A Quiet Manifesto: A Review of Jonathan Kramnick, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness

Literary studies has recently seen a sharp uptick in interest in all things broadly "empirical:" from the influx of cognitive approaches (Lisa Zunshine, Alan Palmer) to sociological methods (Heather Love) to science studies (Bruno Latour). This scholarship attempts, on the one hand, to walk back the discipline's longstanding skepticism of empirical approaches as theory-laden political positions in disguise (a poststructuralist legacy) without, on the other hand, naïvely embracing the merely given. Jonathan Kramnick's new book, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness, weighs the stakes of empirical approaches for literary criticism, and expertly cashes out a version of this approach in particular readings. Broadly conceived, the book does two things. Its first third assesses the potential for literary study to intervene in extra-disciplinary debates. To do so, it combats various reductionisms—those of many of Kramnick's empiricist forebears—that would situate the literary as little more than a data set for the methodologies of other disciplines. Against this, he proposes a version of form that presents the subject matter (or content) of other disciplines in a unique way, allowing literature to reframe those disciplines' questions and thereby make new answers possible. The rest of the book fleshes out this new formalism by reading a clutch of literary works, from the eighteenth century to the present day, with the help of recent cognitive-scientific work on embodied perception. These works present, at the level of form, a picture of mind as enmeshed within rather than floating above the world. The book's primary achievement, to my eye, is that it advocates a rapprochement between literature and cognitive science that, unlike other recent calls for this sort of détente, preserves the special status of the literary artifact (as form) without romanticizing it.

Most centrally, the book aims to carve out the precise niche of literary contribution to two current questions in the philosophy and science of mind. The first concerns consciousness. In Kramnick's telling, there are two basic accounts of the origin of conscious experience. In the first, consciousness is an emergent property of inert, unfeeling matter. In the second—called panpsychism—emergence is unnecessary because matter already enfolds consciousness as an inherent property of the universe at large. This debate links up with the second question, a related puzzle about perception: is consciousness ultimately an internal "bringing the world to mind" as mental representation, thus prioritizing mediation and skepticism? Or is it a direct "[reaching] out" (10) to things in the world as they lie and as they invite the perceiver, like a kind of touch? The latter answer to this second question forms the book's moral heart. Kramnick champions "direct perception" (8) as "ecophenomenological" (3) or a "dissident [strain] of empiricism" (9) that brokers mind and world without positing either as the determining ground of the other.¹ Because direct perception dissolves the internalism of the representational view, mind has a commonsensical access to world, and yet, because that world is still phenomenal—an "affordance" (5) enabling certain kinds of action for certain creatures with certain physical makeups—we aren't forced to do away with the subject altogether. The world, in this view, invites action rather than contemplation—an ecological engagement whose watchword for Kramnick is "skill" (6). ²

One could object that this account courts scientific reductionism by positing a way of life grounded in a morphological feature of the human body, but Kramnick parries this attack through an account of literary form. For Kramnick, literature helps historicize our perceptual apparatus by encoding, in its formal features, various stances about both the nature of perception and the kinds of environments that prompt it to act in different, contingent ways: "The emphasis on motion, skill, and environment broadens the discussion from the ostensibly unchanging nature of the brain to the historically variable conditions of circumstance" (6). If direct perception syncs up mind and world, and world is historical, then mind is historical too and literature...