JOE'S AWESOME PRESENTATION, SLSA 2012

The Secret Planning:On Individual and Social Cognitive Mapping in Tognazzini's I Carry a

Hammer in my Pocket for Occasions Such as These

“My day to day life is often plotless. I suspect this is the case with the majority.”

-Nathan Leslie

“Fiction is the art form of human yearning, no matter how long or short that work of fiction is.”

-Robert Olen Butler

What is PP\FF, experts? I consider [PP\FF] . . .as representative of how individual works can subvert the very

codes and narratives by which they exist and can expose them as the product of specific historical moments. . .how literary genres conceal traces of their own underlying aesthetic contradictions, including the fact that such metagenres as “poetry”, “narrative”, and the “lyric” are always already contaminated by the generic categories they tend to subscribe to or exclude. . .In this respect. . .traditional generic categories and labels pretaining to “prosaic” as opposed to “poetic” works. . .appear as just another familiar narrative the prose poem tends to subvert and deconstruct by virtue of its own shameless hybrid modalities. (Deville 9)

“[PP\FFs are] that place within literature where social antagonisms. . .achieve generic expression, where aesthetic conflicts between and among literary genres manifest themselves concisely and concretely as a displacement, projection, and symbolic reenactment of more broadly based social struggles.” (Monroe 18)

“[PP\FF] places itself at the service of this more positive freedom, this age-old poetic rule that calls for the poet's receptive listening to guide his or her active saying. Equally, however, American poets employ prose to engage and interrogate what has been thought of as the “anit-poetic” realm of fact and argument, which 'is dealt with solely in regard to its correctness or incorrectness. . .[In writing PP\FFs,] writers “refuse to separate imagination and intellect, inner experience and the world.”” (Friedman 9-10)

For the purposes of today:

PP\FF is an inherently intermodal form of writing in which the generic conflict between “prosaic” (cognitive) and “poetic” (affective) language is an intrinsic element in its construction.

This type of writing has no true name, but is instead a middle point between the two perceived extremes of literary construction.

PP\FF is the minute Samson, iron clad, pulling down twin pillars, one labeled Poetry and the other Prose, collapsing the roof of the church of letters.

Damasio and the purpose of StoryIntrinsic to the understanding of PP\FFs is an understanding of the purposes of story since PP\FFs present stories so short as to not possess a plot.

To this end, let us look at Damasio's reason:

-”I suggest that the engine behind these cultural developments is the homeostatic impulse...The cultural devices created in response to the imbalance aimed at restoring equilibrium of individuals and of the group” (292)

-”Armed with conscious reflection, organisms whose evolutionary design was centered around life regulation and the tendency toward homeostatic balance invented forms of consolation for those in suffering, rewards for those who helped the sufferers, injunctions for those who caused harm, norms of behavior aimed at preventing harm and promoting good, and a mixture of punishments and preventions, of penalites and praise. The problem is how to make all this wisdom. . .stick. . .Storytelling was the solution. (293)

Maps

While Damasio's idea seems correct it begs a question: how knowledge is gained at all, and how does it produce a self-reflexive mind, an autobiographical self.

For the first question, the answer is MAPS!

-Mapping is essential for sophisticated management, mapping and life management going hand in hand. When the brain makes maps, it informs itself. . .Maps are constructed when we interact with objects. I cannot emphasize the word interaction enough. It reminds us that making maps, which is essential for improving actions. . .often occurs in a setting of action to begin with. (63-64)

-[If looking at a filet of cortex] you will discover, in each cortical layer that you inspect, a sheathlike structure that essentially resembles a two-dimensional square grid. . The arrangment. . .is ideal for overt topographical representation of objects and actions (65-66)

More on maps. . .

-Mapped patterns constitute what we. . .have come to know as sights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes, pains, pleasures. . .in brief, images. (70)

-[I]mages are based on changes that occur in the body and brain during the physical interaction of an object with the body. Signals sent by sensors located throughout the body construct neural patterns that map the organisms interaction with the object. . .

Moreover, once maps are committed to memory and can be brought back in imaginative recall, we are able to plan ahead and invent better responses. (72)

Homeostasis, the logic of map production.

-What we have come to perceive as feelings of pain or pleasure, or as punishments or rewards, corresponds directly to integrated states of living tissue within an organism, as they succeed one another in the natural business of life management. The brain mapping of states in which the parameters of tissues depart significantly from homeostatic range in a direction not conducive to survival is experienced with a quality we eventually called pain and punishment. (53, emphasis mine)

Feelings V Emotions

-Emotions are complex , largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions are complemented by cognitive program that includes certain ideas and modes of cognition, but the world of emotions is largely one of actions carried out in our bodies, from facial expressions and postures to changes in viscera and internal milieu. (109)

-Feelings of emotion. . .are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting. As far as our body is concerned, feelings are images of actions rather than actions themselves; the world of feelings is one of perceptions executed in brain maps. (109-110)

IN OTHER WORDS: Emotions are the primary-process responses used by evolutionarily beneficial life-regulation mechanisms in the brain to determine what's best for homeostatic balance. Feelings are the perceptions of emotions as they happen, and result in cogitation or action in response and, most importantly, they are interpreted images of our body state, thusly existing as maps.

Damasio's Working Hypothesis

First Stage: Protoself“consists of a gathering of images that describe relatively stable aspects of the body

and generate spontaneous feelings of the living body” (181)

Second Stage: Core Self“results from establishing a relationship between the organism. . .and any part of the

brain that represents an object to be known”(181-182)

Third Stage: Autobiographical Self“multiple objects, previously recorded as lived experience or as anticipated future,to interact with the protoself and produce an abundance of core self pulses” (181)

Epiphany

Butler: “Joyce spoke of a crucial characteristic of the literary art form, something he called epiphany, a term appropriated from the Catholic Church meaning, literally, “a shining forth.” The church uses it to describe the shining forth of divinity of the baby Jesus. The word made flesh. In literary art, the flesh is made word. And Joyce suggests that a work of fiction moves to a moment at the end where something about the human condition shines forth in its essence.”

Deville: There is no death of books and articles on the literary and philosophical origins of the Joycean epiphany. . .[:] the mind's ability to perceive the hidden meaning of ordinary events and situations (25)

Our term in literary studies for this phenomena is 'epiphany', originally supplied to us by Brother Joyce.

Other terms you may have heard areColeridge's “flashes”, Shelly's “best and happiest moments”, or the various names of Keatsian verisimilatude. (Deville 25)

Story 1: LintThis story is, I would argue, the process of map making presented in conceptual abstraction, accomplished via narrative.“Suddenly, there was a great deal of lint. . .A creepy suspicion slipped into our hearts”

Indicates bafflement. The collective narrator is confused by this occurance: what does it mean? what do we do about it? how do we respond? It is a display of homestatic imbalance, while similarly, the introduction of an external element through which epiphany can be attained.

“We were frightened, but deeply intrigued; scientists and psychics were consulted. Philosophers gave symposia, but by then even words themselves were lint: a soft, matted language of purples and blues.”

This is the cogitation on the feelings, and it is presented in abstract mostly due to the collective “we” narrator. Notice that cogitation is done so both through affective and cognitive means.

“In truth, we are the fixed point, and it is the secret that reaches out, from every direction for us.”

This is the epiphanic moment when the narrators realize and understand the process: They see its potential anywhere and its outcome as anything. This is a story of maps, presented as an ambivalent process of mind in response to the world.

Incentives

-The appearance of brain structures capable of detecting the likely delivery of “goods” or “threats” to the organism was also important. . .They would signal the coming of goods with the release of a molecule, such as dopamine or oxytocin. . .[T]he release would, in turn, optimize behavior required to obtain or avoid the delivery of the stimulus. (54)

In other words, when something good, or pleasurable happens to you, or you think it will happen to you, you are “rewarded” by neurotransmitters promoting good feelings.

Spaces

-The image space is the sapce where explicit images of all sensory types occur, including both images that become conscious and those that remain unconscious. (143)

-The dispositional space is that in which dispositions hold the knowledge base as well as the devices for the reconstruction of that knowledge in recall. It is the source of images in the process of imagination and reasoning and is also used to generate movement. (143)

-Dispositions also assist with the processing of a currently perceived image, for instance, by influencing the degree of attention recorded to the current image. . .Our memories of things. . .exist in our brains in dispositional form, waiting to become explicit images or actions. Our knowledge base is implicit, encrypted, and unconscious. (144)

-[The] measured departure from homeostatic range allows yet other brain devices to command corrective actions, and even to promote incentive or disincentive for corrections, depending on urgency of response. A simple record of such proceedings is the basis of the prediction of future conditions. (49)

Memory; The Context Development Zone

-CDZs record coinicidence of activity in neurons hailing from different brain sites, neurons that had been re-made active, for example, by mapping a current object. No part of the overall map of the object had to be permanently re-represented in the CDZs to be placed in memory. Only the coincidence of signals from neurons linked to the map needed to be recorded. (141)

-To reconstitute a map and thus produce recall, I proposed the mechanism of time-locked retroactivation. . .it was necessary to retroactivate the components of a map roughly at the same interval so that what occured (or nearly so) in perception could be reinstated simultaneously (or nearly so) in recall. (141-142)

The other critical element in the framework consisted of positing a division of labor between two kinds of brain systems, one that managed maps/images and another that managed dispositions. (142)

BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN!Based on all of the previous slides, I will propose the following scenario:

You encounter a given object. Your brain automatically begins to map that object based on your perceptions of it. The images of that object enter into the image space of your brain, then onto the CDZ to attempt to decrypt any relevant memories (i.e. coincidentally similar neuronal activations). The attention you afford to a given object, or rather your brain's unconscious prediction of its importance to homeostasis, is determined by recorded experience of memory.

This will generate emotions, and then feelingsin the protoself which will prompt your core self to interact and develop a representational understanding of the object in relation to you.If the object is a threat, you will be incentivizedto escape it, but if the object is a “good” youwill be incentivized to experience it and berewarded. This is done by the brain floodingyour body with neurotransmitters, either dopamine or oxytocin for goods, or prolactin for dangers.

This process results in the production of a homeostatically valuable cognitive map which has now been added to the autobiographical self's catalog of encrypted memories and can be unlocked for future use in the encounter of similar objects.

Story 2: The Task“I spend a lot of time dreaming about the future, which is one of the reasons I keep forgetting to clean the bathroom.”

First sentence, indicates yearning, or rather, a homestatic imbalance being experienced (felt) by the narrator preventing activity (we can call it a freeze response if we want).

“I'm still here on the couch, pondering options.”

Narrator cogitating on what to do in response to those feelings,which is done so in disjointed depictions of images of things the narrator could do.

““Wow,” you'll say, “Elbow grease.”Later it's August, and we'll sit outside in lawn chairs, eating corn on the cob in the sun. Then, in that chair--kernels in my teeth, my heart unknotted at last--I'll look up to see the past has amended each simple destructive mistake. And that everything I did not do I've done.”

This is the epiphanic moment when the narrator finishes cogitation and is a more homeostatically capable being, having gained the approval of the ungendered other. This is largely positive for the narrator in that it allows the narrator to display affection for the other more effectively. What follows this is the narrator “awakening” from the dream back to the present, and the experience of this cogitation becoming part of the autobiographical self since now the narrator can do the things imagined.

Hold up, wait a minute. . .The phenomena Damasio has outlined in detail, what I would describe as the neurological response to the contextualization of maps of novel or unusual stimuli, is not a new concept for neither the humanities nor neurology.

Gardner: “What we enjoy, we enjoy; dispute is useless. And one of the things human beings most enjoy is discovery. We may go along for years without ever noticing that the third person limited point of view is essentially sappy. And then one day in metafiction one sees that point of view mocked, all its foolishness laid bare, and one laughs with delight.” (Art 90)

Ramachandran: “The law of grouping was discovered by Gestalt psychologists around the turn of the century. . .Your brain says, 'What's the liklihood that all these fragments are exactly the same by coincidence? Zero. So they probably belong to one object. So let me glue them together to see what it is. Aha! Oops! It's a lion--run!' (Tell-Tale 201-202)

To sum upThe claims which are powering my thesis are as follows:

-The epiphany is physical, or that the phenomena we know as the literary epiphany is the result of neurological processes in response to new stimuli.

-PP\FF as a mode of writing attempts to chart in compact, literary form, conflicts between opposed linguistic norms of “prosaic” and “poetic” language, in attempt to bridge art and life, the affective and the cognitive. Some critics argue that as a mode, it is the best method to chart actual mental processes.

-Stories are the method through which cognitive maps, and therefore knowledge and wisdom, can be transferred between individuals and eventually among large populations.

To make it simple.Tognazzini is describing the implications of a person going from

to

My thesis

I am arguing that Tognazzini's I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These is a meta-ppff, utilizing the mode of pp\ffs in order to display the individual and social implications of the neurologic process of creating and sharing cognitive maps.

Story 3: Leaving PlacesLeaving Places is, in my opinion, the final expression of the process Tognazzini has been outlining. Let me show you why:There was a guy who wanted to leave, always saying so. . .”I should have never left. . .why'd you let me leave?”

This is pretty basic from what we've seen in process, but with one crucial difference: the depiction of the guy's adventure is done in past tense from the guy's perspective, and it is done orally: he is telling the group a story. In this story he tells all the cool things that happen: he is productive, falls in love, is well-nourished, lives a life punctuated by art, and finally reproduces. A beautiful story with lots of homestatic value. . .except for the part when he LEAVES OUT WHY IT WAS HE CAME BACK!

“One girl, wearing Ben Franklin glasses and a button-up vest. . .shouted “That sounds wonderful, I'm going there.”. . .Two months later the girl came back. “I never should have left,” she said. “Why'd you let me leave?”

Now another person has followed the map presented by the first, to the exact same outcome, in exactly the same way. Again, we are not told why she came back either.

“But you only notice these things if you are paying close attention. The kind of attention of give to a place just before you leave.And we were all, secretly, planning to leave.

Conk!clusion

I argue that this is the ultimate expression of Tognazzini's examination of this process. Note that in this story, there are two characters undergoing an adventure, the process of cognitive mapping towards epiphany, but some part of that epiphany is left out because the story being told by the first guy left it out. This resulted in only part of the cognitive map of the first guy being shared, and the girl, who now had a partial cognitive map that hinted at pure homeostatic bliss, acted on that map performing roughly the same action.

She has the same experience, and soon, the collective “we” narrator indicates that they want that experience, too.

This suggests that the act of cognitive mapping, and of story telling, is ambivalent in and of itself, but, depending on the storyteller and his/her techniques of storytelling, can result in the spread of cognitive maps that are produce homeostatic distress.

This story casts storytellers, the spreaders of cognitive maps, as responsible for interpretation and understanding of the world since their singular interpretation, whether good or ill, is made present in the minds of all listeners through the power of stories.

Next time, we analyze colors.