Philip Davis, Shakespeare Thinking. London: Continuum, 2007.

Paul, Ryan Singh

Philip Davis, Shakespeare Thinking. London: Continuum, 2007.

Cognitive theories of the embodied mind have energized many areas of the humanities, sparking responses that range from welcoming to skeptical. For some scholars, neuroscience promises a scientific foundation for humanist research, transcending the mind-body dichotomy by connecting psychic processes to the brain's physical structures. But as David Hawkes's provocative article on neuroscience as the "new materialism" demonstrates, others are far less sanguine about brain science's incursions into the humanities. (1) Hawkes challenges humanists engaged in cognitive studies to answer a question: "Is it true that human beings have no soul?" (21). For Hawkes, the "eliminative materialism" of neuroscience inevitably answers in the affirmative (11). The search for the physical origins of thought reduces humanity to nothing but matter, discarding the human subject as an illusion. Hawkes argues that if humanists accept the embodied mind as truth, the consequences could be devastating, and not only for humanities departments subject to "colonizatiorf' by the natural sciences (21). Neuroscience, he contends, is aligned on a metaphysical level with the capitalist project of endless commodification: it reduces humanity to another type of matter to be monetized and consumed.

Hawkes's essay engendered a series of vigorous, erudite responses, all recently published by the online journal Early Modern Culture. Given the influence of cognitive science on humanities research and the stakes involved, the discussion amongst Hawkes and his interlocutors is passionate, enlightening, and wide-ranging. It is unfortunate, however, that none of the participants took notice of Philip Davis's Shakespeare Thinking, a short but exciting work on the creative cognitive properties of language. In this book, Davis outlines a method of literary analysis that incorporates cognitive science while remaining sensitive to poetic subtleties and the dynamic relationship between mind and brain.

Davis argues that Shakespeare's dramatic verse reveals bits and pieces of "an original text or background script for the creation of life" (1). "Shakespearean thinking" is the name Davis gives to this script. Despite the materiality of the textual metaphor Davis employs, he is interested in action rather than substance. Speed is the most important feature of Shakespearean thinking, which jumps suddenly and unpredictably from place to place like a flash of electricity; it is a "quicker, more physically dispersed form of mentality" that expresses the almost pre-linguistic experience of life as it is in action, before the hardening of experience into memory and its inevitable second-order revisions (2). Rather than examining the content of thought, then, Davis attempts to trace thinking in motion, finding evidence of its passing in the transformations wrought upon language by the electrical flash of thought's sudden leaps and connections.

For the language to analyze such an elusive and ephemeral phenomenon, Davis draws on an eclectic array of sources, most notably a tradition of process philosophy that begins with William Hazlitt and moves through Charles Darwin to John Dewey, William James, and Henri Bergson. Contemplating reality as fluid motion rather than fixed substances, these thinkers provide Davis with a nascent philosophical language to "hold open the momentary" and describe life and thought in action prior to the illusory separation of subject and object and to the fixing of experience in settled concepts (10). It is these moments and motions "between," says Davis, that Shakespeare attempts to capture in verse: the generative processes of thinking as living energies collide with one another.

In a series of subtle and elegant close readings, Davis demonstrates the methodological implications of a focus on thinking over thought. Since Shakespearean thinking exists only when performed, it is not "in" the text. Rather, it occurs through the text, activated in and carried along by Shakespeare's dynamic, syntactic, and semantic structures. For example, when Twelfth Night's Viola laments the complex dynamics of the love triangle between herself, Count Orsino, and Olivia, her dialogue, Davis claims, is not merely expository. Viola is herself discovering the nature of her situation: as she traces the overlapping and conflicting relationships between the three, her words shift from one perspective to another. Like the audience, Viola is "as much hearing the report of her own thinking as giving it" (48). Reading Troilus's complaint for the departed Cressida, Davis argues that the repetitions of/f, not, and this form a repeated syntactic pattern: "called into being in the space between" these empty structures, Troilus searches for the language to explain his situation to himself (41). In Shakespearean thinking, the mind comes to recognition of itself through the creative exploration of the dynamic structure in which it is embedded. Importantly, thinking exists not just within the individual mind; rather, thinking calls the mind to imagine an external perspective from which it can recognize itself.

The multidimensionality of thinking is central to Davis's vision for cognitive literary criticism. In his final chapter, Davis turns first to Edwin A. Abbott's 1869 Shakespearian Grammar. Abbott argues that the flexible syntax of Elizabethan English offers a quicker language more responsive to the emotional demands of the moment. Such responsiveness allows for a compressed, elliptical style of striking juxtapositions and quick shifts in meaning, with the steps between elided. Shakespeare's favorite technique for creating compact and energized language is to alter a word's syntactic function; in particular, he loves to verb nouns. Such compressions, writes Davis, create "new life out of basic materials" (80). "IT]he quasi-synaptic connection made between one thought-firing word and another is silent" as the process of thinking jumps from one concept to another, building new connections in language "in the midst and the mix of the life it depicts" (80). Davis compares this creative process to "Thoughtland," the imaginative realm sought by the protagonist of Abbott's science fiction classic Fladand; like the two-dimensional being trying to think in three dimensions, the compressions and elisions in Shakespeare's language reveal thinking straining beyond the barrier of the individual, attempting to think not only its own being but also "outside or above" itself (71).

Like some other entries in Continuum's Shakespeare Naw! series, Shakespeare Thinking is the beginning of a work-in-progress, so it has its share of problems. In building his conceptual framework, Davis relies on a vague definition of "life" as a creative force that is somehow analogous to or related to the process of "thinking." He tends to conflate the two into one nebulous force without explaining their relationship: it is unclear if thinking is similar to life, an effect of life, or perhaps even a form of life itself. And although Davis defines Shakespearean thinking as the expression of primary experience, it is only through the second-order processes of description, paraphrase, and analysis that he can recreate it. Davis sets his sights on thinking in action while at the same time placing it behind the arras of ineffable, momentary experience. Still, his ultimate hypothesis, that Shakespearean thinking can literally change the structure of the brain, shows that a cognitive literary criticism not subject to the demands of "eliminative materialism" is possible. Davis writes that Shakespeare Thinking is part of a larger interdisciplinary project to "recreate a natural philosophy that works between arts and sciences" (92). Hawkes and others fear that cognitive science may be a Trojan Horse that opens the humanities to conquest by the sciences. By developing a literary language that incorporates cognitive theory without raising it to the status of ultimate truth, Davis sees a way to bridge an academic divide and help humanists and scientists collaborate in the study of human life, consciousness, and creativity.

Notes

(1.) David Hawkes, "Against Materialism in Literary Theory," Early Modern Culture: an electronic seminar 9 (2012): 1-31, http://emc.eserver.org/1-9/issue9.html.

Reviewed by Ryan Singh Paul, Allegheny College