A week ago I ran up a post, Innovation, stagnation, and the construction of ideas and conceptual systems, where I argued that conceptual exhaustion is one reason for the intellectual and economic stagnation economists have been observing for years. By conceptual exhaustion I mean that the systems of thought employed here, there, and perhaps everywhere (by now) no longer have anything new to tell us, no really new opportunities for invention and development. At this point it’s all about dotting i’s and crossing t’s. I offered that suggestion in the context of the theory of cognitive development that David Hays and I began with out paper, “The Evolution of Cognition” [1].
Such stagnation has been evident in academic literary criticism for some time now. I saw it two or three decades ago, at least, and the profession has more or less seen it for a decade or so. I have a few things to say about that in the last section, but I want to preface that with some observations about evolutionary biology in the penultimate section. That’s important because evolutionary biology was built on careful naturalistic description and that, naturalistic description, is what I think literary criticism must do. Before I do either, however, I want to say a few words about the general model Hays and I developed.
Cognitive rank
The idea is simple enough. Over the long course of human history new modes of thought emerge. These modes of thinking are grounded in very basic ‘information processing’ technologies – for want of a better generic term.
This is the scheme Hays and I developed and set forth in that initial paper:
Process
|
Mechanism
|
Medium
| |
Rank 1
|
Abstraction
|
Metaphor
|
Speech
|
Rank 2
|
Rationalization
|
Metalingual Definition
|
Writing
|
Rank 3
|
Theory
|
Algorithm
|
Calculation
|
Rank 4
|
Model
|
Control
|
Computation
|
By process we mean a general mode of thought and by mechanism we mean a particular conceptual device characteristic of that method. The medium is the external physical matrix in/on which the mechanism operates while enacting the general thought process. The emergence of speech and writing are widely recognized as important ‘break points’ or ‘singularities’ in cultural history. Where we have calculation the printing press is more commonly recognized but, regardless, the early modern era (aka Renaissance) is widely recognized as a major watershed. As is the late 19th and early 20th century, where we place computation. That is to say, the historical eras we recognize are not of our making; others recognize them as well.[2] Our contribution is to suggest/align specific cognitive mechanisms with those eras.
Evolutionary biology as Rank 4 thought
Hays and I argued that starting around the turn of the 20th century culture began
evolving toward a new rank and that most of the intellectual and artistic displacement we are seeing reflects these growing pains. This new cognitive rank, Rank 4, has its origins in two developments in late nineteenth century thought: the creation of formal systems of logic and metamathematics and the emergence of non- mechanistic science.
We then went on to assert:
The new scientific style was forced further and further from a mechanistic universe by hard facts of the most intransigent and nonmechanistic sort. Thermodynamics provides the prototype, with biology (evolution) right behind (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Perhaps the most deeply unnerving case, however, is that of quantum mechanics. That light behaved in some experiments like waves and in other experiments like particles was uncomfortable. To explain what they could see, physicists had to imagine a quantum world that they could not see: In principle and not in mere practice, the quantum world is not observable (Penrose 1989). Yet it provides a framework for mathematical derivations that explain, if that is the right word, the observations that can be made in our world. The fact of the matter is, Rank 4 science is as different from Rank 3 science as Rank 3 science is from Rank 2 natural philosophy. Sophisticated logic and mathematics become ever more necessary to thought. To admit the forces and the intangible particles without logic and mathematics to regulate explanation would be to readmit magic and superstition.
Time itself comes under new scrutiny. It was only around the turn of the 20th century that motion was studied in enough detail so as to provide descriptions of complex irregular movement. Motion pictures, photographs showing the paths taken by hands performing a task, time-motion studies in factories, and paintings of a single subject at several stages of an action all turned up more or less together. This conceptual foregrounding of temporality, when combined with metamathematical and logical reasoning, led to the development of the abstract theory of computing between the world wars.
The central work is Turing's explication of the algorithm. Rank 3 had concocted and used algorithms, but Turing explained what an algorithm was. In order to formulate the algorithm Turing had to think explicitly about the control of events in time. He described his machines as performing an action at a certain time; then another action at the next moment; and so on for as many consecutive moments and actions as necessary. His universal machine, a purely abstract construction, was an algorithm for the execution of any algorithm whatsoever. With it, he showed that no interesting formal system can be complete in the sense of furnishing a proof for every true statement.
Let’s go back to biology. Darwin is the major thinker and his theory of evolution is his major thought.
That thinking was grounded three centuries of careful naturalistic observation and description resulting in museums full of reference collections and volumes of verbal and graphic description. And this descriptive work went hand-in-hand with the classification system set forth by Carl Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae (1735). This would, in our terms, be the fruit of Rank 3 thinking.
It was Darwin’s achievement to examine that record and see in it a causal mechanism at work, a non-teleological mechanism. And thus Darwin’s thinking was necessarily embedded in a conception of time (cf. the second paragraph in quotation). And he had to imagine some mechanism capable of producing the lineages one observes in the historical record. In general terms the mechanism is descent with modification (third paragraph). That, if you will, is his “algorithm”. I realize that, in fact, the term “evolutionary algorithm” is much in use in this context, though I’m not sure how useful it is. But one can see easily enough how it would arise.
It would be three-quarters of a century from Darwin’s full-scale exposition of this theory to Turing’s explication of algorithms. Is it too much to assert that that explication was somehow implicit in Darwin’s thought? Perhaps so, perhaps so. But it is nonetheless useful to see a connection, however distant.
Literary study at the turn of the millennium
But what does this tell us about literary criticism?
I note that I have been arguing for a method that centers on the careful description of literary form (morphology) [3] rather than the explication of meaning. And I have referenced biology in doing so. Biologists started doing that descriptive work back in the 16th century – though they weren’t called biologists then – but literary critics have scarcely begun the descriptive work. Yes, there is descriptive work here and there, and gestures toward form as well, but it is not systematic and is not regarded as central to the discipline.
When Darwin set out he had a rich descriptive record available to him, and he made substantial contributions to that record himself. A would be Darwin of literary criticism (having nothing to do with so-called literary Darwinism) has no such record available. This critic would have to figure out how to do such descriptions and then someone cajole other critics to join the effort.
What would they discover once the work has advanced to the point where we have high quality descriptions of texts in each of 10, 20, 30 or more genres over two to three millennia across six continents? Obviously enough we won’t know until the work is done. I’ve done a bit of work on narrative that is suggestive, but only suggestive [4].
The big task, of course, is conceiving of a discipline where ferreting out meanings isn’t the lone central intellectual activity.
We’ve got a lot of work to do.
References
[1] William Benzon and David Hays, The Evolution of Cognition, Journal of Social and Biological Structures 13(4): 297-320, 1990, https://www.academia.edu/243486/The_Evolution_of_Cognition.
For a guide to the theory, see William Benzon, Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society, Nov. 23, 2018, https://www.academia.edu/37815917/Mind-Culture_Coevolution_Major_Transitions_in_the_Development_of_Human_Culture_and_Society
[2] The general scheme was suggested by Walter Wiora, The Four Ages of Music, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1965.
[3] Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form, PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608, https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form.
[4] William Benzon, The Evolution of Narrative and the Self, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 16(2): 129-155, 1993, https://www.academia.edu/235114/The_Evolution_of_Narrative_and_the_Self.
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