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On Media and Modules 
Stephen Dougherty 
Elizabethtown Community and Technical College
stephen.dougherty@kctcs.edu 

(c) 2004 Stephen Dougherty. 
All rights reserved. 

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Review of:
Tabbi, Joseph, Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. 

1. Cognitive Fictions is a sophisticated and fascinating book that asks
difficult questions about the place of literature and the literary artist
in the age of digitized mass media. The answers Joseph Tabbi provides are
equally difficult, although the reader's trouble on this score will
depend in part on whether or not he or she ascribes to some of the
guiding assumptions that motivate the inquiry. To its credit, this is a
book that provokes an emotional response. However, Tabbi's reliance on
the modular theory of mind (more on this later) elicits considerable
discomfort even for a reader who does not consider himself or herself a
traditional humanist. 

2. But first things first: Cognitive Fictions represents an important
contribution to U.S. literary studies. Tabbi rightly insists that in a
global culture literary studies must engage more with science and with
media studies. Taking issue with what he sees as a predominantly
unmediated situation of literature studies in its geopolitical framework,
Tabbi suggests another approach: we must develop closer and more detailed
"connections with the sciences and with those communications media whose
recent expansion and unprecedented integration into everyday life made a
global culture possible . . . in the first place" (xviii). Thus, if the
novel is to continue to possess a recognizable cultural diversity and
historical specificity, and if we are to continue to respect it for such
differences, then "it first needs to define itself within and against
those more globalizing powers and distribution networks that threaten to
erase the novel's medial difference" (xix). 

3. This is the task that Tabbi has set for himself. In a time when all
forms of communication (image, sound, text) can be digitized, and at a
point in cultural history when irony, once the hallmark of the postmodern
literary, has been wholly subsumed by advertising culture, he asks along
with the small group of U.S. writers he investigates: What is the novel
for? What does it do? Why does our culture continue to produce and
consume works of fiction? For Tabbi, the contemporary novelist's purpose
has nothing to do with nostalgia for the Real; it is not about the
recovery of an "authentic" America, because in a world where electronic
mass media has penetrated so deeply into the collective consciousness
that distinction no longer has any value, if it ever did. The purpose of
the fiction writer is rather to re-purpose or re-mediate the complex
social/communications systems within which our minds and bodies are
enmeshed through the processes of observation, or rather, observation of
observation. 

4. Tabbi's inspiration here is the autopoesis of Maturana and Varela, and
the work of Niklas Luhmann as well. Just as "autopoesis describes a way
of establishing and maintaining a system's boundary by selecting
meaningful elements (distinctions the system can use) out of an otherwise
indistinct, 'noisy,' environment" (xxii-xxiii), the writers that Tabbi
examines (at least in the latter portion of his book) obsessively observe
and take notes in journalistic fashion, or rather their protagonists do.
Such close observation of the social systems that constitute them makes
(or marks) a difference that becomes useable as a platform for fresh
insight about those systems. Tabbi explains: 

In recognizing the absolute closure of the system . . . , these narrators
create a new distinction, which then enters into the system it describes
and alters it. So the moment a narrator recognizes the possibility of
keeping a "journal of the journal," or turning one's isolated
inconsequential notations into an "absolutely autobiographical novel,"
the narrator can re-enter the system at another level (and at a later
time), and thus keep things going. The distinction (analogous to what
cognitive science would term a "gap" and literary theory might call the
"aporia") between rhetoric and meaning, the writer/observer and the
writing/system under observation, is no longer a distinction between
inside and outside. Rather, by imagining oneself as "outside," the
observer introduces a new distinction within the writing-system. Hence
the possibility of moving the system (not necessarily "up") to a
different level of complexity, so that it can function differently within
the environment (because it is now structurally capable of making new
distinctions and hence seeing things within the environment that were not
visible before). (xxii)

5. Here Tabbi urges that we must distinguish between autopoesis and an
autotelic theory of the literary that insists upon the absolute isolation
of the literary work from the hum of background noise. Autopoetic art
encloses itself in and as a world of words, but it does so in relation to
the outside. The distinction between the autopoetic and the autotelic is
critical for Tabbi, given his desire to save for the literary artist a
purpose or a value that the self-reflexive modernist lost in a hall of
mirrors no longer offers us. Writers such as Paul Auster in his New York
Trilogy, David Markson in Wittgenstein's Mistress, and Harry Matthews in
The Journalist are not out of touch, and they certainly don't go about
conjuring a world elsewhere in the New Critical sense. But then the real
issue for Tabbi is what it means to be in touch, and how one goes about
mediating reality (as a novelist) in a world where human perception is
already so profoundly mediated: "Reflexivity in contemporary fiction,
like autopoetic closure in cognitive science and in systems theory, is
not a shutting out of the world," Tabbi insists. "[I]t is rather a way of
establishing an identity that is better able to connect with the world at
particular points, when one is able, while writing, to re-cognize and put
on hold one's own literary distinctions and categories long enough to see
how they might answer to distinctions in the environment" (80). 

6. The application of systems theory to literary study is promising, and
it is likely that Tabbi's project will prove inspirational for many
readers and critics. Nevertheless, the difference between the autotelic
and the autopoetic is often quite difficult to grasp in Tabbi's readings;
which is to say that it is hard to tell what practical value his authors
and/or their protagonists get out of the close observations that
constitute their textual interventions. Perhaps this is inevitable, given
that Tabbi's concern is with states of consciousness, which are of course
rather ineffable stuff. Nevertheless, one is left with the distinctly
unsettling impression that on Tabbi's account we are in a world so
utterly homogenized through mediation that there is no space for
resistance. That is not because of his use of systems theory. If the
fundamental lesson of systems theory is that human cognition is a moving
blind spot, then as a theoretical framework within which to understand
behavior, systems theory converges in some significant ways with other
theoretical frameworks that trouble but do no obviate the value of
talking about cultural resistance, such as the psychoanalytical. Blind
spots are one thing, but Tabbi's mobilization of the cognitive scientific
model of mind represents in itself a discrete aspect of his theoretical
strategy, and we must separate this out from systems theory. 

7. My main grouse with Cognitive Fictions has to do with Tabbi's
uncritical acceptance of what is known as the modular theory of mind, the
idea that the mind/brain is made up of systems whose resources are
site-specific, so to speak, or "encapsulated" with respect to the data
that each contains. According to this theory, information in the brain is
stored in independent modules which have either very limited or no
knowledge of what goes on outside, in surrounding domains. But as Jerry
Fodor has most vigorously argued in recent books, while the modular
theory may indeed get the architecture of local mental states
right--those that pertain to beliefs, desires, and other forms of thought
that can be expressed propositionally--it explains nothing about global,
or conscious, states. Fodor writes in The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: 

Since the mental processes thus afflicted with globality apparently
include some of the ones that are most characteristic of human cognition,
I'm on balance not inclined to celebrate how much we have so far learned
about how our minds work. The bottom line will be that the current
situation in cognitive science is light years from being satisfactory.
(5)

8. Without getting into the considerable complexities of Fodor's
arguments, which in any case pertain mainly to the logical and empirical
misgivings he has about the modularity thesis, suffice it to say that
Fodor sees far greater virtue in blending domain-specific and
domain-general cognitive architectures. For if the mind is entirely
modular, as cognitive science is wont to argue; if "there is a more or
less encapsulated processor for each kind of problem that it can solve";
and if "there is nothing in the mind that can ask questions about which
solution to a problem is 'best overall,' that is, best in light of the
totality of a creature's beliefs and utilities," then for Fodor cognitive
science has not gotten us very far in the study of human consciousness
(64). This assertion on its own is a powder keg, and I do not want to
endorse it so much as to use it to point toward a problem that dogs
Cognitive Fictions on another level. 

9. Following McLuhan, Tabbi assumes from the start that our electronic
media are extensions of the human sensorium; in effect his book is a
complex and sophisticated study of the relation between those media on
the one hand and "the human measure" on the other. Whereas McLuhan in the
sixties believed he confronted, as Mark Hansen puts it, "'a situation in
which the prostheses we adopt to cognize and intervene in the
technologically driven material complexification of the universe only
seem to expand our experiential alienation'" (x), Tabbi re-envisions the
relation between human beings and their electronic prostheses, or their
media environments, based on the discoveries of cognitive science. His
next assumption, and it is the value rather than the accuracy of this one
that I question, is that the findings of cognitive science refute
McLuhan's thesis that there is a poor fit between our media and our
psychical economies. Digital information processors do of course work on
the architectural principle of modularity. But instead of accepting
neutrally that "emerging sciences of the mind have produced detailed
descriptions of similarly communicating agents, modules, and distributed
networks in us" (x), Tabbi could have more fully questioned from the
start the motivations that have produced these discoveries, which are in
effect metaphorical associations. In other words, what Cognitive Fictions
lacks is a substantial rhetorical analysis of its cognitive science,
because it is by no means a necessary correlative of systems theory.
Neither is it necessarily a good fit. 

10. Tabbi's decision to foreground systems theory and to background the
cognitive theory has a practical payoff because it is a relatively safer
critical strategy. It is even likely that it was the right decision,
given that it frees him to pursue systems-theoretical insights
rigorously. We should not be surprised, however, that it produces a big
blind spot. For Tabbi fails to see the trouble into which his
under-theorized articulation of cognitive science with systems theory
gets him right from the start, even in spite of his explicit statement of
the problem. Here is the statement, which refers back to the prior
announcement of the modularity thesis: "With the coming together of these
two systems--call them the mind and the medial ecology--prospects for
achieving a critical distance, never hopeful in a postmodern context,
seem increasingly unlikely" (x). True enough. But the prospects for
achieving the kind of distance from our media ecology that would allow
for truly productive critical inquiry into its conditions and effects,
which is what Tabbi seems at least wistfully to hope for in this passage,
are radically undermined precisely by the uncritical acceptance of the
modularity thesis. If we do not assume that the mind is "coming together"
with media systems by virtue of deep structural affinities, then we will
invariably find ourselves talking about some other kind of interface
between them--one perhaps, with more friction at work; and one, perhaps,
where there is a greater possibility of achieving a productive critical
distance from media forces. Tabbi is not entirely unaware of the problem.
In fact he acknowledges it head on in his chapter on Pynchon and
cognitive science: 


For a humanism that wishes to read signs of community in a multi-voiced
and multicultural past, the implications [of modularity] remain
disturbing: when consciousness, like corporate power, is itself composed
of a collection of partially connected modules or media, what resistance
is possible? .... Just as cognitive theories of the modular mind require
no self, the proliferating connections among voices and identities in
Pynchon's two most recent novels require no community. (52)

11. But surely it is not only the humanists who ought to worry about the
failure of community, or about the dangerous erosion in the postmodern
world of any space for meaningful resistance. Tabbi does not claim that
we ought to accept such an erosion blithely. Still, the particular
variety of cognitive science he chooses to articulate together with
systems theory leads him to recreate on the critical-theoretical level
some of the same problems he insightfully exposes in the fictions he
studies. 


Fine Arts and Humanities Division 
Elizabethtown Community and Technical College 
stephen.dougherty@kctcs.edu


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Works Cited 

Fodor, Jerry. The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of
Computational Psychology. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.