As I mentioned in an earlier post, for the past month or so I have been writing a paper on Maxwell's demon, particularly as it relates to the "Two Cultures" debate and the contemporary "Science Wars." The interesting thing about this thought experiment of mid-nineteenth-century thermodynamics is that James Clerk Maxwell never used the terminology of a demon at all; it was his fellow scientist, William Thomson, who provided that label, much to Maxwell's annoyance.

In the wake of the Sokal hoax, literary critics were accused of drawing on the terminologies and theories of fields quantum physics or chaos theory in order to bolster their own arguments as having the same epistemological status within the academy as the much respected science faculty. They were using scientific models as metaphors for textual semantics and discourse, a practice which the scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt derided as "metaphor mongering."

My essay on Maxwell's demon shows how, whilst literary and literary critical uses of Maxwell's demon lend credence to this complaint about the abuses of science, simultaneously the evolution of Maxwell's demon shows that it is not simply literary intellectuals who are responsible for turning models into metaphors: scientists themselves sometimes do so in ways that play a key role in the development of new paradigms in science.

Very interesting, interdisciplinary stuff. Having used the essay as my end-of-year review piece, I was just waiting for feedback from my second supervisor, before submitting it to some of the relevant journals. Unlike tenured staff, I am not driven by the demands of the Research Assessment Exercise (or whatever may replace it now Gordon Brown has scrapped it) that one publish a certain amount each year. So I was intending to aim high for this paper, and to submit it to some of the more prestigious journals first, perhaps dropping down the unofficial ranks if it did not get accepted over the coming months. In particular, I was looking at the Configurations journal, the official publication of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. With people such as Gillian Beer and David Porush on the advisory board, this is about as respected as they come.

But academic research, driven by the requirement that it be in some sense aways provocatively original, has an uncanny way of holding the reins of the research you strain to pursue. Searching the web on a tangential topic last week, there at the top of the Google results was a link to "Bruce Clark: Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics..." Its lacunae led me to a stomach dropping moment: there, published in Configurations in 1996, were twenty-three pages of careful historical research into the development of Maxwell's demon, relating it to the "Two Cultures," showing how allegories and models can mutate into metaphors because of the concerns of scientists.

The last four weeks of hard research and writing - pursuits that have taken me at quite a tangent to the specific concerns of my PhD - are invalidated in an instant. With a Faustian hubris, I had believed that my engagement with Maxwell's demon might lead me to produce new knowledge, to providing the all-important first publication on my academic CV. Instead, Maxwell's demon has returned to haunt me. This morning, in my inbox, like a digital cackle, the Oxford English Dictionary "Word of the Day" lurks: "Maxwell n. Compounds 1a. Maxwell's demon."

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

If the "two cultures" fracture lies anywhere, it is between academic analytic philosophy of mind and just about everything and everyone else. Attending a conference on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science last week, as an outsider to the discipline I was struck by just how occlusive all of the papers were, some to the point where - over their hour long delivery - I was unable to understand the gist, barely even a phrase, of what was being argued. As academics in the humanities have a tendency to do, people spoke about other philosophers in an ideological manner, locating them firmly in a particular camp by attaching -ists and -isms to their work: he's a neutral monist, that philosopher is a logical positivist, that position demonstrates a bias towards existentialism. As for myself, I guess I am a too much of a liberal subjectivist to enjoy such absolute interpretations of other people and their works.

Thirty years ago, in the heyday of the Continental theorists such as Derrida and Baudrillard, literary criticism went through phase of using a dazzling array of jargon drawn - some would say plundered - from the sciences, in an attempt to assert itself as a discipline as objective and thus worthwhile as physics or mathematics. Since then, and in the wake of the Sokal hoax, many literary critics have stepped away from the elitist style of writing and interpretation and have tried instead to forge (or, rather, rediscover) a more intuitive and creative approach (see, for example, The Arts and Sciences of Criticism). The style of philosophy I encountered at the conference, however, was situated where literary criticism was thirty years ago.

Functionalist diagrams purporting to explain how the mind operates abounded (although the popular philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, has cautioned against the habit of "boxology") . They reminded me of the old nursery rhyme about the body - "the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone, the hip bone's connected to your back bone..." - only in this case the connections were between short term memory (STM) and feedback loops and input conditions (IC) and Spatio-Temporal Imaginations (STI). As you can tell, acronyms abounded, giving the papers the feel of a scientific approach. But "feel" is the crucial word; the methods in this philosophy of mind were highly scientistic, but not scientific. Apart from a couple of papers given by psychology students, no one tried at length to validate their complex diagrams through reference to empirical studies of the physical brain, behavioural traits or computational simulations of intelligence.

With Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) rapidly improving in resolution and response, I wonder whether this is not going to catch the pure philosophers unawares. As they dispute amongst themselves about what the imagination is, or what memory is, the MRI scientists are going to be able to present them with a conclusive map of the brain, its technicolour detail mapping precisely where imagination acts, where memory resides. In a final blow for dualism, it becomes possible to say that the imagination is the firing of synapses x, y and z and memory the activation of v, w and x, and to leave it at that. Philosophers may respond by saying that a map of the "where" does not explain the "how" or the "why" of the experience (to use their terms, MRI data is a necessary but not sufficient solution to the problem). But literature has already been dealing with these issues of the "qualia" (the sensation of experience) for hundreds of years; as Freud acknowledged when he wrote about the unconscious, creative writers got there first, and provide the sensual framework for what it is like to access another mind better than anyone else. David Lodge's Thinks..., perhaps the most accessible - because fictional - introduction to studies in consciousness, evidences this.

In most of the other humanities lectures I have attended, questions tend to be either precise points of factual contention, or they raise interesting points of connection that might have been overlooked by someone working in a particular historical area ("that comment about modernist x reminded me about what Greek poet y had to say..."), or they take the form of an open request ("I was very interested in that, perhaps you could say more about this aspect..."). This room, however, seemed filled with intellectual testosterone, the hot blood of eager young scholars wanting to make their marks with their peers and faculty superiors (the combatative assertiveness exacerbated by the fact that about eighty-percent of the participants were men, an unusually high majority for the conventionally female dominated humanities). Their questions were not so much probes as wrecking balls. For five, sometimes ten minutes, a questioner from the audience would systematically demolish the speaker's entire argument, and assert his own as the ultimate and perfect consideration of the topic.

That the atmosphere of the conference was so hostile and non-dialectical was a shame. A couple of days ago, I was speaking to a friend who is marking philosophy A-level papers this year. She said the best responses came on topics surrounding philosophy of mind; it is not hard to see why this should be the case, since the questions surrounding it are so engaging and have potentially extensive implications for our moral and social lives: at what point does a machine simulating intelligence become sentient? Is consciousness something shared by all higher animals or unique to humans? How do we know that other people see the world in the same way we do? Though tricky, as the popularity of The Matrix shows, they are not problems that only the elite few can start to address or discuss. However, any outsider attending this conference on philosophy of mind would be left with the impression that the only proper answers are those which are so complex, that few can understand or evaluate them, even as they make ultimate claims to knowledge.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

It is fairly uncontroversial to suggest that English literature begins with Gower, Whitcliffe, Chaucer and his contemporaries. Although infused - inevitably and permanently - with the mythical strains of Anglo-Saxon and Ancient epic, by the end of the fourteenth century English was beginning to make itself heard above French, as the language of verse romance, and Latin, as the language of philosophical debate and government.

The question of if and where English literature ends is harder to answer. India is the country with the largest English-speaking population in the world, and it would be naïve for Britain to cling to an image of itself as the principle island of creativity in the language, when in numerical terms alone it is the root, but not trunk and branch, of the English word.

A glance at recent Booker prize winners – Arundhati Roy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yann Martel - confirms that literary writing in English is no longer necessarily done by holders of English passports. As another Booker winner, Salman Rushdie, wittily phrased it, "the Empire writes back." In contemporary English-language poetry, non-British or post-colonial writers have adapted traditional verse forms and content to register their own racial and social dialects and situations. Thus in an age of global communication, it is not inconceivable that a poet such as Tony Harrison, who invokes dialects from the North of England in formally constructed verse, may share more stylistic features with someone such as Robert Lowell in North America, than with his contemporaries (Benjamin Zephaniah or Grace Nichols, for example) living in a different area of his own country. And with the growing recognition of the potential of translation as a creative and adaptive aesthetic itself (see, for example, Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Beowulf or Christopher Logue’s War Music), the language in which something was originally written becomes increasingly incidental; it is what the word says which matters, not the originally foreign tongue - or variations on the root tongue of English - with which it was once spoken.

Is the answer, then, to make a distinction between "English-literature," of the early period, and "English-language" writing, from the modern period, which is characterised by its development by a variety of international writers? With its clumsy hyphenation and categorisation, this risks developing what linguists call "markedness," the implicit value judgement that lies behind our situating of a particular writer in relation to his linguistic heritage. Thus it is always the "Irish poet, Yeats," the "Afro-Carribean poet Langston Hughes," but never the "English poet Wordsworth."

Perhaps the only solution is to eradicate the proper noun of "English," and to use "english" instead as an adjectival marker of style and relation to tradition, in a similar way to "beat," or "postmodern," or "magic realism."

Labels: English language, Literature