The+Tenth+Week

__Wilson – Neural Geographies__

Antiessentialism – have become not merely routinized, but naturalized.

Arguments driven by critiques of essentialism have not only become de rigueur, they have become the foundational supposition of many contemporary critical projects.

Choice between subversion or hegemony, or, in what amounts to the same thing, that routinized concession “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic.

Phenomenology-scientism – is not simply accidental, or correctable, or degenerate. Instead it produces a theory of affect that would not otherwise be available.

The imperative of a sanitizing, compulsive critical practice.

A more widespread imperative to force a disjunction (or enforce a hierarchy) between science and criticism, between biology and politics – the end effect of which has been to cripple our critical abilities and thereby blunt the cogency, force, and political efficacy of the readings that we produce.

What connectionism offers to a rethinking and reinstantiation of cognition.

While they are clearly not representative of a paradigm shift in the strict Kuhnian sense, connectionist models nevertheless reorient our approaches to, and expectations of, cognitive theory.

Neuroscience has lent an air of contemporaneity to connectionist computation (hybridity being the identifying mark of science at this //fin de siècle//), and its organic realism provides a rejoinder to the artificiality of conventional computational theory. Over and again it is neurology that is the yardstick of connectionism’s credibility and potential.

A reduction inevitably follows once neurology has been incorporated into psychological theory. The reductionist and antireductionist squabbles that structure this commentary are, in the end, arguments for and against neurology.

There has been a persistent deflection of neurological explanations of psychological or behavioral attributes on the grounds that such explanations are a priori reductionist and apolitical.

Critiques seem to be premised on an unarticulated but nonetheless strongly held conviction that neurology itself is regressive and politically dangerous. Such is the strength of the association of neurology with reductionism, and reductionism with the politically regressive, that it is widely presumed (but seldom argued) that neurological explanations of homosexuality must //necessarily// lead to reductive homophobic ends.

Avoiding the correspondingly banal position that neurological theories of psychological behavior tendencies are liberatory, I will argue that the neurological facets of connectionism are indispensable to rethinking cognition, psyche, and biology.
 * What makes these “extreme” (only extreme if one identifies a particular center to which they are periphery) positions so banal?

Connectionism serves as the means through which I can gain leverage on both scientific cognitive theory and our own critical habits and procedures.

Does connectionism offer a political reading of psyche, cognition, and biology not despite its neurocomputational inclinations, but //because of them?//

The body is read as a social, cultural, experiential, or psychical object that touches on the biological realm only lightly, discreetly, hygienically.
 * I wouldn’t say anti-biological. I would say, however, that “biological” as scientific sits within a context of Truth claims supported by certain conceptions of objectivity and universalization, not just essentialism.

When we speak of “the body” we do not mean “this (biological) body.”

The biological body is coded in these routinized projects as the untheorized body, the mechanical, tangible, artless body. In an accomplished gesture of disavowal, “the body” has become the means through which “this (biological) body” is once again expelled, trivialized, or neutralized.

If the conjunction of feminism-neurophysiology appears to be unlikely, unstable, or unproductive, this may have more to do with conventionalized feminist politics than with the nature of neurology itself.

They are unable to think scientific politics outside the routinized critical expectation that the sciences are either objective sites of truth or oppressive forces of social control (or some schizoid combination of both).

It is not a return to biological determinism, but rather an expectation that feminism should ask questions about its own political tendencies.

If gender is the exemplary feminist psychological concept, then the distinction between psyche and body that gender usually entails will likely be axiomatic to most feminist criticism in psychology. A crucial part of rethinking the politics of feminist psychology will be rethinking the utility of gender, especially as it is formulated against biological sex.

Feminism needs to engage with scientific authority not simply at those sites where it takes women as its objects, but also in the neutral zones, in those places where feminism appears to have no place and no political purchase.

Neutral sites are no less implicated in the deployment of patriarchal presumption than are those sites marked as sexed. In psychology, then, we need to be able to ask feminist questions not only about women, but also about cognition, learning, the brain, statistics, the rat, the perceptual system.

How does such a seemingly benign and indispensable notion (cognition) act in the service of phallocentric authority?

They have generated a set of perspectives, //unavailable anywhere else//, that enable us not only to identify the vicissitudes of patriarchal authority in specific scientific sites, but also to enact effective political responses to that authority.

Concerns about the value of “postmodern theories” to contemporary politics (and feminism in particular) is that they offer nothing in the way of a positive project.
 * Positive project, like re-constructive rather than de-constructive projects?

More concerned with negative criticism of Enlightenment or modernist projects than with constructive strategies for change, these critical theories are deemed dangerously apolitical.

Deconstruction simply reverses binaries, privileging the secondary term; deconstruction reinstalls the binaries it criticizes; deconstruction destroys binary structures; deconstruction makes knowledges impossible; deconstruction is rhetorical free play; deconstruction marks the end of politics. These concerns – often owing more to popularized understanding of deconstruction than to a close reading of any particular deconstructive texts – have become the commonsense political response to the complexities of deconstructive procedure.

Rather than negating, excluding, or preventing classical political and epistemological projects, deconstruction is engaged in an examination of the conditions that make such projects possible and the implications and effects of their operations.

While a political project (in the classical sense) cannot occupy itself entirely with these deconstructive concerns, nonetheless any political project or system of analysis that shuns or forgets the effects of these double binds risks falling into political or analytical stasis.

This claim that deconstructin positions itself against metaphysics is //incorrect//. A more careful inquiry into any of Derrida’s texts would demonstrate the great care he takes to formulate deconstruction as something other than the argumentative antithesis of a pathologized metaphysics.

__Wilson – Gut Feminism__

The idea that psychic or cultural conflicts could become somatic events was one of the central organizing principles of feminist work on the body in the 1980s and 1990s.

What this approach does not pay attention to, however, is the role played by biology //that is not damaged//; that is, how the everyday, minute-by-minute, routine action of biological systems (e.g., surges of biochemicals; metabolic activity; synaptic communication; muscular contractions) might be caught up in, and contributing to, hysterical symptomology.

The intellectual corollaries that his model seems to have engendered for the contemporary feminist scene – that the most compelling analytic registers for thinking about the body are symbolic, cultural, ideational, or social rather than biological, and that political or intellectual alliances with the biological sciences are dangerous and retrograde.

Most troublingly, it seems that the very sophistication of feminist accounts of embodiment has been brokered through a repudiation of biological data.

Materializations are not the effect of a //leap// from the mental to the somatic; rather, they are the product of a //regression// to a protopsychic state.

Much more than the front of the mouth or even a little lower down into the esophagus itself, the fauces is a site where the communication between organs may readily become manifest.

The bulimic capacities of the throat should draw our attention not just to behavioral intent or cultural transformation or disorder in higher cortical centers or mechanisms of unconscious representation but also to the Ferenczian language of the digestive organs.
 * Makes sense. If artifacts have politics, shouldn’t biology?

As is so often the case in contemporary biomedical literatures, there is an overriding concern with clearly demarcating causal primacy (what causes what?) – as if determination is a singular, or delimited event.