Extending our pleasures

Interpretation involves experiencing well. In fact, one could say that good interpretation requires perceptual acuity and quality of experience. If one reads a poem like a newspaper, one’s experience of that poem is impoverished. If one’s experience of a poem is impoverished or minimal, one’s interpretation of that poem will likewise be impoverished or minimal. The “capability of mind” that Wordsworth seeks to stimulate and increase in his work is precisely the ability of the mind to engage in experience fully and to be pleased more broadly and readily with what it finds there.

So to focus on the experience of the text is central to doing good interpretation of texts. Without attending to the one, how can we presume to do the other?

With that said, how do we get at the experience of the text? This is the difficulty of the transactional view of Louise Rosenblatt: we have the text, and we have ourselves. But can we access the poem itself? It is the same problem central to reality and representations of it. We have language, we have our own experiences, but we don’t have access to broader truths or meanings until we construct them. Rhetoric is at the core of it all.

Wordsworth calls the core issue “the language of the sense.” But what is it? How do we access it? How does it become sensible to us? Clearly it is important, and prior to conceptual language. But how does it happen?

Perception is neuronal mapping of sensory inputs. Data is selected, screened, assembled, and represented to us for decision-making. Pleasurable inputs are strengthened by feedback and sought again and again. Painful inputs are only strengthened by feedback when reflection indicates long-term pleasures beyond and causally related to the painful inputs. The excitement of the brain can be pleasurable, but over-stimulation crosses a threshold into pain at some point. I’m not sure that pleasure and pain can be mapped entirely as matters of degree (as David Hartley tried to do in his Observations on Man (1749)). They may be related to different centers of activity too—like taste sensors on the tongue.

Wordsworth wrote that “the mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants.” And he asserted that the job of poetry was to “increase this capability” in the reader. This is where neuronal changes come in. How does one learn to feel a rush of pleasure when reading a poem or playing a word game? Is such a pleasure “automatic” or learned? How does one learn to experience pleasure in a good equation? A well-drawn diagram? A diving catch on a baseball field? What brings us back to the aesthetically-pleasing? To what Robert Pirsig (in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) called QUALITY?

Education should partly be about the process of refining and extending the range of pleasures that we can experience. We should be capable of being pleased by word-play, by stories of the past, by dreams of the future, by the worlds of “as if” and “ought to be.” If we are not, our experience will surely be impoverished. And our interpretations of “reality” (and the worldview we assemble from them) will surely follow suit.

Any educational situation that ignores pleasure and quality, and sacrifices them (in the literal meaning of the word) in the name of “discipline” or quantities, is a failure. The Puritan strain in our educational system asserts that play and work never join forces, that pleasure is not part of learning, and that “discipline” means categories and dogged repetition of a limited repertoire of activities. Ouch. How wrong can this be?

Why do we have an educational curriculum that denies pleasure, play, and open making of meaning? Well, it comes from the “Western Tradition” that academics have been so proud of for so darned long: concepts privileged over experiences, objectivity favored over subjectivity, mastery favored over inquiry, control favored over spontaneity. All of this is dangerous and damaging to the human mind. In fact, TV and the Internet and drugs and alcohol and a host of other social innovations have been efforts to bring play and un-directed experience and spontaneity and subjectivity back into our culture. But they bring them in the back door and do not integrate them into our way of understanding ourselves.

In the name of authority and control, we have created educational and business structures based on yes/no and either/or thinking. We have followed the lead of our computers. But rhetoric is central to learning, thinking, and relating to other complex creatures, and we cannot neglect it. Representation, metarepresentation, interpretation, attention, and other factors come into play. The answer to many questions remains “mu”—neither yes nor no—for a long time. And that is good! To jump to conclusions is one of the fatal flaws of human cognition. Better to hold information with a metarepresentational tag (as Lisa Zunshine and others describe it). So and so said this, or I read this in such and such a newspaper, or . . . in the world of rhetoric, judgments are always contingent. But that does not stop us from making choices and acting. Our best judgment guides us, and that must be (adaptively speaking) good enough. Can I jump far enough to avoid falling on that ice spot? Did my friend give me the best instructions for getting to his house? Should I take the job offer I just received, or stick with a sure thing that I’ve already got? Both/And thinking always comes into play.

The university, and public education in the U.S., were built on principles that no longer hold. Education in medieval times centered on cultural memory. Monks copied manuscripts, storing and transmitting the written word and thought from generation to generation. The scale of human thinking was limited by the small scope of both thinkers and their influence on readers. The corpus of knowledge was small, relatively speaking, and a life’s work could result in complete mastery of major subject areas. One could, truly, know the best that had been said and written. Knowledge was accumulative, centered on memorization and identification. Expertise was mastery of a body of texts and ideas. Ph.D. programs and teacher prep programs remain enmeshed in the assumptions of this medieval understanding of knowledge

It is time for a change of direction. I'd love to hear comments on this.