A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

by Siri Hustvedt

  Sass’s image of the anchor is strong. We take our anchoring in the first person for granted. I’m me. I know it. I can feel it. My body is here, not over there. As Panksepp would argue, this is a feeling version of Descartes’s cogito. For several curious hours after the car accident, I was in a hyperaware state that was characterized by bizarre indifference to my fate, but my dissociation, as Janet would have it, was related to “the function that was in full activity at the moment of a great emotion.” The traumatic experience, the crash, had gone elsewhere but returned in horrifying flashbacks for four nights after the accident—a visual-motor-sensory-affective memory that had no words. And yet, despite my alienated state, I could never have confused my hair with anyone else’s.

  In schizophrenia, the smooth continuum of self anchored by a feeling of being, from prereflective to reflective, seems to disintegrate. In a heartbreaking letter written to George Soulié de Morant in 1932, Antonin Artaud describes his schizophrenic symptoms with astonishing perspicacity. He explains that if it is cold he can sometimes say that it is cold, but other times he cannot because something is “damaged” in him emotionally, that there is “a lack of correspondence” between the physiological sensation, cold, and his emotional response to it, and then yet another gap between his emotional response and his intellectual or verbalized one.

  For it is quite clear by now, I hope, what this loss is made of. An inner feeling that no longer corresponds to the images of the sensation. Whether this sensation applies to objects that are immediate, present, and tangible, or remote, suggested, and imagined, provided by memories or constructed artificially, the result is the same, and it leads to the suppression of all inner life.28

  An important recent study by Ebisch J. H. et al. (2012) on first-episode schizophrenic patients in social situations identified areas of the brain associated with the unconscious processing of one’s own body sensations—the premotor cortex, as well as the posterior insula, which has been associated with the perception of bodily feeling and distinguishing self and other.29 We have taken this little detour for a reason. There is much still to be known about the physiology of schizophrenia, but let us say that we knew everything from a third-person point of view about Artaud’s brain at the moment he wrote his letter. We would still lack qualia, the “soft and squishy” experiential character of the illness.

  Artaud felt that something had vanished, just as I knew I was preternaturally calm after the accident. The contents of the two perspectives, the first-person account and the third-person view of the brain, are different, and we need both. There can be no perfect reduction of one to the other because the patient’s account, his story, can also guide the scientist. And, as Sass argues, the experienced phenomenology of the illness may well play a causal role in its development.30 Beliefs and ideas alter physiology. This is philosophically explosive but true. Suggestion, hypnotic and otherwise, may well reside in the “we-centric” space, “the shared manifold of intersubjectivity.” The placebo effect is a potent example. In “Placebo, Pain, and Belief,” D. B. Morris subscribes to what in neuroscience would be called a top-down theory: “Humans activate the neurobiological circuits required for placebo effects through the subtle and diffuse experience of living within the inescapably meaning-rich domain of culture.”31 Morris’s use of the words “subtle and diffuse” will necessarily offend tough-minded thinkers. What is this meaning-rich domain of culture? How does it happen? We are born into it, and it is part of our emergence as subjects. It is an intersubjective world, created between and among us. One may begin to wonder whether it is legitimate to posit a brain in isolation from other brains. Isolated, deprived children serve as poignant case studies.

  There are countless examples, but perhaps the most famous is Victor, the wild child of Aveyron, who wandered out of the woods near Saint-Sernin in the South of France on January 9, 1800. Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, the physician who worked with Victor and was able to teach him to speak, albeit in a limited way, believed that imitation was vital to learning language, but he also knew that for Victor the imitative faculty had been stunted by isolation and that “much more time and much more trouble will be necessary [to educate him] than would be required for the least gifted of infants.”32 Socially isolated mammals are handicapped in myriad ways, cognitively and emotionally. The title of a single paper stands as exemplary: “Social Isolation Impairs Adult Neurogenesis in Limbic System and Alters Behaviors in Female Prairie Voles.”33 Neurogenesis is the production of new brain cells. Mice, rats, and prairie voles are all social creatures and are physiologically altered by their histories with other mice, rats, prairie voles, and predators, not to speak of the giant scientists fiddling with them, who like Appenzzell are not always aware of their influence. In all events, a form of social theory can be applied to all mammals, although arguably the theory gets more exciting the higher you climb on the evolutionary chain of being. The prairie vole never emerges as a linguistic subject in the way a person does. Although it navigates its way in the world efficiently, and I suspect has an inner sense of where it begins and ends, does it have, for example, concepts of hard and soft?

  In Metaphors We Live By (1980), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphorical concepts rise from bodily, lived experience, what they call basic experience. The metaphorical conceptualizations that come from embodied basic experience aren’t necessarily equally basic, and their meanings vary from culture to culture, but conceptual metaphors are generated from corporeal reality—from a being that moves in space and has feelings and sensations in the world. In Middlemarch, George Eliot’s omniscient but personable narrator writes, “For we, all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them.”34 Lakoff and Johnson echo, although less eloquently, the narrator of Middlemarch: “Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophesies.”35 In a later, more polemical book, Philosophy in the Flesh, the authors fit lower animals into their schema, arguing that all animals, even amoebas, “categorize” their worlds into “food, predators, possible mates, members of their own species.”36 To be honest, I don’t think “categorization” is a felicitous word choice. It suggests the Encyclopedists and their zeal for classification, dropping various objects into the correct pigeonhole. “Differentiation” might be preferable. A prairie vole distinguishes between its food and another prairie vole. The core idea here is a version of association theory and Pavlov’s stimulus-response learning. Through their motor-sensory systems, animals learn to associate a flaming fire with the pain of a burn and will avoid the fire ever after. Their learned experience of pain guides their actions as it guides ours. There are still philosophers out there who treat animals as painless, unconscious machines. Not I. In human beings, a basic association between fire and pain may be elaborated far beyond primitive differentiation into sentences such as “I am having a torrid love affair with my dentist.” “Torrid” suggests both pain and pleasure in this case, sexual joy that has a dangerous, burning component. In Lakoff and Johnson’s model, all abstract thinking, no matter how esoteric, is generated from bodily experience, not from free-floating mental concepts.

  We human beings get ourselves entangled in metaphors and act on the strength of them. I suspect prairie voles do not. This is wildly true of theoretical models for our minds. For Aristotle, the mind was a wax tablet that receives the imprints of perception, which can then be remembered. Cicero also drew on the wax tablet metaphor but used the further metaphor of memory as a storehouse or interior space, an elaborate architecture of mind. Lina Bolzoni has written extensively on how the book became a metaphor for the mental acts of memory. As she points out, in the incipit of Vita Nuova, Dante claims that the text of his inner book has been transcribed into the outer boo
k the reader holds in his hands.37 Francis Bacon compared the mind to a mirror. The nineteenth-century scientist Hermann von Helmholtz used the telegraph as a metaphor for neural networks.

  In cognitive science since the 1960s, the mind as computer has dominated the field. Like a computer, the mind processes information by manipulating symbols or representations; it has executive processes, neural circuitry, inputs and outputs, software and hardware. It encodes, stores, and retrieves information that moves bottom up or top down. And despite the fact that these mental operations are applied to the moist living tissue of the human brain, they are weirdly disembodied. Nothing in this model precludes machines from having minds. The metaphor is so insistent that there are those who claim it should be taken literally. Zenon Pylyshyn argues, “There is no reason why computation ought to be treated as merely a metaphor for cognition, as opposed to a hypothesis about the literal nature of cognition.”38 Emotion either falls outside the model or must be brought inside from elsewhere because, of course, computers don’t feel. When brought inside the cognitive model, emotions become judgments or propositions with a rational ground. I am angry because I believe I have been wronged, afraid because I see a bear coming down the road. The truth is, however, sometimes I am angry and afraid when I know perfectly well that I have no reason to be either or, conversely, I recognize that there is something missing because I am not feeling what I should. My judgment and my feelings are at odds. The computer model turns the mind into a rational system of legible systems, highly reminiscent of the cogs and wheels turning in the Enlightenment machine. However, even those who oppose the model often use the language—words, like smiles and yawns, as we all know, are contagious.

  The dominance of the cognitive model lies behind the alarm that many emotion researchers encountered when they began their investigations years ago. Antonio Damasio told me that when he announced that he and his fellow scientist and spouse, Hanna Damasio, intended to pursue the brain science of emotion, their colleagues thought they had gone mad. It just wasn’t done! He would ruin his career. Emotional states were internal and subjective—squishy, fuzzy, low. Jaak Panksepp has complained in print that most emotion theory is based on “high-level cognitive analyses of emotions. This does not make them incorrect,” he writes, “but as a result they have little to say about the raw affective domain where our deepest emotional existence is lived. Perhaps not surprising, all too often theorists ignore and minimize those forces in human life. Most people go out of their way to avoid powerful negative feelings, the fundamental despairs of our lives—feelings of coldness, fear, hunger, rage, thirst, loneliness, and other varieties of pain.”39 Panksepp is right that most of us flee painful experience (with the notable exception of some neurotics, who embrace it), but I would argue that he has missed the sociology.

  The head/body, reason/passion split, which is deeply part of our philosophical heritage, has caused many scientists and philosophers to flee all emotions, including positive or pleasurable ones, passionate dependent attachments (especially on the mother), love and sexual ecstasy, and “raw” bodily satisfactions of every kind and to siphon them off into Habermas’s metaphorical sewage tank of subjective feelings lest they interfere with disembodied rational calculation. The very ideas of high and low, after all, are corporeal. Our heads are top and our bowels and genitals are bottom.

  Computational theory of mind falls into the hard-thinking camp. Thoughts are not literally hard or soft, of course, but the associative train is easy to follow. Clarity, precision, sharp outlines, logic, and dispassionate objectivity belong to hard thinking and hard science, while fuzzy, imprecise, mushy borders belong to soft-thinking poets, novelists, scholars in the humanities, and other subjective and emotional folk. Burton Melnick encapsulates this opposition in the title of his paper: “Cold Hard World/Warm Soft Mommy: Gender and Metaphors of Hardness, Softness, Coldness and Warmth.” He argues that “the expression the ‘hard sciences’ ” carries, along with other proliferating semes, the superiority of the masculine because “male is usually a term perceived in the COLD/HARD constellation, and female a term in the WARM/SOFT constellation.”40 As Melnick points out, neither dogs nor Martians would make any immediate sense of this hard/cold maleness and soft/warm femaleness by touching respective candidates. Men and women do not have different body temperatures. For Aristotle, sexual temperatures ran in the opposite direction: men were warm and dry; women, moist and cold. Warm and dry was naturally better. Metaphors may be basic, but tracing a historical trope back to its origin is by no means simple. Nevertheless, these divisions organized around masculine and feminine run deep in the culture and are often unconscious. As the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin writes, “The gender split is anchored in collective fantasy.”41

  Thresholds, boundaries, and neat divisions are essential to every symbolic structure, but as Mary Douglas argues in her book Purity and Danger, it is precisely where boundaries break down, where they blur and leak, are violated or crossed, that pollution enters the cultural picture. This is especially true of corporeal boundaries. As Douglas tells us, every bodily orifice is potentially dangerous. Feces, urine, menstrual blood, and semen all cross the threshold of the body.42 Pregnancy is the ultimate state of merger, one being inside another. Intrauterine life means the absolute dependence of the fetus on its human environment, the mother. At birth a person crosses the inside/outside boundary and our umbilical connection to the maternal body is cut, creating two wholly separate beings, but our helplessness and need for that large protective body continue for a long time. In early life, mothers are omnipotent. And however many innate capacities the new newborn may have, infancy is not an age of reason. Sensations and feelings, however, run high. And yet, the mewling, suckling, pooping, spitting-up, speechless, emotionally labile infant expelled from its mother’s gaping vagina was every single one of us, and this truth may lie beneath a host of intellectual anxieties about hard and soft. The tender, soft, squishy, feminine, maternal cesspool threatens the higher rational realms of categorical cleanliness.

  As countless scientists have told me, their own work is both personal and often messy. Some researchers resist the artificiality of the third-person histoire for first-person discours. Accidents often produce the best results. Hunches, gut feelings, and emotions of all kinds are essential to research. Hunches have given us both homunculi in sperm and the theory of relativity. There are many hard scientists who recognize Appenzzell’s error. They cannot write themselves out of their research. They take up space, are driven by unconscious forces, and are beset by biases outside their awareness. The most profound and intractable of all may be a fear of and repugnance for the mother’s body where we all once lived and to which we were tethered in early childhood. It is this fear that permeates thinking about hard and soft, and it is possible to argue that these prejudices bleed into not only metaphors but paradigms, the underlying, often unquestioned assumptions of a field, and accordingly restrict what is possible. The boundaries are already erected, and they inevitably limit the question: What are we?

  In my discussion of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and objectivity, of perspective and perception, of the natural and the social, of the body and metaphor and its role in theory, of prairie voles and human beings, of reason and emotion, I have actively worked to blur hard-and-fast borders. My intention is not to turn all thought to mush but rather to create zones of focused ambiguity, to insist that “diverse points of view” when examining the same object are not optional but necessary. For me, ambiguity is a rich concept, not an impoverished one.

  Merleau-Ponty directly addressed the paradoxical, squishy character of human life when he wrote,

  Everything is both manufactured and natural in man, as it were, in the sense that there is not a word, nor a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being—and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life, and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction, through
a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man.43

  The body is at once the “I” and an object in the world that can be seen by others; it has interiority and otherness simultaneously, and it has an implicit relational tendency toward a you, which is there from the beginning. The body is at once natural and social, and lived subjective human experience, mobile and sensual and dense with fluctuating feelings, must be incorporated into frames of understanding along with third-person investigations into the dynamic neurobiology that accompanies it. And finally, whatever we say or write must involve a scrupulous attentiveness to language and its deep metaphors because they can make us blind. It may be far more tough-minded and rigorous to recognize while traveling in the borderlands that the sharp line so visible on the map is not inscribed into the countryside and that the lowering fogs we encounter on the way have an interest and beauty of their own.

  Becoming Others

  * * *

  When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm . . . Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies.

  —Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

  AT some moment in my childhood, I became aware that my visual and tactile senses worked differently from those of most people I knew, not because of my mirroring touch sensations while looking at others, which I assumed were universal, but because even on a sweltering day the sight of an ice cube, Popsicle, or ice cream cone generated a shiver in me and had done so for as long as I could remember. The mere thought of ice can produce an involuntary sensation of cold in me. Looking at or thinking about fire, on the other hand, does not make me warm. For years, I asked people, including neurologists, about my see-ice-feel-freeze experiences but was inevitably met with puzzled faces.