əliʃə bɛθ

Out Of Our Heads: Philip Shepherd On The Brain In Our Belly

“Our culture has been intolerant of attempts to reclaim this lost center of consciousness. In the early 1900s a Chicago anatomist named Byron Robinson wrote a book called The Abdominal and Pelvic Brain in which he describes the neurology of an independent brain in the gut. His work was quickly forgotten — it had no relevance to our cultural story. Then, in the late 1920s, Johannis Langley mapped out the autonomic nervous system. He said there were three divisions: the sympathetic, the parasympathetic, and the enteric. The enteric nervous system, which governs the gastrointestinal functions, is exactly what Robinson called the “abdominal brain.” Langley’s book became a classic, but the enteric nervous system was widely ignored, and students were taught that the autonomic nervous system has just two divisions.

Finally, in the 1960s, Dr. Michael Gershon rediscovered the brain in the gut. In his book The Second Brain he describes how it took him fifteen years of presenting his research and answering refutations before his fellow neuro­scientists capitu­lated and agreed that the neuro­mass in the belly is indeed an independent brain. [Gershon is a professor of pathology and cell biology at Columbia 
University. — Ed.]

Robinson, who first discovered the pelvic brain, was much freer in his assessment of its importance than scientists are today. He talked about it as the “center of life.” I completely agree with that. It is the center of one’s being.”

-Amnon Buchbinder’s interview with Philip Shepherd

Tools for Conviviality

[Ivan] Illich offers the telephone as an example of a tool that is “structurally convivial” (remember, this is in the days of the ubiquitous public pay phone): anyone who can afford a coin can use it to say whatever they want. “The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with — or protect — the privacy of their exchange.”

A “manipulatory” tool, on the other hand, blocks off other choices. The automobile and the highway system it spawned are, for Illich, prime examples of this process. Licensure systems that devalue people who have not received them, such as compulsory schooling, are another example. But these kinds of tools, that is, large-scale industrial production, would not be prohibited in a convivial society. “What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods and services, but the balance between those tools which create the specific demands they are specialized to satisfy and those complementary, enabling tools which foster self-realization.” 

—Suzanne Fischer

Hold the Landscape Culpable

“…part of our mission is to imagine the urban landscape as the cultural equivalent of a crime scene and a scientific subject; to seek out the landscape as a “person of interest” in our investigations; to hold the landscape culpable. Walter Benjamin, in his assessment of Baudelaire’s flaneurism, referred to such a thing as ‘botanizing on the asphalt.’ In doing this, so runs the artistic conceit, we can capitalize on the visible representations of the neighborhood’s sins and glories, and step back to imagine a mythological pantheon of characters, actions, and sites that more truly represent its Truths, rather than merely its Facts.

To do this, we walked.”

—Justin Hopper

The object retreats, fast

as my quickening.

Or is it the other way

around? You,

I love, are bigger than. Bigger, certainly,

than me. Blurred without spill. 

Does love itself eclipse? 

Hides it’s face just

as I begin

to pronounce it. 

As the artist said, seeing

is forgetting it’s name.

Where are you going?

Where are you going?

Seeing Performance

“One important thing that’s never been done until now is to prepare the public how to see performance,” [Abramovic] says.

But Alaina Claire Feldman, exhibitions assistant at Independent Curators International and another Summer School participant, disagrees. “I don’t think it’s necessary, because I don’t think there’s one way to prepare yourself for a performance or for art,” argues Feldman. “Every performance is subjective, based on the person who is experiencing it. And sometimes, yeah, you need to clear your head to experience something, but sometimes you also need your head to be full of things and full of your own personal history so that when you experience something it can be more full,” Feldman says, rather than less.

“Seeing Performance: The Marina Abramovic Way”, by Jen Ortiz