//SUMMARY #17 [Translit] : Literary positivism Conceptually, this issue spins around the concept of the fact, one privileged by all existing positivisms and all the associated philosophical, literary and artistic movements that call for a “return to things/objects.” Generally, this infers an objectivist epistemology of language and a positivist scientific method as, respectively, anti-rhetorical and anti-transcendentalist at base. The fundamental intrigue thus lies in the fact that, although these sorts of programs have appeared with some regularity throughout the history of ideas and philosophy, the project of “literary positivism” was not conceptualized (touted) for what would seem to be a very obvious reasons: literature always opposed the idea of direct transposition, emphasizing to a greater or lesser extent the “deformational qualities” of literary style (and other derivative linguistic games). However, when we turn our attention to the manifestos of the “Natural School,” Literature of the Fact, or Varlam Shalamov’s protocol-esque writing (as well as Western European parallels like the “New Objectivity” [Neue Sachlichkeit], the choseism of the “Nouveau roman,” et al.), it transpires that the tradition of literary positivism can be traced quite distinctly and is manifested in some of the most radical programs for the renewal of literary language. Remaining for the most part an unconscious movement in this same direction, these manifestations — beginning in the 1840s with the journal The Contemporary, including the work of Novyi LEF in the late 1920s, and ending with Shalamov’s manifestos in the 1950s — became visible when literature faced the task of radically distinguishing itself from predecessors (and, during times of “intensified class struggle” in literature, from contemporaries as well). As a result of claims by new social groups moving onto the center stage of culture (in the case of the Natural School: the raznochintsy of literature), the advance of a new social regime, including the redefinition of the social functions of literature (the worker- and peasant-correspondent movements in the case of Literature of the Fact), or an extraordinary existential position and historicalanthropological circumstances (with Shalamov’s camp prose), the tendency to positivism and
movement “toward the object” (as a sort of suicidal move on the part of belles-lettres) is unchanging.1 This literature is without a doubt aware of it being not quite (or even not-at-all) literature, acting more as a subversive theoretical (and not purely literary) movement, and in some cases even forming alliances with corresponding philosophical-epistemological projects. As the role of the observer and his medialcognitive resources became clearer, so much more palpable became the hunger for the immediate and unmediated, for “direct description”; in other words, for a method capable of effecting selfremoval and guaranteeing direct access to reality. In this way, literary positivism dreams of overcoming or harnessing language, it seeks to incorporate reality into the utterance itself, through one of two competing methods: the representative and the indexical. You can strive to describe reality using ultimately neutral language, pretending that it (language) no longer exists; or you can incorporate crude (unprocessed by literary language) fragments of reality into the frame of the work, setting them off through sign conventions but in no way trying to “present” them. Thus language can be used by literary positivism both in its “direct (referential) designation,” as well as in a more inventive key, one that allows reality to be deployed in the work — lured into it. Positivism, including the literary variety, is thus torn between two mutually exclusive paths to reality, one of which is shorter, but more dangerous and leads through deixis, through the gesture of pointing to reality while evading meaning (I. Sandomirskaya / P. Arsenev). This positivisim of deixis (which includes many phenomena, from collages to ready-mades) has a respectable philosophical prehistory (cf. Hegel on the sheet of paper which, it uttered, would find itself burnt to ashes). The same thing can be said about the Bible as indexical literature, the truth of its propositions being of a deictic rather than descriptive character: “You are The One” (A. Montlevich). Pronouns exist less as substitutions for nouns than as emblems of the deictic paradigm, of which names constitute particular cases.
trans-lit.info | #17 [ Транслит ] 2015 | 153