Is Literary Theory Creationist?
"If experience has shown that a certain class of phenomena results from intelligent causes and then we encounter something new but similar, we conclude its origin also to be from an intelligent cause." (Of Pandas and People, page ix)
If it walks like a duck and if it quacks like a duck, ipso facto ... you have a duck. There may be some term in logic for this sort of argument--perhaps Leibnitz's thesis about the identity of indiscernibles -- but upon it rests almost entirely the argument for intelligent design. Strangely enough, it is related to an argument made years ago, in "Against Theory, " where Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp argued against any more general theory of interpetation than the common-sense one. That is, if you have writing, you have an author, and that author is none other than the biographical and biological one. Neither politics nor the unconscious writes with the intention of making meaning. Their argument caused much furor in English departments, but also ignited the turn from using texts and language--what "theory" is essentially--to history as the benchmark for interpreting literature, most notoriously the New Historicism.
In a sense, BM & K's move was to secularize literary and culture study. A theory which explains all interpetation can be called Archimedian, but truly the only perspective that fits is that of a deity or at least an extraterrestial. Yet there is an odd symmetry between their thought experiment about why a text and its intention cannot be separated and the argument for intelligent design. The BM&K argument is that if you came upon, say, "In the beginning, God said Let there be light, and, lo, there was light," written on in the sand on a beach, you would automatically assume that someone wrote it. Someone imaginative might say it was the wind or the waves; a coastal geologist could probably come up with an equation involving fractals to say that while it was highly improbable the writing could have just appeared there, it was not impossible. A reader-response theorist might say that the marks simply coincided with a certain interpetative community. A green autonomous Marxist would say the beach was writing back against the Judeo-Christian multinational corporate conspiracy to pollute the environment. In all the cases, it would be extremely hard not to impute intention and not to make the obvious jump that someone had written them down. Thus, if a design coincides with what we normally regard as something designed, it is difficult to say that, as deconstruction and Heidegger have, Language did it, or as structuralists have said, Literature did it, or as Marxists have, In the last instance the economy did it, when the obvious answer is Someone on the beach before me did it.
The BM&K argument is strikingly similar to the basic argument for (intelligent) design. Essentially, if it looks like it was created, well then there must be a creator. Intelligent design, then, is what BM & K would call intentional design. What is to be made out of the use of virtually the same philosophical gambit to illustrate radically different ideas? BM & K would have no use for "intelligent design" as explanation of evolution, since the shadow behind theory that they are stalking is the New Criticism's theologically inflected notion of genius--in a way, theirs was an "intelligent design" theory of literature. This is a neat trick, in attributing the same qualities to theory, practiced by secular professors, that is often attributed to theology. Where BM & K differ is the claim is that if there is no identififiable biographical author, the writing qua writing means nothing. Whereas the example from Of Pandas and People asserts that we can't find a cause (i.e., an "author") for a particular evolutionary change, which means it is the handiwork of Author, God Himself. (BM & K, on the other hand, would not rule out scientific narratives for how the writing got the beach; those narratives aren't concerned with what the writing says, just the way the marks arrived in their particular arrangement.)
What I take away from this discussion is that there is a difference between a text's meaning and a text's being intended. The Of Pandas and People example simply substitutes the fact that no author can be found with the claim that, therefore, the Author is God. The example also shows us that interpetation is not a scientific discipline--science tells us nothing about the meaning of a process. Both uses of this example then go too far in drawing conclusions.
It is interesting to contrast the 18th century philosopher Giambattiso Vico's thinking on the subject of interpretation with BM & K and intelligent design proponents. Vico believed that there are two forms of knowledge, one that is susceptible to human understanding and the other which is only susceptible to approximations of understanding. For Vico, what is man-made can be understood, because it was made by human beings. What is natural ultimately is beyond certainty for human understanding, because its meaning is God's. Vico's theory is not a theory of scientific understanding, but rather humanistic or poetic thinking. Vico effectively rules out the certainty of the argument for intelligent design, since no certainty can be found in speculation about nature, but he also rules the hubris of the argument against theory that disallows interpetation without knowledge of the author. Texts and writing are human artifacts and, as such, are subject to the possibility of certainty as defined by Vico.
The only objection one could provide to this argument is that language appears to be a natural object; at the very least, it is so intersubjective as to be beyond the scope of an individual in a way that natural processes are as well. Yet this too aids the argument for literary theory: for what is the study of interpetation but the exploration of meaning in a general way, rather than its specific instances?
Edit (21 February 2006): I have just learned that the argument for intelligent design is also a version of the argument for the existence of God called the "Argument from Ignorance." While this title makes it seem like a rather Monty Python kind of argument, this idea actually refer to the belief that the amount we don't know about the universe confirms the existence of God. ID is certainly a version of this argument, though its promoters do try to rectify the main problem with the argument from ignorance, which is that it presents nothing positive for the existence of the creator. ID, thus, is a child of our empirical modern age, rather than the medieval period were metaphysics did not have the ghostly existence it does now.
If it walks like a duck and if it quacks like a duck, ipso facto ... you have a duck. There may be some term in logic for this sort of argument--perhaps Leibnitz's thesis about the identity of indiscernibles -- but upon it rests almost entirely the argument for intelligent design. Strangely enough, it is related to an argument made years ago, in "Against Theory, " where Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp argued against any more general theory of interpetation than the common-sense one. That is, if you have writing, you have an author, and that author is none other than the biographical and biological one. Neither politics nor the unconscious writes with the intention of making meaning. Their argument caused much furor in English departments, but also ignited the turn from using texts and language--what "theory" is essentially--to history as the benchmark for interpreting literature, most notoriously the New Historicism.
In a sense, BM & K's move was to secularize literary and culture study. A theory which explains all interpetation can be called Archimedian, but truly the only perspective that fits is that of a deity or at least an extraterrestial. Yet there is an odd symmetry between their thought experiment about why a text and its intention cannot be separated and the argument for intelligent design. The BM&K argument is that if you came upon, say, "In the beginning, God said Let there be light, and, lo, there was light," written on in the sand on a beach, you would automatically assume that someone wrote it. Someone imaginative might say it was the wind or the waves; a coastal geologist could probably come up with an equation involving fractals to say that while it was highly improbable the writing could have just appeared there, it was not impossible. A reader-response theorist might say that the marks simply coincided with a certain interpetative community. A green autonomous Marxist would say the beach was writing back against the Judeo-Christian multinational corporate conspiracy to pollute the environment. In all the cases, it would be extremely hard not to impute intention and not to make the obvious jump that someone had written them down. Thus, if a design coincides with what we normally regard as something designed, it is difficult to say that, as deconstruction and Heidegger have, Language did it, or as structuralists have said, Literature did it, or as Marxists have, In the last instance the economy did it, when the obvious answer is Someone on the beach before me did it.
The BM&K argument is strikingly similar to the basic argument for (intelligent) design. Essentially, if it looks like it was created, well then there must be a creator. Intelligent design, then, is what BM & K would call intentional design. What is to be made out of the use of virtually the same philosophical gambit to illustrate radically different ideas? BM & K would have no use for "intelligent design" as explanation of evolution, since the shadow behind theory that they are stalking is the New Criticism's theologically inflected notion of genius--in a way, theirs was an "intelligent design" theory of literature. This is a neat trick, in attributing the same qualities to theory, practiced by secular professors, that is often attributed to theology. Where BM & K differ is the claim is that if there is no identififiable biographical author, the writing qua writing means nothing. Whereas the example from Of Pandas and People asserts that we can't find a cause (i.e., an "author") for a particular evolutionary change, which means it is the handiwork of Author, God Himself. (BM & K, on the other hand, would not rule out scientific narratives for how the writing got the beach; those narratives aren't concerned with what the writing says, just the way the marks arrived in their particular arrangement.)
What I take away from this discussion is that there is a difference between a text's meaning and a text's being intended. The Of Pandas and People example simply substitutes the fact that no author can be found with the claim that, therefore, the Author is God. The example also shows us that interpetation is not a scientific discipline--science tells us nothing about the meaning of a process. Both uses of this example then go too far in drawing conclusions.
It is interesting to contrast the 18th century philosopher Giambattiso Vico's thinking on the subject of interpretation with BM & K and intelligent design proponents. Vico believed that there are two forms of knowledge, one that is susceptible to human understanding and the other which is only susceptible to approximations of understanding. For Vico, what is man-made can be understood, because it was made by human beings. What is natural ultimately is beyond certainty for human understanding, because its meaning is God's. Vico's theory is not a theory of scientific understanding, but rather humanistic or poetic thinking. Vico effectively rules out the certainty of the argument for intelligent design, since no certainty can be found in speculation about nature, but he also rules the hubris of the argument against theory that disallows interpetation without knowledge of the author. Texts and writing are human artifacts and, as such, are subject to the possibility of certainty as defined by Vico.
The only objection one could provide to this argument is that language appears to be a natural object; at the very least, it is so intersubjective as to be beyond the scope of an individual in a way that natural processes are as well. Yet this too aids the argument for literary theory: for what is the study of interpetation but the exploration of meaning in a general way, rather than its specific instances?
Edit (21 February 2006): I have just learned that the argument for intelligent design is also a version of the argument for the existence of God called the "Argument from Ignorance." While this title makes it seem like a rather Monty Python kind of argument, this idea actually refer to the belief that the amount we don't know about the universe confirms the existence of God. ID is certainly a version of this argument, though its promoters do try to rectify the main problem with the argument from ignorance, which is that it presents nothing positive for the existence of the creator. ID, thus, is a child of our empirical modern age, rather than the medieval period were metaphysics did not have the ghostly existence it does now.
posted by RobCrowe at 12:08 PM
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