Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 11 Number 2, August 2010
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Schleifer, Ronald. Intangible Materialism: The Body,
Scientific Knowledge and the Power of Language (Minneapolis and London: U of
Minnesota Press, 2009). 243 pages, ISBN 978-0-8166-4468-1, pbk., $25.00
Reviewed by
Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA
Ronald Schleifer is a professor of English and an adjunct at the College of Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. Intangible Materialism is about the interconnection of these two fields. Medicine appears above all via the neurosciences and the growing evidence they provide of links between (among others) language and motor centers in the brain. However, Schleifer’s book is more broadly based than that and provides in chapters one and two an engaging overview of the growing area of common concerns between the hard sciences (in this case predominantly physics) and the humanities (notably semiotics and other linguistic and text-based fields), connected by evolutionary biology. Schleifer interlinks material from these three broad areas in order to establish a set of homologically linked, nested, hermeneutic structures that build from basic physical reality via biological developments to a semiotic superstructure. The latter, however – and this is Schleifer’s key contention – remains an integral part of a materialist world view. Schleifer draws on many notable scholars – from naturalists to physicists, semioticians, cultural historians and theorists, including Charles Darwin, Erwin Schrödinger, C. S. Peirce as well as Fritjof Capra, S. J. Gould, Clifford Geertz, and A. J. Greimas, to mention only the best known among them. However, it is E. O. Wilson’s 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, that provides Schleifer with the starting point for his own project which, in his words, is to “articulate a global sense of materialism in relation to … systems of mechanical analysis, … historical explanations of natural selection, … and semiotic understandings of … the symbolic” (xiii). Significant common ground between these three venues of physical, biological, and semiotic inquiry “avoids the opposition between matter and spirit” and aims to “articulate a way of understanding human experience,” including literature, with “its sensuousness, its constant recognition of our situation in the world, and its creation and instantiations of laws of meaning for cognition and experience” (xix).
The first two chapters discuss findings in the sciences that can be used in support of a comprehensive materialism that includes the “negative science of semiotics.” This approach grounds even language materially. Chapters three, four, and five then provide examples: Tourette’s syndrome in chapter three links (pathological) language production to certain features of poetry and points out the deep rootedness of language in bodily processes. The hand in chapter four serves to illustrate the gestural (as opposed to the vocal) origin of language and emphasizes above all the indexical function of hand gestures, “pointing the finger deletes the ‘here’ of communication to the ‘there’ of the fire” (116 [in gestural support of a statement such as “There is a fire!”]). This chapter also draws on brain structure to reveal common ground of gesture and language: the predominant right-handedness of humans has its roots in “the dominance of the left brain, which is also associated with language” (113). Finally, pain in the last chapter, especially in its uses in religion, connects the physical body via a specific semiotics to the spiritual. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 1985, is one of Schleifer’s main references here and emphasizes the “objectlessness, the complete absence of referential content” as a characteristic of physical pain that “almost prevents it from being rendered in language” or “objectified in any form, material or verbal” (133). The objectlessness of pain emphasizes the body to the point of complete exclusion of the outside world – for instance in religious pain rituals, such as self-flagellation – and thereby opens a path for entry of an otherworldly force – the divine. Schleifer contrasts this physiological base for the imagination of the divine with the “’cultural’ semiotics case of religion” (134) and instead connects it to another physical-semiotic phenomenon – phantom pain. The book contains both a bibliography and a detailed index.
Schleifer agrees with Wilson’s basic proposition of a “’single parsimonious system’ of ‘organized knowledge’ that is materialist, secular, and unified” (36) but criticizes its “’reduction’ to mechanistic physical description as the ultimate mode of explanation” (38). Wilson, a biologist, assumes too easily that “the levels of organization” of the phenomenal world into “physical/molecular,” “biological/environmental,” and “human meanings and understanding” are “continuous and that movements across them are easy and reversible” (39). Schleifer’s book, in essence, provides a correction to this model of nested levels by siding with Capra who notes that “a comprehensive theory of living systems lies in the synthesis of … the study of substance (or structure) and the study of form (or pattern)” (41).
Schleifer’s main tool for analyzing the three levels is homology, the key linking device that allows for the description of the universe of human experience as contiguous and materialist. In the process, Schleifer generates homologous tripartite sets of concepts that link the material-physical with the biological-evolutionary and the hermeneutic-semiotic, as for instance in matter – life – consciousness; physics – evolution – semiotics (each with its specific associated hermeneutic functions of prediction – postdiction – speculation); or icon – index – symbol (the Peircian terms). Physics and biology (the life sciences) are positive inquiries (the first creating order out of disorder, the second order out of order, but the last, semiotics, is “the negative science” (title of chapter two) and creates disorder out of order, mostly through multifunctional indeterminacy of some of its elements but largely by its ability to manipulate time (tense) and, hence, to create contrary-to-factness and facilitating, qua narrative logic, a “synthesis of the heterogeneous” (31).
Schleifer spends most time on the semiotic-linguistic phenomena but drops en passant also intriguing hints (that support his materialist argument) about key historical shifts in the understanding of “facts” which, since the onset of modern scientific inquiry, have moved far beyond simple material-observable givens to become imbued with concepts and theoretical and semiotics-based meanings just as modernist art transcends its materiality and objective qualities in favor of conceptual and theoretical-critical functions. Referencing Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (1998), Schleifer notes that modern facts “are not necessarily observed particulars” but more often “systematically ‘modeled and thus exist at one remove from what the eye can see’” (11). The mechanism that connects pure facts and their accompanying conceptual halo is information, a key link in the chain from physical to intangible materiality. As early as the 1960s Norbert Wiener already argued for the inclusion of information in materialism besides matter or energy (6).
Intangible Materialism is an ambitious and broadly philosophically and theoretically supported contribution to the expanding intersection of language, literature, semiotics, and the cognitive and neurosciences. It contextualizes more narrowly focused studies such as Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read (the title of her book, 2006; not referenced by Schleifer) or Patrick Hogan’s The Mind and its Stories, 2003 (referenced) and continues work around the broad concept of the “embodied mind” (subtitle of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, 1999; not mentioned by Schleifer). It is an important contribution to meshing semiotic and life science inquiries.