Description as Redesign: Carving Nature at the Joints

I'm bumping this to the top because I think it's good to be reminded that it was Plato who coined the trope of carving nature at its joints.

In reply to my open letter Willard McCarty made an observation I want to look at: “So an act of description is creative, or more accurately, an act of redesign under constraints which are very difficult to be exact about but which are hard as rocks.” To which I replied: “’Redesign’ – yes. After all, we ARE trying to figure out the design. We're attempting to reverse engineer it. And it is exacting, but the constraints are not obvious.”

Still, we need to be careful. To be sure, in my experience, description is not easy, not obvious, and, I suppose, creative. I’m not following a set of explicit guidelines; there are things I look for, but it’s not the sort of thing I could reduce to a checklist and then give it to anyone who can read.

But also, the “creativity” of literary criticism has been much extoled in the mainstream literature and I’m a bit wary of that. For that’s what underwrites the multiplicity of often-incompatible interpretations for any given text. That’s fine for interpretation, but not so good for description. I want mutual compatibility of descriptions.

 

Turkeys, for example, are fairly complex objects and any given turkey will admit of many descriptions, all true and mutually consistent. But a turkey cannot have both two legs and only one, the other having been lost in an accident) – well, yes, turkeys exist in time and a description that’s apt at one moment may contradict one that’s apt at some other moment; that’s no problem.

But then McCarty re-characterizes description as qualification as redesign. And I like that, comparing it to reverse engineering – which I may say more about in another post. And that led me to that old cliché about carving Nature at its joints. We owe that one to Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates has likened a well-formed speech to an animal with its various appropriately arranged parts and is now examining two different speeches on love (265e-266a):

... we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher, but to take example from our two recent speeches. The single general form which they postulated was irrationality; next on the analogy of a single natural body with its pairs of like-named members, right arm or leg, as we say, and left, they conceived of madness as a single objective form existing in human beings. Wherefore the first speech divided off a part on the left, and continued to make divisions ...

The vehicle of Plato’s simile, butchering, is worth thinking about. When you carve meat, you want to do so cleanly. You don’t want bones to stick out, which means you’ve got to cut right into the joint, not to either side of it.

The problem, though, is you can’t see the joint when it is covered with muscle and skin. It’s hidden and its location is not apparent on the carcass’s surface. That’s where the comparison gets its power.

And so it is with describing texts. The “joints” are not apparent in the surface. It takes skill to find them.

And what of the computational mindset that I regard as essential to literary criticism (see, for example, Computational Thinking and the Digital Critic: Part 1, Four Good Books)? That’s what tells you where the joints are, or at least gives you clues. As I’ve argued in my long paper on literary morphology, literary form is computational form. Ultimately we want to understand how those computational processes work. To do that we must begin by identifying their traces in the text.

A Dream of Simulation and the Reality of Description, an Open Letter to Willard McCarty

Hi Willard,

I know you’re interested in the idea of computer simulations of human mental processes, so I thought you’d be interested in how I got from my vision of such simulation – the Prospero project from the 1976 essay in Computers and the Humanities – to my current hobbyhorse, description. Description, after all, is rather pedestrian and would seem like something of a comedown from the high techno-romance of simulating the mind.

It isn’t. In fact, it’s a consequence of that romance, a step along the way. A trail that has proven to be much longer than I’d anticipated back then.

But how could I have known? Sometimes when you venture into the unknown you end up finding something familiar. But you may also end up having your mind altered and your imagination changed.

❖ ❖ ❖

When I went of to SUNY Buffalo back in 1973 I didn’t intend to work on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. I was gunning for Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and did the Shakespeare sonnet as a preliminary exercise. But I never really got around to “Kubla Khan.”

By the time I’d gotten to Buffalo I’d found my way to some of the early work on semantic networks, but didn’t know I’d find someone at Buffalo who could educate me in that art. A fellow graduate student in English, Ralph Reese, had been studying with David Hays (in the Linguistics Department) and he introduced me. It took me a couple of months to become fluent in Hays’s formalism, out of which I wrote a long term paper on some passages from Patterson, Book V.

By that time Hays had become interested in grounding his semantic theory in something, and that something was a feedback model of the mind developed by William Powers, whose book, Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973) had been well-reviewed in Science. So we – Hays and his research group – set out to figure out how to do that, theoretically, though not in simulation. The result was a model where cognition was grounded in perception and action. Though we didn’t use the term, it was a model of embodied cognition.

DH2013 Busa Award Lecture by Willard McCarty

If you're a digital humanist, or curious about the species, listen to this lecture, carefully!

Roughly at 12:12:

The primary historical object I want to bring into focus and call on for help is the Otherness of computing, not its user friendliness, ubiquitous presence of social power...I want to grab on to the fear this Otherness provokes and reach through it to the otherness of the techno-scientific tradition from which computing comes. I want to recognize and identify this fear of Otherness, that is the uncanny, as for example, Sigmund Freud, Stanley Cavell, and Masahiro Mori have identified it, to argue that this Otherness is to be sought out and cultivated, not concealed, avoided, or overcome. That it’s sharp opposition to our somnolence of mind is true friendship.

Somewhat later: "If we’re not changed by computing, we’re imprisoned by it."

A digital humanist was walking to Damascus...

I’m wondering how many digital humanists set out to do one thing and ended up realizing they were doing something else, something they don’t quite understand. Some texts...

* * *

We who have been working in the field know that the digital humanities can provide better resources for scholarship and better access to them. We know that in the process of designing and constructing these resources our collaborators often undergo significant growth in understanding of digital tools and methods, and that this sometimes, perhaps even in a significant majority of cases, fosters insight into the originating scholarly questions. Sometimes secular metanoia is not too strong a term to describe the experience.

Willard McCarty, A Telescope for the Mind?

* * *

To Capture Infinity in a Bottle: The Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism

The Gist: The only way the digital humanities are going to develop a cultural analytics that is sui generis is by thinking about the nature of computation itself in relation to human minds, as embodied in human brains, and as developing though interaction with other minds through various media and in groups of varying size and social structure. Otherwise the digital humanities will have no choice by to borrow its cultural concepts from other discourses, as it is now doing.

* * * * *

Let has start from some passages. First up, Alan Liu, from “Why I’m In It” x 2 – Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism (September 13, 2013):

The digital humanities can only take on their full importance when they are seen to serve the larger humanities (and arts, with affiliated social sciences) in helping them maintain their ability to contribute to the making of the full wealth of society, where “wealth” here has its older, classic sense of “well-being” or the good life woven together with the life of good.

Compare that with Willard McCarty, A telescope for the mind? (Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): “What can the digital humanities can do for the humanities as a whole that helps these disciplines improve the well-being of us all?”

Back to Liu:

It seems to me that digital humanists can and should evolve a mode of cultural criticism that is uniquely their own and not a mere echo of fading humanist cultural criticism by treating their immediate objects of inquiry (academically-oriented technologies and methods) as always also “mediate objects of inquiry” bearing on the way the human beings they wish their students could become (and they themselves could be on their best days) can really engage meaningfully with larger social agents and forces....The goal is to do research, to teach, and to live as if humanities technology is constantly intertwined with, reacts to, and acts on the way the links are now being forged between individuals (starting with those in the academy where we teach and conduct research) and the social-economic-political-technological constitution of contemporary society.

What it comes down to is that the digital humanities need both to work on tools and methods in their own institutional place (the academy) and to develop a capable imagination of the relation of that unique institutional place (or family of variant institutional spaces) to the other major institutions that play a part in enabling or thwarting the passageway from private human subjectivity to public social sensibility.

It seems that Liu is imagining a cultural criticism centered on institutions and society, one that treats computers and minds as black boxes whose inner workings remain unexamined. In this practice it seems to me that the ideas about culture and society would likely come from already existing bodies of work.