11).
Eagleton was responding to Fish’s exposition of a Billy Pilgrim-style logic that, as we saw earlier, inevitably follows on the awkward alliance between postcolonialism and postmodernism in the indictment of European imperialism: ‘A historically conditioned consciousness’, Fish had argued earlier,
cannot … scrutinize its own beliefs [or] conduct a rational examination of its own convictions … for in order to begin such scrutiny, it would first have to escape the grounds of its own possibility, and it could do that only if it were not historically conditioned and were instead an acontextual and unsituated entity (1985, 10).
Such a deterministic conception of a ‘hard-wired’ human mentality obviously leaves no room for either change or progress in human understanding. Barbara J. King, reviewing Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought (2008), calls it a ‘reductive abyss’ that takes no account of ‘the great plasticity of the human brain’ and its infinite mutability: ‘Our brain circuits are sculpted and resculpted’ constantly (2008, 5). In the words of Susan Haack, challenging the ‘Higher Dismissiveness’ of cognitive sceptics such as Fish, ‘it doesn’t follow from the fact that people disagree about what is true, that truth is relative to perspective’ (1999, 12). Truths can be both foundational and negotiable, and we see such truths in operation around us every day.
It became clear from views such as these that my own attempts to assess what Europeans over the millennia had known about Africa, what they had thus regarded as ‘true,’ and how they had processed and expressed such knowledge would demand further investigations into how human ‘knowing’ actually works. Megan Vaughan nicely pointed up the dilemma for my own researches:
If Orientalism is more than a set of misrepresentations, but is rather a system of academic knowledge outside of which it is impossible for any (western) scholar to stand; and if this system of knowledge constituted an active force in the operation of colonial power, then the possibility of writing histories which are in some sense ‘better’ reflections of lived experience seems to be denied us (1994, 3).
Simply put, the question is whether we are all helplessly strapped to Billy Pilgrim’s cognitive flat-car, or whether cognition is a fluid, interactive and revisionary process whereby we constantly adjust our ‘take’ on the world. Martin Kreiswirth offers one useful approach, distinguishing between a ‘mimetic epistemology’ and a ‘poetic epistemology’ (1992, 636), and suggesting that at different times we employ different ways of knowing. ‘Mimetic epistemology’ is Cartesian and definitive, based on recognition, in which the mind matches things, perceptions, events and so on with concepts already known, including language. ‘Poetic epistemology’ turns on cognition as an inventive, narrative process creating its reality out of an experiential and linguistic repertoire. Paul Ricouer (1971), Paul Feyerabend (1975), Hayden White (1978, 1987), Jean François Lyotard (1979), and Richard Rorty (1979) may be said to espouse versions of a poetic epistemology, which underlies much of postmodernist thinking. Versions of a mimetic epistemology, on the other hand, may well inspire much of the binarist thinking imbedded in Western thought and values; for example, the Judaeo-Christian tradition of Good and Evil, God and Satan, Abel and Cain, and eventually, white and black as reified in Western racism. This has also been called the ‘spectator theory of knowledge’, presupposing ‘a naïve relationship between a body of objective facts and the individual consciousness of the observer who records them’ (Washington, 1989, 61). It clearly also underlies much of the postcolonialist discourse we reviewed earlier.
Yet, if the historic pressures favouring a Cartesian judgemental and binarist mimetic epistemology may be immense, to the point of coming to seem foundational and archetypal, the very fact that human beings have an imagination constantly invites the invocation of a poetic epistemology as well. We can and do change our minds. Our reception of the world is not a one-way, predetermined process, but a conversation, a revisionary loop, an ongoing dialogic encounter such as made famous in Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘dialogic imagination’ (1981). Norman Mailer remarked that we live in ‘a universe based upon metaphor rather than measure’ (cited by Harris, 1996, 27), an insight in line with the notions of both a ‘dialogic imagination’ and a ‘poetic epistemology’. That we may at any given time and in any given place be conditioned as to what we regard as ‘knowledge’, true or false, and that seeing beyond ‘a horizon of expectation’ (Jauss, 1982, in Selden, 1989, 127) requires effort and application, does not mean that we are hopelessly trapped in historical prejudice.
The ‘Gestalt switch’ or rapid change in conceptual paradigms proposed by Thomas Kuhn (1962) and implied in Foucault’s notion of radical shifts in the dominant episteme (1966) does indeed occur, and is for my purposes most dramatically instanced in the way Third World postcolonialists now have little hesitation in excoriating the efforts of nineteenth-century missionaries or colonial educators and philanthropists who in their own time were universally taken to be selfless (even misguided) humanitarian idealists.
Theories and revelations about how the human mind works have in recent decades greatly advanced the case for the capacities and reach of a poetic epistemology (Dennett, 1991; Rorty, 1991). Cognitive neuroscience has revealed (or at least speculates persuasively) that while the mind may exploit complex computer-simulating features such as ‘multiple drafts models’ (Dennett, 1991), ‘reactivity cascades’ and ‘feedback loops’ (Damasio, 1995), and ‘parallel distributed processors’ (Churchland, 1996), our brains are still immeasurably more complex, unpredictable and inventive than any computer simulation (Bloch, 1990; Dennett, 1995; Fodor, 1995; Sperber, 1996; Hacking, 2007).
This is not the place to pursue such arguments, but they make it clear that the sheer inventiveness of the human mind renders naïve many of the cognitive assumptions dear to postcolonialist doctrine. For instance, the once widely held opinion that we cannot hold concepts for which we do not have words, basic to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see below) and essential to proponents of cultural singularity, is now countermanded by the ‘well-established fact that concepts can and do exist independently of language’ and ‘that much knowledge is fundamentally non-linguistic’ (Bloch, 1990, 185–186).
Most particularly, essentialist assumptions – some fundamental to Said’s Orientalism and much of the discourse reviewed earlier – that some cultures are intrinsically doomed to be racist by irreversible mind constructs and linguistic paradigms are unsupportable in light of the ever more complex and extraordinary features of human mentality that are revealed. The Derridean, almost Calvinist, mantra that our cognitive architecture is ‘always already constructed’, rendering us merely responsive to the triggers of socio-cultural preconditioning, is not supported by contemporary models of the mind. Indeed, Derrida has himself at times contradicted the deterministic implications of his work. In Positions (1981), for instance, he proposes that all epistemologies depend on systems of difference that operate within networks of indeterminacy or ‘unstable disequilibriums’ (Selden, 1989, 89). Our minds do not think us – we think with our minds.
Stephen Greenblatt, urging that we resist ‘à priori ideological determinism, that is, the notion that particular modes of representation are inherently and necessarily bound to a given culture or class or belief system’, also explains why: ‘Individuals and cultures tend to have fantastically powerful assimilative mechanisms, mechanisms that work like enzymes to change the ideological composition of foreign bodies’ (1991, 4). What all this adds up to is that ‘the process of cultural contact and reporting [is] often “messy” and undirected’ and that ‘power by itself is too crude an instrument for measuring all the subtleties that make up cultural interaction’ (Schwartz, 1994, 7).
Fundamental to most of the cognitive and cultural models considered above is the nature and function of language, not only in so far as language has the foundational role in our cultural and cognitive being, but also in that language may constitute a model
