Counter on Paul (2024)

Intelligence has always been in question, but perhaps never more so than it is today. This makes all the more pressing our tendency to look back at the concept’s evolving and shifting definitions, as well as the political and moral valuations attached to it, especially in a political sense. In Disarming Intelligence, Zakir Paul sifts through the philosophical, literary, and scientific notions of intelligence from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, mainly in the French context. Paul expertly draws out the problematic nature of attempting to pin down intelligence, especially in a quantifying manner. Ultimately, as he states in the introduction, intelligence “is less a concept in any fulsome philosophical sense than an enduring contest over the ways in which the fluctuating term is used” (26). If, as Paul Valéry identified, changing social and historical forces during the twentieth century resulted in a “crisis of intelligence” (90), we are still within that crisis, particularly as technology continues to evolve. Following an introduction and five chapters focusing on philosophy, literature, and criticism, a short afterword brings the discussion to bear more generally on the contemporary problem of so-called artificial intelligence.

The major strength of Paul’s book is how he draws these discourses together to illuminate the literary relevance of intelligence in particular—including a carefully argued skepticism “of French modernism as an explanatory category” (19), which Paul finds imprecise and inadequate for dealing with particular writers and thinkers as they problematize intelligence through their work—while keeping its wider relevance in mind. After giving a comprehensive overview of the scientific and cultural discourse around intelligence from Third Republic France to World War II, the introduction brings out the book’s key figures: Proust and Valéry, as named in the subtitle, but also the Nouvelle Revue Française circle, Henri Bergson, Hyppolite Taine, and Walter Benjamin. Each of these authors provides different coordinates for intelligence within a larger conceptual framework, and examining their singular contexts helps bring out some of the stratified assumptions attached to the term, the removal of which ultimately allows Paul to clarify what “intelligence” might mean. 

The first chapter is situated between psychology and philosophy, comparing Taine’s and Bergson’s respective approaches to theorizing intelligence insofar as it might be considered a measurable faculty. For Taine, picking up where the 1905 Binet-Simon test left off, intelligence is pattern-based and law-bound, thus serving as a key for understanding the human mind. Bergson, on the other hand, challenges and displaces this notion of intelligence by trying to think its limits and advocating for thinking with its limits. Paul helpfully shows that Bergson, contrary to many interpretations of his thought, does not subordinate intelligence to intuition, but rather sees the two as entangled: “Bergson’s argument criticizes dominant modes of thinking about intelligence more than it attacks intelligence itself” (48), he writes, making his work relevant to literary activations of intelligence.

Chapters two and three, on Proust and Valéry respectively, are highlights here. Picking up from Bergson’s theory, intelligence in Proust is shown to be belated, rather than abandoned—both conceptually in his writing and experientially for his novel’s characters—“com[ing] into play as the work of analytic mind in the aftermath of the encounter with occulted signs of experience” (52). Paul reads Proust carefully, preserving the distance between author and narrator to pull apart the “competing senses” Proust associates with intelligence (79), ultimately stating that it “must be disarmed, losing its primacy, to become disarming, enabling the possibilities of art” (85–6). Following this, the analysis of Valéry’s “fragmentary, paratactic enunciation of intelligence” (90) might be even more impressive, leading as it does to the “crisis in intelligence” (122) Valéry identifies—a shift from one regime to another—and the several senses in which this crisis should be understood. The experiments he conducted in his writings attest to a kind of mobile conception of intelligence, not unlike Proust’s intelligence but in a vastly different form and with divergent literary results. As Paul writes, “Valéry’s prose […] delimits a testing ground to gauge the potential consequences of allowing various forms of intelligence to decay” (128). Taken together, these chapters show to great effect how literary investigations of this concept, while yielding outcomes that could not be more at odds, play a crucial role in breaking down the illusion that intelligence is definitively quantifiable. 

Chapter four examines the reconfiguration of intelligence by the key NRF figures, namely Charles Maurras and Jacques Rivière. During and following the first World War, Rivière especially considered intelligence to be a discerning faculty, something to notice difference and differences, thus lending credence to the tautology of “literature as literature, art as art” stance Rivière put forward. As Paul writes, “Rivière equated intelligence with a nearly impossible foresight of the real consequences of psychic activity, which he vowed to analyze and translate into prose. His greatest fear during and after the war remained the possibility of allowing the conflict to saturate language” (142). By separating the journal’s project from contemporary political relations, this group did something more than keep alive the idea of pure literature, or literature as its own end: it allowed for a new view of intelligence in a critical time. 

The fifth chapter is devoted to the place of intelligence in German philosophy and criticism, most notably Benjamin’s work on French literature. His insight into the trends underlying French literature is explicitly political, as Paul shows with close attention to “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer,” the essay in which Benjamin lays out his theory of “political style.” As Paul puts it, “Benjamin’s essay does not argue that a writer’s poetics are determined by socio-economic factors. Writerly technique, and thus political tendency, is co-determined by the degree to which writers register their social situation and alter their style as a result” (173). While this chapter may be surprising in its partial deviation from the otherwise very French cast of characters in Disarming Intelligence, the translational nature of Benjamin’s project is fitting, especially considering that his contribution is to think of intelligence as a mediating force between the social and the personal.

The shifting nature of intelligence that Paul presents here—almost in relief or under erasure—prepares the way for the book’s epilogue, which turns to AI by way of Catherine Malabou, among other thinkers. “In the second half of the twentieth century, intelligence ceases to be intellectual,” Paul writes (186). Of interest here is Paul’s discussion of the reflexivity of language as opposed to number and code. Though he acknowledges that “the definitions and uses of intelligence are always value-laden and thus the object of real disagreement” (196), Paul leaves us with a picture of intelligence as an unstable (because always in motion) and eminently human concept.