my mind on books

I recently read Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History by Ross Hamilton (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which surprisingly turned out to have a lot to do with changing concepts of the self in Western culture, from Aristotle to postmodernism. I had some difficulty following the argument in this densely woven academic text, so it was something of a relief to find my response echoed by Terry Eagleton’s review:

“But there are times when the subject threatens to disappear under this imposing weight of learning, only to re-emerge just when one thought it had sunk without trace. Hamilton does not keep a sharp enough eye on the storyline. There is a grand narrative struggling to get out of this study, which is the mysterious tale of the disappearing substance.”

Here is a quote from Hamilton’s conclusion that sort of sums up and perhaps gives a flavor of the book:

“we can point to shifts in the value assigned to aspects of accident that demarcate a series of important attitudinal domains: The reign of substance as the enduring quality with respect to accident lasted into the eighteenth century. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a shift occurred from seeking qualitative resemblances to the exploration of differences. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a second shift replaced the retrospective sense of self with anticipatory self-structuring and gave primacy to inwardly determined self-definition. A third shift, one that began in the twentieth century and is accelerating rapidly, sacrificed the claim of a substantive self. According to critics like Foucault or Virilio, this movement threatens to extinguish the self completely.” (p. 301)

After the jump there are some notes from my reading… (more…)

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom (Doubleday Business, 2008)

Product Description
How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in today’s message-cluttered world? An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle? Or do our buying decisions take place below the surface, so deep within our subconscious minds, we’re barely aware of them?

In BUYOLOGY, Lindstrom presents the astonishing findings from his groundbreaking, three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study, a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy. Among his finding:

Gruesome health warnings on cigarette packages not only fail to discourage smoking, they actually make smokers want to light up.

Despite government bans, subliminal advertising still surrounds us – from bars to highway billboards to supermarket shelves.

“Cool” brands, like iPods trigger our mating instincts.

Other senses – smell, touch, and sound – are so powerful, they physically arouse us when we see a product.

Sex doesn’t sell. In many cases, people in skimpy clothing and suggestive poses not only fail to persuade us to buy products – they often turn us away .

Companies routinely copy from the world of religion and create rituals – like drinking a Corona with a lime – to capture our hard-earned dollars.

Filled with entertaining inside stories about how we respond to such well-known brands as Marlboro, Nokia, Calvin Klein, Ford, and American Idol, BUYOLOGY is a fascinating and shocking journey into the mind of today’s consumer that will captivate anyone who’s been seduced – or turned off – by marketers’ relentless attempts to win our loyalty, our money, and our minds. Includes a foreword by Paco Underhill.

The author’s website has chapter summaries and more.

“Buyology Roundup” at Neuromarketing collects reactions to the book.

Origins of Human Communication (Bradford Books) by Michael Tomasello (MIT Press, 2008)

Product Description
Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction.

Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices.

Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans’ cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.

This book is based on the Jean Nicod Lectures for 2006; outline, videos and handouts are available here.

Book review at Babel’s Dawn, plus two additional posts (found via Neuroanthropology)

Tom Pettitt of the Institute for Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark, spoke at UC Berkeley Tues. Oct. 21 on “Closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Renaissance of Pre-Modern Media and Mindwork.” The idea of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis” is that the cultural dominance of print is coming to an end, and postmodern media culture is in many ways similar to the pre-modern oral tradition. Therefore mediaeval studies may have some relevance to contemporary media studies.

The Gutenberg era is characterized by the concept of the “free-standing, complete in itself item” which is associated with values of isolation, autonomy, integrity, and stability. This is reflected, for example, in a view of the body as a container or envelope, in contrast to the pre- and post-parenthetical view of the body as articulated, made up of limbs and joints.

The University of Southern Denmark has a “Gutenberg Parenthesis Research Forum.”

We may be in the best of both worlds right now, since certainly books have become so much more accessible than ever before, both in finding out about books to read and the ability to procure them.

For the textually oriented here are some of the books referred to by Prof. Pettit:

Peter Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (2006)

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents) (1982)

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962)

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (originally published in 1994)

Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, eds., Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (2000)

Karin Littau, Theories of Reading (2006)

Guillemette Bolens, La logique du corps articulaire (2000)

Plus a website – The Pathways Project by John Foley: “The major purpose of the Pathways Project is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the internet.”