Cognitive Fictions (review)

Looking at James Clerk Maxwell's quadratic equations, Heinrich Hertz confessed that he could not "help feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and a true intelligence. They know more than we do and more than those who discovered them; they will give out more information than has ever been put into them." Although Joseph Tabbi does not invoke Hertz, he argues similarly that literary forms are both self-organizing and intelligent—or, rather, that they are becoming parts of systems that are.

The concept of self-organizing, decentralized information systems can be traced at least as far back as Adam Smith's invisible hand, which operated by following discernible rules. Language, for example, is a self-organizing system, because its grammatical and syntactical conventions both resist and permit change through what systems theorists call neighbor or network interaction, pattern recognition, and feedback. Implicit in Darwinian theory, the power of systemic evolution toward equilibria of stability and novelty now attracts students of culture.

The trendiest articulation is the best-selling Emergence (2001), by Steven Johnson, who details how discrete units (slime mold cells, ants, urban neighborhoods) aggregate or self-organize from the bottom up into complex wholes. Tabbi's inspiration is Niklas Luhmann, the current 700-pound gorilla of European media theory, who merges McLuhan and Leibniz in a vision of "autopoesis," or systemic self-creation, arising from connected channels. Predictions of altered human consciousness typical of new communications technologies have thus been made more extravagant by media convergence (remember Teilhard de Chardin's "nöosphere"?). For Luhmann, the human mind increasingly maps onto and manifests itself in hypermediated networks. Because Tabbi wishes to rescue literature from irrelevance, he believes that "print narrative" must also "recognize itself, at the moment when it is forced to consider its own technological obsolescence, as a figuration of mind within the new medial ecology" (p. xi).

As electronic technologies convert print into hypertext, they expose the self-organizing capabilities of metaliterature, a category that includes both fiction and its criticism. Whether print narratives—or the larger mediated systems that Luhmann and Tabbi believe subsume them—can also exhibit cognition is more problematic. At issue is whether media networks function like neural networks. Tabbi defines cognition as originating beyond naming, as a preverbal process that cannot be inferred from words themselves but which operate prior to representation. The messages processed by media, however, are nothing if not representational.

Ascribing cognition to fiction does extricate literature from its current critical cul-de-sac: If language as a symbolic system can refer ultimately only to itself, as poststructuralists insist, then fiction can be no more than an artifact, unless it somehow thinks for itself. But positing a consciousness that functions at so deep a level requires highly speculative assumptions about informational transactions such as shareability and repeatability among nodes, circuits, and strange loops and attractors. It also reduces roles for writers: authors of fiction must find a detached viewpoint from which to apprehend local and global ensembles of information, restrict their own contributions to notations on character, genre, and sensibilities, and find their "re-entry points" (Luhmann's term) in order to demonstrate limited agency within the system.

To support his thesis, Tabbi offers analyses of postmodern authors grappling with the experience of consciousness as redistributed by mediated systems. These range from Thomas Pynchon, famous for his dichotomy of "paranoia" (the belief that everything is connected) and "anti-paranoia" (the fear that nothing is connected), to William Gibson, the title of whose Pattern Recognition (2002) alludes to self-organization, there called "apophenia" (the perception of meaningful connection in unrelated things). Tabbi also examines the fiction of David Markson, Richard Powers, Paul Auster, Harry Mathews, and Lynne Tillman as among those experimenting with media transformations. Attributing collective intelligence even to the Worldwide Web, the largest human-made, self-organizing information system, is doubtless premature. But it is not too soon to...