A subject that comes up briefly in the manuscript on which I’m working, but one I think I will be investigating further down the road.

There is an interesting synergy between new media studies and the study of the emergence of symbolic behavior or open communication systems. Part of this synergy is that the 90’s became the "decade of the brain," as well as the decade of the Human Genome Project, largely through the power of computing. In addition, fields such as cybernetics and robotics have contributed thoughtfully to this discussion of how modern human consciousness and symbolic behavior emerged. There has even been some speculation that these two events–humans developing a consciousness like ours and spoken/gestural languages like ours–may largely coincide.

If this were the case, it would certainly be significant evidence for understanding consciousness as a distributed rather than strictly internal phenomenon. Even if it is not the case, or remains undetermined, there is much to investigate in the communications of  early humans, as well as in the discourses of contemporary humans that undertake these investigations. What we seemingly know/believe is that according to the evidence we have, 80,000 years ago there is no evidence of symbolic behavior, but by 20,000 years ago there is evidence that such behavior is commonplace around the world. Somewhere during this period,  a "creative explosion," as it is sometimes called, took place that altered human consciousness and culture, sending us down the path to where we are today.

If there is any evidence in human existence for the "singularity" that futurists such as Ray Kurzweil discuss, it is this creative explosion: a technological event of such proportion as to transform humanity and send us hurtling down the path of history. Here is another tie-in with the present, as these futurists predict that we are inching toward another such singularity with the imminent emergence of machine intelligence.

I don’t know what to make of such claim. I guess if it happens, it happens. The hallmark of the singularity is that it becomes impossible to predict what will happen after it. This being the case, there’s no point in preparation. Feel free to assume Star Trek technotopia or Matrix technodystopia.

Anyway, one mode of rhetorical analysis available here is along the lines of cultural studies/rhetoric of science. Evolutionary psychologists (see my earlier post on Pinker), linguists, anthropologists, roboticists and so on often articulate their understanding of the consciousness and language in terms of information and information technology. This is especially the case when they are making efforts to speak to a broader audience. This is not unlike Freud’s reliance on steam-driven machines as a metaphor for unconscious drives. Furthermore, since we are talking about a kind of reverse engineering here (i.e. how did we get the brain we have?), it begins with the end point, us. Only problem is that we don’t have a clear sense of contemporary consciousness. As such, any speculation on how consciousness developed is tied into ideological concepts. For example, to ask the question, "how did we develop free will?" obviously presumes that we have "free will." Most of the real ideological issues at stake here are more subtle than that.

That kind of analysis is fine, but  I’m more interested in another less "critical" more productive, I think, mode, looking at the evidence itself through the lens of the theories with which I work. For example, National Geographic is running a program on this topic. In part of the program they discuss an excavation going on the shores of South Africa, where they have uncovered what appears to be jewelry made from snail shells colored with ocher. They have been dated to be 75,000 years old and represent the oldest decorative, symbolic objects we have discovered. Holes drilled into the shells indicate they were part of a bracelet or necklace. In short, they were a technology that served no immediate application, except perhaps to communicate something to someone else.

Now there are  many potential hypotheses about these painted snail shells.

• Perhaps there is some biological-cognitive-genetic impulse that manifests itself in artistic expression
• If the development of speech intensifies social organization and the importance of working in groups, then perhaps the jewelry signifies some social relationship or standing (much like it does today)
• perhaps the jewelry represented some commerce with a spirit world: a ward for example.

Or most obviously, all of these reasons and more. I am thinking about Deleuze and Guattari, or more precisely Massumi’s articulation of their theories of affect. One of the commonly noted important features of language is its grammar of propositional logic, of infinitely nesting propositions (e.g. I know that she knows that he knows that I know, etc). Symbolic behavior simultaneously allows us to grasp/apprehend and produce complex relations, not only within our human community but in the material world as well.

Massumi describes affect as a synaesthetic experience, a sensation crossing and eluding capture within any particular sense. Symbolic behavior, perhaps, becomes a way of apprehending, of organ-izing affect. There is no doubt that down the road people began to realize that a necklace or a speech could have rhetorical effect, that one could gain a social advantage through symbolic behavior. There is a strong predilection, it seems, to explain symbolic behavior as responding to the need for social organization. I think this reflects our contemporary Western prejudice of seeing rhetoric as secondary, as utilitarian.

However, I see the necklace as capturing a feeling. I don’t believe this is the same as saying that symbolic behavior began with "art," although we have a tendency to think of prehistoric drawings as art and there is at least one theory that language emerged from song. The term art reflects our modern cultural notions of communication, a generic separation of symbolic behaviors that doesn’t really apply here. Instead, I am suggesting that the necklace (as emblematic of the "first" piece of symbolic behavior)  constitutes the production/articulation/capture of symbolic thought from affective responses.

So I suppose that shows my hand (at least it reveals it in part to me). I want to approach paleorhetoric with this hypothesis. Symbolic behavior constitutes the embodied technological practice by which affects become articulated thoughts.

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