Subject: Re: Leibnitz
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 18:49:06 +0100


John,

> In my earlier mailing I commented on what I thought was a brutal and
> destructive way for someone who has knowledge to deal with someone who does
> not.

Brutal yes, destructive no. The only way I can explain why I think this is by
reference to the Leavis-Snow dispute over Snow's Two Cultures lecture, back in
1959. At the time, there was a great hoo-ha on both sides of the Atlantic at the
savagery with which Leavis dismembered Snow's position (Lionel Trilling, for
example, agreed with Leavis that the Two Cultures notion was an indefensible one
but ticked him off for his tone, calling it "impermissable"). Having read both
pieces, I find Leavis's argument utterly convincing and the tone of the piece
altogether justified. When Leavis says of Snow that he is "as intellectually
undistinguished as it is possible to be" he is not engaging in abuse or cheap
polemic for the sake of it, or being personally cruel (as many accused him of
being). Snow, Leavis says, is a "portent" and he attacks him solely in this role
as representative of (what Leavis called) the "technologico-Benthamite"
tendency.

In my copy of the Leavis lecture, there is a Prefatory Note where Leavis
responds to Trilling's comments. Here is the first paragraph:

"'There can be no two opinions', says Professor Trilling, 'about the tone in
which Dr Leavis deals with Sir Charles.' More particularly the charge is that my
reference to Snow's novels were gratuitious, not being necessary to my theme and
argument. They are cruel in their gratuitousness, we are to gather: they are
expressed, characteristically (Professor Trilling intimates), in a way
calculated to cause unnecessary pain and offence. I have to comment that, in
thus lending himself to the general cry that I have 'attacked' Snow (and
'attack' goes with the suggestion that I have indulged in an unpleasant display
of personal animus)), Professor Trilling, who passes as a vindicator of the
critical function, seems to me guilty of <i>la trahison des clercs.<i> His
attitude would make the essential work of the critic today impossible. It
belongs to the ethos I was intent on challenging."

Whatever position you take on the Two Cultures controversy, one thing is very
striking -- that the level of debate, even from Snow, was very much higher than
similar discussions today (in so far as they take place today). See what the
distinguished neuroscientist Ramachandran has to say about art and culture in a
recent issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies. At least Snow was a novelist
as well as a scientist, if not a very good one, in fact a very bad one. (Leavis
found him unreadable -- below I've copied some of the things he says about Snow
as novelist, which, if you take a look at any Snow novel, seem eminently
reasonable. To a mind of Leavis's calibre, Snow's approach to literature and his
vainglorious attitude to his own work must have been almost physically
painful -- Leavis who spent a lifetime heroically struggling to assert the
claims of literature as the highest form of cognition).

I quote these passages simply to show that it is possible to be brutal -- well,
I don't actually think it was all that brutal -- without at the same time
intending to be destructive.

Regards
Simon



 "Snow is, of course, a -- no, I can't say that; he isn't; Snow thinks of
himself as a novlist. I don't want to discuss that aspect of him, but I can't
avoid saying something. The widespread belief that he is a distinguished
novelist (and that it should be widespread is significant of the conditions that
produced him) has certainly its part in the success with which he has got
himself accepted as a mind. The seriousness with which he takes himself as a
novelist is complete -- if seriousness can be so ineffably blank, unaware.
Explaining why he should have cut short a brilliant career (we are to
understand) as a scientist he tells us that it had always been his vocation to
be a writer. And he assumes with a happy and undoubting matter-of-factness --
the signs are unmistakable -- that his sense of vocation has been triumphantly
vindicated and that he is beyond question a novelist of a high order (of 'world
class' even, to adopt his own idiom). Confidence so astonishingly enjoyed might
politely be called memorable -- if one could imagine the memory of Snow the
novelist long persisting; but it won't, it can't, in spite of the British
Council's brochure on him (he is a British Council classic). [Leavis was quite
right here: no one, but no one, reads Snow nowadays.] I say 'astonishingly
enjoyed', for as a novelist he doesn't exist; he doesn't begin to exist. He
can't be said to know what a novel is. The nonentity is apparent on every page
of his fictions -- consistently manifested, whatever aspect of a novel one looks
for. I am trying to remember where I heard (can I have dreamed it?) that they
are composed for him by an electronic brain called Charlie, into which
instructions are fed in the form of the chapter-headings. However that may be,
he -- or the brain (if that's the explanation) -- can't do any of the things the
power to do which makes a novelist. He tells you what you are to take him as
doing, but he can give you no more than the telling. When the characters are
supposed to fall in love, you are told they do, but he can't show it happening.
Abundant dialogue assures you that this is the novelistic art, but never was
dialogue more inept; to imagine it spoken is impossible. And Snow is helpless to
suggest character in speech. ..."




**********************************************************************
Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu