Rather than denying the insights of post-structuralist theory, literary interpretation and theory with an evolutionary cognitive perspective actually nestles nicely within a central niche of deconstructionist thinking, that is,the critique of representation. What we learn from recent cognitive science is that the meanings of texts are indeed unstable and dependent upon contingent contexts. While theories of neuronal activity can be understood as analogous to the critique of representation, the cognitive evolutionary argument supports Stanley Cavell's counterproposal, that is, that while our representational powers are not ideal they are sufficient. It is possible then to argue further that the very flexibility that destabilizes meaning is not only good enough, it is responsible for our success, such as it has been, in building and revising human cultures.
Individuals learn, or try to learn, about other people from observing them and analogizing what they see to their own bodily or kinesic knowledge. We watch (for example) the position of limbs and the movement of eyes. We react to evidence of different states of muscle tension. Artists make use of their own kinesic knowledge and count on our understanding of it. But body language does not always reinforce knowledge available in other modalities, say, in language. As in other aspects of communication, conflicts are common between what can be known by observation and what may be known by other modalities. These conflicts are not errors but are a systematic aspect of the way we construct knowledge. The gaps between modalities are the necessary ground for human flexibility and creativity. A brief look at the work of Edouard Manet, Diane Arbus, and Barbara Kruger illustrates how artists take advantage of the conflict between information derived from bodily knowledge and that derived from language or other modalities of knowing.
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