Steven Meyer

WritingScience

 

Title: "The Neurophysiological Imagination: Francisco Varela and Gertrude Stein"

Abstract: In a recent essay, "The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness," the neuroscientist Francisco J. Varela provides a three-part analytic structure for the "complex texture" of time as it is experienced (by contrast with how it is measured on a clock), and hence of the neurophysiological connection between affect and temporality. The present talk considers Varela's argument from three angles:

  1. the extent to which several allusions to William James in the essay ("the specious present," a "knife-edge" present) suggest an alignment between Varela's "neurophenomenological" position and James's well-known theory of emotion as well as, more generally, his radical empiricism;
  2. the role played, in the context of Varela's argument concerning the relation between temporality and affect, by several references he makes to the writing of his own essay, with the writing regarded as an example of what he is writing about;
  3. the relation between Varela's understanding of writing and Gertrude Stein's, especially in the context of the extensive training in neuroanatomy she acquired during five years at Johns Hopkins Medical School (following her much-remarked investigations, with James and others, of physiological psychology at the Harvard Psychology Laboratory).

The talk will conclude with a definition and a demonstration: a definition of what I am calling the neurophysiological imagination, and a demonstration of how several passages from one of Stein's better-known works, Four Saints in Three Acts, display a remarkable neurophysiological imagination at work.

 

Bio: Steven Meyer teaches modern poetry and modern intellectual history at Washington University in St. Louis. He was an external fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in 1999-2000, and in 2001 his study IRRESISTIBLE DICTATION: GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE CORRELATIONS OF WRITING AND SCIENCE was published by Stanford University Press. He is currently working on two projects: a study of modern poetry entitled RHYTHMS OF THOUGHT: TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETRY AFTER THE FACT and a second volume on Stein, deepening and broadening the discussion of neuroscience in IRRESISTIBLE DICTATION, with the working title GERTRUDE STEIN AMONG THE NEUROSCIENTISTS.