robert lee scott

Music: The Late Great Daniel Johnson (2004)

Last week my advisor, Robert Lee Scott, came for a visit. By all accounts it was a good time. We hung out at Barry's, went to museums, had margaritas at the Oasis, had a potluck at my house, and rounded out the visit with a Last Supper on Easter Eve. Jesus didn't come (he was hung up, apparently). Here is a photo gallery that chronicles Scott's visit. Featured is dinner at Barry's, a visit to Lake Travis at the Oasis, bar time at the Carousel, dinner at Fonda San Migeul, a trip to the Herb Gardens at Fredericksburg, wine tasting in the Texas Hill Country, photography exhbit, potluck at Joshie Juice's, final dinner at Barry's . A picture of Psappho with her preventative clown gear is thrown in for a bit of comic relief.

Of course the exigency for Scott's visit (in other words, the ruse) was a talk that he delivered to the department on Friday. Before he began I'm delighted to report it was standing room only in the LBJ Conference Room. The title of Scott's talk was "An Aesthetic Turning: Body Through Which the Dream Flows." In the talk Scott argued for more scholarship that investigated the relationship between speech/rhetoric and the brain, and detailed newer ways of understanding social constructivitism with the "news" of cognitive neurobiology. Scott also addressed "postmodernism" in respect to his celebrated essays, "On Viewing Rhetoric As Epistemic" and "On Viewing Rhetoric As Epistemic: Ten Years Later." From what I understood, Scott didn't see what he was arguing in the 70s as all that different from what so-called pomo scholars are arguing today. The big caveat here, however, is that one must take cognition studies seriously (a point Zizek also makes in his recent book).

I'm not terribly certain what I think about this push toward our colleagues in the brain sciences. Celeste Condit made a similar case in her Carroll Arnold lecture at NCA some years ago. I think the difference between Condit and Scott on the issue is ethics: Scott seems taxed with the ideological imperative underwriting brain research (capitalism, the invention of dis-ease, and so on). I also get the (uneasy) sense that Condit's call for common cause with the biologistic horde is something like the tail wagging the dog (funding and grants, anyone?).

And I have a second reservation, which I voiced in the form of a question after Scott's talk: what's so terribly wrong with dualism? I mean, everyone knows that it is naughty to maintain a dualistic line—but why? Why is what Scott advocates not simply, to carp on an Ed Schiappa-style turn of phrase, "sophisiticated dualism?" It seems to me that if most of us agree that Searle on mind/body is really full of shit---that we'll never be able to understand why red is loud as a trumpet, though Searle has faith!---then we must admit of some fundamental, ontological dualism, a dualism that helps to explain how language colonizes the body.

Finally, a throwaway: if we're really going to theorize "body" we have to look at all of it, not just the brain. Shit is body too!