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Introduction
In The Embodied Mind, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and
Eleanor Rosch represent the mind as having two competing cognitive
processes occurring simultaneously. Cognitive processes at the local
level, from the senses, the organs of the body, and the operations of
memory, self-organize or "emerge" into a global state. That global
state may be considered fictional, since it has no being; it does
function, however, to constrain those lower order processes in order to
act in the world as if it were unified and autonomous. These
antithetical cognitive processes may serve to help inform Deleuze and
Guattari's distinction in A Thousand Plateaus between various processes
of "becoming" associated with the senses, the bodily organs and even
nomadic and rhizomatic thought and action, and their crucial concept,
"the body without organs," the operations of which they describe in
terms of two interdependent concepts: striated and smooth spaces. The
first invokes superimposed geometrical constructs, such as "plane of
consistency" and "strata," while the second invokes references to
various contingent processes such as "waves" or "intensities" that flow
through these surfaces and depths in a constant state of becoming.
For Varela, Thompson and Rosch, as well as for Deleuze and
Guattari, it seems that the condition of contingency, which
characterizes processes of self-organization, is always-already becoming
in a non-dialectical relationship with those superimpositions. The
exertions of that part of the Body Without Organs responsible for
striated spaces, in turn, bear resemblance to the ways in which the
unified, autonomous global construct frames and constrains contingency
from within as well as from without - within the individual mind as well
as in cultural machinery. In other words, the Body Without Organs
constitutes a virtual realm undergoing a kind of mental warfare between
competing cognitive styles - a realm which offers us a new way to discuss
aesthetics as well as politics, and the politics of gender as well as
that of ethnicity.
This temporary alliance between philosophy and cognitive science
may be extended further to artistic expression. Through Deleuze's
own work on Francis Bacon, I would like to apply these distinctions to
Kiki Smith's elaborate, technically brilliant constructions often
involving viscera and fetuses dangling from paper or wax human forms.
Kiki Smith's juxtaposition of elegantly wrought human
bodies out of technically difficult materials such as wax over armature,
or handmade paper and paper-maché with the horrific representations of
flowing menstrual blood, dangling fetuses, placenta and viscera,
deliberately engages contradictory mental processes: the calm
disinterest of aesthetic judgment involving standards of harmony,
balance, proportion, as well as an appreciation of complexity and skill;
the literally visceral response often felt not by the head but by the
stomach and intestines experiencing an involuntary response to a horror,
a threat.
Kiki Smith's Wax and Paper Constructions
It's useful to see Kiki Smith's bodies as extending in different
media the tension between aesthetic disinterest and the visceral
response as in her famous series of antiseptic glass jars containing actual
body fluids. The neat containers, labeled in a way to invoke
division/classification systems (Aristotelean phallo-logocentrism), can
barely hide from the viewer the realm of what, from the perspective of
the consumer of the museum space, constitutes the unspeakably degrading
and inhuman. Yet, with her paper and wax figures, we have the added
element of artistic mastery which changes the context from the merely
rational to technically difficult, a mastery exemplified by her Mother
(1992), a bust of a woman's upper torso on a high pedestal made of paper
and paper-maché hands cupped around breasts leaking paper streams of milk
down the pedestal onto the floor in front; or, The Virgin Mary (1990), a
woman's lower torso dangling in mid-air, as if insubstantial like the
hand-made paper from which it is constructed - with a fetus dangling
upside down from its umbilical cord, the head almost touching the floor.
The wax figures, demonstrating a Renaissance-inspired mastery
reminiscent of marble sculpture, likewise have, in the case of Untitled
(Train) (1993), six strands of dark beads streaming from the vulva
behind a complete and voluptuously rendered female figure as if the
figure were in movement with menstrual fluid trailing behind.
What makes these works far more interesting than the series of
antiseptic jars, conceptually as well as artistically, is simply their
engagement with a complex, often disturbing sense of the integrity of
the human body. For, in Kiki Smith's works the human body is portrayed
as whole, and as having holes. Often incomplete, like Duchamp's Étant
Donnés (1968), formed out of insubstantial
materials, and perceived as insubstantial by the viewer because of its
positioning as well as its materiality, the whole body is often given the
sense of a concept rather than a palpable object complete in itself.
Crucially, the insubstantial corpus of the object constitutes an idea of
wholeness rather than its reality, a frame of reference which the
dangling viscera serve to undermine by the breaking of the frame itself.
To what extent is Kiki Smith's loyalty with the local identity of
individual organs and bodily processes (fetus, placenta, menstrual
fluid, intestines), at the expense of the totalizing body itself?
Perhaps, for Smith, the totalized, global body is by nature the site of
colonization by the male gaze. I would like to argue that by invoking
the work of Varela and Deleuze and Guattari, it becomes possible to
understand Kiki Smith's work as a critique of top-down constraints of
the gaze of global cognition by engendering it male, and a celebration
of local cognitive processes emanating even perhaps from specific organs
of the body, by engendering those local processes female.
Now, it is important to say that Kiki Smith's work does not fit
into the category of shock art; on the contrary, she has taken a number
of hits from the world of art critics as well as other artists for her
seemingly complicitous willingness to work within the realms of
conventional aesthetic standards by making commodifiable objets d'art.
Yet, to give her her due, Smith seems to be making the tension within
the mind of the observer of her works the central battleground for her
artistic corpus: between the aesthetic assumptions put into play simply
by accepting the terms of the museum space, and the involuntary response
of disgust and even fear: a fear of violation - certainly a fear of
domination. In this sense, Marcel Duchamp's insistence that the
avant-garde thrust involves a confrontation not with the observer but
with the rhetoricity of the art event as a complicitous meeting of
artist and observer like warring kings at endgame, helps to explain
Kiki Smith's works as an enactment of contradictory cognitive
responses. First, we find a charged response (termed "visceral") that
is both spontaneous and contingent. Second, we find a contemplative
response, ritualized by the consumers' assumption of the categories of
Kantian judgment in the apprehension of the art object within the
reified space of the museum itself. These categories have their origin
in spatio-temporal superimpositions, supposedly a priori, but which have
a social origin and an ideological cast.
Kiki Smith's work has a feminist cast. Her jars, as well as her
paper and wax constructions, both enact and conceptualize a radical
reconsideration of epistemology and gender through an act of terrorism
against the global state's intrusive schematizing of the emotions and of
the rhythms of the body. In effect, Kiki Smith's works seem to apply
gender distinctions to cognitive processes: the striated Body Without
Organs, associated with the top-down superimpositions of the global
state in cognitive science and coded male, more than meets his match
in the organs without bodies that are always becoming, which are
associated with the emanation of local cognitive processes, and coded
female.
This interpretive tactic raises important concerns: how can the
"minortarian" philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (with Felix Guattari) be
applied to feminist praxis? While in the writings by feminists about Kiki
Smith one may find references to the works and writings
of Alice Jardin, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva and
Judith Butler, among others, there is no question that Gilles Deleuze in particular is
practicing grand philosophy, attempting a philosophy of marginality
applicable to a range of those politically marginal, including women.
Now this brief excursion into Kiki Smith's work is not going to finish
the debate over the role of Deleuze's thought for feminist theory, for
example, as played out within Deleuze studies by Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti and
Dorothea Olkowski. It should, however, provide one arena where this
problem might become more precisely visible. Let's examine in greater
detail the link between the cognitive science of Varela, Thompson and
Rosch, and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, in order to bring
home a sense of Smith's art as a form of cognitive terrorism, not
domesticated by its reification in the museum space, but converted to a
form of didacticism employed for the purposes of an engendered,
cognitive ethics.
Cognitive Science, Becoming and the Body Without
Organs
The shift from the top-down computational model to a bottom-up
connectionist or emergent model of cognition, inspired by computer and
information sciences, resulted from the realization of two fundamental
limitations in the computational model. Otherwise known as the Von
Neumann Bottleneck, the first limitation results from the "sequential
rules" (Varela 86) that constrain the processing of symbolic
information; that is, only one rule may be applied at a time. The
second limitation is indicated by the fact that if any loss or
malfunction of even a small number of symbols or rules occurs, the
system often suffers catastrophic failure.
Varela, Thompson and Rosch argue that it was work by Ilya
Prigogine and others in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and non-linear
dynamics in math and physics, that alerted cognitive scientists and
computer scientists to the phenomena of complex systems behavior, and
while they note that there is no unified formal theory of emergent
properties, symptoms of such systems have been identified across
disciplinary boundaries: in each case a network gives rise to new
properties, and the ability to formalize and replicate artificially
those properties, observed in a large variety of physical and cognitive
phenomena, represents a fundamental shift in the understanding of the
functioning of systems generally speaking.
But what makes this shift from the computational model to the
emergent properties model interesting is its ideological as well as
epistemological significance. Let us borrow from Varela, Thompson and
Rosch once again as they explain simply, in terms of three questions,
the distinction between these two paradigms.
The Computational Paradigm:
Question 1: What is cognition?
Answer: Information processing as symbolic computation - rule based
manipulation of symbols.
Question 2: How does it work?
Answer: Through any device that can support and manipulate discrete
functional elements - the symbols. The system interacts only with the
form of the symbols (their physical attributes), not their meaning.
Question 3: How do I know when a cognitive system is functioning
adequately?
Answer: When the symbols appropriately represent some aspect of the real
world, and the information processing leads to a successful solution of
the problem given to the system (42).
The Emergent Properties Paradigm:
Question 1: What is Cognition?
Answer: The emergence of global states in a network of simple
components.
Question 2: How does it work?
Answer: Through local rules for individual operation and rules for
changes in the connectivity among the elements.
Question 3: How do I know when a cognitive system is functioning
adequately?
Answer: When the emergent properties (and resulting structure) can be
seen to correspond to a specific cognitive capacity - a successful
solution to a required task (99).
What makes this distinction interesting from the perspective of
ideology can be summed up as follows: for the first, the emphasis is
placed on the total control of the trajectories of symbolic
manipulation; any loss of control brings down the computational house.
For the second, the emphasis is placed on the connections among elements
of systems, the deliberate relinquishing of control of those elements,
and the observance of the contingent emergence of new forms of order
among the connected elements that might not necessarily be predicted.
The top-down exertion of control, and the contingencies of
bottom-up emergence represent epistemological and ideological stances
toward cognitive functioning, and in the study of human cognition, there
is no question that both processes go on simultaneously, and perhaps
even at cross purposes. I would like to argue that, of all social
philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have played out the
ideological implications of these two styles of cognitive functioning,
and I would like to move from cognitive science to their social
philosophy, using the art work of Kiki Smith to help visualize their
applications of the principles of cognitive science to social
philosophy, and more specifically, to the engendering of these cognitive
styles.
Becoming and the Body Without Organs
Deleuze and Guattari's "rhizome" exemplifies the emergent
state with its principles of 1) connectivity, which describes the capacity
to aggregate; 2) heterogeneity, as in the coordination of unlike
elements; 3) multiplicity with respect to the connections, the
variability of which is at a maximum; 4) asignifying rupture (allowing
the system to function despite local breakdowns); 5) cartography as
inadequate representational form ("a rhizome cannot be reduced to a
structural or generative model"); 6) decalcomania, or the condition of
infinite flexibility and adaptability and resistance to rigidity.
Specifically associated with all "manner of becomings," (TP 8-21), the
rhizome exemplifies one style of cognitive and social functioning that
resists domination and determination, which are exemplified by the
radical-system, or fascicular root (5) "to which our modernity pays
willing allegiance," and represented by "binary logic and biunivocal
relationships" that ideologically dominate linguistics, structuralism,
and until recently, "information science." But these two cannot engage
in a Hegelian struggle to the death:
You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a
danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify [everting]
formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that
reconstitute a subject - anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to
fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just
waiting to crystalize (9-10).
For Deleuze and Guattari, the answer to domination by rigid
calcification and binary determinism in the trajectories of symbols, as
well as in the behavior of human beings, lies in the in-difference of
emergent aggregative forms as they interpenetrate yet remain beyond the
grasp of those crystaline structures within and without the single
cognizing subject. It becomes a question of a subject or collectivity's
style of functioning whether it obeys one set of laws or another: these
laws exist simultaneously and interpenetrate extensively.
The laws which govern the in-different emergence of aggregating
forms are called collectively Becoming (Becoming-Intense, Becoming
Animal, Becoming Imperceptible) and they become complicated in terms of
the stages by which aggregating forms (woman-child-animal-molecule) may
begin to localize as a site of aggregation, begin to evolve under the
stress of external conditions, and then learn to function under the
condition of in-difference.
The psycho-social condition under which the radical-system
dominates and seeks to control the various becomings is called The Body
Without Organs, and it refers to what might be called a preexisting
condition of wholeness: in other words, the Body Without Organs is the
Global State itself, a "field of immanence" (154), the reductio absurdum which is
the schizophrenic dream of the rubber body suit without any holes to breathe, eat,
defecate. Consistently described in terms of the spherical wholeness of
the egg prior to the complete formation of the embryo, in terms of
hierarchical strata and of planes of consistency through which rhizomes
must propagate but only by avoiding detection, the Body Without Organs
specifies the procedures by which the exertion of constraints on various
becomings occur. Philosophically represented by Spinoza's ethics,
psychoanalytically by the analyst's intrusion in the imaginary and
symbolic formations of the patient, represented by the betrayal of
desire in the form of the hypochondriac body, the schizo body, the
drugged body, the masochist body, the Body Without Organs can be
understood simply as the superimposition of constraints on the lower
order cognitive processes emanating from the organs of the body, from
the autonomic, circulatory and immune systems. Just as the rhizome and
its laws of becoming exemplify the conditions of emergence, the striated space
within the Body Without Organs exemplifies the strict rigidity of the computational
model of cognitive functioning, schematic modelings, structural
representations, and geometrical constructions of time in the formalist
obsessions of art and music.
What becomes interesting is how we might apply the ideological
tensions generated by these competing cognitive styles to the context of
aesthetics. In modern art, the writings and paintings of Kandinsky (On
the Spriritual in Art; Point of Line to Plane) pays homage to the field
of immanence as a field of force, and incidentally to the suppression of
that desiring field through geometric superimpositions. Here,
Kandinsky's model can be compared usefully as an extension of Kant's
insistence on the a priori categories superimposed upon the manifold of
consciousness in the realm of the imagination and structured further by
the intrusions of the judgment.
For Deleuze and Guattari, these a priori categories are a
specific manifestation of the striations coextensive with the Body
Without Organs, which comes under threat only in the catastrophic
breakdown in the cognizing models that enable the subject to function in
the world. I'm speaking, of course, of Henri Poincaré's demonstration of
the social origin of geometry in physics, and Bergson's complementary
critique of the spatialization of duration during acts of cognition, a
critique which insists on the social and ideological origin of those a
priori categories.
Historically, Henri Poincaré and Henri Bergson's work provided a
major part of the ideological underpinning for avant-garde tactics of
resistance to habitual frames of reference, and, in the case of the
works of Marcel Duchamp, to even the conditions under which the
aesthetic engagement might take place. In the works of Kiki Smith, we
find specific acts of terror committed in resistance to the striations
of the Body Without Organs, with reference to the fascism of the Body
Politic at the level of the socius, with reference to the engendering of
cognitive styles at the level of the individual subject. In her
confrontation with the body itself, through the representation of
viscera and the triggering of the visceral response, we find an
enactment of the tension between global domination and local
in-different becomings. But this confrontation is not simply
terroristic; Kiki Smith's work enacts the confrontation within the mind
of the art consumer engaged in the process of aesthetic cognition. The
visceral work of her bodies without organs without bodies therefore
engages simultaneously with instruction as well as confrontation - what
we might call a didactics of visceral judgment, an awakening to the
voices of the parts of a body, under erasure by a totalizing
consciousness, but which continue to speak out of turn.
Martin E. Rosenberg is an
assistant professor of critical theory in the Department of English at
Eastern Kentucky University.
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