Contradictions of Form, Forms of Contradiction: Affordance as an Epistemological Tool

Abstract

Based on recent studies on the epistemological properties of literary form, this article argues that a theory of affordance might help to create what will be described as a ‘confluence’ between the supposedly contradictory epistemological regimes of objective and teleological scientific knowledge and a form of literary knowledge which is characterised as procedural, contingent and object-less. The article will first present a very brief genealogy of these two rivalling conceptions of knowledge and truth, before illustrating how this apparent opposition is utilised, e.g. in Wilson’s reductive notion of ‘consilience’, in order to protect the priority of the sciences and to pre-empt the specific formal scepticism and contradictoriness inherent in literary—and in particular—poetic discourse. In a second step, it will offer Levine’s notion of the affordance of (literary and epistemological) forms as a potential path towards de-emphasising the supposed contradiction, and hierarchical relation, between these two approaches. With recourse to Derrida’s conception of ‘hauntology’ as well as Meillassoux’s ideas of a ‘hyper-chaos’, this article eventually argues for a revaluation of contingency and uncertainty as unique properties of literary discourse.