I recently read the last few issues of Trends in Cognitive Sciences to see what could be of interest for the blog. (That’s one of the things I do here, in case you hadn’t realised.) It struck me that several articles made reference to something that might not be well-known to all my dear readers: Bayesian Probability. I thought it would be good to pin it down so I can refer back to it, and it’s an interesting part of what some theorists of the mind are doing at the moment.
      Thomas Bayes (c. 1701-1761) was a mathematician, philosopher, and minister, who developed a way of understanding probability in terms of knowledge and/or belief. So the important thing in probability is not a mathematical statement of frequency, but rather an assessment of likelihood which starts from pre-existing factors and then changes according to new information. The maths bit – there’s always a maths bit – comes in defining the changes to assessments of probability that result from new, partially or wholly unexpected information.

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It’s not completely clear to me (perhaps not to others either) whether we should stress the belief element here, and deal with the individual as the site of probability judgments, or whether we should see this as a kind of logical operation. Maybe that’s not a good distinction when it comes to the psychological implications of Bayesian thinking: in the mind, logical and subjective are interlocked.
      What Bayes offers to cognitive science is twofold: (i) a model of how the mind responds to its environment, wherein by necessity it has a prediction of what might happen, and then has to modify that prediction as new factors become apparent; and (ii) some maths to give this fluid, organic idea of thought a bit more specificity.

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Some important related concepts:
* Predictive Coding / Predictive Processing: you can read more about this in a description of a brilliant-sounding workshop in Amsterdam here. The idea is that we have evolved to predict the world around us, and to modify those predictions constantly, and as efficiently as possible.
* Free Energy: this relates to the former idea, I’d say, but focuses on how to conceive of the discrepancies between expectation and actuality caused by bad prediction. The general idea is that the mind’s strategy is to minimise this ‘free energy’, by processes of inference and updating. One key proponent, Karl Friston, has suggested that this avoidance of (let’s call it) surprise is verging on ‘’.

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This way of thinking about cognition seems full of potential for literary studies. In a novel, for example, the dynamics of expectation and surprise are carefully managed; sometimes the probabilistic environment is altered in ways that seem lifelike, sometimes not. Sometimes the narrative voice may appear to experience the processes differently from the reader. I won’t go on to generalise more, because I hope that more specific thoughts along these lines will follow in later posts. Instead, I will refer you to a couple of excellent essays by my friend Karin Kukkonen, who was, I think, the first person I ever heard using the word ‘Bayesian’. The first one I ever listened to, anyway.

* Karin Kukkonen, ‘Bayesian Narrative: Probability, Plot and the Shape of the Fictional World’, Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 123 (2014), 720- 739.
* Karin Kukkonen, ‘Presence and Prediction: The Embodied Reader’s Cascades of Cognition’, Style, 48 (2014), 367-384.

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, 2015)

I was in Oslo last week to give a paper as part of this group‘s seminar. One of the things I talked about was Rita Felski’s book, which has caused something of a stir. Her argument is that literary criticism and literary theory are now completely dominated by ‘‘. One way or another, the field revolves around ‘critique’, her key word for this tendency.
      Readers, especially in university theory courses, are taught that they have to seek out the things that literature doesn’t want to yield: we have to detect biases, unveil ideologies, excavate abuses. She argues that this is so ubiquitous that it has become a self-involved and circular endeavour, and that we should seek out ways of defining a ‘postcritical reading’:

Rather than looking behind the text – for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives – we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible. This is not idealism, aestheticism, or magical thinking but a recognition – long overdue – of the text’s status as co-factor: as something that makes a difference, that helps makes things happen.

This sounds to me like ‘acknowledging’ the text in a way akin to things said by Stanley Cavell (whom she discusses) that I’ve discussed in the blog before, here. She is interestingly wary about some historicist approaches: ‘History is not a Box’, she says, arguing that we should think about what connects across time rather than what does not. Her main solution is to recommend an approach derived from the sociology of Bruno Latour. This requires an approach, an Actor Network Theory, that sees literary texts as ‘nonhuman actors’ working with us.

In various ways I feel sympathetic towards this. I think the book spends more time on the problems than on the solution. I also think the value of sceptical questioning is still considerable in all kinds of contexts and it may be that we need to find new ways of doing it. However, it seems right to me to think about how texts and readers work together as an alternative to seeing them as, in one way or another, at odds or in tension.
      My sympathy for the argument encountered a strange obstacle when I began to wonder why the things that I and others have been doing — cognitive approaches to literature — were not mentioned significantly. As it happens, I have spent a fair bit of time with people explictly discussing alternatives to the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. The essay mentioned here is one of the results — admittedly quite an unobtrusive intervention, but still. Felski herself mentions affordances, and these are central to Terence Cave’s recent book Thinking with Literature (review here), but the link is yet to be made. In general, if we are looking for a transhistorical approach with an interest in the shared contexts and resources of writer and reader, then cognitive approaches have something to offer.
      So I began to wonder: why isn’t it there? It may be that cognitive literary studies are simply marginal in the literary theory environment that Felski describes. Perhaps they aren’t part of the landscape because a fear of scientific hegemony puts people off. It is also true that some of the best work in cognitive theory can be linked with the culture of critique: for example, foundational work by Elizabeth Hart and Ellen Spolsky strove to demonstrate the compatibility of their approach with assumptions of post-structuralism. By focusing on indeterminacy, gaps, failings in cognition, they were also probing the underlying faultlines.
      I came quite close to going back to my hotel room and e-mailing Rita Felski straight away to ask her why. It was pointed out to me that it might be hard to get the tone right, that a friendly question might seem like an accusation. It might seem like I was saying ‘why are you ignoring us?’, which I really am not. The specific contributions I refer to above are either below the radar or very recent indeed. A dose of Norwegian rain dampened my enthusiasm further. OK, it would have been a weird thing to do, but I am intrigued: work to be done, links to be forged.

It’s that time again! Well, I look forward to it, anyway. I wrote a review of the year for 2014-15 here and for 2013-14 here, and that nearly makes it a tradition, right? It’s a chance for me to identify some trends and patterns in what’s been covered, so here I go again.

Looking back, I am pleased with some little clusters of posts…
* On refrains, and bridges between brain and mind. It started here, continued here and here. Then Florence Hazrat took this up with reference to ‘ear-worms’ here and I finished the flurry here.
* On turn-taking, a favourite topic of mine; I got back into it briefly here, took a look at the rhythms of silences here, and stayed in the general area when writing about gender and voice modulation here.
* On creativity, self-generated thought, and Milton’s poems here and here; some similar questions were still ongoing in my discussion of Charles Fernyhough’s new book here.
* On slow thinking and metastability here and here and here.
* On some interesting critiques of important aspects of cognitive science and cognitive literary theory, here (extended mind) and here (mind-reading / theory of mind).

That’s a lot of links; and it makes it seem like a busy year, which it was, and not just because of the blog. It’s still proving a satisfying medium in itself, and it becomes all the rewarding when I hear directly or indirectly that people have been reading my posts. Many thanks for the time you give to it!
      I had a plan to feature another clip from a baseball film again. (Don’t ask why; there was no good reason.) But I only did it once so it isn’t even nearly a tradition. In lieu, then, of one of the many excellent bits of Moneyball, I’ll include something different. It’s Dexys’ cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’, and I think it’s quite superb, although I don’t know quite how it gets away with making an uplifting version of that particular song. A proper survey of Youtube will uncover several unspeakable acts of tonal butchery as people get the mood all wrong (Sinatra! Crosby! Carly Rae Jepsen! What were you thinking?), so it’s all the more impressive that Dexys make it work. I listen to it every day and so should everyone.

I thought, as I read some knowledge about your brain into a passage from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, back here, maybe I am reading too much into it? As I realised I was getting close to the blog’s three-year review (next post), I had a few thoughts about this:

* I really don’t think I was; I think what I said was there, was there. Is there.

* I think it’s my job (in that I am a literature academic, yes, but also in that I am an enthusiast who thinks literature is important to the world) to read a lot into great literature, so much that too much requires effort, not just a lack of self-control. It’s not that I think I am noticing things that aren’t available to real readers as they really read, just that I am more explicit about them, highlighting things that are available to implicit perceptions.

* I was reminded of a passage from Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570) by a colleague. It’s more directly germane to some of my other work, which has focused on the imitation of Latin and Greek literature by English renaissance writers. Ascham realises that his detailed discussion of the nature of imitation, as he observes it in practice among the Romans, will make some think he is reading too much into it:

Some busie looker upon this litle poore booke, that hath neither will to do good him selfe, nor skill to iudge right of others, but can lustelie contemne, by pride and ignorance, all painfull diligence and right order in study, will perchance say, that I am too precise, too curious, in marking and thus about the imitation of others: and that the olde worthie Authors did never busie their heades and wittes, in folowying so preciselie, wither the matter what other men wrote, or els the maner how other men wrote. They will say, it were a plaine slaverie, and iniurie to, to shakkle and tye a good witte, and hinder the course of a mans good nature with such bondes of servitude, in folowyng other.

He then goes on to say that imitation of older authors has been the cornerstone of achievement since forever. I would pick out the way that Ascham imagines his detractors effectively demeaning the great poets that are his subject, when they demean his effortful scholarship. It’s unnecessarily patronising to assume that literature is a little thoughtless, the product of wit or genius or circumstances. It seems best to me to default towards respectfully reading a lot into the work of people who have put a lot into it.

Two brief notes…

Tim Bayne, Jakob Hohwy, and Adrian M. Owen, ‘Are There Levels of Consciousness?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 405-13.

This aims to make an intervention in the science of consciousness. It observes a tendency towards a one-dimensional approach, wherein different states are analysed holistically as examples of different points of one scale, high to low. There is some kind of line from coma to conscious wakefulness, but there are other states that don’t fit: REM sleep, sleep-walking, vegetative states. Sleep and sedation have crucial differences. Bayne et al. draw attention to the problem and suggest that we should think in terms of ‘multidimensional space’ rather than levels. Not surprisingly I think that literature affords examples of diverse mental states, including ones not accounted for in their taxonomy. Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, not for the first time, is an example of an unanticipated mind-state that may nevertheless open up special dimensions. The awakening statue, or perhaps, the Queen who, though never a statue, has nevertheless somehow passed sixteen years in a somewhat suspended state: these are categories that enrich the picture of the problem, or the problem of the picture. It might seem an odd way to test attempts to provide a convenient taxonomy of consciousness, but there must be a role for the imagination somewhere in the process, given that the issues obviously aren’t amenable to any simplistic approach.

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Michael A. Cohen, Daniel C. Dennett, and Nancy Kanwisher, ‘What is the Bandwidth of Perceptual Experience?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 324-35

The idea here is that although we think we see the world in rich detail, experiments suggest that ‘the amount of visual information observers can perceive and remember at any given moment is limited’. Cohen et al. are interested in the mismatch between subjective impressions and objective observations. Perhaps consciousness does more, or better, than the perceptual tests allow. Their view is that ‘although we see more than the handful of objects claimed by prominent models of visual attention and working memory, we still see far less than we think we do’. With the help of some simple but effective blurry pictures, they build an argument that ‘a handful of items are perceived with high fidelity, while the remainder of the world is represented as an ensemble statistic (or set of statistics)’. In their view, the interesting thing for consciousness research is ‘the nature of the visual information that is captured beyond the few high-fidelity objects that can be held in visual working memory’. It might be interesting to think about how literary descriptions test out some of the boundaries. Are there ways in which they are over-photographic, subjectively inflected, or manifestly partial and blurry? Obviously this is an issue in visual art as well, but the thing about verbal description is that understanding its perspective, its process, what’s gained and what’s lost, takes a certain sort of work that gives us chances to turn back and think ‘is this what it’s like?’.