THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION:
FRANCISCO VARELA AND GERTRUDE STEIN
In a recent essay* on the "neurophenomenology" of "the specious present," the Chilean, Paris-based neuroscientist Francisco Varela proposed a three-part analytic structure for the "complex texture" of "time in experience," as distinct from the time measured on a clock:
There is the "level proper to temporal objects and events in the world," which grounds
physical and computational temporality (clock time);
there is the level "based on the ‘internal time’ [of the] acts of consciousness that
constitute [these] object-events";
and finally there is the level characterized by Edmund Husserl as the "absolute time[-]
constituting flow of consciousness," in which the distinction between the external and the internal collapses–that is to say, between the object-events, on the one hand, and "the acts of consciousness that constitute them," on the other.
The mere fact that "time in experience presents itself . . . as having a complex texture," Varela argued, offers prima facie "evidence that we are not dealing with a ‘knife-edge’ present," as William James characterized the present of clock time. Four decades ago, Richard Rorty remarked that "time cannot be taken seriously until one ceases to think of the present as a knife-edge and begins to think of it as an extended duration," and this is precisely what Varela set out to do, proposing three "scales of duration" as well as a like number of "scales of affect"– "homologous" to but not "isomorphic" with the scales of duration ("Matter and Event," 520).
Basically, Varela was saying that taking time seriously obliges one to take affect seriously; and in this he proved to have a great deal more in common with James than he acknowledged in his essay, or perhaps than he was aware. For, as is widely known, James had a rather provocative theory of emotion, and was himself so provoked by the theory that he spent the last fifteen years of his career (as professor of philosophy rather than of psychology) extending it to all manner of conscious experience, in particular investigating how feeling functions in acts of knowing–any kind of knowing, however farfetched the claims made for it. At the heart of James’s radical empiricism, as he termed this ontological and epistemological extension of the James-Lange theory of emotion, was the claim that the distinction between knower and known (Varela’s "internal time consciousness" and durative "object-events," say) was only determined by the subsequent addition of some "context of associates": one way or another of contextualizing the experience, which in itself, in the actual present, knows no such division. If this sounds suspiciously like Varela’s third analytic level–the level pertaining to the so-called "absolute time[-]constituting flow of
consciousness," absolute because the "underlying" form of "temporalization" associated with it is "relatively independent of . . . particular content"–that is just the way I want it. For in its philosophical orientation Varela’s neurophenomenology is radical empiricist, however much or however little he may actually have been exposed to Jamesian pronouncements.
In any case, for the purposes of today’s paper I am just going to assert Varela’s and James’s common radical empiricism. What really interests me, aside from Varela’s analysis of the neurophysiological connection between affect and temporality, are his occasional references to the writing of his essay. These references aren’t just occasioned, in the sense of being a mere byproduct of the fact that he was writing an essay; they are exemplary, with the writing regarded as an example of what he was writing about. In Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, I argue for the centrality, within the radical empiricist tradition, of Stein’s experimental compositions in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. This centrality is due, first, to the extensive training in neuroanatomy that she acquired during five years at Johns Hopkins Medical School (on top of the much-remarked years of training in physiological psychology at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory with James and Hugo Münsterberg), and, second, to the extreme concentration with which she attended to the experience of writing in her literary experiments–a degree of attention far greater than that of fellow radical empiricists such as James or Alfred North Whitehead or Ludwig Wittgenstein among the philosophers. So what I am going to do today is to look at Varela’s references to his own writing in the context of the argument he made concerning the relation between temporality and affect, and then I will give you ever so briefly some examples of Stein’s writing to consider from this angle. Where does writing fit into Varela’s scheme? Where does Stein’s writing fit into the scheme?
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Varela referred to his writing three times, once near the beginning of the essay and twice in quick succession near the end. The first reference occurs in the second of the essay’s eight sections–"Lived Time is not Physical-Computational," it is called–and immediately after the allusion to the "knife-edge" present I have already cited. "In a first approximation," Varela wrote, the complex texture of time as it is experienced "can be described as follows: There is always a center, the now moment with a focused intentional content (say, this room with my computer in front of me on which the letters I am typing are highlighted)." "This center," he continued, "is bounded by a horizon or fringe that is already past (I still hold the beginning of the sentence I just wrote), and it projects toward an intended next moment (this writing session is still unfinished)." End of sentence, certainly not end of story. For, as Varela went on to observe, the horizons are themselves "mobile": "This very moment which was present (and hence was not merely described, but lived as such) slips toward an immediately past present. Then it plunges further out of view: I do not hold it just as immediately, and I need an added depth to keep it at hand." This summary suggests most of the topics Varela would discuss in the remainder of the essay: the roles of retention and protention in present experience, for instance; the flow of consciousness; the three scales of duration–that is to say, the 1/10 scale of elementary events, such as the cellular rhythms of neuronal discharges (falling within a range of 10 msec to 100 msec), the 1 scale of completed cognitive acts (on the order of a few seconds), and the 10 scale of "descriptive-narrative assessments." There is the "now moment," with its "focused content"–in this case, Varela’s immediate environment and the letters he is typing highlighted on the computer screen–the "just-past," consisting of the beginning of the sentence he has just composed, and, on a considerably larger scale of the enduring present, the assessment that the current writing session has not yet been completed. This is all fine, at least as I have rephrased it, but is it quite as unproblematic when one takes Varela’s own phrasing into consideration?
1. "There is always a center, the now moment with a focused intentional content (say, this room with my computer in front of me on which the letters I am typing are highlighted)." Is there a problem here in that it remains unclear whether Varela was describing what he was looking at as he was typing or what he was looking at, having stopped typing (which he then resumed in order to type the parenthetical description)? In other words, the description of "focused intentional content" is limited exclusively to the writing on the screen and tells us nothing about Varela’s own neurophysiological experience of writing. Here an activity is reduced to a picture, to the sort of thing that can indeed be captured on a screen.
2. "This center is bounded by a horizon or fringe that is already past (I still hold the beginning of the sentence I just wrote) . . ." But does Varela still hold the beginning of the sentence he just wrote ("This center is bounded," etc.) as he writes the parenthetical interpolation, "I still hold the beginning of the sentence I just wrote"? I am not asking whether he has exceeded his time limit–you’ll recall that he is addressing duration of the 1 scale sort here, that is, on an order of seconds–but what sort of experience are we dealing with when one sentence interrupts another? What sort of temporality is at work here?
3. To reiterate: "This center is bounded by a horizon or fringe that is already past (I still hold the beginning of the sentence I just wrote), and it projects toward an intended next moment (this writing session is still unfinished)." Perhaps I should rephrase the last question: What sort of temporality is at work when a sentence is interrupted by not one but two sentences? Indeed, one might wonder what model for writing is suggested by the double consciousness displayed here, the "double intentionality" (a phrase Varela took over from Husserl) involved in simultaneously describing the temporal experience of writing and the "complex texture" of "time in experience"? What model for writing is suggested, in other words, when one species of "focused intentional content" (everything pertaining to writing) serves as an exemplification of the other (everything pertaining to lived time) even as the former provides commentary on the very medium in which the latter has, it so happens, been articulated? Finally, what are we to make of the analogy implicit in Varela’s remarks, of letters and words representing the 1/10 scale of duration, sentences the 1 scale, and writing sessions the 10 scale?
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I think I can be a bit more concise in discussing the other two occasions in which Varela described himself writing, because in these instances he really was describing his own activities and not just describing the writing. Both references occur in the section of the essay chiefly concerned with affect, and in particular with the affective dimension that accompanies the perception of "self-motion" or "generic instability." On the first occasion, he was addressing the way "malfunctions and breakdowns" serve to interrupt "unreflective absorption" in the world–what he called "transparency"–interrupting as well the accompanying "flow of action." "If, as I write this," he speculated, "I hit a control key, and I am shown a message saying ‘Do you really wish to erase this text?’ I find myself deliberately avoiding pressing the ‘OK’ button, in an emotional tone of hope and tension. The awareness of the possibility of making a fatal mistake breaks into the present, triggering a (more or less marked) shattering of transparency. In parallel, a new stance in ongoing coping emerges: I deliberately click on the ‘Cancel’ button." Once again, the reference to writing serves as an instance of double intentionality, where the writer’s absorption in what he was writing about is interrupted by an obligation to think about what he was doing in so writing. It is also a particularly interesting example of a multistable perception, that is, an image which can be regarded as alternately depicting two distinct objects, such as Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit or the hallway-pyramid Varela himself introduced earlier in the essay. Only, here one of the objects is the piece of writing (or the computer screen with the image of writing on it) and the other is the "focused intentional content" of the writing, interrupted by the need to attend to the writing on the screen as such. In other words, the perception is multistable although it isn’t exactly a "multistable visual perception," like the examples discussed by Varela throughout his essay. What interested him in all such instances was that they displayed "a ‘depth’ in time, an incompressible duration" which made the transition from one punning object to the other "perceptible as a sudden shift from one aspect to the other, and not as a progressive sequence of incremental changes"–the sort of transition beautifully exemplified, say, in Gertrude Stein’s predilection for terms that serve multiple grammatical functions (as in "Might it be left after all where they left / left right left"). At the beginning of this section Varela had noted that "when visual perception shifts abruptly," it is "accompanied by a (more or less distinct) emotional change," exactly how he then imagined the message "Do you really wish to erase this text?" affecting him. "I find myself deliberately avoiding pressing the ‘OK’ button, in an emotional tone of hope and tension."
By th same token, "the loss of transparency is never distant from a dispositional affective tone," Varela added, although the "different degrees of breakdown in transparency and the multiple manners in which it happens opens a panoply of affective tonalities: fear, jealousy, anger, anxiety, self-assurance, and so on." It was with this range in mind that he distinguished between emotion and affect. Emotion, as he used the term, was a specific kind of affect–namely, "the tonality of the affect that accompanies a shift in transparency"–whereas affect, properly speaking, was "a broader dispositional orientation which will precondition the emotional tone that may appear." Hence emotion involved "the awareness of a tonal shift that is constitutive of the living present," and affect was "a dispositional trend proper to a coherent sequence of embodied actions." It should come as no surprise, then, that in order to illustrate this distinction (along with the third affective scale, "mood," which "exists at a scale of narrative description over time"), Varela turned to the activity he was currently engaged in, writing: "As I write now," he wrote, "I have a dispositional atttitude that engages me in a[n] anticipation of writing and shaping my thoughts into sentences." (This is affect proper.) "As I write this word now, the disposition is colored by an emotional charge, a moderate resentment for not finding the proper expression. But that emotional tone appears against a background of exalted mood of a productive day devoted to finishing this text."
Generally speaking, in Gertrude Stein’s massively dissociative writing, the emotional scale–that is to say, "the awareness of tonal shift that is constitutive of the living present"–is heightened and the scales of affect (lending coherence to sequentiality) and mood (which provides the narrative underpinning) are correspondingly muted. If, as I argue in Irresistible Dictation, deliberate error, whether in the extreme form of non sequitur or in something like the left-left example I have just cited, functions as the basic compositional device in Stein’s radically experimental writing, this is because, as Varela observed, "the awareness of the possibility of making a mistake breaks into the present, triggering a (more or less marked) shattering of transparency." In Stein’s writing, the shattering is "more" marked, yet it is experienced as freely chosen rather than as fatal. ("The possibility of making a fatal mistake," Varela had written.) I will conclude, then, all too quickly, with a pair of passages illustrating Stein’s neurophysiological imagination at work, as she sought to "find out," as she explained in a 1934 lecture, "how I by the thing moving excitedly in me can make a portrait" of "what is moving inside" the person or personlike object she was currently contemplating. I take these lines from one of her better-known works, Four Saints in Three Acts, although any of the hundreds of works she composed between 1912 and 1932 would serve equally well:
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* Francisco J. Varela, "The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness." Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Ed. Jean Petitot, Francisco Varela, Bernard Pachoud, Jean-Michel Roy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.