Negative Capability

Back to the problem of the originary hypothesis as an anomaly. The originary hypothesis of the origin of language answers a question which is “real” by any measure: what accounts for the difference between animal and human forms of communication? Even though biologically based semiotics keeps working on minimizing, relativizing and trivializing the differences, so that the differences are no more interesting, and just as quantitative, as signaling differences between, say, one and another species of squirrel, in the end basic differentiating concepts like Tomasello’s “joint attention” and even Stiegler’s “tertiary retention” have to be engaged. Like all attempts to eliminate the human in order to plug holes in some pseudo-scientific paradigm, this stuff can get weird and one just feels like parodying it. The most recent version of this I’ve seen is in Jason Ananda Josephson Storm’s Metamodernity, which draws on a Peircean inspired hylo-semantics to put to bed the postmodern linguistic turn and reintegrate us back into the semiotic world shared by all other species. It’s in fact very good to trace all the continuities of communication across species boundaries because this only sharpens the discontinuity constituting the human (which Storm doesn’t really have anything to say about), the only species, oddly enough, that seems interested in this question. Anyway, I get bored with the inane question of whether human communication is really qualitatively different than animal communication (which is why I admire GA thinkers like Andrew Bartlett and Richard Oort who have addressed it so patiently at times)—I just want to make the point that in saying, “human language emerged in an event, not through a gradual accumulation of genetic mutations tied to signaling behaviors,” the originary hypothesis is answering a real question.

The problem is that no discipline is capable of accepting this answer, even though none of them have a better one, beyond endless complexification of relations between genes, developments of human capacities over time as evidenced in developments in the archeological record and evocations of various dei ex machina like “increased social interaction.” As Eric Gans has pointed out many times, the answer can’t be accepted precisely because it gives people in these disciplines nothing to do—no future dig will come up with some mixture of bones and pottery that will make the originary event more probable, no analysis of data will do so, etc. So, it’s as if we’re being asked to take something on faith in the middle of a laboratory, something which every action-sequence of the modern “scientist” simply overrides. I have myself never liked the idea of applying “faith” in this context, because the originary hypothesis invites heightened and persistent scrutiny, as opposed to faith in the occurrence of certain actual events of revelation of which we can have no “proof.” in a sense the originary hypothesis is “too” scientific, or another kind of scientific. But what kind? I’m probably not the only GA advocate who as devoted some time and thought to this question.

Now it has occurred to me that the answer has been lying out there in plain sight along, in John Keat’s famous (for English majors, at least) concept of “negative capability.” It helps that I loved Keat’s poetry from the first time I read it as a 24 year old grad student, and have lately been drifting off into thought-sequences regarding what Keats and his fellow English romantics were about, in the context of some other questions regarding the emergence of the “aesthetic” in relation to the emergence of modernity (science and politics), etc., perhaps to be addressed sometime down the road. Anyway, I always thought Keats was better than Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron (but I qualify this by acknowledging Ian Dennis’s case for the greatness of the Byron on Don Juan, which I also loved back then), and “negative capability” was Keat’s own attempt to explain why. Looking back over Keat’s discussion of the concept in his letter I realized, first, that Keats only used the concept once and, second, that my own original exposure to it through the Norton Anthology was in fact a string of passages pieced together from different letters in accord with the editors’—a particular intellectual tradition’s—interpretation of the concept. I wish I had my old Norton Anthology, because the interpretation they (implicitly) gave was a very good one, and useful for me here.

Anywhere, here’s the passage presenting the concept:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

The concept seems to have struck Keats like a revelation, offering a justification for what presumably was his own preference for a “fine isolated verisimilitude” over an empirically testable proposition (is there, in fact, any scientific explanation for what makes for a fine isolated verisimilitude?). The singular verisimilitude comes before the irritable reaching after fact and reason (Keats would have hated reddit, I suppose, but perhaps would have thought the “energies displayed” on Twitter had some value), which must be suspended—there’s a kind of thinking here that involves not rushing to define your position, reach a conclusion, show that you are right and the other fake and ghey.

If you’re suspending that rush to secure your position on some disciplinary field it’s in order to see and imagine what gets blocked by that rush. So, what is that? It seems to be, essentially, mimetic investments in the activities of others—a bird hopping around on your window sill, poking and chewing, a bunch of boys involved in a fight—in such a way as to not preclude moving such investments around, however incompatible they might be. You can enter the life of the bird but, then, also the worm it has in its mouth, or the cat stalking the bird; you can shift your identification from one to the other of the combatants, perhaps with an interest in sustaining the scene or seeing various narrative trajectories unfold (you might root for whoever is losing at the moment), or expanding the scene (perhaps the crowd observing and egging on the fighters takes on its own interests). (Here I’m drawing on those excerpts from other letters “traditionally” considered part of the discussion of negative capability). This is, of course, the kind of sensibility Keats identified with Shakespeare (explicitly against Milton, who was very much the thesis stalker), and wished to emulate in his own poetry.

Keats’s reading of Shakespeare already put him on the way toward Girard, who also singled out Shakespeare for his remarkable insight into the mimetic nature of the human. How do you sustain negative capability once you realize that the lives you’re imaginatively participating in without judgment or explanation ultimately become incompatible with each other? This tends to be the kind of realization that leads one to jump ship and start irritatingly looking for things like “structures” and “social laws” to account for why a boy’s fight doesn’t go on forever if one side doesn’t manage to totally clobber the other (or, in another possible naturalistic explanation, they collapse out of mutual exhaustion)—if you keep entering into the actions, struggles, strategies, learning of first one and then another, you can only be interested in how the fight could be brought to an end by the combatants themselves, or perhaps the crowd. How, that is, could the actions in which you are so mimetically invested continue indefinitely, while undergoing transformations at various levels of perceptibility that enable us to demarcate individual scenes within the “flow”?

So, if you really like to maintain and exercise your negative capability, and maybe even communicate it to others, you have a new and interesting problem: how do mutually opposed and incompatible actions nevertheless sustain each other, modify each other, include each other, convert each other into something else, etc.? All this so you can maximize mimetic investment—a mimetic investment, by the way, which is completely shareable with others—and which therefore entails eschewing any recourse to anything extrinsic to these scenes—something putatively in nature, or some social law modeled on a natural one. You’d run through some interesting failures—you could call them “tragedies” along with some “comedic” successes. You’d realize that this mimetic investment has the unanticipated effect of intensifying your mimetic capacities beyond those of the figures in whose lives you immerse yourself, but without coming into the same antagonisms with others as a result—on the contrary, you might get better at finding inventive ways of rerouting mimetic rivalries away from their potentially violent course (which would put an end to the action and demolish the scene). You find the whole world to be full of examples worthy of study and representation. And at no point would you feel a need to have recourse to data or statistics, which really only stand in for insufficiently imagined scenes—only much later, within fully fledged disciplinary spaces can the math be made fully scenic.

So, it’s not faith but negative capability that opens one up to the unverifiable originary hypothesis. I can’t verify this, so it must stand as a hypothesis. Does Eric Gans have negative capability in a high degree? I have no idea, and no way to test it out. Are those dozen or so academics who have taken up the originary hypothesis as their like-long project especially gifted in negative capability? Again, don’t know. How would I even measure my own negative capability against anyone else’s? I’m sure some psychologist could design a stupid test but doing so would show a complete miscomprehension of negative capability, which also stands outside of “verification.” With such a small sample, there could have been any number of reasons why Gans might have arrived upon this a solution to problems he, as a student of Girard, might have been pursuing, or why this particular set of academics would have found this compelling. Maybe even a literary and cultural theory not openly leftist, intellectually unique and challenging, and respectful of religion would have been enough to make it attractive to some academics somewhat alienated by the dominant theories. But I want to think beyond that, and in those terms more important questions would be “can negative capability be taught, practiced or elicited?”—or, even better, how can we engage others so as to presume we are always already working on enhancing our negative capability? (Which I would distinguish from the pathetic liberal concept of “empathy,” as “empathy” involves clinging cloyingly to someone on the scene rather than love of the scene itself.)

I suppose the originary hypothesis would have been too “abstract” for Keats, but you could certainly make a case for him developing an aesthetics of deferral. That you keep setting new deadlines for the attainment and then consumption of your desired objects, and that with each new deadline the object becomes more attractive, with this leading you to want to wait longer because you know it will grow more desirable in the meantime, and, along the way, all kinds of new, supplementary objects of enjoyment emerge in the wake of your deferral, you’re noticing all kinds of fallen warriors of deferral on the field as you advance, along with contrasting figures of deferral as desiccation and deferral as holy devotion—there’s a very Keatsian poem to be written here (and a rather ungrammatical sentence I’ve written). None of his greatest poems can be transcended. Who knows where he was going with The Fall of Hyperion? Keats was a liberal, but less out of any theory than because that’s where the action was—and he no doubt sympathized more with rougher give-and-take he would have seen among the “popular” classes than the encrusted codes of civility (which force mimetic desire into convoluted paths by trying to strangle it). Like the other Romantics, he must have felt that the French Revolution had swept away centuries of accumulated artificiality and cleared the field for an uncluttered view of human nature. But it wasn’t obvious that this would lead to a view of human nature as so fundamentally mimetic that one had to enter it aesthetically and narratively, rather than locate it in the individual or laws of nature to be measured by government statistics.

A specific kind of logic emerges from claiming negative capability as the specifically originary disposition. As you’re thinking something through, or at least thinking something human through, at each point you’re confronted with a choice: you can either accentuate or dissipate the scenic character of the situation or question you’re discussing. You can further pursue the question of what someone is doing in relation to what others are doing, in the process summoning hypothetical others whom that someone must be imitating, participating with, or coming into opposition with. That is, you can keep populating the field, which will lead you to resist any thinning of the field. Or, you can translate what that someone and others are doing into a set of synonyms with a pre-established, imaginary or institutionally defined relation to each other. This latter approach is what brings you into philosophy and the human sciences, even if it’s a version of philosophy or the social sciences that goes on about singularities, processes, etc. For negative capability those philosophical and social scientific scenes would just add further layers of the ongoing scenic construction—more people doing things with and against each with various reciprocally conversing and converting outcomes imaginable.