Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945–1975 by Michael LeMahieu (review)

In Fictions of Fact and Value, Michael LeMahieu offers a much-needed corrective to a genuine historical lacuna: the afterlife of logical positivism in twentieth-century American literature. Through what he appealingly calls the “literature of ideas”—a blend of intellectual and literary history, literary criticism, and philosophy—LeMahieu shows how this arid and abstruse philosophy manages to persist in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, John Barth, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. The book is organized around the claim that logical positivism “appears tactically in postwar literature in order to advance authors’ aesthetic strategies, which are often latent, implicit, or ironic” (5). Part of this “tactical” persistence occurs in the way the fictions under analysis deal with a schism between fact and value, between what can be explained scientifically and what escapes such explanations.

Much of the scholarly analysis here is undertaken specifically in relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s equal parts cryptic and pellucid Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), which the Vienna Circle thinkers who devised logical positivism treated as a major inspiration. Positivism emerged out of the view (often associated with Auguste Comte) that all knowledge arises from experience and so is an account of empirical facts. The Vienna Circle thinkers who took inspiration from Wittgenstein as a “positivist,” however, got things fundamentally wrong about what Wittgenstein was trying to achieve in the Tractatus. Theodor Adorno also falsely treated Wittgenstein as some kind of positivist, assuming the Vienna thinkers’ alignment with the Tractatus was sound.

LeMahieu’s desire to historicize “the reception of logical positivism by tracing its lines of influence, and the ways in which they were subsequently erased, in the decades following 1945” leads to intricate readings of both fiction and philosophy (20). The first chapter offers a sustained reading of Adorno’s critique of logical positivism, specifically in relation to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. LeMahieu argues convincingly that, despite Adorno’s alignment of the early Wittgenstein with a positivism that would relegate artworks to a species of non-sense, his “critique of logical positivism enables the reading of Wittgenstein that debunks [his own] extension of his critique to Wittgenstein” (37). This claim leads to a genuinely original set of remarks on the most influential line of Tractatus interpretation of the last thirty years, the so-called “resolute” reading associated with Cora Diamond and James Conant. The resolute reading is, roughly, the view that rather than a dramatic break between the “early” Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the “later” Wittgenstein of the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) there is continuity. One way such continuity gets expressed, according to this line of interpretation, is in Wittgenstein’s famous injunction at proposition 6.54 of the Tractatus, that once one has read through the propositions of the book one must “throw away the ladder,” realizing that the propositions, too, are “nonsense.” This idea of discarding the very steps that got you to 6.54 is akin (so the resolute reading goes) to what in the later work Wittgenstein calls “therapy”: i.e., thinking designed to break the spell of the false problems that have bedeviled philosophy since the ancient Greeks. Among LeMahieu’s many interesting insights here is an account of the idea of “feelers” (die Fühler) in Wittgenstein’s picture theory of reference and how this idea inflects our reading of the Tractatus as poised between what can be said and what can only be shown. There are also refreshing comments about the possible influence of William James on Wittgenstein’s more “mystical” sounding pronouncements—although nowhere else in the book is there attention to the relation of American pragmatism to logical positivism, such as the way the Vienna Circle’s “verificationist” approach to meaning may be traced to Charles S. Peirce’s 1877 essay, “The Fixation of Belief.”

The chapter on Pynchon’s first novel V. (1963) is especially insightful. As...