Michael Mack, How Literature Changes the Way We Think (Continuum, 2012)
Not for the first time, I have been reading a book that is so near to, and yet so far from, my interests in this blog. (Another was Aboutness.) In How Literature Changes the Way We Think Michael Mack argues that literature offers special ways for us to solve problems. He has pursued this passionate defence of literature in .
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In How Literature Changes the Way We Think Mack argues that the arts have ‘innovative force’, they ‘disrupt homogeneity, , or the reproduction of what we are used to’. He writes about how literature’s ‘mental space has the capacity to change our ways of perception and cognition in a uniquely powerful manner precisely by dint of its separation from what we are used to see as presentations or representations of our world’. It ‘transforms our cognition by undermining the way that fictions keep us enthralled’. Indeed, ‘the cognitive upheavals, which literature initiates and impels, could match the changes in age and longevity that are due to advances in biomedicine’. For Mack, literature’s knowledge is aimed at the future, and for humanity facing its future it is, or should be, ‘key to problem solving due to its life renewing and life preserving impetus’.
This is very much an argument for the present day, and for a particular version of the present, where the world and its societies are aging, and the future poses severe challenges to human resilience, attitudes, and ethics. The argument mostly arises in discussions of writings about art, culture, history, and change by Spinoza, Nietzsche, Arendt, Žižek, Heidegger, and others. When fictional works appear – The Road, 1984, Never Let Me Go – they tend to illustrate the problems rather the solutions, I think. So there aren’t a set of tangible instances of literature presenting readers with new ethical strategies, either in the past or present. And so there are not specific proposals as to how we might take particular texts now and find problem-solving inspiration in them.
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It may be rather prosaic of me to approach a work of cultural criticism in this way. But it’s consistent with my reason for blogging about it. Mack uses the word ‘cognitive’ often, but although he cites Antonio Damasio on a number of occasions (mostly in relation to the mind / body relationship, and Damasio’s approval of Spinoza) his definition of ‘the way we think’ takes hardly any explicit or extended account of cognitive science, its conclusions or methods. Within the humanities it is normal and perhaps reasonable enough to treat thinking as the domain of philosophy. There are indeed some kinds of thinking – consciousness, for example, or deliberation – where scientific experiments really have not got very far. Nonetheless, my inclination now is that assertions about ‘changing the way we think’ lend themselves to, and may require, empirical testing.
Any experiment into whether literature increases adaptive resilience in a changing world would have to work on a reductive scale, in comparison with Mack’s book. It could only define literary experience quite narrowly (a measured period of time spent in close consideration of a text; a threshold for how much time a given person spends reading outside the lab), and it could only represent adaptive resilience narrowly too: questionnaires, scenarios – it’s not exactly Cormac McCarthy. Nonetheless, for me at least, this would be a worthwhile check on Mack’s argument. This seems to me like a typical interdisciplinary tension, and one that’s partly addressed in Mack’s . It doesn’t seem over-ambitious to think that it could be resolved.