Stephen Dougherty

Fine Arts and Humanities Division
Elizabethtown Community and Technical College
stephen.dougherty@kctcs.edu

 

Review of: Tabbi, Joseph, Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.

 

Cognitive Fictions is a sophisticated and fascinating book that asks difficult questions about the place of literature and the literary artist in the age of digitized mass media. The answers Joseph Tabbi provides are equally difficult, although the reader’s trouble on this score will depend in part on whether or not he or she ascribes to some of the guiding assumptions that motivate the inquiry. To its credit, this is a book that provokes an emotional response. However, Tabbi’s reliance on the modular theory of mind (more on this later) elicits considerable discomfort even for a reader who does not consider himself or herself a traditional humanist.

 

But first things first: Cognitive Fictions represents an important contribution to U.S. literary studies. Tabbi rightly insists that in a global culture literary studies must engage more with science and with media studies. Taking issue with what he sees as a predominantly unmediated situation of literature studies in its geopolitical framework, Tabbi suggests another approach: we must develop closer and more detailed “connections with the sciences and with those communications media whose recent expansion and unprecedented integration into everyday life made a global culture possible . . . in the first place” (xviii). Thus, if the novel is to continue to possess a recognizable cultural diversity and historical specificity, and if we are to continue to respect it for such differences, then “it first needs to define itself within and against those more globalizing powers and distribution networks that threaten to erase the novel’s medial difference” (xix).

 

This is the task that Tabbi has set for himself. In a time when all forms of communication (image, sound, text) can be digitized, and at a point in cultural history when irony, once the hallmark of the postmodern literary, has been wholly subsumed by advertising culture, he asks along with the small group of U.S. writers he investigates: What is the novel for? What does it do? Why does our culture continue to produce and consume works of fiction? For Tabbi, the contemporary novelist’s purpose has nothing to do with nostalgia for the Real; it is not about the recovery of an “authentic” America, because in a world where electronic mass media has penetrated so deeply into the collective consciousness that distinction no longer has any value, if it ever did. The purpose of the fiction writer is rather to re-purpose or re-mediate the complex social/communications systems within which our minds and bodies are enmeshed through the processes of observation, or rather, observation of observation.

 

Tabbi’s inspiration here is the autopoesis of Maturana and Varela, and the work of Niklas Luhmann as well. Just as “autopoesis describes a way of establishing and maintaining a system’s boundary by selecting meaningful elements (distinctions the system can use) out of an otherwise indistinct, ‘noisy,’ environment” (xxii-xxiii), the writers that Tabbi examines (at least in the latter portion of his book) obsessively observe and take notes in journalistic fashion, or rather their protagonists do. Such close observation of the social systems that constitute them makes (or marks) a difference that becomes useable as a platform for fresh insight about those systems. Tabbi explains:

 

In recognizing the absolute closure of the system . . . , these narrators create a new distinction, which then enters into the system it describes and alters it. So the moment a narrator recognizes the possibility of keeping a "journal of the journal," or turning one's isolated inconsequential notations into an "absolutely autobiographical novel," the narrator can re-enter the system at another level (and at a later time), and thus keep things going. The distinction (analogous to what cognitive science would term a "gap" and literary theory might call the "aporia") between rhetoric and meaning, the writer/observer and the writing/system under observation, is no longer a distinction between inside and outside. Rather, by imagining oneself as "outside," the observer introduces a new distinction within the writing-system. Hence the possibility of moving the system (not necessarily "up") to a different level of complexity, so that it can function differently within the environment (because it is now structurally capable of making new distinctions and hence seeing things within the environment that were not visible before). (xxii)

 

Here Tabbi urges that we must distinguish between autopoesis and an autotelic theory of the literary that insists upon the absolute isolation of the literary work from the hum of background noise. Autopoetic art encloses itself in and as a world of words, but it does so in relation to the outside. The distinction between the autopoetic and the autotelic is critical for Tabbi, given his desire to save for the literary artist a purpose or a value that the self-reflexive modernist lost in a hall of mirrors no longer offers us. Writers such as Paul Auster in his New York Trilogy, David Markson in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and Harry Matthews in The Journalist are not out of touch, and they certainly don’t go about conjuring a world elsewhere in the New Critical sense. But then the real issue for Tabbi is what it means to be in touch, and how one goes about mediating reality (as a novelist) in a world where human perception is already so profoundly mediated: “Reflexivity in contemporary fiction, like autopoetic closure in cognitive science and in systems theory, is not a shutting out of the world,” Tabbi insists. “[I]t is rather a way of establishing an identity that is better able to connect with the world at particular points, when one is able, while writing, to re-cognize and put on hold one’s own literary distinctions and categories long enough to see how they might answer to distinctions in the environment” (80).

 

The application of systems theory to literary study is promising, and it is likely that Tabbi’s project will prove inspirational for many readers and critics. Nevertheless, the difference between the autotelic and the autopoetic is often quite difficult to grasp in Tabbi’s readings; which is to say that it is hard to tell what practical value his authors and/or their protagonists get out of the close observations that constitute their textual interventions. Perhaps this is inevitable, given that Tabbi’s concern is with states of consciousness, which are of course rather ineffable stuff. Nevertheless, one is left with the distinctly unsettling impression that on Tabbi’s account we are in a world so utterly homogenized through mediation that there is no space for resistance. That is not because of his use of systems theory. If the fundamental lesson of systems theory is that human cognition is a moving blind spot, then as a theoretical framework within which to understand behavior, systems theory converges in some significant ways with other theoretical frameworks that trouble but do no obviate the value of talking about cultural resistance, such as the psychoanalytical. Blind spots are one thing, but Tabbi’s mobilization of the cognitive scientific model of mind represents in itself a discrete aspect of his theoretical strategy, and we must separate this out from systems theory.

 

My main grouse with Cognitive Fictions has to do with Tabbi’s uncritical acceptance of what is known as the modular theory of mind, the idea that the mind/brain is made up of systems whose resources are site-specific, so to speak, or “encapsulated” with respect to the data that each contains. According to this theory, information in the brain is stored in independent modules which have either very limited or no knowledge of what goes on outside, in surrounding domains. But as Jerry Fodor has most vigorously argued in recent books, while the modular theory may indeed get the architecture of local mental states right–those that pertain to beliefs, desires, and other forms of thought that can be expressed propositionally–it explains nothing about global, or conscious, states. Fodor writes in The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way:

 

Since the mental processes thus afflicted with globality apparently include some of the ones that are most characteristic of human cognition, I'm on balance not inclined to celebrate how much we have so far learned about how our minds work. The bottom line will be that the current situation in cognitive science is light years from being satisfactory. (5)

 

Without getting into the considerable complexities of Fodor’s arguments, which in any case pertain mainly to the logical and empirical misgivings he has about the modularity thesis, suffice it to say that Fodor sees far greater virtue in blending domain-specific and domain-general cognitive architectures. For if the mind is entirely modular, as cognitive science is wont to argue; if “there is a more or less encapsulated processor for each kind of problem that it can solve”; and if “there is nothing in the mind that can ask questions about which solution to a problem is ‘best overall,’ that is, best in light of the totality of a creature’s beliefs and utilities,” then for Fodor cognitive science has not gotten us very far in the study of human consciousness (64). This assertion on its own is a powder keg, and I do not want to endorse it so much as to use it to point toward a problem that dogs Cognitive Fictions on another level.

 

Following McLuhan, Tabbi assumes from the start that our electronic media are extensions of the human sensorium; in effect his book is a complex and sophisticated study of the relation between those media on the one hand and “the human measure” on the other. Whereas McLuhan in the sixties believed he confronted, as Mark Hansen puts it, “‘a situation in which the prostheses we adopt to cognize and intervene in the technologically driven material complexification of the universe only seem to expand our experiential alienation'” (x), Tabbi re-envisions the relation between human beings and their electronic prostheses, or their media environments, based on the discoveries of cognitive science. His next assumption, and it is the value rather than the accuracy of this one that I question, is that the findings of cognitive science refute McLuhan’s thesis that there is a poor fit between our media and our psychical economies. Digital information processors do of course work on the architectural principle of modularity. But instead of accepting neutrally that “emerging sciences of the mind have produced detailed descriptions of similarly communicating agents, modules, and distributed networks in us” (x), Tabbi could have more fully questioned from the start the motivations that have produced these discoveries, which are in effect metaphorical associations. In other words, what Cognitive Fictions lacks is a substantial rhetorical analysis of its cognitive science, because it is by no means a necessary correlative of systems theory. Neither is it necessarily a good fit.

 

Tabbi’s decision to foreground systems theory and to background the cognitive theory has a practical payoff because it is a relatively safer critical strategy. It is even likely that it was the right decision, given that it frees him to pursue systems-theoretical insights rigorously. We should not be surprised, however, that it produces a big blind spot. For Tabbi fails to see the trouble into which his under-theorized articulation of cognitive science with systems theory gets him right from the start, even in spite of his explicit statement of the problem. Here is the statement, which refers back to the prior announcement of the modularity thesis: “With the coming together of these two systems–call them the mind and the medial ecology–prospects for achieving a critical distance, never hopeful in a postmodern context, seem increasingly unlikely” (x). True enough. But the prospects for achieving the kind of distance from our media ecology that would allow for truly productive critical inquiry into its conditions and effects, which is what Tabbi seems at least wistfully to hope for in this passage, are radically undermined precisely by the uncritical acceptance of the modularity thesis. If we do not assume that the mind is “coming together” with media systems by virtue of deep structural affinities, then we will invariably find ourselves talking about some other kind of interface between them–one perhaps, with more friction at work; and one, perhaps, where there is a greater possibility of achieving a productive critical distance from media forces. Tabbi is not entirely unaware of the problem. In fact he acknowledges it head on in his chapter on Pynchon and cognitive science:

 

For a humanism that wishes to read signs of community in a multi-voiced and multicultural past, the implications [of modularity] remain disturbing: when consciousness, like corporate power, is itself composed of a collection of partially connected modules or media, what resistance is possible? .... Just as cognitive theories of the modular mind require no self, the proliferating connections among voices and identities in Pynchon's two most recent novels require no community. (52)

 

But surely it is not only the humanists who ought to worry about the failure of community, or about the dangerous erosion in the postmodern world of any space for meaningful resistance. Tabbi does not claim that we ought to accept such an erosion blithely. Still, the particular variety of cognitive science he chooses to articulate together with systems theory leads him to recreate on the critical-theoretical level some of the same problems he insightfully exposes in the fictions he studies.

 

Work Cited

 

• Fodor, Jerry. The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.