Durham E-Theses Interference patterns: Literary study, scientic knowledge, and disciplinary autonomy after the two cultures Adams, Jonathan Neil How to cite: Adams, Jonathan Neil (2003) Interference patterns: Literary study, scientic knowledge, and disciplinary autonomy after the two cultures, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4005/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Abstract Thesis title: Interference Patterns: Literary Study, Scientific Knowledge, and Disciplinary Autonomy After The Two Cultures. Author: Jonathan Neil Adams This project interrogates the claims made for the possibility of collapsing all the various disciplines into one discipline, probably physics, and surely a science, in the name of making clearer the relations between our various fields of knowledge. This is the aim of the radical reductionist, and I take E. O. Wilson's Consilience as exemplary of such attempts. Central to Wilson's method of achieving unity is the new science of evolutionary psychology - itself a re-working of the sociobiology with which Wilson first achieved notoriety. In the on-going project of explaining culture under a Darwinian description, the evolutionary psychologists have begun to suggest explanations for the popularity and content of narrative fiction. Because they are consonant with the rest of science, these bioiogistic accounts of fiction might be preferable to the accounts traditionally offered by Literary Studies. Consequently, there is a risk that the traditional practices of Literary Studies will be made redundant within the academy and gradually atrophy. The demand is that Literary Studies either makes itself rigorous like the sciences (as with such projects as Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism), or else forfeit its claims to produce knowledge. Aware of this threat, some literary critics embrace forms of relativism in an attempt to deny the unity or effectiveness of scientific knowledge and so neuter the threatened takeover. Among these forms of relativism, Richard Rorty's account seeks to collapse the hierarchy of disciplines and seemingly offers Literary Studies a means of retaining its distinctive approach without denying the effectiveness of scientific knowledge. I aim to show that Literary Studies need not become a science, and that such sciences as evolutionary psychology are neither as threatening as some had feared, nor as useful to literary study as some have hoped. Interference Patterns Literary Study, Scientific Knowledge, and Disciplinary Autonomy After The Two Cultures by Jonathan Neil Adams A copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Durham Department of English Studies 2003 1 6 JAN 2004 Contents Declaration and Statement of Copyright 3 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction: Interference Patterns 6 Chapter 1: Scientism and the Unity of Knowledge 24 Chapter 2: Making a Science of Criticism 49 Chapter 3: Evolutionary Psychology 109 Chapter 4: Relativism and the Unity of Culture 145 Chapter 5: Relativism and the Commonsense Realists 190 Chapter 6: Centralities of Language and Matter 238 Conclusion: Tessellation Patterns 303 Works Cited 316 Declaration No portion of the material offered has previously been submitted for a degree in this or any other university in the form presented here. Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published in any form, including electronic and the Internet, without the author's prior written consent. All information derived from it should be acknowledged appropriately. Acknowledgements This study would not have been possible without intellectual, financial, and psychological support. My supervisor. Professor Patricia Waugh, has been an enormous help to me. Beyond her expert suggestions for the direction of my research, she has always offered encouragement and friendship, and this project could not have been completed (or enjoyed) without her. Behind her, there is a history of keen teachers - Dr Juhe Sanders, Dr David Amigoni, and Dr Phillip Stratton-Lake from Keele University, and Mr Dickinson and Miss Dickson at Brookfield Community School, who all made me interested in ideas, and Dr Stephen Bum, who was both a friend and an enormous help with the business of research. For the first year of this study and in the several months of continuation, I was supported by my parents, and by the kitchen staff of Hatfield College, who gave me the hours to pay my rent. For the final two years, I received an AHRB grant, which enabled me to study without having to work or beg. Research has been a solitary business: within many of the sciences, the laboratory environment offers regular contact with people who are at least conversant in the technical terms of your discipline. Literature - like many of the humanities - keeps specialists apart. My thanks here go to the people who have kept me from feeling like I was serving a sentence: to my immediate family - my ma and pa. Chip and Soph, and Lucy and Arnold - who have all been supportive and absurdly generous to me (emotionally and financially); and to my friends, the good humans who would telephone me and visit me. There are too many to list, but special thanks go to Charlotte, Matt, Mitch, Rhodes and Tom; all of who at some stage or another listened politely whilst I bored them. "What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences..." (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow 395) Introduction Interference Patterns There is an anxiety among literary critics that is grounded not in doubts about the worth of the novels, poems, and plays that they study, but in the manner in which those studies are conducted. This anxiety arises because of the sciences. It is thought to be no coincidence that whilst the sciences have enjoyed an unprecedented level of demonstrable success in achieving their aims, they have simultaneously conducted their studies according to quite different methods to those employed within the humanities. It is not the purpose of this work to dispute that success, nor to question the applicability of those methods employed by the various scientific disciplines in the pursuit of their aims, but rather to address the anxiety of literary critics regarding the epistemological status of their work. There is a perception that the type of knowledge scientists possess about natural phenomena is superior to the type of knowledge possessed by literary critics. This is an insecurity felt across the humanities, and exacerbated by those scientists who, emboldened by the achievements of their colleagues, would seek to convert all knowledge into scientific knowledge; alleging that the intellectual demands of the humanities, and the consequent epistemological value of their productions, are grossly inferior to those of the sciences. There is no shortage of voices from within the humanities willing to corroborate those claims. This, for example, is the philosopher of science Bas Van Fraassen: There is a reason why metaphysics sounds so passe, so vieux jeu today; for intellectually challenging perplexities and paradoxes it has been far surpassed by theoretical science. Do the concepts of the Trinity, the soul. haecceity, universals, prime matter, and potentiality baffle you? They pale beside the unimaginable otherness of closed space-times, event-horizons, EPR correlations, and bootstrap models. (258) Those problems which have traditionally exercised the humanities have come to seem not only elementary but, what is perhaps worse, artificial and unnecessary. Literary study looks weak and easy and, above all, parochial, beside the technologies and universal truths of science. Consequently, literary critics will either admit defeat and accept a subservient role beside science (a sense of inferiority before scientists that Auden compared to feeling like "a shabby curate in a drawing-room full of dukes" [The Dyer's Hand 81]), or else challenge the claims of scientists to epistemological superiority. This often manifests in a defensiveness that seeks not to answer directly the complaints of the scientists, but to deny the validity of those complaints. The philosophical positions most suitable for supporting such a denial are those which seek to establish a relativism of human knowledge with respect to culture. Recognising that their own work is bounded by cultural norms, and true only within the culture from which it arises, thinkers within the humanities often choose to demand that scientists impose similar constraints upon