading of the classics, I had never really written down my thoughts on ideology. So I thought I'd compose these notes, without doing any re-reading, just trying to let my thoughts crystallize. While these notes were prompted by reading Eric's paper (and Jason's propaganda book), they are largley independent of those works and shouldn't necessarily be seen as a commentary on them.

Comments welcome, of course, here or by email.

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Here's how I think of ideology: it's a set of affective-cognitive dispositions, instilled in people by their participation in practices.* Its implantation starts with kids growing up in an environment in which certain verbal and physical practices are common and once that implantation takes hold actions coming from those dispositions reinforce the ideology. An ideology doesn’t act, but it makes it easier for those who consent to the ideology to act in ways that are consonant with the content of the ideology.

I don’t think practices are part of ideologies; practices are sets of actions that interact with ideologies, implanting and being reinforced by actions that are the components of practices. For instance, mortgage redlining is a practice that is part of, and reinforces, the general practice of racial segregation which is itself part of and reinforces the way of life of white supremacy ("way of life" would be an interacting set of practices and ideologies).

I don't think a practice is like a belief, norm, value, or way of interpreting the world, which all seem cognitive / subjective. Practices are instead ways of acting in the world (but I wouldn't call it a way of interacting *with* the world, since that installs a subject / world split I think). They find their unity in a "script" which brings together affective-cognitive dispositions that guide actions, beliefs, and so on, so that by following a script different iterations of an action become a practice.

"Interests" is another difficult term here. They aren’t parts of ideologies, but they are a principle of explanation of ideology-guided actions and practices. They are more objective than a norm or value. Hence the occasional problem of a mismatch between the "true" interests of someone and their norms, values, and actions.

For example, the practice of mortgage redlining upholds the interests of certain actors who benefit from the way of life of white supremacy (e.g., white homeowners in segregated neighborhoods in which blacks can't get mortgages), and hurts the interests of those denied mortgages by that practice, but I'm not sure it’s in the same ontological class as belief, norm, value, and way of interpreting the world.

Verbal practices: some actions and the supposed motives that produce them, and the characters of people who repeatedly produce those actions, are repeatedly praised or blamed. Exposure to those verbal practices produces affective-cognitive dispositions to believe / feel in certain ways, thus leading to repetition of the actions, thus providing scripts by means of which the actions might congeal into a practice.

The same with physical practices: all the way from facial expressions: smiles, squints, frowns; bodily expressions: shrugs, recoils; social interactions: shaking hands, patting on the back, hugging, kissing, or pushing, shoving, fighting, killing....

Relating slurs to ideology is a socializing move. The power and danger of slurs is not just that they produce a series of internal representations linking words and classes of people; instead they do that *and*, by cueing ideologies, they trigger affective-cognitive dispositions and scripts resulting in thoughts and feelings and actions that conform to practices that reinforce a way of life.

Slurs are on-the-spot psychologically violent, and by cueing / reinforcing ideologies, they increase the chances of further psychological violence (by further slurs, and by internalization), and they increase the chance of physical violence by (on the outside reading) triggering scripts for practices, or (on the inside reading) by triggering the practices directly.

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* In my own work I talk about "bodies politics" in order to mark social and somatic interaction which result in replication of "affective-cognitive structures", as I think including affective dispositions in "ideology" produces a lot of tension in the expanded concept with the traditional (cognitive) components of beliefs, norms, and values. But if we want to use an expanded notion of ideology I think the affective components should be made explicit.

"The writerly attitude" in Alva Noë's "Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature"

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).

In this note, I want to focus on the notion of a “writerly attitude” in the key Chapter 4 of Strange Tools, “Art Loops and the Garden of Eden.”

Let’s recap from the previous posts, where I mostly articulate Noë’s theses, but also flesh out some implications. The key distinction of ST is that between level 1 (“organized activities”) and level 2 (“reorganization practices”).

Level 1 organized activities have 6 features: they are 1) naturally rooted, 2) cognitively demanding, 3) temporally / rhythmically structured, 4) emergent from endogenous dynamics [in the case of breast-feeding neither nurse nor infant is in charge], 5) functional, and 6) potentially pleasurable. Organized activities are bio-cultural; they become habits; and they are complexly interwoven at multiple scales. The resonance of these activities then provide a functional integration to our lives and their dissonance allows for innovative mixing and matching to create new patterns of activity.

Level 2 is that of the practices that provide a “perspicuous representation” of an organized activity, where “the nature of the organization at the lower level gets put on display and investigated” (ST 29). For instance, choreography displays dancing to us, as (bio-culturally informed) organized activity.  

Now, for Noë philosophy is also a level-2 practice: it “stands to our level-1 cognitive undertakings – reasoning, argument, belief formation, and crucially, the work of science – [as] choreography stands to movement and dancing, or painting stands to picture-making activities” (ST 29-30).

So philosophy shows thought as organized in a particular way – as conforming to a particular image of thought, we could say – and in so doing allows for that organization to be shook up and re-organized. I would say here that, as with all activities put on display by arts, working on our thought patterns to de-/re-organize them relies on plasticity and multiple processuality. That is, in order to be organized in the first place, activities presuppose both a capacity to be organized (plasticity) and a capacity to mesh together multiple biological / neurological processes with cultural processes (multiple processuality).

To pick up with Chapter 4 after this recapping, in a key move, Noë will claim that philosophy and art are necessary because organized activities need a supplement of reflective practices. This is because “we may lack a sense of the lay of the land” the meshwork of activities prepare for us, so that art and philosophy are practices of “making sense” (ST 30). (We may also find ourselves not just dis-oriented but in situations of injustice so that art and philosophy can also indicate points of strength and weakness of the meshwork of activities we find ourselves in and hence help us make sense of how to flee or strike.)

Noë follows this with a series of reflections on writing, which for us in literate societies is the “image of language” (ST 32; italics in original). But writing doesn’t represent a pre-existing, independent language; it loops down and informs our language: “The looping doesn’t stop. The result is a dense, historical, many-layered scriptoral-linguistic structure” (ST 36).

Now comes an extremely important move: Noë generalizes from writing in the restricted sense to a general notion of “graphical practices,” such as the cave paintings “that are at least as old as our linguistic capacities (or as old as we have reason to think our linguistic capacities are” (ST 41).

But that’s not all. In an even more radical move, writing for Noë is beyond any physical, empirical graphical practice, even drawing. Let’s follow the steps.

Even before such graphical practices is a need for them based on an irreducible dimension of misunderstanding inherent in social life: “Language began with the possibility of misunderstanding” (ST 41). That is, there could never be language without the need for reflection on whether or not a communication was successful. The possibility of misunderstanding always haunts attempts at understanding, so “there was never a Garden of Eden, and so there never was a language that we carried out and made use of freely, automatically, always without need for reflection” (on whether or not misunderstanding or understanding had taken place) (ST 42).

This ever-present need for reflection on linguistic practice caused by the irreducible or even necessary possibility of misunderstanding is what Noë calls “the writerly attitude” (ST 42). And this writerliness is an essential part of speech: “We had been using speaking to model speech long before we started using drawing (that is to say writing) for this purpose” (ST 42). In other words, our ancestors would have always already adopted the writerly attitude to deal with the necessary possibility of misunderstanding as soon as they had linguistically mediated social life.

What this means is that writing, which in its empirical form comes later, is a transcendental structure interwoven with empirical speech: “My point is that whether we actually invent a way to write down our speech, we do what is, conceptually, at least, the equivalent” (ST 42). This “writerly attitude” is essential: “There wouldn’t be speech without these practices of self-organization… The second order penetrates the first order through and through” (ST 42).

So we have here, under the name of “the writerly attitude,” an interweaving of transcendental condition (universal and necessary normative reflection responding to the necessary possibility of misunderstanding constitutive of social life) and empirical production (everyday speech and writing).

On the notion of philosophy in Alva Noë's "Strange Tools"

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).

In this note, I want to focus on the presentation of philosophy as a “level 2 reorganization practice” in Strange Tools.

Chapter 4 of ST is entitled “Art Loops and the Garden of Eden.” Here Noë lays out many of the most important ideas of the work. (In my next post, I’ll tackle the notion of “writerly attitude” laid out in Chapter 4; here I’ll focus on philosophy.)

Noë begins by recapping the difference between Levels 1 and 2. Level 1 is that of organized activities (see the previous post); level 2 is that of the practice that provides a perspicuous representation of the organized activity, where “the nature of the organization at the lower level gets put on display and investigated” (ST 29). For instance, choreography displays dancing to us, as (bio-culturally informed) organized activity.  

Now, for Noë philosophy is also a level-2 practice: it “stands to our level-1 cognitive undertakings – reasoning, argument, belief formation, and crucially, the work of science – [as] choreography stands to movement and dancing, or painting stands to picture-making activities” (ST 29-30).

So, to fulfill the analogy that Noë leaves implicit, if dancing taps into a “culturally shaped motion bank” that is informed by downward looping of choreography so that our “spontaneous” dancing is “cliché-like,” (ST 31), then we have a culturally shaped thought bank whereby our everyday thoughts are informed by previous philosophical concepts. (Keynes said that the most hard-headed practical business people are ruled by the thoughts of long dead philosophers; Dreyfus diagnosed the Cartesianism of AI; there are many other diagnoses, grist for the mill of cultural critics.)

I would say that these “banks” are virtual or potential or transcendental with regard to the actual / empirical thoughts we think. But that virtual / potential / transcendental realm is not unstructured; far from it. There are lines running through it, lines that make it more or less likely that we will have a certain thought at a certain time. In other words, by being organized in cultural thought activities we become predisposed to have certain patterns of occurring thoughts.

But, and this is the key, those virtual / potential / transcendental lines are not static Platonic Ideas; they are instead experimentally made and remade by the interplay between philosophical re-organization and cultural organization. The transcendental realm of our “thought bank,” in other words, is always in relation with the empirical realm of our reading and writing philosophy. So that philosophy is a practice of de-organizing our thought patterns and thereby alerting us to our having-been-organized in a particular way so that we might undertake a re-organization of our virtual thought bank.

Now, “undertake” might be too voluntaristic, or at least it’s not the whole story; sometimes I think we “undergo” a de- / re-organization, in relation to our “undertaking” it: sometimes you are shocked into incomprehension but then find glimmers you can follow, by a concentrated undertaking, that might lead you into a new set of thought potentials.

The same conditions of plasticity and multiple processuality we talked about yesterday are the conditions for this de- / re-organization of thought that philosophical practice affords us. So we find philosophy here as the art of thinking.

Notes on "organization" in Alva Noë's new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).

In this brief note, I want to focus on the idea of “organization” Noë puts forth here in his wonderful new book.

He opens the book with a discussion of breast-feeding as an activity that “organizes us. The task itself shapes, enables, and constrains us; we find ourselves put together and made up in the setting of the activity” (ST 5; italics in original).

Organized activities have 6 features: they are 1) naturally rooted, 2) cognitively demanding, 3) temporally / rhythmically structured, 4) emergent from endogenous dynamics [in the case of breast-feeding neither nurse nor infant is in charge], 5) functional, and 6) potentially pleasurable.

First of all, I think the example is important, for, following Colwyn Trevarthen, we can see breast-feeding and other infant/caretaker rhythmic interchange as setting up “primary intersubjectivity” which lays the ground for later turn-taking behavior characteristic of “secondary intersubjectivity” in conversation (Noë’s next example at ST 6-7), dance (ST 11), and so on.

For developmental psychology research here, see the essay collection Communicative Musicality (OUP, 2009); for philosophy see, inter alia, Thomas Fuchs & Hanne De Jaegher, Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (2009): 465–486 and Shaun Gallagher, Two problems of intersubjectivity, Journal of Consciousness Studies 16, No. 6–7 (2009): 289-308.

Next, such organization happens in and enmeshes into the characteristic activities of our culture: “To be alive is to be organized, and insofar as we are not only organisms but also persons, we find ourselves organized, or integrated, in a still larger range of ways that ties us to the environment, each other, and our social worlds” (ST, 6).

Organization, Noë insists, cannot be understood by neuro-reductionism or by hyper-intellectualism, but needs to be analyzed at the “embodiment level,” which is neither sub-personal nor personal; AN refers here not to Merleau-Ponty as might be expected but to Dana Ballard of UT Austin. The point he’s trying to make here is that not all organized activities are social; perception is a case whereby “the environment itself organizes us individually” (ST 8). I’m not sure about this with regard to seeing anything other than just objects; I would think that our concrete perception (“this thing isn’t just a thing, it’s a table”) is irreducibly social.

But leave that be; the interesting thing for me comes next: “Our lives are one big complex nesting of organized activities at different levels and scales… We are always captured by structures of organization…. And crucially, these structures of organization are not of our own making” (ST 10). This is key to our radical historical sociality: our growing up is a process of being organized into evolving structures of organized activity. I’d like to put in a plug here for variation in practices: I don’t think we have a culture, but rather we have cultures, in the plural, and it's the resonance and dissonance of organized activities that lets us achieve both comfortable habits and creative novelty.

In shifting to his discussion of art, Noë distinguishes dancing as organized activity from choreography, which is a practice that “puts dancing itself on display” (ST 13), that aims at producing a “perspicuous representation,” something that “illuminat[es] the ways we find ourselves organized, and so, also, the ways we might reorganize ourselves” (ST 17).

So at this point I want to thematize plasticity and process.

Plasticity has to be as the ground for organization / re-organization. But re-organization implies as well a capacity for de-organization as an intermediary between a state of being organized and a later state of re-organization.

But I also want to inject a process perspective here: aren’t we just always ratios of processes heading toward (re-)organization and de-organization? A fully organized (fully habituated) state is a limit; no one, no thing is ever so locked into repetition without a difference that it just rolls along with no bumps, no variation. On the other hand I fully agree that there’s no life without some degree of organization, some resonance, some habituation: the heart just has to start up again and again and again after each one of its cycles and its rhythm has to get enmeshed with a multiplicity of other processes.

I think this biological necessity for harmony in multiple processes scales up to the level of organized activities: “talking, walking, eating, perceiving, driving” are Noë’s examples (ST 10) but we can extend the list. They have to harmonize to some extent just so we can get through the day, but there’s enough dissonance to open possibilities for experimentation with the interplay of those activities.

I’m tempted to a pun here to conclude. Can we call this experimentation with organized activities – underpinned by plasticity and multiple processuality – and resulting in de-organizing ourselves for novel re-organizations, can we call this the “art of living”? 

Revised commentary on John Stewart, "An enquiry concerning the nature of conceptual categories."

Here. Links to the online version (and to Stewart's piece) in the pdf. My thanks to comments from Ezequiel Di Paolo, John Stewart, and the anonymous reviewer at Frontiers. 

Fall 2010 Talks

I'll be delivering four talks this fall: 

1. Yi-Fu Tuan Lecture Series, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Friday, October 1. I'll talk on my Deleuze and War Music paper. 

2. Keynote speaker, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy / Société canadienne philosophie continentale, University of Alberta, Edmonton. Thursday, October 14. I'll speak on my "New Transcendental Aesthetic" paper.

3. SPEP panel on Evan Thompson's work, organized by Donn Welton of SUNY Stony Brook. SPEP is hosted by McGill University and Université de Montréal. Saturday, November 6. This is also based on the "New Transcendental Aesthetic" paper. 

4. APA invited talk, Symposium on "The Concept of Life in Continental Philosophy." Other panelist is Tony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University. Boston MA, Monday December 27. Talk will be based in part on my Deleuze and Biology lectures. 

Toward a New Transcendental Aesthetic and a New Panpsychism

http://www.protevi.com/john/NewTA.pdf

Uploaded a conference paper I'll give twice this fall, to the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy (CSCP) and to SPEP. Comments welcome!

Two new books on empathy

For those interested in the evolution and neuroscience of empathy, here are two books I’ve enjoyed recently:

The first is Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Hrdy (Harvard / Belknap, 2009). It’s important because it gives a good evolutionary story of human empathy based on group child rearing practices. So it decenters (w/o unduly neglecting) the mother / child relation in favor of the “it takes a village” angle. What’s great is that she criticizes a common reading that war provides the selection pressure for in-group empathy, as well as the “Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis” (i.e., humans got good at mind-reading in order to cheat and catch cheaters w/in the group).  She also criticizes her earlier work (Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species [Random House, 1999) for being too individualistic / competitive. Very interesting stuff!

The other is Maia Szalavitz and Bruce Perry, Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered (HarperCollins, 2010). This book, in the popular science genre, has some great stuff on infant and child neurodevelopment and the need for love, affection, and care to enable eventual self-regulation of the stress response system. So more science to support the “essential interdependence” model. Covers some of the same ground as a favorite of mine, Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture (MIT, 2006). Notes on Wexler available here. More stuff in this vein from the "Evolution and Biology of Morality" course I've taught recently.

UMP | University of Minnesota Press Blog: Author Q&A: On Gilles Deleuze, philosophical tools, and "Political Affect"

A preview from a recent Q&A with me. 

Q: How did you decide on case studies as a method of doing philosophy?

A: I think case studies are an important and under-used tool in philosophy, as opposed to thought experiments ... with case studies we’re not after essential distinctions at the borders of categories. Instead, we’re trying to explore concrete situations and the “problems” they express. Here is where my reliance on the thought of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze comes in. Deleuze did not think in terms of essences that would slot things into categories, but thought that events are the points of intersection of “multiplicities.” That’s a technical term for Deleuze which, roughly speaking, means a field in which several processes meet to produce events, much as a crystal or a lightning bolt or a hurricane forms out of a field of multiple processes. In dealing with analogous multiplicities in our social fields we see that (1) any one move changes the conditions for future moves and that (2) no one solution exhausts the potentials for future creatively different solutions ... The more we explore the Schiavo case, the Columbine case, the Katrina case, the more we realize that concrete situations are “crystallizations” of a problematic field, and that a change here or there, if it occurs at a critical point, might make all the difference in the world. (READ THE FULL Q&A)

via www.uminnpressblog.com

Q & A with me at the U Minnesota Press blog, about Political Affect.

Remarks on Alva Noe's new book, Out of Our Heads

A few remarks on Alva Noë's Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessors from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.

Alva Noë follows up his wonderful Action in Perception (MIT, 2004) with this book aimed at a popular readership. This post will be less formal than a book review, but I would like to set out some reactions.

First, I think it's great that philosophers write this kind of book. There is a well-established popular science genre, but by and large philosophers have not taken up the challenge of addressing ourselves to the educated lay public. That's a shame, as we should all take seriously our obligations to now and again take on the role of the "public intellectual." There's a complex history here with the mid-20th century turn of mainstream American philosophy away from pragmatism cutting us off from the great example of John Dewey, as well a rather different cultural landscape from Europe, where Bergson, Russell, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Habermas and many others have filled the role of "public intellectuals." Noë thematizes just these issues of public engagement in his Preface, where he writes "Natural science … is not discontinuous with broader human concerns." Rather than being "value neutral," it is a human project, aimed at broadening the human understanding of the world. I would have liked a reference here to Dewey. Not that I know too much about him, but I do recognize these themes as resonating with his.

Second, it's not easy writing this kind of book, for you have to balance some technical precision (why else have a professional philosopher be the author, rather than a journalist?) with a format and writing style accessible to educated but not specialized readers. Noë succeeds, I think, in setting forth his main thesis – that consciousness is an activity arising from the interplay of brain, body, and world, and is thus not located purely in the brain – in clear, precise terms that allow the professional philosopher to recognize the issues involved as well as allowing the intended lay readership to grasp what's important in the debate.

Having said all that, I would like to bring up some fairly technical issues here, but as they concern the political context in which consciousness arises, I think that's warranted. Also, I won't write so much about all things I agree with, or that I like in the book, which are many (for instance – but this is only an example – the great stuff on the "mind in life" thesis). But I hope it's clear that I wouldn't write at all if I didn't think the issues were very important and that Noë's contributions need to be taken seriously. It's more praise to disagree with someone on important issues, I think, than agree with him or her on trivial ones. To be more precise, it's not that I *disagree* with Noë on many of these points, it's just that I would like to extend the argument a few more steps.

End of life issues.
On page 34, Noë writes about the end-of-life issues concerning the difference between PVS (Persistent Vegetative State) and locked-in syndrome. Noë writes:

When the family of a person who has 'become a vegetable' refuses to give up on that person, refuses to consider 'pulling the plug' or 'pulling out the feeding tubes,' what they are saying is that the kind of love and commitment they feel for the daughter or parent or partner is simply incompatible with making the kind of cost-benefit decisions that would justify making the life-ending decision. Others, of course, reach very different kinds of decisions.

There are a number of things to say here. I've tackled many of them in my study of the Terri Schiavo case, which can be read here, here, and here.

First, there's a difference between respecting the wishes of a person, recorded before the onset of PVS, not to receive feeding tube care after the onset of PVS, and a third-party decision. In the Schiavo case, it was never a third-party decision, but a matter of respecting Terri Schiavo's wishes. I explore why most people tend to think of these kinds of decisions as self-centered: "I don't want to be a vegetable, so please pull the plug on me!" But it's also possible that one can wish not to receive feeding tubes for the sake of others. In other words, you might know that your loved ones could never make that decision on their own, so you make it for them.

Second, to be legally ratified, third-party decisions have to be made on a "best interest of the patient" basis. There's a way this could be said to be a "cost-benefit" basis, but just that phrase alone makes it seem like just a monetary decision.

Third, the use of "person" with regard to PVS cases is philosophically fraught. There are many, many issues involved here, but let me just refer to the longer pieces mentioned above, along with this distinction: it might be that when a person before the onset of PVS asks not to receive feeding tubes, that the death aimed at here is not suicide (killing the organism in order to kill the person), but "organismcide," that is, killing the organism that used to support a person but is now only the remains of the person, who died when the parts of the brain necessary for consciousness (but not sufficient – I agree with Noe here totally) were destroyed.

Fourth, I think we need to support the right of persons to direct in advance that they not receive tubal feeding not just in PVS, but also in MCS (Minimally Conscious State) and the locked-in condition. In MCS, severe cortical damage has occurred, but some, "minimal," cognitive function remains. A catatonic "locked-in syndrome" occurs with no cortical damage, hence full cognitive function, but with a closing off of motor control. I would speculate that most people fear a "locked-in condition" when they don't want tubal feeding, though the only reason to believe an MCS is any better than being locked in would be the lowered cognitive function. An other-directed motivation for refusing tubal feeding would not be to avoid the horror of the locked-in state (though that is horror indeed), but to allow some peace of mind, closure, and the ability to grieve, to come to our loved ones.

Again, I don't want to make too much out of just a few sentences, and I don't want to criticize Noe for not going into the details of these knotty issues in a popular book. I just wanted to lay out these reactions.

Dynamics of Consciousness
Noë writes at 50-51: "the baby-caretaker 'dyad' is a unity from which the child only gradually emerges as an individual. We can speak of attachment here, but I prefer to speak of oneness.” This bothered me, as it seems to neglect the Meltzoff-Moore experiments on neonate imitation, which Shaun Gallagher interprets in terms of an early body schema of the infant, which would belie the talk of "unity" and "oneness." Now I completely agree with Noë that independence as isolation is not the correct way to talk about maturation of human beings: "There is no such thing as complete detachment from the community of others" (51). But if you're going to do away with isolation as the telos, you should do away with fusion as the arche.

But I also worry about Noë's reading of maturity as "growing comfortably into one's environmental situation," or as "integration" (51). Many people grow up and become mature but precisely into social situations that are disempowering for them, because they belong to disempowered political categories. It's not that this disempowering experience is limited to immigrants, as Noë seems to imply; it's right here at home that many people never quite feel at home, if you see what I'm getting at. Even though it's a great advance to talk about the embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, affective subject (4EA), we shouldn't talk about "the" 4EA subject, but about populations of subjects, many of whom suffer disempowering subjectification practices.

So, for example, when Noë writes at 77: "The body is present in our normal, active, engaged experience … as a range of possibilities of movement and action" I want to say that such an empowered body schema is not available to everyone at all times. Leaving aside for the moment the issue of disability (but what a sentence that is to write!), I also want to refer here to Iris Marion Young's great essay "Throwing Like a Girl" which  discusses the restricted body competence of the feminized body-subject. Young's critique is aimed at Merleau-Ponty, in which the assured competence of the presumably neutral or non-gendered body subject hides a masculinist presupposition. Feminized and masculinized body subjects have different "spheres of competence": a flat tire can appear as a mildly irritating challenge or as an insurmountable problem; a subway entrance as the enticing gateway to the city or as an anxiety-producing danger.

It would be, in my opinion, an unacceptably reductive biologization to generalize the analysis of anorexia Noë gives at 78 ("Her body schema is likely to be just fine…. Her problem is that she feels bad about her body, about how it looks and about her ability to control it.") to cover Young's analysis. In other words, I don't want to say that we all have the same body schema as set of capacities, but that some people have culturally installed distorted body images – in other words, that feminization is a matter of giving people falsely limited opinions about their bodily capacities and / or installing a set of limiting emotional reactions over a body schema that functions just like that of masculinized subjects. Rather – and I think Noë would be open to this approach given his interest in "plasticity" – since our biology is to be open to our culture, we have to locate the analysis of feminization and masculinization at the level of body schema, not just body image.

The key here is to propose a level of analysis that would not be merely idiosyncratic, but that produces traits that would be reliably repeated (to use the distinction Paul Griffiths uses in discussing Developmental Systems Theory in biology) and that would be open to political analysis. This is of course the major problem of feminism, race theory, queer theory, and other such analyses: where to locate the analysis so that you avoid the Scylla of personal anecdote and the Charybdis of ignoring difference altogether. Can we isolate structured subjectification practices that reliably reproduce what we can call a feminized or masculinized body subject? And can we propose that as a philosophical desideratum for the discussion of 4EA cognitive science?

I'll just end these remarks by saying those are the stakes of Political Affect. And by repeating my admiration for Noë's book that it brings up so many important issues, far beyond the few points I treat here.

Cyborg Affect

I collaborated with my former student Roger Pippin of the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida on a paper entitled Affect, Agency and Responsibility: The Act of Killing in the Age of Cyborgs.

Here's the abstract:

While close-range killing is sometimes performed in "cold blood" (with full conscious awareness of a subject), it is more often performed in a de-subjectified state, as in reflexes, rages, and panics. We explore two military modifications of de-subjectified killing: (1) Vietnam-era training for “free fire zones” and (2) current digital and video simulator training for urban warfare of the “shoot / no shoot” type. We focus on how dehumanization of the enemy temporarily allows for activation of a “hunting agent,” but often cannot stop an “empathy agent” from kicking in afterwards, producing a sense of retrospective guilt, even though the practical agent and the moral agent did not coincide at the time of the act of killing.

Conference on Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended

Just saw the Call for Papers for a conference in October 2007 at University of Central Florida on Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended. The conference is organized by Shaun Gallagher, who maintains the very useful the Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences website as well as editing the journal of the same name, along with Dan Zahavi. The conference will feature a keynote by Andy Clark.

Here's the description of the conference:

Recent works in the cognitive sciences have championed various approaches to embodied and situated cognition, including concepts of enactive perception and extended minds.   The assumption that cognition can be studied by looking exclusively at what goes on in the head or in the brain has undergone considerable criticism. A diverse and growing number of researchers now claim that an organism’s cognitive abilities are partly constituted by proprioception, action, environmental manipulation and intricate couplings that spread the causality across organisms and structures in their physical, social, and technological environments.  Research in this area is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on fields such as philosophy, cognitive science, developmental studies, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, simulation science and robotics. Much of it is inspired by or complemented by the insights of thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who emphasize the ways in which experience and thought are structured by bodily constraints and environmental interaction. Special focus will be on topics related to extended and augmented cognition.

New Book Series: "New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science"

I've recently become series editor for a new series with Palgrave Macmillan entitled New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. The topic of the series is a great occasion for dialogue between analytic and continental philosophers, if you ask me, and since you're visiting my blog, I guess you are asking me.

I've added a link to the left column, but if you don't want to click on it, here's what you'll read there:

Panicking, Choking, and Just Plain Losing

The Warriors / Mavericks was a great NBA game last night. I've seen a few games in the last 35 years (since Al Meltzer on Channel 17 in Philadelphia with the Sixers and the Big Five), and this was excellent basketball. The Warriors were leading 112-103 with 3 minutes left and lost as the Mavs scored 15 points in a row, 12 by Dirk Nowitzki. So did the Warriors panic, choke, or just plain lose?

Cognitivism in the News

When I saw it last month, I was struck by this bit of rampant cognitivism in the news. In discussing waterboarding an  AP writer – Katherine Shrader – says “In that technique, a detainee is made to believe he is drowning.” It hit me that “belief” is a poor way to describe the activation of a deeply embedded and evolutionarily inherited panic reflex. It's not the "belief" that you are drowning, it's the intensity of the panic that is induced that makes waterboarding a torture.