. Introduction . On the Possibilities for a Deep History of Humankind . From Transatlantic Histories of “Intoxication” to a
Hemispheric “War on Affect”: Paradoxes Unbound
. Discussion of Smail and Herlinghaus Papers
. What Is Cultural Economy?
. Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge . Discussion of Poovey_and Presner Papers
. Music, Biological Evolution, and the Brain
. An Essay on Neurohistory
. Discussion of Patel, Sheingorn, and Smail Papers . Roundtable Discussion
. Participant Biographies
Introduction
In 2006, the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, along with the University of Chicago, held a conference entitled “The Fate of Disciplines.” Grounded in the long history of disciplinarity in the academy, the conference sought to theorize relations between residual and emergent disciplines and to contemplate the future shape and texture of disciplinary formations and the university structures that contain (and, some would say, constrain) them.
The conference’s keywords set the terms of discussion. More than fixed “content” or objects of study, and not reducible to a “method,” academic disciplines tend to exist in uneasy relation to the institutional structures, such as departments or schools, created to administer them. Conference speakers concluded that disciplines, neither separable from nor reducible to such institutional moorings, exist in tension with the institutional structures that sustain them, and it is in this tension that their transformative promise lies.
The other keyword, “fate,” signaled a sense of the foreordained, predetermined nature of the disciplines’ future—a future that is in some way a destiny, fixed in the natural order of the cosmos, and a natural outgrowth of the past. As Andrew Abbott observes in Chaos of Disciplines (2001), calls for disciplinary change and transformation have been part of the American university system since the 1920s. Indeed, such calls have been one of the academic disciplines’ most enduring characteristics. Over a quarter century ago, Clifford Geertz observed how disciplinary boundaries had dramatically blurred even in his lifetime, and he concluded in 1980 that the procedures then used to analyze our objects of study had merged to the point of forming what he termed “a vast continuous field of interpretation.” The modern American research university came into being from 1880 to 1910, with Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, and Rice as examples. This event coincided with the emergence of major professional associations governing the disciplines, including the Modern Language Association in 1883, the American Historical Association in 1884, and the American Anthropological Association in 1902.
But challenges to these disciplinary formations of the research university and the professional association were almost immediate. Interdisciplinary committees were common on university campuses by the 1940s, and emendations of the disciplinary system in the form of area studies emerged during the same decade. The enduring intellectual lure of what often were termed "shadow disciplines" has led scholars from Lynn Hunt to Judith Butler to caution against wholesale rejection of traditional disciplinary forms. As Hunt reminds us, it is the certainty of disciplinary borders that makes new disciplinary configurations imaginable. New practices, according to Hunt, will not mean anything if the humanities dissolve into an “undifferentiated pool of cultural studies.” Butler expressed concern that eroding the prominence of well-established disciplinary structures such as departments enables the erosion of professional norms like tenure, academic freedom and faculty dissent.
As “The Fate of the Disciplines” made clear, while relations between residual and emergent fields are anything but settled, these relations are part of larger historical fluctuations that aren’t going to be resolved anytime soon. The fate of disciplines, then, is to be internally bound up in these larger institutional processes.
The September 2009 symposium “Emerging Disciplines” and this collection of its expanded presentations attend to a slightly different set of concerns. The focus here is less on the waxing and waning of the disciplinary moon and more on those forms of knowledge that do not fit comfortably or even uncomfortably within the disciplinary regimes that have evolved over the last hundred years.
C. P. Snow coined the phrase “two cultures” to capture the idea that there are two cultures in the structure of knowledge that root themselves into different, often opposing camps, with regard to the set of epistemological presuppositions they employ. Snow coined the term in 1959, but the phenomena he was describing are, of course, much older. The idea that there are two cultures was a creation of the modern world; this concept was gradually institutionalized in universities. At the end of the eighteenth century, most scientists, as Eric Mielants observes, did not see religion and science as incompatible knowledge systems; it was transformations within
the European university system that gradually isolated knowledge practitioners into different camps. In 1795, the Institut de France, for example, designated the natural sciences, literature and the arts, and the social sciences as belonging to distinct and different intellectual spheres. Meanwhile, the rise of specialized journals and the exclusion of the amateur nobleman from the scientific community after 1850 were part of a reallocation of intellectual resources for the new university, which acquired almost complete monopoly over the production and dissemination of knowledge by the end of the nineteenth century.
Thus, as Immanuel Wallerstein and Richard Lee observed, this two-culture formation is itself a product of modernity, and a longer view reveals that knowledge organization did not always fit neatly in the disciplinary boxes we have created in modern times. But such habits of thought are currently being revisited, and epistemological debate about the kind of intellectual- built environment that will most effectively support knowledge production and dissemination has become a topic of central concern.
This is our concern here, and the following papers will, in different ways, ask us to consider the following: What new ways of knowing become available when we leave assumptions about disciplinary order behind? What environmental circumstances give rise to new knowledge practices, and how might these practices alter disciplinary modes of knowledge production? And finally, what knowledge do we need to acquire to think effectively about the disciplinary models, like “two cultures,” that have served as central pillars of modern knowledge systems? While these papers examine a broad range of research questions and approaches, each has unanticipated points of overlap with others. These points of convergence, originating from what our current institutional structures have encouraged us to see as distinct realms, become evident when disciplinary boundaries are pressed upon and when disparate fields are brought together in temporary but potentially far-reaching collaborative exchange.
Bibliography
Abbott, Andrew Delano. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Butler, Judith. “Critique, Consent, Disciplinarity.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 773-795.
Chandler, James and Arnold I. Davidson, (Eds.) The Fate of Disciplines. Issue of Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009).
Geertz, Clifford. "Blurred Genres: the refiguration of social thought," American Scholar 49 (1980): 165-179.
Hunt, Lynn. “The Virtues of Disciplinarity.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.1 (1994): 1-7.
Lee, Richard E. and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein. Overcoming the Two Cultures: Science versus the Humanities in the Modern World-System. London: Paradigm, 2004.
Mielants, Eric. “Reaction and Resistance: The Natural Sciences and the Humanities 1789-1945.” In: Lee, Richard and Wallerstein, Immanuel (Eds.) Overcoming the Two Cultures: Science versus the Humanities in the Modern World-System. London: Paradigm, 2004. 34-55.
Snow, C.P. Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Cambridge UP: 1993.
On the Possibilities for a Deep History of Humankind
In the mid-nineteenth century, as the great French historian Victor Duruy sat down to revise the general history of the world text used in French schools, he found himself facing a question few historians since antiquity had had to contemplate: when should history begin? “Scarcely twenty or thirty years ago,” he wrote, “unexpected discoveries have forced us to break all the old systems of chronology.” [footnote] He was alluding to the time revolution that began in 1859, when the short Biblical chronology, over the space of a decade or so, was abandoned as a geological truth.[footnote] To the new geology was joined the new archaeology, an approach to the past that challenged the very framework of history’s chronology. “A science born yesterday,” Duruy wrote, “has pushed the birth of humanity back to an age where the measure of time is no longer given by means of a few generations of men, as it is today, but instead by hundreds of centuries.”[ footnote] His predecessors had all written in the comfortable certainty that human history was as old as the earth, and that both began in a moment of creation in 4004 B.C. Not twenty years earlier, Duruy himself had published a new edition of a sacred history according to the Bible.[footnote] When he took up the task of revising world history for the French curriculum, he was one of the first historians to stand on the precipice of time, contemplating, in his own words, “an obscure and terrifying antiquity.”[footnote |
Victor Duruy, Abrégé d’histoire universelle, comprenant la révision des grandes époques de I’histoire depuis les origines jusqu’a 1848, nouvelle édition (Paris: Hachette, 1873), 3: “Il y a vingt ou trente années seulement que des découvertes inattendues ont forcé de briser tous les vieux systémes de chronologie.”
Important studies of the time revolution include Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (New York: Harper Row, 1965); Claude Albritton, The Abyss of Time: Changing Conceptions of the Earth's Antiquity after the Sixteenth Century (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1980); Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Thomas R.
Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. 32-35 and 205-30.
Duruy, Abrégé, 4: “Cette science née d’hier a donc reculé la naissance de lhumanité vers une €poque ot! la mesure du temps n’est plus, comme de nos jours, donnée par quelques générations d’>hommes, mais ou il faut compter par des centaines de siécles.”
Victor Duruy, Histoire sainte d’aprés la Bible, 2™ ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1856).
Duruy, Abrégé, 4: “une vague et effrayante antiquité.” The question of how French historians responded to the challenge of deep time has been little studied, to my knowledge. For the situation in the United States and England, see Daniel A. Segal, “Western Civ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 770-805, and Doris Goldstein, “Confronting Time: The Oxford School of History and the Non-Darwinian Revolution,” Storia della Storiografia 45 (2004): 3-27.
When Duruy’s concise universal history was published in 1873, the field of history stood at a crossroads. What the Comte de Buffon had once called “the dark abyss of time” (le sombre abime du temps), clearly, was not an abyss. It was more like a rift valley, with new land unmistakably visible on the other side. As an awareness of deep human time filtered into the practice of history during the waning decades of the nineteenth century, general historians like Duruy found ways to acknowledge the new findings. But they had no idea what to do with them, because deep human time did not fit the pre-existing frame used in the field of history.
By the 1930s, historians had come to a jury-rigged solution, resolving the problem of narrative by using the idea of the “Neolithic Revolution” to claim that human history itself came into being with the invention of agriculture and civilization.[footnote] For the preceding half-century, however, historians floundered. In Duruy’s case, the few token paragraphs he devoted to humanity’s deep time were grafted clumsily onto the front end of the history.[footnote |
V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London: Watts, 1936).
I have explored some of these issues at greater length in On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
Today, the gulf between history and prehistory is no longer terrifying, but it remains nearly as deep as it was in 1873. The inability to close the breach in time was one of the signal failures of history-writing in the twentieth century. In the decades after 1960, the field of history gradually set about the task of recuperating histories that had been invisible to previous historians writing in the Judeo-Christian tradition: histories of women, peasants and workers, marginals, minorities, subalterns, and all those whom Eric Wolf once called the “people without history.”[ footnote] These moves have enriched the field. But because the peoples of the Paleolithic “belonged” to another discipline—archaeology—they remained invisible to the historian's eye. Because their culture is extinct, moreover, the peoples of the Paleolithic aren’t a visibly suffering minority and have no need for justice. This political state of non-being renders them uninteresting to historians moved by advocacy.
Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
If the discipline we call History is a political discipline designed to explain the modern condition, then there is little need for a deep history. But if History is an anthropological discipline designed to explain the human condition, as I believe, there is an urgent need to recuperate the history of Paleolithic peoples, to bring them into the purview of historical studies in the same way that we have brought in Incans, Africans, peasants, and all the peoples who have been denied historicity. This is the task of deep history.
A deep history is any history framed in the full spectrum of the human past, from the present day back to early hominins, australopiths, and beyond. A deep history is not just the study of the Paleolithic era, or everything before the turn to agriculture. Archaeologists and paleoanthropologists already do that. It is instead a philosophical perspective, an invitation to contemplate the entire span of human history within a single frame and treat it as part of the same narrative. For this reason, particular histories focusing on narrower spans of more recent time can contribute to deep history as long as they frame questions in the right way. Deep histories are genealogies. As genealogies, they span the narrow evidentiary bases and the methodological rules that have cut human history into isolated segments.
In the reflections below, I shall begin with a brief historical analysis of why the short chronology typical of the study of history was maintained, with rare exceptions, across the twentieth century. I offer this study on the grounds that the task of designing a deep history will be clearer if we understand why it has taken so long for historians to accept the full implications of the time revolution of the 1860s. Here, I shall focus on trends in the discipline of history, though it is important to acknowledge that for much of the twentieth century, archaeologists were just as interested as historians in clinging to a methodological division of time. According to this division of labor, historians were confined to the short time of written evidence. Archaeologists, in turn, limited themselves to the periods associated with unwritten evidence and had little interest in studying societies that left written records. With this survey in hand, we can more easily appreciate how to move forward in developing a new architecture for the writing and practice of deep history. The key task is to outline a mode of history-writing that escapes the style, much in vogue for thirty years and more, whereby historians plot their histories according to ideas of birth, origins, and revolutions. The use of such metaphors renders deep time invisible. What we need to develop anew is a genealogical instinct.
In his 1962 work, The Idea of Prehistory, the archaeologist Glyn Daniel posed this rather plaintive question: “Why do historians in a general way pay so little attention to this fourth division of the study of the human past; while recognizing ancient history [why] do they not give more recognition to prehistory?... Historians are taking a long time to integrate prehistory into their general view of man.” [footnote |
Glyn E. Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory (London: Watts, 1962), 134.
To answer this question, we need to go back more than a century and consider the trends afoot as the modern practices of history and archaeology took shape. When History formed as a discipline in the late nineteenth century around the three divisions of History’s short chronology—ancient, medieval, and modern—it adopted as its signature method the analysis of written sources. In a manual of historical studies published in 1897, probably the most influential of its kind, the historians Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos argued, “the historian works with documents. Documents are the traces which have been left by the thoughts and actions
of men of former times... For want of documents the history of immense periods in the past of humanity is destined to remain for ever unknown. For there is no substitute for documents: no documents, no history.”[ footnote | Or in the words of V.A. Renouf, “historians get their knowledge from written documents. No history of any country can be written unless its people have left some such record of their activities.” [footnote |
Charles V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1897). I used the English translation, Introduction to the Study of History, trans. G.G. Berry (New York: Holt, 1898), 17.
V.A. Renouf, Outlines of General History, 2nd ed. ed. William Starr Myers (New York, 1909), 2.
This seems logical enough. Yet it is important to realize that this claim represents a significant departure from previous understandings of historical evidence. Universal history, as practiced in the Judeo-Christian tradition, was never defined by methodology. It was defined as a subject: the genealogy of humankind. By way of example, consider the History of the Franks, written by Gregory of Tours around 590 CE.[ footnote] Though the work was a particular history devoted to the lineage of the Frankish kings of Gaul, Gregory began his account with Genesis and continued through the Flood, the generations of Noah, and the story of Moses and the Children of Israel wandering in the deserts of Sinai. His account of the Hebrew race gradually leads up to the Romans and then, by stages, back down to the race of the Franks. Particular histories like Gregory’s ended up focusing on the twigs and branches of the family tree, but the genealogical instinct was common in works of history in medieval and early modern Europe.
Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis
Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).
Since history was a subject and not a methodology, rules of evidence mattered little. As late as 1885, as all academia was beginning to fragment into disciplines, the American historian George Park Fisher recommended that young historians learn how to use written documents such as registers, chronicles, inscriptions, and literature, but he also advised them to consult oral tradition; material structures such as altars, tombs, and private dwellings; and language, using the techniques of comparative philology.
History, in Fisher’s view, was written from a broad spectrum of evidence. To this, Fisher added a recommendation to use indirect evidence, to tease historical conclusions out of an array of recalcitrant sources.[ footnote | George Park Fisher, Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-Book and for Private Reading (New York, 1885), 3.
So in 1897, why did Langlois and Seignobos narrow down the sources of history so radically to documents alone? History, in trying to recast itself as a methodologically rigorous science, was undoubtedly keeping up with the fashions of the day. But the narrowing of evidence had a second consequence, for it helped to exclude prehistory from the ambit of history. As Langlois and Seignobos put it, “for want of documents the history of immense periods in the past of humanity is destined to remain for ever unknown.”[ footnote] Writing in 1897, they knew that this was untrue. Their famous contemporary, the French archaeologist Gabriel de Mortillet, had already used the substantial evidence at hand to classify the phases of the Stone Age by tool type. Perhaps, then, their insistence on documentary evidence was an epistemological sleight-of-hand, a ruse, motivated by their pre-existing desire to preserve the realm of history from the vague and terrifying antiquity of which Victor Duruy had spoken. Whatever the motivation, we can see how humanity’s deep history broke apart at practically the same moment that it became thinkable.
Langlois and Seignobos, Introduction, 17.
So here we have an initial answer to the question posed by Glyn Daniel. In the centuries leading up to the time revolution of 1859, human history was whole and genealogical. In the decades following the time revolution, the subject of history was fragmented along disciplinary lines. Nowadays, history is housed in at least two departments, History and Anthropology. Disciplines, much like cubist paintings, take a unified subject and fracture it on methodological lines. Where the subject of human history is concerned, the methodological division doubles as a chronological division. Archaeologists and anthropologists take responsibility for the Great Before. Historians limit themselves to the Everything After. Despite the enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity these past few decades, there has been very little thought devoted to bringing interdisciplinarity to the study of human history.
Accompanying the disciplinary turn was the well-known shift in subject from the genealogy of kings and battles to the rise of nations. The genealogical mode of writing history used by Gregory of Tours and others is a style of thinking that naturally creates an interest in “first things.” The new mode of history writing that emerged in the later nineteenth century, in sharp contrast, was historically myopic. Metaphorically, it took the form of what biologists would call an ontogeny: a developmental history describing the birth and maturation of a single organism. Where a genealogy describes the deep history of a lineage, an ontogeny writes the biography of a single entity cut adrift from its lineage. The new mode of history writing, in this vein, took form as the biography of nations, a fitting subject for an age that saw the rise of nationalism and the emergence of universal education. Through the metaphor of ontogeny, it became possible to imagine that national histories have founding moments and key transitions. Surveying the histories written in France, England, the United States, and elsewhere in the West in the decades leading up to 1900, it is striking how histories written in a semi-genealogical mode gave way, over the space of several decades, to histories rife with metaphors of origin and birth.[ footnote |
In general, see Ernest Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern, 2" ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The shift in patterns of historical writing, and in particular the transformation in the underlying biological metaphors used to describe the pattern of history, merit further research. For a preliminary study, see my “Genealogy, Ontogeny, and the Narrative Arc of Origins,” forthcoming.
All national history curricula have their own roots in the late nineteenth century, in the work of figures like Victor Duruy, George Park Fisher, and other historians who were instrumental in defining the patterns of history instruction. It is understandable that history curricula, then as now, should emphasize moments of national origins. Nations, after all, are bodies. But leaving aside nations, what was the birth date for history as a whole? In the first half of the twentieth century, this was an issue of some moment in the United States, as many universities adopted “Western Civ” as their basic history course. In the 1920s, the Australian archaeologist Gordon Childe offered historians the twin ideas of the Neolithic Revolution and the Urban Revolution in Mesopotamia, and his style of periodization spread rapidly through U.S. textbooks, general histories, and curricula from the 1930s
onward. The current Social Studies curriculum in New York State, for example, begins officially in Mesopotamia in 4,000 B.C. In Texas, no dates are given for some of the early happenings, but the earliest subject covered is the “Neolithic Agricultural Revolution.”[footnote] In almost all Western Civ and World History textbooks today, history comes into being in the Neolithic.
See http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/socst/pub/sscore2.pdf, page 94, accessed 28 December 2009; Texas Administrative Code, Title 19, Part II, Chapter 113, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies, Subchapter C, High School, p. C-15; see http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter113/index.html, accessed 11 September 2009.
The Paleolithic, in this mode of writing, is a historyless period: a prologue. The idea that some human societies could exist outside of history intrigued nineteenth-century German historical philosophers. In Leopold von Ranke’s famous phrase, Asians were the “people of the eternal standstill.”[ footnote | So were Africans, Australian Aborigines, American Indians: indeed, practically everyone who wasn’t of European origin. It was an odd feature of the new history that historicity, if it was to be accorded to some peoples, had to be denied others.
See Arthur F. Wright, “The Study of Chinese Civilization,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 233-55, here 245.
The idea that only some peoples have history is blatantly erroneous. You don’t have to have much acquaintance with Paleolithic and Neolithic archaeology, let alone Incan and African archaeology, to realize that all human societies are full of history, even those whose histories we must reconstruct with the most fragmentary unwritten evidence. Thanks to the ontogenetic style of writing history, however, the idea that there is a time before history, and then a history, has worked its way into our curricula and our habits of thinking about the past. The errors into which this has led us have been legion. In recent years, we have swept away the instinct to deny historicity to non-Europeans; except, of course, where Paleolithic peoples are concerned.
In proposing a deep history there is a temptation to prescribe. We ought to have historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists in a single department. We ought to work in teams so as to bridge the methodological divisions that break human history into pieces. Most of this is so obvious as to need no comment; it’s the implementation that would be complicated. Before we set about the task of restructuring academic space, the intellectual architecture must be solidly constructed. The first task is to define the narrative arc of a deep history, something that clearly baffled Duruy and generations of textbook authors after him.
The narrative arc of modern history-writing, as noted above, follows the arc of ontogeny. As a practical matter, what this means is that histories— especially but not exclusively works of synthesis such as textbooks, general histories, and introductory survey lectures—frame their subjects using metaphors of origin, birth, roots, revolution, invention, and the like. The key feature of the ontogenetic metaphor is that it proposes a shift from nothingness to being or from stasis to change, a shift projected onto a moment of birth or conception. The nation was an early target for the ontogenetic metaphor: by the late nineteenth century, the idea of the birth of nations was making its way into chapter titles, section headings, and book prologues. The metaphor eventually found its way into book titles, such as Ferdinand Lot’s famous 1948 work, The Birth of France.[footnote] But the metaphor was readily exported for use in other areas. Western Civilization (via the Neolithic Revolution) was an early beneficiary, and the metaphor soon spread beyond this to other entities, ideas, and systems. Over the last fifty years, the list has become long indeed: for medieval Europe alone, claims have been made identifying the period as the point of origin for civil society, the state, commerce and trade, banking, cities, individualism, universities, the modern nuclear family, scientific method, law and justice, human rights, citizenship, colonialism, fashion, and even persecution. Victor Henri Ferdinand Lot, Naissance de la France (Paris: Fayard, 1948).
The ontogenetic metaphor struck a chord in the historical imagination of the latter half of the twentieth century. Books using ontogenetic metaphors became foundational texts. For medieval European history, such works as Robert S. Lopez’s The Birth of Europe and Joseph Strayer’s On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State spring to mind.[footnote] Even a
cursory bibliographic examination will show that recourse to talk of birth and origins has become dense in all fields of history in recent decades. [footnote] Used in titles or massaged into the architecture of arguments, ontogenetic metaphors help create the energy that can drive whole fields of historical inquiry, as scholars engage in fierce debates about the points of origins of human rights, intolerance, or the modern world system. Yet the use of the metaphor comes with a price. An evocation of birth can project nothingness or historylessness onto the other side of the divide. It flattens the long tail of history before the origin into an inconsequential prelude. Robert S. Lopez, The Birth of Europe (New York: M. Evans, 1962); Joseph S. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
Typical titles include Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Neil McKendrick, Jon Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007). Ontogenetic metaphors don’t always appear in book titles, though they are evident in arguments, e.g. Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Ontogeny, clearly, is anathema to a deep history of humankind. More to the point, if we must have origins, they ought to be human origins rather than the ersatz and self-congratulatory origins associated with modernity. The modern practice of history has borrowed its signature metaphors from biology, and biology, once again, provides a metaphorical alternative: that
of phylogeny. Where ontogeny is a biographical vision, focusing on the life history of organisms or systems, phylogeny is a lineal vision describing a succession of changing forms. Ontogeny generates historical myopias and illusions of novelty. Historians who incautiously retail metaphors of birth and origin are liable to imagine that world trade systems were insignificant before the sixteenth century, that mass consumption did not exist before the eighteenth century, that egalitarian and democratic ideas could not have existed before 1789, and so on. Phylogenetic styles of writing history, in contrast, see broad continuities in various domains even while acknowledging that the Paleolithic amber trade was not as vast as the modern diamond trade, that patterns of consumption in ancient Rome took different forms than they do today, and that forager egalitarianism is not like modern democracy. Change is always more visible, and more interesting, when viewed against an invariant background. The most significant difference between ontogeny and phylogeny lies in the fact that phylogeny presupposes a constant dialogue between humans and the ecosystems of which they form a part. In this view, many of the events and trends that pass as novelties in the ontogenetic style of writing history turn out to be normal ecological processes dependent on things like population density and the distribution of resources. Deep histories coalesce easily around the narrative spiral that emerges when one imagines a constant evolutionary dialogue between organism and ecosystem, where the organism itself is constantly shaping and reshaping the very ecosystem of which it is a part, and the ecosystem, in turn, constantly shapes the organism.
Since an example might help explain what I mean by this narrative spiral, let us reflect for a moment on the human body, one of many domains of inquiry that provide a ready base for a deep historical perspective. Animal bodies are always undergoing physical changes, as natural selection tunes the body to a changing environment; if the changes are substantial enough, a new species results. Contemplating the human body from Homo habilis forward, physical anthropologists have described a set of transformations that resulted from the growing human propensity to use tools, where tool- use, by changing the way in which humans released calories from foodstuffs, generated feedback effects on the body itself.[footnote] The human evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham has vividly argued that
the harnessing of fire (a special kind of tool) some 1.8 million years ago explains an especially important cascade of transformations that dramatically reshaped the body of Homo erectus and altered human sociality.[footnote] As digestion increasingly took place outside the stomach, through cutting, pounding, and especially cooking, the gut itself shrank, along with the jaw, the teeth, and the muscles associated with biting. The body itself became less robust. Strikingly, many of the bodily devices that primates use to send social signals atrophied or vanished in hominins at around the same time: canines and bristly hair, for example, used by dominant males to maintain social hierarchies and (probably) the pheromones or swellings that indicate oestrus in females. The new human body suited the egalitarian social structure that was itself a product of fire and tool use.[ footnote |
A standard work here is Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, 3" ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Richard G. Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
In general, see Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
This doesn’t mean that displays disappeared. One of the most striking features of the archaeological record since the Upper Paleolithic (ca. 50,000 years ago) has been the growing density of human-made devices for extending or redefining the edges of the human body through ornaments, clothes, weapons, and (probably) tattoos; later, these devices extended to shoes, armor, pierced ears, smoothly shaven faces and legs, perfumes, wigs, and, eventually, plastic surgery. The changing forms of display and the transformations in material culture that underpin them are the result of many factors, one of which was the return of social hierarchy, albeit in a different form. Hierarchy, in turn, was a product of increasing population densities, an ecological factor linked to changing patterns of food production as well as climate change.
Sketched out above is just a glimpse of how we might write a history narrating the long phylogenetic dance among body, society, and ecosystem.
Developed in a more robust form, this kind of narrative spiral could link the physical anthropology of the hominin body to postmodern studies of the body as a social construct. In a sense, what the history reveals is that the body has always been a social construct, regardless of whether culture’s influence operated indirectly, via transformations in the genotype, or directly on the body itself. The idea of a deep history is that a similar approach, eschewing ontogeny, can apply in a wide array of human domains, such as patterns of migration and colonization, material culture, foodways, family, gender and sexuality, communication, political forms, economic exchange, music, religion, and so on.
In his famous formulation, the biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” namely, that the biological history of a species is mirrored in the successive forms taken by one of its members as the organism develops from fetus to adult. The theory itself was suggested by fish-like gill slits found in human and other tetrapod fetuses. Though recapitulation in this sense has long since been abandoned as a plausible biological theory, it has had a strangely persistent after-life in the discipline of history. History’s continuing reliance on ontogenetic metaphors of birth, origins, and roots, which have become increasingly common in recent historical writing, suggests how the field as a whole operates under the belief that the only history worth telling is the biography of the most recent organism within the lineage, such as the nation or the modern world system. A deep history is an antidote to this strangely compressed and shallow understanding of human historical time, a view of history that seeks to make history historical again.
From Transatlantic Histories of “Intoxication” to a Hemispheric “War on Affect”: Paradoxes Unbound
Together with the eastern slopes of the Andes, the Amazonas and Orinoco regions offer the greatest richness of psychoactive plants in the world. They have been enlightening and tormenting conquerors, colonizers, chroniclers, merchants, the Catholic Church, transatlantic trading companies, chemists, biologists, artists, and writers for more than five hundred years—long before the twentieth century (culminating in the so-called “war on drugs”) introduced its international system for distinguishing illicit narcotics from licit ones.
Psychoactive substances provide a revealing postcolonial lens for looking into humans’ ecological and social relationships with plants and for reexamining the colonization of the New World. The prominence of these substances in history—substances eventually turned into transatlantic commodities and catalysts for new ways of life in the centers of “progress”—indicates the shifting conflict scenarios that bind modernity to a colonial past and a global present. Meanwhile, the Western hemisphere has become the center of controversy over narcotics.
Why, then, has critical cultural reflection (or, more specifically, such disciplines as Latin American literary and cultural studies, area studies, postcolonial or subaltern studies, and political philosophy) paid only fitful attention to the matter? While cultural critics are accustomed to thinking of globalization in terms of power configurations related to capitalism, coloniality, the nation-state, Otherness, gender, immigration, and the mass media, most have neglected the formative role of modern struggles over drugs in these regards.
As far as omissions in Hispanic literary and cultural studies are concerned, are we perhaps dealing with a phenomenon of disavowal—as, for example, the inclusion of Fernando Ortiz’s famous Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar into the academic canon might suggest? Ortiz’s 1940 book, labeled an anthropological and historical masterpiece by Malinowski, [footnote] became a cornerstone in the 1970s and 1980s for the reorientation of Latin Americanist literary scholars. At issue was the search for a new, non-metropolitan branch of cultural studies: transculturation
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studies (or the popularization of the anthropological term “transculturation,’ as discussed in Ortiz’s book, in U.S. literary and cultural studies of Latin America), inspired by Angel Rama’s Transculturacion narrativa en America Latina (1982).[ footnote] However, there was one thing missing in numerous post-traditional approaches to the work of the Cuban anthropologist and his narrative reinvention of tobacco and sugar as “cultural personae”: an awareness that Ortiz’s declaration of tobacco and sugar as the allegorical couple representing a locally and globally informed, transcultural identity of Cubans and other Caribbean peoples was actually a reflection on two of modernity’s powerful psychoactive substances. His was an interest in a kind of Latin American epistemic, ethnographic, and economic protagonism in the global venture, in which such products from the “underdeveloped” world would stimulate and embellish the culture of the European and North American centers.
Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995); Bronislaw Malinowski, “Introduction,” in Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, lvii-lxiv.
Angel Rama, Transculturacion Narrativa en América Latina, (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982).
Since affective expectations and aversions haunt scholarly work beneath its performed “objectivity,” fear of the possible delusion of the idea of the self- conscious subject might have played a part in the disavowal of Ortiz’s most obvious idea. There has also been, in part, a rather narrow secularism in Latin American scholars’ turn to cultural studies, which has led to the prevalent association of narcotics and stimulants with those irrational spheres that belonged to religion or vanity but not modern culture. If, on the other hand, readers of Ortiz’s book had taken note of Walter Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion” and “Surrealism,” and especially of his far- reaching concept-figure of a “dialectics of intoxication,” [footnote] different ideas about modernity’s inherent transgressions and singular counterpoints of psychoactives offered to the West by peripheral cultures might have come our way several decades sooner.
See Hermann Herlinghaus, Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives From the Global South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 11-19.
The shifting relationships among psychoactives, modernity, and globalization cannot be understood simply by looking into the heated vocabulary related to “illicit flows and criminal things” (to use van Schendel and Abraham’s recent book title[footnote]), the narcotics economy, or the “war on drugs.” According to DeGrandpre’s The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World’s Most Troubled Drug Culture (2006),[footnote] a cultic view came to reign in the twentieth century under the allegedly objective label of pharmacology, which classified drugs as either angels or demons (ibid., viii). “The pharmaceutical industry, the tobacco industry, modern biological psychiatry, the biomedical sciences, the drug enforcement agencies, and the American judicial system... have come to embrace a cult of pharmacology, not as a conspiracy but as a de-facto religious belief system” (ibid.). Here we have the first paradox: science on the one hand and belief or fear on the other, each coupled with powerful interests. In the course of his study, DeGrandpre points to the establishment of a discursive order that resembles Edward Said’s idea of orientalism. At issue is a mechanism for making Otherness available to judgment by affectively constructing it in the first place. In Said’s case, colonial discourse provided a dark, mysterious Orient, which eventually served colonialism’s practical interests and deepest drives. DeGrandpre applies the figure of “orientalism,” common among postcolonial scholars, to the trajectories of mystification that have come to characterize a main part of the modern history of narcotics. Psychoactives have become, by means of social and ideological imagination, a hyperbole —a symbol for excess—qualifying their cultivators and users as a dangerous “Other” that calls for moral scrutiny, restriction, and even coercion. This mode of trivial judgment must be reconsidered, though the task is complex and there seems to be no central vantage point.
Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (eds.), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
Richard DeGrandpre, The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World’s Most Troubled Drug Culture (Durham—London: Duke University Press, 2006).
From one particular case—cocaine—we can draw a few epistemological and transhistorical links.
The story of cocaine starts with Erythroxylum coca, the coca plant. [footnote] (Cocaine the alkaloid, the derivative first extracted from coca leaves in 1860, has a different history, which I will bracket for a moment.) Coca is an innocuous-looking plant, growing in small shrubby bushes to a height of four to six feet in wet, humid areas. It flourishes mainly on the eastern slopes of the Andes throughout the region stretching along the western side of South America from Colombia down through Peru to Bolivia and reaching as far east as the first stages of the Amazon Basin (ibid., 3). The historical heart of the coca region is the Peruvian montafia and the Bolivian yungas.
See Dominic Streatfeild, Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 2ff.
This story begins well before the sixteenth century, when the Spanish invaders of Ancient Peru were impressed by the Incans’ regular use of the coca leaf. Studies have dated this beginning to about 20,000 years ago, when hunting and gathering groups first moved into the central Andes of South America.[footnote] Coca could hardly have been overlooked if these groups conducted a rudimentary testing of plants by tasting the leaves, which would have shown coca could numb the sting of a cut lip or reduce toothache pain. Those gatherers also became aware that coca could be chewed to increase physical energy and mental alertness, and to fight hunger and cold; infused to remedy stomach disorders; and employed to ward off parasites. Some of the earliest direct archaeological evidence of coca leaf use dates to 2500-3000 B.C., both to the ceramic lime pots and figurines of coca chewers (with cheeks bulging on one side) linked to the Valdiva culture on the coast of Ecuador and to the Asia I cemetery site on the south-central coast (Peru), where bodies were wrapped with mats that held personal belongings, including snuff trays, tubes, and bags filled with coca and powdered lime. The presence of lime indicates that users knew the leaves would yield their greatest effects when chewed in combination with an alkaline powder,[footnote] meaning that experimentation "with the leaf" must have taken place even earlier and that chewing coca was already part of an ongoing social practice.
See Joseph Kennedy, Coca Exotica: The Illustrated Story of Cocaine (Cranbury, NJ—London: Associated University Press/Cornwall Books,
1985), 13-19; Tim Madge, White Mischief: A Cultural History of Cocaine (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001), 23. See Kennedy, Coca Exotica, 15; Streatfeild, Cocaine, 4, 11.
Joseph Kennedy, writing about coca use in public ceremonial gatherings conducted by shamans in La Florida, the first urban center in Peru, states that “coca was a firmly established part of Peruvian life at least 2,000 years before the birth of Christ,”[footnote] when nomadic hunting and gathering had almost completely disappeared. It was here that—together with extensive settlements and agricultural activities—trade networks developed, facilitating the flow of goods and services across the Andes. By this time, coca was high on the list of those items taken from the eastern slopes across the Amazon Basin and toward the Pacific coast. As Rivera Cusicanqui has emphasized and as Taussig remarks in his book on shamanism and colonialism,|footnote] ancient trade routes constituted mobile transcontinental frontiers, serving as zones of formal and informal exchange of foods, herbs, medicines, magical practices, and other services, successively reactivated in the course of the last millennia. Alternately combated and appropriated by Christian missionaries and trading companies, and intercepted and overridden by colonial and later national borders, they have constituted zones of movement and conflict up to the present. These residually persistent trade routes represent a kind of submerged yet active global contact zone. Informal globalization thus started thousands of years ago.
Kennedy, Coca Exotica, 16.
See Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Las fronteras de la coca: Epistemologias coloniales y circuitos alternativos de la hoja de coca (La Paz: Universidad Mayor de San Andrés/Ediciones Aruwiyiri, 2003); Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago—London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
The Incan empire emerging from the Cuzco valley in the twelfth century made clear even then how thoroughly a single plant could become central to political interest. In the fourteenth century, when the Incans' influence extended across the territory stretching from northern Ecuador to central Chile and integrated millions of Indians across hundreds of tribes and cultures, they faced the challenge of how to combine expansion,
administrative and logistic integration, and ceremonial sanctification. The coca leaf turned out to be of invaluable help in these endeavors.[footnote] It became the divine plant, catalyzing biochemical effects, desire, power, and myth, to be distributed henceforth in restricted form. Vast territories of the Andean world adopted a politics of organizing and circumscribing trade, with coca being the strategic commodity and denominator for control purposes: a single culture trait, physiological stimulant, and medical device shared by many of the tribes under Incan rule. And as Garcilaso de la Vega writes, “it was unlawful for any of the local people to use coca without permission from the [Incan] governor.”[footnote] In his Comentarios Reales, coca (“cuca”) ranks higher than gold and silver: it is “la principal riqueza del Peru.” [footnote |
See Kennedy, Coca Exotica, 20-24.
Garcilaso de la Vega, "El Inca," Royal Commentaries of the Incas (Austin: Texas University Press, 1966), 330.
Garcilaso de la Vega, “El Inca,” Comentarios reales, intro. y notas de Maria Dolores Bravo Arriaga (México, D.F.: SEP, Direcci6n General de Publicaciones y Bibliotecas/ UNAM, Coordinacion de Humanidades, 1982), chapter XV.
Although millions had chewed the leaf before the rise of the Tawantinsuyu (the Incan empire), the Incan state combined life and coca most thoroughly —politically, economically, spiritually, medicinally, and sexually. This was the situation that the Spanish invasion—what the Incans called Pachakuti, or the total disruption of space and time—terminated in 1532-33. The Catholic Church was suspicious of a “magic plant” that seemed even more dangerous than the fruit that led Adam and Eve into Original Sin. Since it looked profane and unappealing, it had to possess a dark side. For the Indian people, coca was associated with the concept of huaca—a sacred quality resident in a thing, place, or person.[footnote] Ecclesiastical authorities and Church people were upset with this pagan concept of the sacred that ran counter to their idea of God’s transcendence as a reign of purity. Chewing coca daily, or “offering the plant to idols” (viewed as demons),[footnote] was suspicious. At stake were conflicting concepts not simply of divinity (monotheism vs. polytheism) but also of materializing (or suppressing) relationships with the divine; in other words, the tension
between Christian representation and pagan enactment of the divine—a delicate matter of political theology.
Joseph Kennedy, Coca Exotica, 26.
See Garcilaso de la Vega, “El Inca,” Comentarios reales, chapter XV.
From the outset of colonization, the war waged by the Spanish Crown and the Church against the use of coca was nurtured by a scholastic—that is, doctrinal—drive. But colonial governments had to give the problem a somewhat different spin for reasons related to the lucrative nature of the growing coca trade, the popularity of the leaf, and its potential for helping people carry out hard work. The colonialists’ coercion of Indian laborers into gold and silver mines, where they were forced to endure extreme hardships, was abetted considerably by providing the laborers with coca rations. Promotion of coca leaves by European and Creole merchants as a stimulant and appetite suppressant helped destroy traditional food-exchange cycles.[footnote] Other factors uprooting the culture of communities turned coca into a treatment for increasing hunger pains and a more or less efficient remedy for a long list of disasters caused by colonial rule.
See Kennedy, Coca Exotica, 36-38.
The above sketches a scenario in which political history linked to the early transatlantic and hemispheric rise of globalization grates against and violently transforms a cultural history that developed from a regional universe of non-modern contours across millennia. One of the results, along with the extermination of uncountable communities, was a tectonic change in what we might call “social ecology,” or the ways in which—and the degree to which—a society relies on its relationships (especially physiological and psychocultural relationships) with the environment. In cultural terms, at issue is the complexity of “bodily” and “embodied” relationships both between and across humans and environments. “Social ecology” thus became one of the disaster zones on which Western libidinal imagination would feed, as Western colonialism destroyed self-sustained socio-ecological communities and autochthonous cultural traditions. William G. Mortimer, in his History of Coca (1914), used as a frontispiece for his book a nineteenth-century mythical drawing of an Indian princess: “Mamma Coca offers the divine plant to the Old World.” [footnote] In the case of this picture, a projection of desires onto a mythical Other served the
needs of colonial imagination, which thus displaced or sublimated actual violence and destruction.
See W. Golden Mortimer, History of Coca: “The Divine Plant” of the Incas (San Francisco: Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, 1974), ii.
The Andean coca leaf would first hit modern world markets in the mid- nineteenth century, and today we date the global emergence of vast circuits of illicit cocaine to the 1950s.[footnote] Because coca leaves travel badly and deteriorate quickly, “outside South America, they remained a fabulous idea” [footnote] well into the nineteenth century. When coca finally entered the global commodity chain, its extensive cultivation in Peru helped reproduce systems of Indian tributary serfdom on plantations where grueling labor and climatic conditions were the rule.
See Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, Zephyr Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000 (Durham—London: Duke University Press, 2006), 321-346.
Madge, White Mischief, 31, 33.
Coca did not function as a catalyst, as did many other commodities, of the “psychoactive revolution.” The term refers to the production, exchange and consumption of psychoactive substances as they figured at the core of Western expansion and colonization and as they eventually became an enabling condition of modernity.[footnote] Narcotics fetishism characterized the transatlantic politics of the world’s governing elites from about the mid-seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, when concerns about manufacturing and taxing drugs rather than suppressing them were dominant. “Drug taxation was the fiscal cornerstone of the modern state, and the chief financial prop of European colonial empires” (ibid., 5). There have been, above all, three such substances: alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine (9). Due to the degree to which they became neurochemical stimulants and psycho-cultural factors around the world, they have been the most resistant to prohibition. Coffee and tea keep the contemporary Western world on the go, just as coca chewing still keeps part of the Andes on the go.[footnote] David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge—London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2, 53-60.
Streatfeild, Cocaine, 6.
Then there are the “little three” regulated substances: opium, cannabis, and coca (in elaborated form, heroin, hashish, and cocaine), which have become prohibited.[footnote] The profit-driven globalization of psychoactive plants and their derivatives, many of which came from the New World, transformed habits, affected the fantasies of millions of people, and influenced the environment. Narcotics were indispensible commodities and psychoactive agents, destined both to second the practices of colonization and become fuels of industrial civilization. At the other extreme, the use of narcotics, along with tobacco, coffee, alcohol, and to a lesser degree opium and cannabis, would rank at the center of socio-economic change in Western Europe and the United States, becoming a daily habit for masses of middle-class consumers—those who came to represent the modern individual in his or her exposure to the experiences of urbanization and industrialization. When Europe and the U.S. discovered cocaine, coca developed into a famous transatlantic commodity as well, shortly before domestic legislation and international treaties brought about the “psychoactive counterrevolution” of the twentieth century (ibid., 5, 184). Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 31.
This is where Sigmund Freud’s early writings—later excluded from the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud— enter our story. Twenty-four years before Freud wrote his 1884 essay, “Uber Coca,” [footnote] Albert Niemann, a chemistry graduate student in Gottingen, had isolated the alkaloid cocaine from a large amount of coca leaves.[footnote] He described it in 1860 as “colourless transparent prisms” and noted: “Its solutions have an alkaline reaction, a bitter taste, promote the flow of saliva and leave a peculiar numbness, followed by a sense of cold when applied to the tongue” (ibid., 49). Curiously, the young Freud, who wrote six papers on cocaine between 1884 and 1887 and held public lectures on the subject at Vienna’s physiological and psychiatric societies, became an important advocate of cocaine use, recommending it to Western doctors and consumers as a beneficial and pleasurable commodity. In “Uber Coca,” Freud, starting with a historical and phenomenological account of the coca leaf’s use among Peruvian Indians and even referring to Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios Reales,| footnote] discusses the exhaustive
biomedical experiments on the effects of coca and cocaine that were undertaken between 1860 and 1887. He then writes:
Sigmund Freud, Cocaine Papers, ed. Robert Byck (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: Meridian, 1974), 47-73.
Madge, White Mischief, 46-49.
Freud, Cocaine Papers, 50.
"The psychic effect of cocainum muriaticum in doses of 0.05—0.10g consists of exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which does not differ in any way from the normal euphoria of a healthy person. The feeling of excitement, which accompanies stimulus by alcohol is completely lacking [...]. One senses an increase of self-control and feels more vigorous and more capable of work; on the other hand, if one works, one misses that heightening of the mental powers which alcohol, tea, or coffee induce. [...] This gives the impression that the mood induced by coca [cocaine; the author] in such doses is due not so much to direct stimulation as to the disappearance of elements in one’s general state of well-being which cause depression. [...]" " I have tested this effect of coca [cocaine; the author], which wards off hunger, sleep, and fatigue and steels one to intellectual effort, some dozen times on myself (ibid., 60). "
Here we are not concerned with the biomedical parameters and potencies of cocaine. Rather, we seek to gain a new framework for problematization. Freud’s deliberations on cocaine help place psychoactive substances in a still larger perspective—their strange relationship with psychoanalysis, which is seen not as a way of talking about individual anxieties and the symbolic sublime but as a possibility of conceptualizing cultural and social criticism. In that regard, the young Freud’s interest in coca leaves and cocaine stands in telling contrast to his later psychoanalytical research and writing. At issue is a historico-conceptual juncture at which Freud has to make a decision about the direction of his future work. From a contemporary perspective, this is not an either/or decision so much as the development of a strategic angle from which to talk about one complex problematic. His subject has to do with understanding modernity in terms of transgression/repression.
During the 1880s, Freud was concerned about the psychic effects that moderate doses of cocaine could exert as a stimulant that “steels one to intellectual effort,” provides euphoria without successive depression (ibid., 61, 62), and shows promise as a positive treatment for hysteria and melancholia (64, 65). Freud eventually lost intellectual interest in the stimulant and turned to culture as neurosis, arguing in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that modern Western civilization had become “neurotic,” or compulsively marked by symptoms of repression. Was Freud writing with an increasing perception of policies directed at restricting and prohibiting cocaine and other substances? Now, if we consider that the “psychoactive counterrevolution” regarding some—but not all—narcotics was mainly launched during the 1910s to the 1930s (almost simultaneous with Freud’s mature reflections on culture and society), we might ask about links between conflicts over narcotics and the affective developments, or repressions, taking place at the heart of Western modernity. If repression is essential to civilization and if Freud saw culture’s repressive agency as necessary for securing the “primacy of the intellect,” self-consciousness, and the sublimation of instinctual drives, what begins to emerge is the conflict scenario in which both psychoactives and neurosis are crucial factors in the negotiation of hegemonies at the turn of the twentieth century. Is not the social, collective, geopolitical, market-driven pharmacological regulation of affect the actual scenario through which unconscious strata are formed and regulated, placing the problem somewhere other than in the individual psyche whose traumatic core Freud had extrapolated onto society? In other words, as historical colonialism and then modem imperialism have taught us, does not modernity’s drive to take hold of an uneven world consist more of a proactive management of affects and embodied imagination than of “necessary” repression and sublimation?
At issue is hegemonic “management” striving to achieve the power to distribute affect unequally and asymmetrically across centers and peripheries and across ethnic, gender, and class lines. Such control points toward a possibly shifting relationship in the twentieth century between sublimation as (self-)containment of qualified, “full” citizens on the one hand, and a sophisticated biopolitical control of populations at both the centers and the margins of the highly developed territories of the West. In sum, I suggest that the breaking down of the strict division between modern
psychoanalysis and biology/neurophysiology might have been an implicit issue for Freud, and that it merits further study.
There are other hints of globalization’s paradoxical history. The transatlantic dynamics of expansion and “modernization” merit consideration in relation to an affective venture and a psycho-economic apparatus whose movens are desires striving for “objectification.” We might think, for example, of the concept of the “open secret” or “public secret,” which refers to a cultural dynamic “where much is known but unacknowledged.”[footnote] “Modern Western history revolves around a deep split in the secret in which truth’s dependence on untruth is ethnically and geographically divided between north and south.”[ footnote] At issue are the mechanisms by which desires of projection, expansion, and domination, the limits of the utterable, desirable, and performable, and that which remains secret or excluded have all been channeled into and distributed in the present. As to psychoactive substances, the primary problem would then be—culturally speaking—neither their unchangeable (for example, religious) essences nor their inherent power of pernicious contamination, but rather the regulation of affect according to social, (bio)political, economic, and moral criteria and particular contexts. The regulation of affect is as much a matter of language and representation as it is a question of secrecy and mystification. In one sense, colonization and modernity’s ascent have relied on the unprecedented commerce and consumption of transatlantically empowering psychoactives, fueling—not by chance—the most obstinate dream worlds and superlatives of “development.” But looking backward from the twentieth century’s scenarios of selective restriction and coercive control, we cannot but ask what happened at a certain invisible conjuncture where things started to turn around. There is no simple response, but we are certainly dealing with something quite contrary to a “natural development,” say, politics that have become increasingly rationalized on the basis of solid insights into the nature of benevolent narcotics versus pernicious and deadly ones. Rosemary Hennessy, “Open Secrets: The Affective Cultures of Organizing on Mexico’s Northern Border,” Feminist Theory, vol. 10.3, (2009), 2. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 78.
Walter Benjamin offers a different approach (as does Nietzsche, if you like) to the concept of “intoxication.” Both thinkers remind us that among the single most powerful, toxic stimulants of the individual and collective psyche in the Western world we find the Christian (the Pauline, properly speaking) invention of guilt and atonement and, in modernity, a never- ending catalogue of anxieties and fears. Such thoughts resonate in a contrastive way with certain of today’s prescripts that tendentiously rank drugs as either devilish or angelical. According to Benjamin’s rarely consulted fragment, “Capitalism as Religion,”[ footnote] for example, capitalism cannibalizes Christianity at the point where it makes an overarching “sense of guilt pervasive” in the concept figure of a guilt/debt spiral that generates a cult of utilitarianism “without truce and without mercy.” [footnote] In my recent book, Violence Without Guilt, I placed Benjamin’s early thinking on religiosity and violence in a global perspective, arguing that the “rise” and “fall” of psychoactive substances contribute to historicization and analysis within both transatlantic and hemispheric frameworks of what I call a “modern war on affect” that fuels particular imaginaries and strategies by which a colonial unconscious is refashioned over time. In my view, today’s hegemonic cultural formations (diverse and contradictory as they are) necessarily reproduce a phantasmic, singularly powerful phenomenon: “affective marginalization,” which connects colonization and modernity in a variety of ways. “Affective marginalities” are in no way unified or easily nameable as “them” or “others.” In fact, the ubiquity and relative fluidity of what is marginalized in affective terms provides a socially and politically efficient case of “symptom construction,” to refer to Freud again, in which anxieties and feelings of guilt can be displaced through projection onto others.
Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in W. B., Selected Writings, vol. 1, eds. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004).
See Uwe Steiner, Walter Benjamin (Stuttgart-Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2004), 170.
A significant means of thinking about affective marginalization comes from new trends in literature, film, and music, including hemispheric “narco- narratives.” I recently coordinated a conference, New Narrative Territories, Affective Aesthetics, and Ethical Paradox, at the University of Pittsburgh
for mapping out what “narco-narratives” could mean. These narratives at first seem to be dedicated to hemispheric drug traffic; however, they pose, in an unfamiliar way, a number of central conceptual issues, such as affective marginalization and forms of contemporary violence that have grown immanent and thus invisible.
In the end, is not today’s hemispheric “war on drugs” a strikingly erratic prolongation of a larger “war on affect”[footnote] that has shaped modernity’s strategies of psycho-economic and geopolitical domination? No doubt, the “war on drugs” has violently interfered in the “distribution of the sensible”[footnote] on a global scale. Hasn’t this war become a sensitive arena shaken by the most exorbitant of desires and outcomes, where economic struggles, fantasies related to Original Sin and guilty territories and populations, and geopolitical punishment are being restaged and played out anew? We only have to look to Hollywood’s retelling and partial prefiguring of the ways in which hemispheric conflicts over narcotics are publicized today. The global North’s fear of intoxication is often predicated on imageries that hypostasize the South’s intoxicating power.
Herlinghaus, Violence Without Guilt, 3-28.
See Jacques Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).
Affective marginalization works in highly flexible terms, for it circumscribes both those in the South who, under conditions of unequal global exchange, make their living by cultivating and trading illicit substances, and those others, predominantly inhabiting the North, who indulge in the pleasures of illicit consumption. To an extent, affective marginalities can be understood as those that carry the burden of sustaining negative affects for the Other and act as potential or imagined trespassers that allow ruling desires and anxieties to occupy a morally safe place. [footnote] Those carrying the burden can be profane actors in sacred territories or subjects and communities positioned at the low end of the class spectrum, the ethnic scale, or the geopolitical map, or otherwise serving as targets of stigmatization. Our initial considerations on the “deep” history of relationships between humans and the coca plant in the hemisphere might suggest a contrastive lens through which the dominant
Western tradition of affective “Orientalization” can be reconsidered. In both Christianity and capitalism, the discursive and imaginary construction of an intoxicating or intoxicated Other is pervasive and open-ended. On the one hand, there has been much criticism of modernity’s rampant exploitation of human labor and natural resources across the globe. But on the other, the critical awareness of modern manipulation and regulation of the neurochemical resources that sustain the bodies of “modernity’s citizens” is still incipient. It is from this vantage point that “transatlantic histories of intoxication” have to be scrutinized anew.
Herlinghaus, Violence Without Guilt, 12-15.
More immediately, the “war on affect” as it is linked to narcotics conflicts in the Western hemisphere challenges current discussions in hemispheric Americas Studies for three reasons. First, it provides a multilayered global scenario that not only has genuine hemispheric contours but that also has strongly and somewhat unexpectedly become fused with cultural, cinematic, and literary imaginaries in both the South and the North. Second, it provides a lens for rehistoricizing Western modernity under the joint markers of colonization/modernization and affective subject fashioning that allows for more subtle and precise insights into delicate issues of citizenship, violence, bare life, sustainability, and the representation of conflicts and values in relation to contemporary history’s “open secrets.” And third, the heterogeneous realm of hemispheric narco-natratives poses weighty conceptual and ethical questions that shed new light on some of the most intricate problems of our global world. Such considerations lead me to end—provisionally—with a question that Walter Benjamin asked in his essay “Surrealism” (1929): “The dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious. Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in the world complementary to it?”[footnote ]
Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” W. B., Selected Writings, vol. 2-1, 210.
Discussion of Smail and Herlinghaus Papers
Audience: Professor Smail, could you elaborate on what’s at stake in your attempt to create the methodology of deep history? I understand why it’s used in African history, in Native American history, and in other histories with no documentary source base, and why it is used as a counter-narrative for people without history. How does your methodology challenge national histories and histories of American or European exceptionalism?
Smail: What deep history does for peoples without history, in the most common sense of the term, is evident. But it is meant to be as mucha political act of collaboration as it is a means of giving a voice to someone. Challenging national histories is a big part of it. Last year one of my students suggested that the Middle East conflicts are fueled by the national histories that came into being in the late nineteenth century. A history centered on humanity transcends that. National histories have a certain role, but they do generate the identities that create conflicts.
Audience: I’m struck by the relationship between textuality and history that Dr. Smail describes and the idea of “I write; therefore, I am.” I write; therefore, there is history, as well as implications for existence.
Smail: The question of how writing entered into history is fascinating. By the time of Lynn Hunt’s textbook, the notion that writing creates history is dominant, not only because it creates the sources that we use in history, but because we train our students in how to read texts. Arguments from the late nineteenth century that are repeated over the course of the twentieth century suggest that this is the case because writing fixes memory. Therefore, writing perhaps creates the sense of guilt that spurs leaders to act in ways that are “better” than those of their predecessors, and these actions have historical weight. In this argument, writing has the Lamarckian effect of passing on memories in efficacious ways. Though this is true, this argument is merely one way in which history can be framed. Remember that in the 1830s and earlier, writing was considered to be a gift from God; it was presented, not invented. Coming to grips with the fact that writing was invented was one of the traumas of the time revolution.
The destruction of archives has been tied to the destruction of whole peoples. Think about what happened to the archives of Jews and Muslims in medieval and 16"-century Europe. The Muslim population of Al-Andalus eventually dissolved into the Christian population, in part because of the destruction of Muslim archives. Writing itself becomes highly symbolic. I write; therefore I am, and therefore, if I destroy everything you’ ve ever written, you are not.
Audience: It seems to me that once you suggest various causes and effects, you’re positing yourself as smarter than your subjects.
Smail: Histories don’t begin at birth moments, and we must recognize that we choose to begin our histories at moments that suit needs of convenience and not historicity. People who work in paleontology roll their eyes and ask, “How can you start at such a recent time?” My choices for beginnings are based on my expertise, but the model itself could run back much further. The field of big history does this well, because it begins with the big bang. The courses that are taught in it tend to spend at least 25 percent of their time on geology and environment. I tend to center my big history on humans, but because of what I call the phylogenetic model, my histories are open to the non-human. The genealogical instinct in the book of Genesis is to use the descendance of humankind as the frame for writing history. In some respects, the reaction against that method created the short histories and predominance of birth moments that we have now.
Audience: One of the features of the ontogenetic temptation is the close intertwining of story-telling and historical disciplines. It seems that one of the exciting horizons that deep or big history approaches is the possibility that our perception of knowledge might not be limited to language-based, narrative models. Is there a media revolution in terms of historical method and practice, where a narrative history is no longer the norm? Are there new modes of history that re-think how story-telling interlocks with other layers of description and other models of how historical knowledge can be imagined?
Herlinghaus: Connecting the phenomenology of narcotics or the ecology of psychoactive substances with deep history can broaden the framework of modern epistemology, subjectivity, story-telling, and many other issues.
Stretching back genealogically allows for different perceptions to emerge, including, for example, those of subjectivity. Social and ecological decisions on narcotics use are made by people in specific contexts, and deep history allows a different context of subjectivity to come to the fore. In the case of intoxication through narcotics, where would we locate the human versus the non-human? If narcotics are non-human, they don’t become human by ingestion; rather the human being becomes something hybrid and different from what we have been calling the modern subject. A different concept of storytelling might reveal other ecological and bodily relationships among human communities, the environment, and conflict.
Smail: As Hermann said, the body-mind distinction is problematic. Goods and consumption make for rich deep histories, because the history of goods takes us back seamlessly 6,000 years. They also make for interesting phylogenetic histories, because goods intertwine with human bodies in the way that narcotics often do. The archaeologist Clive Gamble said that without goods, there are no humans; the two are so tightly linked that their histories are inseparable. For example, fasteners, such as bone pins and buttons, have an extraordinary phylogeny, expanding in an environment of human taste and human use. You could look at history from the point of view of the fastener, as if it were a prion or virus that has harnessed the energy of human societies for its own evolution. Paul Connerton’s book, How Societies Remember, has a brilliant discussion of ways to frame histories or narratives that are not centered on writing alone.
Audience: Might the concept of “man the hunter” figure into the changing frames of history?
Smail: In part because of what was happening with trans-anthropology, European history cut itself off from anthropology, and a wall was erected between the two fields. The changes in titles of histories are also tied to the Second World War. A survey of titles reveals that questions on the origins of human rights faded away in an extraordinary way. How can you write about the origins of human rights in 1951, with such a specter hovering over Europe? Later these questions return.
What Is Cultural Economy?
At the outset, let me say what “cultural economy” is not. Cultural economy is not the study of the artifacts and institutions—such as literary texts, media forms, or the publishing industry—that are assumed to reside in some relatively autonomous domain called “culture.” In fact, cultural economy takes as its initial premise the claim that “culture” cannot be separated from the other two concepts that have traditionally organized the social and cultural sciences: the economy and the social.[footnote] Once we assume that these three concepts, as well as the ontological entities and practices to which they refer, are interrelated in complex ways, it no longer seems adequate to analyze individual discourses, events, institutions, or texts in the kind of hermetic environments that traditional disciplines create. Cultural economy thus examines economic institutions, practices, and texts as cultural entities, just as it explores the economic dimensions of cultural practices and products. And it also investigates the ways that these intersections emanate from and inform social forms, including forms of government, modes of persuasion, and ways of knowing and failing to know the world.
The “Editorial Statement” of the Journal of Cultural Economy states that “the three main organizing concepts of the social and cultural sciences [are] culture, economy, and the social.” Journal of Cultural Economy 1.3 (2008),
n.p.
Next it may be helpful to examine what cultural economy resembles, because the new approach of cultural economy is certainly not the first attempt to treat economic practices as cultural or social forms. In fact, the ongoing financial crisis has generated a veritable avalanche of cultural commentary about economic matters, some of which overlaps with my work and that of my colleagues. The discipline of sociology includes both the sociology of financial markets and the study of such organizations as trading floors. (David Stark’s Center for Organizational Innovation at Columbia University is one manifestation of this.) In some English departments, faculty practice what Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen have called the “new economic criticism.”| footnote] Finally, in anthropology, some scholars stress the anthropology of markets or the culture of finance, others conduct ethnographies of stock traders, and still
others call their work the social studies of finance. Such work, wherever it is found in U.S. universities, also has an international counterpart (with important centers in Edinburgh, Paris, and London), is simultaneously institutionalized (in such centers as Stark’s at Columbia, the Economic and Social Research Council professorial fellowship at Edinburgh, and so on) and has a presence on the web (in, for example, the Social Studies of Finance network). There is already at least one journal devoted to scholarship in this area (Journal of Cultural Economy) and at least one annual conference (the Social Studies of Finance Conference). A growing number of listservs disseminate calls for papers on related topics; these promise conferences such as the one I am helping to organize in the spring of 2010 in New York, special issues of journals, and collections of working papers. If not a discipline, cultural economy (or, as it may also be called, the social studies of finance or financial anthropology) certainly constitutes a publishing opportunity.
Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction,” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, eds., (London: Routledge, 1999), 3-50.
Rather than trying to draw fine distinctions among the various enterprises mentioned above, I will identify their most obvious areas of overlap and a broad methodological difference that divides them, then provide two examples of the kind of work associated with this general field. I will conclude with a brief consideration of how the traditional organization of academic disciplines in U.S. universities makes it difficult to incorporate this field into the existing disciplinary arrangement.
A quote from the website of the Social Studies of Finance, which emanates from Donald Mackenzie’s working group at the University of Edinburgh, helps illustrate the domain these enterprises share and suggests one distinguishing feature:
"To understand the creation, development, and effects of financial markets we need more than the perspectives of economics or of a “behavioural” finance that is rooted in individual psychology. Markets are cultures. Behaviour in them is often strongly gendered. Spatial concentrations such
as the City of London are of great importance. The long history of financial markets can place modern developments in context. Markets and governments interact in important ways. The “science”’ and “technology” of markets—the practical applications of finance theory; information infrastructures; and so on—is crucial. Legal frameworks matter a great deal. Networks of people who know each other personally often play economically significant roles. “Social studies of finance” is the application to financial markets of the social-scientific disciplines that study phenomena like the above—disciplines such as anthropology, gender studies, geography, history, politics, social studies of science, sociolegal studies, and sociology./footnote |"
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh, “Social Studies and Finance,” http://www.sociology.ed.ac.uk/finance/index.html (accessed 12/16/09).
In 2003, the UK Economic and Social Research Council awarded Mackenzie a professorial fellowship to research this field; the fellowship supports this site and a group of post-doctoral students who work with Mackenzie.
As this description suggests, the social studies of finance group tends to view “culture” through the lens of the “social-scientific disciplines” and thus to apply to the culture of the market methods traditionally used by the social sciences: ethnography, ethnology, historical analysis, and the investigation of the social construction of concepts (a method I associate with science studies). The most comparable project in the humanities disciplines is probably the so-called “new economic criticism,” an enterprise defined, in an anthology published under that name, as occupying “the intersection of literature and economics.”[footnote| The essays collected in the anthology suggest that, even by 1999, this intersection was already sprawling: the volume includes essays about metaphorical economies (Lyotard’s “libidinal economy”), capitalist markets (the financing of modernism), and treatments of the signifying dimension of money (money and semiosis in eighteenth-century German language theory). What unites these essays is the authors’ determination to adapt the methodologies associated with the humanities—textual interpretation, historical analysis, the demystifying and deconstructive impulses associated
with the linguistic turn—to the events, texts, and components of market economies. Osteen and Woodmansee, The New Economic Criticism.
Because the humanities disciplines use methods that feature texts and interpretation and the social science disciplines rely on practice- and description-oriented methodologies, the two sets of disciplines approach the intersection of economics, culture, and the social in different ways. This methodological rift—along with the even greater distance between the methodological assumptions of the humanities and those of the hard sciences and mathematics—constitutes an important impediment to attempts to incorporate this enterprise into the existing disciplinary arrangement of U.S. universities. Before examining those impediments in some detail, let me give you two examples of how cultural economy (or whatever we decide to call it) looks in practice. The first is my recent essay for a forthcoming collection of papers on the relationship between modernity and liberalism. The essay is entitled “Stories We Tell about Liberal Markets: The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Great-Men Histories of Change.”[footnote] In the essay, I provide an historical account of the rise of the efficient market hypothesis and argue that the way this history has typically been narrated (as the triumph of a few pioneering economic geniuses) perpetuates certain paradoxes that lie at the heart of modern liberalism. Briefly, the efficient market hypothesis is a theory, formulated by economists and generally stated mathematically, that claims that financial markets are efficient and self-regulating, with stock prices serving as a kind of epistemological barometer because they reflect all the information about individual companies and the market as a whole. This theory allows economists to determine (and to diagram on a graph) what they call the “efficient frontier” (the points at which an investor’s returns are maximized in relation to minimized points of risk). In ways too complicated for me to rehearse here, the efficient market hypothesis is the basis of the portfolio theory of investing (which says that an investor should evaluate the return and risk of an entire portfolio, not individual stocks), the Black-Scholes-Merton formula for pricing options (which enables investors to price futures and other kinds of derivatives), and the entire set of assumptions that led investment banks to develop and trade the complex financial products—credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations,
mortgage-backed securities, and other structured investment products— whose misuse has nearly destroyed the global economy during the last several years.
Forthcoming in The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Joyce. Edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
The essay is an attempt to flesh out the historical, political, legal, and epistemological contexts in which an academic theory was gradually translated into the mathematical formulae and assumptions that led the so- called quants (financial engineers) to develop derivatives and various kinds of structured investment products. The events I describe span the period between 1776, when Adam Smith formulated what looks like a model of market equilibrium (the “invisible hand”), and 2009, when government officials, bank executives, and ordinary people continued to dig their way out of the rubble of foreclosed homes, lost jobs, and outright fraud left behind by the missteps inspired by the efficient market hypothesis. These events include the forty-four—nation acceptance of the Bretton Woods agreement (which, in 1944, made the U.S. dollar the world’s reserve currency); the 1974 passage of ERISA, the Employee Retirement Security Act (which required U.S. companies to set aside and invest money to fund their employees’ retirements); the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (which had previously separated ordinary commercial banks from their investment banks); the rise of U.S. business schools, where the academic discipline of economics gradually joined managerial science as the core of the curriculum; the mathematization of economics; and the rise of professional financial advisors. Against the backdrop of policies associated with the supply-side economics championed in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the regulatory permissiveness associated with the Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations in the next decades, and the rapid displacement of nation-state oversight by the rule of self-interested multinational corporations in the 1990s, real-life manifestations of the efficient market hypothesis began to shape the market that the theory was supposed to describe. Gradually, the premises of the efficient market hypothesis became a self-fulfilling prophecy—even as its shortcomings planted the destructive seeds that would cause most economists to abandon it virtually overnight. As recently as 2007, Peter L. Bernstein, one of the
great champions of this thesis, could celebrate its triumph (in distinctly ominous terms): “it may sound ironic,” Bernstein wrote in the introduction to Capital Ideas Evolving, “but as investors increasingly draw on Capital Ideas [the assumptions implicit in the Efficient Market Hypothesis] to shape their strategies, to innovate new financial instruments, and to motivate the drive for higher returns in relation to risk, the real world is on a path toward an increasing resemblance to the theoretical world described in Capital Ideas [the title of Bernstein’s earlier book].”[ footnote] A year later, George Soros, whose dissenting voice had long been crying in the wilderness, insisted that the efficient market hypothesis was only a theory. “While it is possible to construct theoretical models along [the] lines [of the thesis],” Soros wrote in The Crisis of 2008, “the claim that those models apply to the real world is both false and misleading.” [footnote] For Soros, the fall of the investment house Lehman Brothers in September 2008 decisively demonstrated the dynamic he had been seeing for over a decade: as Bernstein triumphantly claimed, the implementation of the efficient market hypothesis in modern investments, instruments, and innovations had actually created a recursive effect, in which the theory was shaping what it ought merely to describe. Logically enough, when the institutions that created the instruments began to collapse, the credibility of the theory vanished too. “The demise of Lehman Brothers conclusively falsifies the efficient market hypothesis,” Soros announced.|[footnote |
Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving. (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), xviii.
George Soros, The Crash of 2008 and What It Means: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), Kindle Electronic edition, location 797.
Soros, The Crash of 2008, location 1521-24.
In “The Stories We Tell about Liberal Markets,” I explain in more detail how those financial instruments—the alphabet soup of CDOs, CDSs, ABSs, and SIPs—released the destructive potential of the efficient market hypothesis into the global economy. Here I will instead consider the stories people tell about these events. Even though the efficient market hypothesis insists that the activities of individuals don’t matter—because the autonomous system of the market is self-organizing and controlled— histories of this thesis almost all take the form of great-men narratives,
which chronicle the “pioneering,” “heroic,” or “villainous” contributions of individual men (and they are almost all men). The paradox whereby a set of conventions emphasizing individual achievements persists in narratives about the self-regulating capital market thus repeats (and illuminates) one of the central paradoxes of liberalism’s individualism: in this model, some people can be sufficiently “creative” and “heroic” to become characters who merit narrative attention, but neither these traits nor the narratives that celebrate (or excoriate) them depart from the larger patterns of liberalism. What these narratives reveal is that the competition presented as “natural” to the free market system encourages creativity only in the terms that liberalism allows. The creativity that registers in this system as worthy of narrative attention is strictly that which furthers the “evolution” of liberalism’s primary institutions.
The reason this paradox matters is that our preference for great-men narratives reinforces a desire to identify individual culprits or saviours. This in tum prevents us from understanding that the problems masked by the embrace of the efficient market hypothesis are systemic, not the result of individual transgressions. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, not simply the prosecution of individuals who have taken advantage of loopholes written into the system itself. Great-men narratives also prevent ordinary people from realizing that we also bear responsibility for what has happened. When ordinary people assume that finance is just too difficult to understand, they implicitly accept peripheral roles in the financial activities that actively affect their personal well-being. These stories matter because they perpetuate the idea that some individuals rightfully exercise more agency than others, just as the hypothesis that these stories (ironically) endorse perpetuates the idea that whatever the market does is (somehow) right.
My second example offers an alternative to the great-men narratives of the financial crisis. In an essay entitled “From New Deal Institutions to Capital Markets,” forthcoming in Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Martha Poon argues that it was the adoption by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored mortgage agencies, of a particular formula for determining the risk that would-be home-owners posed that led to the distinction between “prime” mortgages and “subprime” mortgages.
[footnote] It was this distinction, in turn, that enabled mortgage originators to assign different interest rates to different kinds of borrowers, and purchasers of these mortgages to expect different kinds of returns from them. These differential interest rates, along with the array of mortgage products created to enable even unemployed borrowers to secure a mortgage, rendered one group of mortgages attractive to large-scale investors because their higher risk meant that they yielded higher returns; attracted to these high-risk, high-return mortgage-backed securities, investment banks were able to generate huge profits by using them to collateralize (and thus leverage) their own borrowing from other investment banks, local governments, and pension funds. As we now know, the interest rates that enticed unqualified borrowers into the housing market were kept artificially low at first by low- or no-interest teaser rates, which had to reset if lenders were to make good on the loans secured against them. When these rates reset in the fall of 2006, borrowers began to default, the subprime mortgage industry collapsed, investment banks discovered that their own highly leveraged wagers had lost value, and credit markets froze. Unable to borrow money for its day-to-day operations, the investment bank Bear Stearns collapsed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized, Lehman Brothers failed, the insurance giant AIG had to be bailed out by the U.S. government, Congress refused to pass legislation designed to pump money into the system (the TARP, or Troubled Asset Relief Program), global stock markets tanked, and everyone’s 401(k) lost 40 percent of its value.
Martha Poon, “From New Deal Institutions to Capital Markets: Commercial Consumer Risk Scores and the Making of Subprime Mortgage Finance,” Accounting, Organizations and Society (2009), doi:10.1016/j.aos.2009.02.003.
How could the adoption of a system for producing a credit score be responsible for this disaster? Poon demonstrates that what lay behind the predatory lenders and the greedy investment bankers was a new calculative infrastructure that created the investment subprime—“at once a class of consumers, a set of ‘exotic’ mortgage products, and a class of mortgage backed securities—as a visible and fluid network of high-stakes financial action” (2-3). This infrastructure, in turn, was produced when the mortgage industry as a whole adopted a single metric for evaluating the relative
chance that individual borrowers would default on their loans. The FICO credit bureau score, a commercially available consumer risk assessment tool, was originally one among many such metrics; the three companies that market credit scores under the brands of Trans Union, Equifax, and Experian initially offered competing metrics. In 1995, however, Freddie Mac decided to adopt FICO in order to standardize underwriting practices in federally sanctioned lending. FICO was then adopted by other lenders and rating agencies (including not only the three companies I just listed, but also Standard and Poor’s, the equity rating agency), and by 2003 it had become the industry standard—in part because it could easily be operationalized through proprietary, automated underwriting software (Loan Prospector). With the adoption of FICO, credit-by-screening, or the case-by-case evaluation of potential borrowers as individuals, was replaced by credit-by-risk, an automated, quantitative assessment of risk pools that did not even require individual interviews. Once in place, the score scale FICO created not only discriminated between a group of loans designated “prime” and those designated “subprime”; it also made it possible for loan originators to devise products for which members of the second group could qualify. In Poon’s words, “once ‘creditworthiness’ is expressed through a Statistical scale of gradated risk, a loan can be arranged for people who are of low credit quality; that is, for those who would not be considered particularly ‘creditworthy’ from a screening point of view. Screening is a risk minimizing strategy; statistical lending is a risk management strategy, that is, one that embraces risk” (14). With lenders embracing risk and packaging (and pricing) mortgages according to risk pools, the pieces were in place for investment banks to buy up, then bundle and slice these pools of mortgages, and then to use them to collateralize their own heavily leveraged bets.
Poon’s conclusions are sobering. “It is not quantification, model building, or numerical expression as information per se, that should be linked to increased channels for high-risk investment in the mortgage industry,” she writes. “Nor can responsibility for the changes be flatly pinned on the [government-sponsored enterprises, like Freddie Mac]... . It is the pioneering journey of FICO scores throughout the industry that has integrated, assembled, and aligned different market agents. The integrity of the chain . . . is what has rendered these diverse agents capable of engaging
together in a distinctive and coherent, globe spanning circuit of productive subprime real estate finance” (17). Then she concludes: “In this view, the protracted globe-spanning credit crisis . . . should be studied first and foremost as the temporary achievement of a tightly calculated system of financial order, not as disorder” (19).
While Poon and I would surely disagree about many things —she is interested in the formal properties of technical systems, not “grander” themes like liberalism—Poon and I are engaged in projects more alike than different. Both of us, for example, want to understand how elements of the financial infrastructure have been naturalized—how they have been built into the financial system in ways that make it impossible for individual actions to counteract them. No individual’s actions can be either “heroic” or decisively “villainous” because no individual can act outside the system that is increasingly tightly organized by both the (economic) assumption that financial interconnectedness is algorithmically rational and the tools (like the FICO scores) that make it so.
Integrating projects like Poon’s and mine into the existing array of academic disciplines will be difficult. As I suggested above, method poses an enormous challenge. Typically, the social sciences take their methodological clues from the sciences, and, even when social scientists like Poon focus on the social construction of entities such as the calculative apparatus of credit scores, the goal is to produce a description that is as accurate—and, by implication, as objective—as possible. In the humanities, which have long emphasized interpretation, objectivity is rarely embraced as the primary outcome. Because most humanists’ objects of analysis derive their identity from a degree of indeterminacy, moreover—they cultivate ambiguity as part of their identity as aesthetic objects—an analyst’s ability to generate an accurate description is either merely a first step toward interpretation or entirely beside the point. As long as social scientific and humanities disciplines define their enterprises in opposition to each other, their methodologies will continue to pull in opposite directions; and, as long as this is the case, it will be difficult for disciplinary curricula to absorb more than a few outlying courses that depart so radically from the disciplinary norm.
But the greatest challenge to any effort to incorporate cultural economy into existing academic curricula emanates from the role mathematics now plays in the discipline of economics. Even though economists did not embrace mathematics until the 1970s, mathematics is now central to economics and to the subdiscipline of financial economics. Pick up any advanced textbook on finance or investing, and the first thing you will see are mathematical equations. The problem posed by the centrality mathematics now assumed in financial economics is not that people who are good at description and interpretation are rarely good at math. The problem is that a deterministic mathematical model, which is what equations are, has to make several assumptions in order to claim that equations are relevant to the real world of finance. The first assumption of mathematical modelling is that real-world examples can be captured by a financial type (x); this removes any anomalies that might make the real-world instance unpredictable. Second, mathematical modelling assumes that future events will repeat past events and that any event that does vary from past events is a one-off (thus irrelevant) departure from the norm. Third, it assumes that markets are rule- governed—that is, efficient (that they enjoy perfect liquidity, infinite credit, and no counterparty risks). All of these assumptions can be summarized thus: mathematical models assume—and produce—abstract space, not the complex, probabilistic, socio-historical, and self-reflexive world where real- life events, including financial events, occur.[ footnote] It is difficult to see how a discipline that embraces mathematics in order to gain legitimacy as a science can ever be incorporated into any other discipline that seeks to understand—whether through description or interpretation—the anomalies that socio-historical conditions generate. As one Wall Street trader put it when home foreclosures began to mount: “You cannot model human behavior with mathematics. There’s no computer model that will ever tell you whether someone will pay their mortgage. And there never will be. The risk will always be there. You cannot calculate it. Risk and reward are beyond the intellectual limits of a computer.” | footnote]
Thanks to Edward LiPuma for formulating these points about mathematics. Private electronic correspondence.
Lawrence G. McDonald, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers (New York: Crown, 2009), 134.
At most, I think, any instances of cultural economy, the social study of finance, or whatever we decide to call it will appear at the boundary that separates the humanities and the social sciences. As long as the present configuration of the disciplines obtains, individuals who practice economics (most of whom aspire to be called scientists, not social scientists and certainly not humanists) will have little respect for this emergent enterprise —even if it helps humanists, social scientists, and the larger population understand the complex ways that financial systems affect our lives.
Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge
Thirty years ago, the French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard published a prescient “report on knowledge” called The Postmodern Condition. Originally commissioned by the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec, the report was an investigation of “the status of knowledge” in “computerized societies” (3). Lyotard's working hypothesis was that the nature of knowledge—how we know, what we know, how knowledge is communicated, what knowledge is communicated, and, finally, who “we” as knowers are—had changed in light of the new technological, social, and economic transformations that have ushered in the post-industrial age, what he calls, in short, postmodernism. Much more than just a periodizing term, postmodernism, for Lyotard, bespeaks a new cultural-economic reality as well as a condition in which “grand narratives” or “meta-narratives” no longer hold sway: the progress of science, the liberation of humanity, the spread of Enlightenment and rationality, and so forth are meta-narratives that have lost their cogency. This itself is not an original observation; after all, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, and others have variously shown where the fully enlightened world ends up. What sets Lyotard apart is his focus on how knowledge has been transformed into many “small” (and even competing and contradictory) narratives and how scientific knowledge in particular has become transformed into “bits of information” with the rise of cybernetics, informatics, information storage and databanks, and telematics, rendering knowledge something to be produced in order to be sold, managed, controlled, and even fought over (3-5). In these computerized societies (remember this is 1979: the web didn't exist and the first desktop computers were just being introduced), the risk, he claims, is the dystopian prospect of a global monopoly of information maintained and secured by private companies or nation-states (4-5). Needless to say, Google was founded about twenty years later, although ostensibly with a somewhat different mission: to make the world's information universally accessible and useful.
Lyotard articulated one of the most significant contemporary struggles— namely, the proprietary control of information technologies, access and operating systems, search and retrieval technologies, and, of course,
content, on the one hand, and the “open source” and “creative commons” movement on the other. Beyond that, he drew attention to several other changes that have affected what he considered to be the state of knowledge in postmodernism: first, the dissolution of the social bond and the disaggregation of the individual or the self (15); second, the interrogation of the university as the traditional legitimator of knowledge; and third, the idea that knowledge in this new era can only be legitimated by “little narratives” based on what he calls “paralogy” (a term that refers to paradox, tension, instability and the capacity to produce “new moves” in ever-shifting “language games”). While I will not evaluate Lyotard's argument extensively here, I do think it's worth underscoring these points because, perhaps surprisingly, they apply just as much to 2009 as they did to 1979. After all, the social bond today is fundamentally realized through interactions with distributed and equally abstracted networks such as email, IM, text messaging, and Facebook that are accessed through computers, mobile phones, and other devices connected to “the grid.” It has become impossible to truly “de-link” from these social networks and networking technologies, as the self exists “in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before . . . located at 'nodal points' of specific communication circuits. ... Or better [Lyotard says] one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass” (15).
Lyotard’s discussion of the role of the university in postmodernism has become increasingly relevant over the last three decades. The university is no longer the sole, and perhaps not even the privileged, site of knowledge production, curation, stewardship, and storage. Traditionally an exclusive, walled-in institution, the university legitimates knowledge while reproducing rules of admission to and control over discourses. Not just anyone can speak (one must first be sanctioned through lengthy and decidedly hierarchical processes of authorization), and the knowledge that is transmitted is primarily circulated within and restricted to relatively closed communities of knowers (Foucault calls them “fellowships of discourse’). True statements are codified, repeated, and circulated through various kinds of disciplinary and institutional forms of control that legitimize what a “true statement” is within a given discipline: before a statement can even be admitted to debate, it must first be, as Foucault argued repeatedly, “within the true” (224). For an idea to fall “within the
true,” it must not only cite the normative truths of a given discipline but— and this is the crux of this essay—it must look “within the true” in terms of its methodology, medium, and mode of dissemination. Research articles can't look like Wikipedia entries; monographs can't be exhibitions curated in Second Life. At least not yet...
Thankfully, universities are far from static or monolithic institutions and, as Lyotard and others point out, there is plenty of room for an imaginative reinvention of the university, of disciplinary structures, and research and pedagogical practices. This imaginative investment lies in the ability to “make a new move” or change the rules of the game by, perhaps, arranging or curating data in new ways, thereby developing new constellations of thought that “disturb the order of reason” (61). The next part of this article will address precisely what this might mean for the work of the Digital Humanities today.
For now, I want to articulate the third and final point that I adopt from Lyotard, namely the problem of legitimation. Wikipedia can stand as a synechdoche for the problems of knowledge legitimation: who can create knowledge, who monitors it, who authorizes it, who disseminates it, and whom does it influence and to what effect? Legitimation is always, of course, connected to power, whether the power of a legal system, a government, a military, a board of directors, an information management system, the tenure and promotion system, the book publishing industry, or any oversight agency. Not only are modes of discourse (utterances, statements, arguments) legitimized by the standards established by a given discipline, by its practitioners, and by its history, so are the media in which these discursive statements are formulated, articulated, and disseminated. The normative medium for conveying humanities knowledge (certainly in core disciplines such as literature and literary studies, history, and art history, but also philosophy and the humanistic social sciences, as they have been codified since the nineteenth century) is print: the printed page— linear, paginated prose supported by a bibliographic apparatus—is the naturalized medium, and the knowledge it conveys is legitimated by the processes of peer review, publication, and citation. This is not necessarily a problem—it certainly works, makes sense, and is authoritative. But we should also remember that this medium wasn't always used and won't
always be: think, for example, of rhetoric and philosophy, grounded in oral and performative traditions, or of “practice-based” disciplines such as dance, design, film, and music, in which the intellectual product is not a print artifact. In much the same vein, Digital Humanities denaturalizes print, awakening us to the importance of what N. Katherine Hayles calls “media-specific analysis” in order to focus attention on the technologies of inscription, the material support, the system of writing down (“aufschreiben,” as Friedrich Kittler would say), the modes of navigation (whether turning pages or clicking icons), and the forms of authorship and creativity (not only of content but also of typography, page layout, and design). In this watershed moment of transformation, awareness of media- specificity is nearly inescapable.
Far from suggesting that new technologies are better or that they will save us (or resuscitate our “dying disciplines” or "struggling universities"), Lyotard concludes his report with a call for the public to have “free access to the memory and data banks” (67). He grounds the argument dialectically, as technologies have the potential to do many things at once: to exercise exclusionary control over information as well as to democratize information by opening up access and use. This, I would argue, is the persistent dialectic of any technology, ranging from communications technologies (print, radio, telephone, television, and the web) to technologies of mobility and exchange (railways, highways, and the Internet). These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever-greater liberation of humankind, as Nicholas Negroponte asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being Digital (1995), for they always have a dialectical underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred-dollar computer will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will also likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy, interconnected world that never existed before [Presner]). Indeed, this is why any discussion about technology cannot be separated from one about power, legitimacy, and authority.
Rather than making predictions, I would like to turn to the state of knowledge in the humanities in 2009. My relatively recent arrival in this discussion, after centuries of thought on this topic, constitutes, in fact, a unique vantage point from which I can begin: today, the changes brought about by new communication technologies—including but hardly limited to web-based media forms, locative technologies, digital archives, social networking, mixed realities, and now cloud computing—are so proximate and so sweeping in scope and significance that they may appropriately be compared to the print revolution.[footnote] But our contemporary changes are happening on a very rapid timescale, taking place over months and years rather than decades and centuries. Because of the rapidity of these developments, the intellectual tools, methodologies, disciplinary practices, and institutional structures have just started to emerge for responding to, engaging with, and interpreting the massive social, cultural, economic, and educational transformations happening all around us. Digital Humanities explores a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds itself absorbed into new, multimedia configurations, alongside other digital tools, techniques, and media that have profoundly altered the production and dissemination of knowledge in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (see, for example, the Digital Humanities Manifesto, Figs. 1 and 2).
Web-based media forms refer to any media produced and broadcast on the web, ranging from YouTube videos to Wikipedia. Many of these media are also viewable on mobile devices and, increasingly, search technologies are keyed to physical location. With a GPS-enabled mobile phone, for example, geographically relevant content can be uploaded and downloaded. Digital archives are steadily moving from being “digital silos” to becoming interoperable repositories, allowing for materials to be aggregated and integrated across collections. With the innovations of Google and Amazon, to name two examples, cloud computing no longer stores data on single machines or a limited number of servers but in the (virtually) infinite “cloud,” rendering data accessible anywhere, at anytime. Finally, the explosion of social networking sites allows for real-time interaction with friends, creating online communities composed of personal networks. Mixed reality applications such as Second Life integrate real-world social
networking with embodied experiences of navigation, gaming, and moving through virtual spaces.
I consider “Digital Humanities” to be an umbrella term for a wide array of practices for creating, applying, interpreting, interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technologies. These practices—whether conservative, subversive, or somewhere in between—are not limited to conventional humanities departments and disciplines, but affect every humanistic field at the university and transform the ways in which humanistic knowledge reaches and engages with communities outside the university. Digital Humanities projects are, by definition, collaborative, engaging humanists, technologists, librarians, social scientists, artists, architects, information scientists, and computer scientists in conceptualizing and solving problems, which often tend to be high-impact, socially- engaged, and of broad scope and duration. At the same time, Digital Humanities is an outgrowth and expansion of the traditional scope of the humanities, not a replacement for or rejection of humanistic inquiry. I firmly believe that the role of the humanist is more critical at this historic moment than ever before, as our cultural legacy as a species migrates to digital formats and our relation to knowledge, cultural material, technology, and society is radically re-conceptualized. As Jeffrey Schnapp and I articulated in various instantiations of the Digital Humanities Manifesto, it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty-first century cultural wars (which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests). Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously—even scandalously—silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and effectively won the right to transfer copyrights of orphaned books to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing? The Manifesto is a call to humanists for a much deeper engagement with digital culture production, dissemination, access, and ownership. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment interests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom? These are questions that humanists must urgently ask and answer.
Like all manifestos, especially those that came out of the European avant- garde in the early twentieth century, the Digital Humanities Manifesto is bold in its claims, fiery in its language, and utopian in its vision. It is not a unified treatise or a systematic analysis of the state of the humanities; rather, it is a call to action and a provocation that has sought to perform the kind of debate and transformation for which it advocates. As a participatory document circulated throughout the blogosphere, the three major iterations of the Digital Humanities Manifesto are available in many forums online: Versions 1.0 and 2.0 exist primarily as Commentpress blogs, and Version 3.0 is an illustrated, print-ready PDF file, which, as of this writing, has been translated into four languages and widely cited, cribbed, remixed, and republished on numerous blogs. The rationale for using Commentpress was to make some of the more incendiary ideas in the Manifesto available for immediate public scrutiny and debate, something that is facilitated by the blogging engine's paragraph-by-paragraph commenting feature, resulting in a richly interlinked authoring/commenting environment. In a Talmudic vein, the comments and critiques quickly overtook the original “text,” creating a web of commentary and a multiplication of voices and authors. By Versions 2.0 and 3.0, the authorship of the Manifesto had extended in multiple directions, with substantial portions authored by scholars in the field, students, and the general public. Moreover, since the Manifesto was widely distributed in the blogosphere and on various Digital Humanities listservs, it instantiated one of the key things that it called for: participatory humanities scholarship in the expanded public sphere.
A DIGITAL HUMANITIES MANIFESTO eS £1 BROWSE COMMENTS Next: The Digital Humanities Manifest COMMENTS on whole page mem | ome =~ = by Section A Digital Humanities Manifesto 28 -DIGITALHUMANITIES MANIFESTOOPEN (ij | General Commonts FOR REVIEW AND COMMENT | AIMS: * [The content of the manifesto represents the view of the [...] The Digital Humanities Manifesto that was authors and does not claim to represent the views of ? discussed at the Mellon Seminar has now been CONTENTS UCLA, the UCLA Humanities, Division, and the Digital published on a WordPress blog at Humanities at UCLA.) http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2008/12 A Digital Humanities /15/digital-humanities-manifesto/, [...J Manifesto * Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of oraanry 13, 2009 4:48 pen Reply » > st — oh sie convergent practices that explore a universe in which 2 ee print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium CATHYDAV:
in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated. This is just fantastic and, needless to say, dovetails
7 beautifully with the three-prongs of HASTAC: ~ Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital critical thinking, creative design /development,
RECENT COMMENTS
revolution looked backwards as it moved forward, It 4 participatory learning. Congratulations on this, on oo 3 taste replicated a world where print was primary and visuality producing such a terrific document. My one fouBurnard says: “digital was secondary, while vastly accelerating search and question and it is one I grapple with all the time: is humanities” is a social retrieval. Now it must look forwards into an immediate it the right time, to use “digital humanities” to construct like others. it's future in which the medium specific features of the digital define what we're doing? Does that leave out social a street gang. that's why become its core. sciences, natural and computational sciences, and itt]
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The Digital Humanities |
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what is(n't} digital humonities (and why it motters)
Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that . explore a universe in which: a) print is no longer the exclusive or the normative
‘S\ medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds J itself absorbed into new, multimedia configurations; and b) digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the production and dissemination of 2 knowledge in the arts, human and social sciences, The Digital Humanities seeks to play an inaugural role with respect to 8 world in which, no longer the sole producers, stewards, and disseminators of knowledge or culture, universities are called upon to shape natively digital models of scholarly discourse for the newly emergent public spheres of the present era (the www, the blogosphere, digital libraries, etc.), to model excellence and innovation in these domains, and to facilitate the formation of networks of knowledge production, exchange, and dissemination that are, at once, global and local.
PDF Version 3.0: http://digitalhumanities.ucla.edu/images/stories/mellon seminar readings/ manifesto%2020.pdf
Reflecting on the Manifesto nine months later, I believe it is not only a call for Hhmanists to be deeply engaged with every facet of the most recent information revolution (Robert Darnton points out that we are living through the beginnings of the fourth Information Age, not the first), but also a plea for humanists to guide the reshaping of the university—curricula, departmental and disciplinary structures, library and laboratory spaces, the relationship between the university and the greater community—in creative ways that facilitate the responsible production, curation, and dissemination of knowledge in the global cultural and social landscapes of the twenty-first century. Far from providing "right answers," the Manifesto is an attempt to examine the explanatory power, relevance, and cogency of established organizations of knowledge that were inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to imagine creative possibilities and futures that
build on long-standing humanistic traditions. It is not a call to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, but rather to interrogate disciplinary and institutional structures, the media of knowledge production and modes of meaning making and to take seriously the challenges and possibilities set forth by the advent of the fourth Information Age. The Manifesto argues that the work of the humanities is absolutely critical and, in fact, more necessary than ever for developing thoughtful responses, purposeful interpretations, trenchant critiques, and creative alternatives—and that this work cannot be done while locked into restrictive disciplinary and institutional structures, singular media forms, and conventional expectations about the purview, function, and work of the humanities.
The Manifesto in no way declares the humanities "dead" or placed in peril by new technologies; rather, it argues, the humanities are more necessary and relevant today than perhaps any other time in history. It categorically rejects Stanley Fish's lament of “the last professor” and the work of his students, such as Frank Donoghue, which claims that the humanities will soon die a quiet death. To be sure, we must be vigilant of the “corporate university” and distinguish our Digital Humanities programs from the “digital diploma mills” (Noble), but we must also demonstrate that the central work of the humanities—creation, interpretation, critique, comparative analysis, historical and cultural contextualization—is absolutely essential as our cultural forms migrate to digital formats and new cultural forms are produced that are “natively digital.” Fish and Donoghue make an assessment of the end of the humanities based on the fact that its research culture, curricular programs, departmental structures, tenure and promotion standards, and, most of all, publishing models are based on paradigms that are quickly eroding. Indeed, they are not wrong about their assessment, which is quite convincing when we start from the crisis of the present and look backwards: academic books in the humanities barely sell enough copies to cover the cost of their production, and the job market—as the 2009 MLA report attests—betrays the worst year on record for PhDs hoping to land tenure-track positions in English or Foreign Literature departments (Jaschik). What this evidences is certainly a crisis, but the way out is neither to surrender nor to attempt to replicate the institutional structures, research problems, disciplinary practices, and media methodologies of the past; rather, it may be to recognize the liberating—and
profoundly unsettling—possibilities afforded by the imminent disappearance of one paradigm and the emergence of another. The humanities, rather than disappear as Fish predicts, can instead guide this paradigm shift by shaping the look of learning and knowledge in this new world.
Instead of facilely dismissing either the critical work of the humanities or the potentialities afforded by new technologies, we must be engaged with the broad horizon of possibilities for building upon excellence in the humanities while also transforming our research culture, our curriculum, our departmental and disciplinary structures, our tenure and promotion standards, and, most of all, the media and format of our scholarly publications. While new technologies may threaten to overwhelm traditional approaches to knowledge and may, in fact, displace certain disciplines, scholarly fields, and pedagogical practices, they can also revitalize humanistic traditions by allowing us to ask questions that weren't previously possible. We see this, for example, in fields such as classics and archaeology, which have widely embraced digital tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and 3D modeling to advance their research in significant and unexpected ways. We also see it in text-based fields like history and literature, which have begun to draw on new authoring, data- mining, and text-analysis tools for dissecting complex corpora on a scale and with a level of precision never before possible.
While the first wave of Digital Humanities scholarship in the late 1990s and early 2000s tended to focus on large-scale digitization projects and the establishment of technological infrastructure, the current second wave of Digital Humanities—what can be called “Digital Humanities 2.0”—is deeply generative, creating the environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is “born digital” and lives in various digital contexts. While the first wave of Digital Humanities concentrated, perhaps somewhat narrowly, on text analysis (such as classification systems, mark-up, text encoding, and scholarly editing) within established disciplines, Digital Humanities 2.0 introduces entirely new disciplinary paradigms, convergent fields, hybrid methodologies, and even new publication models that are often not derived from or limited to print culture.
Let me provide a couple of examples based on my own work on a web- based research, educational, and publishing project called HyperCities (http://www.hypercities.com). Developed through collaboration between UCLA and USC, HyperCities is a digital media platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city spaces such as Berlin, Rome, New York, Los Angeles, and Tehran. It brings together scholars from fields such as geography, history, literary and cultural studies, architecture and urban planning, and classics to investigate the fundamental idea that all histories “take place” somewhere and sometime and that these histories become more meaningful and valuable when they interact with other histories in a cumulative, ever-expanding, and interactive platform. Developed using Google's Map and Earth APIs, HyperCities features research and teaching projects that bring together the analytic tools of GIS, the geo-markup language KML, and traditional methods of humanistic inquiry.[footnote] The central theme is geo-temporal analysis and argumentation, an endeavor that cuts across a multitude of disciplines and relies on new forms of visual, cartographic, and time/space-based narrative strategies. Just as the turning of the page carries the reader forward in a traditionally conceived academic monograph, so, too, the visual elements, spatial layouts, and kinetic guideposts guide the “reader” through the argument situated within a multi-dimensional, virtual cartographic space. HyperCities currently features rich content on ten world cities, including more than two hundred geo-referenced historical maps, hundreds of user- generated maps, and thousands of curated collections and media objects created by users in the academy and general public.
An Application Programming Interface (API) allows programmers to build on, customize, and incorporate existing software code into their own applications. In 2005, Google released its map API, which let programmers invent their own mapping “mash-ups” using the basic content and technologies developed by Google.
As a Digital Humanities 2.0 project, HyperCities is a participatory platform that features collections that pull together digital resources via network links from countless distributed databases. Far from a single container or meta-repository, HyperCities is the connective tissue for a multiplicity of digital mapping projects and archival resources that users curate, present, and publish. What they all have in common is geo-temporal argumentation.
For example, the digital curation project “2009-10 Election Protests in Iran” (see Fig. 3) meticulously documents, often minute-by-minute and block-by- block, the sites where protests emerged in the streets of Tehran and other cities following the elections in mid-June. With more than one thousand media objects (primarily geo-referenced YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and Flickr photographs), the project is possibly the largest single digital collection to trace the history of the protests and their violent suppression. It is a digital curation project that adds significant value to these individual and dispersed media objects by bringing them together in an intuitive, cumulative and open-ended geo-temporal environment that fosters analytic comparisons through diachronic and synchronic presentations of spatialized data. In addition to organizing, presenting, and analyzing the media objects, the creator of the project, Xarene Eskandar, is also working on qualitative analyses of the data (such as mappings of anxiety and shame) as well as investigating how media slogans used in the protests were aimed at many different audiences, especially Western ones.
Election Protests in Iran
13 ewe 2009 Teheee thertion Protects 2009-05-53 - 2009-06-13 Cromer
14 Dewe 2009 Tebeee Uheition Protests 0-84 - 2009-06-14 Cremer
15 Deer 2009 Teheran theition Protests
2009-06-85 - 2009-04-25
16 deme 2009 Tehran Ulection Protests
2009-06-56 - 3009-06-36
17 deme 2009 Tebren Lieition Protests 2009-06-57 - 2009-06-37
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YouTube video on this collection: http://www. youtube.com/watch? v=qkEN02dGOIU
Permalink to this collection in HyperCities: http://hypercities.ats.ucla.edu/#collections/13549
Another project, “Ghost Metropolis” by Philip Ethington (see Fig. 4), is a digital companion to his forthcoming book on the history of Los Angeles, which starts in 13,000 BCE and extends through the present. Ethington demonstrates how history, experienced with complex visual and
cartographic layers, “takes” and “makes” place, transforming the urban, cultural, and social environment as various “regional regimes” leave their impression on the landscape of the global city of Los Angeles. The scholarship of this project can be fully appreciated only in a hypermedia environment that allows a user to move seamlessly between global and local history, overlaying datasets, narratives, cartographies, and other visual assets in a richly interactive space. Significantly, this project—a scholarly publication in its own right—can be viewed side-by-side with and even “on top of” other projects that address cultural and social aspects of the same layered landscape, such as the video documentaries created in 2008-09 by immigrant youth living in Los Angeles' historic Filipinotown. The beauty of this approach is that scholarly research intersects with and is enhanced by community memories and archiving projects that tend, at least traditionally, to exist in isolation from one another.
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YouTube video on this collection: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=logP_YvKslw
Permalink to this collection in HyperCities: http://hypercities.ats.ucla.edu/#collections/15165
HyperCities is also used for pedagogical purposes to help students visualize and interact with the complex layers of city spaces. Student projects exist side-by-side with scholarly research and community collections and can be seen and evaluated by peers. These projects, such as those created by my students for a General Education course at UCLA, “Berlin: Modern Metropolis,” demonstrate a high degree of skill in articulating a multi-
dimensional argument in a hypermedia environment and bring together a wide range of media resources ranging from 2D maps and 3D re-creations of historical buildings to photographs, videos, and text documents (see Fig. 5). What all of these projects have in common is an approach to knowledge production that underscores the distributed dimension of digital scholarship (by dint of the fact that all of the projects make use of digital resources from multiple archives joined together by network links), its interdisciplinary, hypermedia approach to argumentation, and its open-ended, participatory approach to interacting with and even extending and/or remixing media objects. Moreover, with the exception of the last, all of these HyperCities projects are works-in-progress, something that underscores the processual, iterative, and exploratory nature of Digital Humanities scholarship.
The Controversy over Rebuilding the Royal Palace in Berlin (Student Project)
l 01 - 1951-12-31
: Kimmy Von Der Ahe and John
Reynolds
1442-01 Creator
Stadtschloss @ 1442-01-01 - 2009-12-31 Suthor : Kimeny Von Der
1 Ane and John Reynolds
YouTube video on this collection: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=iFtG9HnhwIM
Permalink to this collection in HyperCities: http://hypercities.ats.ucla.edu/#collections/18712
This transformation in Digital Humanities scholarship is something that roughly parallels the development of the web from relatively static, read- only portals and stand-alone applications for the display of content to participatory platforms that foster collaborative production across media environments through the repurposing of both content and software. The birth of Web 2.0 has been well articulated by technology gurus such as Tim O'Reilly as well as leaders in the field of Digital Humanities such as Cathy
Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, the co-founders of the virtual consortium HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), both of whom are fierce advocates of “Humanities 2.0.” Humanities 2.0 refers to generative humanities, a humanistic practice anchored in creation, curation, collaboration, experimentation, and the multi-purposing or multi-channeling of humanistic knowledge. By rejecting the affect-neutral, Enlightenment myth of simply relaying disembodied information and, instead, emphasizing design, multimediality, and the experiential, Digital Humanities 2.0 seeks to expand the affective range to which scholarship can aspire.
Let me now return to and further elaborate the three observations about the state of knowledge that I distilled from Lyotard's report on “computerized societies”: first, the status of the social bond; second, the status of the university and, in particular, the place of the Humanities; and third, the question of knowledge legitimation. The three are deeply entangled and cannot be fully disaggregated. By social bond, at least in the context of the university, I am not referring to uses of social networking applications like Facebook (which, in my opinion, is as much of a data-harvester and miner of personal information as it is a social technology); rather, I mean the transformation of scholarly practice from individuals working and writing in isolation to team-based approaches to research problems that cannot be conceptualized, let alone solved, by single scholars. Here, we are beginning to see the emergence of finite, flexible, and nimble “knowledge problematics” that do not derive from or reflect entrenched disciplinary lines, methodological assumptions, or scholarly silos. I see these knowledge problematics as “virtual departments,” which exist only for a finite period of time, are agile, and are constantly built and dismantled. To use a term from the emergent field of digital cultural mapping[footnote], they might function as “overlays” on existing departments and institutions, connecting distant scholars and communities together and creating new feedback loops or among between them. It is imperative that we imagine concrete ways of reinventing the “social bond” at the university as an expanding set of networks that can be variously mobilized and also dispersed. The finitude of the social bond is just as important as its mobilization, because departmental and disciplinary structures must be flexible, nimble, adaptable, and, ultimately, mortal in order to foster innovation.
The emergent field of Digital Cultural Mapping brings together the analytic tools of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and traditional methods of humanistic inquiry in order to investigate a wide-range of cultural, historical, and social dynamics through space-time visualizations. See, for example, UCLA's new program in Digital Cultural Mapping: http://keckdcmp.ucla.edu/.
This not only affects the state of disciplines but also the status and role of the university in scholarly creation. In its best form, the university does not merely “store” and “transmit” knowledge but rather is a site of contestation, experimentation, and imaginative creation and re-creation. But today, many of the most innovative and impactful research technologies (at least for humanists and probably social scientists as well) are being developed by private industry, leaving the scholars and librarians to be consumers and users of these technologies. As Johanna Drucker has cogently argued, the design of new research environments cannot be left to technical staff and private corporations, as if this were somehow not intellectual work or not something in which we as scholars should be invested. The very word processing tools that I use to write this paper are not value-neutral; Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, web-browsers, web applications like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Second Life, and even markup and programming languages like HTML, XML, Java, and C++ are all culturally contingent technologies for knowledge production and dissemination. You may not agree with or care about the knowledge being produced here, but regardless, we—as humanities scholars—have barely started to grapple with the massive assumptions built into and implications of these technologies and languages and their social and cultural practices. We barely know what can be thought using these technologies, let alone what cannot be thought. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that these technologies weren't designed by and for humanists. I suggest that if we apply the same kind of rigorous, media-specific, social, cultural, and economic analyses that we have honed to study print culture to not just emerging but already prevalent technologies, we can begin to understand the status of knowledge in our “computerized societies” of 2009. Beyond “studying” such technologies, we must actively engage with, design, create, and even hack the environments and technologies that facilitate humanities research and knowledge production.
Finally, let me turn to the issue of knowledge legitimation, which is where Digital Humanities encounters the most resistance, skepticism, and denial. Most humanities scholars have been trained in "Normal Humanities" (to somewhat loosely apply Thomas Kuhn's formulation to our disciplines). "Normal Humanities" means clearly defined and legitimated research based on past achievements, on stabilized ways of knowing and communicating this knowledge, and on general agreement about what counts as and what looks like a research problem. I would venture that the vast majority of scholarship is not really novel but falls into “Normal Humanities,” obeying both the tacit and explicit rules of disciplinarity, media form, scholarly citation, and the accepted theoretical and methodological paradigms of a given field. Many people get tenure and are promoted by doing “Normal Humanities” well. What we are seeing today, however, is much more than a “paradigm shift.” We are at the beginning of a shift in “standards governing permissible problems, concepts, and explanations” (Kuhn, 106), and also in the midst of a transformation of the institutional and conceptual conditions of possibility for the generation, transmission, accessibility, and preservation of knowledge. To be sure, “traditional” humanities knowledge will not go the way of Ptolemy's computations of planetary position or phlogiston theory, since the transformation in humanities paradigms is not, strictly speaking, based upon the “incommensurability” with what came before. Rather, the transformation alters the ways in which the humanities articulates and investigates problems as well as the institutional and media structures that facilitate problem-solving in the first place. Within the transition period, there will, of course, be much searching for the fundamentals of the field as well as the emergence of competing and overlapping paradigms, but when the transition is complete, as Kuhn predicts with regard to scientific revolutions, “the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its goals” (85). A new “Normal Humanities” will have emerged.
Let me end by throwing down the gauntlet and arguing that Wikipedia is not only a model for the humanities but also for the university today. To be sure, there are other examples that I might have mentioned, but Wikipedia is probably the most pervasive, non-corporate, digital technology platform for knowledge generation. Far from a web-based encyclopedia for “intellectual sluggards” engaged in a “flight from expertise” (to quote
Michael Gorman, former President of the American Library Association [qtd. in Stothart]), Wikipedia, I believe, represents a truly innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative, knowledge-generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge. To date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in 47 languages (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia could, in fact, be a model for rethinking collaborative research and the dissemination of knowledge at institutions of higher learning, which are all too often fixated on “individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement and accomplishment” (Davidson and Goldberg, 14).
Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open-ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author. But you perhaps object: The content is amateurish, open to anyone, and, hence, cannot be trusted. Why would we want to abandon credentialing and expertise? And I reply: The point is not credentialing versus amateurness (or expertise versus crowd-sourcing); it's the fact that expertise and credentialing are distributed and shared in a way that increases the depth, scope, duration, and impact of both. Moreover, consensus never finally arrives when the system keeps an ongoing and ever- expanding record of each change and, significantly, always exposes its own conditions of possibility for knowledge production. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. That's worth some pause and reflection.
The point here is not that Wikipedia is “the answer” to the crisis of the humanities or that humanities scholarship should turn into Wikipedia entries; rather, it's that Wikipedia represents a very different model for creating, authorizing, and distributing knowledge; Google Earth and HyperCities represent others; social technologies, virtual worlds, and creative commons authoring environments offer still others. A central part of the work of the humanities must be to create and interrogate new models
for knowledge production in our “computerized” societies of 2009. Not only do we have to rethink how knowledge gets created, we also have to rethink what knowledge looks (or sounds, feels, or tastes) like, who gets to create knowledge, when it is "done" or transformed, how it gets legitimated and authorized, and how it is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global) audience. The twenty-first century university has the potential to generate, legitimate, and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways on a scale never before realized, involving technologies and communities that rarely (if ever) were engaged in a global knowledge- creation enterprise. We have just begun to do this. And that's what Digital Humanities 2.0 is fundamentally about.
References
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Davidson, Cathy. “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 707-17.
Davidson, Cathy and David Theo Goldberg. The Future of Learning Institutions. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009.
Digital Humanities Manifesto Commentpress versions 1.0 and 2.0: http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2008/12/15/digital-humanities- manifesto/ (accessed September 9, 2009).
“Digital Humanities Manifesto.” Commentpress versions 1.0 and 2.0. Institute for Future of the Book. http://www.digitalhumanities.ucla.edu/images/stories/mellon_ seminar readi ngs/manifesto%2020.pdf (accessed September 9, 2009).
Donoghue, Frank. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and The Fate of the Humanities. New York: Fordham Press, 2008.
Drucker, Johanna. “Blind Spots.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 3, 2009. http://chronicle.com/article/Blind-Spots/9348 (accessed September 9, 2009).
Fish, Stanley. “The Last Professor.” The New York Times. January 18, 2009.
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Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
Hayles, Katherine N. Writing Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. HyperCities. http://www.hypercities.com.
Jaschik, Scott. “Disappearing Jobs.” Inside Higher Education. December 17, 2009. http://www. insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/17/mla (accessed December 22, 2009).
Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Translated by Chris Metteer with Chris Cullens. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Vintage, 1996.
Noble, David. Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.
O'Reilly, Timothy. “What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” 2005. http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (accessed September 9, 2009).
Presner, Todd. Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Stothart, Chloe. “Web Threatens Learning Ethos.” Times Higher Education.
(accessed September 9, 2009).
Discussion of Poovey and Presner Papers
Audience: Your papers addressed the future and the development of new approaches for research. Might you elaborate on this?
Poovey: There is nothing more epistemologically interesting than finance, which is about manipulating temporality, inefficiencies, and points of disconnection that occur globally. People make money by taking advantage of the transient inefficiencies that circulate within what is represented as an efficient market. If you want to study the future and think about the possibilities for optimism, then it’s important to understand the ways in which optimism is undermined by certain systematic practices of capital accumulation and various financial manipulations. The possibilities for intervention exist, but not the means. An individual could not have intervened in the process by which the FICO score became institutionalized. We must develop a new form of optimism that is not based on the individual.
Presner: This idea can also be approached from the question of whether narrative is a necessary component of thinking about history. What happens when narrative is embedded in many different media forms? Phil Ethington’s Ghost Metropolis is an example of deep history, since it stretches back ten thousand years. It is also non-systematic since the content of HyperCities includes curated materials organized by academics alongside community-annotated narratives. A teenager who made a Flickr photostream of himself in historic Filipinotown might be talking about the same location that Ethington addresses, but ten thousand years later. This heterogeneity enhances the way in which we think about these deeply- layered place histories. One narrative cannot possibly capture the richness of the palimpsests of cultural and social meaning built into any location. The HyperCities project shows that a place history cannot be represented in a single medium and opens up the community of discussants.
Audience: Todd, is there a strong causal link between the two halves of your paper, one about a shift in the objects of knowledge production, and the other about a shift in the methods? In other words, does the fact that we’re now studying cultural objects other than printed texts produce a distributed
mode of scholarship? And, on the other hand, does that distribution of scholarship produce a shift in the objects of our disciplinary procedures?
Presner: I wouldn’t reduce it to a causal relationship, but the two do exist in a productive tension. The attention to modes of inscription and ways of thinking about navigation, distribution systems, even the fragility of the object have a higher stake in an environment in which new technologies are emerging and others are becoming unreadable. Think of the very rapid change in storage and retrieval systems, including Beta, VHS, DVD, CD, and digital media. The shift in method and the shift in the study of object go hand in hand.
Audience: Mary, you listed methodologies associated with social sciences but not methodologies from the study of literature. The shorthand for literary reading was signaled by the use of the words “stories” and “narrative.” You brought up the idea that the world is slowly becoming theory, rather than the other way around; that in some sense, we are living in fiction. Is there value to listing appropriate methodologies that we can crosshatch into the social sciences or the study of the economy? The word “emergent,” for me, comes from Raymond Williams’ suggestion that before the social fact is apparent to us, it is visible in structures of feeling.
Poovey: The methodologies associated with the humanities are more obvious, turning on interpretation primarily—but not exclusively—of textual objects, comparative analysis, and the analysis of the relationship between language and other modes of expression, including the affective, gestural, and pictorial. Raymond Williams is indeed a precursor of this symposium, but in thinking about emerging disciplines, consider not only his thoughts on emergent versus residual, but also on what goes into a culture. In my university, the methodologies associated with the humanities and literary studies in particular (insofar as those might be encapsulated by the linguistic turn, deconstruction, and Theory) are under attack from within the institution, including from some people within the humanities. It’s important to consider how to reinvigorate the methodologies of the humanities in ways that sustain attacks.
Audience: Professor Poovey, you mentioned that economics didn’t integrate mathematics until the 1970s. In the 70s, liberalism declined with the
upswing in conservative thought, particularly Nixon’s Southern strategy, in which he used populist arguments to put down liberal ones. While economics is a social indicator, its use of numbers and statistics give the impression that it is immutable. Is there a correlation between that upsurge in conservatism and the use of mathematics in economics?
Poovey: This is a very exciting thought. I take it that you’re referring to social liberalism and social conservatism, not free-market ideology. Another paradox is that social conservatism began to rise in part as an endorsement of a liberal market ideology that says that markets should be free to operate. It would be interesting to think about the role of statistics and mathematics in that as well.
Audience: It’s important to distinguish between statistical methods and a mathematical model in economic theory. Why wouldn’t cultural economy and cultural analytics wholeheartedly embrace the statistical method, not to the exclusion of other methodologies, but as a way to cross the social science/humanities divide?
Poovey: I agree that statistical modeling and analysis will help the humanities move away from a purely interpretation- or meaning-based analysis of text. Some of my colleagues and I are sponsoring dissertations that use statistics to chart, for example, the occurrence of the word “sublime” at critical moments. In the eighteenth century, “sublime” is almost everywhere, but when it drops out of the vocabulary, a set of aesthetic theories begins to take its place. There is a distinction between mathematics proper, which is the study of abstractions, and statistical analysis. Mathematics is also key to bridging this divide, especially mathematics as it has been adopted by finance.
Music, Biological Evolution, and the Brain
Abstract
This essay offers a novel theoretical perspective on the evolution of music. At present, a number of adaptationist theories posit that the human capacity for music is a product of natural selection, reflecting the survival value of musical behaviors in our species’ past (e.g., Wallin et al., 2000). In sharp contrast, a prominent nonadaptationist theory of music argues that music is a human invention and is biologically useless (Pinker, 1997). I argue that research on music and the brain supports neither of these views. Contrary to adaptationist theories, neuroscientific research suggests that the existence of music can be explained without invoking any evolutionary-based brain specialization for musical abilities. And contrary to Pinker’s claim, neuroscience research suggests that music can be biologically powerful. By biologically powerful, I mean that musical behaviors (e.g., playing, listening) can have lasting effects on nonmusical brain functions, such as language and attention, within individual lifetimes. Music is thus theorized to be a biologically powerful human invention, or “transformative technology of the mind.”
1. Introduction
The past decade has witnessed a rapid rise in cognitive and neuroscientific research on music. This has led to renewed interest in evolutionary questions about music, which originate with Darwin’s discussion of the topic in The Descent of Man (1871). There are now several adaptationist theories arguing that musical behaviors originated via biological evolution due to their survival value for human ancestors. In contrast, nonadaptationist theories propose that musical behaviors are a human invention. The most prominent such theory, that of Steven Pinker (1997), regards music as a pleasure technology built from pre-existing brain functions (such as language, emotional vocalization, etc.), and posits, “As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless” (p. 528).
Pinker’s idea that music is an invention built from existing brain functions provides a useful null hypothesis for evolutionary debates over music. His
assertion that music is biologically useless, however, is problematic. While Pinker was likely referring to music’s impact on human biology over evolutionary time, as opposed to within the lifetime of individual humans, his writing does not make this distinction. Furthermore, the metaphors he uses to describe music (e.g., “auditory cheesecake,” or “recreational drugs”) imply a view of music as having little biological significance at either evolutionary or individual timescales.[footnote |
While Pinker’s (1997) characterization of music as auditory cheesecake seemed to trivialize music, in more recent writings he has been more careful about assessing the value of music in human cultural life, noting, “The arts could be evolutionary by-products, and be among the most valuable human activities for all that” (Pinker, 2007, p. 170).
A central point of this essay is that discussions of the biological significance of music should conceptually distinguish music’s effects over evolutionary time from its effects within individual lifetimes. The need for this distinction is driven by evidence from neuroscience. Neuroscientific research suggests that music is an invention that builds on diverse, pre- existing brain functions, rather than a trait that originated via processes of natural selection. This is consistent with Pinker’s thesis. However, growing evidence from neuroscience also suggests that music is biologically powerful, meaning that it can have lasting effects on nonmusical abilities (such as language or attention) during the lifetime of individual humans. Importantly, these effects can be observed not only in trained musicians but also in ordinary individuals who engage regularly with music. Thus, I believe that music should be regarded as a biologically powerful human invention or “transformative technology of the mind.” (For brevity, henceforth I refer to this idea as TTM theory.)
This essay is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the evolutionary puzzle of music. Section 3 explains why neuroscience research suggests that music is an invention rather than a biological adaptation. Section 4 provides examples of the biological power of music. Section 5 suggests why music can have lasting effects on nonmusical brain functions. Section 6 provides a non-genetic explanation for why music is so pervasive in human culture. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of the relevance
of a Darwinian perspective for the modern biological study of human music.
It is worth clarifying some points regarding TTM theory’s claim that music can shape brain function. It is obvious that engaging in any humanly- invented activity (e.g., kite flying) changes the brain within individual lifetimes, because learning and memory are instantiated by changes in neural networks, e.g., in the pattern of synaptic connections between neurons. Thus, TTM theory does not simply claim that musical behaviors change the brain. (This is trivially true: even learning a simple tune involves changing brain networks in some way in order to store the memory of the tune.) Nor does TTM theory simply claim that learning music results in lasting structural changes to the brain. (This claim would hardly be novel, given the growing evidence of experience-dependent changes in brain structure caused by learning a musical instrument, e.g., Hyde et al., 2009.) Rather, TTM theory claims that music is a human invention that can have lasting effects on such nonmusical brain functions as language, attention, and executive function, and is concerned with explaining the biological mechanisms underlying these effects.
The qualification of “lasting” effects is important, because this distinguishes TTM theory from theories concerned with the short-term effects of music on other cognitive abilities (e.g., Thompson et al., 2001). That is, TTM theory is concerned with musically driven neurobiological changes that impact other brain functions over the course of months or years, not over the course of a few minutes. In this regard, TTM theory has some parallels to neurobiological theories of reading, another human invention with salient impact on the brain within individual lifetimes (Dehaene and Cohen, 2007). Indeed, reading can be considered another transformative technology of the mind, because it is a human invention built from existing brain systems (such as those supporting visuospatial cognition and language) that impacts a variety of mental abilities (Mar et al., 2008; Patel, 2008:400; Dehaene, 2009).
Of course, music is much older and far more widespread than reading and appeals to humans from infancy. Also, unlike reading skills, basic musical abilities develop without any special instruction (Bigand and Poulin-
Charronatt, 2006). These facts make the claim that music is a human invention seem odd. Yet other theories view ancient and universal human communication systems as inventions. For example, Tomasello (2008) has proposed that language originated as an invention based on communicative interactions between primates who had a special socio-cognitive ability for sharing actions and goals with others (“shared intentionality”; see also Lee et al., 2009). In common with such “language as invention” theories, TTM theory proposes that a complex and universal human trait can originate as an invention rather than as a biological adaptation. However, to my knowledge, all “language as invention” theories leave open the possibility that language, once invented, led to co-evolutionary changes in the brain that were aimed at supporting the acquisition of language (cf. Deacon, 1997). Indeed, the idea that our brains have been modified over evolutionary time to support the acquisition of language is favored by at least ten converging lines of evidence (Patel, 2008:358-366). TTM theory, in contrast, posits that there has been no evolutionary modification of our brains specifically aimed at facilitating musical abilities. Instead, music is viewed as a technology that is learned anew by each new generation of human minds. This view is congenial to the tremendous diversity of musical practices that have been described by ethnomusicologists (e.g., Titon, 1996; Nettl and Stone, 1998) and to the seemingly endless growth and development of music as a human art form (Ross, 2007). It is important to note, however, that TTM theory does not amount to the claim that humans are musical blank slates. Since music is theorized as building on preexisting brain functions (such as language and auditory scene analysis|footnote]), processing predispositions relevant to these other functions are likely to be reflected in the structure and processing of human music (cf. Reynolds, 2005; Dehaene and Cohen, 2007).
The process by which the human auditory system organizes sound into perceptually meaningful elements or sources (Bregman, 1990).
A final conceptual point about TTM theory concerning the fundamental question of why humans are drawn to musical behaviors merits discussion here. TTM theory claims that music can have lasting effects on nonmusical brain systems, but it does not propose that humans engage in music in order to produce these effects. Rather, as discussed in section 6 below, TTM theory posits that people are drawn to music because of its emotional power
and because of its efficacy for ritual and memory. The lasting effects on nonmusical abilities are thus a consequence of how music engages the brain, not a cause of musical behavior. A better understanding of how and why these effects occur is of interest both for basic brain science and for designing musical activities to address problems in nonmusical domains, i.e., in scientifically-based music therapy (Leins et al., 2009).
2. The evolutionary puzzle of music
Like language, music is a human universal that reaches deep into our species’ past (Nettl, 2000). Recent excavations have revealed bone flutes dating to the late Pleistocene era (~40,000 ybp, Conard et al., 2009). Cross- cultural and developmental research indicates that listening to and/or making music has a profound appeal to most members of our species, starting early in life (Blacking, 1973; Trehub, 2003). Thus, one can predict with some confidence that the few remaining uncontacted tribes of humans, when finally described by anthropologists, will have music as part of their behavioral repertoire.
For those interested in the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, such observations are puzzling. Musical activities lack any obvious survival value. Why then is music so pervasive in human life? Are we musical today because music helped our ancestors survive? Has the human mind been shaped by natural selection for music? Darwin (1871) was the first to wrestle with these questions, noting that “as neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed” (p. 1207).
In The Descent of Man, Darwin offered an adaptationist theory of music’s origins based on principles of sexual selection (see Kivy, 1959, for a discussion of these ideas in a larger historical framework). For the next century, scholarly discussion of music and evolution was relatively sparse but began to stir again with the rise of cognitive studies of music (e.g., Roederer, 1984). Interest in the topic has grown considerably in the past decade, reflecting the explosion of cognitive neuroscience research on music (Peretz, 2006). Indeed, since 2000, two scientific volumes of essays
have been devoted to the evolution of music (Wallin et al., 2000; Vitouch and Ladinig, 2009), and the topic has been addressed in many other books and scholarly articles (e.g., Pinker 1997; Hauser and McDermott, 2003; Mithen 2005; Fitch, 2006, 2010; Hagen and Hammerstein, 2009; Kirschner and Tomasello, in press). Several adaptationist and nonadaptationist proposals are now in existence; some of the more prominent ones are reviewed below.
2.1 Adaptationist proposals
The first evolutionary theory for music was offered by Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin drew an analogy with birdsong and theorized that music arose in our ancestors via mechanisms of sexual selection. He wrote: “Musical tones and rhythm were used by the half- human progenitors of man, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited by the strongest passions” (p. 1209). Darwin speculated that wordless courtship songs predated our linguistic abilities and that such singing provided the scaffolding upon which language itself evolved. This idea of a musical protolanguage has proved of enduring interest to scholars researching the evolution of language and music (e.g., Brown, 2000(a); Mithen, 2005; see Fitch, 2010, for an overview and a recent version of the musical protolanguage theory). Indeed, the idea of a shared origin for language and music is pre-Darwinian, dating at least as far back as French enlightenment writings in the 1700s (Thomas, 1995). Commencing with Darwin, however, scholars have explored the idea within an evolutionary framework, proposing theories for how such a form of communication could have evolved and seeking to explain how it could further evolve into articulate language and fully developed music. Such theories view music as having a biological rather than a purely cultural origin and posit that musical behaviors had survival value for our ancestors.
This section focuses on the three most prominent adaptationist theories of music, based on sexual selection, parental care, and group cohesion. These theories have been proposed and explored independently but are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, musical protolanguage theories often invoke all three such theories to account for the biological origin of musical behavior.
As noted above, the sexual selection theory of music originated with Darwin. Sexual selection has the appeal of being able to explain the evolution of elaborate traits that seem nonadapative, or even maladaptive, in the daily struggle for existence, yet that are beneficial in the competition for mates (the peacock’s tail is a classic example). The sexual selection theory of human music has been explored by Miller (2000) and others and continues to attract interest.
A second set of adaptationist proposals concerns parental care rather than sexual selection. As often noted by biologists, human infants are born remarkably early in their biological development compared to other primates, possibly due to constraints on the size of the birth canal imposed by bipedalism (Mithen, 2005). Dissanayake (2008) and Falk (2004) have pointed to the cross-cultural importance of vocal communication in human infant care, whereby adults use melodious and rhythmic affect-laden utterances (“motherese”) to soothe or arouse prelinguistic infants. Positing that such vocalizations had adaptive value for infant survival, these authors propose that music has its origins in vocalizations aimed at caring for infant offspring.
A third set of adaptationist proposals concerns possible benefits of music to group cohesion. Humans, like most other primates, live in groups where individual competition is balanced with cooperation. Humans are unusual, however, in having relatively low degrees of in-group genetic relatedness (due to high gene flow between groups), yet depending to a large degree on in-group cooperation in order to survive and outcompete other groups (Richerson and Boyd, 2005). There has been much recent interest in the idea that music may have served as a mechanism to promote social cohesion within groups (e.g., Brown, 2000(b)). This idea was first clearly articulated by Roederer (1984), who pointed to “the value of music as a means of transmitting information on emotional states and its effect in congregating and behaviorally equalizing masses of people.” Dunbar (in press) has argued that group singing and dancing replaced physical grooming in ancestral human groups, when increasing group size made physical grooming of allies impractical. According to this view, song and dance led to endorphin release (mimicking the neural effects of physical grooming). This in turn promoted bonding, because endorphins, “as a
byproduct of their role in pain control...have the property of making us feel warm and well disposed towards others who share...the experience that stimulates their production” (cf. Cohen et al., 2009, Kosfeld et al., 2005).
One appeal of the social cohesion idea is that music is often a social activity among humans, especially in small-scale cultures, and experimental work suggests that musical group activities promote cooperation between group members on subsequent nonmusical tasks (e.g., Wiltermuth and Heath, 2009; Kirschner and Tomasello, in press). Furthermore, music has certain design features that distinguish it from language, such as discrete pitches (allowing voices to blend together in song) and a distinct beat (enabling synchronized movement through time), which facilitate coordination between individuals and can promote a shared sense of identity and purpose (McNeill, 1995; Bispham, 2006).
Social cohesion hypotheses are currently a focus of much interest within music cognition, mirroring a growing interest within biology in natural selection at the level of social groups (e.g., Wilson and Wilson, 2007; Wilson et al., 2008). Several variant hypotheses have developed. Cross (2009), for example, draws on ethnomusicological literature and emphasizes music’s efficacy in managing situations of social uncertainty, i.e., Situations in which linguistic interaction might give rise to conflict. He also emphasizes the role of music as a training ground for social cognition (cf. Boyd, 2009). Merker (2000), in contrast, draws on observations of chimpanzee group vocal displays and theorizes that music may have originated in our ancestors from synchronous calls aimed at mate attraction (see also Merker et al., 2009). Hagen and Hammerstein (2009) draw on comparative data from nonhuman primates and carnivorous mammals thought to be ecologically similar to human ancestors, and suggest that music may have arisen from group vocal territorial advertisements (for antecedents of this idea, see Geissmann, 2000).
Another version of the social cohesion hypothesis is notable for the relatively small degree of biological specialization for music that it proposes (Kirschner and Tomasello, in press). According to this view, music originated as an invention in ancestral human groups. Because music promoted group cohesion and survival, it acted as a cultural (vs. biological)
adaptation, so that musically-oriented groups outsurvived other groups. Subsequently, due to feedback between cultural group selection and biological natural selection, there was selection for individuals who were biologically predisposed toward musical behavior.[ footnote] Thus, according to Kirschner and Tomasello, modern humans are hypothesized to have “an innate proclivity for musical sounds and actions” without necessarily having any other brain specializations for music processing (cf. Trehub and Hannon, 2006).[footnote |
See Richerson and Boyd, 2005, Ch. 6, for a general discussion of gene- culture coevolution in the context of human cooperative behavior.
The foregoing discussion of several adaptationist theories is necessarily brief, and readers desiring a wider and deeper discussion of adaptationist ideas are referred to the primary literature cited above.
For the sake of brevity, a critique of the above theories is not provided here (the interested reader is referred to Patel, 2008: 368-371). For the current purposes, the relevant point is that all despite their different points of emphasis, all adaptationist proposals view the human mind as having been specifically shaped by evolution to support musical behavior.
2.2 Nonadaptationist proposals
In sharp contrast to adaptationist theories, nonadaptationist theories of music posit that there has been no natural selection for musical abilities in our species. Herbert Spencer implicitly took this position (even prior to the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species) in his essay, “On the origin and function of music” (Spencer, 1857). Spencer argued that music grew out of the rhythms and cadences of impassioned speech and launched a debate that engaged Darwin and many other scholars (for a fascinating discussion, see Kivy, 1960, 1964, and Rehding, 2000).
Some thirty years later, William James voiced a nonadaptationist view of music in The Principles of Psychology (1890). James regarded the human love of music as “a mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system” (Vol. 2, p. 419) and asserted: “It has no zoological utility...it is a pure incident of having a hearing organ...it has entered the mind by the back stairs, as it
were, or rather [has] not entered the mind at all, but got surreptitiously born in the house” (Vol. 2, p. 627).
A modern descendant of James’ view is that of Pinker (1997: 528-538), which has become the most prominent nonadaptationist theory of music. Pinker’s proposal starts with the theory that many human mental faculties have been direct targets of natural selection. Music is chosen as a counterexample and is argued to be a human invention that is universal because of its link to pleasure: “Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once” (p. 528). In a later essay, Pinker (2007) elaborates this point to propose that music and many other human arts are “by-products of two other traits: motivational systems that give us pleasure when we experience signals that correlate with adaptive outcomes...and the technological know-how to create purified doses of these signals...” (p. 171).
Pinker’s proposal is notable for its specificity in suggesting the nonmusical foundations upon which music builds. These are: 1) the prosodic component of language, 2) auditory scene analysis, 3) emotional calls, 4) habitat selection, and 5) motor control.[footnote] According to Pinker, music brings us pleasure because it “tickles the sensitive spots” of these faculties. Specifically, 1) music has prosody-like properties, and the brain rewards the analysis of prosodic signals (patterns of linguistic rhythm and intonation) because prosody is an important component of language; 2) music is rich in harmonic sounds (sounds in which frequency components are integer multiples of some fundamental frequency), and the brain rewards the analysis of such sounds because harmonicity is an acoustic cue used to identify sound sources, an important part of auditory scene analysis; 3) music can evoke strong emotions because it contains pitch and rhythm patterns that resemble our species’ emotional calls, and 4) because it contains sound patterns reminiscent of evocative environmental sounds (e.g. “safe” or “unsafe” sounds, such as thunder, wind, or growls); 5) musical rhythm engenders rhythmic movement (e.g., in dance), and such movement is rewarded by the brain because rhythmic motor patterns are associated with biologically meaningful behaviors, such as walking, running, or digging.
Pinker also allows for the possibility that the love of music is a chance byproduct of the wiring of our brains, e.g., “some kind of...short-circuit or coupling that came along as an accident of the way that auditory, emotional, language, and motor circuits are packed together in the brain” (p. 538).
Pinker’s proposal is much more detailed than that of James (1890), informed as it is by the century of cognitive science research that separates the two books. (For example, Pinker discusses in detail the influential music-cognition theories of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 1983.) Nevertheless, James and Pinker arrive at a similar view of the biological significance of music. James wrote that music has “no zoological utility,” and Pinker asserts, “As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless.” Perhaps James and Pinker were referring to evolutionary utility as opposed to utility during the lifetime of individual humans, but their writings do not specify this. Furthermore, Pinker’s metaphor of music as a recreational drug implies a view of music as having a rather superficial relationship to human biology.
There are now several nonadaptationist theories of music, each offering distinct hypotheses about the brain systems upon which music builds. Livingstone and Thompson (2009), for example, argue that music builds on a recently evolved human theory of mind ability to serve the primary purpose of affective engagement. Panksepp (2009), in contrast, emphasizes music’s connection to evolutionarily ancient socio-emotional brain circuitry. There are other nonadaptationist proposals (e.g., Sperber, 1996), but none systematically considers music’s power to shape human brain function. It is on this point that TTM theory differs from existing nonadaptationist theories of music.
3. Music as a human invention
Given the debates over the evolutionary status of music, it is parsimonious to adopt the null hypothesis that there has been no natural selection for musical abilities in our species and then ask if there is enough evidence to seriously challenge this null hypothesis. When this strategy is applied to language, there appears to be enough evidence to refute the null hypothesis, as reviewed in Patel (2008: 358-366).
What of music? To some, the universal and ancient nature of human music may imply that it originated as a biological adaptation. The danger of such an assumption is illustrated by another remarkable human trait, namely the control of fire. This trait extends deep into our species’ past and is found in every human culture, yet few would dispute that it arose as an invention rather than a biological adaptation. The universality of the trait can be explained by the fact that it provides things that are universally valued by humans, including the ability to cook food, keep warm, and see in dark places. The example of fire-making teaches us that when we see a universal and ancient human trait, we cannot simply assume that it has been a direct target of natural selection (Patel, 2008: 356).[ footnote |
Wrangham (2009) has argued persuasively that the control of fire and the invention of cooking by human ancestors led to co-evolutionary changes in physiology, such that modern humans are now biologically adapted to eating cooked food. He argues that cooking makes certain animal proteins more digestible and softens food, which reduces the cost of digestion. Consequently, our gut shrank over evolutionary time, allowing valuable metabolic energy to be diverted to our brains, which could then grow larger, since brains are energetically very expensive. The idea of a human invention leading to co-evolutionary changes in body and brain is an interesting one, though TTM theory does not take this approach when considering the biological impact of music.
It is tempting to think that brain specialization for certain aspects of music cognition (Peretz, 2006) and the existence of genetically-based deficits of music perception (Drayna et al. 2001; Peretz et al., 2007) point to natural selection for music. Yet upon closer examination, these facts provide no compelling support for adaptationist theories. Here, reading and writing provide useful analogies. These are indisputably human inventions, probably no more than about six thousand years old, making them too young to be associated with any evolutionary brain specialization for these abilities. Yet brain imaging studies of literate individuals have shown that certain aspects of reading, e.g., recognizing written characters, are associated with functional specializations in specific brain regions (Dehaene and Cohen, 2007; cf. Stewart et al., 2003). This specialization is clearly a product of experience-dependent neural plasticity, i.e., long-lasting changes in neurons and brain networks driven by experiences within an
individual lifetime (Dehaene, 2009). Furthermore, certain reading disorders have a genetic component (Fisher and Franks, 2006), even though one can be confident that humans have not undergone natural selection for reading abilities. That is, specific genes can influence brain circuits that happen to be important for a complex human ability without any implication of natural selection for that ability.
The examples of fire-making and reading show that the evolutionary null hypothesis for music is not challenged by music’s universality, age, association with some degree of brain specialization, or its influence by specific genes. Challenges to the null hypothesis thus must come from other sources. Patel (2008: 367-400) reviewed a wide range of evidence in this regard, including data from neuroscience, infant studies, and animal studies, and argued that at present the null hypothesis for music could not be rejected.
Rather than rehearse those arguments here, sections 3.1 and 3.2 below take a different approach and illustrate two lines of research that support the idea of music as an invention. These studies illustrate a comparative approach to the evolutionary biology of music (McDermott and Hauser, 2003; Justus and Hutsler, 2005). The basic logic of this approach is as follows: If one can show that an aspect of music cognition is rooted in other, nonmusical human brain functions or is shared with other species, then it is parsimonious to assume that this aspect has not been shaped by natural selection for music. This approach is particularly powerful when applied to aspects of music which seem domain-specific, i.e., not related to other types of cognition, such as tonality processing and synchronization of movement to a musical beat (Peretz and Coltheart, 2003; Bispham, 2006).
3.1 Tonality processing: connections to language
Most of the world’s musical systems use discrete pitches and intervals to create melodies, with the pitches drawn from musical scales of five to seven tones per octave (Reck, 1997). A widespread feature of music is the differential use of scale pitches such that some are perceived as more stable or structurally significant than others (Krumhansl, 1990). This
differentiation of scale pitches in terms of stability or prominence has been termed a “tonal hierarchy,” and implicit knowledge of such hierarchies develops without any special musical training (Tillmann et al., 2000). This knowledge contributes to our subjective impressions that tones in a musical context have abstract perceptual properties, such as tension or resolution, that are distinct from standard psychophysical tone properties such as “higher or lower” or “louder or softer.”
Krumhansl and Cuddy (in press) argue that “tonal hierarchies...play a central role in how musical sequences are perceived, organized, remembered, and how expectations are formed during listening.” Furthermore, they note that this way of organizing pitch is unique to music, an assertion supported by the fact that language, which can use pitch in highly structured ways, has nothing resembling tonality (cf. Patel, 2008, Ch. 2). Indeed, Peretz and Coltheart (2003) have proposed that processing of tonality in music uses domain-specific brain mechanisms. This view is supported by neurological cases in which brain damage selectively impairs tonality processing while leaving more basic forms of auditory processing, as well as language processing, intact (e.g., Peretz, 1993).
Neuroimaging of healthy individuals has challenged a domain-specific view of tonality processing, however. This challenge commenced with a study that directly compared brainwave (“event-related potential,” or ERP) activity associated with syntactic processing of language and tonal- harmonic processing of music and found a surprising degree of overlap (Patel et al., 1998). Subsequently, neuroimaging studies using a variety of techniques (e.g., MEG, fMRI) have suggested overlap in brain areas involved in linguistic syntactic processing and musical tonal-harmonic processing (e.g., Maess et al., 2001; Koelsch et al., 2002; Tillmann et al., 2003; Patel, in press(b)). The apparent paradox between data from neurological patients (which support a domain-specific view of tonality) and from neuroimaging (which support a non domain-specific view) led to the “shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis” or SSIRH (Patel, 2003). The SSIRH posits that language and music rely on domain-specific structural knowledge stored in long-term memory (e.g., knowledge of words and their syntactic features or chords and their harmonic relations), but that integration of words or musical tones into hierarchical structures
during auditory processing relies on shared, limited neural resources (see Patel, in press (a), for further details and Patel, 2008, Ch. 5, for a full treatment). The SSIRH posits that cases of neurological dissociation result from damage to domain-specific representations, while the similar brain responses seen in neuroimaging studies of healthy individuals reflect shared processes of structural integration operating on these domain-specific representations. Crucially, the SSIRH makes testable predictions, including the prediction that simultaneous structural integration demands in language and music should lead to processing interference. To date, these predictions have been supported by both behavioral and neural studies (Koelsch et al., 2005; Steinbeis and Koelsch, 2008; Fedorenko et al., 2009; Slevc et al., 2009).
Recently, further evidence for overlap between linguistic syntactic processing and musical tonality processing has emerged from clinical studies, including neuroimaging research on specific language impairment (Jentschke et al., 2008), intracranial EEG studies of epileptic patients (Sammler, 2009), and behavioral studies of agrammatic Broca’s aphasia (Patel et al., 2008).[ footnote] Given this growing evidence for links between tonality processing and linguistic syntactic processing, it is worth stepping back and asking why such connections should exist. After all, instrumental music and linguistic sentences serve different communicative ends and are built from distinct raw materials (e.g., musical tones vs. syllables). Furthermore, the hierarchical structures that organize tones vs. words have been argued to be quite different (Jackendoff, 2009, though see Rohrmeier, 2007, for a different view). Why then would the processing of structural relations in music and language engage similar brain mechanisms?
The studies of music perception in aphasia have focused on patients with left hemisphere brain damage and “agrammatic comprehension,” i.e., difficulty understanding the meanings of sentences based on their grammatical structure, rather than difficulty understanding the meanings of individual words. For example, such patients, if told the sentence “The girl on the chair was greeted by the man,” would understand that the sentence referred to a girl, a chair, a man, and an act of greeting, but would be unsure of who did what to whom. See Patel et al., 2008, for further discussion.
A notable similarity between tonality and linguistic syntax is the existence of abstract structural categories that organize sequences of events. In tonality, for example, structural categories such as the tonic (the most stable pitch in the tonal hierarchy) or leading tone (an unstable pitch in the hierarchy) can be realized by any pitch. For example, the pitch B4 (493.9 Hz) can serve as either the tonic or leading tone of a melody, depending on prevailing tonal hierarchy. Language also has abstract structural categories, such as grammatical subject and object, that can be realized by a variety of words.
In both domains, abstract categories play an important role in mental processes involved in sequence comprehension. To take one example, in processing a melody one may expect a tonic as the next note (vs. expecting a specific tone frequency in Hz), and in processing language, it is possible to expect a grammatical object as the next word (vs. expecting a particular word) (Huron, 2006; Gibson, 2006). To take another example, in both domains incoming categories vary in how easy they are to integrate into the existing structural representation of the sequence (Bigand et al., 2003; Koelsch et al., 2007; Gibson, 1998; Levy, 2008). According to the SSIRH, difficult structural integrations in both domains draw on a shared pool of limited neural resources (see Patel, in press (a), for details).
To recap, tonality involves domain-specific knowledge: the long-term knowledge of tonal hierarchies, for example, is specific to music. Yet online processing of tonal relations appears to share mechanisms with language processing, possibly because tonality, like linguistic syntax, deals in abstract categories that are processed in terms of hierarchical structures. The deeper lesson, in terms of exploring links between music cognition and other domains, is the importance of distinguishing domain-specific representations from non-domain-specific processing mechanisms. Indeed, in the case of tonality, non domain-specific mechanisms may be important not only for online processing, but also for the acquisition of knowledge. According to Krumhansl and Cuddy (in press), two psychological principles underlie the development of tonal hierarchies in the mind of a listener: the use of cognitive “reference points” and mechanisms of Statistical learning. They note that neither principle is unique to music, but that the application of these principles to music results in domain-specific
musical knowledge. In other words, tonal music may represent a case of the mind creating domain-specific knowledge via non domain-specific processes (cf. McMullen and Saffran, 2004).
3.2 Entrainment to a musical beat: connections to vocal learning
In every human culture there is some form of music with a periodic beat pattern, to which people synchronize their rhythmic movements, e.g., in dance (Nettl, 2000).[ footnote] Musical beat perception and synchronization (BPS) is an example of the entrainment of rhythmic action to rhythmic sound. BPS does not appear to be an offshoot of language. Language has rich rhythmic structure and can involve tight temporal coordination (e.g., in conversational turn-taking), but does not have temporally periodic beats and does not elicit periodic rhythmic movement from listeners (Patel, 2008, Ch. 3). Notably, BPS (e.g., head bobbing and foot tapping to music) emerges without any special instruction in humans, which makes it an intriguing topic of study from the standpoint of evolutionary biology. Has the human brain been specifically shaped to support this ability?
Periodic beat patterns need not be based on an isochronous (metronomic) pulse. For example, Balkan rhythms can have temporally-repeating cycles of beats, with each cycle having asymmetric time intervals between beats (cf. Patel, 2008: 98).
This question is particularly salient since BPS is distinct in a number of ways from other examples of animal entrainment in nature, e.g. the synchronous chirping of katydids (Greenfield and Schul, 2008). For example, human synchronization to music is very flexible in terms of tempo, is a response to complex sound sequences (not just pulse trains), and is truly cross-modal since it often involves silent rhythmic movement in response to sound. No other species combines these features in their natural entrainment behavior (Patel et al., 2009a). Furthermore, familiar domestic animals such as dogs and cats show no tendency for spontaneous rhythmic movement to music, even though they have lived with humans and their music for thousands of years. Indeed, BPS has been proposed to be a uniquely human ability (Bispham, 2006), reflecting natural selection for
musical behavior in our species, perhaps in the service of promoting group cohesion (cf. Dunbar, in press and section 2.1 above).
Yet neurobiology suggests that BPS may have hidden connections to brain systems with other “day jobs.” Specifically, BPS may build on the brain circuitry for complex vocal learning, a trait shared by humans and only a few other groups of mammals and birds. Vocal learning is associated with specific evolutionary modifications to the brain (Jarvis, 2009) and, like BPS, involves a high degree of neural integration between the auditory and motor systems (Patel et al., 2005). The “vocal learning and rhythmic synchronization hypothesis” (Patel, 2006) posits that vocal learning provides a neurobiological foundation for BPS. One prediction of this hypothesis is that non-vocal-leaming species, which includes all non-human primates, are incapable of BPS. While direct tests of this prediction are still needed via training studies involving movement to music, some support is provided by a recent study that attempted to teach rhesus macaques to synchronize their finger movements to a metronome (Zarco et al., 2009). Despite more than a year of concerted training (six days/week, four hours/day), the monkeys were unable to learn to align their taps in time with the metronome signal—a task that is easy for humans, even young children with no musical training (McAuley et al., 2006).
Additional support for the vocal learning hypothesis has recently been provided by the discovery of entrainment to human music in several parrot species (Patel et al., 2009b, Schachner et al., 2009). Tempo flexibility was demonstrated in an experiment with a sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita eleonora), in which the tempo of a song was manipulated to create different versions ranging from twenty percent slower to twenty percent faster than the original song. The animal was able to synchronize its head bobs to the beat of the music at several different tempi. Synchronization occurred in “bouts,” or periods of sustained entrainment, interspersed in longer episodes of dancing not synchronized to the beat. Interestingly, the non-synchronized dancing was dominated by a preferred tempo of rhythmic movement, and synchronization was best when the musical tempo was near this preferred tempo (Patel et al., 2009c), patterns that have also been observed in how human children move to music (Eerola et al., 2006). Thus, it appears that parrots may resemble human children (vs. adults) in terms of
how they move to rhythmic music, though further research is needed to test this idea.
Crucially, parrots (as far as is known) do not entrain rhythmic movements to rhythmic sounds as part of their natural behavior, indicating that BPS does not require a brain that has been shaped by natural selection for this ability. Furthermore, modern neuroanatomical research suggests that vocal learning in birds and mammals uses homologous brain circuits involving the thalamus, striatum, and forebrain, despite the fact that the mammalian and avian lineages diverged over 200 million years ago (Jarvis, 2007). In other words, there seem to be genetic and neural constraints on how vocal learning is acquired in vertebrate brains, so that even when the ability arises in distantly related vertebrate groups, similar underlying brain mechanisms are at play. This idea of “deep homology” underlying vocal learning circuitry in birds and humans suggests that a brain shaped by evolution for vocal learning has “BPS potential” as a byproduct of its wiring (see Patel et al., 2009a, for further discussion).
3.3 Music as a human invention: summary
The above sections indicate that two core components of music cognition— tonality processing and entrainment to a musical beat—have strong relationships to nonmusical brain functions. Notably, while these aspects seem domain-specific to music at first glance, research grounded in neuroscience points to their underlying connections to nonmusical brain functions. Thus, these aspects of music cognition can be explained without invoking evolutionary brain specialization for music, which is consistent with the idea that music is an invention.
If music is an invention, then future research will show that every component of music cognition can either be related to a nonmusical brain function or be explained via learning in the absence of any evolutionary specialization for music. Of course, even if this is shown to be the case, music cognition as a whole will still be special because it creates a unique confluence of different processing components in the human mind. It is interesting to speculate that the nature of this confluence may vary in
interesting ways across cultures and historical epochs, depending on which processing components a culture uses in building its musical system.
4. The biological power of music: two examples
Challenges to the most prominent nonadaptationist theory of music (Pinker, 1997), which views music as a “biologically useless” invention, come from studies showing that regular engagement with music can result in lasting changes to nonmusical brain functions. Importantly, such studies concern individuals who are not professional musicians. There has been a good deal of research on structural brain differences between professional musicians and non-musicians (e.g., Elbert et al., 1995; Schneider et al., 2002; Bengtsson et al., 2005; Stewart, 2008), with recent research supporting the idea that many such differences can be explained by experience-dependent neural plasticity (e.g., Hyde et al., 2009; Schlaug, Forgeard et al., 2009). The current focus, however, is on evidence that regular engagement with music can exert lasting effects on brain functions in a wider range of individuals (e.g., Sacks, 2007; Dalla Bella et al., 2009; Bradt et al., in press).
Before discussing neurological studies, it is worth saying a few words about the effect of regular music lessons on the cognitive abilities of children, a topic of great public interest. This issue has been explored experimentally by Schellenberg (2004). He conducted a study in which six-year-old first- graders were randomly assigned to weekly keyboard lessons, voice lessons, drama lessons, or no lessons for one year. Each child was tested twice on a standardized intelligence test: once before entering first grade, and once in the summer after first grade. This test had twelve subtests measuring a variety of nonmusical cognitive skills. Children in all groups showed IQ increases over time, as expected due to attending first grade, but those receiving music lessons gained significantly more IQ points than those taking drama or no lessons.[footnote] Based on the fact that the IQ gains in the music groups were seen across a majority of the twelve subtests, Schellenberg argued that music training influences a variety of non-domain- specific skills (e.g., memorization, fine motor skills) or general mental processes relevant to many different cognitive tasks, such as executive function (the ability to organize mental tasks, control impulses, etc.) and
abstract reasoning (see Schellenberg, 2006, for further details).[ footnote | Schellenberg’s findings support the view that regular engagement with music influences a variety of nonmusical brain functions.
The drama group, in contrast, outgained other groups in social skills, such as cooperating with peers. For further research on the possible cognitive benefits of drama training, see Goldstein et al., 2009-2010.
Schellenberg (2006) is also recommended for its extensive discussion of the controversial “Mozart effect,” whereby passive music listening has short- lived effects on certain nonmusical cognitive tasks.
4.1 Music and the recovery of brain functions after stroke
A recent study by Sarkém6 and colleagues (2008) provides evidence that regular listening to music can aid in the recovery of brain functions following stroke. These authors studied 60 patients with left or right hemisphere middle cerebral artery stroke,[footnote] who were randomly assigned to one of three groups. A music group listened to one hour of self- selected music per day, a story group listened to one hour of self-selected Stories per day, and a control group had no additional treatment. (All three groups received standard stroke therapy.) Music therapists assisted in providing portable audio players and audio materials and in encouraging patients to listen. The experimental interventions lasted for two months, beginning soon after stroke onset. All of the patients were assessed on seven nonmusical cognitive tasks and eight mood measures, once soon after stroke onset and then again at three and six months post-stroke. The cognitive tasks examined verbal memory, short-term memory, language, visuospatial cognition, focused attention, sustained attention, and executive functions. The mood measures examined tension, depression, irritability, vigor, fatigue, inertia, confusion, and forgetfulness. All tests were administered by people unaware of which group the patients were a part. Acute ischaemic MCA stroke in the left or right temporal, frontal, parietal, or subcortical brain regions, with no prior neurological or psychiatric diseases (mean participant age: 56 years).
The three groups showed no significant differences in any measures soon after stroke onset. However, at three and/or six months, significant
differences emerged between groups on two cognitive tests and two mood measures. On the cognitive tests, verbal memory and focused attention were superior in the music group compared to the other two groups. On the mood measures, the music group showed significantly less depression and confusion than the control group. For other cognitive and mood measures, the groups showed comparable performance at three and six months, and in no case did the music group perform worse than the other groups.
These findings are striking because they suggest lasting positive effects of passive music listening on neural recovery after stroke. What physiological mechanisms might underlie these effects? Prior research with healthy individuals indicates that pleasurable music listening is associated with activation of reward areas of the brain (e.g., the ventral tegmental area) that project dopamine to wide regions of the cerebral cortex (Menon and Levitin, 2005). The authors thus speculate that the activation of the dopaminergic mesocorticolimbic system by music may have led to enhanced general arousal and mood and suggest that this in turn influenced performance on cognitive tasks. In support of this idea, they point to prior research with healthy individuals that finds links between music-induced positive arousal/mood and performance on nonmusical cognitive tasks (e.g., Thompson et al., 2001).
Two problems with this account, however, are that the prior research was concerned with transient effects of music on immediately administered cognitive tasks (i.e., effects lasting minutes, not days or weeks), and that the dopamine-arousal hypothesis cannot explain why the music group showed improvement on only the verbal memory and focused attention cognitive tasks. It is interesting to consider the possible role of hormones in the current findings because of their long-lasting effects on brain physiology. For example, the glucocorticoid hormone cortisol is secreted by the adrenal glands in response to stress, as a result of neuroendocrine signals from the brain. A major stroke is a life-changing event that seems likely to result in greatly elevated stress in the months following the stroke, due to loss of one’s normal physical and mental abilities. This may in turn result in chronically elevated cortisol levels. Sustained high cortisol levels have deleterious structural effects on neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region
rich in glucocorticoid receptors (Sapolsky, 2000) and involved in verbal memory in older adults (Zimmerman et al., 2008).
How does music enter this picture? Cortisol production is regulated by signals from the hypothalamus, a brain structure that is influenced by projections from the limbic system (brain structures involved in regulating emotion). The limbic system in turn is influenced by music (Peretz, 2010; Koelsch, 2010). The mechanisms underlying this influence remain unclear and may involve sensitivity of the limbic system to voice-like acoustic cues to affect, cues that occur in exaggerated form in music (cf. Juslin and Laukka, 2003). Interestingly, experiments with healthy individuals show that music listening immediately after a stressful event transiently reduces cortisol levels (Khalfa et al., 2003). Thus, one can hypothesize that regular music listening after stroke helps lower average cortisol levels, and these reduced levels facilitate hippocampal function. This could help account for the superior verbal memory of the stroke patients in the music-listening group. The superior performance of this group on sustained attention tasks remains to be explained, however. Neuroimaging research has shown that attentive listening to music recruits domain-general attentional networks (Janata et al., 2002), but it is not clear why or how regular activation of these networks by music would facilitate their operation during nonmusical tasks.
Humans are deeply social creatures, and thus one important question concerns possible increased benefits of social musical activities on cognitive and emotional function after stroke. That is, active engagement of patients in singing or playing instruments may have greater cognitive, emotional, and motor benefits on neural recovery than passive listening to music. In particular, it would be worth comparing live therapy vs. passive listening in terms of the cognitive and mood measures applied by Sarkaém6 et al. If live therapy is substantially more beneficial, this would provide scientific evidence for the value of live music therapy in the post-stroke period.
4.2 Music and the recovery of verbal fluency in aphasia
Aphasia is a language impairment due to central neurological dysfunction. Given the importance of language to human communication, aphasia is a truly debilitating neurological disorder affecting over 100,000 stroke victims each year in the U.S. alone (Schlaug et al., 2008). Nonfluent aphasias generally result from lesions in the frontal lobe and/or its underlying white matter fiber tracts, and are characterized by limited, effortful verbal output, often in the face of otherwise intelligent behavior. Such patients have difficulty retrieving the words they want to say and assembling the words into coherent phrases. Yet a striking phenomenon in many such patients, known for over one hundred years, is that they can sometimes sing familiar songs with great fluency (Racette et al., 2006). This led to the development of a form of aphasia therapy known as melodic intonation therapy, or MIT (Albert et al., 1973), which embeds short phrases (e.g., “I love you”) in “melodic” speech intonation patterns that rely on up-and-down movements between two discrete pitches. Patients practice such utterances intensively and regularly with a therapist, who gradually lengthens the phrases to span more syllables (Norton et al., 2009). The goal of the therapy is to improve fluency for both the trained phrases and for spontaneous, untrained utterances spoken in a normal fashion.
Two features of MIT that distinguish it from non-musical speech therapy are the use of melodic speech intonation and rhythmic tapping (i.e., while speaking the utterance, the patient also taps its rhythm using the hand that was unaffected by the stroke). Schlaug and colleagues have recently begun a set of studies aimed at measuring the efficacy of MIT versus a matched “speech repetition therapy” (SRT) without melodic intonation and tapping. In addition to quantifying MIT’s versus SRT’s effects on post-therapy measures of verbal fluency, the researchers are also measuring changes in brain physiology after the two therapies. Of particular interest in this regard is the extent to which MIT patients shift toward using right hemisphere circuits for speech after therapy. Prior neuroimaging research with normal individuals indicates that song and speech have different hemispheric biases, with song activating several right hemisphere regions not activated by ordinary speech (Callan et al., 2006; cf. Peretz, in press). Hence, one question of interest is the extent to which MIT recruits these regions to compensate for damaged left-hemisphere regions.
Preliminary data reported in Schlaug et al. (2008) support this idea by showing that a patient who underwent forty sessions of MIT showed greater verbal fluency and greater right hemisphere activation when speaking than did a patient who underwent SRT. Furthermore, Schlaug et al. (2009) have reported structural changes in the brains of several patients who underwent MIT. Specifically, these patients show an increase in the thickness of a large fiber tract (the right arcuate fasciculus) connecting the frontal and superior temporal lobes. Furthermore, there was a trend for a correlation between the degree of thickening and the degree of improvement in verbal fluency, though the trend did not reach statistical significance, possibly due to the small sample size (more patients are currently being studied).[footnote] Structural measures of the right arcuate fasciculus were conducted before and after seventy-five sessions of MIT therapy using MRI diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in living patients.
Since this research program is still in its early stages, the findings raise numerous questions, including the reliability of the above correlation when more patients are added and the degree to which changes in the right arcuate fasciculus are specifically driven by MIT (versus SRT or no therapy). Furthermore, the physiological basis of the observed fiber-tract thickening is not yet clear. For example, such thickening could be due to use-related increases in the number of axon collaterals in the fasciculus or use-related increases in the diameter of existing axons.[footnote] Nevertheless, the research of Schlaug and colleagues suggests that musical behaviors can have lasting effects on nonmusical brain functions after stroke. Furthermore, this research provides a model for studies seeking to examine the effects of music on other brain functions, as discussed in the next section.
I thank Robert Turmer for bringing this point to my attention.
4.3 The biological power of music: future directions
The two examples above suggest that music can have lasting effects on nonmusical abilities. The second example provides only preliminary data, but was included because it illustrates the kind of approach needed for studying the biological effects of music on brain function. Specifically,
there is a need for experimental studies that combine longitudinal behavioral and neural measurements to examine how music influences nonmusical abilities in a lasting fashion (cf. Altenmiiller et al., 2009). While studies that collect brain data are particularly valuable, purely behavioral studies are also useful if they lead to hypotheses for underlying neural mechanisms, as in the Sarkam6 study above. Well-controlled studies from the field of music therapy are of considerable interest in this regard (e.g., Bradt et al., in press).
While the examples above focused on adults, an important direction for future work concerns children, because their developing brains are even more malleable than those of adults (Huttenlocher, 2002). Indeed, music may be a particularly efficacious technology for shaping brain function in children because they are drawn to music from a very young age, meaning that it is relatively easy to get them to engage in musical behaviors repeatedly.
An example from research on dyslexia helps illustrate how music might benefit the nonmusical abilities of children. Research has revealed that many children with developmental dyslexia have reduced sensitivity to auditory cues related to the amplitude envelope of sounds, such as the rise- time of syllables (the rate of sound amplitude increase at syllable onset). This auditory deficit appears to be related to their dyslexia: individual differences in rise time discrimination are predictive of phonological awareness, even when factors such as age, verbal and nonverbal IQ, and vocabulary are controlled (Goswami, 2009). Thus, sensitivity to the details of speech amplitude envelopes may play an important role in speech comprehension and in the development of the phonological system (cf. Greenberg, 2006). Neural studies using EEG have shown that the right cerebral hemisphere is particularly adept at tracking the amplitude envelope of speech in normal children (Abrams et al., 2008) and that poor readers have a degraded neural representation of the speech amplitude envelope (Abrams et al., 2009).
What does this have to do with music? Rise-time is not only an important cue not only for speech, but also for music, e.g., in specifying the “perceptual attack” of musical sounds (Caclin et al., 2005). Thus, musical
activities that make acoustic onsets salient and focus on the ability to accurately perceive such onsets, such as games involving clapping to syllable onsets of words in songs, may help refine brain networks involved in encoding amplitude patterns in ordinary speech (Goswami, 2009; cf. Overy, 2003; Tallal and Gaab, 2006). Experimental studies are needed to address this issue.
Studies of the biological power of music need not be limited to individuals with neural anomalies. There is considerable scope for the study of how music affects the development of nonmusical abilities in ordinary individuals, both children and adults (Moreno, 2009). For example, Moreno et al. (2009) recently conducted an experiment in which normal third graders were pseudo-randomly assigned to nine months of music vs. painting lessons. They found that after musical (but not painting) training, children showed enhanced reading and improved pitch discrimination in speech, with the latter improvement shown by both behavioral and neural measures. While the study of how music lessons influence the development of reading is of great practical interest, the relationship between musical training and proficiency at second-language learning also merits study (Patel and Iversen, 2007), as does the relationship between musical training and executive function (Bialystock and DePape, 2009). In addition to these cognitive effects of music, the influence of group musical activities on the development of empathy and cooperative behavior also deserves research attention (cf. Kirschner and Tomasello, in press).
5. Why would music have lasting effects on nonmusical brain functions?
The preceding section provided two examples of the lasting effects of music on nonmusical cognitive abilities. I suspect that in the coming years, more and more evidence will accrue for the lasting effects of music on diverse aspects of human brain function. Thus, it is important to begin thinking about why music sometimes has these effects. That is, what mechanisms underlie these effects? A firm answer to this question requires a large set of empirical studies from which to draw inductive conclusions. In the meantime, however, it is possible to set forth some hypotheses that may help guide future work.
I hypothesize that one set of mechanisms involves the neuroendocrine system, i.e., the regulation of hormones by the brain. Music appears to have a strong influence on the human limbic system (Peretz, 2010; Koelsch, 2010), an emotional regulation system with diverse subcortical (e.g., hippocampus, amygdala, cingulate) and cortical (e.g. orbitofrontal cortex) components, which is influenced by many descending inputs from wide regions of the cerebral cortex (Damasio, 1994). The mechanisms by which music influences the limbic system remain to be understood and may revolve in part around music’s ability to emulate emotionally significant vocal sounds (Juslin and Laukka, 2003; Snowdon and Teie, 2009), though this is clearly only part of the story. For the current purposes, the crucial point is that the limbic system projects to the hypothalamus, which in turn regulates the release of a broad range of hormones from the brain and various peripheral glands (e.g., oxytocin, cortisol, etc.). Hormones are blood-borne chemical messengers that can have long-lasting effects on a range of brain structures that have hormone receptors. For example, the hippocampus and amygdala have cortisol receptors, and chronically elevated cortisol (e.g., due to prolonged stress) can influence neuronal morphology and activity in these brain structures, as well as the birth of new cells in the adult hippocampus (Sapolsky, 2000). Since there is empirical evidence that listening to music can transiently reduce cortisol levels in adults and infants (Trehub and Nakata, 2002; Khalfa et al., 2003; Suda et al., 2008), this suggests one pathway by which regular musical listening may have lasting effects on the brain (cf. section 4.1 above). Of course, cortisol is just one hormone regulated by the brain, and it seems likely that many hormones (e.g., testosterone, vasopressin, etc.) are potentially influenced by music (Fukui et al., 2008). In all such cases, the critical point is that hormones can have long-lasting effects on the cells that they influence. Thus, neuroendocrine effects on the brain are conceptually and mechanistically distinct from transient neurotransmitter effects, e.g., the release of dopamine associated with musical chills (“goosebumps”) (Blood and Zatorre, 2001; Salimpoor et al., 2009).
Of course, the fact that hormones can have long-lasting effects on brain structure or function does not mean that they always do have such effects. The degree to which neuroendocrine effects result in lasting changes to the brain likely depends on the state the brain is in when such effects occur.
Rapidly changing nervous systems (e.g., the brains of healthy infants or of older adults in the period soon after a brain injury) may be particularly sensitive in this regard. Furthermore, there may be genetic factors (including variation in hormone receptor density) that influence tissue sensitivity to hormones.
Apart from neuroendocrine effects, I hypothesize that another way music can have lasting effects on nonmusical abilities is via mechanisms of neural plasticity, i.e. via use-dependent functional or structural changes in brain circuitry. (In contrast to neuroendocrine mechanisms, which can be activated by passive listening to music, plasticity-based mechanisms are likely to be driven by active engagement with music, e.g. via regular singing or playing of a musical instrument.) Modern neuroscience has shifted from a view of the brain as plastic only during early developmental periods to a view that recognizes a substantial degree of plasticity throughout the lifespan (Edelman, 1987; Draganski and May, 2008). The “permanent plasticity” of the brain means that the networks involved in our cognitive functions are malleable throughout life (though the degree of malleability in many brain areas may be substantially higher during early sensitive periods of development). According to TTM theory, music engages processing mechanisms shared with a wide range of cognitive domains, such as language, attention, auditory scene analysis, and so forth. Hence, music has the opportunity to influence these domains by driving plasticity in brain networks that it shares with these domains.
Why would music drive plasticity in these networks? One idea is that music is often more exacting than other domains in terms of the degree of precision that it demands. For example, music and speech both involve the control of pitch, but music demands a higher degree of precision for both the control and perception of pitch than does ordinary speech (Patel, 2008, Ch. 4). Thus, musical experience may sharpen cortical and subcortical pitch processing mechanisms shared by music and language, leading to the observed superior processing of linguistic pitch contours by musicians (Wong et al., 2007; Patel and Iversen, 2007). Similar arguments may help explain why musically trained individuals show superior perception of speech in noise (Parbery-Clark et al., 2009) and other nonmusical auditory processing benefits.
Apart from the demands of high-precision processing, another factors that may promote music’s ability to drive plasticity is the fact that musical behaviors are often frequently repeated (e.g., frequently singing or playing a particular piece) and often involve heightened emotion. Repeatedly engaging in high-precision processing in the context of heightened emotion seems likely to promote functional and structural changes to the brain.
6. A non-genetic explanation for music’s universality
Thus far, this essay has argued that music is an invention. Yet if it is an invention, why is it universal in human culture? Section 3 pointed out that human cultural universals can originate as inventions, as illustrated by the control of fire. TTM theory posits that music resembles fire-making in being an ancient invention that has become universal because it provides things that are universally valued by humans. In the case of fire, these things include the ability to cook food, keep warm, and see in dark places. In the case of music, I suggest that the valued things it provides are mental rather than physical: namely, emotional power, ritual efficacy, and mnemonic efficacy.
6.1 Emotional power
Many people report listening to music for the emotion it induces (Juslin and Sloboda, 2001; Benzon, 2001). Emotions are important for humans everywhere from the very beginning of life, and hence one reason for music’s universality may be its deep connection to the brain’s emotional circuitry (Peretz, 2010, Koelsch, 2010). This connection could help explain the human proclivity for music without postulating any “innate proclivity for musical sounds and actions” (Kirschner and Tomasello, in press).
However, this is a rather unsatisfying explanation for music’s universality, because it only serves to raise more questions. Why does music have these connections to the emotion circuits of our brains? Can the remarkable power of music to induce emotion be explained without appealing to an evolutionary specialization of the brain for music? In this regard, a recent
theory of emotional induction by music is of interest (Juslin and Vastfjall, 2008). According to this “multiple mechanisms” theory, music can induce emotion in several different ways, namely via 1) expectancy and its fulfillment or violation; 2) activation of the brainstem by arousing acoustic features (e.g., sudden, sharp onsets); 3) association with past events; 4) visual imagery; or 5) acoustic cues that resemble the sounds of emotional voices. For the current purposes, the salient aspect of Juslin and Vastfjall’s theory is that none of the proposed emotion-inducing mechanisms is unique to music. For example, focusing on the first mechanism, auditory expectation and its relationship to emotion may be a very general aspect of human cognition, not shaped for music but exquisitely exploited by music (see Huron, 2006, for a detailed theory, and Steinbeis et al., 2006, for empirical data linking musical expectancy to emotion). Focusing on the final mechanism, the authors postulate that this aspect of music’s emotional power is due to brain mechanisms that evolved to perceive and respond to vocal affect (cf. Patel 2008b).
Thus, music’s remarkable emotional power may arise via its ability to simultaneously engage multiple emotional mechanisms in our brains. While none of these mechanisms is unique to music, music may be unique in the way it temporally activates and coordinates these mechanisms. The result is a complex emotional experience that can differ from our ordinary day-to- day emotions. This might help explain reports of “music-specific” or “aesthetic” emotions (Zentner et al., 2008), which seem qualitatively distinct from basic emotions associated with survival, such as happiness, sadness, fear, or anger.
6.2 Ritual efficacy
All human cultures have rituals, and music provides a very useful framework for certain types of rituals, independent of the emotional impact of the music per se. This is because music provides a structure that can easily be repeated on different occasions, and because musical behaviors are distinct from our ordinary communication. In modern culture, the group singing of “Happy Birthday” provides a familiar example. The performance and appreciation of this song is typically not concerned with the aesthetic or
emotional qualities of the music. Rather, the song serves as a ritual that effectively means “we collectively recognize and celebrate your birthday.”
6.3 Mnemonic efficacy
In addition to emotion and ritual, music often provides an important mnemonic device for storing long sequences of linguistic information, especially when written language is not available (Sloboda, 1985). In this regard, it is notable that music and song are part of most of the world’s ancient oral traditions, e.g., epics and religious chants from diverse civilizations (Rubin, 1995). In our own culture, a familiar example of the mnemonic efficacy of music is the alphabet song, a tune used by many children to learn the order of letters in the alphabet. One indication of music’s remarkable power to enter into human memory comes from clinical research with Alzheimer’s patients. Experiments with such patients indicate that memory of songs is retained in substantial detail, even in the face of significant loss of episodic memories concerning the patient’s own life (Cuddy and Duffin, 2005). The neural mechanisms behind music’s mnemonic efficacy are in need of systematic research.
7. A Darwinian perspective on the biological study of music
Evolutionary discussions of music originate with Darwin, so it is fitting to end this essay with a comment on the relevance of Darwin’s thinking to the current proposal. TTM theory proposes that music is an invention that builds on a diverse range of brain functions and has the ability to shape those functions. Thus, TTM theory, unlike Darwin’s theory of music, is nonadaptationist. Yet it is thoroughly Darwinian in its focus on comparative biological research. As illustrated by section 3 (“Music as a human invention”), TTM theory grows from studies comparing music processing to brain processing in other domains (such as language) and studies comparing music processing to auditory processing in other species. TTM theory is thus committed to using Darwinian research methods to explore the neurobiological foundations of human music.
Before closing, it is worth asking what distinguishes TTM theory from the concept of exaptation, or a trait whose evolutionary origin is not related to its current use (Gould and Vrba, 1982). Feathers are an oft-cited example of an exaptation, as it has been theorized that these structures originated in the context of thermoregulation and were only later put to use (and directly shaped by natural selection) for flight (Gould and Vrba, 1982). Since TTM theory views music as an invention based on diverse nonmusical brain functions, each of which may have been shaped by natural selection, it considers music a type of exaptation. However, exaptation is not a specific enough term to capture the idea of a transformative technology. This is because exaptation (a term coined before our modern understanding of neural plasticity) does not connote the power of a novel trait to shape the biological systems from which it arose (cf. Lewontin, 2000). Furthermore, exaptation allows the notion of secondary adaptation (as in the feather example above), whereas TTM theory holds that that there has been no evolutionary modification of the brain aimed at supporting musical behavior.
Darwin himself was not an ultra-adaptationist; that is, he did not believe that every characteristic of an organism was a product of natural selection. (He differed from his contemporary Alfred Russell Wallace in this regard [Gould, 1980].) For example, in The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote that “many cases could be advanced of organs and instincts originally adapted for one purpose, having been utilized for some distinct purpose” (p. 1208). That is, he implicitly recognized the concept of exaptation long before the term was coined by later evolutionary biologists. What Darwin did not foresee, however, was that human inventions could substantially influence the structure and function of the brain, albeit within the course of a lifetime. This remarkable fact lays the foundation for a biological approach to music and other human cultural phenomena (Wilson, 1998; Becker, 2004; Edelman, 2006; Smail, 2008). Understanding the biology of human inventions involves understanding how our evolved neural organization shapes those inventions and how our inventions in turn shape our brains within individual lifetimes. In exploring this fascinating dialectic, music is a particularly promising area of research.
Acknowledgments
Supported by Neurosciences Research Foundation as part of its research program on music and the brain at The Neurosciences Institute, where ADP is the Esther J. Burnham Senior Fellow. I am grateful to the following individuals for their insightful comments: Jennifer Burton, John Iversen, Sebastian Kirschner, Richard Lewontin, Bruno Repp, Oliver Sacks, Robert Sapolsky, Thom Scott-Phillips, Daniel Smail, Lauren Stewart, William Forde Thompson, and Ellen Winner. I also thank Melissa Bailar for thoughtful editing, and Fred Moody for his prompt and helpful input throughout the publication process.
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