UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Wait. I’ve got one—

“A lawyer walks into a bar”—oh, you’ve already heard it. “A one-legged lawyer walks into a bar”—no? That, too?

How about this one? I’m working on my timing. “What’s the difference between a good lawyer and a great lawyer?” Give up? “A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge.” Is that funny?

n 1873, Robert Vischer coined the term Einfühlung in “On an Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics” in order to designate a sort of personification—the projection of human feelings on the natural world. Vischer was concerned with our ability to feel ‘into’ nature and art, and Einfühlung picks up from the German Romantic tradition of Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardernberg (Novalis) as a process of poetic identification with the natural world and its underlying spiritual relationship with man. Part of Vischer’s interest laid in the fact his father Friedrich Theodor Vischer had, a generation earlier, written the monumental Aesthetik and attempted the use of Einfühlen in order to describe architectural form in congruence with German Idealist philosophy and the rebellions of 1848–49.

Vischer relegated empathy to the place between purely responsive and intellectual feeling, stating “like the immediate feeling, empathy leaves the self in a certain sense solitary. The outward appearance remains a source of unconscious enticement and subjection.” Part of the argument formed here is the processional nature of Einfühlung: it’s only through projection, exchange, and return that the distinctions between internal and external, outward appearance and inner emotion, can be resolved. The first relation of empathy is to one’s self. It’s between the rise of Vischer’s text in the late-nineteenth century and the construction of philosophical aesthetics as a dominant category of the discipline that psychologist Edward Titchener translates the term Einfühlung as empathy for the first time, in 1909—four years after Freud’s publication of The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious.

By this point, the concept of empathy had been transformed by Theodor Lipps, who altered the usage of the term from the domain of aesthetic appreciation to the social and human sciences—ultimately linking our aesthetic perception with our perception of another embodied person as a “minded creature.” The risk here is extrapolating empathy from a metaphoric engagement with optics, perception, and aesthetics and shifting it to our earliest understandings of motor mimicry (advanced already by Adam Smith, as early as 1853), anticipating work with imitation, mirror neurons, and physiological response by as much as 150 years. Though Lipps’ argument is grounded in facial expressions (if we see an angry face on another person, we have a tendency to “imitate” it), he extends this concern with empathy to all mental activities requiring “human effort,” including self-reflection.

It’s this sort of empathy-as-simulation that Freud will pick up on, opening The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious with a dedication to Lipps, whom he cites as stating a joke is “something comic which is entirely subjective, which we produce, which is attached to action of ours as such, to which we invariably stand in relation of subject and never of object, not even of voluntary object.” Though Freud will later address the nature of this comic relation and use the simulation model of empathy as a bridge for considering the analyst-patient relationship, he’s well aware at the time of the composition of Jokes that he and Lipps are treading similar paths, perhaps working with a separate set of metaphorics (aesthetics and psychoanalysis) and means (mimicry and imprinting). Leopold and Loeb. Bosom Buddies. Toto sang back-up first for Linda Ronstadt, after all—

So, why all of this good humor? And why so many jokes about lawyers? And why an academic treatise in a publicity blog?

Brian Z. Tamanaha wrote a book called Failing Law Schools. Maybe you’ve heard of it? In it, he takes to task our pedagogical-legal culture, from stories about law school deans tampering with test-scores and the average debt of law students (currently at $100,000) to the ways in which the legal-educational system has become unsustainable. Why do we make so many jokes about lawyers? Perhaps there’s something about their circumstances through which we see ourselves, our culture at large reflected in an oddly scaled dressing-room mirror.

For more on Failing Law Schools, read an excerpt entitled “The US News Ranking Effect: The Ranking Made Us Do It.”

Gabrielle Plucknette/New York Times

The NYT’s 6th Floor blog ran a post yesterday by Amy Kellner about the installation of Yayoi Kusama’s career-spanning retrospective, which opens this July at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show, the first to present a hearty selection of  Kusama’s work to the West since LACMA’s Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968 (1998), was curated by Frances Morris, head of collections at the Tate Britain, where the show originated. Along with some excellent behind-the-scenes shots of “Fireflies on the Water,” originally installed for the Whitney’s 2004 Biennial and now a part of the Museum’s permanent collection, the post included an introduction to Kusama as an “adorable, polka-dot-obsessed Japanese artist.”

No one would argue with the obvious presence of dots, minimalist pop-blobs, flickering lights, and the omnipresence of concentric circles in Kusama’s oeuvre. But the use of the world “adorable”—in regards to an artist who has openly struggled with psychiatric problems, including obsessive and suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, and the decision to voluntarily commit herself to the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she has lived since the mid-1970s—seems a bit more problematic. Or is it? Is it problematic to label Kusama, cloaked in art-pop attire, sometimes hippie-robed, other times blending in with the haute-chic female artists of her day—sometimes appearing slight, other times ferocious—adorable? Is it a problem to label anyone whose illness intertwines with their public and private persona—as descriptively as their curiosity-drenched art, seemingly as much and a little a part of them as any other set of atoms triggering their chemical reactions—adorable? I don’t know. Maybe the argument is against “adorable” in general, for any artist. Because it strips away the complexity of the person behind the work, and because we catch ourselves in a creator’s grand narrative and lose focus on the intricacies and complications of the work (and Kusama’s work was nothing if not primed for all kinds of human experience).

The Whitney’s official press release calls Kusama “legendary, semi-reclusive, and still vibrant,” and a quick Google search adds a strand of adjectives to that short list: prolific, incessant, avant-garde, significant, influential, important, controversial, suffering, celebrated.

Reading Kusama’s autobiography Infinity Net might shed some light on the issue of her appearance, and our own tendency to focus on her signature component:

By covering my entire body with polka dots, and then covering the background with polka dots as well, I find self-obliteration. Or I stick polka dots all over a horse standing before a polka-dot background, and the form of the horse disappears, assimilated into the dots. The mass that is “horse” is absorbed into something timeless. And when that happens, I too am obliterated.

So, yes, sensorially: Kusama is dotty. And in terms of word choice, she is worthy of admiration, as evidenced by the gesture of “adorable.” But the language she uses to describe herself in Infinity Net mirrors any artist’s self-consciousness, not just her own, and reveals as much of her internal complexities, in their plain style, as any appearance-driven adjective cannot:

indecisive, fearful, fantastic, curious. tormented, alive.

Did you know that in a game of cultural touchstones, it’s only a single gesture or two that takes us from this:

To this:

To this:

“We do not live in the sort of universe in which simple lineal control is possible. Life is not like that.”—Gregory Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature” (1968, 47)

Today, we regard Gregory Bateson as the Kuhn-ian impresario behind systems-theory-based cybernetics—a friend of Jerry Brown’s and the ex-husband of Margaret Mead, Bateson was also the first to credit Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh as originating our modern concept of the double bind. Bateson wrote about somatic practices and linked the functions of the body to other epistemological systems, ultimately focusing on man’s capacity for scientific arrogance and purpose-driven, autocratic understanding. Interestingly enough, Bateson made a name for himself outside of cybernetic circles through his association with Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly in the mid-to-late 1970s (other contributors included Witold Rybczynski, Wendell Berry, and Ursula K. Le Guin), which popularized the ideas of space- and media-based practices, often in a New Journalism-inspired style. The other star of CQ? Lewis Mumford, whose talk influential talk “The Next Transformation of Man” was transcribed in the fourth issue.

Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future explores the largely forgotten group of British thinkers—Bateson included—that tripped the light fantastic at the frontiers of psychiatry, systems management, politics, epistemology, and Eastern thought as the twentieth century came of age. In the excerpt that follows below, he locates Bateson’s ideas on schizophrenia and enlightenment alongside Western appreciations of Zen, as a form of what Foucault might call “gymnastics of the soul.”

***

Bateson noted a formal similarity between the double bind and the contradictory instructions given to a disciple by a Zen master—Zen koans. In the terms I laid out before, the koan is a technology of the nonmodern self that, when it works, produces the dissolution of the modern self which is the state of Buddhist enlightenment. And Bateson’s idea was that double binds work in much the same way, also corroding the modern, autonomous, dualist self. The difference between the two situations is, of course, that the Zen master and disciple both know what is going on and where it might be going, while no one in the schizophrenic family has the faintest idea. The symptoms of schizophrenia, on this account, are the upshot of the sufferer’s struggling to retain the modern form while losing it—schizophrenia as the dark side of modernity.

This, then, is where Eastern spirituality entered Bateson’s approach to psychiatry, as a means of expanding the discursive field beyond the modern self. And here it is interesting to bring in tow more English exiles to California, Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley. Watts was a very influential commentator on and popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the United States in the 1950s, and he was also a consultant on Bateson’s schizophrenia project. Two of the project’s principals, Haley and Weakland, “took a course from Watts on the parallels between Eastern philosophy and Western psychiatry, back in the days when he was Director of the American Academy of Asian Studies I think the focus on Zen offered us an alternative to the ideas about change offered in psychiatry in the 1950s” (Haley 1976, 107). It makes sense, then, to see Zen as a constitutive element of the Batesonian approach to schizophrenia. And, interestingly, Bateson’s cybernetics also fed back into Watt’s expositions of Buddhism. In The Way of Zen (1957), Watts drew on cybernetics as “the science of control” to explain the concept of karma. His models were an oversensitive feedback mechanism that continually elicits further corrections to is own performance, and the types of logical paradox that Bateson took to illuminate the double bind. Watts also discussed the circular causality involved in the “round of birth-and-death,” commenting that in this respect, “Buddhist philosophy should have a special interest for students of communication theory, cybernetics, logical philosophy, and similar matters.” This discussion leads Watts directly to the topic of nirvana, which reminds us of the connection that Walter and Ashby made between nirvana and homeostasis… .

Next, to understand Laing’s extension of Bateson it helps to know that Aldous Huxley had also evoked a connection between schizophrenia and enlightenment two years prior to Bateson (neither Bateson nor Laing ever mentioned this in print, as far as I know; Huxley cited D. T. Suzuki as his authority on Zen, rather than Watts). In what became a countercultural classic of the sixties, The Doors of Perception (1954), Huxley offered a lyrical description of his perceptions of the world on taking mescaline for the first time and tired to convey the intensity of the experience via the language of Zen philosophy—he speaks of seeing the dharma body of the Buddha in the hedge at the bottom of the garden, for example. But he also linked this experience to schizophrenia. Having described his experience of garden furniture as a “succession of azure furnace-doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian,” he went on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE32tcojArI

More by Andrew Pickering

The Mangle of Practice: Time, Energy, and Science

Science as Practice and Culture (ed.)

Statement

“The greatest work of the twentieth century will be that of those who are placing literature on a plane superior to philosophy and science. Present day despairs of life are bred of the past triumphs of these latter. Literature will lay truth open upon a higher level. If I can have a part in that enterprise, I shall be extremely contented. It will be an objective synthesis of chosen words to replace the common dilatoriness with stupid verities with which everyone is familiar. Reading will become an art also. Living in a backward country, as all which are products of the scientific and philosophic centuries must be, I am satisfied, since I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments.”

William Carlos Williams, c. 1931

***

If you share an affinity for Williams’ four-diver white prose under the summer sun (“So I come again to my present day gyrations”), you’ll find him (or discussions of his work) here:

Paterson, Book V: The River of Heaven, in The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine, edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman

“Projective Verse” and “The Practice” in The Poet’s Work: 29 Poets on the Origins and Practice of Their Art, edited by Reginald Gibbons

“The Breughel Museum of William Carlos Williams,” discussed in Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery, by James A. W. Heffernan

“The Beast in Pain: Abjection and Aggression in Archilochus and William Carlos Williams,” discussed in The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination, by Mark Payne

                                  (Image copyright: Dino Ignani)

From Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, A Bilingual Edition

Edited and Translated by Jennifer Scappettone           

Da Palermo ’63 (1963)

Poesia dedicata a Spatola

Il mare ha delle punte bianche ch’io non conosco e il tempo, che bravo
si dimena bravo nelle mie braccia, corrompo docilmente—
e sottile si lamenta per i dolori al ginocchio a me toccàti.
Senza livore io ti ricordo un immenso giorno di gioia
ma tu dimentichi la vera sapienza. Se la notte è una
veraconda scematura io rivorrei giocare con le belle
dolci signore che t’insegnavano che il dare o il vero, non
è vero.

Sentendo morire la dolce tirannia io ti richiamo
sirena volenterosa—ma il viso disfatto di un chiaro prevedere
altre colpe e docili obbedienze mi promuove cretine
speranze.

Gravi disgrazie sollecitano.

Il vero è una morte intera.

                   ***

From Palermo ’63 (1963)

Poem dedicated to Spatola

The sea has white points that I don’t know and tempo, so good
it wags good in my embrace, I corrupt sweetly—
and slight it laments the aches at the knee touched to me.
Without spite I remind you of an immense day of joy
but you forget true knowledge. If the night is a
trueful abature I would like again to play with the sweet
belles mister who taught you that giving or the true, is
not true.

Sensing sweet tyranny die I recall you,
eager siren—but the face stripped of a lucid prediction
of other faults and docile submissions promotes idiot
hopes in me.

Grave misfortunes solicit.

The truth is a death entire.

             ***

The Academy of American Poets recently announced Jennifer Scappettone as winner of the 2012 Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize for Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, an excerpt of which appears above. The collection is the first to bring together a selection of poetry in both English and Italian (as well as fundamental prose documents, a critical introduction, and notes) by Rosselli, one of the most important postwar European poets—a musician, musicologist, and self-defined “poet of research”—whose trilingual body of work fused the confessional sensibilities and eruditely broken-lyricism of John Berryman with the formal experimentation of Ezra Pound, and a troubadour’s flourish that extends from Dante to the French moderns. The $10,000 award is given every other year for the translation into English of a significant work of modern Italian poetry, and Scappettone will accept the award and read from her translations on October 19, 2012, as part of the sixth annual Poets Forum in New York City:

“The virtues of Locomotrix, Jennifer Scappettone’s daring new translation of Amelia Rosselli’s selected poetry and prose, begin with the title itself, which slyly prepares the reader for the polylinguistic fare (and the self-proclaimed ‘infirm mind’) that follows. In Scappettone, Rosselli has found an inventive, aesthetically kindred translator, one who rightly chooses ‘to startle when Rosselli startles, and not to gloss’—to maintain, that is, rather than tame, the singularities of Rosselli’s capacious and difficult work. But the word ‘maintain’ makes it sound too easy, as if the translator had only to leave well enough alone, when of course what is often required is the invention in English of sympathetic singularities, which Scappettone, a poet herself, provides in abundance. As if that weren’t enough, the poems themselves are framed by Scappettone’s excellent introduction and by well chosen prose selections and helpful bibliographies and notes. Locomotrix is an exemplary volume.”—Geoffrey Brock, from the citation accompanying the prize announcement