Radio Head
you need STEM to understand humanities
Maybe it’s an idea. ‘It’ feels more like a visceral response that generates or induces a recognition. Consciousness tries to match that recognition with mutable arrangements of words that approximately represent or reproduce that idea-response. Thinking can only range through arrangements of words an concepts that are available to it to be thought: radiation would have been unthinkable to someone in 1707, at least in its Marie Curie form. Recent research shows, as Paul Armstrong writes in Stories and the Brain (2023), that “Someone who has not had a particular experience might not be able to experience it as completely as someone whose brain and body would be able to simulate and reenact a somatosensory, embodied cognitive act” (123). Moreover, the metaphors we use to make sense of the world and ourselves, “constrained by our bodily=based abilities and dispositions, structure many, if not most . . . of the relationships of similarity and difference through which we categorize states of affairs and (accordingly) reason, perceive, and act” (Stories 125).
Instead of simply writing those words down, or starting to, and having them wander around a bit at the outer-edges of my memory-cache, I start to generalize and associate a list of potentially similar instances, events, or circumstances. Scholarly habit, defense mechanism, and a mnemonic building-tool to test whether the idea will hold up or mutate, there’s a pause to go through the notebooks. Then find the disc drive on which I saved most of the years of The United States and Democratic Review, to glory in how lovingly they (likely Margaret Fuller) reviewed Elizabeth Barrett. (A Drama of Exile was first published in an 1844 issue of USDR, accompanied by a long critical appreciation. Among other factors this seriousness helped Emily Dickinson believe in the possibility of being a serious woman and poet.
Confined entirely to her own apartment, and almost hermetically sealed, in consequence of an extremely delicate state of health, the poetess of whom we write is scarcely seen by any but her own family. But though thus separated from the world—and often, during many weeks at a time, in darkness almost equal to that of night, Miss Barrett has yet found means, by extraordinary inherent energies, to develop her inward nature; to give vent to the soul in a successful struggle with its destiny while on earth; and to attain and master more knowledge arid accomplishments than are usually within the power of those of either sex who possess every adventitious opportunity, as well as health and industry. (USDR July 1844, 73)
But would the example of Miss Barrett’s “extraordinary inherent energies” count as influence on Miss Emily? One could probably claim more forcefully, that impelled by the artistic and personal influence of Miss Barrett’s life on Sophia P. Hawthorne, that the Barrett furor of 1844 drove Nathaniel Hawthorne to write “Rappacini’s Daughter,” which appears sandwiched between Barrett poems and notices in 1844 USDRs.
Writing in the middle of World War 2, John Eidson argued that “scholars of English and American literature” ignored “the influence which American criticism has had upon the careers of leading English literary figures” (xi). For Barrett and Tennyson, Eidson traces this ‘influence’ to a coterie of motivated readers linked to Harvard and Ralph Waldo Emerson: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Sophia Peabody (Hawthorne, who, with her drawing of the Lady of Shalott in 1839, was one of the first artists to illustrate Tennyson) (Eidson 6). In particular, Emerson thought Fuller “had a sort of right to [Tennyson and Barrett] since she had ‘made their merits widely known among our young people’” (qtd. in Eidson 9).
The ‘influence’ Eidson asserts—connected through dubious logic, philosophy, and pseudo-political science to the “zones of influence” that drove 19th and 20th century colonialism—bears only a slight resemblance to the process whereby certain young people discovered poets who spoke to them and felt compelled to let others know. That “young people” in Emerson’s letter to Fuller, for instance. You could read it, and of course “Manifest Destiny” folks like John Louis O’Sullivan (editor of USDR, Hawthorne’s best man, and possible originator of “Manifest Destiny” [though Jane Storm Cazneau could have written the piece it appears in]) would tend that way. But you could also read it as “young people”—which is more directly true, given the audiences drawn to Barrett and Tennyson. In 1943 Eidson felt compelled to provide cover for the ridiculous arguments about influence and culture that led to decolonization and the kind of colonial debacles Graham Green recounts in The Quiet American—whose evil flows directly from the office of an “influential” president of Harvard.
“Influence arguments” deservedly fell on hard times in literary studies in the last few decades—especially since the burden of proof for establishing “influence” and the mechanisms for how whatever it is might work have always been deliberately bogus. “Influence” was a concept elaborated from poorly applied physical metaphors intended to justify the position of discourse-providers in empire. Unfortunately, as Isobel Armstrong struggles to work out a “radical aesthetic” from which “the aesthetic is not intrinsically bound to wealth, privilege, and power . . . [and] does not depend for its existence on class and money” (4), our inability to engage with the STEM-based processes which structure “the constitutive nature of affect” has resulted in either obfuscation, ignorance, or over-simplification.
Paul B. Armstrong, channeling Alan Palmer, argues in Stories and the Brain that the more we learn about “brain-based processes that are necessary for socially situated, embodied cognition” we have to abandon “narrative theories [that] are inconsistent with the science” (5). Thus, when Isobel Armstrong prefigured the “turn to affect” in Radical Aesthetics by bemoaning how “the constitutive nature of affect has been ignored or bracketed in contemporary theory because of its seeming resistance to analysis” (13), her own analysis proved the inadequacy of philosophical or psychoanalytic approximations of what drives affect to do much more than obcure the processes. The actual affect scholars (in particular Brian Massumi and Patrick Colm Hogan), though, as Armstrong details, also misread research in terms of theoretical commitments (Deleuze and Guattari for Massumi, Chomsky for Hogan) “to posit a bodily, autonomous realm of subpersonal affective processes prior to cognition” (Stories 62). The effect denies individual cognitive autonomy and locates it in some form of dystopic never-land. Of course, despite the seeming cognitive impossibilities, baseball and cricket batters hit objects they cannot see: “We steer and guide our actions,” writes Paul Armstrong, by anticipating how these visual and motor patterns will come together” (67).
How do we make our anticipation models? How do they get attuned to different types of signals? How do those signals get processed, amplified, transformed, reproduced? People who think “radios” are magic boxes will not ask, much less be able to answer those questions when they assert, as David Byrne did, the existence of someone who is a “Radio Head.”
Since the 1920s we could have figured “influence” as wireless transmission. We could have developed analogies from understanding the components and processes involved in signal production, recording, transmission, detection, amplification, and reproduction to understand how individuals and societies do similar activities using roughly similar neural circuitry. The closest we’ve ever come, however, to any ‘theorization’ based on, to use just one example, The Basic Theory and Application of Electron Tubes (JAN Technical Manual, 1952), is Ezra Pound’s strongly argued but loosely developed assertions that what matters in literature is a “voltage of emotional energy” (52). Instead, ‘we’—cultural theorists—stay confined within prestigious discourses that have little practicable applicability. Thus, we’re stuck with, when we try to re-think “the way the cognitive is bound up with aesthetic experience,” reading “Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic as a poetics of thinking and thought” (Radical Aesthetic 16).
It did not have to be this way. The thinkers Isobel Armstrong covers in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, & Politics (Routledge, 1993) did draw upon the available analogies between electromagnetic induction and poetics to ground their assertions of what Armstrong calls “the double poem . . . which governs the construction of the self and its relationships and to the cultural conditions in which these relationships are made” (13). William J. Fox, who edited the progressive Monthly Repository and contributed to the Westminster Review, observed, in a review of Tennyson’s Pauline that, to quote Armstrong’s paraphrase: “the truly democratic poem can transform belief and disseminate political principles through its power over the associative process and the imagination. Poetry transforms psychological patterns through the power of emotion” (Victorian Poetry 113).
Fantasies of coercive power, however, distorted these attempts. Armstrong notes that Fox’s verbs betray him: “command,’ ‘power,’ ‘conquer,’ ‘blast,’ ‘force’ show that “he is thoroughly aware of the ideological importance of emotion” (113). Armstrong claims, on shaky grounds, that “Fox avoids the authoritarian implications of his aesthetic—but only just” (113). These fantasies of “influen[cing] the associations of unnumbered minds” veer fascistic. Armstrong’s attempt to deny it notwithstanding, they presume “that the associative process is . . . passive” before the superior force of imaginative works (VP 113).
It took destroying the spirit of a woman he could have/should have loved for Matthew Maule to learn the evil associated with worshiping “the right of the strongest spirit” in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. The metaphors our culture derived to conceptualize how people produce, communicate, and transmit meaning before the advent of wireless production, transmission, and reproduction block and mislead how we think about the process because the people making them wanted to legitimate, participate in, and normalize empire. The related concept of impression relies on conflating physicality with psychology to make pressing or striking model “an effect produced on the mind, conscience, or feelings” (OED). Dating to the beginning or just before the invention of print, thanks to Locke it drove the early modern model of consciousness as largely passive reception of strong and or repeated impressions.
However communicated to us, we can feel emotionally intense messages more intensely than physical blows, or impressions. Those feelings transmit and re-assemble, amplify, and propagate as waves of force that can transform into images, sounds, language: neither physical, nor spiritual, or imaginary. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is bs.
Some readers might be thinking of a scholiast who acquired a supposed influence by asserting the primacy of influence over all things literary. Based on a pretentious, but intellectually lazy mash-up of Freudian psychology, Nietszchean pseudo-philosophy, and strenous reading on a couch, Harold Bloom’s influence theory, elaborated in Anxiety of Influence, Agon, and infecting the ridiculous series of literary guides, reduces agency to an inescapable (& homoerotic and patriarchal) wrestling with “precursors” who always, inescapably, did things better than you ever could.
So many of our cultural myths, from Dead Poets Society to Byron, grow out of witchful lusting after “magnetic,” “mesmeric,” or supposedly magical powers of “influence” exerted by one who possesses the “right of the strongest spirit” over one or more others: from Gervayse Pyncheon’s study, to the Quarter-Deck of the Pequod, to Plankton’s Chumbucket helmets, it’s a fascist fantasy. Sam Pickering, (upon whose teaching at the elitist Montgomery-Bell Academy in Nashville Tom Schulman based the Keating character in DPS), was politely horrified by his side-long encounters with “Celebrity,” writing that to allow himself to be swept up in the force of the movie’s influence would be to deny the smaller, but equally real forces and connections made his own writing and teaching.
Over-looked in comparison to “Dover Beach” and Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gipsy” counts as an early example of dark academia. Using an old story recounted by one of the guys who inspired Cotton Mather to persecute witches, it precisely satirizes the drive to sacrifice all wordly connections for a witchcraft of influence that would either secure patronage or make the pursuit of it irrelevant. “Scholar Gipsy” (and the Harry Potter series, and R.F. Kuang’s work, for that matter) shows that western academic institutions have long had a constitutive fascination for fascist dreams of influence.
But, Roger Waters’ paranoia notwithstanding, education ain’t influence. Because education—literally defined as the activity of revealing paths—opens paths and provides the tools and techniques to follow, or try to follow, or make new paths, tools, and technologies. You can label it however you want: Freirean, bell hooks, or constructivist, but the point, i’d suggest, comes to this: to quote another obscure song, We “make energy matter.” Institutions and agents in our cultures have fought for centuries to hide this basic truth from us. When we study reading, and engage in the work of detecting, amplifying and representing encoded feelings and ideas, these processes allow us to make and re-make our selves. Patronized agents of empires developed conventional metaphors of influence that deny and obscure our ability to do these things, in part because of their willed ignorance of the processes involved. All of us having “a receiver inside my head” (& “a transmitter”) might not be exactly what David Byrne and Thom Yorke had in mind when they were drawn to the phrase “Radio Head,” but . . . imagining us as receivers and transmitters might help transform education into a making that respects the individuality and agency involved in our attempts to “leave the land of noise” and make “the sound of a brand-new world” (“Radio Head”)