Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS

3 Thirds and Wings

3 Thirds and Wings ฀ If language is of฀the฀world, like galaxies and ecosystems, this means it participates฀in฀what฀it฀represents, though how privileged it may be either as a representative or as a participant remains to be seen. “Always part of the totality it represents” is how deconstructionist literary theorist Paul de Man characterized the operation of a symbol (191), at least as it had been conceived by the romantics in the late eighteenth century. De Man argued that the romantic doctrine of the symbol was a kind of philosophical bad faith, the retreat to a comforting wholism in order to avoid confronting the harsher realities of various kinds of alienation (most broadly, the alienation of “being in language”) and of historical limits (most broadly, the predicament of “being in time”). Of course, even Coleridge recognized his own self-aggrandizement and bad faith in imagining the lines of his poetry to be like the strings of a harp caressed by a divine breeze and “all of animated nature” in turn to be nothing but “organic Harps diversely framed.” The critique of too easy wholism is still useful and necessary: the whole is not necessarily static or transcendent or determining or determinate or, perhaps most important, even singular. The฀whole฀is฀part฀of฀the฀parts—that is,it may participate in the system without any necessary privilege.But if deconstructionist theory threw out the baby of participation with the bathwater of totality, subsequent cultural studies theorists have worked to reimagine participation฀without฀totality and without absolutizing or rigidifying the separateness of language from the world (which can function as a comforting retreat in its own right). The kinship of language and the world also compromises the doctrine 01-05.1-30_Livi.indd฀฀฀11 9/6/05฀฀฀10:38:27฀AM known as realism. At the heart of realism is the belief in an ultimately de- finitive description of the world, a single “God’s-eye view” toward which we should strive, even if we can only approach it. A more pluralist or “promiscuous ” realism (as John Dupré describes it) proposes instead that “there are countless legitimate, objectively grounded ways of classifying objects in the world” (18). Though opening up realist dogma considerably, this kind of pluralism still seems to overstate the separation of language (“ways of classifying objects”) from the world, only to overstate in turn its attachment (“grounding”) to the world.All realisms, one might say, tend to rely at some level on a kind of antinaturalism, defined here as the belief in a radical or categorical discontinuity between language and nature.In the broader sense, such antinaturalism is a kind of exceptionalism about humanity, and in this sense it may derive from a Western religious tradition that situates humanity as categorically different from the fallen world it inhabits and can come to transcend. Naturalism, on the other hand, can stress instead a continuity of language and the world, or, to put it more accurately, naturalism insists only that the continuities and discontinuities between language and the world are not necessarily any more or less radical than those among other kinds of entities in the world. For those who like official-sounding names, the position being advanced here could be called antirealist฀naturalism. Realism, as I have suggested, tends to efface or disavow the act of representation in order to pose as a transparent window or a perfectly reflecting mirror on the world; it downplays the medium in favor of the message. To start,one might say that antirealism (as I am using the term here) emphasizes instead the refractivity of language. The realist who dreams that the articulations of language could correspond perfectly to the “joints of nature”—dead words nailed to dead things—could only be a kind of butcher, of language and of nature.Instead,antirealism emphasizes language not as skeletal but as muscular,as performative,as able to make things happen precisely because it straddles the “joints” of things. But antirealist naturalism also makes a claim about the world, not just about language: it is a refractive and a muscular world, a world in which, finally, things don’t correspond perfectly to other things or฀to฀themselves. Their noncorrespondence to themselves, one might say, comes from their being creatures of relationships. Even (or especially) the simplest or most elemental things—like gravity or quarks or what have you—are not given but have coevolved, have been produced and are sustained by...