Matthew Calhoun Shafer Responds to Jonathan Kramnick (Yale, English), CHESS Workshop, October 16, 2015

It’s a pleasure to be commenting on Professor Kramnick’s paper, which draws attention to how the form of the novel can do important work in addressing what in many disciplines has come to be called “the hard problem of consciousness.” You define this problem succinctly, as the question of explaining “how experience can emerge from something that has no experience at all, the sound of a loon from the firing of a neuron” (3). I’ll very briefly summarize the paper’s project before moving to three longer questions about its implication.

You  first take up Marilynne Robinson’s novels, which you argue enact her commitment to panpsychism — the claim that “experiential or phenomenal properties abide with physical properties among the fundamental particles, forces, and laws of the universe” and thus that “every concrete object has some trace of experiential being” (4). Robinson’s work thus consistently “insists at once on the irreducibility and ubiquity of experience” (10) in the way that she talks about things, events, happenings. Her very language presupposes panpsychism and embodies its claims in the work of evocative description. You then move to Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, whose protagonist is committed to a materialist reductionism about consciousness. You demonstrate that the kind of new-atheistic Darwinism of the text’s claims is undercut by the novel’s “pervasive interest in beauty” (24). As you put it, “McEwan’s form stands in a curious relation to its topic” (21) because the novel “put[s] experiences into sentences that also perfect and abstract that experience” (24). You move finally to Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, which presents a picture of consciousness as performatively embodied. The work of the protagonist as he constructs and interacts with built environments lay out a picture of perception as activity, rather than as a kind of gatekeeper between an external world and a closed representational system interior to a mind. The novel presents the problem of consciousness fundamentally in terms of an “encounter with structure “ (28) — a work of “flattening” that is embodied in the very flow of the novel’s sentences, as demonstrated by your fascinating reconstruction of the significance of prepositions in the work. The three texts in the end serve to demonstrate that “novels and other art works fill in what neural explanation cannot supply on its own” (37).

Now, on to questions.

1. First, I want to ask about the extent to which the fictionality of the novel matters for the work that you see that literary form as doing on the question of consciousness. We have a compelling reconstruction in your paper of what the formal tools of the three texts contribute to the consideration of experience and materiality — but it’s never quite clear to me whether, or in what way, the status of the novels as fiction shapes the nature of that contribution. After all, can’t similar formal moves be made in memoir, in various forms of experimental writing, and broadly in other kinds of “non-fiction”? Consider, for example, this sentence from the first volume of Mircea Cartarescu’s pseudo-autobiographical, hallucinogenic book Blinding: he writes,

“Nocturnal Bucharest filled my window, pouring inside and reaching into my body and my mind so deeply that even as a young man I imagined that I was a mélange of flesh, stone, cephalo-spinal fluid, I-beams and urine, supported by vertebrae and concrete posts, animated by statues and obsessions, and digested through intestines and steam pipes, making the city and me a single being.”

In other words, it’s not clear to me whether the tools that you’re identifying are specific to fictional forms, or whether they inhere more broadly in particular kinds of literature, fictional and nonfictional alike. What’s the specificity of the novel for your project?

2. Second, I want to turn specifically to panpsychism, the first and I think most provocative of the three takes on the materiality of consciousness that you reconstruct from these novels. Panpsychism holds that there is something of experience in everything. This position entails, among other things, that we can meaningfully ask what is it like to be a rock — even if we don’t know how to answer the question. Given that you take up the potential of panpsychism as it emerges in a work of literature, then, I want to ask — what is it like to be a novel? Does panpsychism give us a picture of the kind of being that cultural artifacts have? A novel, after all, gains its existence and its meaningfulness not simply through the arrangement of atoms into the shape of a book, but also through the arrangement of ideas into the shape of a text. Does the novel as such have a consciousness, on your account? How do we approach, more broadly, the experientiality of artworks, of language, of rituals?

3. Finally, you make it clear that the question of consciousness in the work of the novel implies an aesthetics. A question that your essay raises for me — perhaps predictably, as a political theorist — is that of whether the approach to consciousness that you reconstruct implies also a politics. There’s a long association in Western intellectual history between philosophical anthropology and political theory: to put it perhaps somewhat over-generally, I think one of the presuppositions of the tradition is that every picture of the subject implies a picture of the collective, and vice versa. Whether it’s Plato’s Republic, in which the just polis and the good person share a common structure of harmony, or the Leviathan of Hobbes, where the state is famously represented visually as a literal collective person made up out of the individuals who join together in it, there’s a consistent sense that the ordering of political life moves in parallel to the working of consciousness. You give us a picture of experientiality that is always unstable, scattered throughout the world or dispersing itself ceaselessly throughout materiality. Should we conclude the territorially bounded state is an attempt to impose a large-scale coherence on the turmoil of consciousness—a reining-in of the diasporic movement that constitutes the experiential basis of subjectivity? Must we affirm that just as consciousness exceeds individuality so too must politics exceed its national boundaries? Does your account of consciousness necessitate a political cosmopolitanism, a skepticism towards projects of coherent community, a radical rejection of forms of collective life that take themselves to be self-sufficient and self-perpetuating? Can we have a state at all, if consciousness is in the end something that cuts through us, not something that we contain?