No revolution is going to come from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, or even computational algorithm theory. That’s only partly because these are all — by now — seriously entrenched university-based fields (and defended with all the fervor and irascibility of any tempest in a teapot, that is, as viciously as you can get). It’s because none of these fields offers anything very interesting to say about matters that have attracted attention ever since someone listening to Homer began to criticize his new-fangled ideas.

The kind of transformation Bill wants comes ONLY from Very Young People — undergraduates, a few grad students, young kids who have nothing to lose except their minds if they have to listen to another @#$%^& boring lecture on whatever it is. There is, at present, something of a ground swell — or a couple of examples, maybe — of such kids performing “Star Wars” scenes in the New York subways. In full costume, dialogue and all, with Storm Troopers arresting Princess Leia, who is sitting on a subway seat reading a book called “Galactic Revolution for Dummies: The Princess Edition.” It’s just plain funny, and the subway riders are watching and grinning and applauding. In recent years, there have been a few such new openings — one example is the emergence of manga and anime, brought over to the US by kids downloading stuff illegally and emailing it to all their friends for free, just because they all like manga and anime. But no one can predict what sort of inventiveness will seize the day next.

Back in the 1960s, when the structuralists and deconstructionists were all new, they appealed to just these young kids. “Thank Loki,” they said (since they were grad students in literature, they knew who Loki was), “something NEW!” But when the Professor says that human culture is motivated by an evolved system designed to leave genes, you can see — I mean, physically SEE — dark waves of sleepyness emerging from the classroom and narcotizing half the campus. NOT INTERESTING. In brief, you had to go to school to learn THAT? Lemme out of here!

But have faith, Bill. Some bunch of kids somewhere are concocting the New Paradigm, which in 40 years will become the Old Paradigm and be replaced by a Newer Paradigm and that, eventually, by a Newer Paradigm Still.

Timothy Perper (my PhD is from 1969 in case anyone wants to know).

What you see as the politicized and sclerotic state of a very visible segment of the profession . . . is, in part, the result a 40-year old effort at disciplinary self-criticism and re-construction.

What guarantee do we have that a new round of criticism and reconstruction will have a happier outcome? There is, of course, no guarantee. But, it would certainly help if the profession were to take the advice you offer the literary Darwinists, that they should consult “the other sciences of human nature: artificial intelligence on the nature of intelligent systems, cognitive science on visual imagery and theory of mind, linguistics on the use of language to narrate plots and control readers’ attention,” (175) and so on. That advice entails institutional problems.

Superficial knowledge of those matters is readily at hand in a wide range of excellent popular accounts, including yours. But you cannot rebuild the study of literature on the basis of those popular accounts, plus cognitive metaphor theory, some conceptual blending, some Theory of Mind, and a dash of mirror neurons. Those are decent entry points, but, as you know, one needs to become comfortable with at least some of the technical literature and, in particular, one needs to become comfortable with the idea of computation in some significant form . . . . The last could take various forms – a modest proficiency in computer programming, an upper level course or two in linguistics, or mathematical logic, or knowledge representation – but whatever the specific form, it’s not likely to fit readily into the schedule of an early or mid-career scholar. And what literature graduate program is going to encourage their graduate students to take strange courses in other departments that will allow those students to write a dissertation that is likely to be very obscure to the extant literary faculty?

Pinker’s reply to those comments was not encouraging: “I agree with you that there is a lot be explored here. And I also despair over whether this will happen in universities, for exactly the reasons you mention.” The problem is not just with English, or the humanities, it is with the current institutional structure of the academic world.

I see little prospect of it changing. I began my career as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, which had just formed an interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Again, from my letter to Pinker:

And so, in due course, the French landed in Baltimore in the Fall of 1966 at a conference on Les Langages Critiques et les Sciences de l’Homme. The conference was organized by two young comp. lit. professors at Johns Hopkins, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, and was designed to promote consilience among the sciences of man. To be sure, the word “consilience” wasn’t used back then, but that’s what the effort was about. Among others, the conference featured Georges Poulet, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland “death of the author” Barthes, Jacques Lacan the Obscure, and the Archdeacon of Deconstruction, the Dynamo of Academic Disaster, Jacques Derrida. For many of us, it was the most exciting thing going in the humanities.

Now the academic landscape is littered with interdisciplinary centers. But our intellectual life is still dominated by a disciplinary arrangement laid down in the 19th century. Beyond that we have the growth and intensification of academic serfdom in which undergraduate instruction is being consigned to permatemps of one sort or another – post-docs, adjuncts and, of course, graduate students who will, in time, become adjuncts or leave the profession. Distance learning is making it possible for for-profit institutions to take over the vocational training that had been done in colleges and universities.

The old institutional forms are all dying. They do not have enough energy to nurture new structures of intellectual life. Where, then, will new institutions come from, and what form will they be like?

I do not know, but I am confident that they will emerge.

Consider, for example, the case of Nina Paley. As you may know, the Animator’s Club has been even stricter about it’s “No Girls Allowed” policy than the Scholar’s Club has been. And yet, I hate to break it to you, guys, but, um, err, Nina’s a girl. This skilled and gifted woman employed post-modern digital technology in artistic laboring through which she transformed her heartbreak into one of the best films of this, the new millennium: Sita Sings the Blues. Not only did she make it herself – and animation is one of the most labor intensive forms of art there is, with work typically being done by teams and teams of teams – but she released the film under a copyleft license and is making money through donations and merchandising.

Consider this silk bag, hand-embroidered with an image of Sita:

These beautiful silk bags are produced in India by Ubuntu at Work, “a global social networking community that connects women micro entrepreneurs across the developing world with coaches and collaborators around the world who offer them encouragement and support to develop sound business ideas, funding assistance, and networking resources to pursue their entrepreneurial aspirations.” ubuntuatwork.org

Consider the connections, from whatever events Valmiki distilled into the Ramayana, though a couple thousand years of history, to 21st century America, where Nina Paley retold that story as her own and has thereby made it possible for Sita’s biological descendants to make money with their craft skills.

In such a world, anything is . . . well, not anything is possible. Never has been, never will be. But surely such a world will afford ronin scholars the opportunity to create new institutions whose forms are grounded in new intellectual realities.

Michelle A. Kline and Robert Boyd, Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania. Proc. R. Soc. B, 22 August 2010, vol. 277, no. 1693, 2559-2564

Abstract: Much human adaptation depends on the gradual accumulation of culturally transmitted knowledge and technology. Recent models of this process predict that large, well-connected populations will have more diverse and complex tool kits than small, isolated populations. While several examples of the loss of technology in small populations are consistent with this prediction, it found no support in two systematic quantitative tests. Both studies were based on data from continental populations in which contact rates were not available, and therefore these studies do not provide a test of the models. Here, we show that in Oceania, around the time of early European contact, islands with small populations had less complicated marine foraging technology. This finding suggests that explanations of existing cultural variation based on optimality models alone are incomplete because demography plays an important role in generating cumulative cultural adaptation. It also indicates that hominin populations with similar cognitive abilities may leave very different archaeological records, a conclusion that has important implications for our understanding of the origin of anatomically modern humans and their evolved psychology.

He’s right about Martindale. The value of novelty isn’t so deep as it’s cracked up to be. Why, after all, do story-tellers in traditional cultures insist on telling the story the same way each time? – keeping in mind, of course, that their concept of sameness is different from that engendered in a print culture, where “the same” means “identical, word for word.” I’m inclined to think that novelty is an acquired taste and when large segments of the population have acquired that taste, that is itself a phenomenon that needs explaining.

His mention of Decker’s point about beginnings and endings suggestions an observation about Sita Sings the Blues. While most of the film is given over to its intertwined parallel narratives, the opening and closing sequences are a bit different. The Ramayana, after all, is a religious text and, as such, brings with it a whole cosmology. Paley gives us a quick “tour” of that cosmology in the opening, with appearances of the major Hindu deities. At the center of this we have a tableau in which the goddess Lakshmi is massaging the leg of the recumbent Vishnu. Paley reprises the cosmology briefly at the end, but the tableau is different. Now it is Lakshmi who reclines while the god Vishnu massages her leg. Through Sita’s sacrifice, the world has changed.

So first of all, a demurral from Martindale. It’s certainly true that audiences crave novelty, and Tony Gilroy (writer and director of Michael Clayton and Duplicity) speaks really interestingly of an arms race between audience and filmmaker in suspense movies about whom to trust. Duplicity is the latest turn of a narrative screw that started with Marathon Man, says Gilroy (this is in The New Yorker, March 16, 2009, in an article about Gilroy by D.T. Max):

Gilroy believes that the writer and the moviegoing public are engaged in a cognitive arms
race.

“How do you write a reversal that uses the audience’s expectations in a new way? You have
to write to their accumulated knowledge.”

So I think that this bears Martindale out a little bit. On the other hand, everyone still loves Hitchcock. Why? Why George Eliot or Balzac or Austen or Fielding or Milton or Shakespeare or Chaucer or Dante or Virgil or Homer? How can audiences still receive them? Well partly we are also thinking about what their original audience members must have been thinking about the story. We are not only interested in our own surprise. We’re interested in seeing others surprised, or imagining their surprise. We like seeing characters surprised. We like seeing what’s going on in a movie just before our friend does. We love saying, “Oh, I get it,” before the person sitting next to us gets it. We have a kind of vicarious experience of what narrative theory calls the narratee, sometimes embodied in the person next to us at the movie, sometimes in the person we press the suspense novel on, sometimes the original audience as we imagine it. We take pleasure — a very basic kind of narrative pleasure — in thinking about how someone else is misinterpreting the story, misanticipating what’s going to happen. The suitors have no idea what they’re in for. But we do, and we relish their correction. The naive viewer has no idea that Portia has another trick up her sleeve. But we’re waiting for it. And if we’re sometimes tricked, we own the trick subsequently when we say, “You gotta see Sixth Sense. Watch carefully: it doesn’t cheat,” as though it’s to our credit that it doesn’t cheat.

And it is. The movie has taken our perception seriously, our engagement with the story and plot and our insistence that it follow the rules of fair narrative play. So it’s not just the case that we crave novelty. Probably more primordially we crave the vicarious experience of novelty for other people. This is an impulse to story telling: here’s a story that will keep your interest: so say both tellers and their enthusiasts to new audiences. Those audiences can be imaginary as well as real, from the first readers of Dickens to the kids we teach. Gilroy is saying much the same thing: the arms race is between the teller who enjoys the audience’s surprise, and the audience. But word-of-mouth enthusiasm is about all of us enjoying the surprise we’re promoting by promoting the movie.

I also want to mention that Genette certainly talks about indeterminate events in Proust, events that (as it were) appear on the complex plane of the novel but aren’t ordered as the real is. (/Mathematical analogy.) Sometimes this is necessary for the ring structure that Benzon cites Mary Douglas on. Dan Decker’s great screen-writing primer Anatomy of the Screenplay is one of the best books I’ve ever read about Shakespeare, whom he never mentions. Decker is interested in the structure of the American mainstream film, but what he says applies perfectly to Shakepeare — partly, no doubt, because of historical and cultural influence; but partly because of the universal tendency of audiences to compete with all the parties to a story: i.e. (very basically) the author or teller; the characters; the other audience members; the narratee.

I’ll say more about this in a second.

Decker says that in your film you want, as much as possible, every major character to appear in the first ten minutes, in Act 1, and ideally together, and every surviving character to reappear in the last scene, again all together. This rarely happens perfectly, but something very close to this usually happens — in Hamlet and King Lear as in Casablanca and Pirates of the Caribbean. Why do we eat up convergence (to use Decker’s major term)? Because we want all things settled in a way that everyone knows the score at the end.

Competing, knowing the score: I’ve just used these terms from sports and games, and I want to use another one. It’s evident that in narrative we root for characters, usually or most simply the protagonist (the first player). Usually we root for an apparent underdog (who will meet what seem like insuperable obstacles: the hatred of the gods, the skill of the enemy). We do we root? And why for the underdog? What does this have to do with narrative?

Well rooting, especially for the underdog, is a kind of competition too. Ye of little faith, ye think Catherine Moreland won’t marry Henry Tilney. But I have faith — in Austen. I may not be able to see how she’ll pull it off; I’m not in her narrative league. But she’s my guy, and I know that she’ll succeed and this puts me one up on you.

And sometimes I’ll figure out how the narrative will get my hero out of a jam before I’m supposed to. Then I may be one up even on Hitchcock! But of course he’ll tell the story to y’all better than I can. So Hitch and me, we’re the man.

Our pleasure in narrative surprise, like our pleasure in jokes, is two-sided. The fact that we’re surprised is also a promise that others will be surprised in their turn. We listen hard and appreciatively to jokes in order to be able to tell them to others (or recommend them to others, or think about how others will enjoy them). Our own surprise is actually not the experiential goal of narrative or joke or riddle: it’s an earnest or warrant that others will feel the same thing, and so an anticipation of our own vicarious experience of others’ pleasure. Do we think their pleasure is simple and an end in itself? Probably we often do. But the fact or possibility that we’re wrong about that doesn’t mean that our vicarious pleasure is empty.

Why so much interest in vicarious experience? Well, that’s another story, but it does seem uniquely human, irreducible, and essential to human cooperation and sociability. But my bet (which I hope to collect in a few hundred years when Benzon’s research project finally confirms my intuitions) is that the general structures of narrative will all be shown to allow for a kind of tandem novelty, a differential and differentiating attitude towards the story being told where those who keep track better will bask in their own admiration or in the admiration they imagine they’re keeping track of in others who are impressed by their quickness to tell or understand the story.

I rooted for Spain yesterday, and like millions in Madrid, I feel that those who rooted well and passionately and got what they rooted for are entitled to some of the credit. The story teller may be the first rooter, who like all rooters has to imagine a way for her favorites to win — by winning in comedy and by losing well in tragedy. As Enobarbus says:

Yet he that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fall’n lord
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place i’ th’ story.

The following passage is from a New York Times article on the use of robotics as teaching aids and such. RUBI teaches language.

The timing of a robot’s responses is one. The San Diego researchers found that if RUBI reacted to a child’s expression or comment too fast, it threw off the interaction; the same happened if the response was too slow. But if the robot reacted within about a second and a half, child and machine were smoothly in sync.

Physical rhythm is crucial. In recent experiments at a day care center in Japan, researchers have shown that having a robot simply bob or shake at the same rhythm a child is rocking or moving can quickly engage even very fearful children with autism.

“The child begins to notice something in that synchronous behavior and open up,” said Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University, who collaborated on the studies. Once that happens, he said, “you can piggyback social behaviors onto the interaction, like eye contact, joint attention, turn taking, things these kids have trouble with.”

There’s nothing surprising about this. The importance of interactional synchrony has been known since the late 1960s and 1970s when Richard Condon, a Boston psychiatrist, published observations in various journals, including Science. My sense is that Condon’s research has just dropped off the face of the earth, though I do hear rumbles here and there.

I discuss Condon’s work in Beethoven’s Anvil, and reference it in this essay-review of Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals (see the section on synchrony and intentionality.)

There is a larger question: How much excellent research from the past has been forgotten by current researchers, who end up rediscovering the wheel? How often, for example, does the Theory of Mind research discuss Piaget’s work on egocentricity? There are connections there, and some researchers are aware of them, but my sense is there is too much ignorance of past research.

I tend to be interested in the former, but the subject, of course, encompasses the latter, and much more, as well. Over the long term the variety of cultural materials and expressions increases. Practices accumulate over time, societies grow, become more populous, and incorporate other cultural groups through conquest or immigration. And so we arrive at a world where marketing proceeds by creating artificial mini-cultures goods and services. Thus, for example, the Marlboro Man evoked the mythical ethos of the old West to sell cigarettes, Apple Computer trotted out Orwell’s 1984 to do battle against IBM (and is now doing a good Big Brother act of its own).

@Mark Changizi: Would you say a little more about dynamics approaches to the brain? I ask because I’ve been influenced by the work of Berkeley’s Walter Freeman, who’s been pursuing brain dynamics for decades using a three-pronged research program including: 1) observation of brain activity with EEG, 2) mathematical analysis of observations, and 3) computer simulation derived jointly from mathematical analysis and micro-scale neuro-physiology. As I understand it, his idea is the self-organizing sheets of neuropile develop their own dynamics. Under perceptual “pressure” from the external world, those dynamics “capture” a pattern in the perceptual input and reorganize so as to incorporate that pattern into their own dynamics. Thus actual brain dynamics reflects the interaction between the brain and the world.

Now, most of Freeman’s work has been on the olfactory system. And there’s more to the brain than the sense of smell, though that is critical. You have all the other senses, each embodied in multiple regions of the brain, and then the motor systems, and so forth. And the whole contraption reflecting millions of years of neural development under pressure from the external world (cf. Benzon and Hays 1988). So you’ve got a lot of structure there, but it took a loooonnngg time to emerge.

Finally an observation that connects Martindale’s work to Sita Sings the Blues. Martindale examines expressive culture in terms of stylistic elaboration and the incorporation of primordial content. I’m pretty sure the Agni Pariksha sequence would score high in primordial content with, e.g. the apparently naked form of a woman dancing with abandon, and with imagery the tends to blend everything together. Further, in an interview I conducted last week, Paley told me that “It is by far the rawest and most emotional piece in the film, and possibly that I’ve ever done.” It contrasts with the rest of the film, which is told in four different styles, each developed with sophistication. The fact that there ARE four other styles, of course, indicates a high degree of technical control. Thus Paley’s film would seem to incorporate the disparate artistic tendencies that Martindale has discovered replacing one another in cycles of aesthetic change.

And that’s where I find the “memetically active” usage to be helpful. It came to me when I was explicating Rhythm Changes as a complex memetic entity (CE4 and especially CE5). As I explain in those posts, Rhythm Changes is a complex entity that would be recognized instantly by any reasonably skilled jazz musician (or fan). At a standard tempo it unfolds over about a half minute and may be repeated 10, 20, or more times in a single performance, never sounding the same way twice (except, perhaps, for the first and last time through). Take one of those 30-second segments, any one. For all practical purposes it has an unbounded number of perceptual properties (including some that we can’t hear because the sound waves are too high, or even too low). A good many of those properties are irrelevant with respect to rhythm changes. Volume, for example, doesn’t matter; and volume is likely to fluctuate from moment to moment. Nor does the timbre of the individual instruments matter. And many details of rhythm and melodic contour are irrelevant. What matters are pitches, relationships among simultaneous pitches, and some aspects of changes among pitches and pitch relationships. Those are the properties that are memetically active in Rhythm Changes.

This usage also allows me to talk about the whole pattern without having to specify in any detail the elements that make up the pattern. For Rhythm Changes is not a primitive memetic entity. It’s got components that are memetically active independently of their role in Rhythm Changes.

Note also that, if you aren’t familiar with the jazz idiom, you may not hear Rhythm Changes as a coherent musical entity. That perceptual properties that constitute Rhythm Changes will not be memetically active for you. You may well pick up some of those properties, but the whole will prove elusive.

I note finally that the concept of the gene has gotten rather slippery; it’s changed a great deal since Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene. A couple of years ago Evelyn Fox Keller and David Harel offered some new concepts to replace the old and battered concept of the gene. I offer a few remarks on their paper, Beyond the Gene, (PLoS ONE, 2007) in CE5.