This is the old blog

I don't blog here anymore. The new blog is here.

I have a small book here.

Thank you.

A List for Summer

June, July, and August, you will be used to these ends:

1) Do this blog again, but differently. Notes written from an odd locale sorta thing.
2) Sew the clothes that need sewing.
3) Read two books for my thesis.
4) Visit the zine archive.
5) Fix the CCM: new stem, headset & bars, maybe SPD pedals. New front tire. New brake, for sure.
6) Infinite Jest?
7) Find a new fiction writer I can appreciate.
8) Bike to Duluth.
...to be continued...

The curiosity cabinet

I'm not posting what I said I would, but this is better--an excuse to link to an article from Cabinet magazine about curiosity cabinets that I really like. (Go there for images!) Be warned--this post is from a school paper.

The curiosity cabinet, popular during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a microcosm for the study of a larger, concomitant shift wherein an initially aesthetic appreciation of natural phenomena became a scientific endeavor to classify and define. This change paralleled the changes brought about by Newtonian physics and the rise of science, changes that affected, among many other things, both how and where we look for truth. Science became the preferred "how," and a nature whose truths are accessible to scientific method became the "where." Rather than look for truths inherent in nature, Nietzsche, Koestler, Hesse, Arbib, Kövecses and others argue for a reality of contingent truths constructed by humans, a mythos that is, as Robert Pirsig says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, "a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues" (317). The everyday act of constructing reality through metaphor becomes an artistic act, one that relies on an aesthetic appreciation of similarities to create the network of meaning and relationships that is our reality. It is also a rhetorical act, one defined by probability rather than certain truth, and one that implicates us as creators of the very causality and reality science once defined as unaffected by human involvement.

The claim that "all is metaphor" represents a thorough departure from the ideology defined by the science formed up to and during the 17th century ---to be an inquiry, first by Aristotelian deduction, then by induction, into nature in order to discover its fundamental truths. As Hesse and Arbib characterize it, "In the seventeenth century, the rise of science was accompanied by the conception of an 'ideal language' that would enable us to read off from the 'book of nature' the true science that exactly expresses reality" (149). The universe was seen as a book humans could read, given we could divine the proper (that is, logical) methods for reading its text. Science was the chosen system of methods for doing this, and this choice represents a calcification of values that even today seem established, a priori, obvious--indisputable. As Hesse and Arbib argue, the seventeenth-century myth of inherent truths in nature discoverable by humans lives on in the nineteenth-century project of a universal logic, a formal analysis of language that takes for granted fixed, stable meanings (150). Within such an analysis, there is little room for metaphor as anything more than decoration, so metaphor is afforded no more status than mere decoration. Wherever there is the notion of fixed meanings, metaphor, with its quixotic displays of novel meaning, will always be anomalous, deviant, difficult to systematize, and thus relegated to an innocuous outpost that is even inferior to aesthetics.

At the time when Liebniz was searching for a language that corresponded exactly to the language in which the text of nature was written, the curiosity cabinet represented visually the contemporary shift from an aesthetic, haptic understanding of nature to a logical, categorical, and ultimately textual understanding. Prefigured by the Wunderkammern (wonder chambers) of the Renaissance, curiosity cabinets were collections of rare, curious, beautiful, and valuable objects that were for the most part nature's dead: dried, stuffed, preserved, bottled and skeletal (Olalquiaga "Object Lesson/Transitional Object"). They represented at first wonder at nature, over time control and categorization of nature, and finally a conquer of nature through the repetition of (and perhaps ritualization of) organizing, naming, labeling, and categorizing natural phenomena.

Curiosity cabinets came to resemble texts, filled as they were with systems of organization and displayed in an increasingly linear way behind glass, rendering them two-dimensional and discouraging any sensory involvement beyond sight. The immediate accessibility of exhibition was transformed into an esoteric system, which suggested that "truth" was not immediately apprehensible but required study, initiation, and knowledge of particulars. "Natural history was no longer a matter of surface and exteriority, and therefore of mere aesthetic arrangement and disposition, but rather one of depth and interiority in the empirical sense. Admirative joy gave way to autopsic glee" (Olalquiaga "Object Lesson/Transitional Object"). Curiosity cabinets were no longer about the clutter and curiosity of the Renaissance Wunderkammern but about systematic inquiry, and inquiry was no longer about looking but about studying, learning the boundaries of categories, reading nature's text--no matter that nature's text was ordered, defined, and ultimately written by humans.

Brain Maps, Icons & Indices, THE END.

"So anyway, like I was saying" is part introduction, part resignation concerning a debate I've addressed obliquely but hope to illustrate a little more bluntly here. But I've resisted roughhandling it so far, this little argument, because roughness begets dichotomous, angsty things I want nothing to do with, no way. I don't want to see this intricate argument turned out and pried apart. And I certainly don't want to see it solved. Some things, particularly this sort of debate, lose to the wastes of resolution what made them meaningful all along: an ability to exist outside strict categorization, to remain unnamed.

But to keep an air of inscrutability about this business, I won't yet address this thing directly. Indirectness and uncertainty -- in fiction, these often lead to revelation of identity and knowledge. There's Box Man, the narrator of Kobo Abe's The Box Man, who lives and moves about Tokyo in a cardboard box he outfitted with one-way windows and little air holes and hooks. A chapter near the end is titled "In His Dream the Box Man Takes His Box Off. Is This the Dream He Had Before He Began Living in a Box or Is It the Dream of His Life After He Left It...?" Ambiguous 'its'...ambiguity abounds. So too in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, where "box" is physical appearance and literature the frame for the contexts Orlando's many guises suggest. That unity can be achieved via opposition and divisibility is the idea that disguise and change make clear, especially in something like Dhalgren, an ode to mutability and who-the-hell-am-I meanderings that arrive by departure from any pretense to a coherent story. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the same people keep appearing as different people, and in this time-bound cycle there's the sense that while individual crusades will fail, the answers each is after are somehow contained in an overarching and messy and glorious thrust toward...who knows. It contains that answer, too.

It's in this light I want to suggest that science relies on metaphor -- whether admittedly or not -- whenever it makes claims about the outcome of experiment. A recent article illustrates this nicely with its suggestion that we'll soon be able to experiment on simulations of bacteria rather than on bacteria itself (itsselves?). The reason? We already know all there is to know about bacteria -- it's a closed system, so modeling it is less complicated than modeling something like the brain, about which much is still unknown. As the article suggests, models are becoming experimental subjects, proving valid at least one instance of the annoying postmodern claim that science really just ends up investigating its own constructs. That aside, what give me hope is the fact that the human brain, the unknown that it is, allows debates like this one to sprawl and mutate and get absolutely no closer to resolution on this coordinated thrust toward who the hell knows. Where it's headed doesn't so much matter, does it?

What to expect

Soon: A last post about brains.
And then: What happened when a lecture on the Ptolemaic universe and theism inspired a daydream about aliens.

Brain Maps, Icons & Indices, continued

A representation of any process seems, paradoxically, more abstract and removed from reality until time is visually accounted for--nevermind that time is probably one of the most abstract concepts we've devised for ourselves to deal with. Very briefly, the history of brain-imaging techniques shows a progression from direct observation (sawing into the skull and prodding), to observation via static x-ray images, to static MRI-imaging, to SPECT images (also static, and revelatory of only appearance and not function at the time of the image), to PET images (reconstruction of imagistic "slices"), to functional imaging (depictions of the brain as it's working), to various still-experimental techniques of analyzing the brain from within (such as tiny "devices" like bacteria that could sense the localization of blood flow to a region of the brain and follow it there to record). Overall, the progression is from image-as-representation (icon) to image-as-diagnostic tool (index). The important change from the static to the functional representation is the addition of time--and the corresponding but implicit assumption that time implies causality.

It's difficult to look at a time-series progression of images of the brain without importing some causality from one image to the next. (Really, this is the simple principle that accounts for the magic of those early-animation flip-books.) Especially when a series of brain images depicts a "real-time" event like a movement of the arm, for example, it's almost irresistibly easy to regard the image as the event's equivalent. However, it might be more conceptually sound to regard it as no more than an analogy. ("No more than" should not lessen the usefulness of the analogy, though.)

An analogous rather than a causal link is useful for both practical and metaphysical reasons. Practically, it maintains the distinction between brain and brain image, between object and exploratory method. If the interest of science is objective observation, it should at least focus some of that observation on its own methods, and any initial conflation or blurring of important distinctions might make science blind to itself and as such a rather unwieldy beast. Metaphysically, to accord an analogous relationship to the time-series image of the brain and the brain itself at least leaves room for a distinction between mind and brain, which (it has been argued*) is conflated by increasingly precise time-series images of the brain without a corresponding increase in accuracy.

My summary of the argument is: scientists are much more precise than they are accurate. Overly precise images of the brain might give the mistaken impression that we know more than we do. For instance, a time-series of a brain showing an arm movement might give us very precise information about the brain during segments of this event, and, along with the illusion of causality, this precision might suggest that the cause of the event--the impetus for movement--is discernable. When really, we might be looking at the wrong thing entirely--or at the thing in the wrong way entirely.

*This was Prof. Alan Gross' argument in a lecture of his I recently attended. This post owes much to his lecture and to the audience's questions during the lecture.

Tbc, again...

Brain Maps, Icons & Indices

There are certain things we take for granted about science, that paradigm of objectivity. For one, there's its objectivity; that science is not objective seems a vague and fundamental contention whose proof seems as obvious and elusive as the horizon. There's another thing we take for granted: that models mirror the causal structure they depict. It's easy to forget that images generated by apparatuses such as MRI and electron microscopy are still essentially maps, and it's easy to construe the image with the thing generating the image--a tool that's the product of another tool (the scientific method) that's the product of The Human Brain, a popular subject of so many models and images.

First a few concessions: these images are for teaching and learning; the people who drew the amygdala in early issues of Brain knew very well that it wasn't perfectly congruent with the original. It was The Amygdala, a representation, not an amygdala functioning as part of a system filled with idiosyncracies and undocumentable anomalies. Really someone just wanted to convey the idea of the amygdala, enough said.



But these icons can become a little more connected to the real thing: they can become indeces. Comparing a representation of the brain to an actual brain, certain variations become noticeable. A representation that records this variation is an index: basically, a repository for information storage and retrieval. Now the diagram is a little more implicated in the system it represents.

There are other examples of images that are both icon and index: for instance, a map drawn by someone who, nevermind the circumstances, is quite without significant parts of his left brain. For this person, the map is an icon--it's a familiar, sorta gestalt representation suggestive of the represented (the actual content of which is often not experienced, or not able to be experienced, entirely and simultaneously). So, working from a map, this person draws, say, the U.S's West Coast, sees that he's copied what the map shows, and calls it complete. For a psychologist, this map isn't an icon, but an index of the guy's brain injury. The guy was his own diagnostic tool. The diagram is an important part of the system at work in this guy's brain.

To be continued...