Cognitive Science and Irony
I usually hate these sorts of thing, but the Stanford Humanities Center had a great conference on Friday on cognitive science and literature. I unfortunately could only attend the morning session on irony, which featured Herb Clark (Psychology, Stanford), Joshua Landy (French, Stanford), and Elaine Scarry (English, Harvard) and was chaired by Lanier Anderson (Philosophy, Stanford). The discussion largely focused on Clark's 1984 paper (with Gerrig), "Irony as Pretense," which argues, against the so-called "mentioning" theory of irony, that when X is being ironic, he is pretending to be X* speaking to Y*, a hypothetical conversant who may or may not be present. Irony thus becomes a form of pretense, a dramaturgical critique by X of X*. I googled Clark's paper and discovered a 2007 book Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader, a collection of papers on cognitive science research on irony.
I came to Stanford thinking I'd be working on the relationship between cognitive science and literature, but then decided it would be too difficult to do a decent dissertation on that relationship unless I seriously engaged with the cognitive science literature. Complicating matters, most English departments are very strongly historical in their orientation and institutional organization, implicitly demanding that grad students specialize in particular periods and authors if they hope to find jobs. The result of these pressures is that even the most theoretical dissertations are grounded in specific periods and historical horizons, which is not necessarily a bad thing. And all things considered, I would rather not have to conduct empirical research into how our brains process literature because the necessary tendency of such research is to quickly abstract away from particular examples to cognitive structures and processes. So I moved on to other interests, first to the genre of postmodern encyclopedic fiction (Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Silko, Wallace) and then finally to postironic fiction, which I continue to work on. But it's nice to be led back, via postirony, to cognitive science. I want to try to make use of this literature in the diss., even if only in a peripheral way.
Cognitive Science and Irony
I usually hate these sorts of thing, but the Stanford Humanities Center had a great conference on Friday on cognitive science and literature. I unfortunately could only attend the morning session on irony, which featured Herb Clark (Psychology, Stanford), Joshua Landy (French, Stanford), and Elaine Scarry (English, Harvard) and was chaired by Lanier Anderson (Philosophy, Stanford). The discussion largely focused on Clark's 1984 paper (with Gerrig), "Irony as Pretense," which argues, against the so-called "mentioning" theory of irony, that when X is being ironic, he is pretending to be X* speaking to Y*, a hypothetical conversant who may or may not be present. Irony thus becomes a form of pretense, a dramaturgical critique by X of X*. I googled Clark's paper and discovered a 2007 book Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader, a collection of papers on cognitive science research on irony.
I came to Stanford thinking I'd be working on the relationship between cognitive science and literature, but then decided it would be too difficult to do a decent dissertation on that relationship unless I seriously engaged with the cognitive science literature. Complicating matters, most English departments are very strongly historical in their orientation and institutional organization, implicitly demanding that grad students specialize in particular periods and authors if they hope to find jobs. The result of these pressures is that even the most theoretical dissertations are grounded in specific periods and historical horizons, which is not necessarily a bad thing. And all things considered, I would rather not have to conduct empirical research into how our brains process literature because the necessary tendency of such research is to quickly abstract away from particular examples to cognitive structures and processes. So I moved on to other interests, first to the genre of postmodern encyclopedic fiction (Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Silko, Wallace) and then finally to postironic fiction, which I continue to work on. But it's nice to be led back, via postirony, to cognitive science. I want to try to make use of this literature in the diss., even if only in a peripheral way.
ALA William Gibson Panel
Some dissertation-related news. I'm going to be on a panel dedicated to William Gibson at this year's ALA conference. My paper, based on the trendspotter chapter of my dissertation, is on Pattern Recognition.
Title: The Brand as Cognitive Map in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition
This paper analyzes the figure of the coolhunter in William Gibson's eighth novel, Pattern Recognition, and argues that Gibson uses literary style toward an ethical end: to invite his readers to embrace the ethos of the coolhunter. Modeled on but not identical to Cayce Pollard's "violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace," Gibson's proposed coolhunting ethos treats the brand name as a cognitive map of the multinational economic supply chains that underlie the glossy surface of the brand.
The need for such a mapping exists because, across many industries, the brand has been transformed from a way of marking cattle or insuring product quality into a piece of intellectual property valuable in and of itself. As brand ownership and the cultural dimensions of economic life have become more profitable, multinational corporations have increasingly outsourced less profitable areas of production overseas. Consequently, the connection between any particular brand and the supply chains supporting that brand are concealed within a global maze of anonymous subcontractors.
Gibson's coolhunting aesthetic seeks to transform the reader's relationship to the "logo-maze," to reconnect the free-floating brand to the hidden supply chains that make brands profitable in the first place. I relate this project of relinking to what Bruce Robbins has called the "sweatshop sublime" and to popular notions of ethical consumption. Ethical consumer movements have sought to embed a concern for invidious "externalities"—such as the abuse of factory workers and environmental destruction—into the endogenous preferences of the individual consumer, usually through the medium of price. I argue that Gibson's coolhunter is a modified type of ethical consumer, a figure able to map economic systems onto personal meanings as meanings, turning the behavior of the market not into a more just price point at the shopping mall but rather into a new aesthetic sensibility.
ALA William Gibson Panel
Some dissertation-related news. I'm going to be on a panel dedicated to William Gibson at this year's ALA conference. My paper, based on the trendspotter chapter of my dissertation, is on Pattern Recognition.
Title: The Brand as Cognitive Map in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition
This paper analyzes the figure of the coolhunter in William Gibson's eighth novel, Pattern Recognition, and argues that Gibson uses literary style toward an ethical end: to invite his readers to embrace the ethos of the coolhunter. Modeled on but not identical to Cayce Pollard's "violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace," Gibson's proposed coolhunting ethos treats the brand name as a cognitive map of the multinational economic supply chains that underlie the glossy surface of the brand.
The need for such a mapping exists because, across many industries, the brand has been transformed from a way of marking cattle or insuring product quality into a piece of intellectual property valuable in and of itself. As brand ownership and the cultural dimensions of economic life have become more profitable, multinational corporations have increasingly outsourced less profitable areas of production overseas. Consequently, the connection between any particular brand and the supply chains supporting that brand are concealed within a global maze of anonymous subcontractors.
Gibson's coolhunting aesthetic seeks to transform the reader's relationship to the "logo-maze," to reconnect the free-floating brand to the hidden supply chains that make brands profitable in the first place. I relate this project of relinking to what Bruce Robbins has called the "sweatshop sublime" and to popular notions of ethical consumption. Ethical consumer movements have sought to embed a concern for invidious "externalities"—such as the abuse of factory workers and environmental destruction—into the endogenous preferences of the individual consumer, usually through the medium of price. I argue that Gibson's coolhunter is a modified type of ethical consumer, a figure able to map economic systems onto personal meanings as meanings, turning the behavior of the market not into a more just price point at the shopping mall but rather into a new aesthetic sensibility.
Granta v. McSweeney’s
I received a link to this Times article today. A few interesting quotes:
The McSweeney’s author is not above playing language games or creating work that is aware of its artificiality, although he is also careful not to let this playfulness detract from the work’s emotional impact. There is by no means a house style, but there is something that might be called the McSweeney’s tone: a buzzing, mischievous hipness, wrapped around a core of sentiment and hopefulness.
This seems to me pretty much the definition of postirony, although the question of "house style" is interesting and ambiguous. It seems clear enough that there is no official style among McSweeney's-affiliated writers. Their writers have a variety of perspectives and literary commitments, but there does seem to be some family resemblance born of self-selection and, possibly, social-network effects. Writer and publishing venue often converge subtly, in ways that are hard to document.
Another quote:
Anyone familiar with the publishing world understands that it is in the process of being irrevocably damaged by corporate owners who are crowding out the merely excellent in favour of the readily saleable; who are glad to put respected “mid-list” authors out to pasture so they can focus on publishing meretricious, photogenic newcomers.
I wonder about this claim. McSweeney's publishes and supports some excellent so-called mid-list authors, but the big names associated with the network are very successful. Eggers, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, among others, have done quite well. They're readily saleable, not to mention photogenic.
Which isn't to condemn their success--who wouldn't want to be successful?--but rather to suggest that the dividing line between what Amidon calls McSweeney's "opposition to the corporate model" and corporate publishing is very thin indeed. In fact, we might think of McSweeney's as doing something like nonprofit R&D for the big corporate publishers. They identify talent and, on the strength of their brand, corporate publishers will often publish that talent. If McSweeney's disappeared tomorrow, a new venue would have to be found--or invented--to serve exactly the same function.
Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers
Forget Obama as a postironic candidate. What we have here is a prospective presidency that only a flat-out ironist could love.
But Mr McCain has serious handicaps, too. One is his temper. “It is startling to contemplate how violent John McCain was well into his 20s,” notes Matt Welch, a critical biographer. Drunk on shore leave in Cuba, he charged into a brawl between Marines and sailors. He admits to having “loved” such encounters.
Mr McCain no longer brawls, but he still cusses like a sailor, even at fellow senators. He is quick to accuse adversaries of bad faith or even corruption. And he does not seem to care whom he insults. People who insist that Vietnam still holds American prisoners-of-war, for example, he calls “dime-store Rambos”.
Most Americans will forgive Mr McCain his wild youth, especially since he freely supplies so many details about strippers, affairs and knocking over power lines while larking about in his plane. Many will turn a deaf ear to his cursing too. It was not diplomatic of him to shout “Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers” at the North Vietnamese guards dragging him off to be tortured, but voters will probably cut him some slack, given the circumstances. Plus, and infinitely more important, he has since then pushed hard for reconciliation with Vietnam.
In a Clinton-McCain contest, McCain may well win it.
Granta v. McSweeney’s
I received a link to this Times article today. A few interesting quotes:
The McSweeney’s author is not above playing language games or creating work that is aware of its artificiality, although he is also careful not to let this playfulness detract from the work’s emotional impact. There is by no means a house style, but there is something that might be called the McSweeney’s tone: a buzzing, mischievous hipness, wrapped around a core of sentiment and hopefulness.
This seems to me pretty much the definition of postirony, although the question of "house style" is interesting and ambiguous. It seems clear enough that there is no official style among McSweeney's-affiliated writers. Their writers have a variety of perspectives and literary commitments, but there does seem to be some family resemblance born of self-selection and, possibly, social-network effects. Writer and publishing venue often converge subtly, in ways that are hard to document.
Another quote:
Anyone familiar with the publishing world understands that it is in the process of being irrevocably damaged by corporate owners who are crowding out the merely excellent in favour of the readily saleable; who are glad to put respected “mid-list” authors out to pasture so they can focus on publishing meretricious, photogenic newcomers.
I wonder about this claim. McSweeney's publishes and supports some excellent so-called mid-list authors, but the big names associated with the network are very successful. Eggers, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, among others, have done quite well. They're readily saleable, not to mention photogenic.
Which isn't to condemn their success--who wouldn't want to be successful?--but rather to suggest that the dividing line between what Amidon calls McSweeney's "opposition to the corporate model" and corporate publishing is very thin indeed. In fact, we might think of McSweeney's as doing something like nonprofit R&D for the big corporate publishers. They identify talent and, on the strength of their brand, corporate publishers will often publish that talent. If McSweeney's disappeared tomorrow, a new venue would have to be found--or invented--to serve exactly the same function.
Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers
Forget Obama as a postironic candidate. What we have here is a prospective presidency that only a flat-out ironist could love.
But Mr McCain has serious handicaps, too. One is his temper. “It is startling to contemplate how violent John McCain was well into his 20s,” notes Matt Welch, a critical biographer. Drunk on shore leave in Cuba, he charged into a brawl between Marines and sailors. He admits to having “loved” such encounters.
Mr McCain no longer brawls, but he still cusses like a sailor, even at fellow senators. He is quick to accuse adversaries of bad faith or even corruption. And he does not seem to care whom he insults. People who insist that Vietnam still holds American prisoners-of-war, for example, he calls “dime-store Rambos”.
Most Americans will forgive Mr McCain his wild youth, especially since he freely supplies so many details about strippers, affairs and knocking over power lines while larking about in his plane. Many will turn a deaf ear to his cursing too. It was not diplomatic of him to shout “Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers” at the North Vietnamese guards dragging him off to be tortured, but voters will probably cut him some slack, given the circumstances. Plus, and infinitely more important, he has since then pushed hard for reconciliation with Vietnam.
In a Clinton-McCain contest, McCain may well win it.
Social Networks and Power
Here's an interesting article about the social-network modeling of Duncan Watts, a researcher for Yahoo! who contests the popular marketing idea that influencing so-called Influentials is the key to making your idea or product go viral.
I first heard about him at a CSN conference last year; he had just published research suggesting that the success of any particular pop song or musician was essentially random, linked to early positive feedback from consumers.
The quality of a song accounted for something like half the variability in the success of a song in the artificial culture market he constructed. In short: if you suck, don't expect to be successful, and if you're amazing, you'll do OK no matter what, but blessed are the mediocre, for they shall inherit the earth. But only if they're lucky.
This sort of research matters for how we model literary history. What makes a book--let's say, Invisible Man, which I'm writing about now--become a massive, runaway success. Was its success the result its outperforming the field of relevant competitors? Of Ellison's being very well connected to elite literary and cultural circles? Of an essentially random processes of cultural selection, independent of its content (relative to the whole literary field)?
To answer these questions, we'd need a more precise definition of how networks of social power work, but history is unfortunately very messy, not anything like a controlled experiment. My gut tells me that we can't abandon the idea of Influencers just yet, at least not in a slow-moving field like literary production (as opposed to, say, faster-paced music and clothing markets). If my research into the literary culture of the '40s and '50s has taught me anything, it's that there are centers of cultural power, journals and magazines that don't merely reflect the latest trends but rather influence the cultural conversation far more than you'd suspect by looking at data like relative circulation.
Social Networks and Power
Here's an interesting article about the social-network modeling of Duncan Watts, a researcher for Yahoo! who contests the popular marketing idea that influencing so-called Influentials is the key to making your idea or product go viral.
I first heard about him at a CSN conference last year; he had just published research suggesting that the success of any particular pop song or musician was essentially random, linked to early positive feedback from consumers.
The quality of a song accounted for something like half the variability in the success of a song in the artificial culture market he constructed. In short: if you suck, don't expect to be successful, and if you're amazing, you'll do OK no matter what, but blessed are the mediocre, for they shall inherit the earth. But only if they're lucky.
This sort of research matters for how we model literary history. What makes a book--let's say, Invisible Man, which I'm writing about now--become a massive, runaway success. Was its success the result its outperforming the field of relevant competitors? Of Ellison's being very well connected to elite literary and cultural circles? Of an essentially random processes of cultural selection, independent of its content (relative to the whole literary field)?
To answer these questions, we'd need a more precise definition of how networks of social power work, but history is unfortunately very messy, not anything like a controlled experiment. My gut tells me that we can't abandon the idea of Influencers just yet, at least not in a slow-moving field like literary production (as opposed to, say, faster-paced music and clothing markets). If my research into the literary culture of the '40s and '50s has taught me anything, it's that there are centers of cultural power, journals and magazines that don't merely reflect the latest trends but rather influence the cultural conversation far more than you'd suspect by looking at data like relative circulation.
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About Me
I'm a novelist, scholar of post-WWII U.S. fiction, and ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Princeton University. My first novel, Pop Apocalypse, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2009. 
I co-edited (with Samuel Cohen) a collection of creative and critical essays, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which was released by the University of Iowa Press in 2012.
My second novel, Hamsterstan, was recently completed. 
I'm working on a literary history of countercultural irony from Ralph Ellison to David Foster Wallace, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. My writing has appeared in The Believer, boundary 2, io9, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. I blog pretty regularly over at Arcade. In the fall, I will become an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. If this litany of interesting biographical tidbits doesn't slake your fact-thirst, please feel free to contact me at lee [dot] konstantinou [at sign] gmail [dot] com or via Facebook. |
@lkonstan
- @LeifSorensen1 Will do. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- Off to Chicago tomorrow for "Comics: Philosophy & Practice." Superexciting lineup: http://t.co/jw7sQfeJ What should I do at night? http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @Ed_Raso Oppositional in the sense that they oppose the degrading effects of a dominant cultural irony, and want a positive alternative. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- Got my copy of J R from @Dalkey_Archive today. #OccupyGaddis commences in a little more than 2 weeks at @LAReviewofBooks http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @Ed_Raso His stories and essays often geographically counterpose a credulous midwest against a cynical coastal elite. He wanted a third way. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @Ed_Raso Totally agree. Wallace took that common Gen X feeling and turned it into interesting art. I think his Midwestern-ness mattered... http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
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