WReC's Reply
2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.53.3.0535
ISSN1528-4212
ResumoWe are grateful to Comparative Literature Studies for mooting the idea of, and for providing journal space for, this discussion, and to Alexander Fyfe for convening it. We would like to thank our respondents—Sarah Brouillette and David Thomas, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Joshua Clover, David Damrosch, and Barbara Harlow—for their suggestive and challenging engagements with our work. We appreciate the candor and robustness of their assessments, and hope that our own responses to them in turn—equally robust, as befits the occasion—will be taken in the collegial spirit in which they are intended.Our book attempted to resituate the problem of "world literature" as one better defined as the literature of the capitalist world-system, that is, "world-literature." We sought to address world-literature by pursuing initially the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. The implications of this theory for cultural analysis have received relatively little attention, even though it might be said to draw attention to a central arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of "world literature" and "modernism," on the other, that our book looked for its specific contours. The first two chapters argued for a single, but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. The four substantive chapters that follow explored a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of world-literary comparativism is dramatically highlighted. We treated the novel paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a "modernizing" import. The peculiar plasticity and hybridity of the novel form enables it to incorporate not only multiple literary levels, genres and modes, but also other nonliterary and archaic cultural forms.Because David Damrosch's response is the most openly adversarial of the five, it might be best to begin with his. He laments our "monocular anglo-centrism," which he sees as limiting what we are able to say. In developing his argument, he singles out our analysis of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North for particular criticism. The facts that none of us knows Arabic and that we have therefore not consulted any untranslated Arabic scholarship on Salih are for him definitive. We have, of course, examined the work of such critics as Sabry Hafez, Saree Makdisi, and Waïl S. Hassan, as well as the standard reference, Mona Amyuni's Casebook, whose contributors—with the exception of Barbara Harlow, herself a distinguished writer on Arabic literatures—are all native Arabic speakers. While engagement with Arabic writers in addition to Salih might have added another layer to our commentary on the novel's complex narrative forms, its schema of spatial and temporal tropes, and literary style, we are not persuaded that the absence of such an additional tissue of literary-biographical or intertextual commentary undermines or qualifies our reading of Season.Damrosch writes that our "anglo-phonic" reading is only able to reproduce the banality that Salih's novel is "wholly concerned with an irrevocable conflict between the capitalist-imperialist West and the anti-imperial, anti-capitalist Sudanese." In fact, we explicitly oppose ourselves to this line of third-worldist argument, proposing instead that the excess of various kinds of violence (patriarchal, ethnic, and racial, as well as imperialist and capitalist) that Salih accommodates in his style is an expression of the structural logic of historical capital's combined unevenness, one that does not permit Sudan to be reproduced in the novel as homogeneously anti-imperialist or anticapitalist. Indeed, it is precisely in the representation of the cataclysmic divisions within Sudanese (and also English) society as a "deadly germ" of world-historical proportions that we see the world-literary claims of Salih's novel. (It is worth emphasizing, perhaps, that the form and style of Season of Migration to the North are atypical of Salih's work as a whole.) We maintain that this correlation between "combined and uneven development" and literary form can be sustained without its being necessary to embark on stylistic comparisons with other Arabic writings. (And, mutatis mutandis, with other Russian, Icelandic, Hindi, or Yoruba writings.)Looking past our dissent from Makdisi and Hassan, Damrosch argues that Season is an exercise in "cultural and political translation," allowing Salih to explore "issues of hybridity in dialogic tension with his critique of Western politics and economics." Really?! It is hard to think of a more hackneyed construction of Salih's writing than this: as Damrosch cannot not know, there is absolutely no need to trawl through the Arabic-language archives for readings of this stamp, since they are the very staple of postcolonial studies in its most routine and unreflexive variants, and have been reproduced in veritable profusion over the course of the past thirty years or so.Although Damrosch concedes we have read quite a lot, he urges us to read more, to "develop dimensions that [we] … currently minimize or even exclude outright." More, farther, deeper, wider. The appropriate response to this kind of criticism was already provided by Moretti in "Conjectures on World Literature," the essay that kick-started the contemporary renewal of interest in the subject. "[W]orld literature cannot be literature, bigger," Moretti wrote, in a passage that we cite and highlight in our book: "what we are already doing, just more of it. It has to be different. The categories have to be different … [W]orld literature is not an object, it's a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method; and no-one has ever found a method by just reading more texts."Combined and Uneven Development was very obviously written as a spur to discussion, and not as a "last word" on anything, let alone a subject as complex and differentiated as "world literature." But we think that we have a right to ask our critics how—in what ways—what they are proposing in opposition to us is going to produce readings that are more secure, sharper, and better than those that we have produced, and like Moretti, we think that this is a matter of methodology and not the mere size or location of the archive that is mastered.Perhaps Damrosch's misreading of our argument reveals a central theoretical difference between him and us: that is, between a liberal conception of capitalism's historical unfolding as a diffusionist process that hybridises (his preferred term) all cultures, and a Marxist conception that sees the combined unevenness of the historical process critically registered in specific cultural and literary texts that can then be designated as world-literary (or world-cinematic and so on). There is, of course, a striking paucity of any evidence for the diffusionist model for capitalism. And when this idea is then used to produce theories of cultural hybridity, it tends to obscure the contradictions and inequalities that are the very matter of literary exchanges.Damrosch points to Salih's location in London as a part of the history of the production of his novel. Unlike him, we do not see this bit of biographical information as evidence of the author's hybrid sensibility. Rather, we understand Salih as being caught in the uneven structure of the field of world literary culture distinguished by a dispersed acquisition of cultural capital—Sudanese education, BBC, UNESCO, and so on—and yet, despite this, able to meditate on these fugitive facts in fictional form. No doubt more could be done with Salih's position in the transnational cultural field of the mid-twentieth century: but the rubric of hybridity would not be relevant to that effort.Damrosch also takes us to task for our alleged "self-congratulatory sense of English departments as the sole centre of cultural critique." Here he is on very shaky ground. It appears he has taken some time to look at the online research profiles of some of the members of our collective. But a glance at the top of the webpages ought to have been enough to make clear that the Department in which WReC (Warwick Research Collective) was initially forged (Sharae Deckard has subsequently moved to University College Dublin and Benita Parry has retired) is not an "English Department." There is, indeed, no such entity at Warwick; nor has there ever been one. When the University was founded in 1965, a Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies was created—now, incidentally, one of only three departments in the United Kingdom to have "comparative literary studies" in their name. Well into the 1990s, it was not possible for Warwick undergraduates to do a degree in "English": only comparative and interdisciplinary degrees were offered. Furthermore, the founding principle of the Department, as formulated by George Hunter, was that no "English" specialist should be hired who lacked fluency in at least one other language. (Hunter's Eurocentrism—since he meant one other "European" language, of course—is not the point here.)Not having done his homework, Damrosch casts us as cheerleaders for "English" Studies. Where we criticize Comparative Literature in its institutional form, he seeks to defend it. WReC's critique "doesn't apply for American academia, at any rate," he states—"where [Emily] Apter and many other progressive scholars were trained not in English but in French, Latin American studies, or comparative literature, and where the proliferation of African-American and women's studies programs in the 1970s had much to do with the need to get beyond the confines of English."We are in flat-out disagreement with Damrosch here, for we believe that our critique applies emphatically for "American" academia. As it happens three of the seven members of our collective are Americans, educated in the United States; and a fourth spent the formative first 18 years of his 35-year teaching career (to date) in the United States. Damrosch has failed to think through the implications of his own statement that "the proliferation of African-American and women's studies programs in the 1970s had much to do with the need to get beyond the confines of English." As we argue in our book, such programs emerged from within Departments of English—not of Comparative Literature—because it was in "English" that a burgeoning awareness of the limitations of Eurocentrism and of belletrist formalism was afforded an airing—or, better, was able to win an airing for itself—and gathered sufficient critical mass sufficient to force the new programs into existence. (In some instances, revealingly, the battle was fought—and won—within "English" Departments themselves.)In our numerous meetings, drafting sessions and editorial exercises, no premium was placed on academic seniority. The reference to "disagreements and divergent emphases" in our prefatory "Note on Collaborative Method" was not, as he supposes, a coded reference to the subordination of "junior" colleagues in the Collective: it was meant rather to gesture to the process of genuinely collaborative work, in which the arguments finally put forward have been batted around so extensively (and intensively) within the Collective that they are finally attributable to no single member but only to all. We greatly appreciate, in this respect, Maria Elisa Cevasco's celebration of our collective authorship, which, she writes, "gives a special quality to [our] … prose: one can see central issues being examined, arguments being solved, informed consensus being built."Where Damrosch's critique of our project has nothing to say about method, Joshua Clover's focuses exclusively on this aspect. Clover takes issue with our construction of the idea of "combined and uneven development," arguing that, in common with a range of other thinkers—Giovanni Arrighi, David Harvey, and Neil Smith prominent among them, evidently—we have failed to pay due attention to the realities of the term "combined," focusing overwhelmingly, instead—or even exclusively—on unevenness. In our "term-setting opening chapter," he writes, "[a]ttention drifts to the 'uneven' term, to the copresence of differing degrees of development." Our slogan "combined unevenness" then "gives the game away" altogether: "Unevenness is the object of thought, combined signifying the synchrony of that unevenness; it no longer modifies development."Where our specific argument in Combined and Uneven Development is concerned, Clover has considerable difficulty, right from the outset, in making his charge stick that we are guilty of overemphasizing the dimension of "unevenness" and of giving short shrift to the dimension of "combination." He admits that in introducing the idea of "combined unevenness" we write that "capitalist development … produces unevenness, systematically and as a matter of course," and that this formulation "seems to recognize before it not just prospect but process." But then he argues that we have no sooner recognized process in addition to prospect than we revert to our privileging of unevenness, insofar as we place before our readers the "simultaneity of the non-simultaneous," in the form of a juxtaposition of the Portman Bonaventura Hotel and the ship graveyards of Nouadhibou and the Aral Sea. We refer in this context to the work of Harry Harootunian. Clover deems the Harootunian passage we cite to be "suggestive," but then proposes that we (and Harootunian also, implicitly) leave the passage "incomplete, offering little account of transformations systemically or locally, beyond the significant but unexplored 'expansion.'" Ours is a "hydraulic model," it seems, even though we go to considerable lengths to ground our observation that "[m]odernity is neither a chronological nor a geographical category."Part of the problem here is that Clover is trying to ride two horses at the same time. On the one hand, he wants to establish a conceptual opposition between space and time as the organizing rubrics of analysis, a difference between what he terms "the geographer's view"—"capturing the variegations and subtleties of a moment distributed across space"—and "the historian's view"—"far less about spatial distribution of unevenness than about an uneven temporal advance of development." (He admits that this opposition is heuristic rather than empirical. Disciplinary historians do not generally think along the lines of "the historian's view" and disciplinary geographers do not think in alignment with "the geographer's view.") However, it is not really the concepts of time and space that Clover is interested in differentiating, but those of "prospect" and "process." To think in terms of "prospect" is to think like a geographer; to think in terms of "process" is to think like an historian. Yet while it is plausible to gloss "prospect" as "space"; it is not plausible to gloss "process" as "time." The two sets of terms counterposed by Clover are not analogous.In seeking to correct us, Clover proposes a "synthesis of the geographer's and historian's views," which he formulates as follows: "capitalism produces combined production and uneven production which jointly structure its development" (emphasis in original). This strikes us as altogether unsatisfactory, and not only because the idea of something producing production grinds against sense. Might there be here a failure of dialectical reason, for there are not two things—"combined production" and "uneven production" (Mademoiselle Combiné and Monsieur Inégal, perhaps?)—that are then conjoined to produce "développement inégal et combiné." Rather, the aspects of "combination" and "unevenness" in development are mutually constitutive of one another, and serve to distinguish capitalist from other historic forms of development.In accusing us of thinking like the geographers of his mind, Clover has not taken on board what we say about concatenation, temporal compression, intensive as well as extensive development, what we describe as "the 'accordionizing' or 'telescoping' function of combined and uneven development as a form of time-travel within the same space, a spatial bridging of unlike times." It seems to us that the problem lies in Clover's own failure to think relationally. When he uses the terms "space" or "prospect," he seems always to have in mind a two-dimensional cartography: places fixed on maps rather than in relation to other places, spaces, and positions. The idea of "periphery" is of course centrally at issue here. Clover believes that core-periphery analysis delivers a flattened view of capitalism as a social order and historical system. We argue, on the contrary, that "core" and "periphery" are relational concepts. To quote from an independent publication of one of our contributors, Stephen Shapiro, the difference between periphery and core should not be conceptualized as simply between static boundaries, since these terms represent spatialized relations more than geographic demarcations. Each spatial level (area, national, regional, urban, familial) contains its own core-periphery differences. Individual nation-states have their own internal corelike and peripheral zones (north-south and urban-agrarian divisions) and they often have a "city-system," where some cities dominate others. Cities likewise have their own "Manchester-effect" of class-differentiated regions, such as the core sectors where elites live and work and the peripheral slums housing the manual labor forces … Due to these manifold geometries of unequal exchange and power relations … we think of logistical boundaries rather than spatial ones and imagine the divisions as involving relations that cannot easily be mapped on two- or even three-dimensional surfaces, even while the nation-state form provides a momentarily useful cognitive map of these differences.1 Clover's commentary overall is clearly predicated on what Fredric Jameson, in his famous essay on postmodernism, written in the early 1980s, spoke of as "the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure" in the contemporary order of the world.2 Described by Jameson as an "inverted millenarianism," this latest version of the hypothesis of epochal change typically looks back to the 1950s or early 1960s for its source. Clover selects 1973 instead, a thought-figure rather than an actual date, representing the end of what he unhelpfully calls "programmatism" or "the program era"—roughly the period between 1875 and 1973, in which "revolutionary strategy" worldwide was supposedly founded on the ideas of "trade union, class-mass party, seizure of the state, dictatorship of the proletariat, command over production, program for transition, eventual withering of the state." While these goals certainly predate the 1870s, Clover offers up a particular version of "postmodernist" social theory, erecting a big ditch between an earlier phase of large-scale industry, "late" imperialism and anti-imperialist struggle, Fordism, and so on, and a "post-break" phase (post-Fordist? neoliberal?) in which class-based subjectivity is seen to have been eclipsed and replaced by other modes of social being and subjectivity.His suggestion that today "capital has autonomized itself from the conditions within which it was imposed by direct force, and become self-moving" we find wholly unconvincing, at one and the same time excessively functionalist and strongly anti-institutionalist—Goldman Sachs on the one side, neo-anarchism on the other. Karl Reitter's critique of the Neue Marx-Lektüre ("New Reading of Marx") tendency in Germany strikes us as being directly applicable in this regard. For the proponents of this new grouping, as Reitter puts it, "class struggle is meaningless and there is no immanent moment that disrupts society. All that remains is the 'automatic subject' capital, which imposes guidelines for acting according to the logic of profit-maximization and the law of value on everyone, across all classes."3 The bravura claims that Clover makes concerning the subsumption of labor by capital, the idea that "the world-economy may be unable to expand further," the obsolescence of class struggle, and so on, strike us as both unhistorical and apocalyptic. They run vastly in advance of the available evidence, as does the obituary for the contemporary desire for reconstituting unions. Whatever the outcome of these theoretical differences, however, it remains unclear in Clover's response what is at stake in disputing our methodology for a reading of world-literature.Sarah Brouillette/David Thomas and Maria Elisa Cevasco are more sympathetic to our stated project of rethinking world-literature as the literature of the world-system. Hence we think that it would be a good idea to take their responses together, not least because there are significant overlaps (and some significant divergences) between them.Let us start, then, by emphasizing that while our book indeed focuses on novels, and assesses the significance of the novel form's rise in tandem with the worlding of capitalist social relations, our selection of this form—and of particular exemplary texts—was more tactical and contingent than categorical or representative. We did not (and do not) mean to suggest that poetry, drama or other literary genres, or other forms of cultural production, for that matter—art, television, cinema, and so on—are not as sensitive to the logic of combined and uneven development as fiction. We conceived of our book precisely as a first testing out of a new methodology. Having put forward a provisional answer in our book to the question of how world-literature is to be conceptualized and interpreted, we consider the book an open invitation to move beyond the novel form and consider other cultural forms in the light of combined and uneven development and the singular modernity of the world-system.Brouillette and Thomas urge us to think about how combined and uneven development works to structure the novel not only in its formal dimensions but also (and primarily) with respect to "the circuits of production and consumption of literature." They warn us not to leave "the mediating factor of the nature of the production of culture" out of our analysis, reminding us that "literary reading" ought not to be naturalized: the latter "has always been geographically and socially unevenly distributed, and it is probably now a residual practice," they write. And they go on to ask, What changes if we begin from the assumption that Raymond William's "long revolution" has ended, and literature and the kind of reading it entails represent a relatively elite and now waning set of practices that assert only residual affective force? An emphasis on literature's production and on the contexts for its end use forces us, at least, to see capitalist restructuring in response to crises as something that is in literature from the ground up, rather than something the work reflects in its themes or its complex of stylistic features and innovations. For what it is worth, we think the jury is still out where the matter of literature's (and/or literary reading's) advancing residuality is concerned: the evidence from the core capitalist countries is counter-balanced by that from India, China, Brazil, and elsewhere, where the market for books is currently growing, let alone in new digital realms. But Brouillette and Thomas's comments do indeed expose a silence or undeveloped area in our book.While Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, which usefully extends Bourdieu's analysis of literary fields to the hierarchy-riven inequalities of the world literary market, and Brouillette's own pioneering materialist study of the conditions of reception and dissemination of postcolonial writers in the global marketplace, were both central to WReC's formative discussions, our book did not finally engage significantly with these works.4 Again, this was partly a tactical decision: we opted, for practical reasons of time and space, to concentrate on aesthetics. But it is now possible to call for work that would take further the re-imagination of world-literature (and cultural production in the world-system more generally) by studying how uneven conditions of translation, reception and production are foundational to the understanding of literary works, and indeed of "literature" itself as a specific form of social practice.Methodologically, this presents a significant challenge, since—as Brouillette and Thomas point out—it requires critics to subject to scrutiny their own formation as critics and their own "professional" investments in "literary reading" (formally inculcated, but experienced as "immaterial," "spontaneous," not the consequence of institutionalization). The analysis of "market" conditions—of "the nature of literary production"—does not come readily to literary scholars; but while it strikes us as indeed indispensable, we also believe that it must not be carried out at the expense of "literary reading." The two forms of analysis need to be integrated and folded into one another. It is to this assignment, we take it, that what we might call in general the "Bourdieusian" tendency in contemporary scholarship ought now to be committed.In Combined and Uneven Development, we address ourselves to the conspicuous prevalence of "irrealist" formal features—anti-linearity, meta-narrative, unreliable narration, for instance—in literary works emanating from semi-peripheral locations in the world-system. Following Roberto Schwarz, Michael Löwy, and others, we conceptualize these features as mediations or formally encoded registrations of "the lived experience of capitalism's bewildering creative destruction (or destructive creation)." For Brouillette and Thomas, however, our failure to refer our readings in the first instance to the structure and mechanics of the world-literary market means that we are left without a "theory of mediation [capable of accounting] for the causal relation between form, the psychic experience of disjuncture, and the violence of capitalist development."Because we spend quite a lot of time in our opening two chapters in discussion of precisely such "a theory of mediation," we find this criticism hard to fathom. We use the term "registration" (rather than representation) to discuss the relation between literary form and social reality, and explicitly highlight its complexity and intricacy; we discuss the difficult Schwarzian understanding of literary form as "the abstract of social relationships"; we assess the theory of mediation (into and through literary form) in Löwy, Adorno, Lukács, Marcuse, Jameson, and other theorists. But Brouillette and Thomas see only passive "reflectionism" in all this: "One is asked to accept the reflectionist premise that peripheral crises are lived as unreal, the world experienced as somehow unworldly and uncanny, and this lived experience is expressed straightforwardly in literary form," they write (our emphasis). This does not seem to us an accurate accounting of what we have presented. Could it be that in attempting to emphasize the irreducible sociality of literary production (a form of social production in general) by way of freeing literary studies from idealism, Brouillette and Thomas have themselves bent the stick too far in the other direction? Literary production must be situated as a form of social production alongside others, to be sure. But its actuality in this respect surely consists as much in what is unique about it relative to all other forms of social production as in what about it is socially typical.In our book, we attempted to build on the preexisting work in the Marxist tradition that situates form as the fundamental historical category for literary theory. To this end, we cited Adorno's powerfully counter-intuitive argument in his essay, "Commitment," that "[t]here is no content, no formal category of the literary work that does not, however transformed and however awarely, derive from the empirical reality from which it has escaped. It is through this relationship, and through the process of regrouping its moments in terms of its formal law, that literature relates to reality."5 And we showed that for Michael Löwy, similarly, the representation of temporal, spatial, and material conditions in literary works is always a matter of mediation, of the transcoding of the "worldly" into form, and never takes shape as a mirror image of these conditions (whatever that might be taken to mean).What our account then takes from and shares with the theories of Schwarz, Marcuse, Adorno, Jameson, and so on, is an understanding of mediation as an ever unfinished and open-ended process of disclosing and interpreting what perpetually remains "still-to-be-known" in a literary work. When Brouillette and Thomas pose the question as to whether there is "any good reason, aside from the fact that we are trained in literary studies and teaching literature, and working in situations in which literary study is, as a whole practice, under threat, to persist in treating literature as offering any unique insight into the dynamics that are identified in this study," they seem to us to recapitulate their interest in the contexts of literary production—or in the circuits of the production, distribution and reception of literature—but at the cost of desensitizing themselves
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