A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

by Siri Hustvedt

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I

  A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING AT WOMEN

  A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

  Balloon Magic

  My Louise Bourgeois

  Anselm Kiefer: The Truth Is Always Gray

  Mapplethorpe/Almodóvar: Points and Counterpoints

  Wim Wenders’s Pina: Dancing for Dance

  Much Ado About Hairdos

  Sontag on Smut: Fifty Years Later

  “No Competition”

  The Writing Self and the Psychiatric Patient

  Inside the Room

  II

  THE DELUSIONS OF CERTAINTY

  III

  WHAT ARE WE?

  LECTURES ON THE HUMAN CONDITION

  Borderlands: First, Second, and Third Person Adventures in Crossing Disciplines

  Becoming Others

  Why One Story and Not Another?

  I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I Was Blind

  Suicide and the Drama of Self-Consciousness

  Subjunctive Flights: Thinking Through the Embodied Reality of Imaginary Worlds

  Remembering in Art: The Horizontal and the Vertical

  Philosophy Matters in Brain Matters

  Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Truths of Fiction

  Author’s Previously Published Essays

  About Siri Hustvedt

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  IN 1959, C. P. Snow, an English physicist turned popular novelist, gave the annual Rede Lecture in the Senate House of the University of Cambridge. In his speech, “The Two Cultures,” he bemoaned the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” that had opened up between “physical scientists” and “literary intellectuals.” Although Snow acknowledged that well-read scientists existed, he claimed they were rare. “Most of the rest, when one tried to probe for what books they had read, would modestly confess, ‘Well I’ve tried a bit of Dickens,’ rather as though Dickens were an extraordinarily esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer, something like Rainer Maria Rilke.” For the record, Snow’s glib remarks that Dickens’s work is transparent and Rilke’s too opaque to give pleasure, which he implies reflect global literary opinion, strike me as highly dubious. But the man was working his way toward a point. Although Snow regarded the scientists’ lack of literary knowledge as a form of self-impoverishment, he was far more irritated by the characters on the other side of the gulf. He confessed that “once or twice” in a pique, he had asked those smug representatives of what he called “the traditional culture” to describe the second law of thermodynamics, a question he regarded as equivalent to “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” Did the defenders of tradition redden and wilt in shame? No; he reported that their response was “cold” and “negative.”

  Snow called for an overhaul in education to fix the problem. He criticized England’s emphasis on classical education—Greek and Latin were essential—because he was convinced that science held the key to saving the world, in particular improving the plight of the poor. Snow’s resonant title and the fact that his talk precipitated an ugly, personal rejoinder from F. R. Leavis, a noted literary critic of the day, seems to have guaranteed his words a lasting place in Anglo-American social history. I have to say that when I finally read Snow’s lecture and then the expanded version of it, not long ago, I was severely disappointed. Although he identified a problem that has only grown more urgent in the last half century, I found his discussion of it wordy, wan, and a little naïve.

  Few scientists today feel Snow’s need to be protected from snooty “literary intellectuals” because science occupies a cultural position that can only be described as the locus of truth. And yet, in spite of spectacular advances in technology since 1959, Snow’s implacable faith that science would soon solve the world’s problems proved misguided. The fragmentation of knowledge is nothing new, but it is safe to say that in the twenty-first century the chances of a genuine conversation among people in different disciplines has diminished rather than increased. A man who sat on a panel with me at a conference in Germany acknowledged that within his own field, neuroscience, there are serious gaps in understanding created by specialization. He said frankly that although he was informed about his own particular area of expertise, he had any number of colleagues working on projects that were simply beyond his understanding.

  In the last decade or so, I have repeatedly found myself standing at the bottom of Snow’s gulf, shouting up to the persons gathered on either side of it. The events that have precipitated my position in that valley generally fall under that pleasant-sounding rubric “interdisciplinary.” Time and again, I have witnessed scenes of mutual incomprehension or, worse, out-and-out hostility. A conference organized at Columbia University to facilitate a dialogue between neuroscientists working on visual perception and artists was instructive. The scientists (all stars in the field) gave their presentations, after which a group of artists (all art-world stars) were asked to respond to them. It did not go well. The artists bristled with indignation at the condescension implicit in the very structure of the conference. Each bearer of scientific truth gave his or her lecture, and then the creative types, lumped together on a single panel, were asked to comment on science they knew little about. During the question-and-answer period, I made a bid for unification, noting that despite different vocabularies and methods, there really were avenues open for dialogue between scientists and artists. The scientists were puzzled. The artists were angry. Their responses were commensurate with the position they had been assigned on the hierarchy of knowledge: science on top, art on the bottom.

  Many of the essays in this volume draw on insights from both the sciences and the humanities. They do so, however, with an acute awareness that the assumptions made and methods used in various disciplines are not necessarily the same. The physicist’s, the biologist’s, the historian’s, the philosopher’s, and the artist’s modes of knowing are different. I am wary of absolutism in all its forms. In my experience, scientists are more alarmed by such a statement than people in the humanities. It smacks of relativism, the idea that there is no right and wrong, no objective truth to be found, or, even worse, no external world, no reality. But to say that one is suspicious of absolutes is not the same as saying, for example, that the laws of physics do not theoretically apply to everything. At the same time, physics is not complete, and disagreements among physicists are ongoing. Even settled questions may produce more questions. The second law of thermodynamics, the law Snow insisted upon as a sign of scientific literacy, explains how energy will disperse if it isn’t hindered from doing so, why an egg plucked from boiling water and placed on the kitchen counter will eventually cool down. And yet, at the time Snow gave his talk, there were open questions about how this law applied to the origin and evolution of life-forms. In the years following Snow’s lecture, Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian scientist, and his colleagues refined questions about the law in relation to biology and received a Nobel Prize for their efforts. Their research into nonequilibrium thermodynamics led to growing interest in self-organizing systems that has affected science in ways Snow might not have imagined.

  But let us return to the angry artists for a moment. What is knowledge and how should we think about it? The artists felt th
at they had just watched the work they had spent their lives making reduced to either neural correlates in an anonymous brain or a biological theory of aesthetics, which they found startlingly simplistic. I am interested in biological systems and how human perception works. I believe that neurobiology can contribute to an understanding of aesthetics, but it cannot do so in a vacuum. Two central claims I make in this book are that all human knowledge is partial, and no one is untouched by the community of thinkers or researchers in which she or he lives. Gulfs of mutual incomprehension among people in various disciplines may be unavoidable. At the same time, without mutual respect, no dialogue of any kind will be possible among us.

  As a young person, I read literature, philosophy, and history. I also developed an abiding interest in psychoanalysis that has never ceased. I received a PhD in English literature in the mid-eighties. (I wrote my dissertation on Charles Dickens, which no doubt explains my irritation at Snow’s assessment of the writer.) About twenty years ago, I began to feel that my education lacked what I now call “the biological piece.” Like many people immersed in the humanities, I was mostly ignorant of physiology, although as a migraine sufferer I had read a number of books for laypeople about neurology and neurological illness. I was also fascinated by psychiatric disorders and the fluctuations of diagnostic categories, so I was not entirely ignorant of medical history. By then neuroscience research had exploded, and I set out to learn about that much-studied organ: the brain. Although my investigations were not formal, I read enormously, attended lectures and conferences, asked questions, developed a number of friendships with working scientists, and, little by little, what had been difficult and inaccessible to me became increasingly legible. In recent years I have even published a few papers in scientific journals.

  The ascendant position of science in our world, the reason Snow believed science literacy was more important than studying the classics and why the organizers of that conference gave the role of teachers to the scientists and the role of pupils to the artists is due to the tangible results of scientific theories—from steam engines to electric lights to computers and cell phones—none of which should be underestimated. To one degree or another, every person on earth is both a beneficiary and a victim of scientific invention. It does not follow, however, that reading history, philosophy, poetry, and novels or looking at works of visual art or listening to music does not also transform people’s lives, both for better and for worse. Although such changes may be less tangible, it does not render them less real or somehow inferior to the effects of technology. We are all also creatures of ideas.

  Over and over in my forays into the worlds of science, I have been confronted by the adjectives “hard” and “soft” or “rigorous” and “squishy.” “Soft” and “squishy” are terms applied not only to bad scientists, whose methods, research, or arguments fall to pieces because they can’t think well, but also to people working in the humanities and to artists of all kinds. What constitutes rigorous thinking? Is ambiguity dangerous or is it liberating? Why are the sciences regarded as hard and masculine and the arts and the humanities as soft and feminine? And why is hard usually perceived as so much better than soft? A number of the essays in this book return to this question.

  In “The Two Cultures,” Snow continually refers to “men.” He does not mean “man” as a universal, a convention that has all but vanished in the academy due to the rise of feminist scholarship. In academic books and papers, “he” and “man” are no longer routine designations for “human being.” But Snow was not talking about “mankind.” Both his natural scientists and his literary intellectuals are men-men. Although there were women working on both sides of Snow’s articulated gulf in 1959, they do not appear in the lecture. It may help to remember that full suffrage for women in England was not granted until 1928, only thirty-one years before Snow gave his speech. It wasn’t that Snow banished women from the two cultures; it was that for him they simply did not exist in either as speakers.

  Feminist theory is hardly a bulwark of consensus. There has been and continues to be a lot of infighting. It is now safer to refer to “feminisms” than to “feminism” because there are several different kinds, and yet, the disputes that rage inside universities often have little impact in the wider world. Nevertheless, feminist scholars in both the humanities and the sciences have made Snow’s deafness to women’s voices a more difficult position to maintain. The metaphorical ideas of hard and soft, whether articulated or not, continue to inform the two cultures as well as the broader culture that lies beyond them both.

  I LOVE ART, the humanities, and the sciences. I am a novelist and a feminist. I am also a passionate reader, whose views have been and are continually being altered and modified by the books and papers in many fields that are part of my everyday reading life. The truth is I am filled to the brim with the not-always-harmonious voices of other writers. This book is to one degree or another an attempt to make some sense of those plural perspectives. All of the essays included here were written between 2011 and 2015. The volume is divided into three parts, each of which has a guiding logic.

  The first section, “A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women,” includes pieces on particular artists, as well as investigations into the perceptual biases that affect how we judge art, literature, and the world in general. A number of them were commissioned. The title essay was written for a catalogue that accompanied a Picasso, Beckmann, and de Kooning exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, curated by Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, in which only images of women were shown. “Balloon Magic” appeared on Simon & Schuster’s business book site. (Notably, over the course of almost two years, it has not received a single comment.) “My Louise Bourgeois” was delivered as a talk at Haus der Kunst in Munich during the Bourgeois exhibition Structures of Existence: The Cells, curated by Julienne Lorz and on view in 2015. The Broad Foundation asked me to write about Anselm Kiefer for a book about the collection edited by Joanne Heyler, Ed Schad, and Chelsea Beck. The text on Mapplethorpe and Almodóvar accompanied an exhibition at the Elvira González Gallery in Madrid, and the piece on Wim Wenders’s film about the choreographer Pina Bausch was printed in the booklet for the DVD version issued by the Criterion Collection. “Much Ado About Hairdos” appeared in an anthology about women and hair. “Sontag on Smut: Fifty Years Later” began as a couple of pages published online by the 92nd Street Y in New York to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Unterberg Poetry Center and then was expanded into a longer essay. I wrote “No Competition” simply because I had an urge to write it. I gave a more theoretical version of “The Writing Self and the Psychiatric Patient” as a lecture in September 2015 for the Richardson History of Psychiatry Research Seminar at the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, where I now have a position as a lecturer in psychiatry. In it, I discuss the stories of patients I taught when I was a volunteer writing teacher in the locked wards of a psychiatric clinic in New York. I have changed some details to protect the privacy of the writers. “Inside the Room” is an essay about what psychoanalysis has meant to me as a patient. I have given it as a talk in different guises at different times in several countries to groups of psychoanalysts. By and large, the essays in the first part can be read by a broad audience. They vary in tone from light to sober, but no special knowledge is required to read them.

  The second part, “The Delusions of Certainty,” is an essay about the intractable mind-body problem that has haunted Western philosophy since the Greeks. While I was writing it, I wanted above all to communicate to the reader as lucidly as possible that the questions about what a “mind” is as opposed to a “body” remain open, not closed. Early on in my adventures in neuroscience, I found myself asking scientists simple questions. Why do you use the term “neural correlates” or, more puzzling, “neural representations”? What are these neurons correlating to or representing? Why all the computer metaphors for brain actions? They had no clear
answers. To say that the mind-body problem is a vast subject is an understatement, but my purpose in writing the essay was not to summarize the history of the problem or to resolve it; my purpose was to open the reader to ways in which this old philosophical puzzle shapes contemporary debates on many subjects. Although the psyche-soma split is openly discussed in the consciousness wars, more often it is hidden. My mission was to expose the myriad uncertainties that remain with us and further to show that every discipline, hard and soft, is colored by what lies beyond argument—desire, belief, and the imagination.

  As a perpetual outsider who looks in on several disciplines, I have come to understand that I have a distinct advantage in one respect. I can spot what the experts often fail to question. Of course, literacy in a discipline is required before any critical perspective can be taken, and becoming literate requires sustained work and study. The truth is that the more I know, the more questions I have. The more questions I have, the more I read, and that reading creates further questions. It never stops. What I ask from the reader of “The Delusions of Certainty” is openness, wariness of prejudice, and a willingness to travel with me to places where the ground may be rocky and the views hazy, but despite, or perhaps because of, these difficulties, there are pleasures to be found.

  Eight of the nine essays in the third and final section of this book, “What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition,” are talks I gave at academic conferences. The single exception is “Becoming Others,” a piece on mirror-touch synesthesia that I wrote for an anthology on the subject, Mirror Touch Synesthia: Thresholds of Empathy in Art; it will be published by Oxford University Press in 2017 and will include contributions from artists, scientists, and scholars in the humanities. The other texts were delivered to specific audiences in one field or another or at gatherings that included people from several disciplines. When I wrote these speeches, I had the luxury of assuming knowledge on the part of my listeners, which means that some thoughts and vocabulary may be unfamiliar to uninitiated readers. In 2012, I was a Johannes Gutenberg Fellow at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. One of my tasks was to give a keynote lecture at the Annual Convention of the German Association for American Studies. “Borderlands: First, Second, and Third Person Adventures in Crossing Disciplines” addresses the problems every person faces who lives in two or more intellectual cultures. Alfred Hornung, a professor at Mainz, has had a strong interest in facilitating dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, and there is now a PhD program in Life Sciences–Life Writing at the university.