I’m impressed by how nuanced Antonio Damasio’s presentation of consciousness is in these writings. I must admit to expectations of a coarse materialism or scientific literalism—and I am happily corrected. I have only just progressed into his new book, but something interesting came up while reading the assigned chapter from The Feeling of What Happens that I’d like to use for my post.

This week has been especially busy for me, so at one point my girlfriend offered to read aloud to me while I finished up some chores around the apartment. She soon had begun this passage:

You are looking at this page, reading the text and constructing the meaning of my words as you go along. But concern with text and meaning hardly describes all that goes on in your mind. In parallel with representing the printed words and displaying the conceptual knowledge required to understand what I wrote, your mind also displays something else, something sufficient to indicate, moment by moment, that you rather than anyone else are doing the reading and the understanding of the text. [p10; bold added]

And this feels not quite right in the moment. To be sure, each of us has our own private experience of consciousness: her reading/representing/understanding and my hearing/representing/understanding. But the sense of ownership seems somehow in between us. We are both involved in a relation to these symbols… Oh I’m sorry, I tell her; I interrupted. I let her finish.

The sensory images of what you perceive externally, and the related images you recall, occupy most of the scope of your mind, but not all of it. Besides those images there is also this other presence that signifies you, as observer of the things imaged, owner of the things imaged, potential actor on the things imaged. There is a presence of you in a particular relationship with some object. [p10; bold added]

I generally do my best to hold awareness close to the present moment—focus down a stimulus, clarify my consciousness of that stimulus, and observe any identification with that consciousness. I am loving Damasio’s explication because it nestles right up with this recursive subject–object relationship, and as a scientist he offers such refreshingly substantial grounds for his musings.

But even if Damasio laid it all out—literally figured out how we are conscious individuals—there would be more to tell. We are not just conscious and therefore necessarily conscious of, but we are conscious together. We will come into class on Wednesday—individuated, separate—and fully attempt to share consciousness with one another by constructing external objects to which we all might relate. Is it accurate to describe the experience of such conversation or reflection as just the coeval creation of x personal consciousnesses, each creating for itself an external object to which it can relate? Do we hold the same object between us: a single locus supporting our individuated experience? Or do we truly experience together, and support as a collective some higher order consciousness, altogether above us as individuals but inextricably bound up with our individuality?

Could we know if it’s one way or another anyway?

Hm. Hah, I’ll keep reading and look forward to Wednesday.

Antonio Damasio’s theories of consciousness and the self are complicated and can get bewildering on a first reading. This is partly because he builds the theory through the explanation of relationships among a pretty large number of parts. The good news is that he’s careful to define his key terms–which give names to these various parts. A good way to get a handle on Damasio is to keep track of his key terms as you read and to revisit them. First, be sure that you understand his definition of each term. Then, do your best to understand the relationships among the terms. If you understand these relationships, you’ll understand the nuances of the theories he proposes.

Here’s a list of terms to look out for:

• organism, object, and image
• core consciousness and extended consciousness
• primordial self, prot0 self, core self, autobiographical self
• self-as-subject and self-as-object
• qualia, emotion, and feeling
• image, neural pattern, neural representation, maps
• internal milieu and homeostasis
• body loop and “as if body loop”

You’ll find these terms scattered throughout the two texts we’re reading. Just look out for them at first and mark them when you come across them. Revisit them later and see if you think you’ve understood his point with regard to each. (Some of the terms will be familiar from Hustvedt and Eakin.)

We’ll talk about all this in class, but your reading will be easier and more productive if you focus on the terms from the outset.

Natalie Sutherland has published an interesting account of the relations between autobiography and fiction in the online magazine Perilous Adventures, entitled “The Fiction in Autobiography: Fantasy, Narrative and the Discovery of Truth.” A lot of her discussion relates to ideas we talked about in class tonight. A colleague, Carrie Hintz, who’s teaching an “Approaches to Life Writing” course in the MALS program, sent me the link to the article. You might find the material her students are posting on their blog interesting–and relevant with regard to our discussions. I’ve linked to it above. I’ll add it to our list of links too.

In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from Sutherland’s essay:

We concluded above that there is a difference between narrative as it is “lived” or experienced in life and narrative as it appears in autobiography. Mustn’t there then also be a difference in the life and in its narrated counterpart? This leads us to the notion that autobiography is not be a simple recalling of the past – to engage in such an act would elude the entire concept and act of narrative, both in life and in writing, since narrative involves not merely thumbing inattentively through life’s experiences, but sequentially and meaningfully relating the ‘parts to the whole.’

Hustevedt’s chosen form and frame carried me along her reading of her body and of a self forged from pain, through a deeply personal quest to understand the relationship of body to self, where contradictions illuminated the phenomena of what it’s like to have a body and a self. Yet through her essay, she reveals the scientific and theoretical fruits found on her quest to unearth and explain a bifurcated self, leading us to not only diagnose her physical and psychic symptoms along with her, but to investigate how all selves are forged – arguably borne out of pain and death, a seeming contradiction.

I am reminded of another essay of sorts, one delivered verbally to me by my father – one that I also was allowed to watch shift as he progressed on his search for self. Before I was born, my father was a marathon runner and trained on his college campus while studying behavioral psychology from Skinner’s department at Western Michigan University. He has type one diabetes, and one day he had an insulin reaction while running alone and passed out due to low blood sugar. He wasn’t found by a campus janitor until he was nearly dead, and then died in the ambulance that was called. Paramedics, then doctors tried to resuscitate him at the hospital as he remained dead for over ten minutes.

During this time, my father had what can be conceived as a classic out-of-body experience, where he tells me that his consciousness separated from his body, watched the doctors working on his prone body from above, felt an insurmountable and seemingly permanent sensation of peace, and began to drift towards a bright light. He became conscious of an impulse to go back into his body, to do more in his life, and recounts willing his “self” back into his physical body, feeling the sensation of his “spirit heels” clicking into his physical ones – reclaiming his heartbeat & pulse at that very instant.  For years, he recalled this experience as a spiritual one, and dedicated himself to spiritual practice to try to recreate his new understanding of self and sensation of peace he’d experienced while dead, but this time while alive. Unable to do so, like Hustevedt, he read as much neurobiology and brain chemistry as he could understand, and now explains the phenomena as a neurochemical process: his brain, in shock and dying, released chemicals to make him feel at peace during our most extreme conscious transition.

Like Hustevedt, the amount of brain scan imagery available, neuroscience, and psychosomatic research on the brain’s processes is a tempting and illuminating road to follow when explaining schisms like she and my father have had.  Hustevedt takes us on a tour of psychological and physical anomalies – her own and those of others, treating the exploration of her own illness as a kind of self voyeurism she lets us in on, alongside cases of “alien hand syndrome,” patients who have gone blind but don’t mind or even acknowledge this limit, tales of deep disassociation, double visions of oneself, synesthiesia, Tourette’s syndrome and more. To toggle between writing personal narrative and empirical data and its historical permutations seems to be part of her healing process, and one that blew apart ideas of mental/physical dualities,  suppositions that equate mental symptoms as “not real” and the real yet inextricable combination/split of body and self. Her (and medicine’s) inability to neatly connect a mental process to a physical outcome, or marry her conscious mind to her involuntarily shaking body, shows us how alienating of a place the body can be, but also how complex, inexplicable, and intriguing our psyches are.

I recently returned from a seven day silent Vipassana insight meditation retreat, where one of the teachers spoke about the Buddha’s definition of the self in the Pali Canon as just five simple aggregates: Form (our physical bodies and the outside world), our senses and perceptions (sight, sound, etc… as positive, neutral, or negative), our mental formations (feelings, thoughts, opinions), and then our consciousness (discernment) of all those things. How strange that all we are working with is a body with senses, our internal world of thoughts and feelings, and then our awareness of those four simple pieces – And yet things are this complicated!

Hustevedt’s ability to find some solace in the lack of explanations (despite the ever-advancing and overlapping fields of psychoanalysis, medicine, history, and neuroscience) some healing in psychogenic illness, in the contradictions that accompany the autobiographical self is a delight to watch. I too, require pulling from vast disciplines, even finding myself on meditation retreats (something I never thought I’d be interested in) to be alone with my consciousness so that I may come closer to understanding my self. As Hustevedt probed, even if compulsively, she shows that through the death of a “normal” self and through emotional and physical pain, one is alive as we maintain, reconstitute, and transcend ourselves at each moment of consciousness. I’ll also be recommending this to my father, as he continues on his path of inquiry.

As I was studying philosophy for my BA, I began to take an interest in philosophy of mind and the cognitive studies.  I had always been fascinated with the mind (I began my higher education as a psychology major) and the interactions between biology and cognition and consciousness.  However, I felt unsatisfied with each definitive assertion that tried to connect the biology with vague, linguistic terms such as “self” and “identity.”  I sincerely applaud the research and attempts at empirically defining such a thing, however, I feel it is an impossible feat.  My own personal thoughts on the topic of selfhood and identity was that it was not a static entity with a single, definable quality.  The vagueness and limits of language have attempted to construct symbols and definitions for something that is not definable, or at least singularly categorized.  The issue I have had with several books and theories I have read is the attempt to take a newly discovered mental trait or disorder and extrapolate it to encompass a full theory, or vice versa, construct a theory to explain a trait or disorder.

In my opinion, the disconnect is often linguistic.  The reason we have a hard time defining a self, is because we have no definition for it.  Humans construct language and the term self, and other vague terms like love, identity, etc…, isn’t something that can be identified on a micro level like in biology.  The science interested in defining the self wasn’t around when the word was introduced into vernacular and therefore its attempts are futile.  Things like the self and consciousness cannot be neatly packaged into a strict definition.

I believe Siri Hustvedt’s curiosity of the mind and her attempts to find the cause of her peculiar shaking led her on a journey without an answer and I think that is personified in the fact that ultimately she finds no answer.  Despite the amount of research and sources used from a variety of different disciplines, no one answer seemed to fit the mold.  Some worked better than others, but no one theory or discipline could get it right (her affliction or a clear definition of self).  Once again, I chalk it up to linguistic struggles.  If one tries to define self biologically through anatomy and neuroscience, one misses the “feeling” of self and what it is to be “someone.”  However, if one attempts to define the self through things like psychoanalysis or literature, one misses the scientific “proof” or empirical evidence necessary to be a concrete theory.

Therefore, I think my experience with Hustvedt’s book served to help solidify my thoughts and musings of what the self is.  If anything, the book read more like the journey we all encounter when attempting to solve this question on our own.

I grew up in a very religious family, my grandparents who I lived with for a few years and who I spent most of weekends with are Pentecostal Christians and my mother is a Jehovah Witness. In my grandparents church I was told that I would go to hell and burn in fire if I didn’t ask Jesus to “save” us and my mother believed that I would simply die and turn into dirt if I did not get baptized. I was in church/Kingdom Hall at least 4 times a week, sometimes sleeping over.  Because of my strong religious influenced, into adulthood I believed that my actions were controlled by the devil and that I needed to be “saved” by Jesus and the holy ghost will cast the devil out of my . I will then become a Righteous being and my spirit would float up to heavens once I died. When my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer, my entire belief system about who my core self will always be was challenged. My strong independent grandmother became a walking corpse in just a few years. She spent the majority of her days staring into space. My grandfather in his frustration told me “this is not the person I married. I don’t know who she is.” Siri Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman only raised more question in regards to whom or what “I” am.

In The Shaking Woman Siri Hustvedt elicit thoughts about what it means to be human and how we perceive ourselves.  While my grandmother lost cognitive control, Hustvedt lost control over her body. She believed that this loss of control was due to hysteria, a Conversion disorder, which occurred because she did not grieve her father’s death. This caused a duality in her and like the statement that my grandfather made in reference to his wife; Hustvedt’s shaking body became separate from which she was. She states that “the shaking woman is certainly not anyone with a name. She is a speechless alien who appears only during speeches (47).” Hustvedt was not the shaking woman and this woman was not my grandmother although she occupied my grandmother’s body.

Another study that Hustvedt explored was that “the very interesting act of inscribing the words I remember generates memories (62-63).” The simple act of writing can generate memory. She presented case studies in which two subjects lost the ability to recall memory in speech but were able to write what happened even when they were unable to read their own writings; this lead to Hustvedt wondering if she suffered from systemic disconnection (68). This makes me think of my grandmother’s own memory loss and wonder if she will one day regain them. There are moments where my grandmother seems to return to her body when she looks at me and say “I haven’t seen you in a while pretty girl.” Then I feel like she remembers me and my grandmother has returned. Will she always be able to look at me and have these moments of clarity?

When I think of who I am, I wonder if I will always be a lucid rational being. Will emotional trauma or physical trauma cause any radical changes in my personality? Can anyone ever truly figure out who we are as humans? What ultimately control our behavior? Is it our brains? Is it God? Is it our unconscious? Is it the Devil?

When Hustvedt’s described her father’s death, I felt myself in her. She, as I did, understood intellectually and academically the meaning of the loss of a loved one. When my mother died two years ago I had some time to prepare for it. When I received the call that she was gone, I remember observing that the world had not stopped, that I still breathed, that I still felt remarkably normal. Though I do not describe  my mother’s death as eloquently as Hustvedt does in her essay, I understood perfectly what she meant.  I too had a delayed very physical reaction to my mother’s death though nothing so severe as the author. My support system was well in place for any possible physio-psycho breakdown. My family, mainly my stepmother was concerned that I would become absolutely hysterical and backslide.

You see I understand Hustvedt’s search and meaning for understanding in her illness  and her identity through it.  I understand  her trying (and wanting) to find a common ‘physical’ cause for what she endured. For years, I would get inexplicably ill and because of a childhood trauma I had (have) sometimes awful depression. This new aspect of my illness would physically knock me down have me stuck in bed or the bathroom for days.  No one knew why. Every known test came back normal. I went into astromonical debt from collapsing and being rushed to the hospital.  I was told to get therapy for my problems and that my symptoms were ‘all in my head’. Myself and the people around me changed. They were afraid to set me off lest I have another episode because it was ‘all in my head’. My identity, who I was to myself and the people around me became my illness much like Husvedt’s and at times I seemed to drown in it.  She connected her shaking to her grief and past migraines, I connected mine to my childhood trauma.

Husvedt’s journey for identity and selfhood mirrored mine except for some major differences.  It turned out after many years my new ailment was quite physical. A keen woman doctor noticed a cyclical not psychic pattern of my symptoms that revolved around my menstruation (Sorry for the TMI). I suffered from stage IV endometriosis, which oddly enough still has a sexist hysterical background as it was once known as the ‘career woman’s disease’ as it was once thought that the only cure was to have a child. It is also a disease that can only be diagnosised by exploratory surgery as it will not show up in an MRI, PET SCAN,etc.  It took eight doctors and about four years in order to get this diagnosis. When I saw this last doctor, I omitted  my own history of depression and PTSD because once said my physical symptoms were written off as hysterical.  But I knew it wasn’t ‘me’.

I never really thought about my identity  as my illness and how  it attached itself to me in this way until I read this book. The psychic me and the physical me intertwined to make one identity, which thankfully I can now separate, but it doesn’t change the fact that one of the  illnesses really is ‘in my head’.  It was implicit in Husvedt’s  case as in mine that being a woman our symptoms and feelings were not taken seriously. And that often we must fight to be taken seriously, our very actions automatically taken as hyperbole and as superfluous.

This is not a new phenomenon and something that was also delved into in Barbara Duden’s ‘The Woman Beneath the Skin’, where John Storch, an 18th century physician, journals his women patient’s illnesses between the years 1747 and 1752. They way in which these women were treated 250 years ago frighteningly mirrors some of what Hustvedt’s experience in her own journey through her studies of Freud, neuroscience, modern medicine, & etc. As well as her Kantian/Freudian psychoanalysis and the cultural ans social constructions around women’s bodies. And although we no longer believe in the ‘wandering uterus’ and ‘humours’ many of the attitudes remain the same.

This book, for me at least, hit a little too close to home.

The back-cover of my copy of Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves displays a review that contains the phrase “odyssey of discovery”, and because I am one of those people who will read the back and inside covers of books and then develop predispositions, this cliche misled me into believing Hustvedt’s auto-biographical essay would be some kind of literal journey across the world, filled with interviews and testimonials and remembrances. Predispositions are problematic because they are rarely accurate and yet they can be automatic – they must be helpful sometimes (especially when they are re-shrouded as “intuitions”) and yet are more likely dangerous (when they are unmasked as “prejudices”). When a scholarly talk is given by someone described as a European brain specialist, I automatically imagine someone who looks and talks like Antonio Damasio, and thus my version of reality is confirmed as nearer to realistic. Similarly, when I read the words “odyssey of discovery” I expect the following book to read somewhere in-between Homer’s Odyssey and “Eat, Pray, Love”.

Instead, The Shaking Woman reads like the perfect combination of exactly what it is billed as, an autobiographical essay. It is scholarly enough in that it is packed with references to writers and works and ideas and concepts, and yet its tone is familiar and comprehensible, with Siri’s real life episodes used sparingly, and then mainly as examples that illuminate theories or doubts she is reporting or expressing. The open-ended-ness of her argument – for indeed, I believe there is an argument for the relationship between the self, the body, disability or deviation, and life writing present in this book – only proves to enforce the inter-disciplinary  slant her investigation. By smartly incorporating multiple discourses in her work, Siri deftly demonstrates her authority and this rhetorical turn weakens resistance to what she’s writing. Overall, I felt like I learned a slew of different things by the end of this book, even if Siri and I never discovered the source of her shakes.

Thomas Couser does a lot of work in establishing the necessity of life writing in relation to under-represented portions of the disabled community. Obviously, “disability” is a blanket term too complicated to even truly warrant such a sweeping categorization, and it is exactly this enormity of difference and dissimilarity that invalidates any attempt at establishing a “community”, yet we sometimes must deal in generalizations to hasten our informal blogposts. The fact that Siri does not discover an answer is significant because it reveals both our extreme unawareness (disknowledge?) of the human body and its capabilities AND the importance of the search for more answers. As I said, our understanding of “disability” can run the gamut from physical to mental and emotional to political or social – all categories can be referred to as possessing bodies and thus all physical, mental, emotional, political, or social Others can become images of disabled bodies, but this vast majority of stimagtized figures rarely gets the opportunity to represent themselves, and this absence creates the problematic binary of abled/disabled to begin with. Siri’s investigation is motivated by her own mental/physical malady, but her work undoes any easy diagnosis as she becomes a kind of maverick body which disproves many theories, or rather, exposes the oft-taken-for-granted “theory” for what it really is, an educated, contestable guess backed by some evidence. I think this is significant, for Disability Studies as a field exists to show an always-fluctuating range of humanness that denies such static states as “healthy” or “unhealthy”.

Although I cannot find the section now, I especially liked the portion of Siri’s essay that dealt with the doctor who bemoaned the absence of storytelling in the hospital as a form of medication. As The Shaking Woman makes clear, the biological is inexplicably linked with the imaginative – diagnosis and theories are, in the end, creative arguments that utilize, above all, language – and that autobiography is paramount to understanding the self. As a question I would pose before I sign-off (because I worry my train of thought has become confusing or disjointed), I wonder what this essay or the Eakin excerpt would make of individuals who do not have the capacity to generate an autobiography or utilize language, for either general mental/physical reasons, or from illiteracy, and how they perceive self-ness.

For Wednesday’s class, choose a moment in Siri Hustvedt’s book in which she uses one of Gordon Harvey’s “Elements” in an interesting ways. (If you weren’t in class for our first meeting, see the Documents page on this blog.) You might choose this moment because Hustvedt uses Harvey’s element in a way you’d like to emulate; or because she uses it in an usual way; or simply because her use of it confuses you or raises questions you’re not sure how to answer. You may have another reason altogether, or a combination of reasons. It’s up to you. We’ll spend the first part of class comparing the moments you’ve chosen, so have them at the ready.

I’ll give you an example, with regard to Hustvedt’s use of both sources and stance. In the following passage, Hustvedt has the chutzpah to rewrite Freud:

In The Ego and the Id (1923) Freud writes, “The question ‘How does a thing become conscious?’ would thus more advantageously be stated, ‘How does a thing become pre-conscious [available to consciousness]?’ And the answer would be ‘through becoming connected to the word presentations corresponding to it.’ ” Further, he says, these words are “residues of memory.” He does not deny that visual imagery is part of the remembered mental world, but he argues that it has another character, that being conscious of an optical memory is more concrete and that “the relations between the various elements of the subject matter, which especially characterizes thought, cannot be given visual expression (59; ebook 46/159)

Hustvedt’s revision of Freud is characteristic of her writing–and her stance in particular. It’s clear that she admires Freud, and often displays real affection and respect for his work. But she’s not afraid to say he’s gotten this wrong, or at least not quite right. The difference between “conscious” and “preconscious” is important to Hustvedt because it indicates something fundamental about both mind and self: we don’t control which thoughts or feelings become conscious. Hustvedt follows Freud in seeking a logic for how and why particular thoughts and feelings become “available to consciousness,” but she stresses the fact that their availability doesn’t mean they ever will become conscious. They may influence us without our ever knowing it. Her quest to understand “the shaking woman” is driven at least partly by a desire to gain a better sense of how her own preconscious feelings may be influencing the behavior of her body. So, basically, Hustvedt uses a source her in a way that seems characteristic of her stance toward the history of ideas. Let’s be respectful, she seems to be saying, but not precious. She implies that she, like Freud (or anybody else) is likely to get some things wrong, and that we shouldn’t worry too much about that, because genuine contributions to intellectual debates require the audacity to make claims even when you know you’re likely to be wrong at least as often as you may be right.

In another passage, Hustvedt offers an extremely  articulate explanation of her method:

Who are we, anyway? What do I actually know about myself? My symptom has taken me from the Greeks to the present day, in and out of theories and thoughts that are built on various ways of seeing the world. What is body and what is mind? Is each of us a singular being or a plural one? How do we remember things and how do we forget them? Tracking my pathology turns out to be an adventure in the history of experience and perception. How do we read a symptom or an illness? How do we frame what we observe? What is inside the frame and what falls outside it? Janet’s patients didn’t have brain scans, but Neil did. Neil’s scan does not explain his dissociated orthographic memory. Automatic writing once had a place in medical theory. Now it is an outcast, a curiosity that stuns researchers. Why? (69; ebook 53/159)

Notice that she characterizes her method as “an adventure in the history of experience and perception.” Adventure requires daring–and fun. Hustvedt begins with some questions: “Who are we, anyway? What do I actually know about myself?” To find answers, she has to read voraciously in a variety of fields and synthesize what she reads. Then she has to find ways to articulate what she has learned and synthesized in ways that will appeal to an audience.

Every writer has to do this, but not every writer is quite so articulate about her processes and methods. One goal for this course is for us all to become more aware of the processes and methods we develop in order to find answers to questions we care about as passionately as Hustvedt cares about hers. It doesn’t hurt to have some fun in the process.

This week’s episode of This American Life (entitled “How I Got Into College”) features a story about economist Emir Kamenica–which resonates pretty strongly with our reading for this week. Kamenica tells Ira Glass a story about a teacher who changed his life as a child. Glass hires an investigator to find this teacher, and she tells her version of the story. Then the staff of the show does some fact-checking. I don’t want to give away any details, but it’s pretty interesting to hear what happens when Glass confronts Kamenica with alternate versions of the story of his own life. The episode is airing on various NPR affiliates this weekend. It will be available online after 7 pm on Sunday.