Tom Lee, UWS

Critical Periods are periods of extreme neuroplasticity, during which crucial developments occur that last in an organism’s historical trajectory. The paradigmatic example is artificial blindness (the taping shut of a kitten’s eye, for example) becoming a life-long disability if it occurs during a critical period. With continued use and research the concept of a critical period has become periodically hazy. Initially restricted to infancy, critical periods are now thought to occur throughout lifetimes, according to varying criteria. With the assistance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, and W. G. Sebald’s prose fiction, I’d like to wonder at the notion of a critical period as it might be nebulised through an environment, or of an environment that builds up to its own critical intensity by demonstrating how things receive each other without discrimination.

Whitehead’s philosophy is corrective of a tradition that favours human sense perception over the receptiveness going on in our surrounds, and likewise, Sebald’s narratives build meaning not through authorial plot development, but through articulating resonances, blurring edges, and speculating as to the correspondences between imperceptibly (un)connected events and things. The aim of this paper is interpret critical periods with Sebald and Whitehead, and to interpret the Whitehead and Sebald with this paradigm in mind.