About Bill Benzon
Bill Benzon is an independent scholar who has been working and publishing on the 'newer psychologies' and culture for three decades. He is also a trumpeter who has opened for Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, and Al Grey.
More Bio:
I was educated in the heart of Theory country, but turned away from it. I did my undergraduate and master’s work at Johns Hopkins in the late 60s and early 70s and then went off to SUNY Buffalo for my Ph. D. I was OK with the notion that, for example, Western metaphysics was in trouble, but I didn’t think that Derrida & Co. knew what to do about it. Plus I just didn’t like that intellectual style. I liked the quasi-mechanistic style of linguistics, and I liked developmental psychology, and Karl Pribram had just written a fascinating article on neural holography in Scientific American.
So, when I was in Buffalo I hung out in the Linguistics Dept. with one David Hays and went deep into cognitive science, ending up writing a dissertation on “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory.” I figured cognitive science was up and coming and I would be the literary point man for it. And perhaps I was, but no one was listening back then.
Email Address: bbenzon@mindspring.com
Website: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/
Posts by Bill Benzon
Friday, July 30, 2010
The Anti-Theory Wing of Literary Studies
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.
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Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Fans: A New Public for Literary & Cultural Studies
In continuing to think about fan culture I sent a query to Francesca Coppa, a long-time student of fan culture and one of the founders of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit that is all about fan culture, serving it, studying it, and advancing it. In her reply she mentioned several kinds of ongoing fan scholarship and observed:
I think of all of these as “real” research; the question, perhaps, is what sort of umbrella it would have to be gathered under to “count.” But everyone knows that “fans” are a kind of grassroots academy who know more about the things they are fans of than any “TV and media” scholar!
So, I’m thinking that if the literary academy really wants to reach the general public, these folks should be high on the list. But just what would that entail? These people are actively creating their own artistic expressions in words, images, and sound, and are actively pursuing their own research agendas. What does the academy have to offer these people? Can the academy conceive of a relationship that’s more of a partnership than a relationship conceived around more evaluative essays in intelligible prose?
Because I’m thinking that that’s where the deep action is going to be. Not in trying to reconstruct the glory days of Leavis and Trilling and the rest, but in doing something that’s of this 21st century, something that’s new.
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Friday, July 23, 2010
Toward a Fan-Based Research Collaboratory
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Despite some reservations about fan scholarship—e.g. I’ve seen pointless edit wars at Wikipedia & pros are adept at pointless quarrels as well—I’m seriously thinking about an initiative to see if fans are interested in doing at least some of the descriptive work I call for in the piece on cultural evolution I recently did for the National Humanities Center (cf. this “quasi-festo" for naturalist criticism, and this piece on “Kubla Khan"). I see little prospect that academy-based scholars will under take such work in the near term. The sort of descriptive work I have in mind is not obviously subordinate to an inquiry into the “meaning” of a text. That pretty much means that the work is not unpublisheable on its own; there’s no obvious way to earn professional credit for doing it.
But fans may well be interested in doing such work, but on the texts that interest them. And those texts are only rarely going to be canonical high culture texts. And that’s just fine with me. I’ve done such work on manga and cartoons and would have no problem with doing it on episodes of, e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Trek (any generation).
I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work on Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film by Nina Paley, which I discuss in the Humanities Center post. As some of you may know, the film is done in four different visual styles. So I’ve made a table with a column for each style and then gone through the film from beginning to end and briefly annotated each segment in the proper column. You can find that table online in a Google docs file here. One of those segments, the Agni Pariksha, is done in a fifth style. I’ve gone through that segment an annotated each “shot” or sequence within it. You can find that here. In prinple each of the some 60+ segments in the film could be described at the level of detail I’ve used in the Agni Pariksha segment.
In fact, one could easily describe a film frame-by-frame. Would that be worthwhile? In some cases, yes, and in some cases no. It depends. There’s really no way of knowing until the work’s been done in at least some cases and we can take a look at it.
It’s clear to me that such descriptive work is a necessary precondition to a deeper knowledge of texts, whether written, filmed, or videotaped. All the cognitive psych and evolutionary psych and neuro-psych in the world is not going to accomplish what can only be accomplished through description. If the pros aren’t going to do the work, then it’s up to the fans. If the fans get into it, then in a decade or two the pros will have no choice but to follow or simply to drop off the edge of the earth.
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Monday, July 12, 2010
Romantic Love, Conversation, Biology, and Culture
Note: This post grew out of reflection on an earlier post on bundling.
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins I took a course in Medieval literature and was thoroughly gobsmacked when I learned that romantic love had been invented in 12th century France. Until then I’d believed it to be a human universal – one and only, forever and ever, that was just how it was, no? Well, not quite.
What arose in Medieval Europe is something called Courtly Love, a set of conventions used by high-born men in wooing their lovers. And these lovers were not their wives, nor wives to be. For aristocratic marriage had little to do with personal preference; it was politics. Powerful families would forge alliances by arranging marriages among their young.
In time, over the course of centuries, so the story went, romantic love was transformed from an aristocratic game into a set of conventions used to define the necessary, or at least the ideal, precondition for any marriage. This set of conventions was in place, at least among the middle class, by the time Jane Austen wrote her novels in the early 19th Century. Those conventions have remained more or less in place up to the present, though they’ve become a bit tattered in the last decade or three as a soaring divorce rate has made it abundantly clear that true love does not last forever. That, of course, is not exactly news – why, for example, did Flaubert write Madame Bovary? – but the myth is so attractive that it dies hard.
That was the state of things during my undergraduate years – which coincided with the emergence of feminist activism in the late 1960s. Whatever their personal experience, everyone gave lip service to one and only forever and ever and believed that it was human nature. In that context, then, the revelations of the learned scholars shook my world.
Counter-Revolution
Learned scholars, however, do not constitute a single tribe. Their tribes are many, and often contentious. Even as the literati were blissfully proclaiming the recent and Western origin of romantic love, other scholars set out to prove them wrong. In 1992, for example, W. R. Jankowiak and E. F. Fischer published “A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love” (Ethnology 31: 149-155). They defined romantic love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future” and they contrasted this with “the companionship phase of love . . . which is characterized by the growth of a more peaceful, comfortable, and fulfilling relationship.” They examined ethnographic data on 166 societies from around the world and discovered romantic love in 88.5 percent of them, suggesting “that romantic love constitutes a human universal, or at the least a near-universal.”
More recently Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordland, published Romantic Love: A Literary Universal? (Philosophy and Literature 30: 450-470, 2006). They conducted a cross-cultural study of folktales from 79 cultures and at least one reference to romantic love in 55 of those collections and multiple references in 39 collections. They assert that their study “offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal. It would also seem to increase the probability that romantic love may be an absolute cultural universal offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal.” “Statistical universal” is a term of art meaning that something is in a lot of places, but not everywhere, yet. It seems clear that if Gottschall and Nordland were to place a bet, they bet that further research would find that romantic love is a true cultural universal, present in every culture for which we have reliable records.
Still more recently, just yesterday in the time-scale of academic publishing, Brian Boyd has asserted, with the calm assurance of senior scholar in command of wide learning, that “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies and even species” (The Origin of Stories, Harvard 2009, p. 341). To this, Michael Bérubé has replied, with the calm assurance of senior scholar in command of wide learning, but learning leavened with a dash of school-boy wit:
This just won’t wash. Other species might court and mate for life, but they do not engage in romantic love in the sense that humanists employ the term, save perhaps for the cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. “Romantic love” does not mean “mammals doing it like mammals”; it refers to the conventions of courtly love, which were indeed invented in the European middle ages and cannot be found in ancient literatures or cultures. Those conventions are culturally and historically specific variations on our underlying (and polymorphous) biological imperatives, just as the institution of the Bridezilla and the $25,000 wedding is specific to our own addled time and place.
What’s going on here? Who’s right?
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Monday, July 05, 2010
The Human Sciences
I’m discussing Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities, a blog of the National Humanities Center. Here’s the blurb:
IN THE FORUM
William Benzon, an independent scholar who has written about cognitive science, art, music, and the web, is in the Forum. The author of Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001), he outlines here a comprehensive approach to the human sciences, championing methods and insights from researchers trained in the humanities and the sciences. His essay,”Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities,” claims that a humanistic range of knowledge of cultural phenomena is necessary for effective description of the objects of analysis. Lacking such background, students of the human are likely to produce unscientific models and theories about population-wide maintenance, propagation, and incremental change of cultural codes.
To build accurate models at what Benzon calls the micro-scale, one needs to understand perceptual and cognitive processes and how meaning is negotiated through interaction. On the larger canvas, one needs to see at the macro level how changes in cultural codes support the emergence of new forms of mental activity. Properly pursued, the study of humanity can reveal the design of cultural codes as emerging from the collective efforts of populations where each individual negotiates his or her life transaction by transaction.
Bill Benzon is on the scientific advisory board for the Institute of Music and Neurologic Function in New York City. Previously he was a Senior Scientist with MetaLogics, Inc., where he worked on knowledge representation and information design for web-based health services. Benzon taught in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has published scholarly articles, reviews, and technical reports on African-American music, literary analysis and theory, cultural evolution, cognition and brain theory, visual thinking, and technical communication. In conjunction with Richard Friedhoff, he wrote a book on computer graphics and image-processing entitled Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution.
Come on down!
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Sunday, June 20, 2010
Between Fans and Scholars
Sites like tvtropes.org (discussed here) aren’t the only venues that are blurring the lines between scholarship and fanship. The Organization for Transformative Works has a variety of programs serving both constituencies. Here’s how OTW glosses “transformative”:
Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators. Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and graphics. A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, “adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.” A story from Voldemort’s perspective is transformative, so is a story about a pop star that illustrates something about current attitudes toward celebrity or sexuality.
The OTA envisions “a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity.” They have archiving projects, legal advocacy, a peer-reviewed journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Symposium Blog, that is intended to be “a bridge between the OTW’s academic journal and fannish discussions, through posts that discuss both fannish meta topics and fannish perspectives on fan and media studies.”
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Thursday, June 17, 2010
Rant: Theory of Mind, NOT!
Theory of mind (aka TOM) is all the rage in (some quarters of) cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. It’s driving me batsh¡t crazy. And its use by literary critics makes me super-mega batsh¡t crazy.
Why?
Well, first, in case you don’t know what TOM is, it refers to the capacity humans have for attending to and wondering about what’s on someone else’s mind. It’s a capacity that’s possibly unique to humans, though perhaps not, and it begins appearing at around four-plus years of age. My problem is not with the research itself or the notion that some-such capacity comes “online” at that point in development. What bothers me is the term and its implications.
It bothers Melvin Konner too. Here’s a passage from an opinion piece* he published in Nature a few years ago:
Meanwhile, social-cognition theorists have come up with a phrase inferential enough to make one almost long for the black-boxers: theory of mind. Freud sought one, Skinner assiduously didn’t, and most people don’t bother to ask themselves whether they have or need one. Yet there is serious debate as to whether chimpanzees or four-year-olds have a theory of mind. Closely inspected, the phrase seems to mean something like perspective-taking or, when mutual, intersubjectivity. True, a four-year-old can see and act on another person’s perspective whereas most three-year-olds can’t.
This is fascinating stuff and something we need to understand. But a term such as ‘theory of mind’ simply stands in the way. It makes for catchy article titles but conveys no meaning. Is the maturing orbitofrontal cortex newly able to calm an impulsive and self-centred limbic circuit? Is there a down-regulation of some neurotransmitter receptor, allowing a younger form of social mirror-imaging to grow into identification and parallel perspectives? As long as we are playing with pretty word-coins that substitute for brain functions, we will never know.
This TOM-talk is rather like Richard Dawkins talking about “selfish” genes. He knows perfectly well that genes aren’t the kind of agents that can be motivated by selfish considerations, but it’s a useful way of talking. And, in a pinch, he’s quite capable of explaining what’s going on without recourse to the personification; that is to say, Dawkins and others can give technical accounts that do not require genes to have mental states.
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Friday, June 11, 2010
A Myth of Africa: Ritual Structure in Dusk of Dawn
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Serendipity, fate, kismet, synchronicity, or just plain coincidence. Call it what you will.
I’d been planning to post these notes ever since I started my series on race in the symbolic universe. Earlier this week I’d decided that this would be the week. And now I see that Aaron Bady has a post on the Western construction of Africa. And so this post of mine becomes something of an oblique counterpoint to that. While it too is about a Western construction of Africa, it is a specific construction, by a single individual, the great W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois was born in New England and died in Ghana. He was a Pan-Africanist whose need for a symbolic Africa was different from that which Bady describes in his post.
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Dusk of Dawn. In W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. by Nathan Huggins, Library of American © 1986 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, pp. 549 - 802. First published in 1940 by Harcourt Brace.
Ritual Structure
No autobiography is a simple chronological account of the facts. There is always a plot, an argument, some special pleading, a mythological/symbolic dimension. This is very obviously so with Dusk of Dawn —Du Bois tells us as much several times, first in the opening “Apology.”
I believe that Dusk of Dawn an overall form corresponding to ritual structure as expounded by Van Gennep and Durkheim. The center section of the book, in which De Bois describes his trip to Africa, corresponds to the marginal phase of ritual where the celebrants have left the secular world for the sacred but have not yet returned. It is in the center of the book, chapter 5 out of 9, that we find the romantic evocation of Africa.
Here’s how I explained this standard ritual structure in my essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
In “Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time” Edmund Leach has described the ritual structure of Durkheim’s “states of the moral person” (Leach 1965a). They are: 1) secular life, 2) separation from the secular world and transition to 3) the marginal state where the ‘moral person’ is in a world discontinuous from the ordinary world, often being regarded as being dead, and from which a return to the secular is made by a process of 4) aggregation or desacralization, often symbolized by rebirth. Arnold van Gennep talks of separation, transition, and incorporation in The Rites of Passage (Van Gennep 1960). The ritual sequence involves two realms of being, the secular and the sacred, and is designed to order the transition of initiates between these two realms. The ontological problem is isomorphic to that of hypnosis. Secular life corresponds to ordinary waking consciousness; separation corresponds to induction; margin or transition corresponds to trance; and aggregation or incorporation to release – which leaves the person back at the initial state, ordinary consciousness, or secular life. Hypnosis and ritual both involve ontological transition.
This is the pattern that Northrup Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, associated with New Comedy in ancient Greece, and which Frye C. L. Barber have used in analysing Shakespeare’s comedies. It is thus a pattern with a strong literary pedigree.
What’s surprising about finding it in Dusk of Dawn is that that work is not a work of fiction, it is an autobiography, a work of fact. Fictions can be patterned to suit the needs of the author. Lives are not so readily patterned, what happened is what happened.
But one need not tell what happened in the order in which it happened. One can change the order in the telling while remaining truthful about the dates so that the reader can supply the chronological order. And that is what Du Bois does. His displaces his first trip to Africa, which took place later in his life, to an earlier part of his narrative. It is that displacement that signals to the reader that something special is going on here.
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Tuesday, June 01, 2010
tvtropes.org & what it implies
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Over at ARCADE, Andrew Goldstone had a post about tvtropes.org, which he describe as “is an amazing wiki devoted to the ‘tropes’ of television, film, fiction, and, potentially, everything. The organizing idea of the site is the trope, very loosely defined as any convention or pattern to be found in and around these cultural objects.” What makes TVT interesting, of course, is that it is not run by scholars, it’s run by ordinary folks, by fans. Goldstone is interested in what TVT implies about the future of the humanities. He thus takes comfort in the fact that it is formalist in method, indicating that, whatever the current state of affairs in the academy, formalist isn’t dead. He is also pleased that “the site is resolutely ecumenical in its treatment of culture.” Anything’s fair game.
He goes on to point out:
On the one hand, it means--just as media studies and cultural studies have been insisting all along--that popular culture, far from being a wasteland of zombielike acquiescence and repetition, is shot through with self-reflexivity, creative variation, and analytic thinking. Academic values and the values of other parts of culture at large may not be as divergent as we think in the darkest watches of the night.
Yes.
What interests me, at the moment, however, is the extent to which this “self-reflexivity, creative variation, and analytic thinking” reflects the success of literary and cultural studies pedagogy over the past half century (or more). Have we succeeded in creating a new kind of more or less routine public discourse about fictional texts?
Note that I’m not claiming that the academy gets sole responsibility for this, that pop culture really would be “a wasteland of zombielike acquiescence” if it weren’t for us. I don’t for a minute believe anything so silly. At the same time, I observe that it’s not as though popular culture were over there in some other universe having little or no connection with the universe in which we do our research and teach undergraduates. It’s the same universe.
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Thursday, May 27, 2010
Two Cultures
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Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Some Links
Mark Changizi on art & brain: the brain evolved to track the environment, therefore one can do neuroaesthetics by showing how art too tracks the environment. An interesting post.
Raymond Mar (OnFiction) on imagination engendering empathy.
Wikipedia on the world’s best-selling books: the Bible is tops (with between 2.5 & 6 billion copies out there), Mao’s Little Red Book is second (under a billion), A Tale of Two Cities is the highest ranked novel (200M), then Lord of the Rings, The Da Vince Code is a just ahead of The Catcher in the Rye, and so it goes.
Michael Barrier on Brad Bird’s move to live-action film (he’s slated to direct Mission Impossible IV) and how Pixar, like its parent company, has jumped the shark.
Nature Precedings: A place where scientists can upload papers without peer review and have others read, rate and comment on them.
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Race in the Symbolic Universe 6: Cultural Evolution?
Cross-posted at New Savanna
As I’d originally planned it, this series of posts ended with the one on The Cosby Show (where you can find links to the earlier posts). However, I’ve decided to add one last post in which I briefly think about what it would mean to consider this succession of texts – The Winter’s Tale, Huckleberry Finn, A Passage to India, Light in August, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Cosby Show – as being the product of cultural evolution. That, of course, links this post with my ongoing series on cultural evolution (here, here, and here).
Let me begin by noting that, in a private email, Jeb suggested that we consider Caliban as an instance of the Medieval trope of the Wild Man. That makes sense to me. Now consider my last comment in that discussion, which loosely follows from a conception of cultural evolution:
Continue reading "Race in the Symbolic Universe 6: Cultural Evolution?"Let’s think of literary texts as indicators of the cultural psycho-social dynamics existing in the population in which the texts circulate. Other dynamics may also be circulating in those populations. And, of course, it’s quite possible that there are similar dynamics in populations which pay no attention to these particular texts of interest.
So, on the one hand there’s a certain dynamic of projection in the relationship between Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest, a text that is known to a certain population which we’ll call X. Just what this population X might be, that’s a tricky question, as that particular text has been read far and wide (and acted on the stage) for four centuries or so. Are we interested in that whole population, smeared as it is all over geographical space and historical time? Well, I don’t want to try to come up with a precise answer to that, not here and now. Not so much because this is merely a comment to a blog post, but because I simply don’t know how to do it. Let’s say that we’re particularly interested in the subpopulation of X that existed in early modern England in the early 17th century.
Imagine, then, that we find a similar dynamic in some other text or texts, texts that circulate in some different population Y. Under what circumstances does it make sense to argue for a historical and causal connection between the underlying psycho-social dynamics of population X and population Y? I think, for example, that there is a projective psycho-social dynamic in A Light in August that is similar (but not the same) to the one in The Tempest. Is there some kind of causal connection between the cultural psychodynamics operating in that early modern English population X (in the case of the Shakespeare) and the cultural psychodynamics operating in that mid-20th century American population Y (in the case of the Faulkner)?
Consider a similar, but different question. That early modern population X spoke some version of English. That language is similar, but not the same, as the version of English spoken by the mid-century American population Y. Those versions of English are similar enough that people in the two populations could converse with one another and have some degree of mutual understanding, though there certainly would be difficulties. Is there some causal connection between the English spoken by X and that spoken by Y? If so, how does that causal connection work? There certainly isn’t any direct influence (there’s that word) between early modern England and mid-20th century America. But there is something. What is it and how does it work?
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Friday, May 21, 2010
Mimi on Permatemping
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.
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Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The Funkified Standard Version of the American Dream: The Cosby Show
This is the fifth in a series of five posts dealing with the symbolic deployment of racial difference. The first was about Shakespeare’s Caliban; the second was about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the third dealt with A Passage to India and Light in August; and the fourth was about Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
The works we’ve examined so far—Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Forster’s A Passage to India, Faulkner’s Light in August, and Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit—differ in many ways. What they share is a common division within their symbolic universe. In each case we have the world of white people, who dominate the action, and the world of some non-white Others, who play a critical role in the emotional lives of the dominant whites. This split is at the heart of the social interaction which has, in the United States, given us a twentieth century expressive culture which is, in music and other spheres, driven by the expressive achievements of African Americans. In the twentieth century, many white Americans have, with Eddie Valiant, decided to reclaim their projected desires by learning to act like those Others they had formerly despised.
I now want to consider the The Cosby Show, one of the most successful television shows in recent history. In this show the Others have moved front and center. This is their show, they are the characters we must identify with.
This program created by a stand-up comedian and actor, Bill Cosby, centered on a thoroughly middle class black family, the Huxtables. This family embodied widely shared values and aspirations which we might as well call The American Dream — interesting and remunerative careers for mother (lawyer) and father (physician), attractive children, familial harmony, an elegant home and nice clothes all around. Previous African-American families on prime-time television had been quite different. Fred Sanford (& Son) was a junkman living in the ghetto. George Jefferson (& family) was very successful, but also very insecure in the status attendant upon his material success. He was constantly on the lookout for racial slights. His insecurity may well be closer to reality than the Huxtables’ easy self-assurance, but, remember, TV is mythology, not sociology. The myth is that everyone has a right to what the Huxtables had. That, by the way, these particular people are black, simply puts African-Americans at the center of this myth.
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Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Wassup? Review Copies
For the past few months Valve authors have been getting occasional offers of review copies of fiction, though we rarely, if ever, review books, much less fiction. (Book events are 1) non-fiction, and 2) rare.) Ah, but there is Adam, and Rohan.
I was wondering how this goes with other blogs. For example, there are blogs that review lots of fiction; I’d assume, but don’t really know, that they’ve been getting review copies since the beginning of time, or at any rate, since several months after the birth of the blogosphere.
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