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9.3
526
19
Appendix
55
A2.
offers a comprehensive package of resources for
Output and aggregate demand
411
41
back of the book.
477
provides helpful
16
562
topic at a basic
Connect, through
Long-run total, marginal and average costs
14.4
214
Case
456
Appendix
126
141
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world and the way in which economics can make sense of it.
Online Learning Centre
page ii
An adjustable peg
Review questions
23.7
Representation in multilateral bodies
page xi
32
Long-run total, marginal and average costs
.
stretch yourself
441
554
Review questions
Chapter 20
Growth in the OECD
Maths
164
306
Portfolio selection
11.4
25.4
9.2
The relationship between short-run and long-run average costs
Trade patterns
Title
Summary
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529
Speculative attacks on fixed exchange rates
Portfolio Manager: Sabrina Farrugia
459
Review questions
Houses’ elasticity of supply
integrated into
235
19.2
16
Tools of economic analysis
The economics of happiness
550
Information and the digital economy
Micro and macro
348
17.3
Monetary control
4.4
Appendix
model in action
Endogenous growth
Why market structures differ
105
Chapter
Production in the long run
The cost of unemployment
355
23.7
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636
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and an entire new part on the digital economy.
29.6
177
334
575
159
22
28.4
These aim to show
Equilibrium inflation
634
604
30.1
We aim to show where economists agree – on what and for what reason – and
32
Internet and the elasticity of demand
229
243
economics helps us make sense of our changing world, think about where it
2 Penn Plaza New York, NY 10121. Copyright © 2020 by McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
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Portfolio Manager: Sabrina Farrugia
19
581
22.2
22.3
The demand for money
improves performance over a variety of critical outcomes. It gives lecturers
have acquired from
Appendix
Demand and supply curves
Money and its functions
The
9.8
477
101
illustrate economics in action.
215
Equilibrium output
32.9
Review questions
Maths
8
494
15.1
Connect also
Acknowledgements
Review questions
PART FOUR Macroeconomics
72
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Natural monopoly
19.5
13
What GDP measures
The long-run equilibrium real exchange rate
Review questions
195
207
8.8
24 Aggregate supply, prices and adjustment to shocks
14
economic principle can be applied in practice. There are four different types
14.4
Concept:
11.8
Other trade policies
assignments.
17.6
41
apply the
Chapter 13
6.5
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28 Open economy macroeconomics
2.10
311
348
Utility functions and indifference curves
1.1
7
Introducing supply decision
Appendix
some additional, more challenging, topics for you to explore.
Business cycles
UNDERSTANDING
28.2
Economic sovereignty
41
Maths
understand things is to test yourself. There are opportunities to do this in the
15
Review questions
44
26
Free markets and price controls
The costs of inflation
Production in the long run
Summary
21
Monetary and fiscal policy
23.4
model in action
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can set homework
596
Maths
120
Local government
6.3
8
Production, costs and supply
Tools of economic analysis
21
22
Concept
8
30.1
443
173
60
Activity
page v
range of videos.
11.8
routine problems and unforeseen circumstances. With practice, you will be
go to our tour of the resources on page xv.
minded you are. The best ideas are simple and robust, and can usually be
3.7
7.6
15.5
643
606
bc
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7
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18.9
Review questions
Equity and efficiency
Growth and accumulation
265
86
The costs of inflation
217
27.4
583
26
273
30.2
Our aim is to allow students to understand today’s economic environment.
465
160
30.1
Business organization
Summary
Demand, willingness to pay and
492
How to study
113
310
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transport costs, also explains trends towards globalization, and associated
Business organization
and
276
Activity
274
The policy mix
13.3
A fall in aggregate demand
Preface
627
xxiii
13.2
15
581
Equilibrium and adjustment in the market for capital services
34
is now
20.7
Chapter 16
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simultaneously of reason and feeling. Thus, there
is a mathematical sublime (that which is large
beyond all comparison) and a dynamic sublime
(by which one measures oneself against the spectacle of nature as a power threatening fragile
human existence). The sublime thus does not lie
within any part of Nature but only within our soul,
inasmuch as we can recognize ourselves as superior to Nature (Kant 1790).
Definitions of the sublime,h o w e v e r ,d on o t
stop with the eighteenth century. If the nineteenthcentury sublime found the world of symbols, the
twentieth-century version often referred to the metaphors of Lucretius, for whom the receiver of the
sublime can be compared to a spectator observing
a shipwreck (Blumenberg 1979). Comforted by
their own position of safety, the subject conserves
a certain emotional distance from that which they
observe, even if in horror, allowing themselves an
exclusively Aesthetic form of contemplation.
Within the sublime there thus exists a paradox
that we can summarize in the following manner:
“1. People avoid things that provide painful experiences and only pursue things that provide pleasurable experiences. 2. People have painful
experiences in response to putatively painful art
(e.g., tragedies, melodramas, religious works, sad
songs, and horror). 3. People pursue putatively
painful art . The paradox boils down to a simple
question: If people avoid pain then why do people
want to experience art that is painful? ” (Smuts
2009). In the history of Aesthetics there are at
least two main ways to solve this paradox: the
meta-response theory and the conversion theory.
The first states that terror and fear are negative
experiences which are effectively painful for the
subject experiencing them, while pleasure is a
meta-response to them. “[...] [T]he meta-response
is a recognition of our capacity to feel emotions
appropriately – to pity someone in a tragic situation”, stimulating our sense of humanity. This fact
arouses a meta-reaction in us: the satisfaction in
finding ourselves to be moral beings. According
to conversion theory, however, emotional activity
is pleasurable even if it is provoked by the sight of
ugly or imperfect objects, simply because it makes
us aware of a level of reality higher than ourselves
(Brady 2013).
Through re flecting on the representation of
ugliness and the sublime, Aesthetics responded
to an important question: can pleasure be found in
that which is unpleasant and, if so, how can one
understand the connection of judgment therein?
Both the sublime and the ugly share a sense of
painful tension; yet from a qualitative and quantiebookmass.com
tative point of view, the ugly is strikingly different
due to its resigned outlook, the lack of heroic
tendency and high-sounding ethical moments,
for its contained development of any form of
empathy. It is possible (indeed, this is the case
for many artists) to see connections with the caricature and grotesque within the ugly, even connections with the disgusting due to the profane
tension that animates it.
In our own period, “ugliness” is increasingly
an indicator of a vast range of artistic effects
whose features – even if they can be described –
are becoming increasingly blurred and uncertain.
Under the wide umbrella of the ugly we find a
complex and contradictory amalgam. Ever since
so-called beautiful art came to terms with the art
market, ugliness has become characterized as the
tawdry and vulgar, becoming increasingly similar
to kitsch.
Kitsch is a container of imitations that has to
serve the function of immediate pleasure. Prefabricated words, expressions, attitudes and situations used a 1000 times over: everything
becomes a cliché within a world of consolidated
conventions. Kitsch mimics. With an increasing
Platonic distance from the truth, it copies the
artifact and makes it available to everyone. For
the receiver, kitsch is a pleasing image that protects and intoxicates the present. Its opposite
extreme is not represented by the high-brow but
by all that which is simply mediocre (Greenberg
1939; Dor fles 1972).
Kitsch is to inauthenticity as art is to authenticity, even while maintaining the fact that not
even “great art ” can entirely lack bad taste precisely because every form of art contains “a minimum of convention, of the acceptance of pleasing
the client, from which no artist is immune ” (Moles
1971). Even today the hyper-production of kitsch
can be seen as a response to the uneasiness of the
common man or, in Moles ’ terms, to “the inability
Aesthetics 47
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of the average conscience, of the man of the
masses, to raise himself up, other than by gradual
steps, to the heights of man ’s philosophy, industry
and products, and to accept them as such ” (Moles
1971).
Reception
To view or receive means to enjoy or not enjoy
something and thus to find pleasure or displeasure
in it; it also means to taste, listen or to allow oneself
to be taken over by an emotion. Experiences,
whether or high or low levels of involvement,
imply two levels of investigation: a first, immediate
moment of experience (tasting, for example) and a
second that re flects on this experience, and which
in some way also creates distance from the object in
question (an analysis about that which one has
tasted, which often then leads to a judgment: “I
like it” or “I do not like it ”).
Our daily experience is filled with judgments
of taste cloaked in consciousness: “this is beautiful”, “that one ’s ugly. ” Due to the ease with
which we issue judgments, we are not aware of
its complexity. We are not aware of how much that
judgment depends on our history, our culture, our
educational backgrounds, the society in which we
live, on the visual, palatal or sonic taste in which
we are immersed, on subjective inhibitions, openings, and closures in relation to new experiences.
If we want to recall some of the issues that
taste raises, we should first ask ourselves if there
is only subjective taste of if it is possible to speak
of a norm or a rule for taste. If we establish that we
can speak of such a rule, we must then ask if it has
any normative or regulative value; i.e., if taste is a
question of immediacy or if it derives from a
thought that meditates on and recognizes an object
with a speci fic quality; and whether anyone is able
to make a judgment or if this is only the privilege
of the critic.
In the eighteenth century the need was felt to
have a de finition of taste. The century also saw
the development of the “critic” (and the birth of
the role of the art critic) who represents the “institutional” side of reception. At the basis of the
eighteenth-century investigation we find the
broadly shared presupposition according to
which – even if strongly compromised by sense
(sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) – pleasure is
shared; sharing thus becomes the basis for a common sense. Tasteseems to be a unity of individual
preferences that nevertheless coalesce and coagulate within a community that recognizes them (Du
Bos 1719). This claim to universality seems to
stand in contradiction with an entirely subjective
system of choice. The normative nature of the
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Enlightenment reflection on taste revealed in
the writings of German authors has a historic
origin in the relation to the precepts of good
taste in seventeenth-century France, as well as
conceptual roots in the shift form the use of the
term “taste” in its physiological dimension to a
figurative, intellectual use. The notion of taste is
in fact characterized by a normative value both
within its physiological version as well as in a
theoretical, cognitive sense. The basic question
for the normative nature of taste is represented
by the study of those elements that might make up
such norms (the faculty of the soul, of the imagination, intellect, reason; their functioning, the definition of the parameters of a correct faculty of
judgment) and by the problem of the normative
effectiveness of good taste and the role of elements considered as composing it (Hume 1757;
Kant 1790; Mazzocut-Mis 2012).
Through the multiplication of artistic languages over the twentieth century, taste was no
longer able to pose itself as a unitary point of
reference. Many avant-gardes (and neo-avantgardes) push against any exercise in taste that
attempts to center itself as an inter-subjective aesthetic judgment , opening themselves up instead
to the two polarities excluded by eighteenth-century judgment: the physiological – e.g., the artistic
field that stimulates visceral reactions in the spectator: the ugly, the sublime and disgust
(Menninghaus 2003) – and the more speci fically
intellectual – e.g., the horizon of conceptual art or
the ready-made (Danto 2003). The removal of
technique as a point of convergence for taste –
the value of a work inasmuch as a product of
manufacture is no longer an element under judgment – has slowly diminished the claim to universality from a critical-evaluative point of view.
48 Aesthetics
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There is, however, still another aspect to be
analyzed. Over the last 50 years, the problem of
reception has broadened our investigating psychological, sociological, physiological, and neurological horizons. The artistic universe thus
becomes on of emotions that can even be measured and validated from a psychological, psychiatric, or neurological point of view. Furthermore,
Aesthetics must now face the disciplinary challenges established by neuro-aesthetics, using its
own conceptual tools to shed light on the implicit
and unexplored claims of these disciplines without, nevertheless, being passively assimilated into
new cultural horizons. Over the 1980s, Aesthetics
has opened up to neuro-scienti fic research distinguished by the discovery of mirror neurons, a
particular class of visual-motor neuron situated
in the ventral premotor cortex (area F5) and in
the inferior parietal lobule of macaques and
humans alike, which has been attributed with the
development of information relating to the comportment of others. Mirror neurons activate when
we look at static images of actions or emotions
and even representations of objects of still lives,
which stimulate the mechanism of motor simulation, inducing the viewer to act as if the image
represented was effectively real. The success of
this discovery has not, nevertheless, radically
transformed research into the role of the viewer,
inasmuch as while it is true that the active cerebral
zones that allow us to appreciate a Picasso painting, these are the very same that allow us to look at
any kind of colored object. The question about
why and how we judge something to be beautiful,
ugly, sublime or kitsch, etc. remains (Chatterjee
and Vartanian 2016; Leder 2013).
What is the future of taste? This depends on
the constantly evolving object that is the work of
art. If it is true that it is no longer necessarily taste
that dictates the rules of art, it is also true that art
requires a public that dictates its rules, rules that
can be maintained or ignored. They are
maintained if there is a meeting with the masses
(as in kitsch) or ignored if the public is not the
main horizon of reference, as has been the case for
avant-gardes.
In order to understand tomorrow ’s viewer, we
must thus also wait for the art of the future, a form
of art that will move within reproduction, stereotyping and, perhaps, the development of new
technologies, and within the unique, unrepeatable
character of the here and now. Perhaps in the near
future even the method of reception will radically
change. That which probably will not change is
the method of expressing judgments of taste,
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whether more profound and re flective or super ficial and entirely a-temporal.
Creation
When one speaks about “creativity,” even if the
usual use of the word might seem well de fined,
one needs to bear in mind that we are dealing with
an expression that has changed its meaning over
the course of the centuries. It is a term that did not
appear in philosophy, theology or European art for
nearly a 1000 years: the Greeks had no corresponding term; the Romans did, but they did
not apply it to any of these three fields.
What is creativity then, and what is its connection to possibility?
Speaking about “genius” means, first and foremost, referring to an expressive field that, beyond
the aesthetic history of the concept, refers to subjective abilities made explicit in the production of
artistic objects. These abilities have, in various
ways, intersected with those oftastethat sometimes
are inseparable from them. The bond between
genius and the subject ’s inventive immersion can
be seen through different pathways which do not
always coincide, ranging from rhetoricto psychology and from poetry to theories of expression.
It was yet again in the eighteenth century, as
was the case with taste, that the need was felt to
conceptually de fine genius, beginning from its
poetic-rhetorical roots (Batteux 1747; Du Bos
1719). The artist (or, better still, the genius) interprets, develops and constructs through their confrontation with nature – in which they themselves
are rooted. The interpreter ’s vision is, or ought to
be, impersonal, and contains an attempt to put
subjective daily passions between brackets in
order to open a direct and universal relation
between perspective and the world. In this relation
(which is in itself representation), the “possible” is
Aesthetics 49
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formed, which is the artist ’s own choice. The artist
interprets nature, creating a “new nature ”, which
is itself the work of art (Gerard 1774). Genius is
thus not an unregulated power, but rather the
natural talent that gives art rules, constructing
“aesthetic ideas ” capable of animating the complexity of all subjective faculties (Kant 1790).
This complexity – and perhaps here we find the
aporetic conclusion of the entire journey of eighteenth-century aesthetic thought – which can no
longer be contained within a harmonious and regular framework.
Over the nineteenth century, the power of creativity widened out and genius was the flame that
fired up artists to rise up; one can clearly see a
changing relation between genius and taste
which, in the century of Enlightenment, saw the
second of the two terms take the dominant position. In the nineteenth century there were differences of degree between the two principles but not
qualitative differences, because one can say that
genius became independent of taste. This shift
raises the question of whether genius contains
taste within it or whether taste ought to be understood as already genius in itself. Both of these two
directions, however, seem to claim the assimilation of taste by genius, meaning that in the nineteenth century genius was decreed as omnipotent
(Schelling 1796–1805; Hegel 1835).
Today we no longer talk about genius, and we
can only speak about “creation” with dif ficulty.
The artist does not necessarily create works of art
(as much as the artist seems to be situated within
this expression with a certain durability or even
permanence) but instead builds, develops or simply presents objects that enter into a circuit call the
art market. The twentieth century seems to have
definitively removed the notion of genius from
the divine, mythical aura to which it was still
attributed in the nineteenth century. Many artists
even began to claim the impersonal dimension of
their authorial status. It is almost as if, after centuries of productive effort to be recognized in their
own right, the parabola of genius has to be drawn
back into its work or by a kind of factory stamp
more similar to a brand than an artist ’s signature.
What is the status of the creator today, and
what is a work of art? One used to say that the
artist creates self-suf ficient “beings”, from which
arise perceptions and affects that are cannot necessarily be assimilated to those of their creator.
But of how many objects entering into the art
market today are we prepared to attribute the
preceding de finition?
We know that Duchamp did not present his
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Fontaine (1917) for artistic delight but that,
soliciting a reaction against visual indifference,
hoped to reawaken people from an aesthetic slumber. Phenomena of aestheticization of daily life
within the artistic sphere seem to have stimulated
ar e flection both on the here and now (society in
its commonly accepted forms, its canonized
deformities, its preconceptions, etc.) as well as
on the medium that expresses it (art itself). But
can this “magic” continue inde finitely? The rei fication of the daily object within the museum
circuit and that of the art market makes such
objects open to being bought and sold, increasing
their economic value. Faced with a rei fied object
of this kind, it is dif ficult to question George
Dickie’sd e finition according to which it is the
art world – i.e., its experts – who determine what
art is (Dickie 1974): a de finition that is not entirely
outdated and which holds true in many spheres.
In the twentieth century, while many avantgardes opposed the standardization and commodification of art, arguing against bourgeois and
kitsch taste , at the same time the art market and
the entertainment industry made art its own product, a mass experience, a brand.
It is thus dif ficult today to answer the question
about what the status of the creator might be. We
are in a period of fast, unstoppable change. Nevertheless, something remains and is conserved. A
vast horizon lies ahead of us waiting to be investigated, in which creativity and reception meet
and fall away, love and hate each other, looking to
each other for commercial goals or meeting simply on the basis of the unfathomable basis that is
emotion itself.
Conclusions
Let us take a last look at Duchamp, who in
1914 made an artwork out of a bottle-rack.
50 Aesthetics
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This involved no more than a simple syntactical maneuver – from the cellar to the museum;
this is de facto a semantic shift, from an
instrumental object to an art object. The
world thus opened up, as it has done, to
every possibility. Since then art and the possible have been held in an inextricable and
complex tension that has led to radical
changes in which we are still immersed. In a
certain sense, the ready made l e dt h ew a yt o
the hyper-realism that has today become, more
than ever before, a dominant theme in the
recognition that new technologies have had,
and continue to have, over the field of creation. Ready made has now become, as
Baudrillard underscores, the “virtual technology media circus ” and the “perpetual reality
show” (Baudrillard 1995). Art invades reality
and reality invades art, removing Aesthetics,
which investigates creation and reception.
From every comfort zone provided by the
discipline ’s history. When the image of reality
coincides with reality itself, or when the art
work, in coinciding with an instrumental
object, becomes an artistic object only by
inserting itself into the museum circuit and
that of the art market , then Aesthetics must
change its standpoint and, without nevertheless
losing itself, turn to other disciplines. In the
end, new technologies – marked by immersion
and the increasing involvement of the receiver,
the viewer – open up new challenges, chasing
the new dream of a reality that increasingly
confuses itself with the virtual and vice versa.
Cross-References
▶Aesthetics
▶Emotion
▶Empathy
▶Genius
▶Here and Now
▶Reality
▶Rhetoric
▶State of Consciousness
▶Sublime
▶Virtual Reality
References
Batteux, C. (1747). Les beaux-arts réduits à un même
principe. Paris: Durand.
Baudrillard, J. (1995). Le crime parfait . Paris: Galilée.
Baumgarten A. G. (1735). Meditationes philosophicae de
nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus. Halae Magdeburgicae:
Litteris Ioannis Henrici Grunerti, acad. Typogr.
Baumgarten, A. G. (1750). Aesthetica. Hildesheim: G.
Olms. 1961.
Blumenberg, H. (1979). Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer: Paraebookmass.com
digma einer Daseinsmetapher . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Brady, E. (2013). The sublime in modern philosophy: Aesthetics, ethics, and nature . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burke, E. (1757). A philosophical enquiry into the origin of
our ideas of the sublime and beautiful . Oxford: Blackwell. 1990.
Chatterjee, A., & Vartanian, O. (2016). Neuroscience of
aesthetics. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 136 (9), 172 –194.
Danto, A. (2003). The abuse of beauty: Aesthetics and the
concept of art . Chicago: Open Court.
Dickie, G. (1974). Art and the Aestethic: An institutional
analysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Diderot, D. (1751). Lettre sur les sourds et muets . Genève:
E. Droz, 1965.
Dorfles, G. (1972). Il Kitsch. Antologia del cattivo gusto .
Milano: Mazzotta. 2000.
Du Bos, J.-B. (1719). Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et
sur la peinture . London: J. Nourse. 1748.
Gerard, A. (1774). An essay on genius . München: Wilhelm
Fink Verlag. 1966.
Greenberg, C. (1939). Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Partisan
Review, New York, VI (5), 34 –49.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1835). Aesthetics. Lectures on fine art (2
V ols). Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1975.
Hume, D. (1757). Of the standard of taste . Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill. 1965.
Kant, I. (1790). Critique of the power of judgment . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000.
Leder, H. (2013). Next steps in neuroaesthetics: Which
processes and processing stages to study. Psychology
of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7 (1), 27 –37.
Mazzocut-Mis, M. (2012). How far can we go? Pain,
excess and the obscene . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Pub.
Menninghaus, W. (2003). Disgust: The theory and history
of a strong sensation . Albany: SUNY Press.
Moles, A. (1971). Psychologie du kitsch: l ’art du bonheur .
Paris: Denoël-Gonthier.
Montesquieu, C. L. d. S. d. (1757). Essai sur le goût . Paris:
Payot & Rivages. 1993.
Rosenkranz, K. (1853). Ästhetik des Hässlichen .
Königsberg: Verlag der Gebrüder V ornträger.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1796–1805). Philosophie der Kunst und
weitere Schriften. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog. 2018.
Smuts, A. (2009). Art and negative affect. Philosophy
Compass, 4 (1), 39 –55.
Aesthetics 51
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Affordance
Vlad P. Gl ăveanu
School of Psychology, Dublin City University,
Dublin, Ireland
Centre for the Science of Learning and
Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen,
Norway
Abstract
Affordances have been conceptualized by J. J.
Gibson as what the environment offers, provides or furnishes the organism, in other
words, as possibilities for action. However,
this notion is not without controversy, in particular surrounding its nature and properties.
This entry will consider the ways in which
the concept of affordance can help us build a
material theory of the possible, one that is
intimately related to both subjective experience and to culture. The entry discusses different de finitions of affordance, its types and
characteristics, before outlining a model of
the possible based on the interplay between
materiality, intentionality, and normativity.
The implications of this model for our understanding of agency and possibility are
discussed in the end.
Keywords
Affordance · Materiality · Intentionality ·
Culture · Objects · Agency
Introduction
Chairs are typically made to sit on. Glasses and
bottles help us store all sorts of liquids. Mobile
phones allow us to call or text people. A boat is
meant to float on water. In each one of these
cases, what I am referring to are key affordances.
Chairs afford sitting, glasses and bottles afford
drinking from, mobile phones afford communicating, and boats afford sailing. That is, in principle, what they do. A boat with a hole in it loses
its affordance of floating. Similarly, a broken
glass cannot carry liquid or can carry much less
of it. At the same time, all these objects afford
much more to our action than singular possibilities, for as convenient (and conventional) as
these possibilities are. One can also stand on a
chair to reach something on the top shelf. Or can
use a mobile phone to play music or watch
videos.
As we can see from the brief discussion above,
there is something intrinsically important about
the relation between affordances, action, and possibility (as well as impossibility). Affordances
facilitate, guide, constrain, and sometimes forbid
specific courses of action. At the same time, they
are multiple, dynamic, and relational. As I will
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discuss further in this entry, an affordance is not a
universal property of an object. Chairs don ’t
afford sitting for everyone at all times; for example, they would be too tall for toddlers to reach and
adults in a pitch-dark room would never realize
they are even there – either way, affordances represent a meeting point between person and environment and reside in neither of them.
The notion of affordance was coined by
James J. Gibson, a founding figure of ecological
psychology, the branch of psychology focused
on the importance of the environment for
human perception and action. Of course, the
interest in the environment and its objects precedes Gibson and yet it is his notion of
affordance that became very popular and started
being used in a variety of applied fields (Luyat
2009). This popularity ignited also many controversies – several of which will be reviewed
here – that make the concept dif ficult to grasp,
conceptually shifty, and either too wide or too
narrow to be used in practice. It is worth noting
here that Gibson himself didn ’t propose a full
theory of affordances and merely got a chance to
sketch this notion, often in contradictory ways.
His interest was mainly in the study of perception, in particular visual perception (see Gibson
1986). Gibson believed that, when we perceive
objects, we don ’t merely form a mental representation of their sensorial properties or qualities
but what we perceive are their affordances, i.e.,
what they afford our action. In this way, he
considered perception as an activity.
52 Affordance
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It is this close connection between affordances and human activity that prompts many
scholars to de fine the former as possibilities for
action (see Shaw et al. 2019). This proposition
has been studied mainly from the point of view of
action but what exactly does “possibility” mean
here? And how can affordances help us build a
material theory of the possible?T h ep r e s e n t
entry focuses on these two questions. In order
to answer them properly, however, we need to
understand better what an affordance is, why it
can be hard to theorize, and what its characteristics and types might be.
Definition and Controversy
Gibson famously de fined affordances in the following terms:
The affordances of the environment are what it
offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes,
either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found
in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I
have made it up. I mean by it something that refers
to both the environment and the animal in a way that
no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. (Gibson
1986, p. 127)
The idea of complementarity between animal
and environment, mentioned above, is essential to
understand Gibson ’s thinking and his overall project of overcoming mind-matter and mind-body
dualisms. The study of perception before him
often pitched an external, objective reality against
the personal and subjective ways of making sense
of it. For Gibson, an affordance “points two ways,
to the environment and to the observer ” (p. 141).
It is, as such, a relational notion, one that cannot
and should not be attributed to either environment
or observer but their interrelation. Greeno ( 1994)
considered this interrelation as the articulation
between affordances or attributes of something
in the environment and the abilities (or effectivities, or aptitudes) of the person. The presence of
both is necessary for action or for actualizing an
affordance. However, this formulation risks
throwing the notion back into old dualisms
between person and world. By firmly linking
affordances with material attributes, some might
be tempted to study them separately from the
abilities of the person. We can imagine, for
instance, listing material affordances in abstract
terms, independent of any individual abilities.
This falls short of Gibson ’s plea to refer “both”
to environment and animal, for affordances to be
“equally a fact of the environment and a fact of
behavior”, “both physical and psychical, yet neither” (Gibson 1986, p. 129).
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Another well-known reinterpretation of the
notion of affordance comes from Donald A. Norman who made them popular in design studies.
For him, “the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily
those fundamental properties that determine just
how the thing could possibly be used ” (Norman
1988, p. 9). From a designer ’s perspective, it
makes perfect sense to focus on perceived
affordances and how easy or hard it is for users,
for example, to pick up the fact that a possibility
for action exists and can be acted upon. “When
affordances are taken advantage of, the user
knows what to do just by looking: no picture,
label or instruction is required ” (p. 9). But here,
once again, we enter the same old problem of
dualism. By distinguishing between “real” and
“perceived” affordances, Norman as well accepts
that an affordance can exist in objective terms
without an observer to “meet” it and, in “meeting”
it, to make it possible. Gibson himself was
tempted by the idea of affordances as objective
features before rejecting it based on his antidualistic stance: “the affordances of the environment (... ) are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often
supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is
both if you like ” (Gibson 1986, p. 129).
The difficulty of studying affordance as a truly
relational phenomenon has plagued this area of
research for more than four decades and it continues to do so today (see, for instance, the recent
distinction between physical and neurocognitive
levels in Osiurak et al. 2017). This has made many
scholars highly critical of the term and its use
(e.g., Oliver 2005). And, in fact, the roots of this
discontent can be found in Gibson ’s own writing
Affordance 53
A
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and his own failure to overcome dualism. Consider the following passage:
The concept of affordance is derived from these
concepts of valence, invitation, and demand but
with a crucial difference. The affordance of something does not change as the need of the observer
changes. The observer may or may not perceive or
attend to the affordance, according to his needs, but
the affordance, being invariant, is always there to be
perceived. An affordance is not bestowed upon an
object by a need of an observer and his act of
perceiving it. The object offers what it does because
it is what it is. (Gibson 1986, pp. 138 –139)
Here Gibson lays the ground for the hypothesis
of direct perception of affordances, in other words
their objective reality, outside the observer, and
their immediate grasp whenever “information is
available in ambient light for perceiving them ” (p.
140). Not only does this claim betray anti-dualism, but it also ignores the basic fact that our
interaction with the material world is thoroughly
cultural and grounded in acts of learning with and
from others. In the words of Dant ( 1999), the
“material environment is not natural or given ”
(p. 12) and our “interactions with things – touching, making, looking at, talking and reading about,
using, storing, maintaining, remaking and so on –
are social in that they are learnt and shared within
the culture ” (p. 14). To come back to the initial
example of the mobile phone affording making
calls and listening to music, these affordances
would never be spotted through direct, culturally
unmediated perception. One needs to have learnt
about phones in order to perceive these
affordances even “in ambient light ”.
Gibson was well aware of this critique and,
at different points in his writing, formulated it
himself (see, for example, his discussion of
mailboxes). As he noted, direct perception
often reveals affordances but not always. “We
must, of course, learn to see what things really
are – for example, that the innocent-looking
leaf is really a nettle or that the helpful-sounding politician is really a demagogue. And this
can be really dif ficult” (Gibson 1986, p. 142).
Once more, affordances do not “belong” to
material reality alone; they are emerging from
the co-evolution of person and environment
that is culture. Costall ( 1995, p. 472) added
to this discussion when he rightfully claimed
that learning affordances doesn ’t simply conc e r nw h a tt h e yh a p p e nt oa f f o r db u tw h a tt h e y
are meant to afford. Culture doesn ’t only make
certain affordances obvious to us – like sitting
on chairs and drinking from glasses –,i tc r e ebookmass.com
ates conventional or canonical uses that are
hard to think beyond. Could chairs be glued
to the wall and be called art? Yes, their material structure affords this action, but we need
some special person attributes to enact it. And
this has major consequences for what is
possible.
Last but not least, there are some other controversies associated with the de finition and
description of affordances. For instance, it is
debatable whether they are stable and permanent or fleeing and highly situational. Gibson ’s
writing seems to suggest both even if he often
argued for the former. Chemero and Turvey
(2007,p .3 3 )d i s a g r e e : “affordances are exquisitely context-dependent and ‘quicksilvery ’:
they emerge and dissolve very rapidly, due to
small changes in the animal, environment or
both.” Once more, we are coming back to the
objective (and thus invariant) versus relational
(and thus situational) nature of affordances. In
this entry, I will strongly argue for the latter, in
agreement with the spirit of Gibson ’s anti-dualistic stance, even if not always in line with his
actual statements about affordances. The fact that
an affordance is, indeed, relational, plays an
important role in how we theorize the possibilities
associated with acting on affordances. Before
outlining this in more detail, let ’s consider the
characteristics and types of affordances, a discussion that prepares the ground for the framework
of the possible proposed at the end.
Characterization and Types
Following Gibson, there are three main characteristics of an affordance:
1. An affordance exists relative to the action capabilities of a particular actor.
2. The existence of an affordance is independent of
the actor ’s ability to perceive it.
54 Affordance
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12
The port of Piraeus was busy, with every stone quay and repair berth filled. As
well as the business of bringing in food and goods for the people of Athens,
the main fleet was in dock, preparing to go out. Pericles and Cimon had
matched each other for lack of sleep and sheer labour over the course of three
weeks. It had begun as something like chaos, then settled into checking
accounts and tallying up resources. Each ship had to have enough fresh water,
grain, dried meat and cheese to keep two hundred souls at sea, a vast
undertaking on its own. Adding in a store of weapons, helmets and shields was
just the start of it. Sailcloth, oars, nails, tools, bronze blanks and wood for
repairs made each trireme its own workshop and storehouse.
There had been no shortage of replacement crew members, at least. Both
rowers and hoplites took injuries in training. An arm crushed in an oarlock or
a bad blow to the head meant a man might have to be turned out onto the
streets. Others grew too old, or the sailor’s gripe became so painful in their
joints that they could not go on. A man’s mates would raise a cup to him then
and spit against bad luck, but his seat or place on deck had to be filled one way
or the other. Young lads from the city came trooping up to the signing table
each morning, ready to train or take up an oar. One or two were followed by an
angry mother or father to drag them back to a family shop or business, but
most were accepted and given the first part of their pay. There were no slaves
working for free in the Athenian fleet.
The flood of silver drachms going out each week in dock made even Cimon
sweat. With a group of senior trierarchs, he’d gone to the council in the Agora
to ask for funds. Though they could see the fleet patrolling the waters of the
strait by Salamis, it had still been a struggle to get his own people to release
what was needed. The mines at Laurium were working night and day,
producing much more for the city’s coffers than when Themistocles had been
in charge. There was still a difference between agreeing something was good
and right – and actually handing over talents of silver and seeing them walk
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away. For once though, they were not the only source. The treasury on Delos
had come to four hundred and sixty talents in all, a hundred and twenty of
those from Athens alone – a vast war chest. Given the constant demand for
stone, iron and wood, the seams at Laurium could not have met demand. It was
fortunate that a merchant fleet now bought and sold goods all over the
Aegean. With Persia cut out of commerce, a single ship’s captain could make a
fast fortune trading food or pots of red and black. The Assembly took a fifth
tithe – and no captain dared complain. Only one had his licence revoked and
his ship taken against debts. The rest accepted the cost of using the port and
reaching the great market of Athens. The flood of wealth showed even in the
new theatre, with row upon row of seats made from timbers taken from the
Persian fleet. The great tent that had once sheltered King Xerxes on the shore
now formed part of the back stage. It was true, tickets cost twice what they had
before the war, but every space had been filled, first to see a comedy, then a
work by Phrynichus that had men weeping in the street as they walked home.
Cimon yawned as he stood on the dock. It was almost noon and his
stomach was making odd noises, reminding him he had not eaten since the
night before. He’d lost weight, he realised, just through physical work and
ignoring his hunger. He usually slept on sacks of grain at the port and ate with
the dockers there.
He caught sight of Pericles in patient conversation with one of the
shipwrights employed by Aristides to oversee the port accounts. Cimon had
been plagued by the fellow until he’d made Pericles his official contact and left
them to it. The result had been a week of sweet peace, though Pericles claimed
he had come close to strangling the man at least twice.
Cimon frowned at the sight of Thetis walking just a pace behind the pair.
She carried a leather bag over one shoulder and a rolled scroll under each
armpit. She looked as if she’d picked up everything Pericles had forgotten,
which made Cimon smile, though warily. He saw the little group would pass by
and he prepared himself for awkwardness. His wife and child were in Athens.
Having Thetis still around as the fleet prepared to leave meant they met at
intervals. Pericles was his second in that port, or had made himself so with
labour and intelligence. They met and consulted many times a day – and Thetis
was always there.
Cimon made a ‘hmm’ sound at the back of his throat. It was not uncommon
for Athenian men to take a mistress, or for that matter to while away a night
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with a stranger. He was not expected to bring them home, however. Cimon
breathed through his nose, thinking to himself. He had been more than
generous with the woman from Scyros. His particular difficulty of imagining
how his mother would want him to treat her had kicked in at the moment of
parting. Thetis had cost him already in food and trouble – not least in forcing
him to give up a competent man to Xanthippus. Cimon knew he could easily
have turned her out on the docks without a drachm to her name, but he had
not. Instead, he had given Thetis enough to keep her while she looked for work
– and even arranged an offer from a laundry and seamstress. Her home city of
Thebes was a long way off and no friend of Athens that year. He had no further
responsibility, and that might have been the last he’d seen of her if Pericles
hadn’t interfered. Somehow, the young idiot had offered her a tour of the city –
of all the temples and landmarks. That had turned into… Cimon looked up as
the three of them reached him. He was not completely sure what it had turned
into.
‘Ah, Pericles!’ he said. ‘I was just thinking about you. I don’t know why
everything always comes down to a frenzy at the last minute. To leave
tomorrow, we’ll be working through the night, I don’t doubt it. Yet if I took
another week, it would be exactly the same.’
They smiled, as he expected them to. Cimon spoke without much thought,
giving Pericles honour by taking the time. That was the power of status, of
being a strategos. The third member of the little group, Aristides’ man… No,
the name would not come. Cimon bowed his head, including him in the
gesture. Thetis was watching, Cimon thought. Had she ensnared Pericles to
remain close to the one she wanted? Cimon hoped not, for Pericles’ sake as
much as his own. He had known women of that sort before, with their large
eyes and haunted expressions. Once the obsession began, it never ended well
for anyone.
Not for the first time, the thought of just rowing away from port and
leaving everything behind was Cimon’s private joy. His ships. Oh, perhaps
Athens had paid for most of them, perhaps Aristides and Xanthippus were in
formal command, but still, when the oars bit, and the waves crashed, all his
troubles could be left like a pile of clothes on the shore.
‘How is your father, Pericles?’ Cimon asked. He saw the quick grimace
before the reply and understood it.
‘Not very well,’ Pericles said.
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Despite the tone, he spoke unaware, a form of confidence Cimon could
barely remember. Pericles knew the forms – the correct response. His father lay
hunting for breath in rooms by the port. His son would show all the proper
dignity and restraint, but he did not truly believe Xanthippus might actually
die, that he might not get better as he always had before. Pericles had never
known a day of his life without Xanthippus in the world. The possibility of
going on without him was not real. Cimon had seen that in a dozen
conversations, as he’d tried to make the younger man visit the archon, just so
he could say he had done all he could and said the right words.
Cimon’s own father had died when he was just a boy. He remembered the
triumph of Marathon and the disgrace of the failed expedition after it. His
poor father had come home a broken man, hot with fever and tormented by a
trial. Xanthippus had played a part in the accusations then – and Cimon had
begun to drink enough for three men. He’d lost himself in grief and pain and
anger… and Pericles was oblivious, trying to look stern and full of grief, while
it was all just a counterfeit. Cimon saw Thetis touch his arm in comfort and
raised his eyes to heaven. He could not make the younger man understand,
though he would soon enough.
‘You should see him,’ Cimon said gently. ‘We’ll be heading out tomorrow…
you should say your goodbyes.’
‘Of course I will,’ Pericles said.
He knew he was being pressed and he didn’t like it. Thetis seemed to
understand better than he did. Yet her eyes remained on Cimon as he turned to
the sea, wanting to be out there, wanting to be away.
The lamps were low when Pericles entered the house, close by the docks. His
father owned property at the heart of the city as well as an estate outside it, but
the journey into Athens had become difficult for him. He had rented a few
rooms in the port, where he could still walk down to the ships each morning.
Pericles raised his eyebrows in surprise to see his mother, Agariste, with his
sister Eleni at her side in a dark veil. Already married, Eleni had grown into a
beautiful young woman, with one daughter and another child swelling her
womb. Eleni had been marked by time or loss, with deep lines showing around
her mouth. In quiet dignity, she came over to greet her brother, pressing her
head into the nape of his neck as she embraced him. It was hard to see the girl
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82 A Tripartite Self
The Master said: “ At fifteen, I set my will on learning. At thirty, I took
my place. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I understood the mandate
of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was compliant. At seventy, I could follow the
desires of my heart– mind without going beyond the rule [the carpenter’s
square]. ” (Lunyu 2.4/ 3/ 1– 2)
Here the heart– mind is linked to desires. The metaphor of the carpenter’s
square further emphasizes the theme of physical alignment in this account of
virtue attained in old age. By contrast, a second passage focuses on the heart–
mind, describing Y an Hui as capable of spending three months with “nothing
in his heart– mind but humaneness” (6.7/ 12/ 19).
A third passage refers to the ability of music to reflect the player’s inner nature. It relates that Confucius was playing on the stone chimes in the state of
Wei. A passerby remarked that “there is something on his mind (you xin 有
心)! How he beats the chime stones!” (Lunyu 14.39/ 41/ 4– 7). A fourth passage
criticizes someone who eats all day and does not apply his mind to anything (wu
suo yong xin 無所用心, 17.22/ 15/ 14). The fifth recounts Shun’s sacrificial prayer
when passing on his throne to Yu. Shun claims to have concealed nothing and
urges Yu to use his heart– mind to examine Shun’s actions (20.1/ 57/ 1– 2).
The first passage refers to the affective state of a person in a mature state of
self- cultivation. The third builds on the assumption that Confucius’s musical
performance reflects his inner state. But neither passage comments on the
nature of the mind or its relation to other components of a person.
Like the Odes, the Analects clearly uses the term shén to refer to spirits—
extrahuman powers— rather than to signify human psychological capacities.
Confucius is famously reticent about them and “does not discuss prodigies,
feats of strength, disorderly chaos or spirits” (7.21). He even defines wisdom
as an attitude in which one “respects spirits but keeps them at a distance”
(6.22). Finally, he admonishes his disciples not to be distracted by the service
to spirits in the afterlife, but rather to concentrate on life in this world (11.12).
Nonetheless, ancestors and spirits are central to his moral program, and as
such, they are an important part of his thinking. At a discussion of sacrifices,
he remarks that one should sacrifice to the dead and to the spirits as if the
spirits are present (ji shén ru shén zai 祭神如神在, Lunyu 3.12/ 5/ 24).
These remarks are in no sense claims that spirits did not exist, but rather
they signal that humans should not engage with them or try to influence
them. As Puett puts it, spirits have great potency, but humans should not
speak of them or worry about them. The purpose of ritual should be not to
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Mind and Spirit Govern the Body 83
influence spirits, but to cultivate ourselves. Spirits should be revered, but the
highest way to revere them is not to try to influence them.11
In summary, the Analects has much to say about the body, especially the
embodied person, but relatively little about mind or spirit. It combines a strong
interest in ritual— for human purposes— with respectful distance from spirits.
The Mozi
The treatment of body, mind, and spirits in the Mozi is significantly di vided between the early Mohist doctrines, which discuss spirits at length,
and definitions of body and mind, which occur in the epistemological
chapters.12
Mohists on the Mind
In contrast to the Analects, the term xin occurs over fifty times in the Mozi.
In some instances, it clearly referred to affective states, such as “not having a
peaceful heart” (wu an xin 無安心, 1.1/ 1/ 10) or “having no remorse in his
heart” (wu yuan xin 無怨心, 1.1/ 1/ 12). But, in other instances, xin seem to
refer to a clearly cognitive faculty, often used to describe a gentleman or superior person. For example, “Cultivating One’s Person” (Xiushēn 脩身) (ch.
2), argues that even purveyors of underhanded counsel will not gain support
as long as a gentleman ensures that:
譖慝之言，無入之耳，批扞之聲，無出之口，殺傷人之孩，無存之心，
11 Puett 2002: 98.
12 The Mozi refers to texts and teachings associated with Mo Di 墨翟 (fl. c.430 bce). The Mozi
consists of seventy- one pian, of which eighteen are no longer extant, in six groups. Books 1–
7 date
from the mid- to late third century bce and contain summaries of Mohist doctrines. Books
8– 38
consist of ten “triads” (with seven chapters lost) that expound the ten doctrines of the early
Mohist
school and date from the mid- or late fifth century. Books 39 to 40 are critiques of the Ru
school
(Fei Ru 非儒), and do not present Mohist doctrines (39 is lost). Books 40 to 45, the “Later
Mohist”
texts or “Dialectics” (Mo bian 墨辯) include two chapters of “Canons” (Jing 經, chs. 40 and 41),
two
“Explanations” of the Canons (Shuo 說, chs. 42 and 43), and two lost chapters on ethics and
language
(chs. 44 and 45). The Later Mohist texts are fragmentary and complex, and probably date
from the
late fourth to mid- third centuries. Chapters 46 to 50 are “Dialogues” of sayings and
conversations
attributed to or involving Mozi and probably date to the mid- to late fourth century.
Chapters 51 to 71
(ten have been lost) address defensive strategy and military engineering. See Fraser 2016:
12– 14. For
further information on the structure and dating of the Mohist texts, see Durrant 1977– 78,
Graham
1985 and Meader 1992.
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84 A Tripartite Self
there are no slandering words coming in his ears, no threatening sounds
going out of his mouth, and no [thought of] killing or harming others’ children abiding in his heart– mind. (Mozi 1.2/ 2/ 14, ch. 2)
The same chapter describes a gentleman as wise, and wisdom is linked to
the mental faculty of discrimination:
慧者心辯而不繁說
For those who are intelligent, their minds make distinctions, but they are
not complicated in their speech. (Mozi 1.2/ 3/ 2, ch. 2)
Even incapable rulers have minds and try to think:
不能為君者，傷形費神，愁心勞意，然國逾危，身逾辱。
Those who are not able to be gentlemen wear out their forms, exhaust their
spirits, tax their heart– minds and belabor their thoughts, and yet their
states are even more in danger and their persons even more humiliated.
(Mozi 1.3/ 4/ 23– 24, ch. 3)
Other passages in the Mozi use xin to refer to faculties that arguably are
both affective and cognitive, but certain passages include cognitive activity,
for example, the comment in “Exaltation of the Virtuous, 2” (Shangxian xia
尚賢下) that when rulers reward the meritless and punish the innocent: “it
makes the people become distanced in mind and disjointed in frame” ( you
xin jie ti 攸心解體, Mozi 2.3/ 15/ 16, 9).
In summary, although the heart– mind continues to be an affective faculty
that feels peace, grief, and the like, accounts of the mind as an explicitly cognitive faculty that discriminates and thinks first seem prominent in the Mozi.
Spirits in Early Mohism
The early Mohist doctrines include extensive discussion of external spirits
and postmortem consciousness. Confucius and the early Mohists agreed
on the importance of the correct performance of sacrificial rituals but for
very different reasons. The early Mohists recommended constant attention
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Mind and Spirit Govern the Body 85
to extrahuman spirits in accounts of “ghosts and spirits” ( guishén 鬼神),
and focused on three issues: (1) whether they existed; (2) whether they
had consciousness ( ming 明)— understood as whether they were aware of
human right and wrongdoings and rewarded good and punished evil— and
(3) critiques of Ru attitudes and practices regarding ghosts and spirits.
In the Mohist canon, respect for the spirit world was based on certainty
about the existence of spirits as external extrahuman entities. “Explaining
Ghosts” (Minggui 明鬼, chs. 29– 31) presents many examples of workaday
interactions between humans and spirits, including during sacrifice. 13
Accounts of spirit manifestations focused on events that demonstrated
human shortcomings, moral or practical and material.14 They believed that
spirits were not only conscious (ming), but that spirits had foreknowledge of
human actions and could reward the worthy and punish the unworthy:
偕若信鬼神之能賞賢而罰暴也，則夫天下豈亂哉！
Now, if we could persuade the people under Heaven to believe that ghosts
and spirits are capable of rewarding the worthy and punishing the wicked,
then how could there ever be disorder in the world? ( Mozi 8.3/ 50/ 26– 27,
ch. 31, Sterckx 2007: 28)
The early Mohists also believed that the dead have consciousness. 15 The
view that human consciousness survived death differs in emphasis from the
later Mohist definition of “life. ” Like Aristotle’s account of the faculties of
the soul, where the living body is inextricably joined to the soul, the Mohist
definition defines life as the union of the physical form and awareness
(discussed below).
Early Mohist views of spirit also manifest in their critiques of Ru ritual
practices. On the one hand, they opposed Ru funerary rituals because their
expense and duration impoverished the living without directly addressing
the (conscious) dead. Mohist belief in sacrifices to the spirits rose from their
belief in both the consciousness of the dead and the moral power of the
spirits. By contrast, Confucius’s “respectful distance” acknowledges ghosts
13 See Sterckx 2007: 26– 30.
14 Additional accounts of the perspicacity of ghosts and spirits come from the Shanghai
Museum’s
excavated Chu manuscripts, “The Perspicuity of Ghosts and Spirits. ” See Guishén zhi ming 鬼
神之明
(On the perspicacity of ghosts and spirits) in Ma Chengyuan 2005 (Shanghai bowuguan vol.
5): 307–
21. For discussion, see Brindley 2009 and Ding Sixin 2006 and 2011.
15 死人有知. Mozi 8.3.51/ 68/ 24 (Minggui xia 明鬼下, 31), cf. Graham 1978: 281.
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of the established Church, which shall be discussed in in Chapter/uni00A05. Prosecutions
for violating the Conventicle Act also fostered distrust of the judiciary for violat ing jury right.
Although some of the juries in the Quaker trials revived the Levellers’ efforts to
insist that juries could find law as well as fact, their claims did not match those of
Lilburne and the Levellers in scope or intensity. Nevertheless, the juries in these
Quaker trials did reject the judges’ interpretation of the Conventicle Act and presented their view of the true meaning of this statute. More significantly, the
Quakers and their juries challenged the bench over the high- handed tactics that
judges used to force juries to convict. Now, it had been clear for more than a century that judges in criminal trials considered themselves part of the prosecution
and in that capacity sought to control the jury. /T_he main method of exercising
that control was by summing up the evidence and giving instructions to the jury
regarding the law that applied in the case. But the tactics the bench used to coerce
the juries in these Quaker trials, which included threatening, fining, and impris oning jurors for not returning guilty verdicts, were unprecedented.
/T_he issue was joined in 1666 when Sir John Kelyng, Chief Justice of King’s
Bench, tried to control both grand and petty jury verdicts, not only in Quaker
cases, where jurors voted to nullify the Conventicle Act, but also in homicide
cases, where the juries were at best practicing a form of discretion, and where
law- finding was not an issue. In one case where the jury found that there was
insuffi cient proof against the accused, Kelyng told the jury that the evidence was
manifest and sent the jury out again, ordering them to find the defendants guilty.
Kelyng responded by fining and imprisoning the jurors, calling them “peremp tory saucy fellows. ”²⁸ Complaints against Kelyng led a committee of the Commons
to pass a resolution against the chief justice for “innovations in the trial of men
for their lives and liberties” and for using an arbitrary and illegal power tending
to the introduction of arbitrary government.²⁹ A bill proposed to that end failed,
and further proceedings against Kelyng were dropped. /T_he charges against him,
however, are significant because they reflected a much broader loss of confidence
in the judiciary than had been evident in the trials of Lilburne. /T_hat loss of trust,
moreover, surfaced not only at the assizes but even in the solidly royalist Cavalier
Parliament (1661–79). One possible explanation of that sentiment is that Kelyng
had intervened in homicide as well as Quaker trials, and the former were not as
politically explosive as the latter. Indeed, the attacks on Kelyng and by extension
the entire later Stuart bench serve as a prelude to the broad opposition to the
tactics of Chief Justice Jeffreys during the Bloody Assize of 1685.
²⁸ /T_he Diary of John Milward: September 1666 to May 1668 ,ed. Caroline Robbins
(Cambridge,
1938), pp. 159–60. For a full discussion of Kelyng’s tactics see Green, Verdict According to
Conscience,
pp. 213–21.
²⁹ Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 9, p. 35.
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/T_he case against the coercion of juries gained further support—this time from
the bench itself—in the decision by Chief Justice Vaughan in Bushel’s Case (1671).
In this famous decision, Vaughan, who had been a moderate law reformer during
the revolution, established the principle of noncoercion of jurors: a judge may not
punish or threaten to punish jurors for their verdicts. Vaughan’s decision occurred
in the a/f_termath of the acquittal of the Quakers William Penn and William Mead,
who had been indicted for causing an unlawful assembly and disturbing the
peace. During the trial Penn had challenged the validity of the indictment.
Despite pressure from the bench to convict, the jury returned a verdict of not
guilty, thereby overturning the indictment. In retaliation, the court fined Penn
and Mead for contempt and the jurors for finding contrary to the evidence, that
is, the facts of the case, as well as the court’s instructions in the matter of law. In a
series of tracts written in prison, Penn exposed the weakness of the indictment,
arguing that the court could not prove that the those who attended the meetings
had intended to cause physical harm to any person (the common law standard),
much less a riot (the statutory standard).
More than two months a /f_ter the trial had ended, Edward Bushel, one of the
four jurors who had been imprisoned for refusing to pay his fine, sued a writ of
habeas corpus out of Common Pleas, claiming that the fine had no basis in law
and that therefore he was being held without cause. Habeas corpus, it should be
noted, was a prerogative writ, originally intended as a weapon against jailors
rather than the Crown. ³⁰ In his decision upholding the suit, Vaughan did not in
any way address the issue of jury nullification, which had been the reason for the
fines and imprisonments. Nor did he challenge the traditional restriction of the
jury to matters of fact. As judges of the facts of the case, however, Vaughan held
that jurors could be fined only for finding against their own view of the evidence,
which would have made them guilty of perjury. /T_he most striking claim in
Vaughan’s decision was that the judge could never direct a verdict because he
could never know what evidence the jury had. /T_he jury could, at least theoreti cally, have personal knowledge of the crime—a reference to the original selfinforming jury—or evidence obtained out of court. ³¹
/T_he ruling in Bushel’s Case did not have any discernible impact on routine felony cases, in which judges and juries continued to function pretty much as before.
Nor did the decision challenge the traditional division between fact- and lawfinding. /T_he principle of noncoercion did, however, have an effect upon political
trials of the period, where the chances of a di fference of opinion between judge
and jury was much greater. In those cases, the judges had to develop di fferent
methods of jury control that fell short of coercion. /T_hese tactics became apparent
in the treason trials against Whigs during the Second Stuart Despotism—the last
³⁰ Paul Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2010).
³¹ Howell, State Trials, vol. 6, 1006–12. Green, Verdict According to Conscience, pp. 236–49.
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four years of Charles II’s reign—and especially those conducted by George
Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice of King’s Bench, in the wake of the rebellion by the
duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, in 1685, the first year of
James II’s reign.
/T_he late Stuart judiciary deployed various tactics—some more prejudicial than
others—against the Whigs in the state trials of the period. Only one of those tac tics concerned juries. Unable to coerce jurors as a result of Vaughan’s decision in
Bushel’s Case, the courts turned to the requirement that in cases of high treason
jurors did not have to be freeholders, that is, tenants of freehold land. At the
height of Whig power in Parliament, many boroughs, including London, were
under Whig control. /T_hey could therefore select jurors who were not as vulnera ble to o ffi cial influence as were poor men; the more substantial residents of the
City tended to be sympathetic to the Whig cause. /T_he Whigs used their control
over impaneling jurors to return a verdict of ignoramus in the indictment of the
earl of Sha/f_tesbury, the founder of the Whig Party, to protect them from the judicial tactics of the Tory court. /T_he Tories, however, turned the tables on the Whigs
in 1681 with writs of quo warranto, which forced boroughs to surrender their
charters until they agreed to purge the members of borough corporations of
Whigs. Quo warranto therefore not only marginalized Whigs in the next elections
to Parliament but also led to the impaneling of juries that included nonfreeholders in state trials. Since the sheriff was in charge of impaneling jurors, this
represented a loss for the Whigs. /T_he success of the Crown in politicizing the
courts in this way led ultimately to the inclusion of Article 10 in the Bill of Rights,
which stated that only freeholders could be impaneled in treason trials. /T_he Bill of
Rights also invalidated quo warranto writs in Article 8, which declared that elec tions were to be free. John Locke, among other Whigs, considered the writ of quo
warranto as a tool of arbitrary government.³²
Article 10 of the Bill of Rights, which declared that excessive bail, excessive
fines, and cruel and unusual punishments were illegal, also arose in a response to
the tactics of the judiciary in the late Stuart period. /T_he bail clause in the article,
which challenged the deliberate setting of bail that defendants could not a fford,
was based on the right of the defendant to have bail in accordance with the statute
of 1554. /T_he bail clause was linked to the right of habeas corpus, the ancient writ
that had been confirmed by statute in 1679—the one solid victory of Sha /f_tesbury
and the Whigs in the last session of the Cavalier Parliament. /T_he one loophole
in that statute was the failure to set a limit to bail, a loophole that the Crown
exploited by making bail so excessive that defendants could not a fford it, thereby
denying them the ancient right to bail. Article 10, therefore, provided protection
of one of the liberties of the people.
³² Locke, Second Treatise of Government, para. 202.
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/T_he excessive fines rendered illegal in Article 10, which also qualified as unusual
punishment, were also a response to judicial abuses by the bench. Excessive fines
were clearly a denial of ancient right, which required equality between crime and
punishment, while Magna Carta held that a fine should be proportional to the
gravity of the offense. Despite these limitations, Star Chamber had imposed steep
fines on opponents of Charles’s I’s regime. /T_he abolition of that court in 1641
put an end to that predatory practice, but in the late 1670s and 1680s the courts
imposed severe fines on enemies of the regime. In 1677 a committee of the Commons
resolved that by imposing these fines, the courts were acting “arbitrarily, illegally
and partially. ”³³ In 1682 Sir /T_homas Pilkington, the sheriff of London, was fined
the extraordinary sum of £100,000 for speaking against the duke of Y ork, while
two years later Sir Samuel Barnardiston was fined £10,000 for seditious words.
/T_he related charge of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment—one of the two
phrases in the English Bill that also made its way into the United States Bill of
Rights—was also a statement of ancient right. /T_he punishment of Titus Oates,
who was admittedly a pathological liar, for two counts of perjury in 1686 can only
be described as cruel. Oates was fined 2,000 marks, life imprisonment, whipping,
and pillorying four times a year for life.³⁴
/T_he granting or promising of fines and forfeitures before conviction, which
Article 12 of the Bill of Rights declared to be illegal, referred specifically to trials
for treason in which defendants pleaded guilty so that their sentences could be
commuted to transportation. /T_his led to the practice in which courtiers competed
for the opportunity to sell the rebels into penal servitude in the West Indies. Most
of these and other violations of due process occurred in the trials conducted in
the a/f_termath of a rebellion in the southwest against James II (1685–8) in the first
year of his reign. /T_he Whigs had tried to exclude James from the throne in three
separate parliaments between 1679 and 1681 on the grounds that he was a Catholic,
but the Crown, with the support of the Tories in Parliament, had managed to
assure James’s accession. /T_he rebellion was raised in the name of James Scott,
duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles and his mistress, Lucy Walters.
Monmouth, a Protestant whom some of the Whigs had supported as an alternative
to James in the Exclusion Parliaments, was unable to recruit su ffi cient support
among the gentry in the region, and the rebellion failed.
/T_he most egregious violations of due process occurred in the prosecution of
more than 1,400 rebels at the assizes (trials held in the counties twice annually
before judges of the central courts at Westminster) at Winchester, Salisbury,
Dorchester, Taunton, and Wells between August and September 1685. Chief
Justice Jeffreys presided over these trials with five other judges. On September 18
³³ Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 9, p. 689.
³⁴ Howell, State Trials, vol. 10, pp. 1316–19. See Anthony /uni00A0F./uni00A0Granuci,
“‘Nor Cruel and Unusual
Punishments Inflicted’: /T_he Original Meaning, ” California Law Review, 57 (1969), pp.
844–7.
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and 19, some 500 of the prisoners were tried at Taunton. Of these, 144 were
convicted and executed by hanging, with their remains being displayed publicly
throughout the county. /T_he trials came to be known as the Bloody Assizes because
of their brutality: 320 men were hanged—some of them by the brutal method of
hanging, drawing, and quartering—while 841 others were sentenced to be trans ported to the West Indies to serve as indentured servants, where many of them
soon died from disease. /T_he remaining prisoners were held for further trial, and
while in jail many of them died of typhus.
Much of the distrust of the criminal justice system that found expression in
four of the thirteen articles in the Bill of Rights of 1689 arose in response to the
conduct of these prosecutions. In particular the articles referred to Je ffreys’s
attacks on defendants and witnesses during the trials and pressuring the jury to
convict. His presumption of the defendants’ guilt and the intemperance of his
rhetoric in dealing with defendants and witnesses exceeded all bounds of the
impartiality that judges were still expected to demonstrate. Known widely as “the
hanging judge, ” Jeffreys remains notorious for his cruelty and drunken rages. To
the nineteenth- century historian /T_homas Babington Macauley, he was “the most
consummate bully ever known to his profession. ”³⁵ Upon his return to London
a/f_ter the trials, he was appointed Lord Chancellor, and served James in that
capacity. When the king decided to flee the country in December 1688, Je ffreys
also tried to flee in disguise but was recognized at a tavern in Wapping and barely
survived an attack by a mob shouting “Vengeance Justice!” He died in the Tower
awaiting trial in April 1689.
/T_he harshness of Je ffreys’s sentences and his prosecutorial zeal were most
apparent in the treason trial of Dame Alice Lisle, the elderly, frail, and partially
deaf widow of a regicide whom Cromwell had appointed to the Upper House created by the Humble Petition and Advice in 1657. /T_he charge against Dame Alice,
“a false traitor against the most illustrious prince, James II, ” was that she had
given aid to two rebels a /f_ter the insurrection had been crushed at the Battle of
Sedgemoor. One of these men was John Hicks, a nonconformist preacher who
was a member of Monmouth’s army and whom the indictment of Alice also
referred to as a false traitor. Hicks had sent one Mr. Dunne with a message to
Dame Alice requesting shelter for himself and another rebel named Nelthorpe.
With Lisle’s consent, Dunne led the two men to Lisle’s home, where the three
spent the night. Upon hearing that she was harboring the three men, soldiers
searched the house, found the men, and arrested them. Because she had sheltered
them and therefore allegedly served as their accomplice, Lisle was charged with
the crime of high treason.
³⁵ /T_homas Babington Macauley, /T_he History of England from the Accession of James the
Second
(London, 1848), p. 412. For a more impartial assessment see Paul
/uni00A0D./uni00A0Halliday, “Jeffreys, George, first
Baron Jeffreys (1645–1689), ” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
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From the very outset Je ffreys indicated that he was determined to secure a
verdict of guilty. He opened the proceedings, which took place at Winchester on
August 25, by reminding the court that Lisle was the widow of a regicide and that
Hicks had been identified as a member of Monmouth’s army. At this point Lisle
declared that she was opposed to the rebellion, but Je ffreys told her to be silent.
/T_he most important witness was Dunne, the messenger who had brought Hicks
and Nelthorpe to Lisle’s home. /T_he court needed Dunne to confirm the testimony
of the only other witness, a royal agent named Barter, that Lisle and Hicks had
discussed the rebellion. When Dunne refused to confirm that conversation,
Jeffreys cross- examined the witness himself, an interrogation that was laced with
ad hominem attacks on Dunne and tirades against rebels and traitors. At one
point the judge interrupted Dunne to say, “Jesus God, that we should live to see
such creatures among mankind too, to the shame and reproach be it spoken of
our nation and religion!” Je ffreys did not succeed in breaking Dunne. All he
achieved was to get Dunne to admit that Lisle probably knew that Hicks was a
nonconformist.
Jeffreys also displayed his prosecutorial zeal in pressuring the jury to convict.
He began his summation by attacking all dissenters and then insisted that the
testimony against Lisle proved her guilt, which was as evident “as the sun at noon
today. ” /T_he jury, however, was sympathetic to Lisle, not only because of her age,
gender, and physical condition, but also because they were not persuaded that she
had sheltered Hicks for his part in the rebellion. Dame Alice, who in the absence
of counsel (which was denied defendants in treason trials until 1696) presented
her own defense, declared that she knew Hicks only as a dissenting minister who
was looking for a place of safety from arrest for holding an illegal conventicle. /T_he
jurors also questioned whether she could be tried for treason because Hicks,
whom she had sheltered and therefore had acted as his accomplice, had not yet
been tried or convicted of that crime. When the jury raised this point before the
bench, Jeffreys replied that it made no difference, because there could be no doubt
that Hicks had committed treason. In his summation Jeffreys also refused to read
Dame Alice’s self- defense. Despite that omission, the jury returned a verdict of
not guilty. Upon hearing the verdict, Jeffreys flew into a rage and, a/f_ter rehearsing
all the evidence, sent the jury back to reconsider. Once again the jurors returned a
verdict of not guilty. Not to be deterred, Je ffreys ordered the jurors to retire a
third time with the threat that if they did not find Lisle guilty, they themselves
would be tried for high treason. /T_his blatantly illegal tactic finally produced the
verdict Jeffreys had demanded.³⁶
Jeffreys proceeded to sentence Lisle to burning at the stake—a penalty reserved
for a woman guilty of petty treason against her husband or master. /T_he sentence
³⁶ Howell, State Trials, vol. 11, pp. 354–74. See also George/uni00A0W./uni00A0Keeton,
Lord Chancellor Jeffreys and
the Stuart Cause (London, 1965), pp. 214–15.
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was subsequently commuted to beheading, both because she had been convicted
of high treason and because, as the daughter of a peer, she was spared execution
by hanging. Lisle’s sentence, coupled with Je ffreys’s conduct during the trial,
became widely known, and not only in the West Country. His actions in the
Bloody Assize were arguably the main reason that a large segment of the political
nation—Tories as well as Whigs—lost trust in the central courts at Westminster
in the run- up to the Glorious Revolution.
Treason
Treason is a betrayal of the trust that had been placed in a person serving in the
government, usually in an administrative or military capacity. Although it was
defined in England as a violation of one’s allegiance and loyalty to the king, it
was/uni00A0essentially a crime against the kingdom or what later came to be viewed as
the state. It is also the only betrayal of political trust that has traditionally been
treated as a crime. Because the traitor had fomented rebellion or otherwise endangered the entire realm and hence national security, treason was considered the
worst of all crimes, and for that reason traitors were subject to extreme and o/f_ten
cruel punishments. In England during the early modern period these punishments
included hanging, drawing, and quartering, mutilation, and being burned alive. In
the United States today, the maximum punishment is death. Since 1862, however,
only one man, William Bruce Mumford, has been executed for the crime.
Because treason was a crime against the state, it was also considered the most
insidious violation of trust. Queen Elizabeth recognized this in 1586 a /f_ter the
conviction of Mary Queen of Scots for her complicity in a plot to assassinate
Elizabeth and replace her with Mary. In a meeting with a parliamentary deputa tion at Richmond regarding Mary’s fate, Elizabeth, who had corresponded
secretly with Mary, declared famously, “I have found treason in trust. ” ³⁷ It was
diffi cult for Elizabeth to admit that a person of her own sex, much less her own
cousin, had committed treason; it was much more likely for men to have done so.
In that connection Elizabeth may have been thinking of the fourth duke of
Norfolk who had been executed for treason in 1572 for supporting a plot to put
Mary on the English throne. Now, however, Elizabeth had to accept that treason
had been committed by a female cousin and fellow sovereign who had been
entrusted with political power.
A century a/f_ter Elizabeth’s speech, during the spate of treason trials in the late
seventeenth century, the poet John Dryden, who nurtured an abiding hatred of
traitors, echoed Elizabeth’s comment about the connection between trust and
³⁷ /T_he speech was reprinted in John Baron Somers, A Second Collection of Scarce and
Valuable
Tracts (London, 1750), p. 67.
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treason when he wrote, “Treason is there in its most horrid shape where trust is
greatest. ”³⁸ In the early eighteenth century, John Trenchard paraphrased Dryden
when he wrote: “Where there is greatest trust, the betraying it is the greatest
treason. ”³⁹ And at the end of the eighteenth century, during the American War of
Independence, George Washington, the Commander- in- Chief of the Continental
Army, reacting to the news that one of his most able generals, Benedict Arnold,
had betrayed the army, asked the Marquis de Lafayette and Henry Knox, “Whom
Can We Trust Now?”⁴⁰ In this rhetorical question, Washington may have been
following Shakespeare’s advice in Henry V to trust no one. It is more likely, however, that despite Arnold’s betrayal, Washington could still trust Lafayette, Knox,
and Hamilton and others in his trust network. His question was open to both
positive and negative answers.
Despite the widespread agreement that treason was the ultimate violation or
betrayal of trust, the changing definition of the crime and the conduct of treason
trials led to the recognition that subjects accused of treason were o /f_ten prosecuted unfairly. /T_he government did this by expanding the definition of the crime
to silence or eliminate opponents of the regime, while judges facilitated their
prosecution by instructing juries to convict on the basis of insu ffi cient evidence.
In order to restore faith in the judicial process, Parliament passed bills in 1661
and 1696 setting down strict evidentiary requirements for convicting an individ ual of treason. A similar concern in the young American republic led to incorporating the same evidentiary requirements for conviction of the crime of treason in
the United States Constitution.
/T_he basis of the law of treason in England was a statute of 1352, passed during
the reign of Edward III. ⁴¹ /T_his Act established seven di fferent categories of treason, the three most important being compassing or imagining the death of the
king, levying war against the king, and adhering to or giving aid and comfort to
the king’s enemies. /T_he Edwardian statute remained the basis of English and later
British treason law until the nineteenth century. Whenever subsequent treason
legislation that had amended or expanded upon the Edwardian statute was
repealed, English treason law reverted to its Edwardian foundation. /T_he Act of
1352 also became the foundation of American treason law, as set down in Article
III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution.
/T_he Edwardian statute was intended to clarify the uncertain grounds of conviction for treason at the common law. /T_he vagaries of those precedents had allowed
common law judges to bring reckless prosecutions against enemies of the Crown,
³⁸ John Dryden, All for Love, or /T_he World Well Lost (1678), 4.1.543–6.
³⁹ Cato’s Letters, No. 30, March 11, 1720.
⁴⁰ Brian/uni00A0F./uni00A0Carso, Jr. “Whom Can We Trust Now?” /T_he Meaning of
Treason in the United States from
the Revolution through the Civil War (Lanham, 2006), pp. 5, 152, 177n.51. It is unclear
whether
Washington actually spoke these words.
⁴¹ 25 Edward III, st. 5, c. 2.
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/38755/chapter/337547577 by
University of Essex user on 07 October 2022
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88 /orn.005_4 THE ESSENCE OF SLEEPINESS
IMPLICATIONS FOR IH
The most straightforward interpretation of Factor S was that it represented sleepiness associated with infection or inflammation. This is consistent with everyday experience; a mild infection or fever generally enhances sleepiness, pushing
down REM sleep in favor of non- REM, but a more intense fever can disrupt
someone’s sleep. The lethal effects of sleep deprivation in animal experiments may
have been caused by bacterial invasion of internal organs.17 Yet Krueger and his
colleagues have accumulated evidence that cytokines induced by Factor S also
have an everyday physiological role, outside of fever or extreme sleep deprivation.
Their levels vary rhythmically, rising at night, and tweaking their levels in mice
can modulate how much the animals sleep.18
Clinical studies are underway that may address whether these observations
apply to IH. People with IH aren’t sleep- deprived goats, but it is possible that some
of their sleepiness comes from substances produced by intestinal bacteria or from
heightened levels of inflammatory cytokines. People with sleep apnea— who may
superficially resemble those with IH— have elevated markers of inflammation,
although this is difficult to disentangle from obesity, which often contributes to
sleep apnea.
ROMANCES GONE ASTRAY
By the time Factor S was being characterized, several rival sleep molecules had
appeared. T wo examples demonstrate how sleep’s biochemical complexity has
defied simple dissection.
In the 1960s, a wave of enthusiasm washed over the sleep research field for the
neurotransmitter serotonin. The French neuroscientist Michel Jouvet, who discovered the areas of the brain that control REM sleep in cats, described his and
others’ research on serotonin as like a love story: a romantic encounter, leading
to a honeymoon, followed by divorce.19
Jouvet and others found that depleting serotonin by inhibiting its synthesis
caused profound insomnia in cats. Anticipating a central role for serotonin in
sleep, the Swiss neuroscientist Werner Koella suggested renaming it “somnotonin.” But electrical probing of neurons that produce serotonin showed that
their activity decreased during sleep and increased during time awake— the opposite of what Jouvet and Koella had predicted. Decades later, the insomnia of
serotonin depletion in the cats was found to come from hypothermia.20 It illustrates how sleep is bound together with metabolism and regulation of body
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THE ESSENCE OF SLEEPINESS /orn.005_6 89
temperature. Researchers still think that serotonin is central to the regulation of
sleep, but one molecule is unlikely to be the golden thread coordinating a complex set of brain functions.
Another sleep- associated molecule that did not withstand close scrutiny
deserves highlighting: DSIP (delta sleep- inducing peptide). The rationale for pursuing DSIP was the opposite of that for Factor S. Instead of depriving animals
of rest, Swiss researchers thought they could synchronize animals’ brains and see
if they produce something that can cause sleep in another animal. They exploited
the discovery that electrical stimulation of the thalamus produced deep slow- wave,
or delta, sleep— hence DSIP’s name.
The Swiss researchers set up a system in which rabbits were electrically submerged into sleep while relevant substances were continuously extracted from
their blood via hemodialysis. In the late 1970s, they had accumulated enough of
the “sleep potion,” as the New York Times called it, to decipher biochemically.21
It also turned out to be a peptide, nine amino acids long.
In the 1980s, DSIP was cited as the most extensively tested sleep molecule.
DSIP was different from Factor S, but the two molecules were perceived as competitors. Although a variety of neurochemical effects were attributed to DSIP,
doubts began to emerge early on.22 A peptide would be unlikely to last long
enough in the blood or cross the blood- brain barrier if administered peripherally.
In their long trek toward purifying DSIP, the Swiss team was supported by
several pharmaceutical companies. DSIP appeared promising enough that Hoffmann- La Roche filed for a patent on it for treatment of addiction withdrawal.23
As clinical studies proceeded, DSIP’s previously reported properties became difficult to explain, and Roche abandoned commercial development of DSIP in the
late 1980s. Some of the observed benefits probably came from a placebo effect.
DSIP enjoyed an afterlife at a few Swiss clinics, where people recovering from
addiction were willing to pay for it,24 and in Russia, where derivatives of DSIP
were tested in clinical trials. 25
Nobody ever isolated a gene encoding DSIP or a receptor for it. In 2006, Vladimir Kovalzon, a Russian sleep researcher who had studied DSIP at length, suggested that its original discoverers had gotten the peptide sequence wrong. He
called DSIP a “still unresolved riddle.”26
A IS FOR ADENOSINE
For one sleep regulatory factor, there was no need to go hunting for it. The first
letter of the genetic alphabet had been in front of us for decades. Adenosine is
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90 /orn.005_4 THE ESSENCE OF SLEEPINESS
what’s left when phosphates are removed from ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the
carrier of chemical energy in cells. In the brain, extracellular adenosine is like discarded wrapping paper and boxes outside a house: a sign that gifts were opened
inside. When brain cells send messages to one another, they pack ATP into vesicles, together with neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, glutamate, or GABA.
Upon delivery, ATP is left over and gets quickly converted into adenosine. Outside the brain, adenosine has other functions, regulating blood pressure and
inflammation. It is found on emergency room crash carts because it can calm a
dangerously racing heart.
Adenosine’s sleep- inducing effects were observed in the 1950s by scientists in
London, who were injecting drugs directly into the brains of live cats.27 They were
testing many substances— acetylcholine, serotonin, and others, too. At that point,
they were really just stabbing in the dark; it was difficult to know the physiologically relevant amounts.
In the early 1970s, the neurochemist Henry McIlwain observed that cells
released adenosine when they were stimulated electrically. Others showed that
when enough adenosine is around, it will inhibit brain cells’ firing, sort of like
GABA. However, adenosine has its own set of receptors— four, with two types
in the brain— and acts through different biochemical mechanisms.
For adenosine to modulate alertness and sleepiness makes intuitive sense,
because caffeine, something many are familiar with on a daily basis, interferes
with adenosine’s access to its receptors. Adenosine seemed to fulfill Pieron’s
hypothesis that a product of cellular metabolism accumulates in the brain.
Some popular books, such as Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, say that adenosine is responsible for sleep pressure, the force that drives us to feel drowsy after
a long time awake, and that adenosine builds up with time awake.28 This is a nice
explanation, but adenosine’s actual accumulation in the brain has been difficult
to demonstrate, and adenosine is not the only element of sleep pressure.
In the 1990s, scientists at Harvard Medical School proposed this role for adenosine, showing that its concentration progressively increased in the brains of cats
kept awake for several hours.29 These experiments weren’t as cruel as before; the
cats were kept awake by petting them or by having them play with plastic toy
lizards.30
The Harvard group originally thought that prolonged wakefulness would elevate adenosine levels throughout the brain. 31 H o w ev e r , in animals, accum ula tion of adenosine has only been confirmed in one region, the basal forebrain,
which is part of the network that modulates alertness. At other sites, adenosine
levels appear to stay stable or fall off over time awake. Adenosine may be broken
down or recycled too quickly to accumulate noticeably in extracellular spaces.
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In humans, the question was tested— just once. Neuroscientists rarely have a
chance to peer inside the human brain directly, so they take advantage of the
opportunities they have, which come when epilepsy patients are in the hospital
for seizure diagnosis. While monitoring the brain for seizure activity, surgeons
can leave in place electrodes that are hollowed out, with space to collect a small
amount of fluid for chemical analysis. When investigators at UCLA did this, they
did not see increases in adenosine concentration. The levels actually fluctuated
or decreased over time, even in patients who were kept awake overnight to amplify
the likelihood of a seizure.32
“We couldn’t say much about the basal forebrain, because we were restricted
to probing areas that were clinically relevant for the patients’ epilepsy,” said Jamie
Zeitzer, lead author of a 2006 report on the UCLA experiments. “However, we
could say that an increase in extracellular adenosine seems not to be a global phenomenon.” “Technically speaking, adenosine doesn’t accumulate,” he added in
an email. “Increased extracellular concentrations are due to a mismatch between
release and reuptake, where the latter cannot keep up with the former. Adenosine, though, is rapidly removed from the extracellular space.”
Despite inconclusive experiments in humans, plenty of evidence supports adenosine’s role as a messenger of sleepiness. Even if it’s difficult to detect adenosine’s accumulation, having more available to the nervous system has a measurable
effect. For example, people who have a less active form of an enzyme that breaks
down adenosine displayed deeper sleep, with fewer awakenings at night.33 Those
with the less active form didn’t sleep longer overall, but they were more susceptible to sleep deprivation.34 Experiments with mice showed that signals from
adenosine appear to be important for the deeper slumber that occurs after insufficient sleep.35
Still, the lack of observable accumulation leads to a more fundamental question: where does sleepiness live? In a substance outside cells or within the cells
themselves? “It’s simpler to conceive of it as one thing, but I don’t think it is,”
Zeitzer said.
Besides adenosine, other molecules have been seen to accumulate in response
to sleep deprivation in humans, such as beta- amyloid, the neurotoxic protein
fragment connected with Alzheimer’s disease plaques.36 This doesn’t mean betaamyloid is the embodiment of sleepiness, but it does indicate that sleep deprivation impairs the machinery that flushes beta- amyloid out of the brain.
Recent experiments suggest an alternative way of viewing how the brain is
responding to the lack of sleep. German researchers have observed that when volunteers went without sleep overnight, one type of adenosine receptor increased
in density throughout the brain. That is, the stress of sleep deprivation pushed
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