Brain Drain

Posts Tagged ‘Literature’

Taking stock, a reflective exercise often assigned at the end of a class, is also a graduation requirement. This is my first draft. Tweaking to follow… although references to ”navel gazing” and “mental masturbation” are definitely keepers.

The Collegiate Experience and My Intellectual Cosmos

This reflective essay has been assigned to help connect my Senior Seminar experience, with its focus on pre-romantic poetry, to the greater Saint Rose experience and thus my intellectual cosmos. To be honest, I find this task rather difficult. My trouble stems from the Senior Seminar portion of this ponderance. Let me first say that I have thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual, in-depth conversation every class has offered and that I find significant value in the exploration of early literary theory and the ability to measure today’s ideas by comparison. Still, I struggle to kindle some sort of greater passion for the subject matter in a present-day application that brings new awareness to light.

In my ideal world, Senior Seminar should be more than an entertaining intellectual exercise. I had hoped for a topic that would engage my passion, inspire me to action in righting some contemporary wrong and raise my own awareness as well as the awareness of those who read what new discoveries my research has to offer. Instead, I am reminded time and again, as we jest about the many ways in which poets have continually pondered their navels, that the struggle of the human experience merely shifts at a snail’s pace. Looking to history offers little more than greater historical knowledge of humanity’s slowly morphing circumstances, faulty attempts at understanding through overly general categorization, and constant repetition of these mistakes. While history is a fantastic place to begin, traveling back in time is not necessarily the best place to finish, at least in the opinion of this Saint Rose senior.

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SPOILER WARNING!

The grand finale of Galatea 2.2 has gummed up my works. Too much input. My neural net is still churning and I mean this in the most profound and complimentary way.

In the end, the joke is on everyone. The true bet between Lentz, Powers and the scientific team is never whether a machine can learn to think, but whether a human can make meaning where none exists. Powers, the Center’s token humanist, is taken for a ride in believing that Helen, his beloved neural net, is cognizant… or is he? Helen’s abilities surprise even Lentz, the largest skeptic of all. While the joke on Helen is that the human condition is vile, corrupt and undesirable, most interesting is the joke played on the reader, having believed the fallacy alongside Powers the entire time.

For my own ignorance, I blame adulthood. Had I been a child, I would have seen the prank. Pardon my jest, repeating a philosophy conjured by Powers, but having finished his novel, I now understand. The innocence of childhood protects us from the horrors of humanity. Once innocence is lost, we shield ourselves from the harsh reality of our existence using fiction to process that which we cannot understand. We only hope to stumble upon answers. That hope is our only redemption.

I find fascinating a work of fiction that moves beyond the scope of entertainment, using its own structure to examine its worth. It becomes particularly potent for this English Lit. major as I am forced to ask myself:

• What value does the study of literature hold?
• Is meaning inherent within a text or do we make meaning as we back-propagate new data through the filters of lived and learned experience?
• Does the difference of inherent or made meaning ultimately matter as we struggle to understand the point of our existence?

Since called upon to decide, I say this. I believe that ideology makes meaning on a cultural level. Within that ideology, literature holds a great deal of power, particularly in its ability to persuade. From fables, myths and war propaganda to presidential elections and the civil rights and environmental movement, people will always chose the side most representative of their individual reality. Without literature, we would never have the ability to share such complex ideas or decide what our personal reality requires to exist.

For these reasons, having a deep understanding of literature, both the ways in which it operates and its limitations, grants us the power to move toward the goals we deem fit. While this in no way ensures collective agreement, or the chance to single handedly change the world, we have, at the very least, the power to organize around a small seed of understanding and find companionship or, as Powers hopes, love in that one simple connection. To read, to be read, to exchange ideas and make meaning as it applies to the here and now of our existence… This is only the beginning of my thoughts on what literature is to me.

And with that ponderance I leave you, offering my sincere gratitude for taking the time to make meaning of what I’ve had to say.

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the makers of Viagra and Geritol.

Which reminds me… This is one of those books, like Don Quixote, that should be read three times in life, somewhere around the ages of 22, 35, and 60. I find that my young classmates identify with A. at 22, interpreting Powers as rather lecherous. Still feeling 22 at heart, I (at 37) suffer from the same disbelief as Powers – that so many years have passed and so little has been learned. I only hope that, by my next reading, I will have staved off the bitterness suffered by Lentz, disheartened by literature and the world at large.

Between the pages of 155 and 268, our narrator, Powers, and Dr. Lentz struggle with their traditional masculine roles, feeling that they must care for and protect their women. Lentz feels responsible for his wife Audrey’s stroke occuring directly after their argument while he was intentionally unreachable. Guilt ridden for not taking enough care, he visits her waning consciousness with daily devotion at the Center. Powers also cares for his lost and confused C. but learns that:

The more care I took, the more I turned her into the needy one. And the more I did that, the needier she became. We construed her neediness between the two of us. And that was not care on my part. That was cowardice. (240)

Together, Powers and Lentz search for some sort of answer to the masculine condition through the production and training of Helen, the beloved and experimental neural net in Galatea 2.2. Lentz, although he can’t change the past, has the desire to change the future, developing a way to back up the brain in the case of memory failure. Powers interprets and mulls this goal:

We could eliminate death. That was the long-term idea. We might freeze the temperament of our choice. Suspend it painlessly above experience. Hold it forever at twenty-two. (170)

We have yet to learn what Powers gains from the experiment, but perhaps Donna Haraway might offer a clue.

Pulling out the ol’ Norton, I brushed up on Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, several quotes of which were rather pertinent to Helen. First off, “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism… a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (2269). Already, in this one definition, the cyborg blurs the boundaries of human, animal and machine as well as reality and fiction.

Since Helen is essentially a new “other,” her existence could be constued as a cultural encounter similar to, for example, that of Europeans and Native Americans. It is assumed from the ideology at hand that one must dominate the other. That said, how is it possible to avoid the dominant/male and submissive/female trap that haunts the majority of historical human existence? According to Haraway, the power lies within the technology.

The cyborg has no origin story… they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (2270-2271)

According to Haraway, Powers and Lentz are “inessential” as fathers. Once they load the data, Helen thinks on her own. Although Powers has coded Helen with gender, it is within the power of the cyborg to blur the boundaries of such a dichotomy as the masculine and feminine. Once blurred, perhaps some revelation will be made to both about the roles of men and women in society.

While this unique lesson of love between man and machine has yet to be revealed , one thing is certain. Helen has already invoked much discussion about what constitutes human intelligence, blurring the distinction between true knowledge and switch flipping. Are we nothing more than weighted switches constantly back-feeding input through our neural nets, or is there something inherently human that sets us apart from a machine?

I’ll be turning pages rapidly to find out…

‘IT’
In terms of defining literature, what the heck is ‘it’ anyway?  (From what I gather, it’s certainly not San Francisco’s Original Ice Cream Treat.) Raymond Williams’ use of the term ‘it’ in reference to literature, complete with single quotes for emphasis on pages 1568 and 1573 of the excerpt from Marxism and Literature, seems quite relevant to his argument that ’it’ has been rendered inatimate rather than a living, breathing organism.

As Williams explains, literature’s broad beginnings in the 14th Century referred to both the ability and act of reading. Since then, the meaning has been hacked, chiseled and vastly narrowed through time. By the 19th Century ”literature” pertains to the highly specialized reading and printing of the social elite. Reducing literature to “formal composition within the social and formal properties of language” (1568), is the utmost abstraction. 

William’s certainly pooh-poohs this constraint. To be specialized in such an ideological way leaves little room for outside criticism. Who could do it? Never the elite! In doing so, they would destroy the very structure which allows their exclusive access. Thus “criticism” as the practice of faultfinding devolved into the “exercise of ‘taste’, ’sensibility’ and ‘discrimination.’” (1570) By noting this abuse of categorization and abstraction, and abstraction’s power to distill literature into sterility, Williams believes ‘it’ becomes less than a living, breathing thing.

Marxist criticism stretched the concept of tradition, giving literature to all people by including pop culture. Then there was the reconstitution of bourgeois social practice. Without challenging the practice in it’s own right, social history was widened to include “conceptions of ‘the people’, ‘the language’, and ‘the nation’.” (1573) 

So what was born from Marxist criticism? Ray thinks that democratization or putting literature in the hands of “the people” again brought it to life in new ways. Everything from the State of the Union to smiley’s on the Internet have become forms of literature. No longer limited to print, technology has been an historical development that, once again, helped to shift literature’s meaning back to something full of life as an ever growing and changing entity.

TANGENT: When I think reconstitution, bourgeois social practice or otherwise, I think orange juice. To my spoiled ass it doesn’t taste as good as fresh squeezed, it’s cheaper and widely available, but it does make me ask questions like, “How do they take water out? And how does it get back in? What makes it taste different afterward? What’s the point?” …And then I drink it anyway because it’s the new technology in orange juice and it satisfies my thirst.

AS FOR DELEUZU AND GUATTARI’S RHIZOMES
I am all about these little tubers. I love to plant peonies, ferns, and dahlias and have suffered invasions from hostile bamboo. When peonies eventually grow beyond their boundaries, I dig them up, divide their carpeting mass of bulbous material, and replant the smaller hunks in new places. This is not always an easy task as the mass can be a mess. This system is not as cut and dried as that of a tree, which is what makes it so relavent.

We’re taught early on about seeds and trees. Roots grow down. Shoots grow up. End of story. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, there are limitations when applying this cliche to the analysis of literature. Rhizomes are not limited to this up and down movement. They grow up, down, left, right and on every possible diagonal. One bulbous center produces willy nilly outcrops of root strands and shoots that criss-cross and jut out at random. Choas, yes. Still, the central orb is important to the theory as it ” is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed” (1609). The tree analogy provides no pulpy center, no central  and multiple plateaus. A tree just doesn’t cut it.

Clearly, the rhizome analogy makes far more sense when applied to the ways in which literature can be approached. The multitudinous lines of study stemming from one body (wO- “without organs”) of work is, quite possibly, infinite.