Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the Power of Language

3. Material Voices: Tourette Syndrome, Neurobiology, and the Affect of Poetry

71 The neural bases of human language are intertwined with other aspects of cognition, motor control, and emotion. —Philip Lieberman, Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain The “I” of the lyricist . . . sounds from the depth of his being: its “subjectivity” in the sense of modern aestheticians is a fiction. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy In this chapter, I examine the relationship of poetry to the neurobiological condition known as Tourette syndrome in order to describe a kind of physiological materialism that situates itself within the hierarchy of levels of organization I examined in the preceding chapter. Tourette syndrome is clearly an organic condition that involves, among other symptoms, the seeming emotion-charged use of language, the spouting forth of obscene language that, as researchers note, “may represent ,” among other symptoms, “a common clinical expression of underlying central nervous system dysfunction” (Fahn and Erenberg 1988, 51).1 That Tourette syndrome entails the automatic outpouring of emotionally charged uses of language allows us to situate it within an evolutionary framework. In The Descent of Man, Darwin notes the ubiquity of music and impassioned speech in all known cultures and argues that “these facts with respect to music and impassioned 3. Material Voices: Tourette Syndrome, Neurobiology, and the Affect of Poetry 72 Material Voices speech become intelligible to a certain extent, if we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by our half human ancestors, during the season of courtship” (cited in Mithen 2006, 178). That “impassioned speech” was selected for its adaptive capabilities suggests that the dysfunction of such speech in Tourette syndrome could be understood within a biological–evolutionary framework as well as the biophysiological frame I foreground in this chapter. The language of Tourette syndrome—with its rhymes, echoes, and strong rhythms—seems to me to be the very kind of “vocal gestures” that Steve Mithen traces in the evolution of language through music. Finally, the fact that poetry takes up many of the resources of the impassioned phonic or linguistic behavior of Tourette syndrome originating in the subcortical—or what many call the “reptilian”— brain suggests a third possible level of understanding the material phenomena of Tourette syndrome. The uncanny verbalizations of Tourette syndrome, as David Morris (among many others) has argued, are apparently connected “to subcortical structures [of the brain] that permit them to tumble out unbidden , like a shout or cry” (1998, 170). Poetry also, in the description of A. J. Greimas, attempts to create the “meaning-effect” of a “primal cry,” an “illusory signification of a ‘deep meaning,’ hidden and inherent in the plane of expression,” in the very sounds of language (1970, 279; my translation). Language, as neuroanatomy has demonstrated, involves various regions of the brain, especially the Broca area in the frontal region of the neocortex and the Wernicke area in the posterior area of the cortex. Both the cortex and neocortex have been consistently associated with more abstract modes of reasoning .2 But subcortical regions of the brain, especially the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the basal ganglia—regions that have been called our reptilian brain because humans and other primates inherit them from earlier and less complex life forms—have also been associated with language (see Lieberman 2000). Studies in experimental neurobiology have closely correlated these areas of the reptilian or “old brain” with motor activity, basic instincts, and emotions. Poetry, I contend, in its more or less intentional and willful activity , calls upon all of these neurological resources of language—so that in poetry, as in the neurobiology of language more generally, the strict distinction between language and motor activities is less and less apposite. This contention, I believe, is illuminated by an examination of Tourette syndrome in its more or less unintentional and Material Voices 73 impulsive activity. Just as the facial tattoos of Maori warriors create the “effect” of the facial signaling of aggression (McNeill 1998, 302), which is part of the behaviors of many primate species and has clearly been associated with cortical and subcortical regions of the brain (especially the amygdala, the seat of emotions in primates containing what researchers describe as “face-responsive [neuronal] cells” [Aggleton and Young 2000, 113; see also Emery and Amaral 2000, 179]), so poetry creates the effect of the vocal signalings of primates, which, it seems clear, manifest themselves involuntarily in Tourette syndrome. In this chapter, I argue that the conventions and resources of poetry...