Mind, Brain, Rock ‘n’ Roll

One of the basic distinctions in contemporary thought about thinking is between brain and mind. “Brain” means the organic machine inside our skulls. “Mind” is more elusive: it can refer to anything from the generic subject of any possible judgement to the syndrome of affinities, experiences, and commitments that we now describe as personality, and was once called a soul. As Ivan has pointed out , the reduction of mind to brain is a dominant tendency in modern neuroscience. On the other hand, the dualism of body and soul encourages dangerous indifference to man’s corporeal being.



Over the weekend, I found in Tom Stoppard’s recent play Rock ‘n’ Roll a serious, if slightly contrived investigation of this dialectic. For Stoppard, the extremes are represented, respectively, by Marxist materialism and the erotic, impressionistic music of bands like Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, and above all, Czech heroes the Plastic People of the Universe . Both promise liberation from the human condition. But because they are radically partial, each leads to a particular kind of disaster.



Stoppard’s main target is the Communist subordination of real life to rational abstraction. The play, in fact, is a reimagining of Stoppard’s own biography, in which a Cambridge philosophy student returns from England to his Czech home after the 1968 Soviet invasion. “Jan’s” only luggage is a crate of rock ‘n’ roll records. Although he pretends to be a loyal Party man, Jan’s main ambition is to deliver this precious cargo to his friends behind the Iron Curtain.



The authorities, of course, are uncooperative. As the Prague Spring turns to winter, Jan becomes involved with the organized opposition. Unlike his comrades, however, Jan sees that the regime understands how to respond to the traditional apparatus of dissent like parties and manifestos. What they cannot repress, precisely because it makes so little sense, is the indifference to instrumental reason expressed by the music he loves. As the action runs into the ‘70 and ’70s, it becomes clear that rock ‘n’ roll is not enough. But Stoppard makes it clear that he sees cultural revolution in the West, long hair and all, as the necessary condition of political freedom in the East.



What about the victims of our inverted celebration of mind without brain? These are a little harder to find: Stoppard’s characters are bourgeois academics whose family and romantic attachments survive all the usual experiments of living. But there is warning in the fate of Syd Barrett, the short-term member of Pink Floyd who hovers over the stage like a ghost. We see him for the first and only time as Pan, whose song calls the formerly repressed to self-realization through self-expression. Stoppard’s characters resist the dissolution of their minds into Dionysiac impersonality. But Barrett ends a broken man, now using his given name of Roger, whose seclusion began in madness and is enforced by the reporters camped outside his door to catch a glimpse of the fallen pop-god.



For Stoppard, the forces rock ‘n’ roll channels have the power to undermine a society based on fundamental misconceptions of human nature. Under democratic capitalism, it is able only to destroy individual lives. The friend with whom I saw the play suggested parallels to Bellow, but Stoppard is much more optimistic about the possibilities for finding balance and meaning under postmodern conditions. It seems to me that one’s view about our now inescapable inheritance of rock ‘n’ roll might not be a bad way of exploring the meaning of postmodern conservatism.