The
world on paper - review
The
World on Paper. The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing
and Reading, David R. Olson (Cambridge University Press, 1994),
xix+318 pp., $18.95 (£25.95) Hb. First paperback edition (1996),
£12.95.
David R. Olson's wide-ranging divagation on the
consequences of literacy starts from the tradition of Havelock,
Goody and Watt and finishes in eight general principles (cited
here from pp. 258 -279: 1) 'writing was responsible for bringing
aspects of spoken language into consciousness', 2) 'no writing
system, including the alphabet, brings all aspects of what is
said into awareness', 3) 'what is represented [nevertheless] tends
to be seen as a complete model of what there is', 4) 'once a script-as-model
has been assimilated it is extremely difficult to unthink that
model', 5) 'the expressive and reflective powers of speech and
writing are complementary rather than similar', 6) 'while scripts
well represent lexical and syntactic properties of speech they
do not adequately represent the author's audience-directed intentions
[illocutionary force]', 7) 'once texts are read in a new way,
nature is "read" in an analogous new way', and 8) 'once
the illocutionary force of a text is recognized as the expression
of a personal, private intentionality, the concepts for representing
how a text to be taken provide just the concepts necessary for
the representation of mind'. Stated as such, at the end of the
book, the arguments do more or less cohere, with the key links
being supplied by principles 5 and 6: Olson's underlying purpose
is to point out the limits of epistemologies based on writing,
and hence the limits of everything based on those epistemologies.
Yet the path taken to state this case is by no means as clear
as the conclusions might appear; readers should not wait on tenterhooks
for the culminating 'representation of mind'. Olson tends to lead
his reader into dead-ends, not to say pitfalls; his evidence at
certain key points is second-hand and debatable; and he does little
to discount alternative theories of the phenomena he purports
to describe.
The primary problem is no doubt considerable ambivalence
about what Olson's actual object of study is. At some points it
is the history of scripts; at others a focus on literacy as competence;
and at its most innovative level this becomes the history of reading,
later glossed as the ability 'to think about texts in particular
ways' (64), at which point the main finding is tautologically
embedded in the definition of the object. Elsewhere, Olson musters
evidence in which writing is never separated from the general
social practice of 'schooling' (43), which in turn allows him
to rope in research on childhood cognitive processes, all of which
is problematically universalized. In short, the object itself
is construed differently at different stages in the argument,
such that writing - or whatever it is to be called - can indeed
be seen as a cause of all things. Most surprisingly, though, this
protean object actually lacks a few materialist dimensions: although
Olson sets great store on the origins of "literal understanding"
in the 13th century, he entirely overlooks the fact that paper
became common in Europe precisely at that time, with major consequences
for the development of literate bureaucracies (see Burns 1981).
It seems that this 'world on paper' embraces just about everything
except paper!
A second flaw in Olson's argument is his unfalsifiable
idealizing of spoken discourse: statements such as 'Speakers can
generally make their meanings embarrassingly clear' (189) not
only assume some magical non-spoken access to those meanings but
also place the speaker's intention in spoken utterance (121) and
thus underlie the primacy of pragmatics as 'how the speaker or
writer intends the utterance to be taken' (118). This hopelessly
overstated primacy of illocutionary force enables Olson to idealize
everything that writing cannot represent, at the same time as
he falls into the very epistemology of representation that he
initially set out to challenge. At many points he conveniently
forgets that some thoughts may be thought only to be written;
some languages exist only to be written; grammatical metaphor
and literary devices have their own pragmatic force; and writing
may do far more than fail to represent non-writing.
Olson's penchant for slick generalizations was justly
criticized when much of this was published in article form (cf.
Halverston 1991). Although some work has been done to shave off
a few of the wilder claims, there are still fascinatingly giddy
jumps from childhood psychology to medieval poetics, from ethnographic
quips to the history of English law, from a series of quick truths
about a 'Renaissance' that lasted from the 12th to 17th centuries,
to a very weak section on 'fiction' somehow understood as 17th-century
realism (don't ask me!). Much of the material is indeed fascinating;
some of the suggested parallels are truly stimulating. But great
care must be taken with a mode of argumentation that takes second-hand
generalizations from one small domain and projects them on the
rest, basically because everyone, it seems, is basically the same:
'of course all people are rational' (22). Well, all individuals
might be the same at one level or another, yet since this search
for 'cognitive change' only really looks for effects on the individual
it bypasses serious attention to social causation or interest-based
ideologies. Since everything is assumed to be connected on the
level of the individual who speaks, writes or reads, everything
can ultimately be seen as the cause of everything else. If literacy
should have any pride of place here, it is perhaps simply because,
as Olson admits, his 'concern is with the conceptual implications
of writing rather than with the history of ideas' (242). At least
the second part of this claim may be true.
© Anthony Pym 1998
References
Burns, Robert I. 1981. "The Paper Revolution
in Europe", Pacific Historical Review 50. 1-30.
Halverston, John. 1991. "Olson on Literacy",
Language in Society 20. 619-640.
© Anthony
Pym 2014
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