Romantic Systematics and the Genealogy of Thought: The Formal Roots of a Cognitive History of Images

Abstract

Romantic Systematics and the Genealogy of Thought:The Formal Roots of a Cognitive History of Images Barbara Maria Stafford (bio) Across the arts, theory of design, and new media studies a history of the senses is springing up.1 Simultaneously, the multiplying brain sciences are developing a finer neurobiology of feeling.2 Yet, not since the Romantics has there been such Kierkegaardian urgency in determining the place of the singular being within a heterogeneous and indifferent universe. We are warned that the concept of the "person" is in deep philosophical trouble,3 and that the nature of "personhood" needs to be questioned in relation to neurochemical and other invasions of the body. Extravagant claims of intimate detection, especially, surround neuroimaging techniques (PET, fMRI, near-infrared spectroscopy). While reminiscent of nineteenth-century claustral phrenology, today's high-tech version asserts the inescapable link between minute brain-activation patterns and highly individuated personality traits like risk aversion, guilt, pessimism, persistence, and empathy.4 The rise of a biocultures [End Page 315] paradigm5 and, in academic circles, the "eclipse" of a politics of identity or the politics of recognition6 are yet another sign of the perceived problem of intersubject and subject-world incommensurability. Still absent from these various concerns about the contemporary situation of the individual is a combined story of the emergence of subjectivity.7 We have yet to formulate a soma-poetics of human interiority, or what Thomas Metzinger calls "a truly internalist state space semantics."8 This essay offers a glimpse into a possible new kind of image history, one that intertwines the aesthetic with the neurobiologic. Integrating a cognitive perspective into humanistic inquiry allows us both to imagine and to construct an alternative framework for representation-as-presentation—that is, for the creation of a public object-event that existentially expresses a private inward performance. How might humanists studying images contribute to this bridging project? In the remainder of this essay, I suggest that formalism—the recognition that embodied structure is a powerful signifier—is a major area ripe for reevaluation in light of the current revolution in brain studies. If human consciousness involves an "intentional stance," as Daniel Dennett proposes,9 then the embeddedness of thinking animals in environments both natural and social allows them to figure out practically, or to materially form-ulate, what to do. This phenomenological activity—whereby the internal shaping of the self is externalized in graphic, gestural, and kinematic expressions—is a useful corrective to those computational branches of contemporary neuroscience (of which Dennett is a key representative) heavily indebted both to linguistics and to analytical philosophy. The performative process of creation suggests, on the contrary, that we can think without using words. I propose that exploring this deep corporeal capacity for forming moving images or, even deeper, neural patterns—using the elementary [End Page 316] representational tools of the sensory and motor systems—entails the creation of a neuronal aesthetics.10 Yet we lack a mutually informed cross-disciplinary inquiry into the complexities of human behavior from the inside out. One obstacle to establishing this innovative field of relationships is the deep rift currently separating the humanities and social sciences, under the sway of a contrastive "cultural turn,"11 from the physical and biological sciences, which are intent on uncovering innate human responses. An additional task, then, is innovative intermixture: finding ways to reinsert the biological into the investigation of cultural practices, as well as inserting evidence from past states-of-mind into contemporary cognitive research. In the process of opening up the scientific "theater of consciousness" to the social and cultural study of images, I specifically want to close the tenacious modernist gap between form and function. There is a distinguished pedigree for such an elision stretching back to late eighteenth-century attempts at characterizing a semio-translational universe perfused with signs. Recall that figuring out an object afresh over and over again—that is, repeated concept re-formation—was central to the Critique of Judgment intent on bridging the sensible and supersensible domains. From Plato to Kant, "structure is something we rejoice about."12 While I provide new interpretations of schematic compositions, from William Hogarth to Thomas Struth...