March 17, 2009
poetics: world clouds
Franco Moretti's program of "distant reading," which has caused such consternation, is surely intended to consternate. Program and provocation admixed. Most evidently, it's a shot not across but at the bow of a literary reading tradition which, however serious and engaged its goals, is founded on delectation, the beauty myth, and allegories of form that are themselves expressions of class and national ideologies. Moreover, it acknowledges and routes around the evident disaster through which modernism's critical or antagonistic modes have become period styles, forms of bourgeois auto-immunity.
But if distant reading contains that anti-aesthetic spirit, it means also to set New Historicism on its feet — or to push its logic to the horizon and then beyond, refusing NewHist's habit of eventually doubling back to really understand the particulars of the text in a newly enlarged and nuanced context. Which seems like a good habit to obliterate. Seriously, fuck that.
It ought also be remarked that Moretti's declaration of the program is itself ironically rhetorical in its pitch; his anti-literary appeal is a bit literary, one might say. In the millennial essay "Conjectures on World Literature" he refers his own argument to the poetic declaration of Marc Bloch: years of analysis for a day of synthesis. This is surely the scholar's analog to the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility," routed though the world-systems perspective — Wallerstein's Wordsworth, let's say — and it's both moving and useful to understand Moretti's program in that light. And this sense of a rhetorical pitch continues:
...we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know.
As one more coordinating fact, the particular moment of this move to "World Literature" as method (rather than just category) should be understood as a balletic shimmying away from a US/anglophone-centered conception timed in exact coincidence with the terminal crisis of American hegemony, which reveals itself as a political fact in 2001 and an economic fact shortly thereafter. This is the historical underpinning of Moretti's leap. The quite persuasive implied argument goes: since the transfer of power will not merely be a transfer of centers but of scale (as argued authoritatively by Arrighi), we need our conception of "world literature" to shift not just in center but in scale.
• Epater le bourgeoisie aesthetique. • I'll show you New Historicism! • World-systems analysis for literature. All of this makes for a persuasive, even irresistible argument. Almost. Almost, as long as a certain magical substitution goes unnoticed. To wit: it requires "literature" to be novels, more or less.
Certainly novels are the only literature discussed or cited in the essay and those following. And as soon as one notices this, one realizes that the program of distant reading can only make sense for the form of the novel; as method, it can no more confront the particulars of poetry than it could, say painting; it would be reduced to something like Komar & Melamid's parodic surveys of "most wanted paintings."
This is less a blind spot than something like aspect-blindness (one reproduced by lesser scholars within universities by the entirely embarrassing habit of titling courses with the word "literature" when the syllabus shows only fiction). And even as there is a timeliness to Moretti's argument, there is a complementary failure: the period in which the novel stands as the hegemonic form of literature best able to grasp the broader situation is in fact waning. Indeed, the scalar shift of distant reading is symptomatic of the novel's lessening social force in the decline of the era of High Postmodernism, replacing qualities with quantities.
All of that said, there is something cheering for those who read poetry — that is to say, readers — in Moretti's unstated reasoning. It admits, after all, that the novel is finally evidentiary and little more. Here we do not levy the tiresome complaint that scholars, particularly cultural/left scholars, tend to read them this way, but rather that this is what they are good for. No arguments here. And so, why not endeavor to read these texts as global cahiers des doléances — again, Moretti's timing is right. But it is well to remember that even if it is a global 1781, for a thousand Cazottes and Bernardin de Saint-Pierres, we shall still require at least a single Saint-Just, or nothing.
Posted by jane at March 17, 2009 08:44 AM | TrackBack