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"Cultural studies has reinvigorated the literary category of 'context.'"

"Meaning is context-bound....context is boundless; there is no determining in advance what might count as relevant" (Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction)

David-- I've gotten your book, and hope to get to it soon.

In the interim...

I've found your adding a historical dimension to our conversation very helpful, especially your focusing on "the epistemic break that occurs around the time of the seventeenth-century discovery of scientific method," and your suggesting that "this shift created a new, anti-rhetorical paradigm of transparent communication."

I was trained in 19th century American literary studies, and continue--through many changes--to teach the big books that first enticed me into the field--Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Emerson's Essays...none of these assume the transparency of language, and I think my whole career has presumed its opacity, its always "standing-in-for" that which eludes us, its insistently reminding us of that elusiveness.

What I've learned, from hanging out with the scientists @ Bryn Mawr over the past five or six years, is (what seems to me) their much more naive presumption about how language (should!) work: calling a spade a spade, thinking a rose is a rose is a rose...

But it is also (curiously?) the case that it is in conversations with these scientists--especially in the Working Group on Emergence--that I came to understand the degree to which every story falls short, needing to be extended and exceeded by its interpretation.

...how we make "meaning" as we try to bridge the gap between what we know and what we do not understand, between past and present, between present and future: how our stories are the explanations we "make up" to explain how we got from A to B, how we might have gotten to B from A.

The task here is neither discovering the past or dictating the future, but rather making use of the past to create something for the future. Following the logic of emergence, students need not worry when confronted with a poem they don't "understand," since their task is not to "get it right," but rather to contribute to this process of exploration.

Strikingly--and I think this may be the spot where we "rub" against one another?--the process is facilitated by the inexactness with which we hear one another's accounts. Recognizing the productivity of our inability to hear exactly what one another says constitutes a fundamental revision of one of our primary myths about what is needed to facilitate human interaction.

In the Genesis story of the building of the Tower of Babel,

the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language...and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do....let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

In the Biblical version, the people are powerless to act without a common language, and the building of the tower ceases. But emergence offers a contemporary counter-story and alternative explanation: lacking a common language, people have a means of discovering things they didn't know. Their gap in understanding is itself productive of new meaning. Paul wrote about this in Two Cultures:

In a class session devoted to analysis of some poems...the conversation turned to the question of differences between "languages". If indeed there were highly unambiguous "languages" (mathematics, as well as, for example, computer programming languages), how come ordinary "language" was invariably highly "ambiguous" in interpretation (so much so that poetry was a legitimate art form and "literary criticism" a legitimate profession, with a method not dissimilar from "science")? What emerged from the discussion was the idea that ordinary language is not "supposed" to be unambiguous, because its primary function is not in fact to transmit from sender to receiver a particular, fully defined "story". Ordinary language is instead "designed" (by biological and cultural evolution) to perform a more sophisticated, bidirectional communication function. A story is told by the sender not to simply transmit the story but also, and equally importantly, to elicit information from/about the receiver, to find out what is otherwise unknowable by the sender: what ideas/thoughts/perspectives the receiver has about the general subject of the story. An unambiguous transmission/story calls for nothing from the receiver other than what the transmitter already knows; an ambiguous transmission/story links teller/transmitter and audience/receiver in a conversation (and, ideally, in a dialectic from which new things emerge)

As I see it, the use-value of literary criticism, of the literature it interprets, and of language more generally, emerges in these transitional moments or interstitial places where negotiation is necessary--and where (therefore) meanings need to be constructed. We see this in the evolution of new words, new literary forms, new literary interpretations, and in re-making the meaning of old ones of each of these.

Each time a new story is told, at each of these levels, it identifies--in ways that are unpredictable beforehand--other tales not yet articulated. New stories get generated in an emergent process, as interactions in the environment leave traces (in literature) that are continuously picked up (in literary theory) and re-combined in new configurations. Literary analysis makes new stories out of the stories we have preserved; the most useful of those are continuously generative of that which surprises.

Okay--given that that's where I'm coming from...

particularly striking to me, in your report on the MLA session on cultural studies pedagogy, was the notion that what you are after is getting students to "surrender their own frameworks for understanding." I certainly want students to suspend their own frameworks and try to enter others, but my goals have everything to do with making something new in history, not with going back and settling there: I'm much more interested in moving from familiar to unfamiliar, not in "reproducing" what we've been told, but rather to make something NEW.

I understand the need for constructing frameworks that enable discussion to take place among students different in capacity and preparation; and join in your attempts to get them to extend their insights thereby...Once you made it clear that "shared understanding" is a "rhetorical platform that student may use to develop their own insights," rather than a final destination, I realized that we are not only literally but pedagogically on the same page.

And yet...

If the "emphasis on historicization... leads us away from the question of present political significance," why are we looking back instead of forward? What is your idea about what education should/might be doing?