The Laws of Gravity Are Very Strict

Continuing yesterday's ramble....

I had an enormously bratty student once, whose thesis I was advising. She was very difficult--she wouldn't show up for meetings or would show up late. She badmouthed the administrative staff of our department (which is a great staff and includes a few personal friends). She badmouthed Americans.* The night before her thesis was due to her external readers, she emailed it to me at midnight and asked me to proofread it. In short, she was a nightmare.

But the biggest sticking point in our relationship was about what a literary essay entailed. She wanted to write about how good the books were and what they made her think of. It was like a parody of some horrible New Age-y class where everyone talks about their feelings.

"I just don't understand why everyone in this department insists that an essay should have an 'argument,'" she would say. And then the capper: "I don't see how this prepares me for later life."

She wanted to be a journalist, and she didn't see how thinking critically about language would be helpful in later life! Sheesh.

This dispute finally had to be resolved by the old standby: "because I said so" (which is both an alarming and a deeply satisfying thing to say). But before it reached that point, I brought out all the heavy artillery in my war to defend the study of literature. It's a question I get asked a lot: "what is the point?"

I don't mind the question, really. In fact, I think it's important to remain institutionally self-critical, to avoid complaceny and to be prepared to defend the relevance of a discipline that is not "useful" in a strictly market-driven sense. It's also important to defend against this corporate-type notion of utility that's creeping into discussions of the function of the university, but that's a post for another day.

So here were my answers:

Studying literature patiently and critically makes us more attuned to the ways in which language is used and the ways in which our perceptions of reality are linguistically or discursively shaped. We are surrounded by language: in advertising, political speeches, newspapers, textbooks. Very little of this language is rhetorically neutral, even if it pretends or strives to be. It's an important--a "useful," if you will--skill to be able to analyze and sort out what the rhetorical posture of a piece of writing is.

Even more broadly, it permits us to see the metaphoricity of concepts that we've naturalized, metaphors that we mistake for immutable truths. When we speak of the "body politic" or the "head of state," we are speaking metaphorically. It's important, "useful," to be able to see this as a metaphor, so that we don't take it as a given. The government-as-body is an old and pervasive metaphor (but this doesn't make it a truth, just a persistent trope). Aesop told the fable of the belly (retold by Shakespeare in Coriolanus), which legitimizes the subordination of the people to centralized power.

In the 14th century, Nicolas d'Oresme wrote a work, De Moneta, about the function of money. He likened coins to the then-current theory of bodily humors, arguing that coins should circulate throughout the realm the way the humors circulate throughout the body.

The frontispice to Hobbes' Leviathan shows a king made up of tiny people, literalizing the connection between the body and the body politic.

And while anatomy gets used as a metaphor for government, government gets used as a metaphor for anatomy. In the 17th century, William Harvey's treatises on the circulation of the blood were rife with political metaphors. In his 1628 treatise, De Motu Cordis, he describes the heart as the “prince” who governs the “oeconomy of the body,” dispensing its resources to its
“dependents.” The heart is to the body what the king is to his kingdom.

In 1649, published shortly after the beheading of King Charles I of England, Harvey wrote another tract on the circulation of the blood, the catchily titled De Circulatione Sanguinis. In this work, Harvey focuses attention away from the activity of the heart to a more republican emphasis on the importance of the blood itself in supplying nourishment to the body. The heart in this new work is no longer prince, but a first among equals (at the same time as England was
replacing the monarchy with a republic—coincidence??).

In The Federalist Papers, James Madison writes that "the states which lie at the greatest distance from the 'heart' of the union may partake least of the 'circulation' of its benefits."

Now, this might not be a very good metaphor, but it's still important to note how overlapping the figurative language of science and power are.

Science is full of metaphors, tropes, and analogies, and like all figurative language, there are certain implicit values and certain rhetorical postures. Medical science is perhaps where the metaphors are the most obvious, especially when we are a generation or two removed. "Hysteria," for instance shows how the discursive construction of femininity shaped the ways in which women were diagnosed, even after the uterus was no longer believed to be involved in "hysterical" behavior.

But metaphors exist in less polemical ways, as well. Why, for instance, do we call it the "Law of Gravity" rather than the "Rule of Attraction"? What is the difference between saying that something is "innate" versus saying that it's "hard wired." Gaston Bachelard wrote about how the symbolism of fire, along with its phenomenological properties, shaped scientific discourse. Theodore Brown's terrific Making Truth discusses how even the most rigidly empirical scientific language is filled with metaphor--his chapter on the shifting metaphor of the atom is especially great, I think.

This is not to say that science or government or any of the other institutions that regulate and formulate our ideas about reality are nothing more than poetry, but understanding the poetry of everyday life makes us better able to understand the way these institutions are constructed. It makes us better able to live thoughtfully and critically in the world.

That was my answer. Tune in next time to hear about why I think this is radically incomplete! And then I'll get off the boring pedagogy posts.

*Now, I'm not opposed to badmouthing American policies. In fact, I quite favor it. And among friends, it's ok to poke fun at one another's country more generally, but this girl was NOT my friend. And she just went on and on about how stupid Americans are and, get this, how bad American education is. The why in the world did you come to school here???