Whose Plateau?

Joseph Plateau, a Belgian physicist, studied the illusion in the mid-1800s. He developed a special device for the purpose, a black disk with a thin white spiral line drawn from the center to the outer edge, that could be rotated at various speeds. If an observer were to stare at the moving disk, then look away, whatever she looked at next—Plateau's head, for example—would appear to grow or to shrink depending on the direction of rotation. The disk, which other scientists frequently employed over the next half century, came to be known as Plateau's spiral. By the time he described the motion aftereffect in 1849, Plateau himself was blind. His wife acted as his reader and secretary. His sister, an artist, drew his illustrations. (Are these details about how the work was done and who did it beside the point, too?)

Are these details about how the work was done and who did it beside the point? I asked a few years ago in the middle of an essay on value, or on the conflation of various kinds of values, or on the relationship between derivatives—like market futures, like cultural movements, like concepts—and the sources from which they derive—like rice, like bodies, like other derivatives. An editor sensibly suggested then that I eliminate the women and the question from the final draft, perhaps because the essay was already full of loose threads, most of which remained unbraided at the end. I refused, not because I was certain that a reference to Plateau's unnamed wife and sister were crucial to any larger storyline of mine, but because it felt criminal to simply edit them out (again). Their unreconciled status seemed relevant, not to reconcile then and there, but to incorporate as-is. Better to risk breaking a contract with my reader, I decided, than to knowingly participate in re-diminishing people who were reportedly a great man's eyes and hands, never mind that visual perception was his very subject of study. While an awkward non-sequitur may not amount to justice, omitting awkward facts to achieve a more confident silence would surely have been a form of injustice. Years later, the question lingers—it was not rhetorical—I haven't yet settled on a definitive answer.

Joseph Plateaustraat or Rue Joseph Plateau is a conspicuously short street near the center of Brussels, which I visited briefly during a recent stay in the city, hoping to meet with the "Statue de Joseph Plateau" promised by Google Maps. Merely half a block long, the street separates an Ibis on one side from a Novotel on the opposite and is otherwise (otherwise!) unremarkable. In fact, I missed the "statue" altogether on my first pass. Anticipating a representational bronze, I walked right by the round epoxy-coated plaque memorializing one of Plateau's (or his sister's) phénakistiscopes, which had been dug into the sidewalk. It was shielded on one side by a semi-circular wall about three meters tall. This presumable "statue," or wall, consisted of a sturdy steel frame covered by translucent plastic panels printed with black and white images representing the history of cinema from Méliès' A Trip to the Moon through Polanski's Frantic. In other words, it was a monument to movies, its evident reason for being to re-memorialize adored icons like Buster Keaton and Marilyn Monroe, both of whom featured prominently in the plastic montage. When assessed as a monument to Joseph Plateau, however, it communicated firstly that those who commissioned, conceived, and green-lighted the project either weren't much concerned with the man's work or didn't think their public would be. The statue represents that Belgium, given the slightest pretext, would rather claim the invention of cinema than the inventions of Plateau. (He is perhaps better known among physicists for advancing our understanding of soap bubbles and for illuminating related mathematical laws, which continue to inform the study of foams, than for his [sister's] proto-cinematic rotating animations.)

Of course, I hadn't really expected that Plateau's statue would answer my question. I didn't believe it would clarify the role others had played in achievements for which he alone is credited, nor spell out what their rightful historical status ought to be—whether quite beside the point or much closer to it—, but even I was surprised to find those achievements (considerable, really) and the figure of the man himself obscured by a supposed monument to both. So much for the glory history hoards on his behalf...

Then again, that's one but only one (disappointing) way of interpreting a disappointing statue: discredit its motives, dismiss its legitimacy, cancel the monument. Cynical me. Is that really the best I can do, the best we can do, for our monuments and for ourselves? Why not play a different game? Why not simply accept this curved plastic wall (and the world along with it!) for the oracle it is? Why not assume the Statue de Joseph Plateau contains pertinent truths, that it has been waiting for our understanding to catch up with it—that it is neither a mistake nor a lie, that it is instead, like all monuments, a supreme manifestation?

Are these details about how and who beside the point? I ask Plateau's actual statue, which happens to be a curved lightbox of plastic and steel, chockablock with images of Charlie Chaplin, Cathérine Deneuve, and Ben Hur spliced together like a teaser for a classic movies channel.

Did you know collective representations change the structure of the brain? the statue answers back promptly, to our tremendous satisfaction.

What is a monument, after all, if not a testament to our faith in collective representations? And what is a monument to movies, but an expression of our collective fascination with our own, collective imagination? Details about how and who are not beside the point any more than they are the point, the Plateauless statue de Joseph Plateau & co. insists. They are ways points get made and remade within the social mind, which impacts what points can be made there, and by whom, again, and how, again and again, in turn.

Don't take my word for it, though. I'm a woman who talks to walls outside the Novotel. Listen to two esteemed, old (male) scientists instead—researchers Robert Turner and Charles Whitehead proposed my idea a few years ago in their 2008 paper, "How Collective Representations Can Change the Structure of the Brain," published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies:

Abstract: Culture not only influences human psychology and perceptions of self, others and reality, it also, in certain contexts, influences the quality and degree of consciousness itself. If the brain gives shape to consciousness, then we would expect culture to have a corresponding impact on the functional anatomy and microstructure of the brain. The concept of 'collective representations', as developed by Durkheim, refers to the often crucial components of human life that have meaningful existence only because we agree that they do—such as customs, money, religion, cosmology, language, games, laws, power structures and artistic genres. We present recent imaging research which illuminates the feedback relationship between these two types of representation—the collective and the cortical—and which demonstrates that collective representations can have well-defined cortical representations.

Turner, a physicist and neuroscientist, was a lead developer of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, which is used to conduct brain scans. Whitehead worked in advertising for twenty years before switching teams, establishing a second career as a cognitive anthropologist. In their paper, the two venture that culture changes brains, and, since brains shape conscious experience, that means culture and consciousness are bound together in mutual formation. The paper consists primarily of a review of existing research that supports their hypothesis, but they take pains in the summary to emphasize "the contingent nature of our experience as social actors—which must qualify the way that we perceive ourselves, each other and the world—as we refer to a collectively defined system of concepts, rules, beliefs and even physical structures in order to give meaning to our actions and find meaning in each other's actions." Elsewhere, Whitehead writes less carefully that "Western individualism has delayed scientific recognition of the essentially social nature of consciousness." So, we know where he stands. Hear here. Nothing is beside the point once you do or don't see fit to put it in there.