Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR

LIFE

This booklet has been published as an addendum to

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

and features a curatorial introduction by Hicham Khalidi, a

lecture transcript and a book review from 1986 by neuroscien-

tist Israel Rosenfield, an interview with philosopher Catherine

Malabou, and an essay by the thinker Daniel Blanga-Gubbay,

plus documentation pictures of the exhibition

WITH MANY THANKS TO NATASHA HOARE AND ROWAN MCCUSKEY FOR TRANSLATIONS AND DESIGN.

ARTEFACT IS AN INITIATIVE OF STUK ARTS CENTRE, THE PROVINCE VLAAMS BRABANT AND THE CITY OF LEUVEN

Poem on coverArchaic Torso of Apollo

by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)Translation Stephen Mitchell, 1995

TABLE OF CONTENTS

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE – HICHAM KHALIDI

WHAT DOES THE BRAIN DO ?– ISRAEL ROSENFIELD

INTERVIEW WITH CATHARINE MALABOU

THE INSTANT BEFORE JUMPING– STORY OF A TRAPEZE ARTIST– DANIEL BLANGA-GUBBAY

NEURAL DARWINISM: A NEW APPROACH TO MEMORY AND PERCEPTION– ISRAEL ROSENFIELD

EXHIBITION PHOTOSBIOSCOLOPHON

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YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

“And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we

are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particular-

ity and self-development, to make our own individual paths

through life.”

Oliver Sacks, On The Move, A Life, 2015

Must Change Your Life as its title, and sought to question the idea of

self-transcendence from the perspective of the plasticity of the human be-

ing and the variability of its environment. The exhibition also posed the

question: how can man change himself in a continuously changing envi-

ronment? Is it not the external environment that determines how people

change, just as the torso appeals to Rilke to change? This publication has

been created as an addendum to the exhibition, and features a curatorial

introduction by myself, an essay by the thinker Daniel Blanga-Gubbay,

an interview with philosopher Catherine Malabou and a transcript of a

lecture and a book review from 1986 by neuroscientist Israel Rosenfield.

This selection of texts intends to provide an overview of the complex in-

teraction between the idea of self-change as defined by philosopher Peter

Sloterdijk in his book You Must Change Your Life, from within the field of

neuroscience, and the philosophy of plasticity and resistance.

LIFE AS A SELECTION

PROCESSAccording to neuroscientist Israel Rosenfield, all moving animals de-

veloped brains because they are faced with an ever-changing and unpre-

dictable environment. The space in which we move is an invention of our

brains, thus also our memory. Both are formed through the mechanism of

natural selection5, and have enabled us to survive.

In other words, man moves in a

space that he invented himself and to

do that he needs a brain. The brain

5 – Natural selection is an idea of Charles Darwin and is based on the premise that life evolves by mutation, migration and genetic drift. If you have variation,

differential reproduction, and heredity, evolution by natural selection is the outcome.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR

LIFEAccording to Catherine Malabou, a philosopher in the field of (neuro)

plasticity, plasticity means the capacity to receive form and to give form.1

What is plastic is formable. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk plays upon the

relationship between the plasticity of human being, and the plastic art of

sculpting, when he borrows the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem

Apollo’s Archaic Torso (1908) as the title of his book You Must Change

Your Life (Boom Publishers, 2011). In this poem, the Bohemian-Austrian

poet looks at an ancient sculpted torso and tries to find the right words

for what the body in front of him conveys. However, the poem lingers in

metaphorical descriptions. In the last two lines something radical happens,

a reversal that is unparalleled in poetry, the body speaks to Rilke and

commands him with the words: “(…) for here there is no place that does

not see you. You must change your life.” (Translation Stephen Mitchell,

1995).2 Sloterdijk uses this poem as a metaphor for man, who can and

must change.3 In Rilke’s poem it is visual art that initiates this change,

but at the same time, the sonnet was written in a period in which Rilke

was looking for a change in his life;

he wanted to become a better poet,

and to achieve this he must make a

change in his life.4

The exhibition for Artefact Festival

2015 took Sloterdijk’s dictum You

10 11

1 – Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain, p.52 – From Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer

Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell and published by Modern Library. 3 – One could say that plastic art explores the deformability of life through the

plastic properties of the material used: as in clay or plaster. 4 – This reversal of subject and object is key against a historical background

in which late romanticism made place for Modernism; the Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of new technology and science. In poetry it was no longer sufficient to describe nature with metaphorical comparisons. The emerging

medium of photography had the monopoly in mimicking nature. Artists searched for other ways to represent the reality around them.

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE

For Sloterdijk, self-transcendence is rooted in sensing the external en-

vironment, and becoming better at this process: “For every organism, its

environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown

the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears.”11

Man developed religion, arts and sport to transcend a dangerous and un-

predictable environment. These are exercises with which man can reach

higher planes by striving for a more elevated or vertical position. Man is

an anthropotechnic, a practician of the human condition who increases

his resistance by practicing on a biological, psychological and social level;

cells in humans defend against external threats, the human conscience re-

pels us from pride and insecurity, and living together in societies repels us

from other societies or animals.12

There is no beginning and end to self-change. Man must continuously cre-

ate new outlooks and anticipate new or unexpected situations; this is what

saves humans from determination. Through the mechanism of natural se-

lection (natural law), nature takes what it considers necessary. For exam-

ple, if I keep creating many different new ideas it is more likely that one

of them is successful. The more ideas, and the crazier the idea, the more

likely it will be that I will find someone who can do something with it. Karl

Popper points this out in his lecture, Natural Selection and The Emergence

of Mind, when he compares the process of making art with the mechanism

of natural selection: “On every level,

making comes before matching; that

is, before selecting. The creation of

13

and movement in space are evolutionarily intertwined in a complex re-

lationship. In one of his lectures What does the brain do? Rosenfield in-

dicates that, “If living things did not move brains probably would have

never evolved. Plants do not have brains; only animals do.”6 A plant has a

nervous system, but requires no brain due to its stasis.7

In a piece for the New York Times Book Review 8, reissued especially for

this publication, Rosenfield reflects on the work of Nobel laureate Gerald

Edelman, explaining that memory is formed through a process of selection

that works like our immune system: the body produces a large variety

of antibodies which may be linked through a process of trial-and-error

(selection) to bacteria and viruses. Our brain, in the same way, makes a

wide variety of context related connections that, depending upon the situ-

ation in which the person finds him/herself, may be turned on or off. Some

contemporary researchers dispute Edelman’s Neural Darwinism theory,

refuting it as a true form of Darwinism9. Edelman’s response to this kind

of criticism is that the idea of variation holds due to the sheer amount of

connections in the brain (it can make more connections than there are

stars in the known universe). As each brain is unique its processes must

lead to variation, and thus to selection.10

To what extent can we effect change when considering life as a process of

selection? Where does self-transcendence, as Sloterdijk defines it, begin or

end?

11 – You must change your life by Peter Sloterdijk (Polity Press, 2014) 12 – Keith Ansell-Pearson on You Must Change your Life and The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice, Philosophy of the Acrobat: On Peter

Sloterdijk, July 8th, 2013

12

6 – Israel Rosenfield, What does the brain do? Questioning perception, consciousness and free will, The Institute for Public Knowledge, 2011

7 – The brain anticipates on opportunities and threats coming from the external environment. As a result, the brain is continuously in the future.

8 – Neural Darwinism: A New Approach to Memory and Perception, 1986

9 – Chrisantha Fernando, Queen Mary University of London, Computational Theories of Evolution, A New Research Program: Evolutionary

Neurodynamics. 10 – Gerald Edelman, Why I don't think the brain is a computer, The

theory of neural Darwinism

CONCLUSIONThe spiritual moment that Rilke experienced in front of the torso of Apol-

lo can be read as an expression of the internal mechanism inside the hu-

man being that necessarily strives for something higher, something better.

Through this metaphor the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk states that man

can and must change, and in this way transcend his/her environment. Con-

temporary neuroscience provides a possible answer to the question of how

man can change when his environment is also constantly changing. This

view of self-change contends that we are born with a genetic makeup that

we cannot change; we cannot change the course of natural selection, be-

cause it works through the mechanism of random mutation and variation

at the population level, beyond our individual lives. But within the frame-

work of man’s individual life, in his own time, we are plastic, even into old

age. What we become in our lives we determine ourselves to some extent.

What we will become as a human race now and in the future cannot be

determined; natural selection has the patent on this through the system of

random mutation. Thus one could say that we are partly determined by a

non-determined system.

When we view life as a process of selection similar to the mechanism of

natural selection, the only way man can exert influence is to be open to

change, to anticipate what will be, to take a vulnerable position, as Blan-

ga-Gubbay has stated. When we move from A to B we make ourselves vul-

nerable, and by doing this, we exert resistance. With resistance we grow.

an expectation, of an anticipation, of a perception (which is a hypothesis)

precedes its being put to the test.”13

Transforming your own life is second nature, as Catherine Malabou states

in the interview featured in this publication, “something that Foucault

calls the care of the self; the ability to form oneself and not see oneself as

just factically thrown into existence and its variability.” We are not just

thrown into the world, by being aware of our plastic ability we exercise

our strength, “Practice then is definitely a practice of resistance.” But is

this a voluntary act? According to Malabou, consciousness is something

other than free will, “even if the brain is and will remain forever out of the

reach of consciousness (no one can feel their own brain), we may neverthe-

less produce a kind of knowledge of the epigenetic power of our cerebral

capacities. Brain development takes place all life long, and is certainly

not limited to genetic dispositions. Education, habit, and experience, leave

traces in the brain and form it, which means that we are partly genetically

predestined, and partly epigenetically indeterminate.”

In his essay A Trapeze Artist, written especially for this publication, phi-

losopher Daniel Blanga-Gubbay asserts that by making yourself vulnera-

ble you create an ability, which in turn creates a possibility to excel and

transcend. He states that: “Every ability originates from a vulnerability;

every exceeding reveals a limitation; every transcendence implies a famil-

iar; every attempt to escape elsewhere presupposes a here.” Blanga-Gub-

bay takes the human body and its limited character as a starting point, a

body that moves from one situation to the other and by doing that grows

in strength: “(...) every training session makes the body more elastic; each

workout makes the body more athletic and makes wider its possibilities:

“Precisely by being vulnerable man

excels.”

15

13 – Karl Popper, Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind, Delivered at Darwin College, Cambridge, November 8, 1977

14

WHAT DOES THE BRAIN DO ?

16

ingredients that go into the cake are transformed when they are put into

the oven. So too, stimuli are transformed by the brain into the sounds

(music and words), images and thoughts we are aware of.

A damaged brain has all the ingredients of a cake, but not the means to

bake it: it has the flour, the eggs and the milk, but it can’t bake the cake.

One of the most famous cases in the history of neurology was Ju-

les Dejerine’s 1892 description of a man who could write, but not read

what he had written. He had other problems as well. He was an amateur

musician, but he could no longer read music; he could not make sense of

multi-digit numbers; and he could not see colors in part of his visual field.

These symptoms are not unrelated, as will be discussed in the talk.

Dejerine’s patient cannot read multi-digit numbers because the in-

dividual digits change their meaning (nine, ninety, thirty-nine, nine thou-

sand, etc.) depending on their place in the multi-digit number. The same is

true of musical notes; the notes can be seen, but not the melodies and the

harmonies. In other words, the difficulties Dejerine’s patient (and patients

with similar brain damage) have is an inability to interconnect, to relate

stimuli – to bake the cake. They are, at best, aware of relatively simple

stimuli; but their brains cannot integrate them into a larger and meaning-

ful whole.

Oliver Sacks describes a patient who is present with us this evening

– Howard Engel - whose neurological problems are strikingly similar to

those described by Dejerine. Engel is a professional writer who cannot

read what he has written. Engel, like Dejerine’s patient, is partially able to

overcome his reading disability using movement. In Oliver Sacks’s words:

Howard started to move his hands as he read, tracing the outlines of

words and sentences still intelligible to his eyes. And most remarkably, his

tongue, too, began to move as he read, tracing the shapes of letters on his

teeth or the roof of his mouth ... Howard was replacing reading by a sort

of writing. He was, in effect, reading with his tongue.

WHAT DOES THE BRAIN

DO?What does the brain do is a transcript of a lecture by Israel Rosenfield at The

Institute for Public Knowledge co-presented with Harper's Magazine

If living things didn’t move brains probably would have never evolved.

Plants don’t have brains; only animals do. Brains evolved because moving

creatures are confronted by an ever-changing, unpredictable environment.

Plants don’t have brains because they don’t need them; they don’t move

from place to place. For animals, motion creates a world of visual, tactile,

and auditory sensations that are unorganized and unstable; in short, the

world is constantly changing. What the brain must do—it’s probably the

principal reason brains evolved—is create a stable, coherent sensory en-

vironment for the individual organism to understand and use. The brain

does this by “inventing” a range of perceptions: a series of constructs that

we “see,” “hear,” and “feel” when we look, listen, and touch.

For example, there are no colors in the world. In the 1950s Edwin

Land used two black and white photos to demonstrate how the brain

creates, or constructs colors from a dirty-grey world. We will repeat the

experiment. And we will explain how colors simplify and stabilize the

visual world that is ‘naturally’ a dirty grey.

Artists have always known, intuitively, that the brain makes possible the

creation of our visual worlds, since representational art uses materials on

a flat surface to create the illusion of faces, objects, and scenes.

Neurological damage limits the brain’s ability to construct, or create

images, words and thoughts. We might say the brain is baking a cake. The

18 19

an individual’s relationship to memory and past experience. John M. Hull,

who became blind in his mid-thirties, describes in his book Touching the

Rock how he gradually lost any visual sense of those he continued to have

contact with, and how he started losing visual memory as well:

An adult recently blinded [has] a strange feeling that one has stopped

accumulating experiences. Previously, one seemed always to be standing

upon the edge of a line of experience which had been steadily expanding.

It was like laying down a mosaic pavement. It was always possible to

pause on the edge and look back at the pattern. As I look back now, I feel

that the laying down of the mosaic ended in the summer of 1980.

Another construction of the brain is space and a sense of depth.

Hammerhead sharks and cuttlefish are able to move their eyes from the

sides of their heads to a frontal position, changing a panoramic view of

their environment (without a sense of depth) to a binocular view (with

depth) that allows them to rapidly seize prey. Human beings are unable

to make such rapid shifts from panoramic views to depth views, but Sue

Barry, who is present this evening, was born cross-eyed and had to de-

velop an unconscious strategy to overcome the failure of her two eyes to

work together. She viewed the world one eye at a time. In December of

2004 Barry wrote to Oliver Sacks: “You asked me if I could imagine what

the world would look like when viewed with two eyes. I told you that I

thought I could. . . But I was wrong.”

“Struggling to find an analogy for her experience,” Oliver Sacks

writes, “Sue had suggested, in her original letter to me, that her experience

might be akin to that of someone born totally colorblind, able to see only

in shades of gray, who is suddenly given the ability to see in full color. Such

a person, she wrote, ‘would probably be overwhelmed by the beauty of the

world. Could they stop looking?’”

In some ways the loss of the ability to read what one has written is not

unrelated to a loss of the ability to recognize faces. The artist Chuck Close

is famous for pixilated, close-up portrait paintings and photography. This

is his way of remembering faces: “I don’t know who anyone is and have

essentially no memory at all for people in real spaces, but when I flatten

them out in a photograph, I can commit that image to memory in a way.

I have almost a kind of photographic memory for flat stuff.” What makes

Close’s greatly enlarged faces memorable for him is their very flatness—

the diminishment of dimensionality. By flattening them, he magnifies their

details and the discrete parts of their physiognomy, just as Dejerine’s pa-

tient could read single-digit, but not multi-digit, numbers.

Facial recognition can be destroyed in other ways as well. In 1923,

French neurologists Joseph Capgras and Jean Reboul-Lachaux described

a patient who, though she could recognize her husband and children,

believed they were impostors. Capgras and his co-author attributed this

delusion to a neurological breakdown that prevents the individual from

having an emotional response to people she knows intimately. I am just

as interested in the patient’s own explanation of her complaint: “You can

see it in the details,” she said. His mustache was longer than it had been

the day before, his hair was combed differently, his skin had become pale,

and he was wearing a different suit. She could not relate her husband’s

appearance from moment to moment. In her case, lack of visual synthesis

prevented her from forming a gestalt of the members of her family. Her

husband and children looked different throughout the course of the day.

Their hairstyles, clothing, locations, and facial expressions kept changing,

and this shifting data made her believe they were different people altogeth-

er. There is a connectivity, a continuity, a flow to our perceptual worlds

(James’ ‘flow of consciousness’) that is destroyed by brain damage.

Yet brain damage is not the only cause of an individual’s inability to

perceive larger wholes. Blindness too, can do this by profoundly altering

20 21

In conclusion the colors we see, the words we read, the music we play

and listen to – in short, our entire sensory experience is part of the brain’s

attempt to create a stable environment that we can understand. Our in-

dividuality, our subjectivity is a direct consequence of this sensory world

the brain creates.

22 23

INTERVIEW WITH CATHERINE

MALABOU

24

morphosis, that is a renewed (and not only new) essence, then the formula

makes sense. It refers to the capacity that a subject has to transform their

own life into a second nature, something that Foucault calls the care of the

self; the ability to form oneself and not see oneself as just factically thrown

into existence and its variability. Practice then is definitely a practice of

resistance. Paradoxically, we have to resist change (constant mutability,

capitalistic continuous display of ‘options’ in all domains) in order to be

able to change, that is to become what and who one is. To become what

one ‘is’ is necessarily a construction.

HK: In your book What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2008) you say

that humans make their own brain, but that they do not know it. Basi-

cally, it is a matter of whether you are conscious of your ability to change

your brain, or not. Does this mean that we voluntarily change things only

if we are conscious, otherwise change happens necessarily?

CM: This is a major challenge of our times; to understand that becoming

aware of something does not necessarily entail that this thing becomes an

object for the Will, or even paradoxically, for consciousness itself. When I

speak about the current urge to produce a consciousness of our own brain,

I mean that even if the brain is and will remain forever out of the reach of

consciousness (no one can feel their own brain), we may nevertheless pro-

duce a kind of knowledge of the epigenetic power of our cerebral capaci-

ties. Brain development takes place all life long, and is certainly not limited

to genetic dispositions. Education, habit, and experience, leave traces in

the brain and form it, which means that we are partly genetically pre-

destined, and partly epigenetically indeterminate. This situation brings to

light a new crossing between nature and history. When Marx urged people

to become conscious of their historical dimension, this also didn’t mean

any action of the Will or of consciousness proper. Such is the challenge of

INTERVIEW WITH

CATHERINE MALABOU

Hicham Khalidi: The theme of this year’s Artefact Festival is You Must

Change Your Life. It is drawn from Prof. Peter Sloterdijk’s Formulations

concerning exercise and practice as ethics, resistance, and immunity. You

Must Change Your Life could be read in two ways; either that over the

course of a lifetime a person necessarily changes, or as an imperative com-

manding a person to change her/his life. Following the latter, Sloterdijk

stresses that man must leave his comfort zone and actively change her/his

life.

We ‘must’ could be seen either as a necessity, or as a desire. How is neces-

sity connected to desire for you in the context of changing one’s life? What

can we change and what is an illusion? What is practice in this context?

Catherine Malabou: For me the problem resides in the meaning of ‘change’.

‘Change’ is more difficult to grasp than ‘life’ in the formula “you must

change your life”. If by ‘change’, one has to understand a simple mutation,

due to the flux of life, the flexibility of becoming (a bad interpretation of

Heraclitus’ panta pei, everything flows), then “you must change your life”

is devoid of meaning: if life is constantly ‘changing’, why should we inter-

vene in this change? But if, by ‘change’, we understand a new coming into

presence, a carefully fashioned new self, less a change proper than a meta-

26 27

extent that epigenetics plays with the malleability of the phenotype, with

what depends on gene transcription and interpretation in it; this ‘play’

situates itself precisely in-between chance and necessity. The question of

contingency is currently at the heart of many discussions, see Quentin

Meillassoux’ After Finitude (2010) for instance. I recently engaged a dis-

cussion with his definition of radical contingency in my last book After

Tomorrow, Epigenesis and Rationality, which came out in French in 2014

and will soon be published in English by Polity Books.

HK: Can we predict change in this context; when it is undetermined such

as natural selection is partly a random process? There seems to be a ten-

sion between chance, necessity and desire, such as we would like to change

things, but things are already changing around us without determination.

If they are random, what are we really changing?

CM. No, I don’t see why and how we might predict change. Biology is not

determinism, contrarily to the usual assertion. See what Sigmund Freud

already said about desire and the drive: they are forces, obscurely deter-

mined, and yet they remain highly unpredictable.

HK: What is the relationship between ‘thrive’ and natural selection?

CM: I think it is helpful to recall Darwin’s distinction between necessity

and purposiveness, or teleology. Natural selection is a law, in that sense, it

is necessary, mechanistic even, but since it pursues no goal, it remains un-

foreseeable. Who can tell what the identity of an offspring will be? In that

sense, the difference between natural selection and ‘thrive’ is not so big as

we might think. Today, some neurobiologists define their work as a form

of neural Darwinism. They explain the synaptic development according

to the laws of selection and stabilization of synapses. Some neural config-

historical materialism: to produce a form of consciousness without con-

sciousness, a process without a subject. I would say that it is the same with

the idea of a critical consciousness of the brain.

HK: A question Daniel Blanga-Gubbay wanted to raise with you in this

context is “Does plasticity put the idea of resistance beyond the categories

of voluntarily / involuntarily?”

CM: Exactly. But we should also examine whether it has been the case

throughout the whole history of philosophy. The greatest thinkers of the

will: Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, or Friedrich Nietzsche, for

example, have always defined it as something different from the ‘volun-

tary’. No one does anything voluntarily for Kant. If I do so, my action is

not morally pure. It is the same in Nietzsche: the will is not a ‘volunteer’.

It is something else, something difficult to grasp, which has more to do

with the couple commanding/obeying rather with the duality voluntarily/

involuntarily. To go back to plasticity, it certainly has a strong relationship

with the instinct of commanding and obeying, which are life instincts in

the first place.

HK: In your book you beautifully state “Today it is no longer chance ver-

sus necessity, but chance, necessity, and plasticity”. Your brain can change

out of necessity, it can change because it needs to change, it is plastic. Do

you mean that these terms do not mean oppositions, but that they corre-

spond?

CM: Yes, epigenetics is a science that deals with the non-genetic modifica-

tion of phenotypes. These modifications do not alter the DNA sequence,

but are significant nonetheless, as they are able to fashion individual iden-

tity. There is an intimate link between plasticity and epigenetics, to the

28 29

urations disappear, others get stabilized. It is a form of natural selection.

This said, there are no norms that would be able to objectively and defin-

itively account for this selection. Current neurobiology provides us with

new possible readings of Darwin, Freud, and even Henri Bergson. The

fluidification of frontiers between authors and disciplines is a fascinating

phenomenon, which definitely changes our lives, even if we don’t know it!

30 31

THE INSTANT BEFORE JUMPING

– STORY OF A TRAPEZE ARTIST

32

simply training for the show. Rather his exercise is an end in itself, or a

means with no end.

Suddenly, alone in the room and with his feet on the edge of the platform,

the trapeze artist questions us with his readiness to jump: what drives him

to leave the platform?

In You Must Change Your Life Peter Sloterdijk explores man’s ability to

transcend himself. The book’s title comes from the final line of the poem,

‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, by Rainer Maria Rilke, and far from both a

normative agenda and a revolutionary imperative, these five words of the

title are intended to be more ontological, defining the man as the one

who is busy with a constant vertical tension, with a continuous attempt at

self-overcoming. Man is the animal that transforms itself, that exceeds its

limits, the one who – in the words of Rilke – ‘from all the borders of itself

burst like a star. For here there is no place that does not see you. You must

change your life’.i

From all the borders of himself, man goes beyond the body, training him-

self as the being who is potentially superior to himself. Sloterdijk acknowl-

edges here the legacy of the anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, appropriat-

ing his description of an excentric positionality, as that which defines the

human condition. Men are not animals that just change their position;

they exceed their own position. Men are the ones who live outside their

body, that refuse to be confined to the materiality of their body, that – with

an effort similar to that of Michelangelo’s Prigioni – tenaciously exceed

their limits. Men are not simply transported by their life; they step out of

their bodies, they – in the words of Sloterdijk – ‘step out of the river of

life and take residence on the shore. All increases of a mental or bodily

kind begin with a secession from the

ordinary’.iii – Rilke, R.M., Archaïscher Torso Apollos, The Archaic Torso of Apollo, 1908.

ii – Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life (Cambridge: Polity Press), 2013, p.217.

THE INSTANT BEFORE

JUMPING – STORY OF A

TRAPEZE ARTIST

With his feet on the edge of the platform, the trapeze artist claps his hands

creating a dense cloud of magnesium. He walks through this floating mass

of powder before making his entrance, as if it were a special effect metic-

ulously prepared to announce to the void in front of him his imminent

appearance. He is about to leave the stability of the platform; he is about

to venture into a continuous sequence of instabilities.

What drives him to leave the platform?

We usually think about the flying of a trapeze artist from an aesthetic

viewpoint, as if his aerobatics are only for the aesthetic pleasure of the

onlookers; or as if – even when alone during the day – his exercise is just

aimed at fulfilling the onlookers’ desire at the evening performance.

But what if we try to reverse for an instant this causal relation? What if

the trapeze artist is not training himself just in order to perform at night?

What if the evening spectacle is not the reason for his training, but simply

an exhibition for others of what he does in any case? While thinking this

way, his training ceases to be simply a means to an aesthetic end; he is not

34 35

bones, making it seem much more vulnerable and lithe, acrobatic’.iii The

body is revealed in its abilities only when exposed in a vulnerable position.

The trapeze artist does not just transcend his body with his abilities,

but while doing so he reminds us that he has a body, a vulnerable one.

While flying into the air the body is no longer protected by the thickness

of a safe position, but is covered by a veil of abilities that – like any thin

veil – cover and reveal at the same time the vulnerable flesh. The trapeze

artist reminds us that each ability presupposes a vulnerability, and that

each vulnerability implements an ability. Vulnerability and ability appear

for a moment as two sides of the same coin, indistinguishable as they spin

through the air.

Every ability originates from a vulnerability; every exceeding reveals

a limitation; every transcendence implies a familiar; every attempt to es-

cape elsewhere presupposes a here. In this way, the words of Maurice

Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception resonate with us, when

he says (or almost allows these words to emanate from the lips of our

trapeze artist): ‘The word here applied to my body does not refer to a

determinate position, but the laying down of the first co-ordinates, the

anchoring of the active body in an object, the situation of the body in face

of its tasks. Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and

envelop its parts instead of spreading them out, because it is the darkness

needed in the theatre to show up the performance, the background of som-

nolence or reserve of vague power against which the gesture and its aim

stand out’.iv The body is the weight necessary for any challenge to gravity,

the limit necessary for any improvement, the limited unit of measurement

necessary for any exploration of the space outside.

At a closer look, however, what the

trapeze artist is showing us is that

this unit of measurement is not fixed

iii –Deleuze, G., Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation (New York: Continuum), 2003, p.22.

iv – Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 2005, p.115.

Hence, with his feet on the edge of the platform – or, we could say now,

with his feet on the shore – the trapeze artist seems first and foremost to

be setting up a dialogue with his body. His eyes are already staring into

the empty space in front, in which he imagines his vaulting body: in his

mind he sees the future instants, already translated into coordinated nerve

impulses that he feels running through himself. He is ready to jump into

the empty space, which is a jump into his own vulnerability, and while

staring into the void, he seems to defiantly say: I’m more than a body. If

you think all bodies are hopelessly imprisoned by the laws of gravity, I’m

more than this. I have the opportunity to challenge my body in its inexo-

rable fall towards earth.

With his aerobatics the trapeze artist leaves the stability of his body

to prove himself to be more than it. This is his secession from the ordinary,

from being simply a body.

Maybe only while looking at him in his first moments of exceeding

his body, we can clearly understand the obsessive fascination with images

of trapeze artists and athletes of Francis Bacon, for whom the figures de-

picted in his paintings leave the stability of the bones to venture into the

vulnerability of the flesh; they are bodies escaping the body.

However, while our trapeze artist throws himself beyond his body, he does

not leave his body. This last does not disappear. On the contrary, it be-

comes suddenly a unique unit of measurement of his thinking. The extent

and abilities of the body become the only unit of measurement for all

vaulting in space.

What the trapeze artist suddenly reveals is that every activity of ex-

ceeding the body inevitably allows the appearance of the body. That is

why, while writing about Bacon’s paintings and describing the bones ‘like

a trapeze apparatus (the carcass) upon which the flesh is the acrobat’,

Gilles Deleuze declares that the body emerges precisely because of the

aerobatics: ‘the body is revealed only when it ceases to be supported by the

36 37

entitled Drawing Restraint 1–6. His primary intention was to address the

implementation of some pencil drawings, in a way that made it difficult

to produce them. Barney proceeded by hanging a white sheet of paper on

the wall in such a position that it is nearly impossible to reach, so that

he is able to leave some marks on it but only with a great deal of bodi-

ly effort. His artistic approach seems to focus more on the process than

on the object, an approach pioneered by Yves Klein with his well-known

Anthropometries, which he referred to as ashes of his art. In the Drawing

Restraint series, however, the pencil marks that have appeared on the sheet

by the end of the performance are not to be regarded as just ashes of an

effort: more than a relation with the past, they are traces of a not yet. The

Drawing Restraint series fixes a movement that refuses to be exhausted in

the result, in which the artistic tension must be kept as such, since it is only

by giving up the achievement of the creation to which he is attracted that

the artist can keep himself in a creative tension towards the very object.

Maybe it is not a coincidence that Barney was an athlete before becoming

an artist. And through him we can understand Sloterdijk’s idea when he

speaks about a Homo Artista defining this conquest of improbabilities,

the performer of the excellence of human training: the Artist is an Athlete,

and the Athlete is an Artist, the creature in ceaseless training, who does

not want to end the training session.

For this reason when writing about Drawing Restraint,v the English art

critic Neville Wakefield described Barney’s body as a ‘Desiring machine’.

Barney presents himself as the one – or the machine – who is able to main-

tain this physical distance, in which the desire is a never satisfied desire.

In order to prevent himself from what seems to be unavoidable absorp-

tion, Barney manages to preserve this unfolded distance and to materialise

a physical strength that allows him

not to yield to the attraction. Hence,

in one of the Drawing Restraint, he

v – Wakefield, N. and Scott, K., Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint: vol. V, 1987–2007 (London: Serpentine Gallery, and Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung

Walther Konig), 2007.

at all. In fact, every training session makes the body more elastic; each

workout makes the body more athletic and makes wider its possibilities.

The space in front of us – which is measured by the possibilities of our

body – will measure up differently. This is at last what the trapeze artist

does, training session after session, and this is why Sloterdijk speaks about

man’s ability to immunise his vulnerability. If man is the animal that ex-

plores, he is also the animal that can change the unit of measurement of his

explorations, of his own challenges; that can change the here in relation to

which each elsewhere is conceived. Maybe this is the deeper meaning with-

in the sentence You must change your life, which may not allude simply to

the ability to change your life, but rather the ability to change the unit of

measurement through which life is experienced.

Still,while looking at the trapeze artist, it would be difficult to reduce his

training only to a productive means or to a real necessity of immunising

the vulnerable body. The idea of productivity or functionality is continu-

ously questioned by his aerobatics: first of all his aerobatics do not appear

to be a means of achieving something concrete; he does not simply jump

from the platform to reach the opposite one, or to reach a different place.

As soon as he feels it is safe to land, he jumps backwards to be reabsorbed

by the uncertainty of his own vulnerability. He looks for a vulnerable sit-

uation. There is apparently no functionality in what he is doing, and jump

after jump he insistently raises again the question in our mind: what drives

me to leave the platform?

If we observe him, the trapeze artist wants to reach the opposite

platform, but at the same time he avoids reaching it easily. He puts in

some resistance so that he does not land on the it without effort. May-

be not so many works as the one of American artist Matthew Barney

can help to visualise this double tension. Between 1987 and 1989, while

studying at Yale University, Barney created a series of performance events

38 39

he reminds us that man does not just step forward to arrive somewhere,

but – while exceeding the body – remains joyfully suspended in mid-air in

a challenging fragment of uncertain contingency.

With his feet at the edge of the platform, and while thinking about the

imperative ‘you must change your life’, a last problem still emerges for the

trapeze artist. The voice that Rilke heard speaking to him at the Louvre

contains the echo of a last doubt: how can you change something which is

changing anyway? Sloterdijk suggests that man has the exceptional ability

to change life, but life is far from being an immutable material in front of

which we can decide – or not – to produce changes: is not life changing

always and in any case?

In the aforementioned quote Sloterdijk defined human beings as the

ones who ‘step out of the river of life and take residence on the shore’,viii

and this stepping out corresponds to a change. Nevertheless, was not life

within the river already constantly changing? Is not the river itself con-

stantly changing? No metaphor is here simultaneously more appropriate

and problematic: the river does in fact constantly change, and the water,

flowing evenly forward, is always already different from itself.

But maybe Sloterdijk seems to suggest something else: indeed, while step-

ping out from the river we cause the flow to deviate. The river is constantly

changing, but while moving within it we change the way it changes, we

change its changes.

We have then to think differently about the experience of the trapeze

artist. He is alone on the platform, in a cloud of magnesium and with a

desire to exceed his body, before he jumps into the void. Yet, on closer

inspection, there is never a void in front of him, but always a space. Some-

times he is alone, but still the air in front will be moved by his jump. At

other times he jumps forward and, at

that very moment, a second trapeze viii –Stotedijk, P., You Must Change Your Life, op. cit., p.217.

placed the sheet on the front of a boat and tied himself to the opposite side

with some elastic ropes that prevent him from reaching the paper easily

with his pencil. Both the ropes – which slowly become the most significant

tool of these performances – and the setting of this part of Drawing Re-

straint remind us of the episode of the sirens and Odysseus, in which he

ties himself to a ship’s mast to stop himself from falling towards something

that is calling out to him loudly. Hence, Barney’s gesture – like that of the

trapeze artist – is anything but idle: he is already outside his body and

headed for the object, but he freezes halfway between an opening toward

the creation and a wavering from it, in an interstitial space where the crea-

tive forces are not exhausted; where the desire is not reabsorbed in satiety.

To recall the words of Plessner, we might sat that ‘enclosed but exposed,

man is the being lacking of something, the one that waits, desires, strongly

tries, wants, asks’.vi Man is the being that desires to desire.

This is the desire of the trapeze artist: the desire of exceeding is more

important than the outcome; he turns around the Darwinistic-capitalistic

approach towards exercise that focuses on the result of exceeding, to al-

low the still unsatisfied desire of exceeding to emerge. And here we can

understand Franz Kafka’s main character within one of the first short sto-

ries he wrote, about a trapeze artist who does not want to get off the tra-

peze: ‘A trapeze artist – this art, practiced high in the vaulted domes of the

great variety theaters, is admittedly one of the most difficult humanity can

achieve – had so arranged his life that, as long as he kept working in the

same building, he never came down from his trapeze by night or day’.vii He

lives in his being outside the stability of his body, and his exercise of insta-

bility is not a means, it is not a function of the show, rather it is the end

in itself. Kafka’s trapeze artist is the ultimate example of exceeding the

body that is not directed towards a

result, but which is rather a pure ex-

pression of vulnerability and desire;

40 41

vi – Plessner, H., The Stages of Organic and the Man, p.108. vii – Kafka, F., Erstes Leid, 1921. First Sorrow, translated by Willa & Edwin

Muir.

Adriana Cavarero suggests with the idea of an ontology of inclinationix,

ethics is no longer a form of rectitude, rather it is a form of inclination.

We asked: what if the trapeze artist is not training himself just to perform

at night? What if the evening spectacle is not the reason for his training,

but simply a sharing of what he does anyway? We started by denying the

aesthetic reasons for his training and suddenly an ethical reason emerges.

His training shares an ethical dimension with the onlooker; nestled in his

exercise – as in other unsuspected places – an ethical dimension slowly

appears.

With his feet on the edge of the platform, he jumps through the cloud of

magnesium into the void. He swims in the air and outside the regular river

of life. He is hovering and his ability and vulnerability burst like a star

from all the borders of his body, impressing us. And finally the air that

he inevitably moves arrives with us, and affects us, at last reaching our

ears with the echo of the voice of Apollo, eventually whispering to us the

words: You must change your life.

Palestinian Parkour, Jerusalem, © Sebastien Leban

artist leaves his activities or starts to calculate the effort necessary to catch

him while he flies, or a safety net is laid out below. Life is constantly

changing before him, but with his changes the trapeze artist changes the

way things change; he changes the changes.

We never face the void, rather the space in front of us is a spider’s web,

or a cosmic tissue: each step we take on the web does not only affect our

position, but it also redefines the space itself, which, far from being just

an impassible background to our actions, is an interlocutor of our every

step. This is how, when we tread on the edge of a platform, we bargain

with our position in the world; we are constantly tourists outside our own

bodies, uncertainly exploring a space that we share with others. And that

is why Sloterdijk suggests that shared interests in life require for their suc-

cess a horizon of universal co-operative exercise. We can now understand

Sloterdijk’s idea of social justice or ecology as training activities, mac-

rostructures of global immunisation, which he defines – while retaining

a high degree of scepticism towards Communism – as ‘co-immunism’, a

shared exercise?

The direction of Rilke’s imperative suddenly deviates. At the beginning it

seemed to see ethics as a verticality: a continuous tension of overcoming

one’s self, a persisting towards an impossible challenge, like a piece of

furniture that tries to stay balanced on one leg and upright. Yet there is

a second direction: the trapeze artist, motionless on the edge of the plat-

form, tilts forward; and once the body’s centre of gravity is crossed, this

first inclination becomes an inevitable step that shuffles the space in front,

forcing him to be confronted with the other. If from stretching upright – in

a vertical direction – we could fall back to the same position, this incli-

nation would drag us elsewhere, beyond the body and inevitably towards

the other. The trapeze artist redefines

the spatial direction of ethics; and as

42 43

ix – Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations, (English translation of Inclinazioni, Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2013), Stanford University Press (forthcoming)

NEURAL DARWINISM:

A NEW APPROACH TO MEMORY AND

PERCEPTION

44

In 1895, Sigmund Freud made his last attempt to explain the neurophys-

iological basis of the way the brain functions. His essay on the subject,

“Project for a Scientific Psychology,” was never published during his life-

time. We have learned much about the brain since 1895, yet no equally

ambitious attempt has since been made to examine the broad implications

of neuroscientific research for the functioning of the brain and for psychol-

ogy. Recently, Gerald M. Edelman, director of The Neurosciences Institute

at The Rockefeller University, has proposed a new theory, one that gives

us powerful reasons to revise our ideas about how we think, act, and

remember. Although this theory is not directly based on Freud’s work, it

confronts several of the problems with which Freud wrestled throughout

his creative life.

Central to Freud’s work was the connection between memory and the

psychology of everyday life. He considered memory to be a permanent

record of past events, a record that was anatomically separate from the

brain mechanisms that are responsible for our ability to make sense of the

world around us. As he wrote in the final chapter of The Interpretation

of Dreams,

[T]here are obvious difficulties involved in supposing that one and

the same system can accurately retain modifications of its elements

and yet remain perpetually open to the reception of fresh occasions

for modifications…. [Therefore] we shall distribute these two func-

tions on to different systems.

On December 6, 1896, Freud wrote to his close friend Wilhelm Fliess,

As you know, I am working on the assumption that our psychical

mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the

NEURAL DARWINISM:

A NEW APPROACH TO MEMORY AND PERCEPTION New York Times Book Review

October 9, 1986 issue

“Through a Computer Darkly: Group Selection and Higher Brain Function” 36, No. 1 (October 1982) by Gerald M. Edelman. in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 20-48 pp. “Neural Darwinism: Population Thinking and Higher Brain Function” by Gerald M. Edelman, by in How We Know,

ed. Michael Shafto Harper and Row, 1-30 pp. “Group Selection and Phasic Reentrant Signaling: A Theory of Higher Brain Function” by Gerald M. Edelman, by in The Mindful Brain ed. G.M. Edelman, by V.B. Mountcastle MIT Press, 51-100 pp. “Group Selection as the Basis for Higher Brain Function” ed. by Gerald M. Edelman, by in The Organization of the Cerebral Cortex F.O. Schmitt et al. MIT Press, 535-563 pp. “Neuronal Group Selection in the Cerebral Cortex” by Gerald M.

Edelman, by Leif H. Finkel, by in Dynamic Aspects of Neocortical Function ed. G.M. Edelman, by W.E. Gall, by W.M. Cowan Wiley, 653-695 pp. “Cell Adhesion Molecules” by Gerald M. Edelman. in Science, Vol. 219, (February 4, 1983), 450-457 pp.“Expression of Cell Adhesion Molecules During Embryogenesis and Regeneration” by Gerald M. Edelman. in Experimental Cell Research 161 (1984), 1-16 pp.“Interaction of Synaptic Modification Rules Within Populations of Neurons” (Febru-

ary 1985) by Leif H. Finkel, by Gerald M. Edelman. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science Vol. 82, 1291-1295 pp. “Selective Networks and Recognition Automata” by George N. Reeke Jr., by Gerald M. Edelman. in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1985), 181-201 pp.

46 47

any sense part of a fixed record may be wrong.

If memory is a fixed record, neurophysiologists still cannot say precisely

where and how memories are stored. The hypothesis of a fixed record

may have been formulated prematurely, without sufficient attention to the

means by which we recognize objects and events. We are probably much

better at recognition than we are at recollection. We recognize people de-

spite changes wrought by aging, and we recognize photographs of places

we have visited and personal items we have misplaced. We can recognize

paintings by Picasso and adept imitations of Picasso. When we recognize

a painting that we have never seen as by Picasso or as an imitation, we

are doing something more than recalling earlier impressions. We are cate-

gorizing: Picassos and fakes. Our recognition of paintings or of people is

the recognition of a category, not a specific item. People are never exactly

what they were moments before and objects are never seen in exactly the

same way.

One possible explanation for this is that our capacity to remember is not

for specific recall of an image stored somewhere in our brain. Rather it is

an ability to organize the world around us into categories, some general,

some specific. When we speak of a stored mental image of a friend, which

image or images are we referring to? The friend doing what, when, and

where? One reason why the search for memory molecules and specific

information storage zones in the brain has so far been fruitless may be

that they are just not there. Unless we can understand how we categorize

people and things and how we generalize, we may never understand how

we remember. Yet we do remember names, telephone numbers, words and

their definitions. Are these not examples of items that must be stored in

some kind of memory? Notice, however, that we generally recall names

and telephone numbers in a particular context; each of our recollections

material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from

time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circum-

stances—to a re-transcription. Thus what is essentially new about

my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several

times over, that it is laid down in various species of indications.

In the same letter he writes, “If I could give a complete account of the psy-

chological characteristics of perception and of the [registrations of memo-

ry], I should have described a new psychology.”

Freud was acutely aware that recollections are often imperfect and frag-

mentary, and that they can and do alter perceptions. His theory attempt-

ed to explain how what he took to be perfect stores of memory were so

transformed, arguing that memories cannot be released in their perma-

nent form because the satisfactions and pleasures once associated with

youthful impressions can no longer be experienced directly. Hence they

reappear in dreams, but disguised and reworked. Ideas, Freud argued, be-

come separated from associated emotions (affects) and disappear from

consciousness. The emotions become attached to apparently unrelated

ideas, disguising their real meaning. And we often appear to forget the

memories themselves. Repression, screen memories, latent dream content,

the return of the repressed—all were mechanisms elaborated in Freud’s

theory to account for the ways in which fixed memories, however distort-

ed and incomplete, can manifest themselves and affect our present view of

the world. Freudian theory attempts to account for an apparent paradox:

if we believe that memories are, by their very nature, permanently stored

in the brain, why are they rarely recalled in their original form? It is the

inaccuracy of recollection that Freudian psychology evokes so well. The

reasons for this apparent inaccuracy may, however, be quite different from

those that Freud suggested. In fact, the assumption that memories are in

48 49

tionships between separate sensory information items.”1

Individual needs and desires, then, determine how we classify the people,

places, and events that fill our daily lives. Moreover, the categories we use

seem to depend on cross-correlations, or context. Yet many influential the-

ories of mental function posit fixed entities that have an independent exist-

ence of their own. Freud, for example, described many ordinary objects as

fitting into categories based on their resemblance to male or female sexual

organs (phallic symbols, for example) and tended to view such categories

as representing deeper drives that are universal within the human species.

Many clinical neurologists and psychologists disagree with Freud’s notion

of universal sexual drives; they nevertheless hold that information is or-

ganized into permanent categories in one or more memory systems within

the brain, and that it can systematically be brought to consciousness in

ways analogous to memory searches used in computers. The processes

that are responsible for our recognition of categories, however, do not

seem to depend on such fixed mechanisms.

There are good biological reasons to question the idea of fixed univer-

sal categories. In a broad sense, they run counter to the principles of the

Darwinian theory of evolution. Darwin stressed that populations are col-

lections of unique individuals. In the biological world there is no typical

animal and no typical plant. When we say a salt molecule has a specific

size we are giving a measurement which, allowing for error, is true for all

salt molecules. But there is no set of measurements that will universally

describe more than the one example of a plant or animal we are meas-

uring. Qualities we associate with human beings and other animals are

abstractions invented by us that miss the nature of the biological variation.

The central conception in Darwinian

thought is that variations in popu-

lations occur from which selection

1 – A.R. Damasio, P.J. Eslinger, H. Damasio, G.W. Van Hoesen, and S. Cornell, “Multi-Modal Amnesic Syndrome Following Bilateral Temporal and Basal Forebrain Damage,” Archives of Neurology, Vol. 42 (March 1985), pp.

252–259. Damasio et al.’s interpretation is quite different from the one I have suggested.

is different, just as we use the same word in different sentences. These are

categorical, not just specific recollections.

Clinical neurologists have long been aware that brain disease may lead

to severe alterations in memory, but they have yet to analyze deeply the

nature of categorization. In a rare abnormality resulting from brain dam-

age and known as prosopagnosia, patients lose the ability to identify the

faces of friends and well-known public personalities. But they can recog-

nize faces as faces. And while they cannot identify their own car or their

own coat, they do recognize cars and clothing as such. They apparently

can recall general categories but cannot identify specific items. Something

similar may occur in some forms of amnesia as well. Antonio Damasio

and his colleagues at the University of Iowa Medical School described a

patient with amnesia sitting in a room with the curtains drawn and unable

to recall the season. When the patient looked out the window, he noted the

color of the trees and the dress of a passerby, and exclaimed, “By golly, it

must be July or August.” He could not recall the month of the year, but he

could deduce it given appropriate evidence.

These studies appear to suggest that our ability to recognize general cate-

gories as opposed to the recognition of specific items such as Mary’s face

or Alison’s hat depends on two different brain functions. But the ability

to recognize Alison’s hat is, in part at least, based on temporal associa-

tions. We may have seen Alison wearing that hat last Sunday. The loss

of the ability to categorize events in time can cause a nearly total loss of

specific references. It is not the specific items that are no longer recalled,

but their temporal order or their arrangement in succession that has not

been formed or has been lost. When Damasio and his colleagues examined

the man with amnesia about the calendar year, they found he had brain

damage which made him unable to establish “temporal and spatial rela-

50 51

mold itself around the intruder, thus acquiring a definite shape. Copies of

the mold were made and released into the bloodstream where they would

bind to the invading bacteria. The system learned, or was instructed by,

the shape of a bacterium only after being exposed to it.

Pauling’s theory that there is just one kind of antibody protein proved to

be wrong. In 1969 Edelman and his colleagues worked out the complete

chemical structure of the antibody molecule, providing the important clue

to what structures within the molecule are varied to produce millions of

different kinds of antibodies needed to protect the body against foreign

organisms. For this work he won the Nobel Prize in 1972 along with the

late Rodney Porter of England. Their studies confirmed a theory suggested

in the 1950s by MacFarlane Burnet and Niels Jerne that all animals are

born with a complete repertoire of antibodies and that intruding bacteria

select those antibodies that can effectively combat their presence.

Contrary to Pauling’s theory, the presence of the bacteria does not deter-

mine the nature of the antibody that is made, but only the amount. A lim-

ited number of genes, a few hundred or a few thousand at most, provide,

through recombinatory mechanisms, the codes for the many millions of

different antibodies. Specialized cells in the blood each produce one of the

many kinds of possible antibodies that then become attached to the cell

surface. An antibody molecule that happens to fit more or less closely a

virus or bacterium floating in the bloodstream will bind itself to the virus

or bacterium. This sets off a chain of events that causes the cell to divide

and make thousands of copies (clones) of itself and more of the same kind

of antibody. Other cells may carry antibody molecules that fit the virus or

bacterium in different ways, and these cells, too, will bind to the virus or

bacterium and produce clones. The body can only rid itself of a virus or

bacterium if there is at least one good enough fit in its antibody repertoire.

may take place. It is the variation that is real, not the mean. It was Dar-

win’s recognition of this profound difference between the biological and

physical worlds that led to the rise of modern biology. The mechanisms

of inheritance through genes create diversity within populations; selection

from these populations allows certain organisms to survive in unpredict-

able environments.

Darwinian ideas have had a variable influence on psychological thinking,

which has sometimes strayed away from biological explanation. Modern

ethology, which studies the relation of animal and human behavior, has

recaptured much of the Darwinian flavor that unfortunately left psychol-

ogy when early learning theorists such as Pavlov seemed to be successful

in explaining behavior without paying heed to the differences between

animal species. But as important as their insights are, ethologists have not

applied Darwinian thinking to the workings of the brain in each individ-

ual of a species.

Does evolutionary thought have anything to do with the explanation of

the psychology of individual human beings? The theory of the brain Ger-

ald Edelman proposed in 1978 sought to explain neurophysiological func-

tion as a Darwinian system involving variation and selection. Although his

theory is confined to neurobiology, implicit in this work is a bold attempt

to unify the biological and psychological sciences, one that strongly de-

pends on the ideas of evolution and the facts of developmental biology.

Edelman had earlier studied the immune system. For years, scientists had

wondered how the body produced antibodies against viruses or bacteria

it had never encountered. Linus Pauling had suggested in 1940 that there

was one basic kind of antibody molecule in the body. When the body

was invaded by a bacterium, he had argued, the antibody molecule would

52 53

ers. Twins with identical genes therefore should have identical, or nearly

identical, brains. Learning may not have been preprogrammed in Sperry’s

model, but this model seems to imply that what any person could learn

was limited by predetermined connections in his or her brain. If Sperry

were right, many brain functions would be genetically determined, and

to this extent organisms could be limited in their ability to adapt to new

environments. Adaptive behavior and flexibility would have to arise by

instruction; i.e., by external stimuli creating patterns in the brain, much

as programs give instructions to computers. Yet we know that animals

can adapt individually to different environments. The human brain has

permitted survival in remarkably varied circumstances throughout histo-

ry. Genetic determinism strains credibility because it makes it difficult to

account for the enormous variability of thought and action.

For Edelman, the important question was not, as Sperry had argued, how

specific structures in the brain are made according to markers on each

neuron, but how, given a particular set of genes, enough variability would

be created within the constant overall structure of the brain to account

for the adaptability of humans and higher animals in an unpredictable

environment. The deeper issue that had to be explored to understand this

was the relationship between genes, on the one hand, and, on the other,

the form and structure—or “morphology”—of animals. Notwithstanding

all the work on the genetic code, biologists still cannot predict the shape

of an organism from the information in its genes. If dinosaur genes rather

than dinosaur bones had been found we would never have known they

were dinosaurs and could not have said what they looked like. Why don’t

genes tell us about morphology?

The answer to this question, according to Edelman’s findings, lies in early

embryonic development. As an embryo develops, cells divide, move from

Usually there are several fits and some of them may overlap.

So the immunological system is not taught what antibodies it has to make

to rid the body of a particular virus. The invading virus selects the appro-

priate antibodies and these will be different in each individual. An unfor-

tunate organism may not have any antibodies in its repertoire that can

bind the virus, and this could be fatal. Scientists were generally pleased

with this solution to the immunological question because it was consist-

ent with Darwinian principles of selection that have formed the basis of

modern biology. Theories of immunology based on a process of learning

or instruction were not.

Comparison of those findings on immunology to the theory of evolution

suggested to Edelman that the brain too may function as a selective system

and that what we call learning is really a form of selection. The theory he

worked out is based on three fundamental claims: 1) during the develop-

ment of the brain in the embryo a highly variable and individual pattern

of connections between the brain cells (neurons) is formed; 2) after birth, a

pattern of neural connections is fixed in each individual, but certain com-

binations of connections are selected over others as a result of the stimuli

the brain receives through the senses; 3) such selection would occur par-

ticularly in groups of brain cells that are connected in sheets, or “maps,”

and these maps “speak” to one another back and forth to create categories

of things and events.

But is it the case that there is a mechanism that creates such diversity in

each brain? In 1963, the Nobel Prize-winning neurologist Roger Sperry

proposed that the billions of complicated connections in the brain were

each determined by specific chemical markers on each neuron. On this

view, particular genes presumably provide a code for each of the mark-

54 55

tuted for another without changing the pattern. Above all, the boundaries

will determine the function of the bricks, such as supporting a window or

a door.

As tissue grows in the embryo, borders are formed demarcating the differ-

ent functional parts of the organism; but obviously there is no architect.

The borders are established between different groups of cells by different

intercellular cements or glues, known as cell adhesion molecules or CAMs.

Three kinds of CAMs were discovered by Edelman and his colleagues in

the late 1970s; and more have since been found. Two of the CAMs appear

on the surfaces of cells very early in embryonic development. One is called

L-CAM because it was first discovered in the liver, and the other N-CAM

since it was originally found in association with nerves. L-CAMs on the

cell surface will only stick to other L-CAMs on the cell surface and the

same is true of N-CAMs; L-CAMs and N-CAMs will not stick to each

other. For these primary CAMs, cells can adhere to each other only when

they have the same kind of CAMs on their surfaces.

The structure of the cell adhesion molecules themselves is determined by

particular genes. And in early development of the embryo other genes

regulate when the CAMs are produced. However, the exact amount and

“stickiness” of the CAMs (which vary continuously as the embryo devel-

ops) depend on where the cells carrying them are and where they have

moved, and the individual cell’s position is not under direct genetic con-

trol. Therefore the arrangement of groups of cells that are linked together

by one kind of CAM will vary even in genetically identical individuals.

These groups of cells send signals that turn CAM genes on and off, as

well as turning on and off the action of genes that specify cell speciali-

zation. The entire sequence by which differentiation occurs is therefore

determined not directly by genes but indirectly by the combined action

place to place, and ultimately become specialized. A cell’s fate, whether it

becomes a liver cell or a nerve cell, depends on where it happens to be at

the moment that specialization begins, as well as where it has been. Cell

shapes and movements will inevitably vary in each individual, making it

impossible to predict exactly where a particular cell will be at a given

time. Therefore the genetic mechanisms that determine what a cell will

become must somehow be sensitive to its location at a particular time. If

each cell’s specialization were completely predetermined by genes, even

one misplaced cell could create havoc and the organism’s subsequent de-

velopment would follow an abnormal course. A supporting beam placed

between two walls that arrived just moments too late would be of no use

once the walls had collapsed.

How does a pattern emerge in the embryo from early activity of the cells?

Biological systems are not built from preformed parts. Instead cells are

cemented together in the embryo and the individual cells or groups of

cells are then shaped into structures that serve more complex functions.

In determining the shape, it is the signals across the boundaries of such

structures that count. How this works may be suggested by an analogy.

Imagine an architect given the task of shaping a brick wall into the façade

of a building, with windows, ornaments, and a main door. One way our

imaginary architect may proceed is to indicate where the holes for the

windows would be drilled by drawing the borders on the brick wall. The

holes drilled and the window frames added, he might then add indications

for the shutter hinges on the window frames. In general, shaping a rela-

tively uniform collection of interconnected material units, such as bricks,

into a well-differentiated structure requires determining the boundaries

of the structures that have to be carved into the units or added to them.

And those boundaries can only be determined once all the bricks (or other

material subunits) are delivered or are in place. One brick might be substi-

56 57

The importance of the borders formed by the CAM-linked collectives

was shown in a spectacular series of experiments in Edelman’s labora-

tory on the emergence of a single feather in the chicken. At each stage in

the feather’s morphogenesis, borders were found between groups of cells

linked together with different kinds of CAM. Following the formation of

the borders each group of cells changed, those on one side into one kind

of cell, and those on the other into another kind of cell. For example, the

final feather, with its regular pattern of branching (a pattern that varies

from feather to feather), is carved out of a cylinder of tissue. The distinc-

tive feather pattern arises after alternating groups of cells (i.e., L-CAM-

linked cell groups alternating with N-CAM-linked cell groups) make their

appearance. Groups of cells with N-CAM linkages then die, while the al-

ternating groups with L-CAM linkages become hardened, or keratinized.

The result, a feather. The edges of the barbs on the feather were the bor-

ders between the L- and N-CAM cell groups. Even more dramatically,

when changes were induced experimentally in the linkages made by one

kind of CAM, cell groups that were linked by a completely different kind

of CAM were altered.

From the workings of such epigenetic mechanisms we can see why know-

ing the entire genetic repertoire of an animal would not alone permit us to

predict its final detailed morphology. Identical twins are never absolutely

identical. And just as every feather has a different pattern of branching,

every brain would be expected to have a different pattern of connections.

The demonstration that there are molecular reasons why no two brains

could be identical is central to Edelman’s view that the brain functions as

a system based on selection—the CAM mechanism creates diversity in the

anatomical connections of an individual’s brain. The context and history

of cellular development thus largely determine the structure of the brain;

of genes and signals from cell groups that activate genes, and is therefore

called epigenetic.

Cells linked together in collectives by L-CAMs form borders with other

cells linked together in other collectives by N-CAMs. The borders result

because the two kinds of molecules do not stick to each other. Edelman

and his colleagues have shown that cells on one side of the border will

subsequently change into more specialized cells of one kind, and those

on the other side of the border will become specialized cells of another

kind. Throughout embryonic development, borders are formed between

cells that are linked together with different CAMs, and following border

formation the cells specialize. As the cells differentiate further, new CAM

borders are formed before new changes are introduced by signals from

the cell groups to the genes that activate both CAMs and the genes that

specify cell specialization. Depending on the past history of the two cell

groups, signals exchanged at the border between collections of N-CAM

and L-CAM cells will determine the subsequent formation of very differ-

ent kinds of cells on each side of the border. (Recently a chemical signal

that activates CAM production has been identified.)

The function of the border between cell groups with different CAMs thus

depends on the context—the surrounding cells, and the past history of the

cells. In general, moreover, the rules governing CAM response are similar

both for the neurons of the brain and for other body structures. Because

the borders of cell collectives depend on dynamics of movement, there will

be individual variations that are not determined just by genes and whose

diversity will ensure that different brains would have different structures.

Yet the general patterns formed and the broadly similar sequences of em-

bryonic development would account for the fact that the individual brains

of members of a species resemble one another.

58 59

icance not just because of the anatomical connections and physiological

mechanisms on which the functioning of that group depends, but because

of its context and the history of its received signals as well. If this is true,

then a given “memory” cannot be stored in a specific place in the brain,

since neighboring activities would of necessity change, and therefore the

“context” of any neuronal cell group is never constant. If one were to as-

sume that a memory was in fact stored as it is in a computer, altering this

process would irreparably destroy it.

The embryonic processes I have described involving CAMs are central in

creating a large repertoire of different neuronal groups. But after birth the

principle of selection changes. Instead of alternations of CAMs, changes in

the strength but not the pattern of connections occur; such changes deter-

mine the paths over which neural signals will flow.2 Environmental stimuli

may cause one group to respond with greater activity than other groups

receiving the same input. And when this happens, laboratory experiments

show that the connections between the neurons in that group (the synaptic

junctions) can be strengthened.

Edelman and his colleagues have worked out a set of possible rules that

might govern these synaptic alternations. Molecular changes take place

within neurons and at the synaptic junctions so that the neurons tend to be

activated by similar stimuli on subsequent occasions. Particular variants

within the brain’s population of neuronal groups are selected by the stim-

ulus. Indeed, a group that responds to a stimulus might do more than this.

As its connections are strengthened it might alter the strength of its links to

other groups and, by competing with

other groups, integrate neurons from

them into its own response activity.

The strengthening of the synaptic

2 – This is analogous to the process by which antibodies that have been selected are then produced in large numbers, or cloned. The two processes resemble each

other in effect, but the mechanisms are different: in the brain the strengths of synaptic connections are increased; in the immune system the number of cells is

increased through cloning.

and therefore context and history are also important in brain function.

Because development, structure, and function are related, it would not be

surprising if the functional activities of a connected group of cells in the

brain depended both on the activities of neighboring cell groups and on

the past history of the particular group itself.

To show that brain function, like structure, also depends on context and

history and not on localized functions and fixed memories is the burden

of Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection. What emerges is a new

approach to the biological basis of psychology.

A major claim of this approach is that the unit of selection in the brain is

a neuronal group, a set of interconnected neurons that function together.

The patterns of connections that are established among neurons vary from

group to group because of the changes in dynamics of the CAMs during

development. The brain thus contains large numbers of different neuronal

groups.

Neuronal groups are connected to one another as well as to the sensory

receptors for light, touch, and sound in the eyes, skin, and ears. In general,

neighboring groups of neurons in the brain receive input from neighbor-

ing sensory receptors (for example, on the second and third fingers of the

hand); two neighboring groups in the brain can in fact receive input from

the same sensory receptor. Although the inputs can overlap, the respons-

es of each group to the stimuli will be different. Because each group of

neurons has its own pattern of internal connections, which differs from

those of other groups, each group will respond differently, even to identi-

cal stimuli.

The activities of a group of interconnected neurons would acquire signif-

60 61

create categories of things and events. Different kinds of maps are found

in different parts of the brain, and an analysis of how such maps interact

is an essential and final part of Edelman’s theory.

Because the brain has to be prepared for unpredictable events it must

map stimuli in a variety of ways. Brain maps sort incoming stimuli by sim-

ilarity (same frequency of sound, same intensity of sound, etc.) as well as

by a mixture of properties. The main evolutionary principle at work here

is that stimuli are organized into patterns that will help the organism cope

with its environment.

In 1870 two young Germans, Gustav Theodor Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig,

first discovered that the brain maps motor stimuli. They reported that

touching discrete areas on a dog’s brain activated specific parts of the

body. By the end of the century motor and sensory maps were a well-es-

tablished feature of neuroanatomical teaching. These maps were assumed

to be permanent and more or less identical in all members of a species.

It was therefore surprising when in 1983 Michael Merzenich and his col-

laborators at the University of California at San Francisco discovered that

the sensory maps showed considerable variation in the brains of normal

monkeys. The brain maps in a particular monkey’s brain varied over time.

And there was considerable variation in corresponding maps in different

monkeys as well. Subsequent experiments demonstrated that the maps be-

came rearranged, even within short periods of time, following injury to a

nerve supplying sensory input from one of the monkey’s fingers.

Merzenich’s work gives powerful support to Edelman’s claim that particu-

lar combinations of neuronal groups are selected competitively from the

general population of neuronal groups by sensory input. Since the nerves

connections creates what Edelman calls a secondary repertoire: this is

made up of neuronal groups that respond better to specific stimuli because

they have been selected and their connections strengthened.

In their responses to stimuli, neuronal groups could be likened to a set

of radio receivers, each tuned to a small band of frequencies. One radio

might receive frequencies in the 1600 to 1700 kilocycle range, and another

might receive frequencies in the 1550 to 1650 kilocycle range. Depending

on the broadcast frequencies in the area, some of the receivers will respond

to one broadcast, others to several broadcasts, and others to none at all.

Analogously to an animal moving its head or body, moving from New

York to Peking, for example, would change the response patterns of the

individual receivers. The receiver’s purpose depends on where it is: in Pe-

king it receives Radio Peking, in New York WCBS, and in Moscow Radio

Free Europe, Radio Moscow, and a lot of jamming simultaneously.

Like the radio receivers, a given neuronal group can respond to more than

one stimulus—what is called a degenerate response. In our analogy, a giv-

en radio receiver might pick up Radio Peking better than Radio Moscow,

but it can pick up either station. (Of course, stimuli are not organized into

coherent pieces of information like radio broadcasts. At higher levels in

the brain, the stimuli must be organized in ways that will be meaningful

and useful for the organism.)

The brain performs this organizing operation by using maps made up of

neuronal groups. A map is a collection of neuronal groups in the brain

which are arranged in a way that preserves the pattern of relationships

either between a sheet of sensory receptors (such as those in the skin of the

hand) and a sheet of neural tissue in the brain to which the sensory stimuli

have been transmitted, or between two sheets of neural tissue. Groups are

arranged in maps that “speak” back and forth to one another so as to

62 63

map where the arrival times (called sound disparities) of a given frequency

in one ear are compared to those in the other ear.

The sounds made by a mouse in a field can by this means be categorized

according to the disparities in sound. These disparities can be used to help

determine the sources of the sounds. Specific neuronal groups within a

map may be activated by a difference in arrival time between the two ears

of, for example, one thousandth of a second. In itself the activity of the

neuronal groups will not tell the owl’s brain the source of the sound. But

the entire pattern of activity of the map, the ways in which other neuronal

groups are activated as well, will represent in the owl’s brain the location

of the source of the sound. This pattern will have to be extracted in a

further mapping, which could for example characterize certain patterns

of activity indicating that sources of sound were, say, at 30 degrees to the

left, others at 60 degrees to the right, etc. Finally the mapping that has de-

rived the place of a source of sound is connected to a visual map of space,

created from the owl’s visual receptors. The visual map is thus related to a

map that recategorized auditory sensory input to place sounds in space. By

relating the two sensory modalities, the owl’s brain has created a general

map (auditory and visual) of space and the owl can respond to a variety

of sensory inputs.

A particular pattern of activity will lead to a motor response in which

the owl dives for its prey. If the owl is successful, it will associate that

mapping and that pattern of activity with the particular motor act of at-

tacking. If it fails, however, it will try other responses until it finally suc-

ceeds in capturing its prey. This was shown in the series of experiments

by E.I. and P.F. Knudsen in which young owls were raised with one ear

plugged, thus shifting the perceived location of sound relative to its actual

location. Within four to six weeks these owls learned to localize sound

from the different areas of the skin of the hand are connected eventually

by overlapping branches to the same receiving areas in the brain, the part

of the skin surface represented in a particular brain by a group of neu-

rons depends on selective competition. Neuronal groups in one area of the

brain may, for example, receive overlapping input from both the back and

the palm of the hand, and the stimuli from the palm may more effectively

select particular neuronal groups, establishing a dominant representation

of the front of the hand in the map in that part of the brain.

Should the incoming nerves be damaged, reducing or eliminating the in-

put from the palm (as in Merzenich’s experiments), the groups that could

respond to the stimuli from the back of the hand will then be able to be

expressed in the absence of competition from the neuronal groups in the

palm. Thus, based on the inherent variation among neuronal groups, a

new representation emerges in that area of the brain. The continuity of

the new map’s general activity nonetheless can still represent, in some ab-

stracted form, the activity at the sensory receptors.

Information in the brain is distributed among many maps, and accord-

ing to Edelman’s theory, there must be incessant reference back and forth

among them for categorization to occur. Sounds, for example, can be cat-

egorized as speech, noise, and music; or they can be used to locate things

in space. Recent research shows that such localization requires a number

of interacting maps. Owls, like human beings, use sounds to locate moving

animals, for instance a mouse they might attack. The important sensory

clues are the different arrival times of a sound at each ear, and its intensity.

Since the owl’s brain cannot directly map the different times of arrival of a

sound at each ear, two initial sensory maps represent the frequencies heard

by the owl: one maps those heard in the right ear and the other maps those

heard in the left ear. These representations are then combined in another

64 65

Reeke, Jr., who built a new kind of automaton, based on the principles of

selection, to simulate the mapping activity of the brain. The automaton

abstracted from the mappings of visual inputs a variety of categorizations,

such as for letters of the alphabet, without having been given specific in-

structions to do so. This provided further evidence that the interacting

maps are essential for categorizing perceptions in a selective system.

A spy sitting in a music hall might want to locate the person he just

heard say, “Nine o’clock tomorrow,” and he may also want to enjoy the

singer’s “Casta Diva.” One set of brain maps will locate the person who

said “nine o’clock,” while another set of maps will permit him to hear

the “Casta Diva” for his own pleasure. Sounds have been categorized in

different ways by his brain in accordance with his adaptive needs: business

and pleasure.

Later that evening the spy may have forgotten the time he overheard men-

tioned by the person he was shadowing during the concert. Annoyed, he

hums the melody of “Casta Diva” and suddenly recalls the nine o’clock

assignation. Or he might recall it when he sees the announcement for a

nine o’clock movie. This suggests that memory is not an exact repetition

of an image of events in one’s brain, but a recategorization. Recategoriza-

tions occur when the connections between the neuronal groups in different

maps are temporarily strengthened. Recategorization of objects or events

depends upon motion as well as upon sensation, and it is a skill acquired

in the course of experience. We recollect information in different contexts;

this requires the activation of different maps interacting in different ways

from those of our initial encounter with the information and it leads to its

recategorization. We do not simply store images or bits but become more

richly endowed with the capacity to categorize in connected ways.

accurately. The owls adjusted to the altered mapping of sound apparently

by rearranging their internal mappings. Recognition therefore depends on

mapped and remapped patterns of activity.3

No single map contains all the information necessary for the owl’s

movements, and as I have said there must be a constant reference back and

forth from neuronal groups in one map to neuronal groups in the other

by means of so-called reentrant connections, i.e., nerves traveling in both

directions to link the maps. According to Edelman’s theory, this is how the

brain creates its categories and generalizations. Of course, the owl brain

may also use the initial mapping of sound frequencies for higher maps

that do not represent spatial disparities, but rather the actual sequence of

sounds (to identify the kind of animal making the noise, perhaps). This

will eventually create other kinds of categories for sound information.

The brain has many different kinds of maps and ways of mapping other

maps that categorize “inputs” in many ways. The purpose of the maps

is to create perceptual categorizations that permit the animal to act in

appropriate ways.4 The environments in which an animal might find itself

will of course change and so the perceptual categories must also change.

But this is exactly what the multiple mappings are best suited for: the

maps interact with one another and constantly recategorize information.

And by referring the more abstract mappings back to the primary sensory

maps that have a continuous relationship with external stimuli, the brain

can effectively keep track of its various regroupings of the sensory inputs.

That mappings can be related to one

another without any preestablished

instructions has been demonstrated

by Edelman and his colleague George

3 – E.I. Knudsen and P.F. Knudsen, “Vision Guides the Adjustment of Auditory Localization in Young Barn Owls”, Science 230 (November 1, 1985), pp. 545–548.

4 – The origin of perceptual categories by neuronal group selection is in some ways analogous to the origin of species by natural selection in evolutionary time.

Much as unpredictable events over a long period of time may result in the selection of certain characteristics in organisms, unpredictable environmental

events in an animal’s lifetime may result in the selection of certain neuronal groups leading to the formation of perceptual categories.

66 67

some degree creations and his or her memories are part of an ongoing pro-

cess of imagination. A mental life cannot be reduced to molecules. Human

intelligence is not just knowing more, but reworking, recategorizing, and

thus generalizing information in new and surprising ways. It could be that

inappropriate categorizations from damaged maps may cause psychoses,

just as the inability to correlate the succession of objects or events in time

may be largely responsible for the loss of specific memories in the case of

amnesia already mentioned.

Of course, language is acquired in society, but our ability to use it, to con-

stantly reconceive the world around us, is at least in part a reflection of

the multiple mappings and remappings that appear to be central to brain

function. Such a view reinforces the idea that no two brains can be, or ever

will be, alike. Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection challenges

those who claim that science views individual human beings and other

animals as reproducible machines and that science is little concerned with

the unique attributes of individuals and the sources of that uniqueness.

Humanism never had a better defense.5

Memory as recategorization is one of the deep consequences of Edel-

man’s theory of neuronal group selection. In a remarkable book published

in 1932, the English psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett sketched out the

view to which Edelman’s work has given a precision and a physiological

justification. In Remembering Bartlett wrote:

Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless

and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or con-

struction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole

active mass of organised past reactions or experience, and to a little

outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language

form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimen-

tary cases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important that

it should be so.

It is this quality of memory that Freud, too, sought to capture. Believing

that memories must leave permanent traces, and unable to see how a per-

ceptual structure could remain open to new perceptions if it were altered

by previous stimuli, he constructed a theory quite different from the view

of brain function presented here.

Unable to accept that fragmentary memories may well be fragmentary,

Freud assumed memories were fixed in the same way that Newton had

assumed time was absolute. Einstein eliminated absolute time and thereby

presented a larger view of space and time. In dispensing with fixed memo-

ries and replacing them with memory as categorization, Edelman’s theory

represents a radical departure from previous thought and may well open

the possibility of a broader and deeper view of human psychology.

Each person according to his theory is unique: his or her perceptions are to

5 – I would like to thank Leif Finkel for his invaluable assistance in the preparation of this article.

68 69

previous pages – Choreography for the Running Male (2015)Eglé Budvytyté. Performance

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Catherine Malabou (born 1959) is a French philosopher. She is professor in the Philosophy Department

at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University. Malabou

graduated from the École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines (Fontenay-Saint-Cloud). Her

agrégation and doctorate were obtained, under the supervision of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion,

from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her dissertation became the book, L'Avenir de

Hegel: Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique (1996). Central to Malabou's philosophy is the concept of

“plasticity,” which she derives in part from the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and from medical

science, for example, from work on stem cells and from the concept of neuroplasticity. In 1999, Malabou

published Voyager avec Jacques Derrida – La Contre-allée, co-authored with Derrida. Her book, Les nou-

veaux blessés (2007), concerns the intersection between neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and philosophy,

thought through the phenomenon of trauma. Coinciding with her exploration of neuroscience has been

an increasing commitment to political philosophy. This is first evident in her book What Should We Do

With Our Brain? and continues in Les nouveaux blessés, as well as in her book on feminism (Changer de

différence, le féminin et la question philosophique, Galilée, 2009), and in her forthcoming book about the

homeless and social emergency (La grande exclusion, Bayard). Malabou is co-writing a book with Adrian

Johnston on affects in Descartes, Spinoza and neuroscience, and is preparing a new book on the political

meaning of life in the light of the most recent biological discoveries (mainly epigenetics). The latter

work will discuss Giorgio Agamben's concept of «bare life» and Michel Foucault's notion of biopower,

underscoring the lack of scientific biological definitions of these terms, and the political meaning of

such a lack.

Hicham Khalidi is a Dutch-Moroccan curator of contemporary art. As of May 2015, Khalidi has been

appointed Associate Curator at the Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris after heading the exhibitions

program of Stuk Art Center in Leuven, Belgium for two years. His latest exhibitions as a curator include:

You Must Change Your Life (Artefact Festival 2015); Where are we now? (Marrakech Biennale 2014); On

Geometry and Speculation (Marrakech Biennale 2012); Transnatural Festival (Nemo Science Center 2012)

and Alles, was Sie über Chemie wissen müssen (CTM/Künstlerhaus Bethanien 2011).

Israël Rosenfield received an M.D. from the New York University School of Medicine and a Ph.D. from

Princeton University. He is a professor at the City University of New York and his books, which have been

translated into a number of languages, include The Invention of Memory: A New View of the Brain; The

Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness (revised and expanded French edition,

2005); and the satirical novel Freud's “Megalomania”, a New York Times notable book of the year. He

has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books. A frequent

speaker at international art/science events, he has written essays and satirical pieces for a number of

exhibition catalogues of contemporary artists.

Daniel Blanga-Gubbay is a researcher in political philosophy and performance based in Brussels.

After graduating in philosophy from the Venice University of Architecture with Giorgio Agamben, and

while working with him, he got a European Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, jointly run by the University of

Palermo, Valencia and Freie Unversität Berlin. He currently teaches Political Philosophy for the Arts at

the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels, and he has a research project at the Heinrich Heine Universität

in Düsseldorf, within a project on the use of the concept of possible in art and politics. Results of this

research have been presented recently in Beirut (Orient Institute, AUB), Copenhagen (What Images Do),

Moscow (Political Mimesis), Oslo (The Nordic Society for Aesthetic), Tel Aviv (TAU) and Brussels. He

develops theoretical projects for performing art institutions and festivals, such as the Kunstenfestivalde-

sarts, Santarcangelo Festival, Chantier d'Europe / Théâtre de la Ville de Paris, and Centrale Fies, and is

the founder of the Brussels-based project Aleppo (www.aleppo.eu).

THANKS TOThe participating artists

The volunteersProvince Flemish Brabant (Luc Robijns, Tie Roefs, Wannes Verhoogen, Pia Brys, Nele De Cuyper, Dirk

Bollen) The City of Leuven (mayor Louis Tobback, alderman for

culture Denise Vandevoort, Piet Forger, Steven Dusoleil)

KU Leuven (Katlijn Malfliet, Georges Gielen, Stéphane Symons, Hilde Van Gelder, Geert Bouckaert, Ludo

Froyen)KU Leuven Dienst Cultuur (Kristien Jacobs, Greet

Verbeek, Veronique Verbert, Heidi Froyen)ThromboGenics (Alexandra Schiettekatte)

LRD (Paul Van Dun)Artforum (Hai-Chay Jiang, Marijke Van Geel)

Bibliotheek Tweebronnen (Ilse Depré & An Steppe)Toneelhuis Antwerpen

Moussem (Mouhamed Ikoubaan)Het Depot

ZebraStraat (Isolde Debuck)Campus Gelbergen (Suzan Langenberg & Fleur Beyers)

John HullSerpentine Gallery

Israel RosenfieldBorin van Loon

Edward ZiffDaniel Blanga-Gubbay

Catherine MalabouMuseum Astrup Fearnley (Renate Thorbjørnsen)

Odico formwork robotics (Denmark)Jelle Feringa

TED Global (Kari Mulholland)Shapeways

Peter AdriaenssensIseult Beets

Bert van de VenRaymond Langenberg

Luc Desmet

Annie CooremanNicolas Wierinck

Delfina FoundationKolleg Friedrich Nietzsche

Goethe und Schilller ArchivJan van Eyck Academie (And the generosity of Maria

Ines Plaza, Jerome Daly, Ardi Poels, Dr. Rüdiger Schmidt-Grepaly, Peter Mair, Evelyn Liepsch, Amy Bell,

and Joep Vossbeld)La Maac

Hotel Park InnIbis Hotel Leuven

Jos MaesLoko cultuur (Hannah De Neve & Jasmien Schutz)

Pierre Antoine (fotograaf exposities) Sitonit (Koen Deloose)

Peter Kilchmann GalleryJorn Carels

Marres (Ardi Pols)Summer Sessions (Anneleen van Kuyck, Dagmar Dirkx,

Joeri Verbesselt, Luce Moelans, Olivier Adins, Jeroen Verbeeck)

STUK STAFFSteven Vandervelden - general & artistic director

Klaus Ludwig - financial directorWieter Bloemen - daily operations

Hicham Khalidi – visual arts and Artefact promoterCharlotte Vandevyver - dance promoter

Gilke Vanuytsel - music promoterIlse Van Essche - production Artefact

Fleur van Muiswinkel - production ArtefactLaura Delaere - production performing arts

Frank Geypens - communicationJoeri Thiry - communication

Hans Empereur - communicationLeen Persoons - communication and layout

Danielle Gielen & Jan Delvaux - communication Artefact

Leen Van Hoeck - accounting

Leen Bleys - volunteers coordinationRichard Kerkhofs - technical supervision

Babs Boey - techniqueAnne Heyman - technique

Jesse Jansens - techniqueRoel Penninckx - techniqueErik Penninckx - technique

Johannes Vochten - techniqueJoachim Beckers - facility manager

Ingrid Van Eycken - coordination reception & ticketingAnnemie Lambrechts - reception & ticketing

Hilde Van Wijnsberghe - reception & ticketingLisanne Valgaerts - reception & ticketing

Peter Hannosset - cateringRaphael Klaps - coordination STUKcafé

Zoë Pauwels - coordination STUKcaféCecilia Nyarko - maintenanceAdon Boateng - maintenance

Mohamed El Ghanoui - maintenanceCoordinator guided tours Artefact (Christina Seyfried)

Children's guided tours (Marlies Verreydt, Mieke Lamiroy, Jonas Slegers)

Guided tour interns (Hannah De Neve, Stefanie Verbeeck, Ellen Rottiers, Sofie Vandeweyer, Ana

Schultze, Stijn 'T Kindt)Luce Moelans - intern Artefact

Eline Verstegen - intern Artefact

BOARD OF DIRECTORSJo Stulens (chairman)

Stefaan Saeys (vice-president)Peter Anthonissen

Lies DaenenKatlijn Malfliet

Saïd El KhadraouiIzzy Van Aelst

Nele de CuyperHannah De NeveHeleen DevliegerLuc Haegemans

THIS BOOKLET HAS BEEN PUBLISHED AS AN ADDENDUM TO ARTEFACT ARTS AND SCIENCE

FESTIVAL, 11 – 22 FEBRUARI 2015

Editor – Hicham Khalidi Text translations – Natasha Hoare

Graphic design – Rowan McCuskey

ARTEFACT Artefact is an initiative of the province Flemish

Brabant in collaboration with the City of Leuven. Artefact is partly supported by KU Leuven as part of

“science meets art” Artefact and STUK are supported by

De Vlaamse Overheid, Provincie Vlaams- Brabant, Stad Leuven, KU Leuven Cultuur, Ku Leuven Groep

Wetenschap & Technologie, ThromboGenics, KLARA, De Streekkrant, De Lijn, Cobra en De Standaard.

(mediasponsors)