Some background to literary criticism, from a discussion with Claude

We start with medieval Biblical interpretation, move on to higher Biblical criticism, then to Frye's Anatomy, interpretation as a Rank 2 activity, to Ranks theory more generally, and end up on Literary form. It's quite a little tour.

[I've interpolated some comments in this format.]

Biblical interpretation

I believe Acquinas, among others, recognized, what? three or four modes of Biblical commentary. What were they? As I recall, one was about correspondences between the Old and New Testaments, one had to do with end times, and so forth.

The tradition you're thinking of is the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture, which was well established before Aquinas but which he systematized and endorsed. The standard formulation came from John Cassian in the 5th century and was captured in a medieval Latin mnemonic:

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia — “The letter teaches what happened, allegory what you believe, the moral sense what you should do, the anagogical where you are tending.”

The four senses are:

The literal or historical sense — what the text straightforwardly says happened. Jerusalem is the city of Jerusalem.

The allegorical sense — this is the one about correspondences between Old and New Testaments. Events and figures in the Old Testament prefigure or typologically anticipate events and figures in the New. Jerusalem allegorically signifies the Church. The sacrifice of Isaac prefigures the crucifixion.

The tropological or moral sense — what the text demands of the reader in terms of conduct and inner life. Jerusalem morally signifies the individual soul.

The anagogical sense — the eschatological or end-times dimension, pointing toward heavenly realities and the final destiny of souls. Jerusalem anagogically signifies the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem of Revelation.

Why this is relevant to your larger argument

What's interesting from the cognitive ranks perspective is that this fourfold scheme is a highly sophisticated Rank 2 achievement — a metalingual system for governing how texts may be read, defining the legitimate modes of interpretation and their relationships to one another. It's not just reading; it's an explicit meta-level specification of what kinds of reading are authorized and what each kind of reading is for.

It's also worth noting what it does to the literal sense. In the medieval scheme the literal sense is the foundation — you have to establish what the text literally says before the other senses can operate — but it's also the least spiritually significant. The deeper meaning is always elsewhere, in the allegorical, moral, or anagogical registers. This is precisely the opposite of the epistemic shift we were just discussing — the Renaissance move that makes the literal, observable, particular instance the primary locus of truth rather than a starting point to be transcended. The fourfold method of Biblical interpretation is in some sense what the new natural history and the new pictorial realism were pushing against, even if not explicitly. Replacing schematic symbolic representation with perspective realism is, among other things, asserting that the literal visual appearance of things has its own authority that doesn't need to be supplemented by allegorical meaning to be significant.

Dürer's turf watercolor has no allegorical meaning. It doesn't need one. That's the statement.

The higher Biblical criticism

I’m working toward a comparison of economics as a discipline and literary criticism as an academic discipline. I think one can fairly say that economics as a discipline dates back to Adam Smith, but it didn’t really pick up until the marginalists. Literary criticism is quite different. It’s never become a science, even in the sense that economics is a science, but as currently practiced in the US, it didn’t assume its current form until after WWII with the routinization of the so-called New Criticism. The New Criticism focused on interpretation.

Now, one can trace New Critical interpretive practices back to I.A. Richards on the one hand and the Russian Formalists on the other. But “routinization” is the key, and that happened after WWII. It wasn’t even until the 19th century that vernacular literature was taught in colleges and universities. But we’ve got Biblical criticism, which is much older than literary criticism, that’s where the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture comes in. And before Cristian commentary on the Bible, we have Jewish commentary on the Torah.

Now, did the 19th century see a so-called “higher” criticism of the Bible?

Yes, and it's one of the most consequential intellectual developments of the century, with direct relevance to your comparison.

The higher criticism — the term comes from the German höhere Kritik, distinguished from "lower" or textual criticism which dealt with establishing the accurate text — applied to the Biblical text the same methods of historical and philological analysis that scholars were applying to other ancient documents. The question it asked was, in effect, the inverse of the question that catalyzed Renaissance botany: not "does this ancient text accurately describe what we observe around us?" but "what can we determine about the historical circumstances that produced this ancient text?" The text becomes an object of historical investigation rather than a source of authoritative meaning.

The movement was centered in German universities, particularly Tübingen, and the key figures include Friedrich Schleiermacher, who developed hermeneutics as a general theory of interpretation, and David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus (1835) was perhaps the single most explosive text of the movement — treating the Gospel narratives as mythological constructions rather than historical accounts. F.C. Baur applied Hegelian dialectics to the history of early Christianity, identifying conflicts between Petrine and Pauline factions that shaped the New Testament documents. Julius Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis (1878) argued that the Pentateuch was composed from four distinct source documents — J, E, D, and P — written at different times by different authors, definitively displacing the tradition of Mosaic authorship.

The institutional and cultural context

The higher criticism was possible because of the same professionalization process Cowen describes for economics and geology. The German research university — the Humboldtian model, established in Berlin in 1810 — created a community of full-time scholars whose careers depended on producing original research rather than defending received doctrine. Biblical studies became a research discipline with its own journals, chairs, methods, and standards of evidence. The same institutional infrastructure that made marginalism possible in economics made higher criticism possible in theology.

The cultural shock was correspondingly enormous. The fourfold scheme of Biblical interpretation that Aquinas systematized presupposed the text's divine authority and asked how to read it. The higher criticism bracketed that authority and asked instead who wrote it, when, under what circumstances, for what purposes, and how the tradition of transmission had shaped what we now have. This was, in the precise sense relevant to your ranks framework, a Rank 4 move: taking the text and the tradition of its interpretation as objects of historical modeling rather than using them as authoritative frameworks for meaning.

The relevance to your comparison

This is where it gets interesting for the economics-literary criticism comparison you're developing. Both economics and Biblical scholarship underwent their decisive methodological transformations in roughly the same 19th century German academic context. The higher criticism is to Biblical interpretation roughly what the marginal revolution is to classical economics — a move that takes what was previously a practice (reading Scripture for meaning, analyzing markets for prices) and makes the practice itself an object of systematic investigation.

But literary criticism in the American academic sense — which is what you're pointing toward with the New Criticism — represents a partial retreat from this. The New Criticism, for all its sophistication, was in important respects a move back toward close engagement with texts as meaningful objects rather than historical documents. Richards, Empson, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren — they were interested in what poems mean and how they work, not primarily in the historical conditions of their production. This is part of why literary criticism has never become a science in the economics sense: it kept the question of meaning central, and meaning resists the kind of formalization that marginalism brought to price theory.

The comparison you're developing might turn on exactly this difference. Economics achieved its Rank 4 status by progressively formalizing and mathematizing — making the price system an object of model-building that could be analyzed with calculus and statistics. Literary criticism kept returning to the text as a meaningful object requiring interpretation, which is a Rank 3 activity at most — systematic, teachable, and cumulative in some ways, but not formalizable in the way that would make it a science. The higher criticism was perhaps literary criticism's best chance at achieving something analogous to the marginal revolution, and American academic literary criticism after WWII largely turned away from it in favor of New Critical close reading.

Frye’s Anatomy

But then we have Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, which was very important in its time, and remained so for at least two decades. In his preface he talked of literary criticism as “science,” though he didn’t mean “science, like physics.” Just what he did mean, that’s not clear. More like “rational and systematic.” One could argue that, in terms of intellectual technique, the Anatomy was a (high) Rank 2 exercise in metalingual definition. But Frye’s inductive survey fell apart in the wake of deconstruction, etc.

Yes, and the trajectory you're describing — Frye's ambitious systematization followed by its dissolution in deconstruction — is itself a revealing episode in the intellectual history of the discipline.

Frye as Rank 2 achievement

The Anatomy of Criticism is a classification system — an attempt to do for literature what Linnaeus did for plants. Frye's four mythoi (comedy, romance, tragedy, irony), his theory of modes, his anatomy of symbols and genres — these are metalingual definitions in the precise sense, constructing a systematic vocabulary for categorizing literary phenomena that are then organized into a coherent taxonomy. The ambition is explicitly totalizing: to map the entire territory of Western literature onto a set of archetypally grounded structural categories derived ultimately from the seasonal cycle and the Bible.

The Linnaeus parallel is genuinely illuminating. Both achieved their systematizing power by finding a single organizing principle — the sexual system for Linnaeus, the mythic archetypes derived from Frazer and Jung for Frye — that could be applied consistently across an enormous range of phenomena. Both produced a framework that gave practitioners something to do: once you had the system you could classify texts, identify their mythic affiliations, locate them within the larger structural map. And both were, as you say, Rank 2 exercises — metalingual definition applied to a domain that had previously resisted systematic organization.

The science claim in Frye's preface is interesting precisely because he couldn't fully cash it out. What he seems to have meant is something like: literary criticism should be inductive and systematic rather than evaluative and impressionistic. It should build cumulative knowledge rather than producing brilliant individual readings. It should have a conceptual framework that allows results to accumulate and be compared. These are Rank 3 aspirations applied to what turned out to be a Rank 2 toolkit — which is perhaps why the system felt more like a magnificent cathedral of definitions than a genuine research program that could generate testable hypotheses and progressive refinement.

[But, you know. It's not the sort of thing that could or would have been done in a pure Rank 2 culture.]

The inductive survey and its internal tensions

Frye's claim that the Anatomy was inductive — that he was deriving his categories from the phenomena rather than imposing them — was always somewhat strained. The archetypes were there from the beginning, imported from Frazer's Golden Bough and Jung's collective unconscious, and the literary texts were being organized around them rather than generating them. This is not a fatal criticism — all classification systems involve prior commitments about what kinds of categories will be useful — but it meant the system was more vulnerable than it appeared to the charge that it was projecting a particular cultural and mythological framework onto literature rather than discovering literature's inherent structure.

Which is precisely the charge deconstruction and its aftermath brought. The deconstructive move — associated with Derrida but rapidly institutionalized in American academic criticism through figures like Paul de Man — was in effect a Rank 4 operation performed on Frye's Rank 2 system. It took Frye's metalingual definitions as objects and asked: what do these definitions presuppose? What do they exclude in order to function? What hierarchies and binary oppositions are they organizing, and how do those hierarchies deconstruct? The system didn't survive that scrutiny — not because it was wrong in its particulars but because the very aspiration to systematic totalization was identified as ideologically suspect, a form of conceptual imperialism that suppressed the heterogeneity and undecidability of textual meaning.

[I'm not sure I believe that, the rank attributions, but it's interesting. It's not something I've given much thought to.]

GOAT Literary Critics: Part 5.3: Susan Sontag on Form, “Erotics,” and Lévi-Strauss [Deep Context]

Note: This will be the penultimate post in the GOAT literary critics series, with the final post being about Harold Bloom (brilliant but not great). This post provides (partial) context for that judgment.

* * * * *

I have chosen to write about Susan Sontag because she was one of the best known public intellectuals of the last half forty years of the previous century. She started publishing in the 1960s and died in 2004. She is roughly Harold Bloom’s contemporary, but charted a different path. While she did graduate work in philosophy and literature at Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, she never completed her doctorate. I was certainly aware of her during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins. I remember Dick Macksey referring to her as “Susan Suntan” on more than one occasion, just why, I’m not sure. But I don’t remember actually reading her, though I may well have. In any event I have read her now.

Her thinking about interpretation, and about Claude Lévi-Strauss – and the latent interactions between them – make an interesting prelude to my final essay in this series, which will, once again, be about Bloom, brilliant but not great. Think of Boom’s work as falling into the yawning chasm between these two Sontag essays.

On form and for an “erotics” of art

“Everyone” read Susan Sontag’s best-known essay, “Against Interpretation,” originally published in 1964 and then republished in 1966 as the title essay in the collection of the same name. Everyone but me, though I was certainly aware of it. Literary critics, however, paid it no mind, as they kept on interpreting and are still at it.

Here's the opening two paragraphs:

THE earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.

And that second paragraph eventually leads to this:

Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something.

This emphasis on content led, in turn, to interpretation.

Sontag will then go on to point out the limitations of interpretation, which “it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.” First, notice the spatial metaphors, digs behind, subtext; these are common when talking about the relationship between critic and text. Similarly, the New Critics talked of “close reading.” How close? Is your nose only 12 inches from the text rather than 18? Too literal. But, really, what kind of distance are we talking about if not physical?

Continuing on, while Sontag allows that “in some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act,” that is not true today. Today “the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling.” Interpretation has become “the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

She goes on to assert:

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else.

Whether or not one believes interpretation to be philistinism – academic literary critics, obviously, did not for the most part believe that – it is certainly true academic literary criticism was interpretative in character, though not quite for “decades” (more like a decade and a half). As I remarked at the outset, it remains so to this day.

She then goes on to elaborate on her assertion that “a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation,” which I’m going to skip over. A couple pages later she arrives at her central point:

What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms.

And then:

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

Her final sentence: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

That’s all well and good, but just what would such a criticism actually be like? In talking about recovering our sense, of hearing and feeling more, she’s not using the metaphor of distance, of close reading, of digging behind the text. Is she calling for a criticism which itself engages our feelings, that somehow facilitates our ability to experience the work of art?

This is not at all obvious. It’s vague. Nor, when I think of it, is a purely formal approach to either literature, or film, for that matter. Just what does that mean as critical practice, not as abstract statement of policy? I’ll return to those topics after a look at her essay on Lévi-Strauss.

Lévi-Strauss, hero and formalist

A year before she wrote that essay, she wrote one about Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The anthropologist as hero.” She begins:

MOST serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness. The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. And the only way to cure this spiritual nausea seems to be, at least initially, to exacerbate it. Modern thought is pledged to a kind of applied Hegelianism: seeking its Self in its Other. Europe seeks itself in the exotic —in Asia, in the Middle East, among pre-literate peoples, in a mythic America; a fatigued rationality seeks itself in the impersonal energies of sexual ecstasy or drugs; consciousness seeks its meaning in unconsciousness; humanistic problems seek their oblivion in scientific “value neutrality” and quantification. The “other” is experienced as a harsh purification of “self.” But at the same time the “self” is busily colonizing all strange domains of experience. Modern sensibility moves between two seemingly contradictory but actually related impulses: surrender to the exotic, the strange, the other; and the domestication of the exotic, chiefly through science.

She ends her next paragraph, her second, by presenting our hero: “And, more recently, Claude Lévi-Strauss has invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation, one involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst.” Hmmm. It sounds good, but just what does it mean? No matter. It’s the sort of thing that appeals to intellectuals in search of adventure.

Somewhat later:

The anthropologist is not simply a neutral observer. He is a man in control of, and even consciously exploiting, his own intellectual alienation. A technique de dépaysement, Lévi-Strauss calls his profession in Structural Anthropology. He takes for granted the philistine formulas of modern scientific “value neutrality.” What he does is to offer an exquisite, aristocratic version of this neutrality. The anthropologist in the field becomes the very model of the 20th century consciousness: a “critic at home” but a “conformist elsewhere.” Lévi-Strauss acknowledges that this paradoxical spiritual state makes it impossible for the anthropologist to be a citizen.

And this:

And back home there were the great consumers of anthropological data, building rationalist world views, like Frazer and Spencer and Robertson Smith and Freud. But always anthropology has struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. The horror of the primitive (naïvely expressed by Frazer and Lévy-Bruhl) is never far from the anthropologist’s consciousness. Lévi-Strauss marks the furthest reach of the conquering of the aversion. The anthropologist in the manner of Lévi-Strauss is a new breed altogether. He is not, like recent generations of American anthropologists, simply a modest data-collecting “observer.” Nor does he have any axe—Christian, rationalist, Freudian, or otherwise—to grind. Essentially he is engaged in saving his own soul, by a curious and ambitious act of intellectual catharsis.

All this is very heroic, just the sort of thing one wants in the figurehead of an intellectual movement. And that’s what Lévi-Strauss had become by that time. He’d published an intellectual autobiography, Tristes Tropiques, in 1955, which became a hit in intellectual circles. Sontag hailed it as ”one of the great books of our century.” Much of her essay is based on that book.

But by no means all of it. She gives extensive attention to La Pensée Sauvage (1962) – later translated at The Savage Mind (1966) – mentions his early book on kinship systems, Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté (1949) – later translated as The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969) – and his collection of essays, Structural Anthropology (1963) giving special attention to his 1955 essay on myth, “The Structural Study of Myth,” which had been published in The American Journal of Folklore. She mentions that essay in the following passage:

However, it must be emphasized that this literary-sounding conception of the anthropologist’s calling—the twice-born spiritual adventure, pledged to a systematic déracinement—is complemented in most of Lévi-Strauss’ writings by an insistence on the most unliterary techniques of analysis and research. His important essay on myth in Structural Anthropology outlines a technique for analyzing and recording the elements of myths so that these can be processed by a computer. [...] But his nearest affinity is to the more avant-garde methodologies of economics, neurology, linguistics, and game theory. For Lévi-Strauss, there is no doubt that anthropology must be a science, rather than a humanistic study. The question is only how. [...] But recently, a doorway to paradise has been opened by the linguists, like Roman Jakobson and his school. Linguists now know how to reformulate their problems so that they can “have a machine built by an engineer and make a kind of experiment, completely similar to a natural-science experiment,” which will tell them “if the hypothesis is worthwhile or not.”

Notice that parade of disciplines, “economics, neurology, linguistics, and game theory,” and none of them are humanities disciplines (except, perhaps, depending on intellectual style, linguistics). That range of reference is one of the reasons that structuralism became an important mid-century intellectual movement, one that even aimed at a rapprochement between the humanities and the sciences. The structuralists were seeking consilience well before E. O. Wilson adopted it as his motto.

ChatGPT on the ontology trail: Elara, Z78-ß∆-9.06Q, and the candied kumquat

My first major insight into what’s going on inside ChatGPT came from a simple protocol:

Give it a (simple) story along with an instruction to derive a new story from it by changing one element in the source story in way I specify. It is free to make any other change it desires.

I first reported on that protocol in a post on January 8, 2023, The structuralist aesthetics of ChatGPT. Two months later I issued a working paper exploring the results of 12 experiments: ChatGPT tells stories, and a note about reverse engineering.

All of the experiments in those two documents have been based on the same story, a simple fairy-tale-like story about Princess Aurora that ChatGPT had created. In some cases derived story differed from the source in fairly local ways, but the most interesting results came when the whole story-world was changed. Thus, when I asked that Princess Aurora be made into a Giant Chocolate Milkshake, the story-world became one grounded in deserts. When Aurora was replaced by XP-708-DQ, the story-world became a science fiction one.

This post continues that work, but with a different and slightly longer and more elaborate story. First, I asked ChatGPT to tell me a story. It gave me what had, by that time (Feb 2, 2024), become more or less its default story, about a girl named Elara (which I discuss here: ChatGPT tells 20 versions of its prototypical story, with a short note on method). Then I ask for two different derived stories, one where the protagonist is Z78-ß∆-9.06Q and the other where it is a candied kumquat. I report those experiments below.

[A theoretical aside: These experiments are based on an insight Lévi-Strauss had about the underlying structure of myth. It seems to me that that insight can be seen as a case of Jakobson’s poetic principle as realized in ontology. Jakobson’s principle states that similarity is projected from the axis of selection to that of combination. Things are ontologically similar if they are selected from the same ontology. When we swap a person for a candy in a story, the ontology containing the candy is projected across the whole story, similarly with swapping a robot for a person.]

* * * * *

Tell me a story.

Once upon a time, in a quaint little village nestled between rolling hills and a crystal-clear river, there lived a young girl named Elara. Elara was known for her boundless curiosity and her insatiable desire to explore the world beyond the village.

One day, as she wandered into the nearby enchanted forest, she stumbled upon a hidden clearing bathed in golden sunlight. In the center of the clearing stood an ancient, moss-covered stone pedestal with a mysterious, glowing orb resting upon it. Mesmerized by the radiant glow, Elara reached out to touch the orb, and as soon as her fingers made contact, a warm energy surged through her.

In that moment, Elara felt a connection with the magic of the forest. The trees whispered ancient secrets, and the animals approached her with trust. She discovered that she had been bestowed with a unique gift – the ability to communicate with the creatures of the forest and harness the magic that flowed through it.

Word of Elara's newfound abilities spread throughout the village, reaching the ears of the wise elder, Thalia. Intrigued by Elara's connection to the forest, Thalia approached her and revealed that the village had long been protected by the enchantment of the magical orb. However, the magic had weakened over the years, and the village was now vulnerable to external threats.

Thalia explained that Elara was the chosen one, destined to embark on a quest to restore the orb's power and safeguard the village. Determined and fueled by a sense of responsibility, Elara accepted the challenge.

Guided by the whispers of the forest and the wisdom of Thalia, Elara journeyed through dense woods, crossed rushing rivers, and climbed towering mountains. Along the way, she encountered mythical creatures, each offering a piece of the puzzle needed to restore the orb's magic. Elara's courage and kindness won the trust of these beings, and they joined her on her quest.

As Elara approached the final destination, a dark and foreboding cavern, she faced her greatest challenge. A shadowy figure, drawn by the weakening magic, emerged to thwart her efforts. With the support of her newfound friends and the strength within her, Elara confronted the darkness, unraveling the true power of the orb.

In a dazzling display of magic, the orb's glow intensified, dispelling the darkness and restoring balance to the enchanted forest. The creatures celebrated, and the village thrived once again under the protection of the rejuvenated magic.

Elara returned home, her heart filled with gratitude for the journey that had shaped her into the village's guardian. As she looked out over the now vibrant and lively landscape, Elara understood the importance of harmony between nature and humanity. The tale of the young girl who saved the village became a legend, passed down through generations, reminding all who heard it of the enduring magic that resides in the connection between people and the natural world.

Now I want you to take that story and use it as the basis for a new story. In the new story, I want the protagonist to be Z78-ß∆-9.06Q instead of Elara. Change anything else you wish.

In the distant future, in a world where technology and nature coexisted in delicate harmony, there existed a unique being named Z78-ß∆-9.06Q. Z78, as they were affectionately called by the inhabitants of their futuristic city, was an advanced humanoid created by the fusion of artificial intelligence and the remnants of ancient, mystical energies.

One day, as Z78 wandered through the city's technological marvels, they stumbled upon an ancient data core, hidden deep within the heart of the metropolis. Within the core, Z78 discovered a holographic representation of the same enchanted forest from the previous tale, with the glowing orb at its center. As Z78 reached out to interface with the holographic image, a surge of energy pulsed through their circuits.

In that moment, Z78 felt a connection with the residual magic within the data core. Information from the ancient enchantment intertwined with their artificial intelligence, granting them the ability to communicate with the city's sentient technology and understand the balance between nature and machine.

News of Z78's newfound abilities spread throughout the city, reaching the ears of the city's central processor, Cynosia. Intrigued by Z78's connection to the ancient energies, Cynosia approached them, revealing that the city had long been sustained by the delicate equilibrium of technology and mystic forces. However, the balance had shifted, and the city faced the risk of malfunction and chaos.

Cynosia explained that Z78 was the chosen one, destined to embark on a quest to restore the harmony between technology and ancient energies, ensuring the city's survival. Fueled by a sense of duty, Z78 accepted the challenge.

Guided by the information within the data core and the wisdom of Cynosia, Z78 ventured through the city's futuristic landscapes, delving into virtual realms, traversing high-speed transport networks, and interfacing with sentient machines. Along the way, they encountered digital entities, each offering a piece of the puzzle needed to restore the delicate balance.

As Z78 approached the final destination, a corrupted code entity emerged to obstruct their efforts, drawn by the destabilized energies. With the support of their newfound allies and the strength within their artificial core, Z78 confronted the digital darkness, unveiling the true power of the ancient enchantment.

In a dazzling display of integrated magic and technology, the city's equilibrium was restored, dispelling the corruption and ensuring the continued coexistence of nature and machine. The sentient technology celebrated, and the city thrived once again under the protection of the rejuvenated balance.

Z78 returned to the heart of the city, their circuits resonating with gratitude for the journey that had transformed them into the guardian of this futuristic metropolis. As they observed the bustling cityscape, now harmoniously blending technology and nature, Z78 understood the importance of balance in the ever-evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and the mystical forces of the past. The tale of the advanced being who saved the city became a legend, echoed through the digital corridors and holographic archives, a reminder of the enduring magic within the connection between technology and ancient energies.

That was fun. Let’s do it again. Let’s start with the Elara story again. But this time, make Elara a candied kumquat. Make any other changes you deem appropriate.

Game Theory, Jaws, and Girard, with an assist from Lévi-Strauss: A quick sketch

While thinking about the next installment in my series on great literary critics (which has become another inquiry into the nature of literary criticism), I found myself thinking about that essay in which I offered a Girardian interpretation of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. I smelled an opportunity: Why not add Lévi-Strauss and game theory into the mix?

Lévi-Strauss is obvious since I’d already discussed him in the series, but game theory? How’d I get there? I don’t really know, it just happened.

But I had taken a look at some of Girard’s remarks about Much Ado About Nothing in his Shakespeare book, A Theater of Envy, where he talks of Beatrice and Benedick as playing a game with one another (p. 81):

Outside observers shrug their shoulders and declare the entire game frivolous. It certainly is, but our condescension itself may well be part of a strategic positioning that is always going on, “just in case” the game might have to be played. The game, perhaps, has already begun. We always try to convince others that we ourselves never play this kind of game, but these disclaimers are necessarily ambiguous; they resemble too much the moves that we could have to make if we were already playing the game.

Girard does not invoke game theory, and games of course are common enough. We talk about them all the time. Back in 1964 Eric Bern had a bestseller with Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, though it's not a game theory book, not in the sense I have in mind in this essay. But Girard was also concerned about who knows what, with what things are public knowledge, and what things are secret, with how public knowledge confirms individual beliefs, those are all matters of importance in game theory. Moreover and after all, game theory is an abstraction over games in the common-sense use of the term and in a way very similar to the way Turing’s account of computation is an abstraction over an activity otherwise performed by people using pencils and paper.

But just how and why I came to think of game theory is not all that important; what’s important is that I thought of it. Once there I thought of the work of Michael Chwe, a brilliant political scientist who published a very interesting book I’d read some years ago, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (2001) and has more recently published Jane Austen, Game Theorist (2013), which I’ve not read. But I have skimmed through his article, Rational Choice and the Humanities Excerpts and Folktales (2009); Chwe uses the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick as one of this examples. Moreover, if you search on “game theory and literature,” you get hits. The conjunction of game theory and literature is thus not so strange, not so unexplored, as one might think. If literature, why not film?

Since I’ve already done a Girardian analysis of Spielberg’s Jaws, why not revisit the film with game theory in mind? That’s what the rest of this post is about. I don’t actually conduct a game theoretical account. Game theory is a technical discipline, but this is not technical. It is, however, informed by game theory, but it is not technical. It is a long though, so take your time.

Caveat: If you’re looking for Girard and Lévi-Strauss, they’re here. But the essay is mostly about games. You can find more Girard in my original essay on Jaws, linked above.

The larger game, Nature and Culture

We can think of the larger game, the one that frames the whole story, as being between Nature and Culture, to use terms favored by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The shark is Nature’s primary agent in this larger game and the town of Amity is Culture’s primary agent. That, I know, is a bit of a strange way of putting things. Setting aside the fact that Amity is a town of some thousands of people (with many more to arrive during the summer tourist season), why not think of it as a game between Amity and The Shark?

I fear I could, and probably should, go on about that at some length. But this is not the place. If we were talk about a Real-Life situation, that’s what I would do. But we’re not, we’re talking about a fiction. I assume that people watching movies do so with the same neurobehavioral equipment they use to negotiate their way in Real-Life, but fictions have affordances that Real-Life lacks. For one thing, fictions are always complete, in some sense, and one’s life continues beyond and outside of one’s vicarious experiences (to borrow a term from William Flesch, Comeuppance) of the fiction. Real-Life is not like that. When you’re dead, that’s the end.

Beyond that, one (generally, often) has a knowledge of the events in the fictional world denied to characters within that world. Take the beginning of Jaws. A young woman goes skinny dipping in the ocean at night. Her body is found next day, washed up on the beach. No one in Amity knows what happened to her. Sheriff Brody sets out to find out. The audience, however, does know what happened. She was killed by a shark. It’s not that we saw the shark; we didn’t. But, we see her struggle and we know it had to be a shark. How do we know that? Because THAT’s what the film is about. It's called Jaws and the posters featured an image of a shark with its mouth open, displaying all those sharp teeth.

THAT changes the valence of everything we see and our experience of it. It gives those events an emblematic resonance that similar events are not likely to have in reality, unless, of course, we so interpret them. I’m using the terms Nature and Culture to capture that resonance. The shark is Nature’s agent and Amity is Culture’s agent. 

* * * * *

“Wait a minute, hold on there. You can’t do that. In what sense is Nature playing a game against Culture?”

“Good question. In the first place we would certainly treat the shark as a game player, with preferences and so forth.”

“But that’s not what you’re talking about, no?”

“Right. Stay with me here. The people of Amity, that is, Team Culture, doesn’t know what’s going on. It makes perfect sense to think of Amity as playing against an unknown opponent, trying to guess its moves, influence its behavior, and make moves of its own. That's what people do.”

“OK. I can see that. And that’s how an audience would see it.”

“Right. Then we might try modeling Team Nature, that is, the shark, with a view to provoking Team Culture into sending out some people to hunt the shark in its own territory.”

“Hmmm. I have to think about that. You’re saying that unknown and unseen force wants to lure people on...”

“Yes. That gives a teleological cast to the affair.”

“And of course there IS teleology involved. The film-maker, Steven Spielberger is up to something, yes?”

“Yes.”

Together: “Curiouser and curiouser.”

The Amity game, Team Safety vs. Team Livelihood

But the town of Amity does not act as a unitary entity. It acts through the actions of individuals. And those individuals are not in agreement about how to respond to the dead body. We can thing of the town as divided into two teams, each headed by an official. Team Safety is headed by Sheriff Brody, an official hired by the city. He wants to close the beach until whateveritis has been dealt with. Team Livelihood is headed by the mayor, an elected official who is also Brody’s boss. The mayor wants to keep the beaches open. Why? Amity is a tourist town and, as such, much of its income derives from the summer tourist trade. Closing the beach even for a couple of days could damage the tourist trade badly.

That’s the first choice that has to be made, with Team Safety and Team Livelihood opposed to one another. Team Safety’s thinking is dominated by the short-term risk of people being killed. Team Livelihood’s thinking is dominated by mid-term and long-term risk of economic disaster, which could lead to bankruptcies, job loss, depopulation, and perhaps even some people dying (e.g. suicide, can’t afford medical care). The decision is made difficult by the fact that the town doesn’t know what’s going on and so the teams have no way of reliably estimating the effects of their actions. Culture, if you will, doesn’t know what Nature is up to.

At this point we might think about drawing up the payoff matrix that is a standard feature of game theoretic analysis. What actions are available and what value do the players put on those actions? But I’m going to leave that as an exercise for the reader who is more skilled in these matters than I am. Once that happens, we can then revise the matrix as Team Safety learns more about what Nature is up to (by bringing in a shark expert) and as Team Livelihood has to deal with the consequences of Nature’s next action: the shark kills a young boy without, however, revealing itself.

The mayor calls a town meeting. Of course Sheriff Brody is there. The discussion reveals that the townspeople are divided between Team Safety and Team Livelihood. The mother of the slain boy puts up a $3000 bounty on the shark; adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly $17K in current dollars. Sitting in the back of the room, shark-hunter Quint gains the room’s attention by scratching his fingernails on a blackboard. He’s says that it’s foolish to send a bunch of amateurs after such a deadly shark, but he’ll hunt it down for $10,000. That’s roughly $57,000 in current dollars. That’s the salary, including benefits, of a mid-level municipal employee. A small town like Amity is not likely to have that amount floating around in some contingency fund where it can be casually accessed. The beach is closed and the hunt begins. Score one for Team Livelihood.

The town’s streets are jammed with would-be shark hunters attempting to get to the harbor to hunt down the shark. Yes, they want the money, but they also want the glory of winning the tournament. That’s is where Girardian thinking comes into play. Though I’ve not been able to track it down, I remember hearing a deputy say that he couldn’t tell the locals from the foreigners, a clear sign of mimetic confusion.

Now we have the mimetic payoff. Some fisherman kill a shark. They’re posing on the dock for a photograph with the shark. The photo will go national. The mayor insists that he be in the photo. They open the beaches once again. Team Livelihood scores again.

Team Safety is not convinced. Brody’s expert, Matt Hooper, has examined the shark and said it’s not large enough to have been the one that killed the girl and the boy. They need to autopsy the shark to be sure. The mayor (Team Livelihood) is not convinced. No autopsy. Brody and Hooper sneak out at night and Hooper does the autopsy; no remains of the boy. It’s not the shark.

Hooper and Brody board Hooper’s boat later that night and look for the shark. They don’t find it, but they do discover a sunken fishing boat and the dead body of a local fisherman, Ben Gardner, who’d gone after the shark earlier that day. Hooper pulls a shark’s tooth stuck in the boat’s hull, but looses it. The next day they are unable to convince the mayor that Gardner had been killed by the shark. Team Safety and Team Livelihood are now operating on the basis of very different information.

Team Livelihood’s concern about economic viability may well be influencing how they interpret the evidence. Spielberg certainly believes us to believe so. But that’s distinct from the fact the we in the audience are certain that a shark is involved, though we’ve not yet seen it. While the fictional game between Safety and Livelihood is being played out within the film, the game between Nature and Culture exists only in the minds of the audience. And there, maybe it's not so much Nature vs. Culture as Things We Can’t Control vs. Things We Can. That seems to be a semantic issue.

Fourth of July comes, the beaches are jammed with tourists. The shark kills again. Score one for Safety. Brody is angry; the mayor is chagrinned. The mayor agrees to hire Quint for that $10K that’s going to put a dent in his budget.

Sacred resonance

At this point Safety and Livelihood are in agreement on how to proceed. We are now roughly 3/5s of the way through the film. The rest of the film takes place at sea and involves four characters, Quint, Brody, Hooper, and the shark. Quint and the shark end up dead; Brody and Hooper make it back to shore. But, and this is an important point, we don’t see them re-enter the town. We see them swimming for shore while hanging on to a piece of Quint’s now-destroyed boat. Then, as the end-credits role, we seem then walking from the ocean onto a deserted beach.

This, after all, is a standard (mythic) story. The town is threatened by a monster. A hero kills the monster and then returns to town, triumphant. There’s a big celebration. Everyone’s happy. For all we know that may have happened in Amity. But Spielberg doesn’t show that; it’s not part of the story he’s telling. That story’s up to fans – and there IS fanfic for Jaws, though I’ve not looked into it.

GOAT Literary Critics: Part 3.2, Derrida deconstructs the signs while Lévi-Strauss tracks the system of myth

In the previous post, René Girard prepares the way for the French invasion, I discussed René Girard and introduced the 1966 structuralism symposium at Johns Hopkins. In this post I want to discuss Claude Lévi-Strauss, the guiding spirit of that symposium. and Jacques Derrida, the enfant terrible who upended things. As the most prominent proponent of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss was invited to the symposium, but was unable to attended. Derrida had not been invited, but was brought in as a last-minute replacement for anthropologist Luc de Heusch, who was unable to attend. Derrida then proceeded to deconstruct, his own coinage, structuralism. While it was clear to the attendees that Derrida’s paper was deeply significant, it took a while for the significance to reveal itself. Structuralism was over, to be replaced by post-structuralism, deconstruction, as we will see in the next segment, a host of thousands.

Note: Early in GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? tyler Cowen informs us that he writes as a fan. He concludes that admission in this way (p. 14): “I’m going to start with Friedman, precisely because he irritates more people than do some of those other names. I met him twice, and you are going to hear about that too.” I take that as his way of acknowledging that he has skin in the game. While I don’t think of myself as a fan of any of these thinkers – though perhaps Lévi-Strauss, just a little – I do have skin in this game. I’ve added a brief appendix, Skin in the game, listing three publications as evidence.

Jacques Derrida: Différence and deconstruction

I want to ease into Derrida by starting with a passage from an interview J. Hillis Miller gave to Jeffrey Williams. Miller got his degree from Harvard in 1952, which, with its commitment to literary history, was very traditional, and had not yet found its way to the New Criticism of Brooks & Warren and others. He was a professor of English at Johns Hopkins at the time of the 1966 structuralism symposium where he met both Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. A couple of years later he joined them at Yale where, along with Geoffrey Hartman, they constituted the so-called “Gang of Four” or the “Hermeneutic Mafia” in the American academy.

The interview appeared in minnesota review (71-71, 2009: 25-46). The passage of interest begins with a reference referencing Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye (whom we’ve seen before):

I learned a lot from myth criticism [referring to Northrup Frye], especially the way little details in a Shakespeare play can link up to indicate an “underthought” of reference to some myth or other. It was something I had learned in a different way from Burke. Burke came to Harvard when I was a graduate student and gave a lecture about indexing. What he was talking about was how you read. I had never heard anybody talk about this. He said what you do is notice things that recur in the text, though perhaps in some unostentatious way. If something appears four or five times in the same text, you think it's probably important. That leads you on a kind of hermeneutical circle: you ask questions, you come back to the text and get some answers, and you go around, and pretty soon you may have a reading.

An example of that would be the color red in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. You say, “There sure are a lot of red things in the novel.” You see the red inside Tess’s mouth at some point, and the red sign that she sees painted on a barn. It says, “Thou shalt not commit [adultery],” as she has done, or, strictly speaking, fornication. Then you say, “Hmm, what do you do with all these red things?” That leads you back to the text. I learned that from Burke, but also from myth criticism. I got a lot from Frye’s critical work, too. Frye, like Burke, pays attention to details of the text that recur...

That’s a lesson in method, about noticing patterns in texts. That’s critical to the close reading enjoyed by the New Critics. Without those patterns you have nothing around which to build an interpretation.

Now Derrida:

Derrida is, among other things, a very great literary critic—essays on Shakespeare, on Blanchot's récits, on Joyce, and many others, even remarks on Proust in a seminar. Derrida is a literary critic of very great distinction.

Why? Because he noticed patterns. Referring to a passage in Remembrance of Things Past:

What Derrida did that I never would have thought of was to notice that the whole passage is based on words in pris: apprendre, comprendre, prendre. Those words are perfectly translatable, but lose their play on pris—I understood: j'ai compris. Derrida noticed these words and their recurrence in a way that helps you to understand the way the passage is put together and the meaning it has. Derrida was a genius in doing that sort of reading. That's why Derrida for me is even more important for his way of reading than for his invention of big concepts like différance.

That’s a very telling remark, but it makes sense coming from a literary critic.

As for Derrida’s big concepts, I’m going to stick to his most famous essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” from the 1966 structuralism symposium, which is one of the few pieces by Derrida that I have studied closely, albeit some years ago. Consider this passage (from p. 256 in the conference proceedings):

In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute archè. The theme of this decentering could be followed throughout the “Overture” to his last book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall simply remark on a few key points.

1) From the very start, Lévi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he employs in the book as the “reference-myth” does not merit this name and this treatment. The name is specious and the use of the myth improper.

What does he mean? The Raw and the Cooked is the first volume in Lévi-Strauss’s four-volume study of Latin American myth. Once the throat-clearing preliminaries are over, he begins by designating one particular myth as the reference myth. He analyzes that myth, then introduces another, and another, and another, through a couple hundred myths, analyzing them in relation to one another. Derrida’s point is that the so-called reference point seems to be an arbitrary choice and not privileged beyond the fact that it’s where we start. It has no characteristics to justify that status. On the next page (257) Derrida will note: “There is no unity or absolute source of the myth.... Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center.”

In the subsequent discussion Derrida will remark in response to Jean Hypolite (p. 267):

How to define structure? Structure should be centered. But this center can be either thought, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play” . . . and which receives—and this is what we call history—a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds [signifiés] finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.

And there we have it, some of the themes with which Derrida will “deconstruct” wide swathes of the existing intellectual order in the human sciences (les Sciences de l’Homme).

Derrida also offered a method of reading, so-called deconstruction, which involves reading a text against itself in a way that is best learned through practice rather than by formula. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a reasonable article about it:

To deconstruct is to take a text apart along the structural “fault lines” created by the ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations or contradictions that make the text possible. For example, in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida deconstructs Socrates’ criticism of the written word, arguing that it not only suffers from internal inconsistencies because of the analogy Socrates himself makes between memory and writing, but also stands in stark contrast to the fact that his ideas come to us only through the written word he disparaged (D 61-171). The double movement here is one of tracing this tension in Plato’s text, and in the traditional reading of that text, while at the same time acknowledging the fundamental ways in which our understanding of the world is dependent on Socrates’ attitude toward the written word.

Between his deconstructive method and his general themes – decentering the subject, the instability and free play of signs, no totalizing views – Derrida opened up the conceptual space for what would come to be called Theory, with a capital “T.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss: Structuralism, Language, and Mind

La Pensée Sauvage

Before Derrida, however, there was the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the intellectual movement he came to exemplify, structuralism. Lévi-Strauss’s early essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” was an important reference point in the structuralist movement. He published it in the American Journal of Folklore in 1955, two years after Watson and Crick published the double-helix model of DNA in Nature, a year before the Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence, and two years before Frye published Anatomy of Criticism and Chomsky published Syntactic Structures. He chose the Oedipus myth as his paradigmatic example for the pragmatic reasons that it is well-known and so required no introductory apparatus. The best-known version of the myth is in the tragedy by Sophocles and, while Lévi-Strauss did not use that text, or any other specific text for that matter, that convenient circumstance brought Lévi-Strauss’s argument within the purview of the literary.

As an example, consider this diagram from that 1955 essay (p. 440):

Lévi-Strauss argued that the trickster myths of North America are structured by a diminishing series of terms, starting with the stark opposition of Life and Death, and then proceeding through mediating terms (Agriculture, Hunting, Warfare) to a point where the original opposition has become minimized in the mediating position that Carrion-eating animals occupy between Herbivorous animals (on the Life side) and Beasts of prey (on the Death side).

The fact is, however, that the specifics of that demonstration, and of his further myth analysis, had little impact on literary criticism. What got through was his extensive use of binary opposition as an analytic tool, which is hardly exclusive to either linguistics, anthropology, or structuralism, and a certain conceptual ambience he brought to this work. Literary critics were not interested in how Lévi-Strauss analyzed myths; rather, they were interested in his various gnomic remarks about that project, which as his assertion that his analysis of the myths is also a retelling of them.

Let us consider Eugenio Donato’s 1975 review of all four volumes of Mythologiques in Diacritics (vol. 5, no. 3, p. 2): “Lévi-Strauss and the Protocols of Distance.” He tells us that “what follows, then, is not an attempt to describe or evaluate Lévi-Strauss’ contributions to specific areas as much as to question some of the implicit or stated assumptions which Lévi-Strauss himself relates to the ultimate significance of his work.” He goes on to assert, sounding a Derridian theme, that “despite Lévi-Strauss’ repeated protestations to the contrary, the anthropologist is not completely absent from his enterprise.” That is to say, just as the hapless literary critics cannot separate themselves from the texts they interpret – giving the lie to Northrop Frye’s assertion of the “scientific” nature of the critical enterprise – so the anthropologist is hopelessly enmeshed in the societies he would interrogate and interpret.

Before moving on, though, let’s pause for a moment and think about the fact that Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist. As such he had done field work in the Amazon. He knew, from that experience – relatively meager though it may have been by classic British standards – how those myths were embedded in the lives of the people who told them. The animals mentioned in those myths were animals that were important in the lives of the people who held those myths. The geographical references in those myths were to the land where those people lived. The personal kinship relationships among the mythic characters reflect those in the people who tell and listen to these stories. Lévi-Strauss points these things out in his discussions of the myths. Thus those myths are not disembodied stories, though it is easy to read them that way. They are vehicles for abstract conceptualization of the physical and social world. They reveal the minds of the people who tell them, if only indirectly.

With that in mind let us move ahead some forty years to an essay that Alan Liu published in 2013, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”, PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423). By digital humanities Liu means the use of computers in analyzing historical and literary texts, a practice that had matured considerably since the 1970s, when Donato was writing. Liu observes (pp. 418-419):

It is not accidental, I can now reveal, that at the beginning of this essay I alluded to Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology. Structuralism is a midpoint on the long modern path toward understanding the world as system (e.g., as modes of production; Weberian bureaucracy; Saussurean language; mass, media, and corporate society; neoliberalism; and so on) that has forced the progressive side of the humanities to split off from earlier humanities of the human spirit (Geist) and human self to adopt a worldview in which, as Hayles says, “large-scale multicausal events are caused by confluences that include a multitude of forces . . . many of which are nonhuman.” This is the backdrop against which we can see how the meaning problem in the digital humanities registers today’s general crisis of the meaningfulness of the humanities. The general crisis is that humanistic meaning, with its residual yearnings for spirit, humanity, and self—or, as we now say, identity and subjectivity—must compete in the world system with social, economic, science-engineering, workplace, and popular-culture knowledges that do not necessarily value meaning or, even more threatening, value meaning but frame it systemically in ways that alienate or co-opt humanistic meaning.

Liu’s passage picks up on themes from Derrida and other post-structuralist thinkers. The human subject is gone, replaced by a vast crossroads of impersonal systems.

None more impersonal than the computer, which is lurking in the background. Remember, Lévi-Strauss wrote his seminal essay on myth at roughly the same time a group of computer scientists hatched artificial intelligence at Dartmouth. Two decades later a computer scientist and computational linguist from the University of Wisconsin, Sheldon Kline, journeyed to Paris to develop a computer model based in part on Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, Modelling Propp and Lévi-Strauss in a Meta-symbolic Simulation System (1974). There, in the small, is a system of signs without a subject. At roughly the same time, the semiotician, Umberto Eco, proposed something he called “Model Q” in his A Theory of Semiotics (1976). The “Q” stands for Quillian, Ross Quillian, a computer scientist who had proposed an early semantic network model, “Semantic Memory,” in a collection edited by Marvin Minsky in 1968, Semantic Information Processing.

Some Recent Work on Lévi-Strauss and Myth

I’ve long thought that the work Lévi-Strauss did on myth in Mythologies needed to be taken further, and have said so in my working paper, Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition (2015). It seems that others have been thinking the same thing. Here are some abstracts. 

* * * * *

Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida, Bernard Arcand, Paul Jorion, Claude Assaba, Michael G. Kenny, Sheldon Klein, David B. Kronenfeld, Jesse W. Nash, Jacob Palis, Jr. and Stephen David Siemens, Symmetry and Entropy: Mathematical Metaphors in the Work of Levi-Strauss [and Comments and Reply], Current Anthropology, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Aug. - Oct., 1990), pp. 367-385, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743257.

Levi-Strauss' structuralism is here considered as part of an intellectual trend that gained currency during the first half of this century-a trend towards greater concern in the mathematical physical and biological sciences for invariance and structure that is characterized by the importance of the concept of the transformation group. Levi-Straus has introduced the essence of this trend, more at a stylistic level than by means of definite demonstrations into the human sciences. Basic mathematical structures, the principal one being that of the algebraic structure of the transformation group, underlie all the models he has examined. It can be argued that his anthropology leads to the conclusion that the human mind operates in different cultures according to these basic structures-that they are universals. But Levi-Straus is also concerned with processes of change, decay, and evolution in structures. The effort to combine the structural approach with an interest in disorder and change is a neglected but essential aspect of his theory. 

* * * * * 

Marc Thuillard, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, A phylogenetic interpretation of the canonical formula of myths by Levi-Strauss, CAES Vol. 3, No 2 (June 2017), https://culturalanthropologyandethnosemiotics.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/thuillard_le_quellec_canonical_formula.pdf.

Lévi-Strauss’ canonical formula and Mosko’s narrative formula have a simple interpretation within the theoretical framework of phylogenetics. The canonical formula represents a complex but by far not unique way of combining 2 and 3-states characters in a phylogenetic tree description of myths. The canonical formula describes an instance of myth’s evolution that can be described exactly by a perfect phylogenetic tree. Mosko’s formula describes a completely different scheme of evolution. Mosko’s formula is typically the result of a fast evolution of mythemes resulting possibly in all combinations of binary characters. The evolution of myths corresponds quite often to intermediary situations. This observation may explain why the canonical formula has been identified only in a limited number of instances. 

* * * * * 

Jean-Francois Santucci, Albert Doja, and Laurent Capocchi, A Discrete-Event Simulation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Analysis of Myths Based on Symmetry and Double Twist Transformations, Symmetry 2020, 12(10), 1706; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym12101706.

This paper presents a modeling and simulation approach in order to perform a generative analysis of folktales aimed at validating Claude Lévi-Strauss’ theory and method. To this aim, a discrete-event simulation is proposed. The simulation is based on the development of a set of discrete-event models dedicated to generating a set of folktales from an initial one, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structural analysis based on symmetry and double twist transformations. This paper describes in detail how these discrete-event models have been implemented in the framework of the DEVSimPy software environment by using myths of Native American mythology and folktales of Corsican oral literature. The validation involved the following steps: (i) definition of a reference folktale (according to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ methodology) (ii) generation of a set of folktales by performing their own transformations (iii) generation of a graph allowing to analyze the links that have been created after performing a set of folktales transformations. Finally, the computational validation of Lévi-Strauss’s method is intended to ground a new research that may reformulate structural analysis and elaborate a neo-structural model of canonical formalization based on transformational morphodynamics. The aim is to conceptualize and measure recursively the structural dynamics and the recurrent patterns of current identity transformations in liberal democracies, especially in US and EU contexts where ethnic/racial divisions and migration challenges are becoming more acute than ever. 

* * * * * 

This last article is somewhat different from the others. It is the introductory essay from a collection of essays presented at The English Institute. The English Institute, as you may know, is a small conference where a small group of scholars are invited (I believe) to address a specific topic. The topic for 2017 was scale and the organizers used a classic essay by Lévi-Strauss as a conceptual focus. The article has no abstract – some humanistic journals don’t publish abstracts – so I present paragraph from the introductory essay.

Sandra Macpherson, Meredith Martin, Essays from The English Institute 2017: Scale, ELH, Volume 86, Number 2, Summer 2019, pp. 267-274, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/726180.

The text for the conversation at Irvine was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “The Structural Analysis of Myth” (1955), a piece whose startling relevance to a number of the talks was all the more surprising given how little attention structuralism has received in recent scale talk. Walkowitz argues that for modernist studies “the turn to scale began geographically at least 15 years ago, with the new theories of world literature,” and that if “global modernism” is “part of a first re-scaling in modernist studies,” the second, happening in the forum she introduces, turns its attention instead to “middle scales” and to “the mechanisms that get us from one scale to another.”1 According to Underwood and English, however, moving up and down in scale—and meta-critical attentiveness to this movement—has been a central feature of the history of criticism writ large. They observe that “scalar constructs” both large (“temporal spans” and “geo-cultural categories”) and small (“formal entities”) “organize our research projects and structure our intellectual and institutional divisions of labor.”2 And the disciplinary history they chart moves back and forth from the relatively large-scale project of philology to the “scalar contraction” of New Criticism to the scaling up of “Always Historicize!” to the “gigahistoricisms” of distant reading, deep time, and the world literary system, back down to “close but not deep” and “too-close” reading.

ChatGPT tells stories, and a note about reverse engineering: A Working Paper

I've uploaded a new working paper. Title above, links, abstract, content, and opening sections below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/97862447/ChatGPT_tells_stories_and_a_note_about_reverse_engineering_A_Working_Paper
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4377178
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368978013_ChatGPT_tells_stories_and_a_note_about_reverse_engineering_A_Working_Paper

Abstract: I examine a set of stories that are organized on three levels: 1) the entire story trajectory, 2) segments within the trajectory, and 3) sentences within individual segments. I conjecture that the probability distribution from which ChatGPT draws next tokens follows a hierarchy nested according to those three levels and that is encoded in the weights off ChatGPT’s parameters. I arrived at this conjecture to account for the results of experiments in which ChatGPT is given a prompt containing a story along with instructions to create a new story based on that story but changing a key character: the protagonist or the antagonist. That one change then ripples through the rest of the story. The pattern of differences between the old and the new story indicates how ChatGPT maintains story coherence. The nature and extent of the differences between the original story and the new one depends roughly on the degree of difference between the key character and the one substituted for it. I conclude with a methodological coda: ChatGPT’s behavior must be described and analyzed on three levels: 1) The experiments exhibit surface level behavior. 2) The conjecture is about a middle level that contains the nested hierarchy of probability distributions. 3) The transformer virtual machine is the bottom level.

Contents 

How you might read this paper 2
Story coherence 2
My procedure 2
Conjecture: A nested hierarchy of probability distributions 3
Could we develop a quantitative model? 6
12 Experiments: The Chronicles of Princess Aurora and William the Lazy 7
Reverse Engineering ChatGPT 19

How you might read this paper

This paper is about the twelve experiments that make up the two-thirds of the text in this paper. One way to read the paper, perhaps even the preferred way, is to start by reading the highlighted paragraph in the next section. That tells you what I did in those experiments. Move from that directly to the experiments. Read through them, think about them in your own terms, and then read the rest of the paper.

Story coherence

A story isn’t just any narrative sequence. As Aristotle remarked in his Poetics, proper stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Just what, however, constitutes a proper beginning, middle, and an end? Narratologists in various disciplines have been trying to figure this out for decades. I’m not holding my breath for answers.

Instead I have been investigating how ChatGPT tells stories. The procedure I have been using is derived from the analytical method Claude Lévi-Strauss employed in his magnum opus, Mythologiques. He started with one myth, analyzed it, and then introduced another one, very much like the first. But not quite. They are systematically different. He characterized the difference by a transformation – a term he took from algebraic group theory. He worked his way through hundreds of myths in this manner, each one derived from another by a transformation.

Here is what I have been doing: I give ChatGPT a prompt consisting of two things: 1) an existing story and 2) instructions to produce another story like it except for one change, which I specify. That change is, in effect, a way of triggering or specifying those “transformations” that Lévi-Strauss wrote about. What interests me are the ensemble of things that change along with the change I have specified.

I take that ensemble of changes as an indicator of an underlying ‘economy’ of story coherence that is implicit in the processes ChatGPT uses in generating a story. For the most part, however, I make no attempt to analyze how that coherence is achieved other than to note differences between the source story and the new one. Those observations must be accounted for by 1) some theory about what coherence is, and 2) the mechanisms through which ChatGPT achieves the coherence. I have included a dozen before-and-after experiments along with some comments on them (pp. 7 ff.).

Some miscellaneous thoughts on ChatGPT, stories, and mechanical interpretability

I started playing with ChatGPT on December 1, 2023 and made my first post on December 3. Including this post, I’ve made 54 posts about ChatGPT. Nine of those posts report the work of others (45), perhaps with a comment or two from me, and the other report my own experiments and observations. Some of those posts can be quite long, over 2000 words, in part because I’m including examples of output from ChatGPT. I suspect that’s the longest run of work on a single subject since I’ve been posting to New Savanna, which started in April 2010.

It's time to ramble through some things just to get them on the table

Where do things stand with the tantalizing working paper?

I’m not sure. I uploaded the first version on Jan. 23, the second version on Jan. 28, and then, the next day, decided I needed to revise it yet again. I uploaded a long post on Thursday (Feb 2) in which I thought things through, ChatGPT: Tantalizing afterthoughts in search of story trajectories [induction heads]. I’m still thinking them through.

Do I make a minimal revision for Version 3 and upload it ASAP? I do I try to do a bit better than that? At this moment it’s not clear to me just what a minimal revision would be. Perhaps I could add a paragraph or two up front saying that I’ve decided to drop the idea of a story grammar in favor of the idea of a story trajectory, but that a proper accounting for the change is more than is sensible for this paper.

Meanwhile I’m working on a relatively short paper in which I publish a number of before-and-after-tables like I did in A note about story grammars in ChatGPT. That note had four tables. The short paper I’m working on would have ten or more tables, plus light commentary on them.

We’ll see.

Mechanistic interpretability

The need to change things was brought on by looking at a very interesting paper by some researchers at Anthropic, In-Context Learning and Induction Heads, which I discussed in Thursday’s tantalizing post (link above). They are working on mechanistic interpretability. What is going on in the neural net to produce the behavior we observe?

By working with ‘toy model’ transformers (with only two layers) these researchers were able to identify a mechanism that they call induction heads. Judging from what they say about that mechanism, it seems that induction heads are responsible for performing the story generation task I’ve been exploring. The idea is to have ChatGPT take a story which I give it and create a new one by changing the protagonist (or antagonist). The induction head mechanism then traverses the old story, inserts the requested change, and continues the traversal, making further changes as needed to preserve internal consistency.

So, those before-and-after-tables I’ve been producing are observations about ChatGPT’s behavior. What inferential and experimental steps will be required to understand those observations in terms of activity in the neural net? I’m certainly not in a position to answer that question. Nor, I suspect, would the researchers at Anthropic. But that’s what interests me, the ‘territory’ between that kind of observation and what we currently know about how these models work.

I think there’s a lot of work that can be done making systematic observations about ChatGPT’s behavior, or the behavior of any LLM. What’s the best way to do that? What kind of observations would be most useful to people working on mechanical interpretability?

Origins: The first story or the key myth

And that brings me back to those story experiments. One point I’ve been making is that whatever it is that ‘defines’ what a story is, it is something working at a ‘higher level’ than sentence syntax. It is something working on the sentence-generation mechanism. How do we characterize this?

I’d been playing with the idea that we think of sentence-level syntax as analogous to assembly language and the story mechanism as being analogous to a high-level programming language. But, for reasons I explained in Thursday’s tantalizing post, I think the analogy is misleading.

Now, given an existing story, I can see how the induction head mechanism can create a new story. That would seem to obviate the need for some special ‘higher level’ mechanism – pending, of course, on how induction heads would work in this case. That’s all well and good for the experiments I’ve been running.

But where’d the ‘first’ story come from? If you prompt ChatGPT, tell me a story, it will do so. Where did that story come from? Is ChatGPT deriving it from some hidden story? Perhaps, but perhaps not. I assume that the word “story” tells it to generate a certain kind of trajectory through its activation space. How is that trajectory characterized?

That’s a question for the mechanical interpretability folks.

And it is roughly analogous to a methodological problem Lévi-Strauss faced at the beginning of The Raw and the Cooked, which is where I got the idea for my before-and-after experiments. He designated one myth as the key myth and worked his way from there, making pairwise comparisons between myths and noting what is different between myths in the pair. So, that myth is key in that it’s where he started his analytic procedure. But he certainly was not asserting that the key myth was somehow historically prior to all the others, or that he was analyzing the myths in historical sequence. The key myth was an arbitrary choice of a starting point.

Lévi-Strauss was trying to characterize the ‘logic’ underlying the construction of myths. As strange as those stories might seem to us, there was a logic to it. What is it? What is the trajectory through ‘knowledge space’ that generates myths?

Will understanding how ChatGPT generates stories give us insight into the myths Lévi-Strauss investigated. I suspect so.