A colleague who read my previous post suggested to me that I was calling for a basically "positivist" style of literary scholarship, akin to the would-be empirical investigations of nineteenth-century philologists and historians. He didn't mean that in a positive way. And thereon hangs a twentieth-century literary-historical tale...

Lately I seem to have been running quite often, among humanities scholars and literary writers, into the notion that the essence of the literary, or of the humanities in general,* necessarily stands at odds with scientific procedures and scientific rationality in general--maybe with rationality tout court. (Let me say right away that Lee Konstantinou has used several recent Arcade posts to articulate some non-anti-scientistic, non-anti-rationalistic positions: See Am I Turning Empirical? and Very Interesting.) With John Guillory lecturing at Stanford this Thursday, it seems like an appropriate occasion to reflect a little on the genealogy and consequences of this attitude. Some of Guillory's most powerful work has been on the history of literary-critical anti-scientism; I'm thinking of his lacerating account of New Critical "paradox" in Cultural Capital and his beautiful analysis of the "conflict of the faculties" driving the wearisome debates over the Sokal Social Text hoax in "The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism."

I am interested, however, not only in the academic version of this doxa but in its related yet distinct literary versions. In particular, I want to avoid the assumption that literature as such has spent the twentieth century locked in a "two cultures"-style struggle with the domain of science and what is often loosely called "Enlightenment rationality." If Guillory is right, that is a misrecognized version of quite different struggles. Yet I also have no time for extorted reconciliations of the profoundly differentiated spheres of literary and scientifically rational practice. What more nuanced accounts can we devise?

My colleague's comment about my incipient positivism reminded me of a remark of Wallace Stevens. Stevens, always obsessed with the relationship between his poetry and the world of professional philosophy, had been looking at the work of A.J. Ayer. In a 1948 lecture at Columbia, "Imagination as Value," he discusses the logical positivist's joint dismissal of metaphysics and of poetry as merely expressive rather than empirically verifiable and hence, in the strict logical-positivist sense, meaningless. Responding defensively, Stevens wrote:

We feel, without being particularly intelligent about it, that the imagination as metaphysics will survive logical positivism unscathed.

Stevens was never much of a philosopher, even though he was a master of using philosophical discourse to poetic effect. But here he is not mounting an argument but grounding the rejection of logical positivism in "our" feeling for the imagination and its metaphysics. This is the kernel of the attitude I have been encountering--the sense that "we" literary, humanistic types just know that the metaphysics-eliminating, imagination-scorning enterprise of positivism is not for us. (That's what I meant by using Bourdieu's term doxa above.) There is, of course, a difference between the twentieth-century philosophies called logical positivism and 19th-century positivist ideas more generally, and there is a risk in speaking of these positivisms, science, and rationality all in the same breath. Actually, though, I think these differences make no difference to the attitudes I am talking about, which usually lump together scientism, positivism, empiricism, and rationality itself. Logical positivism, because it cast its lot in with (what it understood to be) scientific understanding, appears as a conveniently extreme example. Philosophers: I am sorry I am making you cry with my sloppy use of all these terms. The point here is that the defensive literary orthodoxy makes no distinctions among these various adversaries.

All of this is a long way of saying that Stevens understands his poetic vocation in traditionally Romantic terms as a critique of Enlightenment. His answer to Ayer is that literature can, at best, only ever exist in rivalry to the scientific knowledge-producing enterprise. Here is a more contemporary version, which I came across in Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture (I have been teaching Anglophone Novelists and the Nobel Prize). Proclaiming the writer's vocation to preserve language against all the uses oppressors make of it, Morrison says:

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed.

Though the twin critiques of political repression and mass culture are most prominent here, I twitch at that quick dismissal of science. It is not that Morrison is mounting a sustained attack on science; just the opposite. The point is that her rousing affirmation of the value of literature cannot possibly omit a swipe at science as a tool of oppression. Literary scholarship is particularly fond of this trope, whose classic exemplar is Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Now, all of this is familiar, especially to those who know the ins and outs of literary modernism and its successor formations. For all the flirtations of high modernism with scientific styles of thinking (in the Pound/Williams cult of exact description or the Eliotic norm of impersonal detachment), the keynote of literary-modernist dogma, in literary as in academic practice, has been a Stevensian defense of the imagination as value, with logical-positivist-style scientific rationality as one of the principal barbarians at the gates. I find this image terribly depressing, since I think anti-rationalism and anti-scientism cannot be legitimate grounds for any academic discipline**; and I am not so sure they do literary production good either (though perhaps the examples of Stevens and Morrison suggest otherwise).

This concern leads me to a question I really can't answer yet: what literary and humanistic genealogies of non-anti-rationalism are there? What meaningful historical and social alignments have there been, in the twentieth-century, between literary and humanistic work on the one hand and logical-positivist-style scientific rationality on the other?

The point here is not to build random analogies between scientific work and literary projects, nor to discover scientific or scientific-rational thematics in cultural production (though these may play a role, perhaps in alignments between science fiction and science popularization); least of all am I interested in the oversimplified versions of literary scientism that culminate today in Proust-was-a-neuroscientist-style arguments. Nothing can reverse the centuries-old differentiation of the literary and scientific fields. But does that differentiation really mean that "positivist" will always be a term of opprobrium for those who work in the humanities?***

*I am aware of the dangers of using literature as a synecdoche for the humanities; that's a topic for another time. Though I think that in this case it would turn out that the conflation has been historically important for the tendencies I'm talking about.

**Oh yes he did. Amanda Anderson's The Way We Argue Now qv also. But this argument will have to be part of my oft-promised series of posts on boredom.

***The easy way out here is to argue, as I'm sure my colleague would, that the problem is not literary hostility to (scientific) rationality as such but simply the methodological weakness of positivism, or, indeed, of logical positivism, especially in the human sciences. But I don't think the hostility I'm talking about is really rooted in legitimate critique; that's what I'm trying to say with my citation of the Stevens and Morrison lectures. Suitably reconstructed versions of positivistic scholarship still meet with tremendous reflexive hostility, quite apart from specific methodological objections.