Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the Power of Language by Ronald Schleifer (review)

One predictable move within the science and religion debate that overflows public-intellectual forums is for the defenders of “faith” to accuse the scientific worldview, if such a tidy unity is even tenable, of materialism. In Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, Catholic physicist Stephen Barr offers a typical example of this, what he calls “so-called scientific materialism”: it is the “basic tenet . . . that nothing exists except matter, and that everything in the world must therefore be the result of the strict mathematical laws of physics and blind chance” (p. 1).¹ Framed in this way, such reductionism does indeed seem ill-suited to the heterogeneous complexity of our biological world and its conscious and conscientious human inhabitants. With the straw man duly hung from the rafters, Barr proceeds to pummel it into dust.

Ronald Schleifer’s Intangible Materialism is a compelling rejoinder, noteworthy for both its breadth and rigor, to such reductions of materialism to “mechanical or physicalist reduction”—to mere laws of physics and blind chance (p. 6). Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines that includes evolutionary theory, neurobiology, cognitive linguistics, philosophies of language, mind, and science, musicology, information theory, literary criticism, and, crucially, semiotics in the traditions of Charles Sanders Peirce and Algirdas Gremais, Schleifer presents a thesis that winningly complicates the simplistic “opposition between matter and spirit” that is characteristic of dualistic accounts of human consciousness—accounts that trace their intellectual pedigree back to René Descartes and that find contemporary proponents in the likes of David Chalmers and E. O. Wilson. “[We] can talk usefully, scientifically, and above all, materially,” Schleifer writes, “about three levels of understanding: the positive science of physics, the ‘environmental’ sciences (or context-dependent interactions) of biology and natural selection, and what I call . . . the ‘negative science’ of semiotics” (p. 47). Adapting a vocabulary from complexity theory, Schleifer claims that these three epistemological frameworks constitute a “nonlinear hierarchical nesting of levels” where, at the base, “physics creates order from disorder,” while “the natural selections of biology and environmental science” (in addition to second-generation cognitive sciences) create “order from order,” while at the top “semiotics creates disorder from order” (pp. 46, 50). For Schleifer, this tripartite categorization “is precisely what allows the possibility of conceiving of materialism beyond physicalism—to conceive of an intangible materialism—especially in relation to ‘nested’ stages of complexity” (p. 11; emphasis in original).

His argument draws on the work of Erwin Schrödinger, Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, John Holland, and Douglas Hofstadter, among others, to delineate the emergence of biological and cognitive organization out of the physical environment (order from order). But the originality in Schleifer’s account of intangible materialism resounds in the move from biological systems to semiotic systems, the kinds of systems that can be employed to understand the dynamics of human culture—in particular, literary culture. Schleifer asserts that “[w]hat semiotics teaches us—and what the elaborate and perhaps defining example of semiotics, literature, also teaches—is that phenomena can be fully conceived within a physical-material environment and still possess the effect of intangibility” (p. xxv). Unlike physics, which organizes wholes from parts, or biology, which treats wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts, for Schleifer, semiotics “deals with systematic ambiguity—or better, systematic undecidability—in which the ‘part’ is alternatively simply an accident and thus not a part at all; in which, that is, a so-called part is alternatively external as well as internal to the whole” (p. 57; emphasis in original). Because semiotics emphasizes this “systemic undecidability” of language, he calls it a “negative science,” a science that can account for the “orderly disorder of meaning—from the mechanical physics of mouth to adaptive smiles [to] ironies of what mouths do not quite say” (pp. 57, 69).

One of the reasons why Schleifer sees literature as perhaps the defining example of semiotics is...