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Monday, October 16, 2017

Another (strenuous) take on what went wrong with literary criticism, John Searle and Geoffrey Hartman edition

Yeah, I know. But it’s important to get this right.

Once again I’m going to review that Geoffrey Hartman statement I find so characteristic of the mid-1970s rearward shift in academic literary criticism, the one about ‘rithmatic and distance. But this time I want to put it in the context a discussion of the ontological and epistemological senses of objective and subjective that John Searle makes in The Construction of Social Reality, Penguin Books, 1995.

Searle: Ontology and Epistemology

After some preliminary discussion, some of which I’ve appended to this post, Searle concludes (p. 7):
Here, then, are the bare bones of our ontology: We live in a world made up entirely of physical particles in fields of force. Some of these are organized into systems. Some of these systems are living systems and some of these living systems have evolved consciousness. With consciousness comes intentionality, the capacity of the organism to represent objects and states of affairs in the world to itself. Now the question is, how can we account for the existence of social facts within that ontology?
How indeed.

Searle then observes (pp. 7-8):
Much of our world view depends on our concept of objectivity and the contrast between the objective and the subjective. Famously, the distinction is a matter of degree, but it is less often remarked that both “objective” and “subjective” have several different senses. For our present discussion two senses are crucial, an epistemic sense of the objective-subjective distinction and an ontological sense. Epistemically speaking, “objective” and “subjective “ are primarily predicates of judgments. We often speak of judgments as being “subjective” when we mean that their truth or falsity cannot be settled “objectively,” because the truth or falsity is not a simple matter of fact but depends on certain attitudes, feelings, and points of view of the makers such subjective judgments with objective judgments, such as the judgment “Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam during the year 1632.” For such objective judgments, the facts in the world that make them true or false are independent of anybody’s attitudes or feelings about them. In this epistemic sense we can speak not only of objective judgments but of objective facts. Corresponding to objectively true judgments there are objective facts. It should be obvious from these examples that the contrast between epistemic objectivity and epistemic subjectivity is a matter of degree.

In addition to the epistemic sense of the objective-subjective distinction, there is also a related ontological sense. In the ontological sense, “objective” and “subjective” are predicates of entities and types of entities, and they ascribe modes of existence. In the ontological sense, pains are subjective entities, because their mode of existence depends on being felt by subjects. But mountains, for example, in contrast to pains, are ontologically objective because their mode of existence is independent of any perceiver or any mental state.
Word meanings, in this sense, are ontologically subjective, which I’ve previously argued [1]. And so are the meanings of texts, even texts about objective facts. Hence textual meaning can be subject to endless, and often fruitless, discussion, especially when intersubjective agreement on the meanings of crucial terms is lax.

Continuing directly on from the previous passage, (pp. 8-9):
We can see the distinction between the distinctions clearly if we reflect on the fact that we can make epistemically subjective statements about entities that are ontologically objective, and similarly, we can make epistemically objective statements about entities that are ontologically subjective. For example, the statement “Mt. Everest is more beautiful than Mt. Whitney” is about ontologically objective entities, but makes a subjective judgment about them. On the other hand, the statement “I now have a pain in my lower back” reports an epistemically objective fact in the sense that it is made true by the existence of an actual fact that is not dependent on any stance, attitudes, or opinions of observers. However, the phenomenon itself, the actual pain, has a subjective mode of existence.
I argue, though Searle might disagree, that the meanings of the words in that statement – “I now have a pain in my lower back” – are themselves ontologically subjective, despite the fact that the statement itself, in context, is ABOUT an epistemologically objective fact (where that fact is about something ontologically subjective, a pain).

It’s confusing, I know. Alas, it’s going to get worse.

How can words, with their ontologically subjective meanings, be used to make statements about epistemologically objective matters? We reach intersubjective agreement on those meanings. In some cases, many cases, that intersubjective meaning is quite robust. But there are cases where it is not, for example, meme. Richard Dawkins coined it in 1976 to mean a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the biological gene [2]. People have been arguing about the term’s meaning ever since.

Meme may be an extreme example, but it’s hardly unique. A lot of abstract terms are like that. But the meanings of terms designating concrete objects are ontologically subjective as well. Quine’s famous “Gavagai” example gets its force from that fact [3]. And then we have the young child who thinks that doggy designates any four-legged furry creature. But of course that child quickly learns that dogs and cats are designated by different terms, squirrels and rabbits too. And thus, in time and through interaction with others, idiosyncratic subjective meanings become assimilated to broadly shared intersubjective conventions of use.

Hartman’s ‘rithmatics

Now, for Geoffrey Hartman. We’re looking at the title essay of his 1975 collection, The Fate of Reading (University of Chicago Press). He’s playing around with the meanings of reading and writing as they have come to exist in Derrida-inflected literary criticism and complains that contemporary theorists have come to privilege critical writing over reading (in what sense?): “To what can we turn now to restore reading, or that conscious and scrupulous form of it we call literary criticism?” (p. 272). In that sentence, of course, “reading” means “the writing of literary criticism”. He goes on to observe: “modern ‘rithmatics’—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism—are not the solution. They widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing.” I believe that Hartman is correct, in a sense, but the standard trope of distance isn’t very helpful. In fact, it obscures things – which is no doubt why it’s so prevalent.

The problem with those modern ‘rithmatics is that they pay attention to the physical substance of language where literary critics want to sweep it under the carpet, the one with the elaborate figures in it that Henry James wrote about. Or, if such notice cannot easily be evaded, as it may be in the case of poetry, or some of those strange pages in Tristram Shandy, one keeps the physical matter of language firmly subordinated. The physical substance of language is, of course, ontologically objective, NOT subjective. A discourse that addresses itself to those ontologically objective phenomena, if only here and there, now and then, has a different ‘texture’, a different valence, a different mode of existence, from one that confines itself to matters that are ontologically subjective.

The meaning of literary texts is of course ontologically subjective. Hartman is fine with that – at least I assume so, as Searle’s discussion wasn’t available to him back in 1975. What bothers him about these new ‘rithmatics isn’t distance at all. It’s the intrusion of the ontologically objective facts of textuality, the intrusion of talk about signifiers in a discourse that wishes to confine itself to the elusive and ontologically subjective signifieds.

And THAT’s what’s going on in the convention of asserting continuity between reading a literary text, in the ordinary sense of reading, and reading a literary text, in the professional sense of reading, is simple. As long as the critical text stays away from talk of the physical text it can maintain the illusion that critical explication is just reading. The discipline insists on the continuity between reading and reading as a way of hiding, dispatching with, evading, awareness of textual physicality.

For literary criticism the so-called linguistic turn is mostly about the arbitrariness of the signifier. Since the relationship between signifier and signified IS arbitrary, we can say that the meaning of the signifier is indeterminate – strictly speaking, that’s not true, but what’s a little evasion among friends? If the meaning of signifiers is indeterminate, then it follows that the meaning of texts is indeterminate as well, and it’s off to the critical races.

And that’s how come we’re in the mess we’re currently in.

But the fact that meaning is ontologically subjective is not necessarily equivalent to being indeterminate. Insisting on indeterminacy conveniently evades the objective existence of physical texts with their systematic patterns of relationships between ontologically objective signifiers and ontologically subjective signifieds. I suggest that a criticism that organizes itself around descriptions of formal properties realized in (ontologically objective) signifiers will provide us with the beginnings of a criticism that can begin constructing (ontologically objective) models of how the (ontologically subjective) phenomena of meaning unfold and accrete in the process of reading (in the ordinary sense).

And now, perhaps, you can see why computational criticism, so-called distant reading, is so important. While it does not, for the most part, deal in the analysis of individual texts, when it deals with a corpus, it does so only through the signifiers. For the computer utterly lacks access to signifieds, to meaning. That such an analytic activity is able to come up with anything at all is due to the existence of systematic and pervasive patterns of relationships between signifiers and signifieds. It is due to the internal structure of the language system. And that’s what I’m after, a literary criticism that pays close attention to the internal structure of the language system rather than gesticulating wildly at it.

Appendix: More from Searle

The following passages precede the ones I’ve quoted above, and provide some useful context (p. 1):
This book is about a problem that has puzzled me for a long time: there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement. In a sense there are things that exist only because we believe them to exist. I am thinking of things like money, property, governments, and marriages. Yet many facts regarding this things are ‘objective’ in the sense that they are not a matter of your or my preferences, evaluations, or moral attitudes.
p. 4:
...the complex structure of social reality is, so to speak, weightless and invisible. The child is brought up in a culture where he or she simply takes social reality for granted. We learn to perceive and use cars, bathtubs, houses, money, restaurants, and schools without being aware that they have a special ontology. They seem natural to us as stones and water and trees. Indeed, if anything, in most cases it is harder to see objects as just natural phenomena, stripped of their functional roles, than it is to see our surroundings in terms of their socially defined function.
p. 5:
The invisibility of the structure of social reality also creates a problem for the analyst. We cannot just describe how it seems to us from an internal “phenomenological” point of view, because money, property, marriages, lawyers, and bathtubs do not seem to have a complex structure. They just are what they are, or so it seems. Nor can we describe them from the external behaviorist point of view, because the description of the overt behavior of people dealing with money, property, etc., misses the underlying structures that make the behavior possible. Nor, in turn, can we describe those structures as sets of unconscious computational rules, as is done by contemporary cognitive science and linguistics , because it is incoherent to postulate an unconscious following of rules that is inaccessible in principle to consciousness. And besides, computation is one of those observer-relative, functional phenomena we are seeking to explain.
p. 6:
The truth is, for us, most of our metaphysics is derived from physics (including the other natural sciences). Many features of the contemporary natural science conception of reality are still in dispute and still problematic. For example, one might think that the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe is by no means well substantiated. But two features of our conception of reality are not up for grabs. They are not, so to speak, optional for us as citizens of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is a condition of your being an educated person in our era that you are apprised of these two theories: the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology.
References

[1] William Benzon, “2 Comments on Moretti’s LitLab 15: Patterns and Interpretation [#DH]”, New Savanna, blog post, accessed October 16, 2017: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/09/2-comments-on-morettis-litlab-15.html

[2] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 212 ff.

[3] Willard van Orman Quine, Word and Object, 1960, pp. 28 ff.

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