An Embodied View of Misunderstanding in Macbeth - CiteSeerX

Poetics Today

An Embodied View of Misunderstanding in Macbeth Ellen Spolsky Bar-Ilan University, English

Abstract The project of describing how people understand each other’s unspoken motivations, beliefs, commitments, and intentions had been housed in departments of linguistics or philosophy until about twenty-five years ago, when some developmental cognitive scientists intervened with different kinds of arguments and evidence. As part of the same broad movement toward academic interdisciplinarity, several young philosophers and some literary scholars have begun to visit the laboratories of psychologists, neurologists, and evolutionary biologists to learn and also to develop joint research projects, using older and newer theories of mind to advantage. Although a full-scale comparison of all the work in the separate and combined fields cannot be attempted here, I would like to make some preliminary comments about the relationship among philosophical and cognitive theories of understanding intentionality, pointing to particular strengths and weaknesses which bear on their usefulness to literary studies. My claim is that their gaps and their complementarity can be seen with particular clarity when they are used to describe interpretive failures in a complex literary text such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

What does it say about human actions that they can be done unintentionally, unwillingly, involuntarily, insincerely, unthinkingly, inadvertently, heedlessly, carelessly, under duress, under the influence, out of contempt, out of pity, by mistake, by accident? —Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy

Poetics Today 32:3 (Fall 2011) doi 10.1215/03335372-1375180 © 2011 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Published by Duke University Press

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The Double Focus: Failure and Embodiment

The resonance of Stanley Cavell’s question for a literary scholar comes from the recognition that the infinite variety of ordinary human failures he notes are precisely the subject of hundreds of years of poems, paintings, plays, movies, and operas. A rich tradition of literary scholarship describes how those works display the embodied human desires, beliefs, and intentions that propel these missteps and also how readers understand and perhaps even learn from these works of imagination. Cognitive literary study builds on all this work by enhancing our perception of the complexity of human understanding and of our fictions by asking additional questions about embodiment: how do the evolved particularities of our bodies contribute to the successes and failures of these actions?1 The extraordinarily important lesson learned from the ordinary language philosophers, beginning with J. L. Austin, as refracted in Cavell’s words above, is the ordinariness, the virtual systematicity, of human failures in understanding others. The psychologists, presumably because they regularly depend on the empirical evidence provided by traumatized or diseased brains in framing their hypotheses of how supposedly normal brains work, seem to regard failures as pathological—that is, as not at all ordinary. The philosophers of mind, for their part, although explicitly post-Cartesian in their claim to extend their analyses of thought to the thinker’s situation in the world, did not have, certainly not in Austin’s day, 1. Cognitive semantics as developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is an important example of this, as is evolutionary developmental psychology. Embodiment, as used in cognitive discourse, refers to the immanent, material grounds of understanding: the muscles, cells, and synapses that underwrite thinking. Embodied knowledge is not opposed to conceptual thinking; it is what allows it to happen. On this view, higher cognitive faculties such as reasoning depend upon an ongoing awareness of our sensorimotor experience, including the monitoring of our emotions. It is also assumed that human physiology constrains thinking in predictable ways. The interaction of cultural biases and constraints is assumed but very difficult to demonstrate. Some constraints may be overridden, others may be reinforced by material and cultural conditions. Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007) describes the importance of embodiment for literary understanding. For the inseparability of emotion from bodily knowledge, see Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness (1999), Kay Young’s Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (2010), and Patrick Colm Hogan’s What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (2011). Nancy Easterlin focuses on the reader’s body seeking a satisfying orientation to the spaces and places of the world in “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation” (2010). Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, in The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (2002), argue that all learning and thinking consist of blends of metaphors based on simple bodily experiences. By describing how naturally we combine apparently distinct concepts, they make clear that making metaphor is not restricted to canonical literary texts but is a central part of our evolved cognitive competence. See also Turner 1996 and Spolsky 2001, 2007 for literary historical arguments based on embodied cognition.


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the empirical resources that recent psychologists muster: such resources challenge them to account in their theories for real brains and bodies with their evolved affordances and constraints. For many philosophers today, however, this distinction has disappeared. Some can be found in laboratories learning from infants, young children, animals, and even (Andy Clark, for example) from robots in artificial intelligence labs. Studies by philosophers such Alvin I. Goldman, Mark Johnson, and Alva Noë have been augmented by neurological work on brain imaging. This essay argues the usefulness to literary studies of a double focus: the model that cognitive literary critics have begun to adumbrate aims to describe how we understand the unspoken thoughts and intentions of others. That model will need to account for our failures as well as our successes, to notice embodied constraints as well as possibilities. In order to produce a realistic picture of how we do and don’t understand others and the imaginative texts in which they appear as characters, the emergent cognitive-philosophical theory needs to confront the constructed complexities of literary texts.2 I begin from Cavell’s suggestion that misunderstanding is so frequent as to count as almost normal. The situation is well described as a gradient; we can be better or worse at recognizing all or parts of the beliefs, desires, and intentions of others in our daily lives and in the fictions we read or watch onstage. We are apparently evolved to keep trying. We can’t decide, it seems, not to try to identify what motivates the actions of others any more than we can hear conversations in a language we know well as noise. The very survival of our species (so far) is taken as evidence that we do often make reasonably accurate guesses about what others have in mind.3 Paul Hernadi (2001: 55) has proposed that our fictions are a kind of virtual reality, helpful in training us in the interpretation of others. He even suggests that engagement with literature makes “selfish human organisms into altruistic members of societies” (ibid.: 56). This could only be so if these 2. Aside from the exceptions of Cavell and Johnson, neither philosophical nor cognitive psychological studies of understanding have sufficiently recognized the value of imaginative literature as a repository of complex displays of embodied interpretive satisfaction and failure. Cognitivists have long shared the lay assumption that because the characters in novels are not “real” and because their conversations are only imagined fictions, they cannot be used as evidence in empirical studies of human behavior. Recently, however, empirical work has begun to argue the error of this view on the basis of imaging studies showing that the same brain areas are activated for real and imagined actions. This would indeed be a parsimonious way of building the power to remember and also to imagine situations of “if ” using perceptual processes already in place. See Gallese and Lakoff 2005. 3. Ruth Garrett Millikan (2004: 73) summarizes the argument that natural sign systems must have evolved to match the world in a lock and key arrangement. It is interesting (and lucky for us) that the partial or gradient inaccuracy of our understanding does not often scuttle the undertaking entirely.


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fictions have enough in common with the speech and actions in real life to make them reliable examples.4 Austin famously did not recognize this overlap and judged the fictions of literary texts to be inappropriate evidence about the way normal understanding works. He explicitly excluded “fictitious” from “serious” speech, as he excluded joking and writing a poem (Austin 1962: 9). Some developmental psychologists have even hypothesized an innate decoupling mechanism in normal brains that distinguishes pretend behavior or play from “actual” or “serious” behavior.5 My study of the speech and actions of that exemplary well-attuned couple the Thane of Cawdor and Lady Macbeth, in the light of the philosophical hypotheses that have become known as ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory and also in terms of several recent cognitive theories of mind, is intended to show that both exclusions are mistaken. Imaginative Literature Displays and Evokes Real-Life Cognitive Competence

Shakespeare’s plays recommend themselves as particularly good examples in the construction of a theory of the degrees of understanding others in part because they expose the complexities of how misunderstandings play out, both comically and tragically, sometimes at once. As in many well- constructed fictions, as both real and fictional time passes, characters and audiences grasp what a speech or a dialogue turns out to have meant and/ or caused—that is, turns out to have performed in the long run. Audiences collect information and construct patterns of understanding that are repeatedly revised, complicated, or ironized away from earlier impressions of significance. No new cognitive or philosophical theories are needed to recognize, for example, the importance of Macbeth’s report, as he emerges from having murdered Duncan, of hearing a voice declare, “Macbeth does murder sleep.”6 Trying boldly to hold onto normality, as against his claim of 4. Suzanne Keen (2007) summarizes and critiques the cognitive evidence on the question of whether reading literature can encourage altruistic behavior. 5. See Leslie 1987 and Tooby and Cosmides 2000. The developmental psychologist Paul L. Harris (2000), to the contrary, argues the dependence of children on the permeability of the distinction as they grow into their culture. Jacques Derrida’s (1970) work from its beginning argues against the possibility of making a distinction between fact and fiction. Mary Louise Pratt (1977: 136) reoriented the literary critical discussion away from the binary standard of truth or falsity by suggesting that literary texts are marked not by truth or falsity but by “tellability.” 6. References to Macbeth are taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library edition (Shakespeare 2009). Text references are to act, scene, and line of this edition.


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having disturbed some higher power, Lady Macbeth dismisses her husband’s fear as “brainsickly,” and instructs him to “go get some water / And wash this filthy witness from your hand.” The theater audience has the additional evidence of the words he speaks while she is off-stage—words that suggest his dawning recognition of the depth of her mistake in thinking that “a little water clears us of this deed.” He asks himself, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” (2.2.57– 79). Murray Roston7 suggests that Shakespeare’s audiences are likely to have recalled here biblical allusions to hand washing, such as when the prophet Isaiah, angry with the hypocrisy of Israel bringing prescribed sacrifices while doing evil, declares: “Your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil” (Isa. 1:15–16). The prophetic reprimand insists on the gap that can open between the action of the body and the mind’s unruly desire: it will not be enough to wash your hands if you do not also refrain from sin. More familiar to early modern audiences would be a scene they might have watched as children: the climactic moment in the medieval cycle plays when Pontius Pilate, faced with the accusers of Jesus, “took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person” (Matt. 27: 24). Here too the bodily hand washing will not make the deed clean, giving those in Shakespeare’s audience that recognized the allusion a hint of the futility of Lady Macbeth’s instructions to her husband and revealing the different way each anticipates future events. As the play continues, we see that Macbeth’s prediction of their irreversible descent into further evil and madness (“From this instant / There’s nothing serious in mortality. / All is but toys” [2.3.108– 10]) turns out to have been correct. When, sleepwalking in act 5, Lady Macbeth speaks madly to blood she imagines on her own hands (“Out, damned spot! Out I say!” [5.1.35]), it is Macbeth who swears he is in control of himself: “The mind I sway by and the heart I bear / Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear” (5.3.10–11). Reading these scenes from the perspective of a theory of cognitive embodiment, however, we are encouraged to notice as well the two protagonists’ different and differently plastic bodily images. As I will detail later, we see Macbeth metaphorically falling apart until in the end the audience actually gets to see Macduff bring in the head separated from the body. Lady Macbeth seems at first determined to pull herself together, but her control of her bodily coherence is short-lived. The task of following their mutual and their respective self-understandings can be interestingly 7. Personal communication with the author, February 2010.


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pursued if we add to our already substantial toolbox of interpretive methods the double focus on failed attunement and expressive embodiment. The Contributions of Austin and Cavell

Austin’s How to Do Things with Words is a landmark in the reorientation of humanities scholars toward a functionalist, action-oriented understanding of how people understand others. His recognition of not only the ordinariness of misunderstanding but also the systematicity of failure was pathbreaking. “The abnormal will throw light on the normal, will help us penetrate the blinding veil of ease and obviousness that hides the mechanisms of the natural successful act” (Austin 1956–57: 6). Although H. Paul Grice (1975) argued against the conventionality Austin claimed as this basis, Grice’s examples of failure and his accounts of their origin were an equally important contribution to the analysis of the different ways communication fails. Austin’s introduction of the terms performative and performative utterance in 1955 launched the study of performativity which has extended way beyond what Austin could have imagined.8 The resonance of recent cognitive neuroscience with Austin’s connection of speech and action can be heard a generation later in Cavell’s inversion of Austin’s speech as act to act as speech, that is, action as readable communication, even without words. Describing Fred Astaire walking and humming in The Bandwagon, Cavell says, “Narratively, he is hoping to cheer himself, letting his body . . . tell him what his emotion is.” Making the connection to Austin clear, he asserts that “the ordinariness in experience is figured in the image of walking” (Cavell 2005b: 23, 25). Cavell makes clear here that it is Astaire’s body movement that counts as what he calls a passionate utterance; it invites the viewer to respond to the character’s inner life. “The urgency of passion is expressed before and after words. Passionate expression makes demands upon the singular body in a way illocutionary force (if all goes well) forgoes” (Cavell 2005a: 185). Austin’s original description of talk exchanges as conventional performances postulated shared conversational conventions as the oil that keeps social life running smoothly. Cavell notes that the price Austin paid to preserve confidence in the conventionality of the system was the deliberate neglect of a class of speech performatives Austin called perlocutionary acts because, as Austin himself recognized, they have unpredictable (that 8. The William James Lectures given by Austin at Harvard University in 1955 were published in 1962 under the title How to Do Things with Words.


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is, nonconventional) effects on hearers. If I say “the ice is thin” as you are about to skate off, I have conventionally performed the locutionary act of making a statement, which has the conventional illocutionary force of warning you, and you would probably understand it as such. But in addition, my warning may have had the perlocutionary effect of startling you, discouraging you, or causing you to lose your balance. Knowledge of conventions thus is of limited help in interpreting the possible perlocutionary effects of illocutionary acts, allowing unpredictable performative failures—enough reason for Austin to have sketched them only briefly. Claiming that Austin gave up too soon, Cavell (2005a, 2005b) has recently recalled the exiles and begun to articulate regularities among the subset he called passionate utterances, hoping thereby to explain how we often do understand the perlocutionary intentions of others when they speak passionately and unconventionally. As a way of formalizing his intuitions about passionate perlocutionary speech acts, Cavell proposes a set of conditions for perlocutionary acts, parallel to Austin’s conditions for the felicitous performance of il locutionary acts. Austin specifies, for example, that for an illocutionary act to be brought off successfully, “the particular persons and circumstances must be appropriate for the invocation of the procedure” (Austin 1962: 34). In a passionate perlocutionary act, however, Cavell (2005a: 181) claims, there are no antecedently specified appropriate persons, but the act itself brings that relationship into existence: “I must declare myself . . . to have standing with you—to be appropriate. . . . I therewith single you out (as appropriate) in relationship to me in the given case.” By its very unconventionality, the passionate speech act “demand[s] from you a response in kind, one you are in turn moved to offer” (ibid.: 182). At the same time, by its very unconventionality it is liable to be misunderstood. Passionate perlocutionary speech acts are not primarily intended to inform, although they may do that. A passionate utterance is, rather, “designed to have consequential effects on the feelings, thoughts, and actions of others.” While in illocutionary acts “the ‘I’ who is doing the action . . . comes essentially into the picture,” “in perlocutionary acts, the ‘you’ comes essentially into the picture” (ibid.: 178, 177, 180). Cavell cites, for example, the outburst by Dona Elvira to Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera: “Monster, felon, deceiver!” Its effect, Cavell (ibid.: 180) says, “is to exasperate and intimidate Don Giovanni, who escapes.” It is also aimed at the audience or, as we will see, in a soliloquy or an aria, may be addressed to the speaker himself or herself. It is interesting how well these conditions suggest the way a narrative or the action of a play, film, or opera gets moving and keeps moving. Pas-


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sionate utterances provoke: they cannot be ignored but demand an active response, and thus they carry the plot further. They may ramp up the speech situation to a new level of intensity by breaking the conventions of what can be politely or publicly said. Their very unconventionality is the stuff that stories are made of. Someone has decided to speak out and, instead of being calm and cooperative, is biased, emotional, and vocal. Passionate acts may ignite misunderstandings, testify to imbalances of power, and reveal conflicting goals. Some, however, do the opposite— they make clear understandings that have been implicit but hitherto unacknowledged, as when Macbeth asks his wife to take the witches’ promise and “Lay it to thy heart” (1.5.13–14). They may require reconsideration of earlier understandings and thus jolt the action into a new and more complicated place. They energize the plot unpredictably. The kinds of speech acts Cavell (2005a: 178) considers to be passionate utterances suggest the plots of a wide shelf of operas, plays, movies, and novels: passionate utterances may “anger, mortify, charm, affront, encourage, disappoint, embarrass, confuse, alarm, offend, deter, hinder, seduce, intimidate, humiliate, harass, incite.” In Cavell’s (ibid.: 182) revised Austin, then, passionate utterances “stake our relationship”; that is, issue a challenge to renegotiate a relationship. If, in general, a performative utterance is, as Cavell (ibid.: 185) says, “an offer of participation in the order of law,” then “a passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire.” Macbeth’s letter to his wife is just such an invitation.9 He not only tells her that the witches saluted him as “king that shalt be” (1.5.10) but also explains why he is writing to her even as he is on his way home: “This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou might’st not lose the dues of rejoicing by being ignorant of what greatness is promised thee” (1.5.10–13). His letter is evidence that he knows she shares his ambition. He is reading her mind here and also inviting her to join him in thinking about a murder, and since he does not say that, she must be reading his, since she is immediately responsive. Although their thoughts are indeed disorderly and unconventional, they are so well attuned to each other that, as Cavell points out, they do not even need to mention their common intention. Cavell (1996: 211) suggests that “each does the deed somehow for the other,” so that “neither knows why it is done.” In a recent production of the play at the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington, DC, the directors, R. J. Teller and Aaron Posner, emphasized 9. The stage direction of the first folio has “Macbeths Wife alone, with a letter” as act 1, scene 5, opens.


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the virtually identical imaginings of the two by having Lady Macbeth reading the letter aloud on the main stage sentence by sentence interrupted by Macbeth speaking responsively, as if to her, but from an upper platform supposedly somewhere on his way home. The perlocutionary effect of her response to the letter is complex: although no mention is made of murder, she assumes it and almost immediately begins to worry that he will hesitate. She thus chides him imaginatively: “What thou wouldst highly, That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win. (1.5.20–23)

We will have occasion to revisit this important speech later as evidence of their differences, but here, as Cavell saw and as the Folger staging showed, husband and wife are working together, improvising according to coordinated passion. They have little choice but to improvise as they build an alliance to murder. The farther away from convention a speech performance is, the greater the risk of misunderstanding, and there isn’t, to take a near example, a set of conventions according to which a king might “felicitously” incite a pair of thugs to murder a high-ranking courtier and his son.10 In performance, visual metaphors and stage action help fill the gap where conventions are missing, suggesting how the director understands the interactions of the characters. Rupert Goold, in his 2007–8 production of the play, set the scene of incitement (3.2) in the Macbeths’ basement kitchen (“hell’s kitchen,” a reviewer [de Jongh 2007] called it) and had Patrick Stewart as Macbeth putting together a sandwich for a midnight snack while he talked to the two men. He eats half and offers them the other half; by thus emphasizing their willingness to “eat” whatever he feeds them, he displays the “moral deviance” of the Macbeth household’s normalization of horror—“the banality of evil” (Tassi 2007–8: 82). Cavell suggests, further, that the unconventionality of the performance of a passionate speech act may be a matter of the persons involved. We might take as an example Macbeth challenging the ghost of Banquo (3.4) and ask what the conventions could possibly be for talking to a ghost whom others don’t see when you should be welcoming your guests to a feast?11 Or 10. “Statements, if adequate to reality, are true, if not false . . . . Performatives, if adequate to reality, are true, if not, then, in specific ways, infelicitous” (Cavell 1994: 81). 11. That there were religious conventions about speaking to ghosts we learn from Hamlet, where Marcellus on the ramparts suggests that Horatio, as a scholar, should speak to the ghost of Hamlet’s father.


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as Cavell mentions, unconventionality may be a matter of unruly timing, as we see in this same scene when the ordinary flow of events is interrupted by a speaker’s uncontrollable need for expression. Macbeth addresses the ghost of Banquo in front of courtiers who have come for a festive meal and cannot yet know, as Macbeth does, that Banquo has been murdered. Lady Macbeth attempts two jobs at once: stopping Macbeth’s disordered speech by demanding his return to conventional behavior (“Are you a man?” [3.4.70]) and interpreting Macbeth’s unruly response to the guests as “a thing of custom” (3.4.119). Failing at both attempts, she asks the guests to leave on the pretense that it is inappropriate for others to witness their king’s illness. Here we see how conventional utterances, such as Lady Macbeth’s to the guests, may fail when the gap between the conventional speech and the evidence of bodies in action is too great. Austin enumerated conditions in which speech events will be infelicitous; this example suggests that the description will be the stronger if it accounts for the likelihood that different perspectives will produce different assessments of the failure or success of a passionate encounter. Goold staged the banquet scene twice. The first time, from Macbeth’s perspective (3.4.107), Banquo appears as a bloody body. After the intermission the scene is reprised, but now Banquo does not appear, and the audience experiences how outlandish Macbeth’s behavior—recoiling in fear, speaking whirling words to the vacant air— must seem to the assembled guests. The audience understands him to be struggling with his guilt for the murder and then also recognizes that to his guests he must seem mad. The production thus demonstrates how the literary complexity reveals an oversimplification in the theory. There are two different infelicities here, one from the point of view of the guests and one from that of Macbeth. The staging allows the audience to occupy the two positions sequentially. Theory of Mind

If Cavell’s revisions of Austin (1962: 22) stray far from the original description of a system of conventions for social interaction in “ordinary circumstances,” his wandering has brought him within range of developmental and cognitive psychologists who, also assuming that there are ordinary circumstances in which conventional speech and actions are understood, describe a system of understanding that is internal, evolved or grown, and presumably universal called Theory of Mind (ToM).12 ToM theories 12. David B. Premack and Guy Woodruff (1978) often get credit for the earliest use of the term. For a fuller development, see Baron-Cohen et al. 2000. For a recent discussion of how growing children learn about intersubjective interactions, see Hutto 2008.


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describe as normative and automatic the recognition that another person has a mind like one’s own, with thoughts, beliefs, desires, and intentions similar to one’s own. To have a ToM (said to be normally developed by age four) is thus to have a metaunderstanding of different states of knowledge and to be able to appreciate that things known (believed, felt, etc.) by oneself may not be known to others. It is also to be interested in and able to identify, or at least guess at, the inner states of mind of others from their behaviors, including facial expressions and body movements. But notice the correlative: the risk of failure is the greater when, as is perfectly normal, actions may be wordless or words may be used obscurely or even deceptively. Babies work on attuning their attention to others well before they can understand spoken language. Soon after birth they fix their eyes on the eyes of others and in the latter part of their first year begin to follow other people’s gazes and follow a pointing finger (Meltzoff 2005). The claim is that gaze following eventually develops (skipping a few steps) into what Simon Baron-Cohen describes as the mind-reading ability of young children—an apparently empathetic understanding from which more complex social behavior develops.13 Lisa Zunshine (2006), discussing how fictional characters mind read from the facial expressions and actions of other characters, has suggested that because ToM grounds readers’ empathetic identification with literary characters, it also underwrites their ability to follow plots, since that activity requires continuous updating of the various characters’ situations, including how much different characters know about what, when they know it, and what they are planning.14 It is also presumably readers’ own ToM that attributes a ToM to the characters within a text and thus allows them to judge whether and how they understand each other. Critics of the arguments for ToM claim that it is not necessary to use one’s own mind as a model for those of others. We may simply make opportunistic use of bodily clues on the basis of past experience, including familiarity with conventions.15 13. See Baron-Cohen 1995 and Wimmer and Perner 1983. The so-called “false belief task” tested in four-year-old children is taken by developmental psychologists to demonstrate the children’s understanding that someone might believe something that is not true and is thus taken as evidence that children have achieved the crucial understanding that others have beliefs, emotions, and intentions that may differ from their own. 14. See also Palmer 2004. 15. It is already clear that the original proposal that ToM is modular, as spelled out by Fodor 1983, with all the accompanying presumptions, is unsustainable. Millikan (2004: 22) argues that it is not necessary to speculate about peoples’ inner thoughts: “Partly, we expect people to exhibit behavioral patterns they have exhibited in the past. Less obvious but perhaps more important, we are often able to predict one another’s behavior owing to patterns


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Zunshine hypothesizes that children enjoy hearing stories because they “engage, tease, and push to its tentative limits, our mind-reading capacity” (ibid.: 4; see also Zunshine 2008: 65 ff.). Literary texts also witness the complexity of the situations in which individual acts of mind reading are embedded. Hearing narratives presumably also provides practice in keeping track of who said what to whom and when, allowing hearers to assess the reliability of the information and inferences as they are collected. Watching stage plays and movies with live actors would surely be even more attractive if an innate drive to competence indeed powers our interest in imaginative fictions. Tracking and tagging can get complicated, but we improve with time. Zunshine cites a series of recent experiments demonstrating that experienced readers are capable, though with difficulty, of following out five or six levels of intentionality and that even untrained readers can follow three or four levels of mind reading, as in “I knew you thought he wanted to go.” Or: “I thought you knew I was aware of his having misunderstood his parents’ wishes” (Zunshine 2006: 28 ff.). Notice how this last example is complicated by two embedded failures of understanding. Audiences also track characters’ reliability as reporters. Their confusion or ours usually alerts us to a failure in tracking levels of embedding, but misjudgments about the reliability of sources do not always immediately announce themselves. Macbeth’s decision to tag the illocutionary force of the witches’ speech to him as a prophecy, and to treat it as fully reliable, entrains his decision to trust everything he hears from them and thence to draw inferences about his own behavior, driving the further action of the play. We observe him deciding to trust Ross’s information that Duncan has named him Thane of Cawdor (“Two truths are told” [1.3.128]), which he then takes as evidence that he should trust the other prophecies. Yet the obscurity of the prophecy in regard to Banquo (he shall “get kings, though [he] be none” [1.3.70]) might have led him to mistrust the witches, or to suspend judgment awaiting more evidence, but instead leads Macbeth to of social conformity or social convention.” Goldman 2006 surveys the arguments about how mind reading works (see also Jacob 2008 and Goldman’s [2009] response to Jacob). Kim Sterelny (2003: 166) argues for “multi-cued tracking.” Recent experimental work (see Teufel et al. 2010) seems to show that attributed mental states influence perception and thus that understanding another’s intentions cannot be an entirely modular, automatic bottom-up process but is bidirectional; that is, depends on top-down (sense-dependent) processing of social information. These last, by noticing the variety of clues that contribute to mind reading, have the advantage of noticing, at least implicitly, that it’s not easy. We have to start practicing as soon as possible, and we ultimately need all the evidence we can get. No one, as far as I know, has attempted to account for the regularity of failure in the job of assessing the intentions and motives of others.


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mistrust and then to murder his good friend. The audience is thus invited to understand that his desire and ambition have pushed him not only to tag the prophecy as truth too quickly but also to conclude that action of his own is needed to make it happen.16 From here the audience can combine the inferences from Macbeth’s passionate exchanges with his wife with this ToM-derived information and may begin to suspect that Macbeth’s own interpretations, not fate, will bring on a tragic end. Distributed Cognition

Austin taught us to notice that words accomplish things, that speech is action. But though he claimed to be interested in “the total speech situation” and did draw our attention to the social situation of speech acts (say, the relative status of the speakers), he seems not to have considered how bodies beyond brains were actually involved. Biologists claim that evolutionary success has depended on our being able “to devise a representation of the world that favors survival” (Changeux 2002: 37). To accomplish this we make the most of what’s available both inside and outside our brains. The search for usable mental representations is served, on this view, by an expanded and distributed cognitive system that is continually sampling its environment and producing corrective updates in response to inner and outer changes. Fragments of information from sensory modules (vision, hearing, touch, etc.) are calibrated with each other, connected to memories, analogous images, emotions, and the accompanying bodily sensations, such as shame, fear, or anger.17 The system is never turned off, even in sleep, but continually updates our continually obsolescent understanding. Any snippet of information, be it a sense perception, a memory trace, or a verbal or visual analogy, may jiggle patterns already constructed, prompting a readjustment of the map which will soon be again outdated and updated by new intakes. The bad news is that, like the Red Queen of Wonderland, we have to keep running just to stay in place. The good news is what the neurologists call plasticity, by which they mean that normal brains have evolved to rise to ordinary environmental challenges 16. H. Porter Abbot (personal communication with the author, February 2010), a subtle mind reader, asks whether Macbeth’s decision to murder Banquo might not imply that he does not entirely trust the witches’ words. This is surely another possibility. 17. Jean-Pierre Changeux (2002: 32) describes the mind as “an open, motivated, and self- organizing system continually engaged in the exploration of its environment.” He hypothesizes that “the spontaneous activity of specialized sets of neurons causes the organism to constantly explore and test its physical, social, and cultural environment, to capture and register responses from it, and to compare them with its inner repertoire of stored memories.” See also Damasio 1999 and Noë 2009.


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and re-form themselves so as to adapt in satisfying ways.18 Learning and memory formation are examples of neuronal plasticity, and the claim is that brains grasp at whatever evidence they can get hold of, without discrimination against fictional representation. The length and complexity of literary examples make them useful for the task of exemplifying how real bodies (including minds) manage in their worlds over time. Theories of distributed cognition argue that cognitive competence is not achieved by the brain’s manipulation of abstract and conventionalized symbols alone but emerges from the continuous interaction of specific parts of the brain with the body and with many different aspects of a continuously changing external world. As Clark (2008: 139) describes it, “Human cognitive processing (sometimes) literally extends into the environment surrounding the organism.” Brains use representations stored elsewhere in the body, as, for example, the arm muscles’ knowing how to swing a bat, or outside it, as when we consult a shopping list, check the outdoor temperature on a thermometer or on a computer, or pick up a pencil to multiply two large numbers.19 The varied contexts of reading that literary scholars value have long been understood to permit, even demand rereading in just the way described by theorists of distributed cognition. We are free to label (and relabel) different patterns as different genres or as multiple interpretations of the same text. Watching a play, we observe a set of characters who, like ourselves, are challenged to rearrange their understanding of a quickly changing world; both protagonists and audiences have to be nimble and active integrators, taking advantage of the world outside their brains. My description in the vocabulary of distributed cognition of Macbeth’s well- known soliloquy as he waits for his wife’s signal to enter Duncan’s bedroom and kill him is intended to emphasize how Shakespeare records the attempt and failure of a distressed brain to make order out of input from 18. Matt Ridley (1993) has used the familiar biological metaphor of the Red Queen as the title of his book explaining evolutionary theory. The technical definition of plasticity describes “the capacity of organisms or cells to alter their phenotype in response to changes in their environment. This property can be studied at the level of the genome (by analyzing epigenetic modifications), the individual cell, and the organism (during development of the embryo or changes in behavior in adults, for example)” (Skipper et al. 2010: 703). 19. Clark and Josefa Toribio (1994: 427) describe our use of internal mental representation in cognition as stretching along a continuum. At one end we do not need much to “know,” for example, that we should drop a hot potato. At the “representationally hungry” end we need to be able to manipulate many complex representations at once, as, in their example, if we needed to identify a Renoir as deserving careful treatment in virtue of its value. See Clark and Chalmers 1998 for a fuller argument from the point of view of philosophers. See Bressler and Menon 2010 for a review of current work in neurology on representation and Richard Menary’s (2010) collection for the philosophically oriented arguments.


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diverse sources and act accordingly. We see how the soliloquy displays the constraints built into our thought processes. Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. [He draws his dagger.] Thou marshal’st me the way that I was going, And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o’ th’ other senses, Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still, And, on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There’s no such thing. It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one-half world Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate’s off ’rings, and withered murder, Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin’s ravishing [strides,] towards his design Moves like a ghost. (2.1.44–69)

The sensory elements he tries to compose include the vision of a dagger, a twitch in his arm urging him to reach and grasp it (“Come, let me clutch thee”) and his inability to do so; the feel of his own dagger; the vision of it again, now with blood on it (indicating his awareness that a dagger’s use is not just for peeling apples); an awareness of the dark that associates night with evil, with bad dreams in curtained beds, with witchcraft and Hecate; the sounds of a call to arms, of a howling wolf; a moving visual image (a memory of a story) of the nighttime crime of the rapist, Tarquin. As he records the sensory stimuli, he also reveals some of the tagging for reliability he is attempting: the question form of the first sentence acknowledges both his hesitation in granting the image normal ontological status and his feeling that the dagger is somehow connected to him (“before me”). His specifying that the handle of the dagger is “toward my hand” is a second clue that he feels the image relates to him, perhaps prophesying his use of it. He tests it by calling it to him, “Come, let me clutch thee,”


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as if to say, “Help me understand myself by showing your relationship to my hand.” He reports the results of the test: “I have thee not, and yet I see thee still,” acknowledging that nothing has been clarified. To his superstitious mind, however, a spectral vision, by its very unreality, seems to be an omen, that is, something to be tagged as reliable. Yet he needs confirmation of this message from a realm beyond reason, and so again he asks a question: “Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight?” Just as his first question had within it a hint of the presupposition of a relationship (“before me”), so does his second. Addressing it as if it is real, he inserts an apostrophe, calling it “fatal vision,” simultaneously acknowledging that he believes it to be a prophetic vision and that he is fated to somehow grasp and use a dagger, with the additional hint of fatality as death. These hints that his mind is almost committed to his future actions (while blaming them on fate) make the next part of his question seem disingenuous: “Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?” Is he still allowing this interpretation, or has he already discredited the rational part of his mind that prompts the question? What could convince him that the vision of the dagger is a trick of the light combined with a touch of indigestion? Nothing of course, as he asserts: “I see thee yet, in form as palpable / As this which now I draw.” And then he admits to himself that he is ready to credit the vision with encouraging his plan—the proof of which is that he now draws his real dagger. Commenting on his own thinking, he expresses confusion about the evidence of his different senses, confusion which makes it hard for him to decide which of his senses to trust: “Mine eyes are made the fools o’ th’ other senses, / Or else worth all the rest.” Now he reports a change in the vision: “I see thee still,” he tells the dagger, but “on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, / Which was not so before.” Since his real dagger is not bloody, he concludes that the vision is a prophecy of what is fated to happen (“this bloody business”). His speech now begins to describe the night as filled with sensory images of sound and movement. The words used suggest that his momentary recognition of some level of reality—that his brain may be “heat-oppressed” and that it is indeed night—is cross- wired with the semantic content of his mental confusion. His reflections (or his metacognition, discussed below) having failed to make sense of his thoughts, he tells himself to stop talking and act. Note he does not act without thinking, it is just that the thinking Shakespeare has him articulate hasn’t helped him clarify his thoughts about killing the king. Here too, as when he accepted the witches’ prophecies, he moves on to act without resolving the confusion presented to him by multiple stimuli or foreseeing the consequences.


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Shakespeare’s recording of Macbeth’s performance here demonstrates the claim of the theories of distributed cognition that individuals can if not control then at least align a conscious understanding of their mental state and their bodily situation with the moving panorama of their environment. The inference is that although evolved inner resources are insufficient as guides to self-understanding or action, they are continually supplemented by an online feed, as it were. Clues from different parts of the body and from beyond it loop into alert brain mechanisms and can be dynamically connected with what is already there.20 The thinker is hungry for these clues and receptive, able to learn from the evidence of other minds, be they fictional or real, or from other parts of his or her own mind. Susan Oyama emphasizes the online dynamism of cognition, the ability to make use of serendipitous material affordances, including bodies—one’s own or an actor’s—their material environment, and the stories they encounter in life, onstage, or on the page. Life processes “assimilate, seek, and manipulate their worlds, even as they accommodate and respond to them” (Oyama 2000: 95). Words and stories, gestures and actions, material contexts and remembered images, each separately inflected with emotional colorings and tagged with degrees of authority, combine in a loose-knit, distributed representational and information-processing economy which they may augment, deplete, refine, reorder, or deconstruct (Clark 2008: 133). But what if they don’t? What if, as for Macbeth, the “life processes” Oyama refers to fail to “accommodate and respond” in the service of life? What if they instead produce acts performed “under duress, under the influence, out of contempt,” to take three of Cavell’s suggestive descriptions, leading to multiple deaths? Cavell’s notion of response as responsibility to a passionate summons from someone beyond oneself fits well with this description of understanding as dynamic and responsive, as ready to deal with the unconventional (say, the prophecy of the witches), and thus to be, or fail to be, receptive to and flexible in the face of the unexpected (see van Gelder and Port 1995). Cavell is attuned to the possibilities of tragic failure and requires of a theory of understanding that it acknowledge that hearers, including not only the characters within the plays but the audiences as well, can recognize and respond to the unruly passions of others even if, or especially when, the intentions that generate them are 20. “We . . . seem to be specifically designed to constantly search for opportunities to make the most of body and world, checking for what is available, and then (at various timescales and with varying degrees of difficulty) integrating new resources very deeply, creating whole new agent-world circuits in the process . . . . This empowering body is constantly negotiable, constructed moment by moment from the flux of willed action and resulting sensory stimulation” (Clark 2008: 42–43).


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not conventionally retrievable and may not be life enhancing or preserving. In the typically showy and extravagant examples of operatic passion that provide Cavell’s examples, the singer’s performance makes it impossible for the hearer to ignore a demand for attention, and indeed Macbeth is not inclined to ignore the witches’ highly unconventional pronouncements. His incomplete understanding of them, however, invites him to fill gaps creatively, which he does with a mixture of pleasurable anticipation and fear. Macbeth’s failure to read even his own mind warrants (to himself at least) his freedom to act on unacknowledged desires. It confirms Cavell’s worry that the mind’s hunger for knowledge outside itself, while it may be a benign and disinterested gathering of evidence, may also serve baser impulses. In his essay on Macbeth, Cavell (1996: 204) describes Macbeth’s “wish to rule out equivocation” as “the prayer of tyranny.” Unlike, for example, Baron-Cohen, the cognitivist who is most closely identified with the description of mind reading and who seems to assume that we not only want high-performance understanding of others but that we can have it, Cavell argues that a world in which all minds are entirely open to the scrutiny of others is not to be desired and thus it is just as well that full insight into the minds of others is never possible. Where literary historians have seen the motif of the witch’s prophecy in Macbeth as connected to, perhaps even a deliberate flattery of King James I’s “scholarly” interest in witchcraft,21 Cavell suggests something more sinister; namely, that his interest in the all-knowing witches is a representation of James’s desire for total power over others. He describes the play as “a warning against the craving for telepathy and soothsaying,” that is, for the perfect “mindreading” (Cavell 2005b: 13) that could allow one person extraordinary control of another. Metacognition and the Pressure of Time

Macbeth’s inability to fit his vision of the dagger, as described above, into a pattern that might guide his behavior, might restrain his evil impulses, is a prime example of the ways the heterogeneous input to an open cognitive system can overwhelm the system’s powers of organization. Macbeth’s soliloquy after his first encounter with the witches could provide the missing evidence needed to enrich the theory of distributed cognition, so that it can account for some of the barriers to the successful patterning of distrib21. James’s dialogue, Dæmonology, was published in Edinburgh in 1597 (see Normand and Roberts 2000).


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uted evidence and the ways minds can be misled to tragedy. Immediately after his new title, Thane of Cawdor, is confirmed by a message from the king (1.3.110), we are given an example of how Macbeth’s metacognitive processes begin to try to compose the distributed evidence. He seems to be searching for a way to confirm the second of the witches’ “truths,” namely, that he “shall be king hereafter” (1.3.52). However, he shakes and stumbles and, instead of making good use of the information on offer from outside his own head, he sets up a competition between his virtuous public self and his murderously ambitious private self. The result is his finding a way to allow part of himself to become that murderer: [Aside] Two truths are told As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme. . . . This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion, Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function is smothered in surmise, And nothing is but what is not. (1.3.140–55)

As I have noted, Macbeth hastily assumes that there are two truths, conjuring the image of a stage performance to which they are “happy prologues,” but then backtracks and articulates his situation of insufficient knowing, questions his own thinking, and comments on his reactions to his mind’s production of images. He judges his reaction to these images and compares emotions evoked to his present (or just recently superseded) fears. When he does name the image as murder and declares it to be “against the use of nature,” “use” might suggest that murder is a customary occurrence, an action, but by lexicalizing it as noun, he occludes the fact that a deed has an actor. Even in his self-reflection on reflection, he resists the declarative formulation “I will murder Duncan to insure that the prophecy comes true” and seems to conjure instead a visual image in which he sees someone else in that role—the actor he merely observes but which “doth unfix [his] hair” with fright.


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Continuing to imagine that the murderer is an actor not identical with himself but another somehow alienated part of himself, Macbeth then describes his cognition kinesthetically and in the third person. Earlier he had asked himself “Why do I yield to that suggestion” as if he, or at least a version of himself at a certain point in time, had done something out of the control of that other part of himself, and now he again comments on the effect that his imagining has had upon his body’s ability to act. His images come from multiple senses, visual and moving images of theater and of murder and the kinetic image of shaking, and are expressed between pairs of contraries (“cannot be ill, cannot be good,” “nothing is but what is not”), suggesting not only that he is but that he understands himself to be split between himself and his thought. No longer occupying the “single state of man,” in his new title as Thane of Cawdor and his hoped for title “king” he is an actor separable from himself. The passive voice—“function is smothered in surmise”—lets him avoid naming himself as the subject of the verb, thus separating himself from the murderer he even now fears, or perhaps already believes, he will be. He has yielded to the disordered co-occurrence of sensory stimulants, and although he virtually predicts that he will murder Duncan, predicts that what he has imagined (his surmise) will overtake (or smother) the action of a normally “single”-minded man, he still does not accept responsibility for his prediction, which he foists, as it were, on the witches’ prophecy. Macbeth fails to compose the scraps and splinters of meaning in a way that satisfies both his honest and his criminal voices, but yet he seems somehow satisfied with this fragmented self that allows his body to move toward his desired end. Thinking about thinking about thinking, Macbeth gives in to the pressure of his immediate desires and his superstition that an image present to the mind is perforce a prophecy. Macbeth’s soliloquy after his encounter with the witches is a passionate performance by which he allows himself—but not himself—to murder. When he learns of his wife’s death in act 5, he again asserts his self- serving claim that “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hours upon the stage” (5.5.27–28). Whose life? A shadow of whom? He has been able to see at least one version of himself as merely an actor, a shadow. Shakespeare here has limned an extreme case of cognition in a situation of inner conflict.22 His many references to time also suggest that Macbeth’s problem in getting all the bits of information aligned is an outsized version of a common experience. In an early exchange with Banquo, he confirmed the force of time, independent of his thoughts, 22. Stephen Orgel (2000: xxxvii) describes Macbeth as (like Hamlet) about “the divided self.”


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with proverbial wisdom, that is, wisdom he needn’t take responsibility for: “Come what come may, / Time and the hour runs through the roughest day” (1.3.163–64). He asks Banquo specifically to take time to think about the witches’ words, but there is none in this play. Macbeth’s guilty muddle is virtually inevitable given the speed with which he needs to assimilate the many fragments of information and the gaps between them.23 Banquo has noticed, after their initial encounter with the witches, that Macbeth is self-absorbed (“rapt” [1.3.156]), tripping over his own thoughts, and then very soon has to contend with more indigestible information: although Duncan praises him generously and publicly, he names his son Malcolm as heir.24 Macbeth’s reaction again displays his organizational difficulties: [Aside] The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step On which I must fall down or else o’erleap, For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. (1.4.55–60)

The new situation of the prince having been named heir presents itself to Macbeth (who has just been getting used to thinking of himself as “king hereafter”) as a kinetic image—a body that is an obstacle between himself and his goal. He commands the stars not to shine—not to reveal the deed of “the” hand (he retains deniability: whose hand?). Yet as with the murder of Duncan, he immediately reveals himself to be hoping the deed will indeed happen: “let that be.” In this passionate speech act, the images of body parts and actions display his disjointed self, in some unspecified way needing to “o’erleap” the young heir, who must somehow be under. The leaping is itself revealed to be a metaphor for an action involving “the” hand—a body part he declines to own with a personal pronoun and which he separates from “the” eye. If he does not own the eye, he does not own the fear, and so he will be able to do the deed he can’t name. Again he declares himself fragmented—split into jumping legs, winking and seeing eye, and hand. Is the short phrase “when it is done” his response? Is he both disowning and acknowledging a decision to enact his black and deep desires? Macbeth’s attempt at self-fashioning provides a complex example 23. Aristotle recognized the importance of time pressure well before cognitive science provided the details. A tragedy, he noted, “endeavors to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun” (Aristotle Poetics: chap. 5; quoted in Butcher 1951: 23). 24. In the Scottish system of inheritance (tanistry), the oldest son did not necessarily inherit.


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of the failure of the cognitive system to satisfactorily compose the distributed affordances that present themselves and is thus just the kind of failure I would like to see an account of in cognitivist theories of cognition. The Pieces Are Coming Together

I would like now to reprise the interpretation of the relationship between husband and wife suggested at the beginning of this essay that now can be seen to have emerged more fully from the combination of speech act and cognitive analyses. We have already considered Lady Macbeth’s response to her husband’s letter, back in act 1. In retrospect, her soliloquy is evidence for their differences as well as for the attunements. Her expression of the fear that her husband’s nature “is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” (1.5.17) has reasonably enough been taken to refer both to a feminine weakness in Macbeth that may make him hesitate to enact the violence his ambitions require and also to an equally inappropriate masculine fearlessness in herself. But it also expresses her fear that he will feel moral scruples. She knows that under pressure he will be deflected from action by conflicting pulls: he wouldst be great . . . but without The illness that should attend it. . . . Wouldst not play false and yet would wrongly win.” (1.5.18–24)

She understands that he will find himself challenged by events to produce a response, one aligned to his public image as “noble Macbeth” (1.2.78) and “most worthy thane” (1.3.111). She intends to overwhelm his hesitation, to “chastise with the valor of [her] tongue” (1.5.30), and allows us, by her vocabulary choice, a glimpse of her recognition of the ethical issue at stake by the slight moral coloration of the words “chastise” and “valor.” That she shares some hesitation with Macbeth is further evidenced by her body’s proprioception, given expression just before her husband enters by her prayer for help in getting her body in tune with her intentions: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between


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Th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry “Hold, hold!” (1.5.47–61)

This prayer, self-directed, is the inverse of her husband’s soliloquies discussed above. She uses bodily imagery to express her desire to act with a unified, cogent, clearly directed self, while he, as we have seen, allowed, even courted fragmentation to hide his immorality from himself. Yet she also shows her attunement with him by matching imagery: he speaks of smothering, she of the blanket of night, she addressing night with a passionate demand that it not impede her intended actions, he having prayed for it to hide even his desires. The important difference is that she admits that it will be her knife. She explicitly asks not only that she be manly strong but that she remain single-mindedly purposeful. Macbeth’s entrance interrupts her conversation with herself, but her greeting to him acknowledges their mutual understanding. It explicitly refers to thoughts that break the boundaries of time; images of the future inappropriately control their “ignorant present”: Lady Macbeth: Thy letters have transported me beyond This ignorant present, and I feel now The future in the instant. Macbeth: My dearest love, Duncan comes here tonight. Lady Macbeth: And when goes hence? Macbeth: Tomorrow, as he purposes. (1.5.67–70)

This entirely homely exchange deserves to be described by Cavell’s adjective passionate, because it demonstrates that their attunement, expressed in their mutual assumption that there is little time to do the unmentioned deed, may already be weakening. Macbeth, who cannot hold the pieces of himself together, does not give his assent to her plan, nor does he reject it. The “horrid image” of “murder” has been in his thoughts, but he hasn’t taken responsibility for it. At the end of act 1, scene 5, unreconciled to himself or to his wife’s murderous plan, he asks for a delay. She responds by instructing him to control his face:


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Only look up clear. To alter favor ever is to fear. Leave all the rest to me. (1.5.84–86)

In the Folger production, while Lady Macbeth greets the king on the upper stage, Macbeth, on the lower, tries out faces in a full-length mirror, wordlessly searching for the proper expression by means of which to cover his intentions, to deflect any attempts to read him. When his wife lays out her plan as act 1 ends, he seems to try to pull together body and intentions: “I am settled, and bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat” (1.7.92–93). With this promise that he will pull himself together and also act a role, refraining from breaking codes of conventional behavior, they are seen to agree about something they didn’t before the words were spoken and responded to. It has, however, taken more than one outburst to achieve this level of mutual attunement, suggesting a complication to Cavell’s description of passionate utterances; it seems that a passionate exchange may consist of several exchanges over an extended period and with interruptions. Macbeth’s letter, itself a passionate utterance, initiated an exchange that lasts until the end of act 3, scene 4, moving the husband and wife from attunement through conflict to agreement as they leave the ruined banquet. After that, there is only distance: they do not speak to each other again, and their deaths are separate. The Relationship of Fictional to Real Brains

In the language of the cognitivists, if Macbeth were a real person, he would have been depending upon chemical and electric feedback loops among parts of his brain, his body, and the world. He employs both embodied and symbolic forms of understanding, drawing on whatever kinds of knowledge he can muster, to work out how to get what he most wants. However, Macbeth’s failure to compose a satisfying understanding and a nonlethal plan of action, in short, to make sense in good time of the extraordinarily unruly stimuli with which he is faced, is describable as the result of his cognitive processes but must ultimately be attributed to the genre of tragedy, not to “his” brain. It is not that the cognitive theory does not describe his situation reasonably but that the literary text requires more than just a philosophical/cognitive description. Macbeth’s cognitive performance, along with all the performances of tragic heroes on the early modern stage, belies the humanist picture of people as reasoning animals able to control


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their will and passions, and it is the literary genre that makes this clear. His brain is not restrained by the scholastic hierarchy that had set reason over will and will over passion. But although human biology would make the failure of a person in Macbeth’s situation probable given the collusion of factors ranged against him, including the indecipherable supernatural messages, and under the pressure of time, it is the generic requirements of tragedy, not biology, that make Macbeth’s failure inevitable. It is in tragedy that neither reason nor environment can be relied upon as constraints on normal human error. In real life the picture is not quite as grim. The recognition of the ordinary possibilities of failure was adumbrated in the argument I made in 1993 (Spolsky 1993), in which I claimed that the very gaps between structures of knowledge that produce ambiguity and instability also allow flexibility. They are just those places where an individual can find the freedom to reimagine and change direction. Human brains within human bodies within time-constrained cultural environments are apparently evolved both to allow and to compensate for instability and failure. As I have been demonstrating in various ways since then, the unsettling challenge of always available and competing interpretations keeps us open-minded. In life, if not in tragedies, it is a good arrangement. It is the instabilities that allow new experiences to register, new information to gain a foothold even when it conflicts with configurations of understanding already in place. The hermeneutic circle is influential but far from watertight, and the gaps between old and new compel the creation of bridging inferences. They not only allow but actively encourage adaptability by means of reclassification and reinterpretation. Understanding something new depends on the ability to trope or distort the familiar, the usual, or the most probable meaning (of a word, say, or of an action) and to infer or guess a function for the difference between the new and the familiar. This neural plasticity provides the resources for adaptability and freedom. Time and quiet seem to lead to better inferences, but there is always a risk of failure. Until given reason to think otherwise in specific cases, cognitivists resist claims that human physiology determines actions but assume, rather, that it allows choice.25 A cognitivist critic like myself, then, seeing Macbeth choose poorly, cannot point to his brain as the cause of his downfall. The genre requires both my agreement that Macbeth is free to fall or not and also the recognition that he inevitably will. My reading of the dagger 25. For a cognitively aware philosophical discussion of free will to supplement my literary argument of 1993 (Spolsky 1993), see Dennett 2003. See Crane 2004 for a different cognitively based view of how Macbeth fails.


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soliloquy strengthens Cavell’s claim that Macbeth fails to take responsibility for his own meaning and actions because he desires his kingship to be granted absolutely by inhuman, prophetic, and unambiguous speech. From the perspective of cognitive theory, and with close attention to the signs in Macbeth’s performance of palpably embodied cogitation, we can see, via his soliloquies, how he rearranges the omens and his perceptions, fears, and beliefs in self-serving ways. His cognitive work does not lead to normative behavioral success; it serves, rather, to justify to himself his unconventional, passionate, and outrageous behavior, and it serves Shakespeare’s project of describing for his audience what makes Macbeth act as he does and with what consequences. Metacognition and Tragedy

I would like to make explicit here a connection between the theatrical fiction of the soliloquy as the overheard speech of a character with himself and one cognitive view of the place of language in human cognition. Speech is more than a report of internal thinking and more than a communication, or a performative, in Austin’s terms. Language is, according to Clark (2008: 44), “a form of mind-transforming cognitive scaffolding” because it allows us “to reflect on our own thoughts and characters” and thus supports “our limited but genuine capacity to control and guide the shape and content of our own thinking.” Discussing the “augmentation of biological brains with linguaform resources,” Clark (ibid.: 58) can hardly contain his enthusiasm for their power to help us not only reflect on our world but to improve it. Clearly he is not thinking of “linguaform” performances such as Macbeth’s when he describes how helpful thinking about thinking can be: Linguaform reason is not just a tool . . . (as suggested by Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2000), but emerges as . . . a kind of cognitive superniche . . . one of whose greatest virtues is to allow us to construct (“with malice aforethought,” as Fodor 1994, rather elegantly puts it) an open-ended sequence of new cognitive niches. These may include designer environments in which to think, reason, and perform as well as special training regimes to install (and to make habitual) the complex skills such environments demand. (Ibid.: 59)

Shakespeare’s stage soliloquies are just such a niche in which characters can be observed thinking and reasoning. Their use in tragedies helps maintain the illusion that the tragic hero has control of his fate. But ignoring Fodor’s hint as well as Shakespeare’s evidence, Clark misses the way people can also furnish a niche with incompatible goals and motivations, combine reasonable observations with half-truths, evasions, destructive


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desires, and unanswerable questions: the result is that self-designs may not all tend to the best. Yet Clark (ibid.: 59–60) does not underestimate the complexity of our ability to embellish our world through language, and he recognizes how this ability is the freedom from biological determinism we hope we have: Linguistic forms and structures are first encountered as simply objects (additional structure) in our world. But they then form a potent overlay that effectively, and iteratively, reconfigures the space for biological reason and self- control. The cumulative complexity here is quite staggering. We do not just self-engineer better worlds to think in. We self-engineer ourselves to think and perform better in the world we find ourselves in. We self-engineer worlds in which to build better worlds to think in. . . . We tune the way we use these tools by building educational practices to train ourselves to use our best cognitive tools better. . . . Our mature mental routines are not merely self-engineered: they are massively, overwhelmingly, almost unimaginably self-engineered. The linguistic scaffoldings that surround us, and that we ourselves create, are both cognition enhancing in their own right and help provide the tools we use to discover and build the myriad other props and scaffoldings whose cumulative effect is to press minds like ours from the biological flux.

Clark is clearly aiming to overwhelm any worry that biology may fully constrain human freedom, and although he clearly does not need Shakespeare to teach him about complexity, he does fail to see that the creative powers he admires are not constrained to act for the good of the individual or altruistically for the common good. The ordinary human brain’s liability to representational failure (of which the routine obscurity of others’ motives is one testimony), is also powerfully generative (Spolsky 1993, 2002). Literature and art are study houses of the creative heights, of the failures and of the creative evasion of failure, of how unconventional words and actions work in the world, and of how the unexpected is satisfyingly managed (or not). We inch a bit closer to understanding the source and power of this creativity via recent descriptions of brain processing that confirm the role of gaps in neuronal connectivity in the emergence of new understanding.26 Conclusion

The interpretation suggested here of the relationship between the separate tragedies of Macbeth and his wife as arising from different images of 26. One way neurologists have begun to explain how mismatches are creative is by hypothesizing them as the spur toward a higher level of generalization or abstraction. See Shohamy and Wagner 2008 and Schacter 2001.


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their own passionately performative bodies has emerged from a perspective that combines insights of speech act theories with those of several cognitive theories of mind and suggests how they supplement each other and how the Shakespearean examples can move them toward greater subtlety. The speech act theories, from their original contribution of recognizing the ordinariness of failure through their argument that speech is action and the rhetoric of performativity that has emerged from them, pointed in the right direction. The lack of attention to bodily affordances of understanding outside the mind has been partially supplemented by Cavell’s explorations into the fictional relationships in plays, operas, and movies. His declared principle that “the law of the body is the law” (Cavell 1994: 87) draws our attention to the distortions of passion as a tragic result of what he calls “disowning,” that is, refusing the evidence of embodied knowledge, and his recent work on describing unconventional, unruly, and embodied passionate utterances has carried the project even further. The cognitive theories, for their part, in developing an account of embodiment to explain how our evolved physiology allows us to understand ourselves and to infer the beliefs, emotions, and intentions of others, is still missing examples of the ordinariness (as opposed to the brain pathology) of failure. But Daniel Kahneman’s recent work, collecting evidence from a range of empirical studies, has begun to attract attention to the regularity with which people make irrational decisions: it shows some signs that cognitive science may be beginning to catch up with the descriptions of human cognitive life and its disappointments that have occupied literary study for years.27 The misunderstandings in Macbeth that result from nonconventional, embodied, passionate speech and action; from cognitive gaps; from the pressures of time; and from embedded inferences tagged with different levels of security are all issues that warrant continued interdisciplinary attention. Our awareness of intermodular gaps, sensory reduplication, fragmentation, and the constant need to bring unstable and heterogeneous data into convergence should keep us alert to the perennial threat of misunderstanding and failure. The literary texts themselves, and the critical interpretations of them, ignored by both philosophers and cognitivists because of their intentional design and their complexity, are in fact just the kind of examples that are needed to produce a theory that accounts both for the complexities of embodied understanding and for the gradient that stretches between interpretive frustration and satisfaction. Literary 27. Although he is a psychologist, Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2002) for work demonstrating the mistake of assuming that people will reliably act in their own best interests. See nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/ kahneman-lecture.html.


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