This Is Your Brain on Culture

Norman,

Your position, as I understand it, rests on a fallacy that is quite simple and basic but that is also foundational to a poststructuralist scheme of things. In your response to José Angel, you say, “Either you think texts do things to readers or you think readers construct texts.” That is a false dichotomy. Readers “construct” meanings out of the signals delivered by books. All mental phenomena result from interactions between external stimuli and internal cognitive/perceptual mechanisms. The either/or way of envisioning this interaction forces a false reduction to one or the other side of the elements in the interaction. This fallacy is like saying that a rectangle consists either of width or height You can show that it does not consist of width alone; so you conclude that it consists of height, alone.

This whole way of thinking is a form of scholastic sophistry, useless and sterile. It produces verbal arguments that consist only in fabricated and unnecessary confusions, confusions like that which you produce as your conclusion in the passage you cited from your book: “the reader constructs everything” (p. 176). This conclusion seems plausible because it slyly blends two separate meanings of the word “constructs.” One meaning is that our brains assemble percepts into mental images. That meaning is correct. The other meaning is that our brains assemble percepts that are not radically constrained by the signals produced in the book. That meaning is incorrect. Once you have this kind of ambiguity at work for you, you can shuffle back and forth between the two meanings, sometimes suggesting the quite radical notion that books don’t “impose” any constraints—any meanings—on readers; and sometimes retreating into the safety of the correct meaning: that our brains assemble percepts.

This is a very wide-spread form of sophistical shuffling. There are a few verbal signals that typically indicate the retreat into truism: phrases such as “of course this is not to say.” For instance, “This is by no means to say that texts don’t exist or that readers make it all up out of nothing.”

For anyone who feels it worthwhile to spend a little time on analyzing this kind of sophistry, I can recommend William Cain’s The Crisis in Criticism. He pins down the strategy that consists in two basic moves: the part where you say it, and the part where you take it back. The part where you say it, in Norman’s instance, is the part where you say that texts don’t exercise any constraining force on the mental events of reading--that texts don't "impose" meanings. The part where you take it back is the “This is by no means to say that texts don’t exist or that readers make it all up out of nothing.” In Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), I also give a good deal of attention to this kind of shuffling. I call it “the truistic/radical shuffle.” Truism makes such formulations seem plausible, and radical false reduction gives them some zing.

Again, reading is a mental event that is the result of an interaction between the stimuli produced by the text and the reader’s cognitive/perceptual equipment. That equipment was originally designed by natural selection to make enough sense of the world—to register its physical and social properties—so that humans could survive and reproduce. That’s the key lesson in Konrad Lorenz’s Behind the Mirror. Lorenz takes Kant seriously; we never see the world directly; we see it only in our own mental constructions of it. That’s the starting point for the kind of verbal confusion that is the stock in trade of poststructuralist theory. But Lorenz goes one crucial step further. While agreeing with Kant that our mental experiences are necessarily constrained by our own cognitive “categories,” he locates that observation within an evolutionary context: our cognitive categories evolved in adaptive response to structures in the real world. They evolved to give us access to properties like light, time, shape, mass, hierarchical organization, and causal sequence. Our minds give us relatively reliable information about the properties in the world, specifically, about those properties that, in ancestral environments, were most important to our ability to function effectively. In the modern world, science has vastly extended our basic perceptual and cognitive abilities.

Reading is a mental event that is the result of an interaction between the properties of the text and the reader’s cognitive/perceptual equipment. That mental event does not consist in either the properties of the text, alone, or in the reader’s cognitive perceptual equipment, alone. But there is better and worse reading. We can see the real shape of things better if we are not in a dark room and if we do not have astigmatism. We can understand the structure of meaning in a text better if we know the language in which it is written, if we have relatively abundant information about its sources and contexts, and if we are smart, skilled readers, able to follow out implications, register subtle shades of meaning, and perceive complex thematic and tonal structures that extend over hundreds of pages. Part of being smart, skilled readers is understanding the conventions, linguistic and social, within which a text is written. Another part is having native intuition into elemental passions, having psychological insight into “human nature.”

********

I’ll copy below a paragraph in which I generalize on the kind of confusion I have been describing in Norman’s theoretical formulations. The paragraph is drawn from an essay titled “Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism.” There is a version of the essay in the current issue of New Literary History, but that version does not contain the paragraph copied below. To get the essay past the censors, I had to delete some of its more pungent paragraphs. The unexpurgated version of the essay is included in a forthcoming collection of my more recent essays, Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice.

If literary study continues indefinitely in the poststructuralist vein, it will do so under two forms of degenerative pressure: the inner inanition that is already so frequent a source of complaint among its own practitioners, and the ever-growing prestige and power of the scientific understanding of human nature. Under that external pressure, “Theory” will have to become ever more elusive, avoiding all direct formulation of propositions that obviously conflict with established results of scientific research. The strategy for eluding science need consist only in refinements of a procedure already widely practiced: formulating all propositions simultaneously in two separate versions: the radical and the truistic. The radical version gives the appearance of a substantive proposition startling in its novelty, and the truistic version gives the appearance of logical invulnerability. The blending of the two versions give the delusory appearance of propositions that are both new and true—the holy grail of all research. For instance, “There is no outside the text.” Radical version: “Nothing exists outside of verbal constructs; only verbal constructs exist.” Truistic version: “Everything we can talk about we can talk about only by using words; all our verbally mediated experience is verbally mediated.” The radical version gives a fallacious appearance of profound novelty, suggesting a fundamental alteration in folk epistemology—that is, common sense. The truistic version, mingling indistinguishably with the radical version, invests the radical version with the self-evidence of tautology. When critics make damaging arguments against the radical version, the deconstructor can smoothly retreat into truism. “All I really meant to say was . . . “ or, preemptively, “This is not to say. . . . “ Anyone willing to participate vicariously in the conceptual blur produced by the mingling of the two versions can enjoy the characteristic deconstructive frisson, the little shiver of cognitive pleasure at the manifestation of the Uncanny. To give substance to this frisson, one need only transpose the logic of equivocation into a slightly more concrete proposition: “All identity is socially constructed.” Radical version: “The only constituents of identity are arbitrary social conventions; even something as basic as biological sex is purely and exclusively a construct of arbitrary social conventions.” Truistic version: “Humans are social animals; all human experience is influenced in some way by participation in social life.” In the blur between these two versions, most criticism has persisted now for decades, and could persist into the indefinite future.

Hi Norm,

Though I disagree with Carroll on many deep and fundamental issues, I'm sympathetic to his position on the matter of text and reader. Let me offer a passage in which Michael Bérubé (2004) defends Wolfgang Iser against Stanley Fish:

. . . 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.)

For myself, I've pretty much decided that the chief practical problem before literary studies is to get a better fix on these “uncontestable cognitive acts,” which extend, I believe, above the low-level matters that Bérubé mentions. I believe, in fact, that literary form is all-but uncontestable in the sense the Bérubé has in mind and I've given a rather extensive theoretical and methodological account of that position in a long article in PsyArt, Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form (downloadable PDF here). I've echoed that argument in a post at On the Human (downloadable PDF here).

On the question of the adaptive nature of literature, I've been back and forth on the question in my own mind and, at the moment, do lean toward some adaptive purpose (see this open letter to Steven Pinker, this piece, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility and this post on the autobiographical self). But all arguments on this question are vague, mine included. Our understanding of the neural mechanisms is poor and unable to support strong conclusions. I'm inclined to think that any strong position on the question represents a triumph of intellectual ideology over evidence and understanding.

Michael Bérubé, 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.

Thoughts:

* Do we read texts, or do texts read us, etc? I've taught rhetoric for several years so know a false dichotomy when I see one. The question is analogous to, "What establishes our identity, Nature or Nurture?" or, "What's more important for weight loss, diet or exercise?" Really, I'm amazed that such an either-or has generated so much discourse.

* While I agree with your basic argument, Norm (no evolutionary advantage), I disagree with your definitions. Is there any advantage to "literature"? The word is too loaded; makes me think of a sophomore-level Shakespeare class. So to are "story," and "storytelling." What we're interested in is the question of *narrative* and whether it's as necessary for living as fire, water and shelter. IMHO? I'll invoke Nietzsche (so I'm 130 years outdated) and suggest that narratives--or the process of narrating, narration--are necessary insofar as they allow us to make sense of this swirling chaos we call life. All Art is some attempt at Order out of Chaos. -- But this is quite different than literature-as-entertainment (e.g. Duma Key) or literature-as-an-academic-endeavor (e.g. Ulysses).

From an *evolutionary* perspective, I can think of nothing more worthless--nay, enervating!--than "art for art's sake," or the sort of literature that offers itself up as a sort of curio to be talked about, a trinket. Is it to our species' advantage to analyze and discuss it? If it exercises our brains, perhaps. Okay. But then analysis and discussion of other cultural objects are equally useful (e.g. yesterday's Boise State v. Va. Tech football game).

* Re: evolutionary psychology. If we're gonna buy off on the idea that human beings make certain choices and so by those choices pass on advantageous traits to further generations. ... I'm highly suspicious of any kind of "lit gene." If we've got one, it's latent or recessive! All you've got to do is look at the relatively shabby social status of writers and poets. (Artists are not, by and large, exemplars of robust health & strength.) Quiz: Name 10 World Class Athletes; then, name 10 World Class Poets. Which names come easier? If lit aids in the survivability of our species, it ranks far down. ...

* You wrote: "Pretty clearly, it seems to me, literary Darwinism rests on a familiar wish by literary critics to show the world that literature is useful." Agreed. And, of course! Literary critics are doggedly trying to survive along with the rest of us. I recently got a sneak peek at the Sophomore Lit guidelines at my former university. Among the goals and objectives: teach students that literature is relevant and worthwhile. I'm sympathetic to the sentiment, else I wouldn't reside in an English department. But having to include such a clause among your goals and objectives? Comes off like a sales pitch. Anytime I'm told how important something is or should be, I immediately question its value.

Mr. Carroll wrote:

"This fallacy is like saying that a rectangle consists
either of width or height You can show that it does not
consist of width alone; so you conclude that it consists
of height, alone."

That's an excellent analogy. Another one might be, an
exercise bike is an inanimate object, it does nothing
to keep anyone in shape, it is solely due to the person
who chooses to get use the bike that they are able to
keep fit. Or... a car is an inanimate object, it is
solely because the driver that the transportation takes
place.

Dr. Holland wrote:

"... all picture a literary situation in which the text
imposes something or other on a reader. There is no
psychological backing for this."

Well I don't know... you actually had an excellent post
on this very subject, where you wrote:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/is-your-brain-culture/200904/your-br...

"The results showed a startlingly clear gradation from
the tightly edited Hitchcock (65% ISC) to the looser
Leone film (45%) to the still looser Larry David film (18%)
and finally down to the entirely unedited film (<5%). Wow!
The correlation between ISC and directorial control really
says something about directorial control. The experimenters
conclude that Hitchcock's ability to "orchestrate" responses
in so many brain regions attests to "his notoriously famous
ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds."

Also from the Frontal Cortex:

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/01/avatar.php

"Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that,
when we're engaged in intense "sensorimotor processing" -
and nothing is more intense than staring at a massive
screen with Dolby surround sound while wearing 3-D glasses
- we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists
argue that such "inactivation" allows us to lose ourself
in the movie"

These are both examples of the movie makers imposing
certain physiological responses on their audience.

As for reading:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090128214820.htm

"A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it
means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers
create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes
and movements described in a textual narrative while
simultaneously activating brain regions used to process
similar experiences in real life."

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/this-is-your-brain-on-kafka...

"This Is Your Brain on Kafka"

Once someone chooses to use an exercise bike, the bike
imposes a particular experience on the rider. Similarly,
though a car provides more freedom than an exercise bike,
it still imposes certain experiences on those who choose
to drive a car.

Terry

Last week was excessively busy, hence my delay in responding to all these interesting and challenging comments. I'll do my best to respond to all at once.

You quote me,"“Either you think texts do things to readers or you think readers construct texts.” That is a false dichotomy. Readers “construct” meanings out of the signals delivered by books. All mental phenomena result from interactions between external stimuli and internal cognitive/perceptual mechanisms."

Your last sentence seems accurate to me, but it's important to understand the interactions. There are merely sensory signals that we construct through, for example, the rods and cones of our eyes. But we do not construct reality that way, only what our physiology allows. With literature, meanings involve much more activity on our part than mere perception, and the constructing is more obvious. The word "delivered" suggests a non-constructing reader--at least in my interpretation of what you write.

--With warm regards,

Norm
Norman Holland

Thanks for agreeing. You say, "What we're interested in is the question of *narrative* and whether it's as necessary for living as fire, water and shelter. IMHO? I'll invoke Nietzsche (so I'm 130 years outdated) and suggest that narratives--or the process of narrating, narration--are necessary insofar as they allow us to make sense of this swirling chaos we call life. All Art is some attempt at Order out of Chaos. -- But this is quite different than literature-as-entertainment (e.g. Duma Key) or literature-as-an-academic-endeavor (e.g. Ulysses)."

It seems to me that if we're going to talk about literature, we need to talk about all literature. We English teachers differ too much about our evaluations to have any stable notions of "necesary narratives" and "literature-as-entertainment."

As for "nec essary," what about illiterate societies? What about the huge number of people (some of them highly intelligent people, whom I know) who never read a book? I think they're not finding either good books or bad as necessary as fire, water, and shelter.

--With warm regards,

Norm
Norman Holland

Hi, Bill,

You quote Berube: "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 "

I would certainly agree with that, although I gather you quote it by way of disagreeing with me on the grounds that "Our understanding of the neural mechanisms is poor and unable to support strong conclusions."

I disagree. Yes, we have a lot to learn about the neural mechanisms with which we apprehend literary works. But we know enough now to make some clear statements, and that is the point of LITERATURE AND THE BRAIN.

--With warm regards,

Norm
Norman Holland

Curiously, Terry, of the three passages you quote in the latter half of your posting the first two seem to support my position. As for the third, you'll have to tell me how Kafka stops you from doing or saying anything. If I choose to say that Kafka wrote in French, what stops me from sahing it?

You quote my reporting of Hasson's work with movies, however, seems to the point. In the chapter on Form in LITERATURE AND THE BRAIN, you'll find me agreeing that authors can constrain us by form. The clearest example is omission. What an author doesn't say, I can't respond to. I think Hasson's work with film editing shows that the edited form of film functions in the same way as say the ordering of chapters. The ordering and timing of film scenes, the framing of an image--these things do indeed constrain us.

But they constrain us at a purely physiological level, like the bicycle you bring in. That's not what people intend by literature "delivering" meanings.

(I was about to say, apartly agreeing with you, that you can't read the letters on the page in a different order from the one the author and printer set. But dyslexics do, don't they?)

--With warm regards,

Norm
Norman Holland

I once had occasion to develop these reader-response ideas to a mixed audience of literary people and neurologists. The humanists responded with dismay and the kind of objections you all have been making. (As a reader-response critic, I've heard them often.)

The neurologists were also baffled. However, their puzzlement was, Why is it these literary people "don't get it?"

--with warm regards,

Norm
Norman Holland

P.S. If you're interested, here is a citation to the paper approximately as delivered: "The Power(?) of Literature.: New Literary History 35.3 (Summer 2004): 395-410.

Hi, guys,

I'll be traveling for the next three weeks with only a small netbook. I won't be able to give your comments the attention they deserve. Apologies.

One last salvo. Contrast the phrases, "imposes an experience," "delivered signals," with the phrase "apprehended a text." The last fits the psychology of perception, the first two don't. That's why Fish and I can say, "The reader constructs everything."

Otherwise, I do think we're going over old ground.

--With warm regards,

Norm
Norman Holland

Hi Norm,

In replying to TerryS you assert of such matters as "the ordering and timing of film scenes, the framing of an image" that "they constrain us at a purely physiological level, like the bicycle you bring in. That's not what people intend by literature 'delivering' meanings." I have real problems with your distiction between "pure" physiology and meanings. I don't think such a distinction is very plausible in the current intellectual environment.

But even a crude statement of those problems extends rather beyond the confines of a comment. So I've written a post at my blog, New Savanna, on the issue.

Best,

Bill Benzon

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