Showing papers in "Substance in 2001"

Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts

Abstract: Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts. Puzzlingly, humans in all cultures engage in a broad variety of aesthetically oriented activities that appear to have no obvious evolutionary utility, including immersion in those falsehoods called fiction. We argue that, despite appearances, aesthetically oriented activities are evolutionarily functional, and are the product of evolved adaptations designed to cause such experiences. These are adaptations whose function is to (1) assist in constructing the adaptations that constitute our species-typical neurocognitive design, and (2) bring those adaptations into a state of effective readiness, individually tailored to deal with the specific adaptive demands that they will confront during that person's life.

The Neurology of Narrative

Abstract: The oral storytelling tradition of philosophy made evident by the dialogues of Socrates and parables of Plato goes underground with the writings of Aristotle. Our sense of what it means "to do" philosophy comes from Aristotle and his legacy, where the structure of storytelling is replaced by the construction of logical propositions, descriptions of abstractions, and assertions of general "truths."And so what are we to make of the following?: "The more isolated I become, the more I come to like stories" (Aristotle, fragment 688). These are Aristotle's words. They prompt us to think of Aristotle's story-that he has a story, that he has an autobiographical "I" who has narrated his desire for narrative as a means of lifting him out of the loneliness of being the solitary thinker who contemplates himself into the philosophical mood. Stories, it would seem, offer Aristotle comfort, company, or the sense that others somehow are present by virtue of what stories tell, or by how they tell. They also prompt in. him the reference to an "I," an "I" who does not rise to the textual surface of his strictly philosophical writings, as in the Ethics or Poetics. What's of particular interest to us about this fragment of Aristotle's is the intertwining of the "I" and the stories, that they are in relation to one another, that one offers the other the chance at individual presence and mutual recognition. And we have come together in our own intertwining as authors to begin to work through what the relation of "I" to story is about, or perhaps more accurately, why that relation is. The parameters that define what narratives accomplish are too vast to disclose, though we can allude to their variety-medical histories, legal testimonies, psychological portraits, texts of pure fiction, news stories, autobiographies, conversations. Stories can openly declare themselves as stories, or they can be hidden. When we choose to be in the company of a story by reading a novel or seeing a film, the narrative sets itself off as a narrative, not as a part of our lives; we stand in relation to it as audience to its "performance" as an aesthetic work. However, the storytelling we experience as an event in life can lose its appearance as narrative by virtue of its integration in life. We are so used to having conversations that function

Becoming Homo Aestheticus : Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions

Abstract: Dissanayake, Ellen. Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions. The common affectional interchange between infants and adults, colloquially called baby talk, is important to the normal emotional, intellectual, psychosocial, and linguistic development of infants. It also is the source, I suggest, of the aesthetic imagination, which arises developmentally from such features of interactivity as temporal coordination of emotional behavior; crossmodal and supramodal neural processing; and mutually-influenced, playful use of ritualized affiliative signals. Similarities between the developmental course in infants of imitation and pretense and the ways the arts present imaginative representations to mature adults argue not only for the deep-rootedness of our aesthetic nature but for the fundamental importance of intersubjective and affective dimensions of the adapted mind.

Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari

Abstract: Hayles, N. Katherine. Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints. Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene and Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus share a common interest in de-throning consciousness as the seat of identity. At the same time, they seek to displace agency into non-conscious actors or dispel it altogether. In this sense they are part of a larger movement within cognitive science and evolutionary biology to define cognition in terms that partially deconstruct the distinction between organisms and environment. Yet their projects differ from this larger movement in that they both rely on performative language to enact dissolutions or displacements that could not take place in empirical reality. To evaluate their projects, this essay develops a theoretical framework that envisions metaphorical language working together with enabling constraints to produce reliable knowledge. Within this framework, the problematic move that Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari make is the extensive use of metaphoric language without the counterbalance of constraints. Instead of the non-human unconstrained agency that these theorists enact through their performative language, this essay proposes a model of distributed agency that works through rather than against constraints.

The Evolution of Imagination: An Archaeological Perspective

Abstract: Mithen, Steven. The Evolution of Imagination: An Archaeological Perspective. Although a definition of the imagination remains elusive, this appears to be a fundamental element of the human mind and seems most likely to be woven into our biological constitution. As such, an understanding of imagination requires an evolutionary perspective. Some aspects of imagination can be readily explained, notably that of imagining alternative future worlds when decisions need to be made as to how to act. But many aspects of imagination, especially those that involve fantasy, are more difficult to explain from an evolutionary point of view. The paper tackles this issue and examines the course of human evolution, seeking to establish what types of imagination were present in a range of human ancestors and relatives between the time of the common ancestor of modern humans and the great apes at 5 mya, and emergence of the Upper Palaeolithic.

Literature and Evolution

Abstract: Hernadi, Paul. Literature and Evolution. Literature functions differently in different persons and different societies. But the performances, texts, and recordings that typically trigger literary experience display one or more of several widely shared characteristics. Of these, I discuss playful impersonation, indirect communication, fictive storytelling, so-called poetic language, and literature's power to affect behavior and motivate action. The existence of cross-cultural features suggests that the underlying mental capacities evolved over time as species-wide adaptations, and I propose numerous reasons why over-average protoliterary competence could help some early hunter-gatherers to outdo their less imaginative rivals in the evolutionary competition for becoming the ancestors of subsequent human generations.

For a Cosmopolitical Philology: Lessons from Science Studies

Abstract: advantages, at a time when "interdisciplinarity" has become a mindnumbing administrative cliche, should be that of provoking new thought about fundamental questions by forcing its practitioners to confront both the problems and possibilities of its unlikely coupling. The present paper is an attempt to contribute to this project by answering the question "what can the literary disciplines learn from science studies?" One crucial reason for doing "literature and science," at least for those of us on the literary side, is to help literary studies-or philology, as I prefer to say-fit into a world where nonhuman things matter, not least because science and technology are restructuring the human parts of the world by acting on the nonhuman ones. As soon as we leave the terrain of literary formalism and want to consider contexts, we encounter science, its objects, and its effects. It is therefore worth trying to understand how science, technology, and the things they work on are connected to (and indeed form an integral part of) "society" and "culture." Cultural anthropologists did well to assert that we humans live in a world of humanly created meanings, but we also live in a material world of terrain, weather, and bodies-of things that we have not made and that act in ways that impinge upon the cultural and symbolic orders through which they take on meaning for us. For a long time it may have seemed possible to keep these worlds fairly separate, and thus to divide our intellectual labors between natural and human sciences. No more.

The Epilogue of Suffering: Heroism, Empathy, Ethics

Abstract: Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Epilogue of Suffering: Heroism, Empathy, Ethics. Cross-culturally, heroic tragicomedies are structured by a quest for domination, one prototype for happiness. However, heroic stories often involve an epilogue of suffering focused on the misery of the defeated enemy or the guilt of the hero. This second ending, following heroic triumph, may be explained if ethical thinking is prototype-based, with different prototypes triggered by different situations. Heroic plots regularly involve conflict between ethical prototypes-of group protection and individual compassion-along with associated forms of empathy. This conffict generates traumas of heroism where the hero violates the ethics of compassion. Victory makes that violation salient, thus leading to the epilogue.

Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff

Abstract: Spolsky, Ellen. Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff. The notion of decoupling, suggested by Cosmides and Tooby as a way to explain how audiences are protected against the misleadingly false aspects of narratives, is itself crucially misleading. The behavioral and linguistic evidence suggests, rather, that the processes by which we protect ourselves from misinformation a) don't work reliably enough to suggest that they are automatic, and b) all seem to be culturally dependent in ways that evolved adaptations could not be. The evolutionary argument itself suggests that it would actually be maladaptive if the making of such distinctions were automatic and decontextualized.

If your Depict a Bird, Give it Space to Fly: Eastern psychologies, the Arts, and self-knowledge

Abstract: Contrary to most of the papers in this volume, I argue that humans have a mode of knowing themselves and their world that is more basic and deeply rooted than the habits of mind that are studied by evolutionary theory and, in fact, by most of Western psychology. The nature of such self- knowledge and how it is the special genius of the arts to evoke it, is elaborated in the various categories of this paper.

Cultural Texts and Endopsychic Scripts

Abstract: Gabriele Schwab. Cultural Texts and Endopsychic Scripts. This article addresses the role literature plays in facilitating processes of self-making (autopoiesis) and in negotiating an exchange between culture and self. Drawing on recent debates in cognitive psychology and object relations theory (Bollas), it explores literature's relationship to the formation and transformation of a sense of self. At the level of an individual act of reading, literature may function as an evocative object that helps to transform cultural experiences into the elaboration of psychic structures. At the same time, literature's effects also operate on a larger scale. Poetry, fiction, and related arts generate a certain cultural idiom, providing abstract shapes that resonate with, refine or transform culturally prevalent emotions, moods, tastes, values and mental structures. It is therefore not only the information literature provides about our own or others' histories and cultures, but also the shaping of psychic structures and patterns of interpersonal and intercultural relating that define literature's cultural and psychic work.

With (and Without) Constraints

Abstract: In France and elsewhere, since 1960, there is a group of writers and others, the Oulipo, whose members don't "write literature under constraints"-an oft-heard approximation-but seek out usable constraints so that literature is written. As for the constraints, the Oulipo brings them back (sometimes exhumes them) from the past, or imports them from far away, or else invents them piecemeal, notably with recourse to mathematics. The Oulipo isfaber, it fabricates tools. The Oulipo's work is first of all this fundamental research: conception and exercise. Sometimes an oeuvre, but only sometimes. There is a current sophistry that could be expressed as follows: L is a book by A. A is member of the Oulipo. Therefore L is an Oulipian book. Unfortunately, it is only sometimes true; sometimes it's false. One also encounters the situation L is a book by A. A is a member of the Oulipo. But L is not an Oulipian book.. In order for there to be an Oulipian constraint, an explicit procedure must be used-a formal axiom whose implications, whose deductive chain of events-will create the text. The constraint is the problem; the text the solution. If you will, the constraint is the enunciation of an enigma, and the text is the answer-or rather one answer, for usually there are several possible ones. Thus the constraint is quite different from an organized manipulation of literary work. And there's nothing wrong with organized manipulation! But it's not the same as a constraint. A constraint is systematic. Further, an Oulipian constraint must be usable by others, which implies requirements of clarity and enunciation (formalization). Constraint is altruistic. Writing under constraints is one way of making literature. It's not the only way. It's one. For me, there are three obvious ideas about constraint, and one latent idea.

Dreams: The Royal Road to metaphor

Abstract: States, Bert O. Dreams: The Royal Road to Metaphor Metaphor, as treated here, is not a rhetorical device or strategy but the primary means by which dream and artistic images arise and give rise in turn to further narrative developments. The paper is chiefly concerned with dreams and the possibility that dream coherence-i.e., meaning, making sense-as we recognize it in the waking state may be a largely irrelevant to the organization and function of dreams that obviously have no artistic mission to be shared by others (readers, auditors) as forms of communication. I examine an experiment in dream-splicing conducted by Allan Hobson and his Harvard colleagues with a view to illustrating that bizarreness and discontinuity in dreams are not necessarily, as Hobson claims, signs of incoherence but may be the natural consequence of dreams exercising the power of association while the body is off-line. If dream images arise from a virtually infinite experience in world-association, it is possible that dreams couldn't perform their function-whatever it may be-by offering coherent narratives of the sort that interest waking readers. In other words, the content of dreams-coherent or otherwise from the waking standpoint-may be less important than the act of dreaming itself. Additionally, I briefly discuss two leading theories of dream function-the recorrelation of memory and the vigilance theories and suggest, briefly, how they might apply not only to dreams but to artistic works as well.

Humanists, Scientists, and the Cultural Surplus

Abstract: Abbott, H. Porter. Humanists, Scientists, and the Cultural Surplus. Assessing the limits of evolutionary and cognitive approaches to the study of culture goes to the heart of an issue that tends to divide humanists and scientists. The issue is how far, in dealing with complex cultural texts and the complex transactions we perform as readers, can we advance by scientific reduction? The issue is vexed by the fact that at times the complexity and novelty of humanistic discourse is little more than obfuscation and strained ingenuity. But such failings discredit neither the search for novelty, nor the earned perception of irreducible complexity, nor the immense importance of work that is necessarily, and terminally, speculative.

Jacques Roubaud: Literature, Mathematics, and the Quest for Truth

Abstract: What do permutations or such mathematical theorems as the isomorphism of algebraic groups have to do with French literature? In 1960, a diverse group of poets, novelists, scientists, mathematicians and philosophers announced at Cerisy-la-Salle the foundation of a literary workshop-later called Oulipo, the acronym for Ouvroir de litterature potentielle. Establishing the aesthetic of formal constraint, Oulipo concentrates on the reciprocal relations between literature and mathematics. The group's intention is to demonstrate the complementarity of these two modes of discourse in their work. One of the first members of the group, Jacques Roubaud, a professor of mathematics as well as a poet, novelist, and critic, succeeds especially well in mathematizing literary inspiration.

Jacques Jouet and the Literature of Exhaustion

Abstract: In the last two decades, Jacques Jouet has patiently constructed one of the most astonishing bodies of work in contemporary French literature. During that time, he has published some 40 volumes in a variety of literary genres. By turn a poet, a novelist, a playwright, a short story writer, an essayist, a lexicographer, and a member of the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Oulipo), Jouet never seems to rewrite himself-and such a consideration alone would serve to distinguish him from many of his peers. As diverse as they otherwise may be, one finds in each of Jouet's books a vast literary curiosity, a deep impulse toward innovation, and a will to test the possibilities of literature through the elaboration of what may appear in retrospect to be an evolving catalogue of the various forms available to a writer today. In short, Jacques Jouet is an experimentalist in the noblest sense of that word, a writer whose work comes to us fresh, each book a "new" book, all of them clearly the product of a literary imagination animated by a keen, ludic intelligence. Having followed his work closely for many years, I also believe it is legitimate to suggest that Jouet is a man of letters (as antiquated as that term may sound to our postmodern ear). He belongs thus to a species that is gravely endangered in our time and latitude; and consequently it is in an ecological spirit, conservationist but not conservative, that I shall present this account of his work. In an influential essay first written in 1967 and much-anthologized since, John Barth offered some remarks on what he called "the literature of exhausted possibility," or "the literature of exhaustion" (Barth 64). Taking as his principal touchstones Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges, Barth examined the hypothesis, current at that time-and in ours, too, plus qa change-that the novel is coming to the end of its possibilities as a literary form: Suppose you're a writer by vocation-a "print-oriented bastard," as the McLuhanites call us-and you feel, for example, that the novel, if not narrative literature generally, if not the printed word altogether, has by

Introduction: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Jacques Jouet (But Were Afraid To Ask)

Abstract: Once again, with this special section on Jacques Jouet, SubStance returns to a format it practiced in its early years, introducing the work of a writer whom it feels deserving of broader recognition among readers of contemporary literature. As Sydney Lévy put it in a recent issue, there are only two rules to be observed here: first, that the author work with the journal in order to shape the dossier; second, that the author figure among the contributors. Born in 1947, Jouet joined the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo) in 1983. He is the author of more than forty books, works that boldly traverse the spectrum of genres available to writers today, and which beggar any attempts at normative critical description—just the sort of gesture, alas, that the present circumstance demands. Suffice it to say that each of those books, regardless of genre, puts literature itself to the question in fresh, intriguing ways, as Jouet deploys wit, erudition, playfulness, and a poetic imagination in which tradition and innovation find such felicitous articulation that they become virtually indistinguishable. His own piece on formal constraint here will give the reader some idea of the importance of rigorous structure, both in his own work and in the broader literary aesthetic of the Oulipo. Michelle Grangaud’s essay on Jouet’s recent three-volume collection of poetry, Navet, linge, oeil-de-vieux, offers a reading of Jouet’s ethos of poetry as vital practice, from the perspective of a fellow-poet. Jean-Didier Wagneur has explored Jouet’s “Republic Novel” cycle, in a consideration of the fiction of power and the power of fiction. Marc Lapprand examines a fixed poetic form of Jouet’s own invention, the “metro poem”; and Ian Monk has provided some examples of those poems in English translation. For my part, I have focused on the way Jouet puts the principle of exhaustion into play in his writing. Finally, I should mention that we expected a contribution from Jean-Charles Baduli, who promised to eviscerate Jouet’s work and persuade us that his books should be burned; but I must report that Baduli’s project has been abandoned. One can only conclude that some critical tasks are more difficult than others. Warren Motte

Jacques Jouet, Metro Poet

Abstract: Jacques Jouet has invented a unique form of poetry: the "poeme de metro," literally a poem exclusively written on the subway. The reader will find in Jouet's own article, "With (and Without) Constraints," details about the genesis of this particular genre along with the so-called self-defining poem, which is itself a metro poem. I would like to examine this new genre in its two complementary aspects: its mode of enunciation, which in effect "kills" the draft version, and the response it imposes upon the reader, making it almost impossible to read a metro poem without, at least in spirit, being in the metro.

Power. Vol. 3 of The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (review)

Abstract: Substance # 96, Vol. 30, no. 3, 2001 simultaneously not avoidances of the Holocaust, while being the articulation of political engagement with this question; in seeking to assume responsibility for addressing this issue, they each give us to comprehend the extent to which the emergence of Nazism cannot—must not—be thought in isolation from the history of Western thought, and must be thought in inextricable relation to an “interminably mimetic universe” (227). Brandt’s own analysis is itself an exemplary consideration of this “universe.” Her perceptive, historically, culturally and philosophically grounded deliberations unveil the “political implications” of mimesis. She demonstrates in the process an intellectual sensitivity and commitment that moves this study beyond mere commentary, placing it alongside the texts she reads so patiently. Geopoetics is an exemplary book in speaking for “deconstruction(s)” as so many unending political acts of reading and responsibility. It attends to the “interrelatedness of the poetic, the theoretical, and the socio-political” (viii), without resorting to a kind of representational reductivism. In this, Brandt addresses the critique of mimesis and its political significance with a hospitality little in evidence in response to the questioning of deconstruction’s politics. Here, and to use her own words, Joan Brandt offers “a promise and an engagement in the future while remaining attuned to the specters of the present and of the past” (251). Julian Wolfreys University of Florida

Transcending Biological and Social Reductionism

Abstract: Turner, Frederick. Transcending Biological and Social Reductionism. The sociological reductionism of poststructuralist analysis has been refuted by biological science-human beings have a nature that evolved. But biogenetic reductionism leaves out as many awkward facts as psychosocial reductionism does. A close reading of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse indicates an answer to the fundamental question at issue. How did meaning, freedom and value evolve in a physical universe? New understandings of the evolution of time, and chaos-theoretical concepts of emergent self-organization and strange attractors, suggest a redefinition of survival, the key concept of evolution, which allows plenty of room for freedom, meaning, and value.

Hath not an Arab eyes?: Paul Smaïl and the conformist inferno

Abstract: On October 26th, 1998, the audience at New York University’s Maison Française was treated to a rare spectacle: Tahar Ben Jelloun reading extracts from Paul Smaïl’s novels.1 It was an especially appropriate moment on a number of levels. First, Ben Jelloun is a capable actor who knows how to bring a text to life. Second, this sort of rendition is probably what Paul Smaïl himself would have wanted, for he well understands the importance of theatricality in the construction of identity today, at this millennial moment in the république black blanc beur. Smaïl’s oeuvre negotiates his identity as a French citizen of Moroccan ancestry in French society of the 1990s. (The term “citizen” is especially appropriate; his grandfather died fighting for France in World War I; his father was a lifetime employee of the SNCF.) In the following essay, I would like to trace Smaïl’s preoccupation through the autobiographical novels that he has written so far, with a view to exploring the construction of identity as represented in French fiction at the end of the twentieth century. I use the term “French” advisedly, since part of my point is that Paul Smaïl, like several other writers often placed under the beur label, is in fact French, not Arab—historic connections to the Middle East and North Africa notwithstanding. My analysis will make use of a term coined by Francis Fergusson: the “histrionic sensibility,” or habit of thinking about the self as a “role,” be it fictitious, theatrical or televised.2 Roger Shattuck has extended the scope of Fergusson’s analysis to explore its ramifications and relationship to the concept of an identity, calling attention to “the ways in which playacting and character formation have mingled in the modern post-revolutionary world” (122). Since citizens of the modern state are no longer born into a pre-determined station in life, it is incumbent upon them to create an identity for themselves, which depends on the performance of the self being developed. For Shattuck, this state of affairs makes acting the salient feature of modernity. Drawing on key moments in La Chartreuse de Parme, Baudelaire’s “Une mort