The latest "sophisticated Marxism...has yet to become a truly literary criticism, since the question of the text's existence and status as a literary object has yet to be squarely faced. Until it is, literature will continue to be assimilated or reduced to history or politics...To do literary criticism will require recourse to the more linguistically self-conscious and philosophical schools of contemporary criticism, structuralism (or semiology) and its successor, deconstruction. Howard Felperin, in Meanjin June 1982)
In this paper I will take up the challenge to develop a theory of the literary text which avoids reduction or assimilation to history or politics though without recourse to deconstruction. The tentative answer lies with Karl Popper's theory of objective knowledge, a reformulation of a notion that can be traced back to Plato's theory of Ideal Forms. More recently Wellek and Warren proposed a similar concept in Theory of Literature (1949) and it appears that this area of literary theory has not advanced very far since then. This is an awkward situation because the demand for progress in academic circles is so compelling that if genuine advances cannot be achieved there is a great temptation to simulate them. In areas that are worm-eaten with essentialism (conceptual analysis), with standards of clarity in writing gone by the board, such simulations are easy to achieve, as witnessed by the efflorescence of the deconstructionists.
Popper's thoughts on objective knowledge are best approached by way of his theory of language. This is a biological theory, rooted in the four-stage problem-solving schema that he has generalised to describe the full range of problem-solving activities from the evolution of life on earth to the intellectual activities of Einstein. The starting point is a problem confronting the organism; the second step is the production of tentative solutions, trial responses to the problem situation. The third stage is the process of error-elimination, weeding out those among the competing solutions that do not work. The fourth stage is the emergence of new problems, created by the foregoing activities. As applied to biological evolution, this model signals some important differences from the traditional picture of "nature red in tooth and claw" where the driving force was supposed to be the pressure of competition in the battle for survival. Here the progressive impetus comes not from the pressure of the environment or competitors but from the capacity of the organism to generate variations in form or behaviour (or theoretical constructs) to explore and exploit its situation.
Levels of Language
Popper followed Karl Buhler in his theory of language. Buhler and his wife Charlotte were pioneers in child psychology in the 1920s. He also laid the fondations for the "theory of signs" in subsequent literary studies. He influenced Piaget, and taught Wittgenstein and Popper. This is a matter of more than passing interest because one of the common themes in Popper and Wittgenstein is the rejection of reductive, mechanical or causal explanations of mental activities. Buhler distinguished three functions of language, each with different biological functions.
1. The expressive function.
2. The signaling function.
3. The descriptive function.
To these Popper added
4. The argumentative function.
There is not supposed to be any correlation between the four stages of the problem-solving schema and the four levels of language, it is simply coincidental that Popper located four levels or phases in each.
Buhler suggested that animal and human languages have much in common at the lower levels of expression and signaling but the descriptive level is distinctively human. The lowest level is symptomatic or expressive of the state of the organism and this level alone is not very important as a means of communication. Machinery functions at this level (a ticking clock or a squeaky wheel).
The signaling or trigger function appears in communities of animals where signals are important in the life of the group. Special signals can indicate the presence of food or the appearance of a predator; others are involved in hunting, mating and raising the young. Signaling occurs when the receiver is primed to respond in a certain way or can be trained to do so. Machinery can be programmed to behave in this way and the signaling function does not require any assumption about intentions on the part of the sender, or any suggestion that the receiver reflectively assigns a meaning to the communication. Of course signals can be interpreted in different ways and the mating call of one species could signal 'dinner time' to a predator.
Reductive or 'nothing but' theories imply that the higher functions are merely special cases of the lower functions. Such reductions have a degree of plausibility because the lower functions are always present with the higher order functions but not vice versa. We can express ourselves or signal without at the same time describing or arguing. The expressive function is the lowest common denominator of all forms of language and so reductionists can always locate an expressive component in any communication.
Moving up the scale, Popper argues that the descriptive function only appears with the human use of language (though he notes that the dance of bees to indicate the source of food is a challenging test case) .
The descriptive function is characteristic of the human species. And it is something new, and something truly revolutionary: human language can convey information about a state of affairs, about a situation that may or may not be present or biologically relevant. It may not even exist. [Popper in a chapter contributed to Evolutionary Theory: Paths Into the Future, Ed J Pollard, John Willey, 1984].
In contrast with the rigid sets of signals which animals (including humans) inherit or learn, descriptive language is almost infinitely flexible and this enables the playful and creative invention of myths and stories (and also the deliberate use of lies). Popper speculated that the evolutionary pathway from the signal to the descriptive level lay with the playfulness of young animals, with the babbling of mothers with babies and the antics of gangs of youngsters.
The advent of descriptive language raises the issues of truth and falsity, which leads to the possibility of argument and the use of reasons for or against the truth or adequacy of a description. This in turn can result in systematic critical thinking and the deliberately cultivated attitude of willingness to reconsider ideas and opinions.
But in order to make it possible to criticise a theory, the organism must be able to regard the theory as an object. The only way known to do this is to formulate the theory in a descriptive language and, preferably, in a written language.
The Contents of Thought
The implication of Popper's argument is that we need to talk about an idea or write it down before we can find out what the idea really means. We need to explore its implications and its relationships to other things that we know. Speech and writing enable our thoughts to have a feedback effect on us, through the interaction between mind and language. And of course the medium of language enables us to communicate with other minds as well.
This raises the question: what is being communicated from one mind to another? It seems the something travels in addition to the sound waves in the air or the rays of light which carry the visual impression of the marks on the paper. The state of mind of the speaker or writer does not travel, though some approximation of something that was in the mind of the sender sometimes makes its way into the mind of the receiver. The standard answer is that the meaning of the communication travels. But what is the status of the meaning, apart from brain states, soundwaves and the like?
Popper has offered an answer to this question with his 'three world' theory, which at first glance resembles the generally discredited Platonic notion of transcendental objective knowledge. Popper's work in this area can be depicted as a continuation of a modern revival of objective knowledge, a revival that started last century with a line of work running through Bolzano, Frege, Brentano and his pupils Meinong and Husserl to Russell and Moore (in the analytical strand) and to Heidegger in a different strand. Passmore described this stream of thought in A Hundred Years of Philosophy as 'The movement towards objectivity' and this movement had the capacity to unify empiricism and rationalism, the two main and apparently incompatible streams of western thought. This paper describes that stream of thought as a "third line" of Austrian thought (in addition to the Austrian economists and Popper's critical rationalism).
Philosophers and scientists in the empiricist tradition seek the truth as revealed by the evidence of the senses; people in the Continental rationalist tradition locate the criterion of truth in the intuition of clear and distinct ideas. In each case the truth forms in the minds of individual people, so each is in essence a subjective theory of knowledge. (This accounts for the strange fixation on perception that afflicted British philosophy for some years, an obsession that was pursued without regard to the findings of scientists working on the same topic). However, under the influence of the movement towards objectivity some people in each of the rival programs began to pay attention to the objects of thought
It may be interesting to speculate briefly how this might have changed the trajectory of philosophy in our time. We might have been spared the interminable debate on the justification of beliefs, also much discourse on the explication of concepts. However this did not happen and the emancipation of philosophy and the social sciences from essentialism and justificationism remains to be achieved. This paper hints at the fertility of the idea of objective knowledge as applied toWittgenstein's notion of "forms of life", moral philosophy, the theory of literature, and sociological explanations.
The Unspeakable Meinong
Bertrand Russell in The Problems of Philosophy (1912) referred to the contents of thought as 'universals' to avoid the mentalistic connotations of the term 'ideas'. As he put it, following Meinong, these things have subsistence but not material being. At this point the empiricists and the rationalists (intellectualists) might have converged to focus on these objective contents. These newfangled notions deeply offended the sensibilities of William James who wrote to a friend 'Surely truth can't inhabit a third realm between realities and statements or beliefs. I wish you would forget about this mongrel cur of a supposal, begotten upon you by the unspeakable Meinong and his English pals'.
He need not have worried. The objective contents of thought disappeared from empiricist theories under the influence of Russell's quest for certainty based on the reduction of beliefs to empirical evidence (possibly goaded by Wittgenstein in his first phase). So empiricism turned into modern positivism and the problem of induction remained at the heart of the philosophy of science. In this way the demand for the justification of beliefs resulted in the loss of the theory of objective knowledge for half a century. (Returning to this essay in the year 2000 it seems that the period of arrested development is likely to be a century or more).
Popper does not deny that there is such a thing as personal or subjective knowledge and he argues that this should be studied from a biological or evolutionary point of view. He has proposed a 'three world' theory to take account of subjective knowledge and objective knowledge as well. In his essay on human freedom titled 'Indeterminism is not enough', Encounter April 1973 he suggested
By 'world 1' I mean what is usually called the world of physics, of rocks and trees and physical fields of forces. By 'world 2' I mean the psychological world, the world of feelings of fear and of hope, of dispositions to act, and of all kinds of subjective experiences.
By 'world 3' I mean the world of the products of the human mind. Although I include works of art in world 3 and also ethical values and social institutions (and this, one might say, societies), I shall confine myself largely to the world of scientific libraries, to books, to scientific problems, and to theories, including mistaken theories.
To make this a little more concrete, consider a book, its contents and its readership. The book as a physical object belongs in world 1. It contains information, which belongs in world 3. Copies of the same book are separate world 1 objects with the same world 3 contents. When different people read them they give rise to distinct and private sets of world 2 events, based on world 1 brain processes. If people attempt to communicate their understanding of the contents of the book in spoken or written form then the contents of their speech or writing can be located in world 3. The communication involves world 2 in the form of thoughts and intentions, and world 1 in the form of more brain processes, soundwaves and marks on paper. The contents of the communication may be very different from the original contents of the book, due to imperfect understanding and the vagaries of interpretation, even so, there will be objective relationships of various forms between the original contents and the translations or interpretations or criticisms that are aroused by reading the work. Popper gave a talk on The Three Worlds in the Tanner Series of lectures.
The Contribution of Wellek and Warren
Now consider Wellek and Warren's theory of the nature of the literary text. In The Theory of Literature they worked through five possibilities, referring to 'the poem' as shorthand for any sort of literature, or perhaps any cultural artifact.
The poem is a physical artifact consisting of marks on paper, or the grooves on a Babylonian tablet.
The poem is the sequence of sounds uttered by a speaker, reading aloud.
The poem is the experience of the reader.
The poem is an expression of the experience of the author.
The poem is a stratified complex of values, which cannot be reduced to any of the previous four theories.
They rejected (1) because a poem can be preserved in a purely oral tradition. Also the precise physical form of the work is not crucial. Hamlet is the same regardless of the size of the pages or the typeface or errors in typesetting or translation of particular editions.
They dismissed (2) because we do not read for the sounds alone, we read for plot and character and much more besides. As for (3) they argued that readers are influenced by all manner of personal circumstances ranging from their own theories of poetry and value to momentary conditions such as fatigue, worry or distraction.
The fourth type of theory takes two broad forms; in one the poem represents the intentions of the writer, in the other it reflects in some sense the totality of experience of the author, conscious and unconscious. The first of these views has little credibility because the so-called Intentional Fallacy has taken a severe beating in modern times. The second splits in half again, yielding deep psychological accounts of the work on one hand, and on the other, theories that account for the work as the outcome of large-scale historical and social influences bearing on the writer.
Wellek and Warren reject all the foregoing (while allowing some scope for investigations along those lines). They favour (5), a combination of phenomenology and modern linguistics.
The work of art, then, appears as an object of knowledge sui generis which has a special ontological status. It is neither real (like a statue) nor mental (like the experience of light or pain) nor ideal (like a triangle). It is a system of norms of ideal concepts, which are intersubjective. They must be assumed to exist in collective ideology, changing with it, accessible only through individual mental experiences based on the sound-structure of its sentences.
This perspective clearly has many points of contact with Popper's three world theory. The poem is more than a physical (world 1) object because is partly a subjective (world 2) event, and there is even more than that because it has some form of intersubjective existence. Wellek and Warren address this aspect in terms of collective ideology, while Popper speaks of the partial autonomy of the contents. Each formulation calls for a theory about emergent possibilities, sui generis qualities that cannot be reduced, without loss, to the more basic physical and subjective aspects of the poem, in the same way that the higher functions of language cannot be fully reduced to the lower functions.
Durkheim and Forms of Life
Wellek and Warren's mention of the emergent, sui generis nature of a literary work should immediately remind us of Durkheim's sui generis theory to account for the nature of that cultural artifact par excellence - society itself. Durkheim's theory of collective representations is a good start on a theory of objective knowledge, though it has not been developed despite Durkheim's status as a founding father of sociology. It appears that nobody could work out what to do with his conscience collective, sometimes translated as the 'collective conscience' to illustrate its role in maintaining moral cohesion in society, and sometimes as the 'collective consciousness', raising the spectre of a group mind which was not Durkheim's intention.
Durkheim confronted the deficiencies of classical empiricism and rationalism and advanced his theory of collective representations, which he described as:
Priceless instruments of thought which the human groups have laboriously forged through the centuries and where they have accumulated the best of their intellectual capitalThere is a close relationship between the three ideas of tool, category and institutionThe rationalism which is imminent in the sociological theory of knowledge is thus midway between the classical empiricism and a priorism. For the first, the categories are artificial constructions; for the second, on the contrary, they are given by nature; for us, they are in a sense a work of art, but an art which imitates nature with a perfection capable of increasing unlimitedly (Section 2 in the Introduction to The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life).
Perhaps the fate of Durhkeim's collective representations shows the problem faced by theories of emergent properties in the face of pressures towards justification by reference to some foundation of belief (see the paper on Bartley's challenge to justificationism), a pressure that tends to promote reductionism - that is the explanation of complex things in terms of more simple components. Reductionism is of course under attack from many strident opponents but it is one thing to criticise, it is another to come up with a workable alternative. It turns out that the critics tend to be stuck in a similar mindset, for example critics of crude, mechanistic reductions tend to be operating with subjective theories of knowledge which lead to unhelpful attempts to explain the contents of literary texts in terms of social, political or historical determinants. Subjective belief theories of knowledge are so deeply ingrained that Popper's theory of objective knowledge is often dismissed out of hand as an incoherent or self-contradictory concept. Young eyes may see more sharply - a nine-year-old schoolchild summed up the nature of objective knowledge when asked whether thoughts could exist without actually being thought. She replied "Yes, because there might be a problem that has an answer, and the answer is a thought that nobody has thought of yet".
Wellek and Warren's theory, along with that of Durkheim, has apparently been buried beneath the weight of subsequent novelties, and like Popper's theory of objective knowledge, appears to be completely out of step with reductive spirit of the times. Another theory which possibly avoids that charge comes from Wittgenstein who, like Popper and Piaget, was taught by Buhler and refused to take on board the mechanistic cause-and-effect model of physics to account for human language and behaviour. Wittgenstein's response is his doctrine of forms of life and language games. This may be compared with Popper's answer - the three world theory, critical rationalism and conjectural objective knowledge. These divergent lines of thought are generally considered to be incommensurable and none of the myriad of books and articles generated by the Wittgenstein industry even mentions Popper. But once their common problem is recognised then they can be compared in terms of the fertility of their different solutions.
Of course objectivity is a notoriously difficult product to sell these days because traditional theories of objectivity depend either on the notion that objectivity equals truth (certain truth) or on a state of mind that is free of bias and presuppositions. But the much-publicised loss of certainty has put paid to any such claims for truth, and theories of objectivity that depend on particular states of mind are not theories about objective contents at all.
Non-Dogmatic Rationality and Criticism
The program of objectivity and rationality that follows from the work of Popper and Bartley does not depend on any guarantees about the certainty of knowledge, it merely calls for a community of interested people who are prepared to use the higher functions of language to solve problems. This includes the problem of grasping the meaning and value of literary texts (and other works of art). Martin Harrison exemplifies this imaginative and critical task in his review of reviewers (in the May 1985 edition of the Age Monthly Review, the journal where this piece was first printed). Applying the four-stage scheme to Harrison's review, we could say that the novelist EJ has presented us with a problem 'What is this book all about?' Harrison examined the responses of a number of reviewers (tentative solutions to the problem); for example 'It is a Gothic novel'. He subjected some of the trial solutions to criticism (attempted error elimination). This presents us with a fresh array of problems: Is he correct in his critical comments? What evidence do we need to evaluate his comments? Should the author be invited to have said? What kind of general assumptions is he making, and do they help us to appreciate other books? Is his approach helpful to people at work actually writing books?
Whether or not he is correct on points of detail, large or small, this is clearly the type of criticism that is required to emancipate writers and readers from the more arid forms of academic criticism and from the ad hoc responses of hasty reviewers. Moreover, it is a type of criticism that has something to gain from the theory of objective contents of texts because this theory frees literature from the deathgrip of the reductionists and ideologues without capitulating to the conceptual anarchy of the deconstructionists.
Such a theory is equally important for writers as it is for critics because the often remarked failure of poets to develop after the age of 25 is quite likely a problem of theory; writers need a theory of writing that enables them to move along and develop after the first bloom of creative inspiration has faded.
Printed in the Age Monthly Review August 1985
