Prof. Amie Parry began her lecture with a telling quote from Samuel Delany who said at one point that the only hope for literature is for it to be read as science fiction. Literature and science fiction as literature was originally thought about as a question about taking a method of looking at the world, and putting that into literature as different from the canon … referring to the work of Darko Suvin, who speaks of estrangement and cognition, coming out of literary theory, is developed in science fiction, where you have something that takes you out of the set of norms and assumptions through which you usually look at the world. Estrangement is here the exercise of defamiliarisation. Cognition is part of the same process, which involves a focusing back of this defamiliarisation onto reality. Most theorists of science fiction would say however it does not reflect back on the world but simply offers an escape from it.Suvin would see the estrangement, or the creativity, as also constitutive of science. Postmodern critics of science fiction (like Broderick) take this a bit further, to say that there is a difference in method of representing reality in science fiction and literature – it is not a subjective perspective, or a stream of consciousness narrative, what it does is objectify things in the world so that it can ask critical questions of it. Amie went on to talk about the film Matrix, as also a place where one can begin to play with gender stereotypes, as also a quest for a better perception of the world.
Delany, as different from other critics who might call some science fiction great literature, calls science fiction and literature as two different discourses, two different categories of knowledge opposed to one another. The placing of science fiction under literature obscures a whole material culture that produces it. Science fiction, for one, is 90% of the time about the future, and therefore first, simply, steps out of the ‘author function’. Moreover, publishing demands, the market, and so on, sometimes create multiple voices for the same author. What, then, is science fiction, if not literature? Amie illustrates this with examples of spoken or written sentences that would mean very different referents in these two forms of knowledge. She went on to illustrate, through a clip from Matrix, the same point about referents. In response to a question about science fiction not being subtle enough, Amie suggested that perhaps it might be the apparent lack of subtlety in a simple sentence that might be significant for reading. Delany states that literature is starting to be a lot more like science fiction, in terms of offering a different mode of reading. Science fiction, then, is inserted by Delany in the larger shift in literature from the author function to more constructionist ways of reading. Amie went on to talk about feminist critiques of science fiction, as challenging stereotypical representations of women, or of gender as fixed definitions, making possible gender as a way of becoming, rather. In response to questions about ‘how to read’ then science fiction, and to skepticisms about the productive ambiguity that it may provide for critical readings of reality, Amie suggested that for one, the reading will have to be open ended, open to interpretations. Another interesting point that came up in discussion was about whether changing representations afforded empowerments that could be good material for feminism. An interesting thought might be that a different representation affords empowerment in a limited sense, with immediate respect to an earlier situation, and only with respect to such a situation. Also, since experience is necessarily mediated, it will be as influenced by the hegemonic as an act of resistance. As such, such a ‘different’ representation might offer resistance, not necessarily an overturning of the dialectic. All this is also what still keeps the definitions of science fiction and literature open. If the attachment is to form rather than to content, the distinction is better made in terms of methodology than content. As to feminism, is it possible for feminism to offer allegiance to fantasy as a genre that works against reality, or to science fiction on account of its own attachments to transformation?
In the second half of the session, Amie went on to speak at some length on the text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, about reading it in a science fiction. She began by putting out some ideas about Frankenstein as an originary text of sf, as opposed to what Suvin says about sf being opposed to myths – of humanist scientific endeavour, of imperialism, of mastery. Other ways of thinking about Frankenstein included studying it as the process of scientific method, or calling it speculative fiction and therefore sf since it is about time. It has also been suggested that Shelley uses the difficulty of representing female characters in the story to talk about the difficulty of representation itself, and of representing the marginal in particular, as also as a text that exposes the myths of authorship as a self-reproducing, narcissistic exercise, as also of good parenting. By implication, the myth of family and universal good nature is also brought out in the novel. Spivak’s interpretation of the text of Frankenstein offers a whole series of options of reading, calling it interesting for feminism through its failure to produce a high feminist text according to the expectations of feminist individualism, nor does it produce the axioms of imperialism.
The session offered, then, a series of questions about representation and its attachment to definition [is it a full mirror of reality or is it an act of interpretation], therefore about genres being interpretatively different rather than definitively so. Are concepts/ definitions fixed or in flux, fixed and individually discovered each time, as a particular theory of knowledge would suggest, or are they up for negotiation among a community of knowers, with all their “ontological heterogeneities” providing greater empirical adequacy, as Longino’s feminist contextual empiricism would suggest? We started with the question of whether sf and literature are different in content, whether sf is a sub-stream of literature, or whether they offer different modes of reading, with sf undeniably offering more interesting modes that have also now permeated the literary canon.
Session 7B: The Emotional Brain: Imprints of Life History
by
Dr. Vidita Vaidya
Reader, Department of Biological Sciences,
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,
Mumbai
Session 7 began with a proposal for situated cognition, offered by Prof. Amita Chatterjee, who also suggested that there is a strong case for interdisciplinarity in cognitive science. Cognitive science has been a movement that counters several ‘isms’. The metaphor of knowledge production itself seems to remind us of other words – wisdom, information, among these. Wisdom – in early Western contexts - was understood in the paradigm of revelation, not production. This seems to have been the tendency in classical Indian traditions too. The metaphor of production, however, throws up the question of the producer, the object produced, and the process. At some stage, we will see some alienation between these three, if knowledge is looked at through the lens of production. The question will then come up on how to integrate these again in any particular framework. This has been the problem of mainstream science. Prof. Chatterjee went on to provide a thick capsule on the frameworks of mainstream science. For realists, reason provided the best tools against religious bigots on the one hand, and the skeptics on the other hand. Mainstream science, before Kuhn, favoured a sort of scientific monism. They also said that Reason is absolute. The content is justified because they are logically related. Logic was also considered one and absolute. Emotion and other subjective aspects of the knower were bracketed, set aside. Pluralism, on the other hand, holds that the world is layered, that there cannot be a unified account of it, there may be different truths, they may be true at the same time. Pluralists now think that special sciences have special needs, and special explanatory strategies. Not everything can be accommodated within science or within one discipline. Prof. Chatterjee went on to attempt a clarification on interdisciplinarity – a juxtaposition of disciplines? A cross-disciplinarity – borrowing knowledge from one field to solve problems in another? A convergence of methods and ends [a monistic approach]? The approach of the 1st wave of cognitive scientists was towards such a convergence. A face of this debate was whether there should be cognitive science or cognitive sciences. Now, with pluralism being the order of the day, the ‘sciences’ is the accepted label. This debate was at its peak in the mid-80s. General pluralism, however, adopts the golden mean between universalism and isolationism – whether disciplines should be cross-bred or united.
Prof. Chatterjee went on to discuss three movements in the cognitive sciences – the embodiment thesis, the embedding thesis, and the extension thesis. The early association of Cognitive Science as a field were established in the 1970s, but the ideas had begun in the war years, in the 40s. Computer science, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology – were the disciplines that participated in the discussions from this time. The early concept of mind was developed using the computer metaphor, describing the mind as a stand-alone information processing system that functions following some syntactic rules. They were reacting against the behaviourist methodology, which took the science of the mind away from the realm of psychology. The mind of the cognitive scientists, then, was a functionalist mind, dissociated from the body in which it was situated, fully rational, devoid of affect, context, culture and history. Emotion was set aside not from any animus but on account of what they saw as the difficulty of dealing with it. This wave is broadly called Symbolicism. It was always a problem, therefore, for this wave to explain how we understand symbols. One of the most active areas of this field – Artificial Intelligence projects – failed in their attempts to make a sufficiently intelligent artificial system to simulate human behaviours. At this point, there was the realization that we need to review the computational model of the mind or brain. From the Turing machine model, we moved to the Artificial Neural Networks – this wave was called Connectionism. The first wave suggested that the functional level of the mind is over and above its physical level, and can be realized in multiple different ways.You can look at this without taking into consideration the biology or physics of the system. ‘Hardware’ – biology - was studied only as limiting conditions. In Connectionism, however, the neurophysical structure of the brain needs to be looked at. If the hardware is different, then, the ways of looking at the world might differ radically … this explains why the Sociology of Knowledge theorists backed this model. We are now proceeding, therefore, to a many worlds theory. At this point, too, we were thinking in terms of the individual knower, the paradigmatic knower, despite the fact that Connectionists introduced dynamicity into their framework. How then can we find a way of looking at different sciences, if our languages are totally different? Would we then have to dissolve our brain-body boundary, the distinction between the mental and the physical?
The difficulties of interdisciplinarity, then, might have to do with difficulties of communication across conceptual frameworks. Cognitive scientists working on situated cognition sensed that looking only at how information is processed inside the brain cannot help us understand cognitive processes. Sensation-perception and action are then not separate activities. Perception is not a merely sensory processing but a sensori-motor one. Phenomenologists, existentialist philosophers, and pragmatic philosophers, have told us that perception is a form of action. The entire world, then, is not represented in my brain; my body knows, in a certain sense. It is not only the brain-body boundary, then, but also the body-world boundary, that is brought into question here. Cognition, therefore, depends not only on the brain but also on the body. The embodiment thesis leads to the perception-action coupling and the bottom-up design. Cognitive activities are also routinely said to exploit structures in the natural and social environment – this is known as the embedding thesis. It says that we need to take into account the complex transactions between the embodied mind and the embedding environment. The extension thesis says that the boundaries of cognition extend beyond the boundaries of the individual organism. There is now no central knower, there are now cognitive augmentations. Such a knowledge situation is very difficult to model. This is the thesis that is most difficult to accept therefore. There is a moderate version of this thesis – from analytic philosophy – which will say there is still a core knower and these are only extensions. But the radical version will see an intimate, constitutive coupling, between the brain body and the world. In such a case, dissociation of the knower from the world is no longer possible.
There is now a continuing dialogue between these cognitive scientists and feminist philosophers, pragmatists, humanities scholars on these issues.
In response to questions particularly on the extension thesis, Prof. Chatterjee suggested that any sort of augmentation may not hold as cognitive extension. There are constraints to such extension. Such augmentation is also a dynamic process, that needs reinterpretation each time. She also went on to answer questions about the connections with Merleau-Ponty, on direct intercorporeality, for instance. This particular position does not win much agreement from cognitive scientists, but in other areas like situated spatiality or temporal situatedness, they are attempting models, although it is difficult. Regarding forms of life, Wittgenstein might say that symbol grounding happens in our social environment – a form of linguistic externalism. Cognition is nothing then but a collection of linguistic skills and practices. As it stands, the extension theorists only offer some thought experiments.
An interesting question that came up with regard to interdisciplinarity was why it may be needed as a fill-in for ‘gaps’ in experimental method, or traditional scientific method, the polemical presumption being that interdisciplinarity is a response to a lack in the natural sciences. Clarifications on this continue to be made through this course.
Prof. Chatterjee also offered insights into some of the theses being entertained in the area of gendered cognition.
The second half of the session was taken by Dr. Vidita Vaidya, who suggested that the nervous system does not exist in the absence of the embedding world, that responses are very much directed by experiences – imprints – in early life. Developmental neurobiologists have shown the sites in the brain that do cognitive processing. Can this blueprint be then instructed actively by the environment? That this is so was proved by work in the 1970s and 80s – described by the term neuroplasticity. It was shown that time windows in the lifespan – different for different senses – were available when the brain was dramatically sensitive to the environment, so that functional output would be based on experience of the environment. At some point, it began to be understood that emotions too are underwritten by circuits, and that life experience shaped emotional responses – not causal, but in terms of association. This, earlier the realm of psychology, now became the field also of the neurosciences. Neurosciences too now are no longer a separate discipline but under the broad contours of biology, and it might be worth thinking of the impulses (biological determinism?) at work here.
In order to study these possibilities, then, neurobiologists/ biologists often choose a model organism, on the assumption of similarities in brain structure and function, as well as an awareness of the dissonances in results. Dr. Vaidya went on to discuss work from the field and in her laboratory to test the assumptions of imprints of early life experiences on adult behaviour. As an entry point, effects of inherent differences in maternal care were discussed. In discussing ways of quantifying such care, Dr. Vaidya recognized the translation of certain kinds of grooming activity as ‘high quality maternal care’, as also thefact that it was the ‘measurables’ that became the parameters for such care. At any rate, these investigations have suggested that animals that have received lesser amounts of such grooming activity have stress responses as indicated by lengths of cortisol peaks that are much higher, this in turn showing biological signatures in the form of stress receptors, going back to the question of neuroplasticity. These stressors also changed when individual environments were shifted. Dr. Vaidya also pointed out that these findings were found to different extents in individual animals, keeping alive the question of the difficulty of generalizations. These experiments have also been repeated in Dr. Vaidya’s own lab with induced periods of ‘maternal separation’, where animals that have been maternally separated for about 3 hours seem to show more anxiety as related to certain behaviours.
Do emotional stimuli evoke responses at a circuit level? Experiments conducted to see if parts of the brain (the medial pre-frontal cortex) respond differently in animals who undergo maternal separation, if the history of early-life stress actually changes the way the serotonin receptor, in this case, responds, showed a greater activation of this receptor in these conditions. Chronic stress results in habituation in control animals. Maternally separated animals responded to chronic stress of a physical kind as if for the first time. In an evolutionary sense, the field tends to think that this promotes survival in the maternally separated animals.
Experiments on retention of memory in these animals also showed that maternally separated animals respond better to tests that have a stress component, in the short term but not in the long term. These responses are reversible, variant too.
Important, neuroplasticity can occur in a variety of ways, but these are not proof to suggest that any of the connections are causal, from the molecular to the cellular to the behavioural levels. Whether such connections will come, remains to be seen.
In response to questions, Dr. Vaidya suggested that care-giving is not seen to be genetic, but environmental or epigenetic. About the primary locus of plasticity, she suggested that physiological, structural and genetic clearly happen, not necessarily in any primary relation. About the implications of such research in clinical psychiatry or criminology, there is a danger of translation that will linearly connect ‘criminal behaviour’ to now child abuse, and identify criminal types. While such translations are more easily discovered in popular press, they also underlie academic activity, and sometimes future research. In such an event, deterministic views need to be challenged. And in this connection, yet another question to existing critique, is – are such deterministic views a constitutive feature of natural scientific knowledge? Regarding how parameters are designed for various tests of anxiety, it is interesting to see, for instance, how such parameters are decided based on effects of anxiolytics – a tautology at best. About positive memory associations, it has been difficult to arrive at these conclusions since the tests associated with these are mostly related to drug abuse and hence somewhat skewed.
Given all of this, it could still be said that extrapolation is a danger associated with any specialist field. Is it then a problem of transmitter/ receiver? It might be more useful to talk about the process of translation itself that necessarily takes place across seemingly incommensurable fields, and the loss involved is not due to a lack of attention on the part of the receiver, or a lack of responsibility on the part of the transmitter, but a constitutive feature of that process.
Does this kind of study have to be necessarily driven by the desire to extrapolate to the human condition? Dr. Vaidya would say no, but the clinical correlations are an interesting translation in human beings, which could be seen as a level of complexity higher up than the rat. It might be said that the further question could well be whether this line can necessarily be drawn, between the rat and the human. The similarities are impossible to ignore, but is the developmental model valid?
Given below are 8 sets of book chapters/ articles from the same or different books, grouped together with a common thread/ theme in mind for each set. These 8 threads arise out of the discussions we have been and will continue to have in the course. Course participants may pick any one set for their assignment, presenting a critical review essay in about 4000 words. The list below is followed by a possible set of entry points that you may or may not use, to enter into the review.
Reading list for a Critical Book Review
1)a travelogue and an analysis of the past and our access to it
a) Introduction 1-42p; Chapter 4,123-166p. From The travels of Ibn Battuta in Asia and Africa 1325-1354 /Ibn Batuta; Rep. ed.; New Delhi : Manohar, 2006.
b) Chapter 4. The Nation and Its Pasts,76-94p. From The Partha Chatterjeeomnibus / Chatterjee, Partha; New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1999.
2)violence and knowledge; is knowledge born of violence, is violence born of knowledge
a) Chapter 3. The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance, 61- 88p;
b) Chapter 4. Coping with the Politics of Faiths and Cultures Between Secular State and Ecumenical Traditions in India, 89-128p. From Time warps : the insistent politics of silent and evasive pasts / Ashis Nandy; New Delhi : Permanent Black and Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2001.
3) articulating pain, articulating knowledge; experience and knowledge; is testimony a counterpoint to knowledge
a)Chapter 1. The event and the everyday, 1-17p; Chapter 3. Language and body : transactions and the construction of pain, 38-58p. From Life and words : violence and the descent into the ordinary /Veena Das; New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2007
b) Chapter 7. Violence and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century Rabindranath Tagore and the Problem of Testimony, 210-234p. From Time warps : the insistent politics of silent and evasive pasts / Ashis Nandy; New Delhi : Permanent Black and Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2001.
4) whose knowledge; contexts of knowledge
a) Chapter 1. Introduction: After the Science Question in Feminism, 1-18p. From Whose science? Whose knowledge? : thinking from women's lives / Sandra Harding. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1991 .
b) Chapter Five/ Nativist or autonomous social science: a clash of orientations, 108-122p;
Chapter Six/ Towards an adequate conceptualization of relevance and irrelevance in the social sciences,123-146p. From Alternative discourses in Asian social science : responses to Eurocentrism / Syed Farid Alatas; New Delhi : Sage,2006.
5) is science different today; modes of knowledge production
a)Chapter 1- From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice, vii p. From Science as practice and culture / edited by Andrew Pickering; Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992.”
b)On the Phenomenology of the New Mode of Knowledge Production 27-33p. From The new production of knowledge : the dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies/ by Michael Gibbons; London : Sage Publications,1994.
6) moving across cultures; science across cultures; orientalism and science; does knowledge travel; travelling theories, composite theories
a) Chapter 6. Bhadralok Perceptions of Science, Technology and Cultural Nationalism, 120-147p. From Domesticating modern science : a social history of science and culture in colonial India / Dhruv Raina, S. Irfan Habib; New Delhi : Tulika Books, 2004.
b) INTRODUCTION: The Alien Insiders, 1-16p. From Alternative sciences : creativity and authenticity in two Indian scientists / Ashis Nandy; 2nd ed.; New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1995.
7) knowledge and modernity
a)Introduction 2006: The Archaeology of Probable Reasoning, xii-xxxiii p. From Emergence of probability : a philosophical study of early ideas about probability, induction and statistical inference / Ian Hacking;2nd rep. ed.; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007.
b) We have never been modern /Bruno Latour ; translated by Catherine Porter; Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1991.
8) a different reason? questioning western knowledge systems
a)Chapter 6. Response and resistance,180-227p. From Science and the Raj : a study of British India /Deepak Kumar; 2nd ed.; New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2006.
b) The Discreet Charms of Indian Terrorism, 1-31p; Modern Medicine and its Non modern Critics: A Study in Discourse, 145-195p. From The savage Freud and other essays on possible and retrievable selves /Ashis Nandy; New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1995.
Possible entry points into the review
1.Choose any 3 of the lectures that help you frame the chief themes of this course. Do a critical review of the set that you choose from the point of view of these themes.
2.List the concepts you find in the set that you choose for review. Respond to these concepts in the light of the concepts that have emerged from these lectures.
3.Relate the entire discussion to your own interests.
Date for submission of assignment: 25th November, 2010. Please submit in soft copy.
The texts mentioned above are all available at the CCS library, and once reviewers are decided on which set they would like to take up, copies will be made available to you.
Note (incentive): The best 2 reviews will be published on this blog, and later included in course proceedings to be published following the course. All who complete assignments and attend more than 75% of the course will, of course, be eligible for the course certificate.
