From the logic of ideas to active-matter materialism: Priestley’s Lockean problem and early neurophilosophy

ABSTRACT

Empiricism is a claim about the contents of the mind: its classic slogan is nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, “there is nothing in the mind (intellect, understanding) which is not first in the senses.” As such, it is not a claim about the fundamental nature of the world as material. I focus here on in an instance of what one might term the materialist appropriation of empiricism. One major component in the transition from a purely epistemological claim about the mind and its contents to an ontological claim about the nature of the world is the new focus on brain–mind relations in the eighteenth century. Here I examine a Lockean trajectory as exemplified in Joseph Priestley’s 1777 Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. However, Locke explicitly ruled out that his inquiry into the logic of ideas amounted to a “physical consideration of the mind.” What does it mean, then, for Priestley to present himself as continuing a Lockean tradition, while presenting mental processes as tightly identified with “an organical structure such as that of the brain” (although he was not making a strict identity claim as we might understand it, post-Smart and Armstrong)? One issue here is that of Priestley’s source of “empirical data” regarding the correlation and indeed identification of mental and cerebral processes. David Hartley’s theory in his 1749 Observations on Man was, as is well known, republished in abridged form by Priestley, but he discards Hartley’s “vibratory neurophysiology” while retaining the associationist framework, although not because he disagreed with the former. Yet Hartley was, at the very least, strongly agnostic about metaphysical issues (and it is difficult to study these authors while bracketing off religious considerations). One could see Locke and Hartley as articulating programs for the study of the mind which were more or less naturalistic (more strongly so in Hartley’s case) while avoiding “materialism” per se; in contrast, Priestley bit the (materialist) bullet. In this paper I examine Priestley’s appropriation and reconstruction of this “micro-tradition,” while emphasizing its problems.     

Vers une Europe de la culture ?

Au Conseil de l'Europe et dans la Communauté européenne, les sens de “culture”, “civilisation” et de “identité culturelle” européennes sont a priori difficiles â identifier et évoluent sur la période 1949–93. L'étude vise, en s'aidant d'une méthode de décompte des mots et d'un rapide examen de l'évolution historique et scientifique de “culture” et “civilisation”, á dégager certains de leurs traits particuliers, au‐delà de la confusion traditionnelle entre “culture” et “civilisation” européennes et entre “culture” et “identité culturelle” européennes. “Civilisation européenne” a pris peu á peu une signification supranationale et s'est raréfiée, tandis que “culture européenne” s'est rapidement divisée en “cultures infranationales”. Les institutions montrent aussi leurs tendances plus ou moins favorables á l'unité européenne, par leur propre utilisation des concepts devenus des éléments “test”.     

William Rutherford Sanders (1828–1881) and his neurologically fertile years (1865–1868)

ABSTRACT

William Rutherford Sanders (1828–1881) was an Edinburgh physician who occupied the Chair of Pathology at the University of Edinburgh from 1869 to 1881. All of his published output between 1865 and 1868 was concerned with neurology. In arguing that a patient did not have paralysis agitans, Sanders (1865) employed the term “Parkinson’s disease” for the first time in the English-language literature to distinguish between the disorder that Parkinson (1817) termed “paralysis agitans” and other types of shaking palsies. He contributed a major chapter on the same topic to Russell Reynolds’s A System of Medicine (1868). Sanders also investigated the innervation of the palate and facial muscles (1865), and in 1866 recorded the autopsy findings in two cases of aphasia. Here, for the first time in the English-language literature, he described findings that supported Broca’s location of the representation of speech to a particular area of the left cerebral hemisphere.     

Théodore Flournoy on synesthetic personification

In 1893, Théodore Flournoy published a landmark book on synesthesia — Des phénomènes de synopsie [Of Synoptic Phenomena]. The book presented a pioneering chapter on synesthetic personification, including numerous striking case examples, and it is frequently cited by twenty-first-century researchers as providing some of the earliest examples of the phenomenon. Flournoy employed a broad definition of personification — the representation of stimuli as concrete and specific individuals or inanimate objects. This definition encompassed a more extensive set of phenomena than the definition used by researchers today and was illustrated by cases that would fall outside of contemporary subtypes of synesthetic personification. Yet, Flournoy’s seminal work remains unavailable in English, and the extent of the phenomenon that he described has not been discussed in the contemporary literature. We provide an unabridged translation of Flournoy’s chapter “Des personnifications” [“Of Personifications”].     

The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery,presbytery, and parti-coloured picts

ABSTRACT

Marvell’s “Ode” (1650) is an English poem about a British problem – a problem further problematized by religion. The “Ode” lauds Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns, but English responses to these “colonial” wars were in reality complicated by protestant infighting among presbyterians, independents, and sectarians. Writers like Milton and Nedham rallied English support for Cromwell’s Irish campaign by recycling Spenserian stereotypes of Irish catholic barbarity. But Milton and Nedham also undercut English protestant unity by flinging these same anti-catholic stereotypes at Scottish presbyterians in Belfast and Edinburgh. Departing from previous studies, this article argues that Marvell’s “Ode” eschews Milton and Nedham’s anti-Presbyterianism in ways calculated to elide, rather than divide, protestant communities. The article explores how the “Ode” presents Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns as exclusively anti-catholic (rather than anti-presbyterian) crusades, comparing Marvell’s presentation of Cromwell in the “Ode” with his identification of Cromwell as an anti-catholic crusader in “First Anniversary” (1655). Both poems anticipate in this respect Marvell’s later anti-catholic, but pro-nonconformist, approach to Ireland in Rehearsal transpros’d (1672–1673). The article is therefore concerned to root Marvell’s post-Restoration commitment to protestant tolerationism within the anti-catholic language of the “Ode”.     

This Is Not an Improvisation: Letitia Landon and the Slipperiness of Taxonomy

ABSTRACT

Writing in 2007, in The Wordsworth Circle, Jeffrey Robinson remarked on the “ephemerality” of improvisational poetry, its fundamental resistance to being “preserved.” Printed poetry is typically regarded as “fixed” and static: what any poem represents as improvisation is, at best, only a record, executed in a fixed medium, of a performance whose infinite variability is inherent in the nature of improvisation itself. Partly an homage to Rene Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe (1928–29) and to Michel Foucault’s 1973 essay on that painting, and using as a test case The Improvisatrice (1825), the long poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, herself a devotee of interdisciplinary and multimedia performance, this essay considers the physical, structural, and methodological challenges and limitations posed to printed “word art” by works that purport to be, or aspire to the condition of, “improvisations.” The improvisatrice who is the poem’s narrator claims to be both a painter and a songstress, but her “speech,” captured and rendered in printed words by Landon (who ventriloquizes that speech), can neither “be” nor even “represent” a work produced (“performed”) in visual art or vocal song. In her long poem Landon effectively creates a literary trompe l’oeil, an illusion that depends for its “completion” upon the reader’s implied participation in that performative act of completion. In the process, Landon’s poem reveals the fundamental incompatibility of improvisational literary production with the performative nature of improvisation.     

Have Taught a Foreign Language in Elementary Grades

The cultural democratization of post-Franco Spain meant the removal of the division between high and low culture. Such democratization of Spanish culture meant a new concept of culture in which, as stated by the postmodern motto, “everything goes,” and that in television translated as the proliferation of reality shows and trash TV and in literature as non-intellectual publications aimed at entertaining readers. Belén Esteban's work Ambiciones y reflexiones (2013) is a good example. I make use of this work to prove that what has traditionally been considered as “low culture” is not necessarily a culture inferior to “high culture” in Spain today. Thus I underline the necessity of replacing the term “low culture” or counterculture for “postculture.” The methodology I utilize is made up mostly of the critical theories of Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi regarding the dichotomy between high and low culture, Cristina Moreiras-Menor's postulate about the need for accepting show culture and consumer culture in Spain due to the split with the dictatorial past this culture signifies, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s rejection of present-day mass culture, a rejection that the aforementioned theorists challenge. Additionally, I support my study with José Álvarez-Junco's premises regarding the difficulty of defining national identity, a crucial topic in Ambiciones y reflexiones and which is related to the high/low culture dichotomy. Luis Moreno-Caballud’s criticism about democracy and its meaning in our neoliberal cultural market complements the critical methodology of this analysis.     

Population and Affective Perception: Biopolitics and Anticipatory Action in US Counterinsurgency Doctrine

Abstract: This paper analyses the biopolitical logics of current US counterinsurgency doctrine in the context of the multiple forms of biopower that make up the “war on terror”. It argues that counterinsurgency doctrine aims to prevent spectral networked insurgencies by intervening on the “environment” of insurgent formation—the relations between three different enactments of “population” (species being, logistical life and ways of life) and a fourth—affectively imbued perception. Counterinsurgency is best characterised, then, as an “environmentality” (Foucault M 2008 The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége De France, 1978–1979. Translated by G Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan) that redeploys elements from other forms of biopolitics alongside an emphasis on network topologies, future‐orientated action and affective perception.     

Neocolonial Urbanism? La Rénovation Urbaine in Paris

This paper analyses the programme of redeveloping housing estates in France overseen by the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Under this programme social housing reconstruction is undertaken in a nationally coordinated fashion in order to “valorize”, “secure” and socially “mix” estates. The paper highlights the political and neo‐colonial aspects of this programme and the wider state spatial strategies it is part of. Redevelopment projects not only further gentrifying land‐rent valorization, state rescaling and territorially stigmatizing symbolic violence; they also reorganize territorial relations of domination in multiple, also racialized, neo‐colonial and partly hegemonic ways. In a longer view, they respond to the “urban revolution” of 1968 (Garnier) and to the “anti‐colonial revolution” of independence and anti‐racist movements (Khiari). The paper builds on a framework that articulates marxist (Lefebvrean) and anti‐colonial (Fanonian) lineages while drawing on research on the neo‐colonial aspects of the French state.     

Implementation of Mao Zedong’s Yan’an “Talks” in the Subei Base Area – The Chen Dengke 陈登科 “Phenomenon”

Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” were officially established as the foundation of national policy on culture after the founding of the People’s Republic, but from the very outset they had direct implications for writers and artists in the Communist base areas of the time. As a case study of the implementation of the spirit of Mao’s “Talks” prior to 1949, this paper will discuss how illiterate peasant soldier Chen Dengke (1919–98) was educated by Party cultural cadres in the North Jiangsu (Subei) Base Area, enabling him within the space of just four years to produce a novella and a novel. In order to critically examine the auto/biographical and “slice of life” writings on which this paper relies, brief discussion will be provided of temporal considerations and genre boundaries of this class of writing in the context of the ever-changing political orthodoxy with which writers were required to comply during the Maoist period. The creation of what has been called the Chen Dengke “phenomenon” is not only a fascinating story, but also illustrates the operation of Communist Party cultural policy during the Sino-Japanese and Civil Wars.     

Tannery and Duhem on the Concept of a System in the History of Philosophy and History of Science

ABSTRACT

This article examines John Toland’s Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews (1714) by placing it alongside other elements of his engagement with Jewish history, Mosaic principles and wider “Hebraica” – specifically, an appendix to his Nazarenus (1718) and his Origines Judaicae (1709). Although Toland’s case for Jewish naturalization shows the strong influence of Locke’s case for political and religious toleration, and also of a general “mercantilism”, it is argued that one of its main characteristics is a philosophical naturalism, shown in its treatment of the human species as a whole. Furthermore, it is also argued that this same naturalism is evident throughout Toland’s engagement with Jewish history and Mosaic thought. Accordingly, when we “fold” these works into each other, we find each enhancing our understanding of the others – not just as examples of Toland’s treatment of “Jewish affairs”, but also as illustrations of a consistent conceptual materialism. To emphasize this, the article concludes by suggesting that the figure of Rabbi Simone Luzzatto, author of a 1638 plea for tolerance, provides an important clue in understanding the links between Toland’s political injunctions and the philosophical foundation on which they are built.     

Instrument Transfer as Knowledge Transfer in Neurophysiology: François Magendie's (1783–1855) Early Attempts to Measure Cerebrospinal Fluid Pressure

François Magendie's (1783–1855) experimental model for measuring blood pressure in animals, which he developed in 1838, had a major impact on French physiology in the nineteenth century, especially upon Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) in Paris. In due course it was also adopted by other European investigators, such as the Leipzig physiologist Carl Ludwig (1816–1895), and by clinicians who developed it into a major measuring tool. Historians of science, however, have paid hardly any attention to Magendie's further laboratory investigations conducted with the assistance of Jean-Louis Marie Poiseuille's (1799–1869) sphygmomètre (blood pressure meter). After having used the apparatus to conduct his experiments on a variety of blood vessels, Magendie also applied the sphygmomètre in 1840 to the ventricular system of the brain in order to measure cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pressure. But the scope of this new procedure had yet to be defined: the new measuring device invited many speculative interpretations about the meaning of CSF flow for the physiology of the ventricular system in healthy and diseased brain function. As such, Magendie's experiments produced phenomena in very heterogeneous knowledge areas, and CSF measurement was situated at the interface of quite disparate investigative spaces regarding the structure and function of the brain. In his textbook Leçons sur les Fonctions et les Maladies du Système Nerveux (Lectures on the Functions and Diseases of the Nervous System), Magendie described extending application of the measuring “apparatus of Poiseuille” from blood vessels to parts of the brain. The instrument thus became something of a liquidodynamomètre (liquor dynamometer), that paved the way for later applications, including (after 1896) diagnostic intracranial pressure (ICP) measurement by Theodor Kocher (1841–1917) and Harvey Cushing (1869–1939). The current paper focuses on the experimental contingencies that prompted the instrument transfer in Magendie's laboratory and opened up new epistemological perspectives for research in neurophysiology.     

Shelley’s Jingling Food for Oblivion: Hybridizing High and Low Styles and Forms

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that there was a sense in which Shelley actively approved of “jingling verse.” His poetic energy was sustained by a substratum of popular and tuneful versifying, such as impromptus, bouts-rimés, anagrams, enigmas, ballads, Mother Goose rhymes, proverbs, hymns, and drinking songs. He hybridizes the registers and meters of these humble forms with elevated, sublime, and erudite ones. This hybridization is, arguably, connected to the characteristic coexistence of the direct and clear with the knotty and puzzling in his poetry. After a brief account of Shelley’s submerged youthful reading, noting in passing that Shelley’s lyrics proved amenable during the early twentieth century to recycling as Shelleyesque jingles, the essay illustrates its thesis from unfamiliar fragments in Shelley’s notebooks, such as the late lyric fragment “Time is flying,” and from more familiar matter such as “Dirge for the Year,” “Mont Blanc,” “The Cloud,” “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Sensitive Plant,” “Song: to the Men of England,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Peter Bell the Third.     

Some New Vergilian Loci and Second Thoughts on Old Ones*

I. The text of Ecl. 3.100–102 is discussed and evaluated: quam is defended against quom and Cartault’s proposal [1897. Étude sur les Bucoliques de Virgile. Paris: Armand Colin] Hisce cutes – not adopted by editors and hardly visible in later apparatus critici, but recommended as worthy of attention by Heyworth [2015. “Notes on the Text and Interpretation of Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics.” In Virgilian Studies. A Miscellany Dedicated to the Memory of Mario Geymonat [Studia Classica et Mediaevalia 10], edited by H.-C. Günther, 195–249. Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz] – is both brilliant and necessary. II. Based on grammar and context the abl. risu at Ecl. 4.60 is taken as modal: “Begin, little boy, to recognize (get to know) your mother with your smile”; then the final lines (62–63) must be restored to comply with Quintilian’s figura in numero (9.3.8) as qui risere (plural) followed by hunc “such a one” (singular); this change in number is shown to be in accordance with the use of a generalizing hic to denote quality. – III. At G. 2.22 I propose quos … vias construing reperire with two accusatives. – IV. At G. 2.266–268 I furnish parallels for similem … et as “like to” supporting Heyworth’s mutata … semina. – V. Rejecting my earlier position on A. 9.462–464 I now give a repentant vote in favour of Conte’s punctuation [2009. P. Vergilius Maro. Aeneis [Bibliotheca Teubneriana]. Berlin: De Gruyter] while at the same time adding an argument in its favour.     

Writing,Immigration, and Sex in Dany Laferrière and Kim Thúy

ABSTRACT

Québécois immigrant writers Dany Laferrière’s and Kim Thúy’s first novels, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) and Ru (2009), both thematize the process of coming-to-writing and autofiction in parallel with the tropes of the sexualization of the nonwhite “other” in a global (post)colonial context. This article examines Laferrière’s and Thúy’s starkly different novels to begin to account for the connection between the act of entering literature and the indictment of racial inequality and sexual exploitation.     

“Situated Bystandership” During and After the Rwandan Genocide

The dominant account of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath focuses on victims and perpetrators, and rescapés and génocidaires. Less is known about bystanders, mainly Hutu non-perpetrators, who are held collectively responsible for having witnessed violence without trying to stop the killers or help the victims. This article challenges the homogenous portrayal of the unresponsive bystander group, and introduces the novel concept of “situated bystandership” to draw attention to the proximal and representational contexts that shape bystanders’ responses, roles and positions in society. First, to be a “situated bystander” means to resist the pressure to participate in genocidal violence and to belong to a moral order that is distinct from that of the extremists: the moral world of the ordinary, good-hearted people. Second, Rwandans who are “neither pursuing nor being pursued” occupy multiple roles at different points in time. Many are bystanders to specific episodes of violence and their “acts of non-intervention” shape the course of history. Given the pressure to participate in the genocide, the inaction of bystanders could be considered as passive resistance to the ideology of mass killing. Therefore, in a continuum between victims and perpetrators, bystanders might be positioned closer to the victims than the perpetrators. Third, gacaca is a process through which not only is culpability ascertained but individual innocence is also established. This reconfiguration makes it possible to shift the homogenized perception of Hutu non-perpetrators from the position of the morally guilty bystander group towards that of the individual innocent bystander. In contrast to the tendency to essentialize accounts of violence, homogenize groups and reframe controversial stories to fit political strategies, there is value in standing back and identifying the contexts that shape bystanders’ roles, responses and representations. “Situated bystandership” is a lens through which this objective can be achieved.     

Tacitus and Tacitism in Johannes Meursius’ historia danica (1630–38).∗

The article examines the role of Tacitus in the Latin history of Denmark (1630–38) by Johannes Meursius. It is argued that “Ta‐citism”; ‐ a contemporary movement influenced by Tacitus both as a stylist and as a political writer ‐ is reflected in Meursius’ work in various ways. The first part deals with Meursius’ introduction and his use of Tacitus’ famous avowal of writing sine ira et studio. Next, Meursius’ Latin prose style, with its brevity, antitheses, and paradoxes, is seen in the context of the contemporary “Attic”; movement, which advocated primarily Seneca and Tacitus as prose models. Thirdly, Meursius’ portrait of the Danish king Nicolaus is shown to be inspired by the Tacitean archtyrant Tiberius. Fourthly, it is argued that Meursius also drew extensively on one of the seminal works of Tacitism in Northern Europe, Justus Lipsius’ Política (1589). Finally, the apparently incongruous union of Tacitean cynicism and Meursius’ generally Christian and moralistic outlook is taken up.