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What has feminism got to do with the microstructure of
cognition (in other words, with connectionism)? By the end
of this book I was convinced that the relationship could be
a promising one if the 'compulsively naturalizing
antiessentialism' of feminism came to terms with the
different way of figuring the neurology in cognition that
Wilson is exploring here, inspired in particular by Freud's
Project for a Scientific Psychologyvia Derrida. To
put it in Wilson's unfailingly subtle and critically refined
language:
Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of
Cognition by E.A. Wilson was published by Routledge:New York and
London in 1998.
Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure
of Cognitionby Elizabeth Wilson
Wendy Hollway Situated at the nexus – at once unlikely
and overdetermined – of cognitive psychology,
deconstruction, psychoanalysis and feminism, this book takes
recent developments in connectionist theory as the means by
which a number of questions can be asked not only about
cognition, the brain and psychology, but also about the
politics of feminist-critical interventions in contemporary
scientific psychology' (p5).
Connectionist theories offer a refiguring of cognition which
goes beyond any simple location of cognitive processes in
the brain, while retaining the neurological facets of
connectionism as 'indispensable to rethinking cognition,
psyche, and biology' (p13). '(C)onnectionist models figure
cognitive processing as the spread of activation across a
network of interconnected, neuron-like units. It is the
connections between these units, rather than the units per
se, that take on the pivotal role in the functioning of the
network' (p6).
If you are beginning to lose interest – this is a
Humanities journal you're reading after all – just hang
on in, because you are probably caught up in the 'usual
theoretical habits and procedures' (p1) which, Wilson
argues, are profoundly problematic in the concept of gender,
as feminism has come to shape it. She points out that the
body at the centre of social, cultural, experiential and
psychical discourses is 'curiously abiological' (p14). She
notices how feminist psychology's take-up of the body
addresses only women's reproductive body (the difference
from men) and quotes Kirby's reminder of other biological
matter: "peristaltic movements of the viscera, the
mitosis of cells, the electrical activity that plays across
a synapse, the itinerary of a virus" and wants readers
to open their minds to the possibility that it is in these
neutral zones that current feminism 'may gain its most
effective political purchase on biology' (p18).
Much of the book is concerned with a meticulous, subtle and
creative critique of the traditions of cognitive and
neuropsychology, philosophy of mind, deconstruction,
feminism and critical theory which have repeatedly got drawn
into a biological reductionism: 'There has been a
persistent deflection of neurological explanations of
psychological or behavioural attributes on the grounds that
such explanations are a priori reductionist – not
simply anti psychological .. but asocial and acultural'
(p13). This reductionism is invariably equated with a
politically regressive stance. If critical and feminist
theory can redirect our critical habits and procedures 'so
that biology and neurology are not the natural enemies of
politics .. then we will find a greater productivity in
biology than theories of gender would lead us to believe'
(p62).
This is a tall order, and one that could be approached from
many angles. Wilson takes on the challenge that she sets
herself, however, in that she not only critiques this
dualistic order of things but takes on a refiguring of
neurology and its relation to the psyche. Following Grosz
and Kirby, she advocates 'readings of biological matter
wherein biology is thought as excess to the limits of
presence, location and stasis that theories of biological
determinism and theories of gender alike have ascribed to
it' (p65).
This reading takes off from the 'uncanny points of
convergence' (p133) between three approaches to cognition,
memory, the trace and psychical writing. These are Freud's
Project for a Scientific Psychology,Derrida's
reading of it and the recent connectionist theories of
cognition in psychology. Briefly (and the account is
scrupulously detailed and rigorous) '(w)hile the
neurological is usually thought of as the self-present
origin of the psyche, there is a strategic movement in all
three of these projects that disperses this origin through a
system of differences and deferrals' (p133).
Psychoanalysis, according to Wilson, may have been a product
of the division of neurology from psychology. Yet their
integration was a project that obsessed Freud, one which he
felt to have failed in. In the Project,Freud tried
to resolve the paradox that 'neurons are altered by
stimulation, yet they must also remain unaltered for future
stimulations' (p142). His insight was to see neuronal
effects as a function of differences, displacing the idea
that psychical action is inherent in the neuron and
replacing it with the idea that it is the effect of
differential anatomical placement. This idea, incomplete as
Wilson reveals it to be, 'gives us our first ... glimpse of
a critique of neuropsychological locationism' (p143), a
critique which is central to Wilson's argument. Derrida's
interpretation of Freud's idea of facilitation ('Bahnung',
otherwise translated as 'breaching') is informed by the
thesis 'that neuronal effect proceeds through difference and
deferral' (p145). As meaning is achieved through pure
(Saussurian) difference, so facilitation can be attributed
to the difference of facilitations, a delay as well as a
spacing: 'Différance, that ungraspable yet unerasable
difference between facilitations, is what constitutes the
psyche; it is difference and delay (différance) that
are at the origin' (p148). As a result the 'trace' ( a term
which is at the heart of cognitive psychology, but usually
reduces to an actual location in the brain, either
explicitly or implicitly) need not be an empirically fixed
entity, yet it is material, 'the effect of breaching and
somatic excitation'. In this way 'confounding both a
faithful scientism and a reactionary antineurologism, this
trace exceeds the logic of empiricism versus antiempiricism
by invoking an irreducible, non-present materiality'
(p149).
As in Wilson's reading of Freud and Derrida, I cannot go
into the detail of this connectionist model which the book
provides. The individual units in a connectionist system
function internally to propagate and transform activity in
the network, so have no representational status. For
example, the capacity of the networks to learn is explained
by modifications to weights as a result of previous
activations (p157). The idea moves away from the traditional
linear and sequential manner in which cognitive information
is expected to flow. Rules are implicit in the structure of
the network (there are no stored rules in a central
executive). Knowledge is distributed rather than local, and
not locatable, either cognitively or anatomically.
'(K)nowledge is stored in the spatial and temporal
differences between connection weights' (p160-1). 'Thus
there is a double displacement; from the locale of the unit
or store to the connection, and then again from the
connection to the spaces between connections' (p161-2).
Wilson goes on to argue
that the connectionist project
offers an occasion for a critique of a self-present,
originary, locatable psychical trace. Moreover this critique
is delivered (surprisingly) through the processes of
traditional scientific inquiry. Via connectionism, the
embodiment of the psyche is enacted not through present
cortical traces, but through the deferral and difference of
a material trace that is nowhere locatable. (p162)
In her concluding chapter, Wilson gives a brief example of
the potentially radical implications of such a revisioning
of the cognitive trace. She argues that Simon le Vay's
scientific claim 'that homosexual and heterosexual
identities have a neurobiological substrate' …
'constitutes neurocognitive matter as self-present and
originary' (p202-3). This is in contrast to the body in
queer theories, for example, which effect a 'displacement of
biological presence' (p203). Politically speaking, science
forecloses the idea of 'neurocognitive mobility' and
critical theory recoils from the neurological domain in
response. For Wilson, a breach, in contrast permits 'the
infraction of immobile boundaries and a displacement of the
fixed political-critical spaces they enact' (p204).
I have taken care to represent in hopefully faithful detail
Wilson's terrain and her argument because it is a powerful
challenge to the dualisms within which feminists (notably
feminist psychologists – of which I am one) tend to be
constrained. Elizabeth Wilson's thinking is shockingly
– and refreshingly – different. It covers an
immensely broad terrain. It remains impressively accessible.
Even the book's structure, whose coherence I questioned from
time to time, probably better reflects the subtle 'double
movement' she advocates, which glides between empiricism and
criticism, neuropsychology and psychoanalysis, without
relinquishing any of them, nor resolving their tensions. I
hope it inspires feminist psychologists, indeed feminist
anti-essentialists everywhere, to think the body
biologically as well.
Wendy Hollway, Reader in Gender Relations, School of
Psychology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
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