‘Metaphor: mongering’ Index entry in Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1998).
In 1994, in a vituperative attack, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt complained that humanities scholars were indulging in ‘metaphor mongering’ in their approach to the Sciences (1). It was, perhaps, the first significant shot in what later, with a touch of grandiloquence, became known as the ‘Science Wars.’
Although the controversy swiftly polarised, particularly after the physicist Alan Sokal placed a hoax article with the journal Social Text (claiming, on publication, that the editors’ failure to spot that it was a tissue of meaningless and self–contradictory statements revealed shoddy standards of scholarship in the humanities), the terms of the debate (or of the abuse) are instructive. Gross and Levitt’s complaint is that a perception of knowledge as, essentially, textual was being transferred onto disciplines where it did not apply. For all that their attack on the humanities, and particularly on what has become known as ‘Science Studies,’ reveals a lack of understanding of what we do, it does raise an important question for a subject like English, where we frequently seek to contextualise our object of study by reference to phenomena exterior to it: how do we make meaningful connections with the other disciplines with which we come into contact?
In a recent article in this newsletter, Philip Martin investigated usefully the role history can play in both opening up and closing down the meanings of literary texts, arguing that a text’s historicity is an issue we must broach, as an open one, with students (2). History provides a good starting point, because there is a temptation, when we deal with Science, to treat its contextual value to us as versions of the less interesting kind of History. Although we know that History is an essentially interpretative discipline, and that it is subject to the shapeshifting nuances of variant textual readings, the tempting short-cut, at least in teaching, may be to use it as a solid background context against which to play out the more complex discussions of literary texts we allow to take place.
This temptation is all the more alluring when we encounter subjects, like Science, further removed from the normal spheres of expertise in which we practise. The easy way to use it is as a subset of historical knowledge, a steadily accumulating body of facts and insights, fixed at any given moment: evolution in 859, relativity in 905 and so on. In this perspective, Science is solid and uncontroversial, not a living group of disciplines with their own peculiar controversies, forms of discourse and communities of practitioners in debate with one another.
Certainly, in older debates about the Arts and the Sciences, there was a tendency to assume their absolute difference from one another, without really engaging with the interesting questions of subjects’ identities that arise with true cross–disciplinary engagement. For instance, when Matthew Arnold and T.H. Huxley debated the relative merits of different forms of education (classical or scientific), there was a strong sense that these were alternate modes of knowing, with few areas of intriguing overlap. Although Arnold claimed that ‘[a]ll knowledge that reaches us through books is literature,’ he did not effectively contest the distinction he ascribed to Huxley that a scientific education confers a ‘knowledge of things,’ while humanist enquiry produces a ‘knowledge of words’ (3). Eighty years later, the most famous spat about English and Science, the ‘two cultures’ debate, principally between F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow, did little to advance our understanding of how these ‘cultures’ might interrelate. Snow’s famous claim that not knowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics is equivalent to ignorance of the works of Shakespeare, and Leavis’s petulant assertion that a strong English School is at the heart of the modern university, are revealing of institutional power struggles to control loaded terms like ‘education’ and ‘culture,’ but fail to interrogate what such terms, or even ‘English’ or ‘Science’ themselves, might mean. There is little interest in the complex ways in which the different languages of literature and Science might be related to one another, except in asides by, for instance, Aldous Huxley (4).
In the run up to the Science Wars, though, debates about English and Science took on a markedly different character. A key moment is, surely, Gillian Beer’s insistence in Darwin’s Plots ( 983) that ‘not only ideas but metaphors, myths, and narrative patterns could move rapidly freely to and fro between scientists and non–scientists’ (5). This is a new form of interdisciplinarity entirely. It does not just see Science as part of a history of ideas that might be necessary to contextualise literature. Instead, it treats it as a form of literature.
Although Professor Beer qualifies her claim by noting that in the nineteenth century primary scientific texts were, in general, accessible to the educated lay reader, a large number of literary and cultural critics have since followed her example, many transferring the ‘Science as discourse’ perspective to more recent developments. Science Studies is, in fact, driven by this insistence on the textual life of Science: Lisa Jordanova introduces essays collected under the title Languages of Nature with the claim that they focus on the ‘discourses common to literature and Science,’ Robert Scholnick claims that historians of Science have learned to approach it as ‘only one among other social constructs,’ and James Bono speaks of understanding ‘the textuality of scientific discourse and the metaphoricity of the languages of Science’ (6).
This is, from the perspective of English, a comforting approach to take. It implies that the specific skills we value (close textual analysis; imaginative analogy) are sufficient to the task of making cultural sense of Science. It is also an approach which has drawn complaints from some in the Sciences. To Gross and Levitt’s dislike of metaphor mongering, we might add Sokal’s claim, in a book, Intellectual Impostures, co-authored with Jean Bricmont, that ‘the natural Sciences are not a mere reservoir of metaphors (7).
For one side in the Science Wars, Science (note the singular form) is caricatured as monolithic, enchained in an empirical doctrine and rooted to the belief that it speaks the Truth. For the other side, the Humanities, and in particular Literary Studies, are lampooned as riddled with seditious semioticians, speaking of a subject, Science, about which they have little understanding, and to which they naively apply an extreme relativist philosophy. The cartoon is completed by the suggestion that some of these people are (‘the horror, the horror’) postmodernists. The first group sees Science and writing as separate activities; the other sees them as one and the same.
Even in these caricatures, though, there is a way out of the impasse between those seeking to understand Science as a dynamic force within the culture, and those who argue that Science should be left alone. Sokal’s position that the natural Sciences are not a ‘mere reservoir’ of metaphors is a reasonable one, but does not mean that Science does not (whatever else it might do, and whatever else it might be) also function as a reservoir of metaphors and narratives on which the culture draws, and to which it might even contribute.
Perhaps there is a way of being serious about culture, and about Science in the culture, without having to broach the issue of Science’s truthfulness at all; about whether, for instance, in debates about evolution, Stephen Jay Gould is right that the primary unit of selection is the individual or Richard Dawkins is correct in saying that it is the gene. When we deal with culture we deal with representations, the turning of experience into narrative, and Science is a powerful force within our culture because it is a source of potent narratives about who we are, where we come from and the world we live in. Those narratives are for many of us, as non–scientists, translations from a language we do not fully understand, and the most we can hope to do is to talk in an informed way about the translations, rather than the raw Science, if there is such a thing.
But this is not necessarily the death knell for our understanding of Science as culture. It is, after all, only as translations into popular Science books, technological spin–offs, and general understandings of the world, that Science exists within culture. The accuracy of those translations – the sense in which they are mistranslations – while undoubtedly a crucial issue in one sense, is, in another – for our role as cultural critics – more peripheral. Here, a little linguistic sleight of hand can help us immensely. If we distinguish between professional Science (descriptions of the world as formulated by, and within, communities of scientists) and cultural Science (the manifestations of Science within our culture, which may or may not be accurate reflections of professional Science, and are certainly likely to be only loosely tied to whatever peculiar modes of thought, experiment and logic we use to define Science), we can put in parentheses the issues of Science and truth, and concentrate on the more culturally vital phenomena of Science and representation.
To give an example, from the late 980s to the mid 990s there was a penchant for getting terribly excited by chaos theory. This was partly to do with the word, ‘chaos,’ which is culturally resonant, but also to do with the way in which popular narratives about chaos were constructed, in particular James Gleick’s big-selling, and influential, piece of Science writing, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987). Gleick sells chaos in rhetorically appealing ways as a new and, moreover, paradigm-changing, Science. He constructs a narrative, combining archetypes of the Romantic hero and the American West, in which sole, male adventurers, working alone, and quite often pictured in frontier landscapes, make new discoveries.
Other representations of chaos theory, in books and newspaper articles, drew on similar rhetorical constructions. There was a very strong sense that chaos was important, revealing, as The New Scientist Guide to Chaos Theory put it, ‘fundamental limits to human knowledge in an uncomfortable way’ (8). There was even a brief fad for posters and t-shirts with fractal images, chaos’s most dominant visual motif. Within Literary Studies, articles and books, like Katherine Hayles’s Chaos Bound and Harriet Hawkins’s Strange Attractors, found exciting analogies between the features associated popularly with chaos theory (a strange and exciting new world somewhere between chaos and order; the sense of a paradigm-shift in thinking) and cultural developments which might loosely be described as postmodernist (9).
This fashion drew the ire of Sokal and Bricmont, and Gross and Levitt: it is the only scientific topic to have its own chapter in Intellectual Impostures, and fifteen pages are devoted to it in Higher Superstition. The claim is that the importance of chaos theory, and even central tenets of it, are grossly misinterpreted by Humanities scholars. This is, of course, an important issue: whether chaos theory is, or is not, a watershed in the history of Science, really matters. It is, though, one that can only be solved, in the short term, by an appeal to authority and, when scientists are themselves split over its significance, the authorities we choose are liable to be dictated by our own agendas.
However, important though the status of chaos in professional Science is, from our point of view as literary and cultural critics it is the wrong issue. Our concern cannot be what chaos theory is, but how it is represented. Representation, rather than essence, is the root of our professional interest in Science. Culturally, for the very reasons Sokal and Levitt identify – the unscientific and rhetorical appeal of words like ‘chaos,’ and the analogies between popularisations of chaos theory and other cultural developments – chaos theory is, or at least was, significant. It may only have been of passing significance, and perhaps it was not the enduring, revolutionary development it was hailed to be, but the fact that it was presented in such a way is of importance. It is chaos as narrative, as a story which intersects with other tales within our culture, which makes turning to it important.
So the antagonists in the Science Wars debates talk about Science in two very different senses. For one group of contributors, it has specialised, technical meanings that might be to do with a mode of thought, a system of experimentation, or a body (or rather bodies) of knowledge, and for another group it is a system of discourses within the culture.
This is not to say that the differences between the polarised positions produced by the Science Wars are purely semantic. While common ground is often obscured by different styles of discourse, there are also some very real differences in relation to issues of truth, culture and education. Even here, though, there is very often a blurring of the opposing arguments.
For example, amongst those of us on the, let’s call it, ‘Science is culture’ side of the debate, there can be a tendency, on the one hand, to reduce Science to discourse, and on the other, simultaneously, to invoke Science as though it lends authority to the reading of literary texts. This is not a new phenomenon. When I.A. Richards sought to formalise the case for, and the practice of, university study of English in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Science and Poetry (1926) and Practical Criticism ( 929), it was at once both an attempt to resist the growing institutional and cultural power of Science, and to emulate and reproduce, methodologically, scientific rigour in the study of literature (10).
A similar blurring of opposing positions can also occur amongst those on the, let’s call it, ‘leave Science alone’ side of the debate. In this case, the very process of engaging in extended discussions of the misuses of Science cannot help but demonstrate the powerful function of Science within cultural discourses. Norman Levitt, for instance, bemoans the prejudicial and uninformed way in which Science is treated within contemporary culture in his book Prometheus Bedeviled, but in order to do this he has to engage in what is, essentially, an extended work of Science Studies, analysing the cultural potency of terms like ‘Science’ and ‘nature.’ He certainly does not have the same views as his Science Studies antagonists, but he does have to acknowledge the cultural power of Science and the way in which the term and its meaning are moulded by other discourses. He even adopts a rhetoric – as when he declares his aim to ‘consider the peculiar authority of the term ‘natural’ in the discourse of our culture’ – which is indistinguishable from the ways of speaking (use of the term ‘discourse’) and the project (deconstruction of cultural authority) within Science Studies (11).
My purpose here is not to suggest that the debates and differences that followed the publication of Sokal’s hoax article in Social Text were not based on very different world views and ideas about knowledge. However, they certainly were not entirely at odds with each other, even when the rhetoric employed might have implied that they were.
On the most fundamental level, then, even though the rhetoric of the Science Wars implied absolute difference, there were areas of overlap and agreement, primarily in the understanding that Science is culturally powerful. Why it is powerful, and how that power is exercised, is of course a different matter. Nevertheless, given this power, what questions and issues do we need to address if we are to embrace the Sciences as living disciplines in our practice as teachers and scholars of English?
First, what do we mean by the term ‘Science’? Do we define it as a specific body of knowledge? (and, if so, is it a knowledge that simply accumulates, or is it a knowledge that is constantly being overturned, and refashioned, as new understandings come along?). If we see it in this way, do particular sorts of Science, or particular disciplines, come, in our minds, to stand for all Science? (as, for instance, in Gleick’s presentation of chaos theory, in which all contemporary Science is, by implication, subsumed under the umbrella of this particular development). If Science is not a specific body of knowledge, can we de- fine it as a mode of experimentation or thought? Or is it a word that has meaning only in relation to the institutional and social contexts in which it is invoked?
Second, how do we see this thing called Science, however we are defining it, engaging with the rest of the culture? Is it something that sits in a discrete zone, its development powered by internal disciplinary drives, and feeding material into the culture, but not impacted upon by cultural developments? If it is shaped by cultural developments, is this in a weak form, whereby, say, political, financial and social contexts determine what sort of research can take place, but do not shape the eventual findings of that research? Alternatively, is it in a stronger form in which culturally specific perceptions, biases and ways of thinking have a shaping effect on scientific enquiry and the narratives produced by Science?
Third, why so often is it that we talk specifically of ‘literature’ and ‘Science’? The terms seem incommensurate. In a university context, one is a faculty–level concept, while the other is only the label for a single discipline, or the activities that might take place within a limited number of disciplines. Is this mode of speech a product of the way in which debates between the disciplines have been fashioned by institutional political battles over terms like ‘education,’ ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation,’ not to mention the scramble for limited public funds? Might we run the risk of homogenizing a diversity of disciplines and methodologies under the single term ‘Science,’ because it makes it more containable? Also, by pitching ‘literature’ or, before that, the even more politically loaded term ‘English’ into battle against Science, do we reproduce, without even realising it, the sense that Arnold, and later, Leavis, had, that Literary Studies is somehow at the centre of the university? In other words, is one of our starting assumptions the belief that our basic activity – dealing with words and language – is the foundation upon which all other Humanities disciplines, and increasingly Science disciplines too, are reliant? Is there a sense, in other words, in which we feel our ‘metaphor mongering’ qualifies us to reach out in our intellectual adventures into other academic departments and Faculties?
Fourth, what do we mean by ‘literature’ when we put it next to the term ‘Science’? Are we talking about literature as ‘object’ – bodies of written work – or are we talking about an academic discipline? (Literary Studies rather than literature). This is important because much of the discourse in the Science Wars has been about discourse. Talking about texts – novels, popular Science books, or whatever – that interweave with scientific discourses, is different from talking about the sorts of dialogue that may or may not take place between ways of doing literary study and ways of doing Science.
Finally, while the interest in Science as writing has given us a means of engaging with the cultural presence of Science, might scientific developments give us new means of engaging with literature? Recent scientific research into consciousness and language must, surely, at some point, impact upon Literary Studies.
We can carry on doing what we have been doing in the past, without broaching these questions, approaching Science, where we must, only to provide a context for literature. However, if we can find a way to engage with Science writing, by which I mean the inscription of cultural Science into every aspect of our world view, it may open us to a dialogue that takes us beyond a vaguely defined sense of Science as absolutely other to what we do in English.
Notes
1. Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1994; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), p. 116, p. 121.
2. Philip Martin, ‘With or Without? Is there any History in this class?’, English Subject Newsletter 7 (November, 2004), pp. 18–21.
3. T.H. Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1905), pp. 645–46.
4. Huxley, for instance, acknowledges the complexity of the relationship between language and the world: ‘That the purified language of Science, or even the purified language of literature should ever be adequate to the givenness of the world and of our experience is, in the very nature of things, impossible.’ Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), p. 99.
5. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth–Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 7.
6. L.J. Jordanova, ‘Introduction’, in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, ed. Jordanova (London: Free Association Books, 1986), p. 17; Robert J. Scholnick, ‘Permeable Boundaries: Literature and Science in America,’ in American Literature and Science, ed. Scholnick (University of Kentucky Press, 1992), pp. 1–2; James J. Bono, ‘Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,’ Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeasern UP, 1990), p. 60.
7. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (1997; London: Profile, 1998), p. 177.
8. Nina Hall, Introduction, The New Scientist Guide to Chaos, ed. Hall (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 10.
9. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991); Harriet Hawkins, Strange Attractors: Literature and Chaos Theory (New York: Prentice– Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995).
10. I. A. Richards, Poetries and Sciences: A Reissue of ‘Science and Poetry’ (1926, 1935) with Commentary (London: Routledge, 1970); Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge, 1964); Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1989).
11. Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999), p. 66.
