Saturday, June 7, 2008
experimental criticism
Instead of the post on Plato's Laws I'd planned (which: forthcoming), I thought I'd begin with a topic of general interest. I was discussing experimental philosophy (http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/) with a grad student of my acquaintance the other day, expressing a certain skepticism as to whether it's not just sociology by another name. He wisely remarked that while one is probably not doing philosophy while one is doing experiments and vice versa, the process that allows one to connect the two must be philosophical. By that logic there's nothing, I think, to prevent us from doing experimental criticism--so my question for all of you is: what sort of experiments would we do? I'm not suggesting, mind you, any servile aping of the sciences--I think the term 'experiment' is probably broad enough to have some application suited to our pursuits, even taking it in a non-metaphorical sense.
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The way that I see "experimental criticism" working most frequently is through the application of theoretical models. An infatuation with a given theorist or school of criticism often leads us to pursue what I would call experiments. Take Marx for example--after we read Marx, we might enter into other texts looking to apply Marxist thought (either as a strategy of reading or as a more content-based analytic tool). This, in a way, seems a lot like the sciences: discover a certain method that works in one case and apply it to others. But I'm sure most of us would agree that entering into an unfamiliar text with a specific set of guidelines or expectations like I've described is rather pernicious. To use a trite metaphor: just because we find that the hammer is useful doesn't mean that we should approach every task banging away with a hammer. Sometimes we need a saw, or a wrench, or...
In the sciences, one of the most important aspects of experimentation is the ability to respond with speed and agility to every new result--adjusting the method when the data reveals something unexpected. Maybe this isn't so far off from what we're to do as readers. In the broadest sense, every act of interpretation is experimental, no? Every claim we make is at first tentative, awaiting data to support it.
One question about experimental criticism: *form* is often fetishized as the site at which experimentation (and now I'm using the term in the 'artistic' sense, rather than the scientific) can really happen in critical work. (I.e. Avital Ronell) But what about content??
And a second question: If the process that allows one to connect experiments and philosophy is philosophical, then is the process that allows one to connect experiments and criticism critical?
All I know about experimental philosophy is from Appiah in the NY Times Magazine, the magazine with the amazing ability to dumb things down for Sunday morning consumption. But there, it seems that philosophy becomes experimental when it incorporates not theories but numbers and/or opinion. All his examples are thought experiments or moral quandaries put into survey form, so that we learn that given a certain situation, 82% of people think the CEO has harmed the environment, etc.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09wwln-idealab-t.html)
It seems to me that Moretti is someone trying to use data to interpret literature. He has a hypothesis and proceeds to test it on other people's data (at least, in the case of World Lit, see: http://www.newleftreview.org/A2094). And people find this either comical, or threatening (recall: a certain friendly visiting prof's disparaging use of the word "sociology" in a comment on another lovely visiting prof's talk on world lit this April).
Moretti--and the possibility of taking him seriously--is on my list, but I haven't quite gotten there yet. Sarah's post reminds me that science isn't necessarily this mechanical thing (data, hammers, etc); that "the ability to respond with speed and agility to every new result" should be a part of interpretation too.
Re: what kind of experiments would we do? How about creating a list of books, spending 4 months reading them, and hoping some sort of synthesis will emerge out the other end?!
Sarah--to the extent that it's done well, I'd say that the connection between experimental results or numbers or whatnot and ideas about literature is necessarily a critical one. I doubt numbers alone could ever tell us anything of interest about literature, without a critical mind interpreting pretty heavily. Moretti underrates himself, I think, in overrating his methodology--but I think the methodology itself isn't at all bad. It's in genuine contrast to most other schools out there, and that makes it pretty valuable.
I don't see Moretti's quantitative work, however, as the only place literary criticism can go for experiments--leaving aside the criticism, for a moment, that's more metaphorically termed 'experimental.' There is, of course, the thought experiment--we use these all the time, but without being explicit about it: for example, when we try to understand a given genre, and do thought experiments to find limit cases. Or, in a subtler way, when we note something odd in a book--surely it's only odd in comparison to some implicit 'what if it were like this instead.' But I think it might be fun to take our thought experiments further, and to be more explicit about them. The Roman lawyers developed an incredibly coherent system of legal philosophy because you could go to a jurisconsult and ask whatever you liked, not just the matter of a case at hand, but some limit case invention, and their answer would still be law. I really do think we might try to imagine a possible world in which (say) The Red and the Black ended with Madame de Renal helping Julian escape from prison, or a much grander possible world in which English was not an accentual-syllabic language, but merely a syllabic one! And there is, were we to attempt it, plenty of scope for sociology proper, surveys of all kinds, but with conclusions that are literary, not sociological.
Again, the last thing I'd suggest is that we try to be more scientific. But the thing is, as critics we have a vast power of appropriation over conclusions, methods, and whatever else from anyone we like. And I certainly think we ought to make the most of it, if only because it would be so much more amusing.
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