Serendipities

A new early modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at Siris! Very carnivalesque — food, drink, violence, and a very topical reference to early modern earthquakes.

I just came back from a wonderful time in Yorkshire. With my monthly Tristram Shandy reading group, under the expert guidance of a true Shandean, we visited Shandy Hall, the architecturally quirky home of Laurence Sterne in Coxwold. We were warmly welcomed by the curators, and stayed the night in a lovely cottage in the garden (which can be hired for a holiday or as a writer’s retreat). The gardens and the views of the surrounding hills were just stunning. What a way to spend the weekend…

One of the articles on the list for last week’s lecture in my MA course Bodies and Selves in Early Modern Culture, was Jonathan Sawday’s “The Renaissance Cyborg” from a volume called At the Borders of the Human.

Sawday’s article is fascinating not only because he provides a convincing new interpretation of a line in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, or because he offers a correction on Donna Haraway’s theory of the cyborg. I enjoyed it also because it looks at the widespread early modern interest in automata such as those designed by Ramelli, who featured on this blog a long time ago.

Sawday signals a similarity between anatomical books published in the period, and the ways in which illustrations in machine books bring to light the hidden workings of machinery. The machine designs according to Sawday were not designer’s blueprints, the machines were not meant to be built. Instead, they were visual exercises in combining and re-combining mechanical structures. If corpses in anatomical illustrations tend to feature inset engravings of their inner parts (often lifting a flap of skin to reveal the organs), then these machine designs regularly come with inset illustrations of hidden pistons and cylinders. This similarity in conventions of representation points to a similarity in perception of body and machine. In Sawday’s words, “machines and humans, or bodies and engines, have a long history of intersection with one another” (184). A hundred years later, Descartes would indeed posit that the human body is little more than an automaton.

A new exhibition will open at The Centraal Museum in Utrecht this weekend. Genesis examines the parallels between art and science, and will be inaugurated with a lecture by none other than Bruno Latour.

Here’s a snippet from the announcement on the museum website:

The end of the information age: biorobots, clones and wet sculptures
The information metaphor reduces life to a sequence of abstract signs and denies the importance of a context. Life seems to be based on a single principle: the genetic code. Philosophers call this limited perspective ‘reductionism’. For many critics this reductionism is typical of the sciences. But as Genesis shows, this reductionism has also infiltrated our perspective on life, in the visual arts as well as science. Thus it is not science in itself that is reductionist, but the significance that is attached to ‘information’. How are the arts and sciences to escape the ‘information age’?

I’m not sure I can follow the logic of this passage, but its thematics interest me. What’s more, the website mysteriously announces that “during Genesis chickens will roam the museum”… I am definitely going.

Images from the Centraal Museum website

About a year ago, I read Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine and wrote about the experience. I was fascinated by this attempt by natural scientists to explain cultural change, but had some major reservations as well. Today I read parts of another book on memetics: Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, edited by Robert Aunger, with a foreword by Daniel Dennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).This interlibrary loan book had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while, so I decided that it was going to be Easter reading. The interesting thing about this volume is that it not only includes contributions by proponents of memetics, such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett, but also contains critical chapters. Robert Aunger writes in his introduction that the aim of the book is “to see where a reasonable consensus might fall on this spectrum of opinion regarding the utility of the meme concept.” (5)

In his foreword, Daniel Dennett is quite stern about my sort of people - cultural historians who reserve criticism:

It is obvious that there are patterns of cultural change - evolution in a neutral sense - and any theory of cultural change worth more than a moment’s consideration will have to be Darwinian in the minimal sense of being consistent with the theory of evolution by natural selection of Homo sapiens. [...] [T]he ferocity with which Darwinian accounts of the evolution of language and sociality are attacked by some critics from the humanities and social sciences show that in some influential quarters, mere consistency with evolutionary theory is not yet the accepted constraint it ought to be. (ix)

The editor, Robert Aunger, in his introduction is much more open to criticism from the humanities. He offers his volume as a collection of opinions, and leaves it up to the reader to decide (although his rhetoric subtly hints at his own position):

From whence does this disgruntlement spring? From intrinsic defects in the notion [...], in incidental features of its present manifestation, or from intellectual agendas having little to do with memetics itself? The reader must judge.

Biased reader as I am, I was especially fascinated by the contribution of Maurice Bloch, a British anthropologist. His answer to Aunger’s question would be that the disgruntlement is not simply due to intellectual agendas or different traditions, but to the fundamental features of the different parts of a single totality that natural and social scientists study. Bloch is not opposed to the idea of memes and encourages cooperation between the two kinds of science — in fact, he chides anthropologists for their disinterest in memetics. In his contribution to the volume, he seeks to pinpoint some of the failures of meme theory as it stands, so that it might in future be more successful.

His first point is that the general claims made by Dawkins and Dennet resemble the ideas of anthropologists working as early as the late nineteenth century. Proponents of the meme theory seem not to have taken any notice of insights developed in anthropology. It is of course hard to keep abreast of literature in other disciplines, Bloch comments, but “memeticists have freely chosen to explore exactly what anthropologists have been studying for more than a century.”

His second objection is to the similarity that memetics suggests between memes and genes - the idea that human culture consists of discrete bits. If memetics is to work, then “memes have to be something with a defined existence in the world” they cannot be a unit of analysis or a metaphor — like genes, they have to be an ontological fact. But how do you divide phenomena like catchy, tunes or folk tales up into memes? In reality, he argues, culture does not allow itself to be cut up into such neat units. (Bloch does not mention Vladimir Propp, the structuralist who analysed Russian folk tales to identify their smallest narrative elements, but I think that Propp took into account the cultural specificity of the tales he studied. He did not assume that these elements would be found in Chinese folk tales as well — correct me if I’m wrong.)

Bloch turns to the historical case of the diffusionists to illustrate his point. Diffusionists were anthropologists who in the early twentieth century argued that human culture cannot be understood as governed by an evolutionary process, because humans share information with each other. The critiques that American and British anthropologists formulated on diffusionism could be useful in a consideration of memetics as well.

An important objection of American anthropologists that also applies to memes, is that information or culture does not spread like a virus, but is constantly unmade and remade as it is absorbed into new cultural environments. A meme does not lead an independent life of its own, but exists in these processes of reshaping. “What noodles mean to Italians is therefore quite different from what it means for the Chinese” (198). British anthropologists, on the other hand, would argue that knowledge is too complex to locate it as a single type: it is integrated in single minds at different levels of consciousness, but also inseparable from action.

Although Maurice Bloch seeks to bring anthropologists and biologists together, the critique he formulates seems to me quite fundamental. If memes are not like genes, do not exist independently but are shaped either by society or individual psychology, then what is the advantage of the theory over existing ideas in the cultural sciences?

For a complete table of contents of Darwinizing Culture, see Robert Aunger’s website.

Other recent natural science perspectives on literature:

• Mr Darcy suffered from autism
• Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature

Two months and six days is quite long enough for this little miracle of an invention to feature at the top of this blog. The date of my last post, the 1st of February 2007, points the finger at the cause of my silence: teaching. The spring semester started on that exact date.

Now, a lot of people teach and manage to write blogs too. Even if I don’t write about daily goings-on in class since my non-pseudonymous blog makes that a bit awkward, I could still write about the subject of my teaching, my research, reading, heck, I’m even directing a play at the moment — if I just made a little time for it. Blogging inspires, orders ideas, serves as an archive, and gives you direct feedback on little nuggets of thought. The kind comments that I kept receiving even though I hadn’t said a word in weeks kept nagging at me. So from now on, I am going to do just that: make more time for blogging. Structurally. There, now I said it, I have to keep to my promise.
Happy Easter everyone!