Over at Circling Squares Philip has a couple great posts on naturalism (here, here, and above all here). I think there’s a lot of anxiety in the humanities arising from both methodological worries and university politics. With regard to the first source of worry, there seems to be concern that naturalism leads to the erasure of meaning, replacing the analysis of cultural texts with neurology, biology,and so on. With regard to the latter, liberal arts departments have increasingly witnessed economic assaults on their departments, while watching the hard sciences grow.
I’m certainly not for the erasure of meaning or the thesis that fields such as neurology and biology provide us with the real account of cultural artifacts. My thesis is more modest: if naturalism is true, then signification as signification is a natural phenomenon. If that’s true, then it can’t be a phenomenon outside the constraints of physics, the rate at which information can travel (the current barrier being the speed of light or 186,232 mps), neurology, the processing power of computers, etc. so while I recognize that meaning, as a natural phenomenon, has it’s own organization that needs to be attended to if we’re to understand Homer, I think we also need to be open to the role played by various physical structures. For example, does the range, durability, and speed at which information can be exchanged in a particular society influence the sort of structure it can have and the form signification takes? Such questions require us to attend to the physics of information under a particular medium. There’s much more to say here, but dinner beckons.
Larval Subjects . 
February 24, 2013 at 2:36 am
Allow me to pronounce,
the speed of information propagation is essential for the “-ism” !
OF course the leaders expect that information reaches
them in-time, and on-demand. The total mobilization
of ALL forces sanctifies the means. That’s just natural.
Erhm, well, except if it’s too costly. I might look for a homoestatic
balancing, or to program some evolutionary algorithm, or what has you.
February 24, 2013 at 2:49 am
Precisely. Global capitalism isn’t possible without current communications technologies because markets as we know them can only affect one another if information can circle the globe at a certain speed. This entails that communications technologies, at the level of their physics, are a site of the social and political. Moreover, these technologies require energy to run and produce waste.
February 24, 2013 at 3:36 am
yet the speed problem is already solved – global synchronicity has been achieved. De-acceleration has also been called for already.
I fear neuroscience might turn to other things. It’s scary. The blind process of science will shurely come up with quantifications of desire in nano-volt.
February 24, 2013 at 4:39 am
Yep.
February 24, 2013 at 11:43 pm
the crucial nexus: “signification as signification is a natural phenomenon.” And much like the evolution of teeth or opposable thumbs what really matters is what we actually do with it – or what we are afforded via its deployment.
February 25, 2013 at 3:43 am
Levi you wrote Yep. That’s a bit too horrific, since it slightly implies that all hope is lost .. my answer to Yep therefore is No, tongue in cheek.
The way Naturalism provokes ‘anxiety in humanities’ is their thought of them maybe going extinct according to some evolutionary logic, posing “need” for decisions whether to align with naturalism or not, etc. Second, my above phrase of a “blind process of science” is itself naturalism at its best. I am already IN the realm of naturalism, then.
I think that’s due to the fact that the blog post presents N. as a master signifier. I believe we can ‘superposition’ on this the discourse of the capitalist.
By which I mean – since the blog post says S1=naturalism the commentators here (me included) take the role of some “capitalist” pseudo-hysterics, asking “tell me, tell me Naturalism is about to come”, producing some S2 proving naturalism naturally is unavoidable, or more moderate, “what really matters is what we actually do with it”.
In the 1950s they called it “agenda setting”.
Naturally the discourse of capitalist can switch in an instant to another commodified S1, say culturalism, which was extinct the moment before, which would be then prone to its “return”. We just don’t know when that will be. [ Please, Levi, don’t answer “Yep.” again. :-) ]
In the mean time, maybe something like Ernst Cassirer’s 1946 “The Myth of the State” could be helpful, centering on the question of Myth.
February 25, 2013 at 4:29 am
Matze,
My view is that we always need good maps to change things.