Reconstruction in Literary Studies

An Informalist Approach

B. Vescio

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137428837
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Teoría de la crítica literaria

Pointing the way toward a revitalized future for the study of literature, Reconstruction in Literary Studies draws on philosophical pragmatism to justify the academic study of literature. In turn, Vescio connects the changing field to its social function as an institution.

Part I

Informalism vs. Formalism

1

Purposiveness with a Purpose

Post-Darwinian Aesthetics and Literary Studies

For John Dewey, the “spectator theory of knowledge,” which is the main casualty of his reconstruction in philosophy, is a vestige of a prescientific, pretechnological, and predemocratic culture. Specifically, it was the product of the hierarchical society of ancient Greece: “The actual conditions of life in Greece, particularly in Athens, when classic European philosophy was formulated set up a sharp division between doing and knowing, which was generalized into a complete separation of theory and ‘practice.’ It reflected, at the time, the economic organization in which ‘useful’ work was done for the most part by slaves, leaving free men relieved from labor and ‘free’ on that account” (Reconstruction ix–x). The result was an association of knowledge with the kind of pure contemplation available to the leisure classes—the conception of knowledge as an end-in-itself rather than an instrumentality. Reconstruction in philosophy, for Dewey, is an attempt to replace that conception of knowledge with one more suited to modern democratic cultures, one that breaks down the rigid separation of theory from practice. The most important step in that process is to abandon the emphasis on fixity and hierarchy in favor of an emphasis on change and continuity, to abandon a world of fixed ends-in-themselves in favor of a world of ever-shifting instrumentalities. According to Dewey, Darwin is the figure who most clearly showed how to do this, and Dewey concludes chapter 3 of Reconstruction in Philosophy by characterizing that project as an attempt to extend the Darwinian revolution in science to other areas of culture:

Until the dogma of fixed unchangeable types and species, of arrangement in classes of higher and lower, of subordination of the transitory individual to the universal or kind had been shaken in its hold upon the science of life, it was impossible that the new ideas and method should be made at home in social and moral life. Does it not seem to be the intellectual task of the twentieth century to take this last step? When this step is taken the circle of scientific development will be rounded out and the reconstruction of philosophy be made an accomplished fact. (75–76)

Formalism in literary studies may well be seen as a development parallel to that of the spectator theory of knowledge in philosophy, since it also divorces literary value from instrumentality, construing literature as another functionless end-in-itself. In Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey briefly observes that the aesthetic quality in general has traditionally been associated with the same contemplative ideal that inspired the spectator theory of knowledge, seemingly putting traditional conceptions of art at odds with the development of modern science. He concludes, “surely there is no more significant question before the world than this question of the possibility and method of reconciliation of the attitudes of practical science and contemplative esthetic appreciation” (127). But he stops curiously short of proposing a new democratic counterpart in the realm of art for his reconstruction in philosophy. He would not formulate his own solution to that problem until his 1934 book Art as Experience, which, as we will see in Chapter 2, takes a very different tack from his reconstruction in philosophy. Surely, though, it would be possible to reconstruct literary studies for a modern democratic culture along the lines of Dewey’s reconstruction in philosophy. And just as Darwin’s insights serve as the point of departure for Dewey’s replacement of the spectator theory of knowledge, perhaps they could also be the starting point for a replacement of formalist conceptions of literature.

I. Literary Aesthetics as Memetics

There are at least two distinct conceptions of literature that have currency in contemporary American culture.1 One is simply everything written. Under this definition, novels, short stories, poems, plays, and essays certainly count as literature, but so do scientific articles, newspaper stories, and computer instruction manuals. While ancient practices of the oral tradition and recent developments in electronic media may trouble the boundaries of this definition, these issues are not our concern here, since this conception of literature is clearly not the one that informs the institution of literary studies. No matter how the category has been expanded in recent decades, no one who teaches literature believes that his or her object of study includes everything written. Even practitioners of the outgrowth of literary studies known as cultural studies, who do study virtually anything written and much else, have acknowledged this point by coining a new term to describe their practices. The general definition that applies to the “literary” in “literary studies,” then, is the more limited conception of literature in common usage: the definition of literature as written texts possessing aesthetic value. That is to say, literature as it is studied in educational institutions is most generally a branch of art, art in the medium of written language. But what exactly is “art,” and what is “aesthetic value”? Anyone who believes there are simple, noncontroversial answers to these questions must ignore centuries of very contentious debate about them in the branch of philosophy called aesthetics. But an attempt to reconstruct the discipline of literary studies must begin with a consideration of aesthetics.2

For the past two centuries, the philosophy of art has been dominated by the ideas of Immanuel Kant. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith points out, “the topics that dominate the first part of the Critique of Judgment continue to define the domain of formal aesthetics and the text itself remains scriptural within it” (64). Kant consistently places the aesthetic in opposition to instrumental value, defining it in his most famous formulation as “purposiveness without a purpose.”3 From this definition, Kant concludes that the aesthetic quality of an object must be an intrinsic quality, not deriving from any purpose or function outside the object itself and that aesthetic judgment must therefore remain “disinterested.” Smith writes, “as Kant explains, a sensation/judgment of the beauty of some object can rightfully claim objective validity when—but only when—it is independent of any identification of the object’s meaning, purpose, or even existence and is thus also free of emotion, interest, desire, and such compromising gratifications as might be offered by the object’s charm, perfection, ethical goodness, or practicality” (68). This view of art, with its emphasis on the importance of form at the expense of meaning, its requirement of disinterested contemplation, and, above all, its insistence on the intrinsic quality of aesthetic value, is clearly the root of formalist conceptions of literature and literary study.

As Terry Eagleton points out, the aesthetic for Kant is “the contemplation of this pure form of our cognition, of its very enabling conditions” (Ideology 65). This makes his theory of the aesthetic analogous to the epistemological stance Dewey dubbed the “spectator theory of knowledge,” which associated knowledge with contemplation free of purpose. Not surprisingly, some theorists have located the roots of Kant’s theory in the same predemocratic cultural values that Dewey identifies as the source of the spectator theory of knowledge. Smith summarizes Pierre Bourdieu’s important discussion of this point in Bourdieu’s book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979) as follows: “In particular, the ascetic ideals of disinterest, disembodiment, purity, and autonomy that are associated with ‘the Kantian aesthetic’ and exhibited in aristocratic tastes emerge as a symbolic counterpart and active sign of the objective and subjective distance of members of the dominant classes from practical urgency and economic necessity” (75). Interestingly, Dewey finds the same predemocratic impulses behind Kant’s epistemology that Bourdieu finds behind Kant’s aesthetics, writing, “but Kant’s philosophy served to provide an intellectual justification or ‘rationalization’ of subordination of individuals to fixed and ready-made universals, ‘principles,’ laws. Reason and law were held to be synonyms. And as reason came into experience from without and above, so law had to come into life from some external and superior authority” (98). So to the extent that Kantian aesthetics have been the basis for formalist conceptions of literature, Dewey’s diagnosis of the need for reconstruction in philosophy is also an apt diagnosis of the need for reconstruction in a discipline of literary studies that takes formalism for granted. And perhaps just as Dewey’s reconstruction in philosophy begins by applying Darwinian ideas to epistemology, so a reconstruction in literary studies can begin by applying Darwinian insights to aesthetics.

While Dewey locates the roots of a shift in European thought from fixity and intrinsicality to change and relationality as early as Bacon’s identification of knowledge with power, he considers the Darwinian revolution in biology to be the decisive moment in securing that shift in science. His essay on “The Influence of Darwin upon Philosophy” (1909) identifies that influence as “his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life” (8–9). As Dewey notes in Reconstruction in Philosophy, the sense of change championed by Darwin entails a sense of relation: “The laws in which the modern man of science is interested are laws of motion, of generation and consequence. He speaks of law where the ancients spoke of kind and essence, because what he wants is a correlation of changes, an ability to detect one change occurring in correspondence with another. He does not try to define and delimit something remaining constant in change. He tries to describe a constant order of change” (61). Moreover, the constancy modern science seeks is different from the constancy the ancients sought because it is not physical or metaphysical but functional: “In one case, we are dealing with something constant in existence, physical or metaphysical; in the other case, with something constant in function and operation. One is a form of independent being; the other is a formula of description and calculation of interdependent changes” (61). Many other expositors of Darwin have seen his influence as having extended functional, purposive, or instrumental thinking into areas of culture previously dominated by ideas of the intrinsic or the essential. In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995), Daniel Dennett finds in Darwin the roots of what he calls “adaptationist thinking” or functional explanation, which he recommends for widely divergent areas of culture.4 The literary critic and theorist David Bleich also identifies Darwin as the inspiration for instrumentalist thinking in the humanities, saying that Darwin introduced “originological” or “motivational” logic to them (162–63). Rudolph Arnheim has described the implications of evolutionary theory for the humanities as follows: “Everything a human being or an animal or a plant is or does or strives for serves the purpose of survival; in other words, it is purposive with regard to the enhancement of life. This holds true for the human mind. Everything about the human mind, including its very existence, and everything produced by the human mind must be reducible to the enhancement of life” (233). Extending this Darwinian revolution to the philosophy of art would surely provide the impetus for an abandonment of the Kantian formalism that has dominated the field in the twentieth century, leading the way to a reconstruction of literary studies that is better adapted to a democratic culture.

Perhaps the most promising gestures toward such a reconstruction of the aesthetic can be found in one of the most respected and influential books on the implications of Darwin’s ideas, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976). In this book, Dawkins dispels a number of misconceptions about Darwin’s theory—most notably, the popular idea that the struggle for survival that provides the impetus for natural selection in biology is primarily either a struggle among individual organisms or a struggle among species. Instead, as the title of his book suggests, Dawkins argues that the survival interests of individual genes are what fuel the mechanism of natural selection. One consequence of this position is that natural selection as Darwin describes it is not necessarily confined to the domain of biological evolution through genetic transmission. Instead, Dawkins believes that Darwin’s theory describes how evolution occurs in any system in which “replicators,” like genes, are forced to compete for survival. In chapter 11, Dawkins makes a bold attempt to extend the theory to the domain of human cultural transmission. He suggests that the development of human language and culture has introduced a new kind of replicator into the world, a replicator he dubs the “meme,” whose distinct pattern of evolution can affect and sometimes even combat genetic, biological evolution. Dawkins’s notions of memes and a new science to study them, called “memetics,” suggest some starting points in a post-Darwinian reconstruction of aesthetics.

Dawkins defines a meme as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (192). Examples of memes would include a line of poetry, a melodic passage or theme, a technique in painting or filmmaking, an advertising slogan, or even a philosophical or scientific idea, like Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection itself.5 Memes are replicators in the same way that genes are because they multiply through a form of reproduction, even though their form of reproduction is cultural transmission rather than the physiological method of transmission employed by genes. Just as genes use the bodies of living organisms as their vehicles of survival, so memes use human brains, and their technological extensions in various forms of information storage, as their vehicles for survival. In the same way our bodies are constituted by our genes, so our minds are constituted by our memes to the extent that they are composed of our hopes, fears, beliefs, desires, and other mental states. When we are born, we inherit the genetic dispositions of our ancestors, and when we learn a language and the values, customs, and traditions of our parents and their cultures, we inherit the memetic dispositions of our ancestors. Thereafter, our store of memes continues to grow and change as we are influenced by the various forms of cultural transmission we encounter. But just as genes struggle for survival by competing with one another for the limited space in the DNA of surviving organisms, so memes struggle for survival by competing for the limited space in human brains and their extensions. As Dawkins says, “if a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes. Other commodities for which memes compete are radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper column-inches, and library shelf-space” (197).

One subset of what Dawkins calls memes, of course, is the category of cultural productions designated as works of art, and Dawkins’s idea of memes has interesting implications for the philosophy of art. In the first place, it confirms the widely held assumption that the ability of artworks to survive over time is an indication of their value. At first blush, the idea that the survival of memes indicates their value might look like an application of Spencer’s view of evolution rather than Darwin’s. In his essay “Rationality and Cultural Difference” (1992), Richard Rorty contrasts Spencer’s “triumphalist” version of evolution, which “provided a universalistic criterion of the ‘health’ or ‘goodness’ of an evolutionary or cultural development,” with Darwin’s, which denies that the triumph of genes or memes is evidence of a “right” to triumph and holds “tautologously, that what survives survives” (191–92). Rorty notes that Dewey preferred Darwin’s version because it fully embraces contingency, while Spencer’s version smuggles metaphysical ideas of fixity into the story of evolution. Daniel Dennett also warns against a Spencerian interpretation of memes in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, saying that, as in the case of genes, “whether or not the meme replicates successfully is strictly independent of its epistemological virtue; it might spread in spite of its perniciousness, or go extinct in spite of its virtue” (364). On the other hand, Dennett points to a crucial difference between memes and genes that does associate the survival of memes with their value: “It is no accident that the memes that replicate tend to be good for us, not for our biological fitness . . . but for whatever it is we hold dear. And never forget the crucial point: the facts about whatever we hold dear—our highest values—are themselves very much a product of the memes that have spread most successfully” (364–65). He goes on to say, “the haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes” (365). So the survival of memes is an indication of their value in a way that it is not for genes because memes adapt to their particular environment—the human mind—by weaving themselves into the hopes, fears, beliefs, and desires that constitute that environment and directly serving the complex purposes of human beings.

This conception of memes avoids the problems with Spencer’s version of evolution because it eschews universality. As Rorty points out, Dewey’s idea of history as a story of increasing freedom, for example, “is merely saying that, given the evaluative hierarchy provided by our memes . . . past events and future possibilities are usefully connected by a dramatic narrative of increasing freedom” (“Rationality” 191). So the theory of memes explains why the survival of works of art over time is evidence of their value, though not of anything like universal value. While traditional aesthetic theories typically attribute the “timelessness” of great works of art to their universality—what remains constant through generations and across cultures—the memetic theory attributes their ability to survive to the same quality that allows genes to survive: their flexibility or adaptability to constantly changing environmental conditions. As Dawkins says, “the success that a replicator has in the world will depend on what kind of a world it is” (265), on what kind of environment it inhabits. This difference between universality and flexibility as criteria of aesthetic value is a result of the difference between traditional aesthetic theories’ focus on unchanging, intrinsic, essential qualities of the work of art and the Darwinian tendency to emphasize shifting, extrinsic, functional qualities.

Another way in which Dawkins’s Darwinian conception of art encourages us to think of the aesthetic in instrumental or functional terms is by suggesting that the way many kinds of memes propagate themselves is through various institutions in society. Just as genes typically ensure their survival by making themselves indispensable to the purposes of their host organisms—as with the genes that produce sharp teeth and claws, camouflage coloring, and big brains—so memes typically ensure their survival by satisfying the purposes of their host brains. Because memes are social products, the purposes they satisfy will tend to be social purposes, so we should expect memes to express themselves in useful social institutions in the same ways that genes express themselves through useful physiological traits. Among those institutions are the ones that constitute our academic disciplines—each discipline designed to transmit and preserve a particular category of memes. So, for example, Dawkins says that we come to recognize memes as “scientific” only when they receive significant mention in scientific journals: “If the meme is a scientific idea, its spread will depend on how acceptable it is to the population of individual scientists; a rough measure of its survival value could be obtained by counting the number of times it is referred to in successive years in scientific journals” (194). Academic disciplines, then, become the mechanisms by which we sort out memes by the specific social functions they perform. In this way, Dawkins’s post-Darwinian account of cultural productions suggests that we look for the definition of a category of memes (like that of “literature”) by examining the social functions of the particular institutions (like those of literary studies) that provide their primary means of survival.

One consequence of this post-Darwinian aesthetic that might be troubling to humanists is that it makes the study of art a branch of “memetics,” and thus raises the specter of reductionism. If artworks are conceived as sets of replicators that evolve by natural selection, doesn’t the study of art become the task of scientists? Dawkins certainly seems to believe that memetics can, and should, be a scientific discipline. The key assumption that leads him to that conclusion is the assumption that memes must be identical to brain structures: “DNA is a self-replicating piece of hardware. Each piece has a particular structure, which is different from rival pieces of DNA. If memes in brains are analogous to genes they must be self-replicating brain structures, actual patterns of neuronal wiring-up that reconstitute themselves in...