Month: December 2003

Literary Darwinism?

In today’s Science section of The New York Times, there’s an article about so-called “Darwinian literary studies,” which purports to find confirmation of evolutionary psychology in works of literature. Female college students were given two passages from Sir Walter Scott, one describing one of Scott’s “dark heroes, rebellious and promiscuous,” and the other describing one of Scott’s “proper heroes, law-abiding and monogamous.” And lo and behold, it turned out that “the women preferred the proper heroes for long-term unions,” but said that the dark heroes “appealed to them most for short-term affairs.”
The psychologist who did this study says that it “demonstrates that the distinction between long-term and short-term mating strategies” postulated by evolutionary psychology “is instinctive.” The reasoning seems to be that only biological “instinct” could explain the response to a two-centuries-old text by women today.
Of course, this is nonsense. Nobody who knows anything about the history of popular culture, or for that matter who has ever gone to the movies or watched TV, will be the least bit surprised that the stereotypes that Scott drew upon, and contributed to, two hundred years ago are still stereotypes today. The cliches and commonplaces that the evolutionary psychologists draw upon when they make their theories are the same ones that Scott drew upon when he wrote his novels. The study proves nothing whatsoever, because it is completely tautological; it is just like Wittgenstein’s witticism about the man who bought several copies of the newspaper in order to assure himself that what it said was true.
Actually, I think that there is a use for Darwinism in literary studies. But it is not this drivel about literature confirming the hoariest cliches about innate instinct and male/female behavior. It is rather what Morse Peckham suggested years ago: that mutation due to “accident, or chance, or randomness” plays a crucial part in cultural innovation, just as it does in biological evolution. So it is “the brain’s capacity to produce random responses” that causes “the indetermination in human behavior of response to any given stimulus”; this indetermination, in turn, is why we have cultural variability and cultural change, and why no society succeeds in totally controlling the behavior of its members. Continual mutation, not a fixed, innate “human nature” is the lesson that literary study can profitably extract from biology.

In today’s Science section of The New York Times, there’s an article about so-called “Darwinian literary studies,” which purports to find confirmation of evolutionary psychology in works of literature. Female college students were given two passages from Sir Walter Scott, one describing one of Scott’s “dark heroes, rebellious and promiscuous,” and the other describing one of Scott’s “proper heroes, law-abiding and monogamous.” And lo and behold, it turned out that “the women preferred the proper heroes for long-term unions,” but said that the dark heroes “appealed to them most for short-term affairs.”
The psychologist who did this study says that it “demonstrates that the distinction between long-term and short-term mating strategies” postulated by evolutionary psychology “is instinctive.” The reasoning seems to be that only biological “instinct” could explain the response to a two-centuries-old text by women today.
Of course, this is nonsense. Nobody who knows anything about the history of popular culture, or for that matter who has ever gone to the movies or watched TV, will be the least bit surprised that the stereotypes that Scott drew upon, and contributed to, two hundred years ago are still stereotypes today. The cliches and commonplaces that the evolutionary psychologists draw upon when they make their theories are the same ones that Scott drew upon when he wrote his novels. The study proves nothing whatsoever, because it is completely tautological; it is just like Wittgenstein’s witticism about the man who bought several copies of the newspaper in order to assure himself that what it said was true.
Actually, I think that there is a use for Darwinism in literary studies. But it is not this drivel about literature confirming the hoariest cliches about innate instinct and male/female behavior. It is rather what Morse Peckham suggested years ago: that mutation due to “accident, or chance, or randomness” plays a crucial part in cultural innovation, just as it does in biological evolution. It is “the brain’s capacity to produce random responses,” Peckham says, that causes “the indetermination in human behavior of response to any given stimulus”; this indetermination, in turn, is why meanings can never be fixed once and for all (as the deconstructionists are always reminding us), why we have cultural variability and cultural change, and why no society succeeds in totally controlling the behavior of its members. Continual mutation, not a fixed, innate “human nature,” is the lesson that literary study can profitably extract from biology. And it is by drawing on these Darwinian lessons about mutation that Peckham anticipated most of what theorists like Derrida and Foucault said, only without the European metaphysical baggage.

Kish Kash

I didn’t immediately fall in love with Basement Jaxx‘ new album Kish Kash the way I did with their previous two albums (Remedy and Rooty). I mean,those were almost perfect pop recaords: taking house and electronic dance in such new directions that they seemed to be entirely original and new, and to fulfill some sort of Platonic ideal of what pop music was supposed to be. But Kish Kash has grown on me with repeated listenings, and now I’m convinced it is as great as anything else Basement Jaxx has done.

I didn’t immediately fall in love with Basement Jaxx‘ new album Kish Kash the way I did with their previous two albums (Remedy and Rooty). I mean,those were almost perfect pop recaords: taking house and electronic dance in such new directions that they seemed to be entirely original and new, and to fulfill some sort of Platonic ideal of what pop music was supposed to be. But Kish Kash has grown on me with repeated listenings, and now I’m convinced it is as great as anything else Basement Jaxx has done.
I think my delayed response has something to do with the new album’s gigantism: it stretches its songs to almost operatic proportions (not in length but in density — i.e. heavier and more densely orchestrated), so that they aren’t as clean and neatly defined and graceful as the songs on the previous albums were. And I usually find that sort of thing annoying, in pop. But what’s converted me this time is the fact that Basement Jaxx do in fact achieve their ambition: the emotions in these songs are larger than life, which means that they are both intense and also strangely frozen (the same sort of distancing effect one gets in good melodrama). The effect is totally gorgeous, and the album covers a lot of ground in terms of different genres, all of which get reflected, amplified, and put onstage, as it were. Basement Jaxx go beyond the house/dance framework of their previous records to a more extensive sort of funk. Indeed, the music recalls both the ambitions and the stylistics of Prince in the 1980s; and if it doesn’t have the dynamic personality of Prince, it does have the dexterity, virtuosity, and range. And as for the personality: the album, as usual, has great guest performers singing for them, most notably Meshell and Dizzee Rascal and Siouxie Sioux (!) (as well as Lisa Kekaula – I don’t know who she is, but she is fabulous).