Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves +

1. Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves + Deboleena Roy, “Asking Different Questions: Feminist Practices for the Natural Sciences” Davi Johnson, “‘How Do You Know Unless You Look?”: Brain Imaging, Biopower and Practical Neuroscience” Paul John Eakin, “Autobiographical Consciousness: Body, Brain, Self, and Narrative” Charcot / Paint. by Brouillet / 1887 André Brouillet's painting of the neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot, Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière, 1887. Photograph: AKG Images/Erich Lessing http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/30/siri-hustvedt-shaking-woman

2. Neurocognitive Approaches to Literary Studies The Evolutionists: seek to explain how and why “the literary” (aesthetics, narrative, metaphor, etc.) exist at all. Where did these functions of the mind come from? The Cognitivists: seek to explain what kinds of mental states are engendered by particular texts. How and why does this happen? Can the literature help us understand the mental states? Can we learn something about how the mind works by studying literature? The Universalists: seek to explain the cognitive foundations of literature, the elements that seem to recur in all, or at least many, literary texts. They are the heirs to structuralist narratology, but they are more attentive to clarifying the relationship of universal aspects of cognition and their historically and culturally specific manifestations. The Cognitive Narratologists: draw on brain research and cognitive studies that suggest that narrative is fundamental to both brain and mind—and to the connection between matter and the immaterial—and put these into dialogue with well-known schools of narrative theory. The Neuro Enthusiasts: draw on brain research—as opposed to the mind research of cognitive science—and put insights from this research (about a variety of subjects, including consciousness, dreams, altered states, neuropathology, memory, emotion, and sensory experience) and put these into dialogue with literary texts and an eclectic range of literary theories. The Neuro Skeptics: draw on brain research and social theory to critique neuroscience, neuro-normative thinking, and the medicalization of identity. The Cognitive Historicists: are committed to historical specificity and the idea that an objective historical perspective is impossible; and are in the business of putting contemporary cognitive models into dialogue with historical models that emerge from any number of disciplines (psychology, medicine, political criticism, philosophy, etc.).

3. How would you describe the writer’s audience? What are the writer’s motives with regard to this audience? Where would you position yourself relative to that audience? How would you evaluate the writer’s success relative to the goals you mentioned? What’s your favorite ele ment of the text? Your least favorite? Did the text change the way you think in any way?

4. My Claims: Let’s Test Them Roy’s argument would be clearer and and more persuasive—and resonate more widely—without some of the theoretical frameworks she uses to develop it (particularly Harway’s cyborg theory and, building on that, Sandoval’s “methodology of the oppressed”). Johnson’s argument uses Foucault and “biopower” as a prop: the concept and the reference do little to advance her argument—and may alienate science audiences. Eakin’s use of Damasio is integral to his argument, but his argument would be stronger if the connections between Damasio and the memoirs he discusses were more explicit. Eakin’s terminology--“I-narrative,”“I-characters,” etc.—is clunky, will never catch on, and does more to limit his goals than advance them.

5. Davi Johnson, “‘How Do You Know Unless You Look?”: Brain Imaging, Biopower and Practical Neuroscience” Abstract Brain imaging is a persuasive visual rhetoric by which neuroscience is articulated as relevant to the construction and maintenance of desirable selves. In this essay, I describe how “brain-based self-help”literature disseminates neuroscientific vocabularies to public audiences. In this genre, brain images are an authoritative visual resource for translating neuroscience into a comprehensive program for living. I use Foucault’s discussion of biopower to describe the ways in which brain-based self-help literature enables self-constitution in a biosocial age where health is a central means of communicating personal worth, social value and political order. The implications of this continuous self-fashioning are not limited to the personal realm but have important political consequences.

6. Davi Johnson, “‘How Do You Know Unless You Look?”: Brain Imaging, Biopower and Practical Neuroscience” Conclusion: neuroscience, biopower, and the “duty to be well” The dispersal of neuroscientific vocabularies and ways of living through brain-based selfhelp books lubricates the function of biopower in contemporary society. Individuals are impelled to manage and improve themselves through a host of self-fashioning technologies, actively participating in their own government. The types of norms and behaviors promoted in these discourses appear to emanate from individuals’ own desires to achieve their optimal state of health. The brain images render a truth that is internal in two senses: first, the scans are thought to make literally visible the inaccessible interiors of the corporeal body. Second, because scan and character are identified in the brain discourses, the images manifest a psychic interiority, the space of individual character or subjective existence. The images ground neuroscientific knowledge in a truth that is at once objective and technical and derived from the individual’s own internal, unique subjectivity. Individuals are governed through their own desires, their own interests in becoming healthy subjects—they are, in Nikolas Rose’s terms, “obliged to be free,” in a political context where modes of self-management and self-improvement “are more profoundly subjectifying because they appear to emanate from our own individual desires to fulfill ourselves in our everyday lives, to craft our personalities, to discover who we really are.” Government operates through freedom and subjectivity as a constituting force, rather than from without as a constraining force. This obligation to freedom is made effective through contemporary discourses of health. Monica Greco writes that health and illness “have become vehicles for the self-production and exercise of subjectivities,” manifest in a “duty to be well.” Health is something that is not imposed but must be chosen voluntarily by individuals, a capacity of the will framed in moral terms. Amen’s book shows how, in the name of health, individuals are induced to a host of different modes of self-care and self-management. Because these initiatives are taken up at the behest of the individual, for their own improvement, they appear to be apolitical. The “natural” vocabulary of neuroscience contributes to this perception that the proscribed means of self-transformation are simply correctives that will restore an individual to his or her natural, healthy state. However, in terms of neoliberal government, practical neuroscience plays an important role in constituting efficient and adaptable citizens, or “healthy” individuals who are also “healthy” citizens who participate in effective government.

7. Deboleena Roy, “Asking Different Questions: Feminist Practices in the Natural Sciences Wylie further argues that standpoint theory “offers a framework for understanding how, far from compromising epistemic integrity, certain kinds of diversity (cultural, racial, gender) may significantly enrich scientific inquiry” (339). She suggests that there is value in what the marginalized or insider-outsider standpoint has to offer. The values she refers to include: (1) access to evidence whereby the position of marginality makes one see evidence not normally seen; (2) inferential acuity whereby an individual makes connections between power dynamics; (3) an expanded range of interpretations and explanatory hypotheses for making sense of the evidence; and as a condition for the first three values, (4) critical dissociation from the taken-for-granteds that underpin authoritative forms of knowledge (346). (140) The reason that standpoint theory, strong objectivity, and situated knowledges offer potentially mind-altering experiences for the feminist scientist is that rather than placing value solely on aperspectival and mechanical objectivity, they invite the engaged and invested investigator, who belongs to a community of knowers, to practice her research agenda choice through a “positioned rationality.” (143)

8. Paul John Eakin, “Autobiographical Consciousness: Body, Brain, Self, and Narrative”

9. Paul John Eakin, “Autobiographical Consciousness: Body, Brain, Self, and Narrative”

10. Paul John Eakin, “Autobiographical Consciousness: Body, Brain, Self, and Narrative”

11. Paul John Eakin, “Autobiographical Consciousness: Body, Brain, Self, and Narrative”

12. My Questions Jaime titled his blog post “The Shaking Woman as Living Laboratory,”suggesting that Hustvedt’s narrative represents the kind of situated science Roy advocates in “Asking Different Questions.” This would also suggest that Hustvedt manages to escape the “neuro-normative” traps set in so much of the popular, self-help literature that focuses on the brain. Does she manage to escape this? If so, how? Building on Walt Whitman, Eakin argues that reading can catalyze “an amazing process transubstantiation, bringing author and reader into intimate, embodied relation.”In her post, Ashleigh makes the point that Mrs. Dalloway involves readers in a “meta-cognitive” process that turns a story about a party into one about “what it means to be a self-conscious being.” Do techniques for eliciting metacognitive responses—in Woolf and Hustvedt—enable the readerly transubstantiation Eakin argues for? Or might they inhibit it?

13. Hustvedt on the Self—Her Self “It appeared that some unknown force had suddenly taken over my body and decided I needed a good, sustained jolting” (14, e-book). “Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evidence in the language we use about it” (18, e-book). “I decided to go in search of the shaking woman” (19, e-book). “A friend of mine at Columbia university when I was a graduate student and who was also a participant in the seminar, told me afterward that it had been like watching a doctor and patient in the same body” (51, e-book). “Can I say that the shaking woman is a repeatedly activated pattern of firing neurons and stress hormones released in an involuntary response, which is then dampened as I keep my cool, continue to talk, convinced that I’m not really in danger? Is that all there is to the story?” (176-77, e-book) “The headache is me, and understanding this has been my salvation. Perhaps the trick will now be to integrate the shaking woman as well, to acknowledge that she, too, is part of myself” (258-59, e-book) “I am the shaking woman” (294, e-book).

14. Hustvedt on Writing and Reading When I am writing well, I often lose all sense of composition; the sentences come as if I hadn’t willed them, as if they were manufactured by another being. This is not my day-to-day mode of writing, which includes grinding, painful periods of starts and stops. But the sense that I have been taken over happens several times during the course of a book, usually in the latter stages. I don’t write; I am written. (112, e-book) The closest we can get to this entrance into another person’s psyche is through reading. Reading is the mental arena where different thought styles, tough and tender, and the ideas generated by them become more apparent. We have access to a stranger’s internal narrator. Reading, after all, is a way of living inside another person’s words. His or her voice becomes my narrator for the duration. Of course, I retain my own critical faculties, pausing to say to myself, Yes, he’s right about that or No, he’s forgotten this point entirely or That’s a clichéd character, but the more compelling the voice on the page is, the more I lose my own. I am seduced and give myself up to the other person’s words. Moreover, I am often lured in by very different points of view. The more alien, inhospitable, or difficult the voice, however, the more I find myself divided, occupying two heads at once. Overcoming resistance is one of the pleasures of reading. (221-22, e-book)

15. Hustvedt on Language and the Self “I” exists only in relation to “you.” Language takes place between people, and it is acquired through others, even though we have the biological equipment necessary to learn it. If you look like a child in a closet, he will not learn to speak. Language is outside us and inside us, part of a complex dialectical reality between people. Words cross the borders of our bodies in two directions, outside in and inside out, and theremore the minimal requirement for a living language is two people. (88, e-book) We organize the past as explicit autobiographical memory, what Antonio Damasio has called the ‘the autobiographical self’; fragments are linked in a narrative, which in turn shapes our expectations for the future. There can be no autobiographical self without language. (92)

16. Raymond Williams on Mind and Culture The central fact of the [new] account of the activity of our brains is that each one of us has to learn to see. . . . There is not reality of familiar shapes, colours, and sounds, to which we merely open our eyes. The information that we receive through our senses from the material world around us has to be interpreted, according to certain human rules, before what we ordinarily call “reality” forms. The human brain has to perform this “creative” activity before we can, as normal human beings, see at all. . . . [Reality] as we experience it in this sense is a human creation; . . . all our experience is a human version of the world we inhabit. This version has two main sources: the human brain as it has evolved, and the interpretations carried by our cultures. (qtd. in Zunshine 6)

17. Zunshine on the Implications and Possibilities of Cognitive Approaches First, we cannot continue to see art as qualitatively special and thus discontinuous with everyday practices, a perspective that has historically led to either extolling art as a qualitatively special and thus discontinuous with everyday practices, a perspective that has historically led to either extolling art as a superior version of reality or denigrating it as its inferior imitation. . . . Second, we can now link individual cognitive development with the functioning of social institutions, for, viewed from a cognitive perspective, an institution can be sustained only as long as it successfully communicates, that is, changes the way people see the world. (10-11)