Blade Runner 2049, a quick hit

Saw Blade Runner 2049 yesterday evening. I had to. Don’t you?

I saw the original when it came out and have watched some DVD version many times. I know, because I’ve seen it on the screen, how Ridley Scott’s original influenced a whole world of films, near future noir, if you will.

Visually, thematically, temperamentally, the new film is true to the original. It’s a long film, 2h 43m, and feels a bit slow, as the original did from time to time. But there’s nothing quite like Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy (Rutger Hower) in it–I’m talking energy, impact (for some characters did have a Pris look about them).

Not only is it visually true to the original – and spectacular – but it has picked up motifs, images, aura from films influenced by the first. Thus I saw Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (did I ever see this one!), The Fifth Element, the Matrix films, and Spielberg’s A.I. up on the screen. But also, and oddly enough, Kubrick’s 2001, which is much earlier (1969) that Ridley Scott’s (1982).

On the whole, I agree with A. O. Scott, The New York Times:

As such, “Blade Runner 2049” stands in relation to “Blade Runner” almost exactly as K stands in relation to Deckard before the two meet: as a more docile, less rebellious “improvement,” tweaked and retrofitted to meet consumer demand. And the customers are likely to be satisfied. But now and then — when K and Deckard are knocking around the old gambling palace; when K visits an enigmatic mind-technician played by Carla Juri — you get an inkling that something else might have been possible. Something freer, more romantic, more heroic, less determined by the corporate program.

As for the underlying philosophical issues, in the end, I must confess, I don’t quite get it, not with this film, not with its predecessor. It was only in reading Scott’s review just now that I remembered, oh that’s what it’s about: “How do we know what is real, ourselves included?” Well, yes, how DO we know? The film attempts to convert that question into a puzzle, a matter of dogged and clever detective work, when perhaps it should be working harder to reveal it as an unending mystery.

* * * * *

Villeneuve’s picked up a trick from the Wachowskis, who released The Animatrix, a collection of nine animated shorts situated in the Matrix universe. Villeneuv’s commissioned three shorts, though only one of them is animated. That one, Black Out 2022, is by Shinichirō Watanabe, who directed Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, two of my favorite anime series. You can see these three films on YouTube, both separately and combined. Here’s the three of them together:

Two dogs and I-don't-know-what-it-is-but-it-ain't-human

Taboo, abstraction, and living with animals

The late Mary Douglas had been kind enough to blurb my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. After it's publication in 2001 my editor, Bill Frucht, put my directly in touch with Douglas and we began corresponding on a variety of things. Here's a long note I sent her on June 22, 2001.

* * * * * 

Dear Mary,

I've been reading a bit about the Nuer and their cattle (Evans-Pritchard 1940) and the Huaulu and their taboos (Valeri 2000) and find myself wondering what it would take to argue that abstract thinking emerged in our ancestors as a means of organizing their minds under the pressure of living among animals. Why the need to differentiate ourselves from them?

As long as you think of the mind as the Cartesian instrument of rational thought, the question is unintelligible. The differences between us and them are quite obvious. From that point of view, primitive thought is hopelessly confused.

But, of course, that point of view is wrong. The differentiation required is social and emotional, not perceptual and logical.

Cousin Sue 

First, however, let me tell a story. It is about my cousin Sue. She was born in the city and raised in the suburbs. But in her mid-30s or so she moved to the country and married a veterinarian. She began to raise sheep, not as pets, but as a source of wool to be spun into thread which she would then weave into cloth. When the sheep reached a certain age, she would take them to the butcher and, a day later, she and her husband would stock their freezer with mutton.

Despite the fact that these sheep are not pets, taking them to be butchered was not easy. Nor was their first meal comprised of mutton from sheep they'd raised. I'm told that when Sue and Larry sat down to that meal they were rather glum and sat there in silence, eating nothing. Then Sue said "baaa" in imitation of a sheep, they laughed, and began eating.

It seems to me that that complex of attitudes and behavior is what taboo is about. In making a sheep's call my cousin was both acknowledging an identity with the animal she'd raised and signaling their difference. Once that had been done it became possible to eat the meat.

Wolves to Dogs

So I now find myself wondering just when in our evolutionary history we first found ourselves faced with the problem of living among animals. It's a problem both of how we interact with animals and of the capacity of our neural machinery at the time. At the moment I'm thinking about the domestication of wolves into dogs, which seems to have happened on the order of 130 kya to 150 kya. By that time we were fairly large-brained. Up until then we knew animals as predators and prey. To domesticate wolves we must, in effect, come to know them as children and as subordinate companions and workers. That is, we must take them into our social system.

As Valeri has noted in his remarks on the Huaulu and their dogs (2000, p. 229), from a dog's point of view, the human master is just Top Dog. That is, dogs assimilate humans to their own social system. My point is that the identification goes in the other direction as well. Thus John Morgan (1999, p. 205) notes that "domestication was greatly facilitated because humans and wolves shared similar cooperative hunting behaviors and extended family social structure. Thus wolves and humans were pre-adapted to fit into each other's ecologies and families. Tame wolves and their descendants would have provided an enormous competitive advantage for the human groups that domesticated them.... From the dog's point of view, humans were pack members who brought food to the pups. Human support enabled dogs to have two litters of pups per year instead of the single little in wolves."

Langauge Change: Grammar evolves faster than vocabulary

Simon J. Greenhill, Chieh-Hsi Wu, Xia Hua, Michael Dunn, Stephen C. Levinson, and Russell D. Gray. Evolutionary dynamics of language systems. PNAS, 2017 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1700388114

Significance

Do different aspects of language evolve in different ways? Here, we infer the rates of change in lexical and grammatical data from 81 languages of the Pacific. We show that, in general, grammatical features tend to change faster and have higher amounts of conflicting signal than basic vocabulary. We suggest that subsystems of language show differing patterns of dynamics and propose that modeling this rate variation may allow us to extract more signal, and thus trace language history deeper than has been previously possible.

Abstract 

Understanding how and why language subsystems differ in their evolutionary dynamics is a fundamental question for historical and comparative linguistics. One key dynamic is the rate of language change. While it is commonly thought that the rapid rate of change hampers the reconstruction of deep language relationships beyond 6,000–10,000 y, there are suggestions that grammatical structures might retain more signal over time than other subsystems, such as basic vocabulary. In this study, we use a Dirichlet process mixture model to infer the rates of change in lexical and grammatical data from 81 Austronesian languages. We show that, on average, most grammatical features actually change faster than items of basic vocabulary. The grammatical data show less schismogenesis, higher rates of homoplasy, and more bursts of contact-induced change than the basic vocabulary data. However, there is a core of grammatical and lexical features that are highly stable. These findings suggest that different subsystems of language have differing dynamics and that careful, nuanced models of language change will be needed to extract deeper signal from the noise of parallel evolution, areal readaptation, and contact.

Writing on the wall (Jersey City, Bergen Arches)

Comparative Rings: To the grocer’s, King Kong, Heart of Darkness

Skull Island ahead.

While I’d originally learned about ring composition in the mid-1970s, I didn’t start thinking about it seriously until I had entered into email discussions with Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, some time in the middle of 2001. She’d been studying ring composition for awhile, mostly in the Old Testament, and was wondering whether or not there could be a neural basis, that is, something more specific than the trivial fact that everything we do has some kind of neural basis. The best I could do was navigation, something I’d looked into in connection with my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil. Why would researching music have me looking into navigation? Because music is about time, and so is dead reckoning – but that’s a digression in this context.

Note: This continues the discussion I began in Beauty and the Beast: King Kong as ring composition, plus myth logic, New Savanna, October 2, 2017: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/10/beauty-and-beast-king-kong-as-ring.html

To the grocer’s and back

All animals have to navigate their way around the world, way-finding it’s often called. The neural structures for it thus must be ancient. And they are, the hippocampus among them.

So, imagine you take a walk to the corner grocer’s to get a quart of milk and you return home by the same route:

1. Walk out the front door and turn left on Oak St.

2. Walk three blocks west and turn right on Princeton Dr.

3. Go two blocks north. Big Al’s Little Grocer is on your left.

X. Enter and purchase A quart of Aunt Emma’s Dairy Fresh Milk.

3’. Exit Big Al’s and walk two blocks south on Princeton.

2’. Turn left onto Oak and go three blocks east.

1’. Turn right and enter your home at No. 223.

What I like about this is that the path is a ring-form, certainly not geographically (you don’t travel in a circle), but in the sense meant in ring composition. You start at one location (home), take a trip where you accomplish some goal (purchase milk) and then return to your starting location (home). You traverse the same path on the return trip as you did setting out, but in the opposition direction. The two paths are thus symmetric with respect to landmarks passed over time.

But you didn’t set out to execute a ring-form trip. You set out to get a quart of milk. The ring-form was a side effect of the interaction between your conscious intention and the lay of the land.

And that’s what I want for ring composition, a way to ‘generate’ it naturally without conscious deliberation. Journey’s are common enough in literature – Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Moby Dick, King Solomon’s Mines, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn come to mind. But do we have any ring-form texts where we have journeys of the requisite kind (same path to and fro)? Yes we do, King Kong and Heart of Darkness.

Journey to Skull Island

The movie doesn’t specify the route in detail, but the general idea is clear enough:

1. New York

2. Ocean Voyage

3. Skull Island: Native Territory

X. Skull Island: Kong’s Territory

3’. Skull Island: Native Territory

2’. Ocean Voyage

1’. New York

I’ve crossed out the ocean voyage on the return leg because that isn’t depicted in the film. We cut directly from Kong unconscious on the beach of Skull Island to New York City the day Kong goes on exhibit.

But of course it’s not the mere trip that’s important. That’s just a vehicle, if you will, for the story. What happens during each leg of the trip? Here’s a sketch:

1. New York: Denham recruits Darrow.

2. Ocean Voyage: Darrow and Driscoll fall in love.

3. Skull Island: Native Territory: Natives substitute Darrow for native woman as an offering to Kong.

4. Kong takes Darrow inland to his lair; Denham, Driscoll and others follow.

5. Driscoll wounds Kong in finger.

X. Kong defeats T-Rex in front of Darrow.

5’. Driscoll rescues Darrow.

4’. Return with Darrow through village; Kong goes on a rampage.

3’. Skull Island: Capture Kong.

2’. Ocean Voyage.

1’. New York: Kong put on display, escapes and captures Darrow; Kong killed.

Note that I’ve elaborated the central sequence, treating Driscoll’s rescue of Darrow as the ‘answer’ to his wounding of Kong. I’ll justify that in a later post where I look at the underlying myth logic.

That last step strikes me as being a bit busy; too many events for only one segment. Here’s what I’m going to do: What happens is what’s important, as opposed simply to where it happens. Hence I’m going to drop the ocean voyage from the return left and redistribute the events of that last segment. That gives us this:

1. New York: Denham recruits Darrow.

2. Ocean Voyage: Darrow and Driscoll fall in love.

3. Skull Island: Native Territory: Natives substitute Darrow for native woman as an offering to Kong.

4. Kong takes Darrow inland to his lair; Denham, Driscoll and others follow.

5. Driscoll wounds Kong in finger.

X. Kong defeats T-Rex in front of Darrow.

5’. Driscoll rescues Darrow.

4’. Return with Darrow through village; Kong goes on a rampage.

3’. Skull Island: Capture Kong.

2’. New York: Kong put on display, escapes and captures Darrow.

1’. New York: Kong ascends Empire State Building with Darrow; Kong killed.

In this version Kong’s escape and capture of Darrow in New York (2’) ‘answers’ Driscoll and Darrow falling in love (2). Intuitively, that makes sense in terms of myth-logic – yes, I know, I’ve got some explaining to do...later.

Do I like it? Yes.

But do I believe it? Not yet. I’m just making it up. I need to think it through.

Why radicals in the professorate?

Neil Gross in the NYTimes:

But there’s reason to believe widespread reliance on adjunct faculty may encourage the very radicalism conservatives fear. Social scientists have found that when aspiring intellectuals face highly restricted employment opportunities, they often take refuge in extreme politics. In a 1996 study, the sociologist Jerome Karabel sought to identify the circumstances under which intellectuals, from would-be academics to writers and artists, embrace or rebel against the status quo. “Especially conducive to the growth of political radicalism,” he wrote, “are societies in which the higher levels of the educational system produce far more graduates than can be absorbed by the marketplace.”

Frustrated that their long investments in education and cultural cultivation haven’t paid off, intellectuals in such societies train their anger — and ideas — at the economic and political systems (and social groups) they hold responsible. Professor Karabel cited the example of Germany in the 1930s, when a slow-moving academic labor market increased the appeal of Nazism for a surprising number of underemployed intellectuals.

The same situation can breed support for radical movements of the left. Poor job prospects for American thinkers during the Depression helped draw many into socialism or communism. More recently, the sociologist Ruth Milkman found that well-educated millennials were overrepresented among Occupy Wall Street activists. These young people had spent their lives diligently preparing to enter the knowledge economy and became disillusioned when, after the financial crisis, it all seemed to be crashing down.

Ice, the Photoshop edition

So, start with the photo I just posted, but before I'd turned it into a gray-scale image:

It was sitting in a blue pail, hence the blueness. Now intensify the blue and modify to produce red and green versions as well:

Now let's return to the gray-scale image and add some false color:

And play with that a bit:

Once more, a history of American Lit Crit, this time with politics, Part 2

Back in July I took notice of a review of  Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Harvard 2017) by Bruce Robbins in the LA Review of books. Now Marco Roth does an essay-review in   n+1.  In Roth's recounting North is trying to figure out:

How did literary studies come to turn away from an “institutional program of aesthetic education” and embrace what he terms the “historicist/contextualist paradigm”?

Those recently acquainted with university literature courses will grasp this distinction intuitively, even if most people under 40 have only a dim idea of what “an institutional program of aesthetic education” might mean in real life. For those outside the high paywalls of the academy, a brief version of the historicist/contextualist paradigm runs something like this: The vagaries of genre, style, and narrative make literature a special record of resistant, oppressed, and marginal subjectivities. This is literature’s value. Sometimes the literary text excludes or hides these voices; sometimes, inadvertently or programmatically, it amplifies them. Research into the text’s period can disclose its latent or overt political meaning. The work of scholarship, or criticism (the conflation of the two is part of the problem North diagnoses), is therefore to show the encoding of specifically and exclusively political desires within and through literature.

Now, skipping over a whole bunch of stuff having mostly to do with I. A. Richards, Leavis, Cambridge (the British university), and the New Critics, Roth arrives at:

Gone is the task of providing “equipment for living,” in the words of Kenneth Burke, one of Richards’s American contemporaries and soul mates. Instead, the discipline or profession of literary studies aims to produce knowledge about the literature or societies of the past, with no overt purpose beyond the circulation and transmission of this knowledge to a group of similarly trained specialists, whose qualifications are assessed based on their ability to reproduce accepted “knowledge forms.” Even though the knowledge produced is rich in political content — and is often deliberately political — the use value of that political content must be denied or covered up by vague Enlightenment equivalencies between knowledge and progress at the very moment it appears as professional work.

The model here is the sciences, but without the empirical, reality-testing element. The validity of the knowledge produced from literary studies is determined by no other agency (in the sense of power) than the people who are reproducing it, and who, through means both fair and foul, have risen to the top of their profession. This explains why, after the creative ferment of the Sixties, the most easily replicable and legible form of knowledge, historico-contextualism, has come to dominate, even if it was never the most literary. It also means that there is no god but the boss, be they department chair, dean, provost, trustee, or external government bureau. And the boss judges value based on productivity above all.

ALTHOUGH NORTH signals his wariness of pendular or cyclic historiography, it’s difficult for his readers not to feel that academic literary study has returned to BC — “before criticism.” There is still supposed to be an object out there in the world called “literature” with inherent properties, this time of a political rather than aesthetic nature. One studies literature not for oneself but for the sake of these objects. As before, there is a canon or canons, even if the old canon is now more of an index — dangerous books to be read under proper supervision with neutralizing doses of the anticanonical, itself now a canon of its own. As in the past, the free play of textual interpretation and analysis is often foreclosed by extra- and intracurricular power relations and by the economic and status anxieties attendant on them. Regardless of content, the principles and practices of literary criticism in our time are only superficially different from the principles and practices of other aspects of society governed by neoliberal attitudes.

At this point I'm suspecting that "neoliberal" is doing rather too much work, certainly for Roth, but perhaps for North as well. Skipping over more stuff, we get to Roth's penultimate paragraph:

What this shows is that a change in institutional emphasis is of greater urgency than yet another revolutionary turn in method or paradigm. Not only must undergraduate education be prioritized, but the aim of a professional degree needs to be reconfigured to include commitments to secondary education. The split between “education” as a professional field that trains teachers for public schools and “literature,” which trains specialists, must be bridged. To enter a graduate program in literature and emerge as a teacher of adolescents, or even children, should be imbued with as much prestige, status, and respect as landing a tenure-track post or prized fellowship, and the methods of selection for these programs changed to include those temperamentally and intellectually suited to general education. On the flip side, this would also require elevating the status of the work secondary school teachers already do, taking the skills of a teacher who specializes in literacy as seriously as the work of a professor of literature.

Hmmmm...Why not!

Ice

Wolfram on complexity and evolution, with some observations on directionality

From my notes, 5.22.2002. Posted originally to Brainstorms.

Wolfram, S. (2002). A New Kind of Science. Champaign, Ill., Wolfram Media, Inc.

Let’s consider some of Wolfram’s remarks on biological evolution. He begins with the following (p. 383):

Biological systems are often cited as supreme examples of complexity in nature, and it is not uncommon for it to be assumed that their complexity must be somehow of a fundamentally higher order than other systems.

And typically it is thought that this must be a consequence of the rather unique processes of adaptation and natural selection that operate in biological systems. But despite all sorts of discussion over the years, no clear understanding has ever emerged of just why such processes should in the end actually lead to much complexity at all.

Wolfram, of course, is going to offer a different view, which I’ll get to in a moment. But first I want to comment on his characterization of biological thinking about evolution.

What I’m wondering is the extent to which those comments characterize what evolutionary biologists actually do in their technical work – whether it be explicating the fossil record, running experiments on peas or fruit flies, or doing computer simulations in population genetics, and so forth — as opposed to what gets said in meta-level statements about methodology and Big Issues. In his notes Wolfram indicates that he’s talked with many biologists and he asserts that “the further one goes from those involved with particular molecular or other details of biological systems the more one encounters a fundamental conviction that natural selection must be the ultimate origin of any important feature of biological systems” (p. 1002).

My (not very well informed) impression is that biologists are mostly indifferent to some notion of complexity (not necessarily to be identified with Wolfram’s notion), while a few are hostile to it, e.g. Stephen J. Gould, and a few are favorable, e.g. John T. Bonner. The discussions which come most immediately to my mind (because these are most relevant to my own work) are meta-level statements by evolutionary psychologists, which certainly do stress the adapted nature and complexity of psychological systems. But, beyond a general commitment to “the computational view of mind,” there is little discussion of the actual neural mechanisms underlying behavior, much less any attempts to characterize their complexity.

[On that score I note that, while human behavior seems vastly more complex than ape behavior, at least in an informal sense of the word, it seems hard to attribute that to a vast increase in complexity of the human brain over that of ape brains. The human brain is mostly larger, because it has many more neurons, but those neurons seem to be arranged in relatively simple ways. I’m inclined to agree with Ralph Holloway that there is some reorganization, but it’s not clear what that is. The human neocortex is certainly more richly folded, and I’m inclined to believe that has computational consequences; but that folding seems mostly the effect of the physical constraints of fitting a large cortical sheet into a specific volume. The differences between human and ape brains thus seem structurally simple.]

In any event, Wolfram is going to argue that complexity seems easy to come by and that we have no reason to believe that organisms are tightly adapted to their environments. The notion that complexity is easy to come by, of course, is one of the key ideas of this book: simple programs can produce complex behavior. In general, we cannot predict how programs will behave. Rather, we have to put them in operation and see what happens.

Wolfram makes a general argument that we see lots of regular patterns in organisms and that the underlying components (ultimately cells) of different organisms are drawn from a relatively small repertoire. I’m in no particular position to dispute this claim. He then goes on to wonder (386):

But just how are the programs for these and other features of organisms actually determined? Over the past century or so it has become almost universally believed that at some level these programs must end up being the ones that maximize the fitness of the organism, and the number of viable offspring it produces. . . . if one assumes that the program for each new offspring involves small random mutations then this means that over the course of many generations biological evolution will in effect carry out a random search for programs that maximize the fitness of an organism.

This is where he’s going to launch his attack. He refers to an earlier discussion of constraint satisfaction (which I have not read) where (p. 386)

for sufficiently simple constraints — particularly continuous ones — iterative random searches can converge fairly quickly to an optimal solution. But as soon as the constrains are more complicated this is no longer the case. And indeed even when the optimal solution is comparatively simple it can require an astronomically large number of steps to get even anywhere close to it.

He simply does not believe it makes sense to talk of evolution as involving a search for optimal solutions to adaptive problems. Most of the observed features of organisms simply (386) “represent solutions that were fairly easy to find, but are good enough not to cause fatal problems for the organism.” As far as Wolfram is concerned, relatively simple underlying processes make available a vast well of complexity from which organisms may draw, and thus “the vast majority of the complexity we see in biological systems has its origin in the purely abstract fact that among randomly chosen programs many give rise to complex behavior” (388). Correlatively “it is comparatively coarse features that tend to determine the success of an organism — not all the details of any complex behavior that may occur” (388).

From yesterday's shoot: Graffiti

The nation-state and capitalism

Writing in Aeon, Dani Rodrik observes:

The populist revolt of our day reflects the deep rift that has opened between the worldview of the global intellectual and professional elites, and that of ordinary citizens. These two groups now live in parallel social worlds and orient themselves using different cognitive maps. Yet the intellectual consensus that brought us to this chasm remains intact. Proposed remedies among mainstream thought leaders rarely go beyond an invocation of the problem of inequality, and a bit more focus on compensating the losers.

But the problem lies deeper, in elites’ attachment to a globalist mindset that underplays and weakens the nation-state. Without a shift, we might find not only our open global economy, but also our liberal, democratic order swept away by the backlash wrought by the blind spots and excesses of this mindset.

Among the intelligentsia, the nation-state finds few advocates. Most often, it is regarded as ineffectual – morally irrelevant, or even reactionary – in the face of the challenges posed by globalisation. Economists and centrist politicians tend to view globalism’s recent setbacks as regrettable, fuelled by populist and nativist politicians who managed to capitalise on the grievances of those who feel they have been left behind and deserted by the globalist elites. Last October, the British prime minister Theresa May ignited an outcry when she disparaged the idea of global citizenship. ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world,’ she said, ‘you’re a citizen of nowhere.’

Markets need regulatory and legitimising institutions to thrive – consumer-safety rules, bank regulations, central banks, social insurance and so on. When it comes to providing the arrangements that markets rely on, the nation-state remains the only effective actor, the only game in town. Our elites’ and technocrats’ obsession with globalism weakens citizenship where it is most needed – at home – and makes it more difficult to achieve economic prosperity, financial stability, social inclusion and other desirable objectives. As we’ve all seen, elite globalism also opens political paths for Right-wing populists to hijack patriotism for destructive ends.

A principled defense:

A principled defence of the nation-state would start from the proposition that markets require rules. Markets are not self-creating, self-regulating, self-stabilising or self-legitimising, so they depend on non-market institutions. Anything beyond a simple exchange between neighbours requires investments in transportation, communications and logistics; enforcement of contracts, provision of information, and prevention of cheating; a stable and reliable medium of exchange; arrangements to bring distributional outcomes into conformity with social norms; and so on. Behind every functioning, sustainable market stands a wide range of institutions providing critical functions of regulation, redistribution, monetary and fiscal stability, and conflict management. These institutional functions have so far been provided largely by the nation-state.

Postmodern matryoshka dolls

Close reading? You really mean it? Just what is “close”? And “reading”?

Back on July 25, 2011 Andrew Goldstone made a post at Stanford’s Arcade: Close Reading as Genre [1]. It began:

Just what is that infamous thing, a close reading?

I have recently been seething with irritation at a certain scholarly book. Tempting as it would be to use the internet for its natural purpose and gripe about that book in detail, I am instead going to channel my energies into something with a little more intellectual value. The source of my irritation, you see, is that this book exaggerates to a fault—an incredibly irritating fault—all the virtues of “good” close reading. But what do I mean by that, my rational self asks my (normally dominant) griping self? Hmm. Fair question, rational self.

Close reading, ostensibly widely taught and widely practiced in literature programs, remains a bit of an enigma. It is learned mostly by imitation, and like pornography, it is most often distinguished by an “I know it when I see it” test. Now this just means that professional literary scholars, and our apter students, internalize the rules for doing close reading without ever needing to make them fully explicit. And what I’d like to do with this post is make a first stab at enumerating some of those rules—and try to provoke you, dear readers close, distant, suspicious, generous, and otherwise, to help me expand and refine the list. 

So he proceeds to make his list, enumerating 19 characteristics of this rough beast, close reading.

Down in the comments Natalia Cecire observes:

What we're teaching, of course, is not the reading (“close”) so much as the writing (of close reading), as you suggest, and I find the distinction you're making useful. But the “so much” is key, too: the kind of writing that we call a kind of reading is one of those privileged sites where the practice of writing and the practice of reading converge. That is, there's something about the writing that we call “close reading” that is so close to reading that we just go ahead and call it reading.

She too is a bit skeptical about this reading business. Let me suggest that there is, in fact, NOTHING IN PARTICULAR that’s special about this kind of writing “that we just go ahead and call it reading.” We do it out of convention. The convention had been long established by the time Goldstone and Cecile entered the profession, but it hadn’t become completely stabilized at the time I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins (1965-1969). I remember wondering to myself “Why are they calling this interpretive activity a kind of reading?”

Another passage, this one from a 2003 essay by Tony Jackson [2]:

That is, a literary interpretation, if we are allowed to distinguish it as a distinct kind of interpretation, joins in with the literariness of the text. Literary interpretation is a peculiar and, I would say, unique conjunction of argument and literature, analytic approach and art form being analyzed. (p. 202)

There we have it, Cecire’s privileged site “where the practice of writing and the practice of reading converge.” Same trope, different words.

Now let us go back in time, to Geoffrey Hartman’s 1975 collection, The Fate of Reading. In the title essay Hartman is grappling with the fact that, no matter how intensely critics are oriented toward the texts of which they write, that very act of writing requires distance from those texts. One cannot write about the text if and while one is immersed in reading it. Complaining that contemporary theorists—mostly French or under French influence—have come to privilege such writing over reading, Hartman asks (p. 272):  “To what can we turn now to restore reading, or that conscious and scrupulous form of it we call literary criticism?” Hartman then observes: “modern ‘rithmatics’—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism—are not the solution. They widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing.”

He’s right about those modern ‘rithmatics’. But are they really all that different with respect to this magical mystical closeness than other analytical techniques? When you’re writing a critical essay, fer chrissakes! – as Cecire observes – you’re writing, not reading – though you may dip into passages from your primary text from time to time. I submit that what is lost, and hence must be restored, is not so much that mystical communion, but the nostalgic rhetorical stance that such textual communion is the proper and possible end of literary criticism.

And that, I believe, is why structuralism and linguistics were rejected by literary critics in the mid-1970s. Whatever philosophical reasons were given – scientism, reductionist, naïve – they were mostly intellectual cover. The real reason was that, by directly focusing on language as such, they exposed the trope of closeness for what it was, a convention. Us critics are examining someone else’s language, and examining it is not the same as simply and directly reading it.