Darwin and Dickens

A new breed of literary crtitics is using evolution to explain literature--and to challenge intellectual orthodoxy.

Nick Gillespie from the November 1998 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

The poststructuralist position on science essentially boils down to a variation on Freud's famous rhetorical question, "Does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology?" That is, science and the rational analysis it attempts are not qualitatively different from other sources of knowledge. Indeed, contrary to its grand claims to "universal" truth, science is merely one subjective form among others. What's more, like any other system, it only makes sense within its own set of self-confirming rules.

For poststructuralists, scientific inquiry cannot lead to anything approaching "objective" reality, either because no such thing exists or because, if it does, it is ultimately unknowable since the language we use to discuss it is inherently distorting and inadequate. In Derrida's famous phrase, "There is nothing outside the text"; that is, there is no way to get beyond language, to reach a vantage point from which we can verify or refute our basic systems of knowledge. "There is no meta-language," proclaimed Jacques Lacan, another major poststructuralist thinker, "for it is necessary that all so-called meta-language be presented to you with language."

What About Antibiotics?

When coupled with the work of the hugely influential French thinker Michel Foucault, such insights lead to an extreme conceptual relativ-ism. Since no theory is objectively "truer" than another, the dominance of one theory over another is seen as less a function of that theory's explanatory power and more an artifact of intimidation and social control.

In an ambivalent homage to Francis Bacon (usually vilified as the apotheosis of the desire to understand something only to control it), poststructuralists equate claims to "knowledge" with the exercise of power; indeed, Foucault took to writing about "power-knowledge." In such an analysis, Enlightenment "science" and "rationality," far from liberating society from superstition and stultifying tradition, are simply new ways of gaining social or political control. In works such as The Birth of The Clinic (1963) and Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault argued that the rise of modern medicine and progressive penal reform hardly represented the systematic, humane improvements their defenders claimed. Instead, they represented little more than new, increasingly efficient and insidious strategies of domination and repression. Indeed, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault suggests that the Catholic Inquisition--usually cited as a model of anti-Enlightenment inquiry--actually provided modern science with "its operating model." Both, he wrote, essentially express "an authoritarian search for a truth."

The upshot of such thinking is a skepticism toward all systems of knowledge, especially those, such as science, that make claims to objectivity. As Duke University's Stanley Fish has written, "The givens of any field of activity--including the facts it commands, the procedures it trusts in, and the values it expresses and extends--are socially and politically constructed, are fashioned by man rather than delivered by God or Nature." Hence, poststructuralism's emphasis on the "social construction of reality" and its attempts to "denaturalize" linguistic, social, and political practices--to show that any given system's foundations are ultimately built on sand.

Such moves often have considerable rhetorical and explanatory power. For instance, in Madness and Civilization (1961) Foucault's discussion of the rise of mental institutions in modern Europe, while historically suspect in many regards, nonetheless draws attention to how definitions of "insanity" and "mental illness" can function as ways of stigmatizing and controlling political dissent or other forms of unpopular behavior (an argument with significant parallels to Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness, also published in 1961). Similarly, poststructuralists are undeniably right that mistaken and mendacious appeals to "God or nature"--and science itself--have often underwritten all sorts of repressive policies, ranging from slavery to denying women the right to vote to imprisoning homosexuals.

At the same time, poststructuralists pay a high price for maintaining what detractors refer to as "dogmatic skepticism" and what proponents celebrate as "radical subversion." "It is now the received wisdom that Western science and technology are merely hegemonic cultural constructions," writes Joseph Carroll. But "if those who propound these views were to take their propositions seriously enough to live by them, and not merely write books propounding them, the propositions themselves would soon disappear along with the observers....People who make such airy claims about science...still have their children vaccinated...use antibiotics, visit the dentist regularly, and willingly undergo surgical procedures designed to save their lives." The viability of such methods, Carroll underscores, does not depend on the beneficiary's belief in or understanding of the medical model.

In a poststructuralist context, then, the evolutionary critics--what with their references to "biological modes of thought," "primate evidence," and "scientific rationality"--are not simply slightly out of step: They are beyond the pale, beholden as they are to spuriously "objective" facts, "transparent" truths, and "transcendent" positions.

Critical Upstarts

Interestingly, the evolutionary critics (and the science they rely on) are quick to underscore the provisional nature of knowledge and recognize the ways in which social and cultural factors can muddy analysis. Modern science, while pursuing an ideal of complete understanding, acknowledges only partial success as inevitable. A similar sense of what might be called epistemological humility pervades the work of the evolutionary critics.

In a discussion of the scientific method, Carroll draws a sharp distinction between the turn-of-the-century views of Leslie Stephen and later work by Karl Popper. Where Stephen believed in "accepted and ultimate truths," writes Carroll, Popper held that "all ideas are necessarily provisional conjectures and that none of them attains the status of absolute and final truth....Popper rightly rejects the naive positivist belief that there can be ideas that have no `hypothetical element,' that consist wholly of `fact,' and that are thus `ultimate truths' that need never be modified." In a similar manner, Storey writes, "The `truth of things' in all of its wholeness and baldness must forever elude the human mind."

In their emphatic rejection of traditional, dualist conceptions such as "nature vs. nurture" and "genetic vs. environmental determinism," the evolutionary critics display something like the poststructuralist penchant for showing how apparent oppositions collapse under close scrutiny. Certainly, they have little use for the exclusive categories of "nature" and "nurture." As Storey writes, "There is no separating the `innate' and the `learned.' Learning...can be carried out only by an organism biologically prepared to learn, and the `innate' can manifest itself only if environmental conditions allow. ...Culture is both an expression and a critique of what the species...is biologically disposed to do." And as the evolutionary critics are quick to point out, "the natural"--an empirical category--bears no necessary connection to "the good"--a moral one.

None of this diminishes the evolutionary critics' vast differences with poststructuralism, chief among them the idea that science differs from other forms of discourse (especially in the requirement that it create falsifiable hypotheses) and the ability of human beings to gain knowledge of a world that exists beyond linguistic or cultural conventions. Such notions run completely counter to the philosophical anti-realism of poststructural thought and its unwillingness to acknowledge a world in which human beings have been marked by evolutionary processes.

The "Constructivists" Self-Destruct