Category: The b2o Review

by Devin Zane Shaw

In an interview from 2012, Jacques Rancière states in response to a question about the role of dialogue in philosophy:

I don’t believe in the virtue of dialogue in the form of: here’s a thinker, here’s another thinker, they’re going to debate amongst themselves and that’s going to produce something. My idea is that it’s always books that enter into dialogue and not people….Dialogue is never, for me, what it appears to be, which is something like the lightning flash of an encounter, a live exchange.[i]

We should, then, approach the recent Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016), with a similarly circumspect attitude.

The core of the book, edited by Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty, is the debate between Rancière and Axel Honneth that took place at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in June 2009, but it also includes a supplementary text by each author and an essay from each editor. Given that the editors’ essays comprise, at eighty pages, forty-five percent of the text, one should be particularly attentive to the ways in which their interventions shape the reception of the debate that was the book’s occasion. Against the editors, I want to argue here that this debate demonstrates the incompatibility of Honneth’s and Rancière’s respective projects. Moreover, Rancière’s work cannot be reconceptualized in the terms of Honneth’s liberal iteration of critical theory without sacrificing precisely those parts of his thought that are the most inventive, interesting, and politically and intellectually subversive.

My differences with Genel and Deranty can best be summarized through our respective interpretations of Rancière’s claim that, in his critique of Honneth, he has reconstructed a “‘’ [sic] conception of the theory of recognition” (95). In my view, Rancière critically appropriates the terms of “recognition” to show what it would require to become a theory of dissensus and disagreement. Deranty outlines what he takes to be Rancière’s concern with a theory of recognition that ranges from Althusser’s Lesson to Disagreement in order to demonstrate an “in-principle agreement” between Rancière and Honneth (37). First, he argues that many of the examples from Disagreement are based on historical research that Rancière conducted in the 1970s. Then Deranty adduces passages that mention recognition, such as Alain Faure and Rancière’s “Introduction” to La parole ouvrière (1976), where they refer to political struggle as “the desire to be recognized which communicates with the refusal to be despised” (quoted on 38). He also cites an early interpretation of Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s account of the plebeian revolt on Aventine Hill (an episode which also plays a crucial role in the argument of Disagreement) where Rancière writes that the “rebellion was characterized by the fact that it recognized itself as a speaking subject and gave itself a name.”[ii] Rancière continues, though: “Roman patrician power refused to accept that the sounds uttered from the mouths of the plebeians were speech, and that the offspring of their unions should be given the name of a lineage.”[iii] This description has little to do with Honneth’s account of recognition, in which individuals recognize their freedom and the freedom of others as mediated by established social institutions. And then Deranty concedes that “Rancière just disagrees with some of the key concepts used by Honneth,” which undermines the verbal parallels that he draws upon to signal their agreement (36, my emphasis). Indeed, their principled dispute about their respective concepts undermines the very possibility of an “in-principle agreement.” Therefore, to evaluate the relationship between Rancière’s egalitarian politics and Honneth’s theory of recognition we cannot rely on verbal parallels; instead, we must address how the concepts of recognition and disagreement play out in relation to a theory of the political subject, the relation between politics and the political, and problems concerning what Rancière calls “the police” and social normativity.

To address these questions, I will begin with the final essay included in Recognition or Disagreement, Honneth’s “Of the Poverty of Our Liberty: The Greatness and Limits of Hegel’s Doctrine of Ethical Life.” Earlier in the book, Honneth claims that “all kinds of political orders have to give a certain description or legitimation for who is included in the political community,” and, indeed, political philosophy often aims to supply the legitimation for a given society’s norms that decide how and whether individuals and their practices are included or excluded from the political order (115). Hegel, on Honneth’s account, demonstrates the logical and practical coherence of the social objectivity of the various types of individual freedom, that is, how freedom relates, through recognition, to politics, work, and love.

In the book’s concluding essay, Honneth examines, first, how Hegel reconciles two common, subjective concepts of individual freedom within his account of objective freedom as it is realized in ethical life. Both subjective concepts are abstract sides of modern political freedom. For Hegel, the transition to modernity entails conceptualizing social institutions as “making possible the realization of freedom” (160). In other words, on Hegel’s account, individual freedoms are mediated through institutions—and institutions are mediated and produced through the actualization or realization of individual freedoms. Thus, when Hegel reconciles the two subjective concepts of freedom, which approximate what Isaiah Berlin calls negative and positive freedom, he demonstrates that both fail to incorporate the objectivity of freedom as it is embodied in concrete social institutions. According to the “negative” concept of freedom, an individual is free insofar as they are unhindered by the actions of others. While Hegel incorporates this incomplete concept of freedom within his system as “abstract right,” which ensures state protections of individual life, property, and freedom of contract, he faults negative freedom for lacking a positive determination of what the subject can do, socially, with freedom. According to the “positive” concept of freedom, which Hegel largely derives from Kant, the basis of morality is autonomy, the self-legislating and self-reflexive activity of the subject. While this concept of freedom gives a positive foundation to what morality is, it nonetheless remains subjective, lacking a concrete relationship to social objectivity.

These negative and positive concepts of freedom are, therefore, in Hegel’s terms, “merely” subjective, while Hegel aims to demonstrate that individual freedom is objective, that is, reflected and recognized within objective social institutions. This concept of objective freedom is not limited merely to how we understand social institutions. To say that freedom is objective delimits an important intersubjective feature of individual freedom. As Honneth points out, Hegel argues that we cannot rely on Kantian models of autonomy in friendship or love, since the self-limitation of my freedom in the experience of friendship or love is not a self-limitation; it is “precisely that the other person is a condition of realizing my own, self-chosen ends” (164). The realization of a given individual’s freedom entails concrete social situations that implicate the freedom of others, and it is because social institutions mediate our relations with others that they have objective reality. Hegel—and by extension, Honneth—maintains that institutions receive normative justification insofar as they reflect and embody the practices of individuals’ freedoms, and that social institutions, in turn, engender the emergence and expansion of individual freedoms.

Now, one can see why Honneth follows Hegel through the discussion of objective freedom in the doctrine of ethical life: what both the negative and positive subjective concepts of freedom lack is recognition. In our institutions, Honneth suggests, we should be able to recognize not only our own intentions but also the intentions of other subjects. In addition, Hegel identifies three ethical spheres in which each individual’s freedoms are realized in relation to others’: personal relationships, the market economy, and politics. For these reasons, Honneth argues that the “general structure” of Hegel’s doctrine of ethical life, despite some shortcomings, “remains sound even today,” and that this doctrine provides “us with a normative vocabulary that we can use to assess the respective value of the various freedoms we practice” (169; 167). Nonetheless, Honneth also faults Hegel for treating “as sacrosanct” three historically specific institutions as the outcome of the self-realization of objective spirit: the family—“guided by the patriarchal prejudices of his own day”—the capitalist market economy, and constitutional monarchy (171). While Hegel did not explicitly address the possibility that these institutions could be transformed to “make them more amenable to the basic demand for relations of reciprocity among equals,” Honneth contends that Hegel’s account of morality hints toward how political practice can revise social norms and reorganize social institutions to make them more democratic (172). According to Honneth’s revision of Hegel, the inclusion of liberal rights and the possibility for “moral self-positioning” allows for individuals to engage in “morally articulated protest” (174). Thus Honneth allows for a continued moral progress within societies and social institutions to a degree that was not envisioned by Hegel.

*

Despite his Hegelian framework, and despite his debts to the Frankfurt School, Honneth’s project shares some of the central concerns of mainstream Anglo-American political philosophy today: the emphasis on processes of justification and establishing conditions of justice in order to evaluate institutional and normative frameworks. By contrast, Rancière’s political thought shares neither the methods nor goals of mainstream political philosophy. Todd May has already explored in detail the differences between Rancière and mainstream political philosophy (including Rawls, Nozick, Amartya Sen and Iris Marion Young). In May’s account, these political philosophers rely, whether they are proponents or critics of distributive theories of justice, on a concept of “passive equality”: “the creation, preservation, or protection of equality by governmental institutions.”[iv] Rancière, though, makes the stronger polemical claim that political philosophy embeds itself in, and offers justification for, regimes of inequality that he calls “the police” or “policing.” One of the most striking features of Rancière’s work is his claim that what we typically call politics, even in its most democratic forms (voting, deliberation, governance, and popular legitimation), is policing. In Disagreement, Rancière defines the police as:

first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and that another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.[v]

Since this definition of the police sounds very close to the way that Rancière often glosses his concept of “the distribution of the sensible,”[vi] we should specify that policing produces and reproduces relations of inequality, the stratification of roles within a given distribution of the sensible that partition individuals and groups according to inclusion and exclusion, such as those whose task it is to rule and those whose task it is to obey. Moreover, on Rancière’s account, politics—in May’s terms, “active equality”—is a dynamic of collective engagement and revolt that aims to subvert and resist the stratification and coercion of policing and social institutions. Given that Honneth’s account of recognition emphasizes how social institutions mediate and engender individual freedoms, it then follows that in Rancière’s terms Honneth’s theory of recognition would not be an account of politics as much as it is an account—though a progressive one at that—of policing.

And yet, in “Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition,” his critique of Honneth (and Chapter Three of the book), Rancière does not use the terms “police” or “policing.” Instead, he begins with the conditional hypothesis that his differences with Honneth are best articulated by treating their respective approaches as competing theories of recognition. At the outset, however, he signals his critical intent by suggesting that “the term ‘recognition’ might also emphasize a relationship between already existing entities,” these entities being individuals and established social institutions (83). When, then, Rancière concludes that he’s sketched, through his critique of Honneth, his own theory of recognition, he’s appropriated the language of critical theory to articulate a politics of dissensus and disagreement.

Rancière pursues this hypothesis—that he and Honneth are outlining competing theories of recognition—in order to locate their central points of disagreement. In Disagreement, Rancière defines disagreement (la mésentente) as a specific kind of political challenge to a given order of policing, “a determined kind of speech situation in which one of the interlocutors at once understands [entend] and does not understand [entend] what the other is saying.”[vii] In French, the term la mésentente plays on different connotations of the verb entendre, between “to hear” and “to understand.” On Rancière’s account, the politics of disagreement emerges when the marginalized or oppressed (what he calls “the part with no part”) within a given social order challenge the ways in which society is policed, and often these challenges are phrased in terms that have readily accepted meanings within society. However, politically contentious terms, such as equality, rights, or justice are given inventive new meanings that challenge the normative frameworks of a given regime of policing; the part with no part who are contesting injustice and the police can “hear” the same demands but “understand” entirely different things. Many political theorists lament this ambiguity and aim to define it away. However, Rancière argues that the ambiguity of our contentious terms and ideals makes dissensus possible. That is, this ambiguity makes it possible to identify how these politically contentious terms circulate between policing and politics, how they come to articulate and combat inequality and coercion. For example: justice, for some, means due process and equal consideration before the law, while justice for movements such as Black Lives Matter opens on to both a broad indictment of how so-called due process legitimates injustice against African-Americans who are victims of police violence, and a broader vision of transformative social justice.

In “Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition,” Rancière uses disagreement in a broader, dialogical sense rather than its specific, political sense. He argues that dialogue—to be truly dialogical—must be an “act of communication [which] is already an act of translation, located on a terrain that we don’t master” (84). Dialogue always involves translation, distortion, but also invention; in terms of philosophy, it means that both interlocutors must think outside of their usual terminology: distortion remains “at the heart of any mutual dialogue, at the heart of the form of universality on which dialogue relies” (84). But Rancière also suggests that dialogue, in its more specific, political sense, requires acknowledging the “asymmetry in positions” between interlocutors. This claim summarizes his differences with Habermas, which he had previously outlined in Disagreement: acknowledging how asymmetry and power distort the ideals of political dialogue entails, in Rancière’s account, a stringent form of universalism that demands philosophers to confront not just institutional barriers to democratic deliberation, but also how the processes of deliberation function to exclude certain forms of political speech and action. Thus Rancière’s critical question: to what degree does Honneth’s theory of recognition rely on the presupposition that the demands of political subjects have always already been mediated by social institutions?

To confront this question, Rancière proposes three working definitions of recognition. Two reflect common usage: on the one hand, recognition means the concurrence of a perception with prior knowledge, as when we recognize a friend, location, or information; on the other hand, recognition in the moral sense designates how we recognize other individuals as autonomous beings like ourselves. In both cases, Rancière notes, “re-cognition” functions as an act of confirmation. He then hypothesizes that recognition could also be conceptualized in the terms of what he calls a distribution of the sensible. Recognition, then, “focuses on the configuration of the field in which things, persons, situations, and arguments can be identified” (85). In this sense, recognition comes prior to any act of confirmation—and the critique of recognition entails disagreement over the conditions in which persons, things, or situations are understood as such.

We could ask, for instance, how is it that a given regime of policing frames some enunciations as political demands against injustice and others as merely subjective complaints or even noise? And we could use an analysis of this situation to attack the broader norms that legitimate this distribution of speech and noise.  While Rancière acknowledges that Honneth’s account of recognition “echoes” his own polemical account, he raises a crucial question: to what degree does Honneth’s account rely on the two connotations of the common usage, presuming a stable distribution of the sensible or normative framework that relies on an “identitarian conception of the subject” that conflicts with a “conception of social relations as mutual” or dynamically or socially constructed (85)?

First, Rancière contends that Honneth embraces an “anthropological-psychological” concept of the subject that is heavily indebted to a Hegelian “juridical definition of the person” (87). Thus Honneth’s account of the subject’s struggle for recognition emphasizes the affirmation of self-identity and self-integrity within the intersubjective structure of recognition. In other words, it’s the same integral individual subject who is seeks recognition within a multiplicity of situations related to love, work, or politics. Then, Rancière argues that this juridical model of the integral identity of the subject conflicts with its claim to articulating intersubjective social agency—a point encapsulated in Honneth’s summary of love and recognition in the book: “in friendship and love my experience is precisely that the other person is a condition of my realizing my own, self-chosen ends” (164). To say that love involves two individuals realizing their respective ends and interests through another is overly juridical. To Honneth, Rancière counterposes love as it is found in À la recherche du temps perdu, where Proust describes love as a dynamic and aesthetic construction of an other. Rancière writes:

What appears at the beginning is the confused apparition of a multiplicity, an impersonal patch on a beach. Slowly the patch appears as a group of young girls, but is still a kind of impersonal patch. There are many metamorphoses in that patch, in the multiplicity of young girls, through to the moment when the narrative personifies this impersonal multiplicity, gives it the face of one person, the object of love, Albertine. (88)

Rancière offers this counternarrative to show how our theoretical frameworks delimit the possibilities of social agency that we are able to recognize—a criticism that Honneth subsequently accepts.

Rancière’s attention to this point can perhaps explain how Rancière’s terminology can be alternately powerful and abstract. When he opposes the politics of equality to policing, it readily calls to mind clashes between protestors and cops, though politics cannot be reduced to these terms. However, when he defines those subjects who confront the established order as the part with no part, this definition is far more abstract than saying marginalized and oppressed. But Rancière relies on this level of abstraction in order to avoid delimiting conditions of political agency that could delimit who this part is because it could exclude groups who have yet to emerge and who we cannot foresee.

In general, for Rancière, political subjects are neither self-identical nor self-integral. Instead, political subjects emerge through a dynamic of what he calls disidentification, the rejection of the roles, places, and tasks assigned to bodies within a given regime of policing. We could interpret Proust’s description of love, then, as a metaphor for the dynamic of political subjectivation: political subjects emerge first as a multiplicity, at first an impersonal patch in the social field, until it takes shape through the invention of a name—for instance, #blacklivesmatter or #NoDAPL—for a collective disruption of or rebellion against the police order. Given that all regimes of policing are instantiations of social inequality and coercion, politics is, for Rancière, by definition egalitarian. It is equality, he argues, that leads to a much more exacting concept of universality than an account of politics that neglects the asymmetry between the political subjects who exist by virtue of contesting the social order and the established order of policing. Politics enacts the affirmation of “an equal capacity to discuss common affairs”; in other words, politics enacts the intellectual and political equality of anybody and everybody (93).

The task of political thought is to ascertain how politics involves a “polemical configuration of the universal” (94). The Black Lives Matter movement began with a call for justice for Mike Brown in Ferguson, but, according to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, its next stage involves both “engaging with the social forces that have the capacity to shut down sectors of work or production until our demands to stop police terrorism are met” and movement building through solidarity, which addresses how, while African-Americans “suffer most from the blunt force trauma of the American criminal justice system,” the broader normative framework of “law-and-order politics” functions to oppress the poor in general.[viii] From a standpoint informed by Rancière, the goal of political thought would be to identify the movements and practices that drive “the process of spreading the power of equality” in the here and now, to identify how specific movements involve a polemical force of universality to subvert and combat the normative frameworks of a given police order (94). Far from endorsing a theory of recognition, Rancière has redefined recognition as a politics of dissensus and disagreement.

*

Thus we have good reason to doubt Deranty’s claim of an in-principle agreement between Rancière and Honneth. Indeed, the editors and I reach very different conclusions regarding the significance of this debate because they accept Honneth’s theoretical framework to interpret it, while I refuse to subsume Rancière’s concepts under Honneth’s. The point here, though, is not establishing who has read Rancière or Honneth correctly, but to examine how these interpretations delimit what each thinker believes is politically possible and feasible.

Our first difference concerns the supposed common ground shared by Rancière and Honneth. Though Rancière explicitly chooses to oppose “politics” (la politique), rather than “the political” (le politique) to “the police”, Honneth and the editors equivocate between “politics” and “the political.” However, the terms, especially in French philosophy, are distinct—which means Rancière has made a deliberate conceptual choice.[ix] Politics, on his account, designates a dynamic activity, while “the political” carries the connotation of an original, fundamental political sphere upon which policing has supervened. For Honneth, then, when Rancière discusses equality, he’s describing either an “original definition of the political community” (115) or a political anthropology in which human beings “are constituted by a wish or a desire to be equal to all others,” and this “egalitarian desire…brings about the exceptional moment of politics” (99). In their “Critical Discussion” included in the book, Rancière rightly rebuts both of these characterizations. He holds that if politics takes place, it does so through an egalitarian praxis opposed to the police. To treat Rancière’s politics as a political anthropology, imputing particular desires or motives to political subjects, implies that the debate is about whether human beings are motivated by either a desire for recognition or for equality. We could, in that case, resolve the debate with a political anthropology of desire.

If this is not enough reason to reject Honneth’s way of framing the debate, he also characterizes recognition and disagreement as two complementary forms of struggle with different scopes—but this categorization carries with it an implicit normative claim that recognition is more practical. He argues that Rancière brusquely reduces “the political,” considered as “a stratified normative order of principles of recognition,” to policing (103). Therefore Rancière interprets this stratified normative order too rigidly, when these norms are given to conflicts over their meaning, that is, subject to reinterpretation and revision. For Honneth, the revisability of the normative order allows us to conceive of two types of political intervention: an internal struggle for recognition and an external struggle for recognition. In Honneth’s terms, Rancière focuses exclusively on the external struggle for recognition, which, while it combats the “political order as such,” ignores the “reformist” ambitions of the internal struggle for recognition that aims to reinterpret existing normative principles to make social institutions and their normative frameworks more democratic and inclusive.

But Honneth’s distinction between the internal and external struggles for recognition is not merely descriptive, but also normative: given, he claims, the difficulties in formulating injustice in revolutionary terms, it’s more important in day-to-day politics to “deal with these small projects of redefinition or of reappropriation of the existing modes of political legitimation” (106). Unlike Honneth, Rancière does not prescribe the scope of political struggle within a given situation, since such a prescription functions to legitimate or delegitimize choices we make about what is to be done. These choices cannot be evaluated outside of the context of political struggle itself. But Honneth’s normative preference is part of his philosophical framework: if the freedom of individuals is engendered and mediated by social institutions and norms, and if self-integrity is one of the primary ends of the theory of recognition, then individuals should aim to reform and reinterpret these institutions and norms incrementally.

From Rancière’s perspective, even if we grant that political freedom is sometimes engendered by existing social institutions, this does not entail that all parts of society should recognize these institutions as engendering their freedom. Those who are marginalized and oppressed could just as equally recognize how a given institution has functioned to exclude, marginalize, oppress, or immiserate them. The goal of politics for these political subjects need not or should not be—nor should we prescribe their goal to be—the reform of or formal recognition within these institutions that have historically oppressed them. From Rancière’s standpoint, it is right for the part with no part to combat and transform the very normative principles that legitimate and reinforce these institutions of inequality, and to prescribe reform rather than radical normative transvaluation serves to delegitimize the possibility of formulating and enacting broader goals of political struggle.

Thus while Recognition or Disagreement presents the debate between Rancière and Honneth, it speaks to broader issues about the scope and aims of contemporary political thought. The contrast between Honneth and Rancière ably demonstrates Rancière’s stubborn refusal to engage in the processes of justification valorized by mainstream political theory—indeed, it serves as a stark reminder of how engaging in these problems often, (and in Rancière’s view, always) entails accepting profound social inequalities. However, this book is also important because it shows that if we mainstream Rancière’s work, as Genel and Deranty attempt to do, we lose those parts of his work that are most subversive and inventive—and we are left with only Honneth.

Devin Zane Shaw teaches philosophy at Carleton University. He is the author of Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Rancière (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art (Bloomsbury, 2010).

Notes

[i] Jacques Rancière, The Method of Equality: Interviews with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan, transl. Julie Rose. Malden: Polity, 2016, p. 183.

[ii] Quoted on 38, but the reference is incomplete. See Rancière, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, transl. David Fernbach. London: Verso, 2011, p. 37.

[iii] Rancière, Staging the People, 37.

[iv] Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008, p. 3.

[v] Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, transl. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 29.

[vi] As Rancière defines it in Recognition or Disagreement, a distribution of the sensible is “a relation between occupations and equipments, between being in a specific space and time, performing specific activities, and being endowed with capacities of seeing, saying, and doing that ‘fit’ those activities. A distribution of the sensible is a set of relations between sense and sense, that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation that makes sense of it. It is a matrix that defines a whole organization of the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable” (136).

[vii] Disagreement, p. x.

[viii] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016, pp. 217, 211.

[ix] See Samuel A. Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 50–57.

Aamir R. Mufti:  Forget English!  Orientalisms and World Literatures (Harvard University Press, 2016)

Reviewed by Vassilis Lambropoulos

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal. 

Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! exposes the regulatory operations of presumably borderless world literature.  Second, it questions the cultural control of presumably egalitarian global English.  Next, it traces the Orientalist administration of presumably universal colonial knowledge.  Readers may agree with all this despite the repeated warnings that these three systems remain closely implicated not only in the objects of study but also in epistemological critique.  Mufti’s most radical proposition comes last:  The basis of the modern national and global cultural field is the institution of literature, that is, the disciplinary literary regimen that includes the askeses of composition, the exercises of pleasure, the practices of interpretation, and the technologies of education.  Mufti’s critique of critique itself as an aesthetic ethics ought to be disturbing.  In what follows, I will repurpose his project, reshuffling its case studies, to foreground its ultimate target, literary ideology, namely, the constitutive antinomies of the interpretive freedom, the self-imposed limits and controls of aesthetic understanding.  I will do that by narrating the institutional story of “literature” that underlies his anatomy of world literature.

Mufti proposes that today, as a popular project of translation, circulation, criticism, and scholarship, “world literature” turns an opaque and unequal process of violent appropriation into a supposedly transparent and equal one of free communication.  Its inviting name occludes “the ways in which contemporary critical thinking unwittingly replicates logics of a longer provenance in the colonial and postcolonial eras” (248).  This is particularly evident in multicultural celebrations of the Global South.  Mufti warns against “the triumphalist ‘We are the World’ tone so clearly discernible in the self-staging of world literature in our times.  In many ways, the rubric ‘postcolonial literature’ as used in the Global North now serves as a means of domesticating those radical energies – and not just linguistic or cultural differences – [for example, the now defunct “Bandung” internationalism] into the space of (bourgeois) world literature as varieties of local practice – as Indian, African, or Middle Eastern literary practices, for instance” (92).  Instead of liberal appeals to “diversity” and its token-like selections, what is needed is “a concept of world literature (and practices of teaching it) that work to reveal the ways in which diversity itself (national, religious, civilizational, continental) is a colonial and Orientalist problematic, one that emerges precisely on the plane of equivalence that is literature” (250).  Sensitivity to diversity and respect for difference may express noble sentiments but do nothing to question the values dominating the literary and academic market.

Studies of scholars in world literature often “are salutary in having emphasized inequality as the primary structural principle of world literary space rather than difference, which has been the dominant preoccupation in the discussion of world literature since the late eighteenth century, including in Goethe’s late-in-life elaboration of the idea of Weltliteratur.  But they give us no account whatsoever of the exact nature of these forms of inequality and the sociocultural logics through which they have historically been instituted, logics of the institution of inequality that incorporate notions and practices of ‘difference’ and proceed precisely through them” (33).  Whether they are describing a “world system” or a “republic of letters,” these scholars fail “to understand the mutual imbrication of inequality and difference” (33) in their operations, which is as short sighted as studying autopoiesis in Niklas Luhmann but not Cornelius Castoriadis.  Mufti does not elaborate a new model of doing world literature.  Instead, he examines how this comprehensive approach to culture has been devised and institutionalized for some two hundred fifty years, starting with the observation that its current resurgence is “a post-1989 development, which has appeared against the background of the larger neoliberal attempt to monopolize all possibilities of the international into the global life of capital.  This mode of appearance of the literatures of the Global South in the literary sphere of the North is thus linked to the disappearance of those varieties of internationalism that had sought in various ways to bypass the circuits of interaction, transmission, and exchange of the emergent global bourgeois order in the postwar and early postcolonial decades in the interest of the decolonizing societies of the South” (91).  Mufti seeks “to unmask and to make available for criticism and analysis” (20) world literature in the twenty first century as the main “field force” (199) of the project to subsume all centrifugal possibilities for an international literature under the monopoly of global cultural capital.  He treats it simultaneously as a “concept,” a “field of study,” and a set of “practices and institutional frameworks” (10), and uses a genealogical approach for a “critical-historical examination of a certain constellation of ideas and practices in its accretions and transformations over time” (19-20).  In what follows I discuss much less the numerous and wonderful cases to focus on the larger historical trajectory produced by this approach.

The genealogy of world literature begins with the role that “literature as national institution” (3) played “in the emergence of the hierarchies that structure relations between societies in the modern world” (97).  An international literary space first formed in Europe as a structure of rivalries among the traditions (58) emerging in the “intra-European ‘competitive’ vernacularization,” which was later followed by its “colonial absorption and transformation” (76).  The standardization of the vernaculars was a central part of “a project of ethnonational or civilizational nationalism in linguistically diverse and multicultural societies” (148).  This made possible the formation of “literature” as a separate domain of writing and reading out of diverse guild, church, local, and other traditions.  “The nationalization of languages over the past two centuries all over the world . . . transformed former extensive and dispersed cultures of writing . . . into narrowly conceived ethnonational spheres” (146).  Through an extensive philological and interpretive operation “often-overlapping bodies of writing came to acquire, through a process of historicization, distinct personalities as ‘literature’ along national lines” (97).  This is how literature achieves centrality in all constellations of national arts.  “The (now universal) category of literature itself . . . marks this process of assimilation of diverse cultures of writing” (80).  New practices of reading claim existing textual regimes for new purposes and milieus while new elites are also trained to curate them.  “In this process of the acquisition of literary history, the textual corpus acquires, first of all, the attributes of literariness.  That is to say, . . . it enters the world literary system as one among many other literatures, being subject henceforth to the requirements and measures of literariness, replacing the models and modes of evaluation internal to the textual corpus itself.  Furthermore, in the moment of its historicization, it undergoes a shift of orientation within the larger social formation, being reinscribed within a discursive system for the attribution of a literature to a language, understood as the unique possession and mode of expression of a people” (141).

A foundational act of historicization produced for the first time the terms of a distinct and independent literary history, anchoring a regional tradition in a national logic (143).  When a premodern corpus of undifferentiated writing acquired such a prestigious history, its newly self-regulating “works” entered literary modernity (38-9).   The admission of a corpus “into world literary space as a distinct literary tradition has characteristically taken place since the nineteenth century through its acquisition of a narrative of (‘national’) historical development” (131).  A literary history proper legitimized the literary modernity of a writing tradition by granting it national authority.

Thus the word “literature” in the term world literature “marks the plane of equivalence and compatibility between historically distinct and particular practices of writing” (240).  The word “world” in “world literature” is a world of nations, the new regimes of sovereignty.  “’World’ and ‘nation’ are in a determinate relationship of mutual reinforcement here, rather than simply one of contradiction or negation” (77).  When world literature is invoked, it is important to keep in mind “the forms of nationalization of language, literature, and culture installed . . . precisely in and through the world-historical process that is the emergence of world literature” (130).  Literature and nation are mutually authenticating and reinforcing:  They confirm the antiquity and autonomy of one another. “The concept and practices of world literature, far from representing the superseding of national forms of identification of language, literature, and culture, emerged for the first time precisely along the forms of . . . nation-thinking” (97).  In addition, world literature played an important role in the orientation of national literatures toward the global space to which every nation could make its own “distinct national contribution” (112).  This role ought to be placed in an even broader global context since it is important to stress that “the emergence and modes of functioning of world literature, as the space of interaction between and articulation of the ‘national’ or regional literatures, are elements of the much-wider historical process of the emergence of the modern, bourgeois state and its dissemination worldwide, under colonial and semicolonial conditions, as the normative state-form of the modern era” (98).  Literature strengthened the claim of the national state against other state forms by giving voice to its organic character.

It is in this broader context that Mufti introduces world literature as “the (bourgeois) understanding and experience of the world as an assemblage of ‘literary’ or expressive traditions, whose very ground of possibility was the Orientalist knowledge revolution” (90).  Tracing “the historical dialectic of Orientalism and/as world literature” (38) within literary studies since the late 18^th century (99), he highlights the production of entirely new objects of study and insists on the central role “that philological Orientalism played in producing and establishing a method and a system for classifying and evaluating diverse forms of textuality, now all processed and codified uniformly as literature” (80).  If national literature was from the beginning world literature too, this was based on Orientalist assumptions.  Mufti’s strong thesis is that “a genealogy of world literature . . . leads to the classical phase of modern Orientalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an enormous assemblage of projects and practices that was the ground for the emergence of the concept of world literature as for the literary and scholarly practices it originally referenced” (19).  The project of philological Orientalism, from the microscopic level of the text to the macroscopic one of the library, produces an entire hermeneutics, which “may be understood as a set of processes for the reorganization of language, literature, and culture on a planetary scale that effected the assimilation of heterogeneous and dispersed bodies of writing onto the plane of equivalence and evaluability that is (world) literature, fundamentally transforming in the process their internal distribution and coherence, their modes of authorization, and their relationship to the larger social order and social imaginaries in their place of origin” (145).  In a nutshell, this is how the colonial Orient was collected, archived, studied, and administered, and the regimes of the truth of the empire established and imposed.

Orientalism should be understood not only as the apparatus that produced the Orient as a domain of interpretation and administration but additionally as “the cultural system that for the first time articulated a concept of the world as an assemblage of ‘nations’ with distinct expressive traditions, above all ‘literary’ ones.  Orientalism thus played a crucial role in the emergence of the cultural logics of the modern bourgeois world, an element of European self-making, first of all” (35).  In this respect, as in others, the author acknowledges his predecessor, Edward Said, whose  “entire effort in Orientalism was (at one level) to argue for the centrality of Orientalism, as cultural logic and enterprise, to the emergence of modern European culture, to Europe’s self-making” (75).  Mufti illustrates his argument with a fascinating example, proposing that the “lyricization of poetry in the West,” that is, the “gradual expansion of . . . ‘lyric’ norms of expression . . .  to encompass” all practices of reading and writing poetry, is “an intercultural and worldwide process” that can be traced back to the “Orientalist ‘discovery’ of the ‘ancient’ poetic traditions of the ‘Eastern nations’” (71).   By considering the Orient/Occident interplay, a genealogy of the early concepts and practices of world literature shows how a “’lyric’ sensibility emerged in Europe at the threshold of modernity in the encounter with ‘Oriental’ verse and, having taken over the universe of poetic expression in the West, became a benchmark and a test for ‘Oriental’ writing traditions themselves, erasing in the process all memory of its intercultural origins” (74).

Together, philological Orientalism and (adopting a contrast of Erich Auerbach’s, Herder’s “Nordic” national rather than Vico’s “Latinate civilizatory”) philosophical historicism made the new concept of world literature possible.  The combined Orientalist and historicist thinking legitimized both the different manners of being human and “the same manner of being different” (77).  In addition to its contribution to European self-making, Orientalism contributed to world making as well and deserves to be studied “as an articulated and effective imperial system of cultural mapping, which produced for the first time a conception of the world as an assemblage of civilizational entities, each in possession of its own textual and/or expressive traditions” (20).  Oriental mapping structured “the cultural logic of the modern, bourgeois West in its outward orientation” (11) and facilitated the expansionist “transformation of societies on a world scale” (90).  In non-Western societies it fabricated “forms of cultural authority tied to the claim to authenticity of (religious, cultural, and national) ‘tradition’” (27).

Orientalism was first activated in the production, periodization, and territorialization of India.  “What the early generation of Orientalists encountered on the subcontinent was not one single culture of writing but rather a loose articulation of different, often overlapping but also mutually exclusive, systems based variously on Persian, Sanskrit, and a large number of the vernacular registers, often more than one in a single language, properly speaking” (104-5).  To make sense of this variety and complexity, they re-structured it completely on the basis of the only model they knew and trusted, the historicist narrative of an evolutionary national history.  “The German and eventually pan-European discourse of world literature is thus fundamentally indebted to and predicated on” (104) the British colonial project of Indological philology, launched near the end of the 18^th century.  “It is in this manner, by providing the materials and the practices of a new cosmopolitanism (as well as indigenist or particularist) conception of the world as linguistic and cultural assemblage, that English began to supplant the neoclassical order on the continent in which above all others French and France had provided the norms for literary production” (109).  Non-Western textual traditions entered the literary space as “literature” through the revolution of the philological knowledge that included the “discovery” of classical languages in the East and the invention of their family tree (58).  Eastern writing practices were absorbed into “literature” when their ancient works were classicized, that is, established as the original tradition of a civilization and arranged as its core national canon.

Mufti documents “that Orientalist theories of cultural difference are grounded in a notion of indigeneity as the condition of culture – a chronotope, properly speaking, of deep habitation in time – and that therefore nationalism is a fundamentally Orientalist cultural impulse” (37).  What he calls the “chronotope of the indigenous” (74) consists of “spatiotemporal figures of habitation” (74) deeply rooted in both place/territory and time/history (129).  Its territorially common ground validates “the authenticity of tradition” (112).  Consequently, the task of genealogical inquiry is “to give a historical account of the acquisition of literary history . . . by a vast, diffuse, and internally differentiated body of writing … a historical (and critical) account of the . . . ascription of historicality . . . structured around the chronotope of the indigenous” (143).  The Orientalist practice of indigenization standardized the pluralist logic of a pre-modern cultural space into a differentiated linguistic-literary field and ushered it into the colonial “world republic of letters.”

The “dual process of indigenization” (116) of language, literature, and culture, which incorporates of the intertwined strategies of historicism and Orientalism, consisted in classicizing (say, into Sanskrit) a civilization (say, the Indo-Persian one) and vernacularizing (say, into Urdu and Hindi) its cosmopolitanism (say, the subcontinental one).  Τhus, through indigenization, Indian writing essentialized itself into a national literature in order to be admitted to the Orientalist canon of world literature and join the global system of different and unique cultures.  The overlapping colonial cultural projects of indigenization “in the name of return to the origin” (173) and vernacularization as recovery of “authenticity” (251) are inseparable from bourgeois modernization (119).  “It is thus in English as cultural system, broadly conceived – namely, in the new Indology and its wider reception in the Euro-American world – that the subcontinent was first conceived of in the modern era as a single cultural entity, a unique civilization with its roots on the Sanskritic and more particularly Vedic texts of the Aryans. . . .  The idea that India is a unique national civilization in possession of a ‘classical’ culture was first postulated on the terrain of literature, that is, in the very invention of the idea of Indian literature in the course of the philological revolution” (109).  The encounter between Oriental philology and Occidental literature produced a national literary model that inspired the Indian national sentiment and identity (115) and created the “institution of Indian literature” (37, 73).

I have constructed here the chronological genealogy of world literature that drives Mufti’s argument, the linear story that is plotted in his book through complex discussions of practices, notions, and texts.  The “world” of world literature consists of indigenous cultures using vernaculars to sustain literature as their national institution.  Their heterogeneity is predicated on standardized difference, their cosmopolitanism is based on the nation-state, their unity guaranteed by unequal power relations, and they can all be traced to the Orientalist construction of the colonial archive, be it registry, collection, or museum.  Mufti puts into practice with great integrity and virtuosity his conviction that “the task of criticism today is at the very least the untangling and rearranging of the various elements presently congealed into seemingly distinct and autonomous objects of divergent literary histories.  The critical task of overcoming the colonial logics persistently at work in the formation of literary and linguistic identities today is thus indistinguishable from the task of pushing against the multiple identarian assumptions, colonial and Orientalist in nature, of Hindi and Urdu’s mutual and religiously marked distinctness and autonomy.  A post-colonial philology of this literary and linguistic complex can never adequately claim to be produced from a position uncontaminated by the language polemic that now constitutes it and can only proceed by working through its terms.  This secular-critical task, furthermore, corresponds not to the erection of some image of a heterogeneous past but to the elaboration of the contradictory contemporary situation of language and literature itself” (128-9).  Forgetting English is possible only in English.

He advocates resistance both to the colonial gaze and national authenticity, asking fellow scholars to “forget” (that is, learn to question by working with) not only English and the “world” in world literature but also the prefix in post-colonial.  “If, on the one hand, I urge world literature studies to take seriously the colonial origins of the very concept and practices they take as their objet of study, on the other, I hope to question the more or less tacit nationalism of many cotemporary attempts to champion the cultural products of the colonial and postcolonial world against the dominance of European and more broadly Western cultures and practices” (53).  This position exemplifies notion of a contrapuntal criticism that takes into account intertwined perspectives and discourses. “No self-described attempt to ‘return’ to tradition, religious or secular, can sustain its claim to be autonomous of ‘the West’ as Other. . . . No attempt at self-definition and self-exploration can therefore bypass a historical critique of the West and its emergence into this particular position of dominance.  And, in this sense, the critique of the West and the logics of its imperial expansion from a postcolonial location is in fact a self-critique, since this location is at least partially a product of that historical process” (153-4).

While both Orientalism and Occidentalism/Anglicism seek to capture an “one-world” reality, they are caught between the local and the cosmopolitan, the particular and the universal (3).  By consciously operating within these tensions without being at home in either of their poles, the exilic perspective introduced by Auerbach and later advocated by Said can avoid both cosmopolitan detachment and communal narcissism.  An “exilic rethinking of the philology of world literature” (41) would become the basis for a radicalized “philology as homeless practice” (200), for a “historically engaged and linguistically attuned” (241) secular criticism with a “missing homeland” (202).  Supporting neither transnational nor autochthonous social imaginaries, it can provide a dialectically alert account of concrete cultural circumstances “because it captures simultaneously the violent exclusions of the national frame, the material reality of its (physical as well as symbolic) borders, the dire need to overcome its destructive fixations, and its inescapability in the present moment” (194).

In his conclusion, addressing the central case of post-colonial subcontinent, Mufti supplements the exilic perspective with an additional one, also drawn from twentieth century experience, which promises to offer intrinsic means of study by drawing explicitly on partition as condition and modality since the “politics of linguistic and literary indigenization is a distinct element in the larger historical process that culminated in the religio-political partition of India in 1947 and is thus at the same time an important element in the history of the worldwide institution of world literature” (38).  In a manner reminiscent of the ways in which post-Heideggerian thought puts metaphysics “under erasure,” Mufti puts the subcontinent under partition.  “In light of the historical analysis of the cultural logic of Orientalism-Anglicism operating in the long, fitful, and ongoing process of bourgeois modernization in the subcontinent that I have attempted here, the task of criticism with respect to the field of culture and society in the region is therefore to adopt partition as method, to enter this field and inhabit the processes of its bifurcation, partition not merely as event, result, or outcome but rather as the very modality of culture, a political logic that inheres in the core concepts and practices of the state” (200).  Not a closed part of the past or even its living memory, partition is “the very condition of possibility of nation-statehood and therefore the ever-renewed condition of national experience in the subcontinent” (201).  The political logic of partition is inherent in the normative majoritarianism of the modern nation-state which by definition entails the minoritarization of certain groups and practices, a crisis of legitimacy leading to the partition of society (200-1).  “To argue for partition as method is, therefore, to argue for extracting submerged modes of thinking and feeling from the ongoing historical experience that is partition” (202).

Furthermore, in the twenty first century this condition operates far beyond the subcontinent.  Ours is a time of proliferating boundaries where the traditional institution of the border of the nation-state is undergoing internal and external challenges and transformations, with some of its functions “redistributed throughout social space” (7) and others globalized, turning it into a “universalized institution” (201).  What is the meaning of world literature in a world where borders are traversing urban, regional, national, and transnational environments and literature often functions as a generalized cartography?  With this question I will proceed to indicate just a few of the many fields of inquiry where this book deserves to be studied and activated.

Mufti’s notion of “partition as method,” which enriches the problematic of books like Asia as Method:  Toward Deimperialization (21010) by Kuan-Hsing Chen’s and Border as Method (2013) by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, should be of obvious interest to Border Studies, an interdisciplinary field that since the 1980s has been examining geographical, political, economic, cultural, and other boundaries primarily in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and with an emphasis on matters of migration and gender.  The field started by looking at legal, political, and lexical definitions but it has been expanding to consider how borderscapes are narrated, performed, and de-legitimized in the Global South.  An anatomy of world literature would complement current studies of the ways in which, in addition to lands, borderings distribute languages, communities, stories, signs, and jurisdictions.  The order of literature since its national and Oriental origins shows borders working as epistemological devices and markers of relations rather than lines and locations.

An adjacent and even more interdisciplinary field is the study of territories and their flux in the integrated post-industrial world.  Influenced by the work of Deleuze & Guattari (with their interests from “minor literature” to plateaus to nomadology), it has radically shifted emphasis from the structure to the flow of capital and the dominant econo-semiotic system, which Mufti too has done with literature.  The “assemblage of enunciation” might fit well with his notion of the writing corpus, and the “plane of immanence” with his “plane of equivalence.”  Most importantly, the Deleuzian “rhythm” of difference and repetition would resonate with the contrapuntal circulation of literature in the post-colonial milieu.

The sociology of culture would benefit greatly from attention to the emergence of the literary sphere and its citizenry, whose members often belong to the national intellectual aristocracy.  Given its interest in the ways in which Bourdieu’s habitus operates according to a logic of practice, it would examine the subfield of literature within the objects, norms, and practices of the cultural field.  Mufti’s work on production and appropriation, and above all domination through symbolic power, provide numerous examples of the kind of capital gained and interest served by disinterested taste as competence and distinction as performance.

The quest for cultural capital and symbolic power has been driven by the counter-political ideology of the aesthetic state, a milieu and habitus where aesthetic practices constitute the highest form of politics.  Mufti contributes greatly to an understanding of this regime, including the institutions it establishes and cherishes.  The bourgeois subject, who is the citizen of that ideal state, responds to the functional differentiation of society in distinct borderlands with the democratization of art and the sacralization of high culture. Through the proper literary education, fiction and poetry train readers to achieve a Kantian freedom of aesthetic autonomy by giving the interpretive law to themselves above the constraints of any internal or external partition.

The path from the sociology of culture to its ideology may lead next to its ethics, namely, art as a spiritual ascesis.  Mufti has discussed the political rationality of the humanities and the aesthetically administered university.  His rigorous genealogical approach may be supplemented by Ian Hunter’s interest in humanism and the pre-national state of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the aesthetic discipline of literary cultivation that emerged with Romantic literature and philosophy.  The origins of the philological skills that mobilized Orientalism to create world literature may also lie in a combination of artistic pleasure as worldly ethical competence with literary criticism as a moral practice of the self, that is, in the aesthetico-ethical training of the self in interpretive (self-)problematization which first produced the reader of literature.

In addition to chronicling the emergence of world literature, Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! reflects on “just about the most encompassing cultural concept of our times, the notion of the systematic totality of the expressive productions of nothing less than humanity in its entirety.” (252).  Through a genealogy of literary comparison it raises the question of doing comparative humanities on a global level.  That is why it ought to have a broad scholarly and pedagogical impact.  This is not a book that scholars may read with profit, and then simply add to their bibliography and syllabus.  It invites reflection on what it means to compare at a time of universal comparability, that is, when everything is comparable (and also appears contemporary) to everything else.  Rather than seeking to add unknown or neglected materials to our canons, it challenges us to reconfigure canon making itself as well as the way we put together panels, collective volumes, or institutes.  Ultimately, Mufti is proposing that, in addition to new critiques, World Humanities needs new ways of constituting the humanities as a common.

Vassilis Lambropoulos is the C. P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek in the Departments of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature of the University of Michigan.  He is the author of Literature as National Institution (1988).