“Cog it out”: Joyce on the Brain

He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.

—Ulysses 17.1012–15

I

Consciousness studies today has become a deeply divided discourse. The first division lies within the problem of disciplinary and discursive territoriality, which in some instances approaches chauvinism: Philosophers may claim seniority, having mulled over the meaning of thought throughout—and even as—recorded history, while incomparably better-funded cognitive scientists can approach this last unexplored frontier with the swagger underwritten by split atoms, decoded genomes, modern miracles. This situation underscores the caution that every conscious person is an authority on consciousness. It is a caution worth bearing in mind, though perhaps overstated, because one could also say that every breathing person is an authority on oxygen. The second division lies in what are generally reckoned to be two kinds of approaches to consciousness, dualism and materialism. The former view, most famously hypothesized by Descartes, absolutely cleaves mind from matter, while the latter view suggests that the hunk of electrified meat lodged in my skull is inseparable from the processes by which I formulate and write this sentence. These are approaches, not models, and very wide-open approaches at that. Indeed, proposed materialist models for consciousness can seem to differ as much as the two approaches themselves do. Finally, there is a third, cataclysmic division: Among these sects, both philosophers and scientists, dualists and materialists alike, there are those who believe that consciousness is knowable and those who firmly hold that it is unknowable, that the workings of consciousness are precisely that which consciousness cannot fathom.

What has this to do with literature, let alone James Joyce? Nothing at all, if one believes Raymond Tallis, who in a Times Literary Supplement screed entitled “The Neuroscience Delusion” rejects the entire notion of “neuroaesthetics” (he does not seem to be familiar with the term “cognitive poetics,” but that’s probably just as well).¹ He rightly points out that neuroscience is very, very far from a fait accompli—though of course that is tautological because scientific inquiry is understood by definition to be an ongoing pursuit—but he also assumes that its purported findings and developments provide an a priori foundation not only for the recent interest among authors and scholars in cognitive research but for any kind of indication or suggestion as to what consciousness is or how it works that might be discerned in literature. Here is how he concludes:

Neuroaesthetics is wrong about the present state of neuroscience: we are not yet able to explain human consciousness, even less articulate self-consciousness as expressed in the reading and writing of poetry. It is wrong about our experience of literature. And it is wrong about humanity.²

Tallis hammers out an overture to the first division I mentioned: Human consciousness is one thing, literature is another, and, strangely, “humanity” may be something else altogether. I’d like to note in passing the oddity of the phrasing “articulate self-consciousness as expressed,” which I’ll return to later. Although Tallis rejects the use of neuroscientific ideas in interpretations of poetry—in the same way that he rejects any theoretical approach or “fashions,” as he calls them, in a totally wicked use of retro-80s reactionary lingo³—he evidently cannot even imagine any other sort of contact between these discourses and forms.

This outright balking at even the idea of cooperative discussion and exchange between literary studies and what is emphatically branded neuroscience is reminiscent of how Alan Sokal, in explicating every joke and jape of his infamous 1996 hoax essay, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” ultimately reveals his own bias not merely against inaccuracy but concerning form.⁴ In a footnote that states, “The intimate relations between quantum mechanics and the mind-body problem are discussed by Goldstein,” Sokal offers this concise disparagement: “Goldstein’s book on the mindbody problem … is an enjoyable novel” (219, 262). For Sokal...