The failure of structuralism and linguistics: Why did academic literary criticism turn its back on intellectual opportunity in the mid-1970s? [and why did I ignore the profession?]

6.25.21: Revised and updated with new material.

I’ve been through this before, I know, but I keep coming back to it. Maybe this time I can get it right, or at least inch beyond were I got the last time. However, I’m not going to take the time to link to specific posts or working papers that are relevant. I’m just going to talk this one straight through.

However, I did update a post where I’ve been keeping track of my thinking on this issue. Here it is:

The profession of literary criticism as I have observed it over the course of 50 years [& related matters], https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-profession-of-literary-criticism-as.html

I will say this, after having drafted this essay, I think I’ve got it right, more or less. This satisfies my curiosity about this matter, though no doubt there are details to be nailed down, etc.

Two Perspectives

We have two perspectives, two aspects to examine: 1) the profession in general, and 2) my history in particular. Let us assume that by my senior year in college, 1968-69 at Johns Hopkins, I had internalized some version of a standard academic approach to literary criticism. The object of criticism was to interpret the text. There was some question as to whether or not interpretations were unique, whether or not they could be objective, at least in principle. This was quite problematic and extensively debated. But there was no doubt that interpretation was the name of the game.

That’s the period when structuralism, not post-structuralism or deconstruction, was getting attention, what with its codes, little diagrams, and formulae. Perhaps, some thought, structuralism will clear up some of the debates about the nature of the text, meaning, and interpretation and, at the same time, open avenues of collaboration with neighboring disciplines. I grabbed ahold of that and had worked my way to computational semantics by early 1974. But the profession tossed structuralism over in favor of Derrida and friends. Why the divergence? And why did it take me so long – roughly two decades, into the mid-1990s – to realize that it had been form that had my attention all along that, in effect?

Lévi-Strauss and the logic of myths

I suppose it was in my sophomore year that I first encountered the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. It would have been in a class I took with Richard Macksey. He’d assigned the following text as optional reading:

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 68 No. 270, Oct-Dec 1955, pp. 428-444.

I read it and was fascinated. I did a paper on Oedipus at Colonus – so it must have been his Idea of the Theatre course – in which I drew a table modeled more or less after something I’d seen in that article. It’s important that I’d internalized the article to the point where I did draw a table.

I forget what kind of table it was. I may still have the paper – I’ve kept some of my undergraduate work (just as Jerry Seinfeld has all his notes back to the first bit he ever performed) – but it would be in storage along with the rest of my library. It might have looked something like this, from the article:

That’s about the logic underlying the Oedipus stories. I sometimes talk of ‘myth logic.’

Then there’s this intriguing diagram:

It looks a bit like a slice through some kind of machine, a myth machine, no? Notice that we’ve got “life” at the upper left and “death” at the lower right. In between we’ve got some linkage between “animal food” and “life destroyed.” What’s going on?

Lévi-Strauss was working out a theory/model whatchamacallit that myths work by resolving binary oppositions. The big one, of course, is life-death. You then substitute mediating terms for each side of the opposition until you reach a point where you’ve got a common term, or something like that. That’s what that horizontal slot is about.

He argued that in myth after myth after myth for several years, until he adopted a somewhat different and more elaborate whatchamacallit in Mythologies, the first volume of which was The Raw and the Cooked, which are mediating terms for nature and culture, respectively.

That’s what caught the attention of the folks who organized and attended the (in)famous structuralism conference at Hopkins in the fall of 1966. Though I was on campus at the time, I didn’t attend any of the sessions, nor would it have done me any good as they we all in French, one of many languages of which I know little to nothing. But I was in Dick Macksey’s orbit, and that was enough. I read that essay, wrote that paper, and was hooked on Lévi-Strauss for the next few years.

But why?

The word illusion and the problem of meaning

When I talk of the word illusion I’m alluding to the fact that when we see words on the page – or for that matter, hear them, but mostly we see them on the page in our work – we think we’re seeing the whole word in the way that we see the whole cat when we look at it. In the case of the cat, of course, we may be looking at it from, say, its left side, but it has a right side that is invisible to us, not to mention the belly and back, as well as its interior organs. But that’s not quite what I have in mind.

We see a word on the page and we know how to spell it, how to pronounce it, how to conjugate it (if it is a verb) and so on. And we know its meaning, or perhaps meanings. We feel that we grasp of that when we see it there on the page. The word.

But the word, the whole word in full, isn’t on the page at all. All that’s on the page is the word form. We hold all the rest of that in our heads. That all the rest of it is somehow inherent in those marks on the page, that’s a perceptual-cognitive illusion. The word illusion. If meaning inhered in the marks, then you could look at a text in a foreign language and grasp the meaning immediately, from the marks. Obviously language doesn’t work like that.

Well, linguists have quite a bit to say about word forms, and about phonology, morphology, and syntax. And the structuralist movement latched on to this domain primarily through the structuralist linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure. He talked of the sign as consisting of a signifier (the word form) and signified (meaning), where the signified was explicitly understood as being different from the referent, the thing (out there) in the world to which the word referred.

It’s easy enough to say all that, and even to believe it. But how do we work with, think about, those signifiers? We can’t get at them directly. They’re not physically present in the speech stream or inscribed on the page with written symbols. They’re in the mind, or brain, but we can’t observe them directly.

We have to get at them indirectly. Obviously they form some kind of system. Perhaps it’s a differential system, like the phonemes, which have binary features. We can work with phonemes directly. Perhaps we can detect the workings of a differential system of meanings in texts. That’s what Lévi-Strauss was doing in his work on myth. He was examining myths, how they unfold through some system of categories, how those categories reflect off one another, and deducing the likely terms in the underlying system of meaning. Those diagrams, those little formulas, they’re all representations of a system of signifiers in the mind, your mind, my mind, every mind. Those representations make the hidden and invisible world of signifiers real and tractable.

That’s what made structuralism so appealing to a generation of scholars who, having entered into the business of interpreting texts, were beginning to fear it to be a somewhat dodgy business.

Well, members of the profession gave it a try from the mid-1960s and into the 1970s. Robert Scholes produced a little book on structuralism. Jonathan Culler produced a somewhat bigger book, Structuralist Poetics, and lectured it across the country in ‘75 or ‘76. But, in a review of Mythologiques in Diacritics at that time, Eugenio Donato said we can set aside the analyst of ethnographic materials; it’s Lévi-Strauss the enigmatic philosopher who interests us, the Lévi-Strauss who believes his analysis of a myth is but another variant of the myth, and so forth. [I had little interest Lévi-Strauss the philosopher.] In the title essay of The Fate of Reading (1975), Geoffrey Hartman pronounced an interdiction on semiotics, linguistics and “technical structuralism” in literary criticism. And behind it all was Derrida’s deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” the paper he delivered at the 1966 structuralism symposium at Hopkins.

Derrida had won. Structuralism and linguistics lost. But I went with losers. I went beyond them. It was clear to me from my careful study of The Raw and the Cooked, that if there was that much structure there, there must be more. I was going to look for it.

Trees in “Kubla Khan”

But it wasn’t at all obvious in 1968-69 that structuralism and linguistics had lost. What’s when I took a two-semester course in Romantic Literature, taught by Earl Wasserman. He praised my Wordsworth paper as exhibiting a “mature approach” to whatever poem I’d analyzed, I forget which. I’d also done a paper on “Kubla Khan,” and that poem would come to dominate the earliest phase of my career. I was told that that paper prompted Wasserman to ask a question in my name (they did that back in those days, do they still do it?) at some presentation where I wasn’t present. I believe that I’d proposed that the poem achieves completeness by asserting its own completeness and he asked about that.

Form, computation, and plot summary: A short note on method

I’ve just made a short post about To Catch a Thief. It’s been on my mind for weeks but I didn’t post because: 1) what I had in mind was simple, really, but 2) as I thought about it I realized that I would get tangled up in recounting the plot, more so than I wanted for such a post. Well, I managed to skim over the plot rather quickly, but I fear, alas, the post is likely to seem a bit cryptic.

But then, going back to graduate school days this has been an issue. When dealing with narrative I’m always summarizing the plot. Why?

Well, because I feel it’s necessary in order to understand what I have to say, which often seems obvious once I’ve said it. Why is it necessary?

Because – now that I think of it – what I have to say is ultimately about computational form. I need to summarize in order to set out the computational framework; the syntagmatic structure governs the computation, so you need to see it.

Jakobson’s Poetic Function and Textual Closure

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, 1) on general principle, and 2) because, with almost 2900 reads, it seems to be unusually popular for a quasi-technical post on literary form. It was originally published on 12.25.2017.

Roman Jakobson’s poetic function [1] is one of the best-known and most obscure ideas in modern poetics. I believe that it extends beyond the kinds of examples Jakobson himself gave, to include, for example, ring-form narratives. It may as well be considered a computational principle applying to texts considered as strings of word forms.

Literary Form

Two years ago Sandra MacPherson wrote [2] that she's looking for “for a genuinely formalist critical practice, a little formalism that would turn one away from history without shame or apology” (p. 385). What does she mean by form? She means “nothing more—and nothing less—than the shape matter (whether a poem or a tree) takes” (p. 390).

The basic shape that literary matter takes is simple, a string. When spoken the string is an acoustic wave. When written the string is a collection of written symbols that generally take rectangular form on the page but that are read as though they were one long string – which they are. The rectangular arrangement is but a convenient way of fitting the string onto sheets of paper.

Music takes the form of a string. That’s one example for us, and poetry is often likened to music. Beads on a wire is another example – a metaphor sometimes used to characterize DNA. I suggest that Roman Jakobson’s poetic function is an abstract statement of a formal principle for things strung together in linear order, such as words.

Jakobson’s formulation of this principle is one of the most enigmatic statements in the critical literature (p. 358):

The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.

What does that mean? The sequence, of course, is our string. A bit later he says (p. 358):

Measure of sequences is a device that, outside of the poetic function, finds no application in language. Only in poetry with its regular reiteration of equivalent units is the time of the speech flow experienced, as it is — to cite another semiotic pattern — with musical time.

Almost all of his examples are from poetry. Take rhyme. Line endings occur at regular measured intervals. When similar syllables occur at specific fixed intervals, that is projection from the axis of selection (one syllable or another, one word or another) to the axis of combination. That is rhyme. Rhyme is a simple and obvious example of the poetic function. Jakobson goes on to give other, more sophisticated, examples.

But I want to move out of the domain entirely. Let me suggest that ring-composition also exemplifies the poetic function. You may recall that ring-composition involves linear arrangements of this form:

A, B, C...X...C’, B, A’.

The letters indicate ‘slots’ in the sequence while the identity of the letters indicates the pattern of symmetrical matching that is characteristic of ring composition. Matching pairs are equivalent in some semantic sense and the form requires that they be deployed in a certain sequence.

That, I realize is a highly abstract paragraph. As I intend this as only a short note, I have no intention of filling that out [3]. My object is simply to point out that ring-composition can be seen as exemplifying Jakobson’s poetic function, thereby extending its applicable range beyond the kinds of examples Jakobson himself gave and that others typically give. The poetic function isn’t specifically about poetry. It operates in non-poetic narrative forms as well.

I have no reason to believe that the poetic function will account for all aspects of literary form. Just how many aspects it accounts for, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. That will require more work.

The poetic function as a computational principle

Not only can Jakobson’s poetic function be extended beyond the examples he gave, which came from poetry, to other formal features, such as ring composition. I now want to suggest that it is a computational principle as well. What do I mean by computation [4]? That’s always a question in these discussions, isn’t it?

When Alan Turing formalized the idea of computation he did so with the notion of a so-called Turing Machine: “The machine operates on an infinite memory tape divided into discrete cells. The machine positions its head over a cell and ‘reads’ (scans) the symbol there.”[5] There’s more to it than that, but that’s all we need here. It’s that tape that interests me, the one with discrete cells, each containing a symbol. Turing defined computation as an operation on the contents of those cells. Just what kind of symbols we’re dealing with is irrelevant as long as the basic rules governing their use are well-specified. The symbols might be numerals and mathematical operators, but they might also be the words and punctuation marks of a written language.

Linguists frequently refer to strings; an utterance is a string of phonemes, or morphemes, or words, depending on what you’re interested in. Of course it doesn’t have to be an utterance; the string can consist of a written text. What’s important is that it’s a string.

Well, Jakobson’s poetic function places restrictions on the arrangement of words on the string, restrictions independent of those made by ordinary syntax. Let us recall his definition:

The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.

The sequence, of course, is our string. As for the rest of it, that’s a bit obscure. But it’s easy to see how things like meter and rhyme impose restrictions on the composition of strings. And we have just seen, if only briefly, that ring composition may be seen as restrictions of the composition of a string. In a working paper on ring composition, I have already pointed out how the seven rules Mary Douglas gave for characterizing ring composition [6] can be given a computational interpretation (pp. 39-42).

Textual closure and literary form

I propose these as central to a computational account of literary form:

1. The process whereby word forms, whether spoken, written, or gestured (signed), are linked to meaning/semantics is irreducibly computational.
2. A complete text is well-formed if and only if its meaning is resolved once the last word form has been taken up.
3. It is in this context that Roman Jakobson’s poetic function may be considered a principle of literary form.

1 and 2 are about language in general.

It is not clear to me whether 1 is a matter of definition or a statement empirical fact subject to investigation. If it is to be construed as fact, what would the investigation be like? What counts as evidence? If it is a matter of definition, what is the more general definition of computation of which this would be a particular instance? Would Alan Turing’s definition, via the Turing Machine, be sufficient?

On 2, I rather imagine there is relevant literature, though I don’t know. Obviously there is a huge literature about computational completion, and 2 would fall within the scope of that literature. Whether or not a computation will complete is one thing. This is much more specific. It says that we are

1. computing the value of a string by
2. moving through the string from left to right (though I suppose we can allow some back-tracking and some looking ahead) and that
3. the value of the string will have been completed shortly after the rightmost character has been read.

“Shortly after” means, say, less than 1/1000 to 1/100 of the time it takes to read the string from beginning to end–something like that; it needs to be adjusted to allow for both haiku and triple-decker Victorian novels.

On 3, I note that Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney takes the form of a sermon, but it exhibits ring-composition and thus falls within the scope of Jakobson’s poetic function [7]. I note as well that Alan Liu’s essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”, exhibits ring-composition, but is expository and argumentative prose [8]. It is possible, but by no means obvious, that all literary texts are governed by the poetic function (whatever “govern” means), but that non-literary texts exhibit it as well. It is also possible that some literary texts exhibit it and some do not. Finally, we might ask whether or not, and if so, in what way, the use of the poetic function in a text contributes to its closure, as defined in 2.

References

[1] Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press,1960), 350-77.

[2] Sandra Macpherson, A Little Formalism, ELH, Volume 82, Number 2, Summer 2015, pp. 385-405.

[3] For that, see, e.g., Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition, Yale University Press, 2007. I have numerous posts on ring form at New Savanna, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ring-form
and a number of working papers at Academic.edu: https://independent.academia.edu/BillBenzon

[4] I have argued at some length that literary form is computational: 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

[5] Turing machine, Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 19, 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine

[6] Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology, Working Paper, September 28, 2014, 70 pp.
https://www.academia.edu/8529105/Ring_Composition_Some_Notes_on_a_Particular_Literary_Morphology

[7] Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney: Technics of Power and Grace, Working Paper, July 2015, 37 pp., https://www.academia.edu/14487024/Obama_s_Eulogy_for_Clementa_Pinckney_Technics_of_Power_and_Grace

Can you learn anything worthwhile about a text if you treat it, not as a TEXT, but as a string of marks on pages? [#DH]

With Matt Jockers' 3300 node graph on my mind, this post deserves a bump to the otp of the queue.

The Chronicle of Higher Education just published a drive-by take-down of the digital humanities. It was by one Timothy Brennan, who didn’t know what he was talking about, didn’t know that he didn’t known, and more likely than not, didn’t care.

Timothy Brennan, The Digital-Humanities Bust, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 2017, http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Digital-Humanities-Bust/241424

Subsequently there was a relatively brief tweet storm in the DH twittersphere in which one Michael Gavin observed that Brennan seemed genuinely confused:

Hate to say it, but what lit critics understand as "the text" is only loosely related to signs on the page. Concept of text is incoherent.

— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) October 17, 2017

“Lexical patterns”, what are they? The purpose of this post is to explicate my response to Gavin.

The Text is not the (physical) text

While literary critics sometimes use “the text” to refer to a physical book, or to alphanumeric markings on the pages in such a book, they generally have something vaguer and more expansive in mind. Here is a passage from a well-known, I won’t say “text”, article by Roland Barthes [1]:

1. The text must not be understood as a computable object. It would be futile to attempt a material separation of works from texts. In particular, we must not permit ourselves to say: the work is classical, the text is avant-garde; there is no question of establishing a trophy in modernity's name and declaring certain literary productions in and out by reason of their chronological situation: there can be “Text” in a very old work, and many products of contemporary literature are not texts at all. The difference is as follows: the work is a fragment of substance, it occupies a portion of the spaces of books (for example, in a library). The Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (though not reproduce term for term) a distinction proposed by Lacan: “reality” is shown [se montre], the “real” is proved [se démontre]; in the same way, the work is seen (in bookstores, in card catalogues, on examination syllabuses), the text is demonstrated, is spoken according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language: it exists only when caught up in a discourse (or rather it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself to be so); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work which is the Text's imaginary tail. Or again: the Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example, at a library shelf); its constitutive moment is traversal (notably, it can traverse the work, several works).  

And that is just the first of seven propositions in that well known text article, which has attained, shall we say, the status of a classic.

I have no intention of offering extended commentary on this passage. I will note, however, that Barthes obviously knows that there’s an important difference between the physical object and what he’s calling the text. Every critic knows that. We are not dumb, but we do have work to do.

Secondly, perhaps the central concept is in that italicized assertion: “the Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production.”

Finally, I note that that first sentence has also been translated as: “The Text must not be thought of as a defined object” [2]. Not being a reader of French, much less a French speaker, I don’t know which translation is truer to the original. It is quite possible that they are equally true and false at the same time. But “computable object” has more resonance in this particular context.

Now, just to flesh things out a bit, let us consider a more recent passage, one that is more didactic. This is from the introduction Rita Copeland and Frances Ferguson prepared for five essays from the 2012 English Institute devoted to the text [3]:

Yet with the conceptual breadth that has come to characterize notions of text and textuality, literary criticism has found itself at a confluence of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, history, politics, and law. Thus, for example, notions of cultural text and social text have placed literary study in productive dialogue with fields in the social sciences. Moreover, text has come to stand for different and often contradictory things: linguistic data for philology; the unfolding “real time” of interaction for sociolinguistics; the problems of copy-text and markup in editorial theory; the objectified written work (“verbal icon”) for New Criticism; in some versions of poststructuralism the horizons of language that overcome the closure of the work; in theater studies the other of performance, ambiguously artifact and event. “Text” has been the subject of venerable traditions of scholarship centered on the establishment and critique of scriptural authority as well as the classical heritage. In the modern world it figures anew in the regulation of intellectual property. Has text become, or was it always, an ideal, immaterial object, a conceptual site for the investigation of knowledge, ownership and propriety, or authority? If so, what then is, or ever was, a “material” text? What institutions, linguistic procedures, commentary forms, and interpretive protocols stabilize text as an object of study? [p. 417]

“Linguistic data” and “copy-text”, they sound like the physical text itself, the rest of them, not so much.

If literary critics were to confine themselves to discussing the physical text, what would we say? Those engaged in book studies and editorial projects would have more to say than most, but even they would find such rigor to be intolerably confining. The physical signs on the page, or the vibrations in the air, exist and come alive in a vast a complicated network of ... well, just exactly what? Relationships among people to be sure, but also relationships between sights and sounds and ideas and movements and feelings and a whole bunch of stuff mediated by the nervous systems of all those people interacting with one another.

It’s that vast network of people and neuro-mental stuff that we’re trying to understand when we explicate literary and cultural Texts. As we lack really good accounts of all that stuff, literary critics have felt that we had little choice but to adopt this more capacious conception, albeit at the expense of definition and precision. Anyhow, aren’t the people trying to figure out those systems, aren’t they scientists? And aren’t we, as humanists, skeptical about science?

And then along came the computer.

An ontological gulf

The thing about computational criticism is that computers don’t have all that other stuff – a complex fluctuating network of interactions among people both containing and embedded in a vast and turbulent meshwork of flashing neurons (one of Tim Morton’s hyperobjects?) – available to them. The computer deals only with those dumb marks on the page, or rather, with digital representations of them. There is only the physical text, that dull thing that other literary critics pass over in favor of The Text.

Thus there is an ontological gulf between computational criticism and the many varieties of – I hate to say it ­– conventional literary criticism. Here I mean ontological in the sense it has come to have in the cognitive sciences, a sense where a more conventional humanist might talk of different discourses (Foucault) or paradigms (Kuhn). In this sense an ontology is an inventory of concepts. Salt, as ordinarily understood, and sodium chloride, exist in different ontologies in this sense [4]. Humans have known about salt since forever, and apprehend it through its taste, texture and color; even animals know about it. Sodium chloride is quite different conceptually, though physically, yes, it is salt. Conceptually it is defined in terms of bonds between atoms which themselves consist of electrons, protons, and neutrons, a set of concepts developed in Western science in the 18th and 19th centuries.

When it comes to the concept of text, the conventional critic and the computational critic operate in different conceptual worlds, with different ontologies. Yet there are subtleties.

Segmenting the language stream [words are tricky]

It is sometimes useful to reflect of the fact that, aurally, the speech stream is continuous, not segmented. The segmentation is something we impose on the stream through cognitive mechanisms – that, I argue, is the computational foundation of language. Thus early forms of writing often consisted of a continuous stream of characters, with no segmentation into separate words. Victor Mair has a post at Language Log that speaks to this, The challenging importance of spacing in Korean:

Who'da thunk it? – spacing is the most difficult aspect of Korean writing. One might have thought it would be a simple task, that word spacing / separation is innate for all speakers of a given language. Apparently that is not so.

In Hanyu Pinyin, it is called fēncí liánxiě 分詞連寫 ("word division; parsing"). Of course, it has its problems, but we do have rules to guide us, viz., zhèngcífǎ 正詞法 ("orthography").

This morning in my "Language, Script, and Society in China" course, I embarked on a discussion of the difference between zì 字 ("character") and cí 詞 ("word"). Although this seems like a simple, straightforward question, it is always one of the most difficult topics encountered in the course — especially for students of Chinese background. It took me a whole semester to get the idea across to the 72 very smart students in my language studies class at the University of Hong Kong in 2002-2003. Even at the conclusion of the semester, there were still some of the students who just couldn't comprehend the distinction.

Be sure to read the comments.

Addendum: In fact, I'll reprint one of them in full. Victor Mair, who started the thread, posts this on behalf of an unnamed colleague

Spacing–word division–assumes shared knowledge among users of what constitutes a language's words. This is not a trivial matter, and Korean linguists, lexicographers and publishers have been working the issue for decades.

The basic problem, as one of the commentators intimates, is that words, like (morpho)phonemic spelling, are an artifact of writing. They are not a given to be plucked from someone's brain. Orthography takes it upon itself to regularize (adjudicate) the intuitions users have about what constitutes the lexical units of their language, which are far from uniform and constantly shifting. Korean lacked that tradition and is catching up, although in a sense all written languages that use word division are continuously "catching up." I don't see it as a major problem, or a problem at all.

What I do find problematic in Asian languages is fluid "standards" for sentence representation, namely, where the period goes. This is not an issue (for me) in Korean, probably because the language does use word division, which enforces a discipline on writers that carries beyond the identification of (agreement on) word boundaries to one's whole approach to sentence structure. Chinese sentences–the text between periods–are often by western standards two sentences, five sentences, or partial sentences. Japanese writers also seem to have more liberty in this regard than a westerner would expect. Vietnamese sentences, in earlier novels at least, end or don't end seemingly at whim. And I question if Tibetans even have the concept of "sentence."

I've been out of this field for too long so my thinking may be dated. But there may be psycholinguistic issues at play here that merit serious study.

This too is relevant to the issue of computation in the mind. And so: I've just been thinking about this. And I'm wondering if the problem isn't similar to the problem that adolescent and post-adolescent second language learners have with pronunciation. I don't know what the current literature says about that, but in the past I've seen it attributed to a lack of neuro-plasticity. I don't find that terribly convincing. My intuition – and it's no more than that – is that the problem is more like conscious access. For some reason conscious access to (something in) the aural-motor channel has been, if not lost, somewhat degraded.

Could the same thing be going on in the transfer of segmentation from the aural-motor channel to the visuo-orthographic?

Language, Computation, and Literary Form

I’ve been making a lot of posts over the past year or so about language, computation, and literary form, with a particular flurry in the last month or two linking Jakobson’s poetic function into the mix. This is going to be another one of those posts. I figure I’ve got to keep going over it until I feel that I’ve got it right, whatever that means.

What I’m NOT saying

I’m not saying that the human mind, or brain, is essentially computational, or digital. Those may or may not be true, but my assertion is more limited.

It limited to language and, within language, to the process whereby word forms are linked to semantic objects and structure (informally, to meaning). Let me emphasize process. It is something the mind does rather than something the mind is – to put it rather sketchily.

Other processes may or may not be fundamentally computational – sensation, perception, movement, pattern recognition, feeling, whatever. Off hand I’d think there’s computation in the sense that word-form-binding is computation, but I also think there are non-computational processes.

Moreover, I’m NOT saying that word-form-binding can be modeled by or usefully thought of as computation. I’m saying that it IS computation. And linguistic form is computational form. Linguistic form guides the binding process.

In what sense computation?

In the sense that we say the earth is a planet that revolves around the sun, and the moon revolves around the earth. Neither of those assertions can be verified by direct perception. Direct perception tells us that the earth is stationary and that both the sun and the moon move over the earth’s surface. Where does the sun go at night? Direct observation doesn’t tell us. Where does the moon go during the day? Direct observation doesn’t tell us.

The heliocentric model of the solar system is an abstract idea. It’s based on a wide range of observations by many observers at many times and places. But not simply observations. Reasoning, physical reasoning and mathematical reasoning.

It’s model subject to revision as needed. Thus Pluto has recently been demoted from planet status, a relatively minor matter of definition. More consequentially, the advent of complexity theory and digital simulation has allowed us to realize that, over the long term, the system is chaotic. The bodies in the system are constantly influencing one another and, consequently, orbits are gradually changing.

Well, that language involves computation is like that, irreducibly so. We don’t understand the system nearly so well. And, to some extent the argument has to be a negative one: What else could it be? As far as I know there simply are no other proposals on the table.

Alan Turing has defined computation in a way that’s independent of any particular physical realization, and THAT’s the kind of thing that can perform the binding task. We know that primarily because we have built artificial system that perform the binding task in limited domains. We have no reason to think that the limitations of those systems can be attributed to computation itself.

Conversation

In looking over my posts I realized that back in August of 2016 I’d posted, Words, Binding, and Conversation as Computation, and What’s Computation? What’s Literary Computation? YES. The back and forth of computation strikes me as being inherently computational (read those two posts).

That, of course, involves the interaction of autonomous agents, which is not something we ordinarily think of in conjunction with computation, which has been characterized as something done by a single agent. I don’t see that as a problem, however. In fact, that may be how computation (in this sense) got started. And through a process perhaps first described by Vygotsky (in his account of language learning) the process that had been distributed across two agents becomes internalized in one.

Also

Anaphoric reference and duality of patterning – but I’m not going to remark on these here and now. I note, however, that duality of patterning pretty much implies the binding problem. And it is, of course, related to indexing as Hays and I discussed it in Principles and development of natural intelligence [1].

Form on a string

Language is manifest as a string of word forms, one after the other. In the case of some but not all written language the word-forms are sharply separated from one another. They are not sharply separated in spoken form nor, I believe, in the gestures of signing. Where the string does not naturally exist in discrete forms the perceptual system must do the job of segmenting; sometimes there are failures.

In a way and somehow I want to say that computation is somehow necessitated by the fact that semantic structures (meaning) are inherently multi-dimensional and cotemporaneous while language takes the material form of one-dimensional strings. It takes computation to go back and forth between these two – not, alas, a very felicitious formulation.

Literary form and description

It is because literature is made of language that literary form is, like linguistic form, computational in nature [2]. Note that the literary string may be subject to quasi-independent sources of ordering (as in verse, where sound may be ordered independently of sense).

I’m thinking – pace yesterday’s discussion of ring composition – the routine description of literary form is only possible in the context of the explicit recognition of the computational nature of linguistic and therefore literary form. The ring composition literature seems to me a bit ‘spotty’ and in a way ‘opportunistic’. It’s a bunch of local accommodations and fixes without any overall system. Also, in some forms it is overly reliant on spatial metaphors and references to oral practice, both of which are beside the point (and the spatial metaphors are misleading).

Routinization requires systematic thought and description. In the case of literary form we must explicitly recognize that literary texts ARE strings. It’s not that anyone doesn’t know that, but it’s not something that’s thought about and theorized. And we must recognize that literary form words outside the bounds of conscious thought and deliberation (as, indeed, does linguistic form as well).

Literary form is necessarily about restrictions on the structure of literary strings. That’s what Jakobson’s poetic function is about. It remains to be seen whether the poetic function is absolutely general, providing a ‘complete’ account.

More later.

References

[1] William L. Benzon and David G. Hays. Principles and development of natural intelligence. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 11, 1988, pp. 293-322. https://www.academia.edu/235116/Principles_and_Development_of_Natural_Intelligence

[2] My 2006 article on literary morphology is my major systematic statement about literary form, 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

Once more, and thinking of ring composition: Why aren’t literary critics interested in describing literary form?

I keep coming back to this question. Sometimes I think I’ve got an answer, but then, gradually, it goes away. I’m not quite sure what the question is.

If literary critics didn’t talk about form and if formalism weren’t a well recognized (family of) critical position(s), the answer would be simple. But that, I’m afraid, is not the case. Form and formalism are much discussed. And one of the big discussions revolves around the questions: What IS form, anyhow? There’s no consensus answer, not even close.

What brought the subject to mind just now is that I was thinking about ring composition, a particular kind of formal structure. I bring up ring composition because it’s not form-in-general. It’s a specific kind of form. And so is more tractable.

And what I’ve been thinking about that is that it has mostly been studied in oral culture, classical texts, the Bible, and in non-Western classical literatures (the Vedas, the Quran, etc.). And, as far as I can tell (from running searches on Google Scholar and Academia.edu), those discussions remain current, though it doesn’t seem to be a scholarly hot-bed. That is, it’s studied in literatures that AREN’T US.

But also, it really isn’t studied as one kind of form in the general world of literary forms. It seems to be this oddball kind of topic unto itself. Sometimes it’s approached through spatial metaphors, which I fear is a mistake. But sometimes it’s also discussed in relation to music – I recall seeing such an article.

Why isn’t the study of literary form as sophisticated as the study of musical form (at least I think it’s sophisticated)? Literary art, after all, is a temporal art, no? But it’s difficult to think of it that way, I suspect, because words have meaning and musical pitches don’t. Those meanings and their accumulation get in the way of focusing on the temporality.

On the whole, and at the moment – I’m making this up as I type it – I’m thinking that literary form is difficult to focus on. Ring form is studied in ‘remote’ literature precisely because they’re remote. That remoteness reduces the ‘pressure’ on meaning and allows the formal features to be treated more straightforwardly. What makes literary form difficult to focus on is the fact that, as physical objects, literary texts are strings. How do we think about the form of strings?

Where the elements on those strings are words and so have meaning, I suspect that, in the end, computation is the only way we’ve got for thinking about the form of strings of meaningful objects. I note that when I blundered into the form of “Kubla Khan”, my experience with computation played a role. I thought about computer programs and how the difference between, say, a comma and a semicolon was the difference between a program that ran and one that didn’t. Natural language isn’t so unforgiving. But form in natural language texts is broadly of a kind with form in computer language texts. Grouping of word forms matters.

I note that arriving at the form of “Kubla Khan” was not a straightforward process for me. On the one hand, I had no model. I wasn’t looking for form. I was looking for meaning. Once I’d blundered into the form, I didn’t know what to do with it. What I did was to go looking for the underlying mechanisms, which was as close as I could get to looking for meaning. I didn’t find them, though I certainly did find a fascinating intellectual world in computational semantics and such. Beyond that, it was a BIG DEAL for me, two decades later, to reflect back on it all and realize that what drove me was form, the formal features I’d identified in various texts.

That is, while I may have been following form for years, it took me a long time to consciously realize and focus on it. On the whole it seems to me that, as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, I had internalized a fairly standard litcrit mindset, on more or less oblivious to form. But I had internalized a bit of linguistics and perhaps a bit of computation as well, and those things came into confluence and collision in my study of “Kubla Khan”.

At the moment I’m of the opinion that there won’t be any serious study of literary form that doesn’t recognize computation as essential to language. By “serious” I mean analytic and descriptive. The descriptive work doesn’t have to start from scratch. Much existing work in poetics and narratology is relevant. What’s most important at this point, however, is the description of individual texts in varying levels of detail.

The concept of computation authorizes the study of form. Without that authorization there can be no such study [1]. It’s not simply a matter of authority, though it IS that as well. It’s about intellectual focus.

The ring composition literature is interesting and important, but it’s a fluke, a fortunate fluke.

* * * * *

[1] See, for example, my recent post, Jakobson’s Poetic Function and Textual Closure, December 25, 2017,  https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/12/jakobsons-poetic-function-and-text.html

Natural language is irreducibly computational

Not so long ago I made three assertions:

The process whereby word forms, whether spoken, written, or gestured (signed), are linked to meaning/semantics is irreducibly computational.

A complete text is well-formed if and only if its meaning is resolved once the last word form has been taken up.

It is in this context that Roman Jakobson’s poetic function may be considered a principle of literary form.

This post is about the first of those assertions.

Why do I believe it? When I made the assertion I didn’t reason it out beforehand. I simply made the assertion, on an intuitive basis, if you will.

I regard that assertion as being not very different from the assertion that water is liquid or that a pine three is a plant. That’s just what kind of thing it is, computation. Unfortunately that process is not something we can observe directly – like water or pine trees. The solar system is a better source of examples, specifically, the idea that the earth moves around the sun and that the moon is a satellite of the earth. Those are not perceptually obvious. It takes quite a bit of observation, by multiple observers at many locations, and abstract mathematical reasoning about those observations to establish the plausibility of those relationships.

So it is, I’m suggesting, with word forms, meaning, and their linkage through computation. We have to reason indirectly, and abstractly, more so than about the moon. As far as I know, computation is our best current proposal about how word forms are linked to meaning – for all I know it may be our only proposal other than something like, you know, magic. In this context magic is sometimes called intention.

Of course, it’s not as though I haven’t been thinking about this for a long time, since graduate school and my immersion in computational linguistics with David Hays. Of course computational linguistics, by definition, uses a computational process to link word forms to meaning – though it doesn’t always involve meaning. More often we have simple parsing, where a syntactic structure is assigned to a string of word forms. That’s all well and good, but many of the systems created in computational linguistics were not intended to model the human process and, of those that are so intended, how do we know they’re correct or in what aspect they are correct?

We don’t know, not yet.

There are at least two issues:

1. What is computation, anyhow?

2. Just what is the scope of my assertion?

On the second, I mean only that process, the linking of word forms to semantic structures. There is also, of course, a process whereby word forms are identified in the speech stream, on the page, or in gestures. That process may be computational as well, but I’m not making that assertion. And there is the process whereby at least some semantic structures are linked to perception, apples, oranges, snakes, thunderclaps, mountains, and the like, things we can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and so forth. Those processes may also be computational, but I’m not including them within the scope of that assertion.

More generally, I note that we can use computation to simulate anything we can specify is sufficient detail (of the right kind). But that doesn’t mean those phenomena are computational in kind. The simulation of an atomic explosion is very different in kind from a real atomic explosion; the same for simulating turbulent flow in a pipe, complex dynamics in neural circuits, or traffic queuing at a toll booth, and so forth. Simulations are one thing; the simulated processes, another.

Any computer model of that linguistic process, binding word forms to meanings, will necessarily be a simulation, for it will be realized in a digital computer. The human brain is not a digital computer. But, if my assertion is correct, it will be a simulation of a naturally occurring computational process – for I do including human language within the scope of natural phenomena.

That leaves us with the first question: What is computation? Alan Turing has provided us with one answer. But I’m not sure how useful that answer is for my purposes. If we can simulate anything on a digital computer, well then pretty much follows that we can specify a Turing machine that is LIKE that phenomenon. That’s not terribly interesting.

And in a way it’s a bit circular. As I recall Turing got his basic conception as an abstraction over what people do when making arithmetic calculations. And arithmetic calculation is, after all, a very specialized use of language. If we think of language as a natural phenomenon, then arithmetic harnesses it – to borrow a word from Mark Changizi ¬– for a culturally specified purpose, numerical calculation. So arguing that natural language is computational in Turing’s sense is a bit circular.

No, I’m fishing for something else.

In “Principles and development of natural intelligence” [1] David Hays and I specified five principles that have emerged over time in the course of evolution and that operate cumulatively. The fifth principle allowed clever apes to become human. We called it indexing:

The indexing principle is about computational geometry, by which we mean the geometry, that is, the architecture (Pylyshyn, 1980) of computation rather than computing geometrical structures. While the other four principles can be construed as being principles of computation, only the indexing principle deals with computing in the sense it has had since the advent of the stored program digital computer. Indexed computation requires (1) an alphabet of symbols and (2) relations over places, where tokens of the alphabet exist at the various places in the system. The alphabet of symbols encodes the contents of the calculation while the relations over places, i.e. addresses, provide the means of manipulating alphabet tokens in carrying out the computation. The token at a place is a value and the place is identifiable by way of the relation given an address (see Fig. 13). Thus, the structure of the computational space can be used to locate various content items¬–that is, indexing. The possibilities of indexed computing become particularly exciting when one realizes, as von Neumann did, that values and places can be encoded in the same alphabet, making it possible to introduce the manipulation of computational geometry into the content of computation.

Indexing sounds an awful lot like what goes on in binding word forms to meanings, where the word forms are the indexes for the meanings.

Computation thus seems fundamental to human nature. It is the inner structure of language and it is what makes us human.

* * * * *

[1] William Benzon and David Hays, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Vol. 11, No. 8, July 1988, 293-322. https://www.academia.edu/235116/Principles_and_Development_of_Natural_Intelligence

* * * * *

Whoops! been there, done that: On the binding of word forms to structures of meaning: A quick note on computing in the mind.

Textual closure and literary form

The process whereby word forms, whether spoken, written, or gestured (signed), are linked to meaning/semantics is irreducibly computational.

A complete text is well-formed if and only if its meaning is resolved once the last word form has been taken up.

It is in this context that Roman Jakobson’s poetic function may be considered a principle of literary form.

* * * * *

See Jakobson’s Poetic Function and Literary Form, New Savanna, blog post, September 7, 2017: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/09/jakobsons-poetic-function-and-literary.html

Jakobson’s poetic function as a computational principle, on the trail of the human mind, New Savanna, blog post, September 19, 2017: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/09/jakobsons-poetic-function-as.html

On the binding of word forms to structures of meaning: A quick note on computing in the mind

The basic linguistic process is the binding of word forms to structures of meaning. I think that is an irreducibly computational process. Just how that computation works, that’s unknown. I note that the semantic system is richly structured and that much of syntax derives from that.

It is not necessarily the case that all the processes involved are themselves computational. The fact that we can simulate a neural net, at various levels of detail, on a digital computer does not mean that the neural net is itself computational, any more than simulating an atomic explosion implies that such explosions are computational.

Finally, I note that, when David Hays and I wrote “Principles and development of natural intelligence” (abstract below), we asserted that indexing is what transformed apes into humans. It was indexing that gave us language as we now know it.

More later. HERE for example.

* * * * *

William L. Benzon and David G. Hays. Principles and development of natural intelligence. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 11, 1988, pp. 293-322. https://www.academia.edu/235116/Principles_and_Development_of_Natural_Intelligence

Abstract: The phenomena of natural intelligence can be grouped into five classes, and a specific principle of information processing, implemented in neural tissue, produces each class of phenomena. (1) The modal principle subserves feeling and is implemented in the reticular formation. (2) The diagonalization principle subserves coherence and is the basic principle, implemented in neocortex. (3) Action is subserved by the decision principle, which involves interlinked positive and negative feedback loops, and resides in modally differentiated cortex. (4) The problem of finitization resolves into a figural principle, implemented in secondary cortical areas; figurality resolves the conflict between pro-positional and Gestalt accounts of mental representations. (5) Finally, the phenomena of analysis reflect the action of the indexing principle, which is implemented through the neural mechanisms of language.

These principles have an intrinsic ordering (as given above) such that implementation of each principle presupposes the prior implementation of its predecessor. This ordering is preserved in phylogeny: (1) mode, vertebrates; (2) diagonalization, reptiles; (3) decision, mammals; (4) figural, primates; (5) indexing. Homo sapiens sapiens. The same ordering appears in human ontogeny and corresponds to Piaget's stages of intellectual development, and to stages of language acquisition.

Why the computational form of literary texts is mere form in the Kantian sense

Actually, it’s not me that’s taking the look at Kant. To be sure, I read some Kant years ago, and I do mean years, more like decades. But I don’t remember it and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Critique of Judgment, which is the text in play here. It was put in play in a recent article:

Robert Lehman, Formalism, Mere Form, and Judgment, New Literary History, Vol. 48, No. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 245-263.

I’m thus in the precarious position of having to rely on Lehman’s presentation of Kant. But then, isn’t that what intellectual life is like, working in the community of scholars, always depending on the kindness of strangers?

What is formalism, what is literature?

Before looking at Kant via Lehman, however, let me give you the rough and ready on two matters: 1) what I mean by formalism, and 2) how I understand what literature is.

My basic approach to the second is a crude “I know it when I see it.” Of course, I’ve learned from others, starting with my parents. They taught me that, for example, Moby Dick is literature, The Voyage of the Beagle is not, and so forth. Now that I think about it, I’m not at all sure that I’ve ever had to determine, for myself, whether or not this text was literature or not. Good vs. mediocre vs. downright bad literature, yes. But literature vs. something else, I don’t think so.

But let’s assume that there may well come a time when I would have to make such a judgment. It might be an easy judgment to make, or it might not. Where the judgment is easy for me, I suspect it will be easy for others. Where it is difficult, there as well. But in that case, we might arrive at different judgments. In consequence we could enter into a discussion about the matter and give our reasons. Perhaps we’d reach agreement, perhaps not. If not, what of it?

Well, one might throw up one’s hands and say, but then, but then, isn’t the distinction between literature and non-literature pointless? No, difficult and fuzzy, yes; pointless, no. There are color patches that are obviously blue and other ones that are obviously green. That doesn’t mean that difficult cases, cases we decide, perhaps, by tossing a coin, force us to abandon any notion that blue and green are different colors. This or that virtuoso theorist may care to gum up the whole works by invoking a difficult case, but so what? That’s posturing, not thinking.

As for formalism, all I mean is that I’m interested in analyzing and describing the formal properties of literary texts. My big beef with existing literary criticism is that, for the most part, that project seems peripheral to the enterprise despite the fact that form is a central concept of the discipline and formalism a well-recognized critical stance, or family of stances. I find it odd that these formalists, for whom the general fact of form is so very important, show so little interest in specific instances that they cannot spend time analyzing texts for their formal features.

Kant on phenomenal vs. mere form

But I think Lehman’s article can help us sort this out.

He opens by observing (p. 245):

... the ascendancy of the old formalisms—of the Yale School (minus the antiformalist Harold Bloom), or of the New Critics (expanded to include René Wellek and Austin Warren), or even of Aristotle—tended to coincide with an increased attention to or anxiety around the question of literature as such, the rise of the new formalism has not.

But these new formalists are no more interested in describing formal features than those old formalists were. What differentiates these new formalists from the old, it seems, is that “the new formalism has done nothing to answer the question: what is literature? As far as I can tell, it has not even tried” (p. 246). OK, I’m with them on that.

Here’s what Lehman thinks formalism is, both old and new, (p. 246):

At its most basic, I mean an approach to art objects—literature, film, painting, and so on—grounded in an attention to these objects’ spatiotemporal qualities, their phenomenal qualities, which might allow for the transmission of a content or a meaning but that are not themselves intrinsically meaningful. As a critical practice, then, formalism would prescribe consideration of meter, line, composition, rhythm, movement, shape: all those characteristics that are supposed to make an art object what it is. Now, I hope that this definition is broad enough to be relatively uncontroversial. I intend it to be prior both to Levinson’s distinction between “activist” and “normative” formalism—that is, between approaches that affirm and approaches that deny the compatibility of formalism and historicism—and to the question of what model of form ought to be adopted—static or dynamic, molar or molecular. And it does not depend on any especially rigid division of form from content, a division that certain varieties of formalism pride themselves on their having moved beyond.

Am I a formalist in THAT sense? Let’s be careful here.

Two questions about language: Why is it computationally privileged? Why is literary form objectively knowable, but meaning not?

What does that first question even mean? In what sense is language computationally privileged? They may well be an abstract answer to that question, but I don’t have to skills to articulate it. So I’ll have to do so indirectly.

In the decade or so following World War II electronic digital computation developed around a few key problems: 1) data processing, e.g. tabulating census statistics, 2) dynamics, e.g. simulating atomic explosions, artillery calculations, and 3) machine translation. Not artificial vision, or hearing, or motor kinematics, or any other human sensory or motor activity. The problem was to translate texts from one natural language to another.

THAT’s computational privilege, but I mean privilege in perhaps a peculiar sense. Machine translation, of course, was important for reasons of national defense. It wasn’t just any language we wanted to translate from; it was Russian. But that’s not what I mean by privilege. That’s why the work was funded, but by privilege I mean something like tractable. Language was deemed computationally tractable.

Language is computationally tractable in a way that those other activities – seeing, hearing, moving the body – are not. Why? Because digital computing is itself a linguistic activity, albeit that languages involved are highly restricted and limited in a way that natural languages aren’t. Still, natural language is more like computer languages than seeing, hearing, and jumping rope are. That’s what I mean by computationally tractable.

And this point it gets a little tricky. What is arithmetic? Ordinarily we think of it as a kind of math, which is very different from language. Ordinarily, that’s so. But it’s also superficial.

How do we do arithmetic calculations? One can use a simple mechanical device, like an abacus. But we’re taught to do it with numerical symbols, for values zero through nine, plus a decimal point, plus four operators (plus, minus, times, divided by) and the equals sign. That, plus a bunch of simple rules, makes arithmetic a kind of simple language. There is thus a deep connection between language and arithmetic, and hence between language and mathematics.

That’s computational privilege.

Now, our second question: Why is literary form objectively knowable, but meaning not? Caveat: This is going to be quick and impressionistic, more of a conceptual placeholder than anything else.

Literary form belongs to the computable aspect of language. Word meaning, and hence the meaning of texts of any kind, including literary texts, ultimately depends on the world and our access to the world through the senses and the motor system. That access is, in principle, open-ended and undefined. It is not computable.

Word meaning, I submit, is pretty much like those elusive qualia that philosophers talk about. Perhaps we can think of it as the qualia of the mind. We can build and test models of visual perception, for example, and so investigate the relationship between objective characteristics of the visual scene and color perception, that is, we can build models of how qualia arise, but those models are models, not qualia themselves. If the model is implemented in a computational system attached to visual sensors, then it may actually created pseudo qualia, but real qualia require a living system. We don’t know how to create those.

The same is true for language, for meaning vs. semantics. We can build a semantic model, which is about how words and texts have meaning. But it IS a model, not meaning. (For more on the distinction between meaning and semantics, see my recent post, 2 Comments on Moretti’s LitLab 15: Patterns and Interpretation [#DH].)

Meaning and qualia are both ontologically and epistemologically subjective in Searle’s sense. Semantics models and sensory models are both ontologically and epistemologically objective in Searle’s sense [1]. (Also see my recent post, Objectivity and Intersubjective Agreement.)

* * * * *

[1] John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, Penguin Books, 1995, pp. 5 ff.

Describing structured strings of characters [literary form]

I recently argued that Jakobson’s poetic function can be regarded as a computational principle [1]. I want to elaborate on that a bit in the context of the introduction to Representation’s recent special issue on description:

Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, Building a Better Description, Representations 135. Summer 2016. 1-21. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2016.135.1.1.

That article ends with six suggestions for building better descriptions. The last three have to do with objectivity. It is the sixth and last suggestion that interests me.

Rethink objectivity? 

Here’s how that suggestion begins (p. 13):

6. Finally, we might rethink objectivity itself. One way to build a better description is to accept the basic critique of objectivity as impossible and undesirable. In response, we might practice forms of description that embrace subjectivity, uncertainty, incompleteness, and partiality. But why not also try out different ways of thinking about objectivity? Responsible scholarship is often understood as respecting the distinction between a phenomenon and the critical methods used to understand it; the task of the critic is to transform the phenomenon under consideration into a distinct category of analysis, and to make it an occasion for transformative thought. Mimetic description, by contrast, values fidelity to the object; in the case of descriptions that aim for accuracy, objectivity would not be about crushing the object, or putting it in perspective, or playing god, but about honoring what you describe.

OK, but that’s rather abstract. What might this mean, concretely? They offer an example of bad description, though the fact that it is placed well after a blank line on the page (p. 14 if you must know) suggests that it’s meant to illustrate (some combination of) the six suggestions taken collectively rather than only the last.

Here’s the example (taken from one of the articles in the issue, pp. 14-15):

In her criticism of the objectivity imperative in audio description, Kleege explains that professional audio describers are instructed to avoid all personal interpretation and commentary. The premise is that if users are provided with an unbiased, unadorned description, they will be able to interpret and judge a film for themselves. Kleege writes, “In extreme instances, this imperative about absolute objectivity means that a character will be described as turning up the corners of her mouth rather than smiling.” For Kleege, reducing the familiar act of smiling to turning up the corners of one’s mouth is both absurd and condescending. The effort to produce an objective, literal account only leads to misunderstandings, awkwardness, and bathos. This zero-degree description is the paradoxical result of taking the critique of description, with its mistrust of interpretation and subjectivity, to one logical extreme. Tellingly, the professional audio describer’s “voice from nowhere” is not only weirdly particular; it also fails to be genuinely descriptive, since its “calm, controlled, but also cheerful” tone remains the same no matter what is being described.

OK, that makes sense. Let me suggest that smiles are objectively real phenomena and so we don’t need to rethink objectivity in order to accommodate this example.

To be sure, there are cases where one needs to know that smiling means “turning up the corners of her mouth”. If one is investigating the nature of smiles as communicative signals one might begin with that bit of description. But that itself is not enough to differentiate between spontaneous smiles and deliberate “fake” smiles – something that has been investigated I’m sure. In that contexts smiles cannot be taken at face value, as it were.

But that’s not the context we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with someone watching a film and describing what the actors are doing. We’re dealing with (images of) the natural context of smiling, human communication. Those configurations of facial features and gestures exist for other people and so it is appropriate, indeed it is necessary, that we frame our descriptions in terms commensurate phenomena under observation (“fidelity to the object”).

But what has that to do with describing literary texts? Texts, after all, are quite different from human beings interacting with one another.

Jakobson’s poetic function as a computational principle, on the trail of the human mind

Not so long ago I argued that Jakobson’s poetic function could be extended beyond the examples he gave, which came from poetry, to other formal features, such as ring composition [1]. I now want to suggest that it is a computational principle as well. What I mean by computation [2]? That’s always a question in these discussions, isn’t it?

When Alan Turing formalized the idea of computation he did so with the notion of a so-called Turing Machine [3]: “The machine operates on an infinite memory tape divided into discrete cells. The machine positions its head over a cell and ‘reads’ (scans) the symbol there.” There’s more to it than that, but that’s all we need here. It’s that tape that interests me, the one with discrete cells, each containing a symbol. Turing defined computation as an operation on the contents of those cells. Just what kind of symbols we’re dealing with is irrelevant as long as the basic rules governing their use are well-specified. The symbols might be numerals and mathematical operators, but they might also be the words and punctuation marks of a written language.

Linguists frequently refer to strings; an utterance is a string of phonemes, or morphemes, or words, depending on what you’re interested in. Of course it doesn’t have to be an utterance; the string can consist of a written text. What’s important is that it’s a string.

Well, Jakobson’s poetic function places restrictions on the arrangement of words on the string, restrictions independent of those made by ordinary syntax. Here’s Jakobson’s definition [4]:

The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.

The sequence, of course, is our string. As for the rest of it, that’s a bit obscure. But it’s easy to see how things like meter and rhyme impose restrictions on the composition of strings. Jakobson has other examples and I give a more careful account of the restriction in my post, along with the example of ring composition [1]. Moreover, in a working paper on ring composition, I have already pointed out how the seven rules Mary Douglas gave for characterizing ring composition can be given a computational interpretation [5, pp. 39-42].

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Mathematics, Computing, and the Literary Mind

As some of you know, Willard McCarty has been hosting an informal online seminar on the digital humanities since 1987. One topic that comes and goes is the question of whether or not computing has more to offer the humanist than a set of practical tools. Could computing offer us a way of thinking about how the objects and processes of humanistic inquiry actually function? This topic has reappeared once again and I've decided to offer my two cents. Here's the note I posted to the seminar.

Dear Willard et al.,

This business – mathematics & computing and what they offer humanists other than tools – is something I've been thinking about, off and on, since the late 1960s. Back then I wasn't interested in practical tools (for making a concordance, or stylometrics, or whatever), I was interested in thinking about how the mind worked. Of course lots of thinkers have pursued that line over the years, and while it's produced its share of nonsense, I don't think that should discredit the whole line of investigation, which is hardly unified and is still very much open-ended.

As far as I know the nature of computation is itself still very much under investigation. And I figure that literary studies (my particular corner of the humanities) may well have contributions to make. That is, understanding the computational properties of the literary mind is NOT (going to be) a matter of taking some existing ensemble of computational processes and fitting them to one text after another. Rather, we – someone – is going to have to create appropriate computational procedures.

Just how we – someone – get there from here, that's way beyond the scope of an email note, nor would I be able to chart a course given whatever scope I please. But I think we have to start with literary form and we must learn how to describe it.

I've got some general notes on this in a working paper, Description 3: The Primacy of Visualization: https://www.academia.edu/16835585/Description_3_The_Primacy_of_Visualization

Here's a somewhat more polished account (though unpublished): Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature: https://www.academia.edu/28764246/Sharing_Experience_Computation_Form_and_Meaning_in_the_Work_of_Literature

Some years ago I engaged in extensive correspondence with Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, and she got me interested in ring-composition. Texts with the form:

A, B, C...X, C', B', A

Why ring-composition? 1) Because it "smells" like something that requires a computational account. 2) It's something definite one can look for in a text. 3) Identifying and describing ring-composition in texts doesn't require any esoteric knowledge. But it does require the sort of feel for the phenomenon that comes only from paying close attention to texts.

Douglas has published short book on the subject (her last), based on a series of lectures she delivered at Yale: Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition (Yale 2007). There's a chapter where she lists a set of identifying features of ring-composition.

I've produced a handful of working papers in which I describe ring-composition in a variety of texts. You can find those listed here: https://independent.academia.edu/BillBenzon/Ring-Composition

If you're interested in reading around in that material, you might start with, Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology: https://www.academia.edu/8529105/Ring_Composition_Some_Notes_on_a_Particular_Literary_Morphology

One of the things I do in that working paper is gloss Douglas's diagnostic features as being aspects of a computational process.

Finally, it's worth remembering that ordinary arithmetic (which is fairly important in the theory of computation) is, after all, a linguistic process. The symbol set is highly restricted, as is the set of rules for its use (both sets are finite); but it is a creature of language.

Best,

Bill Benzon