JK Fowler
Academic Papers (Physiology)
Nomadic Trajectories: Traversing Through Conceptions of Places Fragmentally, Presently Past
Preface
Everything is connected. I am limited only by my inability to currently experience and see the connections of all with all. This paper relates to a topic without beginning, without end, in continual becoming and destruction. If I could write on it for the entirety of my life I would not only do so out of desire but out of necessity—the process involved is effervescent, hungry, and weaves together strands of the sane with the insane, the normalized with the bastardized. To sing a song in stanzas. To never stop singing. This nomadic traversing of trails bases itself on the premise that there is no Truth; that we know only that we do not know. In this humbled severity, the paper is acted upon by its objects of inquiry with the burgeoning knowledge that the manner in which we approach subjects matter. There is only effective: that way in which we approach something intangible, unspeakable which translates this to another human being in effective and affective ways. To succeed, even if only partially in this, is a worthy goal.
Each individual piece of this paper has a deep and complex history. As such, individual papers (or books) could (and have been) written on each but the goal of this paper is not to dwell on such histories individually but rather create a collage of interrelated objects, disciplines, ideas, and visualizations to build connections and bridge gaps. It is my hope that by glossing over such deep histories, my attempts to build such connections will not be undercut as it is in the visualizing of the connections between that I see a necessary project to dissolution ourselves from believing that we know ‘Truth’, that fixedness in particular areas of knowledge exist, that specialization does anything other than divide us as human beings from the larger picture, in essence, that we know. This project is an attempt, the first of its kind for me, but undoubtedly, it is in no way a first. Perhaps for me, it is a beginning and for this paper, it is my hope that this will suffice.
Frenzied, distracted, the complexities traverse my mental networks and explode upon the page in messy, filthy sentences, words, and complex architectural tones. Distant leaps into the brain can be accompanied by the severed limbs of endless accounts, attempts at clarity—it must contain the visual, the auditory, the felt and the tactile as they allow us to compose our fragmentary yet fluid lives of becoming and decomposition and yet, I have limited myself for my purposes here and now to the visual. So often are our other sensory inputs translated to the visual, the image. It is for this reason that I feel it is appropriate to firstly take up the issue of visualization and it is my hope that you, the reader, feel the same.
“As you shed your beauty, your youth, as the world forgets you, as you recognize your transience, as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one, as you know there is no one watching you and there never was, you think only about driving, not coming from any place, not arriving at any place, just driving, counting off time. Now you are here: it’s 7:43. Now you are here: it’s 7:44. Now you are…gone”[4]
I
I feel like I’m searching for a lost conception, a timely remembrance of how once the world and our functioning within it was simpler. But no, this is not it. I see an apple, hold it in my hand. The red overtones remind me of the buttocks of a lover I once had, the stem curves upwards and to the right, a fallen timber of a historic now. The apple now in my hand is absorbed and devoured through my eyes traveling at light speed into the mushy matter that resides between my ears. It traverses the temporal. Frontal, parietal, to the occipital lope and hunkers down in my brain stem but does not stop there. It leaves trances behind as it goes, rememberings of “appleness” in my eyes, throughout my brain as it shoots outwards, down my spine, through this central nervous system of mine. The apple has become a synapse of milliseconds shooting outwards and inwards, erupting throughout my body as Deleuzian rhizomes leaving traces as it pulses through the rhythms of now. It eventually reaches my bony fingers, urges them to grasp its ‘appleness’ tighter, pull it towards my face and take a bite. This apple in my hand is a multitude of apples now and remembered, a multitude of many pulsing apple-traces which have marked my body, my mind over the years. It is a remembered apple, never the same as those recalled, never the same as the one I am holding. It is the historical now present, the futuristic becoming. It is an apple but so much more.
Traverse this body of ours for pages ahead. Schizoid searching shall be our style, a bundle of nervous twitchings attempting to etch out a story of the mind. Tools to play with: body at Deleuzian strata (molecular and molar, accumulations, coagulations, sedimentations, foldings, forms, substances, codes, milieus, extremely mobile, rhythms)[6]; brain as assemblage (operative in zones where milieus become decoded, extracting a territory from milieus, made from decoded fragments of all kinds)[7]; thought as rhizomatic (assemblages of complexes of lines, breaks and twists, frees itself of things, passing between, through, over things, nomadic multiplicities of becoming, flight and repute, micro black holes that breed creation and destruction)[8]; the visual apparatus enveloping sensory input; the wisp and whirl of electrical impulses through the optic nerve to the brain; the brain processing such information in milliseconds, organizing, making connections, leaving traces everywhere and treating these traces as memory; the visual apparatus as one hand writing upon the Freudian mystic writing pad while another (the brain) raises the covering sheet from the wax slab[9]; the place in which memory is deposited, the nature with which we recall such memory, the creative reproductions of such memory; brain as physical territory and scientists embarking upon the enterprise of ‘mapping’ out the brain, colonial in their approach; the brain as an active recipient and resister of such coloniality. From colored, Crayola drawings to schizoid neural mappings, attempts are made to understand the utterly complex, non-definable through defined and restricted mediums. Input arrives, leaves traces, we attempt to understand the rhizomatic eruptions and implosions of recall and colonize the brain through mappings, tests, trails, and forced confines. But the brain responds perplexingly even the most ‘apt’ to study it. To try to understand is to attempt control.
II
Carl Bianco, an MD writing for the website HowStuffWorks.com begins his article on “How Vision Works” as follows: “It’s no accident that the main function of the sun at the center of our solar system is to provide light. Light is what drives life. It’s hard to imagine our world and life without it”[13]. Light, it seems is key to visuality. Yet, what is light?
Light waves, a concept envisioned by Christian Huggens in the late 1700s (reinforced in 1807 by Thomas Young), consists of energy in the form of electronic and magnetic fields. Light itself (thanks to Einstein) can be conceived of as streams of energy packets called photons. When we observe objects, occurrences, faces, or the quiet landscapes of the country, we are observing a conglomeration of visible light waves in the form of color, one of the seven currently accepted frequencies of light. Colors themselves are related to frequencies, violets being of the highest frequencies (most energy) and reds being of the lowest frequencies (least energy). As I read a book, I am visually bombarded by light traveling at 186,000 miles per second, light which is composed of collections, fragments and networks, of one or more photons tumbling through space as electromagnetic waves. What is important is that light is not unitary, nor complete. It is fragmented, only partially seen by our eyes and in this way, it is fractional, fragmentary, sectional, limited, and constantly networked not only as a conglomeration of photons amongst themselves but those very photons are networked with the visualizer and the visualized objects that we observe, the visualized light merely being those photons which are reflected off of the object and absorbed by our eyes. As Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “…what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels the earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, — i.e. only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself”[14]. Two concepts related to light will later be explained: energized atoms which fall from high to normal energy have electrons which emit photons with specific frequencies (or colors) that match the distance the electron falls, and colors are created through differently reflected frequencies of visible light off of objects and therefore depend on electron emissions, the objects with which they interact, and our eyes which perceive them.
Given this information, what if our vision is based on partial, collective, networked fragments (photons)? What if this vision informs our brain of how to conceive of ourselves in the world, our sense of memory and history? What if in formulating conceptions of the world, we act only to have objects act back upon us through the reflections of visible light (i.e. I see an apple, conceive of an apple, think to pick up the apple but in looking at it again, the light (fragmentary, fractional, partial, networked, and visible photons) act upon my eyes? What if objects act upon us? What if we are biologically capable of seeing only 1/7th of the spectrum of light and even then, we see only a fraction of that fraction?
III
“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world”[16].
The light from the sun beams through the glass of my windows and hits the book in front of me. I see the book only because of the fact that such light is reflected back into my eyes. Absorption, reflection, refraction, a smattering of scattered photons bombards my eyes, causes me to see only that which the book dares me to see. The light passes from its source to the book to my eyes, illuminating and reflecting as it travels, losing photons spasmodically left and right as it scours the room. My eyes are privy to the bloodied remnants of a high speed chase to everywhere, a photonic joyride. The energy of the light waves, the natural frequency at which the electrons vibrate in the material of this book and the strength with which the atoms in the material hold on to their electrons erect and whittle my vision down to a fraction of a fraction of a helping of that which is possible, saying nothing of the schemes the brain may have in store for the interpretive dance it may lead with the light it may receive.
“Everything we see is a product of, and is affected by, the nature of light”[17].
IV
Nicolas Langlitz discusses Weber Luhmann’s conceptions that the perspective of first order observation as an exploration of latent possibilities produces more knowledge about a certain object of inquiry while the perspective of second order observation can see, “less and other things”[19]. The observer of the observer observes how the observer observes but cannot see what the observer sees and instead sees the observed observer’s blind spot. A first order observer such as a statesman going about his bureaucratic day may believe his bureaucratic duties to be natural and necessary while a second order observer may see such things as artificial or contingent. Likewise, a first order observer may be adamant that when she observes injustice, it is verifiable truth that such injustice exists as well as natural, and again necessary but remains within the confines of her ‘visible world’ (that confined space which we, others and objects themselves create by limiting our vision of the possible) while a second order observer of the observed may see her ‘injustice’ as an acceptable form of justice. Through such second order observations, reality, “now appears as refracted by a multitude of different perspectives (and conceals others)”[20]. Alternative perspectives are disclosed, the picture is complicated and contingencies are communicated. Refraction (as a manner in which light hits an object) occurs, “when the energy of an incoming light wave matches the natural vibration frequency of the electrons in a material”[21]. Light of differing energies will bend at slightly different angles. Thus, 2nd order observations penetrate the observed observer’s perspective at differing frequencies and cause contingencies to erupt from within and new perspectives to surface.
V
Reflected light composed of photons passes through the cornea into the machinations of fifteen major parts in the functioning of the human eye. It eventually travels down the optic nerve as a cirque du soleil, miscellany of images in the form of electrical impulses to the occipital lobe of the brain. Simultaneously, cornea, ciliany body, iris (the dilator and sphincter muscles) and the retime (containing rod cells for vision in low light and cone cells responsible for color vision and detail) act to absorb, focus, detail, and register color with the light that is absorbed into the eye[25]. The retina contains two types of cells, called rods and cones, and it is when light contacts such cells that a series of complex chemical reactions occur and the chemical that is formed (rhodopsin) creates electrical impulses which travel down the optic nerve. Such impulses are transmitted to the brain and interpreted as light. This flow from light source to objects, reflected, acted upon the eye and transmitted to the brain is continuous, spasmodic, and composed of fragmented continuities of time, place, and matter. “Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time, and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity”[26].
VI
Electrical impulses erupt and travel across the train track optic nerve to the brain, through the intensities of the temporal and frontal lobes leaving traces of deadened impulses scattered like dried leaves along lobed landscapes. Those character-laden impulses explode with music, transmit memories, evoke long-gone moments, create thoughts, refill gaps with explosive rememberings. They come repeatedly, spasmodically, like the regulated images of musical notation in “Star Guitar” by the Chemical Brothers[28]. A new way of seeing, of perceiving music, oozes out of the timbered tones, beats, rhythms, silences and salvos. The repetitive cycle of the beats bring regularity and predictability while sudden eruptions and dissonances are read as interesting developments or bothersome noise but the sudden eruptions lead to reaction, cause judgment, incite cogitation. “Music makes one see some very strange things, colors and percepts, Deleuze says. He imagines a kind of civilization of those dimensions into each other, between philosophical concepts, pictorial percepts, and musical affects”[29]. Hearing particular songs can evoke memories, smells, tastes, emotive responses while dancers learn particular steps in line with musical dance numbers and students and children study and retain information with classical music, recalling it later when such music is played. Musical therapy aids ailing patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and singing is used as a retrieval technique for face-name recognition in nursing homes of the aged. Photonic packets of energy travel into the eye, laterally along the optic nerve transformed into electrical impulses and into the brain. Light enters the brain and like a Phoenix, memory flares.
VII
“Memory is a mental system that receives, stores, organizes, alters and recovers information from sensory output”[32].
What of this mental system, this fluid and pungent place? We have a sense of where this may be: for some in the grey matter between our ears, for others within demarcated places and objects, for others still a rousing, volatile web of electrical impulses fed by the optic nerve. Where else do we more often dwell than in our memories, the geographical and sentiment-laden spatial mental system of space? As Keith Basso states, “Animated by the thoughts and feelings of persons who attend to them, places express only what their animators enable them to say; like the thirsty sponges to which the philosopher eludes, they yield to consciousness only what consciousness has given them to absorb”[33]. As objects act upon our eyes by reflecting and offering visible light to them, so too do we act upon our places of memory, assigning meaning, temporality, prescribing thoughts and feelings to be attached to such memories, and acting through the resonance of the ‘past’. As the locale of endless streaming sources of input both audible, visual, and tactile (in short, sensory), this space of memory as mental system drips with remembrance as etched into its very fabric but also drips with narratives both verified and unverified but always present in informing our actions as well as our views of the world, of that which is composed of visible light. Bassos conception of Dudley Patterson’s narratives are telling: “…Patterson’s narratives have transformed its reference from a geographical site into something resembling a theater, a natural stage upon the land (vacant now but with major props still fully intact) where significant moral dramas unfolded in the past”[34]. The sense of place which we may locate in and around the mental system of meaning is laden with feeling and shared sentiment, although rarely (if ever) identical. How does sentiment arrive within the interstices of our minds, as traversing members of our cranial reality, as filaments which wrap themselves around our nerves and neurons and inform our actions? Is it, as Stoler states, that, “memory is that through which people interpret their lives and redesign the conditions of possibility that account for what they once were, what they have since become, and what they still hope to be”[35]? Is it that memory exercises a certain selection among the impressions at its disposal and oddly, the earliest recollections of a person often seem to preserve the unimportant and accidental, not the weighty and affective[36]? Or is it that memories, like geographical landmarks, can be mapped out, systematically and strategically targeted and erased as in the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind[37]? Is it none of these, is it others, or is memory an amalgamation of all of these conceptions? Who dares to say? Light (in its fragmentary form) plays a prominent role in illuminating objects external and internal, irradiating darkened corners of our minds through enabling objects (through visible light) to act upon us. Without such action, what forms might memory take, what gaps might memory seep from, what auditory forms might memory resemble, what olfactory concoctions might percolate within the complex neural networks of now?
If we distinguish between short-term and long-term memory, we may conceive of the former as that which, “includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome” and the latter (long-term) as family, race, society, civilization, traces and translations as acting upon it from a distance off beat in an untimely way[38]? And although sometimes shared, these conceptions of memory are not contiguous but operative under conditions of multiplicity, fragmentation, rupture and discontinuity much like our very vision and the light upon which that depends. And yet, like Deleuzian stratification, a world of conjointness is created from this world of vision-laden chaos in the process of being continually renewed and created. Strata (accumulations, coagulations, sedimentations, foldings, physicochemical, organic, anthropomorphic, consisting of coded milieus, formed substances and extremely mobile) as shared places emerge[39]. As Basso states, “Locked within the mental horizons of those who give it life, sense of place issues in a stream of symbolically drawn particles – the visible particulars of local topographies, the personal particulars of biographical associations, and the motional particulars of socially given systems of thought”[40].
We move laterally across the optic nerve into the geographical tundra of memory and into the interstices of the brain as the bullet in Tobias Wolff’s short story, “Bullet in the Brain”: the bullet smashes through Ander’s skull and comes under the mediation of brain time[41]. He remembers so little as the bullet clears its pathway but does remember the minor history of a summer day. He remembers that which he has thought himself to have forgotten and the bullet continues its work, leaves the troubled skull behind and drags its comet’s tail of memory along shadowed spaces of the brain. As we traverse the entrails of these places of our own memoried minds, what tracings do our bullets revitalize, what shadows do they dissipate? What is left when the bullets have exited our skulls and reaped wormy caverns in our remembered pasts which are now?
VIII
Roy Vedas’ “Fragments of Life”[44] plays in the background of a nebulous bar in Brooklyn, NY and although I am surrounded by acres of crooked, raw concrete, I can think of nothing other than the beach. The beach as remembered place surrenders itself to the surface through the medial pre-frontal cortex just behind my forehead. Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California at Davis says, “What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head…it calls back memories of a particular person or place…”[45]. Through the allocation of 13 UC Davis students, Janata played 30 different songs randomly chosen from the Billboard “Top 100” music charts while the students sat under an fMRI brain scanner and listened. Lit up were those parts of the brain which were actively tracking chord and key changes as well as any autobiographical memories that such songs conjured up. The most vivid and emotion-filled responses as well as the most active spikes in mental activity were most prevalent when listening to songs which evoked autobiographical memory. A piece of music, whether read or heard, is an object which acts upon us and which we assign knowledge and feeling towards: “When knowledge and feeling are oriented towards something real, actually perceived, the thing, like a reflector, returns the light it has received from it. As a result of this continual interaction, meaning is continually enriched at the same time as the object soaks up affective qualities”[46]. As we interact with objects of inquiry, memory, or the tangible, its actions upon us through the physical process of visual intake are often assigned meanings and feeling which confuse “what is felt and what is perceived”[47]. Thus, as music acts upon our senses, we perceive the object (music) and demand our perceptions to be real as first order observers through associations to places, people, and tracings of the past.
IX
“My job is to plumb the depths…so to speak. Drudge up something from inside, something honest. I gotta tell you: the life of the mind…there’s no roadway for that territory…and exploring it can be painful…kind of pain most people don’t know anything about…”[51].
The brain as physical object mystifies through the power of knowledge, intelligence, motor skills and consciousness that it enacts as performer. We locate the brain as a space saturated in performative, ascribed actions and meanings: a lump of gray matter (that you can touch, smash, cream, freeze, divide), the central nerve, one of the many locations of the mind, seat of intelligence, the battery (driver of motion-related forces), memory bank, central processing unit, a network (the depths of which continually befuddle), a synonym for thinking, feeling, acting, remembering, creating, coding, decoding, the Achilles’ heel of human existence, machine, electric impulses, stone fruit, ideas, feelings, disparate illustrations, gridlock, traffic, intertwining freeways, future, present, past, LSD trip, education, control, death, reason, molding, sculpture, self-monitoring, gender, race, sexuality, musical vibrations, planetary alignment, popping, fizzing, clicking, Benjamin’s Arcade project, a blank slate, a key to the unseen universe, the cause for all our worries, our loves, our laughter, our unhappiness, our forgetting and the sentiments we remember.
We dwell within our brains as a place represented and enacted and its meanings are continually woven into the fabrics of social life, anchoring it to the features of the landscape[52]. The mind as ‘sense of place’ is accepted as a fact of life but accepted through, “culturally mediated images of where and how they dwell”[53]. This habitus of the mind is enacted through the brain’s representation in two major mapping techniques: the elementary and the networked. Within the elementary, the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes in addition to the cerebellum and brain stem are assigned colors. Each color is used to slice the brain into recognizable locales or territories. Such brain-cartography follows from the state’s violent constitution of territory as sanctified through the project of the map, the over-simplification of which is clearly illustrated within the technique of elementary mapping[54]. The Center for Neuroskills has produced the image below as its model for the human brain[55]:
In observing the clean-cut lines, such a simple landscape does something to our conception of this very complex locale of interrelated component parts. What this does to an individual will be left to their subjective realities but societally, to see the complex as simplistic, to fail to offer complexity as a view in and of itself to the public at large for consumption is problematic. As Cosgrove and Daniels state, “Maps as an impersonal type of knowledge tend to “desocialize” the territory they represent. They foster the notion of a socially empty space. The abstract quality of the map…lessens the burden of conscience about people in the landscape”[56]. Desocialized, empty, color-coded space offers an image of the brain that people can control through the veneer of simple understanding. It is a product, viable enough for people to consume and through consuming, the brain is socially simplified, the terrain of this territory emptied of its innumerable complexities. Should mapping fail to satiate those longing for simplicity, here is a recipe for a brain using clay or playdough[57]:
Materials:
2 cups water
2 cups flour
4 teaspoons cream of tartar
One quarter cup vegetable oil
1 cup salt
Red food coloring
Mix the water, salt, flour and cream of tartar in a large bowl or blender until the lumps disappear. Then mix in the vegetable oil. Put the entire mixture into a sauce pan and “cook” it over low heat until it gets lumpy. Pour the mixture out and let it cool. Then knead and shape it into the form of a brain. Don’t forget to add wrinkles (gyri) to your brain. Squirt in different hues of food coloring for the different lobal sections.
Alternatively, neural mapping techniques of the brain and its interlaced environ offer complexities that astound. The problem no longer becomes one of over simplification but instead becomes overtaxing as this system of the brain, “is made aware of its internal contradictions, of viewpoints playing a part, of other possibilities”[58]. Mapping against the regimentation of the German forests that James Scott speaks to in Seeing Like A State, the neural mapping technique produces stems and filaments that seem to be roots in Deleuzian rhizomorphous fashion, understanding the brain as a, “multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neurologia, a whole uncertain, problematic system (the “uncertain nervous system”)”[59]. As assemblages (understood to be territory made of decoded fragments of all kinds, assuming the value of properties, assemblages of enunciation and machinic, and assemblages cut across other assemblages to create deterritorialized spaces), these neural mappings etch out an ever-changing territory of partial, collective, networked fragments in visionary form and open our vision to an alternatively ordered form of the possible across, through and under existing limitations. Such assemblages make connections between innumerable fields of existing and developing work in the nanosciences (particularly nanotechnology), chaos synchronization, postcolonial studies, anthropology, medical anthropology, biotechnology, history and new conceptions thereof, critical race theory, music theory, corporate organizational theory, defense technology, artistic design, architecture, and many more begging those of us daring (or crazy) enough to conceive of ourselves as human beings in a different light with regards to our relationship amongst ourselves and within the world at large. Exploded are traditional cartographic notions of fixedness. Instead, we are shown that perhaps, “maps do not mirror reality, but depict it from partial perspectives, figuring in accordance with particular standpoints and specific aims”[60].
In what I hope to be a much larger piece, one aspect (amongst many others) that I wish to expand on is the notion of brain mapping (in all its forms) as a colonial enterprise. The physical and forced entry into this once-dark space is enacted daily all over the world by scientists prying into the brains of their patients[61]. The skull removed in hardened sections and slices, the brain is subjected to fragmentations of light and the once invisible is made visible. The physical brain is inundated with machinery, light and foreign chemicals, mapped constantly by portable intra-operative magnetic resonance imaging (IOMR). To map such localities out, declare boundaries to lobes, classify particular parts of the brain and document such classifications is an exercise of colonial power worth exploring, with our very brains as the geographical territory[62]. What does it mean to take these darkened spaces of the invisible and make them visible through the introduction of partial, collective and networked photons?
X
Origin, “although a thoroughly historical category, nonetheless has nothing to do with beginnings…that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool…its rhythm is apparent only to a double insight”[66].
“The world is my idea”[67].
The mirror reflects the image of the imagined self. Thoughts arise, come and go just as fast, arrive as they become clear and sink back into oblivion. Like many-colored marbles, the fragments of the mind roll out upon the page as ideas, link to one another as assemblages, as “regulated improvisations”[68]. Thought is becoming and as such, can be conceived of as, “an inherent moment of the very process of (social) being, of collective praxis, as a process embedded in social reality…as its active moment”[69]. Masses of minds constantly chatter to the reverberations of consciousness amongst and within themselves. Through these at times steadied, at time frenzied, warblings of discourses (both internal and external), these ‘sedimented folds’, new planes and surfaces reemerge[70]. Thought is discontinuous, quietly leading from one thing to another, but rupturing suddenly and drawing connections between seemingly disparate ideas. How are we to understand this? Scientists state that there are over 100 billion nerve cells in the network which is the brain and that they have only just begun to scratch the surface of what this means[71]. Neural synapses exploding with electric impulses (bottled light) shoot star-like and gaze into both familiar and unfamiliar territories. Aware only of a fragment of a fragment of these occurrences, what are we to gauge the meaning of thought to be?
XI
“…in each of us, in varying proportions, there is a part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result. Yet we do not sense this man of the past, because he is inveterate in us; he makes up the unconscious part of ourselves”[75].
“Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times”[76].
“But if History escapes me, this is not because I do not make it; it is because the other is making it as well”[77].
History as teleological. How can this be? What temporality exists within that which images our minds, the photonic, fragmentary light that informs so much of our being? I view objects, their reflections are rendered distorted snapshot synapses in and through my brain, leaving traces of themselves throughout. The now constantly becomes and just as quickly leaves but the remnants and scatterings of its affects, the sentiment which it weaves through my being remains and I am interwoven with a sense of temporality that is not linear as ‘past’ but is so very present in informing their views of the world and their place within it.
History and memory waltz together at times in harmony, at others as chaotic feuding ex-lovers. But the relationship, whether soft or sour or merely indifferent, remains, and narratives are created in and through which people live their lives. These paraders of people are at once subjects confronting history and at the same time producers of the very narrative that shape their (and other’s) lives. Human beings, in Trouillot’s terms, are “doubly historical”[78]. As objects and momentary eventful glimpses of people’s lives explode or quietly seep across their historical, remembered presents, what sense if made of the madness? As objects of their own histories, what reflections of visible light are made possible through the words and actions of its participants?
History as object, an object which acts continually upon its possessors and subjects. The wind does not cease to exist simply because we do not see the effects of it upon the leaves. The currents of history too, never disappear and the affects course through our branches at times unseen, but ever-present. People wear their minds and the coursings of history upon and within their mismatched wardrobes of second-hand clothes.
Philip Glass’ “Etude No. 6”. Deeper. Confusing etchings, filaments, wrappings, deeper. Dancing vibrations, neuron romance, electric sparks, connections, calmness and clarity erupted, resonances of images within my brain, light-stricken pathways of moving train windows and all those people passing by with all of those thoughts, repetition, continuance, ruptures met with regular tempo. History.
XII
The visions-imagined inform action whether through words, gestures, or physical manipulations and the many conjectures which have trespassed our bodies erupt in outer manifestations upon, with and through objects.
XIII
“The end is built into the beginning”[79].
We arrive where we began, on pathways into the human eyes as objects act upon our vision and dictate what we may and may not see. As the objects act, they speak of storied pasts now operating through our vision, our brains, and the coupled romance of history and memory. The sedimented beings which incorporate objects speak volumes to that which we do not know. I am. I was. I was but am. Pressing flaps of time continuous, ubiquitous yearnings ravage our conception of the known and the interstices of the words upon this page explode with all of that which has not been said. An object is an object but so much more. What awaits us when our vision expands?
“Objects, these mysterious suits of armor beneath which desire awaits us, nocturnal and laid bare, these snares made of velvet, of bronze, of gossamer that we throw at ourselves with each step we take; hunter and prey in the shadows of forests, at once forest, poacher, woodcutter, that woodcutter killed at the foot of a tree and covered with his own beard smelling of incense, of well-being, and of the that’s-not-possible; free at last, alone at last with ourselves and with everyone else, advancing in the darkness with feline eyes…”[80]
Epilogue
This is potentially a huge project. Perhaps it is a project I will take up as my thesis work. I have limited myself in many, many ways due to the required size of this particular project but my interests were sparked in a number of other areas: auditory reception and interpretation as it relates to vision and thought, the feedback the brain encounters from other body parts, vision, memory, thought and action within the wider animal kingdom, the incalculable historical depths of vision, the brain, memory, history and action which I have only here begun to scratch the surface of, the many conflicting narratives related to vision, the brain, memory, history and action that only reinvigorates the notion that we know only that we do not know, the very deep and complicated role that language (both verbal and non-verbal) play in vision, brain trauma, networks sciences, blindness, savants, color psychology as it applies to how people go about color coding brain mappings, the olfactory and tactile, psychological disorders, the historical lineage of conceptions of the brain from as far back as possible, the greater role of psychoanalysis (particularly with regards to repressed memories—where do they go?), the mechanical and pseudo-unethical biological re-wiring experiments carried out on human subjects, deaf studies, short ethnographies on and with various communities regarding how they conceptualize their brains, amongst others. This is only the beginning.
[1] www.boingboing.net
[2] www.wiki.brown.edu
[3] www.anthonymattox.com
[4] Synecdoche, New York, Dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2008.
[5] JK Fowler
[6] Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 502.
[7] Ibid., 503-504.
[8] Ibid., 505-506.
[9] Freud, Sigmund. ‘A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad.’’ Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 21 (4) (Tr. James Strachey.), 232.
[10] www.mocoloco.com
[11] www.esch.dircon.co.uk/second/second.htm
[12] www.googlecology.com
[13] Much scientific insight on the nature of light for this section was gathered from: www.howstuffworks.com/light
[14] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology: Volume I. Oxford: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 169e.
[15] All four drawings were gathered from: http://science.howstuffworks.com/light
[16] Schopenhauer, Arthur, and Irwin Edman (ed.). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Modern Library, 1928, 14.
[17] www.howstuffworks.com/light
[18] www.neuroculture.org
[19] Langlitz, Nicholas. “What First-Order Observers Can Learn From Second-Order Observations.” Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Note, no. 3, 2007: 7-8.
[20] Ibid., 8.
[21] www.howstuffworks.com/light
[22] www.campar.in.tum.de
[23] www.philipkdick.com
[24] www.astronomy-pictures.net
[25] The following resources were referenced in collecting information related to the eye: http://www.nei.nih.gov/, www.howstuffworks.com/eye, and http://cim.ucdavis.edu/eyes/eyesim.htm
[26] Schopenhauer, Arthur, and Irwin Edman (ed.). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Modern Library, 1928, 5.
[27] www.projektas-muzika.lmta.lt
[28] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws_R_GxZX2o
[29] Gilles Deleuze’s ABC Primer. Dir. Pierre-Andre Boutang, Int. Claire Parnet (1996), 41.
[30] www.math.uconn.edu
[31] www.content.techrepublic.com
[32] Coon, D. Essentials of Psychology. New York: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1997.
[33] Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, 56.
[34] Ibid., 66.
[35] Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002, 170.
[36] Freud, Sigmund. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Interpretation of Dreams, and Three Contributions To the Theory of Sex. New York: Modern Library, 1938, 30.
[37] Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dir. Michel Gondry, 2004.
[38] Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 16.
[39] Ibid., 502.
[40] Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, 84.
[41] Wolff, Tobias. “Bullet in the Brain.” Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2008.
[42] www.oasas.state.ny.us
[43] www.news.ucdavis.edu
[44] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6YhNcEbOHE
[45] Hsu, Jeremy. “Music-Memory Connection Found in Brain.” www.livescience.com/health/090224-music-memory.html
[46] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search For A Method. New York: Vintage Books, 1963, 89.
[47] Ibid., 89.
[49]https://successfulenglish.wikispaces.com
[50] http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/10/BRAIN.jpg
[51] Barton Fink. Dir. Joel Cohn, 1991.
[52] Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, 57.
[53] Ibid., 57.
[54] Neocleous, Mark. “Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography.” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 6, no. 4, 2003: 409-425.
[55] http://www.neuroskills.com/brain.shtml#map
[56] Cosgrove, Denis and Stephen Daniels, eds. “The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments”, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography, 9, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 312.
[57] Neuroscience for Kids- Washington University: www.faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chmodel.html
[58] Langlitz, Nicholas. “What First-Order Observers Can Learn From Second-Order Observations.” Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Note, no. 3, 2007: 7-8.
[59] Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 15.
[60] Coronil, Fernando. “Beyond Occidentalism.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 11, No. 1., 1996, 53.
[61] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2UdpEGWD8A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqCGidmZ5sk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1ILrYHvnpA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF04XPBj5uc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZogbIvdgfzQ&feature=related
[62] Scientific colonialism is by no means new but the neurosciences offer new expansions of existing boundaries worth pursuing.
[63] www.smithkramer.com
[64] www.thethirddegree.wordpress.com
[65] www.photohome.com
[66] Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1991, 8.
[67] Schopenhauer, Arthur, and Irwin Edman (ed.). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Modern Library, 1928, 3.
[68] Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 79.
[69] Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2009, 6.
[70] Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 160.
[71] Kandel, Eric R., James A. Schwartz and Thomas M. Jessell, eds. Principles of Neural Science. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000, xxxiii.
[72] www.pdphoto.org
[73] http://www.geekologie.com/2007/09/18/magical-weave-mirror.jpg
[74] www.pestproducts.com
[75] Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 79.
[76] Foucault, Michel and Paul Rabinow ed., The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p.76
[77] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search For A Method. New York: Vintage Books, 1963, 88.
[78] Troulliot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, 24.
[79] Synecdoche, New York, Dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2008.
[80] Luca, Gherasim. The Passive Vampire. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2008, 71.
