R.D. Laing’s Language of Experience

by Gavin Miller


abstract

The radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-1989) was an accomplished author with an extensive philosophical knowledge that informed his ideas on reading, writing, and interpretation. Laing argues that psychiatry should be modeled on skilful textual exegesis rather than scientific explanation. The exegesis of a psychotic’s words and actions is difficult, he infers, because the impoverishment of our experience cuts us off from the sense that lies within seeming madness. Like philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Laing therefore criticizes the way in which the natural sciences have invalidated subjective experience. He consequently employs a rhetoric designed to disclose with renewed vigor its complexity, variety and reality. Laing fails, however, to find an alternative to scientific reason: "experience", in his weakest work, is an irrational realm of mystical and self-validating certainty that closely parallels Heidegger’s later accounts of "Being".

article


Despite a revival in psychiatric studies of his writings, the literary importance of the radical Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing has been underestimated in the years since his death in 1989. Yet Laing was immensely influential not only upon psychiatric practice, but also upon the arts. He influenced the novelists Doris Lessing and Alasdair Gray, the screenwriters David Mercer and Clancy Sigal, the playwrights David Edgar and Peter Shaffer, and poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Tom Leonard (for further details, see Showalter 220-47; Mullan Creative Destroyer 26-29, 89-91, 214-16, 304-6; Miller 53-85). Laing’s influence upon the creative professions is not accidental: in many ways, his psychiatric writings were consciously literary productions. Indeed, his earliest ambition was to be a writer. While a high school student in 1940s Scotland, he worked his way through the local public library: "I wanted to be a writer. [. . .] I gave myself the age of thirty as an absolute deadline for the publication of my first book" (Laing Wisdom, Madness, Folly 68-76). This literary aspiration does not mean, however, that Laing’s eventual psychiatric writings were merely works of fiction. Psychiatry, as Laing saw it, needed what writing could give it: a sensitivity to obscure and recondite meanings, a revalidation of immediate experience, and a renewed "disclosure" of the world. But to value writing in this way brings potential risks: Laing’s appreciation of the "world-disclosing" properties of poetic language becomes, in his worst work, an infatuation with a realm of mystical, self-validating certainties.

Previous discussion of Laing’s literary status has been marred by the mythology that surrounds the man. Even as perspicacious a critic as Elaine Showalter, who has praised Laing’s literary talents, makes some notable blunders. She claims that "Laing was born in 1927 in the Gorbals, the roughest, darkest, and most depressed district of Glasgow" (Showalter 224). The date is right, but the place is wrong: Laing was born in Govanhill, a middle-class district, and there he lived with his lower middle-class family (see Burston 9). The point of such mislocation is readily apparent: the imagery of roughness and darkness, of male brutality, assists Showalter in her claim that Laing’s psychiatry was masculinist—"a male adventure of exploration and conquest" that "drew upon his own heroic fantasies" (Showalter 236).

A parallel rhetoric is offered by Clancy Sigal’s Zone of the Interior (1976), a novel to which Showalter refers, and which seems to have informed her depiction of Laing as an intellectual pugilist. Sigal’s roman ŕ clef remained unpublished in the UK for almost thirty years because of fears of libel. It features Laing as "Willie Last", an LSD-guzzling psychiatric guru sitting at the center of a network of folly and messianic rhetoric. This caricature of Laing, though often entertaining, also positions him somewhere in sub-rational masculine darkness. Last’s dialogue is rendered in a pseudo-phonetic orthography and spattered with apostrophes, while the narration of the central character (a North American) is rendered in orthographically standard, and thus rational and properly human English: "He [Willie Last] came to the front door himself. All my previous shrinks had had snooty housekeepers. ‘Och Sidney Bell, is it? Come in, mon. It’s a pleasure tae meet ye. I’ve read yir work’" (Sigal 3); later, Sidney tells how, "Dr Last hastened to assure me I was mad ‘only in th’ eggistainshul sense’" (Sigal 21).

In a curious irony, the Scots poet Tom Leonard has remarked, although not with conscious reference to Sigal’s work, that in this traditional technique of narration, "the dialect speaker tends to appear in a narrative like Laing’s patient in a hospital: there is complicity between author and reader that the speaker is ‘other’, that the user of such language cannot be the person who has written or who is reading the work" (Mullan Creative Destroyer 59). Showalter and Sigal therefore both rhetorically position Laing as the "other". He slides from psychic conquistador to Caliban, a thing of darkness (and roughness, and depression) who struggles to imitate the speech of his masters. Naturally, it is hard to imagine an account of, say, Jacques Derrida that would carelessly and conveniently misrepresent his place of birth, or which would record his speech as if he were a comical Frenchman—a kind of Inspector Clouseau of the Sorbonne. As literary readers, we therefore have a duty to look beyond what Leonard calls the "smokescreen anecdotage about Laing" (Mullan Creative Destroyer 91); and this means turning to Laing’s texts, rather than to reports of his person. There is indeed some truth in the charge that Laing was at times a mere rhetorician who preferred striking assertion to careful argument. Yet there is a quite complex philosophical progression that explains Laing’s tendency to venerate "experience" as a privileged source of mystical, self-certifying insight.

Any study of Laing’s language must start with his contention that the psychiatrist is, or should be, a skilled reader. In his first book, The Divided Self, published in 1960, literary hermeneutics provides Laing’s model of the therapeutic encounter: "The personalities of doctor and psychotic, no less than the personalities of expositor and author, do not stand opposed to each other [. . .]. Like the expositor the therapist must have the plasticity to transpose himself into another strange and even alien view of the world. In this act, he draws on his own psychotic possibilities, without forgoing his sanity" (Laing Divided Self 34). The therapist is an exegete, making sense of a puzzling and baffling text by drawing upon the possibilities of being that he shares with the patient. Laing’s understanding of his psychotic patients therefore displays a keen literary sense. Metaphors for unusual experiences abound in his "readings" of psychotic speech: "Fire may be the uncertain flickering of the individual’s own inner aliveness [. . .] Some psychotics say in the acute phase that they are on fire" (Laing Divided Self 45). There are allusions and inter-textual relations: a patient who has no secure sense of her existence except in the presence of others is, to Laing, "like Tinker Bell. In order to exist she needs someone else to believe in her existence" (Laing Divided Self 56). Puns and multiple meanings also abound. Another patient claims she is a "tolled bell" (Laing Divided Self 187): a bell that is tolled because she feels passive, controlled from the outside, but also a beautiful and passive girl, a "belle" of the ball, who has become what she was told to be. Laing’s literary skills are needed to understand such patients because, as he puts it, they express "‘existential’ truth [. . .] with the same matter-of-factness that we employ about facts that can be consensually validated in a shared world" (Laing Divided Self 87).

Rather than trying to "explain" psychosis, Laing offers various genres and motifs which may help to bring sense from words and actions that seem incomprehensible. Even silence and immobility may be a communicative action, rather than mere "behavior". In his autobiography Wisdom, Madness and Folly, for instance, Laing confronts a hypothetical catatonic: "Is he a pillar of salt? Is he god incarnate [in] stone? Is he the still centre of the turning world?"; only when such possible understandings are exhausted, can one rightly ask the final question on the list, "Is there something the matter with his neurochemistry?" (Laing Wisdom, Madness, Folly 87). Throughout Laing’s work there is an insistence on charitable exegesis wherever possible, rather than upon impersonal, non-intentional explanatory forms. The terminology and conceptual scaffolding vary from work to work: from ontological insecurity, to the schizoid condition, to "double-binds", to "knots", to proscribed transcendental consciousness, and so on. But the ambition is the same throughout: to restore a fully interpersonal relationship with the other, rather than to have a relationship in which he or she is understood as possessed by some causal, or quasi-causal, mechanism.

Laing’s way of understanding is therefore very different from that employed in traditional psychoanalytic interpretation, particularly that directed at psychotic speech. Laing’s opposition to psychoanalytic interpretation is present throughout his career, but is most clearly expressed in The Voice of Experience (1982), where he argues that, like sophomorish literary analysis, it is an obstacle to confrontation with "otherness". Wilfred Bion’s psychoanalytic interpretations of a psychotic patient prove particularly provoking to Laing. In the case study that Laing cites, Bion’s patient complains about a lack of interesting food and new clothes, laments the condition of his socks, and says that picking a piece of skin from his face has made him "feel quite empty" (Laing Voice 50). Bion interprets this as the patient’s attempt to communicate to him a feeling that he (the patient) has eaten his (Bion’s) penis. Such constructions, says Laing, are "a grinding machine which reduces any sense to total nonsense", and forestall any genuinely revelatory interpersonal relationship: "It is difficult to imagine what the patient could say that could tell Bion anything he does not think he knows" (Laing Voice 52). Such reduction of the other to the same, to the already-known, merely extends the impersonal attitude: "A psychosis, like a dream, like a brain, is up for grabs, for rotation, reversal, reshuffling, slicing, apposing, juxtaposing and transposing" (Laing Voice 49)

Laing therefore tries to find what is intelligible in terms of the "here and now" of the other’s experience, rather than to pursue one-sided interpretations built around the "there and then" of repressed psychic materials. In The Divided Self, at any rate, this means that Laing’s exegeses are (consciously) in the spirit of Sartre’s discussion of subjective experiences such as nausea, shame, and vertigo. "Vertigo" for Sartre has nothing to do with inner-ears or repressed psychic trauma; it’s a subjective disclosure of freedom—the vertigo that I feel by a sheer drop is a consciousness of my freedom to throw myself into it, regardless of any psychic causality which might be supposed to impede me (see Sartre 30). Laing, in discussing experiences of being on fire, or being petrified, and so forth, is trying to do for psychotic psychology what Sartre does for more everyday experience.

Indeed, Laing’s affinity with the European phenomenological movement offers one of the surest routes to an understanding of his idea of language, and how it should be used. Laing draws the logical conclusion from what he sees as a mistaken assumption that the psychotic’s speech is unintelligible. We are, he believes, experientially impoverished—cut off from the many different modalities of experience that are phenomenologically apparent. This is why we cannot easily understand the psychotic, and it is also why we are unable to understand ourselves. We are, he claims in "The Politics of the Family", all victims of a modern "holocaust of [. . .] experience on the altar of conformity" (Laing "Politics of Family" 101). The implied chiasmus is of course obvious: from the holocaust of experience there arises the twentieth-century’s experience of holocaust. In his 1967 bestseller, The Politics of Experience, Laing declares: "Our behavior is a function of our experience"; "If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive" (Laing Politics 12).

The destruction of our experience, its reduction to ash or some other useless residue, was to Laing philosophically elucidated by phenomenology’s critique of the natural sciences. Husserl in The Crisis of the European Sciences (1936) pointed out the side-effects of a "scientific" or "causal" theory of perception. Such a theory treats experience of the world as primarily the effect of a cause, and so experience becomes nothing more than the effect produced by the mind as objects causally impinge upon it. What we see, feel, hear, smell, savor, and desire, may have no more resemblance to what "really" exists than the crash of a cymbal to the stick that hits it:

The phenomena are only in the subjects; they are there only as causal results of events taking place in true nature, which events exist only with mathematical properties. If the intuited world of our life is merely subjective, then all the truths of pre- and extrascientific life which have to do with its factual being are deprived of value. They have meaning only insofar as they, while themselves false, vaguely indicate an in-itself which lies behind this world of possible experience. (Husserl 54)

Or, as Laing puts it in a 1980 Lecture, "What is the Matter with Mind?", "Sight, sound, taste, touch and smell [. . .] all sensibility, all values, all quality, all feelings, all motives, all intentions, spirit, soul, consciousness, subjectivity: almost everything, in fact, which we ordinarily take to be real is de-realized, is stripped of its pretensions to reality" (Laing "Matter with Mind" 10-11). A similar expression of this idea is found by the English philosopher A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947), whose work Laing also knew (and cited in The Voice of Experience (see Laing Voice 15n)). The scientific view divides the world into an unknowable causal nature, and the apparent nature given in experience: "Causal nature is the influence on the mind which is the cause of the effluence of apparent nature from the mind" (Whitehead 31). Experience, in Whitehead’s words, is "effluence" not just as what "flows out" from the action of thing upon mind, but also as a flow that is waste, toxic, or contaminated, like the effluent from a factory or a sewage works.

Laing notes that scientists typically refuse to see what philosophers such as Husserl and Whitehead have understood: that even the basis of science, sensory experience, must be reduced by science itself to an "effluent". To borrow Laing’s words, "all experience, along with the most strangely modulated and transformed [. . .] is consigned by science to its slop bucket" (Laing Voice 69). Since all experience is merely an illusion mechanically produced by a realm of beings-in-themselves, then, as Laing puts it in an interview with Douglas Kirsner, the scientific view is essentially "that experience is a psychosis of matter" (Mullan Creative Destroyer 45): everything we experience should, in a consistent scientific worldview, really be as delusive and illusory as the experience of a madman.

Laing fights fire with fire. The scientific account of truth is based upon a nonsensical metaphor in which experience accurately represents something which can never be experienced—truth is the "relation between a picture and the undepictable reality the depiction in the picture alludes to" (Laing Voice 29). Against such incoherent metaphor, he musters his own rhetorical armory. In his Schumacher lecture, Laing ends with a list (which I shall not quote in full) of "[a] few of the other modes of existence outside the investigative competence of natural science": these include, "love and hate, joy and sorrow, misery and happiness, pleasure and pain, right and wrong"; "everything, in fact, that makes life worth living" (Laing "Matter with Mind" 18-19). Laing wants to open our eyes to the diversity and variety of experience, to everything beyond the "primary qualities" or "things-in-themselves" nonsensically preserved in the scientific worldview. To do this, he increasingly employs the neglected rhetorical device of enumeratio, the making of a list or catalogue. The variety and irreducible diversity implied by enumeratio is central to Laing’s depiction of experiences that may be otherwise rendered anodyne or trivial. In his autobiography, Wisdom, Madness, and Folly, World War Two is decomposed by Laing into the horrors of modern conflict (enabled, of course, by modern technological rationality): "When World War II started no one could imagine how it could possibly end without endless devastation, poison gas, germ warfare, torture, mutilation, rape, pillage, massacres, killing and killing and killing, shelling, bombing, sea warfare, food shortage, famine and pestilence" (Laing Wisdom, Madness, Folly 35). Enumeratio is also the scheme with which Laing depicts the things that genuinely make him feel alive: "My life-saving consolations were moonlight and gaslight, the angel on the dome of the library, music, the coal fire, fun, indeed all things—sky, sun, stars, clouds, rain, sleep, snow, flowers, trees, birds, flies, prayer, a few people, even asphalt, fog" (Laing Wisdom, Madness, Folly 52). The figure repeats throughout Wisdom, Madness and Folly, from the many ways of committing suicide with "razor blades, nuts and bolts, soap, broken glass, lavatory chains, buttons, knives, forks, spoons, hair, hammers, files, combs, broken saws, coins, lavatory paper, clothing" (Laing Wisdom, Madness, Folly 118) to the fascination of night-time experience—"solitude, silence, desolation, camaraderie, romance, meditation, prayer, vigil, carousing, music, the moon, the stars, the dawn" (Laing Wisdom, Madness, Folly 29).

There are various other techniques by which Laing forces his readers to confront the inauthenticity with which they might attempt to downgrade vast domains of their experience to some "psychosis" of their own neurological matter. He has a gift for novel metaphor—for the reworking of what George Lakoff would call an "Idealized Cognitive Model" of madness (see Lakoff 68-76). For example, when describing the refractory wards of Gartnavel mental hospital in Glasgow during the 1940s, Laing recalls an uncanny and oddly hopeful experience that draws upon an analogy with twentieth-century avant-garde composition. In his own words: "the ward sounded like an out-of-tune orchestra endlessly tuning up, each instrument unrelated and out of pitch", yet there is a kind of harmony, as "when the jumble of sound in a difficult piece of music all suddenly makes sense" (Laing Wisdom, Madness, Folly 123). The possibility of this hidden tunefulness inspires Laing in his early experiments with a therapeutic community based on minimal intervention. By offering his musical model, rather than a medical model, Laing hopes that the reader, seeing (or perhaps hearing) madness differently, will also perceive that drugs are not a cure for an illness, but a way of trying to "harmonize" the madman with his society: "There are drugs to calm agitation, to soften frantic feelings, to tone down awful moods, to modulate the tonal region of feelings, to regulate thoughts and the style and content of imagination and dreams" (Laing Wisdom, Madness, Folly 25).

There are undoubtedly many more rhetorical strategies in Laing’s discursive writings. Some are listed, for instance, by Martin Howarth-Williams (see Howarth-Williams 64-68), including the use of archetypal imagery, syntactic parallelisms, and abrupt juxtapositions between different discourses (such as mystics and politics, or religion and science). To fully consider all Laing’s prose devices is beyond the scope of this article. To analyze fully the rhetoric of his more identifiably literary or poetic writing—that of his Sonnets (1977), the spiraling logic of Knots (1970), the mini-dramas of Do You Love Me? (1977), or the dialogues of Conversations with Children (1978)—would also require lengthy consideration.

But one strategy in particular stands out as a clue to Laing’s philosophical legitimation of his rhetoric. If there is indeed a modern "holocaust of experience", then it may be that the traces of an earlier meaning can gesture towards what has been repressed, sidelined, or simply exterminated in our lived reality. In his second book, Self and Others, published in 1961, Laing close reads Jean Genet’s play The Balcony by drawing attention to the etymology of the word prostitute: "Most of the play takes place in a brothel. The girls in the brothel are shown to be, in a literal sense, pro-stitutes. They stand for (pro-stare) whatever the client requires them to be, so that he can become for a while that figure which he wishes to be" (Laing Self and Others 103). The existential meaning in prostitution is its furnishing of a "collusive identity" (Laing Self and Others 104). To collude is to play together at self-deception: "The term collusion has the same root as de-lusion, il-lusion, and e-lusion. The root ‘lusion’ ultimately comes from the past participle of the Latin verb, ludere. [. . .] It can mean to play, to play at, or to make a sport of, to mock, to deceive" (Laing Self and Others 98). Such rediscovery of language is a frequent trope within Laing’s work. Elsewhere, he draws attention to the etymology of words such as companion (literally, a bread-sharer), orientation (to find the East), diagnosis (to see through), and the obvious (that which stands in one’s way, and so both evident, and an obstacle). As Martin Howarth-Williams rightly concludes, "This technique involves looking afresh at a common word [. . .] to discover new, or often, very old, meanings, which are literal, thereby sweeping away, or at least, relativizing, the conventional meaning" (Howarth-Williams 65).

This concern with uncovering an older, forgotten meaning, came to Laing from Heidegger. Glasgow in the 1950s, as well as apparently being (according to Showalter) a dark and depressed domain, was also an important centre for the translation of German-language philosophy into English. As well as Ronald Gregor Smith’s translations of Martin Buber, Glasgow also produced what was for many years the only English translation of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, the version produced by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (see Heidegger Being and Time). Laing, indeed, was known to both Macquarrie and Robinson: "John Macquarrie was working on the translation [of Sein und Zeit] which I thought was a total disaster and at times I tried to persuade him that the whole point of Heidegger was totally lost by translating sein, which is the German infinitive of the verb to be, sein, by ‘being’" (Mullan Mad to Be Normal 367). The influence of Heidegger is quite apparent throughout Laing’s work. In his second book, Self and Others, for example, Laing meditates on the English idioms that revolve around how "a person ‘puts himself into’ his acts", how he "may seem to be ‘full of himself’ or ‘beside himself’, or ‘to have come to himself’ again after ‘not being himself’" (Laing Self and Others 117). This everyday existential vocabulary directs us, he says, to a different notion of truth, one different from the representational account presupposed in causal theories of perception (see above). Citing Heidegger, Laing contends that "in natural science truth consists in a correspondence, an adaequatio, between what goes on in intellectu and what goes on in re" (Laing Self and Others 120). Yet, "there is another concept of truth which is to be found in the Greek word αληπεια. In this concept, truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without being veiled" (Laing Self and Others 120). The concept of truth as aletheia, or disclosure, is central to the literariness of Laing’s writing. This conceptual refocusing of truth brings together Laing’s existential exegesis of schizophrenic speech, his opposition to reductive psychoanalytic interpretation, his revalidation of "anomalous" experience, and his poetic reworking of psychiatry’s rhetoric. Laing claims in The Politics of Experience that "[w]ords in a poem, sounds in movement, rhythm in space, attempt to recapture personal meaning in personal time and space from out of the sights and sounds of a depersonalized, dehumanized world. They are bridgeheads into alien territory [. . .] Their source is from the Silence at the center of each of us" (Laing Politics 24).

Laing argues for the function of language as a poetic disclosure of so-called "inner" being, our "personal idiom of experiencing our bodies, other people, the animate and inanimate world" (Laing Politics 6). This claim that poetic art discloses being (or Being) is much the same as that made by Heidegger in his later work, where he asserts that "language alone brings beings as beings into the open for the first time", and concludes that "All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is as such, in essence, poetry" (Heidegger "Work of Art" 197). This indebtedness to Heidegger helps to explain what many have seen as the failings of Laing’s later work—an unwillingness to argue, an indifference to evidence, and a tendency to mystical assertions. Although there is a temptation to attribute these failings to the merely psychological causes at work upon Laing (e.g. drug and alcohol abuse), there is also undoubtedly a logically intelligible path to such a mode of discourse. Habermas has argued that Heidegger’s project, by insisting upon disclosure as the primary meaning of "truth", eventually produces a series of incommensurable "truths" that are "in each case provincial and yet total; they are more like the commanding expressions of some sacral force fitted out with the aura of truth" (Habermas 154). Thus, as Laing starts to echo Heidegger more faithfully (The Politics of Experience is particularly filled with such repetitions, e.g. the paraphrasing of Heidegger’s "What is Metaphysics?" (Laing Politics 22-23)), he begins to follow the same path. Reason quickly becomes downgraded to a mere instrumental mastery over the world as Laing echoes, for example, Heidegger on the technological disclosure of nature as a "standing-reserve" (Heidegger "Technology" 322)—to describe a goose as "raw-material-for-pâté", says Laing, is "a brutalization of, a debasement of, a desecration of [. . .] the true nature of human beings and of animals" (Laing Politics 38). What Laing correspondingly elevates is not rational discourse, but a supposed realm of self-validating certainties. In The Voice of Experience, for instance, Laing voices his fascination with re-incarnation: "Belief in a cycle of reincarnation is worldwide. Whole civilizations have been dominated by it"; such experience "is in no way accounted for by being dismissed as the delusions and hallucinations of the mind unable to reach to the haven of scientific disenchantment" (Laing Voice 99). Similarly, in The Politics of Experience, religious faith is also above rational critique: "Faith was never a matter of believing He existed, but of trusting in the presence that was experienced and known to exist as a self-validating datum" (Laing Politics 100).

What therefore marks, and mars, Laing’s later work is something like the same mystical certainty that Habermas notes in Heidegger:The event of Being can only be meditatively experienced and presented narratively, but not argumentatively retrieved and explained [. . .] Dasein ["being-there", i.e. human being—GM] is no longer considered the author of world-projects in light of which entities are at once manifested and withdrawn; instead, the productivity of the creation of meaning that is disclosive of the world passes over to Being itself. Dasein bows to the authority of an unmanipulable meaning of Being and rids itself of any will to self-affirmation (Habermas 152-53).



No doubt this sounds very abstract. Consider then an illustration from Laing’s writings: he claims that "[f]ew are made to believe their experience. Paul of Tarsus was picked up by the scruff of the neck, thrown to the ground and blinded for three days. This direct experience was self-validating" (Laing Politics 100-01). By imbibing Heidegger with his LSD, Laing came to the position outlined in The Politics of Experience: "True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego [. . .] and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine" (Laing Voice 101). The schizophrenic journey is therefore something more than the masculine voyage of exploration described by Showalter; it is equally a Heideggerian transition in which "[t]he being of phenomena shifts and the phenomenon of being may no longer present itself to us as before" (Laing Politics 92).

Laing never fully retreated from this position (which is frequently glossed as the "romanticization of schizophrenia"—an accurate, yet partial understanding of his thesis, which is as much philosophical as psychiatric). It haunts his work, particularly in his repeated hints at the reality of re-incarnation—as in Conversation with Children, for instance, when his young son insists that he was a soldier who killed a lot of people, "last time I was alive" (Laing Conversations 1). Sigal’s mockery of this thread in Laing’s thought is thus scarcely an exaggeration: "When a patient is so sure she came fr’ another planet", announces Willie Last, "th’ integrity of her statement slices my rationality off at th’ knees" (Sigal 206). Yet the movement of Laing’s philosophy of language is far from eccentric: the progress from hermeneutics, existentialism, and phenomenology, to something approaching a deconstructive free-for-all (in which aliens and re-incarnation are all equal "truths") could be seen as a compressed history of an important strand in literary and critical theory. Laing’s vices were, and are, shared by the intellectuals of his generation: like many, he followed the critique of "instrumental reason", but could find no alternative model of rationality. His language of experience directs us toward what is "heterogeneous" to the scientific destruction of phenomenal reality, and it does so with the skill of an accomplished novelist, playwright, or poet. But, without some alternative rational criterion with which to separate wisdom from madness and folly, Laing’s language becomes at times a "mere" rhetoric which promotes a mystical submission to the anonymous power of "experience".

Works Cited

Burston, Daniel. The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Habermas, Jürgen. Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity and Blackwell, 1987.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

---. "The Origin of the Work of Art." Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London: Routledge, 1993. 139-212.

---. "The Question Concerning Technology." Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger. Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge, 1993. 308-41.

Howarth-Williams, Martin. R.D. Laing: His Work and Its Relevance for Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977.

Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

Laing, R.D. Conversations with Children. London: Allen Lane, 1978.

---. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican, 1965.

---. The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon, 1967.

---. "The Politics of the Family." The Politics of the Family and Other Essays. London: Tavistock, 1971. 65-124.

---. The Self and Others: Further Studies in Sanity and Madness. London: Tavistock, 1961.

---. The Voice of Experience. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

---. "What Is the Matter with Mind?" The Schumacher Lectures. Ed. Satish Kumar. London: Blond & Briggs, 1980. 1-27.

---. Wisdom, Madness, and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist 1927-57. Canongate Classics 89. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1998.

Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Miller, Gavin. Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Communion. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.

Mullan, Bob. Mad to Be Normal: Conversations with R.D. Laing. London: Free Association, 1995.

---, ed. R.D. Laing: Creative Destroyer. London: Cassell, 1997.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 1969.

Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980. London: Virago, 1987.

Sigal, Clancy. Zone of the Interior. Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire: Pomona, 2005.

Whitehead, A.N. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920.

To cite this article, use this bibliographical entry: Gavin Miller "R.D. Laing’s Language of Experience". PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. Available http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/miller-rd_laings_language_of_experience. July 8, 2021 [or whatever date you accessed the article].

Received: October 15, 2006, Published: December 3, 2006. Copyright © 2006 Gavin Miller

R D LAING 

By Richard Sennett
Oct. 3, 1971

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In a moment of anger in his new book, R. D. Laing writes, “Our own cities are our own animal factories; families, schools, churches, are the slaughterhouses of our children; colleges and other places are the kitchens. As adults in marriages and business we eat the product” These charges may all be true, but they are tiresome, written in such a way that the reader turns them off. The strongest impression I have after reading “The Politics of the Family and Other Essays” is that Laing has substituted an easy rhetoric of accusation and condemnation for the struggle to understand people's feelings that dignified his earlier work.

In the dullness of his attacks on an inhumane society, Laing is, of course, not alone. Many of those who took fire during the recent years of turbulence are now passing through a moment when a great number of painfully acquired ideas threaten to enter the comfortable landscape of cliche. I don't mean that radical rhetoric is out of date, because the fissures in society stimulating it are still there; I mean rather that something is going wrong with the way we perceive injustice, something is atrophying in the words and ideas to express anger, so that the rhetoric remains true but no longer truly angers. Why this should be so, Laing's new book, in its very weariness, helps clear.

Lassitude follows periods of upheaval with almost monotonous insistence in history, but an exhaustion of sensitivity usually comes upon a people after they have endured a revolution or great change in their lives. The extravagants of Paris who emerged after the death of Robespierre gloried in precious clothing and precious sentiments, all the while mouthing the old revolutionary slogans; the “empty men” of the Weimar Republic, as Brecht called them, also bore the marks of exhaustion left by a domestic war. But the present loss of sensitivity is different, and puzzling, for when we turn away from the enthusiasm for apocalypse that sets the tone of newspapers and television, we face a society whose wars, poverty, racism and all the rest, are changing slowly if at all. Can it be only that we are tired response to the world—argued with stale anger from listening to so much talk about the need for change?

The writings of R. D. Laing have moved from early books which put forth a complex, painful vision of the human oppression involved in the phenomenon society labels “insanity” to books which replay all the early themes in such a fashion that the reader feels he is in a closed and stuffy room. Laing's thought has disintegrated dramatically in the last four years, but it is unworthy of him simply to itemize that decline. For what has happened to ?? shows why it is not just a matter of words that makes contemporary words of anger stale.

“The Divided Self,” his first book, appeared in England in 1960, when Laing was 28. The book's power lay in Laing's ability to catch the rationality behind seemingly irrational behavior, a logic he revealed by making the reader see through the eyes of someone labeled schizophrenic. Laing did not “explain” schizophrenia as a disease; he showed how schizophrenia was a perfectly logical way of coping with impossible, longstanding situations in a person's family or immediate society. Much of this ground was prepared for Laing by the American anthropologist Gregory Bateson—probably one of the greatest and most neglected writers on human behavior in this country.

A few years earlier (1956) Bateson had arrived at a theory of “double binds” to explain the contradictory language people called schizophrenics speak. A double bind is a situation in which a person is issued two contradictory negative commands he or she must follow in order to gain love. A mother tells her daughter to do dishes before math homework if she wants love from Mammy; the father tells the girl she must do math first if she wants his love.

When contradictions like this persist, what is the child to do? She wants and needs the love of both parents. It becomes logical for her to obey both parents at once: she may make dishwashing motions while reading her math, or call the dishes she handles plus and minus signs. In this way she comes to appear disconnected and deranged to her teachers or to a social worker, when in fact it is a situation she had no hand in creating that is deranged.

Bateson was concerned with the logic of “illogical” language. What Laing seized on in “The Divided Self” and in books that followed in rapid succession—”Self and Others” (1961), and “Sanity, Madness and the Family” (with A. Esterson in 1964)—was to ask why these contradictory and painfully disorienting situations should come into being.

In the course of these books Laing came to think that parents are no more to blame for posing the child insane demands than is the child for responding insanely. Forces out of their personal control make them hurt the child; few of the people in families of schizophrenics, Laing remarked, ever want to create sickness; they have to, they are driven souls. Who then is responsible?.

Laing came to believe that everyone and no one is. Society makes insanity, he argued; sanity is a condition in which people are willing to obey social rules, even if the commands are inhumane and irrational. The rebels are labeled insane. That little girl is a rebel in her acts because she didn't try to paper over a contradiction; she tried to respond as honestly as she could to the demands made on her, and her show of honesty prompted others to think she was sick.

Here, too, Laing was not alone. Michel Foucault's brilliant first book, “Madness and Civilization” (1961), argued that a long history stands behind the practice of treating the deviant as insane, so that, in his “illness,” he doesn't have to be taken seriously. The incarceration of Soviet dissidents in mental hospitals is an overt example today, but Foucault and, later, Laing argued that all of “civilized” society, practices this behavior, unaware of its own repression.

By the time Laing wrote “The Politics of Experience” (1967), it seemed logical that he would become a social analyst, a man whose experience as a psychiatrist would give him, and his readers, new insights into how society organized repression. But these insights were not forthcoming. Rather than follow the logic of his own anger and become a social critic, he chose to make his patients, whom he had formerly seen as dignified in their suffering, into heroes. He dealt with society only by clinging to those people who were its victims and whose actions, if not intentions, showed they were fighting back.

This tendency to cling to the victim as hero took hold of Laing in two ways. Everything he saw in his consulting room, all his intellectual associations and allies, made him think that traditional psychiatric logic, pos iting “rational” standards of behavior, was a sham, was really a tool for keeping dissidence down. If Laing were to become a social critic, if he began to ask why society brought into being these human traumas, wouldn't he run the risk of becoming one of “them,” wouldn't his gifts of sensitivity and originality fall prey to the deadness of that sane world? There is a failure of nerve here, a fear of putting himself in enemy territory, but it is complex and humane because it is a fear of losing his own humanity.

Of course the victims of brute power arouse sympathy, and any victims who show signs of resistance command respect. But the spectator of their plight, free to leave them and go home, engaged in their woes by empathy rather than necessity, always runs the risk of feeling that the victims have something he doesn't, that in their suffering they have transcended the vicious world that the empathetic observer gets along in. He is led by the force of his own sympathy to admire them, to want to be like these rebels, at least to champion them. As a a result, society seems ever less real apart from its effect on the lives of its victims, and the sympathizer's own life seems less real too; he orients his own reactions to society by those who are suffering so much more than he is. As their follower, their champion, he feels he too is

Blacks in the South and the urban ghettoes who were treated this way during the 1960's told their white friends to go home; the blacks felt used. Laing's sympathy for his mentally ill patients is enmeshed in the same contradictions that led to a crisis between black and white civilrights workers, but he has gone a step further. Laing has come to see madness not just as an act of rebellion, but as an act of “liberation,” of “waking up,” of a “freeing” of the individual from society's constraints. Rebellion and liberation are separated by a simple matter of fact: a liberation ends the causes of the distress that makes people want to rebel. Laing, however, has turned this around, and looks at madness as a liberation in which the individual reorganizes the world on his or her own terms, so that society can be shut out. But why then are mentally ill people usually in great and un

We do not know much of how Laing's patients feel about their doctor's sympathy. Kingsley Hall, the therapeutic community Laing organized in London, has had some dramatic successes and failures. But I suspect that the patients' relief at finding a professional who does not treat them with condescension must be balanced by the burden Laing places on them as his proxies. Further, we must ask what does the conversion of a victim into an existential hero do to the sympathizer, to the man losing himself in the struggles of others? This tendency is not Laing's alone, it is characteristic of many of his readers, who have learned during the last decade to feel angry by identifying with the victims of our society; the results of this identification are what Laing's latest boox has to show.

“The Politics of the Family and Other Essays” has as it; main section a rewrite of five radio talks given In 1968 over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the eighth series of Massey Lectures; the three other essays in the book come from a talk given to English social workers during the same year and two pieces previously published in specialized medical books in England. All the essays are ostensibly concerned with the role of the therapist intervening in family crises.

I should say at once that the reader who was moved by “The Divided Self” will find in these essays of a decade later a few pages with the old force. For example, Laing gives a brilliant analysis of how the famed 19thcentury French psychiatrist B. A. Morel drove a patient mad: failing to explore the reality before him seriously, that a young boy hated his father, Morel assumed instead that there was some hidden physical disease to explain this unnatural and impolite feeling; the boy was institutionalized and eventually became no more than a vegetable because the doctor refused to accept the “mad” idea of father‐hatred as equal in lucidity to the presumptions of natural filial affection ruling the doctor's own

Sadly, the few passages with the old fire are sandwiched between dead prose like the following: “As Sartre would say, the family is united by the reciprocal internalization by each (whose token of membership is precisely this interiorized family) of each other's internalization.” Much of the book reads at this level or worse; Laing can no longer write clearly unless he is showing someone being hurt.

Laing cannot talk about the theories and intellectual constructs surrounding mental illness with the same imagination and originality with which he talks about the mentally ill patient because he won't permit himself to. All of Laing's own powers of originality are concentrated on speaking for the patient; but the patient, as Laing elsewhere argues so strongly, is not the maker of his own illness. What can Laing use to confront the tormentors? Examples of their practices gone wrong. But there is no way of explaining what has gone wrong other than by using their terms. He sounds like Doctor Laing, pompous and boring, because it is he who made the split between doctor and human being, for fear he would not have the strength to confront the doctors without his patients to hold on to.

Making the victim a proxy for his own anger forces Laing's thoughts about victimization itself into a pedestrian mold. In “The Politics of the Family” he argues that there is a triangle composed of blind authority, the invasion of intimate feelings, and “waking up” through mental illness. From the moment of their birth men are contaminated by others, ultimately by society. Laing draws a “map” of this invasion, but the countryside and the routes of invasion have all been laid out before by Freud, David Rappoport and Alfred Adler—none of whom gets much credit. Laing argues that nuclear war and genocide are connected to schizophrenic feelings without drawing the connections at all. How can this psychiatrist help us if outside the consulting room his great gifts of intelligence go dead, and he mechanically and woodenly repeats the ideas of others? This failure of intellect is especially disturbing since the behavior Laing perceived in his consulting room could not be adequately explained by the older

This invasion from the outer world, Laing says, is blind, unintentional: each person or social group wounds others only hoping to protect itself. I believe this, but I don”t understand why. Laing believes it, and doesn't think it matters why, because “why” gets us too far away from the “reality that is the patient.”

So when Laing talks of waking up, of liberation, he ends at an impasse. If this is a vicious and insane world what are men to do? How are they to wake up? The analysis of schizophrenia on which Laing's work rests is that people are forced into what society calls insane behavior when they try to take the world seriously; it is the essence of his argument that you do not become insane by some willful act or failure of your own. If you did, we would be back in the world of Morel where patients needed to learn to control themselves better. If I, a sane man, want to wake up, and I can't will myself into mental illness, what

Here is the closest Laing comes to an answer “I consider many adults (including myself) are or have been, more or less, in a hypnotic trance. ... Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up ... is going crazy. Anyone in this transitional state is likely to be confused. To indicate this confusion is a sign of illness, is a quick way to create psychosis.”

It is an obsessive litany: You will be punished for being mentally ill when you wake up. But how do I get there? There is no therapy in this therapist's writings.

The conversion of his patients into “models” of behavior inhibits Laing from talking about three issues. The first is himself: “When I was thirteen, I had a very embarrassing experience??f shall not embarrass you by recounting it.... The first family to interest me was my own. I still Imow less about it than I know about many other families. This is typical.” A humanistic psychiatry does not have to bear the burden of autobiography or ‐confession, yet Laing cannot talk about himself openly in the detail he feels entitled to talk about his patients. When he uses “I” in this book, it usually is in terms of putting himself in the place of a suffering patient

Laing thinks of himself as an existentialist—indeed, one of his best books is a commentary with David Cooper on Sartre called “Reason and Violence” (1964), which has just been published for the first time in this country by Pantheon and Vintage Books. But as a writer he has become the worst of existentialists, one of the “spectators” Sartre so detests. How can a writer be an existentialist when he discounts himself?

Secondly, Laing talks about how emotions get twisted, but seldom talks about what emotions there are in the heart to twist. A reader who wants to find out about the range of feeling involved in human trust, in friendship, in sensuous pleasure, will not find it in Laing. “The Divided Self” described an idea of “ontological security” in which men felt able to take a wide variety of risks; the books since “The Politics of Experience” show a writer who can imagine only one.

This is to say, finally, that Laing has lost that capacity to dream which is necessary in any enduring radical vision. Critics like Marx and Freud did not content themselves with saying justice would reign when the old abuses disappeared.. Each of them tried to create a scenario for a just life that was greater than a mirror image of the old. For Marx, socialism ended the abuses of capitalism, but Communism instituted human relationships of a wholly new order. The acts of intelligence Freud called ego strengths were not compromises between the warring factions of instinct and external circumstance; they were creative powers to make new meanings, new satisfactions. Because Laing now has lost the power to dream and make his readers dream and desire, his catalogue of abuses is losing its power to anger.

What has gone sour in Laing is not unique to him, but is representative of the deadening of sentiment in the last few years that has seized us, his contemporaries. His refusal to think about the enemy mirrors our own: white racism, genocide, monopoly capitalism these are the villains and what more do we need to know about them but that they must be destroyed?

In truth, the resistance each man can mount to repression has to be renewed in his life, not by repeated declarations of will, but by continual doubts about what and why he is fighting. “A revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love,” said Che, but he is also moved by curiosity; I think a man is liberated not by becoming completely absorbed in the fact that he is oppressed, but in exercising his power to understand with a certain grim disinterest the forces impinging on him. Political sensitivity thrives on uncertainty because the possiibility to be moved, to revolt, and be moved again, comes only from a deep distrust that at last one has settled what is

Intellect keeps uncertainty alive, and the failure to use it closes one up in the room where Laing is imprisoned. White, middle‐class persons who have come to sense what blackness means to an American black, or warfare to a Vietnamese, now speak of “identifying” with these struggles. Few of us in Laing's generation speak of identifying with the middle class, because we don't like it, and we think we can make change only by orienting our sensibilities around persons or conditions ineradicably different from ourselves. When Laing crossed that barrier and began to live through others, he went dead inside, could not speak of himself as probingly as he could speak for his patients, lost the power to create anger at the world which held them both so harshly in its grip. I wish I knew where it would lead to think out the realities of our lives as persons who are not dramatically suffering, but I do know that until we stop this' presumptuous sentimentality, until uncertainty and curiosity about who we are ourselves return, we will become increasingly bored with our own “causes” and tolerant of the society that brings them into being.■

Labour Produces All Value, All Value Belongs To Labour.

The labour theory of value dominated the research agenda of economics for more than two centuries, from at least the time of Sir William Petty in the 1660’s until the 1870’s when Leon Walras, Carl Menger and William Stanley Jevons established the marginal utility theory of value. One generation of economists after another struggled to explain the price of commodities by the labour required to produce them, but nearly everybody saw errors in the work of their predecessors. They wanted to keep the labour theory, because they believed in the philosophical, moral or ethical implications of it. Its powerful appeal rests on the self-evident proposition that, when production is traced back to its origin, all commodities can, in principle, be reduced to land and labour. Since land is a free gift of nature that costs no human effort to produce, it cannot explain value, though it is the source of physical things. From this perspective, capital goods are merely “past labour,” to quote, Sir William Petty. John Locke turned this conception into a theory of property rights. The “political” agenda of political economy, whether it took the form of liberalism or Marxism, rests on the moral principle that labour is entitled to the fruits of its labour. As an economic theory, however, it raised more problems than Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx could solve when they tried to explain market prices with it.

 

Locke's Labour Theory of Value There are three possible meanings of a labor theory of value that are relevant to Locke's writings: a labor theory of value may identify labor as the source of use-value or utility (the reason people desire a good in the first place), it may attempt to explain the determination of relative prices (the exchange value of goods) based on some measure of labor inputs, or it may claim that labor provides the only justifiable claim to receiving the exchange value of the goods it produces. A labor theory of value in the first sense states that the usefulness of goods and services demanded and consumed by individuals is created either exclusively or principally by the labor that goes into produc- ing them. Almost all economists would identify labor as a contributor to the use-value of com- modities, but the idea that labor is solely responsible for this use-value is unusual and probably only found in the writings of Karl Marx." All discussions of Locke's "labor theory of value" ultimately refer to the theory of property he develops in Chapter V of the Second Treatise. It is there that Locke presents his famous justification for private ownership of goods and land on the basis of the effort or labor which individuals expend to produce goods or to cause the land to produce goods of value to human beings. The structure of Locke's defense of private property is un- doubtedly familiar to most readers. In the state of nature before governments had come into existence, men all had common access to the earth and the fruits thereof which God had pro- vided for their use. However, although God had given all men an equal right to use the earth's resources, in order to survive, individual men had to appropriate some of these resources to feed, clothe and shelter themselves. [p. 3041 It was Locke's problem, and the problem of seventeenth century political philosophers in general, to explain how these appropriated resources became legitimate private property which excluded other men from having any claim upon them. Grotius and Pufendorf had both argued that private property was establish- ed in the state of nature by the cansent of all mankind who once shared in the original com- munistic ownership of these resources.'s1 Such a theory of property implied, however, that since property only existed at the consent of society, this consent could be withdrawn or modified by the society which sanctioned it originally, a conclusion which Locke sought to avoid. Instead, he argued that private property was established in the state of nature not by the consent of mankind, but by natural law. Adam Smith had considered and rejected the idea that the exchange value of a good or service depended on its utility. Smith distinguished between value in use and value in exchange, and argued that the value in exchange could not depend on the value in use. He cited the Paradox of Diamonds and Water to show that (as he understood it) there was little predictable relationship between value in use and value in exchange. Accordingly, Smith argued that value in exchange must depend on something else. In most cases, Smith argued, that something else would be the labor used up in the production of the commodities. He was certain that would be the case in an "early and rude state of society," in which, Smith suggested, it might require the same amount of hunting time to capture two deer or two beaver. Then, Smith suggested, two deer would exchange for one beaver. Therefore, the relative price of a deer would be two beavers, the same proportion as the labor required to produce (catch) them. Adam Smith held a labor theory of value, not only in the context of an “early and rude” society, but as an explanatory theoretical tool in his examination of an advanced (for his period) capitalist organization. To be sure, he did alternate between a labor-embodied and labor-command approach. But, as he never specified anything but labor as a standard in his command theory (no oxen or any other commodity is brought forward as an alternative measuring rod), one can reasonably argue that Smith was (generally) clear as to what his general point of view was.

So the labor theory of value was not unique to Marxism. Marx did attempt, however, to turn the theory against the champions of capitalism. He pushed the theory in a direction that most classical economists hesitated to follow. Marx argued that the theory is supposed to explain the value of all commodities, including the commodity that workers sell to capitalists for a wage. Marx called this commodity "labor power."

Labor power is the worker's capacity to produce goods and services. Marx, using principles of classical economics, explained that the value of labor power must depend upon the number of labor hours it takes society, on average, to feed, clothe, and shelter a worker so that he or she has the capacity to work. In other words, the long-run wage that workers receive will depend upon the number of labor hours it takes to produce a person who is fit for work. Suppose that five hours of labor are needed to feed, clothe, and protect a worker each day so that the worker is fit for work the following morning. If one labor hour equaled one dollar, the correct wage would be five dollars per day.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher and political economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. He is regarded as the father of political economy and Marx found several important ideas in his writings.

i. Surplus comes from Production. Smith argued that a surplus emerges from production, not from exchange. Earlier writers had often been confused concerning this issue. The French physiocrats had argued that agricultural production alone creates wealth, whereas Smith argued that both agriculture and industry create wealth.

ii. Social Labour creates Wealth. This wealth is the "necessaries and conveniences of life" that are produced, that is, the commodities made available in production. (Marx may have used this idea to help develop the notion of the importance of the commodity). But this wealth is produced by the annual labour of the nation. This can be interpreted as social labour in the sense that it is useful labour, with skill and dexterity, applied in agriculture and industry. It is not isolated, but is exercised within the division of labour. For Smith, wealth is not produced by trade or amassing gold and silver, but by social labour.

iii. Division of Labour. For Smith, the development and expansion of the division of labour is key to the creation and accumulation of wealth. The level of wealth is increased by expanding the division of labour within society as a whole, and within specific industries. Society's labour as a whole is exercised within this division of labour, and each worker's claim on society's wealth is in proportion to that worker's position within the division of labour. The view that the division of labour is a cooperative aspect of the structure and development of socity may have inspired Durkheim, whose first major work was The Division of Labour.

Smith did not have what Marx considered to be a systematic labour theory of value that would explain exchange in modern capitalism. For earlier societies, Smith claimed that products exchanged more or less in proportion to the amount of labour embodied in them. However, in capitalism, each of land, capital and labour had a return to them, so that the labour theory of value no longer explained prices.

While Marx was quite critical of Smith, he did adopt some of his ideas, although he changed or developed them in a somewhat different way than Smith. The notion of value emerging in production, and on the basis of labour, became a key aspect of Marx's model of society. The notion of the division of labour is also important for Marx and other sociologists. Marx thought Smith too uncritical in his acceptance of the division of labour. While Marx recognized the cooperative character of the division of labour under capitalism, and on the other hand he viewed it as a source of alienation and argued that a social system eliminating much of the division of labour would ultimately develop. Marx was also critical of Smith's invisible hand, the unseen force that Smith claims guides individual self interest to promote the general good of society. (The invisible hand might be considered an economic counterpart of Durkheim's solidarity and order).

Marx inherited the labour theory of value from the classical school. Here the continuity is even more pronounced; but there is also a radical break, For Ricardo, labour is essentially a numeraire, which enables a common computation of labour and capital as basic elements of production costs. For Marx, labour is value. Value is nothing but that fragment of the total labour potential existing in a given society in a certain period (e.g. a year or a month) which is used for the output of a given commodity, at the average social productivity of labour existing then and there, divided by the total number of these commodities produced. and expressed in hours (or minutes), days, weeks, months of labour.

Value is therefore essentially a social, objective and historically relative category, It is social because it is determined by the overall result of the fluctuating efforts of each individual producer (under capitalism: of each individual firm or factory). It is objective because it is given, once the production of a given commodity is finished, and is thus independent from personal (or collective) valuations of customers on the market place; and it is historically relative because it changes with each important change (progress or regression) of the average productivity of labour in a given branch of output, including in agriculture and transportation.

This does not imply that Marx’s concept of value is in any way completely detached from consumption. It only means that the feedback of consumers’ behaviour and wishes upon value is always mediated through changes in the allocation of labour inputs in production, labour being seen as subdivided into living labour and dead (dated) labour, i.e. tools and raw materials. The market emits signals to which the producing units react. Value changes after these reactions, not before them. Market price changes can of course occur prior to changes in value. In fact, changes in market prices are among the key signals which can lead to changes in labour allocation between different branches of production, i.e. to changes in labour quantities necessary to produce given commodities. But then, for Marx, values determine prices only basically and in the medium-term sense of the word. This determination only appears clearly as an explication of medium and long-term price movements. In the shorter run, prices fluctuate around values as axes. Marx never intended to negate the operation of market laws, of the law of supply and demand, in determining these short-term fluctuations.

The ’law of value’ is but Marx’s version of Adam Smith’s ’invisible hand’. In a society dominated by private labour, private producers and private ownership of productive inputs, it is this ’law of value’, an objective economic law operating behind the backs of all people, all ’agents’ involved in production and consumption, which, in the final analysis, regulates the economy, determines what is produced and how it is produced (and therefore also what can be consumed). The ’law of value’ regulates the exchange between commodities, according to the quantities of socially necessary abstract labour they embody (the quantity of such labour spent in their production). Through regulating the exchange between commodities, the ’law of value’ also regulates, after some interval, the distribution of society’s labour potential and of society’s non-living productive resources between different branches of production. Again, the analogy with Smith’s ’invisible hand’ is striking.

Marx’s critique of the ’invisible hand’ concept does not dwell essentially on the analysis of how a market economy actually operates. It would above all insist that this operation is not eternal, not immanent in ’human nature’, but created by specific historical circumstances, a product of a special way of social organisation, and due to disappear at some stage of historical evolution as it appeared during a previous stage. And it would also stress that this ’invisible hand’ leads neither to the maximum of economic growth nor to the optimum of human wellbeing for the greatest number of individuals, i.e. it would stress the heavy economic and social price humankind had to pay, and is still currently paying, for the undeniable progress the market economy produced at a given stage of historical evolution.

Theory of Value

Before Adam Smith, the political economic concept of labour was defined by reference to a feudal system in which all grades and classes of labour and all other forms of property were, ultimately, subject to a Monarch while the soul of the labourer was entrusted to the tender care and mercies of a Church with a monopoly on revelation. The resulting ‘caste system’ also embraced a more ancient division of labour between the Liberal and Mechanical Arts. From the time of the ancient Greeks when slavery was first introduced through the Roman Empire into the Christian Middle Ages and up to the Renaissance, those who worked with their heads practiced the Liberal Arts; those who worked with their hands, the Mechanical. In essence, the first were considered ‘ennobling’; the second, ‘demeaning’. It is interesting to note that writing was considered a mechanical art in the ancient and medieval worlds. It was something a ‘gentle’ person did not do; it was for scribes (Fuller 2000, 46).

It took the 15th century artist/engineer/humanist/scientist genius of Da Vinci, Dürer, Michelangelo and their kin to begin bridging this ancient chasm. An additional span was laid by their successors in the 16th and 17th centuries – high artisans and instrument makers - whose ‘experimental method’ inspired Francis Bacon and fuelled the ‘Scientific Revolution’ (Zilsel 1945).

With Smith, and the republican ethos of the American and then the French Revolutions, the labourer (Liberal and Mechanical) became free of feudal ownership and religious intolerance. In economic theory or moral philosophy as it was then called, the value of goods and services was rooted by Smith, among others, in a ‘labour theory of value’. Smith’s theory quickly eclipsed older exchange, scarcity and use value theories. It was the time, effort and skill of labour (and wages – the higher the better according to Smith for the wealth of nations) that determined the ‘just price’ of a good or service in the marketplace.

Even Capital, as physical plant and equipment, was subsumed under the labour theory by Bohm-Baverk and the Austrian School. In essence, capital was historically embodied labour using ‘round-about’ methods of production (Blaug 1968, 510-11). How to measure labour content of a good as well as historically embodied labour in capital was not, however, convincingly answered (Dooley 2002).

The labour theory of value maintained theoretical dominance for nearly a century until the Marginalist Revolution of the 1870s and innovation of the Marshallian Scissors of supply and demand. Marshall rejected the labour theory in favour of what can be called a modified theory of exchange involving equilibrium between:

• the constrained utility maximization of the consumer (subject to price and income constraints) measuring ‘willingness’ to buy, a.k.a., demand; and,

• the constrained profit maximization of the entrepreneur (subject to cost and technical constraints) measuring ‘willingness’ to produce, a.k.a., supply.

The labour theory of value continued, however, as the foundation stone of Marxist economic thought and fueled the Communist Revolutions of the 20th century. To appreciate the importance of the theory, one may look at the ‘Cold War’ that geopolitically divided the planet into two armed camps threatening global ‘mutually assured destruction’, or MAD, for nearly half a century. One camp believed that capital, as private property, was the foundation stone upon which ‘hired’ labour - through its division and specialization – transformed natural resources (or ‘dumb nature’) into commodities of use and value to a ‘sovereign’ consuming public. The other believed that ‘sovereign’ labour was the only productive asset and ‘capital was theft’. On this dispute the life and death of human civilization, as well as the biosphere of the planet, lay beneath a nuclear sword of Damocles dangling on an elliptical trajectory with a fifteen minute warning.

The triumph of market price over Marx as a ‘theory of value’ – equating the ‘willingness’ of consumers to buy and producers to sell – occurred at a time, however, when the ancient distinction between the Liberal and Mechanical Arts resurfaced in a new strain – management versus labour. In effect, labour worked with its hands; management worked with its head.

While a satisfactory theory of capital never emerged from the Classical School of Adam Smith or the Neoclassical School, the idea of a single owner of capital directing production was, and remains, an elementary assumption of the economic theory of the firm. Growth and development of the limited liability corporation, however, spread capital ownership wider and wider (contra Marx) to embrace more and more ‘shareholder’ owners. This, in turn, led to a separation of ownership and control first formally noted by Berle & Means (1932) with the concomitant emergence of a new class of labour called ‘management’. This new class exercised the prerogatives of ownership as hired agents (employees) of shareholders. That the ‘agency problem’ in economics has not been solved is evident in the recent wave of corporate scandals, e.g., Anderson, Enron, Tycho, Worldcom, et al.

But why should one class of labour ‘work’ and another ‘manage’? This was the subject of Richard Bendix’s historically exhaustive Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (1956; 1976; 2001). Bendix traces the conceptual history of modern management back to feudal times. He finds, in effect, a theory of positive thinking: managers have a positive self-image and can defer gratification while workers do not and cannot do the same. Bendix captures, perhaps, the last embers of the Classical ‘Iron Law of Wages’. Classical economics viewed, with relative equanimity, the starvation of the labourer who must then accept lower real wages and who, alternatively, with higher real wages simply bred increasing the labour supply thereby lowering real wages through competition. Full employment, under the Classical model, was assured on the backs of labour, or what Marx called “the surplus army of the unemployed”.

John Kenneth Galbraith in his New Industrial State (1967) went further and described the modern corporation as governed by a self-replicating technostructure of managers (produced by and selectively chosen from among graduates of so-called ‘B’ or business schools) who then direct ‘workers’ on behalf of an ever increasingly and diffuse pool of shareholder-owners. Galbraith also explored the relationship between large corporations and a newly emerging class of labour - creative talent, specifically artists (Economics & The Public Purpose, 1973). While the classless genius may have emerged with the Renaissance’s artist/engineer/humanist/scientist, by definition, it is exceptional and has not, historically, constituted a distinct class of labour.

By the late1960s, however, as a result of mass post-war, post-secondary education, an historically large demographic cohort of talent became available to both arts and science-based industries. By the 1980s and 1990s observers such as Robert Reich in The Work of Nations (1992) recognized that the displacement of manual workers by automation and computerization (together with increasing Third World ‘off-shore’ production) was creating a new class of American symbolic workers, i.e., those who manipulate words, numbers, visual and other recorded images and sounds. The most recent wave of talent include so-called ‘biotech stars’ responsible for the emergence of a whole new sector of the economy – biotechnology (Zucker et al, 1998).

The mainstream economic concept of labour holds one additional and inherent bias. Other traditional factors of production – capital, entrepreneurship and natural resources – can reasonably be assumed fixed in the short-run; labour is the variable factor to be adjusted to maximize profits. Calculation of the Newtonian equilibrium for constrained profit maximization, however, becomes problematic when the variable is volitional.

In his 1998 article “Beyond the Information Revolution”, Peter Drucker captures the dilemma of shareholders and management in dealing with the new knowledge worker. Bribes in the form of stock options will not suffice, Drucker concludes. The old schism between management and labour, between the Liberal and Mechanical Arts, between geeks and suits, according to Drucker, must be healed through respect based on mutual need:

Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers’ greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and social power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners. (Drucker 1998, 57)

Henry George, the 19th century American economist and social philosopher, saw the problem of protecting the working peoples' wages and Jobs one of distributive justice. He attacked as fallacious the idea that equality of opportunity to work was a "privilege" accorded to labor. The protectionist system, he held, was based on the antidemocratic notion that "the many are called to serve and the few to rule." The paternalism of protection, whether in the domestic or the world economy, is "the pretense of tyranny," he argued. He holds that labor, including workers and entrepreneurs, and not landholders, or owners of capital, is the source of all economic value. Labor, he reasoned, "employs capital," and not the reverse. George's theory of value was an improvement on Adam Smith's, putting into it a greater emphasis on the importance of land in the analysis of the distribution of wealth. But it was a production cost theory, with all its problems and advantages.

DID MARX HOLD A LABOR THEORY OF VALUE?

One popular apologetic view has it that Marx began by accepting the labor theory of value he inherited from Smith and Ricardo when he wrote the first part of Capital, but abandoning it after getting bogged down in the details of its application. This view does not stand up well to historical scrutiny; Marx had drafted all three volumes of Capital before Volume I went to the printer.

A more plausible view is that the labor theory of value served two purposes: to emphasize the fact that the worker sells labor-power to the capitalist, who then owns the product of that laborpower, and to account for the antagonism between worker and capitalist, with the resulting struggle over the length of the working day—both of which needed simple explanations for a non-specialist audience.

Marx’s rejection of the labor theory of value in Volume III was prefigured in a much discussed but little understood part of the first section of the first volume of Capital, the section on “Commodity Fetishism.” Marx points out that it is a peculiar feature of capitalist economies that the social relations involved in production assume in the eyes of the producers “the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Exchange ratios confront producers as a natural force, independent of human will. “Value converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.” The discussion of fetishism appears immediately following Marx’s introduction of the labor theory of value. Yet if the labor theory of value were true, it is hard to see why commodity fetishism would be a problem; exchange ratios really would be a natural form, the reflection of objective features of the world, rather than of social relations between persons.

In the labor theory presented at the beginning of Capital, exchange is explained in terms of a natural feature of commodities, the amount of laborpower required for their replacement. Exploitation is also conceived of in terms of a natural feature, the difference between the value of labor-power and the value it produces. Only appropriation is treated as the outcome of a social process. By the end of the final volume of Capital, though, both exchange and exploitation are recognized for the social processes that they are. Each depends on the capitalist’s ability to appropriate surplus, rather than on any objective feature of the labor process or the commodities produced. It is because exchange is a social process that its confrontation of those involved as a natural process is a fetish. All commodities are made commensurable by capitalist appropriation, not vice-versa. The subtitle of Capital is ‘a critique of political economy’: as critique, it investigates the conditions and limits of exchange. It turns out that exchange is conditioned not by prior exchangeability, but by the appropriation of surplus by those who control the means of production. That is why “the products of labor acquire a uniform social status.”27 It is also the answer to the question that “political economy has never thought to ask,” i. e. “why labor is represented by the value of its product and labor time by the magnitude of that value.” Labor is measured by the value of its product because the capitalist buys it for what it can produce. Labor-power is the source of surplus value because it is purchased on the basis of its ability to produce not physical surplus, but surplus value. Labor, initially the shared feature of commodities, turns out to be ‘abstract’ in capitalist production not because it is all interchangeable, but because capitalist social relations make it so.

Marx’s labor theory of value is one of the most misunderstood elements of his work, and this is partly a result of its historical context. Marx was not the first economist to recognize that commodities exchange at a value equivalent to the labor used in their production. Adam Smith accepted this, along with most other early capitalist sholars. However, Marx extended the idea at a time when it was losing favor among classical economists. While capitalist thought on economic value turned in the direction of price theory, Marx formulated a theory of value that, like most of his thought, was founded in the study of the underlying social relations of production. What this means is that the labor theory of value is not necessarily incompatible with capitalist price theory. For, the labor theory is the result of a fundamental concern with the ways in which economic value is constructed in capitalist societies, not with the particular numerical form it takes. By asserting that the value of a good bears a direct relationship with labor, Marx is not claiming that labor value can be equated with price. Quite the opposite. If surplus value is defined as the difference between the value of work performed and the wages earned for that work, and wages bear a direct relationship to price, then the difference in labor value and price is actually a component of labor exploitation under capitalism. Therefore, labor value and price are, by definition, not identical within the framework of Marx’s theory.

From the preceding discussion, we can draw the following conclusions: 1) Smith rejected the universal validity of the labor theory of value on the ground that the existence of profit implies that capital creates value in addition to labor, and, therefore, that labor is not the only determinant of value. Such a view is inconsistent with Smith’s own theory of profit of book I, chapter 6, paragraph 5. Against Smith, Ricardo and Marx are right to point out that, on the basis of Smith’s own theory of profit, the presence of profit does reveal any creation of value by capital, because this theory conceives profit as the part of the product of labor that does not accrue to the working class, but to the capitalist class. The same can be said about the existence of rent: it does not imply that land creates value, and, therefore, that not only labor determines value. For a labor theory of value, the presence of profit and rent does not involve any refutation; precisely, they are the object that require explanation, and they are explained as shares in the product of labor in virtue of certain property rights. The presence of profit in the price of commodities does not imply that capital creates value, nor does the presence of rent imply that land creates value. But neither does the presence of wages imply that labor creates value. The distributive parts of price reveal nothing about the nature of exchange value, but about the structure of property rights over a value determined independently of these rights to appropriate it. 2) Smith rejected the validity of the labor theory of value under capitalism because he was not coherent with his theory of profit and thought, mistakenly, that the fact that the product of labor is to be shared between the workmen and the capitalist implies that labor does not determine the whole value of the commodity. Since wages do not exhaust the whole value of the commodity, something else than labor is causing value, thinks Smith in book I, chapter 6, paragraph 7. He draws the wrong conclusion from his own premises. Once the confusion of “wages” and “labor” is removed and the text rewritten so as to make sense, we can see that Smith, contrary to what he believed, had found nothing against the validity of the labor theory of value under capitalism, but, rather, against some “wages” theory of value. 3) Ricardo and Marx did not invent a false legend when they held that Smith had not been consistent with his distinction between “labor” and the “value of labor”. They did not hold that Smith had confused the two concepts: they held that though he had correctly distinguished them in his theory of profit, he failed to be coherent with himself when he rejected the labor theory of value under capitalism.

EXPLAINER: What’s the history of the Olympics protest rule?

FILE - In this Oct. 17, 2018, file photo, a statue in honor of former Olympians Tommie Smith, left, and John Carlos is seen on the campus of San Jose State University in San Jose, Calif. Smith and Carlos raised their black-gloved fists while their national anthem played during the 200-meters medals ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. Rule 50 of the IOC charter states: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File)


TOKYO (AP) — The simple act of taking a knee felt like something more monumental when it happened on Olympic soccer pitches in Japan on the opening night of action.

Players from the United States, Sweden, Chile, Britain and New Zealand women’s teams went to a knee before their games Wednesday night, anti-racism gestures the likes of which had not been seen before on the Olympic stage. They figured to be the first of many of these sort of demonstrations over the three-week stay in Tokyo.

The Olympic rule banning such demonstrations at the Games has been hotly debated and contested for decades, and those issues reached a flashpoint over the past two years. What resulted were changes in the rules, and the willingness of some sports organizations to enforce them.

How have protests and demonstrations at the Games evolved over the years? Here’s a brief rundown.

WHAT: The Olympics have always billed themselves as a nonpolitical entity designed to bring countries together to celebrate sports and international unity. One of the best-recognized symbols of that nonpolitical ideal is a prohibition of “propaganda” at the Games. Rule 50 of the IOC charter states: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”


WHO: The ideals of the rule were most notably put to the test before it was officially enshrined in the Olympic charter. American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists while their national anthem played during the 200-meters medals ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. They would not only eventually be sent home for disregarding the ban on demonstrations, but ended up being ostracized from the Olympic movement for nearly a half century. Not until 2016 did the U.S. Olympic Committee bring them to an official event. Not until 2019 did it enshrine them in its hall of fame.

WHEN: The basic structure of Rule 50 was written into the Olympic charter in 1975. At that time, it was actually part of Rule 55 and it stated: “Every kind of demonstration or propaganda, whether political, religious or racial, in the Olympic areas is forbidden.” It would be refined and rewritten over the years. Only a few months ago, in the face of mounting pressure to do away with the rule, the IOC made its latest tweak, saying it would allow some demonstrations but only “prior to the start of competitions” and not on the medals podium. The IOC has also given discretion to the international agencies that run the individual sports on how — and whether — to enforce the bans.


WHERE: The rule became a sticking point two summers ago, a half a world away from Tokyo, in Lima, Peru. It was on the medals stands at the Pan-American Games that U.S. hammer thrower Gwen Berry raised her fist and U.S. fencer Race Imboden took a knee. They both received letters from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee that put them on a yearlong probation and, with the Tokyo Games scheduled for the following year, sent a message to other American athletes who were thinking of doing anything similar. The coronavirus pandemic pushed the Games back by 12 months, and the killing of George Floyd in the United States — and the activism that followed — prompted a thorough rethinking of the rule. The USOPC decided it would no longer sanction athletes who violated Rule 50, thus placing pressure on the IOC, which often depends on the national committees to enforce its rules at the Games.

WHY: While the USOPC was undergoing its review, the IOC also tasked its athletes commission to rethink the rule. The commission sent out a worldwide survey that found broad support for the rule as it was written. Following that lead, the IOC chose to keep the rule largely intact. It set up the possibility for tension throughout the Games in Tokyo, where, in addition to the soccer teams, Berry and U.S. sprinter Noah Lyles had telegraphed themselves as among the athletes to watch. Lyles wore a black glove and raised his fist at the starting line at Olympic trials, while Berry turned away from the flag during a playing of the national anthem.

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Socialist Science and Scientific Socialism

Robert Young has a great essay on values in science whereupon he states;

If science is not value-neutral, then what values does it reflect, reinforce and reproduce? For a marxist there can be only one answer to that question: the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of its ruling class. (In case you are wondering what I'd say about societies whose ruling class is not capitalist, I'd reply that I am talking about all hierarchical and authoritarian societies, both capitalist and nominally socialist. I know of societies which have begun to deviate from that norm but none which has got very far.) If we say that science is not value-neutral, then we must mean that science thereby gets included in the critique of values. In its radical form the critique of values is the critique of ideologies. Then science - not some science or some sciences some of the time, but science - is ideological. We live under capitalism, so we have capitalist science. We want to bring a different set of values into being, to bring about a new set of ruling ideas—ideas of a society without rulers, a part of a different ideology or world-view. We want to bring about a socialist society. It will, if we are vigilant, have a socialist science. I can imagine it, or some of it.

So: Is there a socialist science? No; no more than there is a socialist society. But is socialism possible? Yes, we are struggling to bring it into being. I can imagine it, or some of it. To repeat: science is not value-neutral; it embodies capitalist and other hierarchical values. Our values are aimed at bringing about a different world-view - an alternative cosmology - that of socialism. Our scientific practice is therefore aimed at becoming part of socialist science. If so, we'd better get on with it in that scientific practice. (By the way, if you don't think that science is part of the world-view in which it is practiced, then you think it's value-neutral and cannot believe in a specifically socialist science, only in science under socialism. You don't really have to disturb yourself at work until the industrial working class has produced the revolution. That's a relief, isn't it?) The problem is to move from science which is capitalist to science which is socialist. In practice, in our work and lives, the problem is to place our work in science - our social relations at work and in other settings - inside (not alongside) our socialism. That is the second sense in which it is time to move on: to change our work and the rest of our lives so that our socialism comes first. Not many self-styled radical scientists have got round to that.

Big brains may have helped birds survive dinosaur-killing asteroid


Just a few million years before an asteroid killed nearly all dinosaurs on Earth, a creature resembling a small albatross with teeth flew through the Cretaceous skies. The creature, known as Ichthyornis, is considered an early bird -- but not part of the lucky lineage that survived the mass extinction and gave rise to modern birds.MORE: Extreme heat causing baby birds to injure themselves after fleeing hot nests

Now, a newly discovered Ichthyornis fossil sheds light on why some early birds survived the asteroid-triggered catastrophe known as the K-Pg extinction, while close relatives like Ichthyornis perished. The key may have been a vastly expanded forebrain -- a trait that all modern birds possess, but Ichthyornis and other extinct lineages lack.

The earliest known bird is Archaeopteryx, which lived about 84 million years before the K-Pg extinction. Archaeopteryx shared a similar brain shape with nonbird dinosaurs and reptiles, with the cerebellum and optic lobes arranged in a straight line behind a modest-sized forebrain. In contrast, the forebrains of all modern birds are hugely enlarged, spreading above the optic lobes and pushing the whole brain into a new arrangement.

© Ghedo via Wikipedia

There are dozens of other known bird species that lived between Archaeopteryx and the K-Pg extinction, but until now, researchers had no idea how their brains were shaped. That's because bird skeletons are extremely brittle, and none of the other surviving fossils were preserved in enough detail

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© Ghedo via Wikipedia An example of the skeleton of an Ichthyornis is displayed in an undated stock image.

"Usually one of the first things that happens is the skull gets crushed," said Christopher Torres, a paleo-ornithologist at Ohio University in Athens. "What makes our new specimen of Ichthyornis so special is that it preserves a nearly complete skull."

Ichthyornis is one of the closest known relatives of living birds, and the new specimen lived just 5 million years before the K-Pg extinction. Thus, it likely shared many traits with the ancestors of modern birds. But Torres and his colleagues found that it had a relatively small forebrain, like Archaeopteryx and more distantly related dinosaurs.MORE: One of the world's biggest-ever new dinosaur species found

There were probably multiple factors that helped the ancestors of modern birds survive, noted Torres. Still, the new findings suggest an enlarged forebrain could be part of what gave them their edge. The forebrain orchestrates many high-level cognitive tasks, and it tends to be enlarged in highly intelligent animals. Torres suspects that early birds with big forebrains were better able to change their behavior in response to the chaotic climate conditions following the asteroid impact.

"Because the ancestor of living birds already had that expanded forebrain, it was uniquely capable -- it was uniquely prepared to modify its own behavior in the face of these rapidly changing circumstances," he said.

The findings were published today in the journal Science Advances.