A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  As vital as I believe language is to delineating both my experience and my perceptions and to the creation of an autobiographical narrative for my own life, which is indeed a form of fiction—not to speak of the importance of language to making my own fictional narrative art and the characters who populate it—I have found myself intellectually and emotionally dissatisfied with the airy postmodern subjects that seem never to put their feet on the ground. I am equally unhappy with the disembodied abstractions conjured by the logicians on the other side of the Channel, whose mental calisthenics often leave me flabbergasted. Despite the fact that analytical philosophers are endlessly declaring their opposition to Cartesian dualism—that mind and body are of separate stuffs—and fall all over one another to defend various versions of monism, including hard- and soft-line reductionist physicalism and eliminative materialism, the role of the mental and mental states in this thought is as ethereal and intangible as Foucault’s socially constructed bodies.

  We all bodily inhabit the first person, and it is a phenomenological truth that what you see depends upon where you are. Personal perspective is crucial to experience, and fortunately, we are not plants but mobile beings exploring our world. We can literally move around other people and objects and get multiple perspectives on them. And this very dynamism assumes an openness to the world of others and things that changes what we do and what we are. For Merleau-Ponty, the perceiving body is the “I,” and others are lived through this corporeal reality. He underscores a relation between self and other, in which the other is always entwined in the self, although the two are neither identical nor confused. “Between my consciousness and my body as I experience it, between this phenomenal body of mine and that of another as I see it from the outside, there exists an internal relation which causes the other to appear as the completion of the system. The possibility of another person’s being self-evident is owed to the fact that I am not transparent for myself, and that my subjectivity draws its body in its wake.”15 Neither I nor the other person is an open book, and this opacity on both sides is part of our relation. The players in the system partake in both first/second-person engagement and a third-person awareness of their bodies as objects in the world.

  But we can also shift perspective in our imaginations. I am here now speaking to you, no longer back at my desk writing this text. I can actively imagine I am in Morocco, where I have never been, or consciously remember my time in Thailand in 1975, and those shifts into fanciful adventure or into the past happen in part through the flexibility of language—“if I were” and “when I was”—but also in my mental imagery, which can be willed but may also simply appear. A majority of my visual autobiographical memories take place in the first person, but they may arrive as observer memories. I sometimes see my child-self as another—a little girl on her slow and meandering route to kindergarten. Migraine patients have hallucinated their own doubles (autoscopy) walking along beside them. In the images that precede sleep, involuntary hypnagogic hallucinations, I have occasionally seen images of myself. In these unbidden experiences, I inhabit my own subjective position in the here and now but in relation to a second self; it is as if the reflected body, the mirror image, wanders off to become a third-person object, a she.

  The third person, a form of Mr. Nobody, sometimes flies in on a rescue mission to quash the unbearable feeling of first-person experience. In traumatic situations, it is not unusual for people to have out-of-body experiences. An injured child watches himself from the ceiling while he is being beaten by his father. Using Benveniste’s terms, the nonperson shields the first person. The observer floating above the room does not feel pain. Traumatic dissociation, depersonalization, numbing, and detachment are modes of escape from qualia.

  In depersonalization disorder, people feel chronically detached from themselves and from the world. In brain-imaging studies, the feeling or rather lack of feeling in these patients has been linked to subcortical, limbic structures in the brain associated with emotion that appear to be inactive and prefrontal cortical regions associated with the inhibition of emotion that are active. There is a functional corticolimbic disconnection.16 It may be that people who suffer from depersonalization live in a heightened state of vigilance but “have selectively dampened responses to aversive stimuli.”17 When a threat arrives, they unconsciously inhibit emotion. These insights correspond closely to what Pierre Janet, the philosopher-neurologist who worked in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, proposed was involved in dissociation—a split or disconnection in psychobiological systems, through which unbearably painful material is withdrawn from consciousness. “The dissociation bears on the function that was in full activity at the moment of a great emotion.”18

  Immediately after a car accident, I found myself frozen and incapable of movement. This paralysis was accompanied by an odd feeling of detachment, a lack of connection to myself, to others, and to the world. I felt objective, neutral, and unfeeling. The sentences that ran through my head, however, were perfectly formed, highly articulate, and entirely rational. For several hours after the shock of my near death, I might be said to have embodied the tough scientific ideal of perfect objectivity, wholly unpolluted by emotion. Depersonalization disorder is an ongoing pathological condition. A brief episode of freezing or shutting down, of tonic immobility such as I experienced, is a very old evolutionarily conserved mechanism of the parasympathetic nervous system that is activated when a creature is under severe threat and that may help protect the organism from further harm. What an alligator or dog probably doesn’t have, but that you and I have, is an internal narrator that goes on talking, representing the events as they occur, but without an appropriate emotional tone. My narrating “I” was intact, but it was not a familiar “I.” It was distant and unconcerned. My linguistic subject seemed to have floated away on its own, creating a strong sense of unreality because what was missing was not language or narration but something far more primal—the emotions that should have accompanied having just undergone an experience that could have killed me.

  The conditions for the subject’s “emergence” must include more than the narrating “I” or a center of narrative gravity. It must include an actual material body expelled from its own mother’s body in labor to begin a life in the world. Our bodies, our nervous systems, and our brains develop, and they develop in relation to others and to the world, and there are experiences we have that we will never be able speak about but are coded without our awareness in the fabric of our beings. In the beginning there is an organism of blood and muscle and flesh and bone and brain and, if all goes well, it will eventually say “I” to a “you.” It will spin narratives and be spun by them, but the time in human life before enunciation and before self-reflection, before there is even the possibility of an autobiographical narrative self or full-blown speaking “I,” the subject, is also vital to understanding what we are.

  But how does one frame that forgotten experience? Not one of us remembers our early infancy; it is truly a time when qualia, the what is it like to be a baby is missing. What is a newborn? In the history of science and philosophy, the infant has been and remains an object of debate. For Aristotle, the unborn fetus was like a plant and the child was like an animal. The rational human part of the soul developed over time to rule over its irrational side, locus of the appetites and passions. Locke’s famous tabula rasa formulation was about the mind and learning. He knew a physical being was present from the beginning. Hegel maintained that the embryo was there in itself but not yet for itself, a neat distinction that separates being from being a reflectively self-conscious being.

  The advent of brain-imaging technology, especially fMRI, which measures oxygenated blood flow in the brain as an indication of neural activity, is often presented in the popular press as a window into or a photograph of brain function. The methods used to find so-called hot spots of activity in brain regions, however, are complex and open to criticism. This does not make them useles
s or insignificant; it simply means caution is warranted. It is useful to remember that with the aid of new microscopes in the seventeenth century, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek saw “animalcules” in spermatozoa, which led him to believe in the primacy of the sperm in gestation, an idea that led to the homunculi theory: the sperm carried a tiny, fully formed being that just needed a warm place to grow. Leeuwenhoek did not, as the myth has it, assert the existence of a homunculus in a spermatozoon, although he confessed to the fantasy: “Although I have sometimes imagined, that . . . there lies the head, and there, again, lie the shoulders and there the hips, but not having been able to judge of this with the slightest degree of certainty, I shall not, therefore, affirm this as definite.”19 It wasn’t until 1695 when Nicolas Hartsoeker published a drawing of a little man inside human sperm that the homunculus theory took on a life of its own. Nevertheless, Leeuwenhoek and the bolder Hartsoeker saw animalcules. How one interprets magnified images of sperm or the red, blue, and yellow spots on an fMRI is another question. Emotion and one of its offspring, the wish, may easily accompany perception.

  In the beginning, there is a human organism. The homunculi theory has vanished, but innumerable battles about borders, categories, and theory remain. Nevertheless, there is new empirical data about human brain development. How the data is understood, of course, is also a subject of debate, but nevertheless our growing knowledge about the organ is fascinating. From a third-person neuroscience view, when we are born there are parts of our old brain, old in an evolutionary sense, such as the brain stem, a part of the organ we share with much simpler creatures including reptiles, that are quite mature at birth. The brain stem controls homeostatic functions—breathing, heart rate, digestion, sleeping. But other parts of the brain develop enormously after birth. There is an increase in metabolic rate, myelination—the formation of fatty white tissue that insulates brain cells—and synaptic density. There are massive growth spurts in cortical synaptic connections after we are born. “Brain plasticity” refers to the organ’s growth and changes in relation to experience.

  This striking postnatal growth is characterized by the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp with a telling metaphor: “The higher brain,” he writes, “namely neocortex, is born largely tabula rasa.”20 For Panksepp, cognitive functions—perceiving, thinking, reasoning—are experience dependent, but they are built on emotional or affective foundations that are instinctual and mammalian. This position is not unlike Freud’s drive theory, and like drives, Panksepp’s core affective systems are changed and modified by learning, but the range of their flexibility is “constrained by the design features of emotional systems.”21

  Emotion is vital to consolidating memory and therefore to learning. In Synaptic Self, Joseph LeDoux writes, “Because more brain systems are typically active during emotional than during nonemotional states, and the intensity of arousal is greater, the opportunity for coordinated learning across brain systems is greater during emotional states. By coordinating parallel plasticity throughout the brain, emotional states promote the development and unification of the self.”22 Conversely, emotional trauma, especially when repeated, may create conditions for a nonintegrated self or selves, for dissociation, conversions, and many other psychiatric disorders. LeDoux, Panksepp, and Antonio Damasio all have versions of selves with anatomical bases, but they are not identical. The self is a battleground in every discipline, it seems, but wherever one locates the self, it is easy to see how any complex socio-psycho-biological model of self must integrate inside being and outside world, must admit social reality and the acquisition of language into its schemata.

  In Self Comes to Mind (2010), Damasio articulates a hierarchy of internal brain selves: “In the perspective of evolution and in the perspective of one’s life history, the knower came in steps: the protoself and its primordial feelings; the action-driven core self; and finally the autobiographical self, which incorporates social and spiritual dimensions.”23 For Damasio, the speaking subject or “I” would correspond to the autobiographical self, which is highly developed and capable of self-reflection. Exactly when and how this self-reflective mobility of self arrives is open to question. It seems to me that mirror self-recognition—the moment a child is able to recognize his reflection as himself—is pivotal to reflective self-consciousness and is then furthered by his capacity to represent himself in language and consciously imagine himself from a second- or even third-person view as if he were another or an object to himself. Prereflective, preconceptual self-consciousness, however, a sense of me-ness as opposed to you-ness, may well be present from birth or very early in postnatal development and is, as both Panksepp and Damasio maintain, present in some form in other animals. And that sense is not unconscious; it is actively felt, which is why when it disappears or is altered, the self and the world may become alien.

  The baby of contemporary research is not the baby of earlier research. The shift in thinking may be described as a movement from the infant as a borderless isolate who is gradually brought into a world of others and an awareness of his separateness to an inherently social being, a person who from the beginning of life participates in a proto-subject/other-subject dialogue. Both Freud and Piaget conjured a nondifferentiated, asocial baby, but the new newborn, a being without concepts, gender, or an “I,” is nevertheless capable of what is now called “primary intersubjectivity.” Primary intersubjectivity is a pretheoretical, preconceptual interpersonal relation that precedes mirror self-recognition and Benveniste’s pronominal I-you reciprocity of language.

  The discovery that newborns can imitate the expressions of adults and the explosion of research on the dynamics of early exchanges between caretakers and their infants by Daniel Stern, Stein Bråten, Beatrice Beebe, and Colwyn Trevarthen, among others, have reconfigured ideas about early life.24 Protoconversation, that musical exchange of sweet lilting jabber that passes between caretaker and infant, is now subject to rigorous empirical study. In infancy we find ourselves in the cradle of meaning, the dialectic of voices, gestures, and gazes that constitute developing—learned—emotional-cognitive communications or attunements, an early Buberian between-zone, through which a baby becomes herself. The frequent use of the noun “dyad” (for two in one) or the adjective “dyadic” to describe the relation between caretaker and baby points to a reorientation of perspective and a shifting of boundaries in thought about human development.

  The 1991 discovery of neurons in the premotor cortex of the macaque monkey that fire both when an animal acts and when it watches the same action performed by another monkey and the subsequent research on mirror systems in the brains of primates and humans, which confirm that understanding the intention of a seen action is also part of these systems, has lent strong neurobiological evidence for what Vittorio Gallese calls “the shared manifold of intersubjectivity,” a “we-centric” space between self and other that is implicitly understood,25 an idea harmonious with Merleau-Ponty’s statement that “an internal relation” is established “that causes the other to appear as the completion of the system.” In this view, meaning doesn’t begin with the psychological or the mental, with floating conceptual structures, but rather in the sub- or prepersonal reality of a living body in the world that interacts with other living bodies and an environment, and these interactions create loops of between actions.

  The conditions for the emergence of the linguistic subject, the “I” who can skip from one point of view to another, including the one adopted in tough-minded scientific objectivism, are rooted in the faculty that develops from our early prelinguistic, intersubjective, emotionally coded encounters into increasingly flexible symbolic forms, through which we become others to ourselves and project ourselves into multiple imaginary selves and locations. But there is no self without an other, no subjectivity without intersubjectivity.

  Years ago, a psychiatrist friend told me a story I have been thinking about ever since. After she had been to the hairdresser, my friend had a session with a schizophrenic pat
ient. The patient walked into her office, sat down in the chair opposite her, took one look at her head, and said in dismay, “You cut my hair!”

  How do we begin to explicate the borderland between these two? If one is unaware of its context, You cut my hair is an impeccably logical sentence. Its nonsensical quality emerges only when we know that the pronominal dislocation has created a confusion of heads and hair.

  Pronominal deficits in schizophrenia have often been seen as a cognitive disorder of higher thought functions and speech. These have certainly gone awry, but Louis A. Sass argues that schizophrenia involves a more profound form of self-alienation, “a defective preconceptual attunement between the individual and the world.”26 The derangement here is not merely about pronoun use but about a deeper level of selfhood or me-ness in relation to the other. The phenomenal feeling of being here and now, a sense of the lived body as the locus of sensation and action, has been so disturbed that your hair becomes mine. One body seems to have spread to another. In the phenomenological tradition, bodily self-consciousness is prereflective and embedded in a first-person perspective, which involves an operational intentionality, as Husserl put it, or a motor intentionality, as Merleau-Ponty put it. I would call it a motor-sensory-affective intentionality, through which a relation between the person and something or someone in the world is established. In schizophrenia, this relation to the self and the other is defective. As Sass argues, “Persons with schizophrenia demonstrate a . . . fundamental failure to stay anchored with a single frame of reference, perspective or orientation.”27