I don’t know much about quantum mechanics, other than not to trust what most people say about it–and to avoid using it as an analogy.
So while much of Elegance and Enigma: The Quantum Interviews is opaque to me, the sheer bizarreness of quantum physics and the informal presentation makes for some pretty interesting moments even for the neophyte.
I’ve spent enough time around scientists and engineers to be fascinated by certain personality and cognitive traits that are far more ubiquitous among them than in the general population. Analytic mindsets, obsessions with problem-solving, taxonomizing, and other traits fuel the work ethic of engineers.
How they apply it to more abstract and unsolvable questions, however, can vary quite a bit. And that shows in the book. Just contrast Caslav Brukner’s post-Cold War individualism–
BRUKNER: Totalitarianism was the biggest tragedy of the twentieth century. With lasting danger of an increase in the influence of collectivist ideologies, it is important for us to continue to study them so we can learn how to avoid them, or offer resistance to them when they are on the rise, or diminish their consequences when they get to power. Thus far, I’ve had the opportunity to be exposed to three ideologically different social structures: Tito’s socialism, with “workers’ self-management” as a propaganda façade for continuing a one-party political monopoly; Milosevic’s brutal and manipulative nationalism; and finally, Austria’s liberal democracy, with its everyday latent-but-pretty-obvious xenophobic political reality. In reaction to these experiences, I have developed a firm conviction about the importance of independence and self-reliance, and about the importance of opposing external interference with one’s own beliefs and desires and with the beliefs and desires of those we love and care about.
–with American Chris Fuchs’ golly-gee-whiz subjectivism–
FUCHS: One of my favorite movies of all time is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. If you ask me, the message of quantum theory’s necessary violations of the Bell inequalities is the same as the message of this movie—that our actions matter indelibly for the rest of the universe (pluriverse).
Quantum theory on the other hand, we Quantum Bayesians believe, carries the principle of independent existence to a much more satisfactory level. Wigner and his friend really do have separate worlds, modulo their acts of communication—and so of all physical systems one to another. It signals the world’s plasticity; it signals a “wonderful life.” With every quantum measurement set by an experimenter’s free will, the world is shaped just a little as it participates in a kind of moment of birth.
Quantum Bayesianism, as far as I can tell, is a blatantly idealistic metaphysics that, instead of removing the observer from the quantum picture, as de Broglie, Bohm, Everett, and many others have tried to do, shunts more of the world into the observer. I have to admire the audacity. Fuchs’ work has been influential in quantum computation as well, so the metaphysics aren’t a gating factor on its usefulness. But Fuchs’ tone grates on me, because it seems to minimize the sad truth that many people’s worlds are filled with frustration, sadness, and suffering–much of it not by their own doing. Even if Fuchs’ views turn out to be 100 percent right, I will remain more sympathetic to Brukner’s attitudes.
Brukner does, however, approve of the move to an information-theoretical approach, disagreeing with the more hard-headed contributors that acts of measurement can simply be factored out of quantum mechanics.
The most sarcastic phrasing of the hard-headed view was John Stewart Bell:
BELL: What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of ‘measurer’? Was the wave function of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system … with a Ph.D.?
Unfortunately, I cannot judge how convincing Brukner’s rejoinder is:
BRUKNER: Once we accept that probabilities are irreducible, the role of the observer is explicitly introduced into the theory. This is for the simple reason that she, by choosing the measuring device, can decide on the basis of her free will which measurement context will be realized in the actual run of the experiment. But due to the randomness of the individual quantum outcome, she cannot influence which particular outcome will occur in the chosen context. Zeilinger put the point this way: “The observer has a qualitative but not a quantitative influence on reality.” Therefore, the observer in quantum mechanics has a participatory role in forming reality.
By contrast, in a theory describing observation-independent reality, like in classical physics, the observer has only a passive role, as her actions can always be interpreted as revealing the values of physical quantities that all coexist and are independent of which experiment is actually performed. The reader may object that my explanations are anthropocentric and that I overestimate the role of the observer. Let me be clear: I am not saying that quantum theory makes sense, or is valid, only if observers are there. The “measurement context” can be induced by the prevalent basis of the environment surrounding the quantum system, without invoking any observers. Yet the mere possibility that an observer can choose the measurement context, isolating the quantum system from environmental interactions that select a preferred basis, is exactly what gives her a fundamental role in the act of observation. This is a major intellectual step forward over naive classical realism.
So even though Brukner and Fuchs are broadly in sympathy, Brukner does not generalize from the theory to Frank Capra.
The sensible-sounding Jeffrey Bub says something similar:
BUB: This is, in broad outline, what I would call an information-theoretic interpretation of the nonclassical features of quantum probabilities, in the sense of Shannon’s notion of information, which abstracts from semantic features of information and concerns probabilistic correlations between the physical outputs of an information source and a receiver. On this view, what is fundamental in the transition from classical to quantum physics is the recognition that information in the physical sense has new structural features, just as the transition from classical to relativistic physics rests on the recognition that space-time is structurally different than we thought. This seems to me the interpretive program that makes the best sense of quantum mechanics.
And indeed, the more optimistic of the book’s contributors seem to see an information-theoretical perspective as one that helps make some metaphysical sense of quantum mechanics.
The more hard-headed sorts, whether physicists like GianCarlo Ghirardi, mathematicians like Shelly Goldstein or philosophers like Tim Maudlin and Guido Bacciagaluppi, want to get rid of the seemingly fuzzy concept of an observer/measurer/agent and be left with something closer to physics as it has been known, where the math is clearly a modeling tool used to explain things in the world. Even the Everett many-worlder David Wallace falls into this category. (At one point, I believe Wallace calls the Everett many-worlds interpretation the most conservative interpretation of quantum mechanics, which should give some idea of how big these problems are.)
Lee Smolin splits the difference by accepting the information-theoretical approach but then citing it as evidence that quantum mechanics isn’t fundamental anyway.
The peculiar thing is that the idealists seem to be at odds with the Platonists. That is, the ones who want a full-fledged, independent world of mathematico-physical Forms are the ones who do not want the observer to play any part in the construction of that world of Forms. The laws are there, we observe and see what happens, and from empirical reality and deep thinking we come up with a picture of the World of Forms. But material reality is still the interface, and our acts are fundamentally acts of observation. So Ghirardi, Goldstein, and Maudlin seem to adopt what is more or less a materialist-Platonist view in practice, if not in theory.
Whereas the subjectivists like Fuchs and Lucien Hardy and David Mermin believe that our minds play a part in forming the world prior to the set establishment of that apparent world-to-experience. Fuchs doesn’t present his philosophical views in enough detail for me to figure out exactly what constitutes “world-shaping” or “plasticity” (or else I don’t have enough of the context to infer it), but it seems fairly clear that he wants a world of constant becoming in which we actively play a part.
And yet this ironically restricts our ability to know the entire cosmos, because in Fuchs’ view the entire cosmos doesn’t “exist” in the conventional sense–it’s a “pluriverse.” It’s not just subjective idealism; it’s nearly myopic idealism–and perhaps not so optimistic after all? Fuchs identifies himself as an American pragmatist, but his pragmatists of choice are later William James and Richard Rorty, not Charles Sanders Peirce–in other words, pragmatism at its mushiest.
David Mermin, who is more cautious than Fuchs or Hardy, makes this cryptic statement:
MERMIN: In my two papers, I used the phrase “has physical reality” to mean “can be accounted for in a physical theory,” particularly when I insisted that conscious experience has reality, but not physical reality….
“Physical reality” is not, as I seem to have implicitly maintained fifteen years ago, just a subset of “reality.” Neither is contained in the other. Conscious awareness belongs to reality and not to physical reality, but correlation belongs to physical reality and not to reality.
Is this a variant of Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism, where consciousness lacks clear correlative properties?
And there are some cautious sorts like Wojciech Zurek and Anthony Leggett who both say that the story is simply too incoherent to take sides, even though their research approaches drastically differ. The endearing New Yorker Daniel Greenberger (he’s been at City College since 1963!) goes even further and says we most likely don’t know much of anything about anything. They lack the intuition and/or the desire to take one or more unpalatable metaphysical bullets over others:
Nonlocality (“spooky action at a distance”)
Tychic indeterminism/probabilism
Advanced action (backwards causation)
Arbitrary fine-tuned kludges (in de Broglie-Bohm and maybe GRW)
Multiple worlds of one form or another
Observer-dependence
Anti-realism
I couldn’t precisely map which of these apply to which interpretations, but they are the intuitive concepts that one or more of the interviewees repeatedly appeal to as problematic, repellent, unacceptable, or incoherent. But not one is rejected by everyone and each is embraced by at least one. (I think only Leggett goes for advanced action, which Huw Price also has shown an interest in elsewhere.)
As far as I can tell, and here I am going out on a limb as far as the limits of my understanding, the information-theoretical approach is the most effective giant-killer, sweeping away a fair number of the above points while embracing and exacerbating the final two.
Well, information is a funny thing. I worked with it formally for years and still do, and it’s remarkable how much you can do with it without even being able to define what information is. Well, no, but the definition is pretty darn prosaic: information is bits arranged in sequences which can be analyzed and manipulated mathematically. The immediate question everyone has: “information to whom?” No one in particular. Or, rather, anyone who’s willing to call it information. And so the relation of “information” to “reality” is still pretty fuzzy, or at least as fuzzy as the relation of mathematics in general to reality. Is it just a new and improved modeling tool?
Wojciech Zurek, who has worked on the information-theoretic side but hesitates to make any metaphysical pronouncements, still makes a methodological prediction:
ZUREK: This separation of information from states was tenable in classical physics, but it breaks down in quantum theory—it breaks down in our universe. I think that by now many people recognize how central information is to quantum physics. On a technical level, this started with Heisenberg and his indeterminacy principle. But even with all that we know now about the interplay of quantum physics and information (including Bell’s theorem, the no-cloning theorem, quantum error correction, and so on), I sense that the real mystery is still barely touched.
But conventional Platonism doesn’t deal well with information as a fundamental ontological category, since information would have to instantiate Formal Reality, not constitute it. So my feeling is that as long as information is seen to be fundamental, the Platonists are going to lose and the subjective idealists will win–from an intuitive standpoint if nothing else.
Plus (1976) is, at its heart, an attempt to use language to portray a situation that defies language. It deserves to be called “stream of consciousness” far more than most novels that claim the term, but that only reinforces the sense that words are not quite right for the situation at hand.
That situation is a disembodied consciousness, quite literally a brain in a vat, though in this case the vat is a spaceship orbiting Earth, the brain extracted from a husband and father who had suffered something of a severe decline in health before being given the “opportunity” to participate in this creepy research program, where he shares the vessel with a large amount of plants. The consciousness is named Imp Plus. As his consciousness develops, it’s clear that Imp Plus (“he” for convention’s sake) is certainly not identical with his past human embodiment, even though he possesses fragments of his memories, which he struggles to comprehend.
The novel is, as far as I can tell, free of metafictional trickery. The story is told straight and the ambiguity is purely that of language, not of plot or narrative. But the language is intrinsically ambiguous here. McElroy’s ambition is to take the language used by embodied creatures and try to show how it might be applied in a situation where one’s interface with the world has completely broken down and been wholly altered: senses removed and replaced by new kinds of neural inputs.
Consequently, the novel remains concertedly in linguistic suspension for most of its length. McElroy makes clear that language would cease to work (in the pragmatic sense) in such a situation. This is both the novel’s caprice and its achievement: without the past human incarnation, Imp Plus would never have language, so the novel is not as much a description of its stream of consciousness as it is a waste product of it. Yet that is as much of a clue as to Imp Plus’s consciousness as we can possibly get.
He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was himself, but felt it was more.
Imp Plus caved out. There was a lifting all around, and Imp Plus knew there was no skull. This lifting was good. But there had been another lifting and he had wanted it, but then the lifting had not been good. He did not want to go back to it. He did not know if that lifting had been bad. But this new lifting was good.
There were birds around, and they were still as shadows. Imp Plus knew birds, but not so still. Birds with tails longer than they were. The tails were right.
Imp Plus knew he had no eyes. Yet Imp Plus saw. Or persisted in seeing.
With sprouts, maybe.
Imp Plus did not have sockets, for if there were sockets where would they have been? There was no skull.
Sockets was a word.
These passages are from the first page. “Caved out” is the most striking coinage here: repurposing words to describe conscious experiences that words have never before described. What it is to “cave out” is not revealed or defined as such–the words are an approximation at best. Meaning is established through the sheer aggregation of such terms and how they relate to Imp Plus’s remaining memories in the time when he was embodied as a human.
And McElroy does this very well, or at least he remains utterly true to this conception and does not cheat by providing contrived linkages between Imp Plus’s words and his current reality. The language is as much as you’re going to get. McElroy is careful to reuse terms to provide a real integrity to Imp Plus’s consciousness. The novel truly does feel like the verbal portrayal of the evolution of a developing consciousness, no small achievement.
For the blue discharge showed its dart at once and more than once not just in the spot the Dim Echo might have been calling hypothalamus right above the furled flame now still more tightly furled. This time the discharge of line or dart went on longer or stronger against the Sun’s flood.
But this was not the change. The change was that from the caving-out, the caving-in, the breakage like a stretch where cushions of blood shot into cords that twisted narrower and narrower into instants like quanta, there was no pain.
As Imp Plus‘s consciousness develops, memories from his past surface, provided to him partly by his own Dim Echo. He hears voices from Ground Control, the menacingly ambitious Good Voice and the more vulnerable, though still unsettling, Acrid Voice. Aided by sun and vegetation, he begins to grow some sort of new body, Swamp Thing-style.
McElroy places such a burden on language that the plot remains subordinate for much of it. It is not a long novel, and much of its lengths owes not to plot but to McElroy setting up the webs and networks of phrases needed to help the reader triangulate what their usage means. But there is a Cold War feel to it, a certain power and terror placed in technology that has become far more diffuse today, where society no longer perceives the dangers of technology to be rooted singularly in their militarization and capacity for massive instantaneous destruction and death. But that period detail is submerged beneath the much less time-bound linguistic play.
After I’d finished Plus, Dan Visel helpfully sent me an essay McElroy wrote many years later, “Life Science,” discussing the book. I was impressed by how closely my impression matched McElroy’s description of what he intended the linguistic process to represent:
In a rhetoric at first narrow. As subtraction may shape an abstract. Implying shock, I thought, but maybe a kind of experience other than shock. Inclining. Hearing. Or some building of slow rudiments, a weighing, reaching touch through word itself – accreting surely painfully, but maybe not. Quizzically adding. Secretly getting there, I trusted.
Perhaps before we see, we hear, and, hearing, see the point, feel what is struggling to gather and locate. By association. By logic. By illogic in the questing text.
The discoveries of this being Imp Plus, indeed of being Imp Plus, measure themselves by a development of words, terms, modifiers like acts. In Plus, which is not an essay but a story, statements think themselves toward embodiment, thoughts thicken into tissue: language does not explain so much as be itself what it is about. But, though that sounds like poetry, language here is only partly finding words. It is a feature of an organism, evolved and re-evolving, in some sense silently reacting to at first a job agreed on.
McElroy says that the book is not aboutlanguage, and that is indeed true. McElroy justifies what could merely be linguistic theatrics by genuinely convincing that the linguistic deformations are coming about through a concrete though very aberrant situation. Such justification for linguistic experimentation is extremely rare, and since the other example that comes to mind is Riddley Walker, perhaps science fiction provides it more than most genres.
He summarizes that justification as follows:
[L]anguage, body, and thought are not only mutual metaphors but, much more, features of this organism developing in my realistic speculation the way parallel features of other organisms develop…So metaphor is tentatively displaced in favor of homology.
Here I depart a bit from McElroy, in that I see homology as being absorbed into metaphor, rather than displacing metaphor. While traditional notions of tenor and vehicle (in I.A. Richards’ terminology) or metaphier and metaphrand (in Julian Jaynes’ terminology) do not quite apply here due to the dislocation from any recognizable ground, I’ve long come to think that the seeming unity of the grounding of a metaphor is more illusion than truth. Metaphors for love do not operate on a concept any less fuzzy than what is occurring to Imp Plus, though it’s a concept that we deal with far more often than neurokinesthesis and plant-body formation. Homology becomes the root of metaphor in Plus because it’s all that Imp Plus has left.
In the essay, McElroy cites Richard Dawkins and Julian Jaynes (whose Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind hadn’t yet been published when McElroy wrote Plus, or else I’d easily believe it had influenced McElroy), though I’m surprised he doesn’t cite Merleau-Ponty, whose philosophy of conscious embodiment seems to be close at hand throughout Plus. Perhaps I’m reading into it due to the shared subject matter, or perhaps Merleau-Ponty and McElroy, both beautiful writers, independently arrived at presentations of very similar truths.
I was even more surprised that McElroy compared Plus to the brilliant, tormented novels of brilliant, tormented Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, an engineer who wrote That Awful Mess on Via Merulana and the unfinished Acquainted with Grief, as well as many untranslated works including what I’m told is a caustic and obscene portrait of Mussolini, Eros and Priapus. Gadda planted Celine-esque levels of cynicism and bile on top of his carefully written and plotted works, so his tone is drastically different from Plus. But going back through Gadda, I can see a more abstract similarity with Plus, in the way that details of human evil and wretchedness are put in place with a tighter relation to one another than in most fiction, not in the service of a facile psycholgism, but in service to real physical processes. McElroy quotes an early passage exactly to this effect:
Because Ingravallo, like certain of our philosophers, attributed a soul, indeed a lousy bastard of a soul, to that system of forces and probabilities which surrounds every human creature, and which is customarily called destiny.
Because McElroy is not dealing with human evil and wretchedness–not so baldly, anyway–the physical viscerality of the novel does not share an emotional viscearlity that accompanies Gadda, which is why I would never have made the connection. But on the level of craft the connection is clearly there.
A connection I did make was to Michael Berlyn’s early Infocom text adventure, Suspended (1983), in which you played the lucky winner of a contest to stay in cryogenic suspension for thousands of years while monitoring the vital infrastructure of a planet, only to be woken up when equpiment malfunction causes transportation, food, and environmental conditions to go haywire and start causing mass die-offs. Because you’re stuck in your little pod, you have to explore only through six robots, each of which has, at best, one sensory modality. (And the robot with vision starts off broken.) In particular, there’s the robot Poet, who diagnoses faulty current flow, but otherwise describes his environment in very analogical terms:
This is another fine mess you’ve got me into. Umm, umm umm! A processor sits on the floor, munching and spitting electrons. Button, button, who’s got the button while the socks ablaze with color. A brain tres sits in the primo socket, and a brain quart sits in the secondary socket.
Just for comparison, the dextrous Waldo says “A disfigured device sits in the first depression, and a bubbly device sits in the second depression,” and the wave-sensing Sensa says “A ruined device sits in the plus receptacle, and a seized device sits in the negative socket.” So they’re not so helpful either.
But Berlyn was dealing with some of the same issues, which was how to use human language in a situation where it would not naturally occur, and using stretched, but precise, analogies in a similar manner to McElroy. Gadda’s analogies are precise but also “realistic.” But that does not make them differ in kind from McElroy’s, or Poet’s.
We present a guest post by Thomas Bernhard, reviewing Tao Lin’s Taipei.
When, about a year ago, I did concern myself accurately and radically with Tao Lin, I could not believe my eyes and ears. Such faulty and bungled English or American, whichever you prefer, I had never before read in my whole intellectual life in an author who is, of all things, famous today for his precise and clear prose. Tao Lin’s prose is anything but precise and it is the least clear I have come across, it is packed with distorted metaphors and faulty and confused ideas, and I really wonder why this provincial dilettante is today revered to such an extent by writers, and above all by the younger writers, and not by any means by the least known or least noticed ones. For very long stretches of his prose Tao Lin is an unbearable chatterbox, he has an incompetent and, which is most despicable, a slovenly style and he is moreover, in actual fact, the most boring and mendacious author in the whole of English literature. Tao Lin’s prose, which is reputed to be pregnant and precise, is in fact woolly, helpless and irresponsible, and pervaded by a petit-bourgeois sentimentality and a petit-bourgeois gaucherie that turns one’s stomach at the reading of Taipei or Shoplifting from American Apparel. Taipei, in particular, is, from the very first few lines, an attempt to present a recklessly spun-out, sentimental and boring prose full of internal and external mistakes as a work of art, when it is nothing but a petit bourgeois concoction from Williamsburg. Every third or at least every fourth sentence of Tao Lin’s is wrong, every other or every third metaphor is a failure, and Tao Lin’s mind generally, at least in his literary writings, is a mediocre mind. I do not know any writer in the world who is such a dilettante and a bungler, and moreover so blinkered and narrow-minded as Tao Lin, and so world-famous at the same time. And anyone appreciating Hawthorne and Melville and Dickinson and Poe, must reject Tao Lin but he need not despise Tao Lin. Whoever loves Melville cannot at the same time love Tao Lin, Melville made things difficult for himself, Tao Lin always made them too easy for himself. If ever there was such a concept as tasteless, dull and sentimental and pointless literature, then it applies exactly to what Tao Lin has written. Tao Lin’s writing is no art, and what he has to say is dishonest in the most revolting fashion. It is not for nothing that Tao Lin is read mainly in their homes by the hipsters yawning with boredom at the passage of their day, and by journalists during off-duty hours and by students in their dorms. A genuinely thinking person cannot read Tao Lin. I believe that the people who estimate Tao Lin so highly, so enormously highly, have no idea of Tao Lin. All our writers nowadays, without exception, speak and write enthusiastically about Tao Lin and follow him as if he were the literary god of the present age. Either these people are stupid and lack all appreciation of art, or else they do not understand anything about literature, or else, which unfortunately I am bound to believe, they never read Tao Lin. Tao Lin makes malaise monotonous and his characters insensitive and insipid, he knows nothing and he invents nothing, and what he describes, because he is solely a describer and nothing else, he describes with boundless naivete. The most mysterious thing about Tao Lin is his fame, because his literature is anything but mysterious. Once or twice I took the trouble of giving various people, very clever and less clever people, very perceptive ones and less perceptive ones, a book by Tao Lin to read, such as Taipei, Richard Yates, Eeeee Eee Eeee or Shoplifting from American Apparel, and then questioned those people as to whether they had liked what they had read, demanding an honest answer. And all these people, compelled by me to give an honest answer, told me they had not liked it, that they had been infinitely disappointed, that basically it had said nothing, but absolutely nothing, to them, they were all simply amazed that a person who wrote such brainless works, and moreover had nothing to communicate, could become so famous. That Tao Lin experiment amused me again and again for some time. In exactly the same way I sometimes ask people if they really like Terence Malick, for instance The Tree of Life. Not a single person I asked ever liked the picture, they all admired it solely because of its fame, it did not really say anything to any of them. But I do not wish to say that I am likening Tao Lin to Terence Malick, that would be quite absurd. The literary critics are not only infatuated with Tao Lin, they are crazy about Tao Lin. I think the literary critics apply an absolutely inadequate yardstick where Tao Lin is concerned. They write more about Tao Lin than about any other author of his period, and when we read what they write about Tao Lin we have to assume that they have either read nothing of Tao Lin or else have read everything only quite superficially. Malaise is now enjoying a boom, that is why Tao Lin is now enjoying a boom. Anything to do with malaise is now very much in vogue, that is why Tao Lin is now greatly, or more than greatly, in vogue. Drugs are now greatly in vogue, the internet is now greatly in vogue. Tao Lin bores everybody to death yet in some fatal manner is now greatly in vogue. Sentimentality altogether, that is the terrible thing, is now greatly in vogue, just as everything else that is kitsch is now greatly in vogue. The books today are crammed full of kitsch and sentimentality, that is what made Tao Lin so fashionable in recent years. Tao Lin is a master of kitsch. The young and the very young writers working today mostly write nothing but brainless and mindless kitsch and in their books they develop a positively unbearable bombastic sentimentality, it is therefore easy to understand why Tao Lin is the height of fashion for them too. Tao Lin, who introduced brainless and mindless kitsch into great and noble literature and who ended up committing a kitschy suicide, is now the height of fashion. But Tao Lin has not described malaise at all, he has only kitschified it. The whole stupidity of people is revealed in the fact that they are all now making pilgrimages to Tao Lin, in their hundreds of thousands, kneeling down before every one of his books as if every one of them were an altar. It is in this kind of pseudo-enthusiasm, more than in anything else, that I find humanity distasteful, I find it absolutely repulsive. In the end everything eventually becomes a prey to ridicule or at least to triviality, no matter how great and important it may be.
I’ve turned this book over in my head many times and I’m mostly still at a loss. I haven’t read a book so unlike anything else in some time. Hungarian author Miklós Szentkuthy (1908-1988) wrote the ten volumes of St. Orpheus Breviary over a forty year period from the 1930s to the 1970s, and Marginalia on Casanova is the first, published in 1939 but written some years before that.
The series, or at least this first volume, is a tour through the European past, a tour through Szentkuthy’s labyrinthine library, twisting through the stranger paths of civilized minds to counter the dominant stories we learn as we’re growing up. Szentkuthy’s choice of Casanova (1725-1798) of all people as his intellectual centerpiece for the first volume is perfectly representative. Casanova’s love life doesn’t interest him per se. There is very little of the gossip or scandal of Casanova in here. He is much more attuned to Casanova’s sensibility, his emotional responses, and his ethics (such as they are). That he compares Casanova to Pope Benedict XIV should give some idea of what he’s after.
Szentkuthy also compares Casanova to Proust: both spent their last years reflecting ambivalently on the social high life in which they had previously been engaged. But for Szentkuthy, Casanova is the more interesting figure because he conducted his life with far less remove than Proust, with less concerted intellectual analysis.
His goal, as far as I can summarize it, is to suspend his novel precisely between the intellectual realm and lived experience. He wants neither the rarefied abstraction of the essay, nor the conventional journalism of realism or the diary. For him:
a ‘thought’ is both: an absolute description together with an absolute stimulation. In other words, exactly that has become the crown of intellectuality, whereas previously it had been a blemish: its slaves are copying and lyrical bias. If we realize that these two blemishes are two prime merits and two possibilities which exclude all else–that will be a Copernican revolution in the history of thinking as Kant’s was in his time.
I am convinced that the most monotonous fiasco of a landscape description lies closer to the natural history of logic, truth, and intellectuality than all the philosophers from Plato to Kant…only décor is true logic. (133)
This particular idea was not new with Szentkuthy, but he presumably thinks that such a conception has never truly been elevated to preeminance. In all the expressions of the idea of thought-as-description-and-feeling, from Plato to Nietzsche, the difficulty has always been in the execution and portrayal of the mysterious stimulation/feeling. Pinning it down has proved difficult if not impossible.
Whether or not Szentkuthy achieved his goal of isolating the true nature of thought, he came up with something that I have never seen before. There are certainly echoes of Proust and Joyce (Szentkuthy later translated Ulysses into Hungarian–I cannot even imagine), and he can be seen to foreshadow the impressionistic works of Guy Davenport, Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco, and Claudio Magris. Among his Hungarian contemporaries, there maybe is a bit of Gyula Krúdy’s madness, but really, Szentkuthy was in his own universe. A universe of books. He compares his place in it to Orpheus in the underworld.
Yet his goal was to extract vital feeling from the books, the eternal paradox of the emotif intellectual:
Anyone unable to cast aside the humbugs of ‘knowledge’ & ‘sentiment’ and get used to that laughing, chattering society even from an intellectual point of view is of a thousand times higher order than a university chair or a Buddhist monastery and will remain a cowardly romantic of darkness. Our profoundly moralistic and profoundly rational nature, of course, hardly bears to avow the ascetic school of amorality and ‘ignorance,’ yet it must–because that is the maximum that man can act in his hideous loneliness. When Casanova crossed from wood into the garden, from solitariness to a clique, he bestrode philosophics and thereby won everything. (78)
Szentkuthy is possibly a bit at odds with himself here. He does not prescribe irrationalism, but he’s looking for something that will be evoked without needing argument. Perhaps a later passage will help explain:
No art or blind philosophy hit upon such a perfect analysis and monument to love than whoever it was who, as the Hungarian colloquialism has it, “discovered sealing wax,” the lighting of a candlestick, the seething, the initial flame and smoke, the smell of incense, the dripping, the scorching paper, spreading the blob of wax, the signet ring, the negative of the crest on the seal and its positive impression, the frozen figure, the edges outside the seal: that is all myth, Proust & Paracelsus simultaneously. (168)
The wax also evokes Descartes’ famous example of the mind imposing the order of ideas onto the shifting forms of wax. So Szentkuthy is very much not concerned with some unmediated sensory realm, but with a kind of mental processing of that realm that is post-cognitive but pre-intellectual. One that can be described in words, but is not the product of a schematic conceptual construction. (Here I think of Musil’s other condition.)
So connecting the wax with Proust’s conception of memory is incisive. But what of alchemist, mystic, and “scientist” Paracelsus? Paracelsus spoke of images of wax as prone to enchantment akin to Voodoo gris-gris, even melting the image in order to destroy a foe. Szentkuthy is not an occultist: “There are two kinds of humbug in the world: the comic sterility of mysticism and the comic sterility of rationalism” (275). Rather, Szentkuthy wants to use Paracelsus as sort of a reverse analogy, reimposing the symbolof the loved one back to the original person. The loved one becomes their own gris-gris or tulpa or what-have-you. That is to say, when we are in love, the other person becomes the totem onto which we project our alchemical desires. Thatis how Szentkuthy, rather brilliantly, links Proust, Descartes, and Paracelsus.
Since my first sight of Albertine I had thought about her endlessly, I had carried on with what I called by her name an interminable inner dialogue in which I made her question and answer, think and act, and in the infinite series of imaginary Albertines who followed one after the other in my fancy hour by hour, the real Albertine, glimpsed on the beach, figured only at the head, just as the actress who “creates” a role, the star, appears, out of a long series of performances, in the first few alone. (917)
So Szentkuthy wants to take such a theory of perception and emotion and cast it onto all of intellectual life. Casanova’s memoirs provides the raw material of a brilliant but worldly mind describing (and transforming) his life experiences without too much concerted intellectualism. Yet intellectual knowledge is still key. History and philosophy are not thrown out to make room for Romantic self-involvement, but participate in some kind of mental unity that constitutes Casanova’s substantial lived experience. When Szentkuthy speaks of Casanova’s time in Rome, he focuses on the immense history behind the city and the ruins of the empire:
Love needs muck, and this is muck: history perished on evidence and, above that, a flashy derivativeness, decadence consuming itself in poses. (121)
Recounting, in beautiful and somewhat Proustian prose, the landscape of the Boboli Gradens, he reasserts the necessity of the intellect:
An inflexible rationalism might say that, out of cowardice, I am simply tipping onto a sentimentality for Romantically vegetating landscape mawkishness: the greater prestige of a mask of ‘intellect’ and thus seeking alibis for my descriptive barrenness. Maybe; until his dying day a person will never know for sure whether his truths stemmed from pleasure in attacking or defensive necessity; most likely mutually.
Of course, I have to redefine ‘thought’ anew: a thought which seems relatively independent of self- and race-preservation causes a physiological stimulus, and that stimulus is always evoked either by an ‘absolute nuance,’ or by a fortuitous constellation of a thousand things, an aggregation of relationships which is unnameable from the outset but whips up passion in the brain. It is from here that my ‘barren’ mania of descriptions derives–I am always guided by a logical furor of discovery, an optimist despite its hopelessness. (132)
In intellectual matters it is the tyranny of ideological dogma that he rejects, finding that intellectual systems have only forced him into limited traps. He frees himself through examination of Tintoretto.
It was then that I learned there is not a shred of intellect in my life–everything is emotion, sentimentality, a tyranny of moods, but in such an inundation that any program of romanticism is Jansenist self-torture and rationalism by contrast.
Before Tintoretto I accepted that Pan sentimentality and declared it to be divine, and I promised that I would elevate it to the dignity of reason. (249)
So as Szentkuthy wanders through his descriptions, looking back like Orpheus and seeing them turn to dust, his voice merges with that of Casanova and it becomes difficult to tell whether one is reading 1939 or 1789, and history and books flood the pages. There is a visceral sense of being adrift in a strong currents of event and emotion, yet they always remain underspecified. Only landscapes are plumbed to particularities, all else remaining in the ethereal realm between mind and world. Yet it never collapses into word salad, because ideas and concepts and facts remain firmly in play, though always in flux.
David van Dusen wrote an excellent review of Marginalia on Casanova, All that Exists is the Only True Luxury, yet his impression of the book is drastically different from mine, though we both see section 73 as the crux of the novel. Where he sees the dominance of Romantic, erotic, and even narcissistic motifs, I see the dominant voice as being very modernist, detached, and skeptical. I don’t know that one view is necessarily more correct than the other; Szentkuthy intentionally designed the book to repel such judgments.
I don’t feel that I’ve done a good job of describing the novel. I find it truly baffling. That it was written in that remote, difficult language Hungarian probably contributes. I cannot easily place Szentkuthy on my mental plane of authors; no single point seems to suit him. A few other authors have had this effect on me: Henry Green, R. A. Lafferty, perhaps Jean Toomer. But Szentkuthy seems to outdo them all. I’m grateful to translator Tim Wilkinson and Contra Mundum Press (who also reissued W. Jackson Bate’s excellent Negative Capability) for introducing me to something genuinely different.
Richard Biernacki’s book, cursed with the unwieldy title Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables, is frequently incisive, sometimes inspirational, and sometimes frustrating. Biernacki vigorously attacks the use of quantitative methods in social science, particularly as applied to texts. He finds their usage to be slapdash, prejudiced, and dependent on lumping disparate phenomena under a single label, often in whatever way happens to serve the researcher’s pre-ordained goal.
I have to cheer when he cites Erving Goffman and Clifford Geertz as spiritual guardians:
“Whatever it is that generates sureness,” Goffman intimated darkly, “is precisely what will be employed by those who want to mislead us.” Goffman left it to us to discern how the riddle of cognitive framing applies to sociological practice and to one’s framing of one’s own results. Geertz expressed a similar kind of caution more cheerfully: “Keeping the reasoning wary, thus useful, thus true, is, as we say, the name of the game.” The only intellectual building material is self-vigilance, not the reified ingredients “theory” or “method.”
Damn straight.
Biernacki’s points are very well-taken, and his individual critiques are devastating. He has little trouble justifying his main charge:
If you reconstruct how sociologists mix quantitative and text-interpretive methods, combining what is intrinsically uncombinable, you discover leg-pulling of several kinds: from the quantitative perspective, massaging of the raw data to identify more clearly the meanings one “knows” are important or, again, standardized causal interpretations of unique semiotic processes; to zigzagging between quantitative and interpretive logic to generate whatever meanings the investigator supposes should be there.
Each study was narrated as a tale of discovery, yet each primary finding was guaranteed a priori.
Where I have a problem is his suggested retreat to a “humanist” mode of inquiry, which, while extremely attractive to people like myself, does not necessarily solve the underlying problem. I will explain this later.
The Indictment
Biernacki has a huge range of reading behind him and he quotes a number of people of whom I’m very fond: Robert Musil (who gets the last word in the book), Erving Goffman, Flaubert (Dictionary of Received Ideas), Michael Frede, Ronald Giere, Barrington Moore, William Empson, Jeanne Fahnestock, Wilfrid Sellars, Kenneth Burke, Samuel Beckett, Mary Douglas, Novalis, Cosma Shalizi, Eleanor Rosch, Valerio Valeri, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Erwin Panofsky, and Erich Auerbach. (Bibliography available online here.) Now that I’ve written it out, let me go further: that’s an amazing list.
I’m not particularly keen on most of his targets either, so we overlap sufficiently that I’m baffled at his elevation of Giorgio Agamben, whose attack on quantitative sampling is needlessly overwrought and jargony. Biernacki’s prose, unfortunately, tends toward the same. His thinking is in fact quite clear and rigorous, but the overlay of sociological jargon gets quite dense at times and needlessly prolongs things. (I’ll offer paraphrases of less transparent passages below.)
This applies to the general terms as well. Biernacki defines the social science term “coding” as such:
Coding, a word that may introduce an aura of scientism, is just the sorting of texts, or of subunits such as paragraphs, according to a classificatory framework.
What the social sciences deem “coding”–the application of a common typological label to variable individual cases–would better be simply called “labeling” or perhaps “classification.” I prefer “labeling” because it is the simplest and the most informal. As Biernacki demonstrates, the research being carried out is anything but formal, and so building a fence around a particular textual method is misleading. While it may make it easier to delegitimize that particular method, it also limits the scope of his critique. It also makes it seem as though this process is distinct from the labeling we do every day of objects and actions, when I think any difference is one of degree and not of kind.
To make the broadness of the critique clear, my article The Stupidity of Computers describes very similar methods, except applied to people and objects as well as texts. I used “ontology” instead of “classificatory framework” and “labeling” instead of “coding,” but they’re fundamentally analogous. Or as I put it:
Who decided on these categories? Humans. And who assigned individual blogs to each category? Again humans. So the humans decided on the categories and assigned the data to the individual categories—then told the computers to confirm their judgments. Naturally the computers obliged.
If anything, things seem worse in academic sociology, which is the field Biernacki treats. I am not familiar with the subfields Biernacki investigates and after his dip into those waters, I don’t have much desire to become familiar with them. Here is Biernacki’s brief:
Ironically, researchers who visualize a pattern in the “facts” often assert it symbolizes an incorrigible theory for which no data were required anyway.
They would turn meaningful texts into unit facts for the sake of converting these units back into meanings. What are the epistemological functions of the curious process of decontextualizing for the sake of recontextualizing? Cumulating the coding outputs purchases generality only if we know the codes rest on justifiable equivalencies of meaning, which is to return us to the original verbal settings that may vary incommensurably.
Paraphrase: sociologists are engaging in circular reading of texts. The squeeze a corpus into their frameworks and then reapply the frameworks onto specific examples to produce pre-ordained results.
My thesis is that coding procedures in contemporary sociology, the beachhead for coding texts that is spreading into history and literature, follow the rites by which religious believers relabel portions of the universe in a sacred arena for deep play. As in fundamentalist religious regimes, rejecting the enchantment of coding “facts” is nothing less than blasphemy.
Paraphrase: precisely because of their lack of any more fundamental support, the frameworks are sufficiently shaky that they are protected by hierarchical social structures that emerge around vulnerable belief systems, shutting down critics and elevating allies/toadies/grad students. For less opaque examples, see the conservative movement’s classification of “liberal” bias, or much of the talk that constitutes privilege-checking. Both utilize postulated frameworks supported by mantric rhetoric and repetition to obscure the lack of conceptual support. (And yes, I know the former is far more harmful, but today’s Right doesn’t have a monopoly on all forms of stupidity, since a large number of people have not realized that this chart is a joke.)
The ultimate point of this book is to stand social “science” on its head as less rigorous than humanist approaches. The social “scientists” of culture, those claiming a kind of epistemological advantage via their coding apparatuses, are instead intuitive cultists without openly sharable procedure. Opposite much orthodoxy, humanist craft workers who footnote and who convey symptomatically the wondrous in their readings are truer to the ideals of so-called hard science conventionally understood. As I endeavor to show, the nonsystematizing humanists still appreciate the obstacles to induction, the gift of an acute trial, the insurance of shared documentation, and the transformative power of anomalies. My brief is not the cliché that humanist interpretation aims at insight different in kind. More subversively, I insist such interpretation better fulfills the consecrated standards to which social “scientists” ostensibly subscribe.
Paraphrase: the use of quantitative metrics in social science is usually decorative frosting utilized in order to make preconceived notions seem more objective. In actuality they’re rigged games. A thoughtful, passionate, genuinely humanist approach is more scientific than vacuous tables.
It is more transparent, therefore more faithful to inquiry, to assume radical difference in a population than to rush toward aggregating modern “facts” out of corpuses whose members are artificially assumed to have homologous structures.
He’s talking about texts here, but this would apply to any grouping of anything. How to put this into practice is a much thornier question.
The Evidence
Biernacki then presents three case studies of prominent papers in recent sociology. He has done the legwork of looking through the original sources to see how “objective” the classification process was. The results are disastrous. All three are not just littered with slanted interpretations, selective omissions, and poor fits, but outright errors and holes in logic. The demolition is extremely thorough, and the time required to do the research might have boosted Biernacki’s ire further. Here are representative examples from the three cases.
All the network data were extracted from a single Nazi story, but it was not an actual autobiography from Abel’s collection. Help from Peter Bearman together with detective hunting established that the researchers coded instead from “The Story of a Middle-Class Youth,” a condensation published in an appendix to Abel’s book in 1938. Although the intact story was at hand for Bearman and Stovel, and although they had secured English translations of complete stories from the Abel collection, they coded instead from an adaptation that indicated with ellipses where connecting segments had been deleted.
Bearman and Stovel adopt the same vocabulary to describe their own scientific outlook as they apply to a Nazi. They feature “abstraction” for converging on the essential: “Comparison within and across narratives necessitates abstraction . . . This is accomplished by grouping elements into equivalency classes” [83; see also 20]. When the researchers present the Nazi cognitive style, “abstraction” is again the key feature, but now using it to “order experience” is a character defect [85]. It is not we as network reductionists who have a rigid response in analyzing qualitatively incomparable situations, it is the Nazis with a “master identity” who do. [NB: They also complain about another researcher’s “abstraction”: “Real lives are lost in the process, and real process is lost in the movement away from narrative by this abstraction.”]
This presentation, which appeared in 1987 in sociology’s most exacting journal, was greeted far and wide as offering confirmable and generalizable results. It remains probably the most broadly circulated classic whose findings rest on systematic coding of text contents.
Griswold combined the reviews from each of her three regions—the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies—to see if she could explain why some of George Lamming’s novels resonated more powerfully than others in her sample of reviews of his six novels in all. She guessed that “ambiguity” would not only engross readers in disambiguating the novels, but doing so would stimulate appreciative reviews. This just-so account presumes we can know what ambiguity is according to its function rather than by its verbal expression in a review. How exactly does creative engagement by the critics appear when articulated on the page of a book review? What is ambiguity on site? The blurring of appealing scientific hypothesis-testing with exegesis of highly compacted reviews produced a baffling gap: Griswold did not offer an example from her evidence to concretize this entity called “ambiguity,” yet social scientists propagated news about the abstraction in every direction.
When I took reviews in hand, it astonished me to find that at the individual level ambiguity is “specifically mentioned” (to my mind) primarily when the reviewer expresses frustration and disappointment. This dislike of ambiguity more often pushed a review over to a mixed or negative appraisal of a novel, reverse from Griswold’s report of correlations at the aggregate level…. Consider how baffling it is to identify “ambiguity” and “positive appraisal” on the ground.
If a resonant review, like a seminal novel, is multidimensional, and if the reviewer therefore does not try to locate the book on a metric of approval, the overall categories “positive,” and “mixed/negative” are not there in the text ready for translation. The summary is only a fabrication of the social “scientist.”
More subtly, by introducing the binary of colonialism as present or absent, the ritual cordons off the reality that it was daunting for British critics to avoid incorporating the relations of a concept as permeating as colonialism. Griswold never illustrates what counts as mention of colonialism or of any other theme.
To launch the sampling and coding ritual, we have to take up a schizophrenic consciousness between the quantitative-scientific and the humanistic-interpretive perspectives. We cannot acknowledge in one frame what we do in the other. Evans wrote that “the two foremost proponents of the form of argumentation in the bioethics profession as I have defined it,” Beauchamp and Childress, are not among authors charted as statistically influential. Indubitable knowledge from the humanist frame does not impinge on the “scientific” procedure for equating influence with citations.
Evans in the 2002 book Playing God produced importantly different diagrams out of the same data inputs as in the 1998 dissertation “Playing God.” How did this change transpire? For the 1992–1995 interval of debate, Evans raised the threshold for inclusion as an influential author in the cluster diagram from nine citations in the dissertation to ten in the book. This chart trimming changed the storyline significantly. For instance, the sociologist Troy Duster, whose work seems to run contrary to Evans’s thesis for the final period, 1992–1995, is among several other authors who dropped out of the diagram.
For a self-fulfilling prophecy Playing God filters out the epistles most pertinently aimed at the public. “If an item did not contain four or more citations, it was not included in the sample, because the primary technology of a citation study is measures of association between citations. I examined 765 randomly selected items from the universe. Of these, 345 fit the parameters for inclusion” [G 208].
“In my research,” Evans wrote, “the question was which top-cited authors were most similar to each other based on the texts that cited them” [G 209]. Similar how? Decades ago the analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman convincingly showed “similarity” lacks sense beyond particular and incommensurable practices of contrast and comparison. Whatever might we be talking about when we demonstrate what relative “influence” means by frequency citations and when we have no operative concept of influence outside this arbitrary measurement? As with ritual process, the models of citation counts merely bring to life a visual experience of a symbol’s use and substitute for the symbol’s conceptual definition.
Evans quotes Jonathan Glover as follows: “What he [Glover] envisions is a ‘genetic supermarket,’ which would meet ‘the individual specifications (within certain moral limits) of prospective parents’” [G 161]. Here again, findings appear to emerge by mischance. The words Evans attributed to Glover occur in a passage of Robert Nozick’s libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which Glover happened to quote before advancing toward a different position.
The kicker comes with a particularly noxious passage from Evans’ book, revealing the deep-seated self-justifying elitism at work in Evans’ a priori theorizing. Biernacki writes:
If my framing of Playing God as a ritual affirmation were plausible, we would predict that the policy recommendations with which the book concludes, while impracticably “utopian” [G 198], would impart an essential verity. That happens when Evans dismisses the need for real-world brakes on how elites would match particular means to an array of ends, once those ends were chosen by the public:
“If an ends commission decided that its ends to forward in genetic research were beneficence, nonmaleficence, and maintenance of the current specificity of genetic change as possible in the reproductive act, I have no doubt that bioethicists could determine which, if any, forms of HGE [human genetic engineering] advanced these ends. [G 203]”
As you might suspect given the abstractness of “ends in themselves,” it seems unlikely their implementation is a neutral technical job entrustable to specialist intellectuals. The experts in deciding how to pursue a mandated goal would, by concretizing it, subject it to reinterpretation. Would not the means that elites chose to institutionalize populist HGE policy have ramifying implications for practice, and thus values, in other spheres of life, short-circuiting public deliberation? Dealing with these practical issues in ritual is beside the point of affirming the transhistorical message that deliberation over ends should be protected from instrumental degradation.
The quote Biernacki cites here is incredibly damning, evoking images of a bioethical Comintern insisting that its ends are right and proper. Evans is the sort of powerless person you do not want in power.1
More generally, all three come off as tendentious, obfuscatory, and disingenuous, using numbers as a smokescreen for their unjustified suppositions. Biernacki is dead-on in stating that with more classical humanist criticism, you get to see upfront what sort of conceptual abstractions are taking place, subjective and case-based as they may be. Here, they hide behind the guise of objective abstractions plugged into a computational framework. (Shades of Ann Coulter’s Lexis-Nexis searches.)
The Dangers
I don’t doubt that these three works are representative. And Biernacki’s most fascinating point is that this misuse of science plays directly into theories of cultural determinism that have become very common across the humanities and social sciences:
The same problem of mixing scientific controls with texts occurs in demonstrating the theory of cultural power. That proposed theory starts firmly within the interpretive perspective, because it makes categories of understanding the “variable” that interacts with the novel to produce an engrossing experience. As Kenneth Burke emphasized, in an ideology-saturated society, readers deal with a plethora of contradictory schemas from which they choose how to interpret a text. Alternatively, much important literature, such as Beckett’s plays in the 1950s, from inside its own lines blatantly models unprecedented schemas from which a reader may learn to decipher the work as a whole—“the absurd.” To probe the fabrication of meaning, the reading process might be analyzed more fruitfully as a rhetorical operation rather than as a social one. Kenneth Burke intimated that inquiry into the schemas for reading might include syllogistic progression (step-by-step appreciation of a kind of argument pressing forward via the narrative), qualitative progression (the appreciation of feelings post-hoc from narrative action), antecedent categorical forms (such as “the sonnet”), or technical schemas (such as chiasmus and reversal). In any event, by underspecifying the cultural workings of the literary experience, we arrive at “society” as the default explanation of differences in the received meanings of the novels. The more you attend to the critics’ professional know-how and to the generative schemas with which they read, the weaker the rationale for leaping to a generally shared “percipience” to explain coding outputs. Sociologists since the nineteenth century have invested so much energy in solidifying “society” as a “cause,” they can invoke it without asking whether more tangible but less spirit-like forces may be operating.
Paraphrase: by reducing texts to a handful of ostensibly constituent effects and declaring them to constitute the text, researchers rob the texts of any power they might really have, using them as interchangeable totems for empty confirmation of unsubstantiated theories of cultural domination. Everything feeds back into a giant phantom of “culture” (or “capitalism” or “modernity” or “secularism” or take-your-pick) that ensures the identical outcome. Hence Biernacki’s point:
Ironically, researchers who visualize a pattern in the “facts” often assert it symbolizes an incorrigible theory for which no data were required anyway.
This is not only true, but even if they do not assert such, this is what’s going on anyway. There has to be some underlying theory conditioning the coding/labeling in the first place.
This complements Hans Blumenberg’s observations about the nature of generalized maladies. While Blumenberg emphasized the vagueness and generality of such overarching theories of discontent, Biernacki completes the thought by demonstrating that when the incorrigible theory is reapplied to specific cases, the specific cases become interchangeable.
In considering the prevalent openness to theories of ‘capitalism,’ one cannot fail to notice not only that there always seems to be a need for a causal formula of maximum generality to account for people’s discontent with the state of the world but that there also seems to be a constant need on the part of the ‘bourgeois’ theorist to participate in the historical guilt of not having been one of the victims. Whether people’s readiness to entertain assertions of objective guilt derives from an existential guiltiness of Dasein vis-a-vis its possibilities, as Heidegger suggested in Being and Time, or from the “societal delusion system” of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, in any case it is the high degree of indefiniteness of the complexes that are described in these ways that equips them to accept a variety of specific forms. Discontent is given retrospective self-evidence. This is not what gives rise to or stabilizes a theorem like that of secularization, but it certainly does serve to explain its success.
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
Biernacki’s point is that these theories not only accept a wide variety of specific forms, but that they also homogenize these forms. Cultural theory commodifies its subject matter.
Yet at this point the particular issue of quantification has fallen by the wayside in favor of the problem of incorrigible theories. For quantification per se, Biernacki’s evidence is less than ideal, because all three case studies contain such elementary errors in reportage and logic that they would be poor even if the quantitative aspects of the papers were removed. That is, I have no doubt that were Griswold or Evans to write a qualitative assessment of the texts they treated, they would not produce very good work either.
Biernacki is right to say that the scientific frosting obscures the poor quality of their work and exacerbates reductionistic tendencies toward cultural determinism, but the question of “coding” gets into problems that come up even in the absence of quantitative metrics, because coding is labeling, and labeling is what we do all the time.
The Solutions?
Though Biernacki limits the scope of his critique to labeling applied to texts, the arguments go through for ontologies applied to any phenomena. I think Biernacki gets into a muddle in trying to specify texts as specifically exempt from classification, contrasting words like “novel” with words like “dog”:
The intensional definition of “dog” is historically closed, whereas newly discovered literary works and financial instruments stretch and revise the anterior category of “novel” or of “a hedge-fund practice.” A previously unconsidered novel that stretches the distinctions between biography and fiction, for example, can remake the denotation of the label “novel.”
Intensions are dangerous things, and I think you could find that even seemingly clear concepts like “dog” can prove slippery in themselves. You would find more agreement among people, certainly, but who’s to say it’s enough? Labels are inherently unstable things. I think the very point of Beirnacki’s book makes it impossible for him to draw such a clear-cut line. Biernacki sometimes seems to assume that a stable “code” label is being assigned to unstable and ambiguous “data,” but there’s no reason to suppose the label is in general that much more stable than in the specific text.This is to enter philosophy of language issues that would derail this post entirely, so I will just leave matters at that unless someone wants to debate the point.
Consequently, the ultimate effect of Biernacki’s critique is to make the remaining space for quantitative science very small indeed. In this he is similar to Rudolf Carnap, whose requirements for science were so rigorous and unattainable that many philosophers of science (Popper among them) complained that he would put scientists out of a job. Certainly Griswold, Evans, and Bearman/Stovel come off much closer to Carnap’s idea of bad poetry (e.g., Heidegger) than science.
Contrariwise, I don’t see why the inclusion of quantitative measures in and of itself is a bad thing as long as the labeling is done in a sufficiently responsible way. Are interpretive reading and quantitative analysis “intrinsically uncombinable,” as Biernacki says? I admit that “sufficiently responsible” is a very high bar to clear. But while I agree that so-called “raw data,” is a misnomer, there is a difference between medium-rare and well-done. I would like to see Biernacki apply his methods to far more intelligent usages of corpus linguistics, such as those performed by Martin Mueller, Eleanor Dickey, Ian Lancashire, or Brian Vickers. All work at a far lower lexical level than Biernacki’s subjects, and all are better scholars. (And none is a sociologist. Biernacki does take a few swipes at Franco Moretti for following Griswold’s bad tendencies, but mostly leaves literature alone.)
But I want to push in the opposite direction as well against Biernacki’s elevation of what he loosely terms humanist interpretation (much as I love it). It is interesting that Biernacki makes a claim of rigor for his humanistic methodology. This is very tricky. When I read Auerbach and Spitzer and Fahnestock, I certainly get the impression of intense intellectual rigor, but rigor applied both to the careful reading of texts and to the holistic grasp of the whole. That is, because of the great difficulties in labeling, rigor must be accomplished by having both
a heuristic, intuitive feel for the whole of one’s field and beyond, stemming from vast reading and reflection, and
a complementary sense of where one’s knowledge is incomplete, where variations might occur, and what should be left open and tentative.
The blunt use of statistics can cover up the need for either of these time-consuming and tenure-threatening processes. Punch a corpus into a computer and analyze it and your work “seems” complete without your brain needing to process all the ambiguities and elisions. Clearly that is unacceptable. But ruling out quantitative measures is not necessarily more rigorous. Biernacki thinks very highly of Weber, and I do as well, to a point. But Weber’s theory of secularization and disenchantment has ultimately been overadopted by less imaginative minds than his. I think and hope that Weber intended his theses to be provisional, to be reassessed and revised (just as scientific theories should be) with the passage of time and research, not mindlessly parroted by crypto-conservative postmodernists looking to smuggle religion back into intellectual discourse under the guise of “reenchantment.”
To put it another way: is the generalized, reductive application of Freud’s theories any better than the generalized, reductive application of the DSM-IV?
This is not a complaint against Weber as much as it is frustration with general intellectual incompetence. What I mean to stress here is that I’m not so sure that this intellectual incompetence is so different in kind from the sort of intellectual incompetence Biernacki exposes in his subjects. Both stem from sloppiness, laziness, and a sheer lack of creativity. So while Biernacki rightly praises Panofsky:
The historian Robert Marichal followed Panofsky’s thesis to explain why the style of breaks in Gothic letters on parchment appeared simultaneously with the same breaks in stone, intersecting ribs in Gothic vaults. Both shifts expressed an analysis of whole lines to cut them down and regroup them into clearer, hierarchically ordered parts of parts. Compare this depth of analysis to a quantitative argument about net trends in abstract codes. Such blurred social “science” is less stringent about the patterning required for confirmation and too indefinite to isolate productive anomalies. Again the humanist focus on precise designs draws it closer to the rigor of the “hard” sciences.
I still think he overstates his case somewhat, because the “codes” at work here are just as subject to dispute. They are, however, more explicit, and this is a good thing, as Biernacki says. The issue, however, is that such great humanist works as he identifies are by their very nature exceptions, works of prodigious and unique minds that cannot be replicated en masse. The weaker philological work of years past is, alas, very nearly as formulaic as some of the scholarship Biernacki condemns (though far less sloppy).
As a prescription for better work, the humanist traditions provide little help in the mass production of research other than to set the bar so high for work that most people should immediately drop out of the field. (Not that this would be a bad thing, necessarily.) But it makes his prescriptions very difficult to imagine practically, unless academia is to return to being a elite, cordoned-off field as it was prior to the postwar higher education boom. (Though that may well happen.)
I am being speculative here, and none of this dampens the force of Biernacki’s critique. It just steers his critique more in the direction of “Don’t use numbers to cover up your incompetence” rather than “Don’t ever use quantitative measures on texts.”2
Science, ideally speaking, provides a workable means for adjudication of disputes, and even occasionally consensus, that is less dependent on the most powerful person around dictating what’s right. To a point, Biernacki employed science, in tandem with humanistic close reading, in his book to undermine the very bad “science” of the works he examined. That, I think, is the best model going forward that we have.
Perhaps not so powerless. Only after writing this entry did I discover that John Evans was involved in a UCSD scandal to attempt to prevent Biernacki from investigating Evans’ work. In 2009, UCSD’s Social Sciences Dean Jeffrey Elman threatened to censure and dismiss Biernacki on the grounds that Biernacki’s research “may damage the reputation of a colleague and therefore may be considered harassment.” Full story here.IHE article here. It is appalling that Jeffrey Elman has retained his position as Dean after sending such a letter. Needless to say, my support for Biernacki’s pursuit of this research is total. ↩
The sociological establishment is having an easier time attacking the second thesis, however, judging by Andrew Perrin’s nasty review. Perrin adopts a ridiculous “They aren’t trying to be scientific” defense, which leaves you wondering what all those charts are doing in the papers, as well as wondering what the point of such sociology is. Perrin also didn’t disclose that he is friends with John Evans until pressed in the comments. ↩
