Part I -- Chapter One

The Sense of the Self:
Approaching a Biology of Discourse

A simple beginning...

Whatever else we may wish to say about natural events, about culture, about living organisms and their effects, their varied relationships to the rest of the 'physical world' (and the mental processes these engender in thinking entities), one thing appears to be certain: complex phenomena tend also to be complex in their origin.

Nevertheless, the concern to understand the texture of a difficult moment leads us often to envision causes (and outcomes) which are less complicated than the facts appear to warrant. We conjure 'simple' explanations for complex functions and tendencies. We trace intricate structures of the imagination back to 'single' bursts of creative inspiration and invention. In science entire theories are said to owe their existence to isolated moments of insight. Though ancient in its derivation, the dubious notion that complex events have simple beginnings has survived as an important feature of the modern world-view. It has prominence in both science and the metaphysics which science claims to ignore. (The popular image of the 'Big Bang' takes its place, somewhat uncomfortably, alongside the monogenesis of Western religious traditions.)

Consider the way we view our origin as a species. In the main, science has not ventured much beyond the parameters set forth in the biblical account. Although few continue to subscribe to the idea that the human organism was introduced to its earthly paradise in approximately its modern form, and in the unique image of its divine creator, we continue to subscribe to the belief that we appeared at a single (relatively recent) moment in evolutionary time and that a goodly assortment of biological accomplishments are ours alone. It is commonplace to read that homo sapiens is the 'first...' (as well as the 'latest' biologically speaking), the 'only...', the 'most advanced...', the 'smartest...', the 'most ingenious...', the 'most adaptive...'. The listing of unique properties and achievements is familiar to all. Evolutionary science, and the press which reports its findings, never tires of bringing them to our attention. It seems we must demonstrate that in biology at least, if no longer in the religious imagination, important things 'begin' and 'end' with the human likeness.

Science is complex and its results not always easy for lay-persons to fathom. Nevertheless, scientists themselves would probably agree that such declarations of human 'achievement' are gross distortions of fact. It might be argued that they are metaphors adduced in the wider interest of instruction. The structures which underlie causation must be reduced to their simplest elements, if the student is to understand the present world and its complex nature.

The notion of the simple beginning is so rooted in the contemporary imagination that one may be inclined, despite all evidence to the contrary, to consider it an innate feature of cognitive process! The precept is traditionally coupled with the notion of an ultimate event. Thus actions have simple ends, which present experience tends to locate somewhere in the future (as 'goals' and 'objectives' of various kinds), as well as simple beginnings.

Meanwhile present actions proceed from the presumed middle area of experience which the subject regards as 'complex' (and often difficult). This model, which Western tradition perpetuates as a quasi-religious belief, is the basis for the notion of derivation in evolutionary process (and in the picture assembled, typically, of language development). We look for the 'simple beginnings' of phenomena which are complex and variegated in their present manifestations. Meanwhile, the notion of the 'simple end', manifest in scientific inquiry, one might add, as projected goal or result, reveals itself in the Western imagination in the concept of Paradise, the simple match for the simple beginning!

To be sure, this model is shunned in its more blatant presentations by the intellectually sophisticated who deplore, for example, the moral candor and transparency of the story of Genesis where the simple goodness of Creation is seen to give rise to complex evil (i.e. present disorder). Shunned likewise (by the intellectually fastidious) are conspiratorial explanations for present pain in which the alleged cause and its effect are both evil. The 'conspiracy theorist' finds the origin of complex present disorder in 'simple cause'. She/he sees the solution to such manifestations of disorder in the eradication of that simple Evil element. This notion, too, has roots in Near Eastern religious tradition.

The pre-condition for the appearance of this principle is a proposition ancestral to it: the notion of 'linear time' which the Western tradition finds suspended between 'simple beginning' and 'simple 'end'. This concept has been a significant force in Western perceptions and has its immediate roots in the same Near Eastern intellectual milieu. (Mircea Eliade has said as much.)

The denial of hidden process...

We live in an environment most of us do not understand. The practical conditions of our lives -- how and where we live, our sources of food and shelter, the way we get from one place to another, our tastes and cultural preferences, the people with whom we work and play, the essential infra-structures of our communities -- all are determined in great part by complex social arrangements which, though real enough, are nevertheless remote, unseen, intangible.

In view of the probable uniqueness of such a condition in the collective experience of humans one might expect that people would feel an urge to investigate these hidden structures. One should imagine that healthy curiosity, the expression of a strong preference in our animal nature, would require as much.

In general, however, this has not been the human response. A set of countervailing pre-suppositions, likewise imbedded in our individual and collective awareness, appears to override the message of that earlier (and probably more primitive) impulse and tells us we must ignore what we can not see. In accordance with the dictates of this latter precept only the surface reality of our lives appears open to review and evaluation.

The present chapter is preparatory to an analysis of the role language has played in the orchestration of this remarkable cultural denial. I shall assume, here and in the two chapters which follow, that language has had an effect (from behind the scenes as it were) upon the wider discourse of the culture and has helped to transform it in accordance with a particular vision of reality, a picture of the world in which internal process is suppressed. (The 'wider cultural material' is to be imagined, vaguely, as the recent Western or European tradition.) My assumption, further, is that the social effects of this transformation are ruinous to the long-term interests of the species.

Successes and Failures...

As conventionally understood, evolution is a sequence of favorable outcomes. It makes little difference whether the topic is culture or biology, fish or fine arts, politics or the way we care for our children. In the conventional view -- and this is reflected in the actual goals of science and individuals -- evolution is a cumulative record of positive adaptations. And one assumes, without debate or much reflection, that a group of organisms is biologically (and culturally) 'more advanced' if it can display a longer string of such accomplishments. It goes without saying that humans belong to an order which is the most 'advanced' of all: the order appropriately called 'Primates'.

It is not my intent to deny the obvious circumstance that one group of organisms may be biologically more evolved than another. But I do have difficulty with the reading of evolution as a series of success stories. Such a rendition of the empirical record poorly equips us to recognize decline, the inevitable dark side of the process. If we take the mere existence of a property, function, or life-structure as unqualified evidence of its evolutionary 'success', we may fail to anticipate a striking contingent possibility: that immediate 'success' may portend failure in the long term. An adaptation which has provide benefit to a population in the distant past, may turn out to be the very instrument which brings about its collapse and ultimate demise.

Lurking behind the notion of evolution as a succession of felicitous results may be the unconscious recognition that our own cultural-evolutionary experience needs explanation: but more importantly, we may feel it needs justification. This perceived need is dramatically manifest in our assessment of language and its presumed positive contribution to human biological and cultural evolution.

It understates the scope of the problem to say that science is mesmerized by the advent of language on the evolutionary scene. Biologists praise its appearance, and 'unparalleled success', in terms which are lyric and frankly mystical. If language is a 'crown jewel' in the neurological 'wonder' of the human brain, is it not perverse (or even mischievous) to suggest that this transcendent event has a 'downside'? As a biological adaptation which is ours alone -- it is, after all, entirely specific in its occurrence if not in its effects -- is not the 'success' of language already implicit in the wonderful history of those who invented it?

It is the objective of this and the next chapter to explore a distinctly contrary viewpoint. The evolutionary gains, which language may have afforded at a significant transitional moment in the past, have long since been trivialized by the emergence, and triumph, of a set of negative factors -- a particular pathology if you will -- which has blocked the healthy expression of the collective (and individual) sensibility, undermining in the process the social purpose of language, its biological raison-d'être. English would bring this pathology to a new level of refinement (a topic more fully explored in Part I -- Chapter II); but I will suggest that the socially destructive pressures, which these influences have brought to bear, are evident in human language from its 'beginnings'. A glimmer of their presence may be discerned in pre-linguistic forms of discourse, a matter the present chapter will consider in its own concluding pages.

However, much of the present chapter is an introduction not to language itself as a specifically human capability--this larger topic we leave to Part I -- Chapter II--but to what we must regard as the functional substrate of human language. As its title indicates, the present chapter is an approach to a biology of discourse. It sees the capacity for discursive interaction as a fundamental adaptive property of the living organism. Moreover, leaning heavily on the findings and implications of recent work in the field of neurology, I shall suggest that the impairment of this complex, if primitive, function may be the source of a wide range of human medical and social disorders.⁽¹⁾

True and false: the expression of Emotion...

It is safe to say that spoken language served (originally) to supplement a complex array of existing functions; it was one method, among many, by which the organism used parts of its body (which were conveniently directed to the external environment) for a secondary purpose: to express meaning. The immediate objective of this arrangement, and the complex manner of its instrumentation and delivery, was to transfer the contents of the organism's own 'mind' to the 'minds' of others. (Naturally its ultimate purpose was to create social connection.) Spoken language was probably not intelligible in practice, and can not now be understood in theory, apart from the totality of this remarkable visceral performance. By itself the spoken utterance was meager and insufficient.

Even the modern speaker of a language conveys his/her 'feelings' significantly through tone of voice, facial expression, body-posture, etc. If one attempts, as a narrator using language alone, to reconstruct the output of this complex process one encounters difficulties. How does one describe another's emotional state? A narrator can describe, with relative ease, what a 'third person' does. (Traditional narrative has largely confined itself to the description of actions.) But to attempt to record, in speech or writing, a third person's affective response, or frame of mind, in a given moment, is quite another matter. Where 'feelings' are concerned, language seems pushed to its limits.

There is another set of obvious but far-reaching considerations. Language has a property shared by no other expressive function of the human body. Speaking is not exactly automatic, like blushing, trembling, and other surface representations of internal process. In the expression of our deepest feelings alien structures seem to intervene. And these often distort the final form of the delivery. We speak; but we do not necessarily say what is on our minds. For reasons which only the speaker may be cognizant of, the sentence

I feel good

may actually conceal the fact that he/she feels a cold coming on, or chills and fever, and does not feel good at all. For one reason and another, language is often used to hide our feelings and intent. To that extent language can be said to fail in its biological purpose--if the unhampered communication of 'feelings and intent' was/is a central element in that 'original' purpose.

We can cast doubt on the veracity of a representation of 'feeling' merely by calling attention to the fact that it was expressed through language: the first of the sentences below

He says he's in good shape
He looks in good shape

may imply, depending, perhaps, upon movements of the eyes, face, shoulders, and hands, that the verbalization and the feeling it claims to express are at variance (in the opinion of the narrator). By contrast, the meaning of the second sentence may not ordinarily expose itself to the same degree of doubt. The visual signals one's body produces appear to be more reliable indicators of its current 'inner state' than any verbal structures we devise to describe that state. The linguistic utterance, perhaps because it is partly 'self-conscious' in its delivery (i.e. it can be worked out in advance of its actual implementation), introduces the likelihood of the unintended, even deliberate, falsification of meaning.

Prevarication is listed by Charles Hockett as one of sixteen "design features" of human language. Hockett does not suggest that all speakers of all languages lie. A design feature is a property which is present in some systems but not in all systems⁽²⁾. It should be mentioned that deception can have a positive social value for humans and other animals: the female deer, who, through snorts and general commotion, seeks to mislead a dangerous intruder (in a direction away from a new-born fawn she has hidden), is an example familiar to those who have tramped the north-woods in early summer. This is deception in the service of the expanded self (and, presumably, the population of organisms), about which more in the concluding pages of the present chapter. It would seem equally obvious that deception in the service of the individual can be maladaptive or socially counterproductive. The felt need to deceive, for the purpose of personal gain (and at the expense of community), is a good example of an originally adaptive mechanism gone wrong. This unusual potential of language would have been noted and exploited by divisive structures arising in opposition to the adaptive purpose of discourse.

However, there was a problem which lingered in the evolutionary setting as we have briefly imagined it. The non-linguistic side of the discursive action, the body's direct and relatively unmediated expression of 'feeling', would have posed a problem to the 'divisive interests' mentioned above, those which would use language to deceive. As indicated above, the primitive methods the body employs to 'emote feeling' are undeliberated. The response tends to be automatic or semi-automatic as in smiling and other movements of the face and eyes. From the viewpoint of structures which emerge in essential opposition to a state of integration in community, 'primitive emotion' is a threat of no little consequence. Where language conceals a separate agenda, the primitive expression of feeling will tend to subvert that ulterior intent...

But the potential discrepancy between what is spoken and what is felt tears at the connective tissue of society. If poets existed in earliest times their function might easily have been to keep discourse whole, to mend these damaged connections.

Gertrude Stein and William James...

Certainly in recent times poets have deplored the sharp discontinuities between feeling and language which modern life has exacerbated, if not created. Under the influence of William James, her teacher at Harvard, Gertrude Stein sought to bring language into a better and more natural alignment and balance with the other means the body employs to disclose the contents of the mind. She was most intrigued by the Jamesian notion of 'stream of consciousness' which was a new idea at that time in the burgeoning field of psychology as well as in letters. When Gertrude Stein, in 1893, attended William James' lectures on psychology in the old Harvard Annex (soon to become Radcliffe College), Proust was eighteen years old, James Joyce only eleven!⁽³⁾

It became Stein's personal mission to put language in direct touch with the flow of mental images as they occur naturally and immediately in human thought process. There is no question that her intent was to close the existing gap between feeling and verbal expression, and this she accomplished in a wholly Jamesian spirit; that is, without much concern for logical sequence or grammatical consistency. Eventually, many years later, as the mature Stein began to find a broad readership in England and America, the syntactic discontinuities and eccentricities, which this approach seemed to produce, would become the highly publicized hallmark of her method and literary style.

An isolating influence...

While Stein labored in Paris to produce an English language which was more authentic, and on better footing with the body's other emotive resources, modern technology was approaching the same question in a quite different way. Though hardly its recognized purpose, the invention of the telephone accomplished a remarkable feat: it separated the strictly vocal part of the communication -- the part which exhibits a striking capacity to falsely represent internal process -- from the direct and biologically more primitive visceral component, the part which had tended, through countless millenia of human evolution, to keep us honest.

The telephone made great strides in the direction of a social transformation I have called the 'objectification of human experience'. It accomplished what mere writing had failed to do in thousands of years of human history: it was a necessary contributing factor in the building of a technological base for the broad denial of internal process. The telephone provided the vehicle for the emergence of a form of discourse which, though 'cool' and detached, was still truly 'interactive' in a way which letter-writing could never be. Thus its success. (This topic will be treated extensively in another chapter.)

To be sure, in trimming away much of the directly expressed content of 'physical interactions', the technology created a host of problems for new users. It is easy to forget that in the beginning, when telephones were new, it was not so easy to speak, as it were, into a void. One had to learn how to connect with persons one could not see or touch, and it was an arduous process for some. Moreover, the absence of direct visual representations of 'feeling' tended to affect the vocal production itself. A 'telephone voice' emerged which was itself 'stripped down' as an expressive instrument, relatively neutral in its delivery, significantly less in touch with the speaker's actual feelings.

However, the telephone was not an effective barrier to unwanted signals arising from the vocal tract itself. Minute changes in intonation, stress, or a certain wavering of pitch and intensity were signals which tended to reveal the actual intent behind the speaker's words. Only the most experienced users, those who spent much of their day 'on the phone', were able effectively to suppress those distracting messages which tend to erupt from 'beneath the surface' of the discourse. Computers (and increasingly telephones as well) have abandoned the human voice as (perhaps) too revealing and, in so doing, have moved us considerably further in the direction of a social 'interaction' in which feeling plays no role at all. Even in 'e-mail', where the exchange is rapid and often quite personal, the entire format and display of the messages is abstractly symbolic, basically cleansed of unwelcome signals from the bodies of the human participants.

Human Discourse--Human Language...

In partial summary of the above. When we attempt to discern the actual motivations of a third person (for narrative reasons, simply, or for purposes of collective 'decision-making'), we are often at a loss, even without the filtering effects of the telephone or the computer. We confront the difficult task of giving explicitly linguistic form to representations which are, in the narrow definition of the concept 'linguistic', not linguistic in nature.

To be sure, the underlying content of the actions we report seems often self-evident. Nevertheless, the feelings which give rise to such actions are hidden behind structures which linguistic mechanisms deal with only awkwardly if at all. Traditional discourse requires a much wider referential framework than the language system alone, and the technologies used to convey language-based messages, seems able to assemble. Language is but one manifestation of the expressive capability of humans, as human discourse is but one manifestation of the discursive bonds which unite living entities. To say that language is 'unique to humans' is probably valid in the narrow, if interesting, sense that language does appear to have pursued its 'own agenda' and did prepare the ground for a wide range of social structures which appear truly 'unique' to human culture. (It will be a task of the following chapter to delineate, more fully, the discursive purpose that modern language envisions for itself.) But to restrict biological discourse to the social interaction of humans, raises a host of theoretical questions which are not easily answered.

If, by linguistic discourse, we mean not just the 'verbal utterances' of humans (which, in the actual practice of linguistics as a science, are usually text-based and quite 'pure') but wish to include the wider panoply of expressive instruments available to the speakers of a language and discussed briefly above: gesture, vocalizations of various kinds not normally thought of as 'linguistic', intonation, movements of the head and eyes, meaningful distortions of features of the face, signals which have varied sources in the body of the speaker and are often a direct response to similar actions by a silent, or not so silent, listener; then what do we do with the obvious fact that animals other than humans engage in exactly the same behavior--minus, of course, the specifically 'linguistic' component of the message?

Though a reasonable case can be made that language itself is a 'uniquely human' possession, we run into a logical trap when we attempt to give discourse that same unique evolutionary status. Language is a sub-category of discourse, a single peculiar manifestation of an inclination to discursive interaction which is deeply rooted in animal 'behavior'. While human discourse is obviously distinct from, let us say, the discourse of bonobos, one must consider, at the same time, the likelihood that common structures unite all discursive interactions in nature. In other words, we confront at the outset some very general questions which the present chapter will hope to address. How is discourse manifest in living nature? More to the point, what is discourse outside human speech and actions? But the most important question of all is one approached earlier in this chapter: what role does 'feeling' play in the construction of a discursive perspective?

The 'production side'...

The expression of 'feeling' in animals must be visualized as a two-way exchange which, like much else in biological process, involves heavy traffic, much back and forth. On the one side is the organism's production of sensation -- it may be surprising, to some, to realize that sensation has an invisible production side -- and, on the other, the complex manner in which sensation is perceived or interpreted; for in the interaction, and complementarity, of the two superficially quite different sets of actions we find the origins not just of human language (relatively recently) but of social discourse generally, which, we discover, is mapped across the entire terrain of conscious life.

Discourse appears to make its evolutionary debut with the bilateral processing of sensory information, a function which, in the evolutionary perspective, may have come into being soon after the appearance of the biological senses themselves. (It goes without saying that 'original' occurrences of this presumed interaction took place for the mutual benefit of the participating organisms. Moreover, it was continuously successful in the long haul. Otherwise animal discourse would have ended in the evolutionary trash bin.) It is therefore intriguing that many in the biological sciences seem to view discourse as intraspecific exclusively--as the property of humans alone, language-centered moreover.

What are we to call social interactions when they occur outside language, outside the world of the human being? If not discourse, how are they distinct from human discourse? What is discourse if it is not the capacity to produce sensory signals for interpretation and evaluation by others? Is this general characterization--which encompasses, in words which are as suitable as any I am able to muster, the primitive function of spoken language--not applicable to all social 'behavior'? from the sexual pairing of the simplest organisms to the complex actions of 'higher primates' in an airport or at a scholarly conference? Does the very generality of the characterization not help us to assemble a better understanding of our common biology? It is surely not the case that our common biology is of no serious interest where human social interactions are concerned!

Though psychology has paid much particular attention to perception -- i.e., the response to the world as stimulus or object -- science fails (for its own set of reasons I shall propose) to take into account the other side of the discursive reality, namely the sources of the signals we perceive in others, that is, the production side in the making of an emotional connection. 'Emotion' gives outward expression to the world as an internal reality -- as feeling rather than as felt object. When all is said and done, 'emotion', or the expression of 'feeling', is the basis of the discursive instinct in animals, the primitive equivalent of the 'first person' of linguistic discourse. Yet it is considered 'unscientific' (even 'romantic') to give voice to this simple empirical fact. We encounter the odd structure peculiar to the 'scientific perspective' of our day, a bridge secured at only one end.

The sources of feeling...

The production of 'emotion' encompasses a wide range of evolutionary adaptations which science prefers not to think of as discursive, or social, in nature. These include sexual interaction itself (as suggested above), a highly specialized discursive function which has the differentiated propagation of the species as a mere evolutionary by-product. For it is a matter of simple fact that the maintenance of a population of sexually 'reproducing' organisms depends on a social instinct expressed through emotional interaction. Purpose and means are perfectly matched in this most ordinary illustration of biological function. Natural discourse (which includes much more than sexual 'reproduction' itself) begets biological diversity, the most important observation to be made about biology as living structure. Evelyn Fox Keller has pointed out that the concept of 'individual reproduction', though fundamentally in error on two obvious counts, seems to survive in the knee-jerk thinking of many biologists who explicitly endorse the peculiar notion that we survive, as biological 'individuals', by making 'copies' of ourselves. ( As used preferentially in the main body of this text, the term 'sexual differentiation' has two mutually encompassing levels of meaning. It characterizes the division which produced the two sexes originally. But it describes also the by-product of their subsequent 're-joinder', namely the production of offspring which are biologically distinct from each parent.)

The older Darwin struggled to address the role of emotion in natural selection, and to find answers which fit the general framework of his thinking.⁽⁴⁾ Not surprisingly, he came, when all was said and done, to the conclusion the outward expression of 'feeling' by an animal ('aggressive posture' and so forth) serves primarily the internal purposes of the individual, i.e. to prepare 'him' for the 'fight'. The Darwinian connection will be reviewed extensively in Part Two -- Chapter Four.

Though the surface boundary of the individual organism conceals much essential process -- the formation and manipulation of images for example -- 'feelings' have numerous external representations (among which language is only one) which make them immediately available to others for processing and interpretation. This is why the expression of 'feeling' is so crucial to discourse. Though a tingling may exist in our extremities which we alone are aware of, goose bumps may appear on the surface of the skin which others immediately notice (visually and tactilely let us not forget). Blood rushes to the external surfaces of the body and we turn red, we emit odors, perhaps, which in an earlier evolutionary time would have been certainly intelligible to organisms in the immediate vicinity (and may be still). In complementary action a complex set of musculature distorts the features of the face; or another intricate set of muscles tenses the joints, the body cringes; we produce sounds, perhaps, but only after the larynx has contracted to raise the pitch of our voice.

The actor, and the audience as well, are transported by affective meanings which, though genuinely felt, may have few sources in the real experience of the individual. Antonio Damasio has noted that the deviations from the normal physical states of the body which the organism presents to the world outside (or the actor to her public) are never merely the outward representation of a specific internal process (see Damasio [1994], pp. 148-49). Internal images and feelings are, in fact, critically dependent on the very surface structures they give rise to. Internal process and external representation exist in a relationship of complex feedback and interplay. Not all of us are provided with the gift to exploit this capacity on the stage; but actors have claimed that the mere action of smiling is sufficient, in many instances, to produce many of the feelings which normally go along with this surface representation. A deliberate smile may have, for most of us, the appearance of being forced or contrived. But for a talented actor (and, in a limited sense, for the rest of us too) the contrived smile can give rise to its own reality. It can turn into a real smile with its attendant images.

My point in all this is that an animal's feelings, though hidden from others, have surface representations which are instantly accessible. This is, in fact, their evolutionary raison d'être. Feelings are made immediately available to discourse through numerous outward changes in body-states, this independently of the possible surface representations of 'feeling' in human language. (One must not forget that language, too, regardless of what else we may say about this complex phenomenon, is the highly elaborated result of an 'emotive' process.)

Feeling and the Neurological Connection...

To return to Antonio Damasio whose work we have cited. Let us consider, as a partial model for the production of what we may call 'primary discourse', a set of assumptions which he believes are valid for the production of emotion and feelings in human beings and probably many other animals. (This was surely not his principal intent though it is my hope that he may concur with the extended meaning given here of his/our proposal.) We are 'wired', Damasio says,

...to respond with an emotion, in pre-organized fashion, when certain features of stimuli in the world or in our bodies are perceived, alone or in combination. Examples of such features include size (as in large animals); large span (as in flying eagles); type of motion (as in reptiles); certain sounds (such as growling); certain configurations of body state (as in the pain felt during a heart attack). Such features, individually or conjunctively, would be processed and then detected by a component of the brain's limbic system, say, the amygdala⁽⁵⁾; its neuron nuclei possess a dispositional representation which triggers the enactment of a body state characteristic of the emotion... Note that in order to cause a body response, one does not even need to 'recognize' the bear, or snake, or eagle, as such, or to know what precisely is causing pain. All that is required isthe early sensory cortices detect and categorize the key feature or features of a given entity... and that structures such as the amygdala receive signalsconcerning their conjunctive presence... (p. 131-32).

In humans, and presumably other animals as well, a subsequent step is the

...feeling of the emotion in connection to the object that excited it, the realization of the nexus between object and emotional body state (p. 132).

There can hardly be a question that the stimulus for the category of responses Damasio cites arises from the objective environment of the organism. I hope it is not taken as nit-picking if I state that the decisive 'percept', the thing which precipitates the expression of emotion at this primitive level of cognitive evaluation, is (for various interesting reasons) not best thought of as an 'object'. Damasio himself calls attention in the quoted material to the fact that the effective stimulus is a feature, or set of features. To be sure, the stimulus which initiates the production of 'feeling' may involve an object. But it is an object in a conjunctive relationship (as William James might have said), an object usually in motion against a constant background, an entity possessing a certain wide expanse, for example, something low-flying and above the head, something which casts, perhaps, a horrifying shadow on the ground.

The expression of emotion is complex in its sources and in its communicative effects and can scarcely be dealt with in a few paragraphs. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that the baby chick's expression of alarm, in the face of a frightening disruption of its routine, serves the purpose of discourse in ways which involve the hawk to be sure, but only indirectly. It solicits first the support of others in the nest who may have been less attentive but are now urged to respond in like manner, whether or not they have experienced the same thing directly. Meanwhile, the ultimate 'purpose' (to argue teleologically) of the collective outcry and fuss may be to announce, to any adults who happen to be present in the near vicinity, that a serious danger has arisen.

Important to Damasio (and to us) is the idea, first, that feelings, and other manifestations of internal process which science (and convention) locates, essentially, in the 'brain' of the advanced organism, have effects on the 'body-proper' which returns signals of a varied and complex nature to the brain (the 'interaction' between body and brain being thus already 'discursive' in a primary sense). However, the fact that the principal share of effects of this internally structured 'discursive interaction' is either noticeable to others, or has effects which are immediately noticeable to others, is something which Damasio recognizes but does not devote sufficient attention to, in my opinion.

Discourse: A two-way street...

It does not suffice to say that the amygdala sends signals to muscles and limbs which mime internal process; or that the same organ, a tiny component of the brain's limbic system, sends autonomic signals to viscera which lie significantly in the region of the physical boundary of the organism. The point of these external replications of 'feeling' is that they are interpreted as such by others. Moreover, complex feedback is maintained between all levels of representation, not just those within the individual proper. Included necessarily are those which straddle the boundaries of the individual organisms. Feelings course from the interior of one individual into that of another, interrupted only momentarily by their respective visceral exteriors. (The latter are equipped with both sensory transmitters and receivers which function as contact points in the maintenance and regulation of discourse -- eyes, ears, vocal apparatus, olfactory systems, glands for the secretion of pheromones which adjacent organisms respond to, skin areas of particular sensitivity, fingers, lips, areas in the genital regions, clitoris and labia on human females, foreskin and glans on males, systems of musculature which serve diverse purposes.) Despite the derived meaning of the word -- the movement of the feelings of the organism 'out' of an interior region -- it is quite impossible to imagine the production of 'emotion' as one-directional, or as coming to a halt, or as simply reversing direction once the feeling reaches the outer limits of the organism's 'body'.

Let us follow Damasio's description to the particular point where he leaves the process (in my view) suspended in mid-air. A stimulus may first affect certain sensitive areas in the surface boundary of the individual organism, is then processed by early sensory cortices to become cognitive 'images', or 'feelings', under the guidance of what Damasio calls 'dispositional representations' (which are held in distributed manner over a large number of higher-order cortices) which find varied and parallel routes back to the surface. But the variation in the content of these internal images -- here our respective accounts begin to diverge -- is due to discursive feedback which comes not just from the viscera of the single organism (and from chemicals released into its own bloodstream) but from the same processes at work in the adjacent individual. Transformed by minute changes in their respective body states, which are signaled continuously to association cortices in their respective brains (where they undergo finely tuned imaginal reconstruction), feelings are projected back to the surface boundaries of the individuals in steadily up-dated form -- the smile fades, for example, and is instantly replaced by an expression of extreme dejection -- so that the organisms are kept continuously abreast of each other's cognitive-emotional state and are able to respond appropriately and efficaciously. Damasio has reminded us that

...feelings are just as cognitive as any other perceptual image, and just as dependent on cerebral-cortex processing as any other image (1994 p. 159).

Thus the structure which Damasio visualizes as the vehicle for the expression of 'feeling' in the individual may serve as a model for something he did not, principally, have in mind: it provides, namely, a basis, or physiological point of departure, for the investigation of discourse among living organisms as a specific (and probably interspecific) social phenomenon. His account of this primary discursive process is the crucial element in the theoretical edifice we hope to construct, but it is only half the story. We need to consider the mechanisms he sets forth in a much wider perspective. We must assume the presence of a responding entity, or group of entities (which may be distinct from the objective stimulus of the emotion: which is the low-flying hawk, for example, which may or may not respond and may or may not be a participant in the discourse in question). For in the absence of a second organism -- an explicitly responding organism -- the externalization of 'feeling', which Damasio otherwise brilliantly characterizes, has little adaptive meaning. Discourse has little evolutionary purpose if organism number one is simply another 'stimulus' in the 'objective environment' of organism number two. If the effects of the adjacent organism are no different, in principle, from the effect of the flying predator on the nested chicks then we have, to be sure, another case of stimulus and response; but there is little sense of mutual assimilation which is the principal adaptive value of discourse among animals. Assimilation is the key to the adaptive response. Language is adaptive to the extent it is assimilative. Structures are adaptive to the extent they are socially beneficial.

Approaching the Biological Self...

In the arrangement we have described the second organism does not simply react to the presentation of the first, as the chick reacted to the image of the low-flying 'object'. The 'feelings' which have been 'emoted', or moved from the 'center' of the first organism to its surface boundary, are literally transferred to the second, via the latter's own surface boundary sensory capacity, thence to become the material for its own internal representations which correspond to and reinforce those of the adjacent individual. The response of the second organism thus recreates the internal 'feelings', and attendant physical state, of the first. Responses on all sides are assimilative, necessarily empathetic.

It may be appropriate in this context to emphasize, once again, the fact that the expression of 'feeling' is not an individual matter but serves as the basis for discursive interactions of all kinds including sex. Franz de Waal has noted that female bonobos

...frequently bare their teeth in a pleasure grin during coitus, particularly toward the end when the male slows down for his final, deeper thrusts. Furthermore, females often utter characteristic screams and squeals before or during coitus, as well as when they engage in GG-rubbing [genito-genital rubbing] with other females (De Waal-Lanting p. 104).

There can be little doubt that these 'emoted feelings' serve an essentially discursive purpose. De Waal observes that sexual partners

...often face each other, so they can closely monitor each other's facial expressions and sounds, and the exchange becomes quite intense and intimate (De Waal-Lanting p. 104).

The nature and social function of these expressions of emotion was known twenty years ago. Videotaped slow motion recordings of bonobos engaged in sex revealed that

...the speed and intensity of thrusting was visibly altered or terminated as a function of changes in the facial expression or vocalizations of one of the participants. These observations strongly suggest that the pygmy chimpanzee [the bonobo] is responsive not only to his own physiological feedback during copulation, but also to the subjective experience of the partner as mediated via facial expression and vocalizations (Savage-Rumbaugh, S., and B. Wilkerson. 1978. Socio-sexual behavior in Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes: A comparative study [Journal of Human Evolution 7: 327-44]).

If the expression of the emotions is to make sense, in evolutionary terms, then the half of the story Damasio directs our attention to is not enough. At the very least, the two organisms must be viewed together as the unit upon which selection operates, for it is in the success (minimally) of the pairing that the adaptive purpose is or is not fulfilled. But even this concept, though it frees biological process from the tyranny of the individual, tends to impose a serial construction on discursive interactions which is much too confining.

Biology has paid these evolutionary equations little heed. It is not surprising therefore that the unit within which discursive assimilation takes place (and on which selection may be presumed to operate minimally) has no general recognition as a scientific category and thus no name. The word 'pairing', as used in the preceding paragraph, may be helpful in designating certain kinds of important social discourse -- sex, for example, which can hardly be described except as shared action which occurs frequently, if not invariably, in the context of the shared emotions and shared goals of two individuals (as in the actions described above). But to envision all social interactions as a composite of individual binary interactions is not just cumbersome; it grievously mis-represents the ongoing multi-lateral nature of much collective endeavor including sex (as the bonobos themselves amply demonstrate).

To be sure, in the discursive joinder of two individuals we have the smallest unit within which exchange of 'feeling' may be assumed to occur; but the word 'pairing' hardly begins to do justice to the astonishing complexity of mutual interaction in natural community. ('Natural community' may be the better designation for the process in question.) Life forms strive, in the representation of experience, to establish a collective vantage which takes in much more than the perspective of two or three individuals. This striving is so natural to us, so deep-rooted in our cognitive-responsive capabilities as living organisms, that it is embarrassing to have to raise it as an issue requiring the special attention of science. The transference of 'feeling', from one organism to another, is the essential ingredient in collective process. Its effect is to expand -- in evolutionary terms as in the experiential development of individuals -- the practical reach of the personal 'self', bringing a sense of shared identity to structures much larger than those contained within the mere surface boundary of the 'individual proper'. The ancient concept of the 'self' may be the best choice of word to designate this enhanced sense of subjective awareness.

If science is able someday to put together an understanding of what it means for an organism to 'be aware', Damasio's insights will certainly have contributed indispensable pieces of the puzzle. The communication between 'brain' and 'body proper', in some advanced or rudimentary form, will likely be seen as supplying the foundational elements for the construction of a theory of the 'biological state of self' (p. 227).

Two to tango...

However, Damasio's current review and interpretation of this question tends to ignore a fact of biology which seems obvious: the participation by the body's surface viscera in the business of 'emotion' reveals an explicitly discursive drive in animal behavior. And discourse itself may be the basis of consciousness in the individual. Damasio may believe, in his private ruminations, that this is true--he concedes as much in numerous places in his text--but his acute and wide-ranging perceptions are sometimes curbed in conformity with the neo-Darwinian emphasis on the 'individual'. He notes, for example, that

...the primacy of the body as a theme applies to evolution: from simple to complex, for millions of years, brains have been first [my emphasis] about the organism that owns them. To a lessor extent it applies also to the development of each of us as individuals so that at our beginning these were first representations of the body proper, and only later were there representations related to the outside world... (pp. 228-29).

Note the elision of the crucial social stage in the evolutionary development of what one presumes is the mammalian 'brain'. The idea, eminently reasonable on the surface, that the brain's first concerns are the many signals to and from the organism's body, nevertheless badly needs the explanatory follow-up which the italicized word seems (at first) to promise. For in actual fact, brains have never been merely about the organisms which 'own' them. From their evolutionary beginnings brains have been about the bodies of other organisms as well, most of whom have also possessed brains and the capacity to make 'feelings' available to others. Remarks scattered passim in Damasio's fascinating treatise make clear the theoretical importance he attaches to social interactions in neural development. Nonetheless, in his various summations, especially as these might be applied on an evolutionary scale, he skips around the single observation of fact which may be the most important of all: it was not the survival of the individual per se which was ensured when nature

...stumbled on [the] highly effective solution [of] representing the outside world in terms of the modification it causes in the body proper, that is, representing the environment by modifying the primordial representations of the body whenever an interaction between organism and environment takes place (p.230).

Nor was the complex interplay between 'mind' and 'body' simply an ingenious means by which the organism learned to represent the world to itself. The principal adaptive value of the innovation in question was that the organism thus acquired an effective means to represent itself to the world. Nature found herewith the mechanism by which survival could be ensured for the vital relationships upon which the individual's 'personal existence' was predicated. First and foremost, the brain was 'about' the survival of these larger structural affinities.

I do not want to belabor what may seem to be a tangential issue, but the mistaken notion that the exterior boundary of the individual organism comprises the outer limits of its personal identity is widespread in the social sciences. In another (earlier) passage Damasio hoped to demonstrate that the emergence of the subjective sense of awareness may be entirely dependent on the explicitly interactive relation between brain and body proper:

For the biological state of self to occur, numerous brain systems must be in full swing, as must numerous body-proper systems. If you were to cut all the nerves that bring brain signals to the body proper, your body state would change radically, and so consequently would your mind. Were you to cut only the signals from the body proper to the brain, your mind would change too (p. 227).

Damasio pursues, for several interesting paragraphs, the implications of a Gedankenexperiment known to philosophers as 'brain in a vat' in which the organ in question is maintained 'alive' in a bath of appropriate nutrients (in the manner demonstrated by Steve Martin in The Man with Two Brains) and stimulated, by means of its detached and dangling nerve ends, in exactly the way it would be stimulated were it enclosed in a real body. Would the brain regard its 'experience' as normal? Damasio's answer is an emphatic No:

The absence of stimuli going out into the body-as-playing-field, capable of contributing to the renewal and modification of body states, would result in suspending the triggering and modulation of body states that, when represented back to the brain, constitute what I see as the bedrock of the sense of being alive (p. 228).

To this I would add that the normal function of an individual, capable of renewal and modification of its mind and body states together, is thwarted in the absence of an emotionally assimilated external world, the actual 'playing-field' of the biological enterprise. The 'sense of being alive' is, in essence, the sense of an expanded subjective awareness, the true 'self' from an evolutionary perspective. The passage quoted above is unexceptionable in its narrow meaning; nevertheless, the feeling of integration, which the organism experiences when all systems are in 'full swing', results as much from the sense of 'emotional' connection with the adjacent reality, and from the feedback which comes in discursive interaction with that reality, as from the personal recognition that the relation between body and mind is indeed intact and functioning.

Damasio draws attention to a possible ambivalence on this issue. He makes an effort to separate the relatively more stable 'background feelings' of an organism--its 'mood', essentially, over stretches of time, perhaps much of its life--from the external circumstances of its mundane existence:

The continuity of background feelings befits the fact that the living organism and its structure are continuous as long as life is maintained. Unlike our environment, whose constitution does change, and unlike the images we construct relative to that environment, which are fragmentary and conditioned by external circumstance, background feeling is mostly about body states. Our individual identity is anchored on this island of illusory living sameness against which we can be aware of myriad other things that manifestly changearound the organism (p. 155).

Animal Discourse as an Adaptive Function...

Actually, the continuity of 'background feeling' Damasio speaks of can never just be about the prevailing 'body states' of the individual (as assessed by the individual). It arises as much from the enduring state of the 'self' in its wider lateral compass. Nor does this comprise merely the enduring relationships of the individual to other members of the same species and the 'social reality' in terms of which the lives of these individuals run their course. Indeed, the continuity of 'background feeling' depends, in the properly functioning individual as an adaptive organism, on a 'sense of the other' which includes much more than the 'living environment' of the population in question. The sense of 'place', which appears to derive as much from the physical geography (which the organism appears sometimes to engage in 'discursive interaction') as from the social environment of the organism, is sometimes so powerful and abiding a factor that life all but ceases when this connection is broken.

In its biological origins, language was just one among many visceral mechanisms by which the organism represented its feelings not just to itself but to the external environment. The social function of the vocalization of 'feeling' is undeniable and appears to have come into being over vast stretches of evolutionary time. In the manner typical of adaptive alterations of behavior and experience, the function was 'originally' secondary to pre-existent anatomical structures and their uses. The first larynx, or 'vocal folds' (i.e. the fibrous device in the human trachea which makes possible all speech), was a valve in the pharyngial architecture of air-breathing fish which prevented water from entering the lungs⁽⁶⁾. Gradually the structure was altered in such a way that it acquired a sound-producing capability which had expressive utility for the organism in question. Thus began an entirely new chapter in the story of life on earth.

However, this new discursive function appears to have been gained at the expense of respiratory efficiency: there was an inherent conflict between the more basic biological need of the individual to breathe and the social purpose served by its new capacity to produce sounds for expressive or communicative purposes. I have brought this to the reader's attention to suggest that, as a general principle of evolutionary process, social value will tend to take precedence over the presumed 'needs' of the individual. Indeed, evolution may have 'on its mind', principally, these larger relationships (and certainly the survival of the individual organism depends on these relationships).

Nowhere is this ranking of evolutionary priorities better illustrated than in the presumed origins of human language. In the interest of the complex social interaction, and enhanced assimilation, which evolution wisely anticipated language would provide, nature consistently moved the floor of the pharynx ever deeper into the throat so that, as Darwin pointed out,

...every particle of food and drink which we swallow has to pass over the orifice of the trachea, with some risk of falling into the lungs [C. Darwin, (1859/1964) On the Origin of Species, facsimile edn, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, p. 191.]

Only humans, among primates and other animals, live in danger of ending their days on earth by choking to death. The risk comes slowly to the very young, along (appropriately) with the acquisition of language itself. Until a human baby is about three months old

...it is able to breathe and drink at the same time, because its airway for breathing runs from the nose through the larynx and trachea into the lungs. The larynx is elevated in such a way that fluids can pass either side of it and enter the pharynx and oesophasgus behind the larynx, but cannot fall into the larynx and trachea to choke the baby. The vocal tract of a newborn human baby is virtually identical to that of an adult chimpanzee.⁽⁷⁾

Not so with the lowered pharynx of the human adult. We must, our entire lives, endure difficulty when we eat, breathe, and talk at the same time, especially when this is accompanied by other vocalizations (combined with discursive visual displays) such as laughing which produces abrupt and unexpected intakes of air--a life-threatening combination of circumstances which is greatly exacerbated by the consumption of alcohol. One suffers the occasional death of a family member, or acquaintance, from a 'cafe coronary', so-called because the cause of such fatalities has been often mistakenly recorded, by official medical investigators and others, as a 'heart attack'.

In any case, this threat would seem to constitute the evolutionary down-side of an adaptation which had as its more compelling positive objectives (1) the improved capacity of the organism to produce a spectrum of sounds which facilitated the emergence of language (as humans know it) and (2) the greater social integration which this apparently enhanced linguistic capability was able (initially) to afford. The larger vocal tract, plus a differently shaped (and more flexible) tongue which could block, or impede, the passage of air in positions which range from the opening of the mouth all the way back to the uvula made possible the articulation of a much wider range of intelligible oral vowels and consonants. (Philip Lieberman has devoted much of his distinguished career to explaining the physiological basis of human language. See his seminal book [1984] The Biology and Evolution of Language, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press.)

Discourse and Objective Representation...

In its biological origins, language served the primary adaptive purpose of social discourse which was to produce representations of 'feeling' which were externally available for assimilation by others. The limits of the perceived 'self' were thus extended for participating organisms individually. For the discursive moment at least, two (and more) individuals were as one. Language was a striking addition to the array of visceral accomplishments by which the lateral transference of 'feeling' had been effectuated through eons of evolutionary change. Language must be regarded as playing, for a population of organisms (in moments of crisis especially), a decisive role in the construction of a shared perspective with its implicit stock of shared images. This more or less extensive congruence of the varied patterns in which 'individual identity' is manifest provides the functional basis for the collective arrangements and actions which nature, in any summation we may venture to construct of its intents and purposes, wishes to preserve.

From the vantage point of the individual the composition of the 'self' is defined, at once, by what is included and what is not. With respect to the former, the individual expands the compass of the perceived 'self' by embracing, as its own, certain segments of the living reality which lies adjacent to its surface boundary. However, in the absence of a through-going animist construction of the world (such as may have evolved as an adaptive social strategy among certain hominids and early homo sapiens) much of what the organism takes in as stimulus is excluded from this sphere of subjective intent, feeling, action, etc. Essentially 'dead' to assimilative process, as here defined, it constitutes the external representation of a world which lies beyond the reach of the discursive function, a world which exists merely to be devoured, pushed aside, avoided, or 'managed' in some way. Assessed positively it may be the odor of food, and an array of associative images, indeed the sight, taste, and texture of the food itself. Negatively, it may signal danger and provoke alarm, for example, as in the case of the low-flying hawk and its effect on the nested chicks. To be sure, these remain significant stimuli in the animal's world, familiar structures to which the sensible organism reacts with all the adaptive resources appropriate to the situation. These elements of the organism's external environment may, in fact, be 'alive', may engage the organism in lively contest or in other forms of physical 'interaction'; but to the perceiving organism they remain, nonetheless, mere surface representations. Their 'feelings', to the extent that these have the capacity to surface and can be thus said truly to exist as potentially transferable structure, remain largely inaccessible to the perceiving organism. They lie outside the domain of the perceived 'self' and comprise thus an excluded section of the organism's external environment. It may be helpful, in anticipation of the discussion which follows, to consider the surface representation of this excluded world as the objective dimension of the organism's experience.

Discourse as 'Interaction'...

The verb 'interact' perfectly suits the mythic program of our times. Like the noun 'behavior', discussed in the opening pages of the next chapter (and again in Part Two -- Chapter Four), it suppresses meaning in the reality of an animal's existence. The word recognizes that the exchange of information between living organisms does take place; at the same time, however, it tends to de-emphasize, or ignore altogether, certain facts which are not fully compatible with the assumptions of modern science: first, 'interaction' among living organisms serves primarily a social purpose; second, the mutual exchange of 'feeling', by means of external representations which are mutually intelligible (and thus assimilable), is the principal means by which this process of social integration is carried forward. The term 'interactive' tends to strip social function of all connection to internal process. Interestingly, if ominously, the word is used to characterize actions which an age less in thrall to the dictates of objectivity might have described as 'manipulative': the relation of a human operator to a complex 'machine', for example; or the effect of a 'self-serving' action of one human being on another (to whom the former exists in a primarily objective relationship).

As I compose this sentence I do not consider it appropriate to my task to divine the internal state of the word-processor which rests on the upper surface of the desk in front of me. Though some might describe the process in which 'we two' are engaged as 'interactive', the 'behavior' of the device is all I 'care' about. For me the machine has only an objective reality. Meanwhile, this complex device, produced at great expense, is indifferent to my own feelings: it would not dream, had it the capacity so to dream, of changing its internal constitution to accommodate my state of mind at the given moment, the very least one should expect of an interaction among entities engaged in authentic discourse. It is precisely such states of mutual indifference to internal process which are popularly called 'interactive'.

In summary, I ask the reader to bear in mind that the word 'interactive' may, for some, evoke meanings which are in conflict with the principal thrust of my proposal (and the true spirit of 'discourse') which is that authentic social 'interaction' involves the exchange of 'feeling' and that discourse is primarily assimilative in its evolutionary effect and meaning. To be sure, I have used the word 'interactive' occasionally in the present text. But I have endeavored to choose contexts which clearly indicate the meaning I have in mind.

It would be pretentious to state that my purpose in the following pages is to construct a 'theory of discourse'. Yet this, in a relatively more modest sense than the meaning unfortunately conveyed by the phrase, is what the present writing is about. I do not have the whole story, clearly, nor does anyone else. But I believe that an opportunity has presented itself to identify certain constituent elements which a 'theory of discourse', if and when it becomes available for comprehensive study and evaluation, will find essential.

The foregoing pages have dealt with certain important preliminary issues: we have sought to establish that discourse is a general function of biology, not something like language or music (to mention an additional subset of the category which springs to mind), which for the purpose of the inquiry of the moment can be cordoned off -- sometimes usefully, but not always (I would maintain) -- and examined as specifically human in their constitution and delivery. The concept 'discourse' has, in my opinion, little in the way of non-trivial meaning if the social interaction it designates is separated from its obvious sources in animal biology, although its use in the narratives of the contemporary social sciences does not lead one, in the normal reading of a text, to suspect that this is true. To see discourse as essentially language-dependent, which is the inexplicit assumption underlying much current research in communication and related areas, is, in fact, to treat the obviously generic as a subset of the obviously specific! On the other hand, if we insist (correctly I believe) that language is but a special manifestation of a general process in nature, then 'discourse' is probably the best name after all for this wide-ranging and most event-filled phenomenon in animal biology. If the first task of an aspiring theorist is to establish the general area in which the theory-to-be applies, then that much, I hope, has been accomplished in the foregoing pages: human language is clearly a specific subset of animal discourse.

The Advent of the Pathological...

If a theory of discourse is to possess an authentic power to explain, then the patterns of 'behavior' it purports to account for must be considered the expression of a biological function with a specific evolutionary purpose and content. A comprehensive 'theory of discourse' will hope to address such questions, too. It may seem hardly necessary to state that the adaptive meaning of discourse was/is its explicit value to social process, its efficacy in the creation and maintenance of structure which transcends the individual proper.

Nevertheless, as obvious as this function may appear on the surface, it needs further exploration: if for no other reason than the fact that what we call 'adaptive', in evolutionary process, contains often the seed for the eventual emergence of properties which have a distinctly contrary effect. We must know the difference between the two. Life structure appears often burdened with the residue of process which was once beneficial but is now out-of-sync, for one reason or another, with original purpose, process which has become in fact maladaptive. These questions have no simple answers. The mechanisms which move the organism inexorably toward a particular evolutionary goal often exhibit a dark impulse which was not necessarily inherent in the 'original intent'.

One searches for a concept according to which the responses of an organism might be adjudged 'adaptive', or healthy and 'normal', on the one hand, or 'pathological' on the other. Just such a crucial idea -- not new perhaps to the thinking of psychologists who have long seen the need for such a conceptual framework and have, indeed, made use of the very word has arrived upon the scene rather unexpectedly in Damasio's discussion of the neural basis of consciousness (a topic about which, he properly warns us, it pays to be modest [page 160]). I have adopted the concept as the focus of our attention for the past fifteen pages, or so, and have stressed its contribution to the health of socially adapted organisms. It is, of course, the ancient notion of the self, the area of the individual's subjective interest. The enhanced self may have been the primitive avenue to social awareness, the means by which the organism first learned to cope with the problems of a separate and biologically restricting personal identity. It was appropriate that the first step in this direction would be taken through assimilative interaction between the 'body' of the organism and something like a 'brain' (as Damasio has suggested); for it was through the exchange of meaning -- now at yet a higher level of structural relationship -- that individuals first achieved the sense of collective being and the capacity for collective action. Regardless of whether the focus is the individual or some larger grouping of the population, or whether the perspective we choose in the moment of inquiry is that of history, and evolutionary change, or current state and condition, the individual's sense of the 'self', its self-definition, is revealed as healthful, or adaptive when conforming to configurations represented at the 'upper' end of our measuring stick, and maladaptive and/or sickening at the theoretically 'low' end.

The sense of the self may be the key we need to deal conceptually with certain impairments of cognitive function which have baffled science for decades. Examination of the pathological side of the equation -- i.e. the impairment of the function in question -- may throw light on the 'normal' occuurrence. Damasio has drawn our attention to compelling evidence, derived in part from his own clinical observations, that special brain regions cooperate in the definition (and necessary expansion) of the biological self. Damage to these regions which, in their normal overlapping biological functions facilitate the generation and external representation of feelings, results in maladaptive behaviors of a clearly recognizable kind. In their extreme representation, the patient fails to perceive his/her arm or leg, for example, as extensions of his or her own intrinsic identity! These natural appendages appear as mere 'objects' -- my interpretation of the condition Damasio describes -- in a world which lies essentially outside the domain of a greatly retracted self (which is no longer sufficiently extensive to encompass the organism's own body).

Not so strange to initial medical perceptions perhaps, but proceeding, Damasio appears to believe, from the same impaired neurological capacity for 'constructive subjective awareness' (my language), is the behavior of a second group of patients who are unable to access, and properly assimilate, the feelings of others. This clear lack of emotional connection, now expressed at a distinctly social level of biological organization, gives rise to patterns of behavior which are most destructive of the long-term interests of the individual. For those who suffer from this condition, other human beings, to whom they were presumably close before the sudden delivery of the tragic sequence of events, are turned into the mere detail of an objective landscape. The social indifference of these individuals alarms friends and family members, though it is of little concern to the patients themselves, which is the hallmark of their disease. They suffer typically the loss of their jobs. But soon the patience and affection of spouses (and friends) gives out and they become progressively isolated, a circumstance which appears likewise to be of no special concern to the individuals themselves who remain unaffected and aloof at the center of an evolving social catastrophe. The word 'suffer' is perhaps best used to describe the feelings of those unfortunate 'others', who must witness the breakdown of a complex personality, not the experience of those who are supposedly afflicted. For them, the devastating injury has blocked genuine feeling (and the capacity to suffer emotionally) at its source; which is, Damasio grimly points out, the "only felicitous aspect of [an] otherwise tragic condition" (p. 64).

An impaired capacity to recognize failure...

In the following pages I will attempt to add support to what Damasio himself suspects: the differences between the sets of symptoms described briefly above may be only superficial. When the last word is in, the disparate 'behaviors' described above will almost certainly turn out to be expressions of the same pathological condition: namely the patient's inability to construct a sense of the self which is a fully developed and integrated structure. In each case the cause of the disorder is a greatly compromised sense of personal identity which has its physical source in damage to certain regions of the brain which Damasio, and his colleagues, have begun to identify with a remarkable degree of precision. These fail now in what must be considered their primary adaptive function.

Damasio considers the possibility that this impairment of the 'normal function of assimilation' (my interpretation of his data) has become endemic in modern society. In a striking departure from the narrow focus his role as treating physician has imposed on his narrative, Damasio indicts the culture at large as possibly pathogenic:

The effect of a 'sick culture' on a normal adult system of reasoning seems to be less dramatic than the effect of a focal area of brain damage in that same normal adult system. Yet there are counterexamples. In Germany and the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s, in China during the Cultural Revolution, and in Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime, to mention only the most obvious such cases, a sick culture prevailed upon a presumably normal machinery of reason, with disastrous consequences. I fear that sizable sectors of Western society are gradually becoming other tragic counterexamples (p. 179).

Damasio's relative inattention to the social etiology of the particular disease is readily understandable. After all, his patients arrived in his care because of a single 'physical injury' to the brain with an often well-documented history of personal consequences which ensue as a result of such an injury. It is not a complex set of 'relationships' which enters his clinic typically, seeking help, but an 'individual' with a specific problem.

It would be most valuable to consider Damasio's tentative conclusions against results obtained from the study of persons whose brains may have been damaged by factors which are clearly social in nature. Public policy tends to regard such persons as moral miscreants and seeks to deal with them in accordance with the dispensations of criminal law, i.e. by punishing them in a fashion it, no doubt, considers 'objective'. Studies of such individuals are urgently needed but have not been undertaken or even contemplated, to my knowledge. The obstacles to such inquiry are immense and largely political. Research of this kind would require the extensive participation of neural psychologists, neural physiologists, judges and law enforcement agencies, ordinary politicians and, of course, the victims themselves (many of whom languish on 'death rows' in U.S. prisons and elsewhere), an impossible convergence of potentially conflicting interests and circumstances.

An organism's 'awareness' of its current state of functional wholeness, both internally and with regard to social relationship, is the key to much adaptive and self-regulating process. To know that something is amiss, is to possess the indispensable key to a wide range of possibly corrective actions. An animal's capacity to know that the self is endangered or incomplete -- i.e. that it may suffer, or has suffered, injury in a particular member -- is the obligatory first step if the organism is to assimilate this suffering state of the 'other', if it is to develop appropriate images and feelings for the defective part and ultimately care for its recovery--or at least compensate for the temporary (or permanent) loss of function. (The injured member, or suffering 'other', may be the afflicted individual's own arm or leg; or it may be an assimilated entity in the individual's external environment.) The otherwise healthy and integrated organism may not know what is wrong; but it knows at least that something is wrong; and, thanks to other ongoing exchanges of information between brain and body proper, the organism knows also approximately where the trouble is located, all of which are necessary initial determinations in what could be called the 'autonomy of healing'.

With these preliminary observations as a background, let us return to Damasio's experience as a practicing physician; in particular his encounters with the curious cognitive impairments described briefly above. The first of these is known to neuro-psychologists and others as anasognosia. This remarkable condition is manifest in the patient's inability to recognize, and acknowledge, that something is functionally wrong with his/her own body. The 'denial' of illness--which happens to have been paralysis in the majority of the cases which have commanded the attention of physicians and psychologists--is due to "damage to a select group of right cerebral cortices which are known as somatosensory" (Damasio, p. 65). "It has long been," Damasio says,

...my working assumption that the brain areas that cross-talk within the overall region of the right hemisphere damaged in anosognosia, probably produce, through their cooperative interactions, the most comprehensive and integrated map of the current body state available to the brain (p. 66).

The Body as Object...

Thus the initially most startling aspect of the medical condition in question--the failure of a patient to recognize a paralysis, for example, which affects the entire left side of the body--would seem to result from the fact that the brains of such individuals are poorly informed about the present state of their 'bodies' as a whole. Areas of the brain which in normal individuals remain in continuous contact with each other (which 'cross-talk') and maintain, at the same time, an ongoing interaction with the body--in Damasio's thinking a two-way affair (we may recall)--have suffered extensive damage and are thus unable to perform their immediate and necessary tasks. As a consequence of this impairment of 'primary discursive function' (my conceptualization and language), the individual's notion of the current state of his/her body is hopelessly out-of date. It exists as a poor memory of a time when all was well. Its meager base is a collection of old information which was made available through the participation of helpful structures located elsewhere in the brain:

Whenever I asked my patient DJ about her left-side paralysis, which was complete, she would always begin by saying that her movements were entirely normal, that perhaps they had once been impaired but they no longer were (p. 63).

The cortices implicated in the symptoms of anasognosia are not those which pertain to motor control. Damasio explains that the paralysis, which results from the loss of function in motor regions of the brain, is not a reflection of the disease in question but only the factor which brings the disorder to the attention of physicians. However, there is an inference to be gained from these medical histories that Damasio also considers: that the denial of the paralysis is, somehow, a denial of the body itself. Note the language his patient used when responding to questions about her motionless limb. When Damasio asked her to move her left arm

...she would search around for it and, after looking at the inert limb, ask whether I really wanted 'it' to move 'by itself'. When I would say yes, please, she would then take visual notice of the lack of any motion in the arm, and tell me that 'it doesn't seem to do much by itself'. As a sign of cooperation, she would offer to have the good hand move the bad arm: 'I can move it with my right hand' (p. 63).

The objectivity with which the patient contemplates her body, and its limited capacity for movement, is nothing less than astounding. Moreover, though only her left side is paralyzed, DJ seems to view the right side of her body (the region consisting of limbs and muscles which have not lost their capacity to 'move by themselves') with the same degree of emotional detachment with which she considers the motionless left arm.

I sat for many years in the cab of a 'forwarder', a large machine which brought wood pulp from the deep woods to a 'landing' on or close to a main road (where the material was accessible to heavy trucks which would then transport the product to sawmills and pulp yards). I can state with certainty that the operators of such 'loaders' view the extended segments of their hydraulically driven booms with more sense of emotional attachment than DJ did the limbs of her own body, even the ones which appeared, on the surface, to be functional and 'normal': I can move 'it' [the left arm] with my right hand, she said, trying to be helpful. The injury, which disrupted fundamental communication between brain and body proper, probably affected all body parts in the same way--those which could not 'move by themselves', as DJ put it, as well as those which could.

The malfunctioning 'Self'...

In other words, the trouble with the anasognosic is not just that he/she fails to recognize a malfunction in his/her own body; just as important to the characterization and eventual explanation of the symptoms of the disease is the fact that the sense of the 'self', now retracted to a maximally debilitating extent, no longer identifies with the body or any of its functional or non-functional components. Disease has robbed the body of its capacity to 'feel' for its own constituency. In a healthy, functioning individual the self depends, for the assessment of the limits appropriate to its social environment, on extensive and continuous discursive interaction between brain and the other viscera important to the expression of emotion; and when that necessary exchange of information is impeded, or when it ceases altogether, the afflicted individual perceives the body itself as an alien or 'objective' entity.

Damasio says there is reason to believe that the difficulty the anasognosic faces, in acknowledging impairment of function in his/her own body, would be manifest likewise in the sphere of social relations, had such difficulties an opportunity to surface. These additional problems are avoided, he believes, by the distractions of the severe motor impairment which accompanies the condition. The latter disability limits the patient's interaction with others and thus reduces the likelihood of the occurrence of behaviors which, in fully mobile individuals, immediately reveal a severe social deficiency. Patients with anasognosia, he points out,

...are considered sick, because of their blatant motor and sensory impairments, and are thus limited in the range of social interactions in which they can engage. In other words, their opportunity to place themselves in harm's way is drastically reduced. Even so, the decision-making defects are there, ready to manifest themselves given the opportunity, ready to undermine the best rehabilitation plans made for such patients by families and medical staff. Unable to realize how profoundly impaired they are, these patients show little or no inclination to cooperate with therapists, no motivation at all to get better (p. 67).

Although DJ's injury affected the right somatosensory cortex, with effects which included major paralysis and impaired processing of sensation, Damasio believes common ground exists between her symptoms and those of the second group of patients referred to above, those whose motor control and sensory perception appears to be normal but whose social instincts are grievously impaired. This is a small but impressive array of cases, some of them Damasio's own patients, in which damage involves 'prefrontal' regions in the brain but where motor controls have been left intact. A patient he calls 'Elliot' is a classic case in point.

An explicitly social manifestation of the disorder...

Before Damasio saw Elliot in his clinic, a large and fast-growing tumor had been discovered in approximately the midline area above the nasal cavities, just above the "plane formed by the roof of the eye sockets" (p. 335). The tumor had begun compressing both frontal lobes of his brain upward from below. Surgery saved Elliot's life, but not before the tumor had done extensive damage to right and left frontal lobes, with damage much greater on the right side than on the left:

In fact, the external surface of the left frontal lobe was intact, and all damage on the left side was within the orbital and medial sectors. On the right side, these sectors were similarly damaged, but in addition the core of the lobe (the white matter under the cerebral cortex) was destroyed. As a result of the destruction, a large component of the right frontal cortices was not functionally viable (pp. 38-39).

Before his illness, the patient had been

...a good husband and father, had a job with a business firm, and had been a role model for younger siblings and colleagues. He had attained an enviable personal, professional, and social status. But his life began to unravel. He developed severe headaches, and soon it was hard for him to concentrate. As his condition worsened, he seemed to lose his sense of responsibility, and his work had to be completed or corrected by others. His family physician suspected that Elliot might have a brain tumor. Regrettably the suspicion proved correct (p. 35).

Clearly, surgery, though it saved his life, could not arrest Elliot's plunge into social disgrace. Damage had already occurred which was irreparable:

His knowledge base seemed to survive, and he could perform many separate actions as well as before. But he could not be counted on to perform an appropriate action when it was expected. Understandably, after repeated advice and admonitions from colleagues and superiors went unheeded, Elliot's job was terminated. Other jobs--and other dismissals--were to follow... His wife, children, and friends could not understand why a knowledgeable person who was properly forewarned could act so foolishly, and some among them could not cope with this state of affairs. There was a first divorce. Then a brief marriage to a woman of whom neither family nor friends approved. Then another divorce. Then more drifting, without a source of income, and as a final blow to those who still cared and were watching in the sidelines, the denial of social security disability payments (pp. 36-38).

To shed light on Elliot's puzzling decline, which seemed to suggest profound impairment of the capacity for 'decision-making' which many of us appear to take for granted, Damasio put his patient through a lengthy series of tests to establish his psychological profile and to assess more precisely his level of competence in tasks which are believed to involve 'ordinary reasoning'. Was it conceivable, Damasio asks, that someone as obviously impaired as Elliot would perform well on such tests?

In fact it is: patients with marked abnormalities of social behavior can perform normally on many and even most intelligence texts, and clinicians and investigators have struggled for decades with this frustrating reality. There may be brain disease, but laboratory tests fail to measure significant impairments. The problem here lies with the tests, not with the patients. The tests simply do not address properly the particular functions that are compromised and thus fail to measure any decline (pp. 40-41).

Damasio's belief is that the body is in the loop of 'high reason', perhaps the main point of his book. If I have paid no attention to 'reason', in my discussion of what I believe is his most provocative contribution to science and general philosophy, it is because my immediate concern is not 'reason' but its biological foundation. The basis of discourse is, of course, the production of emotion and the lateral transference of 'feeling'. If 'reason' exists as a separate structure which emerges with the evolutionary advent of advanced life-forms, a matter which would require much further investigation, then it is certainly built on this complex discursive substrate in animal biology. 'Decision-making', like the 'rational process' which is presumed to underlie 'decision-making', is a matter for treatment elsewhere. Of primary concern here is discourse, or the production and assimilation of emotion, a biological substrate of what is presumed to be rational process.

Psychological and neuropsychological tests in fact revealed that Elliot had a superior or average intelligence. This was not surprising to Damasio who had predicted as much. Elliot's memory for digits and geometric design was superior, his delayed recall of words and complex figures was normal, as was his comprehension and production of language. His performance on memory tests involving interference procedures was normal. Perception and construction skills tested in the normal range. Elliot's ability to focus his attention on a particular content, to the exclusion of extraneous thoughts, revealed no abnormal patterns. Tests known to detect damage to frontal lobes failed to indicate organic dysfunction. Elliot's ability to make estimates and logical connections based on incomplete information turned out to be normal. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory--the famous MMPI--showed Elliot's performance to be genuine and normal. At this stage in his assessment of his patient's condition Damasio asked a significant question that he would develop more fully in the course of the treatment:

Could it be that reasoning and decision-making in the personal and social domain were different from reasoning and thinking in domains concerning objects, space, numbers, and words? Might they depend on different neural systems and processes (p. 43)?

If I may rephrase Damasio's important question: did not Elliot's performance on the standard tests indicate that his failure in the area of 'personal and social' relations was due to factors other than flawed 'reasoning and decision-making' (which the psychological testing procedures are presumed to be adept at measuring)? Is it not possible that the neural systems involved in 'rational decision-making' are not the same as the systems which kick in when normal and healthy individuals interact? The matter comes down to a simple issue: if impaired reasoning was not the cause, what was flawed in the biological substrate of Elliot's behavior?

Damasio answers this important question (and my rephrasing of it):

Elliot was able to recount the tragedy of his life with a detachment that was out of step with the magnitude of the events. He was always controlled, always describing scenes as a dispassionate, uninvolved spectator. Nowhere was there a sense of his own suffering, even though he was the protagonist...Elliot was exerting no restraint whatsoever on his affect. He was calm. He was relaxed. His narratives flowed effortlessly. He was not inhibiting the expression of internal emotional resonance or hushing inner turmoil. He simply did not have any turmoil to hush (p. 44).

Clearly, the tests, which had been designed to measure a person's ability to assess and manipulate the surface-reality of his/her existence, had not taken emotion into consideration, much less the social purpose of the expression of emotion. Remarkably, though Elliot's ability to function socially had been compromised, in a way that was apparent to all who knew him, no testing procedures seem to have been available to Damasio and the neuropsychologists on his team to reveal the bare existence much less the extent of this impairment! Even when Damasio's colleagues set out to address Elliot's social disability directly, by designing tests intended to measure his competence in situations which involved relations with others (and a social adeptness presumably), they continued to ignore the twin elements of a discursive capability: first, the organism's capacity to generate and express feeling; and secondly, and in Elliot's tragic case most pertinently, the individual's ability to interpret and assimilate the feelings of others.

Elliot's performance was normal to excellent on tests which measured his capacity to generate options for action, his awareness of the personal and social consequences of actions, his ability to imagine ways of achieving social goals; in addition, his capacity for 'moral judgement' was discovered to be 'excellent'. The tests demonstrated, to Damasio's satisfaction, that the 'records of social knowledge' were not destroyed by the disease which ravaged Elliot's brain. These clinical findings clearly indicated, Damasio states, that

...damage to the ventromedial sector of the frontal lobe did not destroy the records of social knowledge as retrieved under the conditions of the experiment (p.. 49).

Destroyed, he believes, was his patient's capacity to make 'real life' choices between alternative courses of action; the laboratory tasks, which the neuro-psychologists prepared for him, failed to detect this incapacity for reasons which Damasio believes, in retrospect, are obvious:

If it had been 'real life', for every option Elliot offered in a given situation there would have been a response from the other side, which would have changed the situation and required an additional set of options from Elliot, which would have led to yet another response, and in turn to another set of options required from him, and so on. In other words, the ongoing, open-ended, uncertain evolution of real-life situations was missing from the laboratory tasks (pp. 49-50).

Damasio seems close, in the lines quoted above, to a solution to one of the major puzzles posed by Elliot's illness. The testing procedures his clinic employed were inadequate for a specific reason (among others which there is no need to detail): the 'social knowledge' which the testing procedures were designed to measure was a pale substitute for the social knowledge which informs decision in the real world of the healthy organism. The latter is dependent on ongoing social discourse which, as Damsio points out correctly, the tests had not attempted to deal with. Social knowledge is not a body of surface-level information which, once acquired, remains enduring and unchanged by the flow of events. To be sure, it is the necessary basis for social interaction; but it is, at the same time, its cumulative result.

What was then the knowledge which was measured by the testing procedures and found intact in Elliot's case? It was, in all likelihood, the knowledge of interactions as the diseased mind remembered them, mere recollections from a time when his brain was functional and whole. (Memory, Damasio has reminded us, was largely intact in Elliot's case.)

The problems Elliot exhibited in the social routine of his life are fully analogous, because they spring from the same pathology, to the difficulties the anasognosic experiences when it comes to recognizing malfunction in his/her own body. Disease had ravaged regions of the brain which maintain the immediate discursive interactions upon which 'social knowledge' (Elliot's case) or 'knowledge of current body state' (the case of DJ) importantly depends. Elliot was no more equipped to recognize that something was 'wrong', or 'amiss', in his relations with others than was DJ able to detect the paralysis which affected the entire left side of her body. Elliot's social encounters were a sad string of mistaken apprehensions (hence the repeated firings and breakups of his marriages); they were a sequence of poor conjectures based on bad information. Though probably reliable at some moment in the past (as his performance on the tests seemed to indicate), this skimpy knowledge no longer provided a basis for true social interaction and personal 'decision-making'. These depend on information which is continuously updated.

Thus the basis for failure was likely the same in Elliot's case as in DJ's. Disease had largely disabled the neural function by which a healthy brain continuously engages its own body in discursive interaction--DJ's 'problem' in the narrow clinical perspective--and by means of which the healthy organism generates internal feelings and images which it is able successfully to transmit, via organs and viscera located in or near its external boundaries, to others for similar processing, interpretation, and assimilation. The failure of the latter mechanisms was the certain cause of Elliot's social downfall.

It is unlikely, as I have attempted to show in the preceding pages, that Elliot's sole 'problem' is a loss of the capacity to 'decide', as Damasio prefers to view his disability; but to the extent that rational decision-making is a factor in our understanding of the particular pathology, its failure must be recognized, first and foremost, as a failure of the discursive function.

A destroyed capacity for social interaction

Perhaps the best support for the argument I have put forward in the above pages is provided by the results of experiments undertaken twenty-five years ago by Ronald Myers on the neurology of social behavior and affect in communities of 'lower' primates. Myers discovered that Rhesus monkeys with bilateral prefrontal ablations, which involved both the ventromedial and the dorsolateral sectors of the brain, do not maintain normal social relations in their community despite the fact that nothing in their external appearance has changed. In his review of these findings, Damasio points out that monkeys mutilated in this selective manner

...show greatly decreased grooming behavior (of themselves and of others); greatly reduced affective interactions with others, regardless of whether they are males, females or infants; diminished facial expressions and vocalizations; impaired maternal behavior; and sexual indifference [Please note that'sexual indifference' is an inevitable result of the surgically induced social dysfunction described in this passage. Damasio says nothing about Elliot's ability to relate sexually to others.] While they can move normally, they fail to relate to the other animals in the troop to which they belonged before the operation, and the other animals fail to relate to them. The other animals can, however, relate normally to monkeys that develop major physical defects such as paralysis but that do not have prefrontal damage. Although the paralytic monkeys seem more disabled than the monkeys with prefrontal damage, they seek and receive the support of their peers (pp. 74-75).

If the surgery performed on these unfortunate animals had some enduring value, it was to illustrate the intimate and necessary connection between the bodily processes by which feeling finds expression, in the healthy animal, and the same animal's capacity to assimilate the feelings of others. Moreover, Myers' experiments revealed the centrality of the particular neural function in the production and maintenance of social bonds. To disable this function was to destroy the individual's capacity for discursive interaction, thus preventing normal social relations and access to community. Was this not Elliot's problem in a nutshell?

It becomes difficult, at this point in our discussion, to withhold a concluding critical comment on Damasio's view that Elliot's 'problem' was an inability to 'reason and decide'. (Damasio summarized Myers' findings without reference to 'decision-making' as a factor!) The core of Damasio's thoughts on the question, and the source, I believe, of a fundamental confusion, may be detected in the following explicit statement that the defect in Elliot's cognition

...set in at the late stages [emphasis added] of reasoning, close to or at the point at which choice making or response selection must occur. In other words, whatever went wrong went wrong late [emphasis added] in the process (p. 50).

Discourse and the Functional Self...

Though Damasio devotes the bulk of his argument to the proposition that the emotions, or the "lowly orders" of our organism, are in the "loop of high reason" (p. xiii), he seems to give in, in the final summation of his analysis of Elliot's problem, to the idea that what went wrong "went wrong late in the process," this in complete contradiction of the bulk of the evidence he proceeds to adduce. To be sure, the dismantling of the neural machinery by which feeling is processed and maintained was bound to have its effect on Elliot's 'decision-making', which was notably flawed. But Elliot's poor performance in this regard was not the cause of his social failure but the result. His conspicuous lack of success at work (and in family relationships) is to be attributed to a rather more basic neural deficiency than merely an inability to 'make choices' at some final, or late, stage in personal 'decision-making'. Indeed, his problem is to be traced back to a deficiency which is quite foundational: namely his lack of the capacity to generate an emotional response and his inability to evaluate and assimilate the responses of others. His family and co-workers had no basis for knowing, subjectively, 'where he was at'. For his part, Elliot had no basis for knowing where his family and co-workers 'were coming from'. He did not do what he was supposed to do because he did not know, emotionally and thus conceptually, what was 'expected' of him. Besides, in the absence of a capacity to generate an emotional response, it seems he did not 'care'.

Discursive interaction, through the production of emotion, is the means by which the healthy individual extends the boundaries of the functional self. To be sure, in Elliot's case there was 'interaction' of sorts with the adjacent reality. There was 'communication', we may assume, with individuals at work, in the family, in hospitals and clinics, in public agencies of diverse sorts, on the street and in chance circumstances of various kinds. Since Elliot's perceptual capacities and memory were essentially intact, he may even have been aware of minute if disturbing alterations in the 'behavior' and demeanor of others with whom he came in contact. He may even have been able, upon reflection, to impart to these external representations a kind of meaning which was serviceable in many instances.

But he lacked the capacity to generate an immediate and continuing response to the feelings of others. His emotions were 'flat', as Damasio puts it, not because it was in his 'nature' to be reserved, or condescending, but because the brain regions which put the healthy individual in touch with the feeling and experiencing 'other' had been damaged by disease and were non-functional. As a consequence, Elliot's relation to the world had little or no subjective content. Normal discourse, the sine-qua-non of successful social adaptation, was obstructed at its source. What went wrong went wrong early in the process.

1. Antonio Damasio has written a book, which has recently aroused my interest (and nearly full attention), entitled Descartes' Error (1996). This three-hundred-and-twelve (312) page volume, published in soft cover by Avon Books, carries the subrubric Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, difficult terrain which Damasio negotiates with skill and imagination. This first chapter in my own collection of essays deals passim with questions raised by the provocative material in the book cited above. The book is referenced in these pages as Damasio (1994).

2. See C. F. Hockett, 'Logical Considerations in the Study of Animal Communication', in W. Lanyon and W. Travolga (eds.), Animal Sounds and Communication (1960), pp. 392-430. Also, C. F. Hockett and S. Altmann, 'A Note on Design Features', in T. Sebeok (ed.), Animal Communication (1968), pp. 61-72.

3. For a fascinating review of the Jamesean connection and influence, which was acknowledged and affirmed by the poet until her final days, see Elizabeth Sprigge, Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work (Harper & Brothers; 1957), pp. 22-41. Also, James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (Praeger Publishers, NY; 1974), pp. 27-34.

4. On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1883].

5. "Evidence that the amygdala is the key player in pre-organized emotion comes from observations in both animals and humans" (see Damasio [1994], p. 133), where pertinent research is cited).

6. See V. E. Negus (1949) The Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Larynx, New York, Hafner.

7. Kirsten Malmkjaer, "Origin of Language," The Linguistics Encyclopedia, eds. Kirsten Malmkjaer and James M. Anderson (Routledge, New York and London; 1995), pp. 326-2.