Who signs the “empirical facts”?

Abstract

One of the most ambitious forms in which literary theory’s aspiration toward a democratic universality was recently manifested followed from the so called cognitive turn induced by discoveries in modern biology. Its declared objective was to root the idea of literature in the unconscious empirical level of its reception, situated below and beyond the conscious hermeneutic level of its understanding. The first such turn toward the deep and constitutive structure of the empirical was undertaken by the Empirische Literaturwissenschaft put forth during the 1980s under the aegis of radical constructivism of the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela; the second and more “scientific” one, proposed in the first decade of our century, pertains to what has been alternatively called the neuroaesthetics of literature, the biological literary theory, or cognitive literary studies. Both turns emerged in the German academic milieu. Both here and in the Anglophone world arguments rose against the elite bourgeois spirit of hermeneutically-oriented literary studies, by trying to establish a purely empirical frame for the reception of literature in order to introduce a universal intersubjective basis to replace the elevated subjective platform of literary studies. Without neglecting their different shaping of the basic distinction between cognition and experience, I insist that both finally reduce experience to cognition in a manner reminiscent of that which Benjamin has criticized in Kant. In his early Program of the Coming Philosophy Benjamin objects to the subordination, in Critique of Pure Reason, of empirical consciousness to transcendental categories of pure consciousness which ultimately turns experience into a mechanical unity. Though this critique may not exactly hold for Kant, as is testified by more recent readings that depart from his transcendental schemes, I will try to demonstrate that it holds for recent cognitive literary studies. This is why Benjamin’s linguistic structuring of experience, the addressed blind spot of his polemics notwithstanding, remains highly instructive. It mobilizes the concept of human mimetic ability as do the recent cognitive literary studies, to be sure, but dismantling behind the future-oriented democratic intention of the latter the hard-core bourgeois tradition. While Benjamin’s seemingly past-oriented approach to experience revitalizes the “antiquated” concept of similarity, it turns out to be opening much more democratic vistas for literary studies.