Let’s try to surprise allegory in medias res in its effects, instead of beginning with definitions. Perhaps a relatively scientific or philosophical (or at any rate cognitive) text will be the most appropriate specimen for a counterintuitive demonstration. In any case, Daniel Dennett’s now classic Consciousness Explained presents the additional advantage of dealing with a topic—subjectivity—where problems of representability intersect with ideologies of identity, and questions of literary representation and thematics cross paths with some of the oldest philosophical theories on the books.1 His own theoretical context, if an outsider can grasp it, is torn by debates between Artificial Intelligence, computer models of the mind, neuropsychological explorations of the brain, and newer evolutionary theory, not to speak of the traditional history of philosophy as such. But I don’t want to argue about the findings of this impressive book, but rather to examine it as a representation in its own right: indeed, as a kind of language experiment and perhaps as a conceptual narrative, with its own categories of completeness and its own rules for introducing new material or problems (as the novelist introduces new characters and disposes of old ones). Greimas indeed once famously declared that semiotics ought to be able to read a text like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason like a kind of novel, a proposal that might also lend confidence to the undertaking.
Yet if in what follows we do not claim to evaluate the argument, we need at least to do it justice. By this I mean that I will try minimally to give a formal, not to say a formalist, account of the book. But what does it mean to “explain” consciousness? To give a theory of it, a new theory perhaps? Yet the book concludes with a more startling variant: “Look at what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined [consciousness] without them?” (455) This now seems to change the dimensions of the problem. Is imagining the reader’s acknowledgement of the validity of the explanation? But is not imagination a kind of picture thought, a satisfaction of conceptual needs in terms of the non-conceptual or preconceptual? And even if we decided to distinguish between conceptualization—the construction of a theory—and imagination—the rhetorical projection of an image—does not the significant introduction of the thematics of phenomenology in an early chapter of the book add yet a third possibility to this number, one we should not too hastily assume to be a kind of synthesis between the conceptual and the imagined? (Yet although phenomenology introduces the possibility of some identification with concrete experience in which intellection has its full share, it turns out that it will here be a question of “heterophenomenology”—that is to say, an eidetic construction based on other people’s accounts, perhaps in some way vaguely comparable to “ethnomethodology.”) We will return to these matters later on. Suffice it to add here that all three possibilities seem to fall under the general heading of representation as such. Yet not only must representation be a central theme of any approach to allegory, the issue of the representation of consciousness will necessarily loom large in any study of allegory. So perhaps our reading of Dennett will not be so purely formalist after all.
The starting point, and as it were the theoretical prerequisite against which all the stages of the argument can be checked, is the repudiation of dualism (associated with Descartes). Now as idealism is relatively inconceivable for modern people (despite the rather curious Bergson revival); and as materialism would seem to be equally inconceivable—a determination by the brain cells or whatever, dissatisfaction with all earlier versions of which can alone explain the project of this book itself—we seem to be in search of something else, the nature of which has already been queried and puzzled over in the preceding paragraph.
But at least the conceptual adversary is clear (or one of them). Dennett’s opposition to Cartesian dualism is, however, only indirectly phrased in terms of the well-known mind/body split (or parallelism), something that famously made Descartes the father of modern idealism and of modern materialism alike and at one and the same time. Rather, he positions himself in any number of modern philosophical mainstreams by staging his conceptual objects in the form of a critique of what he calls “the Cartesian Theater of Consciousness” (33–39). The pineal gland is in other words the least of our worries. What this (non-Cartesian) characterization of Descartes makes unavoidable are a number of more basic philosophical issues: not merely the separation of the subject from the object, but also the static or contemplative function attributed to consciousness as its primary mode, as well as the perspectival unification of the scene or stage by the spectator in the audience (a theme that might draw us off into the considerations of camera vision deployed in film theory, as well as into the relationship posed by Guy Debord between commodification and the spectacle). A third fundamental theme is only implicit in the theater-of-consciousness model: it is that of personal identity, and it is easy enough to add it into the picture of the theatergoer. But one might also want to query the play itself: is it, as Dennett says in another context, a script “without an author” (12)? This is to repose the question of unification on the other or object side of the dichotomy, and also to raise the issue of narrative, which, transferred back to the subject or spectator, will become one of the fundamental explanatory schemata of Dennett’s book, something which along with much else confirms, as we shall see, his family likeness with literary theory.
Cartesian “theaters,” however, are not merely the theoretical models by various philosophers beyond Descartes himself: they also have relations with stubbornly held common sense views of the self (here called folk psychology), to the point where it is difficult enough to determine which comes first. One can at any rate “disprove” the philosophers, by adducing arguments and objections. Common sense, however—“la chose la mieux partagée au monde”—cannot exactly be said to be false, or rather its illusions must be acknowledged to be real and existing ones. Any theory that wishes to contravene common sense, therefore, must do more than point out fallacies: it must explain the illusion itself. At the limit this is a historicist enterprise: you not only have to show that your truth is true; you also, assuming that truth, have to show why no one has ever thought so before. So,
more precisely, I will explain the various phenomena that compose what we call consciousness, showing how they are all physical effects of the brain’s activities, how these activities evolved, and how they give rise to illusions about their own powers and properties. (16)
The formulation already allows us to note the expressions “composed” and “effects,” which suggest that some account of synthesis will have to be offered (perhaps related to the “illusions”) and also that, alongside narrative (already prematurely mentioned), we may also expect to receive an explanatory scheme organized around the term “evolved.”
So perhaps for the moment we can redefine the troublesome term explanation as the construction of an alternative model of consciousness, whose function is to displace the commonsense (and traditional philosophical) one at the crucial points mentioned above: a separation of subject from object; a static, contemplative, epistemological definition of the subject; the unification of both subject—personal identity—and object world—a “reality” about which one formulates truths. The satisfaction supposed to accompany the “explanation” and to acknowledge its “truth” is then simply the feeling of completion that transpires when the new model has fully taken care of these flaws.
But we can go further in their enumeration, for it seems clear that Dennett has had to do some preliminary work or conceptual prepreparation in order to unify the various illusions. It would seem that this new and unified picture of the commonsense model (also sometimes still called the Cartesian Theater) turns precisely on unification itself, which can be considered dialectically in its two aspects: a manifold reduced to some kind of unity, and a center around which that new unity is constructed. Dennett’s task will then be clarified: it is unification itself that needs to be discredited, at the same time that a substitute is proposed which can do the same work. That substitute will clearly enough initially be identified as the opposite of unification, a formulation which however only sets the direction of the investigation and has not yet done the real work.
Let’s jump ahead to the concrete solution, in order to measure the distance we have to travel from the unification model to its more satisfactory substitute. The latter Dennett calls “Multiple Drafts”: we have moved from a theater (a space) to a “process of production”, indeed, a kind of writing project, in which various approximations are jotted down and then discarded in their turn. In fact, the literary reference is explicit here:
In the world of publishing there is a traditional and usually quite hard-edged distinction between pre-publication editing, and post-publication correction of “errata.” In the academic world today, however, things have been speeded up by electronic communication. With the advent of word-processing and desktop publishing and electronic mail, it now often happens that several different drafts of an article are simultaneously in circulation, with the author readily making revisions in response to comments received by electronic mail. Fixing the moment of publication, and thus calling one of the drafts of the article the canonical text—the text of record, the one to cite in a bibliography—becomes a somewhat arbitrary matter. (125)
Something like this is in fact Jerome McGann’s proposal for a revision of literary criticism generally in the direction of a kind of “editorial materialism”: drawing on the central example of Blake and the various homemade and hand-published “editions” of the latter’s works, McGann constructs a model for which the term “Multiple Drafts is a very satisfactory name indeed, and one which would seem to me considerably to revise what happens on either side of the subject/object divide. On the object side, there is no longer any primary substance: there are simple successive versions of “something” about which our still Aristotelian prejudices are left to produce a kind of cubist vision; since no real object exists, no authoritative first intention or “vision” of the work to be elaborated (inasmuch the very process of linguistic elaboration modifies the starting point beyond recognition) and no “final” text except by the accidents of chronology and abandonment by the author. On the side of the subject, then, we rejoin one of the great themes of modern philosophy, from Sartre to Derrida: that of reification and temporality. If we want to be consequent about our life in time as subjects, we cannot privilege any present instant without reifying it and turning it into a stable thinglike reality: but could we endure (could we even imagine) a consent to temporality such that we are willing to relinquish all those temporal stabilities? Clearly, this is also Dennett’s question, which he will answer by an appeal to narrative, or at least multiple drafts or versions of narrative (Sartre’s “partial totalizations”).
We should also note the insistent presence of history in this passage, in the form of the account of the computer. Is the computer here merely a useful metaphor, a submetaphor useful in the construction of the larger editorial and publishing metaphor? Certainly, from a static point of view. Yet the very historicity of the computer as an invention and an event suggests a perspective from which the computer was absent: what happened in the older slower mode of publishing? Did “final versions” and “canonical texts” exist then, or exist more strongly? Did that ontological category of the completed object have more validity before the word processor? And if the ontology of mutability was always valid, timelessly, even in the days of parchment or stone-carved hieroglyphs, can we say that it was nonetheless the historical “advent” of the new technology that enabled its deeper truth to be more adequately revealed, experienced, deconcealed, in postcomputer history? This is not some secondary matter, as we shall see, but has consequences for Dennett’s book as a whole.
Back now to his Multiple Drafts: he has to show that the brain can function like this, on the one hand. But he also has to show that we can successfully reorganize our own experience of consciousness along the new lines. What has to be given up, then, is the impression that our conscious life consists in reliable messages from the outside world, which are transmitted to some (no doubt equally reliable) central witness or observer. But Multiple Drafts seems to suggest that such messages are not only fragmentary but very numerous indeed, and that the signals never stop coming in, on the heels of all the inadequately evaluated previous ones, which keep piling up somewhere. But couldn’t that somewhere—a memory bank, perhaps—be the place in which someone sets all this information in order and produces at least a provisionally “final” version? Here the key critical concept turns out to be the idea of “filling in,” attributed to the old commonsense or Cartesian theater model: obviously enough, faced with the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the outside world, we fill in the gaps (94, 127, 344ff.). At the very least we “seem” to fill in the gaps (and the notion of “seeming” and subjective appearance is another Dennett target).
The problem is that we are “embarked,” we are “thrown” into our “being-in-the-world,” which is to say that we never have time to do the filling in, we’re too busy with the next incoming signals. The provisional is certainly the crucial idea here, but what is its temporal connotation? Are we to imagine that every so often we withdraw from embodied experience, and add up our findings, “provisionally” fill in the gaps? Even this compromise is not particularly conceivable: to be sure, it makes the Cartesian theatergoer over into a Brechtian spectator, smoking his cigar meditatively and evaluating the quality of the acting or boxing on offer to him. But this is perhaps the place of the philosophical problem of self-consciousness or reflexivity, to which we will return later on. For the moment, since there is no Cartesian theater in the first place (as Dennett so often likes to say), there can be no spectator either, Brechtian or otherwise. We are in real provisionality here, serious makeshift hand-to-mouth desperate crisis management, which is however the permanent situation of “consciousness” and from which there is no respite. Here reality never “comes together”: “the brain does not bother ‘constructing’ any representations that go to the trouble of ‘filling in’ the blanks. That would be a waste of time … The judgment is already in, so the brain can get on with other tasks!” (128).
The brain is certainly faced with an overload of signals: “all varieties of perception—indeed, all varieties of thought or mental activity—are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous ‘editorial revision’” (111). But these “revisions” are as multiple and chaotic as the sensations they were supposed to interpret: moreover, the problem is temporal and chronological fully as much as it bears on some unimaginable simultaneity of all these sensations. For in that sense, just as there is no overarching Kantian form of empty space, so there is also no absolute grid of “linear” time upon which to organize this data. In the new dispensation, as Dennett suggestively observes somewhere, there is no “format in which ‘time is used to represent time’” (153). Temporal sequence is as radically “provisional” a “construct” (if we can call it that) as everything else. At this point, Dennett interrupts himself to offer a brilliant illustration (and one in which the implicit persistence of the theme of communications technology is also to be noted): it turns on “the battle of New Orleans, [fought] on January 8, 1815, fifteen days after the truce ending the War of 1812 was signed in Belgium” (146). If you start to imagine the multiple repercussions of this temporal delay in Bengal, for example, or in Canada, a momentous and idiotic question begins to loom: “Exactly when did the British Empire become informed of the truce in the War of 1812?” (169). In this sense, the brain is as “far-flung” as that Empire (on which the sun never set), and the analogous question posed to it is equally meaningless.
But at least the British Empire had its Foreign Office in Whitehall and its seat of government in Buckingham Palace: can we do without some similar ultimate center when thinking about the brain? The answer is that provisionality still reigns absolutely and that even that “center,” whatever it might be, must be thought to be radically provisional. I turn to another of Dennett’s rhetorical illustrations:
Orienting responses are the biological counterpart to the shipboard alarm “All hands on deck!” Most animals, like us, have activities they control in a routine fashion, ‘on autopilot’, using less than their full capacities, and in fact under the control of specialized subsystems of their brains. When a specialized alarm is triggered … the animal’s nervous system is mobilized to deal with the possibility of an emergency. The animal stops what it is doing and does a quick scan or update that gives every sense organ an opportunity to contribute to the pool of available and relevant information. A temporary centralized arena of control is established through heightened neural activity—all the lines are open, for a brief period. (180)
With this, I’m tempted to say, the construction of the model of Multiple Drafts is complete, and that of the Cartesian Theater (or of the common sense of “folk psychology”) has been replaced. The latter’s unification of the spectacle has been displaced by permanent radical provisionality; and the observing subject has been substituted by that “temporary centralized arena of control” mentioned above. Are we satisfied? Probably not, since a number of outstanding questions or problems have not yet been answered in the new mode: the model has not yet fully been put through its paces. For one thing, the issue of memory remains unexamined and is never fully addressed in this book: in other words, we might be willing to admit that our conventional picture of some larger “unification” of data by way of memory is part and parcel of the old system; but surely, and despite the repudiation of any overall organizing temporal grid, some place will have to be made in the new one for functional equivalent of what used to be called memory. And then there is the matter of thinking itself and of self-consciousness (let alone decision-making and the like). We need to separate this issue from the related issue of the centered subject, or in other words of personal identity. The last two topics are however fully treated here (at least to Dennett’s satisfaction), and we need to note the terms of those treatments rapidly before going on.
What we call thinking is a function of the cerebral cortex (of which more later): but it is a second-degree function, and then naturally enough, thinking about thinking, or self-consciousness or reflexivity is a second-degree function of that second-degree function. For both are, in Dennett’s view, effects of the emergence of language, something which happens relatively late in human evolution, after the cortex itself has been formed: “The innate specializations for language … are a very recent and rushed add-on, no doubt an exploitation of earlier sequencing circuitry” (190): in other words, language is a form of software. How does language itself emerge? Dennett has a splendid and suggestive answer: by listening to ourselves speak—or cry, growl, mutter, shout (195). It is a theory that cuts across the impossible false problems that arise when one begins with “intersubjectivity” or “interpersonal” relations. And by the same token, once language has been elaborated, thinking is talking to ourselves, self-consciousness is a specific set toward that inner language (223) (not for nothing does Joyce achieve symbolic status in this book, alongside Von Neumann and his computer). Thoughts do not really preexist language, so that the operative principle must remain the immortal phrase E. M. Forster attributed to his fictional Old Lady: “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?” (193, 245), a formulation that has lost none of its suggestive power in full poststructuralism and postmodernity.
As for personal identity, here we touch on the alleged “mysteries” of consciousness, and the reader looking for some new theory or solution will probably be disappointed. But remember that what counts as a solution for Dennett is the replacement of the Cartesian model: the evaluation of his proposals for “personal identity” has thus rather to be made on a negative and critical basis and in terms of their adequacy as a substitute for the tradition (the soul, the self, and so on). Can the “temporary arena of control” really do the job personal identity used to do? Not without the positing of some new factor, as we shall see. Yet is not the neurological materialism of the brain and beyond it of the body, my body, “je mein Eigenes,” as Heidegger might put it, enough to secure identity? In a sense: for the very concept of the body as an organism is at one with its boundaries, and already implies the solution to “the fundamental problem of recognition: telling one’s self … from everything else” (174). “This fundamental biological principle of distinguishing self from world, inside from outside, produces some remarkable echoes in the highest vaults of our psychology” (414). Clearly enough, once those borders are established, decision-making mechanisms are ready to hand, most notably the fundamental binary opposition between good and bad: self-preservation is then at least one indispensable feature of what will (in those “higher vaults of our psychology”) be called personal identity, and its presence all the way down the organic ladder also suggests that Heidegger’s supreme “Sein zum Tode,” the death anxiety, is far from characterizing authentic human individuality alone.
But we have not yet tabulated all the “remarkable echoes.” Let’s reframe the question in philosophical terms, those for example so memorably formulated by Nietzsche:
The “subject” is the fiction that many similar states in us are in the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the “similarity” of these states, our adjusting and making them similar is the fact, not their similarity.2
And to “similarity,” which could easily turn into a basic category of Hegel’s Logic, Nietzsche pointedly adds: “which ought to be denied.” Will memory do? We remember William James’s marvelous account of personal identity as the brand of private property we burn onto all our individual memories, so as to be able to round them like cattle when the need arises (when we hear the cry, All hands on deck! for example?). But as I have observed, Dennett here eschews an appeal to memory as some primary explanatory function.
Instead, he introduces that rather different “new factor” I have forecast, and this is narrative as such. All those “partial totalizations” and provisional unifications I have alluded to are in fact narrative ones (and we should remember that in that sense narrative in Dennett is always provisional, always partial, always coexisting with a host of other narrative versions or drafts). The human being is thus here apparently a storytelling animal (79, 94), and an enormous amount of argumentation is made to rest on this apparently ungrounded or even metaphysical proposition, however satisfying it may be for the contemporary mind. Indeed, this is the moment in which the underwater reader suddenly bursts out of the depths of Consciousness Explained into the more familiar atmosphere of a completely different philosophical tradition, as Dennett wryly acknowledges, by quoting a passage from David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988):
According to Robyn (or, more precisely, according to the writers who have influenced her thinking on these matters), there is no such thing as the “Self” on which capitalism and the classic novel are founded—that is to say, a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person’s identity: there is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses—the discourses of power, sex, family, science, religion, poetry, etc. And by the same token, there is no such thing as an author, that is to say, one who originates a work of fiction ab nihilo … In the famous words of Jacques Derrida … “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” there is nothing outside the text. There are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our “selves” in language. Not “you are what you eat” but “you are what you speak,” or rather “you are what speaks you,” is the axiomatic basis of Robyn’s philosophy, which she would call, if required to give it a name, “semiotic materialism.” (410–411)
Dennett draws the line at this name but agrees that “Robyn and I think alike—and of course we are both, by our own accounts, fictional characters of a sort, though of a slightly different sort” (411).
This is then the moment at which we must begin a critical analysis of Consciousness Explained, from which I must now admit that several very important “missing portions” have been withheld. These two missing portions are in fact explanatory mechanisms, which is why my account of the book will have seemed exceedingly thin to readers who have had firsthand contact with its richness and complexity.
The first of these is a feature we have already begun to observe in the discussions immediately preceding (and which, I might add, is significantly and originally present in Nietzsche himself). This is evolutionary theory as an explanatory principle. For one thing, I have omitted to mention that one enormous central chapter of the book is devoted to a seventy-page exposition of current evolutionary theory: not sociobiology exactly, no doubt, but which surely reflects the emergence of sociobiology and the historical need to come somehow to terms with it.
Evolutionist thought (of whatever kind) is certainly to be grasped as a variety of historicism generally: but its early form, Lamarckian teleology, prepares the way for full-blown historicist thinking, while its later or Darwinian version marks an advance on ordinary historicism, which it corrects and modifies in significant ways. Historicist thinking in general involves a mutation in what counts as the explanation of something (this is the sense in which it seems right to see its emergence as a paradigm shift or change—as for example Foucault does in The Order of Things). The change consists in this: that the historical coming into being of a thing, the narrative of its emergence, will now count as an understanding of it. To put it this way is to see how the evolutionist material in Dennett marks a supplement to the appeal to understanding we have described above, which required us to compare the new model with the old one (Multiple Drafts against Cartesian Theater) and seemed to be fulfilled when all of the constituent features wrongly dealt with in the latter were replaced by satisfactory equivalents in the former. Now, for some reason, we seem to need an additional kind of comprehension, which is to be supplied by narrative history.
Thus, where the structure of the brain is consulted in order to show that it was capable of housing the various mental processes posited by Multiple Drafts, we now in addition get the story of its emergence:
Onto this substrate nervous system we now want to imagine building a more human mind … While chimpanzees have brains of roughly the same size as our common ancestor … our hominid ancestors’ brains grew four times as large … When the ice ages began, about two and a half million years ago, the Great Encephalization commenced, and was essentially completed 150,000 years ago—before the development of language, of cooking, of agriculture. (189–90)
One can think of two reasons why this historical “supplement” is required. First, we can imagine a fairly complete philosophical account of the Multiple Drafts model of the mind that would not require any reference to the brain at all: it would not be an idealist account exactly, but not obviously a materialist one either (what it tries to be, of course, is monist, a somewhat different thing from either alternative). But Dennett wishes to position his theory at the crossroads of several traditions, very much including neurobiology and brain research (and their compatibility or incompatibility with computer models and simulations): the evolutionary story secures this materialist level of the content.
Meanwhile, it has not been pointed out that the twist or modification that evolutionism gives historicism generally, and that makes up its originality, lies in the notion of function. Evolutionism distinguishes itself from “mere” historicism by positing understanding or explanation as a grasping of the history of function. But told in terms of lower life forms, these stories become mere decorations or metaphors for human activity. To have the boundaries that make up human identity evoked in terms of amoebas, for example, is only to be offered a simpler and more vivid picture of the human situation: for the most part Dennett eschews the ideological consequences that define sociobiology, namely the conclusion that Ur-life offers us the authentic truth of what human life should be like and serves as an ethical and political model (in this case, incorporation, expansion, cyclical production of new entities, and so on). It is thus the history of human evolution that can alone convert the rich animal illustrations into a substantive argument about human consciousness.
In other words, the story of the cortex has to tell us something new, something that the life of the lower forms cannot convey. This “huge convoluted mantle that has swiftly burgeoned in the human skull and now completely covers the older animal brain underneath” (193) will allow an indispensable next step in what will in fact be a new story. (We have already seen how the general image of the cortex offered a kind of visual support to the model of the decentered mind, with its simultaneity of multiple signals and messages.)
But before outlining the new story, we have to show how its telling us was made possible; and this obliges us to return to the matter of evolutionist historicism in order to mark the originality and the distinctiveness of the Darwinian turn. It is often said that the older evolutionism was teleological insofar as, having told the history of the emergence of a function, it then had nothing more to say, thereby surrendering to the obvious next (metaphysical) question of the purpose of that function and that emergence. Darwinism’s mechanism of natural selection then cuts this stage out and enables a radically nonteleological story of development and evolution to be told. Can this still be called historicism? People who have an interest in discrediting historicism by way of the accusation of teleology will certainly want to call Darwin something else (and it should be added that Marx’s evolutionist view of society follows Darwin in this respect and in this respect is also nonteleological). But perhaps all this can be said in a more complicated Hegelian way: Darwinian evolutionism is a historicism that carries the negation of historicism within itself as a kind of counterpoison. It can thus seem either historicist (it tells the story of a historical emergence) or antihis-toricist (it removes the teleology or invents a new kind of nonteleological storytelling): and this is an excellent polemic defensive position, which allows you to go on telling stories (as we see Nietzsche doing, for example), while at the same time attacking teleology and its historicisms and indeed in some cases using your own storytelling to discredit the older kind.
As for the remarkable mechanism of natural selection, however, we must observe that in Dennett it takes a different form, namely the crucial doctrine of multiple functions, or in other words the unforeseeable developments made possible when an organ developed for one specific function is now appropriated (or “parasitized”) by one or several different ones:
Human designers, being farsighted but blinkered, tend to find their designs thwarted by unforeseen side effects and interactions, so they try to guard against them by giving each element in the system a single function, and insulating it from all the other elements. In contrast, Mother Nature (the process of natural selection) is famously myopic and lacking in goals. Since she doesn’t foresee any at all, she has no way of worrying about unforeseen side effects. Not “trying” to avoid them, she tries out designs in which many such side effects occur; most such designs are terrible (ask any engineer), but every now and then there is a serendipitous side effect: two or more unrelated functional elements interact to produce a bonus: multiple functions for single elements. (175)
This is a somewhat different way of continuing to be a historicist while roundly denouncing historicism: even if you thought, and tried to assert, that the Darwinian model of natural selection was still somehow secretly teleological and historicist, this new twist subverts even that larval teleology by positing the unexpected imposition of new parasitic multiple functions on top of the evolutionary function whose story Darwinism told. In fact, we have seen Dennett reap the benefits of the new second-degree story in his account of language: for he sees that as being a kind of software (221) added on to the evolved human cortex (whose functional reason for coming into being is apparently mysterious anyhow).
And as a matter of fact, the doctrine of multiple functions here stands as a kind of textual autoreferentiality: it models a process Dennett himself will replicate in the construction of his own text. Thus, the new theory of “connectionism”—specifically introduced at this point (175, note 3)—is an idea, a textual “function” if you like, which is here added on to the account of the evolution of the brain. The idea that “each node contributes to many different contents” will allow us to posit “whole systems having specialized roles but also being recruitable into more general projects” (175, note 3). But this is not exactly a neurological finding; rather, it is a mediation between the material description of the brain and the philosophical requirements of the Multiple Drafts model of the mind.
Indeed, the textual “parasitism” enabled by the doctrine of multiple functions will shortly have an even larger exemplification, whose account will complete our discussion of the evolutionist “addition” to the philosophical argument. For it turns out that the evolutionist historical narrative will also enable the superposition of a narrative of social history (in which the historicism of natural history “returns,” as Hegel might put it, into its fundamental essence as the narrative of history tout court).
We have seen that the introduction of the theme of language was crucial for the first or philosophical model in Dennett, for it allowed him to develop a conception of thinking radically different from the old centered kind, based on a Cartesian point of consciousness (language offering multiple drafts of something that is not thinking until it is thus linguistically drafted, and so forth). Now that the fact of language has been drawn into an evolutionist account, however, we are rather unexpectedly able to confront a whole evolutionist story of the emergence of culture itself (in other words, of the nonmaterialist being of something which can no longer be considered natural history at all). This story is retold from Richard Dawkins’s concept of the “memes” (199–208), or in other words specifically cultural entities that can be circulated from mind to mind and also stored up in large quantities:
the sort of complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units—such as the ideas of
wheel
wearing clothes
vendetta
right triangle
alphabet
calendar
the Odyssey etc. (201)
Am I right in feeling that here evolutionist thought has overstepped itself, and that such materials—which can be described in terms of Objective Spirit or in those of “cultural literacy” and attributed to the public sphere or to media culture—are out of place in an account of the evolution of physical organs and their functions? The discomfort comes from the sense of a vicious circle, in which the essentially cultural operations of the human mind are then “explained” by the illicit attribution of just such cultural materials to the physical structure of the brain as such.
Be that as it may, however, my purpose in raising the issue here is a somewhat different one: for I think that the theory of the “memes” now allows a secondary or parasitic historical narrative to be added on top of the first evolutionist one (which thus proves to admit of “multiple functions”). This second narrative is one of history itself, and in particular social history, and whatever it claims to say about the evolution of that history generally, I believe that its most obvious reference can be identified as our own contemporary postmodern society, oversaturated as it is with just such cultural information of this kind. I doubt if any earlier historical society would have described its culture in exactly this way, with the emphasis on the sheer multiplicity of the memes and their overpopulation. It is an intuition once again reinforced by the technological figure: for it will be remembered that language (which alone makes “memes” possible) was described as an add-on, a new software program: “the powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs” (210). Such figures cannot be altogether innocent, and in the present instance it is difficult to avoid the impression that such figurability has a historical content and logic. If we are dependent on the figure of the new information technology to convey our new sense of language and the memes, then surely in some other way the very state of language and the memes that is being characterized can be said to require the historical existence of that information technology in the first place. This is the sense in which I take both references as characterizing our contemporary situation and thereby as introducing some very contemporary connotations to what gave itself as a longer evolutionary narrative.
Let me try to sum this complicated situation up as follows: an evolutionary narrative is introduced into a nonnarrative argument. This narrative of natural history then seems to project a concurrent narrative of social history generally. But now that new dimension seems in its turn to project a far more concentrated story or narrative about contemporary social history (or in other words, the “postmodern condition”). Yet why should it do this, and what is the message of this new third-degree story?
I come therefore at some length to my second general excursus about Consciousness Explained and will now “restore” some other, rather different “missing portions” I have equally withheld until now. The curious reader, indeed, from time to time notes extended metaphors or similes in Dennett, which at first require no particular justification and stand or fall on their rhetorical merits. So it is initially merely amusing that he should deploy “Arthur Laffer’s notorious Curve, the intellectual foundation … of Reaganomics” (109) to tarnish input–output theories of the mind and action on the grounds of the similarity of their graphs. Still, this might well trigger some feeble subliminal message about the relationship of the older mental theories to a certain conservative social order. One’s attention perks up, however, when Stalinism and Orwell’s 1984 enter the picture (116–17): these are meant to dramatize various unsatisfactory (old-fashioned) attempts to explain the alleged “filling-in” operations of consciousness as it rewrites the past—Orwellian “revision” of the past and the staging of Stalinesque “show trials, carefully scripted presentations of false testimony and bogus confessions, complete with simulated evidence” (117). Both are dialectically sent off back to back as versions of the same strategy, and they presumably contrast unfavorably with the new model of Multiple Drafts and perpetual revisions in which partial narratives engage in unending narrative unification of our current experience of consciousness and identity without requiring the act of “revision.” Yet the allusions to the Cold War and its end in Reaganism do somehow begin to project a more specifically historical context of reference in which the emergence of Dennett’s brand-new theory is associated with the new problems of some specifically contemporary situation of postmodernity.
What those new problems are can now be identified by turning to the far more central metaphorics that throughout the whole argument are called upon to characterize the fundamental model of the Cartesian Theater and its flaws and weaknesses. We have until now characterized the characterization of this “theater” in aesthetic terms: the theatrical spectacle itself, or the editorial and textual production of electronic mail. Nor would I wish to exclude some properly aesthetic “level” of the book in which a specifically aesthetic message is being conveyed, however faintly.
But the primary metaphorical rhetoric is political: Cartesian central consciousness is described as “dictatorial” (171), it is consistently referred to as a kind of simulation of the Oval Office (32, 429), as in the following:
The pineal gland is not only not the fax machine to the Soul, it is also not the Oval Office of the brain, and neither are any of the other portions of the brain. The brain is Headquarters, the place where the ultimate observer is, but there is no reason to believe that the brain itself has any deeper headquarters, any inner sanctum, arrival at which is the necessary or sufficient condition for conscious experience. In short, there is no observer inside the brain. (106)
And by the same token, there is no “Boss” and therefore no “Boss agent of ominous authority” (261). And now the political figures take an interesting poststructuralist turn: for the Cartesian despot can also be understood as a Central Meaner or Conceptualizer (238), “an Author of Record, a Meaner of all the meanings” (228). Now a kind of Foucauldian power/knowledge swims into view and is denounced in the same spirit as the more general poststructuralist critiques of norm and authority, and in particular the authority of interpretation and of positing fixed meanings, alongside the political authority of the state.
For it is indeed a very contemporary, or even postmodern, conception of the state which has here via metaphorical repetition come to be associated with the Cartesian model. Centrality is finally also that: if you have a centered subject, a central observer, along with a point of consciousness at the very center, to secure a unified personal identity (not to speak of a unified world or a unified Truth), then you also at length confront the State.
What is the alternative?
It is all very well to equip oneself with an “All hands on deck!” subroutine, but then, once all hands are on deck, one must have some way of coping with the flood of volunteers. We should not expect there to have been a convenient captain already at hand (what would he have been doing up till then?), so conflict between volunteers had to sort themselves out without any higher executive. (188)
The next immediate figure, that of Milton’s Pandemonium, strikes a suitably revolutionary note, but the solution seems to remain that of what Dennett calls “an internal political miracle”: the decentered brain
creates a virtual captain of the crew, without elevating any of them to long-term dictatorial power. Who’s in charge? First one coalition and then another, shifting in ways that are not chaotic thanks to good meta-habits that tend to entertain coherent, purposeful sequences rather than an interminable helter-skelter power grab. (228)
Is this satisfactory? Probably no more so than the model of consciousness that it is designed to represent (but no less so either). Yet the question of what counts as an “explanation” for consciousness has now strangely seemed to shift into the problem of what might count as a satisfactory or plausible political vision.
Indeed, I want to argue that such moments reveal the text to have been parasitized by a theoretical problem of an utterly different kind from that of philosophical or neurological models of consciousness. The philosophical function in other words has also and simultaneously been occupied by a political one; and Dennett (or his unconscious, or some crucial alliance of memes) has also found himself deploying one of the issues which crucially and centrally (if I may put it that way) has engaged postmodernity, the question of the state and that of some decentralized democracy, the question of unified power and multiple social difference, the old questions of political “representation” which have entered into crisis in a situation in which no one believes in the legitimacy of such representation any longer. That Dennett does not altogether solve his philosophical problem and project some fully satisfying new “explanation” of consciousness is then perfectly comprehensible, in light of the fact that political philosophy has been unable until now to provide any properly political models of “democracy” that do away with centralized state power altogether. Anarchism was the only true heroic effort to do so; and it was reactive against precisely those categories of centrality and state power in which the rest of us (no matter how well disposed) are still locked. This is a specific contradiction, I would now like to claim; and we cannot exactly get out of this historical and ideological contradiction by thinking new and better thoughts. Contradictions in that sense are never solved: they are made to deliver up new moments, new configurations, new contradictions indeed, in the light of which the old contradiction sinks into the past.
Thus I am perfectly willing to call the opposition between the State and democracy an ideological opposition: which does not mean that it is unreal, or that we can simply forget about it. On the contrary, it means that it is historically binding, and that we are locked into it without any Utopian vision of what might be possible if it were no longer in force.
Dennett’s secondary narrative is ideological in precisely this sense, although it is difficult to determine whether it reflects the US anti-communist Cold War “liberalism” of the Reagan era (Stalinist despotism and so on) or the more anarchist displacement onto aporias about the state and “radical democracy” that followed the end of actually existing socialism. But I am not interested in passing judgments, even those implicit in such labels; I have been primarily interested in the structure of this work, which can now be seen to be complex and many-leveled. And at this (final) stage in my argument, I am also concerned to correct the misconceptions that may have been conveyed by my use of the term metaphor to characterize the delivery system of the political content described above. For to see this as “merely” metaphorical allows us to see all this as something purely rhetorical and to retranslate the political figures back into simple, if vivid, devices for conveying an idea or making a point.
Dennett himself raises a suggestive issue when, in his own conclusion, he tries to justify the kind of explanation his title promised, and which he feels himself to have offered:
Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all … This leads some people to insist that consciousness can never be explained. But why should consciousness be the only thing that can’t be explained? Solids and liquids and gases can be explained in terms of things that aren’t themselves solids or liquids or gases. Surely life can be explained in terms of things that aren’t themselves alive—and the explanation doesn’t leave living things lifeless. (454–55)
Perhaps the protest comes too late and is an admission of his own dissatisfaction. Yet the terms are most interesting indeed: you explain something in terms of something else, something that first thing is not, something different from it and radically other. But this also happens to be, not merely the meaning, but the very etymology, of the word allegory; and in fact I want to call the textual movement I have been describing an allegorical one, and I believe that I have shown Consciousness Explained to be a political allegory, whatever else it is. This is the sense in which the characterization of the crucial figures as metaphorical is really a competing explanation, which I cannot now refute, and it is a very damaging one indeed. To develop a convincing theory of the allegorical, therefore, requires a confrontation with the claims of metaphor itself.
In the absence of such a confrontation, however, perhaps an equally outrageous and unfounded claim can be made: one that has the whole weight of the tradition of the so-called “history of ideas” against it. The latter, indeed, affirms over and over again that the history of ideas is first and foremost the history of scientific ideas and that it is the latter which “explain” the emergence of other, parallel thoughts in realms as distant as the aesthetic and the political. But what if this were not so? What if, indeed, it was the emergence of new social forms and political experiences which came first, and allowed new forms of other thought—very specifically scientific thinking—to emerge? What if the conditions of possibility of those scientific “discoveries” lay in the apprenticeship of the mind to the new forms closest to its own concrete experience, in the social itself? In that case it will come as no surprise that Dennett needs his political allegory to express his “new” thoughts about consciousness and the brain: for he will have needed the social and political to conceive those new thoughts in the first place.