This is the paper I presented at the CSSA Conference at Florida Atlantic University. The conference was titled "Focusing on the Post(-): An Interdisciplinary Perspective."
October 24, 2014
In the early twentieth century, Ferdinand de Saussure described language as “the sum of word-images in the minds of all individuals . . . of a given community,” which is “not complete in any speaker [but] exists perfectly only within a collectivity . . . [as] a well-defined object in the heterogenous mass of speech facts.” This paradigm is the foundation of structuralism: that language is a collective object existing independently of any individual, an object which in fact constitutes the understanding of those individuals who comprise the “collectivity.” Under the influence of Saussurean Structuralism, much post-war French Theory turned to social and critical analysis by an analogy of this view of language as a collective object, following, for example, Lévi-Strauss, himself a key proponent of structuralism. In this paradigm, analysis looks to “signs” as defined by Saussure as the relationship between signifieds and signifiers, between things and the names for those things. In 1966, in the very act of introducing French Structuralism to critical theorists in the United States, Jacques Derrida deconstructed that framework and introduced instead the poststructuralist critical account, which has now become the de facto assumption of most of the humanities. Although there has been work on the fringes of the humanities that does not presume the poststructuralist account of meaning-making, such work remains obscure, leaving the majority of humanities scholars to draw on the assumptions of poststructuralist thinking, which considers individual people to be brought up within structures that shape them, that “construct” their subjectivity so that they become products of that structure. In this paper, I would like to very briefly examine this poststructuralist foundation and show some of its major flaws, as well as offer some suggestions for how to rebuild it.
Luckily, most of the work has been done for me, long ago. In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky overthrew Saussurean-Bloomfieldian Structuralism in Linguistics without the French Theory that has influenced the humanities taking note. Chomsky’s “Cognitive Revolution” undermined many of the assumptions that stood as a foundation for structuralist and poststructuralist analyses. For example, poststructuralist assumptions arise in a relatively straight line from Saussure’s conception of language as a communal object. However, according to Chomsky’s new understanding, language is a feature of the mind of an individual whose “basic character is an expression of the genes” and “each language [which is distinct in every individual] is the result of the interplay of two factors: the initial state [an expression of the genes] and the course of experience” (NH 4). Hence, if Peter has a language, “we can think of [it] as Peter’s ‘internalized language’” (5). The most apparent evidence for this conception of language comes from the obvious observation that human infants reflexively learn language in an environment in which kittens and other animals do not. This is analogous to the fact that human infants do not reflexively learn a bee’s waggle dance, nor the communicative strategies of birds: they reflexively learn only human language and human culture. This is the biological perspective: language appears to be a feature of human beings like vision and sexual maturity that simply develops in individuals at certain stages of life. Hence, as with puberty, which is not guided by peer pressure, but is a result of the internal organization of the biology of the animal, so too does individual language result from internal guidance in the organism with only minimal data from the environment: it is her internal guidance that allows the human child to discover the features of externalized language in her environment as a cat will not. Only this internal guidance allows the child to even recognize linguistic data from the confusion of everyday experience. Without such guidance, this accomplishment would be a true miracle. Furthermore, the comprehensive ability to acquire language despite an extreme paucity of data within the environment suggests that a majority of the child’s knowledge of language is provided by genetics: “A careful look at the interpretation of expressions reveals very quickly that from the earliest stages, the child knows vastly more than experience has provided. That is true even of simple words” (NH 6). In other words, a great portion of language, of the faculty of meaning-making, is built in to our cognitive systems: it is a genetically determined feature of our species in the same way that shells are features of turtles and particularized nest-construction is a species-property of many kinds of birds.
If this is true, then the contribution of the individual to his own acquisition of knowledge must be accounted for in any theoretical paradigm. This is what makes Chomsky’s revolution cognitive: rather than seeking somewhere in the mind-external world--in the features of a collectivity of language or culture, or in generalizations of behavior--for the properties of meaning-making, we need to look instead to the cognitive faculties of human beings by which the meaning-making faculty is learned and deployed. The poststructuralist account does not address this most important aspect: in fact, most poststructuralist theory relies on the “blank-slate” account of the acquisition of knowledge. According to this, there is no internal guidance for acquisition, but nevertheless our faculties wind up mostly the same, with enormous continuity cross-culturally and cross-linguistically. However, if the blank-slate account were correct, then we should expect each child to develop amorphously, unshaped and shapeless, responding at random to any unaccounted stimulus that enters its experience. I do not know of any coherent argument for this point of view. Most of the time, some kind of internal guidance is assumed without notice, and once assumed, the previous argument for a complex and rich innate faculty should easily follow.
A common attempt to argue out of this problem is to claim that there is no objective, mind-external world, no empirical facts, that nothing exists outside of the mind and everything we think of existing out “there” is in fact a construct of the mind. This is often assumed in what are called “phenomenological” approaches, which insist that a priori knowledge cannot exist objectively if there is no objective reality. The first problem with this approach is to notice that it is fundamentally solipsistic: it can only lead to solipsism, to the idea that the only thing one can ever accept is his conscious experience and everything else is illusory. This is sophistry but brilliantly tautological. We can’t argue out of it once we accept the initial proposition. The key I think is to refuse that proposition: simply notice, as Samuel Johnson did by kicking a stone, that there are in fact things that exist outside of conscious experience that we can be certain of: the sun and the moon do in fact exist. Now a whole world opens up to our ability to investigate and describe it. Ultimately there are no true solipsists. The proposition is accepted for the foundational position, but forgotten and ignored for its consequences when suddenly the solipsist wants to presume knowledge of a world that he at first demanded did not exist. To paraphrase Tim Minchin, every solipsist leaves his house by the front door and not the window on the second floor. Any phenomenological approach, merely by making generalities about random experience, presumes an objective guidance for that experience. Hence, the previous argument is presumed and must obtain. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that our mere experience does not give us introspective access to the processes of mind that give rise to that experience: we are not capable of simply intuiting the workings of the mechanisms that allow us, for example, to generate sentences. In this way, any phenomenological inquiry must inherently fail any real explanation of its intended subject matter.
It is true, however, that our every experience is shaped by mental construction. Ultimately, we may never be able to have any true, objective knowledge of mind-external objects and phenomena. This does not mean that they do not exist, only that we must work within the frame of our mental apparatus in order to attempt to make them comprehensible to us. The world is not necessarily directly intelligible or knowable, but human beings are equipped to describe and explain mind-external phenomena according to our naturally endowed mental capacities, one of which is the language faculty. These descriptions and explanations are theories about the objective world, and although the world may not be directly intelligible, we can construct theories that are themselves intelligible to us. Some of these theories are innate to our minds, are part of our genetic endowment, and are the foundation that shapes how we experience and interpret the world. Scientific theorizing and the scientific method are merely an extension of this faculty of theorizing, the mental world-modeling apparatus that allows us to move through the world. A theory’s ability to describe and predict phenomena is directly related to its adequacy as a theory. Hence, for example, our intuitive modeling of the interaction of forces, of gravity’s accelerative influence on objects, along with the intuitive modeling of our own movements, allows us to throw and catch. By allowing himself to be puzzled by those intuitions, this genetically endowed world-modeling theory, Isaac Newton was able to construct a scientific theory that extends our innate world-modeling capacity and describes real phenomena. This is how the scientific endeavor advances. Now, we should notice that among the innate theories of the world by which human beings interpret experience is a theory of language that is endowed to our mental apparatus by our genetics. This theory guides us in the discovery of external stimuli related to that theory and allows us to adapt the innate theory to our concrete circumstances by acquiring such externalizing aspects of that theory as a phonology--portions of which, incidentally, are already provided by genetics.
Thus it is that the language faculty is a feature of the mind that precedes external stimuli--those stimuli merely provide data for marginal nudging here and there, which is observable in the variations of externalization: for example, the features of what we call American English versus Japanese or Swahili or British English. But we should be careful to separate this notion of language as the externalization process, the process of externalizing thought, from the mind-internal symbol-manipulating faculty which is the linguistic modality of thinking, because language as meaning-making symbol manipulation is thought, and externalization of that thought into phonetic or other modes is a secondary, ancillary process. The Chomskyan study of syntax over the past sixty years has in fact revealed that this distinction is observable. The underlying symbolic meaning on which the symbol-manipulating faculty works is extremely rich. Like the phenomenon of pareidolia, by which our cognitive make-up causes us to interpret random stimuli as meaningful--for example, seeing a face on a grilled cheese sandwich--our minds provide a very rich, reflexive and innate conceptual system. Incidentally, noticing this feature of our mental faculties, that they reflexively, and even often accidentally by over-application, interpret phenomena according to that internal guidance that comprises the mental faculty, might lead us to define “meaningful” as “interpretable by mental faculties.” For example, faces are meaningful because of this psychological phenomenon of pareidolia—but meanings are limited to the constraints of our cognitive interpretive faculties.
Mental objects, the conceptual objects on which our linguistic meaning-making faculty works, have a wide array of properties that real-world, mind-external objects do not. For example, when we speak of concrete, physical objects, we speak of them in ways that suggest that we conceive of them as being materially comprised of their exterior surface. So, for example, when I am on a mountain, I can see it under my feet; but if I am inside the mountain, for instance if I am in a cave, I can no longer say that I see the mountain unless I leave the cave and can once again see the exterior surface of the mountain. If I say that I painted my car red, everyone knows that I mean that I’ve painted the outside surface of my car. Likewise, I can only be near my car if I am outside of it. It should be noted again that no one ever teaches their children these things, but that children are predisposed to thinking this way.
Mind-external objects do not have these properties; we ascribe these properties to objects in the world because of the way we think, because of the properties that mental objects have according to our genetically predisposed conceptual system. This is important. Words do not refer to physical objects in the world. In fact, people use words, and through this use, people refer to objects in the world, and we hence ascribe the properties of mental objects upon mind-external objects through this act of referring, this application of world-modeling according to faculties of mind. Nevertheless, the mind-external objects do not therefore have these properties. If I see a face in the woodgrain of my desk, the desk does not therefore have a face. Likewise, consider the case when the library has two copies of The Great Gatsby, and I check out one copy while my friend checks out the other copy. In this situation, I can say both that we checked out two different books and that we checked out the same book. The mental construction of the book can be either abstract or concrete, or both, as when I would say that when I finish my next book I will show it to you. But the book in the library does not have these properties, nor does the word “book” carry them around with it: these properties are a feature of our minds, of the way in which our conceptual system is predisposed to think about objects.
Consider the Ship of Theseus problem. In ancient Athens, there was a ship kept as a monument that once had belonged to Theseus, the founder of Athens. Over the years, as the boards of the ship rotted, they were replaced until every board was new and no physical piece of the original ship any longer existed to comprise it. This problem baffled philosophers for millennia: was this ship still the Ship of Theseus? If we notice that words do not refer to objects, we notice that the question makes no sense. The physical object we are talking about, in whatever condition, never had the property of being the Ship of Theseus--people merely referred to it as the Ship of Theseus, ascribing properties to it that existed only in their minds: for example, we give mental objects the property of continuity. Hence, the mental object that we are talking about when we say “Ship of Theseus” has this property. We can see this when we think of material transformation: for example, in a story about a Prince turned into a Frog, the Prince maintains continuity so that once it turns back into a human being, we consider it to be the same person it was before it was a frog and while it was a frog. Children have no problem with this idea because it is an innate feature of how we think. This is also likely why I consider myself to be somehow the same person now that I was when a completely different collection of cellular matter attended high school, despite the fact that I have no access to the past--keeping in mind that our memories are always extemporaneous experiences.
These properties of mental objects are what comprise meaning and what construct the constraints of interpretation, and they are all a consequence of the way in which human beings are evolved and consequently genetically predisposed to think. Communication among individuals is facilitated because all cognitively modern humans share fundamentally identical cognitive faculties and conceptualize the world in virtually identical ways. Thus, any individual human being will interpret the actions and behaviors and especially language use of other human beings according to his or her own internal conceptual modeling faculties, essentially asking the question, “what would I mean if I were her and I did that thing?” and constructing an explanatory theory. Simply noticing the immense conceptual richness that is absent in every example of communication among individuals but is nevertheless easily reconstructed by each interlocutor should be an incomprehensible mystery unless we accept that human cognitive capacities are essentially identical among all members of the species.
These genetic constraints upon meaning and meaning-making have not been studied sufficiently, and the brief examples I mentioned are hardly even a glimpse at the complex of unexamined assumptions that the human conceptual system imposes upon us. So, while poststructuralist thinking would assume that meaning and interpretation are socially constructed, conditioned entirely by external factors, in fact we should notice that meaning originates and is constrained by innate mental faculties which are pre-linguistic, or rather, mind-internal: that is, meaning precedes the externalization of language in speech and writing, and in fact speech and writing were appropriately described by Aristotle’s definition of language as an expression of thought.
Most of the humanities have resisted the discoveries of the cognitive revolution of the past sixty years. For example, in the study of literature, which is presumably the study of the apprehension of meaning, and, as meaning does not--cannot--exist within the mind-external objects of study (literary texts), nor within their context, but must in fact exist only in the minds of those who create or encounter those objects, then if critics seek to study literary meaning, we should study the mind of the creature that apprehends the object. In this way, literary theory should in fact be a theory of the human mind, and some version the previous arguments about the nature of that mind should be central to literary theoretical concerns.
What any theory ought to begin with is to offer an explanation for phenomena, and literary theory should be no different. It seems to me that the object of inquiry that literary critical practice is primarily concerned with is meaning: how does meaning come about, and what shape does it take? There are scores of concomitant questions. As any literary theory of meaning should be a theory of the human mind, literary critical practice ought to work toward explaining how that mind goes about understanding literary objects. Why do we speak of characters from literature as if they were real people? How are we capable of reading depictions of alternate lives and worlds? How much does a literary text actually provide for the internal workings of our conceptual systems by which we apprehend the text and thereby conceptually model the literary world? Despite thousands of years of literary critical practice, that practice has revealed very little about the features of the human mind that enable its encounter with literary texts, how it manages to perceive characters or situations, how words on the page are transformed into mental experiences. But how might a reader’s innate cognitive expectations of continuity and projections of agency prime her for an encounter with literary plots and characters? It seems to me that many of the insights of the poetics of fiction may be useful here.
The poststructuralist account insists that culture overwhelmingly shapes meaning, that the subject’s encounter with an object is always constructed by society and culture, and that therefore apprehended meanings are a reflection of that social structure. But this account recapitulates for culture the same mistakes as the poststructuralist account of language. Culture, as a system of assumptions and biases within a society, does not exist as an external, collectivist object somewhere in the world, but can only ever exist within individual human minds. Culture is a reflection of a cognitive framework that guides and rules an individual’s behavior. And, just like language, children acquire culture without instruction based on some internal guidance that is capable of recognizing cultural data out of the confusion of experience. Like language, this means that the mental culture-acquiring system that infants are born with will have properties that will constrain and shape the kinds of potential cultures that are possible, and that much of culture is likely already known by the infant, part of the genetic endowment. For example, it seems that among human beings and even other primates that the cognitive faculties divide an individual’s conceptualizations of other people in the world into the categories of in-group and out-group. Our biologically determined behavior results from these conceptual categories. Hence, we will reflexively care for members of the in-group and fear members of the out-group. The only real distinction among cultures is how an individual assigns other people to one or the other category--although this may equally be constrained in ways we haven’t yet ascertained.
If we want a purely political reason to reject the poststructuralist account, it could come from this simple observation. Poststructuralist assumptions have led to severe group-making in the guise of cultural study and promotion. We are one and you are not. Look at how different we are from you. But the biological, cognitive view should lead to a more inclusive account: barring extreme pathology, all human beings are fundamentally cognitively identical and therefore all human beings should be part of our conceptual in-group. Love all and fear none.
Essentially, the biological-cognitive view of culture is nothing more than an individual’s internal, cognitive human-behavior modeling and theorizing faculty, by which he or she understands and predicts the behavior of other individuals. What we commonly call culture is not generally thought of on an individual basis but a collective: but noting the cognitive account, we might reinterpret the collectivist view of a culture as a set of trends that emerge in various and shifting groupings of individuals. Culture should not be thought of as monolithic, but as a result of descriptive selections by critics, the artificial groupings of individual human beings and their collective assembly of individual cognitive-cultural faculties. These collections do not exist, but are only ever selected by a critic for some purpose. We should never speak of a collective defined by a property, but only of individuals who share a property. Americans are not shaped by the mythology or ideology of the capitalist-libertarian values of the 19th-century American southwest, but maybe some individuals have assimilated into their mental faculties some cognitive meaning-making features derived from such a framework. Structures do not construct subjects: people develop according to inherent, genetically determined guidance through which they understand environmental data in the same way that spiders spin their webs: the web is always fundamentally the same, but nevertheless adapted to the environment in marginal ways that do not fundamentally affect its functionality.
So to return to literary matters: there is a faculty of mind in an individual that perceives other human beings and assigns to them particular and constrained characteristics. Authors presume this faculty for their depiction of character, but we know almost nothing about the features of the faculty of mind on which they are building and on which they depend for reception of their art. Literature, and in fact Art in general, seems to be an expression of cognitive play: in much the same way that kittens and adult cats will play at hunting behavior, human beings play at their own cognitive abilities. A literary theory that is a theory of mind should take this problem seriously and investigate the shape and features of that faculty of mind. We should note that one of the fundamental properties of language is that the human language faculty is capable of both producing and understanding sentences that neither the individual, nor any member of a community, has ever produced or encountered before. In some fundamental way, this symbol-manipulating faculty is a recursive system able to compute an indefinite array of potential expressions. Thus, the human mind is indefinitely creative, and it would seem that, inasmuch as language dominates human mental capacities, the fundamental cognitive nature of any human being is an immense creative fecundity.