The Problematic of Description

From five years ago....

We can frame the problematic of description with a remark David Bordwell made while discussing the state of film criticism. Following Monroe Beardsley, he divides the critic’s activities into four categories, description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. He then characterizes reviews, critical essays, and academic articles with respect to those four categories of activity. All of them employ description. Beyond that, the sense of his usage is that description is the most primitive of elementary of these activities.

In Bordwell’s recasting:

Critics describe artworks. Film critics summarize plots, describe scenes, characterize performances or music or visual style. These descriptions are seldom simply neutral summaries. They’re usually perspective-driven, aiding a larger point that the critic wants to make. A description can be coldly objective or warmly partisan.

The question I want to pose is whether or not neutral, if you will, objective, description is possible. While the issue interests me in its full generality, I’ve been particularly concerned about the descriptive characterization of literary texts. In the extreme, of course, we have that sort of postmodernism that tends to insist the text itself is just a bunch of marks on a surface and it’s all interpretation from there.

For those interested in, say, machine vision, that in itself is a practical, and difficult problem. It is one thing to train a computer to recognize mechanically printed text; that is now routine business. But computer recognition of handwriting is still a difficult problem. That is to say, in that particular intellectual context, merely recognizing the words on the page (or, for that matter, speech sounds in the air) is a deep and challenging problem. It is by no means obvious, however, that such an attitude is reasonable for the general practice of literary criticism. Is it possible to characterize plot structures and semantic structures in a way that is neutral and objective?

Therein lies the problem. In the penultimate chapter of Is There a Text in This Class? Stanley Fish takes up Stephen Booth’s work on Shakespeare’s sonnets, noting that Booth disavows any interpretive aims but declares that he intends simply to describe the sonnets. Fish observes (p. 353):

The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all. The claim, however, is an impossible one since in order “simply to present” the text, one must at the very least describe it . . . and description can occur only within a stipulative understanding of what there is to be described, an understanding that will produce the object of its attention.

That is to say, Booth, among others Fish discusses, seems to be claiming that description is not a starting point, but the end point. And further, that it has unmediated access to the text, something we know, in fact, to be impossible. There is no description without (logically prior) interpretive activity of some sort. Literary texts, whatever they are, are exceedingly complex. Just what we describe, and how we describe it, these are not simple matters.

 

We must realize, however, that there is interpretation and there is interpretation. It is disingenuous of Fish to pretend that all interpretive acts are equally problematic. Michael Bérubé makes this point in “There is Nothing Inside the Text, or, Why No One’s Heard of Wolfgang Iser”, Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise, edited by Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham (SUNY, 2004), pp. 11-26.

... It would have been possible, in other words, to contest Fish’s reading of Iser not by stubbornly insisting on the determinacy of the determinate, and not, good Lord, by insisting on two separate varieties of determinacy and assigning “interpretation” to one of them, but by acknowledging that all forms of reading are interpretive but that some involve the kind of low-level, relatively uncontestable cognitive acts we engage in whenever we interpret the letter “e” as the letter “e,” and some involve the kind of high level, exceptionally specific and complex textual manipulations, transformations and reconfigurations involved whenever someone publishes something like S/Z – or Surprised by Sin. (And, of course, that there are any number of “interpretations” that fall between these extremes, and that the status of each of them is – what else? – both open to and dependent on interpretation.)

That’s what I’m looking for, “uncontestable cognitive acts.” Whether or not they’re low level, that’s another matter. What’s important is that Bérubé bounds them by contrasting them (différance at work) with the “exceptionally specific and complex textual manipulations, transformations and reconfigurations involved whenever someone publishes” professional interpretive criticism.

That’s the problematic of description, to forge a methodology from those uncontestable cognitive acts even if we have to consult new sources of disciplinary inspiration to do so.

* * * * *

I have long since made peace with the idea the meaning is irreducibly subjective not so much in the sense that it is idiosyncratically variable among persons–that may be true, but it’s secondary–but in the primary sense that meaning exists only IN the minds of subjects. Hermeneutic procedures always transform and translate meaning into other terms, terms which are themselves subjective.

But it is far from obvious that hermeneutic translation of meaning is the only sophisticated analytical instrument we have. I believe, for example, that in his work on myth in Mythologies, Levi-Strauss pointed the way to non-translational analytic strategies (cf. Distant Reading in Lévi-Strauss and Moretti) and I believe that I’ve demonstrated such strategies in my work on “Kubla Khan” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” and in other work as well. What I have taken to calling naturalist criticism can only be built on a foundation of descriptive work.

Fountain with droplets

Just a reminder, American Heartache

Eric Weinstein sees the need for hypercapitalism linked with hypersocialism

Sean Illing interviews Eric Weinstein (who, incidentally, coined the term the "intellectual dark web") in Vox. From the introduction:

Weinstein’s thinking reflects a growing awareness in Silicon Valley of the challenges faced by capitalist society. Technology will continue to upend careers, workers across fields will be increasingly displaced, and it’s likely that many jobs lost will not be replaced.

Hence many technologists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are converging on ideas like universal basic income as a way to mitigate the adverse effects of technological innovation.

On capitalism and socialism:

Sean Illing

Let's talk about that. What does a hybrid of capitalism and socialism look like?

Eric Weinstein

I don't think we know what it looks like. I believe capitalism will need to be much more unfettered. Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based.

By the same token, we have to understand that our population is not a collection of workers to be input to the machine of capitalism, but rather a nation of souls whose dignity, well-being, and health must be considered on independent, humanitarian terms. Now, that does not mean we can afford to indulge in national welfare of a kind that would rob our most vulnerable of a dignity that has previously been supplied by the workplace.

People will have to be engaged in socially positive activities, but not all of those socially positive activities may be able to command a sufficient share of the market to consume at an appropriate level, and so I think we're going to have to augment the hypercapitalism which will provide the growth of the hypersocialism based on both dignity and need.

Sean Illing

I agree with most of that, but I’m not sure we’re prepared to adapt to these new circumstances quickly enough to matter. What you’re describing is a near-revolutionary shift in politics and culture, and that’s not something we can do on command.

Eric Weinstein

I believe that once our top creative class is unshackled from those impediments which are socially negative, they will be able to choose whether capitalism proceeds by evolution or revolution, and I am hopeful that the enlightened self-interest of the billionaire class will cause them to take the enlightened path toward finding a rethinking of work that honors the vast majority of fellow citizens and humans on which their country depends.

Beyond the 'two cultures'

Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule, The ‘Two Cultures’ Fallacy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 1, 2018. Final three paragraphs:

As researchers from the Institute for the Future suggested in their "Future Work Skills 2020" report, "While throughout the 20th century, ever-greater specialization was encouraged, the new century will see transdisciplinary approaches take center stage." Projects that bring together scientists, engineers, artists, humanists, and social scientists in ways that bridge traditional disciplinary divides produce fresh approaches to complex questions. New knowledge requires new forms of education. Where 20th-century paradigms of teaching and learning emphasized disciplinary specialization, we now need "a new culture of learning" — to quote the title of Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s 2011 book.

The challenge we face as educators is how to restore imagination and creativity to students who have come to associate education with the lack of those qualities. Rather than offering lip service and window dressing, we need to step far outside our dominant models of learning, thinking, and living. Schools discourage creative thinking, the educator Ken Robinson observes, in large part through their tendency to elevate "some disciplines over others." To counter this, he suggests, "we need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects."

Rather than reinforce boundaries between disciplines and the value-laden hierarchies that keep them in place, we need to accept that studies in "imagination" and "humanity" are no less vital to work and citizenship than those of "facts" and "machines." This is the time for humanists and scientists, fuzzies and techies, to overcome the divisions of knowledge, culture, and value that separate them. Doing so will transform the disciplines themselves, and displace the oppositional framework that has for so long defined and divided them.

What is India, a nation, an empire?

Arundhati Roy, In What Language does Rain Fall over Tormented Cities?, Raiot, June 28, 2018. This is the text of the W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation, delivered June 5, 2018, The British Library, London.

I fell to wondering what my mother tongue actually was. What was—is—the politically correct, culturally apposite, and morally appropriate language in which I ought to think and write? It occurred to me that my mother was actually an alien, with fewer arms than Kali perhaps but many more tongues. English is certainly one of them. My English has been widened and deepened by the rhythms and cadences of my alien mother’s other tongues. (I say alien because there’s not much that is organic about her. Her nation-shaped body was first violently assimilated and then violently dismembered by an imperial British quill. I also say alien because of the violence unleashed in her name on those who do not wish to belong to her (Kashmiris, for example), as well as on those who do (Indian Muslims and Dalits, for example), makes her an extremely un-motherly mother.

How many tongues does she have? Officially, approximately 780, only twenty-two of which are formally recognized by the Indian Constitution, while another thirty-eight are waiting to be accorded that status. Each has its own history of colonizing or being colonized. There are few pure victims and pure perpetrators. There is no national language.

And what is India?

Fundamentally, India is in many ways still an empire, its territories held together by its armed forces and administered from Delhi, which, for most of her subjects, is as distant as any foreign metropole. If India had broken up into language republics, like countries in Europe, then perhaps English could be done away with. But even still, not really, not any time soon. As things stand, English, although it is spoken by a small minority (which still numbers in the tens of millions), is the language of mobility, of opportunity, of the courts, of the national press, the legal fraternity, of science, engineering, and international communication. It is the language of privilege and exclusion. It is also the language of emancipation, the language in which privilege has been eloquently denounced. Annihilation of Caste by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the most widely read, widely translated, and devastating denunciation of the Hindu caste system, was written in English. It revolutionized the debate on perhaps the most brutal system of institutionalized injustice that any society has ever dreamed up. How different things would have been had the privileged castes managed to contain Ambedkar’s writing in a language that only his own caste and community could read. Inspired by him, many Dalit activists today see the denial of a quality English education to the underprivileged (in the name of nationalism or anticolonialism) as a continuation of the Brahmin tradition of denying education and literacy—or, for that matter, simply the right to pursue knowledge and accumulate wealth—to people they consider “shudras” and “outcastes.” To make this point, in 2011 the Dalit scholar Chandra Bhan Prasad built a village temple to the Dalit Goddess of English. “She is the symbol of Dalit Renaissance,” he said. “We will use English to rise up the ladder and become free forever.”

Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, "has been—is being—translated into forty-eight languages."

Given the setting of the novel, the Hindi and Urdu translations are, in part, a sort of homecoming. I soon learned that this did nothing to ease the task of the translators. To give you an example: The human body and its organs play an important part in The Ministry. We found that Urdu, that most exquisite of languages, which has more words for love than perhaps any other language in the world, has no word for vagina. There are words like the Arabic furj, which is considered to be archaic and more or less obsolete, and there are euphemisms that range in meaning from “hidden part,” “breathing hole,” “vent,” and “path to the uterus.” The most commonly used one is aurat ki sharamgah. A woman’s place of shame. As you can see, we had trouble on our hands. Before we rush to judgment, we must remember that pudenda in Latin means “that whereof one should feel shame.” In Danish, I was told by my translator, the phrase is “lips of shame.” So, Adam and Eve are alive and well, their fig leaves firmly in place.

H/t 3 Quarks Daily.

Could Moby Dick have etched this on his own tooth?

Quick notes on ‘meaning’ in literary texts

When a literary critic explicates the ‘meaning’ of a literary text, what is it that they are doing? What is the relationship between the meaning thus explicated and the text which is supposed to somehow ‘harbor’ it? A problematic matter, no?

Early in my career I seem to have converged on the idea that this meaning was something one took up in the course of reading the text, but that was not consciously available. So the job of the critic was to state the content of this unconscious meaning. By convention such meanings are said to be ‘hidden’. Hidden how? where?

Psychoanalytic thought provides perhaps the clearest ‘model’ for such an approach. When a psychoanalyst approaches a dream, the dream has a manifest content and it is the analyst’s job to help the patient arrive at its latent content (or meaning). So it is with the critic and the text. The text itself is the manifest content, which can be summarized and paraphrased. The latent content is something else; it must be discovered, dug out if you will, by other means. But when one reads a text that latent content is there in the mind along with the manifest content. It’s just not consciously available.

Thus, when I was in graduate school in the mid-1970s I studied computational semantics/psycholinguistics and created an explicit model of a mind reading a Shakespeare sonnet (#126, The expense of spirit). That model was no more than an intellectual toy, but toys are useful if recognized as such. 1) It was explicit in a way that standard accounts of (literary) reading were not and are not. 2) Whatever it was, it certainly was NOT a reading or an interpretation of the text.

If what happens in the mind is something like what is made explicit in that model, then what are ordinary interpretations? Whatever they are, they don’t seem to be accounts of the inner workings of something that works like that model does.

So then, what are interpretations? They flow from the conviction that there is something important about these texts, their meaning, and that we have to do SOMETHING to register this. That something has turned out to be interpretation. Now, back in the days when I was first learning my craft the argument was often made that the meaning critics find in texts are, in fact, put there by the critics themselves, and so not really in the text at all. And this argument was countered by the argument that the object of critical scrutiny was the author’s intended meaning. But if THAT’s what the author intended, why didn’t they SAY that instead of writing this poem, play, or novel? And so it went, round and round.

The questions have never been answered or resolved. They’ve just, for the most part, been abandoned.

Should we also abandon the activity of interpretation? Perhaps. But only perhaps. If we’re going to continue it we need to come up with a rationale.

Red flowers

Stanley Fish, machine and mechanism, and the poverty of his intentionalist search for meaning

Over on the Humanist Discussion Group we’ve been examining Stanley Fish’s criticisms of, for the most part, computational criticism (which he frames as a criticism of digital humanities as a whole) – check the archives for June 2018 (see entries entitled “Fish'ing for fatal flaws”). I want to look at something closely related, his sense of machine and mechanism.

Mechanism and Intention

In his seminal essay, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics”[1], Fish made a general point that the pattern of expectations, some satisfied and some not, which is set up in reader’s mind in the process of reading literary texts is essential to the meaning of those texts. Hence any adequate analytic method must describe that essentially temporal pattern. Of the proposed method, Fish asserts:

Essentially what the method does is slow down the reading experience so that “events” one does not notice in normal time, but which do occur, are brought before our analytical attentions. It is as if a slow motion camera with an automatic stop action effect were recording our linguistic experiences and presenting them to us for viewing. Of course the value of such a procedure is predicated on the idea of meaning as an event, something that is happening between words and in the reader’s mind...

A bit further on Fish asserts that “What is required, then, is a method, a machine if you will, which in its operation makes observable, or at least accessible, what goes on below the level of self-conscious response.”

What did he mean by that, “a method, a machine”? Clearly he didn’t mean, for example, a steam locomotive, a sewing machine, a dental drill, or any such device. For a long time I’ve conjectured that modern digital computers were resonating in his mind when he wrote that, though he doesn’t mention them anywhere in the essay. But then, when we talk of, for example, a “political machine”, in what sense is THAT a machine? Is Fish using “machine” in a general sense that covers a wide variety of cases, including phenomena other than electromechanical devices?

While Fish doesn’t mention computers in that essay, he does examine some computational stylistics in another essay he wrote at the time, “What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?” and so is necessarily referencing computers, if only indirectly [2]. We thus know that he knows about computers and has thought about them. But I’m more interested in what he said in the essay about an article by the linguist, Michael Halliday, which doesn’t involve computing, but does involve a linguistics system.

After quoting a passage in which Halliday analyses a single sentence from Through the Looking Glass, Fish remarks (p. 80): “When a text is run through Halliday’s machine, its parts are first dissembled, then labeled, and finally recombined in their original form. The procedure is a complicated one, and it requires many operations, but the critic who performs them has finally done nothing at all.” Note, moreover, that he had framed Halliday’s essay as one of many lured on by “the promise of an automatic interpretive procedure” (p. 78), though he doesn’t ascribe that automaticity to a computer.

If one takes Halliday’s “machine” as a crude approximation to the linguistic mind, well it seems to me, then, that you accomplish quite a lot with it. It’s not an interpretation in the usual sense of the word. But, for whatever reason, that doesn’t seem to interest Fish.

Now let’s come forward in time to Fish’s 2015 address to the School of Criticism and Theory, “If You Count It, They Will Come: The Promise of the Digital Humanities”–a video and transcript are online. On page 4 (of the transcript) he says this:

Now writing in a book called The Companion to the Digital Humanities, digital humanist Hugh Craig acknowledges the force of my criticism in the 1970s, but asserts that the more sophisticated techniques now available make possible a new stylistics with what he calls another motivation. And he defines it, the motivation, quote, to uncover patterns of language use, which because of their background quality-- that is, how deeply embedded they are-- or their emergence on a super humanly wide scale, would otherwise not be noticed, unquote.

But if the problem with the old stylistics was that you could not generalize, except illegitimately, from the data, the problem with this new up-to-date stylistics is that it is by no means clear why you should be interested in the data it uncovers at all. Maybe the patterns that have not been noticed before, patterns like the frequency with which particular words appear in the titles of 19th century books through the decades, should have remained unnoticed, because they are nothing more than the artifacts of a machine.

But what machine is he talking about, the computational machine used by the scholar or the “machine”, or the linguistic mind, that produced the text in the first place? I suspect that he means the latter.

Later on, where he is discussing his preferred ‘school’ of interpretation, intentionalism, he says (p. 8):

For an intentionalist, the fact that data mining can uncover hidden patterns undetectable by the mere human reader is cause not for celebration, but for suspicion. A pattern that is subterranean is unlikely to be a pattern that was put there by an intentional agent. And if it wasn't put there by an intentional agent, it cannot have meaning.

Assuming the pattern was really there, then, where’d it come from?

There are a LOT of assumptions in Fish’s statement about “hidden patterns undetectable...reader” and “put there...agent”, and in the question I just asked immediately above, and this is not the place to untangle them all. So I’m going to let those things alone and skip to where I’m going. Fish seems to think we’ve got intentional agents conveying meaning, on the one hand, and that they are distinct from mere mechanical patterns on the other. Can that be right?

Is this a device for bootstrapping our way into a new world order?

Things are (getting) too complicated

In the past few months I've been getting this vague sense that "things are too complicated." It just comes to me, this vague and weak feeling and this indistinct thought: It's too complicated.

What's too complicated, you ask. 

Just things, the way the world is going, various proposals about what we should do about global warming, nuclear weapons and war in general, health care, units of governance (the city, the nation, the world), information systems in keeping track of it all, AI–you know, THINGS.

I don't know where this feeling/thought is going. Maybe nowhere. Maybe not. Who knows. But it keeps coming back.

* * * * *

This, perhaps, is an example, and article about a partnership between Toronto and Google to develop a dozen waterside acres from the ground up.

Outline for Catch-22, I wonder if it's ring-form

Joseph Heller’s Handwritten Outline for Catch-22, One of the Great Novels of the 20th Century https://t.co/vm2hRHyHhd pic.twitter.com/W6RlY90HQj

— Open Culture (@openculture) July 2, 2018

Shaded street not far from the river in Hoboken, NJ

Some paragraphs on postmodernism

John Nerst, Postmodernism vs. The Pomoid Cluster, Areo, June 30, 2018. There is this, by way of initial definition:

Postmodernism is more complicated than it appears, and its details exceed my own knowledge and certainly what can be discussed here. Nevertheless, the most important thing about postmodernism is right there in the name. Post–modernism. It comes after and must be understood as a reaction to modernism. Modernism itself emerged out of premodernism. In the broadest terms, this trio of words is about the social order and the ideas that describe, govern, and constitute it.

In premodernity, the social order and the nature of the world were one and the same and taken for granted. They were handed down to us by tradition, not options for us to engineer. Modernity upended all that. From the Renaissance on, through the increasing importance of science, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, the world changed, and our ideas changed with it. Along with the natural world, the social order was now the object of reason and critique, of control and systematization. This enables, or even ensures, progress with a capital P. But progress has its limits, everything doesn’t get better cost-free, and it isn’t a given carried by historical momentum. There are pitfalls. Things haven’t always been as easy as they appear. Enter postmodernism.

Postmodernism is the disillusion with and the critique of the whole of the modernist project and its assumptions. Progress is not a given, not a law of nature. We can’t answer all questions with science, and no one framework correctly describes society and history. In essence, postmodernism is the idea that there is no one true method, model, ideology, or narrative with the right to dictate facts and mold the social order. Not Christianity, not science, not dialectical materialism. Nothing.

Postmodernism isn’t so much an ideology, a framework, or a system of thought as it is the rejection of ideologies, frameworks, and systems of thought.

And then Nerst works toward an understanding of how "postmodernism" becomes stripped of its substantive intellectual content in the process of popularization:

This article by Matt McManus is illustrative. He argues that lumping Marxism and postmodernism together makes no sense at all and supports this by describing some profound differences between them. He’s right, of course, but the argument misses its target by assuming that all uses of “Marxism” or “postmodern” are meant in a fully detailed, technical sense. Instead, these terms tend to be used like normal words often are: semi-metaphorically, with only some of their properties and associations active. It’s like calling some sad thing a “tragedy,” even though, strictly speaking, it isn’t a Greek morality play that ends with the protagonist in ruin due to a fatal character flaw.