In the closing
chapter of his recent bestseller The Blank
Slate, Steven Pinker attributes what he dislikes in modern literature
to the influence of poor empiricist psychology. The modernist ‘denial of human
nature’ resulted, Pinker informs us sadly, in the replacement of ‘omniscient
narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and
general readability’ by ‘a stream of consciousness, events presented out of
order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed
narration, and difficult prose’ (p.410). And, worse still, ‘in postmodernist
literature, authors comment on what they are writing while they are writing it’
(p.411). Pinker doesn’t mention the intense pleasure which rather large numbers
of readers find in the novels of Thomas Pynchon or Paul Auster, for example:
but I suspect this would be ascribed to a disavowed hunger for status fostered
by pretentious and unintelligible critics (compare pp.412-6).

Those whose
literary criticism is less impressed with evolutionary psychologists’ nativism
about aesthetics might sensibly seek out good alternative cognitive theory. In
recent years the field of ‘literature-and-cognition’ has indeed become
hearteningly diverse. But Joseph Tabbi here undertakes the particularly
difficult task of finding appropriate cognitive background for theorizing the
kind of reflexive, ‘metafictional’ writing which Pinker singles out for special
disdain.

The American
novelists and poets discussed in Tabbi’s loosely connected essays are, he
argues, moving ‘toward a more cognitive realism in fiction – based on notation
and reportability rather than representation, and recognizing conscious
experience as a process of selection, an autopoietic creation out of noise that
is far more complex than anything yet accomplished by computer simulation’
(p.xxv). Tabbi examines novels by Pynchon, Auster, Richard Powers, David
Markson, and (in less detail) the work of Harry Mathews, Lynne Tillman, and
Stephanie Strickland. These writers, Tabbi claims, ‘are creating a new order of
realism’ by ‘actually imagining those aspects of a cognitive system that have sunk
below the level of operational awareness’ (p.130).

The book is not
well organized. Chapter and section titles are wildly overoptimistic (‘A Media
Theory of the Unconscious’), agonizingly punning (‘Mapping the Cor[e]tex[t]’),
or inaccurate (a section titled ‘The Journalists: Markson, Maso, Mathews, and
Auster’ in fact discusses Maurice Blanchot). Descartes’ solitary revelations in
‘a small Bavarian farmhouse’ occurred in 1619, not 1629 (p.100). More
significantly, it is mystifying that Tabbi does not discuss in any detail the
one novel he mentions which engages deeply with cognitive science, Richard
Powers’ Galatea 2.2, a heartbreaking post-connectionist campus novel
about the attempt to train a program named Helen to produce convincingly
‘human-like’ literary criticism. After a number of postponements in his chapter
on Powers (‘Fiction to the Second Powers’), Tabbi evades the book with the
bewildering excuse that ‘As Galatea
also systematically sets out the cognitive themes that are also my themes,
analysis of these themes would be redundant here’ (p.72). Such teasing might be
understood by sympathetic readers as playful parrying with his material, but
Tabbi’s naïve and unimaginative prose wards us off. Do even
cognitive-scientific readers of Thomas Pynchon need to be told that he ‘is
self-conscious about questions of narrative form’ (p.26)? Brief quotations on
memory and representation from Powers and Markson are unfortunately much more
striking than the theorizing which surrounds them, and the temptation to go to
the novels first should probably not be resisted.

Tabbi’s interest
in cognitive science is intended to issue in a new ‘medial ecology’, a
framework in which to analyze the diverse ways in which embodied brains couple
with various changing technological and cultural systems. His primary frame of
scientific reference is the systems theory of Bateson, Bertalanffy, Luhmann,
and early Varela, rather than any of the movements of the 1990s toward embodied
cognition, dynamical systems, and the extended mind. The ‘cognitive’ references
cited are a popular paper by Bernard Baars, and Francis Crick’s autobiography.
But Tabbi deals with none of the cross-disciplinary work on cognitive
technologies and ecologies which could ground his project, by (for example)
Sunny Auyang, Rodney Brooks, Andy Clark, Merlin Donald, John Haugeland, Ed
Hutchins, Alva Noe, Esther Thelen, Evan Thompson, or Tim van Gelder. This is
particularly surprising given the weight Tabbi places on the notion of
‘distributed cognition’ (e.g. p.59, p.83, p.104, p.121). He never tries to
explain this phrase (nor other key cross-disciplinary concepts like
‘representation’ and ‘emergence’), but Tabbi seems sometimes to be thinking of
distributed representation within individual neural networks in the brain (e.g.
p.104, p.121), and sometimes of the quite different notion of a ‘distributed
cognitive environment’ (p.83) in which mental states and processes are
literally spread or smeared across brain, body, and (social, technological, and
physical) environment.

There’s nothing
incompatible in these two ideas: indeed anthropologist Hutchins and philosopher
Clark have argued powerfully that they are complementary, since unstable
connectionist brains tend to hook up with more durable and representationally-flexible
external media in temporary ‘doubly distributed’ cognitive systems. But
emerging theories of the interface in the arts as in the cognitive sciences
need to address explicitly the difficulty of understanding such tangles of
inner and outer resources. Instead, Tabbi’s complaint that the descriptions of
the ‘materiality’ of both text and brain ‘have been missing, for the most part,
from scientific descriptions of consciousness’ (p.96) suggests that he is
unaware of this diverse work on distributed and embodied cognition.

The most useful
concept which Tabbi draws from systems theory is ‘re-entry’. He hopes that
Gerald Edelman’s views about the cognitive significance of reciprocal pathways
in the brain will parallel or inform literary strategies of jumping to a
different narrative level, as in the nested narratives of Pynchon’s Mason
& Dixon, Auster’s New York Trilogy, and Markson’s Wittgenstein’s
Mistress. Re-entry is, for Tabbi, ‘a way of proceeding from blockage to a
metalevel where narration can continue’ (p.95). Just as the human mind can
‘reinternalize the difference between itself and its environment’ and then use
that discovered difference to reorganize its relations with the environment, so
such narrative leaps can copy or fold a difference into a novel’s system
(pp.21-3).

These strategies
of re-entry come into play once we recognize the impossibility of bringing all
the sedimented and reverberating activities of the mind into consciousness.
Tabbi convicts Pynchon of seeking, in the earlier, magically encyclopedic Gravity’s
Rainbow, to catalogue everything, furiously trying to bring all of the
mind and its noise to the surface. Pynchon’s trademark paranoia is thus
diagnosed as, in part, a panic about mental control, in which characters are driven
‘to read signs of conscious intention everywhere’ (p.34). Tabbi makes
the interesting comparison with the ‘totalizing insistence’ of Gregory
Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology that there is a single loop or
overarching pattern ‘immanent in the total interconnected social system and
planetary ecology’. He then adopts John Johnston’s reading of Vineland to
argue that Pynchon’s more recent work highlights gaps in consciousness, mapping
them onto ‘gaps between different technological regimes’, and foregrounding the
construction of a fragile narrative continuity out of incommensurable
representations. So the later Pynchon ‘seems to have come to terms with the
mind’s partial and contingent nature’ (p.51).

Tabbi himself
ascribes this gappiness in mental life to modularity. Though he says little
about what this means, references to the primitive importance of selective
attention and seriality of output suggest that some Fodorian distinction
between autonomous, impenetrable modules and ‘central systems’ is in play. But
this is not the only way that ‘large tracts of the unconscious and much of our
representational activity may be lost to the self’ (p.32). Tabbi reads a
set-piece in Gravity’s Rainbow in which the nervous system is dramatized
as a surreal bureaucracy as a consequence of Pynchon’s dismissal of
behaviorism, which ‘needs no further elaboration here’ (p.32). But the noisy
pandemonium of the scene might instead be seen as anticipating the way Brooks,
Clark, Daniel Dennett and others argue for the total dissolution of ‘central
systems’. And despite his lip-service to the idea he finds in his writers that
the ‘sense of a personal identity’ is itself ‘a cognitive fiction’ (p.123),
Tabbi himself is strangely reluctant to give up on the privacy and interiority of
the mental. Referring to ‘the irreducible solitude of conscious existence and
writerly activity’, Tabbi argues that one can never enter the head of another
individual, ‘and can never know that individual’s thoughts as such’ (p.92).
Perhaps this is why Tabbi finds it impossible to study structures (media
hardware, or cognitive structures) and consciousness simultaneously, so that we
must instead ‘fluctuate between these incompatible theories’, as if
cognitive/media ecology is inevitably pitted against phenomenology
(p.120).

The development of
a non-Pinkerian cognitive literary theory sophisticated enough to embrace these
writers who ‘comment on what they are writing while they are writing it’ will
be tough. My guess, after reading Joseph Tabbi’s brave but unsatisfying book,
is that it needs a livelier sense of fun, a more robust naturalism about self,
and (especially) deeper, insistent immersion in the multidisciplinary tangle of
psychological work on memory, narrative, mental representation, and embodied,
doubly distributed cognition.

© 2003 John Sutton

John Sutton is
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney.

Categories: Psychology, Philosophical