Stupid Foucauldianism, stupid cognitivism, and just plain stupid

Readers of What is Symbology? will not take long to recognize that the salutary challenge Tedward Tevan Tevans-Britchard has just issued to, at least, a certain kind of Foucault-derived social constructivism, in particular his remark that "making 'the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness' seems to necessarily imply a blank slate view of human cognition, which would obviously be wrong," ties in directly to a point made by Twinglebrook-Hastings some time ago about Benway's and my initial and mistaken identification of "ourselves" (while at work on the Generative Grammar) with what we later identified as the paragnostic-"Judith Butler" subject position: that which denies the referential function of the code, but asserts its social efficacy and relevance. That is to say, the position adopted in the average anthropology seminar, according to our colleague, is indeed precisely that of "Judith Butler." That same position coincides, essentially, with the hegemonic ideology of contemporary literary studies, which I assume to overlap in a number of ways with that to which Tevans-Britchard alludes in anthropology (the fact that the predominant operative mentality of the post-Saussurean humanities matches up exactly with the excluded subject position of the symbological novel, of course, neatly recapitulates our founding opposition of Symbology and Semiotics). Judith Butler (the theoretician, not the subject position) is, at least for propadeutic purposes, a useful concrete universal here: it is hard to read her as adopting anything other than a "blank slate" model; concretely, she explicitly denies the claim that something socially constructed and contingent like gender has any constraints placed on it by any fixed and empirically verifiable body of the sort known to biology, and argues, more or less, that the body itself is historically and socially produced by the intersecting discourses that inscribe it in social reality. Now, I think there are meaningful and interesting ways of talking about the body being a social product (Margaret Lock's work could be read in this way), but the cast given to Butler's claims among literary academics is generally vigorously and axiomatically anti-biological and assumes that any consideration of biological data is inherently heteronormative and reactionary. I am genuinely not sure if Butler herself would agree with this, but it is certainly the way most literary studies people read her. It is also the way they read Foucault, for the most part, and in fact I think they see him mainly as the originator of Butler's position. This is of no small importance since Foucault is probably the most read and cited authority in literary studies at the moment (as a somewhat arbitrary but not unmeaningful test of this claim I just verified that the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism dedicates 55 pages to Foucault's writings, beaten only by his sometime nemesis Derrida with 62 pages [cf. Plato with 53, Freud with 46, Aristotle with 35]).

Interestingly, the main problem Foucault presents to literary scholars, committed as they all claim to be to liberation struggles, is that his model of the social field does not seem to present the possibility of a meaningful resistance that is not always already co-opted by power, since power, in the regime of "micro-physics" characteristic of modernity for Foucault, thrives precisely on the proliferation of resistance. We can debate whether this reading is correct or not, but it is certainly widely understood to be a dilemma, and people ranging from Butler to Spivak tend to be brought in as a kind of supplement to show us how, in fact, there can be meaningful resistance to power after all. I have always found it instructive to read this entire endlessly debated pseudo-problem of power and resistance as an allegory of the "schlechtes Gewissen" of the academic humanities: that is to say, all of the tedious hand-wringing concerning whether discourses necessarily carried out under the auspices of hierarchical, oppressive institutional frameworks can, in fact, alter those frameworks for the better or whether they must ultimately be reducible to the control agendas of the institutions in which they operate, primarily concerns the evident impotence and irrelevance of this debate itself, and the fact that, whatever we make of Foucault's inability to account for social change, the entire discourse of "transgression" invested with such ethical force in the contemporary humanities is pretty transparently a mask for power, or at least a bid for symbolic capital on the part of a class and institution whose prestige has been in decline for some time.

My main point is that there is clearly a problem here, akin to that alluded to in anthropology classroom, and that problem is what we might call "stupid Foucauldianism," in allusion to Tevans-Britchard's reference to "stupid cognitivism"; whether or not MF really deserves the association I am assigning to him, he is certainly invoked and relied upon extensively enough by "Judith Butler" (I refer here to the subject position and not the individual) that it is hard not to regard him as the founder of that particular discursivity. In any case, there appears to be a suggestion that (at least in anthropology) attention to biological facts and structures in addition to cultural facts and structures may provide a salutary response to the prevailing tone of conversations in the anthropology classroom. The question, then, is what is the nature of this "in addition to": clearly not in the sense of reducing the historically and socially contingent to the "hard-wired" (or vice versa, a la Butler). Inevitably, I think here of Latour's critique of strong social constructionism as still operating within the constraints of the modern constitution. So the next question for me is what the specific implications of "hybridizing" the humanities in order to escape the "Judith Butler" trap might be. From within the constraints of literary studies, three possibilities come to mind, the first two dishearteningly familiar, the third somewhat nebulous but attractive:

a) students of the Geisteswissenschaften work hard to familiarize themselves with the latest research in cognitive science, brain imaging, etc. On one level this seems to me a laudable goal, if for no other reason than the fact that the cultural prestige such research currently enjoys behooves students of culture to be aware of it (I would say something similar, of course, about why people should read Dan Brown). However, and with a mind to actual applications of such research within literary studies itself I have encountered literally nothing in the way of research projects based upon a familiarization with, e.g., evolutionary biology which are not both preposterously tendentious and depressingly reductivist (see Kramnick on literary Darwinism) in exactly the way vulgar Marxism and vulgar Freudianism were when they were prevalent in literary studies 50-70 years ago. Thus, poor David Copperfield, who was once reduced to either his status as a participant in the class struggle or his position in the Oedipal matrix, may now be appreciated largely in terms of his attempt to pass on his genes (reading about which attempt apparently somehow enhances the reading public's "fitness" too). The question, I suppose, is once we have familiarized ourselves with the vast and controversy-ridden literature, how precisely is it to be put to use. The literary Darwinists certainly give us a good example of what not to do, but this is a lesson we did not really need to learn again since the argument has been made over and over again across the twentieth century, in response to various psychologizing and historicizing agendas, that knowledge about literature should engage with the specific qualities of the literary object, rather than attempting to decode these qualities with reference to the allegedly more solid ground provided by another area of knowledge. The very genealogy of our modern disciplines portends a certain inevitability that the encounter of the "human" with the "hard" sciences will generally be understood as the reduction of the terms of the former to the terms of the latter. For Baumgarten, aesthetics was the science of "confused ideas" as opposed to Descartes's clear and distinct ones. While he and other early students of aesthetics were convinced that the "confused" sensations associated with aesthetic cognition could not be resolved into the clear and distinct, the modern truth regime has generally placed this position under a permanent suspicion (this is more or less the subject of the interesting and neglected oeuvre of Brazilian cultural critic Luiz Costa Lima).

b) students of the Geisteswissenschaften alter some or all of their research practices in order to find ways of integrating/allying themselves with, say, the biological and cognitive sciences. We find a version of this, of course, in Joshue Knobe's experimental philosophy project (which we have already made fun of pretty extensively). Beyond Knobe's imbecility, the main problem here would be that any imaginable research program of this sort could already be carried out within a cognitive science department anyway, so it is unclear what the point of having a separate discipline of literary studies would even be at this point. The objection obviously applies to literary Darwinism, which if it has to exist at all as far as I can tell is best suited to be a kind of journalistic ancillary discourse to evolutionary psychology (again, if it has to exist at all). The point is that all of its "truths" (adaptation, fitness, selection, etc.) are drawn from research carried out in other realms and can clearly in no way be derived from the object supposedly under examination. Thus, this approach, rather than entailing any hybridization, leaves the modern constitution intact, to the detriment of the humanities.

c) (and I hope it is evident that I regard this as the only promising possibility) we continue the interrogation of disciplinary boundaries demanded by people like Latour. In other words, the founding definition of aesthetics as a science of "confused" ideas, in direct opposition to the clear ideas of nature obtained by Newtonian physics, is an obvious manifestation of the fundamental gesture of the modern constitution. The distinction has held fast in literary studies more or less to the present day, as indicated by various of the ideologies by which it has defined its own agenda: in an earlier era, as "humanizing" by valuing imagination over hard fact; or, more contemporarily, as having to do with the construction of social (ethnic, gender, etc.) identities, ultimately regarded as a liberating practice of creative self-invention (and that is where bad Foucauldianism sometimes enters the picture); its persistence is also evident in the various reductivist agendas described above, in which the soft, pliable, "confused" material of the literary text may be translated into the lucid language of science, be it quasi-Freudian ego psychology, quasi-Marxist economics, or quasi-Darwinian evolutionary psychology. In any case, examining, as Latour and Schaeffer and Haraway do, how the actors, concepts, and practices that make up the "hard sciences" are always "material-semiotic," in fact involve a tremendously mixed traffic in "clear" and "confused" ideas, narrative and data, imbricated in material, social, and semiotic networks, starts taking us in new directions, undoubtedly. I am inclined to think we have the beginnings of some pretty good answers about how to think about science. What I am still not sure of his how similar attempts to to think in new ways about texts, or for that matter, rituals or architecture; that is, I have seen, for instance, how the study of narrative or ritual might be usefully incorporated into an account of how scientific facts are produced, but I am still trying to figure out how scientific facts, understood as the products of social processes and compacts but no less factual for that, might contribute to the study of narrative or ritual (which, I would think, it should in some sense, if we are to take the dismantling of the modern constitution seriously).