Cultural Surplus

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Humanists, Scientists,and the Cultural SurplusH. Porter Abbott

There'snothing,situate under heaven'seyeBut hath his bound,in earth, n sea, in sky ...TheComedy fErrorsII, , 16-17)One of the aggravating things about humanists is the way they have to

begin theiressays with epigraphs. Strangely privileged words that hover aninch or so above the text, they generate vague resonances but rarely settleinto a definitive relation with what follows. In this, the practice of usingepigraphs is simply an extension of the humanist tendency to avoid nailingdown the case. Humanists like to hover while scientists like to land. And inthis difference lies much distrust and mutual disdain and not a little envy.At the heart of this difference is the issue of limits, which is not so much anissue as a maze of issues. My own epigraph resonates with this complexity.Since it comes early in The Comedyof Errorsand since the comedy is byShakespeare, it is not long before Luciana's statement gets turned on itshead. But then it doesn't really get turned on its head. That is, it does and itdoesn't. And this is something like the patternfor this essay about limits, orbounds, or the bounds of limits. But bear with me, for the issue is important.I will take the subject of this special issue of SubStance-the application ofevolutionary and cognitive science to the study of the arts-for my immediatefocus in addressing the general issue of the difference between the wayscientists and humanists go about making arguments.There is no Limit

Iwill start at the opposite extreme fromLuciana,for here on this planet,in our pursuit of evolutionary and cognitive approaches to any human thingunder heaven's eye, assuredly,nothing "hathhis bound." Thereis, or shouldbe, no limit to the effort to understand literaturefrom an evolutionary andcognitive standpoint because literature is the product of evolved, cognitivebeings. As a friendlycriticpointed out, cognitive approacheshave a potentialSubStance 94/95,2001 203


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precursoranalog in the expansion of feminist criticism from the fringe to itscurrent ubiquity.' Feminist criticism could do this by shifting its center ofgravity from feminism per se to gender studies. Like it or not, we are allgendered, whether we be readers or writers. So, too, we all cognize. Andtherefore there should be no limit to the application of energy, imagination,sound thinking, reasoned argumentation, even the scientific method to theunderstanding of literature as the product of evolved cognitive beings. AsMark Turnerwrote, reflectingon his own approachto "TheStudy of Englishin the Age of Cognitive Science," the texts that literary study usuallyaddresses constitute only "the smallest tip of the iceberg," while "theincomparably larger and more interesting background conceptual systemthat makes them possible" is just lying there waiting to be explored. Whydawdle in the froth of canonical great works when there is all this intricatecognitive architecture to be understood (151)?Please, Let There be Limits

But,ifby "limit"we mean thatpoint beyond which "research"no longerconveys something new and useful, then we have to acknowledge with wearyanticipation that transgression of such a limit would be assured-if, that is,evolutionary and cognitive approaches were ever to catch fire amonghumanists. In the current climate this is still a big "if."But should it comeabout,the frenzyof applicationswould inevitablybe inflectedby an academicsystem of advancement that requiresextensive publication in short periodsof time. Given this pressure, combined with the fact that the issues of studyare inseparable from the immense complexity of culture, with little chanceof isolating a phenomenon and subjecting it to controlled experiment, onecan expect the same kind of speedy deployments of theory to which manyother nameable approaches (the New Criticism, psychoanalytic criticism,deconstruction, the New Historicism) have often lent themselves. In otherwords, this is a limitation caused by limitlessness.If this problem is an inevitability of the present-day academic system, italso reflects a more general intellectual problem noted frequently in thehumanities, but at times extended to the sciences (Gould). This is the ancienthermeneutic puzzle of the circularity of knowledge (how can we knowanything that we don't already know?). In the humanities, this problem hasoften been tacitly reconfigured as a positive endeavor (let's see how muchwe canknow in terms of what we alreadyknow). The course of such researchis a circularvoyage from theory to text and then back to theory.The text, in

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other words, is found (or made) to tell us what we knew before we began.Part of the satisfaction in this endeavor is the awareness of fit, of a largerconformity of text to theory that has its own special pleasure. In thisapplication of method, though, theory is absolute while the text is entirelysecondary,standing as either intended expression or unintended symptomof a set of ideas that takes precedence, both literally and figuratively. Forsome, this kind of interpretive circularityis not a problem. Literature,afterall, is nothing if not illustrative. But for others, the prospect of yet anothercandidatein an endless succession of interpretiveparadigmscan be daunting.

At the same time, however, one distinct appeal of evolutionary andcognitive approaches is the possibility of ending this endlessness, or at leaststemming it, by establishing clearempirical constraints on interpretation.Astrong case for empirically demonstrable grounding in specific areas ofhuman behavior would at least curb the drift of fashion from one closedinterpretive system to the next. Withregardat least to these areasof behavior,then, we would have reached an end of the mad chase for meaning. At theleast, this would save us valuable time. The plots of Jane Austen's novels,however complex and richly nuanced, could be seen definitively as drivenby a deep genetic predisposition to engage in sexual selection. Thus thedeep subject of Prideand Prejudices optimizing reproductive success. Orconversely, as Joseph Carrollhas argued in his EvolutionandLiteraryTheory(44-45), Freudian and other readings of the relationship of Catherine andHeathcliff in WutheringHeightscan now be shown to be definitively wrongbecause there is nothing sexual in the love of these lovers. Therecouldn't be,because empirical research has born out the theory of Freud'scontemporaryand intellectual rival, Edward Westermarck,that children raised togetherdon't want to sleep together. In other words, Emily Bronte got it right.The Limits of Limiting the Absence of Limits

But does this mean, then, that narrative success requires evolutionarycorrectness? Do authors fail to the extent that they contravene the hardevidence of kinship studies? And if so, what does this say about narrativeslike Ian McEwan's richly erotic portrayal of incest in TheCementGarden?Why does this novel, with its climactic scene of intercoursebetween abrotherand sister,move so many so powerfully? Have its enthusiastic readers andthe author gone wrong because they are ignorant of the fact that childrenraised together don't want to sleep together? Or is there something morecomplex going on in the sexual dynamics of this novel (as there may well beSubStance# 94/95, 2001

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in WutheringHeights)?And if the latter is the case, can we still account forthis complexity in evolutionary or cognitive terms?This last question is themost importantone. How far, n dealing with complex narrative instrumentsand the complex transactions we perform as readers, can we succeed byscientific reduction?

"Reductionism"is a word that some scientists wear like a badge. E. O.Wilson, in his recentbook, Consilience,ees an enthusiasm for reduction as adefining difference between the scientist and the artist: "The love ofcomplexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity withreductionism makes science"(54).If thereis a touch of condescension in thisstatement of contrast, t reflectsWilson's convictionthat the noblest enterpriseis the continual effort to find the possibilities of reduction at all levels ofcomplexity. At the same time, Wilson is the first to acknowledge that thecomplexity faced by physicists pales in comparison to that of otherdisciplines: "As the distance away from physics increases, the optionsallowed by the antecedent disciplines increase exponentially.... Biology isalmost unimaginably more complex than physics, and the artsequivalentlymore complex thanbiology"(67).Yet still he advocates pressing on: "Insuchan endeavor it is not enough to say that history unfolds by processes toocomplex for reductionistic analysis. That is the white flag of the secularintellectual, the lazy modernist equivalent of The Will of God" (297).2Both Wilson's call to action and his disdain for what most humanistscurrently do has been echoed by several efforts to recast literary study incognitive terms. For Steven Pinker, the attention lavished on high art islittle more than a game of status pursued by those with a "terrorof beingmistaken for the kind of person who prefers Andrew Lloyd Webber toMozart":

We need to begin with folk songs, pulp fiction,and paintingson blackvelvet, not Mahler, Eliot, and Kandinsky.And that does not meancompensating or ourslummingby dressing up the lowly subjectmatterin highfalutin"theory" a semioticanalysisof Peanuts,a psychoanalyticexegesisof ArchieBunker,a deconstruction f Vogue).t means askingasimple question:What s it aboutthe mind thatlets people takepleasurein shapes and sounds and jokesand storiesand myths?(Howthe MindWorks 23)

Again, in Mark Turner's landmarkeffort to get at the "unoriginal ground oforiginality"(20)you find Wilson's reductionistfervorand sometimes a whiffof his condescension. Tofind the deep systematicity of thought and languagethat underlies literature,Turnermakes a self-conscious "effort to avoid all

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novel 'readings."' But then he can't resist adding: "By contrast, 'doing areading' in our profession usually means striving fornovelty.Anew readingseems to be more prized the less it shares with previous readings, no doubtbecause such novelty of interpretationattests to the ingenuity of the critic"(19). Of course, a self-declared avoidance of novelty has its ownfrisson, andTurner's opening out of the complexities of the unoriginal ground oforiginality is nothing if not original. Though, conversely,we certainly knowwhat he refers to when he speaks of the "strivingfornovelty."This is anotherconsequence of the systemic problem in academia that I addressed above.Still, I am not certain that novelty in interpretationcan be disposed of quiteso simply.For at least 200 years, novelty or something a lot like it has had itstheoretical adherents, among them figures as diverse as Coleridge,Baudelaire, Pater,Pound, Shklovsky,De Man, Bloom, and Lyotard.If in thelatterdays of the millennium much of post-structuralist heorizing succeededin turning the principle of novelty into a kind of hell of infinite difference,the post-Wordsworthian value of "making it new" has continued to enjoywidespread endorsement across the humanities.3 Moreover, work incognition suggests that the propensity for novelty may be a neurologicallybased inevitability of the way we know things, and that this in turn mayhave something to do with the way we express ourselves in assessing life onthe planet. Ellen Spolsky, in her fine book, Gapsin Nature,draws on thisresearch to argue that in art, as in criticism, "the phenomenon ofincommensurable readings is not accidental; it is genetically built into thebrain"(5).Inotherwords, it is in our nature to come up with new departures.

Spolsky takes off from JerryFodor's theory of the modularity of mindand the debate that followed it concerning just how modular thinking getsintegrated:what RayJackendoffrefers to as the grey area of higher thought.Spolsky's preferredmodel is that of a "paralleldistributed process." In this"connectivist"model, thereis no centralheadquarters,but, rather,processesof "regrowthand restructuringof the neuronal groups during the life of anindividual brain"(33). Spolsky invokes GeraldEdelman'sNeural Darwinism(1989), in which it is argued that, in our thinking, "there is no centralcontroller.The brain is a jungle of competing claims, and the strongest winout" (34). But this multitude of "competing attemptsto meet local processingneeds ... produces a processor that is highly tolerant of error"(33-34). Thebrain also works by mapping fromavarietyof readingsof the environment-"disjunctive sampling"-which necessarily "does not provide a completerepresentation of the environment." Instead, what we get is "adaptiveSubStance# 94/95, 2001

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categorization" (36). "Thebrain that can muddle through is good enough,"since "survival, not elegance, is sufficient" (37). In Daniel Dennett's words,human consciousness is necessarily "gappy and sparse, and doesn't containhalf of what people think is there"(366;cited in Spolsky, 39). As Spolskysums up: "brainmodularity necessitates the creative and tolerant bridgingof gaps" (40).Thecorollaryto this point is that,since we arealways missing the mark,it makes sense that we keep trying anew. Or,at the least, this makes sense ifunderstanding in the face of changing conditions is critically important. Itwould be relevant in this regardto study the rates of narrative change andinterpretive incommensurability in societies that are small, closed, and incomparative equilibrium with their environment. Are there, in otherwords,social mechanisms that curb or select out the rampant spread of noveltywhen it is not needed? Conversely, it may be no accident that the post-Wordsworthianenthusiasm for "originality," eferred to above, should havecaught on when it did in industrialized Western nations. In complex urbansocieties, the production of the new, in both art and the response to it, wouldappear to grow exponentially with size, demographic diversity, and the rateof change.One major difficultyin handling such complexity with scientificcalipersis what Wilson refers to as "the problem of the genetic leash" (157). The"genetic leash" refers to the degree to which a particular behavior isconstrained by genetic determination. The problem, when thinking aboutcultural behavior, is that we don't know how tight the leash is. We don'tknow, except in very general terms, how closely culture is monitored bygenetics. But we do know that, as in the productivity of language, the leashon culture is far looser than most other leashes that govern our bodilybehavior. In the realm of narrative, for example, we can predict withconfidence that there will be tales of love, tales of kinship, tales of revenge,and so on. And we can predict that most of these tales will have beginnings,middles, and ends. Correlatively, we may eventually be able to makeempirically demonstrable arguments regarding human geneticpredispositions involving love, kinship, revenge, and the need for linearwholeness in narrative. Butif we arepredisposed by this genetic equipmentto respond to certainmasterplots shaped in a certainform,the ways in whichthey are elaborated in the narrative discourse quite quickly surpasses ourcapacity to make predictions of any interest at all. So here is another kind oflimit beyond which evolutionary analysis would seem to be moot. As Wilsonpoints out, the leash on culture is so slack it can be dangerous. Cultures can


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produce collective behaviors that, from an evolutionary standpoint, wouldappear to have no advantage at all. Cultures can even self-destruct (158).But if such cultural behavior requires different modes of analysis, theslackness that permits this makes good evolutionary sense. The veryproduction of possibilities for thought and conduct thata loose leash permitsis what allows us to find those particularpossibilities that may keep us fromdestruction. It follows, then, that on balance our best interest lies in the factthat these possibilities are unpredictable. So, putting Spolsky and Wilsontogether, we can make a double point about the value of novelty in suchcomplex representational constructs as one finds in both art and theinterpretationof art.On the one hand, in our efforts to understand the worldand to communicate that understanding, we are fated by our neuronalequipment to endless approximation.Therefore,plurality and diversity abetour constant efforts to approach the world with this imperfect equipmentand to tell ourselves what we have found. On the other hand, the behaviorthat flows in the wake of these novel understandings has a chance, at least,of being adaptive. Multiple constructions open up multiple possibilities foraction. So here we have a general cognitive and evolutionary explanatoryframework to account for novelty in both art and the interpretation of it-that is, forms of thinking, communication, and conduct that are necessarilyunpredictable and potentially infinite. Unique among species, we occupywhat Tooby and DeVorecalled "the cognitive niche," in which we sort outcontingencies and, as they vary, draw on our powers of improvisation tocompete and survive. Novelty extends this process, working like mutation.It makes up for the knowledge and aptitudes we were not given. In otherwords, we invent because we don't already know.The Art of Living with Cognitive Limits

And what we don't know, it is worth remembering, is infinite. It is anancient theological puzzle why, with our great gifts, we fail so badly andunderstand so little. Luciana had it right from the start: "nothing, situateunder heaven's eye / But hath his bounds." This includes us. So, is God agloater?Does he orshe orit fearcompetition? Why couldn't theAll-Powerfulhave given us more of an edge? The best answer still comes from Darwin,though it is as hard to keep in mind as it is easy to grasp. Our brains aredesigned not, finally, to know but to help us survive. And though realknowledge can often advance the goal of survival, ignorance and




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misunderstandinghave alsoplayed key supportingroles,like those questionson the old SATthat you had to get wrong to score higher.4So what do we do, given the limitations of our equipment, if we wantto do more than survive? How do we manage if knowledge, broad andgeneral and deep and unsubordinated to the needs of survival, is part ofour agenda? What if we want not simply to be smart, but to be wise? Forthis object,the biggest problem confronting our finite minds is the problemof complexity - that complexity that E.O. Wilson claims both to love and tolove to reduce. But, paceWilson, let's put the case that there are points allover the map where our grasp of complexity must necessarily fail in itscompleteness, or at the least, must await certainextraordinaryreductions inthe distant future. How do we deal with that complexity now? And doesthe nature of knowledge and of the kind of intellectual support it tolerateschange once we pass certain imit lines in the analysis of complex phenomenalike cultural behavior? I believe so. When Wilson chides humanists forinvoking the idea of "processestoo complex forreductionisticanalysis"("thewhite flag of the secular individual, the lazy modernist equivalent of TheWill of God"),he is playing chicken in an inappropriateway. Of course onemust immediately affirm the possibility, noted above, that we will findreductionistic analysis applying in a number of cultural areaswhere we areunable to apply it now. And it is importantnot to give up on that possibility.To that extent, Wilson is right. But where Wilson's kind of scientist goeswrong is in failingto understand thedegreeto which the humanist researcher,working in the present, must accept and work with knowledge that is, andmost likely will remain,speculative. It is the willingness to thinkanalyticallyin a realm in which the operating assumptions and the conclusions arrivedat arenot empirically grounded that may be what, at bottom, separates thehumanist researcher from most scientists. This may simply be a matter oftemperament,but even in the matter of the temperamentof intellectuals it isimportant that we have a range to choose from. After all, so many of thereally important things we have to think about in this life lie in areaswherethe question of causation is highly speculative and where an answer, if oneexists, is far down the road. In other words, just because there is large roomfor doubt, it is no discredit to think hard about something and to try toarrive at some conviction about its nature. On the contrary,we cannot liveour lives without this kind of thinking.But shouldn't we do first things first? Shouldn't we first devote ourenergies to the challenge of reductionistic analysis, if only to clear awaymisconceptions? Again, the answer is that nothing should take precedence



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over the business of living. The achievement of valid reductions in theanalysis of culturalbehavior is aworthy goal, but it ought not to be pursuedat the expense of all this life we must live in excess of mere survival.This brings me to another slant on the point I am making. It has to dowith yet another difference between the humanistic disciplines and thesciences. If humanists are, in their way, scientists, in the sense that they aretrying to get to the bottom of things (unprovable as it may be), they arealso,in theirway, engineers. Their mission is splitbetween two kinds of importantactivity: they investigate and they make. Like the scientist, they proposehypotheses about cultural texts, what these texts do, how they change, whattheir component parts are,how readers read them, and so on. Surveying afield of evidence, humanists apply long chains of inductive and deductivereasoning as they try to develop answers. A few, in a spirit of empiricalrigor,have even begun examining readersin controlled experiments (Miall,Gerrig).Buthumanists also provide readings of individual productions:novels,lyrics, epics, dramas, films. They make arguments about how theseproductions can or should be interpreted - how, through their agency, wemight think and feel. It is this side of humanistic work that accounts forwhy some readings stick around for a long time. In the sciences, new workeitherconfirms,qualifies,ordisproves old work. Busyat the taskof achievingcompelling reductions, the scientist tends to concentrate on the very latestresearch,"the cutting edge." Humanists do this too. But in the engineeringside of theirwork, they sometimes design readings that don't get displaced.And the reason they don't get displaced is not because they are stillempirically verifiable, like E = MC2,but because they have become part of arich fabric of response to what is, finally,irreducible.A. C. Bradley's or T.S.Eliot's readings of Hamlet, now 80-100 years old, make their cases soforcefully,and express them so well, that they have become referencepointsin thinking about the play. Even when critics don't agree with them at all(and few nowadays do), such texts provide valuable leverage. They extendwhat the play began. And in so doing they help us to think about an arrayofmoralcomplexity in the lives of creatures-ourselves-who, by the vagariesof natural selection, have been burdened, like Hamlet, not only with desirebut knowledge as well.This is culturalwork.Likeengineering,it is an art.At thepresentmomentin history, of course, it is unlikely that many humanists would declare thatthey are engaged in cultural engineering, a phrase with troubling Sovietresonances. Yetthey are doing it all the same. Soviet cultural programs, ofSubStance# 94/95, 2001



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course, were deeply flawed. Not only were they tyrannical, but they werepredicated on a set of illusions about human nature that were themselvesthe product of prematurereductionistic thinking. Yetin our more open andfree environment, it is still the case that whole generations of students areabsorbing readings of canonical and non-canonical narratives generated bythe artful application of theory to interpretation.And well they should, forthough the quality of this activity varies immensely, the activity itself has itsown keen urgency. This, in effect, is how we use each other to handlecomplexity in the absence of certainty.Toput this anotherway, the urgencylies in the fact that we must live our lives, making choices and acting uponthem every day.For this, we cannot wait for reductionistic analysis. Life, asthey say, is too short.So, to repeat,reductionism may get us a significantway down the road.It may well be, for example, that there are narrative "functions" and"archetypes"that not only replicate across the entire range of cultures butthatindicate, if not directgenetic causation,a significantdegree of epigeneticconstraint.5 In some cases, in other words, the leash appears to be rathertight. What Freudcalled the "law of the talon"-the revenge imperative, aneye for an eye-may well be (though the case is far from being madedefinitively) rooted in a genetic predisposition to strike back. This wouldmake a kind of grim evolutionary sense. Anyway, let's put the case that it is.In narrative literature-in print, on stage, or on screen-one can find itstopos or archetype everywhere. Hollywood specializes in it, oftenexhaustingly, as in the Mel Gibson blockbuster,PayBack.Such cultural textsfeed the genetic need, rousing audiences to a frenzy of unsatiated cravingfor revenge, and then satisfying it. But you also find the revenge plot inHamletand MobyDick.A majordifference,however, between the latter twoand PayBacks that they don't give way to the genetic predisposition. As wefollow the narrative,we are not so much roused to revenge as we aredeeplyconflicted. This is one of the many qualities they have that makes them soabsorbing. They engage in what no amount of reduction will make finallyclear:the immensely important task of reconcilingheclaimsofknowledge nddesire. This is a task that begins in articulation, and is extended byinterpretation.It is a complex ethicalbusiness thatno cultureescapes, and itrequires,not reduction,but thoughtful construction.Should such texts workas cautionary tales with powerful moral lessons that keep warring partiesfromkilling each other off (i.e.,Lookwhere revenge gets you; try negotiationinstead), so much the better. But the main object is larger than this andarguably more important.When humanists do the engineering part of their




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job well, they help the culture to do its business and its people to live theirlives. Not just survive, but live. As Kenneth Burkeput it, the whole literaryprocess is "equipment for living."The issue of the limits of a solely Darwinian accounting of things is notconfined to researchersoutside of biology and paleontology. Much debateinternal to those fields has been expended on Gould and Lewontin's idea ofthe "spandrel,"or the accidental consequence of evolutionary necessity. Inarchitecture,a spandrel is the curved trianglecaused by the struts in a dome.This structuralnecessity became, in its turn,a framefor art,some of it ratherwonderful, but none of it necessary forthe structure'sarchitecturalintegrity.In evolutionary bio/psychology, scholars have argued about specificapplications of the theory of the spandrel to human capabilities, like, say,that of language.6 It may or may not be the case that a complex, culturallyshared artifact like narrative - the capability of producing an event-basedrepresentation of time-is also a spandrel. But it would appear almostcertainlythe case thatthe in-fillShakespeareand Melville createdto elaboratethe evolutionary givens of narrative and revenge is notpresent by necessity.It is all quite spandrelesque.

O vengeance!Whywhat an ass I am!This is mostbrave,ThatI, the son of a dear fathermurdered,Prompted o my revengeby heavenandhell,Must like a whoreunpackmy heartwith wordsAnd falla-cursing ike a verydrab,A stallion!Fieupon't,foh!(HamletI,ii, 567-574)

Hamlet is having a great deal of difficulty here casting himself in a simpletale of revenge, an old masterplot in which he is supposed to play the role ofavenger with all the appropriatepassion. He can't squeeze himself into thisreductive mold, which also requiresreducing his mother,his uncle, even his"dearfather"to their functions in the tale. As a sign of his own irreduciblehuman complexity, a multitude of other considerations inflect his thinkingon the subject. The inclusion of both heaven and hell as "prompters,"themetaphor of prostitution, the opposition of language and deeds are all atplay in his thinking in this briefpassage. It is a rich intellectual counterpoint,set off by the additional music of blank verse.In other words, gifts that we have by virtue of our long struggle tosurvive and reproduce have given us other behaviors that do not seem to beSubStance# 94/95, 2001



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dictated by some Darwinian imperative. They are way out there on thegenetic leash. If this is a point Pinker and others readily admit, the reallycrucialpoint is that these behaviors areno less important for that. This pointis critical if we are to avoid the naturalistic fallacy of passing from an "is"statementto an "ought"statement.Speciessurvival may ormay not be good,but if it is good, it is surely not the only good thing. Nor very distinguished.Wormsdo it. Moreover,they have been doing it much longer than we haveand will be still doing it after we're gone. The really important task is notsurvival but making a life out of the situation survival has landed us in.What art and literature so often enable, and what interpretive work enablesin its turn, is some alleviation of the burden of consciousness. Playing aheavy role in that burden is the need to reconcile, or at least negotiate, theclaims of what we know to be true with the claims of what we seemprogrammed to want. Thismay be a long losing battle,but the alternative isto live in darkness.

Ofcourse,living in darknessis something art can abet as well as alleviate.In this, art is not too different from the brains that create it. Pulp fiction,pictures on black velvet: they grant us what we already know. Thisconsiderationbrings us backaroundto the issue of circles. As Spolsky writes,"the process of drawing inferences from categorizations can reinforce oldpatterns of thought as well as allow the emergence of new understanding"(61).This observation applies to both the creationof art and the response toit. Worksof art,as New Historicists never tire of telling us, can be but bricksin the prison-house of culture.And interpretationoften provides the mortar.Even at the "higher" evels of critique,much of what passes for interpretationis a determination to make texts submit. Controlling the interpretation ofliterature is a mode of culturalreplication that goes on in academic researchall the time, and it extends to controlling the way literature is read byimpressionable students.But the cognitive models that Spolsky draws on in her study also allowfor what Paul Ricoeur described twenty-five years ago as "the surplus ofmeaning," novelties that we never expected to find in our interactions withtexts. Our neuronal inheritance, in other words, working in collaborationwith cultural products, gives us the capacity to escape from our own (alsoinherited) inclination toward circularself-subjection (telling ourselves overand over what we already know). In Ricoeur's view, we are equipped withtwo gifts that allow us to cope creativelywith hermeneutic circles:metaphorand narrative. To use Ricoeur's language, they allow us moments of self"dispossession," when we find something that is new: "amode of being inthe world that the text opens up in front of itself":




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Farfromsayingthata subjectalreadymasteringhis own way of beinginthe world projects he a prioriof his self-understanding n the text andreads it into the text, I say that interpretations the process by whichdisclosureof new modes of being ... gives to the subjecta new capacityforknowinghimself.If the referenceof the text is the projectof a world,thenit is not the readerwho primarilyprojectshimself.The readerratheris enlargedin his capacityof self-projection y receivinga new mode ofbeing fromthe textitself. (94)Cultural Limitlessness and the Limits of Reductionism

In so-called "vulgar Marxism," culture is conceived as a"superstructure," gliding along above the powerful determinants of theeconomic "base" to which it is tethered. It is curious how analogous is thebone structure of evolutionary cultural theory. Depending on one'sintellectual assumptions, much of culture, and certainly "high culture," iseither reducible to the evolutionary needs of the cognitive base, or aspandrelized meringue of happy accidents,embroideredby motives of statusand self-display, or just uninterestingly distant from where the action is.What I have argued above is, first, that much of culture is devoted to asurplus beyond the requirements of survival and, second, that it is no lessimportant for that. To take this position is to acknowledge the burden ofconsciousness, a burden that does not necessarily kill us or keep us fromreproducing,but thatnonetheless has its own imperatives, which we neglectat a peril that cannot be measured in terms of survival. If the culturalproductionof novelty contributesto our collectivesurvival (asarguedabove),it is more than the needs of survival that keeps it coming. As a species wehave, often with great novelty, been creating and commenting on art for allof recordedhistory.And it is more thanthe mere pursuit of novelty, or status,or pleasure, or "a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might facesomeday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them" (Pinker,HowtheMind Works 43)thatfully accountsfor thisbusy productivity. Rather,to get to the bottom of why we behave this way, I would argue that we haveto revisit the idea of reductionism, both as a human phenomenon and as aproblem.It is, of course, to our great and enduring benefit that we arereductionists. Without this wonderful ability, we would never get to thebottom of anything. We could not infer cause. Everything would just liebefore us like junk. So who knows? E. O. Wilson's passion to reduce mightsimply reflecta strongerthan usual genetic endowment.And for thatmatter,and despite Wilson's statement of contrast,humanists can be as reductionistSubStance 94/95,2001



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as anybody else, for when they make arguments, of whatever analytic orinterpretive stripe, they reduce. Certainly the promise of convincingreductions that cognitive and evolutionary theory bring to the humanitiesis, as noted early in this essay, one of its great attractions.The problem is that for all of us, humanists or whatever, this wonderfulgift is also a curse, especially in the way that reductions are so oftenpremature.As may have been the case with the lex talionis,the propensityforprematurereductionmay have been naturallyselected fora certainroughkind of evolutionary work. After all, people need to make decisions,sometimes very quickly and efficiently, and it is hard to keep in mind anawareness of complexitieswhen there'sajobto be done. Our lives candependupon this capability.And so we reduce. As human beings are far and awaythe most complex autonomous units we have to deal with, we employ agreat range of classificationswhen dealing with them. Stereotypes involvingrace,gender, and sexual orientation are only the most currentlyanalyzed ofthese classifications. We colonize almost everybody through mentalappropriation and reduction, underreading the complexity of Serbs,paraplegics, fat people, Communists, mothers-in-law, Presbyterians,alcoholics,avengers. Wealso redLuceountries (Cuba,Rwanda) and concepts(patriotism, evolution). Politics, of course, is an obvious sphere in whichreduction reigns, but in fact, and quite literally,we reduce everything. Ourbrains aren'tbig enough to do otherwise. But the damage that reduction cancreate is catastrophic.And I am not referringhere specifically to damage interms of survival and reproductive success. Even with survival andprocreation guaranteed, the reduction of any class of human beings comesat a terriblecost. Justas there canbe terrible costs in the reduction of complexissues, like, say, that of vengeance.The representationalartsand the commentary on them can of course beevery bit as reductive as any other kind of thinking we do, and it can servethe ill effects of reductionism. But this brings us to the final point in thisessay: how humanists work at their best, complementing in their owncontrasting way the superlative work of people like Wilson in the sciences.Itbrings us back to a point made earlier:the humanities at its best works inthe aggregate and does not elirrinate good work in deference to the cuttingedge. There are, of course, fashions of approach, and an acute anxietyespecially among younger humanists to work on stuff that is "hot."But hotstuff does not displace cold stuff the way Darwin displaced Lamarck.Inthis way, the best we produce is like the best art. If Virgil may have thoughthe was improving on Homer,and Dantemay have thoughthe was improving


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on them both, and Milton improving on all of them plus the Bible, andWordsworth improving on Milton, we nonetheless keep them all togetheron the shelf and look at them together (as most of them might approve).Each,of course,was keenly aware of the inadequacyof his predecessor'sreductions. "All strength-all terror, ingle or in bands, / Thatever was putforthin human form,"wrote Wordsworth,referringto Milton's dependencyon mythological paraphernalia,

Jehovah with his thunder,andthe choirOf shoutingAngels,and the empyreal hronesI pass them unalarmed.Not Chaos,notThedarkestpit of lowest Erebus,Nor oughtof blindervacancy, coopedoutByhelp of dreams canbreed such fearandaweAs fallupon us when we lookIntoourMinds,into the Mind of Man-My haunt,and the mainregionof my song. (204)This is the epic poet as cognitive scientist (see Steen), looking back witha certainarrogantcondescension at Milton, the epic poet as supernaturalist.But Wordsworthno more displaced ParadiseLostthan Milton displaced theBible. In the same way, good interpretive arguments do not displace other

good arguments that oppose them. How can this be? It can be because thecomplexity of the subject does not admit of final reductions, not now atleast, and not for a long time to come. The literary texts that we deal withareas complex and irreducible as the subjectsthey takeup - heroism,justice,rightbehavior,dignity, vengeance. WhenHamletwas firstperformed in 1602,it began a process of staged adaptations and critical commentary thatcontinues to the present day. Getting as much of the best of that history intoyour mind as you can is the best preventative against prematurereduction.So an important part of the good work of the humanities is to sustain as fullan awareness as we can of what is irreducible,even as we go about our localefforts of reduction, as we must. This is why many of us like to hover ratherthan land. It is an acknowledgement of limits, a way of saying: There ismore to this issue than I can handle, and I don't want to forget that.

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WorksCitedBurke,Kenneth."Literatures Equipment or Living" n ThePhilosophy f Literary orm:StudiesnSymbolic ction, econdEdition.BatonRouge:LouisianaStateUniversityPress,1967,pp. 293-304.Carroll, oseph.EvolutionndLiterary heory. olumbia:Universityof MissouriPress,1995.Coleridge,S. T.Biographia iteraria. d. J. Shawcross.Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress,1907.Dennett,Daniel C. Consciousnessxplained. oston:LittleBrown,1991.Fodor,JerryA. TheModularityfMind:An Essayon FacultyPsychology. ambridge,MA:MITPress,1983.Gerrig,RichardJ. ExperiencingarrativeWorlds:On thePsychologicalctivitiesof Reading.New Haven:YaleUniversityPress,1993.Gould,StevenJay.TheMismeasurefMan.New York:Norton,1981.Gould, Stephen Jay,and RichardC. Lewontin."TheSpandrelsof San Marco and thePanglossianProgram:A Critiqueof the AdaptationistProgramme."Proceedingsf theRoyalSociety fLondon,05 (1979),281-288.Jackendoff,Ray.ConsciousnessndtheComputational ind.Cambridge,MA: MITPress,1987.McEwan, an. TheCementGarden.New York:Simon and Schuster,1978.Miall,David S. Pinker,Steven. HowtheMindWorks.New York:Norton,1997.Pinker,Steven,and Paul Bloom."NaturalLanguageandNaturalSelection."BehavioralndBrainSciences 3 (1990),707-784.Ricoeur,Paul.Interpretationheory: iscourse nd theSurplus fMeaning.FortWorth:TexasChristianUniversityPress,1976.Shakespeare,William.Hamlet.Ed.WillardFarham. New York:Penguin,1970.Spolsky,Ellen.Gaps n Nature:Literarynterpretationnd theModularMind.Albany:StateUniversityof New YorkPress,1993.Steen,FrancisF "'TheTime of Unrememberable eing':Wordsworth'sAutobiographyofthe Imagination," /b:Auto/Biographytudies13:1(spring1998):7-38.Tooby,Johnand Irven DeVore."The Reconstructionof Hominid BehavioralEvolution

throughStrategicModeling." nPrimateModels fHominidBehavior.d. W.Kinzey.NewYork:SUNYPress, 1987,pp. 183-237.Turner,Mark.ReadingMinds:TheStudyof Englishn theAgeof Cognitive cience.Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress,1991.Wilson,E.O. Consilience:heUnityof Knowledge.ew York:Knopf,1998.Wordsworth,William."Prospectus o TheRecluse." n TheNortonAnthologyof EnglishLiterature,I,6th dition.Ed.MeyerAbramset al. New York:Norton, 1993,pp. 203-205.

Notes1. Iwant to thankEllenSpolsky,who made thiscomment n ane-mailexchangeand whoalso helped me to see what my realsubjectwas. I also want to thankPaul Hernadiforhis very helpfulreadingof a late draftof this essay.2. Inwhatfollows,myownassessmentof thescientific ttitudemayitselfseemreductionist,so let me acknowledge here not only the necessaryand admirableopenness of thescientific mind, but also the many areas (cosmology,paleontology) where work isnecessarily peculative, ndpossibly orever o. But nthedailyworkof thegreatmajorityof those in the academy, hereare two culturesas anyonecanattest who attends thoseraremeetingswhere scientistsand humaniststryto share heirfindingsand relate heir




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work. These "cultural"differences n the way problemsare framed and results arelegitimated certainlyshowed up in the conference commemoratedby this issue ofSubStance.nthis essay,I have triedto clarifywhy there should be this difference.3. There is a curious link-uphere with Turnerhimself when he quotes GeorgesPerecapprovingly:"To nterrogatewhatseemsto have ceased forever o astonishus. We ive,certainly;we breathe,certainly;we walk,we opendoors,we walkdown stairs,we seatourselvesat tableto eat,we go to bed to sleep.How?Where?When?Why?" 67).Thiscomesvery close to Coleridge'sdescriptionof Wordsworth'special genius:Tofind no contradictionn the unionof old and new, to contemplate heANCIENTof Days andallhis works with feelingsfreshas if all had thensprangforth at the first creative iat;characterizes hemind that feels theriddle of theworld,andmayhelp to unravel t. Tocarryon thefeelingsofchildhood into the powers of manhood;to combinethe child's sense ofwonderand noveltywith the appearanceswhich every day for perhapsforty yearshad rendered amiliar;

'With he sun and moon and starsthroughout he year,And man and woman;'this is the character ndprivilegeof genius .... (I,59,my italics)

Arguably, he line is blurredbetween the novelty Turnerpraisesand the novelty hedisparages.

4.I amreadyto swearthatthis is notan"urbanmyth,"but Ihave not yetbeen able to findthestoriesthatappearedwhenthenews broke.Perhaps ome kindreaderwill helpme.Theessenceof the example s that certainwronganswersprovedbetter ndicators hanright answersof futureprofessionalsuccess and thereforewere coded, in scoring,as"right" ven thoughtheywerein factwrong.5. The ideaof "epigenetic ules"of development s taken fromWilson(127ff.),wheretheyare used in his accountof the varying geneticleasheson culturalbehavior.Epigeneticrules are"algorithms"hatfunctionwithvaryingstrictnessacrossa "rangeofbehavioralcategories" 172).6. See, for example, Pinker and Bloom. For the original and now classic essay onevolutionaryspandrels,see Gouldand Lewontin.


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