I wish to discuss Kara’s comment that humans will generally represent themselves using technologies of the time. This could be an example of the mimetic faculty whereby we use representation to understand or conceive of ourselves. The example Kara gave was the representation of our brain functions as telephone switchboards. Our minds are a jumble of wires and connections which are constantly switched around to process information. Today, one representation is of our brain functions as the current technologies of a computer or circuit board. An image search of the words ‘brain’ with ‘circuit’ or ‘computer’ comes up with representations of the brain both as a circuit board and a computer. Here are two of them:
There is further evidence of this representation in our language. For example, the phrase “reboot my brain” relates human brain functions with a computer or circuit board. A Google search of “reboot, brain” comes up with many hits showing the use or similar use of the above phrase. So, interestingly it seems we choose to conceive of ourselves by representing ourselves as objects we are familiar with. In fact, I am not sure I am even able to conceive of myself or my brain functions without the use of representation. It appears that the mimetic faculty both enables our understanding and limits it.
Allow me to clarify with an illustration. When I try to conceive of my brain processing information I can only come close to understanding it by using representation. I can visualise individual neurons sending information as the 3D images sending electric shocks I have seen on TV programs but that is only a miniscule part of brain functioning. I am unable to step back and see all my neurons firing as one brain. Instead, in order to approximate this larger view I use the representation of the brain as the internet. Many interconnected points or links through which a massive amount of information passes. While these particular representations enable me to better grasp certain aspects of my brain functioning, they also frame them in a way that hides aspects of its nature that do not fit the analogy. My internet representation negates neurochemistry, emotion and gives only one view on how memory is stored to name a few of my brain function’s aspects.
If you are interested, here is a link to a talk on the internet that discusses the concept of the internet as a brain and the future developments of the internet:
http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html
Now I wish to relate the discussion of Kara’s comment to this weeks reading. Perhaps there is a similar mechanism of mimetic faculty that I outline above within the statue-like acting style discussed in our reading. In Nature Still, But Nature Mechanized Roach writes that Steele admired “the musico [who] could manipulate his body with the precision of a moving statue” (p 69). Roach also states that a “similarly structured sequence of patterns, accented by moments in which actors held climactic tableau indefinitely, became the signature of eighteenth-century acting style” (p 69). Roach also points out that this representation extended from style to the plots in performances such as the “commonplace entertainments” of “Rameau’s popular opera-ballet Pygmalion (1748) or Aaron Hill’s knockabout farce The Walking Statue (c. 1746)” and states that these performances “simply returned to theatre a recurring metaphor of Enlightenment physiology and psychology: the human body is a statue mechanically endowed with motion” (p 68). It could be that the familiar form of the statue was adopted into the movements of actors and the plots of performances because it provided a way of conceiving of the body as a moving statue that was easier to relate to than the abstract idea alone.
Just as telephone switchboards and computers are used to represent brain function, the moving statue became a representation for the human body. Maisano remarks that, “Shakespeare made a real human being look like a moving statue” (p 73) in The Winter’s Tale. This representation seems to have been important as it resurfaces so many times. I believe it forms an understanding of the human body as a machine while still enabling a sense of fixedness through the frozen images of statues. As I discussed in my post two weeks ago, I think humans generally relate to themselves as fixed images and perhaps this suggests why this representation was so popular in the eighteenth-century.
It appears that this same representation surfaces with the study of the human passions that could be “academized and systematized” (Roach p 66) into set frozen images that humans move between. For me, Charles Le Brun’s drawing of the six universal passions recalls the statue-like representations within ‘eighteenth-century acting.’
While this representation could have helped a grasp of the human body as a machine, it also frames or limits this understanding to humans consisting of a set of frozen types just as I find representing my brain functions limits my understanding while also enabling it. While statues may not be a technology, they are a familiar object and I think this representation falls into the same mechanism of the mimetic faculty that Kara commented on with comparing technologies of the day to ourselves.
