This is really fascinating, Julianne! It makes me think of the issues Jóhann Árnason tries to address with his version of civilizational sociology, particularly his book on Japan. Your post inspired me to write the following way-too-long set of thoughts inspired by Árnason. The basic idea is that he tries to do in a synthetic and holistic way something that is at the least complimentary with what Ma as you interpret her is doing in a bottom-up, pointillist way.
To situate Árnason as I understand him in a stylized way: one could think of the modernization of non-western countries as a process of westernization (for good or ill). From this perspective, you adopt western technology (and then gradually find your own society transformed by the cultural attitudes that this technology inevitably brings with it), or you are colonized and forced to do so. Alternatively, one can try to avoid the Eurocentrism implicit in the first approach (Eurocentrism which doesn’t go away if you think European modernity is bad) but interpreting the advent of modernity as a kind of stadial process, with religion and cultural production interpreted as superstructural phenomena. Modernity = capitalism; cultural stuff is determined by the means of production, or it is a sort of distracting ornament unimportant to the serious business of political economy. (Nobody admits to thinking this way in so many words).
Most everybody agrees that this alternative is unacceptable and that the way out of it is to see modernity as a global phenomenon that starts around 1500 or thereabouts (it sounds like Ma follows Braudel in putting silver at the center of things). This is fine and even obviously true, but the Bourdieu tendency will use the idea of a "global" modernity as an excuse to make art/culture/religion epiphenomenal to political economy, which (a) is politically a much more ambiguous gesture than they think, and (b) throws the baby out with the bathwater in terms of the old "modernity as westernization" perspective. (A whole complex of perspectives on modernity as westernization has been so central to the Japanese self-understanding for so long that Japan is an ideal test-case for Árnason.) Árnason tries to resurrect the old idea of civilization in the plural as found in Weber and Mauss (and in even earlier writers like Montesquieu or Goethe qua theorist of Weltliteratur) in an effort to understand cultural difference. The idea is to start critically but self-consciously from the most serious western efforts to make universal sense of cultural plurality as a way to achieve real horizontality or “universel latéral” or Horizontverschmelzung or whatever. If instead you assume that a subaltern or postcolonial or what have you position is simply available (even to the “subaltern” of our day), you wind up willy-nilly with economic reductionism.
It seems like Ma as you read her is striving for a similar kind of horizontality in literary criticism. Let the novels illuminate how “the age of silver” was experienced in China, Spain, Japan, and England. The observation of their similarities and differences, with the help of some historical sociology but without a grand theory of what “the novel” is supposed to amount, can create an intercultural frame of reference that hadn’t existed before.
Wow, thanks, this is great. I think I need to read Árnason. I was thinking of you as I wrote the conclusion because of Hegel. Do you see a role here for a theory of uneven and combined development? It doesn't solve the problem of culture, but it does help to reconcile a grand narrative of the European origins of capitalism as a distinctive mode of production with the reality of multiple distinctive societies with genuine historical agency. You can even start before 1500 if you want, ha ha.
Before my current project, I was working within a pretty materialist / economic reductionist framework. In theory culture was part of material history; in practice it was epiphenomenal. Now I'm trying not to do that (I actually deleted a wildly gratuitous paragraph about debasement of the coinage from this post; talk about Braudel) which is prompting me to take a somewhat different perspective on historical causation.
Thanks! I wanted to respond to this comment, but when I got a chance I produced the following goofy rant which I figured I should send to you anyway in case you found it helpful.
I certainly think that a lot of work that flies under the flag of uneven and combined development is indispensable. But when Trotsky used that phrase he mean’t uneven and combined development towards socialism (with the possible alternative of total collapse). The approach embeds assumptions to which we don’t really have a right, just like when people describe the present with Gramsci’s phrase about an interregnum that produces morbid symptoms, as if we knew what healthy development or modernity would be, or could expect the king to return. Árnason takes off from the framework of Marcel Gauchet, an old teacher of mine. For Gauchet modernity is the movement away from religion (as traditionally understood and practiced), but what it is a movement towards is less clear. (At most the weakening of the premodern belief that meaning is given by God or the cosmos provokes an aspiration to something like autonomy as understood by German idealism, but contra Hegel as normally interpreted this process gives no guarantee that the aspiration can be fulfilled.) For Gauchet modernization is westernization, the rest of the world adopting institutions and practices that emerged from the collapse of European Christendom. Of course there’s obviously some truth to this perspective. Árnason insists that the couplet technology / autonomy comes to be experienced differently within what he calls different civilizational constellations. The result is not uneven and combined development (towards the same implicit goal) but a vielfalt der Moderne. Árnason tries to make this all concrete in his big books on Russian and Japanese modernity: different civilizational constellations interact with "modernity" broadly defined to create different visions of the goal of modernization or development.
There’s a strong engagement on Árnason’s part with world systems theory, including some dialogue with Wallerstein, who in the 1980s actually tried to absorb a lot of the language of civilizational theory into his own thought (although it came from S. N. Eisenstadt, who was less philosophically sophisticated than Árnason). In Wallerstein’s hands, however, non-western civilization is basically an ideological resource with which to resist the capitalist world-system and its “Baconian/Cartesian/Newtonian” ideology. The real determining factor in Wallerstein’s vision remains economic, and knowledge of economic truth is what makes inter-cultural (or inter-“civilizational”) comparison/dialogue possible. Whereas from my perspective something like world systems theory can very usefully set the table for the comparison of cultural artifacts like the four novels Ma discusses, but the artworks should be the meal. For the literary sociologist, the point shouldn’t be (i) to explain the similarities of Ma’s four novels in terms of the economic world system that gave rise to them, but (ii) much more importantly to regard the novels as sources of essential but non-empirical insight into “the age of silver,” and (iii) most importantly (to slip into Hegelese) to regard them as Selbstzwecke, things worthy of attention and admiration for their own sake. The Hegelian point is that (iii) is what makes (ii) possible in an interesting way. A sociology that confines itself to (i) is better off studying shipping manifests and leaving novels alone. (Although many sociologists of a materialist inclination convince themselves that they are doing (i) but are actually more interesting than their self-presentation.)
I think that this is perhaps relevant to your recent substack essays and exchanges. IMO, the energy motivating most of the best Marxist interpretations of artistic modernism (from Lukacs and Adorno to Raymond Williams and TJ Clark) comes from a hope in a utopian revolutionary future that it’s now impossible to share. These writers could see both the modern appreciation of premodern art and modernism itself (which seems to need to have one foot in the archaic or aristocratic past, to depend on belief in that one lives in a modernizing but not completely modern world) as always at least implicitly in tension with the self-understanding of capitalist modernity. Art for these Marxists becomes something that reveals to us the fact that we don’t have to live and think in the ways that market society primes us to think are natural. Once this revolutionary horizon disappears, materialist critique risks turning on works of art, seeing them as the manifestation of snobbery or distinction as understood by Bourdieu. One result of this is that academic work like yours has to defend itself from the right (it isn’t useful like learning to code supposedly is) and the left (in spite of heroic efforts it is hard to defend the teaching of Renaissance poetry on the grounds that it makes students more empathetic and inspires them to fight climate change).
This you do on Substack mostly through brilliant aperçus, as in your post on Lady Macbeth. I’d never thought about how small the families are in Shakespeare. Your sociological perspective helps a reader who loves Shakespeare to read him better, to notice things that would otherwise be overlooked. It thus justifies, to a more old-fashioned humanist reader, the esoteric-seeming use of demography and book history to help us study literature. (Based on that Lorentzen essay this is something that a lot of successful literary sociologists can’t do, or are uninterested in doing!) But there is the deeper question: why cultivate a taste for literature at all? Isn’t it some silly affectation? (Nowadays monocles are presumably mostly worn and appreciated by the rich but this isn’t an injustice because monocle appreciation is a weird hobby.) I was really struck by the line from McGurl that Lorentzen quotes: “there is no way for a literary scholar, these days, to engage in strenuous aesthetic appreciation without sounding goofily anachronistic.”
If there is resistance on the part of Marxists to go back to the Hegelian idea of a work of art as a Selbstzweck, it is because this leads Hegel and the left-Hegelian tradition to see art as expressing the divine. This sounds a bit woo-woo, and I don’t know how many takers there are nowadays for the full Hegel / Heidegger contention that art expresses, within a given cultural context, the concrete unity of reason, self-consciousness and freedom or that art discloses a world. (*I* believe this, and the sociology of Gauchet or Árnason probably presupposes at least a version of this attitude.) At least a toned-down version of this position seems like it should be plausible, however. Art helps us to see aspects of our condition that the great religions were constructed to grapple with, and that in a mostly post-religious age we have difficulty grappling with or even seeing at all. It helps us to resist the ways of looking at the world that neoliberal society spontaneously secretes and makes plausible. (This very much includes the half-conscious cultural libertarianism of a Bourdieu-ite critic like Sinykin.) I think that this is what people are getting at when they talk about a “new romanticism” or resisting a “second disenchantment.” I also think that it is part of what you mean when you claim in your post on social mobility that “literary history is valuable in its own right: it’s the intellectual biography of humanity, a vital part of our shared life story. We don’t understand ourselves if we don’t understand this.”
Thanks for this brilliant comment. I think we're in full agreement, though you've captured the 20th-century intellectual history better than I can. (My center of awareness radiates outward from 1600, becoming progressively dimmer in either direction.) Rather than responding systematically let me just make a few very quick, very scattered remarks.
1. A Marxist notion of art as a realm of imaginative possibility, and also as the closest thing to what a purely unalienated labor would look like, is of course found in Marx (as in his famous comparison of Milton to a silkworm). I think it's still something that people intuitively believe, but it's become very hard to express, perhaps especially for academic Marxists.
2. The relationship between criticism (appreciate; evaluation) and scholarship as two strands of academic literary study, and the twentieth-century marginalization of criticism in written scholarship--but not in the classroom--has been discussed a fair bit within academia. The post-critique movement is an attempt to bring appreciation back to the center of literary study and academic writing; I understand the impetus, but in practice, the results are insipid. What I'd prefer is a reunification of the two, but easier said than done. It's easy to feel that there's a robust link between criticism / appreciation and scholarship when the value of literature can be taken as axiomatic, and almost impossible when it can't. To an extent, I sympathize with McGurl's quote. And yet, of course, there's no sense in trying to write a sociological account of literary history if you don't have some kind of theory of the value of literature. But aren't we in this position everywhere, in every intellectual domain?
3. For uneven and combined development, I was thinking of How the West Came to Rule, which I thought indicated some productive directions for thinking about the relationship between local / national economic development and international relations.
This is really fascinating, Julianne! It makes me think of the issues Jóhann Árnason tries to address with his version of civilizational sociology, particularly his book on Japan. Your post inspired me to write the following way-too-long set of thoughts inspired by Árnason. The basic idea is that he tries to do in a synthetic and holistic way something that is at the least complimentary with what Ma as you interpret her is doing in a bottom-up, pointillist way.
To situate Árnason as I understand him in a stylized way: one could think of the modernization of non-western countries as a process of westernization (for good or ill). From this perspective, you adopt western technology (and then gradually find your own society transformed by the cultural attitudes that this technology inevitably brings with it), or you are colonized and forced to do so. Alternatively, one can try to avoid the Eurocentrism implicit in the first approach (Eurocentrism which doesn’t go away if you think European modernity is bad) but interpreting the advent of modernity as a kind of stadial process, with religion and cultural production interpreted as superstructural phenomena. Modernity = capitalism; cultural stuff is determined by the means of production, or it is a sort of distracting ornament unimportant to the serious business of political economy. (Nobody admits to thinking this way in so many words).
Most everybody agrees that this alternative is unacceptable and that the way out of it is to see modernity as a global phenomenon that starts around 1500 or thereabouts (it sounds like Ma follows Braudel in putting silver at the center of things). This is fine and even obviously true, but the Bourdieu tendency will use the idea of a "global" modernity as an excuse to make art/culture/religion epiphenomenal to political economy, which (a) is politically a much more ambiguous gesture than they think, and (b) throws the baby out with the bathwater in terms of the old "modernity as westernization" perspective. (A whole complex of perspectives on modernity as westernization has been so central to the Japanese self-understanding for so long that Japan is an ideal test-case for Árnason.) Árnason tries to resurrect the old idea of civilization in the plural as found in Weber and Mauss (and in even earlier writers like Montesquieu or Goethe qua theorist of Weltliteratur) in an effort to understand cultural difference. The idea is to start critically but self-consciously from the most serious western efforts to make universal sense of cultural plurality as a way to achieve real horizontality or “universel latéral” or Horizontverschmelzung or whatever. If instead you assume that a subaltern or postcolonial or what have you position is simply available (even to the “subaltern” of our day), you wind up willy-nilly with economic reductionism.
It seems like Ma as you read her is striving for a similar kind of horizontality in literary criticism. Let the novels illuminate how “the age of silver” was experienced in China, Spain, Japan, and England. The observation of their similarities and differences, with the help of some historical sociology but without a grand theory of what “the novel” is supposed to amount, can create an intercultural frame of reference that hadn’t existed before.
Wow, thanks, this is great. I think I need to read Árnason. I was thinking of you as I wrote the conclusion because of Hegel. Do you see a role here for a theory of uneven and combined development? It doesn't solve the problem of culture, but it does help to reconcile a grand narrative of the European origins of capitalism as a distinctive mode of production with the reality of multiple distinctive societies with genuine historical agency. You can even start before 1500 if you want, ha ha.
Before my current project, I was working within a pretty materialist / economic reductionist framework. In theory culture was part of material history; in practice it was epiphenomenal. Now I'm trying not to do that (I actually deleted a wildly gratuitous paragraph about debasement of the coinage from this post; talk about Braudel) which is prompting me to take a somewhat different perspective on historical causation.
Thanks! I wanted to respond to this comment, but when I got a chance I produced the following goofy rant which I figured I should send to you anyway in case you found it helpful.
I certainly think that a lot of work that flies under the flag of uneven and combined development is indispensable. But when Trotsky used that phrase he mean’t uneven and combined development towards socialism (with the possible alternative of total collapse). The approach embeds assumptions to which we don’t really have a right, just like when people describe the present with Gramsci’s phrase about an interregnum that produces morbid symptoms, as if we knew what healthy development or modernity would be, or could expect the king to return. Árnason takes off from the framework of Marcel Gauchet, an old teacher of mine. For Gauchet modernity is the movement away from religion (as traditionally understood and practiced), but what it is a movement towards is less clear. (At most the weakening of the premodern belief that meaning is given by God or the cosmos provokes an aspiration to something like autonomy as understood by German idealism, but contra Hegel as normally interpreted this process gives no guarantee that the aspiration can be fulfilled.) For Gauchet modernization is westernization, the rest of the world adopting institutions and practices that emerged from the collapse of European Christendom. Of course there’s obviously some truth to this perspective. Árnason insists that the couplet technology / autonomy comes to be experienced differently within what he calls different civilizational constellations. The result is not uneven and combined development (towards the same implicit goal) but a vielfalt der Moderne. Árnason tries to make this all concrete in his big books on Russian and Japanese modernity: different civilizational constellations interact with "modernity" broadly defined to create different visions of the goal of modernization or development.
There’s a strong engagement on Árnason’s part with world systems theory, including some dialogue with Wallerstein, who in the 1980s actually tried to absorb a lot of the language of civilizational theory into his own thought (although it came from S. N. Eisenstadt, who was less philosophically sophisticated than Árnason). In Wallerstein’s hands, however, non-western civilization is basically an ideological resource with which to resist the capitalist world-system and its “Baconian/Cartesian/Newtonian” ideology. The real determining factor in Wallerstein’s vision remains economic, and knowledge of economic truth is what makes inter-cultural (or inter-“civilizational”) comparison/dialogue possible. Whereas from my perspective something like world systems theory can very usefully set the table for the comparison of cultural artifacts like the four novels Ma discusses, but the artworks should be the meal. For the literary sociologist, the point shouldn’t be (i) to explain the similarities of Ma’s four novels in terms of the economic world system that gave rise to them, but (ii) much more importantly to regard the novels as sources of essential but non-empirical insight into “the age of silver,” and (iii) most importantly (to slip into Hegelese) to regard them as Selbstzwecke, things worthy of attention and admiration for their own sake. The Hegelian point is that (iii) is what makes (ii) possible in an interesting way. A sociology that confines itself to (i) is better off studying shipping manifests and leaving novels alone. (Although many sociologists of a materialist inclination convince themselves that they are doing (i) but are actually more interesting than their self-presentation.)
I think that this is perhaps relevant to your recent substack essays and exchanges. IMO, the energy motivating most of the best Marxist interpretations of artistic modernism (from Lukacs and Adorno to Raymond Williams and TJ Clark) comes from a hope in a utopian revolutionary future that it’s now impossible to share. These writers could see both the modern appreciation of premodern art and modernism itself (which seems to need to have one foot in the archaic or aristocratic past, to depend on belief in that one lives in a modernizing but not completely modern world) as always at least implicitly in tension with the self-understanding of capitalist modernity. Art for these Marxists becomes something that reveals to us the fact that we don’t have to live and think in the ways that market society primes us to think are natural. Once this revolutionary horizon disappears, materialist critique risks turning on works of art, seeing them as the manifestation of snobbery or distinction as understood by Bourdieu. One result of this is that academic work like yours has to defend itself from the right (it isn’t useful like learning to code supposedly is) and the left (in spite of heroic efforts it is hard to defend the teaching of Renaissance poetry on the grounds that it makes students more empathetic and inspires them to fight climate change).
This you do on Substack mostly through brilliant aperçus, as in your post on Lady Macbeth. I’d never thought about how small the families are in Shakespeare. Your sociological perspective helps a reader who loves Shakespeare to read him better, to notice things that would otherwise be overlooked. It thus justifies, to a more old-fashioned humanist reader, the esoteric-seeming use of demography and book history to help us study literature. (Based on that Lorentzen essay this is something that a lot of successful literary sociologists can’t do, or are uninterested in doing!) But there is the deeper question: why cultivate a taste for literature at all? Isn’t it some silly affectation? (Nowadays monocles are presumably mostly worn and appreciated by the rich but this isn’t an injustice because monocle appreciation is a weird hobby.) I was really struck by the line from McGurl that Lorentzen quotes: “there is no way for a literary scholar, these days, to engage in strenuous aesthetic appreciation without sounding goofily anachronistic.”
If there is resistance on the part of Marxists to go back to the Hegelian idea of a work of art as a Selbstzweck, it is because this leads Hegel and the left-Hegelian tradition to see art as expressing the divine. This sounds a bit woo-woo, and I don’t know how many takers there are nowadays for the full Hegel / Heidegger contention that art expresses, within a given cultural context, the concrete unity of reason, self-consciousness and freedom or that art discloses a world. (*I* believe this, and the sociology of Gauchet or Árnason probably presupposes at least a version of this attitude.) At least a toned-down version of this position seems like it should be plausible, however. Art helps us to see aspects of our condition that the great religions were constructed to grapple with, and that in a mostly post-religious age we have difficulty grappling with or even seeing at all. It helps us to resist the ways of looking at the world that neoliberal society spontaneously secretes and makes plausible. (This very much includes the half-conscious cultural libertarianism of a Bourdieu-ite critic like Sinykin.) I think that this is what people are getting at when they talk about a “new romanticism” or resisting a “second disenchantment.” I also think that it is part of what you mean when you claim in your post on social mobility that “literary history is valuable in its own right: it’s the intellectual biography of humanity, a vital part of our shared life story. We don’t understand ourselves if we don’t understand this.”
Thanks for this brilliant comment. I think we're in full agreement, though you've captured the 20th-century intellectual history better than I can. (My center of awareness radiates outward from 1600, becoming progressively dimmer in either direction.) Rather than responding systematically let me just make a few very quick, very scattered remarks.
1. A Marxist notion of art as a realm of imaginative possibility, and also as the closest thing to what a purely unalienated labor would look like, is of course found in Marx (as in his famous comparison of Milton to a silkworm). I think it's still something that people intuitively believe, but it's become very hard to express, perhaps especially for academic Marxists.
2. The relationship between criticism (appreciate; evaluation) and scholarship as two strands of academic literary study, and the twentieth-century marginalization of criticism in written scholarship--but not in the classroom--has been discussed a fair bit within academia. The post-critique movement is an attempt to bring appreciation back to the center of literary study and academic writing; I understand the impetus, but in practice, the results are insipid. What I'd prefer is a reunification of the two, but easier said than done. It's easy to feel that there's a robust link between criticism / appreciation and scholarship when the value of literature can be taken as axiomatic, and almost impossible when it can't. To an extent, I sympathize with McGurl's quote. And yet, of course, there's no sense in trying to write a sociological account of literary history if you don't have some kind of theory of the value of literature. But aren't we in this position everywhere, in every intellectual domain?
3. For uneven and combined development, I was thinking of How the West Came to Rule, which I thought indicated some productive directions for thinking about the relationship between local / national economic development and international relations.
Looking forward to reading this properly soon. On a first scroll-through: your point on "market reductionism" is surely correct.
Thanks! Yes, I was thinking about this after our conversation.