A Quiet Manifesto

Nathaniel Likert (bio)

A review of Kramnick, Jonathan. Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness. U of Chicago P, 2018.

Literary studies has recently seen a sharp uptick in interest in all things broadly “empirical:” from the influx of cognitive approaches (Lisa Zunshine, Alan Palmer) to sociological methods (Heather Love) to science studies (Bruno Latour). This scholarship attempts, on the one hand, to walk back the discipline’s longstanding skepticism of empirical approaches as theory-laden political positions in disguise (a poststructuralist legacy) without, on the other hand, naïvely embracing the merely given. Jonathan Kramnick’s new book, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness, weighs the stakes of empirical approaches for literary criticism, and expertly cashes out a version of this approach in particular readings. Broadly conceived, the book does two things. Its first third assesses the potential for literary study to intervene in extra-disciplinary debates. To do so, it combats various reductionisms—those of many of Kramnick’s empiricist forebears—that would situate the literary as little more than a data set for the methodologies of other disciplines. Against this, he proposes a version of form that presents the subject matter (or content) of other disciplines in a unique way, allowing literature to reframe those disciplines’ questions and thereby make new answers possible. The rest of the book fleshes out this new formalism by reading a clutch of literary works, from the eighteenth century to the present day, with the help of recent cognitive-scientific work on embodied perception. These works present, at the level of form, a picture of mind as enmeshed within rather than floating above the world. The book’s primary achievement, to my eye, is that it advocates a rapprochement between literature and cognitive science that, unlike other recent calls for this sort of détente, preserves the special status of the literary artifact (as form) without romanticizing it.

Most centrally, the book aims to carve out the precise niche of literary contribution to two current questions in the philosophy and science of mind. The first concerns consciousness. In Kramnick’s telling, there are two basic accounts of the origin of conscious experience. In the first, consciousness is an emergent property of inert, unfeeling matter. In the second—called panpsychism—emergence is unnecessary because matter already enfolds consciousness as an inherent property of the universe at large. This debate links up with the second question, a related puzzle about perception: is consciousness ultimately an internal “bringing the world to mind” as mental representation, thus prioritizing mediation and skepticism? Or is it a direct “[reaching] out” (10) to things in the world as they lie and as they invite the perceiver, like a kind of touch? The latter answer to this second question forms the book’s moral heart. Kramnick champions “direct perception” (8) as “ecophenomenological” (3) or a “dissident [strain] of empiricism” (9) that brokers mind and world without positing either as the determining ground of the other.¹ Because direct perception dissolves the internalism of the representational view, mind has a commonsensical access to world, and yet, because that world is still phenomenal—an “affordance” (5) enabling certain kinds of action for certain creatures with certain physical makeups—we aren’t forced to do away with the subject altogether. The world, in this view, invites action rather than contemplation—an ecological engagement whose watchword for Kramnick is “skill” (6). ²

One could object that this account courts scientific reductionism by positing a way of life grounded in a morphological feature of the human body, but Kramnick parries this attack through an account of literary form. For Kramnick, literature helps historicize our perceptual apparatus by encoding, in its formal features, various stances about both the nature of perception and the kinds of environments that prompt it to act in different, contingent ways: “The emphasis on motion, skill, and environment broadens the discussion from the ostensibly unchanging nature of the brain to the historically variable conditions of circumstance” (6). If direct perception syncs up mind and world, and world is historical, then mind is historical too and literature helps shape for us its (local) contours. The argument is a series of nested analogies: the direct perception of represented characters or speakers is like the craft aesthetics of the writer which, in turn, is like the skill of the critic. Seeing is writing is reading. Each draws on the perceptual attunement of the others.

In the first two chapters, Kramnick tackles directly the way we read now. Many claim that literary studies are in crisis. While blame teleports between external (the neoliberal university and its bottom-line agenda, frowning at declining majors and uneasily quantified research output) and internal factors (our critical methodology, balking at value judgments), the prognosis is the same: the continued decline of the humanities’ relevance in the academy. One answer to this bleak forecast has been an ever-more-insistent borrowing from disciplines more firmly vested with public confidence (like the sciences), and Kramnick’s twin chapters address this move (and its underlying cynicism). The first mounts the paradoxical case that “the best way to be interdisciplinary is to inhabit one’s discipline fully” (17). This case depends, crucially, on what Kramnick calls “ontological pluralism” (18) or the idea that each “corner of the world” (51) is not reducible—that is, fundamentally explicable—in the terms of any other area of study. This model is explicitly drawn from Jerry Fodor’s well-known argument about “special sciences” (i.e. all those that are not physics) which resists the idea that these can be reduced to physics (or any to a level more granular than itself) on the grounds that their phenomena are all multiply realizable. That is, they can be instantiated by any number of physical systems—for example, silicon could conceivably give rise to brain function as well as organic matter does—and, thus, cannot be reduced. This view would establish literature as an autonomous field of study, prompting reflection on what Kramnick calls “explanatory pluralism” (18): the idea that a nonreducible panoply of objects in the world requires the same plurality of disciplines to study them, and that each must therefore cultivate its own garden of explanatory terms, definitions, and methods of study. For Kramnick, that particularity lies in form itself, which is the mode of presentation of any phenomenon in a literary text (21); to restate these phenomena as propositions in the language of another discipline is to dissolve the mode of presentation—the form—that makes them unique. Form simply is literature, with the caveat that form is itself beholden to disciplinary norms of explanation, and these remain “inquiry-relative” (38) and context-specific. Even within a discipline, one cannot posit a unifying notion of form that would foreclose others.³ This reductionism (by literary critics themselves) is the target of the next chapter—previously a much-discussed article in Critical Inquiry written with Anahid Nersessian—which argues against the “polemic” of wielding a single notion of form to the exclusion of others (52), defending both the separation of literature from other disciplines and the necessity of ongoing pluralism and debate within its confines.

The remainder of the book puts this capacious notion of form to work by reading a selection of literary texts from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, all of which foreground the two key debates in the philosophy of mind: consciousness and embodied perception. These chapters divide into two sections. Chapters three and four examine eighteenth-century locodescriptive and Georgic poetry to excavate an aesthetic “counter-tradition” that privileges tactile immediacy over the classic conception of disinterested, distanced contemplation. Kramnick shows how these poems, through the “homely style” (60) of formal elements like apostrophe, ferry the world to the speaker for active engagement. The remaining chapters turn to the novel, and primarily concern consciousness while keeping hold of embodied perception. The fifth chapter compares eighteenth-century and contemporary theories of mental representation, arguing that literary scholars can’t assess which theories are right, per se, but can only trace historical change. The eighteenth-century representational view helped produce the epistolary novel, whose sequence of letters resembles the association of ideas in the mind. This chapter also takes up contemporary cognitive scientific approaches to literature, arguing that attempts to posit the biologically essentialist structure of mind that novels approximate miss the historical warp and woof of empirical theory. The sixth chapter suggests that the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” is only a problem because it defines consciousness as purely private experience.⁴ Kramnick takes up two contemporary novels—Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder—which illustrate two distinct ways to rethink this “hard problem,” encoded in the structure of their sentences. The final chapter turns to panpsychism, tracing its fortunes from Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 speculative romance The Blazing World to the recent novels of Marilynne Robinson. Both Cavendish and Robinson respond to reductionist orthodoxies of their day (the Royal Society, New Atheism) that believe grasping the structure of matter will provide the key to experience. Panpsychism holds that since all matter is experiential, the form of that experience will vary infinitely based on the material structure of any given organism. Kramnick teases out this variety in each author’s nested layers of narration.

Paper Minds takes a decidedly hopeful bent toward the future of literary study. The critic seeks to cultivate habitable lifeworlds: both literary texts and a sense of dwelling in a world partially made by one’s own skilled activity aid in and aesthetically christen such work. This is all quite apart from the literary-critical mainstream’s gloomy cultural determinism, descended at least from Saussure, for whom langue showed up precisely in the unconscious moment when one heard a word and automatically supplied its meaning—language preceded the subject, and the signified dangled always out of reach. Not so here. This constructive, realist, optimistic stance shares much with contemporary postcritical thought in its refusal to allegorize texts as symptoms of discursive forces and structures. Critique’s “disputing of ‘common sense'” (Anker and Felski 3) as insufficient to grasp the gears of power behind the curtain has been supplanted by a trusting, even loving attention to the immediately present. What shows up for us in sensory experience is accepted as the given.⁵ Kramnick makes good on this commitment in his prose style, which limits complicated clauses and jargon while adopting a comfortable, good-naturedly modest tone. There is a politics to this style, of course: assent is all but guaranteed by the very simplicity Kramnick claims for his points. To take one example, he constantly uses “just” or “just so” to describe the inviting presence of a three-dimensional object calling out to be handled—as in “a pail placed just so” (65) or “when positioned just so” (146). Similarly, Kramnick uses “just” to discuss both an object being addressed—”a creature who is just here” (95)—and the perceiving subject who is addressing it: “when the head turns just so” (5). The word most obviously means “precisely,” emphasizing the nuanced skill of the perceiver, but it means also “simply” or “merely,” suggesting a plainly available rather than a deviously occluded world.

While launching plenty of critical salvos against reductionism, Kramnick doesn’t have much to say about the position of his positive claims vis-à-vis other contemporary theorists. In fact, at both the theoretical and historical levels, Kramnick comfortably perches his claims beside the standard ones without saying that they’re wrong. A non-interventionist pluralism has been gathering steam for a few years now, against what Jason Potts and Daniel Stout call our “theory-as-wholesale-transformation model” (8), which serves to “effectively linearize the intellectual landscape” (9). In its refusal to figure heroic reinvention as the only way to play, Kramnick’s work doesn’t ask “what’s next,” but rather “what else?” (“Theory Aside”). This is hardly a radical move in the sphere of theory, of course, as fewer scholars would claim today to profess allegiance to, say, poststructuralism or Marxism as the orienting lens of their work. It’s much more of an intervention in historical scholarship, though, which remains relatively committed to the “replacement” model (9). Kramnick emphasizes dissident strands that aren’t the period’s real story but merely a forgotten subplot. He doesn’t deny the dominant representational theory of perception or the importance of the distance aesthetics it subtends—the fifth chapter makes the former’s importance quite clear for early eighteenth century novels, and the latter is so ubiquitous as to almost go without saying—but reintroduces its forgotten double, troubling the self-evidence of the representational account’s progress while adding to, rather than clearing up, our sense of the period’s (and the questions about the nature of mind’s) complexity.

This brings us back to Kramnick’s main achievement in Paper Minds: the deployment of formalism as literature’s key offering to extra-literary debates. On one side of the text, this justifies literary study as an enterprise without lapsing into sentimental claims about improving our moral receptivity or reifying literature itself as some kind of special site that triggers this sort of thing. On the other, it frees literature from its status as either symptom or romantic critic of other discourses, since its formal mode of “presentation” of extra-textual questions reframes rather than merely denouncing or reflecting those questions. Certain speaker-communities (disciplines) are stable enough to broker formal definitions of certain texts that hail them as literature within the context of literary study. Literature, in other words, is what literary critics talk about. And yet, Kramnick also holds that literature is an object with its own “corner of the world” (51), pre-existing our use. It’s therefore an affordance: it has certain properties that invite responses and a certain kind of response coaxed from a certain kind of reader with certain training would be called literary criticism.⁶ Kramnick thereby offers a defense of professionalism without making it disdainful toward or categorically distinct from non-specialist reading.

An especially successful example can be found in the book’s penultimate chapter. There, Kramnick reads Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder not as either a rejection of or a straightforward answer to Chalmers’s “hard problem of consciousness” (the inexplicable way in which non-conscious matter gives rise to conscious experience)—as though literature itself simply made propositions—but instead as a way to ask the question differently by presenting it formally in a particular way. Discussing Thomas Nagel’s related conception of consciousness as “what it is like” to have a certain experience, Kramnick notes that “Asking what it is like to be a bat therefore defined consciousness in a specific way merely by posing the question in a certain manner” (121, emphasis mine). In other words, the emphasis on qualia—subjective experience—automatically builds a notion of consciousness as interior into the very fabric of the question, determining in advance the kind of answer possible (or in this case, precisely not possible). Remainder doesn’t so much answer this question as pose it differently, suggesting a very distinct sort of answer without forcing one: McCarthy’s “deadpan, uninflected first person… does not attempt to represent a thing, so much as to be that thing, to make it present” (Kramnick 134-5). In this way, the formal layout of the sentences themselves—with their affectless presentation of objects as cues for action—suggests that consciousness cannot simply be equated with interior qualia. Crucially, the novel (again, anti-polemically—this is perhaps another reason Kramnick likes literature) never states that position directly: “McCarthy’s innovation in any case lies more in the way his novel presents things than in the content of its ideas” (Kramnick 136), leading us to “wonder whether even the hardest problems posed by the sciences have been phrased or shaped in the right way” (137). This reading is a perfect illustration of Kramnick and Nersessian’s claim that all explanations “are relevant only insofar as they respond to a question in a way that actually answers what is being asked” (51); those questions are in turn the stock-in-trade of disciplines, revisable by “consensus judgment” (51). Positioning questions as discipline-dependent and answers as question-dependent recovers agency for both the critic—whose “workaday interpretive habits” (50) can tweak the questions being asked without tipping over into the mastery of critique—and for the literary text itself, without recourse either to dilettantish cribbing from other disciplines or nostalgic appeals to empathy-training or the undecidability of language.

All of this said, Kramnick’s commitment to the immediate and self-evident experience of the individual also presents the book’s greatest shortcoming: its lack of attention to large-scale, systemic conditions. This is partly a simple consequence of the subject matter and archive, because analytic philosophy of mind deals in minds and persons rather than in subjects and structures. Moreover, on a modular view of the self (again with an eye towards the pluralism so alive in Kramnick’s work), there need not be anything inherently political or apolitical about either one’s disciplinary commitments or one’s conscious experience; one could leave one’s apolitical scholarship at the end of the day and head straight to the union rally, or feel the affordances of a voting booth. Still, this reader couldn’t help but feel, while gliding across Kramnick’s satisfied, warmly reasonable prose about how good it is to take pleasure in, say, apple-growing, that broader political issues—so obviously the context of Kramnick’s bracing call for disciplinarity—simply don’t register to trouble individual pleasure. This attitude actually characterizes quite a bit of recent theory, much of it in the postcritique line, in what Carolyn Lesjak calls an “accommodation to the given” (249). For Lesjak this is a defeatist surrender of Marxist utopian hopes for the blinkered consolation of the good-enough: the jobs we have, the circumstances we find ourselves in, the now rather than the future.

To give Kramnick his due, he is at least committed to a kind of immediate material agency of the perceiving mind. In a passage crucial to the book’s politics characteristically buried in the middle of a close reading of Robinson Crusoe, Kramnick remarks that

What Defoe adds to the Gibsonian picture is the emphasis on how skilled action alters the encountered world. The aesthetics of the handsome is not just a kinetic adjustment to something that is, in Gibson’s preferred word, ‘invariant’; it is a way of adjusting or varying things in turn.(77, emphasis mine)

No mere psychological coping, direct perception presents the world as a set of affordances for action, and that action brings yet more affordances into being in an evolving kinesis of action, reaction, and imbrication. Mind is world is mind, tumbling over each other such that neither enjoys a fully deterministic edge, and the perceivers’ aesthetically-pleasurable skill confirms them as agents in a sort of ongoing homemaking. Still, as a long line of theorists have argued (Foucault is the most obvious example), spatial arrangements call forth certain kinds of actions and the self-perceptions that are their epiphenomena; direct perception, in this account, would be one of the most useful tools of normative social arrangements. Feeling at home in my corporate cubicle, in other words, may be rather more constraining than liberating.

These problems are only exacerbated by an unfortunate tendency to leave out rather vital bits of information in some of the textual readings—specifically political contexts that complicate Kramnick’s soothingly smooth account. Here, for example, is his rendering of a passage from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey:

I own my first sensations, as soon as I was left solitary and alone in my own chamber in the hotel, were far from being so flattering as I had prefigured them. I walked up gravely to the window in my dusty black coat, and looking through the glass saw all the world in yellow, blue and green, running at the ring of pleasure. . . . Alas poor Yorick! cried I, what art thou doing here? (qtd. 47)

Kramnick very cleverly reads Yorick’s cloistering in the hotel room as a critique of Locke’s camera obscura: the locus classicus of the alienating representational view of perception. For Sterne, “The world does not project to a point” (72). Yet Kramnick’s ellipsis erases a part of the passage that turns the screw a couple more times: “—The old with broken lances, and in helmets which had lost their vizards—the young in armour bright which shone like gold, beplumed with each gay feather of the east—all—all tilting at it like fascinated knights in tournaments of yore for fame and love—” (47). The aggressively figurative language here cannot be assimilated to the specific objects of Yorick’s perception; they are imagined, not perceived. Farther still from the simply-available real, the lines are satirical in their use of stately chivalrous language to describe ribald chaos. The same holds for the Hamlet reference: the Prince’s existential carpe diem musings as he stares at the jester’s skull receive a mocking echo here in Yorick’s desire to get out there and get laid. In other words, a vertical gulf of textuality yawns in the horizontal gap between Yorick and the street. It isn’t surprising, then, that Kramnick would banish these lines from his account, committed as it is to the empirical: to what literally shows up before us.

None of this discredits Kramnick’s achievement or the often brilliant formalist insight of his readings. Again, one of the most valuable takeaways of his approach is that realms of human experience always retain at least a partial Venn diagram-separation from each other; my direct perception of a rabbit doesn’t stop me from imagining his kin being harvested at a Smithfield processing plant and acting accordingly. All I’m saying is that the hyper-local focalization necessitated by Kramnick’s topic and the snapshot layout of his readings often doesn’t explicitly acknowledge itself to the extent that it could, such that mere differences in method and emphasis end up looking like willful exclusions.

Literary studies has ridden for some time now on the wave of the manifesto. While the content of these trumpet blasts varies drastically, the overall sense is clear: a change is needed. How we define the status quo of what we do—critique, symptomatic reading, antinormativity, et al.—and what we think is wrong with it—its remove from public life, its dismissal of care, its denial of the “real,” etc.—may matter less than the shape of whatever we think should come next. As I have tried to show, this is where Kramnick’s Paper Minds makes such a timely intervention. We need not accept his answers to appreciate the formal presentation of disciplinary precision as a means to ask better questions. Our profession is by nature interdisciplinary—literature represents the world in all its extra-textual richness—and treating it at the level of representation is necessarily to brush up against other silos of knowledge. But Kramnick shows that, in so doing, we need not play the zero-sum game of getting closer to what “really matters” at the expense of what we already have: literary texts, and specialized if constantly-changing angles of approach to them. Paper Minds thus stands as a quiet manifesto for several bugbears of literary study: the normative (insisting that definitional criteria for disciplines and their objects are useful), the constructive (touting the pleasure of world-building rather than the subtractive impulse of critique), and the distinct (refining our vocabulary to better focalize our critical objects). Mind is bound to world, world is bound to mind, but literary study—minding and binding both—is bound to the future it makes for itself, nothing less.

Footnotes

1. The key figure drawn on here (and arguably the éminence grise of Kramnick’s book) is James J. Gibson, with his influential theory of “affordances,” which are features of a natural or designed environment that enable particular actions for creatures with particular bodily makeups.

2. As opposed to “knowledge,” with its subject/object split. Another of Kramnick’s favorite words is “naïve.”

3. Kramnick holds elsewhere that “any explanation that literary studies can provide of any phenomena of interest must rely in some sense on form and that we ought to be generous and flexible in what we understand the meaning of ‘form’ to be” (12). The trick, here, is that, as with mental states, literary explanations are “multiply realizable” by different kinds of form. Form, thus, is the literary but not in any reductive sense because there are many (perhaps infinite) varieties of form.

4. See David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.”

5. Anker and Felski provide a good overview of critique and its discontents in their introduction to Critique and Postcritique.

6. The concept of “affordance,” thus, does a lot of work for Kramnick, whose argument (with Nersessian) about the explanatory work of form may, otherwise, court circularity; form is in a “corner of the world” which, itself, only comes into being through our corner-talk.

Works Cited

• Anker, Elizabeth S. and Rita Felski, editors. Critique and Postcritique. Duke UP, 2017.
• Chalmers, David J. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1995, pp. 200-219.
• Fodor, J.A. “Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis).” Synthese, vol. 28, no. 2, 1974, pp. 97-115.
• Kramnick, Jonathan. Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness. U of Chicago P, 2018.
• Lesjak, Carolyn. “Reading Dialectically.” Criticism, vol. 55, no. 2, 2013, pp. 233-277.
• Potts, Jason and Daniel Stout, editors. Theory Aside. Duke UP, 2014.
• Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Ed. Paul Goring. Penguin, 2005 [1768].
• “Theory Aside.” Duke University Press, https://www-dukeupress-edu.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/theory-aside. Accessed 16 Mar. 2020.