2 Extended Cognition

Consider three cases of human problem-solving:

(1) A person sits in front of a computer screen which displays images of various two-dimensional geometric shapes and is asked to answer questions concerning the potential fit of such shapes into depicted “sockets”. To assess fit, the person must mentally rotate the shapes to align them with the sockets.

(2) A person sits in front of a similar computer screen, but this time can choose either to physically rotate the image on the screen, by pressing a rotate button, or to mentally rotate the image as before. We can also suppose, not unrealistically, that some speed advantage accrues to the physical rotation operation.

(3) Sometime in the cyberpunk future, a person sits in front of a similar computer screen. This agent, however, has the benefit of a neural implant which can perform the rotation operation as fast as the computer in the previous example. The agent must still choose which internal resource to use (the implant or the good old fashioned mental rotation), as each resource makes different demands on attention and other concurrent brain activity.

How much cognition is present in these cases? We suggest that all three cases are similar. Case (3) with the neural implant seems clearly to be on a par with case (1). And case (2) with the rotation button displays the same sort of computational structure as case (3), although it is distributed across agent and computer instead of

Epistemic action, we suggest, demands spread of epistemic credit. If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!

3 Active Externalism

In these cases, the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right. All the components in the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behavior in the same sort of way that cognition usually does. If we remove the external component the system’s behavioral competence will drop, just as it would if we removed part of its brain. Our thesis is that this sort of coupled process counts equally well as a cognitive process, whether or not it is wholly in the head.

This externalism differs greatly from standard variety advocated by Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979). When I believe that water is wet and my twin believes that twin water is wet, the external features responsible for the difference in our beliefs are distal and historical, at the other end of a lengthy causal chain. Features of the present are not relevant: if I happen to be surrounded by XYZ right now (maybe I have teleported to Twin Earth), my beliefs still concern standard water, because of my history. In these cases, the relevant external features are passive. Because of their distal nature, they play no role in driving the cognitive process in the here-and-now. This is reflected by the fact that the actions performed by me and my twin are physically indistinguishable, despite our external differences.

In the cases we describe, by contrast, the relevant external features are active, playing a crucial role in the here-and-now. Because they are coupled with the human organism, they have a direct impact on the organism and on its behavior. In these cases, the relevant parts of the world are in the loop, not dangling at the other end of a long causal chain. Concentrating on this sort of coupling leads us to an active externalism, as opposed to the passive externalism of Putnam and Burge.

Many have complained that even if Putnam and Burge are right about the externality of content, it is not clear that these external aspects play a causal or explanatory role in the generation of action. In counterfactual cases where internal structure is held constant but these external features are changed, behavior looks just the same; so internal structure seems to be doing the crucial work. We will not adjudicate that issue here, but we note that active externalism is not threatened by any such problem. The external features in a coupled system play an ineliminable role – if we retain internal structure but change the external features, behavior may change completely. The external features here are just as causally relevant as typical internal features of the brain.[*]

*[[Much of the appeal of externalism in the philosophy of mind may stem from the intuitive appeal of active externalism. Externalists often make analogies involving external features in coupled systems, and appeal to the arbitrariness of boundaries between brain and environment. But these intuitions sit uneasily with the letter of standard externalism. In most of the Putnam/Burge cases, the immediate environment is irrelevant; only the historical environment counts. Debate has focused on the question of whether mind must be in the head, but a more relevant question in assessing these examples might be: is mind in the present?]]

By embracing an active externalism, we allow a more natural explanation of all sorts of actions. One can explain my choice of words in Scrabble, for example, as the outcome of an extended cognitive process involving the rearrangement of tiles on my tray. Of course, one could always try to explain my action in terms of internal processes and a long series of “inputs” and “actions”, but this explanation would be needlessly complex. If an isomorphic process were going on in the head, we would feel no urge to characterize it in this cumbersome way.[*] In a very real sense, the re-arrangement of tiles on the tray is not part of action; it is part of thought.

*[[Herbert Simon (1981) once suggested that we view internal memory as, in effect, an external resource upon which "real" inner processes operate. "Search in memory," he comments, "is not very different from search of the external environment." Simon's view at least has the virtue of treating internal and external processing with the parity they deserve, but we suspect that on his view the mind will shrink too small for most people's tastes. ]]

The view we advocate here is reflected by a growing body of research in cognitive science. In areas as diverse as the theory of situated cognition (Suchman 1987), studies of real-world-robotics (Beer 1989), dynamical approaches to child development (Thelen and Smith 1994), and research on the cognitive properties of collectives of agents (Hutchins 1995), cognition is often taken to be continuous with processes in the environment.[*] Thus, in seeing cognition as extended one is not merely making a terminological decision; it makes a significant difference to the methodology of scientific investigation. In effect, explanatory methods that might once have been thought appropriate only for the analysis of “inner” processes are now being adapted for the study of the outer, and there is promise that our understanding of cognition will become richer for it.

Some find this sort of externalism unpalatable. One reason may be that many identify the cognitive with the conscious, and it seems far from plausible that consciousness extends outside the head in these cases. But not every cognitive process, at least on standard usage, is a conscious process. It is widely accepted that all sorts of processes beyond the borders of consciousness play a crucial role in cognitive processing: in the retrieval of memories, linguistic processes, and skill acquisition, for example. So the mere fact that external processes are external where consciousness is internal is no reason to deny that those processes are cognitive.

More interestingly, one might argue that what keeps real cognition processes in the head is the requirement that cognitive processes be portable. Here, we are moved by a vision of what might be called the Naked Mind: a package of resources and operations we can always bring to bear on a cognitive task, regardless of the local environment. On this view, the trouble with coupled systems is that they are too easily decoupled. The true cognitive processes are those that lie at the constant core of the system; anything else is an add-on extra.

There is something to this objection. The brain (or brain and body) comprises a package of basic, portable, cognitive resources that is of interest in its own right. These resources may incorporate bodily actions into cognitive processes, as when we use our fingers as working memory in a tricky calculation, but they will not encompass the more contingent aspects of our external environment, such as a pocket calculator. Still, mere contingency of coupling does not rule out cognitive status. In the distant future we may be able to plug various modules into our brain to help us out: a module for extra short-term memory when we need it, for example. When a module is plugged in, the processes involving it are just as cognitive as if they had been there all along.[*]

*[[Or consider the following passage from a recent science fiction novel (McHugh 1992, p. 213): "I am taken to the system's department where I am attuned to the system. All I do is jack in and then a technician instructs the system to attune and it does. I jack out and query the time. 10:52. The information pops up. Always before I could only access information when I was jacked in, it gave me a sense that I knew what I thought and what the system told me, but now, how do I know what is system and what is Zhang?"]]

Even if one were to make the portability criterion pivotal, active externalism would not be undermined. Counting on our fingers has already been let in the door, for example, and it is easy to push things further. Think of the old image of the engineer with a slide rule hanging from his belt wherever he goes. What if people always carried a pocket calculator, or had them implanted? The real moral of the portability intuition is that for coupled systems to be relevant to the core of cognition, reliable coupling is required. It happens that most reliable coupling takes place within the brain, but there can easily be reliable coupling with the environment as well. If the resources of my calculator or my Filofax are always there when I need them, then they are coupled with me as reliably as we need. In effect, they are part of the basic package of cognitive resources that I bring to bear on the everyday world. These systems cannot be impugned simply on the basis of the danger of discrete damage, loss, or malfunction, or because of any occasional decoupling: the biological brain is in similar danger, and occasionally loses capacities temporarily in episodes of sleep, intoxication, and emotion. If the relevant capacities are generally there when they are required, this is coupling enough.

Moreover, it may be that the biological brain has in fact evolved and matured in ways which factor in the reliable presence of a manipulable external environment. It certainly seems that evolution has favored on-board capacities which are especially

The alternative is to say that Otto has no belief about the matter until he consults his notebook; at best, he believes that the museum is located at the address in the notebook. But if we follow Otto around for a while, we will see how unnatural this way of speaking is. Otto is constantly using his notebook as a matter of course. It is central to his actions in all sorts of contexts, in the way that an ordinary memory is central in an ordinary life. The same information might come up again and again, perhaps being slightly modified on occasion, before retreating into the recesses of his artificial memory. To say that the beliefs disappear when the notebook is filed away seems to miss the big picture in just the same way as saying that Inga’s beliefs disappear as soon as she is no longer conscious of them. In both cases the information is reliably there when needed, available to consciousness and available to guide action, in just the way that we expect a belief to be.

Certainly, insofar as beliefs and desires are characterized by their explanatory roles, Otto’s and Inga’s cases seem to be on a par: the essential causal dynamics of the two cases mirror each other precisely. We are happy to explain Inga’s action in terms of her occurrent desire to go to the museum and her standing belief that the museum is on 53rd street, and we should be happy to explain Otto’s action in the same way. The alternative is to explain Otto’s action in terms of his occurrent desire to go to the museum, his standing belief that the Museum is on the location written in the notebook, and the accessible fact that the notebook says the Museum is on 53rd Street; but this complicates the explanation unnecessarily. If we must resort to explaining Otto’s action this way, then we must also do so for the countless other actions in which his notebook is involved; in each of the explanations, there will be an extra term involving the notebook. We submit that to explain things this way is to take one step too many. It is pointlessly complex, in the same way that it would be pointlessly complex to explain Inga’s actions in terms of beliefs about her memory. The notebook is a constant for Otto, in the same way that memory is a constant for Inga; to point to it in every belief/desire explanation would be redundant. In an explanation, simplicity is power.

If this is right, we can even construct the case of Twin Otto, who is just like Otto except that a while ago he mistakenly wrote in his notebook that the Museum of Modern Art was on 51st Street. Today, Twin Otto is a physical duplicate of Otto from the skin in, but his notebook differs. Consequently, Twin Otto is best characterized as believing that the museum is on 51st Street, where Otto believes it is on 53rd. In these cases, a belief is simply not in the head.

This mirrors the conclusion of Putnam and Burge, but again there are important differences. In the Putnam/Burge cases, the external features constituting differences in belief are distal and historical, so that twins in these cases produce physically indistinguishable behavior. In the cases we are describing, the relevant external features play an active role in the here-and-now, and have a direct impact on behavior. Where Otto walks to 53rd Street, Twin Otto walks to 51st. There is no question of explanatory irrelevance for this sort of external belief content; it is introduced precisely because of the central explanatory role that it plays. Like the Putnam and Burge cases, these cases involve differences in reference and truth-conditions, but they also involve differences in the dynamics of cognition.[*]

*[[In the terminology of Chalmers' "The Components of Content" (forthcoming): the twins in the Putnam and Burge cases differ only in their relational content, but

Otto and his twin can be seen to differ in their notional content, which is the sort of content that governs cognition. Notional content is generally internal to a cognitive system, but in this case the cognitive system is itself effectively extended to include the notebook.]]

The moral is that when it comes to belief, there is nothing sacred about skull and skin. What makes some information count as a belief is the role it plays, and there is no reason why the relevant role can be played only from inside the body.

Some will resist this conclusion. An opponent might put her foot down and insist that as she uses the term “belief”, or perhaps even according to standard usage, Otto simply does not qualify as believing that the museum is on 53rd Street. We do not intend to debate what is standard usage; our broader point is that the notion of belief ought to be used so that Otto qualifies as having the belief in question. In all important respects, Otto’s case is similar to a standard case of (non-occurrent) belief. The differences between Otto’s case and Inga’s are striking, but they are superficial. By using the “belief” notion in a wider way, it picks out something more akin to a natural kind. The notion becomes deeper and more unified, and is more useful in explanation.

To provide substantial resistance, an opponent has to show that Otto’s and Inga’s cases differ in some important and relevant respect. But in what deep respect are the cases different? To make the case solely on the grounds that information is in the head in one case but not in the other would be to beg the question. If this difference is relevant to a difference in belief, it is surely not primitively relevant. To justify the different treatment, we must find some more basic underlying difference between the two.

It might be suggested that the cases are relevantly different in that Inga has more reliable access to the information. After all, someone might take away Otto’s notebook at any time, but Inga’s memory is safer. It is not implausible that constancy is relevant: indeed, the fact that Otto always uses his notebook played some role in our justifying its cognitive status. If Otto were consulting a guidebook as a one-off, we would be much less likely to ascribe him a standing belief. But in the original case, Otto’s access to the notebook is very reliable – not perfectly reliable, to be sure, but then neither is Inga’s access to her memory. A surgeon might tamper with her brain, or more mundanely, she might have too much to drink. The mere possibility of such tampering is not enough to deny her the belief.

One might worry that Otto’s access to his notebook in fact comes and goes. He showers without the notebook, for example, and he cannot read it when it is dark. Surely his belief cannot come and go so easily? We could get around this problem by redescribing the situation, but in any case an occasional temporary disconnection does not threaten our claim. After all, when Inga is asleep, or when she is intoxicated, we do not say that her belief disappears. What really counts is that the information is easily available when the subject needs it, and this constraint is satisfied equally in the two cases. If Otto’s notebook were often unavailable to him at times when the information in it would be useful, there might be a problem, as the information would not be able to play the action- guiding role that is central to belief; but if it is easily available in most relevant situations, the belief is not endangered.

Perhaps a difference is that Inga has better access to the information than Otto does? Inga’s “central” processes and her memory probably have a relatively high-bandwidth link between them, compared to the low-grade connection between Otto and his notebook. But this alone does not make a difference between believing and not believing. Consider Inga’s museum-going friend Lucy, whose biological memory has only a low-grade link to her central systems, due to nonstandard biology or past misadventures. Processing in Lucy’s case might be less efficient, but as long as the

Perhaps the intuition that Otto’s is not a true belief comes from a residual feeling that the only true beliefs are occurrent beliefs. If we take this feeling seriously, Inga’s belief will be ruled out too, as will many beliefs that we attribute in everyday life. This would be an extreme view, but it may be the most consistent way to deny Otto’s belief. Upon even a slightly less extreme view – the view that a belief must be available for consciousness, for example – Otto’s notebook entry seems to qualify just as well as Inga’s memory. Once dispositional beliefs are let in the door, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Otto’s notebook has all the relevant dispositions.

5 Beyond the Outer Limits

If the thesis is accepted, how far should we go? All sorts of puzzle cases spring to mind. What of the amnesic villagers in 100 Years of Solitude, who forget the names for everything and so hang labels everywhere? Does the information in my Filofax count as part of my memory? If Otto’s notebook has been tampered with, does he believe the newly-installed information? Do I believe the contents of the page in front of me before I read it? Is my cognitive state somehow spread across the Internet?

We do not think that there are categorical answers to all of these questions, and we will not give them. But to help understand what is involved in ascriptions of extended belief, we can at least examine the features of our central case that make the notion so clearly applicable there. First, the notebook is a constant in Otto’s life – in cases where the information in the notebook would be relevant, he will rarely take action without consulting it. Second, the information in the notebook is directly available without

difficulty. Third, upon retrieving information from the notebook he automatically endorses it. Fourth, the information in the notebook has been consciously endorsed at some point in the past, and indeed is there as a consequence of this endorsement.[*] The status of the fourth feature as a criterion for belief is arguable (perhaps one can acquire beliefs through subliminal perception, or through memory tampering?), but the first three features certainly play a crucial role.

*[[The constancy and past-endorsement criteria may suggest that history is partly constitutive of belief. One might react to this by removing any historical component (giving a purely dispositional reading of the constancy criterion and eliminating the past-endorsement criterion, for example), or one might allow such a component as long as the main burden is carried by features of the present.]]

Insofar as increasingly exotic puzzle cases lack these features, the applicability of the notion of “belief” gradually falls off. If I rarely take relevant action without consulting my Filofax, for example, its status within my cognitive system will resemble that of the notebook in Otto’s. But if I often act without consultation – for example, if I sometimes answer relevant questions with “I don’t know” – then information in it counts less clearly as part of my belief system. The Internet is likely to fail on multiple counts, unless I am unusually computer-reliant, facile with the technology, and trusting, but information in certain files on my computer may qualify. In intermediate cases, the question of whether a belief is present may be indeterminate, or the answer may depend on the varying standards that are at play in various contexts in which the question might be asked. But any indeterminacy here does not mean that in the central cases, the answer is not clear.

What about socially extended cognition? Could my mental states be partly constituted by the states of other thinkers? We see no reason why not, in principle. In an unusually interdependent couple, it is entirely possible that one partner’s beliefs will play the same sort of role for the other as the notebook plays for Otto.[*] What is central is a high degree of trust, reliance, and accessibility. In other social relationships these criteria may not be so clearly fulfilled, but they might nevertheless be fulfilled in specific domains. For example, the waiter at my favorite restaurant might act as a repository of my beliefs about my favorite meals (this might even be construed as a case of extended desire). In other cases, one’s beliefs might be embodied in one’s secretary, one’s accountant, or one’s collaborator.[*]

*[[From the New York Times, March 30, 1995, p.B7, in an article on former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden: "Wooden and his wife attended 36 straight Final Fours, and she invariably served as his memory bank. Nell Wooden rarely forgot a name - her husband rarely remembered one - and in the standing-room- only Final Four lobbies, she would recognize people for him."]]

*[[Might this sort of reasoning also allow something like Burge's extended "arthritis" beliefs? After all, I might always defer to my doctor in taking relevant actions concerning my disease. Perhaps so, but there are some clear differences. For example, any extended beliefs would be grounded in an existing active relationship with the doctor, rather than in a historical relationship to a language community. And on the current analysis, my deference to the doctor would tend to yield something like a true belief that I have some other disease in my thigh, rather than the false belief that I have arthritis there. On the other hand, if I used medical experts solely as terminological consultants, the results of Burge's analysis might be mirrored.]]

In each of these cases, the major burden of the coupling between agents is carried by language. Without language, we might be much more akin to discrete Cartesian “inner” minds, in which high-level cognition relies largely on internal resources. But the advent of language has allowed us to spread this burden into the world. Language, thus construed, is not a mirror of our inner states but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot. Indeed, it may be that the intellectual explosion in recent evolutionary time is due as much to this linguistically-enabled extension of cognition as to any independent development in our inner cognitive resources.

What, finally, of the self? Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so. Most of us already accept that the self outstrips the boundaries of consciousness; my dispositional beliefs, for example, constitute in some deep sense part of who I am. If so, then these boundaries may also fall beyond the skin. The information in Otto’s notebook, for example, is a central part of his identity as a cognitive agent. What this comes to is that Otto himself is best regarded as an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources. To consistently resist this conclusion, we would have to shrink the self into a mere bundle of occurrent states, severely threatening its deep psychological continuity. Far better to take the broader view, and see agents themselves as spread into the world.

As with any reconception of ourselves, this view will have significant consequences. There are obvious consequences for philosophical views of the mind and for the methodology of research in cognitive science, but there will also be effects in the moral and social domains. It may be, for example, that in some cases interfering with someone’s environment will have the same moral significance as interfering with their person. And if the view is taken seriously, certain forms of social activity might be reconceived as less akin to communication and action, and as more akin to thought. In any case, once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world.

REFERENCES

Beer, R. 1989. Intelligence as Adaptive Behavior. New York: Academic Press.

Roland Barthes

“Fortunately, I learned Theory on my own and did not sit though a bunch of Semiotics 201 classes to be preached to from the pulpit of French Theory and so have found in Theory a welcome solvent for the totalizing claims that various spiritual paths have made upon myself over the years. However, I can well understand how the literary departments of Yale, Brown and the like became churches for worship at the shrine of deconstruction in the 80s. The following article relates the problems the reification of Theory created for its initiate and the recent spat of realist novels that have attempted to redress the matter. A shout out to TL for bringing this article to my attention (AL):

The Theory Generation

by

NICHOLAS DAMES

from N + 1

books reviewed:

If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe they evoke shame (for having lost touch with them, or having never really read them); maybe they evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their inability to solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain. And you can walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly amusing or embarrassing, of finding the very same books.

If so, you belong to what might be called the Theory Generation; and it has recently become evident that some of its members have been thinking back on their training. They are doing so, moreover, in a form older than Theory, a form that Theory has done much to denaturalize and demystify (OK, “deconstruct”): the more or less realist novel, which describes individual lives in a fairly linear manner in conventional, if elegant or well-crafted, prose. Take, for instance, the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, a young woman named Tassie raised in rural Wisconsin, who describes the shock of her first term at her state university:

Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of sunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie.

The deadpan Midwestern humor, so pointedly stark in its syntax, brilliantly evokes the moment of initiation into Theory: spoken over rather than spoken to, Tassie can only, at least at first, receive Theory as a style. Thad’s read his Eve Sedgwick; Moore clearly alludes to the public controversy surrounding Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” the 1989 MLA paper that became a touchstone for conservative think pieces about the decline of academic literary studies. That episode isn’t available to Tassie, however; for her it’s all just a conversation overheard — which encapsulates the constant state of Theory in the American classroom, where debates with concealed or unnamed interlocutors (Derrida with Marx; Foucault with Hegel) become a cacophony of crossed lines. What is audible to her is intonation, the grain of those theoretical voices. Put less metaphorically: the way professors dress and talk, the stylistic alternatives they offer.

The same admixture of the high theoretical and the personal animates a moment in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad:

“What on earth have you got in that backpack?”

It’s Cora, Lou’s travel agent. She hates Mindy, but Mindy doesn’t take it personally — it’s Structural Hatred, a term she coined herself and is finding highly useful on this trip. A single woman in her forties who wears high-collared shirts to conceal the thready sinews of her neck will structurally despise the 23-year-old girlfriend of a powerful male who not only employs said middle-aged female but is paying her way on this trip.

“Anthropology books,” she tells Cora.

“I’m in the PhD program at Berkeley.”

Older and more self-assured than Tassie, Egan’s Mindy is able to apply Theory directly — here, by using Lévi-Strauss to make sense of a complex adult triangle. She is beginning to intuit the promise of using Theory to read situations in her everyday life: “Mindy has even wondered if her insights on the link between social structure and emotional response could amount to more than a rehash of Lévi-Strauss — a refinement; a contemporary application.” But applying Theory to the self, rather than simply being struck by its strangeness, is just another stage: “She’s only in her second year of coursework.”

For decades it’s been easy to trace the impact of Theory on the novel, but largely in the novel’s more experimental or formally innovative reaches; for instance, among the Theoretically sanctioned practitioners of the nouveau roman (Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, Sarraute), or the Anglo-Americans who, after the late ’70s, seemed intent on adding the torque of Theory to their own narrative twists (from DeLillo to late Pynchon, Winterson, Foster Wallace, Tom McCarthy, et alia). There still exists a robust cottage industry — exemplified recently in Judith Ryan’s The Novel After Theory — eager to explain how the contemporary novel has been making room for Theory, draining it of its rebarbative terminology (and much of its snob allure), putting it into concrete situations. It’s a vision of a strangely conservative and undialectical postmodern utopia, in which novelists and critical theorists would march hand in hand, each new theoretical vista finding its narrative mate, while syllabi virtually constructed themselves.

This rather boring, seemingly “advanced” idea — that Theory would alter the novel’s very DNA, so that it would no longer be possible to write fiction the same old way — may hold good for writers working in a recognizably high-postmodern fashion. But now comes a wave of fiction that tells a more complicated, less academically consecrated story. Theory, it turns out, might be most interesting not when it changes the form of fiction, but when it becomes an uneasy part of fiction’s content. In recent novels by college graduates of the late 1970s or 1980s — Egan, Moore, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Sam Lipsyte — and younger writers, such as Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, Theory is judged from within the forms it tried to dismantle (psychological realism; the bildungsroman), by criteria Theory could only recognize as regressive or naïve: What kind of a person does Theory make? What did it once mean to have read theorists? What does it mean now? How does Theory help you hold a job? Deal with lovers, children, bosses, and parents? Decide between the restricted alternatives of adulthood? If novelistic realism aspires to be a history of the present, that present now includes — in the educations of writers themselves — the Theory that relegates novelistic realism to the past.

So far, two responses to this trend are apparent. The first — common to much of the publicity surrounding The Marriage Plot; listen, if you can stand it, to Terry Gross’s gleeful sneering about “tropes and signs” in her interview with Eugenides — is a desire to have these novels confirm the story of Theory’s demise or comic irrelevance, so that we may once and for all consign Theory to the vast bin of ’80s kitsch, along with Duran Duran and shoulder pads. The second, more sensitive response welcomes a realist appraisal of people steeped in Theory. James Wood, praising Teju Cole’sOpen City in the New Yorker, singled out Cole’s ability to show deep reading in critical theory (Barthes, Benjamin, Said, Deleuze, de Man, and more) as “simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person.”

The problem is that these novels aren’t at all sure that Theory can be outgrown like fashion; that, having learned about “tropes and signs,” one can easily dispense with that knowledge. Taken seriously — and for the most part these novelists take Theory with all the seriousness one might wish, often to the point of comic effect — Theory explodes the idea that we might know any “whole context” of ourselves. These novels don’t entirely regret, nor do they entirely accept, Theory; they satirize it with unease. It’s a register best indicated by the double negative, a perfect example of which is the ruefully perplexed formulation from Lipsyte’s The Ask, describing — what else? — the narrator Milo’s college days: “We drank local beer, smoked homegrown and shake. We used words like ‘systemic,’ ‘interpellate,’ ‘apparatus,’ ‘intervention.’ It wasn’t bullshit, I remember thinking at the time. It just wasn’t not bullshit.”

Of course, it would be a mistake to see the realist novel as somehow anti-intellectual, incapable of engaging with ideas. In fact, the list of ideas that the novel has comfortably swallowed is motley and daunting. Associationist psychology (Tristram Shandy); evolutionary biology (Middlemarch, Tess of the D’Urbervilles); finance capitalism (The Way We Live Now, JR); psychoanalysis (Confessions of Zeno); post-Newtonian physics (The Crying of Lot 49) — realism has stretched to include these realms and countless others, many of which — like midcentury existentialism — became standard elements of American humanistic education. Call them the Ideas of Our Times.

Now think of the much smaller set of ideas that realism can’t readily swallow but can only portray, usually through emblematic, almost allegorical characters, because these ideas are poised against realism itself: convulsive, revolutionary political energy; transformative religious fervor. Call these the great Others of realism, recurrently ready to find realism’s small-scale focus and individual humanism either complicit or weak. To which set does Theory (be it of poststructuralist, rhizomatic, or Frankfurt-school coloration) belong?

A good comparison might be found in the great Russian realists of the 19th century. Nihilism in Turgenev or utilitarian utopianism in Dostoevsky: these aren’t ideas that the novel has to, or even can, assimilate; it can only acknowledge their existence. Turgenev’s Bazarov and Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin implicitly reject the assumptions — liberal, individual, psychological, ameliorative — of the form in which they are rendered. The very idea of novel-writing, in the world as they conceive it, is regressive in the extreme: thus Bazarov dismisses the Schiller and Goethe of Nikolai Kirsanov, his friend’s father, and expresses his preference for the materialism of Ludwig Büchner’s Stoff und Kraft. These characters and the ideas they incarnate are at least potentially like Theory: they stem from a new, fringe kind of education, hostile to what they perceive as the backwardness of novelistic narration, and speak for an understanding of the world that would make nonsense of the (novelistic) individual. The novel responds accordingly by plotting their demise while allowing us some lingering attachment to these doomed rebels; thus the logic of plot and that of human experience are seen to cohere in “the way of the world.”

But do the Theory-trained characters of novels like The Corrections, The Ask, or The Marriage Plot possess anything close to the demonic energy of a nihilist like Bazarov? You can imagine them talking to Bazarov — even agreeing with him most of the time — but by comparison they seem harmless, at the mercy of the world Theory has equipped them to deconstruct. Temperamentally they seem closer to Tolstoy’s kind-hearted searchers; Theory is for them like Freemasonry for Pierre Bezukhov, a seductive phase of education that is finally too cultish and self-enclosed to make sense of the world’s upheavals. Or perhaps it’s more like homosexuality in Evelyn Waugh: a maturational phase that has to be abandoned in order to take one’s place in the social order. (The Ask‘s Milo, again, on his college education: “I learned about late capitalism. And how to snort heroin.” To which his interlocutor, a streetwise and profane older lawyer, says: “Did they teach you anything about being a man while you were learning about late capitalism, whatever the fuck that is?”) Does Theory threaten to break apart the norms of the realist world, or do we just need to wait for these characters to outgrow their reading?

This is the odd space these Theory Generation novels inhabit, making them peculiar novels of ideas.¹ Their writers have read enough Theory at a young enough age to be in continued thrall to its power; they do justice to the disorienting shock those texts once had, and perhaps still have. Yet they are old enough to ironize (tenderly or bitterly) that power. Their depictions veer from caustic to nostalgic to regretful; their fictional readers of Theory are disappointed, maladaptive skeptics. It is as if the too-human frailty of these characters means that they fall short of the demands of Theory — a cunningly ironic demonstration (of a kind familiar from the entire history of realist fiction) that these demands might fall short of human needs.

If you had to pick the first shot in this conflict, you could do worse than reread the section in The Corrections in which Chip Lambert, former holder of an “assistant professorship in Textual Artifacts,” teacher of “Consuming Narratives,” lecturer on phallic anxiety in Tudor drama, and casualty of a drug-fueled affair with an undergraduate, heads repeatedly to the Strand Bookstore to sell his large, costly collection of Theory. It is a miniature triumph of realist notation at its most aggressive. Starting with his Marxist theorists, whose collective sticker price of $3,900 is knocked down to $65, Chip works his way through “his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers” to raise money for expensive dinners to impress a new girlfriend. Reduced at the end to “his beloved cultural historians,” Chip “piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115.” The pathetic, specific numbers, the terribly accurate roster of names (not just famous Continental names, but the kind of American academics that demonstrate Franzen’s realist-insidery expertise): this is what Theory is worth.

Scenes in which the vain things of this world are sold — auctions, foreclosures, negotiations with pawnbrokers — occur often in realist fiction, always expressing the hard principle that our ideals don’t translate into market terms. In the end, our fantasies or desires or self-delusions come to the bar, not of Truth, but of what others will give us for them.

Franzen (Swarthmore ’81), Eugenides (Brown ’83), Egan (Penn ’85), and Lipsyte (Brown ’90), among others, were well placed to observe the first vehement arrivals of Theorists in the classroom. Theory felt then — and perhaps still does, in a more routinized way — as esoteric and mysterious and potentially demoralizing as any other adult experience that college promised. The battle seemed epic: it pitted the Makers of Things — poets, novelists — against the Unmakers of Ideologies. The price of entry to many humanistic disciplines, in many corners of America, was to choose the latter. Not that it was a hard choice. Everything around you — public discourse, social demands, economic ironies — demanded critique. “We were stuck between meanings,” The Ask‘s Milo recalls. “Or we were the last dribbles of something. It was hard to figure. The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog. The beginning of aggressively marketed nachos.”

Among other things, it was the moment — call it the long 1980s — when the American university, no longer content to describe or study the socially critical function that artistic avant-gardes had claimed as their own for over a century, became itself the host for the avant-garde. This was literally the case — universities began to house and pay significant European thinkers at the moment their influence in their native lands began to wane. Unlike their predecessors who arrived before and during World War II, figures such as Derrida did not come merely to wait out a conflict. Instead they came to conquer, with newly formed journals, reshaped departments, grad-student protégés and acolytes, and translations produced by university presses and read in pedagogical contexts. The result was the institutionalization of Theory, its submission to the logic of an academic market that demanded regular infusions of new insight; but it was also the transformation of the institution itself, which now began to think of itself as ineluctably avant-garde in function.

There were ironies. Among the cheapest was the complaint that these theoretical avant-gardistes were, thanks to employment and tenure, comfortably middle-class — a complaint that ignores the long tendency of Western modernity to remunerate its critics. The more potent irony was that by transforming itself into an engine for critique, the academy ceased to believe in the goal of socialization — making good citizens — that was still one of its functions. (As Richard Rorty had it, the price higher education paid to keep this irony unexamined was to cede secondary education to conservatives.) At the center of this irony was the liberal arts student, tasked with learning to critique social norms before having consciously or fully lived them. It is both socially and aesthetically significant that so much recent virtuoso realism has come from writers who were undergraduates at precisely this moment, often in the places where Theory had most prestige.

To combat claims that realism was a source of critical knowledge — be it knowledge in the mode of Zola’s gritty naturalism, or Henry James’s more psychologized motto, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost“ — Theory made a sneaky move in the game by claiming to speak for true critique. The critique of realism — the naïveté of its faith in representation; its complicity with banal cultural narratives — was leavened by the sneaking fondness for realism that theorists themselves, even the most canonical, exhibited. Recall Barthes on Flaubert, Deleuze or Kristeva on Proust, Adorno on Balzac, Jameson on Gissing. Jameson in particular devoted himself to a patient explanation of how, in a certain historical moment, realism served a critical function, however distant that moment might now be.

For the student, it didn’t take much insight to see that realism was to be pitied. Dismissed as (pick your favorite) politically inert, bourgeois, retrograde; just another series of conventions and codes, mannered and risible as local TV news; or — worst of all — sheerly middlebrow, realism could match neither the smooth avant-gardiste whose visible disdain for the rest of the party attracts admiring glances, nor the genre novelist whose belly laugh loosens up the room. A concern for everyday compromise, an interest in lyricism straitened by recognizable syntax, some sardonic humor, a bit of adultery, or debt: the creaky old realist novel was no one’s first choice to take home. It didn’t seem up to offering critique or getting us from one meaning to the next, unless it had Theory as a wingman.

By the end of the ’90s, the easy equation that Theory gave you — realism is a tool of capitalist rationality, a product and not an imaginative artifact, a tool of the status quo — had the feel of a truism. But once an argument hardens into a truism, a response is likely already underway. The Corrections provided an early version of this response. It isn’t hard to detect the buried affection for Theory in Franzen’s narration of Chip’s desperate liquidation sale. Theory is still an informing presence in these novels; they are, of course, stories about reification, alienation, and particularly — a term obsessively, if gingerly, employed — late capitalism. But by 2001, Theory had become — at least for students, ex-students, and academics — part of the furniture of their lives, in no need of defense and yet scarcely revolutionary. It was no longer the key to all the world’s things, but rather just another thing-in-the-world. This very banality was what Franzen drew upon: by becoming routine, Theory had gone from object of fear, or satire, or hero worship, to something novelistic. And the novel, particularly the kind that relied on social detail and individual destinies (and in the case of Franzen, on the bourgeois nuclear family), was spoiling for a fight, trying to win back its eclipsed prestige.

No small fact, then, that so many of these novels take the shape of the bildungsroman, that most antique of realist modes. The punctured innocence of Moore’s Tassie, the callowness of Egan’s Mindy — these are paradigmatic steps on the way to an education in Theory. First comes getting used to a style (of insouciance, strange combinations, rejection of middle-class norms); next is learning to use it to make sense of your own maturation. François Cusset coined the term bildungstheorieto describe how Theory operates in the American setting, and Moore and Egan — neither of whom have written novels explicitly about Theory; these are distinctly modern bildungsromane — know that Theory is now, for an American college graduate of a certain kind, part of the sociology of late adolescence. Theory is swallowed by the ordinary developmental processes that it so often sought to disrupt.

This is one way in which contemporary realism has its revenge on Theory: narrating it as just another part of growing up a college-educated American. The revenge, though, takes interesting tonal forms. Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot is full of details rendered with such tender mockery that they seem as affectionate as satirical: the formerly New Critical professor who had “met Roland Barthes at a dinner party and been converted, over cassoulet, to the new faith”; the student in the semiotics seminar who proclaims that “I’m finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so problematized”; the novel’s heroine waiting anxiously to hear the correct pronunciation of the names that were as yet only opaque signs (”Bart. So that was how you pronounced it”). Here Eugenides combats Theory in a register even more effective than Franzen’s satire: nostalgia. What do you do to Theory when you treat it fondly? You make it into one of the wonderful follies of youth: so good to have had them; so good to be beyond them.

Eugenides’s novel is suffused with affection: for its time, its characters, and their ideas; and his characters are remarkably affectionate with one another, as if already imagining themselves in a roseate future anterior. This fondness is not quite echoed by other recent novels of the Theory Generation. From other perspectives it seems less possible to look back fondly, because Theory and the thinking it occasions are still present, still haunting characters, still intervening inconveniently between cognition and action. Here, perhaps, the realist novel about Theory-readers gains its best traction. If — to take three excellent recent examples — the protagonists of The Ask,Open City, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station aren’t living out the kind of traditional courtship and bildung narrative employed so knowingly in The Marriage Plot, it is because they’ve become so suspicious of plot that they refuse forward momentum. They wander, drop in and out of neighborhoods, cities, jobs, and relationships, finding experience itself only through a scrim of irony.

These are novels about consumers. These are people who are given to consuming books, particularly books about other books. It is entirely characteristic that, in the opening pages of Open City, the narrator Julius visits his aging college mentor, a Japanese-American scholar of medieval literature, then proceeds to the closing sale of the Lincoln Center Tower Records to go through the classical CD bins. These are receptive people — their characteristic act is taking in, choosing, evaluating, rejecting. Among the things they are choosing is a framework through which to apprehend the world. Theory doesn’t feel futuristic in these novels; in a slightly different register from The Marriage Plot, but with a similar temporal dynamic, it feels late, a voice from the past that only provokes dissatisfaction.

Consumption isn’t quite the heart of the matter, however. What allies Lipsyte’s Milo, Cole’s Julius, and Lerner’s Adam — a poet spending a desultory fellowship year in Spain, before and after the 2004 Madrid train bombings — is how fundamentallydiagnostic they are. Theory has taught them to treat the world as a set of deceptive signs; they doubt, reflexively, the communications of others. (They aren’t always wrong to do so.) Lerner’s Adam even ruminates on the impossibility this condition creates for the novel:

And when I read the New York Times online, where it was always the deadliest day since the invasion began, I wondered if the incommensurability of language and experience was new, if my experience of my experience issued from a damaged life of pornography and privilege, if there were happy ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, or if this division of experience into what could not be named and what could not be lived just was experience, for all people for all time. Either way, I promised myself, I would never write a novel.

The references to Adorno’s Minima Moralia (“damaged life”) and Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (“happy ages”) are not just grace notes but essential aspects of the dilemma: Adam has been thoroughly educated in a school of symptomology, and the phenomena of the world have become, as a result, a series of signs, not expressions or communications. Julius in Open City sees New York as suffering the neurosis of having repressed its violent, slaving past, which his education leads him constantly to unmask; he mistakes a “dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind” for “the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree.” Lerner’s novel circles restlessly around artistic experiences — poetry readings, museum visits, overheard songs — that provoke only a pained self-consciousness about how impossible it is to feel absorbed by them, as if what art now provides is occasion for ruminating on absent raptness. Eugenides, in a more obviously comic register, shows his characters relentlessly tripping over their autoskepticism: “More worryingly, Mitchell had to ask himself if he wasn’t being just as knee-jerk in resisting the charge of misogyny as college feminists were in leveling it, and if his resistance didn’t mean that he was, somewhere deep down, prone to misogyny himself. Why, after all, had he bought A Moveable Feast in the first place? Why, knowing what he did about Claire, had he decided to whip it out of his backpack at this particular moment? Why, in fact, had the phrase whip it out just occurred to him?” A relentless analytical drive, oriented toward the slippery nature of signs, is the constant mark of these novels, but it is a drive described and not reproduced. Realism depends upon faith, however tenuous, in the trustworthiness of signs. It isn’t a faith these protagonists can easily share, and so they lurk uncomfortably in their own novels. In the case of Cole’s Julius, whose novel ends by springing a sinister trapdoor, they may not even be aware of the most important elements of their own stories.

“I’m finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so problematized”: it’s a good joke. Semiotics was an exemplary introduction to Theory because it could so starkly diagnose the conventions — some of them innocuous, some of them harmful — that governed the smallest aspects of everyday life; and other avenues of Theory did, and still do, explain how those conventions came to be. Once you learned this habit of thought it was hard to forget it. You might never be as literal about it as Eugenides’s poor collegiate semiotician, but if you gave it more than a moment’s grudging attention, it changed you.

It could also change you into a spectator, an omniskeptic, leading a diluted affective existence. This is where the realism of the Theory Generation steps in to redress the balance, or at least to illustrate the dilemma. It’s a strange office for realist fiction. But if the death of the author, which these authors learned about in their college years, has spurred a response (We’re still here!), it has also spurred a new rationale for an old mode: to explore the consequences — in lost urgency, lost feeling, or lost expressiveness — of a life lived as a series of symptoms to be read.

Cole and Lerner are younger than the first wave of Theory Generation novelists, and the difference tells. Their novels are even looser in form than Franzen’s or Lipsyte’s or Moore’s, more solitary and lyrical in their first-person voices, less given to the comedy of social friction. They echo the monologic reveries of the self-consciously failed novels of formation from a century ago: Mann’s Tonio Kröger, Musil’s Young Törless, Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (it isn’t irrelevant that Lerner is better known as a poet), Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, Kafka’s Amerika, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Erudite misfits, well-schooled and skeptical, who by taking their educations so seriously have disabled themselves from the supposed rewards of education: these figures stand for a social crisis in maturation, where the lessons of school — classical studies, militarism, scholastic theology, Kultur — no longer connect to effective socialization. So with Cole’s Julius and Lerner’s Adam: bookish and diffident, they are excellent products of Theory, insofar as they have been thoroughly acculturated into the culture of anti-acculturation. They do not seem to expect their educations to have equipped them for the world they face. Whereas Eugenides’s or Lipsyte’s characters are surprised by the disjunction, they take it as a given. Lipsyte is a contemporary master of the rant; Cole and Lerner tend toward reverie.

Tonio Kröger on his situation: “I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence.” This might stand as a motto for any of the novels of the Theory Generation. Theory was, whatever its many internal disagreements and comic excesses, not just diagnostic but utopian — a training in interpreting the world as a path toward changing it. If it was meant to socialize you at all, it was meant to socialize you for the different world to come: a world of genuine difference genuinely encountered, a world less in thrall to the false gods of Normality and Pathology, a world that would be more transparent and, as a result, less painful. In their variously rueful ways, these novels remind us of the utopianism of Theory by writing its epitaph.

Because what does Theory do for its former students in these novels? It hasn’t prepared them for a new world; instead, it’s given them a way to survive, just barely, in the old one. Having learned well the poststructuralist critique of positions — the necessary exclusions and erasures by which any “position” is made possible — they are eminently flexible, admirably uncommitted ironists. Their novels leave them in temporary limbos that promise only more temporary limbos to come. Lipsyte’s Milo, having long abandoned painting, loses his white-collar development job and finds himself working for a local contractor. Lerner’s Adam floats through a fellowship, after which he will return to the US to nothing certain at all. The music industry that is the subject of Egan’s book doesn’t collapse so much as quietly shrink, undergoing what Mindy might call a “structural” adjustment. Theory, it turns out, is less intellectually powerful than emotionally useful; it habituates you to the anomic, precarious existence you were destined to lead in any case. It was like a drug after all: not hallucinogenic or mind-expanding, but rather pleasantly sedating.

Why such a low-stakes portrayal of what a humanistic education gives you? Because the habit of diagnostic, symptomatic analysis these characters embody is not defeated by the fiendishly well-encoded secrets of Capital or Power so much as rendered inert by a world without secrets, or symptoms, at all. Who needs to reveal the codes through which ideology speaks when ideology speaks plainly? When power dispenses with alibis? Or when power, in the form of Purdy, Milo’s college friend turned big-shot capitalist, speaks of his college gang like this: “They’ll think they are special and that they suffer in distinct ways, but they are all hurtling down the same world-historical funnel. They will attempt to professionalize their passions, or else just get jobs. Some will do better than others. Some won’t have to do better because of their trust funds. Despite what are often radically different fashion aesthetics, not to mention politics, they are all fundamentally the same.” Forget surfaces and codes, forget symptoms and ideological ruses, forget secrets and conspiracies: the ways in which these characters are exploited, used, manipulated, and discarded are as obvious as their all-too-human needs for a little comfort, a little belonging, a little safety. In that kind of world, less secure and polite than the world they were schooled in, hermeneutics scarcely registers as a skill; it’s at best a habit of self-soothing. It allows you to think that when you’re talked to this way, something else might be going on. The dark joke — and it’s a joke realism has always been good at making — is that nothing else is: the cynicism of power is just that cynical.

It’s an inversion that might be one of the signature ironies of these novels: Theory was right all along, just in the wrong ways. “Late capitalism”: can any concept be more germane to Milo’s unraveling life? “Discourse”: as Eugenides’s Madeleine slowly learns, it’s a useful shorthand for the illusion of our uniqueness, particularly the uniqueness of our ability to anatomize social discourses. “Damaged life”: nothing else expresses so well the woundedness of Adam, who invents fictional alibis for others — such as the “fascism” of his kind, liberal Midwestern father — to produce the symptom that’s not really there. Their narratives bear out what they were taught, but in far more literal form. If they took from their exquisitely expensive schooling an elegantly deconstructive cast of mind, what it turns out they needed was to have trusted Theory’s most reductive, blunt, brutally plain lessons instead. It’s a funny, eminently realist kind of warning: Forget the hermeneutics of suspicion. Remember what you’ve suspected all along — what, looking around you, you can hardly avoid suspecting. Be one of those on whom nothing, not even Theory, is lost.

¹ In addition to the writers already mentioned, the number of recent American novels that contain Theory-wise graduate students — Norman Rush’s Mating, Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening, Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector, and so on — is impressive. British novelists, by contrast, often take on Theory and theorists through the question of literary biography after the “death of the author,” as in A. S. Byatt’s Possession or Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. For most American writers Theory is less a matter of how to think of a writer’s life than how to think of a student’s.