Joseph Tabbi
Do not expect any help from explanations of fiction. At best you will understand the explanations … Sewn up in these explanations you will look for what you already know, and that which is really there you will not see.
Franz Kafka
While the expansion of cognitive studies has meant, for some, an opportunity “fully to integrate the evolutionary human sciences and literary study” (Carroll 2009), one could argue that the literary arts always have been about cognition, consciousness, and their coevolution. Critical landmarks in the field – for example, Ingarden’s Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, Szanto’s Narrative Consciousness, and the essays collected in Richardson and Spolsky’s Work of Fiction – require no “and” between the cognitive and literary terms in their titles: literary work is cognitive, narrative is an enactment of consciousness, and fictions do a kind of work (consistent with the mind’s continual need to fill “gaps in nature,” the title of a pioneering book by Spolsky). It may be true that, with the explosion of knowledge about and ways of picturing the mind’s operation, we now have a “novel theory of consciousness” (see Lloyd 2003) – that is, an actual, falsifiable theory presented in the form of a detective novel (with the theory itself set out in an appendix). Actually, we have many novel theories, often advanced by scientists entering territories once inhabited predominantly by literary and cultural scholars.
Before one welcomes the merger of literary studies and the contemporary cognitive sciences, however, it is worth revisiting briefly the way that a literary discipline emerged not by embracing every aspect of cognition under investigation in the sciences, but rather through a process of selection and the setting of institutional boundaries. In rejecting a primary concern with biography and the psychological peculiarities of individual authors, Roman Ingarden was not detaching literary knowledge from knowledge about the world. Though consistent with New Criticism’s rejection of the “fallacies” of authorial intention and readerly paraphrase, Ingarden did not, like many of his New Critical contemporaries, isolate texts from social or scientific knowledge. Rather, the cognition of the literary work was shown to consist of an extensive interaction between conscious and unconscious activity – richer by far, from the perspective of how phrases, sentences, narratives, and characters actually develop, than the notional categories offered by psychoanalysis. Rather than becoming “constantly diverted into other fields of investigation, primarily into a historically colored individual psychology of the poets,” Ingarden sought (following Husserl) to reorient aesthetics by looking at ways in which “the literary works themselves made us aware of specific artistic problems” (Ingarden 1968: 3, 4).
Similarly, Szanto (1972) regarded the “novel as a world in itself,” with its narrating viewpoints, social context, and ecological environment as carefully edited as its textual content. The determining presence of all that is unseen, unrecorded, but nonetheless active at the horizon of consciousness, would eventually distinguish cognitive criticism from more sequestered, largely exegetical forms of critical writing. The innovative take among early cognitive critics on the relation of textuality and a largely non-textual environment was consistent with the mind’s own capacity for separating itself from its environment even as consciousness and a unique personality are shaped by highly selective input from the environment. This combination of self-enclosure at the level of operation (composition, reading, and cognizing) with selective openness to information places cognitive criticism closer to systems approaches than to deconstruction and the latter’s perpetual deferral of meaning in chains of material signification. At the same time, an emphasis on communications within and among separate modules has much in common with media discourse theory, since both approaches emphasize not textuality alone but rather the constitutive coupling of bodily agency, technics, and textual signification (see Hansen 2006).
Another innovation that distinguished early cognitive criticism was its unabashedly evaluative stance, since its concern with “specific artistic problems” (in an environment of mostly operational discourse and instrumental activity) was consistent with the selective processes required by mental operations. Ingarden, for example, made a point of putting the process of evaluation back on the agenda of literary studies:
Works of belles-lettres lay claim, by virtue of their characteristic basic structure and particular attainments, to being “works of art” and enabling the reader to apprehend an aesthetic object of a particular kind. … [Works] can be “genuine” and “beautiful”; generally speaking, they can be of artistic or aesthetic value; but they can just as well be “bad,”“not genuine,”“ugly”–in short, of negative value. We can experience all these works aesthetically; we can also apprehend them in a preaesthetic cognition or in a cognition which is itself not aesthetic but which builds upon the aesthetic experience.
(Ingarden 1968: 7)
With that last sentence, Ingarden distinguishes himself (and a classical “cognitive” approach) from New Criticism’s hermeticism on the one hand and more recent Historicist, Identitarian, and Cultural approaches on the other hand. In seeking a foundation for literature in perceptual and cognitive qualities that are universal, and in retaining qualitative judgment as a fundamental activity in literary critical studies, Ingarden sought to integrate literature within a general cognitive ecology. The advantage to this approach is that it allows critics to identify how an author demonstrates understanding of aesthetic and cognitive problems specific to the development of the literary work and its unique moment in historical time. Szanto, approaching the “novel” genre as “an existence in itself,” pointed to three authors in particular – Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Alain Robbe-Grillet – as exemplary of the co-development of an evolving cognitive understanding and a self-consciously modern literature (Szanto 1972: 5). Current work on and by, for example, Joseph McElroy, Ben Marcus, Richard Powers, Lynne Tillman, David Foster Wallace, and Jeanette Winterson demonstrates an increasing awareness of research on the mind and cognition, a knowledge that is as much a part of the contemporary milieu as psychoanalysis was for Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, and Robbe-Grillet. Still, it would be preferable to emphasize not the intentions of, or direct cultural influence on, the individual artist, but rather the historical development of cognitive knowledge itself, and how this knowledge combines with an appreciation, in Ingarden’s words, of “the essentially necessary structural elements and interconnections among cooperating functions” (Ingarden 1968: 9).
One reason in particular not to rely too directly on evidence of an artist’s level of scientific knowledge is that what passes as knowledge in the sciences so quickly becomes obsolete. When we approach Dan Lloyd’s reformulation of the detective genre as an allegory of a faulty theory (that the relation of subject and object is one of “detection” rather than construction), we encounter not a self-contained novelistic world but a “novel theory.” Similarly, when we approach not a literary text but “The Literary Mind” itself as (in Mark Turner’s sub-title) “The Origins of Language and Thought,” we are entering a very different phase of literary study, one that could easily collapse literary exploration into a belletristic adjunct to scientific investigation. What makes most theories “novel” is also what limits their usefulness as explanations of literary art. The time it takes for authors and scholars to absorb ideas from contemporary science is usually much longer than the time it takes for the scientists themselves to move on to new formulations: so the idea of the “massively modular mind,” we are told, “over-generalizes from the most hard-wired components of the brain. It is a massive oversimplification of human cognitive architecture, and it is already fading into the archives of intellectual history” (Carroll 2009). Whether or not that it so, it hardly invalidates Spolsky’s nuanced reading of modern literature’s growing awareness of gaps in consciousness – an awareness already represented (long before the modular theory was formulated) in the stream-of-consciousness narration found in Joyce and Woolf. Dennett’s notion (formulated in the postmodern literary era) of consciousness as a narrative that is available in partial drafts distributed at various sites in the brain is just one example of a cognitive philosopher resorting to literary metaphor as a way to express distributed brain functions, necessary to consciousness but not themselves conscious. Indeed, the distinction between metaphor and actuality is itself unsettled by scientists concerned not only with Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) but also with their material basis in the brain and their conceptual supports in distributed networks beyond the human body and outside of consciousness.
By contrast, the universal cognitive structures that enable a diversity of expression across cultures and languages (as described in Hogan 2003; Turner 1991, 1996; Zunshine 2003, and many others) would seem to run against the modernist and postmodernist currents. Besides “metaphor,” there is scarcely a keyword or conceptual term used to describe literature’s specificity that cannot be redescribed and refreshed in the detailed terms made newly available by the cognitive sciences: “defamiliarization,” for example, as a way of refreshing habitual perception, intersubjectivity as the “double-scope blending” that enables one mind to conceive of other minds and networks beyond one’s own cognition (Turner 2009), and so on. That the novel itself, as Virginia Woolf remarked in 1924, has “evolved … to express character” is uncontroversial – and the earliest novels were nearly all named after characters: Don Quixote of 1604 and 1614, Robinson Crusoe in 1719, Clarissa in 1747–48 (Burn 2009). Any cognitive history of the novel would be obliged to account for the increasing distribution of characters in alien environments, even as descriptions of the “self” have developed in both psychoanalytical and neurological sciences. “Narrative,” too – considered as a way of situating one’s memories and identity in time – comports with the recursiveness of points of view in fiction and poetry – that is, the way that authors, narrators, characters, and readers become aware of their own awareness.
Whether supportive or contradictory of cultural and literary theories, all of these key insights from cognitive studies are – or with help from narrative theory can be shown to be – consistent with defining features of a modern literary expression. Science need not recognize literature’s priority in arriving at such insights, any more than literature needs to wait on confirmations from science. In any case, we are unlikely to want to endorse a single philosophy of nature (let alone a purported “human nature”) at this point in the development of the cognitive sciences, and Spolsky is wise not to claim science as in any way authorizing an approach to literary representations of consciousness. “It isn’t ultimately of great concern how neuroscientists eventually describe the mind/ brain,” Spolsky writes regarding her own work: “In fact, it would be surprising if there aren’t new theories around by the time this book gets into print” (Spolsky 1993: 40). Neither can the descriptions of neuroscientists predetermine the stylistic signature of authors in a given era. Joyce and Woolf could not differ more from one another or from Kafka and Beckett, though each writer reflects the emerging psychologism of their time with a common tendency to describe the world through consciousness. Kafka’s minimalism is not just a refusal of explanation (see my epigraph); it is also an insistence on the self-containment of the literary world, its capacity to convert the noise of culture and the increasingly specialized languages of modernity into patterns wholly of its own literary making. As Szanto notes, “Only a writer who records with a minimum of intervening filters, of intervening philosophies, can reproduce a world to which one may attach interpretations grown from that world itself” (Szanto 1972: 179). This recognition of reflexivity as constitutive of modern literary expression does not separate literature and its criticism from the social and perceptual world (a charge often leveled against New Criticism of the post-World War II era, with its notion of the “autotelic” literary text). To the contrary, the necessary closure and self-referentiality of works of literature (and of literary work) is consistent with the enclosure of consciousness in individual minds. Such operational closure does not separate us from others; rather, it is a condition for communication, and for meaningful interactions within a culture and among bodies and machines that are themselves closed operationally (see Clarke and Hansen 2009).
What cognitive criticism can accomplish, and what can be aided by attention to contemporary accounts of cognition in the sciences, is a discovery through close reading of the moment-by-moment, word-by-word, and sentence-by-sentence enactment of consciousness in language. Variability –“from age to age, or country to country, or author to author, or even passage to passage” (Turner 1990: 1087) – is of course a primary concern of literary criticism and remains necessary to a description of “what is really there” (Kafka). But for variation to be meaningful (and not just “novel”), criticism must also consider, in Turner’s words, “the underbrush of unoriginal structures” and largely unconscious operations that do not reach expression in the work, or in thought. “The concept of a ‘room’ or a ‘poem,’” Turner points out, “is immeasurably more complex than the original aspects of any one room or any one poem” (Turner 1990: 1077). The figure of life and the literary work itself as a journey (for example), found across cultures and equally in Pilgrim’s Progress and a poem by John Ashbery, embraces the same relations of source and target that define metaphors, in this case our conceptual schema for journeys (source) and our conceptual schema for life (target). The mapping of source to target allows both of these works (and numberless others) to express an entire range of purposes (resembling a journey’s destinations), influences (in the person of a “guide”), “obstacles,”“progress” and so forth. These are all qualities that a “life” can be seen to possess not in itself but by virtue of its resemblance to a “journey.” The relational, directional, and meaningful tendencies in metaphor are important, in turn, for bringing memories of the past and future projections into present consciousness. In this way, cognitive approaches to narrative marry those to metaphor by articulating, in Turner’s words, “consciously and systematically the linguistic or conceptual resources” used “in reading and writing” (Turner 1996: 14).
What cognitive science brings to literary theory, then, is not an entirely new approach but rather a more robust realism grounded in actual, complex, and widely distributed mental processes. When encountering novelty in literary works, the cognitive critic generally calls attention to “the unoriginal aspect of innovation”–a salutary approach in an era when innovation is the rule, not the exception. Where postmodernism could sound quirky or willfully subversive (in the absence of any large-scale post-war alternative to global capitalism even in the former Soviet Union and China); where the postmodern novels of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover in the United States could seem to indulge in metafictional pyrotechnics; and where multiculturalism tended in practice to reduce difference to racial identity or lifestyle choices for those who can pay the price – cognitive criticism seeks a universality in brain operations that across cultures have much more in common than not. What is often overlooked, however, in the fabulism of the above-named postmodernists, is an interest in the universality of storytelling and the cognitive restructuring that is needed to create the narratives necessary to any widely shared, and hence “cultural,” understanding. During this rich, though in retrospect “twilight” (see Cochran 2001), period of literary experimentation, a systematic dismantling and retelling of the classics, of fairy tales, and of the entire history of oral and literary production, has served to translate the varieties of human experience across the boundaries of time and space. The process might be said to have begun, in the United States, with William Gaddis’s Recognitions of 1955, whose title indicates the systematic re-cognition of past literary and visual productions that the author encountered, while at the same time showcasing the noisy diversity of post-war, corporate life in one locale, primarily New York City’s Greenwich Village, and twenty years later, in JR, in the city’s financial offices and residential and school districts. Through the extensive use of dialogue that requires readers to cognize rather than to “follow” a narrative, Gaddis succeeds in linking a diversity of United States dialects to a global power it drives but does not comprehend or control. While Gaddis’s narratives can be said to mirror the corporate culture of continual innovation, criss-crossing communication networks, and endless talk, the novels also contest that culture through a systematic encounter with and transformation of past literary forms, the unoriginal source material that grounds Gaddis’s own innovation.
Spolsky speaks of a mixture of “the humanly universal and the culturally and individually specific, as coded and recorded in cultural artifacts” (Richardson and Spolsky 2004: viii). This formulation, which already complements and contextualizes a range of “well-deserved” successes in racial, class, and gendered approaches to culture, is further complicated in imaginative literature by a concern with what might be called a non-humanly universal – that is, a globalizing or postmodern culture grounded in corporate expansion, technological networking, and an endless accumulation and innovation that can be only partially comprehended in terms of narrative, or indeed of any human terms. That approach to the non-human is what characterizes the most ambitious literary work during the period of cognitive exploration – a period characterized by Turner, with genial exaggeration, as “the age in which the human mind was discovered” (Turner 1991: vii). If so, the era of scientific discovery coincided with a rediscovery, by imaginative authors, of the cognition of the work of literature when consciousness is no longer the predominant object of knowledge, “the human” is no longer the primary subject of history, and print itself, predominant during the rise of modernity, is no longer the predominant medium in which knowledge circulates.
Like most recent cultural “discoveries” (of one’s own personal identity, of community, of a national consciousness, of native and folk forms of production, of ecological environments and the politics of “everyday life”), the discovery of the “human mind” can only mean that what was once thought to be whole (and wholly within “us”), is seen to be knowable only as part of a larger, extended context. The idea of the “human mind,” like these other conflicted concepts, can be unified not in itself and not in ourselves but in relation to an emerging global culture or world system. Forging that relationship between the globalizing systems and the changing life-forms that systems make newly visible is the challenge of cognitive fictions in literature and cultural criticism.
Similar to Spolsky, Terry Cochran characterizes the emergence of a literary culture in systems terms, namely “the real and ideal constraints implied in bestowing meaning on material artifacts” (Cochran 2001: 3). The self-conscious practice of “writing under constraint,” pursued during the postmodern period alongside the more expansive work of Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo in the United States, represents an important strain of cognitive fiction that finds its most visible and articulate expression in the transnational collaborative project of the Oulipo (ouvroir de littérature potentielle). Still to be explored, in cognitive criticism no less than in media discourse theory, is the way that past constraints – the materiality of print, obviously, but also earlier media such as radio, television, video, as well as the obsolescent generations of computer floppies, disks, and platforms – remain an active presence in the new media ecology. Admittedly, the presence of past media is largely ignored, due to a cultural focus, supported by modes of capitalist production and advertising, on what is new and innovative. But old technologies, like the “underbrush of unoriginal” cognitive structures cited by Turner, more often coexist with and even support the new, worldwide information structures. Consider, for example, how current cars equipped with computer maintainance and Global Positioning Systems still need to coexist with roads and highways, while they cannot do without axial propulsion, synthetic rubber tires, and so forth. These latter, earlier-developed technologies are not so much residual as they are active and primary. The same can be said of mental modules that evolved as far back as the reptilian brain but which nonetheless continue to be active, self-enclosed, and largely unchanged by the later development of consciousness.
Similarly, what is revealed by the literary, scientific, and technological explorations of this period is that “culture,” though present in individuals, remains open to systems and networks that are larger than consciousness and beyond the capacity of any one mind to grasp. Writing from a Marxist perspective in the 1980s, Frederic Jameson introduced the term “cognitive map” as a call for criticism to bring the extensive, non-intuitive, and mostly non-human networks of communication and information back into the realm of consciousness and culture. In an age of vastly expanding economic and technological power, this approach made a certain sense and held sway for several decades – from the mid-1970s to “the end of history” (Fukuyama 1992). Like cognitive criticism, Jameson’s Marxism is useful in rebuking common sense, while at the same time holding on to a common vision in the face of cultural diversity. In this case, we are given an absolute vision of “History” as “a process of totalization” designed to incorporate “ever more extensive parts of the globe” and hence enabling “a new and original relationship of absence and presence, of the far to the near and the external to the internal” (Jameson 2009: 596). Jameson recognizes that the History we are making develops on a scale much longer than our own human life-spans; thus, even revolutions, when they occur, are unlikely to take the form of a punctual takeover of power, since power today is too widely distributed for that. Nonethless, he asks whether one cannot have “a kind of cognitive or contemplative knowledge, in which somehow knowing the Absolute as totality, glimpsing it in rare moments of its visibility, takes priority over any acts its viewer might perform?” Or, again, “how can I recognize this forbid-dingly foreign totality as my own doing, how may I appropriate it and make it my own handiwork and acknowledge its laws as my own projection and my praxis?” (606). That Jameson poses these more recent formulations as questions, not as a positive approach or political project, indicates the extent to which the conversion of networks and systems to the human scale is under contention, in contemporary cultural theory no less than in cognitive criticism.
Where Jameson’s project of cognitive mapping remains centered in consciousness, however, cognitive approaches that incorporate current scientific research tend to diminish the importance of consciousness within the ecology of mind, embodiment, and technics. Cognitive and systems approaches, in principle, ought to be suited to the current culture of global media – which, like the specialized modules that enable mental processes, are now present everywhere and might be said to determine not thought or cultural content, but the horizon of meaningful expression. Although advocates of New Media like to speak of “affordances,” in practice one encounters mostly constraints (conscious and unconscious) at every stage of a work’s composition, circulation, and archival existence in today’s hybrid electronic and print platforms. The awareness of how expression is bounded by visual, computational, sound, and other non-verbal systems is heightened in the new “media ecology” (Tabbi and Wutz 1997). As literary critics have emphasized “gaps in nature,” and the fragmentation of expression into media-specific niches, neuroscientists speak similarly of an “explanatory gap” between “an objective scientific explanation” of brain processes and “the elusive subjective quality of our introspective existence” (Burn 2009, paraphrasing Levine 1999). Even so, the tendency remains among mainstream cognitive critics to look out from the human to cognitive environments, turning the likely universality of brain processes into a dubious cultural unity.
Here is how Mark Turner – in an article not coincidentally presented in a networked environment at onthehuman.org – attempts to map cognition onto non-human networks and communicative flows:
Network scale can be vast even though human scale is not, because the network scale is anchored in the human scale. The human scale blend [e.g., of the near to the far, of past experience to present memory, etc.] in the network provides us with a platform, a scaffold, a cognitively congenial basis from within to reach out, manage, manipulate, transform, develop, and handle the network.
(Turner 2009)
Few would doubt that management, manipulation, and transformation come from the human side. And few would deny that our instrumental powers are extended significantly by the technologies that increasingly determine our situation. What is debatable is whether we humans, individually or collectively, can be said to “handle the network.”
To a degree, one’s decision to focus on “the human scale” or on the emergence of psychic and social systems from other material and symbolic technologies will determine whether one holds on to a humanist or what has come to be described as a “posthumanist” approach to the current cultural situation. Turner’s insistence in this same article at onthehuman.org, for example, that human cognition differs fundamentally from that of animals, is questioned by a number of blog respondents and certainly would be contested by critics such as Wolfe (2010) and Clarke (2008), who make the nonhuman animal and our deep embeddedness in hybrid networks and complex systems starting points for posthumanist explorations of literary and ethical consciousness. As Clarke writes, following Niklas Luhmann’s idea that social systems, no less than to psyches, are self-reproducing, referential, “autopoietic” selves:
The organic bodies and ecosystems we impose our technologies on are not beneath us but beyond us, even while all around us, even while sharing us with an environment as yet fit for life. … No system can subdue or contain the entirety of its environment. Systems are possible only within environments that entirely surpass them.
(Clarke 2008: 195–96)
Regardless of one’s position in these debates – among Jameson’s postmodernism, Carroll’s evolutionary humanism, Turner’s cognitive humanism, or Wolfe’s and Clarke’s posthumanism – it is clear that the terms of the debate depend on the location of human culture (and literature as the diminishing margin of verbal expression among material cultures) in networks and systems that are much larger than consciousness.
If we abstract from mental processes to the critical faculty itself, the program for a cognitive literary criticism appropriate to the current media ecology begins to look rather different from any of the “cognitive approaches” currently on offer. Alan Liu, a Romanticist who has successfully relocated his practice to electronic environments, advances a radically new understanding of critical writing (an expression of which also appears, like Turner’s and Carroll’s recent work, at onthehuman.org). Liu is responding to my own suggestion that the effect of an apparently routine online activity, the “tagging” of literary works according to genre, type, and emergent categories, can be an important intersection among authors, critics, and the actual networks where literary works are currently produced and read:
There are very few humans whose acts of criticism I trust. However, there are many more humans – the entirety of the “wisdom of the crowd” or “rule of many” we see on Web 2.0 today, in fact – whose acts of tagging I trust. That crowd, indeed, may be the greatest example today of what I above termed “strangely smart, exceedingly lively creatures.” To be able to appreciate and learn from that different kind of crowd human, I think will require that we rethink the notion of “criticism” so that it draws on lower-order human operations, which in turn overlap with and can be made more tractable through machinic operations (which I think is the point of Semantic Web, in whose context the notion of semantics as “meaning” is too high level to be useful). So, for example, let’s try substituting the notions of “filtering” or “linking” for “criticizing.”
(Liu 2009)
Liu’s distinction among acts of critical judgment and the lower-level, networked behavior of tags, keywords, and Semantic Web technologies parallels the key distinction between consciousness and cognition. Such differences are congruent with the cognitive make-up of humans – where the majority of activity goes on below consciousness and in distributed networks that extend beyond the boundaries of our bodies and self-consciousness. Indeed, only a small part of the brain’s activity is used for making critical evaluations and conscious decisions. One of the challenges, and one of the terrific opportunities, for those who are trying to do literary work in electronic environments is that we are continually confronted with activities and behaviors that go on more or less independently of the meaning-making activities that are the “higher-level” interest of criticism.
In my essay (Tabbi 2009, which occasioned Liu’s response), I spoke of the “methods of tagging texts” in electronic environments as “quite modest” and I located the critical activity not in the tags themselves but rather in the establishment of “professional and communicative networks,” a higher-level, institutional arrangement. That’s where critical judgment comes in, because critics are not trying to develop or master a universal critical language, but identifying concepts in works and then communicating among peers. The creation of tags and keywords is universal, not just the concerted development of any one theoretical school, precisely because the life of letters within networked environments remains beyond “us.” (Hence electronic-literature author Brian Kim Stefans’s Dream Life of Letters [2000].) Putting those new names into circulation, and tracking those terms, as they develop, is the place where criticism can locate itself in the new media. Like consciousness, that place is important but also marginal.
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