Afterword: The Epistemological Turn in Early American Literary Studies

Although I have not been able to locate with certainty the first occurrence of the phrase epistemological turn in reference to recent trends in American literary history, it is safe to say that it has emerged in the wake of a number of recent turns announced in metacritical reflections in literary scholarship and the humanities at large—the transnational turn, the hemispheric turn, the spatial turn, the aesthetic turn, the affective turn, the religious turn, the ontological turn, the hermeneutical turn, and so on. I would therefore like to begin this afterword by offering a brief consideration of the concept of the turn in the humanities more generally. Almost ten years ago, in 2016, Hester Blum published her edition of a collection of essays entitled Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion, in which several Americanists reflect on various recent turns in American literary scholarship. As I note in my contribution to that volume (Bauer 2016: 81–84), scholars, when describing these turns in the humanities, often invoke Thomas S. Kuhn’s famous concept of a paradigm shift, which he coined in his seminal 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although I explain there why there is a fundamental difference between the recent turns in the humanities and a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the history of science, I would like to return briefly to Kuhn’s concept here, as I think it is potentially helpful for illuminating the contemporary significance and possible future directions of the epistemological turn in early Americanist literary scholarship practiced by the authors featured in this special issue.Significantly, Kuhn credited the humanities for his (then novel) insight that epistemological change in the so-called hard sciences should be understood primarily in terms of the institutional infrastructures and cultural contexts in which science is practiced and in which knowledge is produced, validated, and socially constructed. Thus, in the postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn (1970: 208) revealed that its thesis was largely “borrowed from other fields,” explaining that “historians of literature, of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other human activities have long described their subjects in the same way. Periodization in terms of revolutionary breaks in style, taste, and institutional structure have [sic] been among their standard tools. If I have been original with respect to concepts like these, it has mainly been by applying them to the sciences, fields which had been widely thought to develop in a different way.” Like most humanists approaching the history of their fields, Kuhn eschewed the notion—still commonly held by positivist philosophers of science during his day—that history in general can be understood in terms of “progress” and that historical change in the sciences, in particular, follows continuously, naturally, and logically on the heels of new discoveries—that the history of science was “revolution in permanence” (as one of his detractors put it [Watkins 1970: 28]).Not surprisingly, while Kuhn’s approach to the history of science received a warm welcome in the humanities—where it was crowned the book of the twentieth century cited most frequently in the period 1976–83 (Garfield 1987: 3–7)—it was greeted with skepticism, even hostility, by most philosophers of science at the time. Perhaps most disagreeable to Kuhn’s positivist colleagues in the philosophy of science was his argument for the importance that tradition played in the history not only of the arts and humanities but also of science. He had underscored this importance by introducing the concept of normal science—his term for what most scientists do most of the time—as an essentially conservative enterprise that he described as a sort of “puzzle solving” (Kuhn 1970: 35) within the rules, methods, and assumptions of the ruling paradigm. According to Kuhn, shifts in these paradigms occur only rarely; and when they do occur, they do so only after a long and gradual accumulation of many empirical “anomalies” that remain unexplainable within the normal science paradigm. A paradigm shift, he writes, begins with the “recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science” and then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that that the anomalous has become the expected. Assimilating a new sort of fact demands a more than additive adjustment of theory, and until that adjustment is completed—until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way—the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all. (52–53)That adjustment to theory—the seeing of nature in a different way—is a gradual intellectual process that is deeply embedded in and mediated by the social, professional, ideological, and cultural contexts in which science is practiced.But despite Kuhn’s admitted inspiration by the humanities in his account of scientific revolutions, he insisted that the humanities lack paradigms—at least in the sense in which he defined them—and that the paradigm was an exclusive and distinctive feature of the modern natural sciences, which separates them from other fields of inquiry. One of the characteristics of scientific paradigms is their diachronic relationship and the lack (or rarity) of synchronic overlap. “Normally,” Kuhn (1970: 162) writes, “the members of a mature scientific community work from a single paradigm or from a closely related set.” The social sciences and the humanities, by contrast, lack “the unparalleled insulation of mature scientific communities from the demands of the laity and of everyday life. . . . Just because he is working only for an audience of colleagues, an audience that share his own values and beliefs, the scientist can take a single set of standards for granted” (164). Although more recent work in critical science studies has unmasked the fiction of scientific detachment from the social and political world (see Serres and Latour 1995; Serres 1982; Latour 1993), Kuhn’s point about the singularity of the natural sciences in this regard still stands: the natural sciences rarely tolerate the simultaneous existence of multiple paradigms. Their paradigmatic relationship is governed by the principle of supersession.Thus, as described by Kuhn, a “scientific revolution” is predicated on a dialectical relationship between tradition and discovery—not a re-volution in the sense of a return to an older state but rather a quasi-apocalyptic (or revelatory) overturning of tradition by discovery that (supposedly) brings us in a step closer to objective reality. Due to their absolutist claim to truth, paradigms may be replaced by other paradigms, but they rarely coexist with others in the modern natural sciences—and if they do, they usually do so not for long. By contrast, the humanistic turn presupposes a continuously dialogic relationship between tradition and discovery. Thus, critical turns in the modern humanities occur in the form of additions of new epistemic models that grow out of, overlap, and coexist with established ones, frequently competing with but hardly ever invalidating or replacing one another. As such, they more closely resemble the pre- (or early) modern (“Renaissance”) pattern of epistemic change before the seventeenth century, which Roland Greene (2013: 209–22) has compared to a “palimpsest”—the overwriting of an older meaning of a concept (in his case, “invention”) by an emergent new meaning, without the older one being erased, to the effect of a coexistence of several meanings that would seem to our modern minds to be anachronistic. Whereas, arguably, the pattern of epistemic change Greene describes still survives in the modern humanities today, paradigmatic change has governed the natural sciences since the breakup of Renaissance humanism, from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, when the debate about quantum physics and string theory signaled the “end of discovery” (in the modern sense of the word) (Stannard 2010: 209–22).But while a Kuhnian shift in the history of modern science is then fundamentally different from a turn in the modern humanities, it is precisely Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm that has opened our understanding of the history of science to the critical practices of the humanities, hereby anticipating by about a decade the poststructuralist turn in critical science studies more generally associated with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, and (later) Bruno Latour. For me personally, as a student of literature, this “epistemological turn” arrived in the early 1990s, not via Kuhn, Serres, or Latour but via the post-structuralist/postcolonial turn in cultural anthropology in the works of Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, George E. Marcus, Michael M. J. Fischer, Renato Rosaldo, Talal Asad, and others, who availed themselves of the methodological tools of the humanities—especially literary criticism—to turn the ethnographic gaze from the traditional object to the observing and writing subject, investigating, for example, the construction of ethnographic authority and the rhetorical devices of ethnographic objectification (Geertz 1988; Clifford 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Rosaldo 1993; Asad 1973). As a social (or human) science that sits between the hard (or natural) sciences on the one hand and the modern humanities on the other, cultural anthropology was an interesting test case when taking stock of the epistemological changes wrought by poststructuralism and postcolonialism—both more traumatic than a “turn” but less traumatic than a “shift.” Thus, the noted late anthropologist Neil L. Whitehead tried to have it both ways when writing not one but two introductions to his new edition of one of the most important sources for cultural anthropologists and ethnohistorians studying northeastern South America, Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana—one that appreciates Ralegh’s text for what it can tell us about Elizabethan England and its colonialist aspirations in America and another one that (nevertheless) appreciates Ralegh’s text for what it can tell us about South America’s Indigenous peoples in the sixteenth century (Whitehead 1997).If Whitehead came to literary criticism from cultural anthropology—moving from the (social) sciences to the humanities—the contributors to this special issue have moved in the opposite direction. Literary scholars by training, they are engaging with the history of science—or knowledge (scientia) more generally—hereby exemplifying the recent epistemological turn in early American literary studies. In a sense, early American literature has always had at its core the question of knowledge—how it is constituted, stratified, produced, and disseminated. In part, this is due to the fact that the body of texts that constitutes the field of early American literature largely predates the post-Romantic definition of literature as an aesthetic concept, with its generic organization into poetry, fiction, and drama. But more importantly, early American literature—meaning writing in or about America using alphabetical letters—was at the center of the rift emerging between the humanities and the sciences—between the turn and the shift—with the breakup of Renaissance humanism in the early modern period. In the course of this breakup, the so-called New Sciences disavowed the book and proclaimed the “New World” as the paradigm of experimental empiricism, famously allegorized on the frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) as a European galleon passing through the Pillars of Hercules into the unknown of the Atlantic Ocean (see Albanese 1996; Bauer 2019: 3–5; Greeson in this special issue).Of course, Bacon’s announcement of a “novum organum” (new system of knowledge) overturning Aristotle’s old organum did not come ex nihilo but was based on more than a hundred years of philosophical debates about the epistemological status of the “New World” and the means by which it could be known—debates about knowledge that held unprecedented geo- and socio-political implications in the age of European expansionism, colonial conquest, interimperial rivalry, and confessional strife. Thus, while Christopher Columbus had still labored to reconcile his discovery of the Orinoco River during his third transatlantic voyage (1498–1500) with medieval geographical traditions when affirming that he had the only a of years (in a to be a of a by the announced that the South America was not of but rather a is the of these to our and the of who that the world of the mainly of not of is and to the . . . voyage of is than Renaissance of course, would have that this was a of a literary For the existence of a in the had been in since the it the concept had been by ever since the of who the implications that the existence of a would for the of and that on be for as the of one of the of of And to to the to the religious of his own by not only that this was by of but also that these practiced the philosophy of to and may be rather than which had with the so-called return of the to Renaissance in the century (see also Bauer 2019: The of these New the to not only that is than theory but 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