Excerpts from:

Part I Chapter One:
The Sense of the Self:
Approaching a Biology of Discourse
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On the generality of discourse in living nature: “...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 on findings and implications of recent work in the field of neurology, I will suggest that the impairment of this complex, if primitive, function may be the source of a wide range of human medical and social disorders.”

On the telephone: “...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 what we feel - from the direct and biologically more primitive visceral component, the part which had tended, through countless millennia of human evolution, to keep us honest. The telephone made 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 contributing factor in the building of a technological base for the broad denial of internal process.”

On the ‘shortcomings’ of the telephone: [It] “...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 content of 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.”

On e-mail: “Computers (and increasingly telephones as well) have abandoned the human voice as too revealing and have moved us 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 message is abstractly symbolic, basically cleansed of unwelcome signals from the bodies of the human participants.”

On the origins of discourse: “Discourse makes 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 is intriguing that many in the biological sciences seem to view discourse as intraspecific exclusively - as the property of humans alone, language-centered moreover.”

On the extensive nature of discourse: [It] “...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... 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.)”

On the adaptive function of the mammalian brain: “...the complex interplay between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ [was not] 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.”

On the social ‘purpose’ of structural adaptation: “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... 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... 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 need of the individual to breathe and the social purpose served by its new capacity to produce sounds for expressive or communicative purposes... [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...”

On the objective lexicon of English: “The verb ‘interact’ perfectly suits the mythic program of our times. Like the noun ‘behavior’... it suppresses meaning in the reality of an animal’s existence. The word recognizes that the exchange of information between living organism 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... 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....”

On the medical condition of anasognosia: “...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 the sense of the ‘self’, now retracted to a maximally debilitating extent, no longer identifies with the body or any of its 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.”