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Friends:

 In C.E. 1215 the faculty of the University of Paris were told to produce a "comprehensive theory of the world," and I suppose I am the ghost of one of these, condemned to keep trying until I get a small piece at least of the theory "right." I call this an epistle because I am a spontaneous, informal, and undisciplined thinker, and do not wish the following to be regarded as even a draft of a neatly packaged finished product. Also, it is not about the eighteenth century on which we have focused this term, but about a pair of questions Dr. Shankman has frequently asked us: "How do you teach this work?" "Should you teach this work?" I am examining the grounds on which one might answer these, especially the second one, in a relativistic age.

I dreamed I was S.T. Coleridge, and had begun to write the missing chapter of the Biographia Literaria. In it I wrote:

The theory of Association of Ideas, which I have so much admired, will undoubtedly be replaced by other theories as new generations make new discoveries in the sciences of Anatomy and Chemistry. I will go so far as to predict the following: that in some two hundred years there will be an understanding of the brain as a bundle of nerves, running on electrical discharges between quantities of sodium and potassium. That these discharges will be proved to be an expense to the organism, which it must justify to itself by some perceived advantage. That the organism will be shown to have a tendency to conserve its electrical potential, that is, will not think, and this unthinking state will be known to science as habituation, and to the rest of us as prejudice. Any response to a disturbance calculated to upset the equilibrium of the habituated shall be called dishabituation. That a theory of Art, the first such to be found compatible with Science, shall then arise, by which Art shall be discovered to be nothing more nor less than intentional prompting of dishabituation through the simulation of events that theoretically would, had they occurred without such intervention, have produced this dishabituation.

Art is a device for the prevention of the disaster brought on by prejudice. The prejudiced are objectifiers; art seeks to irrupt into the world of the objectifier and turn object into subject--to create identification with, rather than alienation from, the other, by means of modeling (fiction). This is, incidentally, the proper function of myth, that is, the shamanistic function. Criticism works best when it detects the writer indulging in self-expression without tapping the function of turning objects into subjects -- a societal rather than individualistic task. Failure to attend to the shamanistic role is at the root of poor writing in our time.

 Daniel Kimble, a University of Oregon psychologist, reports on habituation in Biological Psychology (1988) as one of the three forms of learning: habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning.

...Karl Dallenbach was fond of pointing out, when introducing the concept of habituation to psychology students, that until he drew it to their attention, they were probably not aware that their shoes were full of feet. When it was mentioned, however, they became aware of the slight pressure of their shoes, which they had ceased to notice. Another common example of habituation is the ticking of the clock or the sound of the air conditioner that we "tune out" of our consciousness but that we can readily hear when our attention is redirected to it....Habituation is learning not to respond to stimuli that are [perceived to be] of little consequence....slight changes in the stimulus can quickly bring about a return of the response to the stimulus--a phenomenon known as dishabituation (349-50).

Closely related to dishabituation is sensitization. This is "an increase in the strength of responses to new stimuli for some time after [the organism] has been exposed to a potentially threatening or noxious stimulus" (350). Sensitization is dishabituation except that it is nonassociative, that is, stimuli bearing no resemblance to the specific threat draw heightened attention from the organism.

A stimulus, or new event, initiates a learned response in animals when they reorganize neuronal synapses to enable the response. The excitatory postsynaptic potentials characteristic of habituation occur when the original environmental change that was a stimulus reappears so often as to appear to be a non-change. The nonresponsiveness of habituation derives from perceived lack of difference over time. The heightened response of dishabituation derives from perceived significant difference over time.

Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, refers to this crucial role of difference in synaptic formation when he offers his famous definition that "mind is whatever responds to difference."

...sense organs can receive only news of difference, and the differences must be coded into events in time (i.e., into changes) in order to be perceptible. Ordinary static differences that remain for more than a few seconds become perceptible only by scanning....Difference is all the mind's input devices can detect, and difference is in a sense all the mind is there to consider and respond to.

I posit the world prior to our perception of it is characterized by change, and therefore difference; lack of difference is nothingness, so that the world is in fact more verb than noun. It is a continually shifting, pulsating matrix of convergent and divergent processes; where processes converge upon a given vector, the sentient organism perceives a "thing." Perception is modeling. The sense organs report on external "thing" and the cerebral cortex builds, according to the needs and capabilities of the species in question, a model, in synaptic patterns, onto which the relevant features of the "thing" are articulated. Biological success or failure are somewhat dependent upon the statistical reliability of such modeling for future action. Such modeling is very resource-intensive, and animals' neurons are equipped with proteins, called calpain and fodrin, that physically limit response to stimuli that so resemble previous stimuli as to be likely to prove insignificant. These chemicals "deliberately" blind us to the constant glare of reality, which would quickly destroy a totally aware organism.

 Complacency, however, breeds danger. Imputing sameness is known as stereotyping, and information that might prove vital to our interests may be unavailable to us due to our tendency to rely on shorthand reality. The danger to individuals is demonstrable; the danger to society even more so. As a species we require constantly updated data on otherness. Our models must be jogged, beyond the threshold set by the neuronal proteins; dishabituated, so that we can compare our models to new data and adjust response accordingly. Ecologists call both habituation and dishabituation adaptation; the one is adaptation into a niche, or advantageous environment, while the other is the capacity to readapt. The more one's species is adapted into a niche, or habituated to it, the greater the risk of extinction should that niche fail. It is in society's interest to keep its individuals flexible; to exercise our response- ability. It does so by creating models that differ enough from our own to cross the neuronal threshold and change our minds. Such modeling is the phenomenon we call rhetoric.

Neuronal models of singular events, once articulated, are in turn articulable onto subsequent singular events, because the differences between model and event are small enough (we hope) to ignore. This mapping is called generalization and the map is called idea. My idea of a table is an abstracted model from table 1, modified by tables 2 through 20,000, until I am habituated to see a table when I see an object I have never seen before, as a door propped on two filing cabinets, and regard it as a table without conscious thought about it.

All models are fictions. This is seldom, and then barely, understood. In the case of language, which is society's analogue of neuronal modeling for the individual, Roman Jakobson explains this:

Why is it necessary to make a special point of the fact that sign does not fall together with object? Because besides the direct awareness of the identity between sign and object (A is A1), there is a necessity for the direct awareness of the inadequacy of that identity (A is not A1). The reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized. Activity comes to a halt, and the awareness of reality dies out ("What is Poetry?" 175).

David Rumelhart, a psychologist interested in the uses of metaphor by small children, observes:

We say that a statement is literally true when we find an existing schema that accounts fully for the data in question. We say that a statement is metaphorically true when we find that although certain primary aspects of the schema hold, others equally primary do not hold. When no schema can be found which allows for a good fit between any important aspects of the schema and the object for which it is said to account, we are simply unable to interpret the input at all ("Some Problems with the Notion of Literal Meanings" 90).

Both authors agree: literal statements cannot escape the fictional qualities we associate with metaphorical statements yet seek to exclude from literal statements. I posit: literal statements are only metaphorical statements for which we seek an unquestioned status that can really only be at best a provisional unquestioned status; we can and do grant this status to many kinds of metaphorical statements, such as cherished myths, legends, dogmas, and stories, for all of which the "suspension of disbelief" is a prerequisite to their enjoyment or social utility. The scientist's truth, like the priest's and the professor's, are but one kind of metaphor among the many that we have.

Any kind of representation within a person of something outside depends on there being sufficient diversity within him to reflect the relationships in what he perceives....if human beings were totally non- comparable in the degree of their internal complexity to what's outside, then there would be no chance of any kind of valid internal representation of what lies outside them....If we're going to talk about relationships instead of about things, then all our talk about what exists, what's prior to what, and so on, just has to be rethought completely....We err through a mismatch between ourselves and the other, and all our falsehoods are falsehoods about ourselves as well....we have incomplete access to the complexity that we are....it eludes us, it's too fine-grained, we're just not organized to be aware of it. One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity that we don't ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry....when we see [an ecosystem] as beautiful, that may be the only way that we can talk about the fact that we've perceived a set {of relationships in it (Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor 287-289).

Local mapping/modeling--the neuronal kind--is accomplished through a kind of metaphor--our image of a painting represents, or "stands for" the painting. Extended, or social, modeling is much the same thing in a different medium. The painting itself is an articulation of the vector(s) of processes ("things" or events) depicted. The words with which I might describe the painting and/or its subject, taken together (for the words themselves cannot do so; they must be combined into the articulation, which we call a sentence), produce a model likewise, in the fictional way described by Jakobsen. The words can be carried from place to place not merely in one head, as is the case with a neuronal construct, but from head to head, by signs which are sounds (voice or Morse code), gestures (sign language or semaphore), objects (ink on paper, iron oxide on floppy disks), streams of electrons (televisions and monitors), or amplitudes of invisible-wavelength radiation (radio). All these modes of travel are used to convey linguistically coded information and linguistic capability is hard-wired into us from conception, in DNA and in the electrochemical battery known as the brain. We are already tracing the correspondence between neuronal imaging and speech:

Once the genes are seen as information first and chemistry second, once their all-important role as symbols is recognized, then the barriers dividing one science from another come down (Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man 91).

We are map-making machines. This we share with all organisms:

...the lowliest organism...a polyp or an amoeba--if it learns at all from its past, if it exclaims in its act, "Hallo! Thingem bob again!" thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker. It is behaving or thinking with a concept...(I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric 31).

But we become habituated to our maps. Suppose it isn't tasty Thingem Bob this time but Thingem John, who eats amoebae?

It is to the community, rather than to the individual per se, that dishabituation is important. One amoeba more or less does not much matter from the point of view of amoebaville. Strategies for amoeba survival need only work in more than a given minimum of cases to be good strategies.

Life is a hypothetical realist...there are many indications that support the reality of the world...but none of them is logically convincing. However, the solution that living creatures have found for the reality problem avoids deductive conclusions and depends on probabilities (Rupert Reidl and Robert Kaspar, Biology of Knowledge: The Evolutionary Basis of Reason 19).
 
 

Society, in order to protect itself, does not grant to individuals a factual knowledge of the universe, which it cannot do, but does offer them a continually updated epistemology by which they may improve their chances of passing on their genes, which are the irreducible unit of the social organism (rather than the individuals--read The Selfish Gene). The improved chances are the object of all rhetoric/art/dishabituation. It is a community endeavor, let romantic/modern/individualist conventions say what they will.

 All literature dishabituates when it first appears; but through familiarity with the conventions of a popularized style, the readership gradually become habituated to it, and it becomes necessary to find a new (or rediscover an old) way to jog the jaded public. This is precisely what the title of our seminar refers to. "Canons old" are the established works of a period, as in the case of the eighteenth century; "canons new" are those by which the period can offer us as fresh a prospect as that of new writing hot from the press, able to teach us something about how to live, simply from its never having been said (to us) in quite that way before.

A case in point is the appearance of Roger Lonsdale's anthology of eighteenth century women poets. Three hundred and twenty-three poems, largely unknown to a previous generation of students, suddenly appear, as it were, in the group mind of academia. Just as women began, in that century, a dishabituation of men that quickly outmoded Steele's definition of a poet as "a very well-bred Man (Spectator #314), their work serves to remind us today that the canonical habituations of the time persist today. The great habituation, or prejudice, of the first half of the century, against which relatively few women successfully struggled into print, was the assumption of their intellectual inferiority. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in her sixth number of The Nonsense of Common-sense, carries on this work of disabusing both men and women of this prejudice of inferiority, by explaining precisely the social cost of chauvinism:

A woman really virtuous, in the utmost extent of this expression, has virtue of a purer kind than any philosopher has ever shown; since she knows, if she has sense, and without it there can be no virtue, that mankind is too much prejudiced against her sex, to give her any degree of that fame which is so sharp a spur to any of their great actions. I have some thoughts of exhibiting a set of pictures of such meritorious ladies, where I shall say nothing of the fire of their eyes, or the pureness of their complexions, but give them such praises as befit a rational sensible being: virtues of choice, and not beauties of accident. I beg they would not so far mistake me, as to think I am undervaluing their charms: a beautiful mind, in a beautiful body, is one of the finest objects shown us by nature. I would not have them place so much value on a quality that can be only useful to one, as to neglect that which may be of benefit to thousands, by precept or by example. There will be no occasion of amusing themselves with trifles, when they consider themselves capable of not only making the most amiable, but the most estimable, figures in life. Begin, then, ladies, by paying those authors with scorn and contempt who, with a sneer of affected admiration, would throw you below the dignity of the human species [emphasis added].

The dishabituating paradigm shift is "Equality for women," not as something to be given to them for themselves alone, but as something which once received will be given back to all a thousandfold. Women, by beginning to treat themselves as subjects and not as objects for men, will pave the way for the liberation of men from their objectifying habituations.

 Oh," someone will now say, "by this dishabituation he means nothing more than consciousness-raising. It is only an old thing under a new name." Well, but that was always true. As Dr. Shankman has said several times this term, it is Aristotle that said, in effect, that the purpose of literature is to give our moral and ethical being a kind of tune-up. One cannot be sure one's consciousness is being raised, though, when society itself is not always certain which way is up and which way is down. "Dishabituation" is an awkward term, and I'm still looking for a better; but it has three virtues: it is not dependent for its obvious liberalism on Marxism, it does not grandly assume moral progress where there might well be regression, and it connects rhetorical criticism firmly to biology, which is a move we will be forced to make sooner or later. Over on the other side of campus they are beginning to discover of precisely which chemicals the pathways of our souls are made; we in the humanities will soon be facing questions in the classroom for which the answers to which we have been habituated will be as inadequate as is the theory of a flat earth to an astronaut. Why then treat literary modernism, post-modernism or new historicism as territories now and forever to be traced on the globe, from which we must choose a place to stand? They are only maps; and the map is not the territory. Old maps should be respected; they are historically significant. But you are the explorers and mapmakers now. There are new paradigms within your grasp, and it is your vocation, your ministry, as S.T. Coleridge would say, to seek, to find, and to return within the gates with an open and bestowing hand.

--Richard Bear
 
 

See also Richard's Commonplace Book, containing the references cited herein, and a number of others that may be of interest.

See the Introduction to the etext edition of Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie for more thoughts along similar lines.

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