Damasio 'Self Comes to Mind' Discussion

Preliminary discussion of Damasio's "Self Comes to Mind" on 4.24.2012 200: account of self involving unalterable aspects and unalienable; what are the social and political implications, possibilities for resistance? 182/204: the relationship between Damasio’s account and more particularist accounts, in terms of interpretation; what would the relation be between cog-sci emphasis on invariance and other accounts of the self in which there is more emphasis upon variance?; relation between different kinds/levels (methodologies) of accounts of self 190ff: relative asociality of protoself, esp. when considering processes of gestation (e.g., as in psychoanalysis; proprioception as it develops during gestation); is the protoself more structurally social than as it is described here?; return to atomistic view of selves? 185: what is the epistemological value/significance of feeling/primordial feeling? 209: core self linked to cognition/cognizing Status of this discourse and the type of material constraints that help us think about meta-ethical issues; what does this mean for these questions concerning, e.g., the asociality of the protoself; are social and political questions appropriate for this kind of account? -wants to give an emergentist account of self processes; eventually wants to get to the broadest categories of experience, i.e., society and culture, but wants to begin with the simplest considerations regarding consciousness -the protoself: the most basic thing an organism has to do is monitor its internal states, i.e., homeostasis/allostasis; there is no substantial self: the self is an ongoing process of maintaining dynamic equilibrium; this is the base for a unified sense of self, and it is something over which we have no control, this is an unalterable condition for selfhood -feelings related to protoself activity are those of which we are not conscious -but cannot define the protoself independent of an environment, so in this sense its not explicitly asocial; maps of internal states are the result of the organism’s ongoing interaction with its environment -so the real question is how we can get a moment of core consciousness out of the activity of the protoself? -core self is the awareness of the changes that objects effect in relation to the mapping of organism/environment relation -deep awareness of being a body placed somewhere: primordial feeling... coming to be aware of this is not independent of the protoself -185: primordial feeling resists the Foucaultian notion that resistance is immanent to power relations -how would Damasio respond to arguments regarding the expansive quality of human equilibrium, e.g., Dewey? -our expansiveness begins with biological needs of the organism; as in Claude Bernard: organism begins with a permeable boundary; orderliness arises out of organism’s need to maintain its boundary -why is ownership necessary as part of the description of the self? Because this is an aspect of self at the level of core consciousness; this is part of a process of individuation and singular propriety and this is liable to function to reify our atomistic conceptions of the self -but might these above concerns be external to this biological account that we’re considering? -this puts into question the possibility of collective experience; might this metaphor be as apt as it is because of the social/political/economic conditions under which we live? Here, for Damasio, collective experience must be an aggregate of singularities rather than a collective body -this is right; he can give an account of our collective experience in terms of mirror neurons and the like, but he would resist an account of embodied sameness with the other, e.g., I cannot feel someone else’s chronic pain, I can empathize; this is based upon claims regarding internal mapping at the level of the individual organism -given the kind of organism that we are, we cannot have an unlimited amount of possibilities for self; there are material constraints, e.g., What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (Nagel) -we must also recognize that we’re talking about a distribution curve, our bodies aren’t exactly the same -Damasio, re: politics: if homeostasis is the primary governance of the protoself, and then it carries up into the core self, and then it carries up into the autobiographical self, then our work at the cultural level is an extension of this process (e.g., Looking for Spinoza) -at this broader level, this extends well beyond so-called material constraints; this speaks to the level of “equilibrium” to which particular social constraints give rise -processes of maintenance are operative in each domain of human meaning; geistege; the political possibilities include the material conditions under which we live that constrain the possibilities for social practices -there are a range of constraints operative in any context, and different methodologies will be better at explaining different constraints; cog-sci will be best for explaining x type of constraints -but Damasio thinks that each increasing level of complexity is pervaded by the constraints generated at the lowest level of organism survival -so we ought to be concerned that we ought not name one account of any particular kind of constraint as the most fundamental; but this might not be right: actuality might very much be prior to possibility, i.e., material constraints are prior to constraints as described in genealogical accounts -is a Damasio-style account equally constrained by accounts as given in genealogy: the difference will be a matter of scope -are we trying to distinguish between hard and soft constraints? Genealogical accounts provide soft constraints? Genealogical accounts, after all, emphasize the fact that things could be otherwise -but material constraints are prior to and constrain these other type of constraints -Damasio is not reductive: at each level of organization, processes are added in to a new level of complexity -so is a society a bunch of individuals? no, there are complex practices operative at the level of society that cannot be reduced to an aggregation of individuals; but he will want to say that processes of allostasis are operative here -what about the fact that this process is directed at the maintenance of life? -at a certain level, it’s not about the maintenance of life, but rather about flourishing: the maintenance of a life that has quality and meaning -Damasio is not reflexive with respect to his own positioning -what about programmed obsolescence (and natality) at the level of the protoself? so the processes of dynamic equilibrium and flourishing seem to foreclose the fact that organisms “plan to die,” or rather that life is structured by its death -why does he have to have death structured into his account? this need not be part of the teleology of the organism; death is not the horizon of the organism, but is a limiting factor upon the -this is why “homeostasis” is not the best model; there isn’t enough possibility for interaction here, e.g., feedback processes, which are nonetheless held together by an organism in its environment -this account is not an account of life as in vitalist accounts; coming-to-be and passing away are immanent to this account -if life is a kind of “holding together,” ought we not to include these rupturing kind of events natality and death as a part of allostasis -no, death is something that happens to the organism; he’s not focused on the fact that we are “beings toward death”

Lisa Adkins Reading Discussion

What’s the background debate? What is this a contribution to? What are the major theoretical assumptions?

Debates about workplace as performance, or performative theories of work/labor. Offering a specification about some of the ways in which gender figures in the workplace. Also offering a conceptual intervention concerning how we are going to map and describe these kinds of specificities. A critique of other forms of this work of specifying, in which identity is not recognized as the outcome of a process of labor.

Is this a descriptive or a normative project? Are they sketching a theoretical deficit in existing accounts of what we are calling ‘capitalist flexibilization’? Or are they also going one step further and offering a normative critique of ‘capitalist flexibilization’? The former is an attempt to be tidier and more rigorous about the concepts of ‘flexibilization’ (our language) or ‘identity performance’ (descriptive). The latter is a critique of what those concepts name (normative).

There is a normative ambivalence here.

Can we unpack the contrast (p. 604) between women works as gendered workers, versus individualizing and flexibilized workers?

What is at stake in the theoretical move that would give no precedence to either term in the relation between “gendered self-identity” and “gendering of the labour of division” (p. 599)? How does this differ from other theoretical accounts? Do other theoretical accounts give theoretical precedence to one term of this relation? Relation between identity and economy—not giving precedence of one over the other.

What is at stake in the treatment of stress (p. 610) as a privileged example or a key site for analysis, inquiry, and critique?

What is the scope of the argument?

How is self-formation linked to earning?