Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness

Paper Minds

Paper Minds

Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness

JONATHAN KRAMNICK

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the

University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57301-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57315-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57329-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226573298.001.0001

Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kramnick, Jonathan Brody, author.

Title: Paper minds : literature and the ecology of consciousness / Jonathan Kramnick.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017060712 | ISBN 9780226573014 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226573151 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226573298 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Criticism. | Consciousness.

Classification: LCC PN81.K696 2018 | DDC 801—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060712

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for Bliss, and also for Arlo, Asta, Belly, Bertie, Phineas, and Timby

Contents

Preface

Paper Minds, an Introduction

PART I  On Method and the Disciplines

1  Are We Being Interdisciplinary Yet?

2  Form and Explanation

with Anahid Nersessian

PART II  Poetry and the Perception of the Environment

3  Presence of Mind

4  On Beauty and Being at Home

PART III  Fictions of Mind

5  Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel

6  Around 2005; or, Two Novels and the Problem of Consciousness

7  Two Kinds of Panpsychism: Margaret Cavendish and Marilynne Robinson

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface

This is a series of connected essays on mind, literary form, ecology, and the disciplines that study them. Each may be read on its own, but the whole has a loose and organized unity. The materials range from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetry and fiction to contemporary philosophy, cognitive science, and literary criticism. My focus throughout is on how the discipline of literary studies can contribute to a broad-based understanding of perceptual consciousness, natural and built environments, and skilled engagement with the world. In this way, the book is also a brief for literature and the humanities at a moment when the authority of each has been challenged on several fronts, from advocates for the STEM disciplines to the managers of the corporate university. Against these grains, Paper Minds looks at how disciplinary life can be an epistemic and ethical ideal, and how literary and historical analysis can play on terrain usually conceived otherwise.

We sometimes believe that taking on the objects or methods of another discipline gets us closer to a more comprehensive picture of things, either because there is something wrong with our field of study or just because other approaches fill in the gaps that would come from any narrow preoccupation. I have often thought this way myself. But the longer I’ve stuck with topics that engage more than one mode of thought, the more it has seemed that we’re also served by the separate procedures of the individual disciplines, their unique ways of seeing and presenting the world. There is I think a reason for this that goes pretty deep. Every discipline has a special and always-evolving perspective on the part of the world it endeavors to explain, just as what counts as a discipline of study and relations among them change over time. The world opens up to us not at once, in other words, but in a manner peculiar to the inquiries and methods we pursue. To recognize this is not to limit our claims; rather, it is to get a grip on them. It is to stand behind a necessarily partial approach to a world itself knowable in parts. For someone working in the literary humanities, the discipline-specific approach to topics that matter means of course attention to how they show up in literary texts of various kinds. So in what follows I am interested in, for example, the topos of landscape in eighteenth-century poetry and the explicit curiosity poets demonstrate in how one perceives natural scenery. But more than this, it means a peculiar way of posing questions and treating phenomena. So I am also interested in how our writing about lines and sentences nudges up against debates about consciousness in the physical world. The way we look at objects, in other words, matters as much for this book as the objects we look at, at least for our carving a distinctive space in the interdisciplinary landscape. I try to set some of that out abstractly in the opening chapters before moving to concrete matters of poetry and fiction. The idea throughout is that literary criticism—not this critic in particular—should be credited with having something to say about questions that many people care about: from the ground and shape of conscious experience to interactions with designed and everyday environments. I emphasize the particular way criticism examines its objects, finally, not out of any sense of retrenchment or a desire to return to some older sense of the way things ought to be done. One exciting feature of professing literature in the twenty-first century, indeed, has been the renewal, proliferation, and vibrant discussion of our methods of reading and presenting texts. I have no argument in favor of one over the other. In making a claim on behalf of literary studies in conversation with other disciplines, rather, I mean to call upon the ordinary practice and everyday competence of literary scholars everywhere, across the institutional landscape, in published works or the classroom.

Paper Minds, an Introduction

When Robinson Crusoe finishes the work on his island home, he arranges the furniture just so: some shelves hewn from trees; a table and chair from the ship’s planks; a pot for freshwater and barrels for dry storage; paper, pen, and a Bible to read. I had every thing so ready at my hand, he reflects, that it was a great pleasure to me to see all my goods in such order, and especially to find my stock of necessaries so great.¹ The pleasure Crusoe finds in beholding the design of his house rests both in the layout of the furnishings and the finding of what he requires within reach of his fingers. This is a pleasure we might say of dwelling: the craftwork of cutting a tree, smoothing a board, and making shelves; the taking relish in what is close by.² The effect on Crusoe is dramatic. I began to keep a journal of every day’s employment, he tells his reader, for indeed at first I was in too much hurry, and not only hurry as to labour, but in too much discomposure of mind, and my journal would ha’ been full of many dull things (56). Now that he has a desk and a chair, he can sit with support for his paper and a pen in his grip, and now that he is in a place that is safe and comfortable, he can be at ease to write. The journal would have been dull, therefore, not because it had no incidents to relate—the wreck and the setting up of his home are, after all, eventful in precisely the way he has already retailed. It would have been dull because Crusoe would not have had the composure to present what happened in its proper form.

He would not have been in the proper place with the proper layout to craft the events in a way that was exciting to read. Instead, the journal would have been a staccato mishmash: I must have said thus: Sept. the 30th. After I got to shore and escap’d drowning, instead of being thankful to God for my deliverance, having first vomited with the great quantity of salt water which was gotten into my stomach, and recovering my self a little, I ran about the shore, wringing my hands, and beating my head and face, exclaiming at my misery and crying out, I was undone, undone, till ty’red and faint I was forc’d to lye down on the ground to repose, but durst not sleep for fear of being devoured (56). Crusoe writes this hypothetical journal entry so that its first sentence might just go on forever: this happened, then this, and then that. And yet it doesn’t. Having presented his once-addled mind in corresponding prose, Crusoe stops, turns, and recounts his arrival in an altered form. Some days after this, and after I had been on board the ship, and got all that I could out of her, yet I could not forbear getting up to the top of a little mountain, and looking out to sea in hopes of seeing a ship, then fancy at a vast distance I spy’d a sail, please my self with the hopes of it, and then after looking steadily till I was almost blind, lose it quite, and sit down and weep like a child, and thus increase my misery by folly (56). The this that it is some days after when Crusoe climbs atop the little mountain would seem to be the events of the thirtieth of September that he has recounted to depict how a journal caught up in the immediacy of things might read. Yet even as it remains within the chronology of the mocked-up journal entry, the vignette of a few days later shifts back to the blend of past and historical-present tense in which Crusoe has been writing, safe in his well-appointed English home. It is this wobbling of style and perspective that sets up the vivid scene taking: the ocean horizon, this bipedal castaway, these eyes straining for a speck on the water, this despair.

Defoe uses more than one tense of narration and finally more than one version of a journal to perform a kind of everyday synesthesia. Mere words on the page describe the perceptual or emotional experience of crawling up out of the ocean and vomiting water, the view from the top of a small mountain just after a shipwreck, the feeling as one squints to see more. The prose is attuned, in other words, to the way the world appears to a body in motion and to the way thought or feeling guides that world into being. This is a paper mind: the formal construal of a world as it shows up for an agent engaged or coping with built or natural environments; the setting down or eliciting of perceptual or emotional or cognitive experience on the page. Paper Minds examines the use of literary form to create a sense of mind or experience during the long moment of literary and intellectual history that brought such minds into existence and during our contemporary period, which has paid them so much attention. It looks not only at what poems and novels have to say about minds and ecologies but at what the literary disciplines and their methods and styles of argument have to say to other modes of inquiry that take such topics as their quarry. It is at once an effort at and a critique of interdisciplinarity.

Sticking with Defoe for just a little longer might help to illustrate these points further. After the ocean prospect, Crusoe describes once again the layout of his house and the beginning of the journal: But having gotten over these things in some measure, and having settled my household-stuff and habitation, made me a table and a chair, and all as handsome about me as I could, I began to keep my journal (56). The getting over of such things amounts to a turn from long-distance views with their melodramatic effects to things closer at hand and more subdued in their register. So much for despair: once my house was built, I was able to sit down and write. And I was able to sit down to write because all my stuff—the desk, the chair, pen, ink, and everything else—was handsome about me. Yet what does it mean in this context to say that everything was handsome? Early eighteenth-century usage includes both the present-day sense of the word to mean attractive (what a handsome vest you have on, Mr. Crusoe) and a now-antiquated sense of the word to mean close to one’s hands (please bring that pen and this sheaf over here where they are more handsome).³ A reader in 1719 could legitimately take the sentence to mean that Crusoe placed everything in his dwelling so that it was attractive or so that it was conveniently at hand. A literary critic three hundred years later, in turn, could legitimately endeavor to emphasize one or the other meaning of the word handsome or state that for historical reasons the meaning cannot be pinned down. But we needn’t think of this as a simple choice between two alternatives. Crusoe takes pleasure in how everything in his habitation falls into place because everything is close at hand. The design is handsome in both senses of the word at once. There is an aesthetic at work here in other words; it just is not one premised on visual perception, or at least not on visual perception detached from tactile engagement. Everything was handsome because it was handsome, attractive because ready to hand, and this was a kind of pleasure and a kind of beauty.

I’m going to be concerned from time to time in this book with the minor-key aesthetic intimated in this passage—one associated with craftwork, with dwelling, and with kinetic or haptic experience—and I will follow this minor-key aesthetic in several literary and philosophical registers: from georgic poetry and debates within empiricism and the theory of art in the eighteenth century to some strains of our contemporary literature and science of mind (strains I would call for my present purposes ecophenomenological). But underpinning the entirety of this concern is a sense that such things as teasing out the meaning of words in their very particular contexts of use or pausing over the mode of experience in specific literary forms matter and that the kind of practice that lingers with these meanings and these modes also matters.

*

Paper Minds contends that such a thing as Robinson Crusoe and the depiction of such a thing as craftwork matter for how we think about thinking, about experiential consciousness, skilled engagement, and natural and built environments. The first part of the book pursues these topics in the abstract, as questions of theory or method. The second and third parts move from theory to practice and between them from poetry to the novel. The topics that cut across the book include varying relations between mind and ecology, the literary forms that explore such relations, and the disciplines that explain them.

Mind

I chose consciousness for the subtitle of this book with some deliberation. The word has a compelling variety of meanings from its modern inception in the seventeenth century to the present-day interest in the brain and has been the subject of controversy for the entire time. For John Locke writing in 1689 consciousness amounted to the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind and served as the grounds for self and personal identity alike.⁴ Locke wanted to know how consciousness—scandalously, rather than the soul—made persons who could be held responsible for their actions. For Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers three centuries later, consciousness amounts to what it is like to have one experience or another and serves as the prompt for a hard problem: how could the matter of our bodies (our brains especially) have or create experience in the first place? This hardening of the problem of consciousness happened concurrently with the ascendancy of neuroscience, amounting to the as-yet-unexplained desideratum of contemporary science: now that we know so much about the brain, how does that mass of matter give rise to conscious experience, and what is experience anyway?

Paper Minds puts literature and literary study in the thick of these discussions and focuses on one particular strain of the argument worth emphasizing at the outset. The so-called problem of consciousness sounds in its outlines to be something that would not vary by time or place, and in most versions it is. For some, however, this abstraction or lack of grounding is itself a problem. On this view, the idea that there is a single problem of consciousness is misguided because it isolates the brain from the rest of the body and the rest of the body from the lived environment. It maintains, as Evan Thompson has put it, that sentience is a strictly internal and phenomenal occurrence, whereas behavior is entirely a matter of external structure and function.⁵ For writers like Thompson, conscious experience should be understood as a kind of transaction between a whole body and an inhabited world. This perspective draws at once from ecological theories of perception (especially James J. Gibson’s account of how vision grasps onto the affordances of an environment) and from phenomenological accounts of mind (especially methods of attending to the immediate features of sensory experience).⁶ Both underscore the relation between consciousness and action. According to Gibson, to see is to interact with the ambient optic array presented by the surroundings, a surface that appears when the head turns just so or that covers another when approached at an angle, while, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it is our bodily experience of movement that provides us with a way of access to the world.⁷ The idea in either case is that physical action brings objects into view through attention and movement and so smears or spreads the locus of experience from interior states of the brain to entire bodies located in specific ecologies. We are caught up in the world, Merleau-Ponty says, and we do not succeed in extricating ourselves from it in order to achieve consciousness of the world.⁸

Philosophers and scientists impressed by this kind of argument in the current period often make note of how even the most apparently docile acts of perception involve adept motion of one or another kind, from the rapid movements of the eye—saccades—that fill in gaps left by the uneven spread of photoreceptors on the retina to the habitual skill with which agents manipulate and extract information from their surroundings.⁹ The vision scientist J. Kevin O’Regan, for example, has likened the work of sight to the grabbiness of touch. Seeing is like exploring the outside world with a giant hand, the retina; it is a means of actively manipulating, probing, and testing the way my visual inputs react to motions of my eyes, body, and external objects.¹⁰ This claim will have an intriguing familiarity to anyone acquainted with eighteenth-century theories of vision. George Berkeley and Joseph Addison, for example, make similar points, as I discuss in Presence of Mind (chap. 3). And so (again) does Merleau-Ponty, who also aligns vision with an exploratory grasp and for whom the active nature of perception meant that ‘sensible qualities’ are . . . [not] reducible to a certain indescribable state but rather present themselves with a motor physiognomy, and are enveloped in a living significance.¹¹ Across the long arc from the eighteenth century to the present, therefore, stretches an attempt to ground phenomenal experience—what it is like or the raw feel of something—in bodily movement and lived ecology. We should, O’Regan concludes, abandon the idea that feels are the kind of things that are generated [in the brain], and instead take the view that they are constituted by skilled modes of interaction with the environment.¹² While the goal is still to explain first-person experience, the vehicle of such experience expands from the brain to, in Alva Noë’s words, the larger nonbrain body and the environment in which we find ourselves. Consciousness is not something that happens inside of us, Noë says; it is something we do or make, an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.¹³

One relevance of this kind of argument for my purposes is that it moves the consciousness problem away from that of accessing purely internal or neural states to the coupling of these states with external objects and environments, including those of language and culture. We might pay special attention in this respect to the recurrence of the modifier sensorimotor to describe the characteristic feel or structure of any one experience.¹⁴ Creatures with bodies of a certain kind perceive and explore the world in a particular way, with every action bringing sensory information that then initiates new actions in a kind of loop. We don’t so much perceive the world in a single snapshot, on this view, as occupy and explore its contents. So the form of one’s experience simply is the form of one’s skillful actions.¹⁵ The point is not that the look of an ocean from the top of a hill is the same as the angle of one’s head or the number of one’s photoreceptors, just that the look is brought about by unfolding behavior that includes the physical environment as well as the organism in its midst. The ocean comes into view because we possess the relevant skills to explore its surrounds and see it the way we do. There is, I think, an important implication to this line of thinking. The emphasis on motion, skill, and environment broadens the discussion from the ostensibly unchanging nature of the brain to the historically variable conditions of circumstance, those conceived moreover not merely as stimuli but as active components or vehicles of experience. Perception on this view involves creating an available world through skillful and habitual activity, not just the bringing into view of things outside the head but the having of these things as cocreators of phenomenal consciousness.¹⁶ This sort of argument will be especially relevant to the pages that follow because it provides an important place for the kind of artifacts we’re used to looking at closely: not only as models or descriptions of experience but as themselves part of the encountered world.¹⁷

The terms and terrain of consciousness talk in any case appear across this book. In the first essay, my argument in favor of a disciplinary approach to interdisciplinarity draws upon the problem of reduction in the science and philosophy of consciousness as a core example. In Form and Explanation (chap. 2), my coauthor Anahid Nersessian and I argue that the use of technical terms like consciousness or species in scientific explanation might provide an occasion for literary scholars to reflect on their own terms of disciplinary art, foremost among them form itself. One role that literary form plays in this context, I argue, is to stage and explore some of the limits of the consciousness debate, especially versions of it committed to the privacy of experience. In Presence of Mind and On Beauty and Being at Home (chaps. 3 and 4), therefore, I examine how eighteenth-century georgic and locodescriptive poetry spread experience into the world (as it were) by conceiving of it as something one does rather than something to which one is subject. I attempt here to bring such formal matters as trope, meter, and line to bear on the relation between experience and handiwork in modest or minor genres concerned with the perception of the environment. In Around 2005; or, Two Novels and the Problem of Consciousness and Two Kinds of Panpsychism (chaps. 6 and 7), I attempt to put the idea that we already use form in the process of explanation together with the idea that literary studies might have its own account of consciousness to place alongside others. The idea in both essays is to put the argument about form and explanation into practice by demonstrating how some writers shape their prose to contribute to ongoing debates about experience and physical matter. I stick to novels designed to participate in this precise debate: in Two Novels, Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005); in Two Kinds, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) and Lila (2014). These are works written with attention to the science and philosophy happening around them, but with a mind to contribute via the unique properties of their medium.

Problems of consciousness are inevitably problems of experience, of how something appears to the senses or occurs in thought. As N. Katherine Hayles and Blakey Vermeule have recently reminded us, however, much of the science of mind brackets these topics in order to consider, as Vermeule puts it, the wide array of automatic processes and activities of which we are not and cannot become consciously aware because they happen too fast or at too massive a scale or in too complex a pattern.¹⁸ The so-called cognitive revolution, now sixty-some years in the making, has consisted to no small degree in opening such unconscious dimensions of the mind to empirical inquiry, whether at the physical level of the brain or at the algorithmic level of computation. Hayles and Vermeule (and, of course, others) are interested in what the humanities can take from or even add to this project, whether its understanding of the rapidly moving heuristics and biases that prompt overt behavior (Vermeule) or of the entanglements and interpenetrations of human and technical cognitive systems that shape current ways of living (Hayles).¹⁹ In Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel (chap. 5), I look at one particular piece of this puzzle: the way concepts refer to or represent elements of the world, especially those elements that dwell inside other people’s minds. Much of the research on such representation has fallen under the rubric of what cognitive science calls theory of mind because it asks how one mind forms a theory of another.²⁰ And much of the past decade’s interdisciplinary work between cognitive science and literary studies—work by Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Blakey Vermeule, and Lisa Zunshine, for example—has brought theory of mind research to consideration of the novel, with its elaborate formal repertoire for the representation of mental states.²¹ My own contribution to this discussion—the oldest part of this book—is to focus on what this research raises for the literary history of the novel and the intellectual history of science. My argument is that the eighteenth-century theory of ideas and the twentieth-century theory of concepts both understand cognition to work on symbols and symbols to stand in for, or be about, external objects or events. This similarity, I further argue, both extends into and breaks down in the details. The consideration of how one mind accounts for the mental states of another is, for example, a mainstay of empiricist investigations of cognition, especially the social cognition of interest to writers like David Hume and Adam Smith. At the same time, the model of how cognition actually works—how concepts take shape in the mind and form thoughts about things—differs considerably between the two slices of time. The eighteenth century tends