Sharing Experience

Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature

Submitted for Publication 28 September 2016 William Benzon

Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature William L. Benzon Abstract: It is by virtue of its form that a literary work constrains meaning so that it can be a vehicle for sharing experience. Form is thus an intermediary in Latour’s sense, while meaning is a mediator. Using fragments of a cognitive network model for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 we can distinguish between (1) the mind/brain cognitive system, (2) the text considered merely as a string of signifiers, and (3) the path one computes through (1) under constraints imposed by (2). As a text, Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney is a ring-composition; as a performance, the central section is clearly marked by audience response. Recent work on synchronization of movement and neural activity across communicating individuals affords insight into the physical substrate of intersubjectivity. The ring-form description is juxtaposed to the performative meaning identified by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. CONTENTS Introduction: Speculative Engineering .............................................................................................. 2 Form: Macpherson & Attridge to Latour ......................................................................................... 3 Computational Semantics: Network and Text ................................................................................. 6 Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Text ................................................................................................... 10 Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Performance .................................................................................... 13 Meaning, History, and Attachment .................................................................................................. 18 Coda: Form and Sharability in the Private Text ............................................................................. 20

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Introduction: Speculative Engineering The conjunction of computation and literature is not so strange as it once was, not in this era of digital humanities. But my sense of the conjunction is differs from that of computational critics. They regard computation as a reservoir of tools to be employed in investigating texts, typically a large corpus of texts. That is fine.1 Digital critics, however, have little interest in computation as a process one enacts while reading a text, the sense that interests me. As the psychologist Ulric Neisser pointed out four decades ago, it was computation that drove the so-called cognitive revolution.2 Much of the work in cognitive science is conducted in a vocabulary derived computing and, in many cases, involves computer simulations. Prior to the computer metaphor we populated the mind with sensations, perceptions, concepts, ideas, feelings, drives, desires, signs, Freudian hydraulics, and so forth, but we had no explicit accounts of how these things worked, of how perceptions gave way to concepts, or how desire led to action. The computer metaphor gave us conceptual tools for constructing models with differentiated components and processes meshing like, well, clockwork. Moreover, so far as I know, computation of one kind or another provides the only working models we have for language processes. My purpose in this essay is to recover the concept of computation for thinking about literary processes. For this purpose it is unnecessary either to believe or to deny that the brain (with its mind) is a digital computer. There is an obvious sense in which it is not a digital computer: brains are parts of living organisms; digital computers are not. Beyond that, the issue is a philosophical quagmire. I propose only that the idea of computation is a useful heuristic: it helps us think about and systematically describe literary form in ways we haven’t done before. Though it might appear that I advocate a scientific approach to literary criticism, that is misleading. Speculative engineering is a better characterization. Engineering is about design and construction, perhaps even Latourian composition.3 Think of it as reverseengineering: we’ve got the finished result (a performance, a script) and we examine it to determine how it was made.4 It is speculative because it must be; our ignorance is too great. The speculative engineer builds a bridge from here to there and only then can we find out if the bridge is able to support sustained investigation. Caveat emptor: This bridge is of complex construction. I start with form, move to computation, with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 as my example, and then to President Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney. After describing its structure (ring-composition) I consider the performance situation in which Obama delivered it, arguing that those present constituted a single physical system in which for sharing experience. I conclude by discussing meaning, history, and attachment.

William Benzon, “The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age,” 3 Quarks Daily, May 5, 2014, http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/05/the-only-game-intown-digital-criticism-comes-of-age.html 2 Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), 5-6. 3 Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’,” New Literary History 41 (2010), 471-490. 4 For example, see Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton & company, Inc., 1997), 21 ff. 1

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Form: Macpherson & Attridge to Latour Though the concept of form is to critical thought, its nature is elusive. This is not the place for a thorough discussion of form.5 I propose, instead, to wade right in by juxtaposing two recent and somewhat different approaches. Sandra Macpherson notes, “For an artist, an engineer, a biologist, a linguist, a philosopher, form is shape—more precisely, the shape a kind of matter takes (marble, paint, bridges, letters, cells, wood)” and goes on assert that she thinks of “form as nothing more— and nothing less—than the shape matter (whether a poem or a tree) takes.”6 That’s how I think of it as well. Derek Attridge objects: Form is, as we saw in the first chapter of this book, associated with a static understanding of the art object, one in which content or meaning is opposed to the physical materials and their shape or structure. In literary criticism, form is usually contrasted with content but—notwithstanding the philosophical tradition descended from Plato and Aristotle—aligned with matter or substance… He proposes a dynamic approach: … form in the sense I am developing here includes the mobilization of meanings, or rather of the events of meaning: their sequentiality, interplay, and changing intensity, their patterns of expectation and satisfaction or tension and release, their precision or diffuseness. […] Through this mobilization of meanings, the work’s linguistic operations such as referentiality, metaphoricity, intentionality, and ethicity are staged.7 Written texts may be static (like musical scores), but we read them word by word, line by line, and page after page. On the face of it these two views are at odds with one another. Moreover, the concept that Macpherson seeks would have practical consequences; we should be able to describe the shape of literary matter. But Attridge’s mobilizations are invisible; his is a view with no obvious practical consequences. I propose to bridge this gap with the concept of computation. The visible or audible matter of the text provides cues for computation, “the mobilization of meanings.” All real computation, as opposed to computation in the abstract, is a physical process and is subject to physical constraints. Roughly speaking, the constraints are time and computing units. In digital computers computing units are active, processors, and passive, memory of various kinds; time can be measured in processor cycles. In nervous systems neurons are the computing units and time can be measured on various scales, from milliseconds for individual pulses through months and years for the growth and maturation of the nervous system.8 Thus to characterize literary form, experience, and text as computational in some respect is to conceive them as physical. It is because they are physical phenomena that they

5 Two journals have recently had special issues on form: Representations, 104 (Fall 2008); ELH, 82, No. 2 (Summer 2015). 6 Sandra Macpherson, “A Little Formalism,” ELH, 82, No. 2, (2015) pp. 385-405. 7 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge 2004), 107, 109. 8 For a classic and still relevant introduction to computing in brains and machines, see John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1958).

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are sharable; that sharing is open to observation. The conceptual framework, computation, may be abstract but the phenomena are embodied. As a crude demonstration, consider a well-known text from which I’ve eliminated line divisions, punctuation, capitalization, and word divisions: theexpenseofspiritinawasteofshameislustinactionandtillactionlustisperjured murderousbloodfullofblamesavageextremerudecruelnottotrustenjoy'dnosoo nerbutdespisedstraightpastreasonhuntedandnosoonerhadpastreasonhatedas aswallow'dbaitonpurposelaidtomakethetakermadmadinpursuitandinpossessi onsohadhavingandinquesttohaveextremeablissinproofandprovedaverywoeb eforeajoyproposedbehindadreamallthistheworldwellknowsyetnoneknowswel ltoshuntheheaventhatleadsmentothishell The text is difficult to read, though it becomes much easier as soon as you recognize it, for that recognition helps you supply the missing cues. This is simple and obvious. The grouping of letterforms into larger and larger units provides cues to the process though which physical signifiers are coupled with mental signifieds, to use Saussure’s terms. Modern psychological investigation shows that, while we may perceive speech as discrete words, the speech signal itself is continuous. As the sonic specification of adjacent phonemes and words tends to overlap, segmenting the speech signal into discrete units is not a simple perceptual task.9 As writing evolved, the grouping of letterforms into words and the arrangement of words into larger units has become conventionalized, though details of punctuation and capitalization can be problematic. Still, cursive script can be perceptually challenging. Signal segmentation is for the most part beneath the notice of literary critics. But if we are going to think about the mobilization of meanings as a computational processes we should acknowledge the full scope of the process, even if other aspects of it are more germane to our interests. Moreover we should acknowledge that the ordinary concept of the word is problematic. The notion that language consists of quasi-autonomous atoms is an illusion of the relative ease and transparency of written language. There they are, we think, fixed and immovable on the page, their meanings obvious. But all that’s on the page is a bunch of marks. For example, what does this word mean?

race Out there in the middle of nowhere, without context, it is hard to say what it means. It could mean this; it could mean that. It depends. When I look it up in the dictionary I find three general senses. One, “a ginger root,” is listed as “dated.” The other two senses are the ones I know, and each has a number of possibilities. One set of meanings has to do with things moving and has many alternatives. The other deals with kinds of beings, biological or human. It is only when it appears in context – race horse, foot race, mill race, the human race, a bloodthirsty race, etc. – that the signifier takes on meaning. The sign function isn’t a static link. Signifiers are bound to signifieds though a dynamic process.10 I have the word bind from logic and from computer science. The binding of sound to sense, sense to sound (or sight and sense) is the basic operation of linguistic computing. Before going on to examine some of that computational machinery I want to bring out three propositions from a methodological article, “Literary Morphology: Nine Randy L. Diehl, Andrew J. Lotto, and Lori L. Holt, “Speech Perception,” Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 55 (2004), 149-79. 10 See the discussion of meaning as meetings of minds in Peter Gardenförs, The Geometry of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2014), 91-112. 9

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Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form.”11 Those propositions set the scope of my theoretical and methodological intention. The third proposition, then called “Form”, can be rewritten as follows: Dynamic Form: The process through which a literary experience is constituted from a text, considered as a mere physical object (auditory or visual), is enacted by computation. The text is MacPherson’s literary matter, the bearer of the shape that the practical critic would describe. Computation provides Attridge’s mobilization of meanings. Here are the two other propositions: Sharability: Computational form is shared among competent readers. Elasticity: The meaning of literary works is elastic and can readily accommodate differences among individuals. I choose the term “elastic” where a previous generation of critics used “indeterminate.” The connotations and implications are very different. Indeterminacy characterizes the problem of a critic attempting an interpretation. Elasticity asks us to consider readers using works to negotiate shared meanings. The different emphasis is important. The former emphasis seems to have given us, alas, a “model of literary criticism whereby the critic feels obliged to claim that his or her interpretation trumps all previous interpretations.”12 When this competition takes the form of critique it all too often arrogates to “scholars the vantage point of the lucid and vigilant thinker, while refusing to extend this same capacity to those naïve and unreflecting souls of whom they speak.”13 Thinking of meaning as elastic returns agency to readers by respecting their need for community and their desire to find meaning and coherence in life. As for sharability, the underlying assumption is that computational process is highly constrained by the physical text and by general cognitive and affective architecture. The details of cognitive and affective systems, however, are strongly shaped by history, both collective and individual. In a later section we will examine a collective event, Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, where the behavior of individuals is coupled to the unfolding of a text and to one another through a common computational form. Finally, let us clothe this conception in Latourian dress. Early in Reassembling the Social Latour distinguishes between intermediaries and mediators (p. 39): An intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs. ... Mediators, on the other hand ... transform, translate, distort, and modify meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry. As discussed above, the form of a work is computationally cued by the physical text, whether written or spoken. It functions as an intermediary. It is through the intermediation of form that we are able to negotiate meaning, which is a function of the mental signifieds, whose William Benzon, “Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form.” PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Published: August 10, 2006, Accessed: August 10, 2016, http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzonliterary_morphology_nine_propositions_in 12 See e.g. Derek Attridge and Henry Staten, The Craft of Poetry: Dialogues on Minimal Interpretation (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 5. 13 Rita Felski, “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, M/C Journal 15, no. 1 (2012), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/431. Accessed August 12, 2016. 11

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valence is subject to historical variation. In thus treating literary works as being both intermediary and mediator, I am simply recognizing the implications of how literature plays on and with the full nature of sign, taken as a dynamic relationship between signifiers and signifieds. Would it be fair to locate the particular agency of the literary text in its dual nature as intermediary and mediator?

Computational Semantics: Network and Text In the late 1960s and 1970s researchers in computational linguistics (CL), artificial intelligence (AI), and cognitive psychology developed semantic models ultimately derived from associationist psychology.14 In CL and AI these models are high-level representations of structures to be implemented in computer code. In cognitive psychology they represent mental structures. This is a mathematical object called a directed graph:

Figure 1: Cognitive network What it represents is generally called a semantic or cognitive network. The nodes are taken to represent concepts while the edges (alternatively arcs or links) between the nodes represent relations between concepts. The meaning of a concept (a node) is a function of its position in the network. This is a small network fragment:

Figure 2: Relations in a network

14 Some representative early texts: David G. Hays, “Networks, Cognitive,” in Allen Kent, Harold Lancour, Jay E. Daily, eds., Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Vol. 19 (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1976), 281-300; Walter Kintsch, The Representation of Meaning in Memory (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1974); Marvin Minsky, ed., Semantic Information Processing (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1968); Donald A. Norman, David E. Rumelhart, and the LNR Research Group , Explorations in Cognition (San Francisco, W. H. Freeman, 1975).

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The labels on the edges specify the kind of relation that obtains between the nodes at either end of the edge. Thus dog is an agent (AGT) participant in an act while liver is an inert (NRT) participant in that act: dog eats liver. Similarly, dog is a variety (VAR) of animal; liver is a variety (VAR) of food. In this diagram the thick lines indicate a specific path through some network:

Figure 3: Path through a network Such a path represents the semantic “deep” structure of a chunk of language, written or spoken. The next diagram shows the path divided into three segments, which might be successive phrases within a sentence, successive sentences within a discourse, successive paragraphs, lines or stanzas in a poem, or even larger units, as the case may be:

Figure 4: Segments of a path That segmentation, and the marks it leaves in the text, is a clue to the work’s form. There is a straightforward relationship between those marks and the mental process that comprehend the text. With this much in mind, let us consider Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit.” This text has modernized spelling and punctuation. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action, and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, Past reason hated as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad: Mad in pursuit and in possession so, 7

10 11 12 13 14

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe, Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

In the first twelve lines our attention is directed back and forth over the follow sequence: Desire: Protagonist becomes consumed with sexual desire and purses the object of that desire by any means necessary: “perjured, murderous, bloody . . . not to trust” (3-4). Consummation: Protagonist gets his way, having “a bliss in proof” (11) Shame: Desire satisfied, the protagonist is consumed with guilt: “despised straight” (5), “no sooner had/ Past reason hated” (6-7). The poem concludes with a curious couplet, asserting that “All this the world well knows yet none knows well/ To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” Knowing that rancid meat can make you ill will prevent most people from eating rancid meat, but, says this couplet, the knowledge that sexual desire will lead you to guilt and disgust is not powerful enough to prevent you from walking to the trap. Now consider some hypothetical mental machinery based on the model developed by David G. Hays15 and his graduate students in the mid-1970s. Two of Hays’s students, Teiji Furugori and Brian Phillips developed computer implementations16; Mary White17 and I did not. I stress this, not so much to emphasize that the model is a collective creation, but to make the point that the model was not developed specifically for a Shakespeare sonnet, nor even for written and spoken texts. Furugori was interested in how we drive cars. White examined the belief system of a millenarian community. Hays used the model to investigate the concept of alienation as used by several social theorists, starting with Karl Marx.18 Thus when I constructed a model for the sonnet I had to follow community conventions. If I had deviated from those conventions in order to accommodate the sonnet, then I wouldn’t have been using that model to account for the sonnet. Moreover, and regardless of public assertions of rigor, all such models are afloat in what Douglas Hofstadter once called “ill-founded swamps of intuition.”19 The argument I am developing does not depend on the details of the model. It depends on the fact that the semantic model is a distinctly different conceptual object from any and all texts.

15 Hays led the machine translation project at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 1960s before chairing the Linguistics Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo. See Martin Kay, “David G. Hays,” in John Hutchins, ed. Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000), 165-170. 16 Teiji Furugori, A Memory Model and Simulation of Memory Processes for Driving a Car, Diss. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1974; Brian Phillips, “A Model for Knowledge and Its Application to Discourse Analysis,” American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1979) Microfiche 82. 17 Mary White, Cognitive Networks and World View: The Metaphysical Terminology of a Millenarian Community, Diss. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1975. 18 David G. Hays, “On ‘Alienation’: An Essay in the Psycholinguistics of Science,” in Theories of Alienation, R.R. Geyer & D. R. Schietzer, eds. (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 169-187. 19 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 375.

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Finally, cognition needs to be grounded in sensorimotor systems, which are in direct contact with the world. To that end we adapted a control theory model that had been developed by William Powers.20 That model also allowed us to connect cognitive and the sensorimotor systems with systems for feeling and motivation. Of course we didn’t have any of this worked out in detail – no one has. It was a matter of principle. Thus, in this context, when I talk of the text of Shakespeare’s sonnet as tracing a path through the network, I am, by implication, talking about it tracing a path through the mind in full. This next diagram is a small, simplified fragment from the model:21

Figure 5: Lust sequence Many physical characteristics of that diagram are technically significant, but we need not worry about that now. Along the bottom we have our three-part sequence: Desire, Consummation, and Shame. Each of those text balloons is a proxy for a sub-network of some complexity. Those sub-networks are represented are in turn by small square nodes which fixes their temporal relations. The lower part of the diagram is the systemic network (SYS). Think of it as roughly like a dictionary; it is a repository of concepts of relatively limited individual scope. The upper part of the diagram represents the episodic network (EPI). Think of it as more like an encyclopedia. It locates things and events in space and time and organizes systemic concepts into large and complex structures, sometimes called plans, scripts, schemas, or frames. That’s all we need to know for our present purposes. Now consider this diagram, in which I have taken lines from the poem and superimposed them on the lust sequence with pointers from words in the text to nodes in the network: Mad in pursuit and in possession so, Had, having, and in quest to have . . .

Consumed by desire

Have sex

Feel shame

Figure 6: Mad in pursuit

William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception (Chicago: Aldine, 1973). For more details see my papers, “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics,” MLN 91 (1976), 952-982; “Lust in Action: An Abstraction,” Language and Style 14 (1981) 251-270. 20 21

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Those words ARE the text of Shakespeare’s sonnet. In the diagram they are physically distinct from the mental machinery postulated to be supporting their meaningfulness. Notice that many words are without pointers. The diagram is incomplete, which is obvious at a glance. That’s a virtue, not the incompleteness, but that it is readily apparent. When pursued properly, such models are brutally unforgiving in such matters. This diagram is similar to the previous one, but it represents the final couplet:

Figure 7: Concluding couplet Notice that this in “All this the world well knows” represents the whole lust sequence, not any part of it, while heaven and hell designate (figuratively) components within the sequence. What’s important here and now is one thing: The mental model and the physical text are clearly distinguishable. They are distinctly different conceptual objects. Given such a cognitive model, one can then imagine “accounting” for a poem by following the path it traces through the mental network as one attends to the poem word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase. That path is a third conceptual entity–it is represented in Figures 6 and 7 by the arrows connecting the text to the model. It embodies or carries the relationship between the text and the model and in that way “explains” the poem. The physical text is the object we examine to determine form in the sense that MacPherson seeks while that path traces the mental mobilization that interests Attridge. That trace is created by computation. Of course this model, even in its original complexity, is no more than a toy. But you can learn from toys. This toy has allowed us to untangle the physical text, whether audible sound or visible markings, from the perceptual and cognitive machinery that gives it meaning.22 It is easy enough to make the distinction in theory; we have all learned to do that. But without some explicit account of that mental machinery, such as those provided in the cognitive sciences, it is almost impossible to maintain that distinction in critical practice.

Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Text Let us now turn to President Barack Obama’s Eulogy for Clemente Pinckney. Taking the form of an African-American vernacular sermon, this text was written, not to be read in the privacy of one’s home, but to be performed in public. We will examine that performance in the next section, but let us first examine the text and consider its form in Macpherson’s sense as the shape of matter.

On the value of having models that can be visualized, see Sydney Lamb, Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language, (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1999), 274; Franco Moretti, Network Theory, Plot Analysis, Stanford Literary Lab, Pamphlet 4, May 1, 2011, p. 4. 22

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We’ll start with an analytic table. The first column in the table indicates the paragraphs that are in that section; I supplied those numbers.23 The second column is a short descriptive label and the third is a brief characterization of what happens in that section.

1-5 6 - 16 17 - 20

Label (1) Prologue [Threshold Event] (2) Pinckney & Church (3) Nation

21 - 27

(Middle) Violation and Grace

28 - 39

(3’) Nation

40 - 44

(2’) Pinckney & Families (1’) Closing [Threshold Event]

45 - 48

Characterization Invokes God and cites Scripture. Address to Pinckney’s relations. Starts with Pinckney and his friends and relatives. ¶17: Uses “nation” for first time. ¶18: Civil Rights Movement. The role of the church in the nation. ¶21: “our nation’s original sin.” Only place where “the killer” is mentioned. Grace enters as a theme that carries through the rest of the eulogy. ¶28: “As a nation…” Starts with the nation and talks about changes we must make. ¶40: “…everything Reverent Pinckney stood for…” ¶41: “…forgiveness expressed by those families…” ¶45: “Amazing grace.” ¶46: Sings the hymn. ¶47: Calls the nine names. ¶48: “May God continue to shed His grace on the United States of America.”

Table 1: Ring-Composition for the Pinckney Eulogy If you examine the labels in the second column you will see they are symmetrical before and after a central section: Violation and Grace. I will say more about that in a bit, but let us begin with that central section, paragraph 21: We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress. An act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination; violence and suspicion. An act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation's original sin. This is the first time that Dylann Storm Roof is mentioned, but not by name (never by name). Obama establishes that this action was not a personal one. It was not aimed at individuals as individuals. In the killer’s mind it was a symbolic act. Roof was attacking a group of people and an institution. The paragraph ends by referencing “our nation's original sin”, slavery, but of course the phrase “original sin” has deep Biblical resonance. In paragraph 22 Obama says, “God works in mysterious ways”. Utterly standard, a cliché, but a powerful one. The next paragraph, 23, has the first use of “grace” and references the “alleged killer” twice. The word “grace” will be repeated throughout the rest of the eulogy. In this paragraph Obama asserts, “He [the alleged killer] didn't know he was being used by God. (Applause.)” This middle section ends with paragraph 27:

23 Here’s a working paper containing the text, with paragraph numbering, and analytical tables for the eulogy: President Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, Analytic and Descriptive Tables, August 4, 2016: https://www.academia.edu/14123971/President_Obama_s_Eulogy_for_Clementa_Pinckne y_Analytic_and_Descriptive_Tables.

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According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It's not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace. There will be no more mention of the murders, or the murderer. Rather, Obama will thread his way back through the material he had established earlier in the eulogy, but this time under the sign of grace. Consider the second section, paragraphs 6 to 17. Obama talks of Reverend Pinckney, first as a man (6-7), then as pastor and senator (8-20). In paragraph 16 he names the others who were killed, then their families (17) and the church, generically as “the center of African-American life.” He then moves on to the third section, moving outward to the general role of the black church in American life and mentioning the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King in paragraph 20. After the central violation-and-grace section Obama returns to the nation in paragraphs 28 though 39, now talking about the need to take action against racism and against gun violence (39): None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight. Every time something like this happens, somebody says we have to have a conversation about race. We talk a lot about race. There's no shortcut. And we don't need more talk. None of us should believe that a handful of gun safety measures will prevent every tragedy. It will not. People of goodwill will continue to debate the merits of various policies, as our democracy requires – this is a big, raucous place, America is. And there are good people on both sides of these debates. Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. With that, Obama narrows his back scope to Pinckney and our responsibility toward him and his beliefs (40) and, in his next paragraph (41), he invokes “the forgiveness expressed by those families” toward Dylann Roof, which he had mentioned in the middle section (23 and 24). He ends this section by invoking a “reservoir of goodness” (43 and 44) and grace. The five middle sections (paragraphs 6-44) are framed by a pair of threshold events, which stand outside the expository and rhetorical flow of those sections. The prologue (1-5) manages the transition from, shall we say, the mundane space-time of the hall and into the ritual space-time of the eulogy, and the closing (45-48) achieves the transition back to the mundane. In the prologue Obama gives the Bible verse (Hebrews 11:13) on which he’ll base the eulogy and acknowledges Pinckney and his family. In the closing Obama leads the assembled in singing “Amazing Grace” (46), once again invokes the names of the fallen (47) as he had done earlier (16) and finishes with a formulaic gesture that paraphrases a wellknown patriotic song: “May God continue to shed His grace on the United States of America” (48). The symmetry exhibited in this text is of a form traditionally known as chiasmus or ring-composition. The term “chiasmus” tends to be used for small scale instances, such as we find in line 13 of Sonnet 129, “All this the world well knows; yet none knows well...,” while “ring-composition” or “ring-form” is used for longer narrative sequences. The form is mostly associated with classical and Biblical texts, but, in her last intellectual work, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition, the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that the form occurs in more modern texts, indeed, that it is universal.24 Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles: An Essay in Ring-Composition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). See also Raymond F. Person, Jr., “From Grammar in Everyday Conversation to Special Grammar in Oral Traditions: A Case Study of Ring Composition,” in Oral Poetics 24

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This is the general idea: A, B, C … X … C’, B’, A’ A’ echoes A, B’ echoes B and so forth, with X being structurally central. We might visualize the Eulogy like this:

Figure 8: The Pinckney Eulogy Visualized Students of cognitive linguistics might think of Threshold, Pinckney, Church & Nation, and Violation & Grace as mental spaces.25 The Eulogy traces a path that originates and ends in the mundane and moves through four mental spaces in ritual performance. Finally, let us note that the Eulogy’s trajectory is an ontological one. Obama starts with a focus on individuals, Pinckney along with his friends and relatives (6-17). Then he moves to collective entities: the church and the nation (18-20). In the central section that ontology is violated by murder and God’s grace intervenes. Then Obama traverses the ontology in reverse order, from the nation and the black church (28-39) and back to Pinckney and his relations (40-44).

Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Performance Obama, along with his chief speech writer, Cody Keenan,26 developed his text for oral delivery. He delivered it on June 26, 2016, with nearly 6000 mourners present in the hall and who knows how many people watching on television.27 Public performance, of course, is the and Cognitive Science, eds. Cristobal Pagan and Mihailo Antovic (Stuttgart: Mohr Siebeck 2016), 30-51; and my “Tezuka’s Metropolis: A Modern Japanese Fable about Art and the Cosmos,” in Uta Klein, Katja Mellmann, Steffanie Metzger, eds. Heurisiken der Literaturwissenschaft: Disciplinexterne Perspektiven auf Literatur (Paderborn: mentis Verlag GmbH, 2006), 527-545. 25 For example, see Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, eds., Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 26 See Michiko Kakutani, “Obama’s Eulogy, Which Found Its Place in History,” The New York Times, July 3, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/arts/obamas-eulogy-whichfound-its-place-in-history.html. 27 You can view the eulogy online, for example, at C-SPAN’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9IGyidtfGI. For a written report, see Kevin Sack and 13

foundational form of ‘literary’ culture. Prior to the widespread routinization of literacy, oral and dramatic performance is all there was; even in literate societies children listen to stories before they read them. Dramatic performance remains with us to this day, not to mention author readings and the sister arts of film and television. Many of our most important texts were created as scripts for theatrical performance. To read them in the privacy of our studies is, in some sense, to read them against their ‘nature’. These texts belong to public culture. That is why we read them, preserve them, teach them, study them, and write about them (at length). This eulogy is public, not only in the sense that it took place in a public arena; but because it was given on behalf of the polis. Barack Hussein Obama was performing in his role as elected President and Chief Executive of State. On June 17, 2016, Dylann Roof killed nine people in a Bible study class at a church in Charleston, S.C. This mass murder shocked the nation. The head of state spoke to the citizenry and, in this representative function, on their behalf at a memorial service. In this context I invoke the New Historicist paradigms of the court and the theater, though I am not so interested in the play of power as the historicists.28 But I would also invoke the philosopher’s concept of collective intentionality,29 and the game theorist’s distinction between shared knowledge and mutual knowledge.30 Consider the well-known story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” There is a point in the story where the Emperor displays his finery before the people. He is in fact naked, but has been told that his clothes are invisible to those who are not worthy of their position. The Emperor thus believes himself to be clothed and assumes that others do as well. At the point where he steps out onto the street, everyone can see that he is naked. They share that knowledge among them. But no one actually knows that the others see the Emperor’s nakedness. Each person may well believe that they, and they alone, are unworthy and thus they do not see the clothes. The minute the young child blurts out that the Emperor is naked, at that point they all know that others see that the Emperor is naked. At this point their shared knowledge becomes mutual knowledge. Now consider this passage by Charles Altieri, where he is considering the final speech in The Tempest, the farewell to the audience: Or, better, finally the audience gets to see that its applause is not mere empty ritual. Applause becomes overtly the confirmation of social bonds and a release from the anxieties that characterize performance—the actor must despair unless there is this show of what seems hearty affirmation. And while the applause the actor projects in fact is his due by mere convention, this way of asking for it elicits awareness of how important those conventions are to seal the performance as mutually satisfying.31 Gardiner Harris, “President Obama Eulogizes Charleston Pastor as One Who Understood Grace,” The New York Times, June 26, 2016: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/thousands-gather-for-funeral-of-clementapinckney-in-charleston.html?_r=0. Accessed August 3, 2016. 28 For example, Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” ELH, vol. 56, No. 4, (1989) 721-771. 29 John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Simon & Schuster, 1995). 30 Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), see Chapter 8, “Games People Play,” 373-426. 31 Charles Altieri, “The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory,” New Literary History, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2007), 93. 14

That is what sermons are about, “the confirmation of social bonds”. That is what congregations are, communities. In this case we have several interlocking communities of varying ‘presence’ and ‘strength.’ Most immediately we have the 6000 people present in the hall. Beyond that we have all those who listened and watched as the event was being televised. Finally we have all of us who have watched at later times. Considering only on those physically present, they saw and heard Obama, as he saw and, yes heard, them, though not necessarily as individuals. Those in the audience also saw and heard one another. The performance was interactive. Obama may have scripted his performance ahead of time, but the precise pacing and delivery was responsive to audience actions, such as applause, shouts, hand waving, and standing. 32 A small band was also there; they improvised comments and accompaniments as appropriate. And on one crucial matter, whether or not Obama would actually sing “Amazing Grace,” that decision was not made until the time of delivery.33 When Obama was done, what was in people’s hearts and minds in those first moments at the close? They had been transported in ritual space; they felt a bit different, perhaps in some sense “elevated” or “transformed.” What went on their minds during that transport, that’s what we need to understand. Subsequently they may wonder about the meaning of the eulogy; they may discuss it with friends. That is a secondary activity, derivative on that original transport. Now let us switch registers and think about this performance at the neural level: 6000 nervous systems interacting with one another. In my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, I made a fairly detailed, if informal, argument that when people make music together they are linked together into a system that functions as a single integrated whole.34 I will hazard a crude summary. The basic notion is that of a system and its states. When Walter Freeman analyzes neurodynamics, he uses a mathematical model that applies to both observed neural activity and computer simulation of that activity.35 How many states can the system assume? That depends on three values: 1) the number of states each element (neurons in this case) can assume, 2) the number of elements in the system, and 3) the constraints the elements impose on one another. Given those values, an individual nervous system can have so many states. Whatever the number is, it is very large. Call it N. Now, suppose our system consists of two individuals, each capable of N states. One might think the system would have N2 possible states. If the system consists of 100 individuals, a symphony orchestra for example, it should have N100 possible states. For the Pinckney eulogy the number would be N6000. If N is very large, then N6000 must be very stupendously humongous. That’s what you’d think. But you would be wrong. Why? Because when people interact with one another, by making music, dancing, conversing, etc., they place constraints on one another’s activity. Interacting individuals give up individual degrees of freedom, as the engineers and physicists call it, when they embrace cooperative interaction. If you are in church and listening to a preacher deliver a sermon you agree to listen and respond to what he says and to respond in concert with your fellows. Participation is an act of will, of surrendering your will to the occasion and thereby lending agency to the occasion. 32 For a succinct account of black preaching see Henry H. Mitchell, Black Preaching: The Recovery of a Powerful Tool (Nashville, TN: Abington Press, 1990). 33 Michiko Kakutani, “Obama’s Eulogy”. 34 William Benzon, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, New York: Basic Books 2001, pp. 23-68. More recently, “Synch, Song, and Society,” Human Nature Review, 5, (2005), 66-86. 35 For accounts for a general audience see Walter Freeman, Societies of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995); How Brains Make Up Their Minds (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999).

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Note, though, that while I am arguing that individuals in a tightly interacting group thus constitute a single physical system, I am not arguing that they somehow possess a single mind, or a group mind. Each has their own mind, single and individual, but not isolated. The minds are linked in intersubjective experience through a (now) single physical system where some signals pass between individuals in the form of acoustic waves and visible movements while other signals exist within individual nervous systems and their couplings to sensory and motor systems. Such groups can function as a single (information processing, computational) system only if their interactions are tightly synchronized, an observation originating with William Condon’s classic work on interactional synchrony.36 Moreover, we have a variety of empirical evidence showing that individuals engaged in conversation are tightly synchronized with one another; we also have evidence of synchronization between the brains of individuals making music together.37 The people listening to Obama deliver the eulogy are not conversing with him, though they may make remarks to one another, but it is reasonable to suppose that they are as tightly synchronized with his speech as they would be with the speech of a conversational partner.38 It is not sufficient that people be in the same space together while they interact. Conditions must be met, conditions set by the temporal constraints of human nervous systems. We can take this neural argument one step further. Over the past two decades or so neuroscientists have identified a set of neural structures that have become known as the default mode network (DMN).39 The DMN is associated with resting state phenomena, including emotional processing, self-referential activity, and autobiographical recollection. Activity in the DMN is attenuated when one is performing tasks that are directed outward toward the external world. Carhart-Harris and Friston have speculated that the DMN is associated with the Freudian ego.40 Meanwhile, other investigators have discovered that

William S. Condon, “Synchrony Demonstrated between Movements of the Neonate and Adult Speech,” Child Development 45 (1974), 456-462; “Communication: Rhythm and Structure.” in Rhythm in Psychological, Linguistic and Musical Processes, eds. J. R. Evans and M. Clynes, (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C Thomas, Publisher, 1986), 55-78. 37 For example, see Uri Hasson et al., “Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world,” Trends in Cognitive Science 16, no. 2 (2012), 114-21; Stephen C. Levinson, “Turn-taking in Human Communication – Origins and Implications for Language Processing,” Trends in Cognitive Science 20, no. 1 (2016), 6-14; Paul Reddish, Ronald Fischer, and Joseph Bulbulia, “Let’s Dance Together: Synchrony, Shared Intentionality and Cooperation,” PLoS ONE 8, No. 8 (2013), 1-13; Thalia Wheatley et al., “From Mind perception to Mental Connection: Synchrony as a Mechanism for Social Understanding,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6, no. 8 (2012), 589-606; Margaret Wilson and Thomas P. Wilson, “An oscillator model of the timing of turn-taking,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12, no. 6 (2005), 957-968. 38 For evidence, see Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson, “Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, No. 32 (2010), 14425–14430; Lauren J. Silbert, Christopher J. Honey, Erez Simony, David Poeppel. Uri Hasson, “Coupled neural systems underlie the production and comprehension of naturalistic narrative speech,: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111. No. 43 (2014), E4687-96. 39 Marcus E. Raichle, “The Brain’s Default Mode Network,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 38 (2015), 433-47, doi: 10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013-014030. 40 R.L. Carhart-Harris and K. J. Friston, “The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy; a neurobiological account of Freudian ideas,” Brain 133 (2010), 1265-1283. 36

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DMN activity is enhanced when subjects are examining paintings,41 that some DMN structures are relatively larger in musically creative people,42 and it is associated with story comprehension and autobiographical memory.43 On the one hand, we have a set of neural structures, the DMN, that are enhanced when one is attending to oneself rather than the external world. But when one is attending to aesthetic objects, paintings and music, DMN activity is enhanced as well. That is, the brain is treating these phenomena as though they are internal, involving the self. What about watching a movie or attending a theatrical performance involve enhanced DMN activity? Until the observations are made, we won’t really know, but it seems likely. What about listening to a sermon? The kind of instrumentation involved in making these observations could not be used in a church, a theater, or in a hall such as the one Obama spoke in. But it would be possible to have people watch a video of the event while positioned in an appropriate instrument. I am outlining a three-part argument: 1. When a people are engaged in a tightly synchronized activity, such as making music, or conversation, we may to consider them as a single behavioral system. 2. External art objects are treated as though they are behaviorally and phenomenologically interior. 3. Therefore individuals in a tightly coupled group engaging in expressive activity are sharing experience that is phenomenologically interior for all of them. That doesn’t seem strange; in fact it seems almost obvious. The objective is to put the argument on an empirical basis. It is not there yet, but the possibility beckons. But what, you ask, has any of this to do with our computational model? By the principle of sharability I assert that the individual responses share the same computational form and thus that observed public behavior also tells us about individual responses. By the principle of elasticity I assume that the meanings people take away from the event will be somewhat different. In some cases those differences will be the occasion of ongoing discussion. THAT’s what I had in mind by setting up this discussion with a computational model, even a toy one. What then is the relationship between the form exhibited by the text and the public performance that took place on June 26, 2016? I cannot answer that question in anything like satisfying detail, but I offer a provocative clue. As Obama delivered his text, the crowd responded, as did the band; that, we know, is common for African-American vernacular sermons, which the Eulogy was. As Obama spoke, people applauded, laughed, cried out (“Amen!”), and stood up from time to time. When Obama got to the structural center, audience response is notably louder and more sustained than it had been up to that point (paragraph 22). Furthermore, for the first time, the organist joins in with some chords and riffs (26). This is not, however, the most vigorous response during the sermon; that happens at the very end. Edward A. Vessel, Gabrielle Starr, and Nava Rubin, “The brain on art: intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network,” Frontiers of Human Neuroscience 8, article 66; doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066 (2012), 1-17; Edward A. Vessel, Gabrielle Starr, and Nava Rubin, “Art reaches within: aesthetic experience, the self and the default mode network,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 7, article 258; doi: 10.3389/ fnins.2013.00258 (2013), 1-9. 42 David M. Bashwiner, et al., “Musical Creativity ‘Revealed’ in Brain Structure: Interplay between Motor, Default Mode, and Limbic Networks,” Scientific Reports 6, no. 20482; doi: 10.1038/srep20482 (2016), 1-8. 43 R. Nathan Spreng, Raymond A. Mar, and Alice S. N. Kim, “The Common Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, Navigation, Theory of Mind, and the Default Mode: A Quantitative Meta-analysis,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21, no. 3 (2008), 489– 510. 41

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My point is simply that a section of the text that has been identified as the structural center by semantic criteria also corresponds to a significant moment in the evolution of the ongoing performance. Just how we get from structural centrality in the text to certain kind of response in the work, that’s not clear. Are there other correspondences between the structural features of the text and the ebb and flow of the live event? I do not trust myself to find them simply by watching and listening and taking notes. The response to that central section is (seems) obvious and striking, as is the climactic response at the end. I suspect, though, that finding more extensive correspondence will require the instruments and methods of a psycholinguistic laboratory. Let us take this information as warranting the further speculation everyone in the audience was undergoing a formally similar transit through psycho-cultural space. Does this imply that the performance had the same meaning for them? No, only that they had similar temporal dynamics. That’s all that sharability requires.

Meaning, History, and Attachment For all that I’ve said about Obama’s text and the performance in which he gave it, I have said relatively little about its meaning in any large sense. Where I to offer a reading I might, for example, start with the central section (paragraphs 21-27) and interrogate the implicit theology. What does it mean to assert that Dylann Roof was being used by God? Is Obama’s reference to “our nation’s original sin” (slavery) to be taken literally or figuratively, and what do those terms even mean in this context? What is the role of God’s grace in human history? What is the nature of history? Does any of this even matter, why or why not? I would, however, be more inclined to start with its performativity, which is at the center of a discussion that Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University, and John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia, had on line on Blogging Heads TV, June 29, 2015.44 They’ve had many of these online discussions, and so are familiar with one another’s interests, attitudes, and moves. Their discussion departures from the observation that Obama spoke in the form of a sermon in the black vernacular tradition, from the vocal and physical mannerisms to the concluding rendition of “Amazing Grace.” They make that point that, after all, this was a performance, artifice, but not in the sense that it was in any way insincere or inauthentic. Rather, it is simply that Obama had to create and perfect the persona in and through which he spoke, as did Martin Luther King, Jr. or Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s pastor in Chicago)–both sons of ministers. Obama, however, was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia largely among white people. He didn’t come to the black church until he was an adult, which, McWhorter emphasized, is late in life to acquire a new way to talk. Loury then observes (48:30, slightly edited): It just resonates in my mind so deeply. Because what does it mean for a people, I speak now of black Americans 30-40 million strong, to have the embodiment of their generational hopes, personified by a person who must adopt artifice, and manufacture, in order to present himself as being of them? What does it say of such a people? No no no! I think this is historic profound.…Orlando Patterson just brilliantly analyzes this. Slavery has to be, you’re putting the slave down. The slave must be a dishonored person. Honor becomes central to the whole quest for equality. And having the Chief Executive of State, be of you, or at the very least, be a person who when in a position of choice, chose to be of you, is countering the dishonor in a very deep way. But perhaps the only way that the state’s 44

Blogging Heads TV: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/35741?in=38:17&out=46:09. 18

symbolic power could be married to your quest for honor is through the person of someone who wasn’t quite fully of you. And your stigma still resonates even in the workings of history that are intended to elevate you. Obama did not have to organize his remarks in that way, nor did he have to perform in that style. What does it mean that he chose to be stylistically black? Consider this sentence from the Eulogy (¶18): Over the course of centuries, black churches served as “hush harbors” where slaves could worship in safety; praise houses where their free descendants could gather and shout hallelujah; rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad; bunkers for the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement. By choosing to present himself in the black manner, has Obama thereby transformed this event into such a hush harbor? Think back to the theological questions I’ve already raised, to the concept of history implied in those words. In his choice of the persona of the black preacher, was Obama thereby enacting a certain construal of history? I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the implications of these or any other interpretive gambits that seem plausible, even if they intersect with one another in tangled skeins of contradiction as well as corroboration. My purpose in hazarding these possibilities is to make apparent the difference between the interpretive reasoning those readings require and the analytic reasoning involved in describing the eulogy’s ringcomposition.45 These are very different modes of thought, though directed at the same object, one with a dual nature as intermediary and mediator in Latour’s sense. Consider what this implies for the event itself. Members of Obamas audience arrived at the venue each the product of his or her unique history. Of course they have shared histories in various degrees and distances but still, in the end, each one is unique. Moreover, while the audience was mostly black, it was not entirely so–I am judging from the video. While racial identity is incidental in many situations, in this one it crucially salient, for it carries the historical depth of the interaction between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. And yet all of these people were their together, their different histories crossing and intersecting as they heard and responded to the same words and gestures at the same time, down to the 10s of milliseconds, and to one another as well. And THAT is how we must understand the agency of literary works, the role they play in society and in history. They are sites of negotiation between individuals who must meld their individual histories through shared conventions and practices. They are vehicles of shared meaning. Let us return to the text for one more interpretive offering. At the conclusion of the description of ring-form I suggested that the middle section was the turning point of an ontological peregrination. That’s a cognitive characterization. What of affect? I would hazard that it is (parental) love; and here I am thinking in particular of attachment, as explored by John Bowlby and his students and colleagues.46 While Bowlby explored attachment in the relationship between mothers and their children, others have extended the concept to adult relationships and even to more abstract objects.47 Consider paragraphs 26 and 27: 45 For a comparative discussion of description, interpretation, explanation and evaluation, see Sharon Marcus, “Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and the Value of Scale,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, No. 3 (2016), 297-319. 46 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1: Attachment (New York, Basic Books, 1969). 47 Parkes, C. M. and J. Stevenson-Hinde, The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior, (New York, Basic Books, 1982); Nelli Ferenczi, Tara C. Marshall , “Exploring Attachment to the ‘Homeland’ and Its Association with Heritage Culture Identification,” PLoS ONE 8(1):

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This whole week, I've been reflecting on this idea of grace. The grace of the families who lost loved ones. The grace that Reverend Pinckney would preach about in his sermons. The grace described in one of my favorite hymnals – the one we all know: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound - that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found; was blind but now I see….grace is the free and benevolent favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Later, in paragraph 43, he cites Marilyn Robinson’s conception, “that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.” This sounds like a mother’s love, the parental face of the attachment between mother and child. In presenting the relationship between God and humans, Obama’s text and performance activates the attachment system, a facet of our biological nature. Having done that, he then retraces his steps, from nation back to Clementa Pinckney, now drawing on that affect and culminating in a performance of “Amazing Grace.” What does Obama do with that love, with that attachment? He talks of what the nation must do to right the wrongs and heal the wounds caused by racism. Thus the occasions binds those present to one another and to the nation. This interpretive line is subject to empirical investigation, although in some respects it would be difficult. When people listen to and watch this video, do they feel love–what are the physical signs? What areas of the brain are activated, what hormones are released? As we investigate these matters, we move from interpretation to explanation: THIS is what happens in the brain when one absorbs this performance. And so we arrive back to the model David Hays and his students developed four decades ago, the model I discussed above. While that model was mostly about cognitive structures, that emphasis was a matter of interest and convenience. It was a model of structures realized in a nervous system, which also enacted perception, action, and feeling as well as thought. I say this, not to in any way imply that somehow we had it all but figured out back then–for we certainly did not, but only to indicate the scope of literary investigation. To a first approximation we are talking about the whole mind, with all its faculties of sense, action, feeling and reason.

Coda: Form and Sharability in the Private Text But what, you might ask, does this story about shared meaning in a face-to-face group tell us about texts read individually and in private. When we are in a group, we are aware of and respond to others even as we all respond to the speaker–whether preacher, poet, or storyteller–or as we all watch the same play or movie. When we are reading privately, there is no one to respond with. Are we in effect virtually coupled with other silent readers? Yes, that is my contention. We share the same computational structure. That is almost certainly true for sentence-level syntactic structure. As for larger scale structures, I believe it is true for them as well, but, certainly, it is open to investigation. Let me further observe that, if sharing is the name of the cultural game, then sharability might be a reason why some texts survive in a society and others perish. Sharability does not, in this view, necessarily equate to popularity. Rather it is the capacity of a text to support satisfying interactions between people over the long term. Conversations, letters, reading groups–does a given text support and reward these activities time after time? If so, it e53872. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0053872; William Benzon, “Talking with Nature in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’,” PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts (November, 2004) http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzontalking_with_nature_in_this_lime_tree_bo 20

has a better chance of surviving than one that does not. In this sense, then, texts are cultural and social actors in the sense of Latourian actor-network theory. Sharability would not be a property of the text like the number of words, or the statistical distribution of word tokens, literary register, or even such things as plot and setting. Rather it is a diffuse and global property that emerges only in the interaction between texts and readers. Readers find and relate to one another through texts. Perhaps we could talk of texts as summoning readers to the reading. The sharable texts survive in society; the others do not. At this point, I submit, we are talking about cultural evolution,48 and that takes us far from this study of computational form and shared meaning in single texts. It takes us into the world of tens and hundreds and thousands to texts emerging over decades and centuries. That is the world of computational criticism, of distant reading. Let us leave it there, in the distance, beckoning. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Alan Liu, Terence Patrick Murphy, and Ted Underwood for helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay. I remain responsible for errors and obfuscation.

48 There is a large interdisciplinary literature devoted to cultural evolution. For an excellent, if informal, introduction, see Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection (New York, Basic Books, 1996). For a useful survey of several schools of thought, though a bit old, see Laland, K. M. and G. R. Brown, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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