I recently had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Raymond Tallis as part of our
open lecture series at the University of Kent. I've followed Tallis for some time, and whilst picking through his latest -
Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinities and the Misrepresentation of Mankind (2011) - a lively attack on, among other things, neurohumanities interpretation, I was reminded of the work of John Onians. Almost a year ago now I had the curious pleasure of seeing Onians speak on the topic of 'Towards a neuroarthistory of the twentieth century' at the KIASH Annual Lecture, again at UKC. Confused, baffled and concerned by his reduction of art to neural stimuli, I immediately rushed out (aka logged on to Amazon) and ordered a copy of his book.
Once the Post Office had done their bit, I plunged into this mysterious world of 'neuroarthistory' and by the conclusion of Onians' introduction I became acutely (and pleasantly) aware that something was amiss. Over the comings months I discussed things at length with a friend who knew more about such things than I (Matthew Thomas, currently studying an MSc in Human Evolution & Behaviour at University College London; follow his musings at
http://tangledwoof.wordpress.com/), and clear cracks in Onians' thesis started appearing. Agitated I furiously constructed the following response.
A short caveat. This was a work of catharsis, designed as a means of exhaling the thoughts that were swirling around my mind at the time. It was not designed to be published. And it has not been edited for some months. This then, is snapshot of my mind in late-August/early-September 2010 (when, I must add, I probably should have been spending my time finishing my PhD thesis... and for those who are concerned, fear not. PhD was submitted on time and successfully viva'd). As such there are some aspects of this I would probably change now. And add to. Nonetheless it is a good starting point, and a useful document of how, where and why my life as a neurohumanties skeptic began.
REVIEW
Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki
John Onians
Yale University Press, 2008
Pp 225. US$40·00. ISBN-978-0-30012-677-8
As it's title suggests, Onians' book has the bold aim of synthesising 'hard' scientific knowledge with the somewhat 'softer' realm of art history. Such work has only recently been made possible, as Onians argues in his introduction, our understanding of the brain has progressed so rapidly in the last third of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries that cultural constructs, the world of signifiers (and signifieds), are no longer sufficient to explain the processes by which works of art were and are created and experienced. 'The use of neuroscientific knowledge as an aid to the study of art', Onians triumphantly writes, 'is now an established practice'. [9]
Onians' positivism is hardly surprising. It was he who coined the term 'Neuroarthistory' in 2005, and the present volume pursues such an application of neuroscientific principles to art developed first in his postgraduate teaching at the University of East Anglia and second in his collaboration with Semir Zeki, the Professor of Neurobiology turned founder of 'Neuroaesthetics' at University College London.
This multidisciplinarity has not gone unnoticed, or indeed passed without significant critique. Raymond Tallis, Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester, had led a fierce resistance against such scholarly behaviour. For Tallis, writing in the
Times Literary Supplement in a response to A. S. Byatt's neural deconstruction of John Donne's poetry in the same publication, Onians (although not mentioned due to the near simultaneous publication of their work) would be considered not as a pioneering innovator but as one of the growing number of so-called 'neuroscience groupie[s]'. Reductionist, professionally exploitative and prone to 'overstanding', these writers Tallis contends deal in 'neurospeculation, not neuroscience' and in doing so marginalise the rich networks of context and understanding which enliven humanities scholarship. As Tallis concludes [link
here]:
Neuroaesthetics is wrong about the present state of neuroscience: we are not yet able to explain human consciousness, even less articulate self-consciousness as expressed in the reading of reading and writing of poetry. It is wrong about our experience of literature. And it is wrong about humanity.
As a sub-discipline of neuroaesthetics we would expect Tallis to hold similar reservations about the veracity and utility of neuroarthistory [a small interjection from present me is required here, as, unbeknown to me, Tallis had indeed made a significant pop at Onians at the time I was writing this: see
here]. Indeed this essay argues that like Byatt, Onians' thesis suffers fundamentally from a similar misunderstanding of the 'present state of neuroscience'. But before discussing how
Neuroarthistory offers a salutary lesson for historians and humanities scholars on the dangers of appropriating neuroscience (and indeed emergent 'hard' scientific processes in general) for their purposes, it is worth outlining the positive values of Onians' study.
Onians makes his aims very clear from the outset. 'The last of our authors, Semir Zeki, claims that artists are often neuroscientists without knowing it. This book', he continues, 'makes a similar claim for writers on art' [13]. Irrespective of the neuroscientific problems associated with this claim, the formulation of his argument is refreshing and at times compelling. His structure involves brief, segmented discussions on the works of major thinkers on art (including notable chapters on Josef Goller, Ernst Gombrich, and Michael Baxandall) covering a period from Aristotle to present day. What is innovative within this chronology is Onians' invocation of theorists not traditionally associated with art, such as Kant, Marx and Freud, and his exploration of how these men (there are lamentably no women) all displayed an underlying and cumulatively developing concern with how the (sub)conscious brain shaped the production of art. Each may have lived in different era of medical and scientific knowledge, but all were keen to postulate on the brains role because they (rightly so, Onians argues) suspected the function of the brain would ultimately (at times read: inevitably) unlock the 'secrets' of art. This synthesis of close readings from works produced by these unlikely actors is achieved with relative ease (with or without the neuroscientific baggage), begging the question of why this position had not been reached previously.
Problems however start to arise, as hinted above, when Onians moves from these more traditional methods of intellectual enquiry into regarding the theorists under discussion as the 'neural subjects' [14] he promises to in his introductory gambit. Although Onians does display caution regarding the fixity of the scientific foundations underpinning neuroarthistory – 'it will constantly change as the knowledge on which it is based is expanded, reinterpreted and revised […] today's knowledge easily degrades into tomorrow's opinion and error' [17] – such comments are at odds with the tenor of his account.
Indeed the closest Onians comes to the tendentious reductionism Tallis accuses Byatt (and neuroaesthetics in general) of is in his neural explanations of how the theories his subjects wrote were arrived at. Passages of this nature conclude each chapter and centre around how environmental factors shaped not the outlook of each subject but there actual neural networks. To do so, Onians invokes the concept of 'neural plasticity' (more on which later), the impact of which he understands thus:
The organ that we rely on for every one of our bodily actions, feelings and thoughts is liable to have its structure affected by all such activities and indeed by all our passive sensory experiences, whether conscious or unconscious.
In short, for Onians every human experience (and more so those from earlier in our lifespans, our formative years) shapes our brains due to the fundamental 'plasticity' of our neural connections.
Thus in his discussions of Goller, Onians makes the perfectly plausible claim that Goller's theory of architecture was ground-breaking because improvements in train travel allowed him to not only see a variety of architectural styles, and hence a wide range of 'data', but to see them in more rapid succession than was ever before possible. Even his modestly neuroscientific claim that Goller 'would have unconsciously become more and more sensitive to patterns of variation through time and from place to place' is thoroughly explainable using 'traditional' non-neurological methods. What is most problematic however is when Onians pushes this neurological reading into territory only his neuroscientific/neuroaesthetic framework can explain, such as his claim that:
As he [Göller] went from city to city, from building to building, he would have unconsciously experienced the formulation of a plethora of memory images in his own brain. [113]
Onians use of neuroscientific theory reaches it's most questionable however in a chapter on Baron Charles Montesquieu. Having explained, through close textual reading, the primacy Montesquieu gives to climate in his theory of art, Onians notes unproblematically that:
Montesquieu's perception of difference had certainly been sharpened by his travels, but his sense of significance of climate and terrain must have a more precise source.
It is here Onians makes one his most startling claims, one which ultimately illustrates the weakness of his neuroscientific theory. He writes:
The principal origin of his [Montesquieu's] wealth was wine growing, where weather and soil were the predominant determinants of success. Constantly at the back of his mind, their role, like that of other factors, slowly became clear to him as he accumulated his data […] Principles, such as the influence of climate and terrain, had emerged only after looking again and again at the materials he had collected. In his wine grower's brain such factors were already important; so it was easy for data in other areas to become related to them, slowly forming a pattern. His ideas had not been imposed on the data. They had grown naturally like vines and the neural networks in which they took shape. [69]
Obviously to explain Montesquieu's theories through the neurological experience of wine growing is ambitious, and raises issues I will leave more experienced readers of Montesquieu to problematise. What is important for the purposes of this paper is that even if we take Onians explanation of current neuroscience as fact these claims seem questionable. Moreover if we pull away their neuroscientific foundations, the whole thesis quickly crumbles.
It is worth reiterating at this point that I am aware that Onians clearly states that he knows the neuroscientific knowledge behind neuroarthistory is liable to change and in the process make neuroarthistorical writings obsolete. Considering this, his taking on of such an endeavour must be applauded. What is problematic, and what I will now move on to show, is that not only has the neuroscience underpinning of Onians' work been challenged since the publication of
Neuroarthistory, but it was far more unstable at the time of writing than he recognises. This, I argue, seems to stem from Onians' (fundamentally problematic) positivist perception of scientific knowledge.
The 'plasticity' or 'neuroplasticity' which Onians relies upon, for example, does indeed mean something close to his definition (see above) in scientific parlance. Yet however 'scientific' this definition sounds it means little more, as Vaughan Bell writes, than 'something in the brain has changed', and thus says little about the impact of environmental experience on theories of vision and art. As Bell continues [link
here]:
The latest refrain in popular science is that ‘your brain is plastic’, that experience has the potential to ‘rewire’ your brain, and that many previous mysteries in cognitive can be explained by ‘neuroplasticity’. What they don’t tell you is that these phrases are virtually meaningless.
Indeed as a recent critique of WEIRD(Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)-centric behavioural generalisations suggests, it is insufficient to register human difference via a “call and response” dynamic between brain and environment. Here the far more complex dynamic of 'behavioural plasticity' is preferred, as it responds to:
Different environments, epigenetic effects, divergent trajectories of cultural evolution, and even the differential distribution of genes across groups in response to divergent evolutionary histories.
[Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan (eds.), 'The weirdest people in the world?' (2010)
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 33, Issue 2-3, June 2010 pp 61-83; 78 - link
here]
Similarly the concept of 'mirror neurons', central to Zeki's theses and crucial to Onians' understanding of how the brain replicates experience, is far from unchallenged. In short 'mirror neurons' are used to describe the phenomenon, first hypothesised in the 1980s by observations upon macaque brains and quickly imported into understandings of the human brain, of neurons in the motor cortex (ventral premotor cortex) which 'fire' both when the animal/human performs a gesture (say picking up a piece of chalk) and when they see the same gesture being performed. This theory has since proven extremely influential, not least because it purports to hold the proverbial key to learning by sitting alongside pre-existing simulation theory and concepts of neuroplasticity.
But mirror neurons are far from unproblematic. The backlash against their existence may have arrived too late to alter
Neuroarthistry, but Onians' statement that 'soon it was realised that humans have even richer neural resources for mirroring' [6-7] is not only vague but represents a crude and ascientific leap between macaques and humans. As the above mentioned paper by Henrich et al. notes, scientists had argued for some time that transferring a biological trait of one species to humans underplays the impact of 'culture-gene coevolution [that] has dramatically shaped human evolution in a manner uncharacteristic of other species' [79]. Or as Tallis writes 'we are different from animals in every waking moment of our lives […] But if we deny this (invoking chimps etc) even in the case of creativity – and the appreciation of works of art – then no distance remains'.
By raising these issues I am not simply criticising Onians for getting his neuroscience 'wrong'. Indeed I warmly congratulate him for attempting, however problematically, to synthesise neuroscience with humanities research. Instead the lesson to be taken from Onians' approach to science is not his mistakes, but his erroneous tendency towards fixity and the cumulative power of science. At no point are the above questions, concerns and debates addressed with respect to scientific principles fundamental to his conclusions, and in their place we are told of the 'surprising precision' with which scientists understand our 'neural resources' [xii]; contestation is not addressed, instead neuroscience is marked by words and phrases such as 'contributing', 'agreed', 'common concern', [5] 'accumulation of knowledge' [5, 7], and 'gradual improvement in the understanding' [12]. To some extent this is true. Knowledge of the brain has improved vastly in the last four decades. However by seeing agreement where there is in fact vigorous debate, Onians is led into making very reductionist and vague statements of scientific 'fact' and the utility of those facts for his study:
The particular strength of neuroarthistory is its ability to reconstruct the unconscious intellectual formation of the makers, users and viewers of art. [13]
The subjectivity of the individual is not, as some have argued, just a social construct. It is embodied in the brain […] Throughout an individual's life it manifests itself in his or her actions, thoughts and products, and, since all the experiences a persons has during their life are liable to affect the formation of their neural networks, to the extent that those experiences can be reconstructed, the subjectivity they produce can also be reconstructed hundreds or even thousands of years after the person in question has died. [14-15]
Indeed the treatment in
Neuroarthistory of Onians' chief influence, Samir Zeki, is particularly revealing. Towards the conclusion of
Inner Vision (1999) Zeki writes:
We have little knowledge of what brain areas are involved in the powerful subjective feelings that the painting [Jan Vermeer's, Girl with a Pearl Earring] arouses, or how these brain areas interact to give us an overall impression of the painting. We are therefore still ignorant of much about the workings of the visual brain, and above all of the neurological basis of beauty. Our ignorance should not, however, detract from the very considerable achievements that allow us to pinpoint with an unimaginable accuracy the brain areas without which all the beauty of portrait painting would simply not exist. [181]
Here Zeki invokes discussions earlier in his book of how specific aspects of vision (colour, facial recognition) are disabled by damage to specific areas of the human brain. Hence he does not claim to understand what these areas we have 'pinpoint[ed] with an unimaginable accuracy' are fully capable of, rather that we simply know their basic functional capacity. Zeki's rhetoric is thus cautious, a sentiment extended in his epilogue where he remarks:
It is quite true that we know almost too little about the brain, and certainly not enough to account in neurological terms for aesthetic experience. [217]
Onians dismisses these humble, cautionary concluding remarks as 'embarrassing' [203], a pertinent indication of his attitude to science for it is the very same tentative rhetoric and willingness to be wrong which the scientific community have applauded Zeki for and found refreshing about his work. To quote Vincent Walsh, Professor of Human Brain Research at University College London:
One of my scientific heroes is Semir Zeki. I think he's been substantially wrong on almost everything, but his contribution to science has been far bigger than those who haven't had the intellectual smarts or courage to put new ideas into the literature. This is no side swipe, I actually think Zeki should have shared the 1982 Nobel prize: he had completely rewritten the architecture of the visual cortex by 1978. The best most of us can hope for is to be fruitfully wrong – and you need to be damned clever and courageous to be so. I can only dream of getting things as intellectually wrong, but there's time.
['Q&A Vincent Walsh', Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 21, 17 November 2009, pp. 970-1 ]
What is interesting about this passage is not only that Zeki's neuroscience is subject to debate but that Walsh, like Zeki, sees being 'fruitfully wrong' as part of the scientists job. In contrast Onians may see it as part of his job, as a pioneer of neuroarthistory, to be similarly 'fruitfully wrong' but his discredits Zeki putting his own work in such an unstable category. As Onians writes:
It is poignant that, after nearly two and a half thousand years of writing on the topic [artistic activity], at the very moment when a wealth of knowledge allows it to be handled with a new level of precision and sophistication, one of the principle authors of the new knowledge has to apologise for his attempts to do just that. [203]
Where scientists see instability, Onians sees a fixity of knowledge. Indeed even fMRI scans, seen for so long as indicators of brain activity, have been subject to a recent backlash, 'the conceit that brain scans present an image of human cognition', writes Crawford, 'hold obvious attraction' which, he continues, is reinforced as much by cultural acceptance as scientific investigation. [Matthew B. Crawford, 'The Limits of Neuro-Talk,'
The New Atlantis, Number 19, Winter 2008]
Despite these problems
Neuroarthistory is a book of undoubted and admirable ambition. However what Onians describes as the 'defining feature' of his 'approach' (we are told categorically that it is 'not a theory'), namely it's 'readiness to use neuroscientific knowledge to answer any of the questions that an art historian may wish to ask', is misguided [17]. Although neuroscientific knowledge has potential to become a tool in the armoury of humanities scholars, at present the foundations of neuroscience are too unstable and too disputed to be of significant use, and to ignore this volatility, as Onians does, is not only erroneous but potentially dangerous. Indeed I was initially, although with some lingering reservations, convinced by the case made by
Neuroarthistory. Yet it took only a few enquiries with colleagues and friends to uncover the shaky foundations of Onians' approach and how his compelling prose and vital capacity for analytical description could cloud and distance the realities of neuroscience and neuroscientific debate from a less inquisitive reader.
Onians acknowledges in his introduction the different pace of scientific and humanities research, and hence the possibility of Neuoarthistory becoming obsolete faster than a 'traditional' work of art history might. This addition is welcome and Onians' bravery and ambition has and should continue to be applauded. Indeed as neuroscientific research continues his position may in fact be vindicated. There is already, for example, the potential (unexplored by Onians) to view the categorisation of the world by the brain alongside the societal urge to stereotype explored in Walter Lippmann's seminal
Public Opinion (1922) and the instinctive rationalising of physiognomic perception outlined by Ernst Gombrich ('On Physiognomic Perception', 1960). Nonetheless it should not be ignored that with a little probing the scientific foundations of
Neuroarthistory are shown to be far less secure than Onians appears to suggest they are, and thus without significant reappraisal and scaling back of its claims, Onians risks the discrediting of the approach he himself has founded. It is hoped then that in the remaining two books of this neuroarthistorical trilogy the imprecision of neuroscience and the debates over some of the key concepts he uses are addressed. Otherwise, regrettably, neuroarthistory must be considered little more than a pseudo-scientific deception.
