in this post I would like to approach not only Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, but also the article that Prof. Moretti sent out last week about language's effects on thought.
I'd like to suggest a concept that these pieces and the matters they have us considering might be profitably understood in common through the use of a little idea that we can attribute to the Yale Literary Critic Howard Bloom: the anxiety of influence.
the anxiety of influence is a generalizeable concept; Bloom employes it as a lit crit tool, but you can see in Havelock a very similar notion with more overtly philosophical, or even metaphysical connotations. Plato's attack on poetry provides a paradigmatic example of Bloom's concept.
whereas Bloom's work is explicitly concerned with poetic creativity, we can see his point thru a the more generally Freudian lens of the Oedipal complex, whereby the father becomes the enemy through a poorly-integrated incestual impulse. The Oedipal complex is unconscious, and thus expresses itself symptomatically; it cannot be perceived directly, but can only really be inferred from the set of distortions it introduces into its local field of actions and experiences...
all of this talk about Whorf and how he obviously got it wrong carries, by my reading, a strong Oedipal signature. Whorf is the deadbeat father of analytical linguistics (Sapir is perhaps its codependent mother), whose legacy must be forcibly appropriated (by Chomsky?), much like Zeus has, in Aeschylus' tale, usurped the throne from his father (Kronos), and Titanic retinue. But in all cases, such violent usurpation leads only to further trouble, to what Emerson called 'secret retributions', which become necessary, either as the fallout from divine politics -as in Aeschylus, or Homer-,or as internal deviations from the moral rectitude of dispassionate philosophy -for Plato-, or by simple virtue of the mounting anxiety of symptomatic deferral -for Freud or Bloom. It's like a deferred, karmic version of Newton's second law.
but as we see in all these cases, this little literary/theoretical problem quickly becomes a great historical/socioeconomic one. The anxiety of influence belies a dissimulative tendency in our comprehension of ourselves and the natural world we inhabit. This dissimulation (or misapprehension) occurs as a function of what we could call epochality, a notion which receives an interesting treatment in Heidegger's work, but the general concept -that we are somehow culturally predisposed to an erroneous conception of history- motivates in an interesting way the work of a wide range of thinkers -usually historians and philosophers of science- including Whitehead (in Science and the Modern World), Kuhn (The Structures of Scientific Revolutions), and Foucault (who draws from Canguilhem, and is drawn on by Agamben)...
this is not a simple problem. With regard to Deutscher's NYT article, his early dismissal of Whorf turns out to be a ploy for our attention; he closes on the note that, "We [do] not know as yet how to measure these consequences [of language on thought] directly...", effectively undermining his own smug assertion, expressed earlier in the article, that Whorf's theory had "crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims."
this kind of waffling seems symptomatic to me. The whole point of Whorf's theory (and Deutscher's, as it turns out), is that the seeming solidity of 'common sense' can be mistaken. And the much more interesting (than political games of attribution and usurpation) question that arises from all of this is: what could possibly constitute 'hard' evidence for an epochal (and this is also the preeminent theme in Husserl's work) structure of language? In the final analysis, I think Aeschylus' story serves as an excellent allegory for the overreliance on fact and reason. Prometheus never shows any 'hard facts' to support his prognostications, yet his foresight is a gift that even Zeus will eventually be unable, either to extinguish, or to do without.
I'd like to suggest a concept that these pieces and the matters they have us considering might be profitably understood in common through the use of a little idea that we can attribute to the Yale Literary Critic Howard Bloom: the anxiety of influence.
the anxiety of influence is a generalizeable concept; Bloom employes it as a lit crit tool, but you can see in Havelock a very similar notion with more overtly philosophical, or even metaphysical connotations. Plato's attack on poetry provides a paradigmatic example of Bloom's concept.
whereas Bloom's work is explicitly concerned with poetic creativity, we can see his point thru a the more generally Freudian lens of the Oedipal complex, whereby the father becomes the enemy through a poorly-integrated incestual impulse. The Oedipal complex is unconscious, and thus expresses itself symptomatically; it cannot be perceived directly, but can only really be inferred from the set of distortions it introduces into its local field of actions and experiences...
all of this talk about Whorf and how he obviously got it wrong carries, by my reading, a strong Oedipal signature. Whorf is the deadbeat father of analytical linguistics (Sapir is perhaps its codependent mother), whose legacy must be forcibly appropriated (by Chomsky?), much like Zeus has, in Aeschylus' tale, usurped the throne from his father (Kronos), and Titanic retinue. But in all cases, such violent usurpation leads only to further trouble, to what Emerson called 'secret retributions', which become necessary, either as the fallout from divine politics -as in Aeschylus, or Homer-,or as internal deviations from the moral rectitude of dispassionate philosophy -for Plato-, or by simple virtue of the mounting anxiety of symptomatic deferral -for Freud or Bloom. It's like a deferred, karmic version of Newton's second law.
but as we see in all these cases, this little literary/theoretical problem quickly becomes a great historical/socioeconomic one. The anxiety of influence belies a dissimulative tendency in our comprehension of ourselves and the natural world we inhabit. This dissimulation (or misapprehension) occurs as a function of what we could call epochality, a notion which receives an interesting treatment in Heidegger's work, but the general concept -that we are somehow culturally predisposed to an erroneous conception of history- motivates in an interesting way the work of a wide range of thinkers -usually historians and philosophers of science- including Whitehead (in Science and the Modern World), Kuhn (The Structures of Scientific Revolutions), and Foucault (who draws from Canguilhem, and is drawn on by Agamben)...
this is not a simple problem. With regard to Deutscher's NYT article, his early dismissal of Whorf turns out to be a ploy for our attention; he closes on the note that, "We [do] not know as yet how to measure these consequences [of language on thought] directly...", effectively undermining his own smug assertion, expressed earlier in the article, that Whorf's theory had "crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims."
this kind of waffling seems symptomatic to me. The whole point of Whorf's theory (and Deutscher's, as it turns out), is that the seeming solidity of 'common sense' can be mistaken. And the much more interesting (than political games of attribution and usurpation) question that arises from all of this is: what could possibly constitute 'hard' evidence for an epochal (and this is also the preeminent theme in Husserl's work) structure of language? In the final analysis, I think Aeschylus' story serves as an excellent allegory for the overreliance on fact and reason. Prometheus never shows any 'hard facts' to support his prognostications, yet his foresight is a gift that even Zeus will eventually be unable, either to extinguish, or to do without.
I wonder if Blooms theory really IS generalizable, though. I mean, in it's most general form (that whatever our line of work we all feel compelled to build on and surpass our precursors, and this creates anxiety) maybe so, but when applied to social scientists I fear it may trivialize the very real need to constantly re-examine and re-test theories that came before, and the very real possibility that previously acceptable ideas will be found legitimately lacking when revisited by a thinker's successors. Oedipal or not, this is an important stage in the process, no? The distinction here between the creation of art and the building of theory about an externally verifiable reality seems an important one.
ReplyDeleteHmm.. interesting point of contention Ruthie, thanks. I don't mean to imply via the generalization of this theory 'about art' that critical succession and the anxious influence that 'drives' it somehow trivializes theories 'about reality'. But doesn't the very idea of 'externally verifiable' reality imply a point of access independent of tradition? This is Plato's conjecture, right? If art is all there is, then Protagoras is basically right; education is basically the inculcation of civic virtue as a set of techniques. The technicality of virtue necessitates a submission to the tradition, to the teacher from whom you can learn these skills. The anxiety of influence implies both an attempt to escape from, and a critical engagement with the 'influence' of a tradition. The anxiety of submitting oneself completely to the authority of a teacher, representing a tradition thought as the reproduction of a set of technical proficiencies... I think the value of this line of thinking lies in its encouragement of critical, skeptical engagement with authority. The tricky part nowadays is that, within a(n American) political context that tends to value critical thought and individual freedom above obedient submission to authority -albeit theoretically- authority tends to want to present itself dissimulatively; as antiauthoritarianism. Cf. Republican populism a la Bill O'Reilly. This means that to really rebel, we should submit ourselves to a constructive engagement with history, rather than succumb to our anxiety about failing to embody the ideal of rugged individualism. Paradoxically, it is through abandoning this anxiety that we really individuate ourselves from the similarly (because ideologically-conditioned en masse) anxious crowd. Platonic rationalism and scientific empiricism can as easily be included in this category of 'ways in which we believe we should be critical, because we have been told to.'
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is a dangerous distinction; I think because of its subtlety: I just think that sometimes critical traditions are precisely the ones that need to be questioned, and that the only way to do that is to (provisionally) assume contrary beliefs. Perhaps this can be done in a pragmatic way, so that an artistic engagement with the past might allow us to experiment with new ways of being critical, by showing us new realities that we can be critical of. ?B