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Neuroscience, Modernism and the Intelligence of Poetry

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Neuroscience, Modernism and the Intelligence of Poetry Felt Thought: Neuroscience, Modernism and the Intelligence of Poetry by Matthew Paul Langione A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and the Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and in Science and Technology Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Charles Altieri, Chair Professor Mitchell Breitwieser Professor Dorothy J. Hale Professor David A. Hollinger Professor John R. Searle Spring 2016 To Aynslie, M & D, Barry O’C, Jaime and the brothers G ~i~ TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..1 Poetic Intelligence in the Age of Intelligent Machines Chapter I…………………………………………………………………………………….55 A Geometry of One’s Own Chapter II……………………………………………………………………………………97 Probability, Pragmatism and the Problem of Personality Chapter III…………………………………………………………………………………136 The Science of Sensibility Chapter IV…………………………………………………………………………………186 Prufrock and the Poetics of Observation Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………242 Intelligent Examples Epilogue……………………………………………………………………………………248 Minding the Gap: The Value of Neuroscience to Literary Criticism Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………....289 ~ii~ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A dissertation is a life’s work even if it springs into being in the white heat of a few months’ labor. My first debts, therefore, are to my parents, Paul and Joanne Langione, who put me in a position to dream of such a thing, to James Kloppenberg who gave me faith that I could do it, and to Barry O’Connell who never allowed me to forget how much it mattered if I did. I am indebted to Kathleen Moran who made it possible for me to come to Berkeley, and to Jennifer Hudin who made it impossible for me to leave. The debts I owe to my committee far exceed my powers of description. They are to be credited for whatever is intelligent in the present work, and to be blamed for none of what is obtuse. It would be difficult to imagine anybody more intellectually generous than my adviser, Charles Altieri, a model of how much a critic must work to be worthy of his art. His influence looms large here even in places where he might prefer not to claim it. Likewise, the project was shaped by—indeed, it could not have proceeded without—the penetrating attention of Dorothy Hale, and the wisdom of Mitchell Breitwieser. If a Berkeley graduate student wishes to know the mind and character of a particular place and time in history, he has two options: either he can lock himself in the Gardner stacks for a year, or he can ask David Hollinger and have the thing in a half-hour. And if he wishes to know how any of it is possible in the first place, he would do well to drop in on John Searle, who is best known abroad for his straight-shooting, incisive brilliance, but who is most admired here for his undimmed and inexhaustible capacity for wonder. My wife, Aynslie Accomando, did everything in her power to enable me to get this project done, while my two boys, Gus and Gordon, did everything in theirs to prevent me. They should not be discouraged. The triumph of their mother’s will was a very narrow one indeed. If this dissertation shines at all, it shines as a testament and a tribute to a wife’s love, patience and belief. I hope she does not find it unworthy. ~iii~ Abstract Felt Thought: Neuroscience, Modernism and the Intelligence of Poetry by Matthew Paul Langione Doctor of Philosophy in English with Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and in Science and Technology Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Charles Altieri, Chair The first decade of the twentieth century was a time of unprecedented epistemic polarization in the American academy. The “tender-minded” orientation of idealism, to borrow William James’s turn of phrase, was quickly ceding ground to the “tough-minded” orientation of scientific materialism on the assumption that, before long, all serious consideration of human experience, meaning and value was destined to come under the care of newly- minted human sciences such as anthropology, psychology, and sociology. This left traditional humanists resentful of what must have seemed to them a kind of epistemic mission creep: the empirical sciences, riding high on the strength of triumphs in fields such as radioactivity and electromagnetics, were suddenly staking claim to territories that had once been the province of literature, religion and philosophy. One dominant view has been that modernist literature comes into being on the hot fumes of this resentment. Frank Kermode, for example, saw modernism as “a rapprochement between poet and occultist” so that “magic came, in an age of science, to the defence of poetry.” Since modernism is an elastic term, there is an element of truth in this view. But many modernists were, especially in the early years, anything but eager to indulge in a revanchist ~1~ mysticism that abstracted away from the vitalizing energy of the modern sciences. In particular, T.S. Eliot, whose graduate work in philosophy brought him into close proximity to the scientific currents of the day, produced a body of criticism that reveals a sophisticated and remarkably coherent cognitive structure corresponding with his aim to find in poetry a literary form that could unite “feeling” and “thought.” Felt Thought begins by establishing Eliot’s motivation both to embrace and to resist the computational ideal of intelligence that was being codified during the period in which he was writing, an ideal that would reach its apotheosis in the 1940s and 1950s with the birth of artificial intelligence. In my introduction I use A.I. as a contrastive paradigm against which to specify the more subtle mode of poetic intelligence that emerges in Eliot’s criticism. It is an ideal that implicates what he calls “sensibility” as it mediates between “feeling” and “thought” in constructive, writerly activity. But since this cognitive structure finds expression implicitly in criticism written for various purposes, rather than explicitly in philosophy, it must be reconstructed with the aid of a robust bank of supplements. I begin with Eliot’s literary and philosophical influences in Chapter I, particularly Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Henry James and Ezra Pound. I turn to his graduate school influences at Harvard in Chapter II, among whom are Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce and Karl Pearson. In Chapter III, I synthesize these influences in the effort to flesh out a cognitive structure that unites Eliot’s major trilogy of critical formulations—“the dissociation of sensibility,” “the doctrine of impersonality,” and the “objective correlative”—and I substantiate those formulations with reference to contemporary neuroscience. Then in Chapter IV, I make use of this neuroaesthetic cognitive structure to interpret Eliot’s first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, as a work culminating in a unique mode of expressive activity that I have termed intelligent exemplification. My Epilogue begins with a breviary on the ways in which the sciences of mind have been called into action in literary study thus far. Then I recommend a set of principles that I hope will sustain at once a more integrative method of interdisciplinarity, and at the same time an increased commitment to the many and intricate ways that the texts themselves ask to be interpreted. ~2~ INTRODUCTION // Poetic Intelligence in the Age of Intelligent Machines “To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” - William Carlos Williams, “Author’s Introduction” ~ The Intelligence of Poetry ~ Let’s begin with an assertion about our subject that should be uncontroversial: poetry reflects and enables a special kind of intelligence. The degree to which a particular culture at a particular moment in its history values the “intelligence” of poetry may be remarkably various, but, at least in the pantheon of Western culture, the “special” status of poetry has been unmistakably secure. Were we to settle on the contents of a time capsule intended to represent Western civilization from antiquity to the present, one suspects that poetry, hardly a quotidian human experience and never the dominant compositional practice, would be overrepresented by far. What makes the opening assertion controversial is not the term “special” but the term “intelligence.” For though we quote poetry regularly in speeches, and though we insist that our children learn to read and to analyze poetry in school, we rarely look to poetry as a mode of intelligence, as a way to grasp the reality of a state of affairs. For poetry, we are given to understand, is subjective rather than objective, expressive rather than scientific. Thus while poetry, in our culture, is assigned decorative value (beauty) and pedagogical value (ethics), it is almost never recognized for its epistemic value. This is true even ~1~ in academia, where criticism tends to feature aesthetic, historical and political criteria.1 One suspects that if the canon of poets were roused from their slumbers to weigh in on this state of affairs, few would be terribly vexed. For most of Western history, poetry was received as historical record (Homer), as secular scripture (Dante), as divine inspiration (Donne), as organic communion (Wordsworth), as cultural decorum (Arnold).2 It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century, amid increasingly powerful institutional and cultural preferences for knowledge-producing, “objective” sciences that aesthetic criticism began to justify the study of poetry on the ground of its unique epistemic affordances. “The first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is,” Walter Pater wrote in 1873, “is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.”3 This alethetic function was increasingly claimed both for poetry and for prose as generic distinctions relaxed thanks to the influence of Henry James and Gustav Flaubert.4 Literature was soon identified as a domain in which otherwise shadowy aspects of one’s perceptual register could be illuminated.
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