- Good afternoon everybody, and welcome to
today this afternoon's Franke Visiting
Fellow lecture for the Spring semester.
I'm Gary Tomlinson, I'm the director
of the Whitney Humanities Center.
And it's my pleasure to
welcome you all here.
The Franke Visiting
Fellowship is named after
Barbara and Richard Franke, who often
are sitting in the
audience for these talks.
But right now, Barbara
and Richard are enjoying
a warmer climate somewhere
very far from here.
One of our two Franke Visiting Fellows
for this year is Steven Meyer.
And it's my pleasure
to introduce him today.
I'm hearing the voices
from the Heavens somehow.
(mimics operatic singing)
It's my pleasure to introduce
professor Meyer today.
Professor Meyer teaches English
and American literature.
Sorry, English and American
literature, and Modern
Intellectual History at Washington
University in St. Louis.
His specialties traverse a wide range
including 20th and 21st century poetry,
and also the relations of
literature and science.
In the first of these areas,
20th and 21st century poetry,
he's currently writing
a study of the work,
likewise wide ranging, of
African American poet Jay Wright.
And I believe you're working
with Beinecke manuscripts.
Are there manuscripts
here in the Beinecke.
Yeah yeah, excellent,
in the Beinecke Library.
But it's from the second
area, the relationships
of literature and science,
broadly conceived,
that his talk today is drawn.
He began developing this area years ago
in a book on a Gertrude
Stein that analyzed
the impact on her innovative
literary practices
of her turn of the century training in
physiological psychology at Radcliffe,
and neuroanatomy at Johns Hopkins.
And this work drew, this work on Stein,
drew Professor Meyer to the thinking
of American psychologist and
philosopher William James,
and Anglo American mathematician
and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead.
A second book that Professor
Meyer is working on now,
alongside the study of Wright's poetry,
is entitled, "Robust
Empiricisms, Jamesian Modernism
"Between the Disciplines,
1878 to the Present."
It examines expanded empiricist practices
that have built on James's and
Whitehead's joint approach.
And it takes in such perspectives as those
of Belgian philosopher of
science, Isabelle Stengers,
French sociologist of
science, Bruno Latour,
and British literary critic
and poet, William Empson.
These interests all have also resulted
in an edited collection of 2018,
"The Cambridge Companion
to Literature and Science,"
in which Professor Meyer gathers the work
of like minded scholars working at
the borders of science and the humanities.
In all this work, Professor
Meyer sets himself to step
beyond the old two cultures
dichotomy of C.P. Snow.
Not to deny the real differences
of Snow's distinct sweeping
approaches to the world,
science and humanities,
but to reanalyze the
terms of the dichotomy,
to reenergize the synergies
between those terms,
and to understand a history
of interaction between them
that reaches back long before Snow
and his cold war, atomic age, concerns.
All of this is of huge interest in itself,
but it's particularly interesting
at the Whitney Humanities Center,
where one of our signature programs is
the Franke Program in
Science and the Humanities.
Please join me in welcoming Steven Meyer.
- So I want to start by
expressing my gratitude to Gary
for creating such a
constructive, and welcoming
environment at the Whitney,
and more particularly
for inviting me to spend this year here.
Before I say anything
more, Maria Rosa Menocal
was a very close friend of mine.
And so it's kind of
awesome to be having her
listening to me right now.
This is the only place she could be
listening to me, but she might be.
So I'm especially grateful
for the opportunity to deliver
today's lecture, which builds on,
"The Cambridge Companion
to Literature and Science,"
which Gary mentioned,
and which I will wave
in front of you just so you see it.
It contains some fantastic essays.
And a difference between
it and what I will be
presenting today, is they're all finished.
It took me a long time
to get them all finished.
But I am satisfied that
they possessed that quality.
And what you're gonna hear
today is not finished.
So it possesses a different quality.
It possesses its own quality,
but it's a different one.
Today's lecture builds on the companion
toward a large project that I have not
directly been working on at all this year,
which Gary mentioned a few details about,
but which is always on my mind.
No doubt, even when I'm sleeping,
though I'm not always aware
of it when I'm sleeping.
But I'm very aware of it when I'm awake.
A study of the joint
investigations of the late
19th and early 20th century philosophers,
William James and Alfred North Whitehead,
who together with researchers
across the disciplines,
including literary critic, William Empson,
the evolutionary developmental
biologist, C.H. Waddington,
the mid century American
philosopher Susanne Kate Langer,
as well as central figures in
contemporary science studies,
such as Bruno Latour, Donna
Haraway, and Isabel Stengers
form an important lineage that
I call Jamesian Modernism.
The talk will focus on three
practitioners of expanded
empiricism, and Gary
mentioned a comparable phrase.
Chiefly the authors of a pair of books
that came out in 2016, literary critics
Branka Arsic and Angus Fletcher
linked in the presentation,
if nowhere else, by
recent work of Latour's.
Only Latour is strictly
speaking a Jamesian Modernist.
Yet, by a fairly unproblematic
stretch of the imagination,
Fletcher fits the rubric and
there's considerable overlap
with Arsic's findings, if not
so much with her approach.
And I want to say again, this is,
because it's a work in
progress, very much so,
I appreciate criticisms,
I appreciate any thoughts
you may have even more than usual.
The title, "The two Silos,"
points to a still broader topic
indicated by a couple of
highly suggestive propositions
that may serve as epigraphs from Emerson.
To put science and the soul,
long estranged from each
other, at one again.
And from Fletcher, our hard task
is to respect the song of the Earth.
Now, I should mention there's
a hand out at the door.
So if you don't have it,
you can sort of gently
go find your way to get a copy.
And I'll indicate when it's relevant.
As you'll see, this is
one of those instances
where the handout is probably
better than a PowerPoint.
Frequently, organizational
and intellectual divisions
in the academy are spoken
of in terms of silos, jargon
apparently imported from
programs in management studies.
Several years ago the Cambridge trained
social anthropologist, and
Financial Times correspondent,
that's a columnist now,
Gillian Tett, published,
"The Silo Effect," on quote,
"The peril of expertise,
"and the promise of breaking
down barriers," close quote.
Easier said than done, if experience
in the academy is any measure.
Given that the broad embrace
of interdisciplinarity
in both the humanities and the sciences,
somewhat counter intuitively
might well have made
the situation worse, even
more experts covering
ever more specialized
domains of expertise.
It is still possible,
however, to be a generalist.
Just last month I happened on a piece in,
"The New York Review of
Books," by Peter Brooks.
You can see him right there.
The founding director, as it happens,
of the Whitney Humanities Center.
He directed the center
between 1981 and 1991,
and again between 1996 and 2001.
The NYRB review was of a volume entitled,
"The Storyteller Essays," which collected
Walter Benjamin's famous
essay, "The Storyteller,"
together with related
material by Benjamin,
and excerpts from text
that in Brooks' phrasing
had talismanic value for him by writers
inseparably stitched
into Benjamin's thinking.
In addition to Nikolai Leskov,
the Russian novelist
and short story writer
ostensibly under discussion in the essay,
these included Georg Lukacs, Paul Valery,
Ernst Bloch, Johann Peter
Hebel, Herodotus, Montaigne.
In somewhat leisurely
fashion, Brooks presents
Benjamin's argument in
the essay regarding,
as he sees it, the death of storytelling,
that might be surprising to
you, the death of storytelling,
and the concomitant art of listening
which followed the shock of the great war.
Alongside the fairly
traditional claim that quote,
"Death is the sanction of
narrative," close quote.
In other words quote, "It is
only with the end of a life
"that its meaning becomes apparent."
Benjamin's preference for
the oral tale over the novel
is duly registered, as is
the increasingly apparent
threat to both tale and novel.
Information is Brooks' term for this.
The editor of the volume speaks of data.
We all know those terms all too well.
In passing, Brooks refers to quote,
"Benjamin's sleight of
hand transitions, surely
"the great gift that Benjamin
passes on to his readers."
Guided by the title of my talk,
you may have detected some
irony in the proposition
that it is still possible
to be a generalist.
Such was the implicit assumption
of the New York Review,
however, when I worked
there back in the mid 1980s.
And I certainly would not
have questioned it then,
barely noticing that
the operative criterion
for the generally excellent
reviews of popular science,
and of working in the humanities,
that they be presented
in a manner accessible
to the university trained
common reader pretty much guaranteed
minimal interaction between the two silos.
They were both on the same page sometimes,
but there was no conversation,
other than what you might
register reading them together.
More obvious was how the
distaste of the editors
of the New York Review for
theory, kept many compelling
developments in the academy
off the pages of the journal.
With the recovery of
Benjamin a notable exception.
Yet in one respect, he was
no more true generalist
than Brooks, for how much
engagement with the science
of the day are you likely
to find in their writings?
That there has, in fact,
been tremendous overlap
between the sciences and the
humanities in years past,
and that this continues to be the case,
is perhaps the great
discovery of science studies
in the adjacent field of literature
and science over the past half century.
Although, like the
discovery of the Americas
back in the day, this
statement is at best half true,
since the greatness of
the discovery only holds
for the discoverer,
not for the discovered,
who have been there all
along, or almost all along.
C.P. Snow was dead wrong when he posited
two separate cultures,
literary and scientific.
Science studies, and literature in science
even more pointedly,
demonstrate that everyday.
Yet there was, and remains,
a long tradition denying the overlap.
The battles of the books
between ancients and moderns,
natural philosophers and humanists,
preachers and scientists,
so nicely described
by Stephen Jay Gould in his last work,
"The Hedgehog, the Fox,
and the Magister's Pox."
Now the three works
I'll be discussing today
are all examples of literature in science.
Yet aside from that,
they are quite different.
The first, Arsic's, "Bird Relics:
"Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau,"
remains squarely in the humanities silo.
The second, an essay
co authored by Latour,
and the Earth system
scientist, Tim Lenten,
doesn't mention literature at all.
Although it was published
last year in Critical Inquiry,
one of the leading venues for
the theoretical humanities
in the US, it identifies itself as quote,
"A journal of art, culture, and politics."
There's no science in that mix,
unless you want to mash
it in under culture,
which is not the whole
story, and certainly not
in the essay I'm gonna be discussing.
The third work, "The
Topological Imagination:
"Spheres, Edges, and
Islands," which the title
doesn't seem to suggest a
strong literary purchase,
contains in fact intricate
readings of works of literature,
although these are
probably fewer in number
than we might expect from its author,
who devotes a great deal of
space to the science of topology
in forming his speculations
about human existence on Earth.
Generically different as they
are, I'll be proposing that
the works by Latour, and Fletcher,
the author of the third
work, Angus Fletcher,
cease to be located in one or
the other of the two silos,
scientific, and literary or humanistic,
and instead operate in the
pluralistic reaches between them.
In a pair of lectures
delivered in 2005 in Amsterdam,
and reprinted in the volume,
"The Lure of Whitehead,"
in 2015, Latour introduced a related
figure for his preferred approach.
Instead of building a
bridge between two shores,
a common enough figure
for interdisciplinarity,
and also instead of
inhabiting the space between
or around two silos, he chose to describe
his mode of investigation as that,
and some of you will
be delighted with this,
others will be somewhat
confused, as a kayaker,
subject to the vagaries of the
river between the two banks.
With this figure, he reversed the order
of the various forms of investigation.
Instead of escaping from
already built silos,
or building a bridge
between preexisting banks,
he was exploring activities of the waters
that had molded the banks themselves.
Before proceeding I should note that
there seem to be four general
classes of investigation
within literature and science.
Although the field has developed in
the aggregate from the
first to the fourth,
there's actually no
set chronological order
where individual instances are concerned.
Arsic is therefore a good
example of the first,
demonstrating the influence
of science on the humanities.
That is probably how
most people unfamiliar
with the field think
of it in its entirety.
Yet already by the late 1970s,
work by Latour and Donna
Haraway, for instance,
had reversed the arrow,
and features associated
with a broad understanding
of literature were being used
as interpretive tools for
understanding science.
In Latour's case this
involved the role of writing
in experimental practices
in, "Laboratory Life,"
co authored with Steve Woolgar.
And in Haraway's that of metaphor in,
"Crystals, Fabrics,
and Fields," subtitled,
"Metaphors of Organicism in
"20th Century Developmental Biology."
Beyond these two unidirectional varieties
of influence study, okay,
the first and the second,
one finds work that attends
to the mutual implications
of the sciences and the humanities.
No doubt in works like,
"The Order of Things,"
Foucault gave a huge boost
to such investigations.
In literature and science
proper this resulted in studies
that took as their compass
the idea of a single culture,
which included both of
Snow's two cultures.
Important works on Darwin by Gillian Beer
and George Levine are
paradigmatic of this second wave.
But logically, a monoculture is not
the only alternative one might take.
Instead there may be many
ways of linking the sciences
and humanities, none of
which dominates the others.
This form of multiculturalism
has a particular appeal
for someone like me who has chosen to work
within the framework
of Jamesian Pluralism.
I remind you of the title
of one of his books,
"A Pluralistic Universe."
Although that framework
is hardly necessary
for literature and science to operate
essentially as an inter field,
with multiplicity
proliferating as it does today.
In any case, read the book,
you'll get a good sense of that.
In any case, both Latour's
and Fletcher's works
fit fairly comfortably
within that framework.
And there is room for non
pluralistic investigations,
as well, as part of the broader pluralism.
So on to, "Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau."
This is a remarkable book, and received
the MLA, James Russell Lowell Prize
for the outstanding book of 2016.
So as I'm using, the framework, again,
I want to remind you is that this book
and the Angus Fletcher book
came out the same year.
Not only did they come out the same year,
they came out from the same publisher.
Not only did they come out
from the same publisher,
they had the same editor.
They're remarkably different books.
So I think that mostly
goes to say that the editor
was in fact somebody who had a very
Catholic broad set of
possibilities in his head.
I'm using it, that is to
say, I'm using Arsic's book
as my example of a work,
that despite appearances,
does not actually challenge
the two silos rubric.
But because I'm gonna be doing
that, I want you to be sure
that you appreciate
some of its many merits.
I mentioned Peter Brooks' review of,
"The Storyteller Essays,"
for several reasons.
And one of them is that if,
as Lindsey Waters suggested recently.
He's, in fact, the editor
of both of the books.
Benjamin functions these
days as something like
a patron saint in the
theoretical humanities.
This is surely due in part to
the romance with the archive
at the core of so many exciting
literary historical efforts.
And figured, for so many of
us, by the, "Arcades Project."
Several months ago I picked
up a copy of, "21 | 19,"
in a local bookstore, Barnes and Nobles.
Actually I have a question for you,
because I realized I didn't
know how to say, "21 | 19."
I think it's 21 bar 19,
because there's a line between 21 and 19,
which is technically a pipe.
In computational analysis
it's called a pipe,
or sometimes it's called a vertical bar.
But the last thing you want
to say is 21 vertical bar 19.
So I think 21 bar 19 might
have gotten this visual image across.
I'm curious, does anybody
have an alternative to that?
'Cause I realized I didn't
know how to say it aloud.
Anyway, okay, good, so I'm as far.
I'm with the curve,
not ahead of the curve.
So I picked up a copy of
this book, it is subtitled,
"Contemporary Poets in the
Nineteenth Century Archive,"
edited by the Thoreau scholars
Kristen Case and Alexandra Manglis,
and it covers similar ground to Arsic.
This is just to give you a sense of just
how much this is of the moment.
Only, there is so much more
of it in, "Bird Relics."
So let me briefly describe the experience
of reading Arsic's book,
and some of the arguments.
Early in, "Bird Relics,"
she describes her method,
which she calls affirmative reading.
Essentially she wants to go with Thoreau
as far as he will take her, and to do this
she eschews critique and judgment.
And more importantly, as she explains,
she finds his quote, "strange
ideas deeply suggestive.
"But that doesn't mean
that I have to believe
"in what he said," close quote.
Okay, that's the affirmative reading here.
Effectively she reads him
by willingly suspending her disbeliefs,
as a tool to take her places.
In other words, if you don't willingly
suspend your disbelief
this is what Coleridge
was talking about when
he coined the phrase.
You just say that's crazy,
and you stop reading,
and you stop thinking.
We live in a culture where that is,
of course, the dominant mode.
And this is, as far as I can tell,
the only way to get around it.
But you have to, in fact,
then live in a world
in which poetry is part of that world.
Because for Coleridge at least,
this is how he characterized
what he called poetic faith,
which was willingly suspending disbelief,
which is very different
from suspending belief.
It's just about your skepticism,
and not letting it get in your way.
So Coleridge proposed
this, when you encounter
very strange material in
poetry, such as zombies.
Of course, many of us encounter
them outside of poems.
Now he calls this, again, poetic faith.
Thoreau is strange enough anyway,
but Arsic makes him even stranger.
And strangeness is one of her key terms.
She uses the phrase over,
and over, and over again.
And of course, there's a long
tradition with that term.
"Strange things happen
in Thoreau," she begins.
That's the first line of the book.
She makes him even stranger
because she has quote,
"Tried to treat all of
Thoreau's utterances
"as if they were meant literally."
This is a work against figuration.
Anytime there's a mean
it looks like a figure,
let's take it literally.
Now I take it that in this
regard, as in a good many others,
Arsic is engaging quite directly with
the philosopher, Stanley
Cavell, who in fact
when you leave today,
you walk down the hall,
on your right you'll find see a poster
for a conference on Benjamin
that was in this building,
and he was one of the speakers.
It's a very small world.
A great reader of Thoreau,
an author, before that,
of the classic text,
"Must We Mean What We Say?"
And so I take it that Arsic
is engaging that question,
and saying with Thoreau,
he means what he's saying.
And he means it literally.
Quite amazingly, reading
Thoreau in this manner
results in an extremely
consistent account.
I say that's quite, it's
not what I would expect.
If I stopped reading
things that are written
in an apparently figurative fashion,
and read them all literally, I would think
I would be all over the place.
Not so, in her hands.
This is strange, except
for another feature
of Arsic's practice, for in
addition to reading Thoreau
in any number of archives,
where his voluminous manuscripts
are stored, many of which
have not yet been published.
Or she's has a tropism towards the ones
that you can only read in the archive.
She also reads him by
reading what he read,
fairly traditional practice.
Hers is a source study
of a very high order.
Greek dramatists, pre
Socratic philosophers,
accounts of Native Americans, and,
this is why I'm speaking
about her book today,
more than 100 amazing pages devoted
to the very strange scientific texts
to which Thoreau was exposed at Harvard,
and which he continued
to devour into the 1850s.
In these works she finds
incontrovertible evidence
of his broad exposure to
what she alternately calls
vitalistic materialism,
and materialist vitalism,
a strain of vitalism that
in turn focuses his grief
at the death of his
brother John in 1842, which
in her accounting is the
definitive event in his life.
One might call this the
undertone of the book,
except that it rings on every page.
The juxtaposition of
Thoreau's brother's death,
and the materialistic vitalism produces,
in Arsic's single minded
but undeniable reading
a remarkable theory of grief,
combining what she terms eternal mourning
with a reframing of the traditionally
fairly sharp divide
between life and death.
So the two brothers continue to share
the same material vitality, even as
this continuity between
life and death is extended
to any number of levels of experience.
It isn't just these two
guys, it's at all levels
of experience in the materiality
for Thoreau, on her account.
So one of the most exhilarating things
about Arsic's study is
her capacity to find
similar claims in the most various places,
until she goes too far,
at least for my taste,
when she aligns Thoreau
with none other than Walter Benjamin,
even as she extends the
figure of the archive,
tweaked some to multiple
levels of Thoreau's world.
It's certainly not the
monomania that I object to.
Obsessive is another positive term
that she relies on throughout the text.
But with Benjamin, Arsic in
affect breaks the fourth wall,
as she manifestly does not do
with Thoreau's own reading,
which is limb to his actual
reading, contemporaneous.
And in particular with the role
of science in her argument.
The Darwin she refers to
is a very thin Darwin.
20th century evolutionary theory
is strictly neo Darwinian.
Many people might think that's what it is.
There's a whole school
literary science studies
that has been critiqued
by a faculty member
very effectively at Yale,
which has a very thin notion
of Darwin that they apply to everything.
But they are also working with
a Darwin that's long out of date.
She has no sense, and no
interest, in the extraordinary
developments of the past
150 years in the sciences.
Of course, she is not writing
about post civil war anything.
Except that she is.
At one point in the book, she lists
a number of vitalists,
philosophical vitalists,
whom she sees coming out
of the Thoreauvien lineage.
Among these figures she includes Berkson,
possible, I mean not directly.
But nevertheless, maybe
there's a overlap there.
She lists Gilles Deleuze,
the late 20th century
French philosopher, who
is undeniably a vitalist.
And she lists William James,
the American psychologist
and philosopher whom Gary mentioned.
So there's a problem here,
James is no vitalist.
Even if Berkson is, and Deleuze is.
Now, Arsic expressly identifies Thoreau's
intense empiricism, which
is a phrase she adapts
from somebody else, and it's spot on,
with James's radical empiricism.
And she has a fascinating
argument for how to do that
without, I don't have
time to give it to you.
And simply, it works, but
it's actually not James.
Therefore it interprets James so that
he conforms with her
vitalism, hers or Thoreau's.
And remember it was supposed
to be Thoreau's only.
But at this point, she's
become a spokesperson for this,
in a way that she had suggested
early on she was not prepared to be.
Moreover, there is no trace of Thoreau's
brand of vitalism in 20th
century developmental biology.
There was precursor work
among his contemporaries.
None at least, now this,
if you know anything about
development biology you may
say hey, that's not true.
There was lots of vitalism.
But, none at least after
the new organicists offered,
often a Whiteheadean
inflected account in place
of the mechanistic or vitalistic accounts
that battled in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries.
This of course, would
be irrelevant had Arsic
stuck to her strictly
historical timeframe,
as she adamantly does with
science, but not with philosophy.
The discipline where following Cavell,
she locates Thoreau most firmly.
So what was happening in the
early to mid 20th century
that put vitalism,
admittedly more traditional
vitalism than Thoreau's, to one side?
For that tale, one only
has to look at the book
by Donna Haraway I mentioned earlier,
her Yale dissertation in fact,
on the emergence in
Anglo American embryology
of what Haraway, drawing on Whitehead,
calls non vitalist organicism.
Now again, I don't have time to go into
the details of this, but
the following contrast
should give you a sense of
what I take it has happened.
In reference to a work
from the mid 19th century,
incredibly interesting work by Robert Hunt
called, "The Poetry of
Science," where he's trying,
in fact, to bridge the
arts and the sciences.
It was a key work for Thoreau.
So in reference to that
work, Arsic writes,
"Science around 1840 was of the opinion
"that the division of phenomena
into organic and inorganic."
We sort of vaguely know, we have
a reasonable sense of what that might be.
"Didn't coincide with the distinction
"between animate and inanimate,
"because everything is animated."
That was the science
that Thoreau was reading.
So the difference between
organized and unorganized
was not animation, but complexity.
Organized and unorganized
are all animate, regardless.
So to get a sense of
how things had changed
by the 1930s in embryology,
all you have to do is flip it.
And so Whitehead developed
a concept which was then
picked up variously by the embryologists,
which he called organic mechanism,
which was designed to sort
of split the difference
between the organic and the mechanistic.
But it was not, again, vitalist.
So what does that mean, not vitalist.
It means that everything
of sufficient complexity
is organic, whether it's
animated or inanimate.
So it's exactly the
opposite of the perspective
that Thoreau would have had
in the mid 19th century.
So again, all I'm
suggesting here is actually
there's a really interesting
conversation to be had
between the Thoreau of 1840, 1850
and the developments in embryology,
which actually occurred in the 1930s,
but have only recently really taken off,
because embryology was largely,
embryology in developmental
biology was largely ignored
within the modern synthesis
of molecular biology.
And so this is a very interesting tale.
And that's why, in fact
her work is fascinating.
I have no doubt that Arsic
is spot on in describing
the extremely strange world
in which Thoreau lived.
In fact, I am quite
prepared to accept that
that strange world is also
the world we actually live in.
There's a wonderful story
that Bertrand Russell
used to tell, or told in one place,
about being completely shocked
by his close colleague,
Whitehead, when Whitehead
said the difference
between you and me Bertie
is that you think the world
really is the way it is at
high noon, with sharp edges.
Where I think the world really
is, is the way it seems to us
when we were waking from deep sleep,
and we then construct a sharp edged world.
And so that's a comparable
vision of reality to
Thoreau's vision of reality
as conveyed by Arsic in her book.
But it is,
my objection to Arsic's argument
is then that she comes across as arguing
for Thoreau's vitalism, rather than,
as she tells us she will,
suspending her disbelief.
And so what I would want to ask her to do
is to suspend her disbelief
about his vitalism,
but not necessarily regarding so many
of his remarkable observations.
For there are alternate accounts of these,
which don't diminish them in various ways.
And so if she took science more seriously,
not just the rose reading in science,
amazing as it is, she
might take her commitment
to what she calls literalization.
She might limit her commitment in order
to allow metaphor a
greater play than she does.
I think there's a connection there.
Okay, now.
I'm actually, I don't think
there is time right now.
So I'm gonna leave aside.
I gave you two handouts.
The first one, the cover of the handout is
from a 1909 French illustrated journal,
with an article about the
true shape of the globe.
And so this is just an
example of not exactly
a traditionally spherical
image of the globe.
And it is, I found it with
when Angus Fletcher's
first lecture that he gave
in this new project at the time of his,
which ended up in the book,
that I'll talk about briefly.
This was, it was a lecture at the,
The Melon, that's not
a museum, what is it?
The Melon Center in LA,
where he was a fellow.
And they had this picture
in their collection,
so they just used it.
The second a handout
that I've given you is
a very rare, copy of a very rare pamphlet
that was published in 1947, which by
a friend and supporter
of Gertrude Stein's.
After her death, her
partner Alice Toklas sent,
Robert House was his
name, sent him some pages
from a work of hers, where
he was in fact talking about,
where she was talking about him.
And so in this description
that I gave you,
he recalls a passage in a work of hers,
called, "The Autobiography
of Alice B Toklas,"
where she is describing an encounter
between herself and Ezra Pound, the poet,
who had moved to Paris and was,
had been a frequent guest
of hers at her apartment.
And then on one occasion,
she didn't like him.
She made this famous remark
about him that he was
excellent, really a village explainer,
which is fine if you're a
village, but not if you're not.
So she thought of him is
just basically second rate.
But he happened to sit
on a chair that she had,
a couple of chairs which are at Beinecke.
The chairs are Beinecke.
So material culture, and
two children's chairs,
18th century French children's
chairs, and he sat on one.
He wasn't very big, but he was
too big, and broke the chair.
And subsequently the chairs were repaired,
and Alice Toklas stitched some patterns
that Picasso had
sketched for her.
And so that's what you
would see at Beinecke.
But before that,
Pound destroyed one of the chairs,
and he was exiled from their flats.
And so Stein, in this book,
recalls meeting up with him.
Stein is writing this in the
third person about herself.
So he met Gertrude Stein one
day near the Luxembourg Gardens
and said but I do want to come to see you.
He's not happy about his exile.
I am so sorry, answered Gertrude
Stein, this you don't have.
But Miss Toklas has a bad tooth.
And beside we are busy
picking wildflowers.
All of which was literally true,
like all of Gertrude Stein's literature.
But it upset Ezra, and
we never saw him again.
How is it literally true?
They're picking wildflowers in Paris?
She's just dismissing him
with something that is an excuse, right?
Literally, Toklas may
well have a toothache.
But the non sequitur is this
other thing is not literal.
So I'm just giving that
to you as an example
of the complexity of the
literal as a mode of analysis.
There's a much longer story,
but we don't have time for that.
So I'm gonna wrap up, and just say,
the essay that I was gonna
present about Latour's.
Now was anybody here at the 2014
Tanner lecture that he participated in?
Just a couple of you, several.
And so, that's the last
time he's been at Yale.
He spoke about how to better
register the agency of things.
And this, in fact, has continued
to be a concern of his.
But it's taken a direction
that I suspect those of you
who were there at that session
might not have imagined.
He had already delivered
the Gifford lectures
in Edinburgh the year before,
which were then published
in English in 2017, as facing Gaia.
And he's become a kind of climate science,
I don't know what the word is.
I would say fanatic except that
that's the right thing to be.
We all should be such fanatics.
This book, however, is
not his strongest work.
Because what he was doing
there was training himself
while he was speaking to the public.
It's very interesting, but
you've got want to read it.
It's not gonna make you read it.
However, in 2018, published
in France in 2017,
a little book called,
translated in English is,
"Down to Earth," was
published by him, fantastic.
Just, it's a superb study of
where we find ourselves right now.
And so I highly recommend it.
Now the essay, that I cannot tell you
strongly enough how fantastic it is,
that was published, as I
say, in, "Critical Inquiry,"
last year, last Spring,
which is called, "Extending
the Domain of Freedom,
"or Why Gaia is so Hard to Understand."
And it's co authored.
They say it has nothing
to do with literature.
But the reason why I
would want to include it
under the rubric of
literature and science,
is because it's by somebody for whom his
literary engagements are
always in the back of his mind,
and they're informing his
engagements with the sciences.
So when one is in this form,
having to sort of dig fairly deep.
But just to give you a little
sense of what's involved here,
because I really want to promote it.
So part of the problem with understanding
the concept of Gaia is
that it was developed
by two scientists, James
Lovelock and Lynn Margulis,
who were working at
opposite ends of the scale.
So the notion of Gaia is
important for Margulis
because she was working
with microorganisms.
Whereas Lovelock is working
with the entire Earth.
And so they're just, so
it's just how difficult
it is to do genuinely
interdisciplinary work
when you're that far apart in your focus.
So it's not that they're
not talking about much
the same thing, it's just that
it's hard for us to grasp it.
It's that kind of training,
it's that kind of training also.
And again, because I want to stop
and hear something from you.
It's that kind of training
also, which in fact,
Angus Fletcher is determined to
develop in himself, and
hopefully in his readers.
So where he differs,
it would seem, quite
emphatically from Latour,
is Latour wants you to
know this about Gaia,
among other things, it is not a sphere.
In fact Gaia is not the planet.
On Latour's interpretation,
Gaia is something called
the critical zone.
And what Latour was doing,
shortly after he was here
in 2014, later in that year
I was actually at a lecture,
a seminar he was giving, and
he said to us, "I got it."
His glee was impossible
for him to restrain.
He had just been given
a grant by the European
Cultural Association to
run a consortium of 23
teams of scientists in
Paris, looking at various
problems around climate change,
one of which was, in
fact, the critical zone.
What is the critical zone?
So let me just, and I'm
gonna close on this.
But it is, to give you just a quick sense,
for Latour with his background,
with his training that he's
managed to pick up quickly,
he is describing something
that he cannot actually,
he hasn't been sufficiently
sensitized to it,
in as much as he cannot see it
as having anything to do with spheres.
It is a critical zone, and not spherical.
Whereas, what
Fletcher is in fact
doing in his entire book,
is trying to give us a way to approach,
through the mathematics of
topology, the way that in fact,
although we live on a
two dimensional surface,
which is again it's not
exactly two dimensional.
The critical zone, so the
critical zone is maybe 14 miles.
But it's almost as if it's a surface,
relative to the size of the Earth.
So he's trying to give us
a sense of how to imagine
what our experience actually is.
And it's just, too he says I can't do it.
But he's trying to get
us sensitive to this.
Latour is doing that in his own way.
But I'll stop there, but I'm
happy to answer any questions.
Okay, thanks.
(audience applauding)
- [Gary] Before we take any
questions I wanted to say,
to tell you there's a
reception afterwards.
Please come into the room
right underneath this room,
down the stairs and the down the hall.
- Yes?
- [Student] So you mentioned that Thoreau
read for better, the leaders
of the science of the time.
Something that is very difficult
for the subject of humanities
is that his profundance
to the science really allowed him
to appreciate what another
discipline of the science is.
A couple of years ago,
several hundred professors
were asked to list their qualitative book.
And Professor Dimock, when
she wrote the professors book,
made this very interesting observation,
that many scientists have cited books
of this latitude, as far as this goes.
But the rest was not the case,
that no humanities professor
cited a scientific book as having been
authoritative influence in their tenure.
So to me it seems, that at least today,
it may not have been so
in the time of Thoreau,
but at least this conversation,
or this appreciation
is really unidirectional,
it's not bidirectional.
So would you like to comment
on how to influence this?
- Absolutely.
So part of that is, I think
the sort of self selection
of humanities professors, as such.
In other words,
if you take, for instance,
are you gonna include
Latour as a humanities professor?
A lot of science studies, is really,
and this is another
synonym for science studies
is sociology of science.
Now with, one of the
directions that this is gone
with Latour and his peers,
is that what might ordinarily
be considered obvious,
which is that the sociology of
science is about scientists.
Because we tend to think of sociology
as a human centered discipline.
But the sociology of science
is nothing like that,
as it's been practiced
over the last 30 years.
And Latour has been
probably the major person
in transforming the
approach, and the approach is
let's go look in the lab,
and see how things get done.
And this is the connection to
his more recent work on Gaia.
And see where the agency is,
where it lies.
And the agency is often
in the interactions
between either the scientists
and various things in the lab,
or between the things, with the scientists
only coming in at a certain point.
This is in fact,
part of the way I would
answer your question,
because I think you're right in that
in our training in the US,
most scientists come out
of college, thankfully,
with a sense of acquaintance
with literary works.
And literary works are actually
credible exciting things,
and they can change your life.
And so it's gonna vary.
Sometimes it's gonna be science fiction's.
Just one of the
transformations in the field
of literature and science was
when people started taking
the effects of science fiction
on scientists seriously.
That is simply opening
up minds to possibilities
that might not have ever occurred to one.
But then there are many
many other ways in which
literary works, humanistic works, can.
So to take an example, another example.
Stephen Jay Gould, who I mentioned.
So Gould is a great paleontologist,
and a great sort of
theorizer of paleontology.
He has said many times, had
said, did say many times,
he could not have done
what he did if he didn't
go talk to his colleagues
in history department,
who had all sorts of ideas
about how history functions
within a human context,
that he was then able
to think about and think with in
paleontology, fossils,
and so on and so forth.
So there it's quite obvious.
And it's bound to happen quite frequently,
because of our educational system.
On the other hand, frankly,
and please correct me if you
think this is an overstatement.
Other than individuals who
work in science studies,
or literature and science,
very few humanities professors
will have had a good
time with the sciences.
Especially, and again this
is something that's happened
since Thoreau, it's a huge factor,
the mathematician of sciences.
Thoreau was not a mathematics
whiz, he was okay.
And he obviously has fascinating things
to do calendars and so and so
forth, if you had an interest.
But it's almost always very creative.
And now, much of really the
entirety of 20th century,
into the 21st century, if
you're gonna be engaging
with contemporary science of your period,
you pretty quickly have to get comfortable
with the mathematics that's involved.
It doesn't mean you have
to be mathematician,
since physicists are not as good
mathematicians as mathematicians are,
or they tend not to, you don't have to.
You know the mathematics you need to know.
You haven't just simply
been stunned into the glories
of mathematics as such.
So again somebody like,
a great example is Snow,
who was a physicist, and was
a pretty good technocratic,
and a pretty good engineer, and he,
in the two cultures essay, he makes fun
of pure mathematicians,
that he said are worthless.
So I think that's a
big part of the answer.
But it's not the case, I'd
like to give you a very simple.
Gertrude Stein, who I wrote about,
was by no means a great scientist.
She was well trained.
I mean almost all of her courses
in college were in the sciences.
She went to Johns Hopkins Med School.
But I would never make a claim
that she's an innovative scientists.
But I do make the claim that
her exposure to the sciences
played a transformative
role in the kind of writing
that she ended up producing,
which nobody could figure out.
(distant mumbling)
Excuse me?
- [Student] Could I address--
- Please, please, please.
- [Student] So have you investigated
her records at John
Hopkins Medical School?
And under what circumstances
did she leave Hopkins?
So you have?
Gertrude Stein was accepted at Hopkins
on the recommendation,
I believe, of James.
She came there, she was very very poor.
And she was able to fly through the school
just on the basis of a reputation.
Howard Kelly, the head of
Ob/Gyn was the first person,
who at the end of her obstetrics training,
said to her that she
had performed so poorly
that if she wanted to
continue in medical school,
she would have to repeat
the obstetrics rotation.
She responded to that, in
a quote that I've seen,
by saying thank you
very much for forcing me
to make a decision I've been
unable to make on my own.
She went off to Paris,
and she never returned.
So I don't know how much science
she really learned at Hopkins.
My suspicion is that perhaps
she didn't learn very much.
- So, I have to beg to differ.
You want to know the full story,
you need to read the chapter
in my book which is all about
her experience at
Hopkins and neuroanatomy,
where she was, in fact,
did very interesting,
not major work, I would
never make that claim.
But there were
transformations in the field
that she was exposed to
that had, I believe, a formative effect on
the kind of writing
that she ended up doing.
Now, in terms of Kelly,
there's a additional factor
that you didn't mention, which is that,
from every all the research I did,
he was strongly anti Semitic.
He would not give her a passing grade,
in part, because she was Jewish.
There was a whole brouhaha about that,
trying to figure out what to do.
And she really wasn't interested.
By then she had lost her interest anyway.
But when she started at Hopkins,
she finished everything.
Again, as you said she made it through,
except for one course at the end.
She was at some level grateful, because
she wasn't enjoying what she was doing.
And it's sometimes hard
to persuade yourself
to get out of a situation like that.
But it was not as simple as you're saying.
She was actually doing
extremely interesting work,
and there have been all
kinds of claims made that
people don't know what
they're talking about.
And so I would be grateful if you would
look at the chapter in my
book and see what you think.
- [Student] I think before
condemning Howard Kelly,
I would look at Howard Kelly's life.
He may have been an anti
Semitic, but he was probably
the most highly respected
obstetrician in America.
His wife even helped out too.
- I have no reason to doubt that,
but I'm saying it can't
be used as an explanation
for why Stein, in fact,
did not do well with him.
- [Student] Okay, can I
ask you one other question?
- Sure.
- [Student] You stated that
stories had disappeared.
It turns out that, you know
this probably more than I do,
narrative medicine has
become a theory of it's own.
And so entire center of narrative medicine
is the stories of patient's lives.
So one considers story
telling, and story listening,
and it is their stories that
cross between the world of humanities
and the world of science as well.
Perhaps story telling, and story listening
is alive in the profession
that actually represents
the meshing of the arts and science world.
- Now you may not have not heard me
when I actually suggested, that this might
surprise some people in
the room to hear this.
I was using that as an
example by a leading
humanities scholar, who
founded this institution,
who was continuing a line of argument
that Benjamin had made in the 1930s.
It's a more subtle argument
than that, for what's involved,
and it has to do with oral
storytelling specifically,
and a certain kind of oral storytelling,
a certain notion of wisdom,
and so on and so forth.
So it's a somewhat different argument.
Same words, but not
the same thing, thanks.
Yes?
- [Student] I have really,
not as a binding question.
Your story about the Stein
chairs, I had never heard.
I had never heard that Pounds
had broken one of the chairs.
And to me the chairs sit
in a particular space
where people are entirely
removed from Stein,
except for their prominent history.
They kind live like on a tour of Beinecke,
and that's my primary
engagement with them.
And I remember Gabriel saying what Stein?
This brings me back to your, almost like,
passing discussion of the
romance with the archive.
I was struck in your talk
by the transcendental
nature of many of these readings.
And one of things I wonder
about in that is where,
almost in a conservator fashion,
where one fixes a particular reading,
how one goes about situating
particular readings in time.
In much the same way that, say when you're
going through to fix a building,
or going through an
archive to fix a place,
you might choose one period, one tree.
In the way of walking their,
what's the point at which you
stop, disregarding the others
that also have their influence there.
And so I was thinking of, for
instance Coleridge in that
he came out of different,
because he was surrounded with,
he came out of different,
especially from Shakespeare
and the different editions of this
when he was talking about
recession, I could be--
- He's actually, it's in
the, "Biographia Literaria."
And he's talking about
how he and Wordsworth
divided up the poems
in, "Lyrical Ballads."
And then he says the way
we did this, and this is
the link in some way to
Arsic's focus on strangeness.
He said I took the subjects,
the topics where you had to
sort of make the strange
seem ordinary to the reader.
And Wordsworth took the
poems where the problem
was the opposite one, where
the reader might think
this is ordinary life,
it's not interesting
as a subject matter for a poem.
And so Wordsworth's assignment,
according to Coleridge.
And of course this is very
mediated by their history.
But Wordsworth's assignment was to take
ordinary things and make them strange.
And it's in that context that
he then starts talking about
the willing suspension of
disbelief, which happens
when you have something
that seems very strange.
- [Student] And so that
goes back to the point--
(alarm blaring over student talking)
The thing changes so much.
So I want to just,
in drawing together
these different leaders
in your argument, how
do you situate the text
that they were engaging
with, or their reading,
within the sort of archival framework that
those ideas might set us apart.
And that might be an
unanswerable question,
but I'd really interested in just hearing
how you think about that
idea, like fixing a reading,
particular a reading across time this way.
I'm was really interested in
your earlier question about
humanists reading science,
and science reading humanists.
Because I've had that
experience trying to,
as a very humanist humanist
trying to engage with Newton,
which is just utterly impenetrable.
Not at least because of the science,
because it's written in Latin.
So there's a way in which one read Newton,
but still never read Newton.
And I wondered if you had
thought about the specificity
that archival perspective
might require for this
kind of engagement with reading.
And just out of curiosity,
hear what you might think.
- I'm still trying to get
a full handle on this.
And you might explain
it a different way but,
the overall perspective
here that, and again I was,
the idea here, you didn't
get the full picture.
So you didn't get much
about Fletcher at all.
But the idea was that you have a field.
This could be viewed as a messy field,
where very different sets of practices
are, in fact, utilized.
And what I was concerned in this paper was
to say that some of these practices
engage with this contemporary
sciences of the scholar.
And some of these practices engage,
we'd say, the contemporary
science of the subject.
In the former case,
it's all kinds of creative work,
there aren't many problems.
In the latter case what happens, again,
in the sort of present day
situation of that scholar
in relation, so it's sort of.
Let me put it another
way, it might be helpful.
Latour, and to an extent
Fletcher, are actually
very concerned, I think,
to be able to address your question.
Namely, they
think there is something
that you have to watch
in the specificity of an
occurrence, and of a life,
in the development of a
life that's not predictable.
So they are, in some sense,
traditional humanists,
in the sense that they want to be able to
get away from a deterministic model.
The final answer over, the
first beginning of an answer,
is extremely careful work.
So that's one of the exhilarating
things about Arsic's book,
is that her engagement
with the manuscripts of
Thoreau, so one thing she'll do.
One of the great reading she does is of
a manuscript notebook
which Thoreau's brother,
John, started describing birds.
And John apparently was dead set against
a classification of birds by species.
He actually had a very, that
was, that ruined the bird.
The classification that
was of interest to him
was the specificity of this bird.
So when he dies, he has this notebook.
And so this is a sort of Thoreau
within an archival setting,
even if it's just in
the house they shared.
So it turns out that Thoreau,
after a couple of months of grieving,
goes out with his brother's notebook
and looks for the particular birds,
in order to continue the description.
And that seems to me, I'm
using as a figure in a way,
but that's sort of closer to
what you're looking for than,
so it's not something
which one size fits all,
but that the archive.
And so she does a wonderful job with that.
It's just that my complaint is that she
isn't paying enough attention
to then the interim,
which includes from when she's writing
to when he was working,
and that this changes.
Because he actually does push in there
all kinds of things in the interim,
but the science is left
out of the interim.
Like I said it's very hard for somebody
who's not trained in specific
scientific discourse,
and in particular experimental protocols.
But that's what, in fact,
the best people in literature in science.
Again, read this book,
"The Cambridge Companion."
These are really fantastic scholars.
And they describe both
the difficulty involved,
and how one can begin to surmount it.
- [Gary] Two more questions.
- [Student] Thank you.
I'm just gonna request
a pointer really quick.
Of course, whatever,
we're always saying more.
But the question for me, we'll go back to
what I understand Katherine
to be driving at as well.
At one point you talk
about, you said something
that attributed something to James,
and you said actually it's not James.
My question is, whose is whose?
It's not James' right, so whose is whose?
And actually who is James?
That would absolutely stabilize
the possession of his particular argument,
or pinpoint in the individual moment.
I guess that's it.
- So here's probably too facile,
a beginning of an answer.
So we all know how astonishingly,
and brilliantly ambiguous statements are,
and that they can be read multiple ways,
and sometimes you have
writers who, in fact,
engage with that multiplicity.
And that's, in fact, the
pleasure of the reading
is to actually figure out how
these different possibilities
are all at play in various ways.
But then you have, and
if you feel that you're,
in fact, engaging that, there is a certain
sense that you're not just
projecting, that you're somehow,
and last thing I would do is say James.
Bu there is a corpus.
There is an extended
engagement of many hands.
The question I was raising there,
is my impression as a James scholar,
but I don't want to just, that's my card.
But I'm just saying, is that
shoehorning James into
this list of philosophers,
and then reading his texts a
couple of times in the book
in ways that seem to
suggest that he's thinking
along the lines that she's
proposing Thoreau is thinking,
when there are many other
readings that are possible,
and this is a probably unlikely reading.
That's the question.
Part of it has to do with the,
I'll just give you an example,
the astonishing ambiguity of
the term radical empiricism.
So this is, as a phrase, is
a phrase coined by James.
They're similar phrases, but
the phrase radical empiricism,
as far as I know, comes off as his pen.
Now you ask philosophers
about radical empiricism,
you ask literary scholars
about radical empiricism.
I know they're likely, I
think, still to think of that
something along the lines
of the Jamesian sense,
the Jamesian sense being
that empiricism traditionally
emphasizes discontinuities among entities,
it sets data, specific data.
And radical empiricism
gives equal credence
to the continuities among entities.
That's what he had in mind,
by coining the phrase.
But it is now a phrase that is,
and there's very specific history.
So again part of it is actually
trying to keep hold of.
This is the philologist in
the contemporary scholar,
trying to keep hold of these changes.
So that at Harvard in the 1950s,
the term started to be
used in a different way,
the phrase radical empiricism.
It was designed in this
new sense to promote the
quite rigid empiricism of
the analytic philosophers
at Harvard at the time, especially Quine.
And the phrase was used to
link the analytic philosophers
to the most radical
empiricist of all, Hume.
Whereas James's coining of the term,
of the phrase radical
empiricism was designed
to take empiricism away from Hume.
So it seems to me it is
possible to make such claims.
That is we're not just,
what do I feel is the
meaning of this here?
And it happens, again I got
couldn't make the argument.
But I could show you that it comes around
the use of the term sensation,
which Arsic is employing
in Deleuzian fashion,
And in Deleuze the term
sensation means a lot more
than the term means in, again, in sort of
more rigid empiricists
traditional formats.
But it is not what James had in mind.
Even in the Deleuzian.
- [Gary] One more question.
- [Student] Yes sir, define
on, let's say secondary sources
about inaccessibility of research,
that Newton was very
afraid of getting into
controversies with people who he thought
did not understand his subjects very well.
And therefore he says I make the paper
deliberately difficult to accept
for those who won't
understand it very well.
(voices overlapping)
- [Gary] Please join us
downstairs for the reception.
And join me in thanking Steven Meyer.
- Thank you, everybody, it was great.
(audience applauding)
(calm music)
