Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development (Historical Materialism Book, 180) [Illustrated] 9004337288, 9789004337282

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Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Sébastien Budgen (Paris) David Broder (Rome) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London)

volume 180

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

Klee, Paul (1879–1940): Fire at Evening (Feuer Abends), 1929. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Oil on cardboard, 13 3/8×13 1/4′ (33.8×33.4cm). Mr. and Mrs. Joachim Jean Aberbach Fund. 153.1970 © 2019. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development From International Relations to World Literature

Edited by

James Christie Nesrin Degirmencioglu

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Permission from SCALA to include the Paul Klee painting Fire at Evening (Feuer Abends) as a frontispiece was received with the financial help of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) at the University of Warwick, UK. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2019018994

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. ISSN 1570-1522 ISBN 978-90-04-33728-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-38473-6 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Figures x Notes on Contributors xi

Part 1 Introducing the Field Introduction: Why Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development? 3 James Christie and Nesrin Degirmencioglu 1

Uneven and Combined Development as a Universal Aspect of Capitalist Modernity 17 Neil Davidson

Part 2 Critiques of Eurocentrism 2

Troubling Time and Space in World Politics: Reimagining Western Modernity in the Atlantic Mirror 83 Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu

3

The Iranian Revolution in the Mirror of Uneven and Combined Development 114 Kamran Matin

4

Rationalist or Nationalist? The Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere Luke Cooper

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Part 3 Towards a Theory of Culture 5

Uneven and Combined Development: Between Capitalist Modernity and Modernism 167 Neil Davidson

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contents

Fredric Jameson and the Rise of World Literature: From World Systems Theory to Uneven and Combined Development 199 James Christie

Part 4 Reading under the Sign of Uneven and Combined Development 7

Late Capitalism in Contemporary Fiction Robert Spencer

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Differential Time and Aesthetic Form: Uneven and Combined Capitalism in the Work of Allan Sekula 253 Gail Day and Steve Edwards

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Aesthetics of Uneven and Combined Development: Tanpınar and Dos Passos at a World Literary Conjuncture 289 Nesrin Degirmencioglu

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Demon Landscapes, Uneven Ecologies: Folk-Spirits in Guyanese Fiction 314 Michael Niblett Bibliography 339 General Index 376

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the following people and institutions for their contributions to this project: Professor Steve Edwards, for his support and enthusiasm during the early stages of publication. Professor Richard Aldrich, particularly in his capacity as head of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick, for his support and advice during the genesis of the project. The Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick, for its financial support throughout this project, and in particular for their funding of the image copyright of Paul Klee’s Fire in the Evening (1929). Danny Hayward of Historical Materialism, for his support and advice leading up to publication.

Figures 2.1 8.1

8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 8.10 8.11 8.12 8.13 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2

‘Catino Planisphere’ (1502), by unknown Portuguese cartographer, showing the Tordesillas line (left-hand side of map) 109 The Sea-Land Quality dockside at automated ECT/Sea-Land Terminal Port of Rotterdam (Plate 41), by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 254 Sugar Gang (Santos) 6, 2010, by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 255 Freeway to China 5, by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 271 Freeway to China 4, by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 271 Freeway to China 2 (Portrait 1), by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 274 Portrait 2 (Matson Terminal, Terminal Island, Port of Los Angeles, May 1998), by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 274 Portrait 3 (Albert Dock, Liverpool, July 1999), by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 275 Good Ship (Limassol) 1, by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 278 Bad Ship (Limassol) 2, by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 279 Hyundai container factory and trucker’s graffito, Tijuana, by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 280–281 Twentieth Century Fox set for The Titanic and mussel gatherers, Popotla, by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 280–281 Doomed fishing village of Ilsan (Plates 54–55), by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 284–285 Bilbao (diptych), by Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio 286–287 An illustration of Mümtaz’s Elliptical Journey, courtesy of Tom Wong 307 An illustration of ‘Song in Mahur’, courtesy of Tom Wong 310 ‘Names of Folk-Spirits in Guyana’, by Satnarine Persaud, 1978, courtesy of Satnarine Persaud 316 The ‘Nondescript’: lithograph from the frontispiece of The Wanderings, 1825, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 318

Notes on Contributors Alexander Anievas is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914–1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2014), for which he was awarded the Sussex International Theory Prize, and co-author (with Kerem Nisancioglu) of How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto, 2015). Gail Day is author of Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press) which was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. She is Professor of Art History and Critical Theory in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. James Christie was formerly a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He now teaches English in secondary education in the UK. His research interests include critical theory and contemporary American fiction. He has published articles in Mediations: The Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, and The Cormac McCarthy Journal. Kamran Matin is a senior lecturer in International Relations at Sussex University, UK. He is the author of Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change (Routledge, 2013) and the co-editor of Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Kerem Nisancioglu is a Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. He is the co-author (with Alexander Anievas) of How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto, 2015). Luke Cooper is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Anglia Ruskin University. His research is currently focused on the role of identity, geopolitics and political nationalism in generating social and economic transformation. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume on the ‘new nationalism’ in Hong Kong.

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Michael Niblett is Assistant Professor in Modern World Literature at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Caribbean Novel since 1945 (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) and co-editor of Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture (Rodopi, 2009). His most recent book is the co-edited collection The Caribbean: Aesthetics, WorldEcology, Politics (Liverpool University Press, 2016). Neil Davidson lectures in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of several books, including the Deutscher-Prize winning Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003) and, most recently, Nation-States: Consciousness and Competition (2016). He is member of RS21 and a supporter of the Radical Independence Campaign. Nesrin Degirmencioglu was formerly a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and currently teaches at the Middle East Technical University’s Northern Cyprus Campus. Her current research focuses on world literature debates and manifestations of neoliberalism in contemporary American and Turkish fiction. Robert Spencer is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures at the University of Manchester. He has written widely on postcolonial literatures, Frankfurt School Marxism, and the work of Edward Said. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature (Palgrave, 2011) and, with David Alderson, For Humanism: Explorations in Theory and Politics (Pluto, 2017). Steve Edwards is Professor of History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck College, University of London. His books include: The Making of English Photography, Allegories (Penn State University Press, 2006) and Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (Afterall, 2012). He is an editor of the Oxford Art Journal and of the Historical Materialism book series.

part 1 Introducing the Field

∵

introduction

Why Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development? James Christie and Nesrin Degirmencioglu

In recent years, academic discussions surrounding the concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD) have generally been underpinned by a particular set of assumptions regarding its status and currency. It has been commonplace for those asserting the contemporary significance of Leon Trotsky’s innovative theorisation of historical development to frame their interventions as being essentially an insurgent affair; a guerrilla raid made by intrepid outsiders against the dominant logics within their respective fields. Those scholars who have pioneered the resurgence of U&CD and its reconstitution within the field of international relations have often articulated their work in these terms. It is a picture which Alex Anievas, for instance, employs when introducing the concept; ‘in a past era, the idea that Trotsky’s writings had anything to offer IR theory might have elicited ridicule. Indeed, it did’.1 Similarly in Justin Rosenberg’s writings, which have played a central role in shaping contemporary engagements with U&CD, it explicitly acts as an antidote to the hegemony of globalisation theory and its excesses. In other circles Trotsky has likewise been employed as an antidote to the perceived flaws of Immanuel Wallerstein and the dominance of world-systems theory. However, given the dramatic and now widely acknowledged rise in the stock of U&CD which has taken place over the past two decades, it is perhaps time to question the continuing usefulness of this paradigm of insurgency. The sheer amount of affirmative writing now in existence which is either dedicated to the exploration of the concept and its implications, or which applies it as the theoretical underpinning of its empirical analysis, has surely rendered such adversarial claims somewhat outdated. The apparatus of Trotsky’s concept – the production of dynamic interdependence between advanced and backwards regions within a singular world system, the anti-linear compression of distinct temporal stages in a single spatial location, and the consequent privileging of temporal and economic backwardness as a driver of transformation –

1 Anievas 2009, p. 7.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384736_002

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surely no longer holds the insurrectionary status it once did. Indeed, it is our contention that a point has now been reached where U&CD has largely completed the transition from the peripheral position it once occupied to a fundamentally more central position within the fields which contain it, and that this structural change in the concept’s status opens up a new and exciting range of opportunities for its further extension and application. It is this range of opportunities to which the essays compiled in this collection seek to respond. In particular, our intention in compiling these essays has been to exploit the interdisciplinary potential which clearly surrounds U&CD but which has only been incompletely developed up to this point. Of course, the roots of U&CD as a theoretical mechanism belong firmly in the field of international relations. Even in Trotsky’s original formation of the concept it is fundamentally hived off from his thinking about art and literature. In the course of its recent resurgence, however, it has been exported beyond its original disciplinary boundaries to be adopted as a theoretical basis within the analysis of literature and culture. In particular, U&CD has become closely connected with the project of world literature, whose rise as a successor to postcolonial criticism and theory has been an increasingly central concern of literary studies in the past two decades. Hence, just as U&CD in the political sciences has risen to prominence as a counterpart and alternative to globalisation theory, so within cultural studies it has emerged in response to the issues surrounding world literature and the cultural logic of globalisation. While its core identity remains in political science, U&CD has in this way also developed a simultaneous existence among scholars in various branches of the arts. And while both of these identities continue to enjoy rich and productive exploration in their own terms, there has as yet been relatively little in the way of attempts to cultivate a formal interaction between them. Yet it is precisely this kind of interaction, we believe, which offers such a potentially rich line of enquiry for the further development and application of U&CD as an interpretive framework. Scholars from both the political sciences and cultural studies have much to gain not simply from a thorough and generous reading of each other’s work, but by understanding the concept of U&CD itself as operating in a continuous way across disciplinary boundaries. It is, as is argued below, key to the unique makeup of Trotsky’s conceptual model that it invites the close integration of political with aesthetic experience; of conceptual abstraction with lived immediacy. Thus, while the term ‘interdisciplinary’ can at times smack of the worst elements of the contemporary academy – of managerialism, streamlining, and bureaucratic imposition – we take it in this context in a positive sense, as being capable of fully unlocking the critical power of U&CD. The case of U&CD in this sense stands as a notable exception to Edward Said’s thesis that the travelling of theory beyond its original context

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entails diminishment and loss.2 U&CD has instead always travelled particularly well, successfully expanding beyond its origins as an element within Trotsky’s narrow description of revolutionary Russia to be reconstituted in a variety of ways and often on a universal scale in response to successive historical realities and settings. It is in the continuation of this spirit of travelling as a form of enrichment that this volume, with its commitment to travelling between disciplines, has been compiled. It is therefore worth, at this point, providing a brief overview of the current state of development which U&CD occupies within the disciplines of both international relations and world literary studies. Leon Trotsky, first articulating the concept of uneven and combined development in order to examine the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, famously defined it as ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey [development], a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’.3 This concept offers an invaluable optic with which to understand the nature of capitalist development in the peripheries and the semi-peripheries of the world-economic system, and it has been periodically revived in the Marxist tradition.4 In recent years, Justin Rosenberg, approaching the concept from within the field of International Relations, has regarded the theory of U&CD as a key to explaining the concept of ‘the international’ – ‘the political multiplicity of the human world’.5 Rosenberg’s emphasis has been on the concept’s ‘transhistoric’ quality and its ability to create ‘general abstractions’ from centuries of social development. These two aspects of his analysis, however, were the main points that sparked fiery debates on the concept of ‘the international’ that initially revealed themselves in an exchange of letters between Rosenberg and Alex Callinicos. In this exchange of letters they question whether mode-of-production analysis or U&CD would be a more fruitful analytical tool in the application of historical materialist analysis to the inter-societal. Callinicos, warning that general abstractions ‘may give rise to essentialisms’,6 argues that ‘the mode of production’ analysis is ‘required once you go beyond generic affirmation of the historical and dynamic character of uneven and combined development to explore its actual modalities in specific regions and

2 See Said 1984. 3 Trotsky 1977, p. 27. 4 See Lefebvre 1962 and Löwy 1981, as well as Fredric Jameson and Franco Moretti’s works published in the 1990s. 5 Rosenberg 2010, p. 166. 6 Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, p. 82.

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periods’.7 Pointing out that ‘generalized commodity production’ is not transhistorical, Callinicos highlights the paradoxical condition that Rosenberg’s theory itself is dependent on a ‘mode of production’ analysis. Rosenberg agrees that ‘the general abstraction of uneven and combined development cannot furnish the particularities of any given mode of production, which … are necessary for the general abstraction to be cashed in’ whereas he claims that ‘the acknowledgement of the inter-societal is not something fully derivable from any conventional mode of production approach’.8 What is at the heart of this debate is how social sciences could formulate a theory that captures both the transhistorical quality of development as well as its particularities at a specific time and space. In response to the exchange of letters between Rosenberg and Callinicos, James C. Allinson and Alexander Anievas argue that ‘while U&CD represents a truly transhistorical phenomenon, its distinct causal determinations, articulated and expressed through inter-societal competition, are only fully activated under the specific socio-historical conditions of generalized commodity production’.9 Their argument highlights the necessity of bringing the external (global) and internal (local) conditions together and developing an apparatus that could simultaneously capture both. And it is the question that Allinson and Anievas ask, ‘How can the internal (sociological) and external (geopolitical) factors in social development be united into a single, coherent explanatory apparatus?’, which seems to coincide so closely with what cultural and literary studies scholars have been asking in recent decades.10 Literary studies scholars,11 taking historical materialist analysis as their primary concern, have in the last two decades generally drawn their analysis from Franco Moretti’s utilisation of Wallerstein’s world-systems approach to literary studies which could be regarded as an abstract theoretical model for the analysis of world literature(s), and from Fredric Jameson’s cultural theories drawn mainly from mode of production analysis. Franco Moretti, in his seminal essay ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, borrowing his ‘initial hypothesis from the world-system school of economic history’, points out that ‘international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one and unequal; with a core and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a relationship of

7 8 9 10 11

Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, p. 102. Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, p. 88. Allinson and Anievas 2009, p. 49. Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, p. 48. See Warwick Research Collective 2015; Lazarus 2011; Parry 2004.

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growing inequality’.12 He draws a parallel between this economic world system and the world literary system (as he calls it), asserting that the latter is ‘One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures)’.13 In contrast to Moretti, who explicitly relates his world literary system to Wallersteinian world-systems theory, Jameson enroots his theories under the theoretical approaches of Baudrillard and Mandel, pointing out that modernity and postmodernity should be considered within a totalising singular system that bases itself on the mode of production of modernity (as well as postmodernity), that is, capitalism. In line with Rosenberg’s emphasis on the necessity of providing a transhistorical theoretical approach, Jameson, grounding his thesis on Ronald L. Meek’s ‘prehistory of the concept of mode of production’, emphasises the necessity of a ‘historical narrative’ for ‘the very possibility of thinking capitalism as a system, synchronic or not’.14 Something closely resembling the theory of U&CD, albeit implicitly, seems to be an integral part of Jameson’s analysis, as he points out that ‘capitalism also produces differences or differentiation as a function of its own internal logic’.15 By defining capitalism as a singular economic system in the production of modernity and postmodernity, his approach does not provide homogeneity; on the contrary, he emphasises the particularity of each peripheral economy’s integration into capitalist world economy by pointing out that ‘all the paths of capitalist development are unique and unrepeatable’.16 Jameson warns that ‘a mode of production is not a total system in that forbidding sense; it includes a variety of counterforces and new tendencies within itself, of residual and emergent forces’.17 In invoking Ernst Bloch’s term ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’, he emphasises the co-existence of these emergent and residual formations between the core and the periphery.18 Jameson’s theorisation of modernity exemplifies how modes of production analysis – the methodology that Callinicos advocates – and the theory of U&CD are interrelated; and both are essential for understanding the condition of modernity and postmodernity within its totality and diversity. Following Moretti’s use of world-systems theory as a general abstraction to analyse world literature and Jameson’s development of a totalising approach by

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Moretti 2000, p. 55. Moretti 2000, p. 56. Meek 1976, p. 219; Jameson 1991, p. 403. Jameson 1991, p. 406. Jameson 2002, p. 182. Jameson 1991, p. 406. Bloch 1977, pp. 22–38.

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using mode of production analysis, the debates encircling the historical materialist analysis in cultural and literary studies thus seem to evoke the debates sparked in the field of International Relations. This volume therefore emerged out of the necessity to reconcile the attempts to use general abstractions and mode of production analysis not as opponents, but as complementary theories that could be contained within the conceptual framework of U&CD. In other words, our aim here is to question whether we could develop U&CD as a theoretical apparatus that would function as a general abstraction that could at the same time capture particularities of capitalist development. It must be recognised, however, that within this proposed interdisciplinary structure the direction of travel from the political sciences to literary and cultural criticism is perhaps easier to identify than the movement in the opposite direction. Marxist literary criticism has of course always, and by definition, sought to incorporate a ground which originates outside itself, in the field of political economy. This is nowhere truer than in the attempts of Marxists to formulate a historically grounded theorisation of world literature, generally in explicit or implied opposition to various liberal or poststructuralist projects. One of the most prominent elements of this incorporation of political economy has of course been the systematic deployment of Immanuel Wallerstein. Primarily through the crucial interventions of Franco Moretti, Wallerstein’s theoretical description of the economic world system in terms of core, periphery and semi-periphery has repeatedly acted as a vital touchstone and foundation for world literary scholars. This centrality of Wallerstein’s political and economic framework in relation to the study of global culture can be seen for instance, in the essays compiled in Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World.19 However, it is important to note that within the political sciences the stock of Wallerstein and world-systems theory has somewhat degraded in recent years. For many scholars there is the sense that U&CD offers numerous advantages over the core, periphery, semi-periphery model. In particular it has been seen as capable of overcoming the perceived rigidity and reductionist tendencies of world-systems theory, and consequently as offering a more penetrating theoretical response to the empirical realities of international relations in the context of contemporary globalisation. What this collection seeks to construct is therefore a provisional repetition of this movement within the sphere of world literature. We hope to encourage scholars of world literature to view U&CD as being at the very least a fertile counterpart to world-systems theory, and cap-

19

See Palumbo-Liu 2011.

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able of transcending some of the former paradigm’s limitations. In particular we would encourage those who find the conception of world literature modelled on world-systems theory to be theoretically inflexible to consider U&CD as a more dynamic alternative – one which might even be flexible enough to encourage those more inclined towards postmodernist or poststructuralist positions towards the fold of historical materialism. In this sense Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development might be viewed as a Trotskyian counterpart to the project of Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World. In this aspiration this book is also influenced by, while seeking to enrich and extend and at times to challenge, the work of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC); in particular their 2015 publication Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature. Several of the essays collected here also highlight the fact that U&CD offers a particularly compelling mechanism for articulating the relationship between cultural production and the historical backdrop of neoliberal globalisation. Admittedly many scholars would dismiss the idea of a special affinity between U&CD and our own historical moment, tending to see it instead either as a transhistorical law equally applicable to any period of human history, or as a phenomenon which is primarily manifested in earlier periods of capitalist development. However, the rise of neoliberal globalisation can legitimately be seen as providing the historical ground which initially shaped the re-emergence of U&CD into academic currency. It was, after all, partly as a way of understanding the persistence of the nation state within the form of globalised capitalism which emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the concept was first re-introduced among political scientists. In this sense we feel that the contemporaneity of U&CD can be fruitfully understood as being closely bound up with its manifestation in the historical realities of the late capitalist, or neoliberal, era. The concept, in short, shares a particular affinity with the story which, in its many different incarnations, centres around the collapse of the postwar consensus in the 1970s, the West’s instigation of free market hegemony against both domestic and international opposition in the 1980s, the construction of a putatively universal capitalist order in the 1990s, and the economic and geopolitical crises and regressions of the 2000s which continue to be experienced into the present day. Many of these essays highlight the capacity of U&CD to provide a singularly powerful representation of this period and the lived reality which it has produced.20 Certainly U&CD offers significant advantages over the sci-fi visions of

20

Although we would also acknowledge the fact that there is much as yet unexplored

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a seamless postmodern hegemon or a frictionless, uniform world order composed entirely of skyscrapers and instantaneous communicational networks which have at times emerged from previous discussions of the relationship between culture and globalisation. Such visions should be resisted not only because they veer towards abstraction, but also because they risk participating in the process which they represent by overlooking the unevenness that exists both between and within individual nations. As Doreen Massey states in a far more pragmatic presentation of the realities of globalisation, amid the Ridley Scott images of world cities, the writing about skyscraper fortresses, the Baudrillard visions of hyperspace … most people actually still live in places like Harlesden or West Brom. Much of life for many people, even in the heart of the First World, still consists of waiting in a bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes. Hardly a graphic illustration of time-space compression.21 By offering a differential model which recognises the residual as well as the advanced components of the process of contemporary globalisation, U&CD is able to assimilate such overlooked spaces while at the same time relating them to the universality of the process to which they are also subject. The full significance of U&CD with regard to the relationship between neoliberal history and cultural studies, though, lies in the fact that this historical stage has also coincided with a period of intense difficulty within the identity of literature and the arts. As many commentators have pointed out, the era of neoliberalism has been in various ways tied up with an unprecedented crisis in the status and formal study of art in general, and of literature in particular. For many Marxists, the ceaseless drive towards commodification and the incorporation of alterity has problematised art’s critical social function and led directly to the collapse of its previously autonomous position. This reduction has then been paralleled in attempts to restructure the university according to market

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potential to utilise U&CD as a framework for reading earlier literary periods. Given the primacy which historical proponents of U&CD assign to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one could easily picture a reading of Dickens or Elizabeth Gaskell or Dostoyevsky in this light. Similarly the close connection between U&CD and the aesthetics of modernism (see WReC 2015, or Neil Davidson in this collection) opens an opportunity for reading a variety of different modernisms under the aegis of U&CD. One could imagine, for instance, a reading of William Faulkner’s novels as formal expressions of the historical juxtaposition between the advanced American North and the backwards South. Massey 1994, p. 163.

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principles; an exercise which has produced a crisis within the arts and humanities that is now itself the subject of extensive academic study.22 We believe that U&CD is capable of conceiving these cultural crises in a singularly original and powerful fashion. More than this, U&CD also has the merit of offering at least a potential route for responding to them; primarily by allowing literary production in the late capitalist epoch to be understood as itself a manifestation of backwardness, and thus as accessing all of the revolutionary power which Trotsky’s model assigned to residual states. From one point of view, this means seeing the difficulties within the identity of literature and the arts as being invested with renewed significance in the specific moment that we are currently living through; the moment in which world capitalism itself appears to have entered its late and declining years, or Slavoj Žižek’s ‘end times’.23 As Robert Spencer argues in this collection, the temporality of archaism, decay and backwardness within literary production takes on a new power in a moment which is defined by the degradation and decay of the global economic system as a whole. The sense of shrinkage and deterioration which has been seen as defining postmodern literary production,24 and which is exemplified in the self-consciously enfeebled literary production of a Philip Roth or Cormac McCarthy (or before that of a Samuel Beckett), gains new meaning when it is seen in the light of a shrinking and enfeebled world economy. An alternative viewpoint might look to develop U&CD along the lines established by postcolonial criticism, focusing on literature which is itself produced within peripheral regions of the world system. Such a postcolonial or worldliterary approach would then see the cultural products of such backwards regions as articulating a vital, often apocalyptic insight into the world order which initially produced that backwardness. Michael Niblett’s essay exemplifies this approach. In this regard, U&CD also provides a powerful tool for classifying the formal mutations which occur in such texts. Whether it is the peripheral modernism emphasised by WReC, the idea of irrealism put forward by Michael Löwy,25 or the figure of peripheral realism advanced by Joe Cleary,26 such dynamic contortions of literary form can all potentially be seen as manifesting the violent integration of local and global forces, and thus as being

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23 24 25 26

See for instance the 2005 Special Issue of New Literary History entitled ‘Essays on the Humanities’; in particular ‘Monster’s Inc.: Notes on the Neoliberal Arts Education’ by Elizabeth Freeman. See also Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1997). See Žižek 2011. See for instance Newman 1985. See Löwy 2007. See Cleary 2012.

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available to the framework of U&CD. Reading literary form in the light of U&CD therefore also invites connections to Roberto Schwarz’s conception of peripheral literature as being defined by the juxtaposition of local content with external form.27 In addition, mention must be made of the way in which these essays configure one of the most prominent features of neoliberal economic history; the rise of finance capital and the simultaneous decay of older forms of manual and manufacturing labour. In essays by Nesrin Degirmencioglu and Robert Spencer, U&CD is offered as a potential response to the challenges posed to artistic representation by the experience of a reality defined by the abstract forms of global finance capital. Meanwhile, Steve Edwards and Gail Day argue that U&CD in fact provides a mechanism for recovering the forms of concrete labour which are otherwise obscured by this move towards abstraction within the world system. Elements of this collection can thus also be seen as following Imre Szeman’s demand for the academic concept of culture to update itself in response to the process of globalisation. For Szeman, that concept has consistently failed to keep pace with the realities of contemporary globalisation, and has instead remained problematically wedded to residual notions of national, spatial and temporal stability. In this way he emphasises the idea that the problems within literary studies have developed immanently from within the discipline itself, rather than being imposed by external forces alone. If, as Szeman claims, the concept of culture is still excessively dominated by an outdated ‘recourse to the aesthetic’, then the forging of an interdisciplinary relationship that can incorporate the more conceptually rigorous criteria of political science alongside the aesthetic presents itself as a viable route towards Szeman’s ‘logic of contemporary culture … [that] has yet to be mapped out’.28 The essays in this collection, which read cultural works in light of the concept of U&CD, demonstrate the extent to which this concept offers the ground for the development of just this kind of interdisciplinary dynamic. It is clear, therefore, that U&CD as it is configured within international relations might make a powerful contribution to the study of contemporary literature and culture in a variety of ways. This relationship is left poorer, though, if it is left at this point, simply as a one-dimensional dynamic in which political science supports cultural studies but little flows in the opposite direction. Such a view in fact smacks of a reductive and outdated construction of the base/superstructure dynamic. The essays in this collection, we feel, consist-

27 28

See Schwarz 2001. Szeman 2003, p. 112.

why cultures of uneven and combined development?

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ently demonstrate that literary and cultural analysis has something vital to contribute to and receive from the study of U&CD among political scientists, and that political scientists therefore have much to gain by incorporating the analysis of artworks into their work. Indeed, the specific conceptual contours of U&CD mean that it is particularly amenable to this kind of incorporation. The logic of U&CD does not tend towards the formation of an abstract theoretical grid or map which is then uniformly imposed upon the empirical reality from above. As Allison and Anievas (among others) have argued, the advantage of U&CD is that it constructs a relationship with socio-political multiplicity that is both less stable and more refined than this. According to them, although the theory of U&CD does contain within it an abstract and transhistorical impulse, that impulse is at the same time singularly dependent upon moments of concrete manifestation. Following this logic, U&CD as an abstraction is seen as only coming to life at points of its lived realisation in raw, pre-theoretical experience. Hence Allison and Anievas’ assertion that U&CD is not theoretically self-sufficient; ‘U&CD is not a theory in itself’.29 Kamran Matin’s paper in this collection makes a similar point. Matin argues that the primary content of U&CD is ‘a hitherto theoretically undigested dimension of social reality’, and that the concept itself originated in the desire to fill a gap within historical materialism which was left by the lived reality of intersocietal interaction. According to Matin, U&CD therefore exerts an ‘upward pressure on [historical materialism’s] transhistorical categories’. In this sense U&CD has established its identity at the outer limits of theorisation, constructing itself at the constantly shifting border between theoretical representation and an untheorised reality. It has come to be defined around the tension, or Matin’s ‘upward pressure’, between raw, lived experience and conceptual reconstruction. And it is for this reason that we believe the political identity of U&CD can also be understood at the same time as being aesthetic. For that tension through which U&CD is defined is precisely the same tension which, in the classic philosophical formulae, has traditionally formed the content of the aesthetic. The indeterminate interplay between raw experience and conceptual categories essentially parallels Kant’s founding definition of the aesthetic as ‘that pleasure which alone is universally communicable, without being based on concepts’,30 or that aspect of cognition which occurs prior to conceptualisation. Consequently, if scholars from the political sciences

29 30

Allinson and Anievas 2009, p. 56. Kant 2007, p. 111.

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are looking to U&CD for a way of synthesising pure theory and practical reality, or of articulating the necessary disjuncture between the two, then it can legitimately be said that what they are searching for is fundamentally aesthetic in character. Another way of articulating this is through the idea, suggested by Neil Davidson,31 that U&CD is both a theoretical description and an objective process at once. It is, in other words, both a way of representing reality and a part of reality in its own right. Or, rephrased in the terminology of aesthetics, U&CD is both form and content at the same time. What such a claim then naturally leads to is the demand for the integration of these two components. It leads towards a situation where the underlying aspiration of U&CD becomes the development of a form of representation which is as closely and sensitively attuned as possible to its objective content. And this desire for the integration of content and form, for the cultivation of a form immediately and organically reflective of its subject matter, is again an aesthetic task as much as it is a political one. Political scientists who are in search of a descriptive framework capable of giving adequate form to the lived and constantly changing reality of U&CD might therefore be well-advised to devote at least a portion of their attention to works of art. They may find versions of the formal structures they are looking for both in the exhausted aesthetic, saturated by commodification, which emerges at the advanced centres of world capitalism (the novels of Don DeLillo; the poetry of Ben Lerner), and in the dramatic formal mutations which occur in backwards or peripheral regions when they are thrust into contact with global advancement (the novels of Natsume Soseki, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar or James Kelman; the short stories of Lu Xun or Jorge Luis Borges). By this point the reader will probably have noted that although much has been said in this introduction about the potential application and development of U&CD, relatively little – perhaps frustratingly little – has been offered in the way of a workable definition of the concept itself. This is because it is hard to offer such a singular definition without falling into reductionism. The identity of U&CD has always been highly fragmented, fiercely contested, and has resisted clear or singular delineation. In Trotsky’s original formation it is combined with the related theory of permanent revolution, and attached to the specific historical context of revolutionary Russia. It took the work of later scholars to extricate it from the limitations of these settings. Once they did so, a series of splits and fragmentations over the concept’s true significance

31

See Davidson 2009.

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began to emerge, meaning that the contemporary engagement with U&CD is as much a site of contestation as consensus. Justin Rosenberg, for instance, speaks of a wide ‘spectrum of interpretation’.32 The most fundamental of these splits concerns the opposition between the modernist or historicist inheritors who identify U&CD primarily with its concrete historical manifestation between the 1870s and 1930s, and the transhistoricists who treat U&CD as a more abstract conceptual law whose manifestations can consequently be identified throughout human history.33 Some might understandably find this aspect of the U&CD debates alienating or frustrating, or as pointing ultimately to a lack of substance. However, the spirit of this collection views this diversity as a positive and productive force. Indeed, as editors we see such interpretive splits between abstraction and concretion as reflecting tensions which exist within the concept of U&CD itself, and which are central to the dialectical flexibility and dynamism which it offers as a theoretical framework. Taken together, therefore, these essays embody the variety of contrasting positions contained within the field of U&CD, rather than attempting to subject them to resolution or establish one position as superior. Indeed, the attempt to forge an interdisciplinary relationship centred around U&CD necessarily entails an examination and adjustment of the conceptual borders and limitations which define it. On one hand, it is important that those employing the concept from outside the field of international relations pay sufficiently rigorous attention to its technical specificities. It is all too easy in the context of literary and cultural discussions for U&CD to become an excessively vague and generalised figure; defined simply in terms of any situation of geographical inequality, or slipping into a hazy, complacent vision of skyscrapers next to slums. This collection therefore hopes to encourage scholars seeking to employ the concept in this context to familiarise themselves with, and then to exploit, the intricacies of its formation within the political sciences. At the same time, however, to dismiss a more generalised approach altogether in the name of conceptual clarity is surely to dismiss something that is essential to the value of U&CD itself. For much of the power of U&CD derives from the fact that it is not simply a concept, but a lived reality. It is not just a theory, but an event which happens; an event which is happening now to an endless variety of real people in real places who find their lives penetrated by the infinitely complex but ultimately singular network of global capitalism. To

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Rosenberg 2009, p. 107. See Davidson in this collection.

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do it justice, its registration in terms of subjective experience must therefore be recognised alongside the technicalities of its structure. While guarding against the risks of conceptual vagueness, this collection has therefore embraced a relatively broad and inclusive approach to U&CD. It contains essays which focus on the theoretical specifities of U&CD, but also essays which adopt U&CD more as an underlying structure of feeling surrounding and defining cultural production. Ultimately, what it seeks to produce is a harmonisation between these two approaches, combining conceptual rigour with a respect for feeling and aesthetic immediacy.

chapter 1

Uneven and Combined Development as a Universal Aspect of Capitalist Modernity Neil Davidson

1

Introduction

The contemporary debate over uneven and combined development began with Justin Rosenberg’s 1995 Deutscher Memorial Prize Lecture.1 Since then, opinion among the growing body of those who find the concept useful has broadly divided in two, with both sides able to claim varying degrees of support from Trotsky’s writings. One sees uneven and combined development as a process which only became possible during the imperialist era of capitalism, usually seen as beginning in the Great Depression of the 1870s, when geopolitical rivalry and colonial expansion partially extended industrialisation from the metropolitan centres to what we now call the Global South.2 The other sees it as a transhistorical or transmodal process which can be found throughout human history, although some adherents of this position accept that it only achieved a truly systematic character during the late nineteenth century.3 I have recently tried to assess the relative merits of the modernist and transhistoric/transmodal positions, from the perspective of the former, and will not repeat that discussion here.4 The question I do want to address in this chapter is whether uneven and combined development is not only a process confined to backward or underdeveloped areas within the structured inequalities of imperialism, as the modernist position tends to assume, but one universally generated by the intrusion of capitalist modernity, in other words since the beginnings of capitalist industrialisation and urbanisation in Europe, North America and Japan. If so, then all societies which have undergone the impact of factories and cities – with the exception of the very few which underwent

1 Rosenberg 1996. 2 Ashman 2009; Davidson 2009, pp. 16–18. 3 Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2015, pp. 57–63; Rosenberg 2006; Rosenberg 2013. For the argument that uneven and combined development takes on a qualitatively different aspect towards the end of the nineteenth century, see Anievas 2014, p. 53. 4 Davidson 2016.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384736_003

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the transition to capitalism before these processes began – have experienced uneven and combined development to some degree. The differences between them would therefore primarily be the political context in which uneven and combined development occurred, above all whether the state was capitalist or pre-capitalist in nature. And the question of the state makes reference to another, overlapping discussion in the Classical Marxist tradition unavoidable. Trotsky first formulated what he called the ‘law’ of uneven and combined development in 1930, in order to explain the conditions of possibility for a particular revolutionary scenario, that of permanent revolution, which he had first proposed 25 years earlier in relation to Russia. In this scenario, capitalist relations of production had been established and were perhaps even in the process of becoming dominant, but the bourgeois revolution was still to be accomplished. The existence of a militant working class, however, made the bourgeoisie unwilling to launch such a revolution on their own behalf, for fear that it would get out of their control. The working class, on the other hand, could accomplish the revolution against the pre-capitalist state which the bourgeoisie itself was no longer prepared to undertake and – in Trotsky’s version of permanent revolution at any rate – move directly to the construction of socialism, providing of course that it occurred within the context of a successful international revolutionary movement: The irrevocable and irresistible going over of the masses from the most rudimentary tasks of political, agrarian and national emancipation and abolition of serfdom to the slogan of proletarian rulership, resulted … from the social structure of Russia and the conditions of the worldwide situation. The theory of Permanent Revolution only formulated the combined process of this development.5 At around the same time that Trotsky was writing this passage, his great contemporary, Antonio Gramsci, was criticising the very strategy of permanent revolution which uneven and combined development was designed to explain, in lines which have become perhaps the most famous in the Prison Notebooks: In the East, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relationship between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil

5 Trotsky 1977, p. 907. For the trajectory of both the strategy of permanent revolution and the law of uneven and combined development, see Davidson 2012, pp. 214–36, 284–308.

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society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there was a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks: more or less numerous from one State to the next, it goes without saying – but this precisely necessitated an accurate reconnaissance of each individual country.6 In his critique of this passage, Perry Anderson accepted the distinction between East and West but argued that it was not in fact the greater strength of civil society which distinguished the West from the East, but the nature of the state. According to Anderson, it was Gramsci’s comrade Bordiga who more accurately understood ‘the essential twin character of the capitalist state’: … it was stronger than the Tsarist State, because it rested not only on the consent of the masses, but also on a superior repressive apparatus. In other words, it is not the mere ‘extent’ of the State that defines its location in the structure of power (what Gramsci elsewhere called ‘Statolatry’), but also its efficacy. The repressive apparatus of any modern capitalist State is inherently superior to that of Tsarism, for two reasons. Firstly, because the Western social formations are much more industrially advanced, and this technology is reflected in the apparatus of violence itself. Secondly, because the masses typically consent to this State in the belief that they exercise government over it. It therefore possesses a popular legitimacy of a far more reliable character for the exercise of this repression than did Tsarism in its decline, reflected in the greater discipline and loyalty of its troops and police – juridically the servants, not of an irresponsible autocrat, but of an elected assembly.7 As we shall see, Anderson was right to draw attention to the extent of the differences between capitalist and pre-capitalist states (and ‘Tsarism’ can act here as a synonym for all the different varieties of the latter) and these have to be incorporated into any discussion of uneven and combined development. He is at least partly wrong, however, about the nature of those differences.8

6 Gramsci 1971, p. 238, Q7§16. 7 Anderson 1976, p. 55. 8 Peter Thomas has in any case argued that Gramsci’s position was more complex than Anderson suggests, in that his emphasis on the dominance of the state in the East was not intended to suggest strength but rather vulnerability, in the absence of a fully functioning civil society. More importantly, in his actual concrete analysis of Western societies, Gramsci was perfectly aware that they were not uniform in the extent to which civil society had developed and – a

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First, capitalist states do indeed have greater repressive powers than their pre-capitalist forerunners, but this is not their only distinguishing characteristic. Equally important is their flexibility, which enables them to make gradual structural reforms in ways that pre-capitalist states, of the sort which existed in Trotsky’s lifetime and for several decades after his death, were not; the latter consequently had to be either overthrown by revolution, or destroyed in war. The same type of flexibility is also constitutive of contemporary capitalist states, even those in the Global South or former ‘East’. However backward they may be in many other respects, they have a far greater capacity for absorption and renovation under pressure. Jeff Goodwin’s ‘state-centred’ approach identifies a number of ‘practices’ or ‘characteristics’ which can make the emergence of revolutionary movements or situations less likely. The most relevant to our discussion is ‘political inclusion’, which: … discourages the sense that the state is unreformable or an instrument of a narrow class or clique and, accordingly, needs to be fundamentally overhauled. … Accordingly, neither liberal populist polities nor authoritarian yet inclusionary (for example) ‘populist’ regimes have generally been challenged by powerful revolutionary movements.9 If the states in question need not be ‘democratic’, then this suggests a second difficulty with Anderson’s argument, namely his claim that representative institutions in and of themselves form a second ‘bulwark’ against overthrow. In fact, if we take bourgeois democracy to involve, at a minimum, a representative government elected by the adult population, where votes have equal weight and can be exercised without intimidation by the state, then it is a relatively recent development in the history of capitalism.10 Far from being intrinsic to bourgeois society, representative democracy has largely been introduced by pressure from the working class and extended by pressure from the oppressed. The authors of an important study of the relationship between capitalism and democracy are therefore right to reject any automatic correspondence between the two:

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more unusual point to make at the time – that the more advanced constituted a ‘hegemonic centre’ which produced ‘the peripheral zones’: ‘West and East are comparable, just as variations in the West itself, because both participate in the dynamic of an expansive political and economic order that is fundamentally and essentially internationalist in character’. See Thomas 2009, pp. 200–3. Goodwin 2001, p. 44, pp. 46–7. Therborn 1977, p. 4, p. 17.

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It was not the capitalist market nor capitalists as the new dominant force, but the contradictions of capitalism that advanced the cause of democracy. … The relationship between working-class strength and democracy may be summarised in the following way: a diachronic analysis within each of the Western European countries reveals that the growth of working-class organizational strength led to increased pressure for the introduction of democracy; a synchronic analysis reveals that these pressures led to the development of stable democratic regimes where the working class found allies in other social groups.11 It is true that that mass suffrage has not proved as dangerous to capitalism as the bourgeoisie initially feared it would, but recognising this does not involve accepting the much more sweeping claim that it is the main source of popular legitimacy for the capitalist state. Most capitalist states in the West and the system over which they presided were afforded legitimacy by their working classes before the vote was extended to them. In the case of Britain, the Representation of the People Act, which finally introduced suffrage for all men and women over the age of 21, was only passed in 1928, two years before Gramsci composed his note. The key factor in securing the adherence of the subaltern is surely not democracy, but the concept most closely associated with Gramsci, hegemony, which may include democratic institutions, but not necessarily so. Above all, it is not exercised solely through the state, as Peter Thomas explains: A class’s hegemonic apparatus is the wide-ranging series of articulated institutions (understood in the broadest sense) and practices – from newspapers to educational organisations to political parties – by means of which a class and its allies engage their opponents in a struggle for political power. This concept traverses the boundaries of the so-called public (pertaining to the state) and the Private (civil society), to include all initiatives by which a class concretizes its hegemonic project in an integral sense.12 These are some of the mechanisms through which hegemony is maintained; its content need not be wholehearted endorsement of capitalism. As Jeremy Lister 11 12

Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1992, pp. 7, 142–3. Thomas 2009, p. 226. Although Thomas writes ‘a class’ throughout this passage, what he describes here is only comprehensible as the modus operandi of a single class: the bourgeoisie.

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notes: ‘Capitalism is not maintained by a mass popular affirmation or affection for what the system objectively produces for society as a whole; it is maintained by the way it has hitherto marginalised alternatives against it, a “better the devil you know” kind of common sense attitude, which in turn promotes a notion of apathy and disinterestedness in the very possibility of change’. In this context all that capitalism has to do is maintain a majority of the working class in circumstances which are bearable compared to the imaginable alternatives. And as Lister points out, those for whom it is not bearable, ‘often lack the conceptual and linguistic tools to understand their position in this system, let alone do anything about it’.13 One reason why an irreplaceable component of capitalist hegemony is nationalism, both as a measure of psychic compensation and means of political mobilisation, is to prevent those with the least from acquiring these tools.14

2

The Classic Forms of Uneven and Combined Development

The preceding excursus on the state and hegemony may seem to have taken us some distance from uneven and combined development, but in fact it constitutes a necessary basis for understanding the political implications of the various contexts in which it has emerged, beginning with those with which Trotsky was confronted in the first decades of the twentieth century. The societies which Trotsky originally identified as being subject to uneven and combined development, and to which he devoted most attention, were ruled by absolutist or tributary states like Russia or Turkey which had been forced to partially modernise under pressure of military competition from the Western powers. As he noted, ‘the Great War, the result of the contradictions of world imperialism, drew into its maelstrom countries of different stages of development, but made the same claims on all the participants’.15 Combined development in Russia was therefore generated by attempts on the part of the absolutist state to overcome the backwardness attendant on uneven development, but as Trotsky pointed out: Historical backwardness does not imply a simple reproduction of the development of advanced countries, England or France, with a delay of 13 14 15

Lester 2000, p. 72. Davidson 2015a, pp. 67–76, 235–43, 250–7. Trotsky 1972a, p. 199. Or, in the words of a distinctively non-Marxist historian: ‘Industrialization was, from the start, a political imperative’. See Landes 1969, p. 139.

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one, two, or three centuries. It engenders an entirely new ‘combined’ social formation in which the latest conquests of capitalist technique and structure root themselves into relations of feudal or pre-feudal barbarism, transforming and subjecting them and creating peculiar relations of classes.16 The former levels of stability typical of feudal or tributary societies are disrupted by the irruption of capitalist industrialisation and all that it brings in its wake: rapid population growth, uncoordinated urban expansion, dramatic ideological shifts. ‘When English or French capital, the historical coagulate of many centuries, appears in the steppes of the Donets Basin, it cannot release the same social forces, relations, and passions which once went into its own formation’.17 Other Marxists had noted the coexistence of different temporalities within the same social formations. Antonio Labriola, perhaps Trotsky’s most important philosophical influence, wrote that Russian industrialisation ‘seems destined to put under our eyes, as in an epitome, all the phases, even the most extreme, of our history’.18 But even here Labriola is drawing attention to the coexistence of forms rather than their mutual interpenetration. Trotsky, however, was interested in the process by which these forms were fused, the result permeating every aspect of society, ideology as much as economy. The archaic and the modern, the settled and disruptive overlap and merge in all aspects of the social formations concerned, from the organisation of arms production to the structure of religious observance, in entirely new and unstable ways, generating socially explosive situations. It is tempting to describe these as mutations, except that the inadequacy of the language involved led Trotsky to reject the biological metaphors in which stages of development had been described from the Enlightenment to the Third International in its Stalinist phase: ‘The absorptive and flexible psyche, as a necessary condition for historical progress, confers on the so-called social “organisms”, as distinguished from the real, that is, biological organisms, an exceptional variability of internal structure’.19 Trotsky himself pointed to the existence of such forms in general terms in his notebooks on dialectics from the mid-1930s:

16 17 18 19

Trotsky 1976, p. 583. Trotsky 1972, p. 68. Labriola 1908, p. 133. Trotsky 1972b, p. 51.

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Some objects (phenomena) are confined easily within boundaries according to some logical classification, others present [us with] difficulties: they can be put here or there, but within stricter relationship – nowhere. While provoking the indignation of systematisers, such transitional forms are exceptionally interesting to dialecticians, for they smash the limited boundaries of classification, revealing the real connections and consecutiveness of a living process.20 The dynamic behind combined ‘social organisms’ was the way in which backward areas were only able to make sectional advances in quite specific areas, not to reproduce the overall experience of the advanced. Trotsky emphasises the partial nature of these adoptions: Russia was so far behind the other countries that she was compelled, at least in certain spheres, to outstrip them. … [T]he absence of firmly established social forms and traditions makes the backward country – at least within certain limits – extremely hospitable to the last word in international technique and international thought. Backwardness does not, however, for this reason cease to be backwardness.21 But within these spheres and limits backward societies could attain higher levels of development than in their established rivals: ‘At the same time that peasant land-cultivation as a whole remained, right up to the revolution, at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries, and in certain respects even outstripped them’.22 These adoptions, however, did not in themselves necessarily undermine the state, since: ‘The [backward] nation … not infrequently debases the achievements borrowed from outside in the process of adapting them to its own more primitive culture’.23 Indeed, initially at least, ‘debased adaptation’ helped preserve the pre-capitalist state in Russia. From 1861 tsarism established factories using the manufacturing technology characteristic of monopoly capitalism in order to produce arms with which to defend feudal absolutism.24 The danger for the state lay in what these factories required in order to run, namely work20 21 22 23 24

Trotsky 1986, p. 77. Trotsky 1977, pp. 507, 906; my emphasis. Trotsky 1977, p. 30; my emphasis. Trotsky 1977, p. 27. Treblicock 1981, pp. 281–4.

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ers – and workers more skilled, more politically conscious than that faced by any previous absolutist or early capitalist state.25 Uneven and combined development in Russia created a working class which, although only a small minority of the population, was possessed of exceptional levels of revolutionary militancy. The very existence of the undemocratic state that ‘debased adaptation’ was intended to preserve provoked the working class into destroying it. Thus, for Trotsky, the most important consequence of uneven and combined development was the enhanced capacity it potentially gave the working classes for political and industrial organisation, theoretical understanding, and revolutionary activity: ‘when the economic factors burst in a revolutionary manner, breaking up the old order; when development is no longer gradual and “organic” but assumes the form of terrible convulsions and drastic changes of former conceptions, then it becomes easier for critical thought to find revolutionary expression, provided that the necessary theoretical prerequisites exist in the given country’.26 S.A. Smith describes the trajectory of one Russian worker who had his mind opened in this way to ‘critical thought’: For Kanatchikov, discovery of evolutionary theory came like a lightning bolt … His discovery of Darwin was soon complimented by his discovery of Marx: by 1902, aged 23, he had painfully mastered the first volume of Capital. This furnished him with a scientific understanding of society and the determination to dedicate himself to the cause of overthrowing capitalism.27 Trotsky was not alone in seeing the possibilities for Russia to avoid supposedly necessary stages of development; but those who shared his vision tended not to belong to the ranks of his fellow-Marxists, but to be among the community of Modernist writers and artists whose work was in many ways a response to or cultural expression of uneven and combined development. In his novel Petersburg, completed on the eve of 1917, Andrei Biely wrote of Russia needing to accomplish ‘a leap over history’ in order to escape the tensions caused by its multiple temporalities, even though his vision of how this would occur was different from that of Trotsky.28 Trotsky began to identify uneven and combined development in countries other than Russia during the 1930s. Some modern writers like Fouad Makki 25 26 27 28

Trotsky 1977, p. 55. Trotsky 1972a, p. 199. Smith 2008, p. 78. Biely 1983, p. 65.

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have argued that this involved overestimating ‘the significance for the nonWestern world of the specific political experience and pattern of development of early twentieth century Russia’ on the grounds that ‘Russia was a major territorial empire in its own right, and its absolutist state was able to relate to the geo-political and economic exigencies of its Western capitalist milieu from a position of relative political autonomy’.29 This is true, but of limited significance, since the key point is not whether particular states are able to compete externally in geopolitical terms, but the internal relationships and experiences produced by the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation – whatever the reasons for which they were undertaken. A stronger case for Russian exceptionalism has been made by McDaniel, who argues that the Tsarist Empire tended to produce a revolutionary labour movement in four ways. First, it eliminated or at least reduced the distinction between economic and political issues. Second, it generated opposition for both traditional and modern reasons – the defence of established religious practices on the one hand, and of wages and conditions on the other. Third, it simultaneously reduced the fragmentation of the working class and prevented the formation of a stable conservative bureaucracy, thus leading to more radical attitudes. Fourth, it forced a degree of interdependence between the mass of the working class, class-conscious workers and revolutionary intellectuals.30 McDaniel claims that, since the emergence of the Russian labour movement under tsarism, a comparable set of conditions has only arisen in Iran during the 1970s.31 It is true that the Pahlavi state bore some similarities to that of the Romanovs, although these are largely formal since the former was a capitalist state and the latter was not; but more importantly, McDaniel ignores the way in which working-class movements comparable to and contemporary with those in Russia arose in societies with quite different state formations. What then were these other types of society identified by Trotsky as subject to uneven and combined development? If the first type was represented by Russia, the absolutist state at the ‘highest’ stage of pre-capitalist development, the second is exemplified by China and the post-Ottoman Arab Middle East after the First World War – formerly analogous state forms now past the point of collapse and disintegrating under FrancoBritish imperialist pressure. Here it is the absence of any centralised state which forms the context. Instead of being directly colonised, these newly fragmented territories saw agents of foreign capital establish areas of industrialisation 29 30 31

Makki 2015, p. 486. McDaniel 1988, pp. 41–7. McDaniel 1988, p. 407.

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under the protection of either their own governments or local warlords, both of which presented the same blocks to overall development. And even where industrialisation and urbanisation occurred, uneven and combined development did not necessarily occur, as sometimes the archaic and modern may be too distant from each other to fuse. Smith quotes an assessment of conditions in Beijing in 1918 by a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Li Dazhao, in which he describes how ‘the gap in time between old and new is too big, that the spatial juxtaposition is too close’: Wheels and hooves move side by side, sirens hoot, there is the sound of cars and horses, of rickshaw pullers spitting and cursing each other. There is diversity and confusion, complexity to an extreme degree. … The new resents the obstacles posed by the old. The old resents the dangers posed by the new.32 It was Shanghai, rather than Beijing, where the different temporalities fused to such an extent that the city became both a centre of capitalist modernity and a key part of the opposition to it, serving as the venue for the launch of the CCP: ‘Shanghai thus served as a polyvalent symbol; an emblem of consumer affluence and of class exploitation, of foreign imperialism and patriotic resistance, of individualism and mass society’.33 As this suggests, combined development was experienced throughout the entire texture of urban life where capitalism took hold. Shanghai was in the vanguard in terms of both production and consumption, as J.G. Ballard recalls from his childhood in the 1930s: … Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme. The garish billboards and nightclub neon signs, the young Chinese gangsters and violent beggars watching me keenly as I pedaled past them, were part of an overlit realm more exhilarating than the American comics and radio serials I so adored. Shanghai would absorb everything, even the coming war, however fiercely the 32

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Smith 2008, p. 18. These comments reflect unevenness within cities of the Global South, but unevenness also existed quite as starkly between cities. During a visit to Brazil in 1963, Eric Hobsbawm contrasted Recife, the impoverished capital of the north-east, with São Paulo: ‘It is astonishing to think I am in the same country as Recife. The skyscrapers spout, the neon lights glow, the cars (mostly made in this country) tear through the streets in their thousands in typically Brazilian anarchy. Above all there is industry to absorb the 150,000 people who stream into this giant city every year – north-easterners, Japanese, Italians, Arabs, Greeks’. See Hobsbawm 2016, p. 35. Smith 2008, p. 18.

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smoke might pump from the warships of the Whangpoo River. My father called Shanghai the most advanced city in the world, and I knew that one day all the cities on the planet would be filled with radio-stations, helldrivers and casinos.34 These were not simply childhood impressions. The city had textile mills before anywhere in the Southern states of the USA and by 1930 was home to the largest mill in the world; the first cinema in Shanghai opened only five years after the first large cinema opened in San Francisco.35 But the changes it involved for the working class were the most dramatic. After 1918, workers were mainly former peasants or rural labourers, who were now subject to the very different and unaccustomed rhythms of industrial urban life without intervening stages. Jean Chesneaux writes that the main characteristics of the Chinese proletariat were ‘its youth, its instability, its swollen lower ranks and its lack of a developed labour elite’.36 And in this the Chinese working class closely resembled its Russian forerunner, not least in the openness to Marxism which these conditions tended to produce: ‘The fact that the students and workers … are eagerly assimilating the doctrine of materialism’, wrote Trotsky, ‘while the labour leaders of civilized England believe in the magic potency of churchly incantations, proves beyond a doubt that in certain spheres China has outstripped England’. In these cases ideology outstrips economy, for ‘the contempt of the Chinese workers for the mediaeval dull-wittedness of [Ramsay] MacDonald does not permit the inference that in her general economic development China is higher than Great Britain’.37 Not in terms of general economic development, it is true, but, as Jürgen Osterhammel writes, ‘even at the end of the nineteenth century, the socially and economically “backward” regions of Europe were certainly not ahead of the more dynamic ones of India or China’.38 Trotsky also identified a third type of society as experiencing uneven and combined development: these were among the actual colonies, although not every colony did so. Once the race of imperial territory began in earnest during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, it became necessary for strategic

34

35 36 37 38

Ballard 1991, pp. 18–19. This passage from his late novel, The Kindness of Women, is effectively an unreconstructed memoir, as can be seen by comparing the relevant sections of his actual autobiography. See Ballard 2008, pp. 3–36. Pye 1981, p. xv. Chesneaux 1968, p. 50. Trotsky 1977, p. 1220. Osterhammel 2014, p. 664.

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reasons to seize territories which were often of no value in themselves – indeed, which were often net recipients of state expenditure – but whose seizure was necessary in order to protect those territories which were of economic value, like India.39 But even in this type of context, some industrialisation took place. The British in India, for example, were unwilling to allow full-scale industrialisation in case it produced competition for its own commodities, but were prepared to sanction it in specific circumstances for reasons of military supply or where goods were not intended for home markets – a form of ‘licenced industrialisation’, particularly in textiles.40 As in the case of absolutist states like Russia, there were examples among the fragmented former empires and the outright colonies of how it was possible to pull ahead in particular areas or industries of all but the most developed areas of the West. Here too the outcomes were not always straightforwardly revolutionary, but leaving aside complete rejection of capitalist modernity, there were three possible responses to it, all of which I illustrate here with examples from the history of modern Islam. One was renewal, where capitalist modernity led to existing cultural practices being maintained in new ways which were then assimilated to existing tradition. Eric Hobsbawm has written of ‘the invention of tradition’ that ‘we should expect it to occur more frequently when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which “old” traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions and their institutional carriers and promulgators prove no longer sufficiently adaptable and flexible or are otherwise eliminated’.41 Here is one example of this from the late nineteenth century, particularly pertinent given the currently catastrophic Western levels of ignorance about the development of Islam: In the Muslim world, the Islamic burkah, the full body covering of Muslim women, was growing in popularity. Often wrongly regarded as a mark of medieval obscurantism, the burkah was actually a modern dress that allowed women to come out of the seclusion of their homes and participate to a limited degree in public and commercial affairs. Even in this insistence on tradition, therefore, one glimpses the mark of growing global convergence.42 39 40 41 42

Hobsbawm 1987, pp. 67–9. Bayly 2004, p. 182; Osterhammel 2014, p. 663. Hobsbawm 1983, pp. 4–5. Bayly 2004, p. 15.

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Indeed, as even one of the arch-defenders of the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis points out of another innovation: ‘The office of ayatollah is a creation of the nineteenth century; the rule of Khomeini and of his successor as “supreme Jurist”, an innovation of the twentieth’.43 These examples illustrate one extreme. At the other we find adoption, a similar embrace of modernity – or at least one version of it – and rejection of tradition that we have already encountered in Russia and China, in this case in 1940s Iraq: The impact of the [Marxist] theory, particularly on minds that lived on ancient ideas – ideas that assumed that poverty and wealth were something fated, unalterable features of life – can be imagined. An Iraqi of a religious family, who had been brought up according to the traditional Shi’ite precepts and became a member of the Politbureau of the Communist party in the forties, recalled in a conversation with this writer how when reading a forbidden book he first came across the idea that distinctions between men were not God-given but were due to human and historical causes, the idea was to him ‘something like a revelation’. There was nothing in his previous experience to suggest anything different. He had taken for granted the Koranic injunction: ‘And as to the means of livelihood we have preferred some of you to others’.44 A third response, however, lies between these extremes, but is all the more interesting because it can be seen as a potential bridge from one to the other – adaptation, where ‘contemporary’ forms of class struggle were deployed in order to defend ‘archaic’ forms of religious observance, as occurred around the jute weaving industry in Bengal during the 1890s. During this period the Scottish mill managers introduced both night working and attempted to prevent workers – many of whom had only recently arrived from the countryside – from attending religious festivals, to which the mainly but by no means exclusively Muslim weavers responded by rioting and striking. Anthony Cox writes of their motivations: ‘In part, this growing militancy was encouraged, if not fostered, by notions of fairness and honour held by Indian workers’. In particular, they held to notions of customary rights (Dasturi), fairness (Instaf ) and social honour (Izzat):

43 44

Lewis 2002, p. 127. Batatu 1978, p. 481.

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For many Julaha weavers, the imposition of night working and the attack on their rights of worship, as well as challenging concepts such as dasturi and insaf, also challenged their sense of honour as Muslims and must have underlined the alien, colonial character of the mill managers and supervisors, making them more receptive to the nationalist and PanIslamic rhetoric of Indian nationalism and Muslim reform organisations respectively. The militancy of the workers, though, went much further than was thought politic by many nationalists and Pan-Islamic leaders.45 Much the same spurs to action can be found in the great strike wave of 1920– 2 in which individual disputes were often responses to assaults by supervisors on children or women: The patriarchal character of social relations within the jute workforce, encompassing ideas of personal honour or Izzat, undoubtedly contributed towards male workers coming to the defence of women and child workers. It is also clear that the heightened political atmosphere that accompanied, and contributed towards, the labour upsurge of the time played a major role in the jute workers’ willingness to challenge paternal despotism.46 Thus far, I have drawn examples from the areas identified by Trotsky as experiencing uneven and combined development and having the potential for permanent revolution, roughly from the period encompassed by his own lifetime. Before turning to those cases where the first applies, but not the second, I want first to discuss virtually the only significant state to have avoided both: England.

3

The English Exception

Memoirs of individuals who lived in England through most of the nineteenth century often reflect on the scale of the transformation which occurred during that period. The historian Godwin Smith, for example, recalled the difference between the town of Reading at the time of his birth in 1823 and on the eve of the First World War:

45 46

Cox 2014, p. 57. Cox 2014, p. 119.

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It is a very quiet place [in 1823]. The mail-coaches travelling on the Bath road at the marvellous rate of twelve miles an hour change horses at The Crown and the Bear. So do the travelling carriages and post-chaises of the wealthier wayfarer. The watchman calls the hour of the night. From the tower of old St. Lawrence’s Church the curfew is tolled. My nurse lights the fire with the tinder-box. Over at Caversham a man is sitting in the stocks. … From this state of things I have lived into an age of express-trains, ocean greyhounds, electricity, bicycles, globe-trotting, Evolution, the Higher Criticism, and general excitement and restlessness. Reading has shared the progress. The Reading of my boyhood has disappeared almost over the horizon of memory.47 Yet England had completed the transition to capitalism over a century before Smith was born and these changes began. It was not, of course, the only territory to have done so, as it was preceded by both the Italian city-states and the United Netherlands. But even if we accept that capitalist relations of production were more highly developed in England than in either of these, it is important not to exaggerate the immediate impact of their introduction. ‘Englishmen and women did not know that they had crossed a barrier that divided them from their own past and from every other contemporary society’, writes Joyce Appleby.48 For well into the eighteenth century labour in the countryside under the capitalist mode of production, whether in agriculture or household manufacture, was still carried out in the natural daylight hours and – in the case of the first, at any rate – according to the rhythms of the farming seasons, within the framework of long-established customary rights and traditions. Edward Thompson famously discussed plebeian resistance ‘in the name of custom’ to ‘innovation in the capitalist process’ which is ‘most often experienced by the plebs in the form of exploitation, or the expropriation of customary use-rights, or the violent disruption of valued patterns of work and leisure’: ‘Hence the plebeian culture is rebellious, but rebellious in defence of custom’.49 By the latter half of the eighteenth century, this rebelliousness was not resistance to capitalism, which was long-established, but a reaction to what Marx called the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labour. Rather than ‘a fundamental modification in the real nature of the labour process … the fact is

47 48 49

Godwin Smith 1911, pp. 1, 4. Appleby 2010, p. 83. Thompson 1991, p. 9.

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that capital subsumes the labour process as it finds it, that is to say, it takes over an existing labour process, developed by different and more archaic modes of production’: For example, handicraft, a mode of agriculture corresponding to a small, independent peasant economy. … The work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may be more continuous or orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist, but in themselves these changes do not affect the character of the labour process, the actual mode of working. This stands in striking contrast to the development of a specifically capitalist mode of production (large-scale industry, etc.); the latter not only transforms the situations of the various agents of production, it also revolutionizes their actual mode of labour and the real nature of the labour process as a whole.50 In one sense then, the real dividing line in English history was when this transformation began. Consequently, as Krishan Kumar argues, ‘it seems reasonable to argue that it was only with the British Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century that modernity received its material form’: Partly this is because of the very explosiveness of the development – a speeding up of economic evolution to the point where it took on revolutionary proportions. Modernity therefore has a before-and-after quality that is also the hall-mark of revolution. With the Industrial Revolution, such a quality increasingly became evident to contemporaries, to the extent that for many of them the only significant division in human history appeared that between pre-industrial and industrial civilization.51 The move from field or cottage to the factory as a workplace is one of the most unsettling and disorientating experiences human beings have collectively undergone. Sydney Pollard has written of the process by which English were transformed into industrial wage labourers: The worker who left the background of his domestic workshop or peasant holding for the factory entered a new culture as well as a new sense of direction. It was not only that ‘the new economic order needed …

50 51

Marx 1976, pp. 1021 and 1019–38 more generally. Kumar 1995, pp. 82–3.

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part humans: soulless. Depersonalized, disembodied, who could become members, or little wheels rather, of a complex mechanism’. It was also that men who were non-accumulative, non-acquisitive, accustomed to work for subsistence, not for maximization of income, had to be made obedient to the cash stimulus, and obedient in such a way as to react precisely to the stimuli provided.52 Yet it was not industrialisation alone which impacted on members of the new factory proletariat, but the fact that their new workplaces were situated in towns and cities. Indeed, as Osterhammel notes, ‘urbanization was a much more widespread process than industrialisation: cities grew and became more dense even where industry was not the driving force’. After noting that many of the greatest European cities, including London, had never been truly industrial, he concludes: ‘Urbanization is a truly global process, industrialization a sporadic and uneven formation of growth centres’.53 In the context of English development, Manchester was therefore closer to being a model than the capital. As Engels noted in 1845, previously, the workers had been ‘shut off from the towns, which they never entered, their yarn and woven stuff being delivered to travelling agents for payment of wages – so shut off that old people who lived quite in the neighbourhood of the town never went thither until they were robbed of their trade by the introduction of machinery and obliged to look about them in the towns for work – the weavers stood upon the moral and intellectual plane of the yeomen with whom they were usually immediately connected through their little holdings’.54 In this and preceding passages, Engels may be guilty of over-romanticising country life, but his summary of the conditions to which they were subsequently subject in Manchester cannot be accused of exaggeration: ‘In a word, we must confess that in the working-men’s dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible; that in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home’.55 Thompson noted that ‘industrialization is necessarily painful’ involving as it did ‘the erosion of traditional patterns of life’, but he adds to this gen52 53 54 55

Pollard 1965, p. 190; the quotes within this passage are from Werner Sombart’s Modern Capitalism. Osterhammel 2014, pp. 149–50. Engels 1975, p. 308. Engels 1975, p. 364.

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eral assessment that ‘it was carried through with exceptional violence in Britain’.56 Thompson’s reassertion of the ‘cataclysmic’ view of the English industrial revolution is defensible in the context of a discussion which sought to overturn the economistic vulgarity of the ‘standard of living’ debate, but does not require that we regard that country as having undergone a uniquely traumatic experience. Indeed, as Craig Calhoun has pointed out, when we consider the experience of India, Africa, the USSR, and even the USA, his claim for the singularity of the English experience is extremely difficult to uphold: ‘Where are the mass shootings, for physical violence, and the prison camps and utter defeats, for psychic violence?’57 For our purposes, the point of distinguishing the English experience from that of Other Countries is not the respective severity of their industrialisations, but why the experience did not lead to the same type of revolutionary upheavals which were to convulse Petrograd and Shanghai a hundred years later. There was certainly a high level of class struggle in Britain between the 1790s and 1840s, but with the possible exception of 1831– 2, at no point was the revolutionary threat to the state. The answer lies in the two unique conditions under which capitalist industrialisation in England took place. First, the capitalist state in England was consolidated at the completion of the bourgeois revolution in 1688, at a time when its economy was still dominated by agrarian, mercantile and financial capital. None of the other early capitalist states achieved this. The Italian city-states refused to unite and indeed were involved in ferocious competition with each other, which left them exposed to conquest and enforced regression at the hands of local feudal lords and ultimately the Spanish Empire by the beginning of the sixteenth century. The United Netherlands, although formally a unified state even before the revolt against Spain in 1567, did not possess an integrated economy, but rather a highly fragmented one in which competition between cities and provinces was unimpeded. More importantly, in this context, the state itself remained resolutely decentralised and unable to pursue initiatives in the interest of Dutch capital as a whole, with power lying in regional governments which tended to be dominated by particular capitalist banking and mercantile interests.58 As a result, industrialisation in both areas was largely postponed until nation states were finally consolidated in the mid-nineteenth century. But industrialisation in England arose within the context of a society where the state was already

56 57 58

Thompson 1980, p. 486. Calhoun 1982, p. 52. Davidson 2012, pp. 563–4, 580–2.

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dedicated to the accumulation of capital, and that state had a far greater capacity for absorption and renovation under pressure than rival pre-capitalist states. As Norman Stone notes of the English – later British – bourgeoisie, in whose interests the state acted: In Great Britain, that class existed so strongly, even in the eighteenth century, that liberal reforms were introduced piecemeal there, and often without formal involvement of parliament. Existing ancien-régime institutions, such as the old guilds or corporations, would be gradually adapted to suit a changing era. Thus, in form, England (more than Scotland) is the last of the ancien régimes; she did not even have a formal law to abolish serfdom.59 In other words, while Britain, or perhaps England, appeared to represent an ancien regime (‘in form’) this concealed what was actually a supremely adaptive modernity, which is only now reaching its limits.60 As I noted earlier, the absorbent character of the English state had had nothing to do with democracy as such: no section of the working class was granted the vote until after industrialisation and urbanisation were well advanced. It is rather that the different sections of the ruling class were fundamentally united and presided over a series of protective structures and enabling institutions which had developed over a prolonged period of time. But this did not simply involve repression or control: confronted by major working-class insurgency, they were collectively prepared to make gradual compromises over non-essentials rather than risk losing what meant most to them: their capital. Second, the internal pressures to which England was subject were in any case more containable than in later-developing states because of the extended timescale in which industrialisation took place. As Pollard writes: ‘Unlike the experience of the following countries which were faced with a fairly comprehensive package of mutually reinforcing changes, the British evolution was slow, piecemeal and unconscious, in the sense of being unperceived as a whole’.61 The gradual, dispersed and unplanned nature of the process in Eng-

59 60

61

Stone 1983, pp. 18–19. Non-Marxists have also highlighted the significance of state forms for capital. Despite the business management terminology deployed by Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson (‘virtuous circles’, ‘positive feedback loops’), at the core of their discussion is a defensible argument about the adaptability of the British capitalist state. See Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, pp. 308–18. Pollard 1996, p. 377.

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land had implications for both the structure of the working class and the nature of the class struggle, both of which are in stark contrast to the forms these took later under actual conditions of uneven and combined development. Workplaces remained relatively small until very late in the nineteenth century, not least in London. As a result, trade union struggles were typically defensive of traditional or at least transitional forms of labour.62 This was one of the reasons Trotsky argued for the greater implantation of Marxism among the working classes of Russia than in that of Britain. In the case of Russia itself, … the proletariat did not arise gradually through the ages, carrying with itself the burden of the past, as in England, but in leaps involving sharp changes of environment, ties, relations, and a sharp break with the past. It was just this – combined with the concentrated oppressions of czarism – that made Russian workers hospitable to the boldest conclusions of revolutionary thought – just as the backward industries were hospitable to the last word in capitalist organization.63 Describing the situation prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917, Gareth Stedman Jones has contrasted ‘the revolutionary maturity of the Petrograd proletariat, uniquely concentrated in the most advanced factories of the capitalist world’ with Britain, ‘the most advanced capitalist country’, where ‘the structure of the metropolitan working class still looked back to pre-industrial divisions of skill and status’: ‘A few large plants were lost in an ocean of small workshops’.64 The second wave would fall between the English and Russian extremes.

4

The Second Wave

Only the Northern states of the US, particularly those on the North-Eastern seaboard, underwent a comparable development to that of England. There too an established agrarian capitalist economy, under an existing bourgeois regime, made the transition to industrial capitalism, initially, as Charles Post has detailed, with industry servicing the farming sector in what was effectively an ‘agro-industrial complex’.65 It is unsurprising therefore that in these areas within the US, the class struggle also took the form of a defence of an 62 63 64 65

Calhoun 1982, pp. 60–84, 149–82; Zmolek 2013, pp. 509–792. Trotsky 1977, p. 33. Stedman Jones 1984, p. 346. Post 2011, pp. 98–9.

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earlier form of socio-economic life, although this lasted later into the nineteenth century than it did in England.66 Insofar as uneven and combined development could be found in the US, it was at the regional level, particularly the ex-Confederate states. As Ernest Mandel notes: ‘They functioned as a reservoir of agricultural raw materials and as an “internal colony” in the sense that they formed a steady market for the industrial products of the North and did not develop any large-scale industry within their own territory (this was to change only with the Second World War)’.67 But within the South, even before the First World War, limited forms of industrialisation gave rise to situations more typical of Saint Petersburg or Shanghai than Memphis, Tennessee. One such area was around the Alabama coalfields. According to Brian Kelly: The region presents an almost classical example of what Marxists have described as ‘combined and uneven development’: the turn-of-the-century South included a number of exceptional areas where large concentrations of industrial workers laboured in mills, foundries, and manufacturing plants on a par with the most advanced in the North, but these stood like frontier outposts of a new age in a region overwhelmingly steeped in primitive agriculture, in some places little-changed from the way it had been conducted in the antebellum period.68 The experience of all the other territories which formed the second wave of industrialising capitalist states was not just different from that of England, the difference was caused by its prior existence as an imperial capitalist power, which altered the conditions under which subsequent capitalist industrialisation took place. The most important capitalist states, above all Italy, Germany and Japan, merged and consolidated themselves between 1848 and 1871. France achieved this slightly earlier – 1830 is the French 1688 in the sense of being the concluding moment of its bourgeois revolution – but French industrialisation takes place essentially within the same timeframe as these later developers. Harry Harootunian writes of Marx’s comments on German uneven development (in the ‘Preface’ to Capital, Volume 1) that he ‘was proposing that capitalist modernization is inevitably destined to produce the co-presence of colliding temporalities, contemporary non-contemporaneities forcing people constantly to navigate their way through different temporal regimes as a condition

66 67 68

Fraser 2015, pp. 88–144. Mandel 1975, p. 87. Kelly 2004, p. 11.

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of becoming modern’.69 But the point can be generalised beyond Germany. In effect, the second wave bourgeois states and their industrialisation programmes faced in two directions in relation to uneven and combined development. One direction was forward to conditions which would later emerge in Russia. As Thomas writes, ‘Italy, along with much of Western Europe, had experienced a “belated” modernity not qualitatively dissimilar from that which preceded the Russian Revolution’.70 Their pace of development was faster than in England, partly because of the urgency of acquiring the attributes of capitalist modernity, partly because the long period of experimentation and evolution characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon pioneer could be dispensed with. In very compressed timescales they had been able to adopt the socio-economic achievements of Britain to the extent that they became recognisably the same kind of societies, without necessarily reproducing every key characteristic. The process of industrialisation and, consequently, the character of the class struggle took respectively more intense and explosive forms. Rather than flowing from an already dominant set of capitalist relations of production, the transition to capitalism was itself ‘virtually contemporaneous’ with industrialisation which was forced on the state by external pressures, leaving the bourgeoisie relatively weak and with less room for manoeuvre in terms of making concessions to working-class movements.71 We can see early glimpses of this in Scotland and Prussia. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the enormous tension produced by industrialisation was heightened in both cases by undemocratic state forms – in Scotland’s case retained after the Union with England of 1707 until the 1830s – and expressed itself in moments of sharp class struggle, above all the 1820 general strike in the former and the 1848 revolution in the latter.72 ‘Scotland entered on the capitalist path later than England’, wrote Trotsky in 1925, ‘a sharper turn in the life of the masses of the people gave rise to a sharper political reaction’.73 Similarly, he wrote of the consequences ‘when the productive forces of the metropolis, of a country of classical capitalism … find ingress into more backward countries, like Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century’.74 But because these societies did make the transition to the ranks of the

69 70 71 72 73 74

Harootunian 2015, p. 62. Thomas 2009, p. 202. Looker and Coates 1986, pp. 98–101, 112–13. Davidson 2000, pp. 167–86. Trotsky 1974, p. 37. Trotsky 1972a, p. 199.

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advanced societies, either as a component part of another national formation (Scotland/Britain) or as the centre of one (Prussia/Germany), these moments passed with the tensions that caused them. The second wave states also looked in the opposite direction, back to the English experience in the decisive sense that they were able to accomplish the bourgeois revolution from above – 1688 being the model rather than 1640 or 1649 – and transform the state, albeit over a much more compressed period of time, in order to direct rapid industrialisation and contain the social tensions which it produced, often within the context of archaic socio-cultural forms. The process is perhaps best illustrated by the only Asian country to undertake this form of development in the closing decades during the period prior to the First World War. ‘In Japan’, Trotsky wrote in the 1930s, ‘we observe even today … correlation between the bourgeois character of the state and the semifeudal character of the ruling caste’.75 The former outweighed the latter. Indeed, Christopher Bayly has drawn attention to the similarities between the British and Japanese states after 1868.76 Between 1870 and 1914, both consciously emphasised the role of their monarch-emperors, the pre-existing symbolism of the crown being used to represent national unity against two main challenges: external imperial rivalry and internal class divisions. Both were capitalist states that could be strongly contrasted with feudal absolutist Austria-Hungary or Russia, even down to the role of the emperor and empresses: ‘Russia represented the opposite pole to Japan within the spectrum of authoritarian monarchy – no corporate regime strategy, much depending on the monarch himself’.77 The state structure was crucial, as in many respects Japanese development was far more rapid than Russia’s, as Trotsky himself noted: Even late-developing Russia, which traversed the same historic course as the West in a much shorter length of time, needed three centuries to get from the liquidation of feudal isolation under Ivan the Terrible, through the Westernizing of Peter the Great, to the first liberal reforms of Alexander II. The so-called Meiji Restoration incorporated in a matter of a few decades the basic features of those three major eras in Russia’s development. At such a forced pace, there could be no question of a smooth and even cultural development in all fields. Racing to achieve practical results with modern technology – especially military technology – Japan 75 76 77

Trotsky 1976a, p. 66. Bayly 2004, p. 104. Mann 1988, p. 200.

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remained ideologically in the depths of the Middle Ages. The hasty mixture of Edison and Confucius has left its mark in all Japanese culture.78 The differences were sharply demonstrated by the Japanese victory over Russia in the war of 1904–5. Lenin welcomed the result, arguing that it clearly demonstrated the different class nature of the two states: Here again, as so often in history, the war between an advanced and a backward country has played a great revolutionary role. And the classconscious proletariat, an implacable enemy of war – this inevitable and inseverable concomitant of all class rule in general – cannot shut its eyes to the revolutionary task which the Japanese bourgeoisie, by its crushing defeat of the Russian autocracy, is carrying out.79 In effect, the post-Meiji Japanese state represented a way of containing the tensions created by uneven and combined development, even though these grew greater during and immediately after the First World War: The war signalled the transformation of the industrial base from light to concentrated heavy industries and the ceaseless migration of rural populations to the urban sites of factory production. … Critics, along the way, noted the sharp lines of unevenness between the newer, modern capitalist industries and the so-called traditional sectors, which, in the Meiji period, had grown concurrently and even complimentarily rather than competitively. But by 1920 and the succeeding years, the sharply silhouetted contrast was widely observed in the uneven relationship between the large metropolitan sites like Tokyo/Yokohama and Osaka/Kobe, which had literally been transformed overnight, and a countryside that supplied the cities with a labour force and capital but … received nothing in return. … Moreover, it brought new classes and an awareness of new identities and subject positions, and it expanded the possibilities for women in the labour market.80 If Japan is the most extreme example of ‘contained’ uneven and combined development, all the states which emerged at the same time display similar

78 79 80

Trotsky 1972d, p. 291. Lenin 1962, p. 52. Harootunian 2000, pp. 3–4.

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characteristics, to one degree or another. Yet discussions of their trajectories tend to emphasise not the capitalist modernity which they embraced, but rather the feudal archaism which they retained, often suggesting that this was expressed through military dictatorship (in the case of Japan) or fascist regimes (in the cases of Italy and Germany). Tom Nairn, for example, writes of the latter: In both situations, hastily created state-nations had dissolved a host of older countries – city and princely states, early-modern or even mediaeval kingdoms – in a way intended to be final, and which indeed still appeared to be so in the circumstances of the 1920s. … And yet the liberalprogressive unit, the grandly proclaimed wider identity, had clearly foundered. What way out was there but a drastic reformulation of that identity along illiberal-populist lines, emphasizing the things either denied or side-lined by the former unity regimes? Later we are reminded that ‘ethno-nationalism has normally had a powerfully rural or small-town foundation’ and ‘how rural the Germany of Hitler and Heidegger was’.81 From the opposite perspective entirely, Zygmunt Bauman argues that to treat the Nazi dictatorship and its dreadful consequences as an aspect of pre-modernity is in effect to avoid confronting our own culpability: ‘The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of civilization and the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture’.82 Neither position captures what ‘combination’ actually meant in Germany. As Richard Evans has pointed out, despite all that has been written about ‘Germany’s supposed backwardness’ on the eve of the First World War, including ‘its alleged deficit of civic values, its arguably antiquated social structure, its seemingly craven middle class and its apparently neo-feudal aristocracy’, it was not regarded in this way by contemporary observers, not least because ‘Germany was the Continent’s wealthiest, most powerful and most advanced economy’. This did not mean that no tensions had been produced by the onset of capitalist modernity:

81

82

Nairn 1998, pp. 149, 151. I think Nairn is on firmer ground when he sees Germany not as irredeemably backward, but as undergoing ‘a moment of rural-urban transition – “moment” here meaning not “instant” but a world-historical phase, possibly multi-generational in duration and yet with a determinable beginning and end’. See Nairn 1998, pp. 151–2. Bauman 1989, p. x.

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… beneath its prosperous and self-confident surface, the sheer pace of economic and social change was frightening and bewildering. Old values seemed to be disappearing in a welter of materialism and unbridled ambition. Modernist culture, from abstract painting to atonal music, added to the sense of disorientation … The old established hegemony of the Prussian landed aristocracy, which Bismarck had tried so hard to preserve, was undermined by the headlong rush of German society into the modern age. Bourgeois values, habits and modes of behaviour had triumphed in the upper and middle reaches of society by 1914; yet simultaneously they were being challenged by the growing self-assertion of the industrial working class, organized in the massive Social Democratic labour movement. Germany, unlike any other European country, had become a nation-state not before the industrial revolution, but at its height; and on the basis, not of a single state but of a federation of many different states whose German citizens were bound together principally by a common language, culture and ethnicity. Stresses and strains created by rapid industrialization interlocked with conflicting ideas about nature of the German state and nation and their place in the larger context of Europe and the world. German society did not enter nationhood in 1871 in a wholly stable condition. It was riven with rapidly deepening internal conflicts which were increasingly exported into the unresolved tensions of the political system that Bismarck had created.83 At this point we should note that ‘debased adaptation’ is not only a feature of backward societies. Trotsky saw this as a much more general phenomenon, necessarily caused by the need to maintain bourgeois hegemony over the exploited and oppressed in an era of revolution and which reached its apogee in the United States. In an address to the First All-Union Society of Friends of Radio in 1926 he warned of the counter-revolutionary possibilities of the technological form his listeners had come to celebrate: It is considered unquestionable that technology and science undermine superstition. But the class character of society sets substantial limits here too. Take America. There, church sermons are broadcast by radio, which means that the radio is serving as a means of spreading prejudices.84

83 84

Evans 2003, pp. 19–21. Trotsky 1973, p. 257.

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Once the notion of combined development was available to him, Trotsky saw this appropriation of advanced technology as the obverse of the ideological advances made by Russian and Chinese workers. ‘In America we have another kind of combined development. We have the most advanced industrial development together with the most backward – for all classes – ideology’.85 These are not merely historical observations. As John Gray has written of the contemporary USA: It has by far the most powerful fundamentalist movement of any advanced country. In no otherwise comparable land do politicians regularly invoke the name of Jesus. Nowhere else are there movements to expel Darwinism from public schools. In truth, the US is a less secular regime than Turkey.86 In a striking passage in an essay of 1933 considering the nature of National Socialism, Trotsky commented on the persistence of ideological backwardness, not only in Nazi Germany but generally in the developed world: Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!87 Contemporary parallels will no doubt suggest themselves. In 1932 Ernst Bloch introduced the notion of ‘nonsynchronism’, which he saw exemplified in Germany after 1871: ‘Germany in general … is, unlike England, and much less France, the classic land of non-synchronism, that is, of unsurmounted remnants of older economic being and consciousness’. According to Bloch, this condition was ‘not dangerous to capitalism’: ‘on the contrary, capital uses that which is nonsynchronously contrary, if not indeed disparate, as a distraction from its own strictly present-day contradictions: it uses the antagonism of a still living past as a means of separation and struggle against the 85 86 87

Trotsky 1972c, p. 117. Gray 2003, p. 23. Trotsky 1975, p. 413.

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future that is dialectically giving birth to itself in the capitalist antagonisms’.88 We might say that ‘nonsynchronism’ is the form taken by uneven and combined development in situations where the state had already been restructured in the interests of capital, but where it was now threatened by the most modern force of all, a potentially revolutionary labour movement, which capital seeks to repulse by mobilising pre-emptive counter-revolution under the banner of a mythical past. We can see this in microcosm in the attitudes of the Japanese sociologist and film theorist, Yasunosuke Gonda, during the inter-war period, here discussed by Harootunian: With Gonda and others, it was possible to understand how capitalism had led to the present, but what he feared most, and what his own vision of a mixed culture circulating elements from past and present, Japan and the West, revealed, was that continuous march of capitalism that would eventually eliminate unevenness – the culture of difference – for one of evenness, levelling, and the homogenizing of the cultural ground. It was this fear of ‘modern life’, as he and others were calling it in the 1930s, together with the representations of cultural form that led Gonda, and others, to embrace fascism. Gonda’s agenda aimed at halting the very process of deterritorialization that had led to the present conjuncture by transmuting that national consumer into the national community.89 But ‘debased adaptation’ or ‘nonsynchronism’ can take a number of forms. One, quite different from the Japanese or German experiences, was premiered, ironically enough, in Russia from the late 1920s. Russia continued to be marked by uneven and combined development immediately after the October revolution. In a letter to the first issue of the journal Under the Banner of Marxism in 1922, Trotsky wrote: The Soviet state is a living contradiction of the old world, of its social order, of its personal relations, of its outlooks and beliefs. But at the same time the Soviet state itself is still full of contradictions, gaps, lack of coordination, vague fermentation – in a word, of phenomena in which the inheritance of the past is interwoven with the shoots of the future.90

88 89 90

Bloch 1977, p. 29, p. 32. See also Harootunian 2000, p. 216 and Smith 2008, p. 18. Harootunian 2000, pp. 165–6. Trotsky 1973, p. 271.

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On a slightly less exalted note, Walter Benjamin observed this ‘interweaving’ during his visit to Moscow in 1926: Here the newcomer learns perhaps most quickly of all to adapt himself to the curious tempo of this city and to the rhythm of its peasant population. And the complete interpenetration of technological and primitive modes of life, this world-historical experiment in the new Russia, is illustrated in miniature by a streetcar ride.91 The Stalinist counter-revolution which began within a few years of Benjamin’s visit transformed Russian society from one undergoing, with great difficulty, the transition to socialism, into something quite different: the first example of the integrated state capitalism that was after World War II to become the typical developmental form in the Global South.92 This transformation heightened the fusion of archaic and contemporary forms to an unprecedented degree, above all by propelling millions of former peasants into the factories and cities. In England, it took 350 years from the emergence of agrarian capitalism to the consolidation of industrialisation, years filled with all the horrors of enclosure, clearance, repressive legislation, and social degradation at home, and of slavery, genocide, and imperial conquest abroad. In Russia the process was compressed into a less than a tenth of that period, with the same horrors magnified in intensity for every reduction in the time. Why then did it not produce a revolutionary response similar to those which had erupted in 1905 and 1917? As we by now come to expect, a crucial aspect was the specific character of the emerging state – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a crucial aspect was the specific character of the personnel whose relationships constituted the state. Alex Callinicos has noted that the counter-revolution in Russia had four main components: forced collectivisation, rapid industrialisation, systematic coercion and – most important in the context of this discussion – the fact that ‘a minority of the population benefited from the changes it brought’: ‘the social meaning of the changes involved was upward mobility for a minority at a time when the mass of the population was experiencing an appalling decline in its material conditions’.93 We tend to think of Stalinist Russia primarily as a totalitarian monolith but, near the top, social relations were also flexible enough to allow entry into the new ruling class and for its members to make

91 92 93

Benjamin 2003, p. 32. Davidson 2015b, pp. 119–28. Callinicos 1991, pp. 34–5 and 29–37 more generally.

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sharp tactical shifts within what was in many respects a chaotic (and certainly not ‘planned’) accumulation process. As Mike Haynes points out: The drive to industrialise Russia opened up new possibilities for people to find ‘room at the top’. New enterprises needed managers. So did hospitals, schools universities and research institutes. The expanding party state needed new layers of senior administrators. Beneath them, intermediate layers of white collar workers, professionals, doctors, teachers and architects had to be filled out. … The fact that capitalism is always in movement creates some capacity for people to move up to the top. But the leap forward begun in Russia in the 1930s vastly expanded these opportunities. Haynes argues against regarding the ruling class as wholly new; rather: ‘The rapid changes opened up possibilities for mobility alongside those who had already established themselves before 1928’.94 At least some talented and potentially rebellious people were elevated into a new ruling class which regarded itself – for the most part quite sincerely at this stage – as a revolutionary force in Russian society. But precisely because ‘Marxism’ was the official doctrine of the state, it was unavailable to the overwhelming majority of the new, urbanised working class as a doctrine of resistance, let alone of revolution, in the way it had for an earlier generation of workers facing the Tsarist state. But the obstacles to revolutionary consciousness were not purely ideological. Moshe Lewin explains some of the reasons why the ‘social cleavages did not turn into political ones’: Repression and terror alone could not explain the phenomenon. Factors like the cultural level, the relatively short industrial experience of the bulk of the employees (and the upward social mobility for many in the system), the existence inside the working class of large unintegrated segments of newcomers, women, youth, a kind of worker’s aristocracy, too, as well as a large differentiation span, all those explain social tensions, crude language, vodka and hooliganism, tekuchka [i.e. ‘spontaneous mobility of manpower’] and dirt, but may also serve as an explanation for the lack of any direct political challenge to the regime. Such a mass was probably difficult to rule – but easy to control …95

94 95

Haynes 2002, pp. 143–4. Lewin 1985, p. 257.

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Control was partly exercised by the ways in which the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation were instituted, which was quite different to the pre-1917 period. In relation to urbanisation, the parallels are not so much with the recent growth of mega-cities in the contemporary Global South (which will be discussed later in this chapter) but somewhere rather more unexpected. At the conclusion of her comparison of industrial cities in the USA and USSR, Kate Brown points out that both states were centrally concerned to suppress the resistance of workers to the dictates of capitalist industrialisation, ‘to fix social relations in place’: … despite the fact that both the United States and Soviet Union were founded on revolution and grew through rapid urbanization, leaders in both countries distrusted the revolutionary and spontaneous quality of urban space and worked to destroy it. With straight lines and the force of the grid, Soviet and American leaders planned new ‘garden cities’ cut through with wide, rebellion-proof avenues, which negated the unpredictability and anarchy of nineteenth-century cities. As a result, both expanding American corporate power and expanding Soviet party-state power etched an anti-revolutionary conservatism onto twentieth-century urban scapes.96 Nor were workplaces themselves conducive to the type of organisation which had been characteristic, above all in engineering, before 1917. Here too there were ironic parallels with Russia’s Cold War rival: Before 1917 … there was a high concentration of labour in Russian plants and this helped forge solidarity. But workers then, even under Tsarist repression, had more chance of independent organisations. After 1928 the larger plants operated more like company towns, fiefdoms of the plant managers, which gave them a degree of authority not only over workers in the workplace but outside it as well.97 It is in this context that Stalinist Russia’s own versions of ‘debased adaptation’ and ‘nonsynchronicity’ emerged. As Smith writes, ‘once the project of achieving Communist modernity got underway, it quickly became apparent that a side-effect of massive social and economic transformation was to revital-

96 97

Brown 2001, pp. 46–7. Haynes 2002, p. 174.

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ize many “neo-traditional” practices and representations’, including ‘the emergence of a charismatic leader, the revival of clientism as a principle of social organization, and reconstitution of social hierarchies more akin to status groups than to modern social classes’.98 The retreat to pre-existing ideologies was inscribed into the Stalinist experience from the Russian point of origin during the late 1920s, as a form of consolation for a population being subjected to otherwise unendurable social convulsions, both terrorised into submission and mobilised into production for a process of breakneck industrialisation. Lewin points out: ‘Institutions and methods which seemed to be entirely new, after deeper insight show the often quite astonishing reemergence of many old traits and forms’. Not least of these was the reproduction, the recreation in secular form, of the iconography and values of Russian Orthodoxy: One telling example of extolling some of the more primitive trends of rural society when state interests seemed to have warranted it, and offering it as a value for the whole nation, is the policy in regard to the family undertaken in the 1930s. … [I]t was clearly the large, archaic rural family, with its high demands on the reproductive faculties of women, authoritarian structure, and apparently solid moral stability, that was presented as a model. … The ‘crusaders’ themselves got trapped in some of the least modern, most orthodox, and most nationalist elements in their tradition, now put to use as ingredients of a renewed worship of the state and its interests.99 Needless to say these levels of mobilisation could not be sustained for decades on end – but then, they did not need to be. Even before Stalin’s death in 1953 the processes of industrialisation and to a large extent urbanisation were essentially complete, and the regime stabilised. Looking back from the 1960s, Alasdair MacIntyre imagined what Trotsky’s response would have been: ‘The liberalization of Khrushchev would have appeared to him as parallel to the liberalisation which has developed in other capitalisms once primitive accumulation has been accomplished’.100 We cannot know what Trotsky would have thought, but this assessment is accurate enough. The relaxation of state repression went hand-in-hand with modest but real improvements in levels of consumption and standards of living more generally, although these were still 98 99 100

Smith 2008, p. 206. Lewin 1985a, pp. 274, 275 and 274–6 more generally. MacIntyre 2008, p. 273.

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shadowed by developments in the West, they were by now clearly moving in the same direction.101 The most familiar image we have of the USSR is at the end: decaying, hollowed-out and in full disintegration; so it is easy to forget that, even as late as the 1970s, serious figures in the West expected it to match or overtake living standards in the USA by early in the twenty-first century.102 But by the time these predictions were being made, the era of uneven and combined development in Russian history was long over.

5

Alternatives and Continuities

As a prelude to considering how uneven and combined development compares with alternative ways of conceptualising the relationship between multiple socio-economic forms, in what was until recently one of the very few attempts to marry theoretical consideration of uneven and combined development with empirical study of the process, Carole McAllister assessed the concepts around which discussion tends to polarise. One, ‘dual economy’, … assumes the existence of two separate economic and social domains in colonial and semi-colonial societies – one organised according to the principles of Western corporate capitalism and the other representing a relatively stagnant subsistence or peasant economy. The society, and especially its economy, is conceptualized as divided into a ‘traditional’ and a ‘modern’ way of life. The problem in this case ‘is the lack of attention to the interactions between the two sectors, and the assumption that they are self-contained’: … in fact, the theoretical division of any society into two such distinct and self-contained units is clearly a distortion. In Negeri Sembilan, as well as in other contemporary Third World societies, it is clear that the socalled traditional sector – organized around subsistence agriculture and the principles of matrilinear kinship – is essential to the functioning of international capitalism and that the latter in turn continues to reshape ‘tradition’.103

101 102 103

Haynes 2002, pp. 179–82; Therborn 1995, pp. 133–46, 150–60. See, for example, the examples in Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, pp. 127–8. McAllister 1990, p. 7.

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As I discussed above in relation to China during the 1920s, even in areas subject to uneven and combined development, these absolute separations do exist, and extend to the entire life worlds of the workers involved. Highlighting them is quite a common approach among non-Marxist radicals. Arundhati Roy, for example, writes that: ‘As Indian citizens, we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breaking and fashion shows, church burning and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labour and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives for dowry, and our delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds’.104 McAllister rightly regards uneven and combined development as an alternative to the mere juxtaposition of extreme differences; unfortunately, some of Trotsky’s own modern supporters have tended to see it as constituted by them, as in this passage by Tom Kemp: India thus remained an example of combined development. Bullock carts and sacred cows existed side by side with advanced capitalist industry and a modern industrial proletariat. Religious fanaticism and superstition abounded; there was an anarchic and distorted land system, stagnation, mass poverty, sloth and filth. On the other hand there were railways, factories, banks, modern city centres and a sophisticated intelligentsia in touch with the most advanced ideas. These contradictions and paradoxes were essential parts of India’s historical legacy of colonial independence.105 An example of dualism being applied to a specific situation can be found in the October 2003 announcement by HSBC that it was moving 4,000 call centre and back office jobs from Britain to the Indian state of Hyderabad. The story gave the media an opportunity to recycle the most banal clichés in the repertoire of travel journalism, including the classic, ‘India: Land of Contrasts’. The contrasts are scarcely picturesque. ‘The biggest difference between HSBC’s smart Babukhan Chambers and the British centres it is usurping is the grinding poverty that surrounds Babukhan – limbless beggars and families in tents’, wrote one Guardian journalist.106 These disparities pre-existed the decisions by British financial institutions like HSBC, Prudential and TSB/Lloyds to transfer part of their telecommunications operations offshore. Indeed, the only reason why these companies are prepared to do so is because India already 104 105 106

Roy 2002, pp. 167–8. Kemp 1978, p. 143. Finch 2003.

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has a relatively high-skilled and – by British standards – low-paid workforce either already accustomed to the modern office environment or in the process of being trained to enter it. Behind these developments lies the software export industry, which has for several years been the fastest growing sector in the Indian economy, and whose requirements the education systems of several states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are now adapted to serve. It has generated its own contrasts, as Anthony D’Costa explains: … rural India is characterised by debt bondage, social servitude, extensive poverty, illiteracy, and limited opportunities for social and economic mobility. Culturally there is a massive divide from the highly integrated, glamorous, and globalised software industry.107 But the division is never absolute. Indeed, many commentators recognise this and regard it as a problem. Jeremy Seabrook is typical here: ‘The loss of jobs to rich countries is small compared to the cultural hybridisation of hundreds of thousands of young Indians’.108 D’Costa similarly sees the divisions between ‘hybridised’ Indians and their compatriots as ‘inherently destabilising’ of Indian society and wants to see them overcome. Yet curiously D’Costa also refers to a theory that points toward more positive implications: uneven and combined development.109 What then does uneven and combined development in contemporary India look like? One illustration is given by the novelist William Dalrymple, who here evokes a mixture of archaic and contemporary forms, not in pre-revolutionary Russia, but in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh nearly a hundred years later: Within a day, I had walked beyond the last metalled road. Along with the tarmac, I left both the telephones and the electricity grid far behind me. Soon I was heading into an apparently premodern world: up in the hill villages, the harvest was being cut by hand with sickles and bound in sheaves, stacked one by one into stooks. Oxen ploughed the narrow terraces with wooden ploughs. In the villages, stone houses with wooden fretwork balconies like those in Mughal miniatures tumbled down steep mountainsides, slate roofs alternating with roof terraces where the 107 108 109

D’Costa 2003, p. 227. Seabrook 2003. D’Costa 2003, pp. 215–16.

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women were drying apricots and stacking kindling for the winter. You could almost taste the woody resin-scent of the deodars and the warm peach-brandy aroma of the drying fruit. One of the goatherds who wandered past our camp the second evening said he was on his way to consult the local oracle, a shaman who channeled a Pahari deity and was celebrated for the accuracy of his prophecies. It was trekking as time travel: I seemed to have walked up into a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk world about as far as I could imagine from the noise and pollution of New Delhi. … Later that morning, at the top of the pass, I stopped in at the village [of] Shakti Dehra, and fell into conversation with the headman. Within minutes, Joginder Rajput had whipped out a cellphone and begun talking to his younger brother who needed him to send down some bullocks for the ploughing. The government telephone network had failed to get landlines up to the village yet, he explained, but there was a good signal from one of the private cellphone companies and about half the households in the village now had mobiles.110 Electronic media and communications technologies are perhaps the contemporary bearers of modernity in the way that the railway and the telegram were in the mid-nineteenth century, and like their predecessors, they can also play a role in social organisation. Take Sipsongpanna, the southwestern border region of Yunnan in China, where ‘hills have been levelled to make way for new roads, power lines have replaced the canopy of the rain forest, and new migrants from the coast are building cities in place of villages’. The Buddhist religion practised by the Tai population has been repressed since 1953, but has recently experienced a revival as monks operating across the national borders of Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and China have attempted to revive the classical Tai ‘though today they carry it not on palm leaves but on floppy disks, videos and CD s’. As Sara Davis says: Thus we should attend not just to the video itself but to the person who carries the video, who puts it in the machine and presses ‘play’, who explains the images that appear in terms a village teenager can understand. In the right hands, modernity is made to feel, not foreign or alienating, but as familiar, remembered, and natural as old legend.111

110 111

Dalrymple 2012, pp. 23–4. Davis 2003, p. 177, p. 199.

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Religion represents a consolation or defence against the intrusion of capitalist modernity, but religion is also communicated and celebrated using the techniques and technologies that capitalist modernity has provided. The other dominant discourse concerning the relationship between multiple socio-economic forms is syncretism, which lies conceptually at the opposite extreme to the dual economy approach. As McAllister notes, it registers ‘the thorough mingling and mixing of historically separate social and cultural traits’, but: ‘In such a perspective, historically discrete elements merge into a syncretic mixture whose different strands eventually become so tightly woven that they are quite difficult to separate out’. The difficulty here is that adherents of syncretism fail to recognise the tensions which these mergers produce: … under the impact of the current process of rapid economic and social change, some of the strands that appeared to be bound together in one ‘rope’ are being dramatically ripped apart and then reinterpreted and rewoven into new patterns. In sum the model presents reality as more static and seamless than it proves to be and as composed of discrete cultural elements that easily combine and recombine rather than fundamental social relations that often wrench as they shift.112 As in the case of dual economy, some syncretist positions converge with positions which are nominally informed by the concept of uneven and combined development. Mike Davis, for example, argues that Dubai and China have this in common: ‘Starting from feudalism and peasant Maoism, respectively, both have arrived at the stage of hypercapitalism through what Trotsky called “the dialectic of uneven and combined development”’. What this suggests, however, is that uneven and combined development is a process with an end point at which the specific tensions associated with it are overcome – although obviously not those characteristic of capitalism in general: ‘In the cases of Dubai and China, all the arduous intermediate stages of commercial evolution have been telescoped or short circuited to embrace the “perfected” synthesis of shopping, entertainment, and architectural spectacle on the most pharaonic scale’.113 A different case for syncretism has been put by leading former-neoliberal-turned-dissident-conservative, John Gray, for whom non-Western societies are free to adapt aspects of Western capitalism to create entirely new formations:

112 113

McAllister 1990, p. 7. Davis 2007, pp. 53–4.

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The growth of the world economy does not inaugurate a universal civilisation, as both Smith and Marx thought it must. Instead it allows the growth of indigenous kinds of capitalism, diverging from the ideal free market and from each other. … Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill believed that modern societies throughout the world would become replicas of western societies. The West would necessarily be a model, its imitators secular, Enlightenment cultures. … History has falsified this Enlightenment faith. Modern societies come in many varieties. Like nineteenth-century Japan, China and Russia, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia are developing as modern countries today by borrowing selectively from western societies while rejecting western models.114 But this form of ‘selective borrowing’ does not come risk-free for the ruling classes involved, as has been pointed out by a very different conservative thinker, although one who is similarly sceptical about the prospects for neoliberalism. Edward Luttwak has highlighted ‘the perils of incomplete imitation’, whereby developing world ruling classes ‘have been importing a dangerously unstable version of American turbo-capitalism, because the formula is incomplete’. What is missing? On the one hand, the legal regulation to control what he calls ‘the overpowering strength of big business’, and on the other the internal humility by the winners and acceptance of the essential justice of their personal situation by the losers from the system: So far, however, in too many countries undergoing turbo-capitalist change, the winners enjoy their wealth all too visibly, are enormously eager to enrich their children, and they give away very little, except to the Church. As for the losers, what they feel is not guilt, but bitter resentment. And neither group is filled with the moral certainty required to punish losers who break the rules.115 It is possible to consider ‘incomplete adaptation’ in more concrete and explicitly Marxist terms, in relation to growth in specific sectors of the economy, where expansion may be at quite a different level from the rest. Beverley Silver has focused on the impact of working-class organisation in such situations of sectional growth:

114 115

Gray 1998, pp. 195–6. Luttwak 1998, pp. 25–6.

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Strong new working class movements had been created as a combined result of the spatial fixes pursued by multinational capital and the import substitution industrialisation efforts of modernising states. In some cases, like Brazil’s automobile workers, labour militancy was rooted in the newly expanding mass production consumer durable industries. In other cases, like the rise of Solidarnosc in Poland’s shipyards, militancy was centred in gigantic establishments providing capital goods. In still others, like Iran’s oil workers, labour militancy was centred on critical natural resource export industries.116 As we shall see, Silver is not the only Marxist to effectively recapitulate elements of uneven and combined development without being aware of the concept, or at least of its relevance. Presenting her particular perspective on the impossibility of complete ‘catch-up’, Silver notes that ‘while spatial fixes tend to erode the North-South divide, technological fixes, product fixes and protectionism tended to reconstitute the divide continually’: Spatial fixes relocated the social contradictions of mass production (including strong working classes), but they have not relocated the wealth through which high-wage countries historically accommodated these same contradictions. As a result, strong grievances and strong bargaining power go hand in hand, creating the conditions for permanent social crises in much of the post-colonial world.117 In sum: so long as capitalism is incapable of overcoming unevenness – and there is nothing in either history or logic which suggests that it will prove capable of doing so – then the tensions produced by combination will persist. Their existence was of course strongly denied during the period, now thankfully concluded, in which we were supposed to have made the transition to an imaginary condition called postmodernity. In the words of Fredric Jameson, its greatest analyst, everything associated with ‘pre-modernity’ had ‘finally been swept away without a trace’: Everything is now organized and planned; nature has been triumphantly blotted out, along with peasants, petit-bourgeois commerce, handicraft, feudal aristocracies and imperial bureaucracies. Ours is a more homo-

116 117

Silver 2003, p. 164. Silver 2003, p. 170.

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geneously modernized condition: we no longer are encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of ‘the West’).118 As is quite often the case with Jameson, it is unclear whether the quoted passage expresses his own view or is simply intended to reflect a widely-held belief: in either case it is partly protected by the ‘at least from the perspective of “the West”’ qualification. But it is wrong, even in some areas of ‘the West’. In postwar Italy, for example, we can see the process unfolding as in-migrants from the Mezzogiorno revolted against their living conditions and low pay during the ‘industrial miracle’ of the late ’50s and early ’60s.119 I noted earlier that Silver’s work had ‘unconscious’ echoes of Trotsky’s: what is remarkable about many of the Italian commentators on this process is the way in which they invoke ‘leaping over stages’ without any reference to Trotsky, although in our time it is more likely to be caused by ignorance of his positions than unwillingness to be associated with his positions.120 Here, for example, is former Communist militant Lucio Magri discussing the way in which postwar Italy was the site of both the most highly advanced technologies and forms of labour organisation: Technological leap did not only mean the application of better equipment and better work organisation to a productive apparatus partly out of use (as in Germany and France). It meant revolutionizing both the one and the other and involving large areas previously excluded from modernity: that is moving quickly from a narrow and sometimes craft based, industrial base to a Fordist industry that was already (at its most advanced) on the threshold of automation, and then extending it to new sectors and new types of production and consumption. It meant leaping over the intermediate stages that other countries had previously crossed with difficulty.

118 119 120

Jameson 1991, pp. 309–10. Ginsborg 1990, pp. 223–9, 247–53; Magri 2011, pp. 141–55. Michael Hardt, whose work is cited below, was once asked whether his failure to consider uneven and combined development in Empire reflected ‘a more general disagreement or critique of [Trotsky’s] view’. He replied: ‘No, I think it’s just a missed opportunity. But I think Toni [Negri] and I are less familiar with Trotsky’s work than we are with Lenin’s work, but, sometimes, those kinds of familiarities are just coincidences of background’. See Hardt 2003, p. 135.

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Magri then refers to ‘the social and cultural upheavals induced or anticipated by the Italian economic miracle’ and highlights its ‘novel interlinking of modernity and backwardness, how it fuelled imbalances and regional or class conflict between North and South, capital and labour, and old and new middle layers’.121 Perhaps even more startling, however, is the following passage from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, which continues the story into the 1970s and 1980s: The transformation of the Italian economy since the 1950s demonstrates clearly that relatively backward economies do not simply follow the same stages the dominant regions experience, but evolve through alternative and mixed patterns. After World War II, Italy was still a predominantly peasant-based society, but in the 1950s and 1960s it went through furious but incomplete modernisation and industrialisation, the first economic miracle. Then, however, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the processes of industrialisation were still not complete, the Italian economy embarked on another transformation, a process of postmodernisation, and achieved a second economic miracle. These Italian miracles were not really leaps forward that allowed it to catch up with the dominant economies; rather, they represented mixtures of different incomplete economic forms. What is most significant here, and what might usefully pose the Italian case as the general model for all other backward economies, is that the Italian economy did not complete one stage (industrialisation) before moving on to another (informatisation). Various regions will evolve to have peasant elements mixed with partial industrialisation and partial informatisation. The economic stages are thus all present at once, merged into a hybrid, composite economy that varies not in kind but in degree across the globe.122 Although the concept is not named, the argument here suggests the ways in which uneven and combined development (‘hybrid, composite economy’) retains its relevance in the contemporary world. But if this is so, are the mechanisms by which uneven and combined development produced its effects still the same as in Trotsky’s lifetime? ‘Today’, writes Joseph Choonara, ‘uneven and combined development is best conceived as a drawing together of successive phases – including, crucially, capitalist phases – in novel forms within countries

121 122

Magri 2011, pp. 142, 148. Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 288–9; my emphasis.

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of the Global South’.123 Choonara stands in the Trotskyist tradition, but similar positions have been taken by writers completely outside it. Jan Nedervee Pieterse, for example, writes in relation to post-Fordist production that ‘the actual options available and directions taken are more likely to be influenced by the interactions among different modes of capitalism than is indicated by merely examining varieties in the North, as if these represent the front end of capitalism (which is not tenable in view of the rise of Pacific Asia) and as if the front end would not be affected by the rear’.124 The claims are certainly compatible with Trotsky’s own position: he thought, for example, that capitalist laws of motion prevailed in China by the late 1920s, but nevertheless regarded that country as being subject to uneven and combined development.125 Regardless of intellectual pedigree, however, it is certainly true that the combination of different phases of capitalist development can produce entirely new social consequences. Here are Hardt and Negri, for example, in a passage that – again, quite unexpectedly – echoes Trotsky’s remarks about the effect of English or French capital being transplanted onto the steppes of the Donets Basin. ‘From the perspective of stages of development’, they write, ‘one might think that through the contemporary export of industrial production, an auto factory built by Ford in Brazil in the 1990s might be comparable to a Ford factory in Detroit in the 1930s because both instances of production belong to the same industrial stage’. But according to these authors such a thought would be mistaken: … the two factories are radically different in terms of technology and productive passages. When fixed capital is exported, it is exported generally at its highest level of productivity. The Ford factory in 1990s Brazil, then, would not be built with the technology of the Ford factory of 1930s Detroit, but would be based on the most advanced productive computer and information technologies available. The technological infrastructure of the factory would locate it squarely within the information economy.126 Uneven and combined development today does not, however, only involve the transplantation of the newest technologies into those areas which had never experienced the older versions; it also involves the continuing impact of cap123 124 125 126

Choonara 2011, p. 182. Pieterse 2000, p. 135. Trotsky 1974a, p. 162. Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 287.

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italist industrialisation and urbanisation on peasants and rural dwellers. The types of combinations which these produce and the political effects which can result have, however, both undergone changes, two of which are particularly significant.

6

New Aspects of Uneven and Combined Development: Mega-Cities and Political Islam

I have stressed throughout this chapter how urbanisation has played an equivalent role to industrialisation and, in some cases, has been even more significant in generating uneven and combined development. This remains the case, but, in the Global South at least, it has taken on new forms. The number of cities with populations of over one million rose from 86 in 1950 to 400 in 2004 and these are expected to account for all future population growth from 2020, until the anticipated peak is reached with a global population of 10 billion in 2050, of which 95 percent will live in urban areas in the developing world.127 What kind of urban areas are these? At one extreme they simply involve adding new streets and buildings of modern design and composed of modern materials onto an older base, as in Thailand: ‘Bangkok is a First World City imposed on the decaying fabric of the original’, writes Seabrook.128 At the other extreme, it involves constructing entirely new cities in previously uninhabited rural or even desert conditions, as in China. What is perhaps even more startling than the appearance of these monuments to Chinese expansion is their tendency to expand to the point of convergence: the Pearl River Delta was still a rural agricultural area as late as 1973; it now consists of nine cities, the total population of which is 42 million people. These are already merging as it were, organically, but the Chinese state plans to consolidate them into one gigantic megacity by 2030, by which point the population should have risen to 80 million.129 Between these two extremes lie two other, perhaps more typical developments. One is where the boundaries between the cities and their surrounding hinterlands begin to dissolve, along with their distinction from each other. Gregory Guldin has written of areas in China which are ‘neither rural nor urban but a blending of the two wherein a 127 128

129

Davis 2004, pp. 5–6; Davis 2006, pp. 13–14. Seabrook 1996, p. 251. He then adds, with typical distaste for anything which might pollute the supposed purity of the non-Western: ‘it exhibits the limits of development, and the unsuitability of Western urban transplants in the South’. Weller 2015.

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dense web of transaction ties large urban cores to their surrounding regions’.130 The other is where cities expand in ways which are genuinely urban, creating peripheral slums quite unlike those which arose during the original process of industrialisation in the West. Mike Davis describes this as a consequence of ‘urbanization-without-growth’ which has become ‘radically decoupled from industrialisation, even from development per se’: ‘The global forces “pushing” people from the countryside – mechanization in Java and India, food imports in Mexico, Haiti and Kenya, civil war and drought throughout Africa, and everywhere the consolidation of small into large holdings and the competition of industrial-scale agribusiness – seem to sustain urbanization even when the “pull” of the city is drastically weakened by debt and depression’.131 Seabrook describes this process in the capital of Indonesia: Urbanization in Dhaka is quite unlike any traditional idea of the city. Whole areas remain semi-rural, and there is little high-rise building. Whole tracts of open land become covered with dense grass in the monsoon, lush grazing ground for cattle. … Even so, an invasive industrialization is the reason for their existence. The tension between village and city is made visible in Dhaka, and in the end it is not the village that prevails. The cooking fires may be in traditional clay chulhas, or stoves, in front of the huts, but the cooking fuel proves to be a mixture of waste material from plastics and garment factories, which melts into a foul-smelling liquid.132 Quite often, the cities of the global south display elements from all four of the ‘ideal types’ outlined here, which are rarely incarnated in completely pristine form. What they all have in common is that many inhabitants of the new slums can increasingly be characterised as ‘informal workers’, now over one billion strong and two-fifths of the population of the developing world. Davis reasonably asks: ‘The labour-power of a million people has been expelled from the world system, and who can imagine any plausible scenario, under liberal auspices, that would reintegrate them as productive workers or mass consumers?’133 This is a potentially explosive political situation, but it would be wrong to imagine that the mass of the population live lives of quiescent des-

130 131 132 133

Guldin 2000, p. 17. Davis 2004, p. 10. Seabrook 1996, pp. 176–7. Davis 2004, p. 27.

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peration in the absence of an immediate catalyst. In the Egyptian context, for example, Eric Denis has gone so far as to write of ‘urbanization from below’: In 1996, the rate of urbanization in Egypt (defined as the part of the population living in the 800 agglomerations greater than 10,000 inhabitants) was calculated at 70 percent. Today, that figure is around 80 percent. Most of these neo-urbanites, no longer engaged in agriculture, have to earn their living and make settlements habitable by themselves – without services from the state and, indeed, without its recognition.134 The middle-class hatred and fear of these populations is palpable. During the 1990s: ‘Commentators warned that the inhabitants of the ‘ashwa’iyat [i.e. “random” or “haphazard”] were not urban and hadari (“civilized”) but rather rural fellaheen – something that didn’t belong in the city and was poisoning its lifeblood’. As Jack Shenker notes, two decades later, on the eve of the revolution of 2011, the inhabitants of the informal settlements were not simply occupying the wrong space, but living in the wrong time: These people, went the narrative, are not our flesh and blood; they are not even of our time. … One investigation into the ‘ashwa’iyat uncovered ‘carts dating from the time of Methuselah’.135 These smug moderns were right to be fearful. Co-existence with Methuselanian modes of transportation would indeed represent an extreme form of uneven and combined development, far beyond even the polarities fused prior to Russia in 1917: but the impacts are quite similar. Shenker rightly points out that, despite the media focus on Tahrir Square, the roots of the revolution of 2011 lay elsewhere: ‘The start of the revolution was … not truly in the city, but in the non-city – those ever-expanding pools of state abandonment which, for so many decades, had been seeping through the metropolis even as those at the top gazed stubbornly out at sand’.136 Although defeated, the Egyptian revolution has been the most important of the contemporary social explosions. It was not, however, alone in having its roots in the new urban peripheries. As Colin Mooers points out about Latin America: ‘Urban neighbourhoods under popular control in Caracas, Santiago, Lima, Buenos Aires and La Paz mobilized around issues of housing, water rights 134 135 136

Denis 2012, p. 241. Shenker 2016, pp. 89–90. Shenker 2016, p. 99.

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and food distribution; and the recuperation of closed factories was pivotal in bringing down traditional governments committed to neoliberalism and paving the way for the ascendancy of Left governments’.137 In at least one important case, that of El Alto in Bolivia, an entire city has been the site of new forms of social organisation. In one sense El Alto is an overspill of La Paz, for which it provides much of the workforce and, crucially, through which three of the four supply-routes pass. El Alto is both relatively new – as a city it has only really existed since the Second World War – and also growing exponentially, with inhabitants mostly consisting of those driven from their former occupations or locations. In a way, the population of El Alto is a classic ‘combined’ group, consisting of former peasants forced off their land, former tin miners made redundant following the ‘rationalisation’ of the industry, and former inhabitants of La Paz who can no longer afford to stay there. It has also the largest indigenous population of any city in Bolivia. Sian Lazar has made an important study of the city, conducted around 2003, the year in which the explosion of struggle in El Alto ultimately compelled President Sanchez de Lozada to resign. In her work, Lazar notes that, for both peasants in the surrounding area and urban workers in the informal sector: ‘Their household model of production allows for fluidity of associational life, but has also allowed them to form alliances and organisations based on territorial location; the street where they sell, the village or region where they live and farm, and, with the addition of the vecino organisational structures in the cities, their zone’. This does not mean that more traditional forms of association have been completely overtaken: ‘Trade unions are flourishing in the informal economy of El Alto and form a crucial part of the structure of civic organisation that is parallel to the state and shapes multi-tiered citizenship in the city’. The emergence of these complex interactions between forms of organisation based on both place of residence and place of work leads Lazar to conclude that ‘the working class in Bolivia is reconstituting itself as a political subject, albeit not in its traditional forms’.138 These forms may not resemble those which emerged in Petrograd in 1905 or 1917, but why should this be surprising?139 In the fusions of the archaic and the contemporary, the latter component at least is always subject to change, although as El Alto demonstrates this has not lessened the resulting potential for social explosiveness.

137 138 139

Mooers 2014, p. 127. Lazar 2010, p. 178. Although we should remember that in Russia too there were peasant soviets – inevitably based in communities – and in the armed services, in addition to those in workplaces.

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It would be wrong, however, to imagine that the consequences of contemporary uneven and combined development always tend towards revolutionary or at least left-wing conclusions. The rapid transformation of cities has a dark side exemplified, perhaps, by the rise of urban gendered violence in India, as Manali Desai reports: For the new, urban, middle-class India, hedonism, voyeurism and sexual prowess are eternally emblazoned on the cities’ and highways’ largerthan-life billboards, in films and, not least, in a vast amount of pornography. India is the world’s fifth largest consumer of online porn – not such a surprise, given the size of its population, yet the relatively poor e-connectivity of rural India compared with China, for example, also needs to be taken into account. All this points to a release of libidinal energy after decades of prudery, leavened only by the occasional glimpse of Bollywood flesh. But this sexual ‘freedom’ is not only circumscribed by sharp gender inequalities, reinforced by caste and ethnic domination; it has also produced a fierce reaction, which is directly threatening to women. The aspirational, gym-toned male body, with distinctly Western consumer tastes – whisky, cigarettes, fast cars – looms large on city billboards, enjoining men to participate in the image, if only vicariously. For India’s surplus men, fantasies fuelled by bootleg liquor are compounded by frustrated mobility and other forms of class desire. Notably, one of the four gang rapists in Delhi was a gym instructor; an aspirational but lowpaid occupation in India’s growing service industry, catering to the new body obsession. Drunk on cheap liquor, the four men drove round the city in one of the small, unregulated private buses that ply the streets. Their sadistic orgy, during which the young woman [Jyoti Singh] was assaulted with a rusty iron bar, seemed to encapsulate the madness of the new dispensation; the funnelling of historically honed aggression into a new capacity to wreak violence in the anomic, uncaring city.140 In the Indian case, these examples of sexual violence are partly produced by the tension between the demands of Hindu nationalism for male libidinal restraint and the new temptations and frustrations of city life. In other areas, however, it is religion itself which has been reshaped by uneven and combined development, to the extent that it forms an alternative to a left politics. Davis has gone as far as to say that:

140

Desai 2016, p. 79.

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Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen again in the post-industrial cities of the developing world. … [P]opulist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity (and, in Bombay, the cult of Shiva) occupy a social space analogous to that of early twentieth century socialism and anarchism.141 As a general argument this is too pessimistic. What is involved is not simply an unchallenged revival of religious belief, but a contest between radical left and populist religious responses to capitalist modernity. As we have seen, in Latin America it is the former which has tended to dominate, while in Central Africa, it is the latter. As Alexander Colas has written, Marxists need to use the notion of ‘populism’ as it is represented by Islamism, ‘not as descriptors of accidental, residual forms of mass political mobilisation, but, rather, as structural features of societies – like those in Africa – far more powerfully subject to the vagaries of combined and uneven capitalist development’.142 The situation in the Middle East is more mixed, although – as the unfolding catastrophe in Syria reminds us – it has to date had no happier an outcome. I noted earlier that uneven and combined development tended to produce three possible responses in the Muslim world: (1) in which Islam adapted to capitalist modernity, incorporating sufficient elements to maintain organisational structures and modes of social interaction, even if this meant inventing novel traditions which allowed it to function in a changed social context (‘renewal’); (2) in which former adherents simply abandoned their beliefs in order to embrace new revolutionary doctrines associated with capitalist modernity (‘adoption’); and (3) which in a sense faces in both directions, where new forms of collective organisation such as trade unions were deployed to defend both material conditions and forms of religious observance (‘adaptation’). This position is, in a sense, the most important, as it represents an unstable situation which ultimately leads to the alternatives represented by either (1) or (2). It is the main terrain of the contest to which I have referred. But it is important to understand that outcome (2) has two possible variants: revolutionary socialism or radical Islam. As we saw earlier, McDaniel has drawn parallels between the Russian and Iranian Revolutions. He compares the Russian and Iranian working classes

141 142

Davis 2004, pp. 29, 30. Colas 2004, p. 257.

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before the overthrow of their respective autocracies, but contrasts the roles which they played during these revolutions: Both were numerically small. … In addition, both industrial labour forces were highly heterogeneous, characterized by large influxes of peasant migrants unacquainted with socialist ideas or traditions of worker struggle. In both too, because of the rapid pace of industrialization, ‘industry’ was very heterogeneous, ranging from traditional craft-type establishments to modern plants with advanced technology. Obviously, these traits shared by the two industrial labour forces were not decisive in shaping labour protest, for they cannot explain the very great differences in militancy and class consciousness.143 There are two points to be made here. First, it is not clear that the role of the Iranian working class was less than that of the Russian in the revolutionary process, given that the former – although even smaller as a proportion of the population – was decisive in breaking the regime and even, in the Shoras, threw up forms of organisation which are clearly of the same type as the soviets or factory councils.144 Second, without reducing the entire difference in outcome to the ‘absence of revolutionary leadership’ beloved of Leninist cliché, it is simply unhistorical to ignore the role of the Bolsheviks and, particularly, the distinct political programme which they were able to offer to workers, which was at least partly responsible for consolidating class consciousness and providing strategic leadership, the absence of which was telling in Iran.145 There is, however, one aspect of McDaniel’s argument which points towards a central issue of state forms. McDaniel rightly affords ‘key significance’ to ‘the contrast between a basically capitalist model of industrialization with pretwentieth-century styles of political despotism’, as in Russia, and ‘a neopatrimonial model with the most modern technology of repression’, as in Iran.146 Behind this slightly over-elaborate terminology lies the fundamental distinction between the state in pre-capitalist Russia and the state in capitalist Iran, whatever formal similarities there may have been between the respective titles

143 144 145 146

McDaniel 1991, p. 138. For the classic discussion, see Bayat 1987, pp. 100–66, but see also Poya 1987, pp. 143– 9. Davidson 2015, pp. 358–61. McDaniel 1991, p. 138.

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held by Nicholas Romanov and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.147 This distinction was carried over into the outcomes. Theda Skocpol writes that, ‘the central phalanx of the clergy fused its authority and activities with the state itself’ and claims that this was not ‘“a return to tradition” in Iran, but rather a strikingly innovative contemporary departure, in which Khomeini and his associates took upon themselves a vanguard, state-building and state-controlling role analogous to that of the Jacobins in revolutionary France and the Communists in revolutionary Russia and China’.148 Whatever the other differences between the latter three revolutions, in each case the state was overthrown; in the case of Iran, it was only the regime. Consequently, and despite the Western fixation on the supposed singularity of Islamist ideology, the regime of the mullahs inherited the pre-existing state rather than creating its own. Skocpol indicates as much herself later in the same discussion: Pre-revolutionary Iran was … a rentier state, where revenues from exports of oil and natural gas were channelled into the state, not so much into truly productive investments, but instead into lavish purchases of modern armaments and into luxury consumption. An Iranian Islamic Republic could remain, for quite some time, another sort of rentier state: a populist, welfare-orientated rentier state, with ulama passing out alms in return for moral conformity on a grander scale than ever before.149 If the Islamic Republic resembles the state of the Pahlavi dynasty in its rentier essence, it also has a wider set of affinities with other capitalist states, as Fred Halliday points out: If one looks at the subsequent history of the Iranian revolution, not as a scriptural but as pragmatic, political one, with ideology used to justify the mundane and universal goal of keeping state power, then much becomes clear. The mullahs have seized and kept control through the mechan147

148

149

There was a period in which revolutionary events in Iran could be directly compared to those in Russia because of the commonality of pre-capitalist state forms, but this was much closer in time to 1917: the ‘constitutional revolution’ between 1906 and 1911. However, during this period the working class was too insignificant to play a role of any significance. For a discussion which situates this revolution within the context of uneven and combined development, see Matin 2006. Skocpol 1994, p. 253. Halliday concurs: ‘The paradox of the Iranian revolution was that it was both the most traditional and the most modern of social revolutions’. See Halliday 2002, p. 62. Skocpol 1994, p. 254.

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isms found elsewhere – mobilization for war, discretionary use of welfare, repression of political opponents, demagogy about foreign threats and conspiracies abroad.150 Halliday is right to emphasise the constraining effects on ideology of attempting to successfully manage a capitalist nation state of any size, but in his understandable desire to resist Islamophobic hysteria, he perhaps underplays the impact the Iranian and other Islamic regimes on social and personal behaviour. Ankie Hoogvelt highlights the real dividing line in relation to state intervention: ‘The Islamisation of officially secular and moderate regimes targets personal law and penal law, leaving intact the existing economic formation and political model inherited from previous regimes’.151 The constraints mentioned above apply to regimes, but not to Islamists who have no prospect of achieving state power. Political Islam as a form of adaptation is quite different from the defence of tradition involved in renewal. This dissimilarity has been obscured by the fact that any group of Muslims who happen to be opposed to Western interests, tend to be described as ‘Islamic radicals’, no matter how conservative they may be. The Taliban may have allowed Al Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base, but that did not mean the two organisations were similar in any way other than their shared religious designation: the former was deeply traditional in its desire to return to established forms of village organisation; the latter profoundly radical in its ambition to create a regime which had not previously existed on earth. In neither case is ‘religion’ an autonomous force. On the contrary, the motivations of radicals in particular are formed by their material circumstances: Just because a lack of graduate employment, decent housing, social mobility, food, etc., is explained by an individual through reference to religion does not make it a religious grievance. It remains a political grievance articulated with reference to a particular religious worldview.152 Indeed, Olivier Roy has argued that in the French context, Islamism ‘is not the revolt of Islam or that of Muslims, but a specific problem concerning two categories of teenagers – mostly immigrants, but also native French citizens. The question is not the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of rad-

150 151 152

Halliday 2002, p. 63. Hoogvelt 1997, p. 200. Burke 2004, p. 25.

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icalism’.153 Roy’s question – why does radicalisation take this particular form among certain groups? – is one that needs to be asked not only of France or the West more generally, but of the heartlands of the Muslim world itself. Part of the answer lies with the modernising secular nationalist regimes, which not only failed to materially provide for the majority of their populations, but usually took the form of murderous dictatorships which were – as in the case of Syria – prepared to kill countless people and destroy unquantifiable amounts of property in order to preserve themselves in power. And those lucky enough to escape the attentions of the Assad regime might then find themselves victim of the latest incarnations of capitalist modernity in the form of Western drone missiles. It is not entirely surprising that those on the receiving end of either or both might be driven to identify their own, quite different, version of what it means to be modern. The starting point for understanding Islamism in the mirror of uneven and combined development has therefore to be that it is not a traditional rejection of modernity. By this I do not simply mean that Islamists inhabit contemporary culture, although this is how a certain school of conservative thought tends to conceive their relation to modernity, offering, at its most superficial, scenarios such as the one imagined here by Samuel Huntington: ‘Somewhere in the Middle East a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner’.154 Nor is the modernity of Islamism limited to familiarity with the latest means of destruction, a familiarity which allows Roger Scruton to contemplate the irony whereby ‘the techniques and institutions on which Al-Qa’eda depends are the gifts of the new global institutions’: ‘It is Western enterprise with its multinational outreach that produced the technology that bin Laden has exploited so effectively against us’.155 John Gray extends the argument in a way that points to a more significant aspect of Al Qaeda’s implantation in contemporary capitalism – its reliance on communications media: It is modern not only in the fact that it uses satellite phones, laptop computers and encrypted websites. The attack on the Twin Towers demonstrates that Al Qaeda understands that twenty-first century wars are spec-

153 154 155

Roy 2016. Huntington 1998, p. 58. Scruton 2003, p. 128.

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tacular encounters in which the dissemination of media images is a core strategy. Its use of satellite television to mobilise support in Muslim countries is part of his strategy.156 But if the techniques and technologies of Islamic radicalism are quintessentially modern, the ideology and the forms of consciousness to which it corresponds are, as we should by now come to expect, far more ‘combined’. ISIS, which has of course long surpassed Al Qaeda as the incarnation of the Islamist threat, illustrates the ways in which the archaic and the contemporary can fuse under present conditions. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Hari Kunzu rightly scorned those who regarded the killers as exponents of a ‘medieval’ ideology: The jihadi movement is a thoroughly modern beast, which ironically owes much to the French revolutionary legacy of 1789. Though they are religious millenarians, looking to bring about global submission to the will of God, they are also utopian revolutionaries, and have adopted tactical thinking from the various movements that trace their legacy to Paris, and that inaugural moment of modernity.157 Gray has argued that, consciously or not, ISIS stands in an even longer revolutionary heritage, in that it has parallels with both millenarian experiments like that of the Anabaptist commune at Munster and modern revolutionary movements, by which he means the entire range from the Jacobins to the Khmer Rouge; but also adduces another aspect, that of transnational crime syndicates: So what is Isis essentially – violent millenarian cult, totalitarian state terrorist network or criminal cartel? The answer is that it is none of these and all of them. Far from being a reversion to anything in the past, Isis is something new – a modern version of barbarism that has emerged in states that have been shattered by western intervention.158 Ultimately, combination of the archaic and contemporary is embedded in the consciousness of individuals who are subject to the process. The journalist Jamie Doward wrote of his encounter with the British jihadi, Mohammed Ezzouek, whom we can take as one example: 156 157 158

Gray 2003, p. 76. Kunzu 2015. Gray 2014.

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The first thing I noticed about him was his size: tiny, birdlike. … The second thing was his beard. Long, black and wispy, it had clearly taken months to grow and was central to his identity. The third was his trainers, Nike, almost box-fresh. This man is a walking contradiction, I thought. He spoke street slang while praising the prophet. He went to Somalia to live under a caliphate and here he was, talking to me in London, complaining about the difficulties getting a mobile phone contract. … The group’s members appear to have existed in a liminal world where east met west and modernity clashed with medieval. Many played five-a-side football together, shared an interest in designer clothes and were at the same schools. But they were also captivated by a London-based Islamist cleric, Hani al-Sibai, who refers to himself as a sheikh and has been named by the US Treasury as a supporter of al-Qaida. Their world is exemplified in the Twitter feeds of Isis fighters who link to speeches by extremist clerics interspersed with rap videos and pictures of themselves posing with fearsome-looking automatic weapons.159 To conclude this part of my discussion, it might be useful to stand back from ISIS, the horrors associated with it and the controversies to which it has given rise, and turn to an earlier example of the emergence of modern Islamism. This was centred in the Malaysian state of Negeri Sembilan, and was not dominated by young men with ‘fearsome-looking automatic weapons’. We are fortunate to have Carole McAllister’s case study of this process, to which I have already referred, as she explicitly treats it as an example of uneven and combined development. McAllister argues that the Islamic revival or dakwah in Malaysia ‘is primarily a reaction against both the economic stress and dislocation and cultural deracination brought by capitalist development; it is in large part an attempt to define a personal and a political alternative’. As in many other, more famous cases, it is essentially modern rather than a retreat to tradition: ‘Although such resistance might in one sense be interpreted as a return to the past or a strengthening of tradition, it is eminently clear that this wave of Islamic militancy – and the reassertion but also reinterpretation of traditional Malay Islam it promotes – is a contemporary phenomenon, arising from people’s current problems and needs’. But McAllister also draws attention to the contradictions which this reinterpretation involves, not least for the women who were so central to the dakwah movement:

159

Doward 2015.

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At the same time, immersion in the revival serves to divert attention away from social to primarily religious matters and essentially blunts their critical awareness of economic and political realities; this occurs in spite of the collective choice of so many young women to embrace fundamentalist Islam represents at least an unconsciousness [sic] resistance to the hegemony of capitalist culture. For a minority of Negeri Sembilan devotees, the dakwah movement, however, has a radically different effect. It actually helps them focus and articulate their growing criticism of their country’s course of dependent capitalist development and its impact on their own lives. For these female adherents, conscious resistance and protest are part of their commitment to Islamic revival, even though such commitment is often characterised by a denial of their matrilinear traditions and thus their pre-existing rights and freedoms as women.160 The fact that adherents of radical Islam desire a complete transformation of society does mean that even the successful achievement of state power would necessarily lead to that outcome. Those who do not consciously seek to overthrow capitalism, those who do not even recognise it as the real force shaping the conditions to which they are opposed, will always end up accepting capitalist imperatives, if only because these seem to be natural, God-given processes beyond human intervention. Unlike ISIS, the dakwah movement was not shaped by the catastrophic impact of Western military intervention, but by the type of industrial and urban intrusions which we have now traced for over 200 years or so; but it raises the same issue as the emergence of ISIS: the need for an alternative and socialist form of modernity.

7

In Place of a Conclusion: China and the Future of Uneven and Combined Development

If the argument of this chapter is correct, then uneven and combined development is likely to be an ongoing phenomenon, which will only cease when the last peasant has been forced off their land into wage labour and city life. Nuclear holocaust, environmental collapse or the socialist revolution are likely to have occurred long before humanity ever reaches that point. In that sense, then, a conclusion remains open. We can, however, close by returning to the country where any future global revolutionary movement is likely to begin.

160

McAllister 1990, pp. 12–13.

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As we have seen, China was where Trotsky first detected uneven and combined development outside Russia, and on several occasions in the latter half of this chapter I have referred to the ways in which it has been impacting on that country since the neoliberal turn in 1978. As I noted in a previous survey, originally published in the mid-2000s, almost anything one says about China is out of date before it appears in print, but it is possible to discern continuities with earlier manifestations of uneven and combined development.161 Here, I want to briefly discuss three: the instabilities caused by migrant flows into the cities; the actuality of working-class resistance and self-organisation; and the capacities of the state to ‘contain’ these instabilities. As in the aftermath of the First World War, there continues to be a massive influx of workers into the cities, but on a much greater scale. And many of these cities did not pre-exist the migration but, as we have seen, are being constructed solely for the purposes of containing new factories and distributions hubs. There have, however, been changes in the composition of the migrant population and the relationship new migrants have to their point of origin. In the 1920s, migrants intended to move on a permanent basis, but this was not necessarily so in the 1980s and 1990s, as Kevin Lin explains: The first generation [of migrant workers] were rural peasants who, pushed by rural poverty and pulled by the burgeoning urban economy, migrated to China’s urban centres in the 1980s. Their city wages were meagre but still higher than their rural incomes. For young women, factory work and urban life also brought a new sense of freedom. But the household registration system and their own rural roots meant that the firstgeneration migrant workers have been predisposed to eventually returning to their villages.162 This ‘dual’ identity was possible because the state maintains a landholding system that allows members of a family to work in urban industry while retaining a link to the smallholding. One factor which helped slacken the tensions which would otherwise have built up uncontrollably in the cities was therefore the link many workers continued to have with the countryside, both as a place of refuge in periods of unemployment or non-payment of wages, and as a source of subsistence through farming:

161 162

Davidson 2015b. Lin 2015, p. 71.

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It is the family farm that lends the migrant worker away from home a substitute for the benefits he or she is not getting from urban work, as well as security in the event of dis-employment or unemployment or in old age. This while that same worker helps supplement the otherwise unsustainably low incomes of the auxiliary family members engaged in underemployed farming of small plots for low returns. So long as substantial surplus labour remains in the countryside, the key structural conditions for this new half-worker half-cultivator family economic unit will prevail.163 By contrast, the second generation of migrant workers, who were mainly born in the 1980s and 1990s, and who might amount to as many as 58 percent of the total, have weaker links to the countryside: ‘Most of them, like the firstgeneration, have come directly from farms and small cities, but a small percentage were born or raised by their first-generation migrant parents. In general this group’s link to the countryside is weaker, and they are more accustomed to urban living’. This does not mean, however, that they have completely ceased to identify themselves as peasants or inhabitants of their rural hometowns: ‘These migrant workers are living in a societal limbo seeing themselves as neither urban or rural; their urban residency youthful aspirations clash with social and institutional barriers to permanent settlement’.164 Ching Kwan Lee argues that what prevails in Chinese workplaces across the board are forms of ‘disorganised despotism’ involving ‘workers’ institutional dependence on management for livelihood, managerial power to impose coercive modes of labour control, and workers’ collective apprehension of such control as violations of their interests and rights’, and that ‘varying degrees’ of such despotism can be found ‘across industrial firms of different ownership types’ on a contingent basis: ‘For example, the generally long working hours and more intensive labour processes in private firms than in state firms are due more to the volume and nature of orders they respectively receive, not due to any difference in management’s institutional power and its imperative to impose discipline in these two types of firm’.165 Migrant workers tend to be employed in the private sector and consequently to be subjected to the harsher conditions prevailing there. This, together with the declining availability of the countryside as a means of escape, however temporary, may have contributed to

163 164 165

Huang, Yuan and Peng 2012, p. 164; see also, Lee 2007, chapter 6. Lin 2015, pp. 71–2. Lee 2002, pp. 197–8 and 197–206 more generally.

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their being more militant than workers in the older state-owned sector, where closures and lay-offs have tended to be the central problems. The relative difference in degrees of militancy is not necessarily reflected in the explanatory framework within which Chinese workers seek to understand their own situation. If anything, Lee’s research found that those still employed by the state indict their oppressors within a cognitive framework of ‘class’, referring to one worker’s ‘spirited critique of the degeneration of the official union into a “yellow union” and the transformation of enterprise cadres into a capitalist class’, while others ‘deploy Marxist concepts to understand and evaluate market socialism’, reporting one who ‘condemns as unfair the unequal distribution of income by appealing to Marx’s labour theory of value’. Migrant workers tend to express their opposition in different terms: ‘Migrant peasant workers’ encounter with market and capitalist forces bring about a critique alluding to “alienation”, grounded more in terms of denial of human dignity, loss of personal autonomy, and dishonesty, not in terms of exploitation’.166 ‘New workers, on the other hand, have yet to grasp their own class position independent of the intellectual “protectors” of their civil rights’.167 This is not as surprising as it might seem. Marxism was available to newly radicalised workers in the 1920s as a new and unsullied doctrine, filtered through the Bolshevik experience, which helped them make sense of their own exploitation and oppression. But where the ideology of the bureaucratic ruling class has supposedly been ‘MarxismLeninism’ for nearly 70 years, it cannot play the same role. At best workers, like those in the state sector, can draw attention to the inconsistencies of neoliberal ‘socialism’, while those in the private sector, for whom Maoist rhetoric has been less significant, express their opposition through a form of moral economy. ‘The two groups of workers, traditional and new, are merging in a common search for class subjectivity’.168 Much therefore depends on whether a genuine Marxism capable of explaining the trajectory of ‘Marxist’ China becomes available to large numbers of Chinese workers. If it ever does, it should find as ready an audience as in the 1920s. In their introduction to Hao Ren’s important collection of interviews with migrant workers involved in industrial struggle across the Pearl River Delta, Zhongjin Li and Eli Friedman note that ‘nominally “socialist” China presents in hyperbolic form many of the problems that those of us in the capitalist world experience: low wages, no benefits, lawlessness in the workplace,

166 167 168

Lee 2002, p. 204. Chun 2014, pp. 41–2. Chun 2014, p. 42.

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anti-union employers and governments, a broken system of political representation’.169 But the response of Chinese workers has also been ‘hyperbolic’. The absence of what might be termed formal or institutionalised class struggle through workers’ parties, free trade unions, or legal social movements does not preclude the existence of class struggle, as has been so clearly demonstrated by rapidly growing industrial struggle and what Lee calls ‘the staggering increase’ in Chinese workers turning to existing legal mechanisms to seek redress.170 The level of ‘mass incidents’ (and their ferocity) doubled between 2003 and 2010, as Chinese workers and peasants responded to the downturn with an acceleration of struggle. What is perhaps surprising is that most of the ‘incidents’ involving workers are successful and that their nature is changing from being a response to employer attacks on wages and conditions to more proactive struggles. The actions taken involve more than strikes (whose status is currently in a legal limbo in China), though these are common, but also blockades of streets, demos and sit-ins. The geography of the Chinese working class as a whole is also relevant here: many of the current wave of labour disputes involve migrant workers alongside a decline – though not a disappearance – in the activities of those workers affected by the destruction of the state industries of the north during the 1990s. The pressure from below has had an impact just as it did during rapid periods of industrialisation and urbanisation in other states. Contrary to the impression that the lack of formal freedoms precludes any changes from above precipitated by struggle from below, Chinese workers, through their quasi-legal and illegal actions, usually without formal organisation, have forced a nervous ruling class to concede major legal changes which have had a real impact and, at a local state level, forced a turn from a sole reliance on repression to a more mixed approach involving both repression and conciliation. The implementation of new labour laws on contracts and arbitration in 2008 led to a huge increase in disputes submitted to official labour dispute mechanisms and to the courts. At the same time far from damping down militant labour struggle these concessions seem to have encouraged them, as instanced by the rise in labour protests. Ironically it seems that information on the new legislation has acted as a catalyst for struggle especially as employers have tried to circumvent the new laws. The level of struggle is all the more extraordinary given the complete absence of independent unions and an official federation, All-China Federation of Trade Unions, that is effectively an

169 170

Li and Friedman 2016, p. xiv. Lee 2007, p. 43.

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organ of state and management control, though one that may now be becoming more responsive to workers’ demands at a local level.171 The most spectacular recent example has been the March–April 2014 strike at footwear manufacturer Yue Yuen in Dungguan over non-payment of social security contributions, perhaps the biggest to date in the Chinese private sector. It climaxed in production being completely shut down across three factories for 11 days, with around 30,000 workers or about 80 percent of the workforce on strike and 10,000 of them taking part in street protests and demonstrations. In the end, the strike was only ended by the intervention of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security ordering the company to pay up.172 What this also suggests, however, is that the state has developed the adaptability to absorb or ‘contain’ the effects of uneven and combined development, just as earlier capitalist states had done. This was partly due to what Charlie Hore refers to as ‘a fundamental shift in power inside the ruling class’ following the neoliberal turn: The government deliberately decentralised economic power, allowing lower levels of the state to keep a greater proportion of profits and taxes. The expectation was that this would lead to greater efficiency, but what local officials actually did was follow their own interests. This is why Chinese economic development has been both so dynamic and so unstable: economic growth has been state-led, but by the lower levels of the state, leading to enormous duplication of investment and assets. … Although China remains a repressive police state, it is far less so than 25 years ago. The government deliberately scrapped many of the controls on everyday life to make economic reforms work. Freedom of movement had to be allowed if markets were to flourish; some freedom of speech was necessary if officials were to tell the truth about the economy and debate policy options …173 Walker and Buck note how neoliberal developments since 1978 (or ‘the transition’ as they describe it) ‘has reconfigured the form of the state in a way that has unleashed the powers of capitalism’. One aspect of this has been the devolution of power to the metropolitan and prefectural levels, giving local governments the ability to annex territory and existing urban areas, and to raise revenue through local taxes and rents. The authors draw an audacious parallel: 171 172 173

China Labour Bulletin 2009, pp. 5–7, 14, 21–2, 23–4, 36. Ness 2016, pp. 135–44. Hore 2003, pp. 8, 25.

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Altogether, the Chinese situation reminds one of the American federal system and its urban growth politics, from which an array of public and private players profit handsomely. Backroom payoffs are far from unknown in the US, but the exchange of favours and rewards is done to the mutual advantage of many. What the Chinese call guanxi is very like what Americans call horse-trading. Regional government competition in China is also reminiscent of American federalism. It is pointless to complain, in this context, about the duplication and inefficiency of local boosterism. The evidence in both the US and China is that this kind of wide-open alliance between state and capital for regional development works very well indeed. … One would not expect the State Council to play midwife to the birth of capitalism in the same way as local governments. China’s ‘developmental dictatorship’ is more in line with continental European experience in this regard. The entirely correct view that China ‘has followed a path not so distant from those of Europe and North America’ leaves Walker and Buck with ‘a final question’ with regard to why China’s polity has not liberalised in line with the neoliberalisation of its economy. The obvious answer is that there is no necessary connection between capitalism – certainly not the neoliberal variant – and democracy. In a sense this brings us back to our starting point: ‘Western polities only gained a degree of real freedom through popular rebellion, dispersion of property, union organizing, expansions of suffrage and political struggle over two long, difficult centuries in which Britain clung to its monarchs and peerage, the United States to slavery and Jim Crow, while France reverted to emperors and kings and Germany and Italy succumbed to fascist dictators’.174 But our end is not in our beginning. Paul Mason has written that ‘Shenzhen’s workers are to global capitalism what Manchester’s workers were 200 years ago’.175 Mason’s desire to establish the continuities within the global history of the working class is commendable, but there are limits to the parallels which can be drawn. The Marxist science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson has one of his characters say that ‘historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation’.176 That seems to be appropriate here.

174 175 176

Walker and Buck 2007, pp. 65–6. Mason 2007, p. 7 and chapter 1 more generally. Robinson 2009, p. 543. But for those who need to have the point established by Authority, see this warning, in Trotsky’s first iteration of the strategy of permanent revolution: ‘Historical analogies, by which liberalism lives and is nurtured, cannot take the place of social analysis’. Trotsky 1969, p. 36. See also Trotsky 1972, p. 6.

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The Mancunian workers who marched to Saint Peter’s Fields in 1819 and the Glaswegian workers who struck for the vote the following year had available to them neither socialism as a goal nor Marxism as a theory. It is a great, if bleak, historical irony that, after the material and ideological devastation wrought by Stalinism, the same is true for most workers today, and not only in China. There are therefore no analogies entirely adequate to describe our current situation and we should therefore not expect to find strategic or organisational models ready-made for use. What we can predict from our experience until now is that uneven and combined development will continue to play a role in throwing up revolutionary conjunctures, the outcomes of which, as always, cannot be predicted in advance.

part 2 Critiques of Eurocentrism

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chapter 2

Troubling Time and Space in World Politics: Reimagining Western Modernity in the Atlantic Mirror Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu

1

Introduction1

The examination of formally sovereign states operating under conditions of geopolitical anarchy forms the core problematic of contemporary International Relations (IR). Consequently, though the study of IR was founded as an intellectual project harnessed in the service of empire-building and colonialism – a project designed to solve the dilemmas posed by white European powers’ attempts to control, subjugate and exploit colonialised subject populations2 – substantive engagements with ‘North-South’ interactions in international relations remains a constitutive absence within the disciplinary mainstream.3 In the extreme case of structural realism, great power politics is the sole defining characteristic of any international system. For if the structure of an international system (polarity) is conceptualised in purely quantitative terms (i.e. the number of great powers), this eliminates the effects of ‘weak’ or ‘peripheral’ states on the nature, logics and dynamics of international politics.4 As such, the histories of the ‘periphery’ are by theoretical fiat written out of the histories of the ‘core’. For a discipline self-defined around the study of war and conflict in world politics, this dearth of engagements with the struggles, conflicts and wars waged between the ‘powerful’ and the ‘weak’ – the long history of Western powers’ efforts to violently bring (post)colonial populations under their heel – is a surprising, if revealing, absence. Addressing aspects of this lacuna of empire and colonialism in IR, this chapter offers an empirically grounded theoretical investigation of the colonial encounter as a unique liminal space in the production of capitalist modernity and, in particular, the making of the modern European-cum-Western Self, legal 1 2 3 4

This chapter draws in part on Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015. Cf. Long and Schmidt 2005; Vitalis 2015. Barkawi 2010. Barkawi and Laffey 2006.

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principal of sovereignty, and linearly defined demarcations in space and time. We ask: what does the empirical reality of the interactively generated modernity in the colony tell us about the making and meaning of time and space in modern world politics? How might it subvert conventional conceptions of the origins of capitalist modernity and its political form, the system of multiple sovereign states? And what might it mean for reconstructing theories of international relations and development more broadly? Addressing these questions, we provide a historical sociological analysis of the colonial encounter in the Atlantic crucible over the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In so doing, we seek to challenge and displace dominant Eurocentric analyses of modernity through the framework of uneven and combined development. We argue that uneven and combined development can offer such a non-Eurocentric approach as it directly engages and subverts three defining attributes of Eurocentric accounts: (1) methodological internalism; (2) historical priority; (3) and linear developmentalism. Based on the assumption that any given trajectory of development is the product of a society’s own immanent dynamics, the methodological internalism of Eurocentrism locates the emergence of modernity exclusively within the hermetically sealed and socio-culturally coherent geographical confines of Europe. Such a method is rooted in the classical sociological tradition’s foundational assumption that the character of a society’s development is determined by its internal structures and agents.5 The self-contained conception of development – the autonomous emergence and reproduction of particular social orders – embedded in the ‘pernicious postulate’6 of this singular abstraction of ‘the social’ simultaneously entails both an internalisation and universalisation of the particularities of the modern European experience.7 It does so by effectively subsuming space to time through what Kamran Matin terms a ‘double movement’.8 Different geo-political spaces are conceptually decoupled from their particularities, while being simultaneously enclosed and homogenised within an abstract universal history derived from the concrete internal history of one such geo-political space: Europe. The constitutive and causal significance of political multiplicity is thereby dissolved into a European temporality refashioned as ‘the universal’.9 In this respect, Eurocentrism combines

5 6 7 8 9

Cf. Poggi 1965; Bendix 1967; Tenbruck 1994; Rosenberg 2006. Tilly 1984. See Amin 1989. Matin 2013, p. 2. Matin 2013a, p. 2.

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‘internalism’10 and ‘historicism’11 producing what can be termed a ‘monadic sociology’12 – a mode of analysis that arguably remains hegemonic within the social sciences, operating across a wider variety of different theoretical traditions despite its many critics.13 By positing this strong ‘inside-out’ model of social causality – whereby European development is conceptualised as endogenous and self-propelling – Europe is conceived as the permanent ‘core’ and ‘prime mover’ of history which, in its worst forms, leads to an interpretation of European society and culture as somehow superior to the rest. This second normative assumption of Eurocentrism – historical priority – articulates the historical distinction between tradition and modernity through a spatial and epistemological separation of ‘West’ and ‘East’. Through this method, non-European societies have been opposed to Europe against which the distinctiveness of Western modernity has been and continues to be defined. From these two assumptions emerges a third predictive proposition: that the European-cum-Western experience of modernity is a universal stage of development through which all societies must pass. This stadial assumption posits a linear developmentalism, wherein endogenous processes of social change – from tradition to modernity, feudalism to capitalism, etc. – are conceived as universal stages encompassing all societies of the world at different times and velocities.14 The framework of uneven and combined development destabilises such Eurocentric assumptions by theoretically registering the ‘geo-socially’ interactive and variegated character of development. By positing the multilinear character of development as its ‘most general law’, uneven development provides a necessary corrective to the ontological singularity and attendant unilinear conception of history that underpins Eurocentric assumptions. By positing the inherently interactive character of this multiplicity, combined development in turn challenges the methodological internalism of Eurocentric approaches whilst further subverting its strong stagist model of development. In short, uneven and combined development supplants the simultaneously Eurocentric-universalist and methodologically internalist assumptions of classical sociology through a strategic theoretical and analytical emphasis on ‘the international’. And it does so by recasting social contexts as ‘neither bounded to a particular society, nor universal in scope, but rather delineated in and through 10 11 12 13 14

Tenbruck 1994. Chakrabarty 2008. Matin 2007. Cf. Anievas and Matin 2016a. See further Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015.

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a specific society’s interaction with other, differentially developed societies’.15 Accordingly, uneven and combined development shares with postcolonial perspectives a conception of history as neither universal nor homogenous, but marked by difference, hybridity and ambivalence – in short, multiplicity. This is a particularly important point when focusing our analytical optic to the interactive processes and developments characteristic of the colonial experience. The theory of uneven and combined development nonetheless goes beyond the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism by directly addressing a fundamental tension within postcolonialism that undermines its efforts in both fully subverting Eurocentrism and reasserting non-European agency into the history of capitalist modernity. This tension is rooted in the parochial scope of its critique; that is, their subject rarely extends beyond the particular experience of modernity in specific localities and, particularly, those experiences in the colonial modernities of the Global South. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, for example, that ‘Provincializing Europe is not a book about the region of the world we call “Europe”’,16 but is instead concerned with the generalisation of its forms and categories. Similarly, Partha Chatterjee claims that ‘[t]he universality of Western modernity … is a product of its local conditions’, which is then subsequently ‘transported to other place and times’.17 And although Ranajit Guha’s classic Dominance without Hegemony18 provides a sharp critique of the liberal historiographies of bourgeois rule, it never provides an alternative substantive historical sociology of the European experience. Consequently, each of these authors uncritically presupposes a discrete and hermetically sealed European history in which modernity was created before being subsequently expanded globally.19 Yet such an idealised view is an integral part of the myth of Europe as an exceptional, pristine and autonomous entity that happened to be especially well suited to the endogenous transition to, and subsequent spread of, capitalism. Insofar as ‘the West is constituted as an imperial fetish, the imagined home of history’s victors’ and ‘the embodiment of their power’,20 many of the processes of developmental differentiation that created hierarchical imbalances between colonisers and colonised

15 16 17 18 19 20

Shilliam 2009, p. 5. Chakrabarty 2008, p. 3. Chatterjee 2010, pp. 296–7. Guha 1997. Cooper 2005, p. 20. Coronil 1996, pp. 77–8.

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are occluded.21 The absence of any substantive engagement with the question of how capitalism emerged and developed in Europe is therefore a – perhaps the – critical lacuna of postcolonial theory, continually frustrating its abilities to offer a satisfactory non-Eurocentric theory and history of the modern epoch. Those postcolonial studies that have extended the reach of their critique to analyse such developments have largely restricted themselves to interrogating the discursive and cultural constructions (and exclusions) of the ‘Other’ in the forging of new (modern) forms of universalist thought in Europe.22 They have done so, however, without providing a positive theoretical alternative capable of capturing these multiform processes into a single framework.23 This theoretical lacuna derives in part from the self-limiting character of the postcolonial project which, as Homi K. Bhabha puts it, ‘resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation’.24 Yet, it is only at the level of a general theoretical re-articulation of ‘the social’ – as ontologically plural, interactive, and thus multivalent – that one may fully subvert and transcend the ‘theoretical grammar generative of these Eurocentric discursive practices’ and thereby formulate a positive, non-Eurocentric theorisation of the making of capitalist modernity.25 Thus to modify Frederick Cooper’s call26 to arms: in order to truly ‘provincialise’ Europe, one must dissect European history itself, and there is no more central myth to be dissected than that of narrating European history around the history of capitalism. Such a task requires not only a theory of modernity or colonial modernity, but rather, ‘a general social theory that goes beyond a mere phenomenology of capital’s expansion and comprehends capital itself as a product of the interactive multiplicity of the social’.27 And this is precisely what the framework of uneven and combined development provides: a general social theory inscribing ‘the international’ at the heart of its conception of development. This allows for a theorisation of the interactively generated, nonWestern origins of capitalist modernity in Europe in a way that eschews any homogenous, or homogenising, conception of the universal.28 Those aspects of world-historical development – alterity, mimesis, hybridity, translation, etc. – that many postcolonial scholars have done so much to highlight are thereby 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Cf. Lazarus 2011. See for example Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Mignolo 2005. But see Shilliam 2009a. Bhabha 1994, p. 248. Matin 2013a, p. 355. Cooper 2005, p. 22. Matin 2013a, p. 364. Cf. Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015.

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rendered theoretically explicable in historical and sociological terms, thus lifting them from mere descriptive statements of otherwise arbitrary instantiations of societal difference into active, causal factors explaining the rise of capitalist modernity. The colonial social space has long been understood as a site of heterogeneous and mixed cultures and identities, a place generative of radically novel social forms defying the limited boundaries of conventional classifications. Historians, anthropologists and sociologists have often spoken of ‘hybrid’ identities and social orders.29 Yet the very language of ‘hybridity’ suggests some kind of ‘pre-combined’ social formation: as if the genealogies of societies took us back to a pristine moment of their discrete origin from which they only then came to interact with one another. This idea of discretely constituted and only subsequently interactive societies is one of the most salient theoretical stumbling blocks in the social sciences. Despite the clear interconnectedness of all societal histories, the classical sociological tradition has overwhelmingly (if not universally) worked with a conception of social structure in the ontologically singular.30 In other words, they abstract social orders from their intersocietal structures and contexts. The result is the mapping onto different social spaces of particular conceptions of time and development. Developed countries and regions are supposed to show the ‘less developed’ the image of their own future. In this sense, they exist as discrete places integrated into a universalised model of historical stages derived from the particularities of a single society’s development. Social theories thereby occlude the inherently interactive and multiform modalities of development generative of the always already ‘hybrid’ nature of modernity. In so doing, they erase the ‘in-between’ sites where modernity is actually produced. Looking at where many of the practices, apparatuses and institutions of modernity actually come from, and how they travelled, problematises conventional stagist time-space narratives. The colonised world has long offered an experimental laboratory for the development of sophisticated and advanced power relations, technics and institutional innovations along with the variegated forms of resistance they generate. To visualise the future of the ‘core’, one must therefore look to the interactive developmental processes within the ‘periphery’. Hence, the causal and imaginative coordinates of modernity must be fundamentally rethought in ways destabilising and theoretically inverting

29 30

Todrov 1982; Gilroy 1993; Chakrabarty 2008. Cf. Rosenberg 2006.

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Eurocentric narratives of a unidirectional North-to-South development. As such, the Global South needs to be viewed not as a pathological aberration within modernity but a paradigm of it. This chapter is developed in three movements. In Section I, we provide an overview of how the Spanish jurists of the sixteenth century sought to reconcile the increasing gap between Christendom as an all-encompassing universal ideology and the encounter with non-Christian peoples in the Americas. We show that the jurists’ response invited a reconceptualisation of universality based on an ontological distinction between Europeans and ‘Indians’. This in turn provided the basis for the ideological emergence of Eurocentrism, linear conceptions of time, and scientific racism, as examined in Section II, and the development of the modern legal principle of sovereignty and novel forms of dividing time and space. Section III turns to an examination of the development of novel territorially demarcated claims to political authority in the colonies, which constituted a crucial step in the formation of the modern territorialised state in Europe. In the conclusion, we tease out some of the theoretical corollaries from our empirical analysis in fashioning a non-Eurocentric conception of modernity, development and international relations.

2

Tearing Down the Ideological Walls of Christendom

The discovery of the Americas was, in many respects, ‘astonishing’.31 On the one hand, the scope of humanity was now framed by a universality that was not merely imagined, but based on an unprecedented combination of all of the world’s inhabited continents. On the other hand, the colonial encounter that took place in the Americas was marked by an exceptionally ‘intense’ and ‘radical’ recognition of difference between its protagonists,32 in which the sharp divergences of sociological unevenness were to be revealed. The challenges presented by the disorienting experiences of the colonial encounter were some of the most formative and constitutive of modern European developments,33 destroying and creating in equal measure. On both sides of the Atlantic, ‘the Old’ was being systematically and violently dismantled, subsequently clearing the path for the emergence of ‘the New’, the modern. While colonialists were conducting the ‘greatest genocide in human

31 32 33

Todorov 1982, p. 4. Todorov 1982, pp. 4–5. Cf. Shilliam 2009a.

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history’ in the Americas,34 ideologues in Europe were busying themselves with tearing down an authority – Christendom – that was proving incapable of articulating ‘New World’ experiences. It was out of the resultant debris that the twin conceptions of the European Self and the non-European Other would emerge, paving the way for an ideological and institutional apparatus – secular universal time, legal sovereignty, Eurocentrism, and scientific racism35 – that would serve to both legitimise the horrors of colonialism and spur the development of capitalist modernity. The colonial encounter posed two significant challenges to the universalist claims of Christendom. First, the presence of different European states with competing claims to colonial preponderance meant that both expansion into and rule over New World territories was ‘contested and open to rival interpretations’.36 Second, the confrontation with American populations called into question why the application of – universal – natural laws diverged so sharply between the Europeans and Amerindians. There was a pervasive and intractable contradiction between notions of Christian universality and the absence of any Christianity in the Americas. In this context, ‘claims to universal authority upon the old foundations of Christendom were, when looked at in this global perspective, as Hugo Grotius bluntly said in 1625, daft (stultum)’.37 Reconciling the facticity of unevenness in the context of the increasingly global scope of European activity required rejecting imperial and papal conceptions of legality based on universal divine law. Through this rejection, a new conception of universality was constructed which would prove central to the justification of colonial expansion. In these ways, as we examine below, the Euro-Amerindian encounter entailed a series of unique and recognised intersocietal differences – themselves rooted in a socio-material relation of unevenness between these societies – that were not only the object of contemporary political thought, but also generative of the construction of such thought itself. There was, in other words, a distinctly ‘international’ dimension of knowledge production38 in the making of the early modern world emergent from the uneven and combined developmental characteristics of the post-1492 Americas.

34 35

36 37 38

Todorov 1982, p. 5. This is a form of racism articulated and enacted through the language and practice of science. Two notable examples of this are eugenics and social darwinism. See Goldberg 2002, pp. 25–6. Greengrass 2014, p. 152. Ibid. See further Shilliam 2009.

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From Sacred to Secular Universalism: The Construction of the European Self and Non-European Other The self-reflection this involved was made possible through a comparison between the Spanish and the populations of the Americas, and the attempt to reconcile the two under a universal framework applicable to both. The Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria – a forerunner in modern international law39 – based his legal thought on a characterisation of Amerindians which emphasised their supposedly ‘natural’ commonalities with Christians. Both peoples, Vitoria argued, were capable of ‘reason’. Like the Spanish, Amerindians displayed ‘orderly arranged’ polities in which rules pertaining to ‘marriage and magistrates, overlords, laws and workshops, and a system of exchange’ were observable.40 A shared possession of ‘reason’ consequently formed the basis of equivalence between Europeans and non-Europeans, binding both under the same – universal – legal framework.41 Vitoria therefore began reconstructing papal universalism on the secular basis of natural laws and the principle of jus gentium (law of nations) which, rather than being dictated by the papacy or emperor, would be administered by sovereigns.42 By treating the Spanish and Amerindians as ‘equal’ participants in the colonial system, Vitoria’s approach provided a system of law which legitimised the Spanish presence in the New World in terms of commerce and expansion.43 However, the specificities of Vitoria’s argument reveal a considerably more insidious underbelly, as his innovations in jurisprudence not only legitimised the unfettered penetration of the Spanish into the Americas, but provided a legal basis on which the coercion of local populations could be justified.44 For despite the idealised conformity between Amerindians and universal principles of natural law, Spanish colonialists were all too aware that the colonial relationship between the two was marked by non-conformity and difference – an

39 40 41

42 43

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Cf. Williams 1990; Anghie 2007; Bowden 2009. Vitoria 1990, pp. 336–7. Setting ‘universal standards for the assessment of human institutions’ would become a hallmark of Enlightenment thinking. In this respect, Vitoria prefigured later attempts to construct ‘a critical morality, rationally binding on all human beings, and, as a corollary, the creation of a universal civilization’ (Gray 1995, p. 123). Anghie 2007, pp. 19–20. Bowden 2009, pp. 137–9. For Vitoria, persons must be permitted free movement: ‘to each to go and to travel into all countries he so desires’. In exchange, ‘[t]he Indian princes cannot prevent their subjects from engaging in commerce with the Spaniards, and conversely, the Spanish princes cannot forbid commerce with the Indians’ (quoted in Todorov 1982, p. 149). Williams 1990, pp. 96–7.

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opposition among the local population to the Spanish ‘way of life’. This eventually forced the debate among Spanish jurists to ‘grapple with an ontological rather than just a political or legal question: what was the nature of these Amerindians; were they human beings at all?’45 Constitutive Absence: The Ontology of the Other In the mid-sixteenth century debates among Spanish jurists, a popular idea took hold that although Amerindians were indeed human, they were hamstrung by a developmental ‘backwardness’ – a ‘primitivism’ – caused by their own cultural peculiarities. While the discourse of the Spanish jurists was theological, one can discern in Vitoria’s studies of the local populations in the Americas the ‘rudiments of a theory of development’46 that served to identify those universal (read: Spanish) qualities that the ‘Indian’ lacked. The absence of certain qualitative characteristics became constitutive of their very being as the Other. This represents an early prototype of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has termed the ‘sociology of absences’: a mode of metonymic reasoning that ‘produces the nonexistence of what does not fit its totality and linear time’ which would become a defining feature of later Eurocentric forms of Enlightenment thinking (see below).47 Both Vitoria and the influential theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda were instrumental in identifying markers of ‘barbarian’, ‘evil’ and ‘savage’ characteristics among Amerindians.48 While sodomy and cannibalism were indicative of a heathen, diabolical, even bestial character – ‘little different from brute animals’49 – the physical nudity of the Amerindians exposed, in the minds of the Spanish, a more pervasive spiritual and cultural nudity, ‘an absence of customs, rites, religion’.50 Furthermore, the Amerindians were considered economically naïve, excessively generous and possessing no conception of private property; they also appeared unable to properly extract precious metals or cul-

45 46 47 48

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Jahn 1999, p. 414. Inayatullah and Blaney 2004, p. 46. Santos 2004, p. 167. Vitoria 1990, p. 335. Sepúlveda thus argued: ‘In wisdom, skill, virtue and humanity, these people are as inferior to the Spaniards as children are to adults and women to men; there is as great a difference between them as there is between savagery and forbearance, between violence and moderation, almost – I am inclined to say – as between monkeys and men’ (quoted in Todorov 1982, p. 53). Notable here is how the opposition to the Other involves an explicit affirmation of the Self as mature, male, forbearing, and moderate. Similarly, Sepúlveda wrote (1990, p. 322) that ‘[t]here is as much difference between them [the Spanish and Amerindians] as there is … between ape and men’. Todorov 1982, p. 35.

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tivate land. The difference in systems of production, property and exchange observed by the likes of Columbus and Cortes served as markers of an absence of social system altogether, from which a view of the Amerindians as ‘backward’ was extrapolated.51 The upshot of such ‘observations’ was that the Amerindians were by nature and divine sanction destined to be slaves.52 As Sepúlveda put it: those who are dim-witted and mentally lazy … are by nature slaves. It is just and useful this way. We even see it sanctioned in divine law itself, for it is written in the Book of Proverbs: ‘He who is stupid will serve the wise man’. And so it is with the barbarous and inhuman people [the Indians] who have no civil life and peaceful customs.53 Both Vitoria and Sepúlveda saw in the Amerindian character a series of defects, each a product of years of socialisation in ‘evil’ customs and practices, which prevented their salvation.54 A long process of counter-education and supervision by the Spanish, designed to ‘undo’ such ‘barbarity’, subsequently became a necessity, no less a duty.55 Moreover, because such ‘barbarity’ was so deeply ingrained, force, coercion, discipline and punishment became necessary to compel local populations to abandon their beliefs and customs.56 If ‘they refuse our rule’, Sepúlveda wrote, ‘they may be compelled by force of arms to accept it’.57 The Cultural Vacuum of Universal Law The brutality of Spanish colonialism led another Spanish thinker, Bartolomé de Las Casas, to produce a ‘counter-history’ of the Amerindians.58 Las Casas emphasised the ‘gentle and peace-loving’ characteristics of the Amerindians,59 51 52

53 54

55 56 57 58 59

Todorov 1982, p. 38. During the Valladolid Controversy (1550–1), Sepúlveda based his justifications for the Spanish colonialists’ enslavement of the Amerindians on Aristotle’s idea of ‘natural slaves’ formulated in Politics, Book I, Chapters 3–7. Sepúlveda 1990, p. 321. As Vitoria (1990, p. 337) put it: ‘these aborigines have for many centuries been outside the pale of salvation, in that they have been born in sin and void of baptism and the use of reason whereby to seek out the things needful of salvation. Accordingly I for the most attribute their seeming so unintelligent and stupid to a bad and barbarous upbringing …’. Sepúlveda 1990, p. 321. Jahn 1999, p. 416; cf. Todorov 1982, p. 156. Sepúlveda 1990, p. 323. Greengrass 2014, p. 153; Bowden 2009, p. 137. See footnotes 19 and 20. Las Casas 1992, p. 53.

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upon which he articulated a principle of Christian equality and ‘the natural laws and rules and rights of men’.60 He contrasted this image with that of the Spanish conquistadors as ‘devils’, thus criticising Spanish practices.61 However, despite his more ‘benevolent’ starting point, Las Casas also saw Amerindian culture as something to be negated and replaced by Spanish practices, albeit ‘peacefully’.62 In justifying this position, Las Casas argued that since Amerindians were ‘docile’ and ‘less resistant’, they were particularly primed for conversion to Christianity.63 Las Casas invoked a paternalistic conception of Amerindian developmental immaturity – they were ‘borne late’ and were ‘rustic’ in character. The ‘cultural vacuum’ that characterised Amerindians would have to be filled through tutelage from the more advanced Spanish.64 Hence, in both belligerent and benevolent sides of the debate, the conclusion was the same: both Spanish and Amerindians were subject to the same universal, natural laws but, due to a deeply ingrained cultural ‘backwardness’, Amerindians were incapable of adhering to such laws. Since Amerindians were incapable of governing themselves, the Spanish were required to govern on their behalf – Spanish rule and tutelage was therefore necessary in order for Amerindians to conform to the ‘universal’ principles of natural law and ‘achieve salvation’.65 By associating ‘universality’ with ‘the adoption or imposition of the universally applicable practices of the Spanish’,66 colonisation and the aggressive transformation of the New World were subsequently presented as a moral and legal obligation. Should indigenous communities deny colonialists the ‘right of communication’67 through which the former would be transformed then the latter would be entitled to conduct a ‘just war’ against them.68 With this move, war became justified ‘under the cover of an international law of reciprocity’69 and took centre stage in the ideology of colonialism. It became the ‘means by

60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69

Quoted in Todorov 1982, p. 162. Las Casas 1992, p. 127. Todorov 1982, p. 170. ‘The infidels, especially the Indians (who by nature are gentle, humble, and peaceful), should be persuaded [to the gospels] by gifts and presents, and nothing should be taken away from them’. For, as Las Casas went on, ‘[w]hatever defects their society may have had can be removed and corrected with the preaching and spread of the gospel’ (1990, p. 328). Jahn 1999, p. 415. Anghie 2007, p. 22. Ibid. Todorov 1982, p. 175. Jahn 1999, p. 417; Anghie 2007, pp. 21–2; Bowden 2009, p. 140. Todorov 1982, p. 150.

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which Indians and their territory [were] converted into Spaniards and Spanish territory, the agency by which the Indians thus [achieved] their full human potential’.70 In short, the destruction of indigenous communities, customs and modes of production became reframed as the ‘humanitarian obligation of the Spaniards’.71 These ideas advanced by the ideologues of the Spanish Empire prefigure – if in incomplete form – the basic components of Eurocentrism to which we now turn.

3

Legitimising Colonialism: The Historical Sociological Foundations of Eurocentrism

As examined above, both the making of the European Self and Amerindian Other were fundamentally interactive processes based on extant and changing forms of sociological unevenness. They were, in short, the outcome of a combined development. Likewise, the ideology of Eurocentrism cannot be historicised within the cultural or geographical borders of Europe alone, but only as an essentially intersocietal development. For it is in the colonial encounter that we find the emergent tendencies to read cultural differences between societies not simply as differences, but as absences: the Amerindians lacked those features the Spanish possessed. Absence in turn served as a marker of ‘backwardness’ in the Amerindian Other, enabling the hierarchical demarcation of the European Self as ‘advanced’ and superior. Through this practice of demarcation, Europeans were able to imagine themselves as a culturally homogenous entity – civilised, advanced, distinct and separate from the ‘savage’ world outside it. As such, the basic premises of Eurocentrism were prototypically established. A methodological internalism (wherein European development is conceptualised as endogenous and selfpropelling) and assumptions of historical priority (which posits the endogenous and autonomous emergence of modernity in Europe) first began to take shape in the Atlantic encounter. Civilisation through Annihilation By setting up this hierarchy, a ‘standard of civilization’ was thereby established, and with it, the moral obligation for the ‘the civilized to take control of the uncivilized’.72 As such, the practice of comparison established difference as 70 71 72

Anghie 2007, p. 23. Jahn 1999, p. 415. Bowden 2009, p. 115.

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something to be negated and overcome – an absence to be filled with the content of Spanish practices. ‘Indians’ had to be civilised, their peculiarities annihilated. Sepúlveda chillingly captured the affinities between ‘civilising’ activities and societal annihilation when he argued that ‘the loss of a single soul dead without baptism exceeds in gravity the death of countless victims, even were they innocent’.73 Sepúlveda’s imperative – a ‘moral’ and ‘humanitarian’ one no less – implied ‘a projection of the subject speaking about the universe, an identification of my values with the values’:74 the projection of Spanish practices as universal. This projection and the possibility of civilisation through annihilation would in turn invoke the third marker of Eurocentrism – linear developmentalism based on a homogenous conception of time, or what Chakrabarty calls ‘historicism’.75 By setting up sociocultural distinctions in terms of linear history, non-Europeans were seen to present an image of Europe’s past and, in turn, Europe posited itself as the image of non-Europeans’ future. Amerindians, on this view, ‘served as a paradigm for an original state [of nature] before property became individuated and secure: “In the beginning all the world was America” as John Locke put it’.76 Or, as Adam Ferguson would later write: It is in their [the American savages] present condition, that we are to behold, as in a mirror, the features of our own progenitors; and from thence we are to draw our conclusions with respect to the influence of situations, in which, we have reason to believe, our fathers were placed.77 Such conceptions of linear developmentalism thereby (re)constructed sociological relations of unevenness through temporal conceptions of distance or separation,78 entailing a particular understanding of how the past, present and 73 74 75 76 77 78

Quoted in Todorov 1982, p. 155. Todorov 1982, p. 154. Chakrabarty 2008. Thompson 1993, p. 164. Ferguson 1789, p. 147. Fabian 2002, p. 16. According to Fabian, linear time existed before capitalist modernity, and so ‘decisive steps towards modernity must be sought, not in the invention of a linear conception, but in a succession of attempts to secularise Judeo-Christian Time by generalizing and universalizing it’ (2002, p. 2). The pre-Enlightenment Judaeo-Christian conception of time was one based on salvation and were therefore inclusive or incorporative – ‘The Others, pagans and infidels (rather than savages and primitives), were viewed as candidates for salvation. Even the conquista, certainly a form of spatial expansion, needed to be propped up by an ideology of conversion’. In contrast, the Enlightenment was based on natural, secular, evolutionist notions of historical time and as such – despite very much

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future related to one another (see below). They also functioned as a framework to legitimise the annihilation of substantive sociological differences between the Spanish (and later French and English) and Amerindians by naturalising the ‘culturally peculiar path of Western development based on private property and state-formation’.79 Race on the Continuum of Linear Time This recasting of sociological unevenness and sociocultural difference in strictly normative terms – which fitted Amerindian ‘backwardness’ into a universal hierarchical axis of historical development – would become a hallmark of modern racism. And indeed, the controversy originally sparked at Valladolid between Las Casas and Sepúlveda was ‘fundamentally a racial debate’.80 For it was here in these debates and the systems of organising the labour process among the Amerindians (the encomienda and repartimiento) that we find the lineages of racism that would become a constitutive feature of capitalist modernity.81 Conceptions of linear developmentalism would find their fullest expression in the Eurocentric stadial thinking of the Enlightenment period. With an emphasis on clearly distinguishable stages of development (what the French Physiocrats and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers conceived in terms of suc-

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justifying colonial practice – saw savages and primitives as ‘not-yet’ ready for civilisation. In this respect, and in contrast to medieval forms, linear time is conceived in terms of distance and separation (Fabian 2002, p. 26). However, the contrast Fabian draws between the two (sacred and secular) requires some nuancing. Read against the writings of early colonialists, Fabian misses the contradictory ways in which both distance and inclusion functioned in a contradictory yet mutually constitutive way. Enlightenment constructions of relations between Self and Other were not only marked by distance, since the project of the civilising mission was purportedly directed at closing that distance. In this respect, it was also inclusive. On the opposite side, early colonial conceptions of difference were not wholly inclusive, since in the thought of Vitoria and Sepúlveda, we get a pervasive sense that ‘Indians’ were ‘not-yet’ ready for salvation – they would require hundreds of years of Spanish ‘tutelage’ to undo their ‘barbaric’ culture. Distance and separation were very much a hallmark of earlier thinking, just as much as inclusion and incorporation was pervasive in the latter. In fact, in both we see that distance/separation (backwardness, savagery, immaturity) serves to legitimise (even oblige) inclusion/incorporation (salvation/civilising mission). As such, the colonial encounter must be seen as one of the first formative steps in the generalisation and universalisation of linear time and hence also a moment in its transition to its modern, secular form. Jahn 1999, p. 412. Acquino 2015, p. 304. Cf. Martinez 2008; Acquino 2015.

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cessive ‘modes of subsistence’) on the continuum of linear time,82 stagism would establish one of the key intellectual foundations for the emergence of ‘scientific’ racism. In keeping with these unilinear stagist models, the employment of scientific and technological criteria in proving the superiority (and thus domination) of Europeans over non-white peoples would become the norm over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As material disparities between a rising capitalist ‘core’ and non-capitalist ‘periphery’ developed, broader philosophical, societal, religious and cultural distinctions were superseded by those ‘based on things’.83 This was one instance of a more generalised technological fetishism emerging from the rapid but uneven development of the productive forces under capitalism in its worldwide expansion, whereby the level of technological development was perceived as determining the moral worth of a particular ‘race’ and/or society. Scientific racism thereby organically arose with the systematisation of unevenness constitutive of the capitalist mode of production and its interactions with other societies. Those communities or ‘races’ which did not ‘adequately’ develop the productive forces were judged unfit to exist or in need of instructive rule from the morally and culturally superior ‘Western’ societies. As with the formation of the United States, ‘Native Americans, like other less-powerful groups who possessed territory coveted by White Americans were declared racially inferior and incapable of productive use of the land’.84 The dispossession of the Amerindians, along with the many later European ‘humanitarian’ interventions, became justified on the basis of a stadial conception of development through which non-European societies were deemed materially (and thus normatively) ‘backward’ in comparison to the ‘West’. Quite tellingly, the so-called ‘father’ of modern liberalism, John Locke, evoked similar justifications for the expropriation of the Amerindians in Englishheld Atlantic colonies. For Locke, the dispossession of the Amerindians was both necessary and legitimate since the ‘Indians had no right, or very tenuous right, to the land, because they had not “mixed their labour” with it sufficiently’.85 Since Locke saw Amerindians as ‘poor “for want of improving” the land by labour’, and such ‘labour (and improvement) constituted the right to property, this made it the more easy for the Europeans to dispossess the Indi-

82 83 84 85

Cf. Davidson 2012, pp. 55–71. Adas 1989. Fry 2002, p. 44. Byres 1996, p. 172.

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ans of their hunting grounds’.86 Europe’s colonisation of the Americas and the ideological apparatuses it spawned marked the embryonic origins of the ‘global color line’87 that would evolve with capitalism’s development into a world system of imperialist domination. Demarcations in Time and Space In the Age of Enlightenment, under the dual impact of the industrial and French revolutions, notions of a linearly defined universal temporality also came to undergird an entirely new form of historical consciousness and political subjectivity directed toward the forward march of ‘progress’. This ‘modern regime of historicity’, as François Hartog terms it,88 represented ‘both a fundamental rupture between past, present, and future – as distinct temporal planes – and their relinking along a singular line that allows for continuity’.89 Historical time was thereby transformed into teleological time. Consequently, the past was divested of its long-held authority, and the circular conception of time represented by the ancient regime of historicity – that took as its historiographical model the topos of historia magistra vitae, which held that the present be made ‘intelligible through the past, and the force of exemplary’90 – was replaced by a future-orientated understanding of history. From the perspective of the modern historical consciousness, the dynamics of social change and development were no longer conceived as more or less cyclical processes, whereby ‘the future might not repeat the past exactly, but it would certainly never surpass it’.91 Rather, they signified an inexorable movement toward the ‘telos of modernity’92 based upon the sharp delimitation between past and present.93 It was upon this continuum of linear time, which essentially took as its end-point the particularities of the modern European experience, that the differential developmental trajectories of different cultures and nation states were to be made legible and judged ‘successes’ or ‘failures’. For the distinguishing feature of the historical consciousness of modern-

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Thompson 1993, pp. 164–5. Du Bois 1961, p. 23. For a discussion of Du Bois’s concept of the ‘global colour line’ vis-à-vis IR theory, see Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam 2015. Hartog 2015. Trouillot 2002, pp. 231–2. Hartog 2015, p. 38. Hartog 2015, p. 105. Makki 2016. As Constantin Fasolt writes (2004, p. 7) with regard to the modern form of historical consciousness: ‘Freedom and progress depend on the distinction between past and present. The founding principle of history is therefore also a founding principle of politics’.

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ity, its distinctive regime of historicity, was the perception of the ‘nonsimultaneity of diverse but, in a chronological sense, simultaneous histories’, which was the consequence of the international rise and expansion of capitalist modernity. As Reinhart Koselleck explains: With the opening up of the world, the most different but coexisting cultural levels were brought into view spatially and, by way of synchronic comparison, were diachronically classified. World history became for the first time empirically redeemable; however, it was only interpretable to the extent that the most differentiated levels of development, decelerations and accelerations of temporal courses in various countries, social strata, classes, or areas were at the same time necessarily reduced to a common denominator.94 In this conception, an acknowledgement of the facticity of the unevenness of social existence was retained, but at the expense of ordering its constituents upon a universal hierarchical axis of historical development fitted with myriad binaries: the ‘archaic’ and ‘contemporary’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’, etc. This was, moreover, a conception of history that was marshalled by Enlightenment thinkers in the service of newly aspiring sovereigns who were seeking to liberate themselves from the antiquated authority of pope and emperor,95 while they were simultaneously defining themselves against their ‘backward’ colonial subjects to which sovereignty was denied. The forms of sovereignty in space these political agents sought to carve out for themselves through linearly defined territorial boundaries were thus co-extensive with linearly defined conceptions of sovereignty in time. For sovereignty ‘requires not only borders in space, but also borders in time’96 as political legitimacy could 94 95 96

Koselleck 2002, p. 166. Fasolt 2004, p. 17. Fasolt 2004, p. 7. For a fascinating discussion of the implications of these points for history-writing vis-à-vis theorising ‘the international’, see Davenport (2016) upon which this section draws but does not fully address all the questions it raises. For if historical consciousness constitutes, as Davenport argues, a distinctively modern form of experiencing and understanding the relations between past, present and future, that is itself inextricably tied to the rise of modern sovereign authorities – and thus by extension the fractured space of ‘the international’ – then what might the framework of uneven and combined development mean for critically reflecting upon the political meaning of history in rethinking these relations? In other words, while this chapter has been focused on examining history from the perspective of uneven and combined development, it does not quite offer a critique of history; though we do believe the theory could prove useful in this respect.

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no longer rest on its continuities with the past (such as through divine law), but through a rupture with it.97 The constitution of modern capitalist sovereignty can be thus conceptualised as having been articulated through a series of interconnected demarcations: the differentiation between the political and economic,98 ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, Self and Other, and past and present. And this latter division of history into distinct temporal planes for which the modern sovereign laid claim meant that individual freedom, autonomy and ‘progress’ came to be conceived as resting within and limited to the internal confines of the sovereign state.99 Indeed, the particular notion of progress entailed in this linearly defined demarcation in time (past from present, present to future) was accompanied by an obstinate demarcation in space: progress, so to speak, stopped at water’s edge. For while ‘progress’ could be detected in ‘national histories considered in isolation’, at the level of the fractured anarchic space of the international, one could apparently only find ‘recurrence and repetition’ in which ‘political action is most regularly necessitous’.100 Such was, at least, Martin Wight’s dismal prognosis for the striking absence of any clear tradition of international theory in the Classical Political Philosophy tradition: an absence that is, as indicated above, replicated in classical social theory. ‘Political theory and law’, Wight wrote, ‘are maps of experience or systems of action within the realm of normal relationships and calculable results. They are the theory of the good life. International theory is the theory of survival. For what political theory is the extreme case (as revolution, or civil war) is for international theory the regular’.101 And it was upon this analytical distinction between the ‘ordered’ realm of the domestic and the ‘anarchic’ structure of the international102 that contemporary realist IR was ultimately founded.103 Sovereign Exemptions These sovereign demarcations in time and space also meant their exemptions from those who did not yet meet the ‘standards of civilization’ entailed in the singular hierarchal axis of historical development upon which the Europeans set themselves atop. As the foregoing analysis has shown, the push and pull of

97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Davenport 2016, p. 257. Cf. Rosenberg 1994. Fasolt 2004; Davenport 2016. Wight 1966, p. 26. Wight 1966, p. 33. Cf. Waltz 1979; Gilpin 1981; Mearsheimer 2001. Davenport 2016.

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colonial subjugation – and indigenous resistance to it – was articulated primarily through cultural difference and separation. In the first instance, it provided the moral and legal basis through which colonialism could be justified: the Spanish were self-perceived as rational, moral, universal, advanced and thus sovereign; the Amerindians were irrational, backward, and so exempted from sovereign agency. For these reasons, Amerindians were obliged to adopt universal – Spanish – ways of life. But, moreover, the definition of Amerindians in ‘state of nature’ terms was driven by the compulsion among the Spanish ruling class to exert greater control over indigenous communities, especially so since Amerindian attempts to reassert their own culture constituted a fundamental attack on the reproduction of Spanish colonialism. As such, cultural difference became a threat, something to be violently negated by colonial rule. Where colonialists could not make indigenous communities conform to the ‘universal’ standards set by the Spanish, they were defined as diabolical or irrational. Colonialists were thus able to exclude ‘women and men in the colonies from the social contract implicit in the wage and “free labour” ’,104 and in the process naturalise the exploitation of colonial labour based on ‘unfree’ methods (slavery, corvée labour, debt peonage, etc.). The exclusion of indigenous populations from this ‘social contract’ – an exclusion that went right to the heart of colonial rule – helps us understand the compulsion felt among Spanish jurists to make a cultural distinction between themselves and the Amerindians based on the ‘state of nature’. The culture wars waged in the Americas were therefore constitutive of altogether new and unique relations of patriarchy,105 class, and later white supremacy that would become formative of capitalist relations in both the ‘periphery’ and ‘core’. In this context, the associated ‘state of nature’ discourse was not an empirical observation, nor an innocent thought experiment. It was, rather, a colonial(ist) construct born out of the ‘culture wars’ waged – and ultimately won – by Spanish colonialists against Amerindians in the name of colonial exploitation. A line of continuity can thus be drawn from the comparative work of Spanish colonialists, through Enlightenment and imperial conceptions of stadial development, to current practices of imperialism. In each, cultural, political and economic differences in so-called ‘backward’ countries have been presented as ‘absences’, with a particular emphasis on lacking or ‘failed’ structures of political and economic governance. The concomitant exclusion of indigen-

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Federici 2004, p. 200. See Federici 2004.

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ous people from the ‘social contract’ and the perceived inability of ‘backward’ countries to govern have in turn been central to legitimising external rule over them – a practice that continues to this day.106 In its more belligerent manifestations, the perceived absence of proper governance structures has served to validate military interventions under the rubric of ‘just wars’. The capacity for and battle over sociopolitical organisation and self-government – that is, statehood and sovereignty – constitutes a key component of the ‘standard of civilization’.107 The ideological, institutional and legal structures of territorialised state sovereignty that would become a hallmark of capitalist modernity in Europe were in fact forged in the (racialised and gendered) crucible of the colonial Atlantic. Only after these institutional and ideological innovations came to prove their efficacy as a particular form of (bio)political rule and control108 did such organisational ‘advances’ radiate back to the European imperial metropole.109 We now turn to examine the theoretical debates and historical processes involved in this often overlooked colonial dimension in the making of the sovereign states system in Europe.

4

The Colonial Origins of the Modern Territorialised States System

Debates surrounding modern state-formation and the origins of territorial sovereignty have been characterised by endogenous (internalist) and exogenous (externalist) logics of explanation primarily, if not exclusively, operating in the European theatre. On the one side, Weberian and Hintzian-influenced approaches have emphasised the effects of war-making and geopolitical rivalries on increasing state institutional and material capacities. In this model, geopolitical and military competition among the great powers in Europe is seen as the prime driver in the making of modern, territorially bounded states.110 Focusing on intra-European developments, the constitutive role of the colonial encounter and empire-building is accorded, if recognised at all, a secondary place in the explanatory schema. Consequently, the agency of the Amerindians is given little to no attention.

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Cf. Miéville 2005; Anghie 2007. Bowden 2009, p. 165. Foucault 2008. As examined below, Foucault’s understanding of the rise of biopolitics as a primarily, if not exclusively, European affair is untenable. For a postcolonial critique of Foucault’s Eurocentrism, see Jabri 2007, pp. 73–6. See, for example, Giddens 1985; Tilly 1992; Mann 1993.

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On the other side, (neo-)Marxist approaches have focused on transformations in the social relations of production within societies as the ‘prime mover’ in the development of the modern territorialised states system.111 While some of these perspectives take the endogenous development of capitalism in England as their point of departure they nonetheless recognise the subsequent role of geopolitical competition in spreading the modern nation state form as continental European states sought to confront the systemic pressures posed by the modernising challenge emanating from Britain.112 The primary focus is again centred on intra-European dynamics as the primary site of inception. While broadening the perspective to include the economically functional role of the ‘periphery’ to the rise of capitalist states in the ‘core’, World-System Analysts similarly pay little, if any, attention to the mutually transformative effects of the colonial encounter in producing the modern state.113 Hence, even where intersocietal determinations are invoked by (neo-)Marxist approaches in explaining processes of social change, they fall short of offering a genuinely ‘international’ perspective.114 The overwhelming attention to ‘Western’ agency is similarly reproduced in constructivist accounts of the rise of the modern states system.115 What these accounts miss, then, is the fundamentally co-constitutive nature of the colonial encounter in the making of sovereign territorialised states. Vitoria’s Subjective Sovereign Returning to the writings of the Spanish jurist Vitoria is again instructive. In his work, we see a pervasive attentiveness to ‘the international’, taking in European geopolitics, but also those of the Americas and Asia. We see how the colonial encounter was not only generative of Eurocentrism as an ideology of colonial legitimation, but also in mobilising the assumptions of Eurocentrism to develop what would become modern conceptions of territorial sovereignty. Emphasising the absence of functioning governance structures among the indigenous populations of the Americas, Vitoria writes … they have no proper laws nor magistrates … It might, therefore, be maintained that in their own interests the sovereigns of Spain might 111 112 113 114 115

Cf. Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003; Lacher 2006. See esp. Teschke 2003; Lacher 2006. Cf. Wallerstein 1974; Arrighi 1994. Hobson 2011, p. 153. For example, Kratochwil 1986; Ruggie 1993; Spruyt 1994; but see Nexon 2009.

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undertake the administration of their country, providing them with prefects and governors for their own towns, and might even give them new lords.116 He then goes on to further substantiate the permissibility of Spanish rule, by articulating the absence of Amerindian governance structures in terms of their historical ‘backwardness’: for if they are all wanting in intelligence, there is no doubt that this would not only be permissible, but also a highly proper, course to take; nay, our sovereigns would be bound to take it, just as if the natives were infants. The same principle seems to apply here to them as to people of defective intelligence; and indeed they are no whit or little better than such so far as self-government is concerned, or even the wild beasts … Therefore their governance should in the same way be entrusted to people of intelligence.117 For Vitoria, the ‘justness’ of war demanded by the tasks of imposing Spanish rule could not be founded on a subjective belief that those conducting war were inherently just, since this opened the possibility that ‘even Turks and Saracens might wage just wars against Christians, for they think they are thus rendering God service’.118 Vitoria’s paradoxically subjective solution to the problem was to demonstrate that Saracens, due to the absence of any conformity to natural law, were incapable of waging a just war. In this way, Vitoria excluded Saracens – and by extension Amerindians – from admittance to the legal rights of sovereignty.119 Finally, Vitoria incorporates into his legal framework a way of distinguishing who is and who is not sovereign, to justify rule over the Amerindians and the exclusivity of this rule to the Spanish: if there was to be an indiscriminate inrush of Christians from other parts to the part in question, they might easily hinder one another and develop quarrels, to the banishment of tranquillity and the disturbance of the concerns of the faith and of the conversion of the natives.120

116 117 118 119 120

Quoted in Bowden 2009, p. 115. Quoted in Bowden 2009, p. 116. Quoted in Anghie 2007, p. 26. Cf. Miéville 2005, pp. 175–6, p. 188. Quoted in Bowden 2009, p. 139.

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Taken together, Vitoria’s statements demonstrate that the perceived absence of recognisable sovereign authority in the Americas not only legitimised ‘just wars’, but also necessitated original ways of dividing, claiming and asserting power over newly conquered territories against other European competitors. Such claims did not go uncontested. Francis I of France voiced his protest to these types of arguments, claiming that ‘[t]he sun shines for me as for others. I should very much like to see the clause in Adam’s will that excludes me from a share of the world’. The king of Denmark in turn refused to accept the Pope’s ruling for the East Indies. Sir William Cecil, the famous Elizabethan statesman, also denied the Pope’s right ‘to give and take kingdoms to whomsoever he pleased’. In 1580, the English government countered with the principle of effective occupation as the determinant of sovereignty.121 Contested Spaces In these ways, newly formulated abstract notions of linear time came to be complimented by novel abstract conceptions of linear geographical space which eventually developed into the modern form of territorialised state sovereignty. The ‘discovery’ of the Americas presented the European powers with the unique challenge of occupying and claiming political authority over vast and unknown spatial expanses populated by ‘Others’ whose very being threw into question the entire ideological apparatus of Christendom. Redefining such spaces as ‘empty’ or ‘virgin’ lands allowed the colonising powers to ‘legitimately’ lay political claim to and territorially organise them according to their needs and interests. Yet, as Jordan Branch notes, these ‘ostensibly empty spaces of the Americas could be comprehended, negotiated over, and competed for only by using an abstract conception of space built on mathematical cartography’.122 For the unprecedented exigencies arising from the making of ‘extra-European political claims’ required the development of new governmental practices and technics by the colonial powers, particularly through the use of ‘linear territorial divisions between spatial expanses’ representing a ‘complex blend of old and new’ conceptions of space.123 The combined character of such contemporary conceptions and practices of territoriality was exemplified by the many early grants and charters established by European states in the New World. These were ‘primarily feudal documents’ in which monarchs granted political and economic rights to deserving persons

121 122 123

Quotes in Williams 1944, p. 4. Branch 2014, p. 100. Branch 2014, p. 100; Sack 1986, p. 127.

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and companies.124 Yet the novelty of conditions and specific challenges confronting the conquering colonial powers in the Americas spurred on the development of new ways of territorially organising social relations based upon an ‘abstract geometrical’ approach to claiming sovereignty over space.125 ‘Almost any seventeenth- or eighteenth-century map of America’, Samuel Edgerton writes, ‘reveals the absolute faith Europeans of all religious persuasions had in the authority of the cartographic grid’. For as colonial powers ‘laid claim to lands solely on the basis of abstract latitudes and longitudes … [t]roops were sent to fight and die for boundaries that had no visible landmarks, only abstract mathematical existence’.126 Such novel articulations of linearly demarcated forms of territorial sovereignty in the Americas had a distinctly ‘modern ring’, one pointing toward the kinds of ‘explicit and intense territorial definition of social relations’127 that would later characterise the European nation states system. And, indeed, the colonial innovation of abstract linear-defined territoriality would come to have major repercussions in Europe. The (political) principles of cartography, based on abstract space and linear territorial divisions, were first formed in the colonial encounter in the Americas and then subsequently reconfigured and transported back to Europe.128 The originality of such conceptions of linear territoriality can be most clearly found in the treaties of the period. In Europe, treaties concluding wars typically emphasised non-linear or non-contiguous territories, wherein the spoils of conquests were divided according to places rather than territories. This was evident as late as the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 which, despite its purportedly modern credentials, still listed every non-contiguous ‘place, jurisdiction, and right to be granted to one party by the other’.129 In contrast, treaties pertaining to the New World used cartographic language to delineate territorial claims based on linear demarcations and supposedly ‘natural’ frontiers. Territories could be claimed in this way precisely because the known political authorities – the Amerindians – were not recognised, denied their right to sovereignty and therefore excluded from any such treaties.130 The first examples of linearly defined claims to political authority can be found in the 1493 Papal Bulls and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain

124 125 126 127 128 129 130

Sack 1986, p. 126. Ibid. Edgerton 1987, p. 46. Sack 1986, p. 126. Branch 2014, p. 101. Branch 2012, p. 288. Branch 2012, pp. 277–8; cf. Miéville 2005, pp. 175–6.

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and Portugal (see Figure 2.1). These treaties apportioned to Spain all newly discovered territories west of a line drawn in the Atlantic Ocean with Portugal receiving those territories to the east.131 The significance of such treaties were ‘not in the details of the lines’, Branch notes, ‘but instead in the very idea of using a linear division to assign political authority: “For the first time in history an abstract geometric system had been used to define a vast – global – area of control”’.132 Colonial Rivalry and the Occupation of ‘Empty Space’ These linear territorial divisions apportioning political authority to particular European powers over specific locales in the Americas were only partly directed at local populations. Defining the Amerindians as ‘backward’ or ‘subhuman’ was an important step in the process of their removal given the European belief that, as the contemporary John Smith put it, ‘to invade and dispossess the people of an unoffending civilised country would violate morality and transgress the principles of international law’.133 Yet, the real utility in politically apportioning such spaces along abstract, linear lines was in dealing with existing and future European rivals. While such claims initially served to posit non-European spaces as terra nullius,134 thereby opening them to European acquisition, their primary aim was in regulating the relative claims of competing European powers. Thus, ‘such treaties were not concluded with the local “sovereigns” in mind at all, but functioned rather as a means of demonstrating a relationship of authority or control to other European powers’.135 The origins of the modern form of territorialised sovereignty were thus the outcome of an aleatory encounter with societies that Europeans considered ‘empty’ and incapable of any sovereign authority, and the competing claims to occupy such ‘empty’ spaces by colonial powers. Rather than being derived from some internal impulse, this was a response to the particular challenges of jurisdiction in these territories produced by historically specific intersocietal interactions. Such state practices and modalities of territoriality then travelled back to Europe forming a crucial step in the formation of the modern territorially defined state, but only ‘after the usefulness and legitimacy of linearly bounded authority claims were made clear by centuries of colonial practice’.136

131 132 133 134 135 136

Miéville 2005, pp. 171–2. Branch 2012, p. 284 quoting in part Sack 1986, p. 132. Quoted in Sack 1986, p. 131. Terra nullius refers to territories not under the sovereignty of any state. Craven 2007, p. 21. Branch 2012, p. 292; see further, Branch 2014, pp. 100–19.

figure 2.1 ‘Catino Planisphere’ (1502) by unknown Portuguese cartographer, showing the Tordesillas line (left-hand side of map) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cantino_planisphere_(1502).jpg (accessed 21 November 2014).

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The wholesale application and re-purposing of New World ‘practices of linear boundaries and territorial exclusivity’ in Europe was perhaps best exemplified at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 where European policymakers ‘used linear territorial demarcations to promote stability among and within conservative regimes across the continent’.137 Such legal and political innovations must therefore be understood as various forms of combined development – constructions initially emerging out of the ‘attempts to resolve the unique legal problems arising from the discovery of the Indians’.138 The significance of our spatially decentred, non-Eurocentric conception of the origins of sovereign territoriality for understanding the rise of capitalism in Europe and its later ascendency to global domination is three-fold. Firstly, it gives lie to the dominant myth that the states system was a product of geopolitical and socioeconomic processes internal to Europe, whilst further problematising those accounts that conceive of this European state-formation process as an exclusively elite-driven affair. Rather, it was the struggle to dominate and subjugate the indigenous populations of the Americas and guard against other encroaching colonial powers that laid the ideological and material foundations for novel conceptions of linearly demarcated, territorialised spaces of sovereignty. The territorialising process of state-formation was thus fundamentally Janus-faced: it gazed inward at dominating newly claimed ‘empty spaces’ and subject populations, whilst looking outward toward fending off other competing imperial powers’ claims. Secondly, the development and consolidation of territorialised states and capitalism in Europe were intimately intertwined and co-constitutive processes. In contrast to influential neo-Weberian and Marxist accounts,139 the formation of the European states system did not precede the rise of capitalism. Instead, the early modern epoch witnessed the co-evolution and transformation of capitalism and the European states system that was continually ‘overdetermined’ by interactions with the ‘extra-European’ world. Capitalism did not only emerge as a consequence of developments internal to England or Europe during the Long Sixteenth Century. It did not later suddenly ‘burst on the international [read: European – AA/KN] scene in the nineteenth century’140 and subsequently radiate outwards in a unidirectional process of Europeandriven change. Similarly, the territorialised states system did not first emerge in 137 138 139 140

Branch 2012, p. 291, p. 292. Anghie 2007, p. 14. Cf. Giddens 1985, pp. 158–60; Rosenberg 1994, pp. 129–39; Teschke 2003, pp. 144–6; Lacher 2006, pp. 106–8. Teschke 2003, p. 209.

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Europe during the absolutist era and it was not exclusively the consequence of military-geopolitical rivalries operating in the European continent. The upshot of all this is that capitalism and the modern states system retain not only a theoretically internal relationship as conceived from the perspective of uneven and combined development, but a historically organic one as well.141 Moreover, this was a relationship that was fundamentally rooted in and constituted by historical processes emanating from outside Europe itself. Thirdly, the development of territorially demarcated states was crucial to the subsequent bundle of processes that eventually led to Europe’s ascendency to global domination. The modern territorialised state, particularly in its later post-absolutist incarnation, proved a militarily and fiscally efficient vehicle of class rule at home and imperial dominance abroad. The two were in fact inextricably bound as the development and consolidation of capitalism at home was fundamentally secured and buttressed by imperial expansion abroad. Moreover, the territorialisation of state and military power was a powerful (geo)political vehicle for the ‘endless’ accumulation of capital that, over a relatively short period of time, outpaced its non-capitalist rivals. In other words, the co-development and evolution of territorialised sovereignty and capitalism were necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the subsequent ‘rise of the West’. Their reinforcing developmental tendencies formed a kind of cumulatively building virtuous circle142 setting Europe (or, more precisely, Northwestern Europe) on the path to global supremacy.143

5

Conclusion

The New World ‘discoveries’ of 1492 were a decisive moment in the formation of modern European societies, constituting a fundamental vector of uneven and combined development through which the modern world order was born. The various practices of subjugation and domination that took place in the Americas led colonialists to annihilate indigenous populations, communities, modes of life and production. This scorched earth policy was complemented by a legal, material and ideological apparatus that served to buttress and legitimise the violence of and rule by Europeans. The rise of altogether new forms of European Self and Other, ideological configurations (such as Eurocentrism and scientific racism), legal sovereignty, a new mode of modern his141 142 143

Cf. Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015. Or a vicious circle depending on which side of the colonial whip you sat. See further Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015.

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torical consciousness, and linear demarcations in time and space accompanying the transition to capitalist modernity were all intricately bound to the cultural encounters in the Americas and its longer-term effects on European development. In these myriad ways, the Atlantic vector ‘constitutes the deepest structural unevenness upon and through which the modern world order developed’.144 The importance of this point for understanding the origins of capitalist modernity, its differentiated developmental trajectories and the subsequent ‘rise of the West’ cannot be overstated. For if it is recognised ‘that non-capitalist social forms and political organisations are not simply sublated under the movement of capitalism’, but are instead ‘co-constitutive of the movement itself, then … we cannot adequately explain modern world development through a narrative that starts with the rise of capitalism, nation and class within England or Europe’.145 Recognising the decisive importance of the transformative interactions between Europe and the Americas problematises the rigid epistemological separation between ‘West’ and ‘East’, whilst going beyond the conception of society in the singular that frames traditional theoretical explanations of capitalist modernity. Only by drawing attention to the interaction of a multiplicity of unevenly developing polities can we begin to theoretically explain their subsequent developmental trajectories in ways eschewing both Eurocentric notions of an internally generated ‘European miracle’ and the linear developmentalism supposedly marking every society’s transition to modernity. In this chapter, we have shown how uneven and combined development provides an illuminating framework, through which one may decentre or ‘provincialise Europe’ as the privileged or sole author of history. This ‘Re-Orientation’146 highlights how many of the categories and theories of development have been built on a problematically singular abstraction of the European experience. This in turn calls into question the use of ‘ideal-types’ derived from or in comparison to this experience. Equally, our analysis challenges any conception of Europe or ‘the West’ and their corollaries – ‘the East’ or ‘the Rest’ – as dichotomously opposed essentialisations. The study of interactive multiplicity – the intersocietal, unevenness and combination – is central to overcoming the ontological singularity that lies at the heart of Eurocentrism. The theory thereby offers a cogent means of theoretically capturing and inscribing ‘the international’ into a macro-sociological account of the ‘generative grammar’ of the making of the modern world. 144 145 146

Shilliam 2009a, p. 72; our emphasis. Shilliam 2009a, p. 72. Frank 1998.

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We hope our analysis goes some way in meeting David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah’s criticism of the framework of uneven and combined development for overlooking how the ‘constitutive role of cultural encounters’ – and, specifically, the ways by which ‘the claims of European universalism … fueled cultural subordination and degradation’ – was crucial in the making of capitalist modernity.147 The cultural encounters examined above further demonstrate the myth of any understanding of the rise of capitalist modernity as a more or less peaceful and natural process: whether this is understood as resulting from the ingenuity and industriousness of some people who worked harder than others in accumulating capital, or as an effect of a number of legal, institutional and normative innovations originating in Europe which gradually diffused across the world, or the highest expression of some immutable ‘human nature’. Marx rightly chastises such idyllic views of capitalism’s miraculous conception as pure myth; one akin to the ideological function of original sin in theology.148 Rather, capitalism was built upon the brutal subordination, annihilation and subsumption of previous ways of life. In short: the history of capitalism has been (and continues to be) a history of violence. 147 148

Blaney and Inayatullah 2016. Marx 1976.

chapter 3

The Iranian Revolution in the Mirror of Uneven and Combined Development Kamran Matin

The Iranian revolution, Foucault once poignantly remarked, ‘irritated a whole lot of people, on the left and on the right’.1 This was so, Foucault surmised, because the revolution displayed a basic peculiarity: it combined religious and secular features. ‘The enigma of the uprising’, he writes, was that the revolutionaries ‘inscribed, on the borders of heaven and earth, in a dream-history that was as religious as it was political, their hunger, their humiliation, their hatred for the regime …’. On the next page Foucault exclaims that the revolution ‘caused a surprising superimposition … [of] a movement strong enough to bring down a seemingly well-armed regime, all the while … [it] wanted to inscribe the figures of spirituality on the ground of politics’. The revolution, Foucault declared, was ‘the most modern and most insane’.2 Now, consider the elements whose combination in the Iranian revolution appeared so peculiar to Foucault: ‘heaven’-‘earth’, ‘religious’-‘political’, ‘spirituality’-‘politics’, and ‘modern’-‘insane’. Each of these ‘irritating’ couplets arguably consists of iterations of the contested concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as distilled from European history. Thus, the ‘superimposition’ of ‘spirituality’ and ‘politics’ was ‘surprising’ for Foucault because it was ‘once familiar to the West’ but now appeared in the ‘middle of the twentieth century’.3 The revolution therefore appeared irritating ultimately because according to Foucault it did not seem to repeat Europe’s break from ‘tradition’ towards ‘modernity’ but actually combined them. The intellectual challenge of this tendency was so great that it prompted Foucault’s call for constructing ‘another political thought, another political imagination …’.4 The question, however, is what was that intellectual mode that prevented even Foucault, the supreme challenger of Enlightenment thought and grand narratives of history, from comprehending a form of politics that combined tradition and modernity: the ‘irritating’ course taken by the Iranian revolution? 1 2 3 4

Cited in Afary and Anderson 2005, p. 250. Ibid, pp. 264, 265, 222. Ibid, p. 265; my emphasis. Ibid, p. 185.

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An important clue can be gleaned from an interview Foucault gave to Baqir Parham, a prominent Iranian intellectual, at the height of the Iranian revolution in September 1978.5 At the end of that interview Parham asked Foucault about ‘structuralism’, of which, he suggested, Foucault was one of the ‘most authentic representatives’. Foucault responded by categorically dissociating his work from structuralism in the sense of a ‘methodology’ that relied ‘more on systems of relations than on explorations of elements and contents’.6 However, Foucault then spoke of a second meaning of structuralism with which his work had an affinity. This second meaning pertained to a departure from Cartesian premise of philosophical thought that privileged the subject over the object and posed the consciousness and freedom of the subject as its key questions. This new mode of thought, Foucault approvingly explained, did not ‘privilege the subject as against the objective reality from the very beginning. Rather it explores the objects, the relation between the objects, and the comprehensibility of objects within themselves’.7 Foucault then elaborates on this intellectual act of ‘decentring the subject’ with reference to his own work: My first book was called Madness and Civilization, but in fact my problem was rationality, that is, how does reason operate in a society such as ours? Well, to understand this issue, instead of beginning with the subject moving from awareness to reason, it is better if we see how, in the Western world, those who are not the subjects of reason … those who are mad, are removed from the life process.8 Now, in this passage and throughout his other writings on the Iranian revolution Foucault is quite explicit about Europe or the West as the specific geosocial referent of his political philosophy. Foucault therefore decentres a specifically European ‘subject’ within a specifically European ‘objective reality’.9 He does so through diachronic contrasts within a European temporality that comprises, sequentially, ‘traditional’ non-capitalist, and ‘modern’ bourgeois forms. The subject is thus uncovered to be discursively constructed from positions ‘outside’ of itself. However, this ‘outside’ and the ‘subject’ itself are both European, more specifically, French. Non-European geo-social spaces have no constitutive relation with technological and discursive shifts and mutations 5 6 7 8 9

Ibid, pp. 183–9. Ibid, p. 187. Ibid, p. 188. Ibid, emphases added. Foucault 1979 and 1967.

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within this temporality. In other words, the dynamic of the (re)constructions of European subject is rendered internal to Europe. This is quite consistent with Foucault’s declared dissociation from structuralism in the sense of a strategic methodological focus on ‘systems of relations’. Foucault’s (post)structuralism therefore elides the constitutive significance of non-European societies in modern social change. That is why when applied to these societies his intellectual mode can only anticipate a historical dynamic that resembles that of Europe. Societies and socialities that involve the combinations of features corresponding to distinct moments of Europe’s lineally conceived temporality become ‘unrecognisable’ and ‘irritating’. This abstraction from societal multiplicity and interactivity in theorising (modern) social change is accompanied by an internalist intellectual mode – an overarching concern with socio-economic structures and politico-cultural forms internal to a given society or politico-cultural unit as the independent explainers of their pattern of development. Thus, a considerable portion of the literature on the Iranian revolution involves a centrifugation of Iranian history sui generis that isolates religion, uneven development of capitalism, or more commonly a combination of both, as the main determinants of the outbreak and specificities of the revolution.10 Foucault himself saw Shi’a Islam as a consistent oppositional force in Iranian history and hence the key to understanding the revolution.11 In an uncharacteristic move he attributed an unhistorical anti-statism, and by implication progressive character, to Shi’ism, which he claimed had not ‘ceased through the centuries, to provide an irreducible force to all that which, at the base of a people, can oppose the power of a state’.12 This stance earned Foucault many critics on the right and the left who accused him of political naivety for unwittingly justifying the new religious oppression that the victory of political Islamists in Iran entailed. The argument that Shi’ism underlies the ‘exceptional’ character of the Iranian revolution was also made by other scholars, notably, Theda Skocpol whose general theory of social revolutions13 was comprehensively challenged by the Iranian revolution. Consequently, she was forced to invert the basic structuralist dictum of her theory and suggest that the Iranian revolution was the only revolution that did not ‘come’ but was ‘deliberately made’.14

10 11 12 13 14

See inter alia Abrahamian 1982; Arjomand 1988; Bashiriyeh 1984; Keddi 1981; Moaddel 1993; Parsa 1989; Saikal 1980. Cf. Matin-Asgari 2010, p. 559. See Afary and Anderson 2005, pp. 209, 247–9, 267–77. Cited in Almond 2004, p. 17. Skocpol 1979. Skocpol 1982, p. 267. For critical responses see Ahmad 1982; Goldfrank 1982; Keddie 1982.

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Iran, however, was not the only country where religion seemed to play a key role in the modern body politic. The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the growth of various religious movements across the world, which generated a large body of literature informed by comparative sociology and politics. A hallmark of this literature was the ‘fundamentalism project’ of the 1990s.15 The Iranian revolution was now seen as an instance of the wider phenomenon of political Islam that was in turn part of a global movement of fundamentalism representing ‘militant and political religious movements which [had] organized in reaction to the prevailing patterns of modernization’.16 The contextualisation of political Islam in a global context arguably attenuated its purported exceptionalism. Nonetheless, the ‘fundamentalism project’ involves three basic problems. First, the de-exceptionalisation of political Islam is achieved through normalising the opposition or inhospitableness of all non-protestant religions to modernisation as sui generis.17 This involves an essentialist conception of religion that obfuscates its socio-historically constructed and changing character. Second, and more importantly, the disruptive impacts of modernisation, the main stimulant of ‘fundamentalisms’, are derived from the uneven development of capitalism which itself remains unexplained.18 Third, the novel and hybrid character of fundamentalisms is acknowledged19 but is not seen as a provocation to the concept of modernity, which remains firmly Eurocentric.20 This ultimately renders fundamentalisms, and hence political Islam, as simultaneously a deviation from, and yet also a contingent feature of, modernity.21 These problems are compounded by a sizable body of literature that shows European modernity has itself comprised a variety of instances that diverge, on occasions rather sharply, from the ideal-typical modernity. The ‘impurity’ of the English bourgeois revolution, the pre-modern character of the French Revolution, the ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) of pre-WWII modern Germany, and the aberrational character of the Russian Revolution are but a few examples.22 In this chapter I challenge this Eurocentric mode of analysis and its underlying premise, which, as Justin Rosenberg has argued, is an ‘ontologically sin-

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Marty, Appleby and Scott 1991–5; cf. Eisenstadt 1999; Keddie 1998. Marty and Appleby 1995, p. 1. But see Gellner 1995. Almond, Sivan and Appleby 1995; Keddie 1998, pp. 699–700. Almond, Sivan and Appleby 1995, p. 402. E.g. Beyer 1994, p. 8. E.g. Roy 1994. Anderson 1966; Comninel 1990; Fischer 1986; Gramsci 1999, pp. 32–6, respectively.

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gular conception of the social’.23 I therefore argue that the problem of theorising the Iranian revolution is rooted not in Iran’s purportedly exceptional religio-cultural idiosyncrasies, but in an intellectual lacuna in classical social theory itself, namely, the international dimension of social change. For general categories of classical social theory are, as we saw in the case of Foucault, constructed by reference to, and through abstraction from, a particular European experience of modernity. Main traditions of social theory, including Marxism, therefore exclude international relations in the construction of their conceptual edifice giving them only a contingent analytical status. By international relations I refer to the interactive co-existence of all historical forms of social coherence in mutually recognised integrities.24 Social theories that fail to incorporate international relations in this specific sense obscure the interactive and therefore multilinear dimension of social change, which is concretely manifest in the amalgamation of historically heterogeneous social, political, economic, cultural, intellectual and ideological forms. Crucially, these amalgamated forms are, I argue, the concrete content of what are perceived to be exceptionalities of non-European experiences of modernity. They are therefore not contingent and external but constitutive of, and internal to, modernity. Their mutative instability is, I shall demonstrate, in fact the political sinew of modern social change in general, and the Iranian revolution in particular. Now, the claim that Marxism has also theoretically neglected international relations might at first appear curious. After all, a key element of Marx’s social theory of modernity is the idea that the capitalist mode of production has an organic propensity towards geographical expansion.25 Indeed, Marx argued that the tendency towards the creation of the world market exists in the very concept of capital.26 Theoretically, however, Marx was primarily concerned with ‘the transnational’, that is, phenomena that occurred despite the sociopolitical fragmentation of the world. He therefore tended to reduce the spatial dimension of capitalist development to the problems it posed to capital accumulation and not to social development per se.27 Consequently, Marx assumed

23 24

25 26 27

Rosenberg 2006. Matin 2013a, p. 3. Recently, there have been welcome calls for ‘connected histories’ by some postcolonial scholars (e.g. Bhambra 2010; Subrahmanyam 1997). However, to date they have not offered any explicit theoretical framework and coherent methodology for investigating processes and outcomes of connections among different histories. Marx and Engels 1985. Marx 1993, p. 408. Marx 1993, pp. 539–40.

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that cultural differences and political boundaries between societies would ultimately become obsolete in the face of the self-universalising force of capital, which is reflected in his notion of the ‘annihilation of space by time’.28 In fact, as Robbie Shilliam has compellingly argued, Marx constructed his social theory through a consistent theoretical suppression of the international and the resulting condition of developmental multilinearity.29 This is most explicit in Marx’s magisterial Capital, where the international is construed as a passive terrain on which a singular and unilinear process of capitalist development unfolds.30 In other words, Marx derives the dynamics of modern world development from an abstractly constructed capital-labour relation to which international and geo-political dynamics are not causal and constitutive. Rather, they are added merely as secondary contradictions. Interestingly, Marx’s pacification of the international and the resulting conception of modern development as unilinear are driven by the enduring sensitivity of his own praxis to Germany’s comparative backwardness vis-à-vis republican France and capitalist Britain – an eminently international circumstance – and the problems this posed to a successful communist praxis.31 The charge of Eurocentrism against Marxism, most consistently made from postcolonial perspectives, has of course not gone unaddressed. Two main kinds of response can be identified. The first kind tends to accommodate postcolonialism’s central idea of ‘historical difference’, i.e. multilinearity, primarily as a descriptive notion. This intellectual move predisposes them towards a merely empirical-comparative recognition of developmental multilinearity.32 The second kind of recent Marxist response to the postcolonial charge of Eurocentrism attenuates the theoretical significance of the question of ‘historical difference’ by positing a highly minimalist conception of capitalism that encompasses all experiences of capitalist modernity and implicitly foresees the obviation of the question and global developmental convergence at a future point in time.33 Paradoxically, this mode of response is itself a form of Eurocentrism since it derives its minimalist conception of capitalism from West European experience and thus replaces the theoretical question of multiple temporalities with the empirical question of a single but chronologically staggered temporality of (European) capital. Both modes of response therefore

28 29 30 31 32 33

Marx 1993, p. 539. Shilliam 2006. Marx 1990, p. 727; cf. Althusser 2001, p. 49. Shilliam 2006. E.g. Anderson 2010. E.g. Chibber 2013.

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pre-empt interrogating Marxism’s Eurocentric tendencies at a fundamental theoretical level. By contrast, I argue that the effective resolution of the problem of Eurocentrism in Marxism necessitates the incorporation of the international into basic intellectual premises of historical materialism rather than its intermediate categories or as part of an auxiliary theory. This is an important question that I will discuss in more length in the concluding section of this chapter. To recapitulate the main argument: the theoretical impasse that Foucault and most scholars of Iran’s experience of modernity and revolution have encountered is ultimately rooted in Eurocentrism, which is itself a particular form of internalism as an intellectual mode that forms concepts and methodologies by reference to relations and structures internal to a particular society or polity. As such like all internalist frameworks Eurocentrism rests on a singular social ontology, that is, its conception of society is monadic. The supersession of this mode therefore requires a social theory based on an ontologically plural conception of the social, i.e. a conception of social reality that proceeds from the recognition of the transhistorical fact of the plural nature of human collectivities. Such a conception marks Leon Trotsky’s idea of ‘uneven and combined development’.34 In the remainder of this chapter I shall first introduce Trotsky’s idea of U&CD, which I shall then deploy to provide a non-Eurocentric longue durée account of the Iranian revolution that fundamentally challenges the notions that it represents either a discreet congealment of, or a deviation from, or a movement against, modernity. The argument is that the revolution was the explosive culmination of a prolonged accumulation of socio-political and cultural contradictions that were specifically generated by Iran’s experience of uneven and combined development. This experience involved the continuous amalgamations of capitalist and non-capitalist forms, which, while organic to the global processes of capitalist uneven and combined development, remained inorganic to the Iranian society, and therefore dynamically unstable. I therefore recast the revolution as a specific but organic product of an intrinsic international property of historical process. In the concluding section I briefly spell out the implications of U&CD for historical materialism.

34

Trotsky 1985. My discussion and use of the idea is informed by its specific appropriation in Marxist International Relations (IR). See Matin 2007, 2012, 2013a, 2013b; Rosenberg 1996, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013. For an extensive list of the recent literature visit www .unevenandcombined.com.

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Uneven and Combined Development35

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a mechanical materialism with a thoroughly linear conception of history had dominated the Marxist movement through the intellectual authority of the Second International. A key political feature of this approach was the idea of the ‘two stage revolution’, the assumption that a socialist revolution could only follow a successful bourgeois-democratic revolution, which would develop capitalism as the necessary foundation for the higher socialist and communist societies. Given the embryonic nature of capitalist development in Tsarist Russia at the time it was a common belief among Marxists that Russia was ‘unripe’ for a socialist revolution. This view was neatly summarised by Engels who in 1885 claimed that Russia was approaching ‘its 1789’.36 However, the 1905 revolution and the role of the Russian proletariat in that revolution posed a fundamental challenge to this axiom. Trotsky’s intervention took place against this intellectual and political background. In his magisterial book The History of Russian Revolution, Trotsky begins by making a fundamental statement regarding the nature of the social world: ‘unevenness [is] the most general law of the historic process …’.37 The meaning, in fact the very existence, of unevenness as a universal condition becomes possible and active in the second element of Trotsky’s idea, namely, ‘combination’: ‘From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which … we may call the law of combined development’. Trotsky defines combined development as ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combin[ation] of separate steps, an amalgam[ation] of archaic with more contemporary forms’. Combination is therefore the concrete expression of unevenness because it can only occur when there is a differentiated multiplicity, i.e. the absence of developmental evenness. Therefore combination is also constitutive of unevenness. The interactive fashion in which the differentiated instances of the social, of whatever scale and complexity, are reproduced, 35 36 37

This and next sections are based on Matin 2013a, Chs. 1 and 7. Cited in Molyneux 1981, p. 18. Unless stated otherwise all the citations in this section come from Chapter 1 of Trotsky 1985. It should be pointed out that Trotsky did not use ‘law’ in its positivistic conception but, as he later explained, as ‘a historical reality’ (cited in Davidson 2012a, p. 2). KneiPaz (cited in Rosenberg 2006, p. 313) also points out that ‘law’ in Trotsky’s formulation refers not to a causal determination but rather to a descriptive generalisation. Uneven and combined development can therefore be seen as simultaneously referring to ‘a historical process and the attempt to theoretically comprehend that process in thought’ (Davidson 2012a, p. 3).

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recombines the existing forms and generates new social forms within societies, which are, of course, the constitutive elements of unevenness itself. In other words, unevenness, by virtue of its very existence, conditions, and is conditioned by, developmental processes within and across the interacting societies. It always involves specific combinations of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ social, economic, political, institutional, cultural and ideational products; a process which renders the analytical distinction between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ itself ontologically unstable. There is a third complementary dimension to the active heterogeneity of the universal in Trotsky’s idea, namely, development. Development is of course a highly controversial concept since for many it smacks of the unilinear stagism of modernisation theory and second international Marxism. However, in Trotsky’s idea it is the concrete and dynamic expression of the uneven and combined nature of social change and, therefore, cannot be unilinear, homogenous, or homogenising. On the contrary, it is interactively multilinear.38 Development in ‘uneven and combined development’ embodies and renders visible the interconnected conditions of unevenness and combination, both theoretically and historically. It is the concrete sign of the reproductive activities of living interactive social forms. It was such a decidedly multilinear conception of development that allowed Trotsky to issue at the heyday of the Second International statements such as ‘history does not repeat itself’,39 or ‘we repeat: history is not made to order’,40 or ‘there can be no analogy of historical development [between England and the colonies] … but there does exist a profound inner connection between the two’.41 Similar statements abound in Trotsky’s writings. Thus uneven and combined development is the conceptual comprehension and expression of the ontological condition of the interrelation of multiple societies’ patterns of development, such that their interactive coexistence is constitutive of their individual existence and vice versa. Three lines of advocacy of Trotsky’s original idea are discernible in contemporary debates: one restricts it to the capitalist period,42 a second extends it to include the pre-capitalist period,43 and a third, intermediate, approach holds uneven and

38 39 40 41 42 43

Rosenberg 2006, p. 308. Trotsky 1969, p. 36. Trotsky 1969, p. 131. Trotsky 1972, p. 67. E.g. Ashman 2009; Davidson 2006; Löwy 1981. Matin 2007, 2013b; Rosenberg 2006, 2009, 2010, 2013.

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combined development to have been operative in the pre-capitalist period but only ‘fully activated’ under capitalism.44 I contend that the intellectual potential of uneven and combined development to provide the theoretical core of a non-ethnocentric social theory cannot be realised if its historical scope is restricted to the capitalist epoch. In fact, a strong case can be made that this restriction is neither logical nor supported by Trotsky’s own work. As Rosenberg45 shows, the restricted conception of the idea of uneven and combined development misreads Trotsky’s ‘two-step process of abstraction’ in his exposition of the idea. For Trotsky first shows that the peculiarities of Russian development are a common feature of ‘backward’ countries within the wider process of capitalist development and then shows that capitalist development itself takes a non-linear form due to uneven and combined development as the ‘more general laws of history’. Moreover, Trotsky explicitly states that it ‘is necessary to understand … unevenness correctly, to consider it in its full extent, and also to extend it to the pre-capitalist past’.46 As we saw above, he also explicitly argues that combined development results from unevenness. Taking these two positions together as we must, it is not clear why uneven and combined development should occur or assume its full significance only under capitalism.47 The cross-epochal character of Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development stems directly from its ontologically plural conception of society. This places Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development at the level of transhistorical categories and general abstractions. Concrete operationalisation of uneven and combined development therefore requires the mediation of auxiliary and intermediate concepts. We can glean a number of such concepts from Trotsky’s own work. These are ‘the privilege of historic backwardness’, ‘the whip of external necessity’, ‘substitution’, and ‘historical reshuffling’. The idea of backwardness is commonly associated with European colonial discourse of stagist history reproduced in modernisation theory and its various reincarnations. However, in Trotsky’s formulation, and my use here, it signifies an inherently relational condition pertaining specifically to capitalist modernity. I therefore echo Knei-Paz’s clarification that in using the term backwardness ‘no moral judgement whatever is intended’. I use it in the same sense as Trotsky

44 45 46 47

Allinson and Anievas 2009. Rosenberg 2013. Trotsky 1969, p. 148. But see Davidson 2016.

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did, i.e. to demarcate a ‘clear social and historical uniqueness’,48 which terms such as ‘less developed’ or ‘under-developed’ do not convey. ‘The privilege of historic backwardness’, Trotsky argues, ‘… permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages’. The possibility to ‘adopt’ advanced products and ‘skip intermediate stages’ signifies the developmental ‘privilege’ of backward countries while the compulsion to adopt highlights the ‘whip of external necessity’, which they come under. In Trotsky’s use ‘the whip of external necessity’ is therefore also a primarily modern phenomenon that includes ‘coercive comparisons’49 and developmental and institutional contrasts that capitalism imposes on all non-capitalist polities, whose developmental capacities are now rendered qualitatively inferior and self-restricting. As a result, backward polities, their elites and privileged classes in particular, pursue projects of political and economic modernisation as a means to maintain or restore political independence. Such projects, and their generative context of backwardness, therefore pertain as much to European as to non-European contexts.50 They are, however, particularly pronounced in those non-western societies, such as Iran, that escaped direct western colonialism.51 A key element in the projects of modernisation and national regeneration undertaken under the whip of external necessity is the phenomenon of ‘substitution’. Trotsky first used the term ‘substitutionism’ in his critique of Lenin’s proposals for reforming party organisation,52 but following the 1905 revolution, he began to view it as a much wider and more multifaceted phenomenon, intrinsic to combined development, and operational in the political, intellectual, ideological, economic, and bureaucratic spheres.53 In this broader sense, substitution involves the mobilisation of various replacements, native and foreign, in backward polities, for the agency, institutions, instruments, material, or methods of earlier processes of capitalist modernisation in West European countries. A process in which the ‘threatening western foe is also a teacher’, substitution necessarily involves and generates amalgamated forms that are dynamically tension-prone, since they are inorganic to the backward society. Moreover, the substitutions involved in the condition of backwardness cre-

48 49 50 51 52 53

Knei-Paz 1978, p. 63. Barker 2006, p. 78. See Gerschenkron 1962, 1994; Mirsepassi 2000, p. 11; Shilliam 2009. The use of the term ‘backwardness’ is widespread in Iran’s postrevolutionary intellectual and political discourses (Matin-Asgari 2004). Knei-Paz 1978, pp. 192–9. See also Cliff 1960; Deutscher 1984, p. 25. Trotsky 1985, pp. 25–37.

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ate new political and developmental possibilities unforeseen or suppressed by Eurocentric or unilinear theories of history. The occurrence of a ‘socialist revolution’ in ‘backward’ Russia, an event Trotsky had predicted and actively pursued, is a glaring example. The phenomenon of substitution involved in reactive or proactive modernisation projects in backward countries is closely linked to the wider phenomenon of ‘historical reshuffling’, which Trotsky describes in terms of the idea of ‘the solution of the problems of one class by another’, which he argued was ‘one of those combined methods natural to backward countries’. More broadly, historical reshuffling involves a change to the developmental sequence of earlier processes of modern transformation. A key form of historical reshuffling is the merger or reversal of the economic and political moments of capitalist modernisation, as it originally occurred in Western Europe, England specifically. This circumstance essentially results from the international mediation of capitalism’s expansion and is central to understanding the nature, course and consequences of economic industrialisation, political modernisation, and nation state formation in the so-called ‘late-comer’ societies.

2

The Iranian Revolution in the Mirror of Uneven and Combined Development

My account of the Iranian revolution informed by the idea of uneven and combined development begins from the Safavi period (1501–1722). The apparent paradox of explaining a modern revolution by starting from a decidedly nonmodern period is due to the fact that the first centralised state encompassing all of the Iranian heartland since the Muslim conquest of Iran was established by the Safavis. The reproductive dynamics of the Safavi state and the manner of its collapse are also crucial to understanding the Shi’a ulama’s autonomy and key role in the modern history of Iran. The discussion of the Safavi period also supports my claim regarding the transhistorical character of uneven and combined development. The Safavis’ unification of Iran and pursuit of regional supremacy pitted them against the expanding empire of the Sunni Ottomans. The ideological dimension of this rivalry was the Safavis’ imposition of Shi’ism as Iran’s official religion. The Shi’a ulama took charge of educational and judicial organs and gained socio-political status and influence. However, they remained subordinate to the state as the Safavis had successfully claimed prophetic descent which obviated their reliance on the ulama for ideological legitimation. Economically, the Safavis’ revenue flowed from three main sources: state tax, war, and long

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distance trade. By the mid-seventeenth century, the latter two sources were severely curtailed as rising European powers dominated West Asian trade and geopolitics. Unable to pursue ‘geopolitical accumulation’,54 the Safavis intensified internal political accumulation through increased taxation but exempted large amounts of their own land by converting them into charitable institutions or waqf managed by the ulama as trustees. With the progressive weakening of the Safavi central state the ulama’s trusteeship transformed into de facto ownership, which became the basis of their enduring economic and political autonomy, which reached its zenith during the Qajar period (1791–1925). The result was the system of the ‘dual sovereignty’ of the state and the ulama.55 However, Iran’s international relations increasingly undermined this bifurcated sovereignty. With Europe’s industrial and political revolutions in full swing, European imperialists’ encroachments and pressures on Iran grew. A series of devastating military defeats by the Russian and British empires powerfully impressed upon the ruling Qajar dynasty and the Iranian elites their country’s geopolitical impotence and the danger of colonial annexation. With an eye on the Ottomans’ Tanzimat reforms the Qajars attempted an ill-planned programme of ‘defensive modernisation’56 involving military, financial, and administrative reforms. However, in the face of strong resistance from the provincial magnates and the Shi’a ulama, who were set to lose out from the reforms, they soon abandoned them. Consequently, Qajar kings were increasingly forced to maintain their rule and Iran’s formal independence by substituting financial and trade concessions to Anglo-Russian capitalists for military and financial reforms. This preserved Qajar rule and saved Iran from outright colonisation but posed a mortal threat to the interests and status of indigenous privileged classes, especially bazaar merchants. More importantly, the Qajars’ strategy of external balancing through constant granting of concessions to rival European colonial powers did not resolve Iran’s relational condition of backwardness, that is, its geopolitical and geoeconomic vulnerability generated by non-capitalist socioeconomic structures that underpinned Qajar rule. In fact, from the perspective of the privileged classes and the nascent intelligentsia, Iran’s comparative economic backwardness had only intensified. This was amply demonstrated during the Tobacco Boycott Movement of 1891–2: a bazaar-instigated and ulamaled movement against the decision by the Qajar monarch, Naser al-Din Shah, to

54 55 56

Teschke 2003, pp. 95–115. Arjomand 1988a. Matin 2013a, pp. 56–7.

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grant to a Briton full monopoly over the production, sale, and export of tobacco in Iran. The movement was successful but the Qajars’ financial and economic concessions to Anglo-Russian capitalists continued. A more radical solution emerged in the form of the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11), Iran’s first ‘revolution of backwardness’, by which I refer to a primarily political revolution in a pre-capitalist society under capitalist pressure that establishes the institutional and ideological bases for bureaucratic rationalisation and centralisation of the pre-capitalist state – a process that has been often followed by a state-led project of ‘primitive accumulation’.57 Emboldened by Japan’s defeat of Russia and the Russian revolution of 1905, a heterogeneous alliance of prominent bazaar merchants, influential members of the Shi’a ulama, and liberal and socialist intelligentsia led a democratic revolution against Qajar autocracy. This involved glaring instances of substitutionism and historical reshuffling as decisively non-capitalist classes and agents attempted – in a substantively non-capitalist society – a bottom-up project of state-democratisation that in western Europe, especially England, had been carried out by capitalist classes within an already capitalist economy. The revolution modernised Iran’s political structure by introducing a written constitution and establishing a parliament (majles) that was to oversee foreign and trade policies. Directly generated by Iran’s entanglement in the wider condition of unevenness and its interactive coexistence with modern European countries, the Constitutional Revolution thus superimposed the political institutions of capitalist-based liberal democracy on a substantively non-capitalist socio-economic structure. This peculiar amalgamation was the first acute expression of Iran’s experience of modern uneven and combined development. Another international event radically changed Iran’s internal political scene yet again. The 1917 revolution in Russia emboldened Iran’s small but growing leftist forces to overthrow the Qajar state, which had been significantly weakened by the Constitutional Revolution and the First World War. Encouraged and initially supported by the victorious Bolsheviks in the neighbouring Russia, the Iranian left sought a radical non-capitalist solution to Iran’s backwardness. As a first step, a Soviet Socialist Republic was formed in the Northern province of Gilan in June 1920. However, this state-socialist developmental route was quickly blocked by Reza Khan’s British-assisted coup in 1921. The new Pahlavi autocracy was aided and abetted by important sections of the ulama,

57

Matin 2012, p. 47.

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merchants and large landlords who were all alarmed by the growth of communism in Iran. Reza Khan’s rise to power strategically fixed Iran on the path of capitalist-oriented modernisation. This was reinforced by Iran’s growing geopolitical significance in the US and West European powers’ confrontation with the Soviet Union. Reza Shah embarked on a project of defensive modernisation that involved nation-building, military modernisation, bureaucratic expansion, the legalisation of private property in land, and secularisation which, following the example of Turkey’s Ataturk, curtailed the power of the ulama. These reforms further sharpened the tensions within the socio-economic amalgamation of proto-liberal institutions of rule and non-capitalist social structures forged by the Constitutional Revolution. For Iran’s largely feudal-mercantile economy was now overlain with a large centralised-bureaucratic state with which it had no organic link. This was largely due to Reza Shah’s formal recognition of large landlords’ continued authority over the countryside in return for their political support. Reza Shah’s defensive modernisation therefore involved a selective, top-down and coercive introduction of modern European political and bureaucratic forms and products in order to buttress an illiberal form of rule over a still substantively tributary social formation. The most salient feature of this process of combined development was the creation of the operative institutions of a nation state in the absence of a nation as an abstract community of individualised persons of capitalist social organisation. Consequently, Iranian nationalism remained an elite phenomenon and Iran’s backwardness, i.e. the entanglement of its non-capitalist temporality with European capitalism, remained unresolved. A new international circumstance, the Second World War, radically changed the political scene in Iran. Reza Shah’s pro-German sympathies and Iran’s strategic location for supplying the embattled Red Army led to the Allies’ occupation of Iran. Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in favour of his son Mohammad Reza and a decade of political freedoms was inaugurated. The left, liberal and religious forces rapidly grew in strength while the power of the young Mohammad Reza Shah became largely ceremonial. Liberal nationalists increasingly saw the control of the oil industry, a British economic enclave since 1907, as the only viable basis for developing Iran’s archaic agrarian economic structure, a project seen as instrumental to the reproduction of the political domination of Iran’s political elites and privileged classes and countering the growing appeal and power of the Iranian left. Mosaddeq’s struggle for the nationalisation of the oil industry was therefore both a progressive struggle for national and economic independence and a politically conservative strategy of development.

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However, the US, persuaded by Britain, increasingly viewed Mosaddeq with hostility, fearing that he might unwittingly facilitate the fall of Iran under Soviet influence. Eventually, Mosaddeq was overthrown through an AngloAmerican coup supported by conservative ulama, and a staunchly pro-western Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was duly restored to power. Thus, if the geopolitical exigencies of the Second World War had created a radical political situation, the postwar American strategy of ‘containment’ led to a conservative restoration. However, although the oil-nationalisation episode left Reza Shah’s nation-less nation state materially unchanged, it supplied a strong popular-democratic element to Iranian nationalism whose abiding influence on Iranian politics remains to this day. The Anglo-American coup against Mosaddeq was not the last instance of the inflective co-determination of Iran’s internal development by its international relations. In fact, the causal impact of international relations on Iran’s internal development continued in even more profound ways. The success of peasant-based revolutionary movements in China, Korea, Cuba and Vietnam alarmed the Shah’s American mentors, who recommended a reform package – including a comprehensive land redistribution programme and educational, electoral and administrative reforms – that was intended to pre-empt a peasant revolution and balance the restive urban centres with pro-monarchy peasantscum-capitalist farmers. The reforms would also sharply reduce the power and influence of big landlords and the ulama. The Shah was initially wary of the implications of a unilateral termination of his post-coup political compromise with the landlords and the ulama. However, reassured of American political support and emboldened by growing oil revenues, he eventually obliged. Thus, the ‘White Revolution of the Shah and the People’ was launched in 1962. In a new bid for overcoming Iran’s backwardness, the agency of an age-old monarchy was therefore substituted for organic social classes that had originally carried through the process of the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in England, the social basis of capitalist modernity.58 However, as with all substitutions involved in the process of uneven and combined development, the Pahlavi revolution from above entailed major contradictions. Land reforms terminated large landlords’ influence over the parliament and national politics but failed to realise its intended goal of the formation of a pro-Pahlavi class of capitalist farmers. In fact, due to its peculiar mechanism of implementation, which was based on peasants’ customary access to land and hence excluded more than 40 percent of the peasants, and the sys-

58

Marx 1990, Part 8.

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tematic promotion of large capital-intensive agro-business, the land reform component of the Shah’s externally induced ‘passive revolution’59 rendered the new peasant-owner class created by imperial fiat economically unviable. This led to a massive rural-urban immigration and the rise of sprawling urban slums where millions lived in abject poverty. By contrast, big bazaar merchants benefited from the reforms in the short-run and in absolute terms but they resented their growing and systematic exclusion from the government’s massive credit schemes and loans that were primarily granted to the comprador industrial bourgeoisie and big multinationals. They also recognised that in the long run the Shah’s industrial bias would erode the mercantile basis of their socio-economic power. The impact of the reforms on the ulama was also ambiguous. Their loss of economic and social influence under Reza Shah was deepened but they could still collect religious taxes and dues and run mosques, shrines and seminaries. Nevertheless, the Shah’s reforms prompted the ulama to rationalise and centralise their financial and bureaucratic practices. They also established private educational centres mixing modern and religious curricula, which attracted many students from among the religious (petty) bourgeois and state employees. Students and graduates of these schools formed the organisational and ideological backbone of proliferating Islamic associations and societies. This stratum’s intermediary class position, ideological traditionalism and modern educational background enabled them to carry out the successful political mobilisation of the lower classes behind the ulama-led Islamists during the revolutionary crisis.60 The net result was that the ulama achieved an enhanced ability to exercise their corporate power and ideological and political influence on a nationwide scale. Uneven and combined development thus generated a new asymmetric amalgamation. A rapidly growing modern industrial-service sector dominated by an alliance of state elites and foreign capitalists, and a small and socially rootless indigenous bourgeoisie was juxtaposed to a large, native mercantile economy with established institutions and a powerful ally in the shape of the Shi’a ulama. A significant number of the employees of the vast state bureaucracy and civil service, Iran’s emergent modern class, had ideological and cultural affinity with the latter. The cumulative impact of this sociological amalgamation generated a hybrid sociality and ideological sensitivity because

59 60

Gramsci 1988, pp. 246–74. Harman 1994.

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the Shah’s internationally induced developmental strategy systematically subverted the political consummation of the capitalist property relations it had introduced from above. These relations had been the concrete basis of juridical equality and formal political rights and freedoms, and liberal democracy in advanced capitalist countries. However, in Iran their politico-ideological expression was suppressed through the substitution of a neo-absolutist state for capitalist classes as the direct forgers of capitalist property relations. In Iran, as in Russia, capitalism was an offspring of the state. Relations between the formally equal and hence politically ‘free individuals’ of capitalist society were directly mediated by the state, personified by the Shah. The sociologicalideological form of this contradictory amalgamation was ‘the citizen-subject’, a liminal agency that combined precapitalist and capitalist subjectivities. The precapitalist component of this hybrid subjectivity was marked by a religious ideological sensibility that overdetermined the secular traits implied in its capitalist constituent. The resulting dynamic tension rendered the citizen-subject particularly prone to revolution. The hegemonic ideological form of the revolution was however by no means pre-given in the contradictions of the citizensubject. Rather, it was established through the praxis of a rising generation of Islamic thinkers and activists whose idea of ‘revolutionary Islam’ engaged more than any other ideology the political and cultural sensibility of the citizensubject. Let us see how. By the late 1970s, the Shah’s regime was developmentally strained, politically disoriented, and internationally isolated. Sheer repression became the main instrument of internal stability. The economic downturn of the late 1970s and the Carter administration’s pressure for political liberalisation paved the way for the outbreak of a revolutionary crisis. Within this context, a radically reconstructed and highly politicised Shi’i-Islamic discourse was fashioned by a group of Shi’a ulama and religious intellectuals that proved extremely influential on the ambivalent subjectivity of Iranian citizen-subjects; an influence that assumed added efficacy due to the organisational destruction and political crisis of the secular left. The process of formation and the content of this new discourse of ‘revolutionary Islam’ represented the praxical working out of the process of uneven and combined development in Iran on intellectual and ideological levels and displayed highly consequential emergent properties. The mechanism of ‘substitution’ was a particularly salient feature of the construction of revolutionary Islam. Ali Shari’ati, a key architect of revolutionary Islam in Iran was explicit in this regard. He argued that the traditional form of Shi’i-Islamic theological and philosophical categories and discourse must be retained but their content must be changed in the service of a justice-oriented revolutionary praxis. Shari’ati claimed that this strategy was also used by the

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prophet Mohammad.61 In Shari’ati’s own variety of revolutionary Islam the strategy of ‘retaining the form, changing the content’ involved a series of creative and refractory subsumptions of Marxist ideas under and through Islamic notions. Key among these was the substitution of ‘oppression’ for ‘exploitation’, ‘the people’ for ‘the proletariat’, and ‘monotheistic classless society’ for ‘socialism’. Thus, Shari’ati’s evolutionary Islam was an ideological Janus, a combined intellectual formation that incorporated the old and the new, the foreign and the native. Consequently, it had a natural resonance with the political subjectivity of the citizen-subject, which had a similarly amalgamated constitution. On the more conservative side Ayatollah Khomeini also engaged in a reconstructive interpretation of orthodox Shi’a Islam. Unlike Shari’ati, whose political discourse aimed at a deep social transformation, Khomeini was primarily concerned with the political, and specifically with the seizure of the state power. His key innovation was therefore a radical reinterpretation of the orthodox Shi’a political theory, which rejected direct political leadership of the Shi’a ulama on the basis of the Shi’i belief that in the absence of the twelfth (Shi’a) imam, Mahdi, all rulers were in essence usurpers and therefore unjust. Khomeini turned this argument on its head by making a crucial distinction between the political and spiritual components of imamat or post-prophetic leadership. He argued that contrary to what ‘reactionary’ Shi’a clergy has propagated for centuries, divine justice in fact necessitated Islamic political leadership in the absence of the twelfth imam to prepare the Muslim community for his reappearance, and that most senior Shi’a clerics who met certain basic conditions regarding knowledge and justice could exercise the same kind and level of political authority as imams without aspiring to, or ever attaining, their level of spiritual perfection. The shorthand for this innovation in Islamic political thought was velayat-e faqih or ‘the guardianship of the jurisprudent’, which became the key pillar of the post-revolutionary political order. Khomeini almost exclusively articulated his innovation in the idiom of orthodox Shi’a theology that was extremely attractive to less educated and more traditional sections of the Iranian masses, which formed a majority of the population. Nonetheless, his substitution of the Shi’a clerical elite’s political prerogative for that of the twelfth absent imam’s was no less revolutionary than Shari’ati’s substitution of monotheistic classless society for socialism. 61

Shari’ati’s understanding and deployment of the strategy of ‘retaining the form and changing the content’ arguably resonates with Trotsky’s argument that ‘the social mind … prefers to borrow the old, when not compelled to create the new. But even when so compelled, it combines with it elements of the old’ (Trotsky 2008, p. 437).

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Together, Shari’ati and Khomeini therefore crafted a novel discourse of revolutionary Islam that had an elective affinity with the citizen-subject as the emergent agency of the Iranian revolution. The bazaar-backed Shi’a ulama and religious intelligentsia therefore succeeded in attaining ideological hegemony over the revolution and steered it towards an Islamic dénouement. Akin to the developmental pattern that had given rise to it, the post-revolutionary state, the Islamic Republic, is also a tension-prone amalgam of the foreign and the native. The tension between the secular-popular form of sovereignty that the idea of ‘republic’ involves and the divine sovereignty that the ‘Islamic’ identity of the new state implies, lies at the heart of the endemic political crisis that has accompanied the Islamic Republic since its formation. This basic contradiction is yet to be resolved as demonstrated by nationwide and increasingly radicalised popular protests in 2009, known as the ‘green movement’, and late 2017 and early 2018.

3

Conclusion: Uneven and Combined Development and Historical Materialism

I have argued that the fact that so many mighty thinkers and astute observers such as Foucault were baffled by the Iranian revolution, and even propounded unhistorical, even proto-essentialist, explanations of the revolution, was not because their approaches were insufficiently historical, but rather because they operated with a conception of the historical that abstracted from the societal multiplicity and interactivity, or ‘unevenness’ and ‘combination’ as ontological properties of social reality. If they had had such a conception of the historical at the deepest level of their theoretical apparatuses, then the hybrid form of the Iranian revolution would have appeared not as an anomalous aberration from modernity but an organic outcome of the wider processes of uneven and combined development of which modernity, in its all diverse instantiations, is itself a product. I have also argued that abstraction from societal multiplicity and interactivity is a feature of the entire tradition of classical social theory including Marxism. Now Trotsky was of course a leading Marxist intellectual and activist, and his idea of uneven and combined development, which is central to my interpretation of the Iranian revolution and its historical and theoretical significance, is part of the Marxist tradition. As such, it is logical then to ask what is the precise nature of the intellectual relation between uneven and combined development and historical materialism, which, as I have now indicated, traditionally has been the wider theoretical idiom in which it has been couched?

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Justin Rosenberg has suggested that by itself uneven and combined development ‘cannot operate as a replacement for the classical social theories … In fact, without being attached to one of these – historical materialism for example – it cannot reach down to the level of concrete historical explanation at all’.62 What are the wider and deeper implications of such attachment in specifically theoretical terms? Explicit interrogations of this relation have been relatively neglected in many of the publications on uneven and combined development. As a leading Marxist thinker and political activist Trotsky himself saw his idea of uneven and combined development as simply derivative of Marxist dialectics and the materialist conception of history, and as such did not seem to have believed that the idea had any major implications for historical materialism. By contrast, I suggest that the plural social ontology that underpins the idea of uneven and combined development invests it with an international ‘Midas touch’ that necessarily modifies the very basic premises of any ontologically singularist social theory, such as historical materialism, with which it comes into contact. I substantiate this claim though a brief critical engagement with Alexander Anievas’s recent explicit discussion of the precise theoretical status of uneven and combined development in relation to historical materialism.63 Using Lakatosian vocabulary Anievas argues that uneven and combined development was a response to the ‘emergence of particular anomalies within a Marxist research programme committed to an ontologically singular conception of society’.64 As such, uneven and combined development acts, according to Anievas, as a ‘methodological fix’ and ‘progressive problem shift in the larger research programme of historical materialism, … an auxiliary theory consistent with the hard-core premises of that programme’.65 I call this conception of the relation between uneven and combined development and historical materialism ‘critical conservative’. ‘Critical’ because it explicitly acknowledges that there is a basic problem in historical materialism represented by its recurrent inability to accommodate certain historical phenomena within its explanatory remit. And ‘conservative’ because depicting uneven and combined development as a merely ‘auxiliary theory’ protects the basic premises of historical

62

63 64 65

Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, p. 86. The attentive reader will have noticed that my own account of the Iranian revolution in the preceding pages is implicitly based on precisely such an attachment. Anievas 2014, p. 43. Ibid. Anievas 2014, p. 43; original emphasis.

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materialism, its ‘hard-core’ in Anievas’s Lakatosian terms, from the destabilising effects of the theoretical externalities, Lakatos’s ‘anomalies’. How plausible is this assessment? It seems that the answer to this question hinges on the prior question of whether or not the ontological assumptions of historical materialism, or any general social theory, can be seen as constitutive of its ‘hard-core’. In answering this prior question a brief look at Lakatos’s idea of ‘research programmes’ is in order. According to Lakatos, ‘research programmes’ emerge when scholars attempt to protect the fundamental postulates or the ‘hard-core’ of existing theories against empirical refutations. Two strategies are common to these attempts. The first strategy involves either the restriction of the empirical scope of the hard-core, or the exclusion of the unexpected outcomes as ‘anomaly’ or ‘exception’, or both. This restrictiverepudiative strategy gives rise to a ‘degenerative research programme’ that over time and with the proliferation of ‘anomalies’ completely erodes the explanatory power of the hard-core. Alternatively, scholars can resolve the anomalies through formulating ‘auxiliary theories’. An auxiliary theory expands the explanatory power of the research programme’s hard-core without adjusting its hard-core. This second ‘expansionist’ strategy leads to a ‘progressive research programme’, which, according to Lakatos, best ensures the growth of knowledge. For Lakatos, embarking on degenerative research programmes or abandoning theories in the face of falsificatory facts, à la Popper, impedes scientific advance and theoretical knowledge. This second strategy is what Anievas has adopted in his assessment of the relation between uneven and combined development and historical materialism. However, there is arguably a limit to the growth of knowledge even within the progressive research programmes, especially those whose hard-core is a general social theory. This limitation arises when the protective belt of auxiliary theories enveloping the hard-core becomes over-layered as a result of the growing number of anomalies. As the relation of the auxiliary theories to the hard-core becomes increasingly inorganic, the hard-core’s logical cohesion and theoretical parsimony are compromised. The accumulating auxiliary theories neither spring from the macro-theoretical postulates of the hard-core, nor can they possess a level of generality commensurate with that of the pre-refutation hard-core. In other words, auxiliary theories might ward off specific empirical challenges to the hard-core but their overgrowth recurrently betrays a constitutive defect in the hard-core itself, a defect that auxiliary theories can only contingently remedy. Such constitutive defects are particularly evident when auxiliary theories pertain to a dimension of social reality that is ontologically on a par with aspects of social reality from which the hard-core’s own fun-

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damental categories are derived. Put conversely, there might exist a hitherto theoretically undigested dimension of social reality whose incorporation into the hard-core of a progressive research programme would either render its auxiliary theories redundant, or intellectually demote them as concretisations of the hard-core’s general abstract postulates. Unevenness – which Trotsky defined as ‘the most general law of the historic process’ – constitutes precisely such a dimension of social reality and yet is arguably absent from the ‘hard-core’ of historical materialism and classical social theory more generally. The anomalies that according to Anievas elicited the original formulation of uneven and combined development by Trotsky are directly generated by this absence. In fact, this absence is the explicit departure point of Anievas’s own work and that of a considerable number of other contributions to historical sociology and IR that theoretically draw on the idea of uneven and combined development. Therefore, logically uneven and combined development cannot be reduced to an ‘auxiliary theory’, which, according to Anievas, is ‘consistent with the hard-core premises’ of the research programme of historical materialism. Rather, the integration of uneven and combined development into historical materialism necessitates a modification of its ‘hard-core’ ontological premises. Venturing out of the Lakatosian discourse I call this assessment of the relation between uneven and combined development and historical materialism ‘critical-reformist’ in that like Anievas’s ‘critical-conservative’ assessment it recognises a basic flaw in the hard-core of the historical materialist research programme, but ‘reformist’ because unlike Anievas’s assessment it also calls for a modification of the hard-core itself. This is so because, as I have tried to explain elsewhere,66 uneven and combined development’s intellectual premise of the ontological multiplicity of the social not only exerts a downward pressure on historical materialism’s intermediate concepts but also an upward pressure on its transhistorical categories. For it comes into an immediate and productive tension with historical materialism’s ontological premise of the ‘double relationship’, which Marx and Engels formulate in The German Ideology. There they write: ‘the production of life … appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as natural, on the other as a social relationship’. The ontologically singular conception of the social that underlies the premise of the double relationship is even more visible in its later rendition in Grundrisse where Marx asserts that ‘All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society’. As can be readily seen, in both iterations of this basic premise of his-

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Matin 2013a.

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torical materialism, the site of ‘production in general’ is the individual society. The logic is also operative in Marx’s explicit abstraction from societal multiplicity in Capital.67 In short, historical materialism’s general abstraction of ‘production in general’ involves an implicit but highly consequential abstraction from the fact of societal multiplicity (unevenness) and hence from its consequence of the interactive development of each individual society (combination). Moreover, uneven and combined development has a transhistorical reach, which is not to be conflated with a supra-historical or unhistorical quality. Consequently, it cannot be reintroduced into particular forms of production a posteriori as one of many ‘concrete determinations’. This would involve the restriction, if not the suppression, of the causal and constitutive impact of the condition of societal multiplicity, or the international, on the concrete form of the reproduction of the society in question. Thus, to put it crudely, the logical implication of the idea of uneven and combined development for historical materialism seems to consist of reforming its premise of the ‘double relationship’ as a triple relationship whereby coexistive and interactive relations among societies have a dialectical relationship with their internal social relationships and external relationship with nature. This modification of historical materialism’s social ontology is, I contend, indispensible to the solution of the problem of Eurocentrism in Marxism, and social theory more generally.68 67 68

Marx 1990, p. 727; cf. Althusser 2001, p. 49. Anievas and Matin 2016, pp. 1–16.

chapter 4

Rationalist or Nationalist? The Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere Luke Cooper

1

Habermas, Critical Theory and IR: The Lacuna of History?

Is there a specifically modern relationship between the discourses that emanate from a distinctively public discussion, on the one hand, and the nature of political power, on the other? If so, how does one trace its emergence? And should we grasp it in normative terms as a progressive historical arrival of a public sphere based on free and rational discussion capable of shaping political systems for the better? To address these questions scholars have frequently returned to the work of celebrated German sociologist Jürgen Habermas whose book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, saw in early eighteenth-century Britain1 a transformation in the nature of political and cultural deliberation with the development of a salon and coffee house culture, which was underpinned by the printed periodicals discussed in these spaces, giving these discourses coherence and fostering a sense of shared identity. As Craig Calhoun notes, the Structural Transformation typifies the interdisciplinary nature of Habermas’s wider oeuvre for it ‘is an inquiry at once into normative ideals and actual history’.2 These two dimensions of Habermas’s book, the normative and the historical, inevitably exist in a degree of tension with one another. For Habermas wishes to establish both the fact of the emergence of a critical public sphere in the salons and cafes of eighteenth-century Britain, and its historically progressive nature, seeing it as a shared space for society to reflect on the nature of political and cultural existence. This tension arguably arises out of Habermas’s place within the wider Critical Theory tradition, one of the main concerns of which has been to identify a latent emancipatory logic to the cumulative transformations of ideas and struc1 Both Habermas and the London-based English writers of the early eighteenth century use England and Britain interchangeably when discussing this case, and this clearly risks ignoring the unevenness that exists within the British Isles and the political complexity of the Act of Union involved. On this see Davidson 2003. 2 Calhoun 1992a, p. 1.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384736_006

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tures over time.3 Consequently, given their commitment to this emancipatory and broadly universal conception of progress,4 Critical Theory scholars in the discipline of International Relations (IR) have tended to stress the normativepolitical potential of Habermas’s ideas as an alternative to mainstream realist and liberal accounts of the international system.5 Indeed, Andrew Linklater, the most prominent advocate of a Habermasian account of IR, has defended an understanding of theory construction that is particularly concerned with locating an immanent logic of social emancipation: … Critical theory in the broadly Marxian tradition avoids the extremes of resignation to international political fate and retreat into Utopian fancy. Normative theory in this tradition focuses on what is immanent within existing social structures, and intimated by the decisive forms of social struggle in any epoch.6 With the nation state system correctly identified as a source of damaging conflicts pitting different communities of human subjects against one another, many Critical Theorists, including Cox,7 Linklater8 and Habermas,9 have seen Europe as the avant-garde of a potentially cosmopolitan and post-national conception of society and citizenship – even if the continent’s travails since the financial crisis of 2008 have left some of them much less sanguine about its prospects.10 The uneasy relationship between the normative and explanatory persists through these intellectual endeavours. It tends to take the form 3

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As Horkheimer put it in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung in 1937, the goal of Critical Theory is ‘man’s emancipation from slavery’ through ‘the rational constitution of society’, see Horkheimer 2002, p. 246. Whether this holds true for the Critical Theory tradition as a whole depends on how one defines membership of it and understands its evolution over time. While it certainly does for Habermas, who has established himself as the most bullish defender of the concept of progress and a vision of historical modernity rooted in the unfolding of the European Enlightenment, other Critical Theorists clearly diverged from this perspective. Horkheimer and Adorno, for example, famously departed radically from their original conception of critique as a theory that pointed towards the rationally constituted social emancipation of the human subject in Dialectic of Enlightenment. But despite the bleak nature of the text, the critique of instrumental rationality was still situated within a concern to elaborate a broadly emancipatory social theory. See Horkheimer and Adorno 2002. Haacke 1996; Linklater 1990; Linklater 1996; Linklater 1998. Linklater 1999, p. 165. Cox 1993. Linklater 1998, pp. 179–212; Linklater 2011. Habermas 2001; Habermas 2001a; Habermas 2003; Habermas 2006. Habermas 2009; Habermas 2012; Oltermann 2015.

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of a tension between the clear desirability of these outcomes and the extent to which existing structures and processes are considered amenable to them. Critical Theory scholars are not unaware of this issue. Linklater complained, for example, that his critics set up an ‘easy target’ by claiming he believed that an imminent transformation in the nature of political community was already occurring. Instead he insisted this is: … [a]n ideal to strive for rather than a vision which is likely to be realised or approximated without political action and struggle … [But] my argument is that this ideal cannot be spun from thin air but is anchored in actual developments within and between nation-states.11 Yet while this criticism of Linklater may be unfair,12 other scholars in the Critical Theory tradition provide grist to the mill of such critiques. Some have argued, for instance, that ‘by creating opportunities for new modes of global democratic practice’, the current liberal international regime is ‘in the process of generating an alternative type of political community to that anchored in the territorial state’.13 Others have drawn perhaps undue encouragement about the prospects for a global cosmopolitan democracy with the entry onto the world stage, ‘in a more structured and institutionalised fashion’, of the citizen as a ‘new political subject’.14 Perspectival differences over emancipatory possibilities aside, a common set of methodological presuppositions underpins these outlooks and all can be situated in Habermas’s theoretical foundations.15 Firstly, the view that the public sphere (or ‘civil society’) as a discursive space has a causal significance in itself regardless of the political content of the ideas generated in this arena, one which arises from the possibility of rational discussion and mutual understanding that it entails.16 Habermas argues this explicitly when he says: ‘progress cannot be measured against the choice of correct strategies but rather against the intersubjectivity of understanding achieved without force, that is, against 11 12

13 14 15 16

Linklater 1999, p. 166. Although Linklater has objected to this criticism, some of his formulations leave him open to the charge. For example, he has argued that ‘in the contemporary world it has become reasonable to suppose that constitutionally secure, democratic states in the core of the world economy may be witnessing the end of geopolitics’ (Linklater 1998, p. 171; my emphasis). Samhat and Payne 2003, p. 273. Archibugi 2008, p. 284. For a cogent critique of the application of Habermas’s ideas to IR, see Anievas 2010. Habermas 1991, pp. 82–4; Linklater 1998, p. 171.

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the expansion of the domain of consensual action together with the reestablishment of undistorted communication’.17 Secondly, they offer a recasting of the historical subject away from the labour-production-social-relations matrix favoured by classical Marxism – and the conflicts these dimensions serve to theorise – towards the ‘developmental logic’ of ‘rationality structures’ and ‘learning processes’, including ‘moral insight, practical knowledge, communicative action, and the consensual regulation of … conflicts’.18 Consequently, the creation of forums à la the public sphere in which ‘what guides participants is a commitment to be moved simply by the force of the better argument’19 becomes a transformative historical act. Finally, these scholars apportion an explicit normative priority to European modernity, arguing that the emergence of the citizen as a political subject reflected a higher level of rationality and morality that is affirmed in its consequent spread to the non-European world.20 Habermas offers an explicitly ‘internalist’ version of this argument that treats Europe as unaffected by wider global processes, claiming ‘a series of specifically European experiences’ gave rise to a cumulative ‘learning process’ that ‘shaped the normative self-understanding of European modernity into an egalitarian universalism’.21 While Linklater argues that inter-civilisational patterns of causality existed between Europe and Asia,22 for him this simply means adaptability and openness23 become characteristic of ‘the rise of a hegemonic Western civilisation’.24 As this illustrates, what might at first appear to be an issue of analytical preference soon raises fundamental questions regarding the nature of modernity. But to fully explore them requires testing the claim of moral and social progress – of a move towards rational and non-violent means for conflict resolution – against the living historical record. In this sense, Critical Theory’s problem is that two distinctive intellectual projects become tangled together: one aims to formulate a historical and sociological account of the cultural transformation elicited by the modern international order, while the other .

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Habermas 1979, p. 120. Habermas 1979, pp. 97–8. Linklater 1998, p. 92; see also Habermas 1990, pp. 88–9. Anievas 2010, p. 153. Habermas 2001a, p. 103. Linklater 1998, pp. 126–9. As Anievas has noted, this both ignores the internal complexity and unevenness of European history and advances a unilinear conception of history in which other states will inevitably ‘repeat the historical stages of moral development experienced’ in Europe (Anievas 2010, p. 153). Linklater 1990, p. 126.

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seeks to identify an immanent logic of universal emancipation in these historic shifts. ‘In practice’, as Justin Rosenberg once argued, ‘these tasks are simply not identical’ and, moreover, Critical Theory often appears to prioritise the latter over the former, risking an ‘indefinite deferment of historical analysis as it leaves the “objectivist” world of “social structures” and “empirical facts” for the exploration of the forms of human subjectivity’.25 Consequently, the natural inclination of Critical Theory scholars is to occlude historical analysis and hypostasise the normative essence, i.e. assume, rather than empirically prove, its actually presence. This has led Habermas’s followers in IR to uncritically accept his historical account of the eighteenth century.26 As such, they have paid little attention to the historiographical writing on this period, despite it throwing into question some of the key Habermasian conceptual claims about the rise of the public sphere.27 A basic assumption of Historical Sociology is arguably called for in this context: that to understand the nature of our present moment, including its normative potentials, a historical understanding of modernity is needed. This ‘return to history’, if it is to avoid romanticising Western cultural evolution, must identify the war and violence that shaped the emergence and discourses of the modern public sphere. In what follows, I explore the case of Britain during the eighteenth century, utilising the theory of uneven and combined development to show how the fratricidal nature of international politics shaped the discourses of the new literati.28 Whereas Habermas’s internalist theory excludes European geopolitics from its causal frame, uneven and combined development elicits its significance. A complex mix of identities and state forms existed across Europe in this period that cannot be reduced to a singular emergence of a bourgeois public. Britain was to lead the way in the development of a homogenous national consciousness in the eighteenth century, which existed in a reciprocal relationship with its mercantilist political economy. This development of a English-cum-British national identity emerged within the conditions of incessant warfare that characterised Europe’s geopolitically combined development, with the fear and insecurity it fostered internally within the psyche of the reading public hardly fertile to the free and rational discussion Habermas emphasises. Indeed, violence ‘without’ fed violence ‘within’; the public authority of the state was an arena for these conflicts as patronage and cor25 26 27 28

Rosenberg 1990, p. 636. For example, see Linklater 1998, pp. 171–2. Calhoun 1992a. Allinson and Anievas 2009; Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015; Cooper 2013; Davidson 2009; Matin 2013a; Rosenberg 2006; Rosenberg 2010.

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ruption were endemic to political life. Reflecting these power struggles, and the heavy sanctions that could follow legal challenge by the powerful,29 newspapers operated within a climate of both formal, and self, censorship. In short, the application of uneven and combined development to the changes seen in the eighteenth-century British cultural arena problematises Habermas’s view by drawing out the modes of violence and exclusion which call into question the extent to which a climate of free and critical debate existed among the British reading public of the age.

2

The Uneven and Combined Development of Cultural Change

If, as will be explored below, Habermas’s conception of the public sphere can be shown to wrongly exclude ‘the international’ arena as a causal factor, then researchers in Sociology and Political Science seeking to correct for this error may look hopefully towards the discipline of IR. These hopes may once have been quickly disappointed by the intellectual assumptions and research interests found in the mainstream of the discipline. For IR’s postwar penchant for rationalist approaches,30 which seek to anticipate the forms of state behaviour that arise logically, regardless of specific historical lineages, within a competitive, ‘many state’ context, hardly lends itself to exploring the dynamics of cultural change. More recently, however, Historical Sociologists and Postcolonial writers have gained an increasing audience for their critique of rationalist IR’s ‘supra-social and non-historical conception of the international’,31 and its de facto ‘ontological exclusion of cultural heterogeneity’.32 Importantly, this has called for the reinsertion of culture as an explanatory category but in a nonessentialised form based on two key propositions. Firstly, a spatial premise that ‘cultural interactions’ between societies form a constitutive dimension to ‘the changing structures and processes of the international system’.33 Secondly, this leads into the temporal premise that rather than seeking to theorise the repetition of state behaviour,34 or uncover supposedly fixed cultural values,35 scholars should see change and transformation as essential qualities of the social

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Greene 2005. Keohane 1984; Waltz 1979. Matin 2013a, p. 356. Matin 2013a, p. 354. Inayatullah 2004, p. 1. Waltz 1986. Huntington 2002.

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world, requiring a concern for historical specificity to be at the centre of the discipline. A key resulting theme of these research orientations is, therefore, how to understand the complex cultural boundaries drawn between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ seen in the modern world. The theory of uneven and combined development36 has gained an intellectual following in this context due to its potential as a framework for sociological enquiry that overcomes the ‘society in the singular’ fallacy of classical social theory.37 By starting from the assumption that no society exists in isolation, the interactive coexistence of societies is recognised as not only a fundamental quality of ‘the international’ realm, but also causally significant to the ‘internal’ dynamics of the ‘domestic’ cultural and political sphere. This emphasis on the unique developmental patterns within a society, which are significantly shaped by its interactive coexistence with others, resonates with some of the arguments found in postcolonial theory. The latter have stressed the hybridity that characterises how the colonised have come to terms with colonial power in ways which are ambivalent towards, or contest, the universal claims of Western thought.38 Uneven and combined development arguably provides a sociological foundation for studying such processes.39 It does so through a parsimonious set of theoretical assumptions about the intersocietal that serve to frame enquiries into history’s many ‘hybrid’ specificities. These assumptions proceed through a three-part conceptual schema. Unevenness denotes the dispersed nature of ‘the social’, its geographical, political, economic, and cultural differentiation between multiple locales. Combination emerges through the interactive coexistence of these communities, shaping their ‘internal’ as much as their ‘external’ relations. Development situates these spatial processes on a temporal register, as the cumulative evolution of interacting communities establishes multiple, unique historical lineages. Taken together this framework offers a radical alternative to some of the conceptual assumptions underpinning Habermasian Critical Theory and the account of the rise of the ‘bourgeois public’ that gives it a historical foundation. Uneven and combined development’s focus on the dynamic interaction between the domestic and international encourages the researcher to ask questions about the ‘external relations’ that shaped the cultural changes of the eighteenth century Habermas defined as the rise of the critical public. In doing 36 37 38 39

Trotsky 1967. Rosenberg 2006. Bhabha 2004; Spivak 1994. Anievas and Nisancioglu 2013; Nisancioglu 2014; Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015; Matin 2007; Matin 2013b; Matin 2013.

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so, it moves away from the form of comparative approach Habermas utilises, which sees the uneven and differentiated cultural changes within European polities, primarily Britain, France and the Germanic statelets, as exhibiting a singular logic in which a broadly analogous historical experience leads to the emergence of a similar public arena. By hypothesising that the cultural and social changes of eighteenth-century Europe were uneven and combined, and thus lacking a singular logic developmental logic as such, a greater concern with historical specificity emerges. Power relations can also be inserted more robustly into the otherwise excessively benign account of the process Habermas advances. Europe’s internecine conflicts – i.e. the specific nature of its geopolitically combined development – drove the development of an authoritarian state form. Nationalist discourses developed unevenly in this context, and existed in a complex relationship to the state. They offered a potential source of coherence and legitimacy, but also constituted a threat to absolutism.

3

Habermas’s Eighteenth Century: The Romantic Image

Habermas argues that the shift to the bourgeois public sphere entailed a transformation away from a form of cultural-political community he refers to as representative publicness. For Habermas this was a feature of the European feudal system where the ‘manorial lord presented himself as the embodiment of some sort of “higher” power’, rather than the political representative of a public made up of private persons.40 European feudalism was, in this sense, pre-political, i.e. the manorial lord presented his own person as the embodiment of society, with legitimacy derived from above – indeed, ultimately, from the celestial – and whose material wealth reflected the fact there was no operative distinction between political and economic power.41 Status, rather than class as such, thus, determined property relations, establishing a key role for the Church as providing Christendom with a unifying cultural system that overlaid an otherwise fragmented order. Indeed, sovereignty was parcelised in a series of overlapping territorial claims, which were held together by cultural and legal conventions rooted in religious authority. Notably, the system did not have the kind of exclusionary territorial claims indicative of the modern state system.42 The treatment of the lord and the country as equivalent defined this structure 40 41 42

Habermas 1991, p. 7. Anderson 1974, pp. 402–3; Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015, p. 98; Ruggie 1993, p. 153; Sayer 1987, p. 61. Ruggie 1993, pp. 149–51.

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of power with ‘words like excellence, highness, majesty, fame, dignity, and honour’ expressing ‘the peculiarity of a being that is capable of representation’.43 As Habermas puts it: When the territorial ruler convened about him ecclesiastical and worldly lords, knights prelates and cities (or as in the … [Holy Roman Empire] until 1806 when the Emperor invited the princes and bishops, Imperial counts, Imperial towns, and abbots to the Imperial Diet) this was not a matter of an assembly of delegates that was someone else’s representative. As long as the prince and the estates of his realm ‘were’ the country, and not just its representative, they could represent it in a specific sense. They represented their lordship not ‘for’ but before the people.44 As this extract suggests, Habermas tends to elide together a very wide sweep of history, discussing representative publicness as a feature of European societies from the High Middle Ages through to, as in this example, the early nineteenth century. This risks conflating the early modern development of the absolutist state,45 which saw monarchs undertake military and fiscal reforms that centralised power into their own hands, thus disempowering the nobility, with the more parcelised forms of sovereignty, which empowered the Church and gentry, found in the feudal epoch. Notwithstanding this potential conflation, Habermas is aware of the importance of the absolutist era to the developments he discusses in The Structural Transformation.46 Indeed, an antiabsolutist sensibility animates his normative concept of the public sphere. In this sense, for Habermas, the public sphere represents a historical rupture away from the continuum in the nature of the cultural arena he identifies across both the feudal and absolutist epochs. While the form of the representative publicness changes – from the localised and fragmented character of the former to the centralised and bureaucratic form of the latter – its basic features endure. He writes, for example, of how the ‘dimension of the polemic within which the public sphere assumed political importance during the eighteenth century was developed in the course of the two preceding centuries in the context of the controversy in constitutional law over the principle of absolute sovereignty’.47

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Habermas 1991, p. 7. Habermas 1991, pp. 7–8. Anderson 1974. Habermas 1991, pp. 52–3, 69, 95, 102–3 and 267. His description of the mercantile state is also, to all intents and purposes, a discussion of the absolutist state, see pp. 17–19. Habermas 1991, p. 52.

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As the centrifugal and multi-layered conception of power was displaced by absolutist monarchy, concern grew over the lack of constraints on monarchical authority. Ultimately, this saw a class alignment emerging between a confident and assertive bourgeoisie prepared to make common anti-absolutist cause with marginalised nobles, blurring the status distinctions that had once been thought of as sacrosanct.48 Habermas explains this elite class ambiguity in how the landed aristocracy were gradually shaped by the ‘new commercial relationships: the traffic in commodities and news created by early capitalist long-distance trade’.49 But he cautions against the view that these changes in themselves heralded a transformation in elite socio-economic power. In its initial phase, this feudal elite in transition could relate to these developments merely as consumers of luxury products, and, for so long as this remained the extent of their engagement with markets, it would not bring ‘traditional production – and hence the basis of their rule – into dependence on the new capital’.50 Importantly, Habermas does not explain the ultimate shift to the capitalist mode of production as a merely economic reconfiguration of class power, but highlights the central role played by the territorial state: These elements of early capitalist commercial relations, that is, the traffic in commodities and news, manifested their revolutionary power only in the mercantilist phase in which, simultaneously with the modern state, the national and territorial economies assumed their shapes.51 Given that individual mercantile states existed in a regional context characterised by aggressive competition, this emphasis on their role in consolidating capitalist social relations could be read as incorporating a geopolitical ‘moment’ into the account of the public sphere’s origins. But, for Habermas, mercantilism emerges as a result of developments that have a purely internal/domestic providence in the process of capitalist class formation. He sees the mercantile state as an institutional form that unlocks the potential52 seen in the growth of private merchant capital by providing the political guar48 49 50 51 52

Habermas 1991, p. 53. Habermas 1991, p. 15; original emphasis. Habermas 1991, p. 16. Habermas 1991, p. 17. While Habermas explicitly endorses the Maurice Dobb position that ‘a mature development of merchant and financial capital is not of itself a guarantee that capitalist production will develop under its wing’, in reality his account has elements of both the Dobb and Sweezy positions. Dobb 1950, pp. 160–1; Habermas 1991, p. 253, see also Sweezy and Dobb 1950.

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antees and military force, which were vital to success in overseas markets.53 The capital demands this generated exceeded the limits of what Europe’s monarchs could raise through financial institutions, requiring the deployment of taxation systems generating income from private persons.54 A key consequence of this lay in how social power was depersonalised as the monarch’s personal holdings were separated from state revenue and expenditure.55 For Habermas these changes eventually result in public authority displacing representative publicness. While ‘the international’ is invoked through the search for commercial opportunities abroad, the causes of this development are internal, moving from the inside outwards. A line of causality is, thus, established that starts with the development of capitalist social relations, moves through the institutional transformation entailed by absolutist rule, and into the formation of the eighteenth-century public sphere. The latter’s complex origins can be seen in how it is both a challenge to absolutist power – as a more plural society of individuals could no longer be represented by the person of the monarch – and a feature of the social changes with which absolutism was interwoven, as this centralised power served to consolidate a general right to private property.56 While Habermas is right to identify this link between the absolutist state and the transition to capitalism, an internalist methodology underpins his approach. It is brought out explicitly in a footnote where Habermas considers whether differences in how the public sphere is consolidated into different legal systems should affect his overall argument: ‘At this level of generality we disregard national differences between Great Britain, France and Germany, which are simultaneously differences in the level of capitalist development’.57 In making the claim that these differences simply express divergent levels of capitalist development, Habermas exhibits textbook reductionism. But the root of this error arguably arises from his failure to see the interaction between these polities as a part of their individual development. Indeed, uneven levels of capitalist development between different polities are significant because of the types of interaction they entail. States that are less developed can adapt the economic techniques pioneered elsewhere without 53 54 55 56

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Habermas 1991, p. 17. Ibid. Ibid. As Anderson puts it, ‘The increase in the political sway of the royal state was accompanied, not by a decrease in the economic security of noble landownership, but by a corresponding increase in the general rights of private property. The age in which “Absolutist” public authority was imposed was also simultaneously the age in which “absolute” private property was progressively consolidated’. Anderson 1974, p. 429. Habermas 1991, p. 267.

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repeating them afresh. A competitive ‘many state’ system also creates pressures for certain forms of behaviour, for example, by pursuing military or diplomatic advantage, or undertaking institutional reform to gain a material benefit over rivals. At the most basic level the coexistence of polities also entails the diffusion of cultural and political ideas, which will shape the experiments in state-formation that actors undertake. Habermas acknowledges the uneven development of capitalism and the public sphere across Europe, but he does not discuss the processes of combined development that concretely shaped the varied form mass publicity took. In this regard, the most striking omission from The Structural Transformation, which emerges as a result of the internalist underpinning of the argument, is the failure to discuss warfare as a factor in the formation and nature of the public sphere. This feature of geopolitically combined development was quite endemic to eighteenth-century international politics. The European order of the early to mid-century saw intense dynastic and religious splits intersecting with the more centralised and efficient war-making capacity of the absolutist and post-absolutist states, creating an environment vulnerable to systemic bouts of armed conflict. Indeed, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8), and the Seven Years’ War (1756– 63) were only the most notable and destructive of the conflicts Europe saw during this complex and uneven transition from dynastic realms to publiclyconstituted political societies. Warfare had three specific implications for the development of the culture of mass publicity. Firstly, military conflict stimulated the appetite amongst the reading public for a regular diet of information regarding the progress or setbacks made by the forces of the realm against their foes. As such, the eighteenth-century ‘revolution in reading’,58 which saw a dramatic increase in the number of newspapers and periodicals, as well as in their circulation figures, was stimulated by this ‘rapid increase in political consciousness and political interest in all major European states’.59 Secondly, from its earliest origins this domain of social life, the new reading and debating public, became a locus for power struggles. Indeed, individuals within the state elite conceived of the print media in instrumental terms as an opportunity for propaganda, rather than as an implicit challenge to the status quo.60 These efforts to constrain, and ultimately tame, the social layers gathering in the public sphere were legitimised by the backdrop of incessant war. They fostered a

58 59 60

Gestrich 2006, p. 423. Gestrich 2006, p. 422. Cowan 2004.

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discourse that was often critical of ‘newsmongers’ accused of spreading unpatriotic disinformation.61 Lastly, the polycentric and war-prone character of the European order shaped the terms through which the reading public began to imagine themselves as a community with an interest in defending the realm against multiple external threats.62 The universal aspirations of the Renaissance were thus displaced by the emergence of ‘the nation’ as the self-definition of the public community. The latter poses a particular problem for Critical Theorists given that they see the public sphere as a step towards, and not away from, a universal and humanistic political domain. In short, a failure to address the way in which the geopolitical context of intensive war shaped the social domain of ‘coffee house culture’ leads Habermas to neglect the forms of exclusion that were present in the discourses and intellectual assumptions operating within this sphere. This becomes clearer still if one elaborates some of the core facets of Habermas’s understanding of the eighteenth-century public. For Habermas the declining importance of status distinctions to the way of life found in the coffee houses is crucial to the types of discussion these spaces entailed. He argues that ‘a kind of social intercourse’ was found in this domain, which, ‘far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether’.63 He further adds that a sense of ‘common humanity’ animated this space as private persons acted as if ‘power and the prestige of public office were held in suspense’ and ‘laws of the market were suspended as were laws of the state’.64 It is on this cultural basis of an inter-subjective consciousness characterised by the perception of egalitarianism that, he argues, ‘the authority of the better argument could assert itself against that of social hierarchy’.65 Habermas thus foreshadows here the more explicit vision of intersubjective rationality he would later develop into a language-inflected theory of modernity.66 In The Structural Transformation, however, he accepts the idea that a status-less domain was not ‘actually realized’ in the eighteenth century; nonetheless, he insists that ‘as an idea it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim’ which ‘was at least consequential’.67 Unfortunately, the effect of this qualification is to render Habermas’s claims rather opaque. On the one hand, there is a potential

61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Cowan 2004, pp. 350–1. Anderson 2006, pp. 40–5; see also Cooper 2015. Habermas 1991, p. 36. Ibid. Ibid. Habermas 1985a; Habermas 1985b. Habermas 1991, p. 36.

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confusion of appearance with essence. Even if café culture purported to disregard status, a look beneath these surface claims is likely to reveal the enduring importance of these distinctions. But, in any case, as I will show in the final section, the evidence suggests status distinctions were accepted within the British public sphere that Habermas takes to be ‘the model case’, even if the traditional figures of the aristocrat and clergyman were gently mocked in some publications. These traditional social ranks were assimilated into a subjective understanding of a cultural cohesive nation, but they retained their importance within this rearticulated version of the social hierarchy, reflecting the complexity of Europe’s socially and geopolitically combined development, specifically the juxtaposition of the discourses of the realm and nation. Neither does the highly romantic vision of the public sphere Habermas presents capture the modes of exclusion that established the terms of acceptability, both legally and informally, shaping the discourses emanating from this arena. Far from recognising the forms of exclusion present in how the eighteenth-century public was constituted, Habermas sees inclusivity as one of its most defining characteristics: However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who – insofar as they were propertied and educated – as readers, listeners and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion. The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate.68 Such remarks illustrate how Habermas accepts that a class exclusion defined membership of this arena, but he does not discuss the way in which it shaped its discourses. As Habermas defines the public sphere in this highly inclusive way, encompassing the array of social groups that were literate and capable of engaging in public political discussion regardless of their status position, one might expect the insecurities of the new middle class and their relationship to those ‘above’ and ‘below’ them to be given more emphasis. Instead, a rather rose-tinted view that the ‘better argument’ – made in the context of reflective and rational debate – could ‘assert itself against the social hierarchy’ surfaces.69

68 69

Habermas 1991, p. 37. Habermas 1991, p. 36.

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The overemphasis on egalitarianism, and the under-emphasis on how the cultural sphere formed a locus of power for the ruling elite, arguably reflects the failure to situate the narrative in the conditions of permanent war that prevailed across the century. The latter throws into question the Habermasian view of the public sphere as a benign, and even radical, force. As I shall now show in the British context – his ‘model case’70 – both primary and secondary sources reveal a public sphere that acted as a form of exclusion defined by national identity and a complex mix of traditional status and new class hierarchies.

4

A Nationalist, Not Rationalist Model Case: Surveying Addison, Steele and Defoe

Given Habermas sees the level of capitalist development determining the political constitution of the public sphere, it is unsurprising to find him claim that ‘a public sphere that functioned in the political realm arose first in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century’ – seeing this as a ‘model case’ that the rest of Europe would follow.71 Habermas notes how Britain’s economic rise in the eighteenth century required an institutional transformation of the state into a vehicle capable of rising above the often conflictual demands of finance on the one hand, and industry on the other, and correctly points to the importance of the Bank of England as significant in creating a state that could pursue the general interest of the realm.72 But he also sees the formal abolition of state censorship in 1695 as an equally important moment that made ‘the influx of rational-critical arguments into the press possible’.73 Habermas imagines a broadly free press emerging to provide a platform for rational public debate and highlights, in particular, the periodicals launched by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.74 Unusually, their papers did not require patronage to survive as they maintained a sufficiently large enough circulation to be self-sustaining.75 For Habermas these circulars stand out from the work of Daniel Defoe who, he argues, took an explicitly political approach to journalism, which ‘defended the cause of the Whigs’ and thus ‘made the “party spirit” a “public spirit” ’.76 In

70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Habermas 1991, p. 57. Habermas 1991, p. 58. Ibid. Ibid. Habermas 1991, pp. 42–3. Cowan 2004, p. 346. Habermas 1991, p. 59.

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contrast, he sees the Addison-Steele press as an exemplar of a more bipartisan and intellectual approach to public life, seeking ‘agreement and enlightenment through the rational-critical public debate of private persons’.77 In this final section, I explore some of the literary output of periodicals under the editorship of these three writers, illustrating how their discourses throw into question the rationality assumption that underpins Habermas’s account of the so-called British ‘model case’. Habermas argues that a shift in the consciousness of the literate middle classes found expression in the Addison-Steele papers in which ‘the public held up a mirror to itself’,78 i.e. they became aware of, and incorporated into, a world of private people with shared concerns and a common identity. Indeed, the new media did have a revolutionary social impact on how society understood its own subjectivity. But what Habermas refers to as individuals coming together as a rational public is arguably better understood as different process: that of individuals coming together as a national public. ‘Nation-ness’ represented a transformed sense of consciousness, which the newspaper presses were key to, as geographically dispersed individuals could share in a social experience and understanding of world events that shaped a sense of common identity.79 The strict traditional hierarchy of status-based identities was first disrupted, and then negated, as people of all social groups discovered their ‘national spirit’ across the eighteenth century.80 Newspapers and periodicals provided the initial ‘glue’ amongst the literate for this social change. While a discussion of the relationship between the nation and the public sphere is rather oblique in The Structural Transformation, the distinction that Habermas wishes to draw is perhaps best put across in his engagement with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s contribution to the concept of public opinion.81 For Mercier it was the role of the enlightened scholar to form the public opinion to which ‘all classes of the nation’, including administrators of state, looked.82 Habermas uses a distinction that is arguably similar by seeing critical-rationality as a feature of the discourses of the café scene and its periodicals, providing a progressive pressure on those in power. He does not, however, note the importance of the intelligentsia in constructing the national imagery that displaced the political structure of representative publicness. This tendency to focus on the rational rather than

77 78 79 80 81 82

Habermas 1991, p. 43. Ibid. Anderson 2006. Ibid., p. 85; Cooper 2015, p. 490. Habermas 1991, pp. 95–6. Cited in Ibid.

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the national leads Habermas to idealise the public sphere. Moreover, the assertion of the rational intellect over, what one might call, the ‘properly political’ results in a depoliticised conception of the literate public, largely ignoring the split between the Whig and Tory elite in post-Restoration England and how this was expressed in the print media. For example, Habermas rightly notes the ‘loss of extraordinariness’ of the Church, arguing that it became one of many associations of private people, rather than the definitive form of public representation.83 But, while there is truth in this, he does not note the strength of early eighteenth-century ‘high church Toryism’84 during the reign of Queen Anne, which defended a more traditional conception of the publicly representative role of the church. In short, there is a complexity to the British transition to a public political society that is not addressed in what sometimes appears to be Habermas’s contradiction-free view of the process. The Addison-Steele papers that Habermas sees as embodying a more rational, intellectual and less partisan form of public discussion were also a form of political intervention on the Whig side. They sought to convey the Whig message in a subtle manner, ‘without appearing to engage in the vulgar and disreputable partisanship’85 that the newspaper industry of the time had a reputation for. From Tory periodicals they borrowed the pejorative satire of the indecent coffee house public and promoted the reform of its social customs and manners, so that it might present as a unifying social force.86 A focus on moral reflection and gentlemanly politeness animated the pages of the Spectator, which claimed to observe an ‘exact neutrality between the Whigs and the Tories’87 despite the disputes between these factions intensifying in the last years of the reign of Queen Anne. It was a nonpartisan commitment the Spectator would regularly reiterate. In issue sixteen, having apparently received letters from readers urging a more partisan approach, the paper insisted it would ‘lose its whole effect should it run into the outrages of a party’.88 But a conscious political agenda underpinned this supposedly non-political posture. The editors’ Whiggism stressed the moral cohesion of society, but looked beyond the monarch and church for this coherence, articulating ‘a new model of civil society with its own authorities’.89 In this sense, Addison and Steele did conceive of

83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Habermas 1991, pp. 36–7. Cowan 2004, p. 348. Ibid. Cowan 2004, p. 349. Spectator (1711) (London, England), Thursday, 1 March 1711; Issue I. Spectator (1711) (London, England), Monday, 19 March 1711; Issue XVI. Klein 2005, p. 110.

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the Spectator and their other organs in Mercier-esque terms as an intellectual and moral project for the social revitalisation of a newly unified nation. But their view of what this entailed was far removed from the kind of evidencebased, open argument over ideology and policy that Habermas associates with the eighteenth-century public sphere. As Brian Cowan explains: … The public sphere envisioned by the Spectatorial periodical essay was a carefully policed forum for urbane but not risqué conversation, for moral reflection rather than obsession with the news of the day or the latest fashions, and for temperate agreement on affairs of state rather than heated political debate. In other words, it was not envisioned as an open forum for competitive debate between ideologies and interests, but rather as a medium whereby a stable socio-political consensus could be enforced through making partisan political debate appear socially unacceptable in public spaces such as coffeehouses or in media like periodical newspapers.90 Indeed, many of the articles found in the Spectator would not be recognisable to the modern reader as news; there was, for example, only limited coverage of domestic or world events. Many editions were comprised of satirical vignettes on the age with the editors’ Whiggish mores only detectable through the subtle mocking of fictional country gentry, such as the harmlessly benign Sir Roger de Coverly, or the musing over whether a similarly imagined clergyman should be spoken of as ‘one of our company’.91 That such gentle mocking of traditional status distinctions was possible did reflect a societal shift, but a rather mild one given the social convulsions that had characterised the previous half century of English history. However, the modernism of the Spectator could be seen in the way that the Whiggish editors sought to cohere new and old class layers into a national community, which they viewed as essential to social stability and to securing the realm against external threats. It was a Whig project realised following the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1715, which fatally damaged the patriotic standing of the Tories, laying the basis for the famous period of Whig supremacy that saw the two-party divide become much less significant.92 The discrediting of ‘high Church Toryism’ after the crushing of the Jacobite rising was symptomatic of the mutation of the British realm into a more

90 91 92

Cowan 2004, p. 351. Spectator (1711) (London, England), Friday, 2 March 1711; Issue II. Ward 2004, pp. 306–7.

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recognisably national form of political community. This might appear a peculiar claim given that the protestant accession of 1714 saw the German Elector of Hanover become George I of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. But it is important not to confuse the formal constitution of the Anglican monarchy with the transformed sense of community seen in British public society, as the discourse of nation was increasingly embraced and proved to be an adept cultural mobilising force for securing colonial interests.93 This was particularly evident in Defoe’s newspapers. In contrast to the Spectator of Addison and Steele, Defoe’s Review offered a more recognisably modern, and often explicitly political, approach to journalistic practice. In its first publication it promised readers ‘with as much care as possible the genuine history of what happens in the matters of state and war now carried on in Europe’.94 This project of distilling into the minds of the English reading public the externalised world of great political events served to cohere the sense of commonality of experience and history typical of national identity. While the paper started out as the Weekly Review of the Affairs of France – focusing explicitly on the progress of forces of the realm against their French foe in the war – it changed its name first to the Review of the English (1706), and then to the British Nation (1707), reflecting its editorial concern with the ‘great affair of the Union of Britain’.95 Defoe regularly invoked nationalist discourses across the pages of the Review. When it changed its name to the British variant he published a poem containing strong nationalist themes, envisaging a new power rising in the world: Uniting Britain from contention free Shall change her feuds and chains for peace and liberty The envying nations for defence prepare The vast conjunction learns the world to fear Similar themes animated the paper on the day the union formally came into being. Interestingly, this saw Defoe put particular emphasis on its internal security implications as he promised readers the settlement would bring to an end the ‘war, bloody, rapine, and devastation which has spread over this whole island to [sic] often’.96 While Habermas does see the creation of internal insti-

93 94 95 96

Wilson 1998. Weekly Review of the Affairs of France (London, England), Saturday, 19 February 1704; Issue 1. Review of the State of the English Nation (Cumulation) (London, England), Tuesday, 1 January 1706; Issue 1. Review of the State of the British Nation (London, England), Thursday, 1 May 1707; Issue 35.

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tutional stability as a condition of a consensual politics, it is difficult to detect in this literature a sense of the considered public debate he associates with the early eighteenth-century English coffee house. For Defoe’s conception of internal stability is heavily laden with a violent animosity towards supporters of the French within the newly united realm: Let them consider what a bloody and destructive war it must have been if the wicked designs of these people had succeeded; how French power from abroad, join’d with Jacobite power at home would have remov’d the seat of war into our own bowels – and would have taught these people, that have formerly snarled at the expenses and taxes of the war, I say, have taught them by said experience, the difference between paying for a war abroad and feeling a war at home.97 Such remarks put in doubt Habermas’s belief in the inclusive nature of this newly created public space. They illustrate how violence ‘without’ begot violence ‘within’ as the political unification of the two realms fed narratives promoting an accompanying exclusion of the Jacobite minority – a promise that would be realised with the coronation of George I. The construction of such mythologising narratives of a single realm on the island of Britain were not novel – Elizabethan England was famously beset with them during its similarly war-plagued times98 – but the shifting communicative and spatial environment of the early eighteenth century had a transformative effect on how these discourses were socially apprehended. The daily newsletter created a sense of the polity as a shared organism on a journey through changing times, providing a platform for societal comprehension of major events and instilling a sense of common agency in the battles undertaken.99 This was in spite of the fact that circulation figures themselves were small and record-keeping was poor. Defoe’s Review was actually one of the less popular titles with a contemporaneous treasury estimate suggesting it sold around 400 copies – though numbers are known to have fluctuated from day to day.100 But the readership of the new press was significantly higher due to the role they played in the coffee house and salon. Addison is said to have estimated that for each copy of the Spectator sold as many as 20 people would read it, and newspapers were also read

97 98 99 100

Review of the State of the British Nation (London, England), Thursday, 1 May 1707; Issue 35. Labriola 1976. Anderson 2006, p. 64; see also Cooper 2015, p. 484. Roosen 1986, pp. 17–18.

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aloud in the coffee houses.101 These forums therefore became central to the crystallisation of a body politic, as a nation of private people reimagined the terms of their political community on the basis of a perceived mutuality of interest, displacing the association of ‘the country’ with the monarch or noble that Habermas describes as representative publicness. Habermas’s error is to see this process as giving rise to a realm of rational debate when the forms of exclusion (‘othering’)102 entailed by the formation of the national community were arguably irrational if considered in the terms through which critical theorists cast their ideas: the universal human subject. For it is difficult to reconcile the hardening of more homogenous ethnic divisions brought about by the construction of national identities as a step towards an un-alienated human community. Moreover, the failure to see this enclosure of the public sphere, which shaped its national form, is indicative of the internalism on which Habermas’s theoretical approach rests. He does not see how the geopolitical divisions of the European regional order overlay the transformed interactive and communicative capacity entailed by the newspaper in such a way as to ensure the public sphere became preoccupied with violent and non-consensual narratives – the very opposite qualities Habermas sees it as embodying. Central to the nationalist substance of this public debate was the regional environment characterised by a mercantilist and colonial political economy.103 Importantly, writers like Defoe articulated mercantilism as a moral project to realise wealth and power for the nation. He devoted multiple issues of Review of the State of the English Nation to essays on the subject in 1706 heralding ‘the merchant’ that ‘makes a wet bog become a populous state; enriches beggars, enobles mechannicks, raises no families only but towns, cities, provinces and kingdom’.104 But while he praised traders for enriching the nation, Defoe’s nationalist populism also led him to mercilessly attack the stockjobbers, and associated new forms of financial innovation, which he held to be a threat to a centralised state and, as such, a conspiracy of the Catholic Church.105 These remarks indicate the transitional nature of this period, as a nationalist, market-based political economy emerged out of, and in competition with, the complex web of sovereign claims in post-feudal Christendom.

101 102 103 104 105

Roosen 1986, pp. 18. For a good discussion of the uses and misuses of this term, see Young 2012. Colley 2009. Review of the State of the English Nation (Cumulation) (London, England), Thursday, 3 January 1706; Issue 2. Richetti 2005, pp. 148–9.

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A mode of external exclusion – characteristic of this newly assurgent British nationalism – which emerged out of the geopolitically combined development of a conflict-ridden Europe, also served to consolidate internal class hierarchies. Defoe’s writings provide a particular insight into the vocabulary that was able to cohere ‘the nation’ behind the statecraft of the British realm. As social insecurities – which the expansion of market dependency brought with it – became greater, discourses in a public sphere dominated by the well heeled often became vehemently hostile to the poor. What John Richetti describes as Defoe’s ‘stridently moralistic understanding of poverty’ saw him regularly dismiss it a sign of the laziness and alcoholism of the pauper – a common classist feature of public discussion missing from Habermas’s focus on its subjective rationality.106 In this sense, like many of his fellow writers, Defoe’s belief in the liberty of the ‘people of England’ was largely a commitment to the rights of property holders that possessed the franchise – rather than to the entirety of the group who constituted the new national political imagination. Indeed, supporters of the coronation of William III and George I often possessed a coherent, class-based understanding of the national cause, identifying the importance of a strong mercantilist state for wealth and prosperity, even where this ran counter – as it did with the Hanoverian accession – to an ethnically homogenous notion of English or British identity.107 This powerful state, viewed as critical to defending the domestic and international interests of property-holders, could, however, also be a dangerous place for newspaper editors and pamphleteers, even when they saw themselves as defenders of the realm amongst the literate. Indeed, Defoe was arrested and pilloried for his satirical pamphlet, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, which mocked the intolerance of High Church Anglicanism.108 Such treatment was hardly exceptional at the time. Despite the formal end of censorship, the establishment of stronger authorial ownership rights through copyright law actually increased their vulnerability to prosecution by incentivising the end of anonymous writing. As Jody Greene explains: … Authors were answerable for a range of crimes. They faced legal charges including sedition, libel, heresy, and treason. On the ethical front, they might be accused of encouraging vice or circulating lies. The perilous waters of the book trade required them to negotiate greedy publishers, outright pirates, thieving booksellers and inaccurate printers. Authors … 106 107 108

Richetti 2005, p. 144. Defoe 2009. Richetti 2005, pp. 23–6.

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might be held responsible not only for their own actions but also for the actions of a reader who chose to cite a printed work as a motive for his or her criminal activity. Given the myriad dangers attached to authorship in this period, and the severity of the punishments to which crimes of writing were subject, authors had to find strategies to ensure that the costs of authorship did not outweigh the benefits.109 One such strategy was to solicit the support of the powerful for funds and protection. In the case of Defoe, he was released from prison under the patronage of Robert Harley, a moderate Tory who effectively became Queen Anne’s first minister as Lord Treasurer. Defoe worked as a secret operative on Harley’s behalf until the latter’s fall from power. As this illustrates, power relations intruded into the public realm not only in a repressive way, but also in a productive manner, as the well connected could sponsor writers to discretely produce material supportive of their positions on factional or policy questions.110 Eighteenth-century British writers may have increasingly resisted the labels of Whig and Tory, professing themselves to be above such ‘factional’ politics, but far from expressing a retreat from ‘the political’ this merely disguised the special interests that were often operating behind the pen.111 For the Habermasian conception of the eighteenth-century public sphere this is all rather problematic. For it is difficult to detect in this literature the kind of reasoned approach to debate that Habermas associates with the newly constituted public. Brute force, or, more often perhaps, the implicit threat of repression – and not the ‘force of the better argument’112 – characterised the way in which competing elite factions intervened in this public space, attempting to mould its discourses around their aims. In this new political imaginary of national consciousness, the mercantile interests of the nation framed the overall terms of acceptability. In this sense, the defeat of even moderate Toryism, whose leaders like Harley were more conciliatory during the prosecution of the war against France and have even been credited with bringing about the eventual peace,113 allowed for the construction of a more organically nationalist body politic in the British realm across the eighteenth century. One might think

109 110

111 112 113

Greene 2005, pp. 15–16. Defoe was even recruited by Harley as a spy with his fine paid out of government secret service funds tasked with gathering intelligence, vetting opposition journalism, and producing material supportive of the government. Richetti 2005, p. 26. Richetti 2005, pp. 79–80. Habermas 1991, p. 36. MacLachlan 1969.

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this would foster a cultural context amenable to mobilising ‘the people’ around the demands of the mercantile political economy for domestic and international growth. Nationalism could then be seen as a central legitimising device for securing domestic support for the violent class reorganisation of industrialisation, and Britain’s frequent prosecution of wars overseas to secure mercantile advantage in foreign markets. But the complexity of these discourses that one has encountered in the early eighteenth century persisted, as national consciousness became stronger and more widespread. Elites were often reluctant to explicitly invoke nationalist narratives in political interventions, even as the identity became monolithic, because they were fearful it could inspire the popular passions of the people against the old order.114 In this sense, even with the decline of the Tories as an organisational force a political conservatism endured that embraced the identity of nation-ness but remained fearful of the destabilising implications of mobilising it politically. Newspaper editors and pamphleteers that gave a political voice to the national spirit would thus remain in a tension-ridden relationship to the institutions of the British state across the century. These are, of course, tensions that Habermas identifies between the public sphere and state power, but by failing to frame the overall analysis in the emergence of a national body politic with an imagined shared interest, he ignores how the mercantile pursuit of wealth and power set the overall terms of acceptability for public political debate.

5

Conclusion

Habermas’s book was originally published in its German form in 1962 and was undoubtedly ahead of its time. Criticism of the text many decades later, and in light of the availability of considerably more historiographical resources, may therefore appear to be unfair. However, across this period both Habermas and, especially, his followers in IR have deepened their methodological stress on the significance of ‘rationality structures’ and domains of critical debate for the formation of modernity as a stage of social evolution capable of managing conflicts through non-violent institutional forms.115 But in doing so they have tended to move away from the more historically grounded form of enquiry found in Habermas’s original text towards more normatively based forms of theorising. As a result, they have often uncritically adopted some of the original

114 115

Colley 1986. Habermas 1979, pp. 97–8.

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assumptions underpinning The Structural Transformation rather than appraise them in light of the new historiography. Thomas McCarthy, in his introduction to the English language version of the text, offers a succinct summary of this highly normative conception of the public sphere: In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people.116 Such a romantic image does not accord with how the terms of public discussion were constrained by both repressive and productive forms of power. While in the former, writers found themselves victims of state power, in the latter, national imagery was utilised by these public personalities to confer moral legitimacy on the actions of the realm and the pursuit of mercantile wealth by means of war and aggression overseas. If the exclusion of the geopolitical environment from the causal frame of The Structural Transformation is the most striking omission from its account of the emergence of the body politic, then what does the incorporation of ‘the international’ into an explanatory account elicit about the nature of the British case? By viewing the British realm in its interactive combination with the wider European order, the emergence of the polity’s sense of national cohesion is explained by the way in which the transformed interactive capacities made possible by the newspaper were overlain by the historical position of the polity within the war-prone regional context. This saw the consolidation of the Hanoverian accession establish the polity’s independence from France, and thus created the peculiar circumstance of a German royal assuming the throne of the united British realm in order to secure its sovereign self-government. The importance of such amalgams of cultural traditions and social forces to the particular physiognomy of individual society is anticipated by scholars utilising the framework of uneven and combined development, because they emerge through the interactive coexistence of dispersed societies. In the early eighteenth century, the British public political nation emerged in a complex juxtaposition to both the domestic institutional order, still contested between Jacobite, Anglican high church and Whiggish factions, and a regional order that combined features of absolutist state power with enduring expressions of par-

116

Habermas 1991, p. xi.

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celised forms of sovereignty. Contrary to what Habermas implies, and what is presupposed by his internalist methodology, there was no singular emergence of the bourgeois public within this context marked by the uneven and combined development of centralised state structures, capitalist markets, and national identities. This context shaped the consciousness of the emergent British nation and cohered it around mercantile-colonial narratives. Implicitly this served to legitimise state intervention into the public realm, as the combination of elite patronage and the requirement of writers to demonstrate their loyalty to the realm set the terms of what was deemed to constitute ‘rational’ political discussion and enquiry. For Critical Theory in IR, these findings problematise the relationship they assume between the formation of an emancipatory subjectivity and the historical development of the bourgeois public sphere. Rather than a domain of rational and critical discussion, the British public society of the eighteenth century was shaped by the mercantile assumptions underpinning state power and subject to elite intervention pursuing orientated, instrumental objectives. Moreover, the national consciousness that cohered in this period was ultimately a form of alienation antithetical to the aims of Critical Theory. If, in spite of the dramatic globalisation of social and cultural life seen in recent decades, the national society remains both the preeminent form of political organisation and a barrier to the formation of the more universal rational society that Critical Theory advocates, then a return to its historical origins is vital to understand the enduring power it commands over the cultural imagination of modernity.

part 3 Towards a Theory of Culture

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chapter 5

Uneven and Combined Development: Between Capitalist Modernity and Modernism Neil Davidson

1

Introduction

I argued in a previous chapter that, with the exception of England and perhaps a handful of other areas, uneven and combined development was a universal tendency under capitalist modernity. Differences in the nature of the class struggle – above all in relation to the potential for permanent revolution – were more dependent on whether countries stood before or after the bourgeois revolution, and consequently on the nature of the state, than the presence of uneven and combined development itself. Peter Thomas writes of one important case: ‘Italy, along with much of Western Europe, had experienced a “belated” modernity not qualitatively dissimilar from that which preceded the Russian Revolution’.1 Indeed, in the case of Italy – one of the established, capitalist, imperialist powers – these developments were occurring contemporaneously with those in Russia. As Gail Day notes: In Italy and especially in Russia the peasant-based life ‘of the past’ and the urban life ‘of the present’ co-existed side-by-side on the cities’ borders. … It seems to have been that the existence of sharp contrasts between the old ways of life and new ones that gave the [artistic] movements in Italy and Russia their sense of greater urgency – an urgency that was bound up with the social and political crises that both countries faced.2 Despite the diametrically opposite political affiliations of the Constructivists in Russia and the Futurists in Italy – themselves indicative of the different outcomes to the crises in these countries – their artistic practices were comparable, suggesting similar responses to a common experience. In this chapter I will attempt to situate uneven and combined development as a form of exper-

1 Thomas 2009, p. 202. 2 Day 1999, p. 209.

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ience, generated by the dynamic of capitalist modernity and in turn responding to it with the cultural forms of modernism. In both cases, it will be necessary to first define our terms.

2

Capitalist Modernity: Industrialisation and Urbanisation

Perry Anderson once dismissed the very notion of modernity on the grounds that it is so ‘extensive’ that it risks ‘dilution and banalization’: ‘If the modern is simply the new, and the passing of time assures its progress, everything in recent or current experience has acquired equal validity and meaning’.3 Jack Goody has expressed similar views, but extends the indictment from ‘modernity’ to encompass ‘pre-modernity’ and ‘post-modernity’: ‘From the viewpoint of everyday usage, these terms do not make much sense, since modern, like contemporary, is a moving target and cannot represent a periodization or a style, except in a fleeting or ambiguous sense’.4 There would be more force in these criticisms if the term were generally used in the relative sense of indicating that every successive era in human history was equally modern in relation to those that preceded them. This was of course the original meaning of the term and continued to be so from the fifth century CE down to the dawn of the Enlightenment.5 It is also true that even some of the classic nineteenthcentury discussions of modernity carry this meaning. During the 1860s, for example, Baudelaire wrote that ‘every old master has his own modernity’ and asserted the necessity for any ‘“modernity” to be worthy of one day taking its place as “antiquity”’.6 Like most contemporary commentators, however, I do not intend to deploy the notion of modernity in this way, but rather to indicate a break in temporal continuity, a way of dividing history into ‘before’ and ‘after’. In other words, it is not the case that every age has its own modernity; the modern age begins after a certain point in historical time. ‘The Middle Ages were interested in eternity, the Renaissance was interested in the past’, writes Boris Groys: ‘modernity was interested in the future’.7 At what point did it

3 Anderson 1992, p. 47. Anderson oscillates between two positions. The remarks quoted here are from the ‘Postscript’ to his review essay, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, but there it is modernism rather than modernity which is denounced as ‘a portmanteau concept whose only referent is the blank passage of time itself’. See Anderson 1984, p. 113. 4 Goody 2004, p. 6. 5 Kumar 1995, pp. 67–75; Osborne 1995, pp. 9–13. 6 Baudelaire 1964, p. 13. 7 Groys 2016b, p. 137.

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become possible to imagine a future in which one could be interested because it was radically different from the past? One obvious historical turning point would be the emergence of capitalism. As Peter Osborne points out: There is a widespread tendency to counterpose the categories of ‘capitalism’ (Marx) and ‘modernity’ (Durkheim and Weber) as competing alternatives for the theoretical interpretation of the same historical object. Yet there is no obligation to continue to use terms in the way in which they have been most consistently abused.8 On this reading, the concept of ‘modernity’ is a way of avoiding references to capitalism while effectively describing the same reality. Accordingly, Fredric Jameson argues that ‘the only satisfactory semantic meaning of modernity lies in its association with capitalism’ and recommends, in order to demonstrate this, ‘the experimental procedure of substituting capitalism for modernity in all the contexts in which the latter appears’.9 Derek Sayer has similarly argued that capitalism and modernity are identical and furthermore claims that this was Marx’s position.10 There are, however, two reasons why a simple identification of capitalism with modernity is untenable.11 One concerns the future. As Jameson himself writes elsewhere in the work cited above, we should ‘entertain the possibility that modernity is incomplete because it could never be completed by the middle class and its economic system’, which suggests that modernity could continue to exist after the overthrow of capitalism.12 Anderson is more definitive: ‘The energies of modernity, once generated by capitalism, are now ever more trapped and compromised

8 9 10 11

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Osborne 1995, pp. 199–200. Jameson 2002, pp. 13, 215. Sayer 1991, p. 24. It is of course possible to argue, as Ellen Wood does, that modernity – which she narrowly identifies with Weberian ‘rationality’ – had no necessary connection with capitalism at all. Wood argues that this form of rationality could not be detected in seventeenth-century English countryside, where capitalist social property relations prevailed, but could be found in eighteenth-century urban France under the absolutist regime, which leads Wood to further conclude that the Enlightenment itself had no connection with capitalism – like apparently everything else in history not immediately reducible to ‘capitalist social property relations’. See Wood 2002, p. 187. For a critique, see Davidson 2016a, pp. 129–41; see also Davidson 2012, pp. 589–94. Jameson 2002, p. 11. Here Jameson is partly endorsing the description of modernity as ‘unfinished’ given in Habermas 1985, p. 5.

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by it’.13 In other words, modernity may owe its existence to capitalism, but is not necessarily confined to it. David Frisby notes that ‘Marx himself was not a modernist in the sense of identifying himself with the experience of modernity that he outlined’.14 Instead, Marx saw modernity, not only as characterising the capitalist present, but also pointing towards the socialist future. Perhaps more than any other interpreter, Marshall Berman has emphasised this dual aspect of Marx’s attitude: The basic fact of modern life, as Marx experienced it, is that this life is radically contradictory at its base … miseries and mysteries fill many moderns with despair. Some would ‘get rid of modern arts, in order to get rid of modern conflicts’; others will try to balance progress in industry with neofeudal or neoabsolutist regression in politics. Marx, however, proclaims a paradigmatically modernist faith … a class of ‘new men’, men who are thoroughly modern, will be able to resolve the contradictions of modernity, to overcome the crushing pressures, earthquakes, weird spells, personal and social abysses, in whose midst all modern men and women are forced to live.15 With the exception of Deep Green advocates, or related ‘back-to-huntergathering’ anarcho-primitivist tendencies, most left-wing movements since Marx’s time have accepted that socialism will complete modernity.16 ‘The socialist and communist movements were fully set within the framework of the cultural program of modernity, and above all the framework of the Enlightenment and of the major revolutions’, writes Shmuel Eisenstadt: ‘Their criticism of the program of modern capitalist society revolved around their concept of the incompleteness of these modern programs’.17 We can imagine the balance of continuity and change that a socialist modernity might involve: the majority of people would not abandon the cities for rural communes, although the cit-

13

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Anderson 1992, p. 55. Note, as an example of the inconsistency to which I have already referred, that this argument assumes modernity is a historical phenomenon. For a more recent ‘accelerationist’ argument for ‘socialist modernity’, see Srnicek and Williams 2015, pp. 69–83, 178–81. Frisby 1985, p. 27. Berman 1983, pp. 19–20. The identification of Marx as a modernist was more common in continental Europe than the USA before Berman’s seminal work appeared, although still relatively rare. But see Lefebvre 1995, pp. 169–75, 231–8, which also invokes the same speech by Marx. See Marx 1974. See, for example, McBay, Jensen and Keith 2011, p. 439 and Zerzan 2002, p. 117. Eisenstadt 2000, p. 11.

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ies would now be fully habitable for their denizens; they would not revert from industrial to artisanal production, although industry would be designed with the needs of the workers and their environment in mind; we would not cease to use electricity, although this would no longer be produced by fossil fuels or nuclear power, but by wind or solar power.18 We will continue to be modern after the revolution. The second reason for questioning the equivalence of capitalism and modernity – and the one most relevant to this chapter – concerns the historical past. For modernity did not emerge with the capitalist mode of production in its original mercantile, financial or agrarian forms, but only with the beginnings of capitalist industrialisation and the related but partially distinct process of urbanisation in Europe, North America and Japan. In other words, it is associated with a particular stage in capitalist development. Political Marxists in particular have stressed that capitalism, as a set of (what they call) ‘social property relations’, is radically different from all pre-existing exploitative modes of production: ‘Only in capitalism is the dominant mode of appropriation based on the complete dispossession of direct producers, who (unlike chattel slaves) are legally free and whose surplus labour is appropriated by purely “economic” means’.19 This is true, but less significant than is sometimes claimed, since the establishment of capitalism as a mode of production does not in and of itself immediately transform the lives of subaltern classes. There are two reasons for this. One concerns the labour process and is outlined by Marx in Capital, volume 1, in his discussion of the difference between the ‘formal’ and ‘real’ subsumption of labour. In the case of the former, rather than ‘a fundamental modification in the real nature of the labour process … the fact is that capital subsumes the labour process as it finds it, that is to say, it takes over an existing labour process, developed by a different and more archaic modes of production’:

18 19

Löwy 2013, pp. 186–9. Wood 2002, pp. 96 and 94–105 more generally. Central to this conception of capitalism is the notion of ‘market dependence’ (or even ‘market compulsion’) and the claim that this only emerged as the result of a purely internal process in England, and even there only in the countryside. I have discussed the problems with this approach elsewhere (Davidson 2012, chapter 17), but one point need to be made here. First, this definition is an ‘ideal type’, not one which has actually existed in pure form anywhere – a point which Robert Brenner, the founder of this school, has himself made: ‘I do not contend that such economies ever existed in pure form, though rough approximations can be found in seventeenth-century England and seventeenth-century northern Netherlands’. See Brenner 1999, p. 44.

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For example, handicraft, a mode of agriculture corresponding to a small, independent peasant economy. … The work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may be more continuous or orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist, but in themselves these changes do not affect the character of the labour process, the actual mode of working. This stands in striking contrast to the development of a specifically capitalist mode of production (large-scale industry, etc.); the latter not only transforms the situations of the various agents of production, it also revolutionizes their actual mode of labour and the real nature of the labour process as a whole.20 In other words, the pre-existing ways of working can remain in place even during the initial phases of capitalist development. It may be possible for historians to retrospectively identify when the transition from feudalism was complete, but this does not mean that direct producers at the time understood that they had entered a new historical period. The other concerns outputs, and in particular the productive capacities of the first fully capitalist states compared with the great Eastern empires which had once been impossibly more wealthy and civilised than the poverty-stricken lands of European feudalism. Peer Vries notes: ‘The type of growth that became normal in the industrial world had simply not existed in the past’.21 The industrial world was in the West, but it only arose there relatively late, and certainly not the latest manifestation of Western superiority, claims for which would have for most of history produced mocking laughter from the East. Indeed, as Kenneth Pomeranz notes, down to around 1800: ‘Far from being unique … the most developed parts of Western Europe seem to have shared crucial economic features – commercialization, commodification of goods, land, and labour, market-driven growth, and adjustment by households of both fertility and labour allocation to economic trends – with other densely populated core areas in Eurasia’.22 It is possible that Pomeranz is being insufficiently attentive to the difference between capitalist and non-capitalist social property relations here, but the central point is accurate: even after the transition to capitalism the formerly backward Western European states, above all England, did not immediately catch-up and overtake those of the hitherto more advanced East. GDP in both areas was similar and, in the Chinese Empire at least, standards of liv-

20 21 22

Marx 1976, pp. 1021 and 1019–38 more generally. Vries 2003, p. 4. Pomeranz 2000, p. 107.

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ing may have even been higher than in Western Europe and North America. It took until 1880 for per capita income there to reach double that of the East, and until the eve of the First World War for it to reach three times the size.23 In fact, it was the advent of industrial capitalism which initiated ‘the great divergence’ between West and East, and the overwhelmingly uni-directional impact of the former on the latter. As Justin Rosenberg points out: ‘Imperial China sustained its developmental lead over several centuries; yet the radiation of its achievements never produced in Europe anything like the long, convulsive process of combined development which capitalist industrialization in Europe almost immediately initiated in China’.24 It is important to understand, however, that the decline of Imperial China was not simply an effect of direct or indirect Western intervention, but of its own internally generated limits to development: After 1800, things changed very fast. Conditions in Asia deteriorated sharply, as continuing population growth ran into the traditional energy and land limits that constrain all organic societies. Indeed, it is reasonable to think that Europe and Asia had similar material conditions because prior to industrialization all societies were limited in what they could produce by the ability of farmers to produce food with organic inputs and muscle power, and of manufacturers to produce products with organic raw materials and wind and water power.25 For both reasons then, ‘it seems reasonable to argue that it was only with the British Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century that modernity received its material form’, as Krishan Kumar explains: Partly this is because of the very explosiveness of the development – a speeding up of economic evolution to the point where it took on revolutionary proportions. Modernity therefore has a before-and-after quality that is also the hall-mark of revolution. With the Industrial Revolution, such a quality increasingly became evident to contemporaries, to the extent that for many of them the only significant division in human history appeared that between pre-industrial and industrial civilization.26

23 24 25 26

Hobsbawm 1987, p. 15. Rosenberg 2007, pp. 44–5. Goldstone 2008, pp. 125–6. Kumar 1995, pp. 82–3.

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For Ronald Hartwell too, industrialisation is ‘the great discontinuity of modern history’.27 Indeed, if we accept the notion that we have entered into a new epoch of geological time known as the Anthropocene, then the discontinuity is even greater than these writers could have imagined. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer argued in 2000 that the epoch of the Holocene – the 11,500-year era contiguous with human civilisation – had come to an end as a result of industrialisation, which they date as symbolically beginning in 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine and began the use of fossil energy as the basis for economic activity.28 Yet it was not industrialisation alone which impacted on members of the new factory proletariat, but the fact that many of their new workplaces were situated in towns and cities. Indeed, as Osterhammel notes, ‘urbanization was a much more widespread process than industrialisation: cities grew and became more dense even where industry was not the driving force’. After noting that many of the greatest European cities, including London, had never been truly industrial, but administrative and commercial, he concludes: ‘Urbanization is a truly global process, industrialization a sporadic and uneven formation of growth centres’.29 Osterhammel’s point about London can be generalised to some other historic cities whose existence long predated capitalism, let alone industrialisation. ‘In a very important sense Vienna and Berlin were much more typically “modernist” cities, almost along the lines of American cities like Chicago, than were cities like London and Paris which underwent slower and more organic growth’, writes Scott Lash.30 But Vienna and Berlin were not equivalent either: of the two, Berlin was far closer to the American model – although the latter too need to be differentiated: ‘If Vienna is not Berlin, neither is Boston Chicago’.31 There is unevenness between the cities of capitalist modernity as well as combination within them. Even those cities which remained administrative and commercial rather than industrial centres were shaped by the requirements of industrialisation, not least the necessity for railways. Berman has identified ‘the unease and uncertainty that comes from constant motion, change, and diversity’ with ‘the experience of modern capitalism’; Wood, however, claims that this is merely

27 28

29 30 31

Hartwell 1971, p. 57. Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; see also Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, pp. 3, 50, and Macfarlane 2016. The Anthropocene has itself subdivided into three stages respectively beginning around 1750, 1945 and 2000, for which see Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, pp. 50–3. Osterhammel 2014, pp. 149–50. Lash 1990, p. 207. Frisby 2001, pp. 177 and 165–77 more generally.

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‘the age-old fear and fascination aroused by the city’, and what Berman has to say ‘about the experience of “modern life” could have been said by the Italian countrydweller arriving in the ancient city of Rome’.32 Now, it is certainly the case that Berman’s specific example (Paris in the 1760s) could be challenged on the grounds that capitalism was not highly developed in France at this time, but Wood is making a general argument that rural populations encountering the city are essentially the same at any point in history. At one level it is obviously true that the size, noise and populousness of cities has often been bewildering for rural populations forced to cross their boundaries (although for some rustics they also provided a welcome relief from the narrowness and conformity of the countryside); but Berman is drawing attention to a qualitatively different situation. In fact, the experience of urban life under industrial capitalism was quite different from any predecessor: ‘In comparison with the village or “pre-modernist” city, not just the sense of time but the experience of space was altered’, writes Lash.33 There is evidence for this from first-hand observations of the English industrial cities. Here is Engels reporting on the changed forms of human interaction in Manchester during the 1840s: The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow selfseeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city.34

32 33 34

Berman 1983, pp. 17–18; Wood 2002, p. 187. Lash 1990, p. 207. Engels 1975, p. 329.

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Engels is here registering the destructive impact of city life on the first generations of the industrial working class, but as urban development stabilised and living conditions slowly improved, it began to take on a more multifaceted aspect for new arrivals in particular. Beyond positive or negative experiences, life in the city was simply vastly different from what inhabitants had previously known, creating new forms of consciousness. Some inhabitants still found this deeply disturbing. Writing in the early 1870s, the Scottish poet James Thompson drew on his personal experience of Glasgow earlier in the century to invoke a city constructed from ‘ruins of an unremembered past’: The City is of Night, but not of Sleep; There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain; The pitiless hours like years and ages creep, A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain Of thought and consciousness which never ceases, Or which some moments’ stupor but increases, This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.35 For every nay-sayer like Thompson, there were others for whom the modern city of ‘thought and consciousness which never ceases’ was not a source of ‘dreadful strain’ but something to be willingly embraced for providing experiences which were simply unimaginable earlier in human history. George Simmel, writing in Germany before the First World War, described the impact of urbanism on city-dwellers in this evocative passage from his essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’: The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli. Man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences, i.e., his mind is stimulated by the difference between present impressions and those which have preceded. Lasting impressions, the slightness in their differences, the habituated regularity of their course and contrasts between them, consume, so to speak, less mental energy than the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli. To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions – with every crossing of the street,

35

Thompson 1993, p. 30, lines 36–7; p. 31, lines 71–7.

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with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life – it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organisation as creatures dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence.36 These are experiences which would simply not have been available to an Italian country-dweller visiting first-century Rome, or, for that matter, an English one visiting sixteenth-century London. How were these experiences represented in culture?

3

Modernism: The Cultural Logic of Uneven and Combined Development

It is difficult to disagree with the Warwick Research Collective that ‘the cultural aspects of Trotsky’s initiating formulation concerning the “amalgamation of archaic with more contemporary forms”’ have received little attention – certainly in comparison with current interest levels in International Relations and the social and political sciences more generally.37 The authors of this assessment apart, applications of uneven and combined development in the field of culture have often involved attempts to treat it as synonymous or at least compatible with more contemporary notions, above all, ‘hybridity’. Take, for example, this sentence by Gareth Williams: ‘The radically hybrid bearing of Latin American literary expression – a hybridity that emerges as a result of the historical realities of uneven and combined development; as a result of the disjunctive simultaneity of its subaltern/metropolis articulations; and ultimately as a result of Latin America’s profoundly nonunitary geopolitical location within world history – embodies and reproduces (perhaps) the discursive tensions (the encounters and disencounters) that are capable of opening up the supply-lines of reflection to a certain kind of futurity’.38 Amid the general incomprehensibility of this passage, one relatively clear statement presents hybridity as a function of uneven and combined development; but the former 36 37 38

Simmel 1971, p. 325. Warwick Research Collective 2015, p. 6. Williams 2002, p. 155. Anyone looking for examples of bad writing with which to update George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ should start with this quotation. For his original examples, see Orwell 1970b, pp. 157–8.

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was characteristic of human societies long before the emergence of capitalism, let alone capitalist industrialisation.39 As Eric Wolf has demonstrated, the notion that the Americas consisted of self-contained, indigenous societies was false at least a hundred years before Columbus inadvertently ‘discovered’ them: Conquest, incorporation, recombination, and commerce … marked the New World. In both hemispheres populations impinged upon other populations through permeable social boundaries, creating intergrading, interwoven social and cultural entities. If there were any isolated societies these were but a temporary phenomenon – a group pushed to the edge of a zone of interaction and left to itself for a brief moment of time. Thus, the social scientist’s model of distinct and separate systems, and of a timeless ‘precontact’ ethnographic present, does not adequately depict the situation before European expansion; much less can it comprehend the worldwide system of links that would be created by that expansion.40 Of course, once capitalism had emerged it increased the number and intensified the extent of these encounters, mainly through moving people, often forcibly, around the globe, by slavery, colonialism and migration. ‘Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic’, writes Edward Said, who also notes that this is as ‘true of the contemporary United States’ as it is of the Global South.41 But even within the context of multiple oppressions resulting from conquest and colonisation, at least some of the populations which inhabited both North and South America were able to draw on techniques and styles of European origin in their own forms of cultural production, as Peter Wollen explains: … the flow from core to periphery and its appropriation by artists on the periphery is nothing new. The rich nineteenth-century tradition of Haida soapstone carving developed directly because of the new market 39 40

41

For examples dating back to the fifth millennium BCE, see Bentley 1996. Wolf 1982, p. 71. It is only fair to note that Rosenberg draws on this and other passages from Wolf to support his case for a transhistoric interpretation of uneven and combined development; but although the latter is here surveying the world around 1400 CE, the type of social interpenetration he describes can be found much further back in history. If every type of human group interaction can be encompassed by the notion of uneven and combined development, however, then the term is virtually co-extensive with history itself, at which point it has lost any analytic specificity. See Rosenberg 2006, pp. 314–16. Said 1993, p. xxix.

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of sailors and travellers, who began to visit the Northwest Coast [of North America] for trade or tourism. … Spanish baroque was appropriated by indigenous artists in Mexico, and increasingly complex forms emerged (as we can see in the work of Frida Kahlo and, more recently, artists on both sides of the Mexican-United States frontier). Indeed this new baroque once again is beginning to redefine Americanness, in a complex composite of differential times and cultures.42 The direction of fusion has by no means been all one way. If Kahlo absorbed aspects of Spanish Baroque in Mexico, then her contemporary, Jackson Pollock, absorbed those of the Mexican muralists – which were themselves hybrids – and the Native America Navajo tribes in the USA.43 It is the temporal and not merely geographical distance between the elements which are brought together that differentiates the cultures of uneven and combined development from those of pre-existing forms of hybridity. The experience of capitalist modernity was one of the conditions for the emergence of modernism, of which Kahlo and Pollock were leading representatives. Trotsky himself was alert to the relationship between modernism and the experience of capitalist modernity in its urban form, as in these remarks on Futurism: ‘Urbanism (city culture) sits deep in the subconscious of Futurism, and the epithets, the etymology, the syntax and the rhythm of Futurism are only an attempt to give artistic form to the new spirit of the cities which has conquered consciousness’.44 He did not, however, explicitly link modernism as a general movement with uneven and combined development except in a handful of passing comments. Reporting on the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 he wrote: ‘Like all backward countries, Bulgaria is incapable of creating new political and cultural forms through a free struggle of its own inner forces: it is obliged to assimilate the ready-made cultural products that European civilization has developed in the course of history’. However, in addition to referencing technological and political forms, Trotsky then goes on to mention ‘other spheres’: ‘Bulgarian literature lacks traditions, and has not been able to develop its own internal continuity. It has had to subordinate its unfermented content to modern and contemporary forms created under a quite different cultural zenith’.45 Ten years later, he similarly noted how ‘the backward 42 43 44 45

Wollen 1993, p. 209. Emmerling 2007, pp. 14, 18–22; Naifeh and Smith 1989, pp. 285–9, 298–302, 337–8; Varnedoewith Karmel 1998, pp. 25–7, 32–3. Trotsky 1991, p. 195. Trotsky 1980, p. 49.

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countries which were without any special degree of spiritual culture, reflected in their ideology the achievements of the advanced countries more brilliantly and strongly’. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy was one example of this, but so too was Futurism, ‘which obtained its most brilliant expression, not in America and not in Germany, but in Italy and Russia’.46 Few discussions of modernism have, however, attempted to explicitly relate it to Trotsky’s concept. One writer who might have been expected to do so was Clement Greenberg, doyen of postwar American art critics and himself a former Trotskyist sympathiser. In a late interview from 1967 Greenberg actually invoked combined development to explain why New York took over from Paris as the world centre of Modernist painting in the 1940s: … we Americans felt so much further behind the French, or behind Paris, that we tried much harder to catch up – just catch up. Then what Marx called the law of combined development came into operation: the strenuous effort you make to catch up sends you ahead in the end; you don’t just catch up, you overtake.47 Marx had no theory of combined development and the process to which Greenberg refers (‘catch up and overtake’) is in any case an example of uneven development. Nevertheless, Greenberg’s rather more cogent earlier writings constitute, along with those of Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, one of the three most important Marxist attempts to periodise and define modernism. Reviewing these in order of their appearance will allow us to see how uneven and combined development offers a more general and comprehensive alternative to them. For Lukács, modernism is indicative of bourgeois decline. Realism, from Shakespeare and Cervantes onwards, had been the literary tendency most expressive of the bourgeois worldview during its prolonged struggle against the feudal nobility and the absolutist state. The realist novel in particular was the form which played that role between the French Revolution in 1789 and the failure of the revolutions of 1848–9. Lukács held consistently to the position that the connection between class position and aesthetic form remains even after the revolutionary phase of bourgeois history is over, but to different effect, for the art of the subsequent period is therefore the obverse of that produced

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Trotsky 1991, p. 158. Greenberg 1993c, p. 304.

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earlier. Lukács is absolutely explicit about the date after which this reversal takes place, writing that ‘the decline of bourgeois ideology set in with the end of the 1848 revolution’.48 From around that date – and certainly no later than 1871 – the bourgeoisie are said to have abandoned the struggle to reconstruct society in its own image, and settled instead for an alliance with their former aristocratic enemies against a now infinitely more threatening proletariat. In other words, the bourgeoisie had gone from a class challenging for power and anxious to reveal the workings of the society they were in the process of conquering, to one in control, all too aware of the class threatening their position, and as anxious to conceal the reality of this new situation as they had been to confront the old. The realist novel therefore enters a decline after 1848: ‘The evolution of bourgeois society after 1848 destroyed the subjective conditions which made a great realism possible’. In the first place, these changes affected the novelists themselves: ‘The old writers were participants in the social struggle and their activities as writers were either part of this struggle or a reflection, an ideological and literary solution, of the great problems of the time’.49 Dissatisfied with the world which the bourgeoisie had made, but unable to embrace the alternative, the novelists first retreated to reporting the surface of events, to mere naturalism: ‘As writers grew more and more unable to participate in the life of capitalism as their sort of life, they grew less and less capable of producing real plots and action’.50 Then, in a further declension, came the retreat inwards signalled by the rise of modernism. ‘Modernist literature thus replaces concrete typicality with abstract particularity’.51 Lukács does allow, however, that this shift did not take place uniformly. In societies which had neither experienced the bourgeois revolution nor completed the transition to capitalism, the conditions still obtained for great realist writing to take place. In particular he refers to the work of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) in Norway and, in particular, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) in Russia, but this could only be a temporary salvation for the form.52 Lukács thus accounts for some late exceptions in a manner compatible with his general thesis. In the case of others which are clearly associated with the triumphant bourgeois world, however, he simply – and not very convincingly – cites uneven development without any attempt at explanation: ‘Of course we can find many latecomers – especially in literature and art – 48 49 50 51 52

Lukács, 1980, p. 309. Lukács 1972, p. 140. Lukács 1972, p. 169. Lukács 1972, p. 43. Lukács 1972, pp. 134–7.

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for whose work this thesis by no means holds good (we need only mention Dickens and Keller, Courbet and Daumier)’.53 Largely consistent up till this point as a purely historical argument, Lukács now shifts ground and asserts that, far from being tied to a bourgeoisie which no longer has any need for it, realism has the potential instead to become a method appropriate to the cultural politics of the working class. Thus, in one of his contributions to the debates of the 1930s, he wrote that: Through the mediation of realist literature the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great progressive and democratic epochs of human history. This will prepare it for the new type of revolutionary democracy that is represented by the Popular Front … Whereas in the case of the major realists, easier access produces a richly complex yield in human terms, the broad mass of the people can learn nothing from avant-garde literature. Precisely because the latter is devoid of reality and life, it foists on to its readers a narrow and subjectivist attitude to life (analogous to a sectarian point of view in political terms).54 (Readers may wish to hazard a guess at what Lukács means by ‘the sectarian point of view in political terms’.) Is realism a method destined to decline with the revolutionary potential of the bourgeoisie which gave it birth then, or one which, detached from its origins, still represents a resource for critical artists today? And the contradictions do not stop there. ‘Lukács asserts that realistic literature has been produced by both bourgeois and socialist writers’, notes George Parkinson: That he should assert this of socialist writers is not surprising, but may seem strange that he should grant the existence of bourgeois realists. We have seen that realism implies a grasp of reality; but in History and Class Consciousness … Lukács argues that the bourgeoisie, by virtue of its very nature as a class, is incapable of grasping a totality, which is something that only the proletariat can achieve. Does Lukács, as this would suggest, therefore expect realist literature to be produced, if not by proletarians, then by writers who adopt ‘the perspective of

53 54

Lukács 1980, p. 309. Lukács 1977, pp. 56–7.

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the proletariat’, those whose sense of totality is informed by Marxist theory? No. ‘Lukács’ explanation of the existence of bourgeois realism is that some bourgeois writers were capable of grasping a totality after a fashion, though their knowledge of this totality was class-limited and their dialectics were only instinctive’.55 In fact, the later Lukács goes out of his way to argue that realism can be produced by writers who are neither Marxists nor even socialists. These contradictions flow from the Stalinist political tradition within which Lukács stood during the period when his major works of criticism were written and they shatter the coherence of his historical argument, with which there are nevertheless two serious difficulties. One is that the definition of realism which Lukács gives is quite specific to literature and this raises the question of the extent to which it can be generalised across the entire spectrum of artistic production. Some ill-considered comments on Schönberg apart, Lukács usually restricted himself to the discussion of writers, yet despite this refusal to engage with disciplines outside his professional specialism, he nevertheless made sweeping general statements about realism and modernism on the basis of literary developments alone. Now, while it is at least possible to compare Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain with James Joyce’s novel Ulysses on a formal level, it is not possible to compare The Magic Mountain with Jackson Pollock’s painting Autumn Rhythm. Considerations on the realist novel cannot be the basis of a discussion of modernist art – which includes not only literature, but painting, sculpture, architecture and cinema. A modernist painting can scarcely be expected to fulfil the same function as a realist novel; indeed, a realist painting cannot be expected to fulfil the same function as a realist novel, and in some key modernist disciplines – architecture, for example – there are styles which precede it, but no ‘realist’ school with which comparisons can be made. Music is perhaps the most obvious example. As Adorno wrote: ‘If we listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie – not the echo of its slogans, the need to realise them, the cry for that totality in which reason and freedom are to have their warrant – we understand Beethoven no better than does the listener who cannot follow his pieces’ purely musical content, the inner history that happens to their themes’.56 Beethoven’s work is surely as expressive of bourgeois ascendancy as that of Scott or Balzac, but in what sense can it be described as ‘realist’? In other words, even if we accept for the moment that Lukács makes a coherent case (which is not the same as a convincing case) for the decline of

55 56

Parkinson 1977, p. 89. Adorno 1976, p. 62.

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literature after the bourgeois revolution, the very way in which his categories are drawn from literature make that case difficult to extend to other mediums other than by assertion. The other difficulty with Lukács’s position is summarised in a statement from late in his life: ‘The author of these essays subscribes to Goethe’s observation: “Literature deteriorates only as mankind deteriorates.”’57 As Anderson writes: ‘The basic error of Lukács’s optic here is its evolutionism: time, that is, differs from one epoch to another, but within each epoch all sectors of social reality move in synchrony with each other, such that decline at one level must be reflected in descent at every other’.58 Anderson rightly rejects this, arguing that transformations in culture do not simply occur in lockstep with those of the economic or the political; to imagine that they do is to ignore the distinction between the ‘immediate and mediated effects of the “economic structure” upon the various social institutions’ under capitalism to which Lukács himself had earlier drawn attention.59 At one point in his later work Lukács still appeared to recognise this, quoting a passage from the Grundrisse in which Marx argues that uneven development means developments in art do not necessarily coincide with those of the economy: ‘In art it is recognised that specific flourishing periods hardly conform to the general development of society, that is, of the material base, the skeleton, so to speak, which produces them.’60 The point endorsed here by Lukács is perfectly correct, but he ignores what Marx then goes on to say, which is not at all compatible with his general position: Is the view of nature and of social relations on which Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? … From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Illiad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions for epic poetry disappear?61

57 58 59 60 61

Lukács 1970, p. 9. Anderson 1983, p. 103. Lukács 1971, p. 235. Lukács 1970a, p. 67. Marx 1973, pp. 110–11. The passage quoted by Lukács above comes from an earlier and inferior translation.

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There are two aspects to what Marx is saying here, one concerned with form and the other with technology; it is the former which is most relevant to Lukács’s arguments. Marx does indeed reject the idea that art must change in lockstep with socio-economic development, but the disjunction between the two is not infinitely extendable to the point of complete autonomy: some forms of artistic practice are so specific to a particular time that they cannot be practised outside it to any serious effect. As Jameson writes: ‘We cannot … return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours’.62 James Wood points out that one of the functions of the novelist is to explore consciousness, yet there are greater difficulties in doing so today than at the height of the historical novel: For consciousness and the construction of consciousness has changed, and is changing, rapidly. In fact, the rapidity of that change is one of the new challenges for writers. The reason that historical novels are nowadays almost always failures or of no artistic merit has to do with the speed of change. Tolstoy was able to reach back 60 years to the Napoleonic Wars because he had a confidence that those 60 years had made hardly any difference to the kind of humans he was writing about …63 But this is not now the case, and has not been since decades before Tolstoy died. As Henry James wrote to one practitioner of the historical novel over a hundred years ago: The ‘historical novel’ is, for me, condemned … to a fatal cheapness … You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as nought: I mean the invention, the representation of the old CONSCIOUSNESS, the soil, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make our, that make the modern world were non-existent. You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman – or rather fifty – whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force – and even then its all humbug.64

62 63 64

Jameson 1991a, p. 50. Wood 2000. James 1984, p. 208.

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In other words, Lukács is right that the realist novel (as he conceived it, at least) could not survive indefinitely, but not for the reasons he gives. For Greenberg, unlike Lukács, modernism is not an unmediated expression of bourgeois cowardice and vulgarity, but rather a hostile reaction to these characteristics: ‘It was no accident … that the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically – and geographically too – with the first bold development of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe’. Greenberg argues that the revolutionary movements of the time allowed the avant-garde both to ‘isolate their concept of the “bourgeois” in order to define what they were not’ and gave them ‘the courage to assert themselves as aggressively as they did against the prevailing standards of society’. However, although avant-garde artists shared with Marxists a revulsion at the bourgeoisie, this was mainly on aesthetic rather than socio-economic grounds; and they were as much removed from the workingclass movement as they were from the philistinism of the Moneybags. However, while they could remain aloof from the former, they could not entirely escape the latter; having abandoned aristocratic patronage, ‘the avant-garde remained attached to bourgeois society precisely because it needed its money’: ‘No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of the society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold’.65 This contradictory relationship with the bourgeoisie was unprecedented for an artistic movement, although it was to become the norm as the nineteenth century went on: Romanticism was the last great tendency following directly from bourgeois society that was able to inspire and stimulate the profoundly responsible artist – the artist conscious of certain inflexible obligations to the standards of his craft. By 1848, Romanticism had exhausted. After that the impulse, although indeed it had to originate in bourgeois society, could only come in the guise of a denial of that society, as a turning away from it. It was not to be an about – face towards a new society, but an emigration to Bohemia which was to be art’s sanctuary from capitalism. It was to be the task of the avant-garde to perform in opposition to bourgeois society the function of finding new and adequate cultural forms for the expression of that same society, without at the same time succumbing to its ideological divisions and its refusal to permit the arts to be their justification.66 65 66

Greenberg 1986a, pp. 7, 10–11. Greenberg 1986b, p. 28.

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Greenberg pointed out that where there is an ‘advance-guard’ there is usually also a ‘rear-guard’. Industrial capitalism sucked the rural masses into the new urban centres of production, obliterating or making irrelevant the folk culture they had known in the countryside. What would replace it? ‘To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide’. Kitsch, as Greenberg describes it, is ‘mechanical’, formulaic, relies on ‘vicarious experience’ and ‘faked sensations’: ‘Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time’. But there was nevertheless a connection between kitsch and the avant-garde: ‘The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends’. But there is a central difference: ‘If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch … imitates its effects’.67 Greenberg insists that only by crossing the divide between aesthetic and political rejection of capitalism – by the mutual embrace of avant-garde and vanguard, if you like – was there any possibility of defending what was of value in culture against the remorseless advance of kitsch.68 Timothy Clark has described Greenberg as being an advocate of ‘Eliotic Trotskyism’ in which the defence of the artistic values of the bourgeoisie in the period of its ascendancy are necessary for the continuation of culture as such: ‘They are the repository, as it were, of affect and intelligence that once inhered in a complex form of life but do so no longer, they are the concrete form of intensity and self-consciousness, the only one left, and therefore the form to be preserved at all costs and somehow kept apart from the surrounding desolation’.69 Greenberg’s attachment to Trotskyism was, however, considerably weaker than Lukács’s adherence to Stalinism, and by the late 1940s at the latest the former had abandoned his earlier revolutionary commitments, a shift which did not leave his theory of modernism untouched. From being a defence 67 68

69

Greenberg, 1986a, pp. 12, 17. For anticipations of this position, see Benjamin 2006, pp. 64–6. A similar account of the origins of the modern artist outlined by Greenberg was given, nearly 50 years later, by Raymond Williams, without reference to the earlier thinker. Given the academic specialisation which means that literary critics are unlikely to be acquainted with the work of art critics, this was probably not plagiarism on the part of the latter, but it is indicative of how little Greenberg’s work has been absorbed into the intellectual culture of the Left. See Williams 1989. Clark 1985, p. 54. See also p. 50.

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against appropriation by the bourgeoisie, modernism becomes an internally generated process of disciplinary self-purification. The differences from his earlier positions can be seen most clearly in the essay ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960). Greenberg argues that before the Enlightenment, art functioned in a similar way to religion; indeed, it usually functioned as an extension of religion. With the triumph of rationalist consciousness much of religion’s explanatory role was removed and it was reduced to the level of entertainment and, as Greenberg has it, therapy. ‘The arts could save themselves from this levelling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained by any other kind of activity’. But the Enlightenment not only posed this problem, it also offered a solution. Beginning with the work of Kant, modernism declared itself as a self-critical tendency in Western culture: The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. … Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art. … Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first. … Modernist painting in its latest phase has not abandoned the representation of recognisable objects in principle. What it has abandoned in principle is the representation of the kind of space that recognisable objects can inhabit. … To achieve autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture, and it is in its efforts to do this, and not so much – I repeat – to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself abstract.70 Unlike Lukács, Greenberg does not use a single style within a single discipline as a model for all contemporary artistic production, although, as an art critic, he is obviously most concerned with painting. In 1960 he began ‘Modernist Painting’ with a declaration of the universal significance of modernism: ‘Modernism includes more than art and literature. By now it covers almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture’.71 If Greenberg’s conception of modernism avoids confining it to a particular discipline, he does reduce it to a particular

70 71

Greenberg 1993, pp. 85–8. Greenberg 1993, p. 85.

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style or approach, and in this, at least, the later Greenberg was consistent with the earlier. In 1944 he had declared that: Poetry is lyric and ‘pure’; the serious novel has become either confessional or highly abstract, as with Joyce or Stein; architecture subordinates itself to function and the construction engineer; music has abandoned the programme. Let painting confine itself to the disposition pure and simple of colour and line, and not intrigue us by association with things we can experience more authentically elsewhere.72 This was the basis of his rejection of Surrealism – it was figurative, and no matter how bizarre the juxtapositions involved in Surrealist painting, it was consequently a literary form.73 Is this the sum total of modernism though? Eugene Lunn argues that there were four features of modernism common to all art forms: ‘aesthetic selfconsciousness or self-reflexiveness’; ‘simultaneity, juxtaposition, or “montage”’; ‘paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty’; and ‘“dehumanisation” and the demise of the integrated individual personality’.74 Yet only the first features in Greenberg’s conception of modernism, here expressed in relation to Joyce: ‘Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem to be, above all … the reduction of experience to expression for the sake of expression, the expression mattering more than what is being expressed’.75 But as George Orwell noted of the first of these novels: ‘Ulysses could not have been written by someone who was merely dabbling in word-patterns; it is the product of a special vision of life, the vision of a Catholic who has lost his faith. What Joyce is saying is “Here is life without God. Just look at it!” and his technical innovations, important though they are, are primarily to serve this purpose’.76 More recent commentators like Colin McCabe have suggested that the content of certain chapters in the novel is specifically related to Irish politics: ‘The resonances and allusions of [the Aeolus section] indicate

72 73 74

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Greenberg 1986c, p. 203. Greenberg 1986d. Lunn 1982, pp. 39 and 34–42 more generally. As Callinicos points out, the characteristics identified by Lunn as constitutive of modernism have subsequently been ascribed to postmodernism by figures like Charles Jencks, which is one of many reasons why the existence of the latter as a distinct set of artistic practices should be in doubt. See Callinicos 1989, pp. 12–14. On the specific question of how the modernist device of Collage has been wrongly claimed for postmodernism, see Taylor 1987, pp. 53–65. Greenberg 1986a, p. 10. Orwell 1970, p. 557.

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that the paralysis of Irish politics is a result of the illusions about class antagonisms that were fostered by nationalist ideology’.77 But even if we accept that one tendency within modernism has indeed been towards what we can refer to in shorthand as ‘abstraction’, there is more than one reason why this should be the case. One might be that artists were attempting to transcend their own historical moment. Boris Groys argues that the avant-garde had set themselves the following questions: How could art continue under the permanent destruction of cultural tradition and the familiar world that is a characteristic condition of the modern age, with its technological, political and social revolutions? Or, to put it in different terms: How can art resist the destructiveness of progress? How does one make art that will escape permanent change – art that is atemporal, transhistorical? This was written in relation to the Russian pre-revolutionary Constructivism, but the point is of general application: one way of producing an ‘art for all time’ might be to remove from it any of the recognisable markers of history or contemporaneity.78 Another reason might be the one that Greenberg himself had given earlier in his career. He was not alone in doing so. In 1931 Walter Benjamin wrote a letter in which he commented on the attitude a committed writer should take to his work, faced with the prospect that it might be used in unintended ways by the class enemy: ‘Should he not … denature them, like ethyl alcohol, and make them definitively and reliably unusable for the counterrevolution at the risk that no one will be able to use them?’79 Although none of the Abstract Expressionists would have known Benjamin’s name, let alone his work, during the late 1940s, the strategy he outlined was the one which some of them, at least, pursued as the Cold War intensified. Serge Guilbaut writes that: ‘Rothko tried to purge his art of any sign that could convey a precise image, for fear of being assimilated by society. Still went so far as to refuse at various times to exhibit his paintings publicly because of he was afraid critics would deform or obliterate the content embedded in his abstract forms’.80 In fact, the danger would not come from critics misrepresenting the content of his work but from critics – of whom Greenberg was in the, as it were, advance-guard – misrepresenting his work as having no content. There are two issues here. 77 78 79 80

McCabe 1978, p. 140. Groys 2016a, p. 65. Benjamin to Scholem, 17 April 1931, in Scholem 1982, pp. 232–3. Guilbaut 1985, p. 160.

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The first is the distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘content’. The early Greenberg was aware of the difference: ‘Subject matter as distinguished from content: in the sense that every work of art must have content, but that the subject matter is something the artist does or does not have in mind when he is actually at work’.81 The later, not so much: ‘I, who am considered an arch-“formalist”, used to indulge in … talk about “content” myself. If I do not do so any longer it is because it came to me, dismayingly, some years ago that I could always assert the opposite of whatever it was I did say about “content” and not get found out; that I could say almost anything I pleased about “content” and sound plausible’.82 Now, at one level this is a necessary caution against ‘readingin’.83 Because one cannot say just ‘anything’ about content does not mean that there is nothing to say. David Caute once noted the confusion which exists in the minds of some critics (he was thinking particularly of Susan Sontag) with regard to these terms ‘subject’ and ‘content’: The Anzin miner’s strike of 1884 is the subject of Zola’s novel Germinal; the content of the novel is what emerges through Zola’s literary treatment of the subject. It is not, therefore … a matter of choosing between form and content because every work of art, however ‘abstract’, however formalistic, has a content. Content always refers to the world (material, mental, associative or whatever) outside the work of art mediated and reshaped by artistic form. The fact is grasped once we cease to identify content with the mimetic representation of a subject or theme.84 Jameson too has criticised precisely the fallacy ‘that works of art … are conceivable that have no content, and are therefore to be denounced for failing to grapple with the “serious” issues of the day, indeed distracting from them …’. If this is understood, then the supposedly ‘abstract’ aspects of modernism take on a new meaning: ‘Modernism would then not so much be a way of avoiding social content … as rather of managing and containing it, secluding it out of 81 82 83

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Greenberg 1986b, p. 28. Greenberg 1993b, p. 270. Orwell too noted the same tendency among literary critics to use words which were ‘almost completely lacking in meaning’: ‘When one critic writes, “The outstanding features of Mr X’s work is its living quality”, while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr X’s work is its peculiar deadness”, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way’. See Orwell 1970a, pp. 161–2. Caute 1971, p. 151.

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sight in the very form itself, by means of specific techniques of framing and displacement which can be identified with some precision’.85 Pollock, the doyen of Abstract Expressionism whose reputation was at least partly constructed by Greenberg, was himself unambiguous on the question. In an interview in 1950 he said: ‘It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Every age finds its own technique … method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from the need the modern artist has of expressing the world about him’.86 This brings us to the second distinction, between ‘representation’ and ‘resemblance’. In everyday usage ‘represents’ is taken to mean ‘something which stands in for something else’. In Greenberg’s hands, it appears to mean ‘something which resembles something else’. But representation can take place without resemblance. The Art and Language group (i.e. as far as this text is concerned, Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden) draw precisely this distinction: ‘Those features of a picture according to which we are able (under certain conditions) to see it as resembling a person or etc. compromise (under certain conditions) the descriptive content of the picture, although these features are in general neither necessary nor sufficient for descriptive or representational content’. They conclude: ‘We cannot infer realism from resemblance’.87 Both aspects of this question were discussed in a brilliant article by Meyer Schapiro, one of Greenberg’s contemporaries and a fellow Trotskyist, in 1937: The logical opposition of realistic and abstract art … rests on two assumptions about the nature of painting, common in writing on abstract art: that representation is a passive mirroring of things and therefore essentially non-artistic, and that abstract art, on the other hand, is a purely aesthetic activity, unconditioned by objects and based on its own eternal laws … These views are thoroughly one-sided and rest on a mistaken idea of what representation is. There is no passive, ‘photographic’ representation in the sense described. … All renderings of objects, no matter how exact they seem, even photographs, proceed from values, methods and viewpoints which somehow shape the image and often determine its con85 86 87

Jameson 1977, pp. 201–2. Pollock 1992, pp. 575–6. Art and Language 1984, pp. 148, 167. The title of this essay is a reference to the series of paintings by Art and Language called ‘Portraits of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock’.

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tents. On the other hand there is no ‘pure art’, uncontaminated by experience; all fantasy and formal construction, even the random scribbling of a hand, are shaped by experience and non-aesthetic concerns.88 The final conception of modernism is that of Jameson. In his foundational essay on postmodernism, Jameson follows Ernest Mandel in arguing that there have been three stages (‘fundamental moments’) in capitalism: ‘These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital’. As he goes on, ‘my own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism, and postmodernism is both inspired and confirmed by Mandel’s tripartite scheme’.89 There are in fact differences in the chronologies deployed by Mandel and Jameson; for the purposes of this discussion, however, they are secondary.90 The key point is that Jameson sees particular periods in the history of capitalism as possessing distinct ‘cultural logics’ and that of modernism is associated with the period which begins after 1848. He therefore retains the element of periodisation characteristic of Lukács, but identifies realism and modernism as ‘cultural logics’ corresponding respectively to the market and imperialist stages in the development of capitalism, rather than indices of totality or fragmentation in the bourgeois worldview. This is free from both the moralism with which Lukács judged modernism and the narrowness with which Greenberg defined it, but is misleading in a different way. Jameson is right, in my view, to associate modernism with a period in capitalist development, but wrong about the nature of that period. It is remarkable that Jameson and Anderson, his most persistent interlocutor, both recognise that modernism does not emerge from monopoly capitalism as such, but rather from the fusion of the ‘contemporary’ and the ‘archaic’, which it initiates. Yet neither man ever invokes the concept specifically intended to illuminate these juxtapositions. Indeed, Anderson has rarely discussed uneven and combined development at all, except for a very brief reference to 88 89 90

Schapiro 1978, pp. 195–6. Jameson 1991a, pp. 35–6. Jameson misrepresents Mandel in two respects. First, the latter identifies four periods in the history of capitalism, down to the early 1970s, not three, each characterised by different forms of technology, in which the stage of ‘market capitalism’ is preceded by an earlier one extending from ‘the end of the 18th century up to the crisis of 1847’. See Mandel, 1975, pp. 120–1. Second, where Jameson sees the period of multinational capital and postmodernism continuing from the postwar period until the present, Mandel regarded that period as definitively ending with the crisis which opened in 1973–4, a point with which I am in agreement. This difference in periodisation is highlighted in Davis 1985, pp. 107–8.

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Germany, post-Unification, although he has discussed uneven development, but not in the context of modernism.91 Jameson, as we shall see, tends to refer to uneven development, even when he is discussing uneven and combined development. The latter concept therefore forms a ghostly, unacknowledged presence in the background of their more concrete discussions, to which we now turn. In his early work, Marxism and Form (1971), Jameson noted of Surrealism that the juxtaposed objects which it depicted are ‘places of objective chance or preternatural revelation … immediately identifiable as the products of a not yet fully industrialised and systematized economy’.92 Although written of one specific school of Modernism, the essential point – that it involved the representation of a world in which old and new co-existed and inter-penetrated each other – was capable of generalisation to the entire field. Over a decade later, in his assessment of Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air, Anderson took this step, quoting Jameson on Surrealism but in order to illustrate a much more general argument.93 In my view, ‘modernism’ can best be understood as a cultural field of force triangulated by three decisive coordinates. The first … was the codification of a highly formalized academicism in the visual and other arts, which itself was institutionalized within official regimes of states and society still massively pervaded, often dominated, by aristocratic or landowning classes: classes in one sense economically ‘superseded’, no doubt, but in others still setting the political and cultural tone in country after country of pre-First World War Europe. … The second coordinate is then a logical complement of the first: that is, the still incipient, hence essentially novel, emergence within these societies of the key technologies or inventions of the second industrial revolution: telephone, radio, automobile, aircraft and so on. Mass consumption industries based on the new technologies had not yet been implanted anywhere in Europe, where clothing, food and furniture remained overwhelmingly the largest final-goods sectors in employment and turnover down to 1914. The third coordinate of the modernist conjuncture, I would argue, was the imaginative proximity of social revolution.94

91 92 93 94

Anderson 1974, pp. 236, 276; Anderson 1996. Jameson 1971, p. 103. Anderson 1984, pp. 106–7. Anderson 1984, p. 104.

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In summary, Anderson argues that, in Europe at least, modernism ‘arose at the intersection between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialised capitalist economy, and a semi-emergent or -insurgent labour movement’.95 This was the situation not only in Russia, but across most of Europe, down to 1945. In the conclusion to his first collection of essays on postmodernism, Jameson deployed what he called ‘uneven development’ to reach very similar conclusions to those of Anderson: … in an age of monopolies (and trade unions), of institutionalized collectivization, there is always a lag. Some parts of the economy are still archaic, handicraft enclaves; some are more modern and futuristic than the future itself. Modern art, in this respect, drew its power and possibilities from being a backwater and an archaic holdover within a modernizing economy: it glorified, celebrated, and dramatized older forms of individual production which the new mode of production was elsewhere on the point of displacing and blotting out. Jameson then refers to Joyce creating his version of Dublin alone in his rooms in Paris, but the point is clearly intended to be of wider application than literature, or any specific form of artistic production, almost an explanation for modernism itself. ‘Modernism must thus be seen as uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development’ – but here Jameson refers specifically to Bloch and ‘nonsynchronicity’ rather than Trotsky and uneven and combined development, before going on to describe ‘the coexistence of realties from radically different moments in history – handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance’.96 It was left to one of Jameson’s admirers, Julian Stallabrass, to draw out the connection with Trotsky’s concept: Jameson has convincingly argued that the most systematic works are produced in circumstances where, due to combined and uneven development, thinkers are faced with extreme contrasts of scene, as if they lived in an environment where it is easy to step from on historical period to another. Peasants in paddy fields may raise their eyes from their work to glimpse a new neighbour, a high rise postmodern office complex. Such

95 96

Anderson 1984, p. 105. Jameson 1991b, p. 307.

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variegated environments, argues Jameson, foster systematic and totalising thinking about historical change.97 Modernism must be seen then, not as a conjunctural moment in the history of capitalism, but as a form of artistic production generated by the triumph of capitalism as the globally dominant socio-economic system. The significance of 1848, in this perspective, is not the failure of the revolutions of that year, but as a marker indicating when that system became definitively established. If the argument of this chapter is correct, however, the form taken by that triumph was precisely the sudden onrush of capitalist modernity into long-established pre-capitalist societies: modernism is not the cultural logic of monopoly capitalism, but of uneven and combined development, which is one of the reasons why countries as politically distinct as Italy and Russia could both manifest such similar versions. Modernism is the way in which the experience of that transformation has been transmitted and understood through culture. In this modernism would appear not as a set of artistic practices related to the historic decline of the bourgeoisie – or indeed to the fortunes of any particular class – but to the contemporary reality of class society itself; the rhythms of capitalist industrialisation, the stimuli associated with urban life and the patterns of social conflict during the epoch of Classical Imperialism – an epoch which, like modernism itself, apparently climaxed with the Second World War. Modernism is obviously not an unmediated expression of experience. Lukács argues that the key distinction between realist authors (such as Mann) and their modernist successors (such as Joyce) is the ability of the former to convey the totality of the social world and the inability of the latter to convey anything but the fragmented experience of that world.98 As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, however, the view that modernist work simply embodies subjective ‘experience’ is untenable: ‘Expressionist and surrealist art, need it be said, are every bit as much constructed as Balzac; we are judging (if we need to) between two different products of ideological labour, not between “experience” and the “real”’.99 I began this section by quoting Trotsky’s views on Futurism. Here, Day shows three different ways in which that branch of modernism was able to translate the experience of capitalist modernity into the forms of art: First, it can refer to a range of modern motifs (cars, aeroplanes, telephones) or their associated qualities (speed). Second, it can refer to the 97 98 99

Stallabrass 2004, p. 71. See, for example, Lukács 1977, pp. 33–6. Eagleton 1981, p. 88.

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experiential ‘sensations’ of life in modern cities (experiences of speed and of ‘simultaneity’ across time and space, as new methods of transport and communication make the world seem smaller, or the feeling of exhilaration produced by competing sensations in the city). Third, it might refer to the technical and formal devices used by artists to ‘represent’ any of the above (the fragmentation and fracturing of picture space, the juxtaposition or collaging of different materials/elements as a way of ‘expressing’ sensations of speed or simultaneity).100 One final issue remains in this connection: the attitude of modernists to capitalist modernity. ‘Generally it is right to stress that modernism was no simple rejection of modernity; it was rather a reaction, a critical response to it’, writes Krishan Kumar. As we have already seen, it was possible to critically embrace modernity from diametrically opposed political positions. According to Kumar, for the Futurists and Constructivists, ‘modern society was not modern enough’: ‘It was “inauthentically” modern. It was too cautious, too cowardly, to accept all the implications of modernity. It preferred to harbour past relics, so preventing the realization of modernity’s full potential’.101 These attitudes extended beyond the Italian and Russian representatives of modernism: they could be found in Weimar Germany, for example: ‘What Gropius taught, and what most Germans did not want to learn, was the lesson of Bacon and Descartes and the Enlightenment: that one must confront the world and dominate it and that the cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind of modernity’.102 Not every modernism embraced modernity and wished to extend it. Modernists in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland – in every sense the most ‘Western’ society in the colonial world – took a quite different perspective. Eagleton describes it as ‘stratified … made up of disparate time scales. Its history was differentiated rather than homogenous, as the anglicized and atavistic existed side by side, and a commercialised agriculture still bore a few quasifeudal traces’. This is a by-now-familiar exercise in identifying an example of uneven and combined development without using the actual concept; for, as Eagleton makes clear, the two temporalities of Irish life did not simply co-exist in separate life worlds: ‘… what is afoot in nineteenth-century Ireland, with the cataclysm of the Famine, the agricultural revolution, the sharp decline of the language and the sea changes in popular culture, is the transformation within

100 101 102

Day 1999, p. 206. Kumar 1995, p. 98. Gay 1968, p. 101.

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living memory of a social order in some ways quite traditional, and so a peculiarly shocking collision of the customary and the contemporary’. The intrusion of capitalist modernity was associated with British colonial power and its local agents, and as a consequence: ‘The modernist sensibility [in Ireland] is not of course synonymous with modernity. On the contrary, it is its sworn enemy, hostile to that stately march of secular reason which was precisely, for many a nineteenth-century Irish nationalist, where a soulless Britain had washed up’. Modernism in this context was ‘a last ditch resistance to mass commodity culture’.103 Or to put it in Greenberg’s terms, the struggle between avant-garde and kitsch expressed in terms of nationalist resistance to imperialism. What this example suggests is that the attitude of modernists to capitalist modernity is less to do with left-right oppositions within nation states, but where these nation states (actual or aspirant) are situated within the structured inequality of the capitalist system in its imperialist stage. And that, in turn, inevitably leads us back to the question of the state. 103

Eagleton 1995, pp. 278–80.

chapter 6

Fredric Jameson and the Rise of World Literature: From World Systems Theory to Uneven and Combined Development James Christie

In many respects, Fredric Jameson can be seen as a key figure within the interdisciplinary debates that define this volume. His work sits suggestively at many of the major junctures from which its rationale has emerged: that between postcolonialist and world literary paradigms, between the aesthetics of literary study itself and the conceptual framework of international relations, and, as I will argue, at the complex intersection between world-systems theory and uneven and combined development as parallel and competing foundations for cultural analysis. Yet I would claim that, despite occupying this apparently central position, the critical assessment and development which Jameson’s work has received within this nexus is still far from complete. The nature and extent of the role which his work has played in this context has yet to be comprehensively understood. Consequently, where Jameson has generally been at the heart of dominant theoretical developments within the humanities over the past four decades, his presence in the formation of world literature has instead been comparatively muted. This situation therefore provides a range of opportunities for further exploration. This trend can be seen in the fact that, while numerous critics have referred parenthetically to the possibility of a meaningful connection between Jameson’s thinking and the rise of world literature, he is often excluded as either a major source of influence or a major object of critique in many of the most influential theoretical engagements with the question of world literature. This is of course a notable contrast to the position which he occupied as a virtually obligatory reference point in earlier debates on postmodernism and postcolonialism, and seems strange, given the obvious confluence which would seem to exist between Jameson’s consistent and vocal adherence to totalising and holistic analytic frameworks and the globalising aspirations of world literary thinking. Debating World Literature,1 the substantial essay collection edited by

1 See Prendergast (ed.) 2004.

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Christopher Prendergast, is representative of this trend. Jameson’s role here is limited to a handful of passing references in essays by Emily Apter and Timothy Reiss. The same is broadly true of other key texts. Jameson does not directly figure in Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters,2 or in David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? or How to Read World Literature.3 Franco Moretti’s work bears Jameson’s influence in a far clearer if relatively fragmented fashion, but he again warrants no more than a few passing references in Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability.4 The central aim of this chapter, therefore, is to address this lacuna. It seeks to achieve this by outlining the idiosyncratic nature of Jameson’s contribution to the field of world literature, as well as providing a systematic account of the unusual receptive narrative by which this contribution has been defined. In this sense it aims to build on Christopher Wise’s suggestion that Jameson’s thinking about literary production in relation to the economic world system constitutes the basis of a ‘Marxian Pedagogy of World Literature’.5 This argument for Jameson’s importance in relation to world literature also intersects with the related question of the connection between world literature and the political framework of uneven and combined development (U&CD). I argue that Jameson’s rich and complex relationship with U&CD stands as a central example of how his work might be further utilised by world literary scholars. On this point mention must therefore be made of the recent work of the Warwick Research Collection (WReC),6 which has done much to centralise Jameson within the context of world literature, and on a related note to highlight the importance of uneven and combined development in his current thinking. As will become clear, my argument in this essay both draws on and challenges this aspect of WReC’s important 2015 work, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. The argument is presented in two sections. The first offers my account of the unusual and tangential structure of Jameson’s relationship with the rise of world literature since the early 1990s. This section seeks to establish his as a vital if largely concealed influence on its emergence and subsequent formation, and thus to highlight the powerful role which his materialist theory has played in structuring the field of world literature as such. The second section aims to develop the thesis of Jameson’s potential significance within this con2 3 4 5 6

See Casanova 2007. See Damrosch 2003 and 2009. See Apter 2013. Wise 1994, p. 173. See Warwick Research Collective 2015.

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text by advancing an argument about the political and aesthetic significance of the relationship between world-systems theory and uneven and combined development as it is incarnated in his cultural analysis.

1

Jameson and World Literature

Major interventions in the field of world literature have often looked for points of origin; past moments in which the claims of the current critic can establish an instance of genealogical correspondence. Goethe’s meditations on Weltliteratur in the early nineteenth century are obviously commonly employed in this way. Similar key moments in the world literary imaginary include the statements on world literature contained in The Communist Manifesto, and the distinct forms of comparativism which emerged from Erich Auerbach’s and Leo Spitzer’s very different experiences in Istanbul in the early twentieth century.7 My argument in the first section of this chapter is that Jameson’s seminal journal article of 1986, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, as well as the critical furore which infamously surrounded its original reception, can effectively be viewed as another such moment. Although the essay and the Ahmad affair which immediately followed it may now appear overfamiliar to many readers, I claim that it has in fact exercised an influence on the later development of world literary debates which is both highly significant and has been conducted in a largely implicit, indirect and therefore hitherto unacknowledged fashion. The story of this article’s reception – the strangely outraged response of Aijaz Ahmad8 which ushered in a long period of negative postcolonialist critique,9 followed by the recovery of Jameson’s theory and consequent disavowal of the Ahmad position in a string of counter-responses published in the early to mid-2000s10 – hardly needs to be reiterated at any length here. The key point is the extent to which Ahmad’s critique is now recognised as having exercised a determining role in the way Jameson’s argument has been read by both his detractors and defenders. At first positions aligned with the critique were dominant, and then positions opposing it. But up until very recently at least, Ahmad’s ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory” ’, with its accusations of overgeneralisation, crude reductionism and a generally lazy 7 8 9 10

See Apter 2004. See Ahmad 1987. See for example George 1999, Buell 1994, and Sprinker 1993. See for example Szeman 2001, McGonegal 2005, Lazarus 2004, and Buchanan 2003.

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Westernised orientalism, largely dictated the terms in which Jameson’s conception of national allegory and third-world cultural production could be publicly discussed. Reading some of the most significant contemporary theorists of world literature, however, one might reasonably come to believe that while this situation may have defined the public reception of Jameson’s engagement with third-world literature over the last three decades, another set of readers were quietly formulating a separate and arguably more sophisticated line of reception. There is evidence, in short, that an entirely different receptive framework was being forged beneath the radar of these more vocal controversies. To illustrate this divergence which exists in Jameson’s reception I take two figures widely recognised as being among the most important of such theorists: Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova. Franco Moretti’s work often wears its indebtedness to Jameson explicitly, evidencing a wide and substantial absorption of Jameson’s thinking. His seminal ‘Conjectures on World Literature’11 is no exception to this. It is, however, to Jameson’s introduction to Kojin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature12 that Moretti turns in ‘Conjectures’, rather than ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’. This fact is striking given the close parallels which exist between Jameson’s theorisation of third-world literature and Moretti’s most famous articulation of his world literature project, published 14 years later. Moretti’s piece reflects Jameson’s in several of its rhetorical and referential features. Jameson, for instance, anticipates the recourse to Goethe’s Weltliteratur, the use of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, and the wider sense of the demand for a new form of world literary analysis as a response to a historical crisis within the traditional structures of cultural studies. This is what Jameson calls ‘the disintegration of our own conceptions of cultural study’13 and what Moretti means when he states that ‘the categories have to be different’.14 More than this, though, it is the very structure of Moretti’s argument in ‘Conjectures’ where the conceptual framework of ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ exercises its most significant and illuminating influence. As the centrepiece of his understanding of world literature, Moretti’s concept of distant reading is the most effective place to begin substantiating this claim. Distant reading arises for Moretti primarily out of a dissatisfaction with 11 12 13 14

See Moretti 2000. See Jameson 1993. Jameson 1986, p. 67. Moretti 2000, p. 55; original emphasis.

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the dominant conceptions of canonicity and the structuring role which they have played in literary analysis and comparison. It thus becomes the mechanism which facilitates the epistemological reorientations necessary for a properly world literature to develop from a foundation in narrow, old-fashioned and nationally determined notions of the canon: ‘if you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature will do so: it would be absurd if it didn’t) close reading will not do it. It’s not designed to do it, it’s designed to do the opposite’.15 The canon thus emerges as the interpretive problem behind close reading, to which distant reading is then offered as a radical solution. Compare this position, then, to Jameson: ‘if the purpose of the canon is to restrict our aesthetic sympathies, to develop a range of rich and subtle perceptions which can be exercised only on the occasion of a small but choice body of texts, to discourage us from reading anything else or from reading those things in different ways then it is humanly impoverishing … Why, returning to the question of the canon, should we only read certain kinds of books?’.16 The starting point is thus fundamentally the same; the presentation of a simultaneous crisis and opportunity within the received forms of literary study which has been brought on primarily by the historical pressures of globalisation and consequent restructuring of the position of the nation state, or Jameson’s ‘fact of fragmentation on a global scale’.17 Close reading, seen as part of an older ideology of the literary canon underpinned by older traditions of Western imperialism and essentialism, has reached its limitations. In order to absorb the pressure placed on cultural studies by the huge expansion in its raw material which accompanies this desire for a newly global or world literary model, it must be replaced not just by a wider canonical frame but a new critical epistemology, or Jameson’s ‘reading those things in different ways’.18 Of course, the solutions which Moretti and Jameson then offer are not identical. National allegory is not the same thing as distant reading. However, I believe that there are important underlying features of Jameson’s epistemological reorientations which do essentially re-emerge in the concept of distant reading.19 As is well known, distant reading for Moretti is primarily a negative formulation, based on the shedding of old aesthetic attachments to the text in order to establish a far more conceptually abstract critical perspect-

15 16 17 18 19

Moretti 2000, p. 57. Jameson 1986, p. 66; original emphasis. Jameson 1986, p. 67. Jameson 1986, p. 66. For further comparison of Jameson and Moretti’s methodologies, see Omri 2008 and Omri 2006, pp. 9–15.

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ive which thus trades a gain in scope for a loss in specificity: ‘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’.20 The traditional aesthetic sensibilities of the literary critic are thus exchanged for the conceptual rigour of the Wallersteinian political scientist. As is confirmed in Moretti’s Distant Reading of 2013, this new footing for literary comparativism then in practice leads into a form of reading in which statistical and data analysis, accompanied by the extensive use of graphs and charts, come to the fore. National allegory does not involve this same turn to scientism or the same resistance to textual detail. Nevertheless a certain, structurally similar notion of distance is central to its functioning. Wise has pointed out that Jameson’s allegorisis in general and his formation of national allegory in particular must be understood in relation to his earlier theory of metacommentary, which he initially formulates in a 1971 essay published in PMLA and then further refines in The Political Unconscious.21 Metacommentary is significant here because it takes as its working assumption the fact that, as Wise quotes Jameson, ‘one does not really confront the “text” at all; one’s primary object of work is the interpretation of the text’.22 This emphasis on a form of interpretation which foregoes the possibility of direct contact with the textual object in order to replace it with an increasingly self-reflexive focus on the act of interpretation itself then feeds into Jameson’s wider conception of allegory as ‘the opening up of the text to multiple meanings, to successive rewritings and overwritings which are generated as so many levels and as so many supplementary interpretations’.23 National allegory then emerges as a geographically and historically concretised expression of this model, appearing primarily as a mediating structure designed to provide a self-consciously provisional and limited interpretive access to a textual reality which cannot be known in direct or unmediated form. It is a structure designed to provide access to third-world texts which appear ‘not immediately, but as though alreadyread’.24 Of course this apparent desire to render the third world available to firstworld scrutiny was at one point routinely attacked as an attempt ‘to provide his 20 21 22 23 24

Moretti 2000, p. 57. See Jameson 1981. Wise 1994, p. 157; original emphasis. Jameson 1981, p. 14. Jameson 1986, p. 66.

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western readers of non-western fiction with a theoretical “Home”, from which they can unproblematically evaluate the “alien” writing produced in the “Third World”’.25 What must be recognised, however, is the extent to which this desire in fact prefigures the later emergence of world literature’s analytical paradigms. National allegory is predicated upon a loss of textual immediacy, a renunciation of the close reading imperative, in the same way as Moretti’s distant reading is defined by a negative relationship with close textual analysis. In this sense Jameson’s response to the historical crisis of canonicity, like Moretti’s, rests upon the idea of distance. What Jameson’s thinking emphasises, and for what it was at one point frequently attacked, is the irreducible distance between a critical subjectivity formed at the core of the world system and a literary text produced at the periphery. It is the provisional bridging of this distance from which national allegory, the idea of the primacy of the nation in the third-world text and the consequent unification of libidinal and political impulses, then emerges: ‘this very different ratio of the political to the personal which makes such texts alien to us at first approach, and consequently, resistant to our conventional western habits of reading’.26 It is true, however, that this emphasis which Jameson places on the nation and on nationalism might legitimately be seen as not according with the attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation and of national literary models which is characteristic of both Moretti and the wider project of world literature. How could an argument focusing on ‘an obsessive return of the national situation itself’27 be the theoretical bedfellow of an argument offering ‘a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures’?28 What must be emphasised in this regard is the extent to which the third-world nation for Jameson is a structure entirely defined by its position within a wider, transnational world system. The residual nationalism which characterises the third world emerges directly out of its oppositional relationship with the universalising force of a postmodern, post-national first world. As Jameson points out in an important footnote, the primacy ascribed to the nation in the third world ‘forms a pendant to the essay on postmodernism which describes the logic of the cultural imperialism of the first world and above all of the United States’.29 For Jameson the preservation of national identities and national borders is thus an explicitly dialectical phenomenon, directly linked to precisely 25 26 27 28 29

George 1999, p. 99. Jameson 1986, p. 69. Jameson 1986, p. 65. Moretti 2000, p. 68. Jameson 1986, p. 88.

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the kind of universal and de-nationalised spatial framework which ultimately defines the project of a world literature. Perhaps the most effective way of expressing this affinity between Moretti and Jameson is therefore in terms of their shared adherence to the notion of totality; a methodology of which Jameson has of course been a pioneering and vocal proponent since the start of his career in the 1970s. The point of metacommentary is to relinquish the focus on the individual text as a discreet singularity and instead shift focus onto the total nexus of historical and interpretive relationships in which it is defined. The loss of original or first contact with the text is thus the prerequisite for a more universal if less concretely specific vision. National allegory then reflects this logic in that it renounces the possibility of an unmediated reading of the literary work in favour of a reading which emphasises its wider situation; its position within the entire world system of which the third world must be grasped as an autonomous yet connected component. Hence, in the same footnote, Jameson highlights the fact that national allegory is a mechanism deployed within the wider project of a universal or global cognitive mapping: ‘what is here called “national allegory” is clearly a form of just such mapping of the totality, so that the present essay – which sketches a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature – forms a pendant to the essay on postmodernism’.30 The point of the nation in national allegory is therefore that it provides access to precisely that wider historical situation in which the individual literary work is defined and through which it can then be linked to alternative locations within the same system. It is not simply the nation but rather the relationship between the nation and the wider world system of which it is part which is thus able to illuminate the internal, aesthetic character of a work like Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ in a way that exposes the historical position it occupies within a global system; its ‘vision of the horror of life specifically grasped through History itself’.31 It is a fundamentally similar aspiration towards a holistic form of analysis which can then be seen at work again in Moretti’s later model. Moretti’s foregoing of the possibility of unmediated close reading is also performed in order to locate the text within a wider, essentially non-literary conceptual framework, or ‘the system in its entirety’.32 And, as with Jameson’s theorisation of third-world literature, this framework is ultimately provided by Wallerstein: ‘explained in terms of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system terminology’.33 For 30 31 32 33

Ibid. Jameson 1986, p. 71. Moretti 2000, p. 57. Jameson 1986, p. 78.

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what is Jameson’s portrait of a global politics defined by the rupture between first and third worlds, if not Moretti’s ‘international capitalism … a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal’?34 Jameson’s emphasis on mapping in this sense reappears in Moretti’s turn to statistical analysis and his even more literal deployment of maps, graphs and charts. What this points to is thus a fundamentally analogous desire shared by both thinkers to restructure the position traditionally ascribed to the Western critic (aestheticist, intellectualist, politically and historically isolated) on the basis of a more holistic viewpoint: one which for Jameson is manifested in the aesthetics of the relationship between first and third worlds, and for Moretti in abstract scientism. At this point I have aimed to demonstrate how a significant, if not explicitly acknowledged, parallel can be identified between Moretti’s reformation of literary analysis in response to the emergence of a newly global literary framework and Jameson’s earlier conception of third-world cultural production. However, of all the theorists most commonly associated with the emergence of world literature Moretti probably displays his relationship with Jameson most clearly and obviously. As a consequence, in order to demonstrate Jameson’s influence on the development of the discourse of world literature more broadly it is necessary to move beyond Moretti. I therefore turn at this point to Pascale Casanova, whose work – unlike Moretti’s – defines itself outside the framework of historical materialism. The connection of Casanova’s work to Jameson and the Ahmad affair is certainly far less easily identifiable than Moretti’s. Largely this is because of the insistent idealist impulse which underpins Casanova’s model of the world republic of letters. Hence Casanova insists repeatedly throughout The World Republic of Letters on the existence of ‘a relative independence of artistic space with respect to economic (and therefore political) space’.35 Once the world republic is conceived as an autonomous field of purely literary and linguistic relationships functioning in abstraction from the material realities of political and economic relationships, then an obvious rift opens up with the impulses of Jameson’s Marxism. There might therefore seem to be relatively little connection between Casanova’s emphasis on the formation of a self-sufficient literary sphere with a power structure and temporality largely sealed off from external influences, and the direct correlation which Jameson posits between the unequal structure of the capitalist world system and the aesthetic relationship between third-world and postmodern literatures.

34 35

Moretti 2000, p. 56; original emphasis. Casanova 2007, p. 10.

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Yet, as WReC point out, it is possible to identify more common ground than this immediate appearance would seem to allow for: ‘in these later chapters, her initially rather rigid formulation of the distinctness of economic from cultural forms of globalisation relaxes and wanes somewhat, and she offers us a model of peripheral writing across continents, times and spaces, connected by homologous situations of historical “backwardness”’.36 Casanova’s resistance to it might be one of the distinguishing features of her own position, but her system is clearly available to this kind of materialist interpretation, which simply needs to collapse her own binary oppositions and view what she sees as the movements of an autonomous world literary field as being rooted in actual geopolitics. Indeed, in the conclusion to The World Republic of Letters it is made clear that what Casanova is calling for is indeed a historicised rather than purely autonomised conception of world literature, writing against ‘the idea of a pure literature, freed from history … The denial of history and, above all, the denial of the unequal structure of literary space’.37 At this point it seems a much shorter step to transferring that historicisation of ‘unequal structure’ into materialist terms as the unequal structure of the global economic system. Viewed in this light, the idea of an affinity with Jameson and ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ takes on much greater significance. Take, for instance, the conception of the structural role which the nation is seen to play in the development of world literary space. According to Casanova the world literary system as a whole is organised around the opposition between dominated and dominating national literatures: ‘its geography is based on the opposition between a capital, on the one hand, and peripheral dependencies whose relationship to this center is defined by their aesthetic distance from it’.38 It is on the peripheral or dominated side of this polarity that the brutal realities of this system of power relationships are readily visible: ‘authors living today on the edges of the literary world, who long ago learned to confront the laws and forces that sustain the unequal structure of this world’.39 The dominating centre, in contrast, is characterised by the erasure of these same realities from view: ‘the ethnocentric blindness of these centers’;40 ‘those in the center who, blinded by the obviousness of their centrality, cannot even imagine these things’.41

36 37 38 39 40 41

Warwick Research Collective 2015, p. 126. Casanova 2007, p. 352. Casanova 2007, p. 12. Casanova 2007, p. 43. Casanova 2007, p. 23. Casanova 2007, p. 303.

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If it is then transferred into a Marxist terminology this model bears a striking resemblance to Jameson’s construction of the world system on the basis of the oppositional relationship between first and third worlds. With Jameson too the postmodern or first-world centre is characterised by the repression of the political realties by which its domination is maintained. Indeed the very imagery which Jameson employs to express this is identical to Casanova’s: ‘a kind of blindness at the center … American blindness can be registered, for example, in our tendency to confuse the universal and the cultural, as well as to assume that in any given geopolitical conflict all elements and values are somehow equal and equivalent; in other words, are not affected by the disproportions of power’.42 The political immediacy of third-world literature is then of course defined, in terms which are again similar to those of Casanova’s peripheral literatures, by the conscious and explicit retention those material inequalities which have been erased in the first world. In this sense Jameson’s modelling of literary production on the basis of an economic and political conception of the world system can be seen as something like a material base from which Casanova’s far more abstracted framework is projected. Both thinkers thus essentially share the foundational idea of a global but internally fragmented cultural field, in which the nation is thus retained but as a residual force defined only in opposition to the transnational aspirations of the system which contains it. The idea of a differential temporality is likewise shared. For Casanova an effect of time lag is produced which means that literatures constructed at the periphery of the system necessarily appear relatively outdated: ‘inevitably starting behind the other competitors’.43 This argument thus finds a parallel in Jameson’s (again, at one point much criticised) claim that third-world literature is characterised by the persistence of realist and modernist aesthetics which have been abandoned in the postmodern first-world centre. Casanova’s assertions that ‘the forms and aesthetics that have currency in a given national literary space can be properly understood only if they are related to the precise position of this space in the world system’44 thus mirror and parallel Jameson’s reading of world literature as being tied to ‘the fundamental breaks between the capitalist first world, the socialist bloc of the second world, and a range of other countries which have suffered the experience of colonialism and imperialism’.45

42 43 44 45

Jameson 1998, p. 59. Casanova 2007, p. 93. Casanova 2007, p. 39. Jameson 1986, p. 67.

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Once again, then, it is at bottom the adherence to a totalising theoretical framework which most clearly marks this connection between Jameson’s thought and the subsequent emergence of the world literary paradigm. Casanova characterises the core of her method as a ‘constant passing back and forth between that which is nearest, and that which is farthest away, between the microscopic and the macroscopic, between the individual writer and the vast literary world’,46 deploying the notion of ‘totality [as] … an actual – albeit unseen – world’.47 In this way her work motivates a Hegelian conception of totality as the speculative unity of opposed phenomena of which Jameson is the foremost contemporary practitioner and advocate. It is difficult, at this point, not to hear in Casanova’s attempt to marry ‘the microscopic and the macroscopic’ at least some echo of Jameson’s earlier attempt to represent the complex set of relationships which exist between the individual thirdworld text and the structural contradictions of the capitalist world system as a whole. Indeed the sense of this underlying connection between the two thinkers has recently been given additional empirical support in an article entitled ‘Combative Literatures’, which Casanova published in 2011 in New Left Review. Unlike the better known The World Republic of Letters, in ‘Combative Literatures’ the debt which Casanova’s conception of the world literary system owes to Jameson and ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ is rendered explicit. It is national allegory to which Casanova repeatedly turns as a key influence, quoting Jameson at length and categorically highlighting the parallel relationship which exists between her own quasi-idealist and Jameson’s materialist understandings of the world literary system. Hence, for instance, these literary spaces are engaged – to a greater or lesser extent, according to their degree of dependence – in struggles for recognition which are both political and literary. This common inclination is embodied in a distinct way in each writer hailing from such a literary space, and can be found, in diverse forms, in every text. These are what Jameson has interpreted as ‘national allegories’.48 At this point, then, I have aimed to demonstrate how Jameson’s thinking, and in particular ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, 46 47 48

Casanova 2007, p. 352. Casanova 2007, p. 3. Casanova 2011, p. 133.

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can be seen as having exercised a broad and significant influence upon the theoretical emergence of world literature49 in two of its foremost proponents. Writing at greater length, this analysis could certainly be expanded to take into account Jameson’s relationship with figures besides Moretti and Casanova. For instance, the idea of an affinity with Roberto Schwarz, whose reading of Machado de Assis seeks to ‘inject allegorical possibilities into the characters’ and ‘to lift them above the irrelevant of simply domestic’,50 readily comes to mind. However, I hope the two examples provided here are sufficient to illustrate how Jameson’s conception of third-world cultural production can be seen as asserting a decisive impact on the formal development of the discourse of world literature, even if the idiosyncratic nature of his central article’s initial reception barred that impact from occurring in a more conventionally explicit or acknowledged fashion. It is now possible to see the extent to which, by 1986, Jameson’s understanding of third-world literature was already pre-empting the terms of what would later explicitly be acknowledged as the theory of world literature: ‘today the reinvention of cultural studies in the United States demands the reinvention, in a new situation, of what Goethe long ago theorized as “world literature”. In our more immediate context, then, any conception of world literature necessarily demands some specific engagement with the question of third-world literature’.51 Before completing this section of my argument, though, I would like to briefly suggest that the fundamental structural formation of the field of world literature more broadly might effectively be linked to terms which were established not only in Jameson’s third-world literature essay, but also in response to the receptive controversies by which the essay is known. In other words, I would like to suggest that the Ahmad affair laid down a framework of assertions and critiques which have in large part re-emerged in many of the subsequent conversations that have come to define the issue of world literature, and that the affair must therefore occupy an important position in the attempt to understand world literature as such. One notable example of this can be found in Emily Apter’s broadside against the world literary project, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. Employing a deconstructionist terminology, Apter’s central critique of the dominant conceptions of world literature is an overlooking of difference, an overhasty theoretical homogenisation of incommensurables, which she frames in terms of the attempt

49 50 51

See also Jameson’s 1987 address ‘The State of the Subject’. Schwarz 2001, p. 49. Jameson 1986, p. 68.

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to render the untranslatable in translated form. Accordingly, ‘I have been left uneasy in the face of the entrepreneurial, bulimic drive to anthologize and curricularize the world’s cultural resources, as evinced in projects sponsored by some proponents of World Literature … [which] fall prey inevitably to the tendency to zoom over the speed bumps of untranslatability in the rush to cover ground’.52 In many ways Ahmad is obviously a very different thinker to Apter. Yet, as Neil Lazarus has pointed out,53 although Ahmad’s intellectual background is Marxist, part of what distinguishes his critique of Jameson is the fact that he draws at key moments upon ideas which seem to run decidedly counter to Marxism’s holistic inclinations. It is on the basis of this strand that his famous attack on Jameson can be seen as anticipating a framework fundamentally similar to that which Apter will employ some thirty years later. Some of the terms of Ahmad’s ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory” ’ are, in short, largely comparable with Apter’s critique of world literature as such: theoretical abstraction, the intellectual homogenisation of empirical difference, lack of sufficient respect for local specificity, and epistemological imperialism. Or as Ahmad puts it, ‘there are fundamental issues – of periodisation, social and linguistic formations, political and ideological struggles within the field of literary production, and so on – which simply cannot be resolved at this level of generality without an altogether positivist reductionism’.54 Apter’s construction of world literature as the attempt to ‘anthologize and curricularize the world’s cultural resources’, can be seen to echo Ahmad’s own attack on the globalising pretensions of the US intellectual: ‘the particular energy of his text … takes him deep into the third world, valorizing it, asserting it, foliating himself with it, as against the politically dominant and determinant of his own country’.55 Thus, although there are also important elements which distinguish Ahmad from Apter (Ahmad, for instance, does not object to translation as such but rather to inadequate or insufficient translation, nor does he object to the use of a global or worldly epistemological framework per se), there are also crucial elements which are shared. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that Jameson and the Ahmad affair can be seen as constituting a significant influence exercising a largely unconscious structuring role in the development of Apter’s critique

52 53 54 55

Apter 2013, p. 3. Lazarus 2004, pp. 46–62. Ahmad 1987, p. 4. Ahmad 1987, p. 24.

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of the conceptual norms of world literature. And the idea of the major rupture within the humanities constituted by the Ahmad affair as playing this anticipatory role can then be extended beyond the important example of Apter to some of the major fault lines of world literary debate more broadly. The emergent world literary paradigm which is at work in Jameson’s essay well ahead of its emergence into widespread critical discussion, combined with its confrontation with the Ahmad critique based in the more established paradigms of postcolonialism, played a key role in laying groundwork that would be followed by numerous later critical interactions and confrontations. For instance, Timothy J. Reiss’s identification of the central problems which have tended to structure world literary debate contains distinct echoes of the issues which are first raised between Ahmad and Jameson: ‘trying to understand cultures in their own terms as wholes’,56 ‘the blindness of critics to their own historical situation and to the historical determinants of their chosen cultural object’,57 ‘the Western dilemma … using instruments presupposing confrontation, separateness and isolation, how are the spaces between cultural places to be bridged?’,58 ‘issues of who maps whom’.59 The same echoes can be heard again in Apter’s own statement that ‘homogenizing difference, flattening forms, and minimizing cultural untranslatability, these are familiar critiques leveled at World Literature’.60 In a similar vein Jernej Habjan has argued that the heated reception generated by Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ essentially reruns the controversies initially generated around Jameson’s essay: ‘the responses to distant reading have been unrelenting dismissals seemingly reminiscent of, and often even reminiscing, what is rightfully Ahmad’s most influential … intervention into literary studies: his critique of Jameson’s “ThirdWorldism”’.61 In short, a powerful case can be made that although many of the more simplistic debates arising from the much vaunted controversy around Jameson’s essay have now become outdated, one of its major consequences whose significance is still ongoing is its deep structural impact on the development of world literature as a contestatory theoretical field. As Silvia L. López states, ‘the well-known debate between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad … may seem like old history. However, it may be worth remembering and resituat-

56 57 58 59 60 61

Reiss 2004, p. 111. Reiss 2004, p. 118. Reiss 2004, p. 122. Reiss 2004, p. 143. Apter 2013, p. 329. Habjan 2013, p. 3.

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ing it now when the discourses of globalization and the bioconcept of “empire” seem to fold all cultural problematics into themselves’.62

2

Jameson and Uneven and Combined Development

At this point I have attempted to establish the extent of the significance which Jameson’s geopolitics potentially possess within the contemporary field of world literature. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to a further and more detailed exploration of this significance, making use of Jameson’s relationship with the concept of uneven and combined development. For it is my contention that Jameson’s configuration of U&CD is an important aspect of his oeuvre, and again one whose complexities have not previously been widely recognised. In particular I would argue that the nature of Jameson’s interaction with U&CD, and the changes which that interaction has undergone throughout his career, express something centrally important about his relationship with the historical development of neoliberal globalisation, and particularly about the connection between U&CD and the contemporary incarnation of capitalist globalisation as it exists today. This argument will focus in particular on the relationship between Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and Leon Trotsky’s conception of uneven and combined development which exists in Jameson’s construction of the cultural spaces which he variously terms peripheral, backwards and thirdworld. Since the publication of Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ in 2000 the relationship between world literature and world-systems theory has obviously been a key area of critical enquiry. The subsequent rise of uneven and combined development in the political and social sciences, and the addition of works like Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature to the field, has codified uneven and combined development as an alternative conceptual foundation for world literary analysis. The relationship between these two political frameworks – be it constructed on complementary or competing terms – has thus become an engaging question within world literature as a whole, and it is this fundamentally interdisciplinary relationship which, I believe, is incarnated in particularly meaningful ways in Jameson’s thought. Key to understanding the intricacies of the connection between Wallerstein and Trotsky in Jameson is the connection between two texts. The first is ‘Third

62

López 2005, p. 242.

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World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ – his most significant early attempt to incorporate the culture of capitalism’s peripheral regions into a global cognitive map. The second is the reformulation of that same project 16 years later in A Singular Modernity, which constructs contemporary ideas about global modernity in terms of ‘worldwide capitalism itself. The standardization projected by capitalist globalization in this third or late stage of the system’.63 When Jameson writes on the subject of third-world literature in 1986 his cultural analysis (anticipating Moretti, as I have argued) is based fairly unequivocally upon Wallerstein’s world-systems theory: ‘explained in terms of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system terminology’.64 Yet by the time of A Singular Modernity in 2002, it is my position that a significant shift has occurred. Although Trotsky is not mentioned by name, the terminology of advancement and backwardness is employed so heavily in descriptions of the relationship between nation state and world system that the idea of a shift towards Trotsky’s description of uneven and combined development (most notably of course in The History of the Russian Revolution)65 becomes unavoidable. Wallerstein, meanwhile, has largely receded from view. In this sense A Singular Modernity joins a group of other classic texts of Marxist cultural theory which appear to deploy the figure of U&CD without actually naming it, meaning that the power and influence of the idea in cultural theory has often been less immediately apparent than it deserves to be.66 But how significant is this idea of specific technical shift within Jameson’s wider movement from the postmodernist paradigm of the 1980s to the discourse of global modernity in the 2000s? Perhaps not very. Perhaps Jameson employs both world-systems theory and uneven and combined development as floating signifiers and therefore as largely interchangeable terms. The construction of third-world nationalism in Jameson’s third-world literature essay certainly contains a strong sense of the revolutionary potential of backwardness within the world system as a whole which accords closely with the radicalism inherent in Trotsky’s theory,67 and arguably A Singular Modernity could 63 64 65 66

67

Jameson 2002, p. 12. Jameson 1986, p. 78. See Trotsky 1934. See, for instance, the concluding chapter of Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973), which similarly seems to reveal U&CD as a key conceptual framework behind the book, if not a terminological one. The same point could be made of several of Jameson’s other Third Worldist texts of this period, such as ‘Periodizing the 60s’ of 1984, and ‘On Magic Realism in Film’ of 1986. In particular the foreword to Karatani displays a clear engagement with the ideas of both global modernity and uneven and combined development, arguing for Japanese culture

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similarly be re-inscribed in Wallersteinian rather than Trotskyian terms relatively simply. Similarly one might well argue that U&CD is already present in Jameson’s work on postmodernism in the 1980s, with Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) repeatedly making assertions regarding the combined character of capitalist modernity. If a shift is to be identified, therefore, it cannot be a matter of hard or clear-cut breaks. Rather, such a view must emphasise a transition of emphasis and subtle inversion of dominant frameworks. Yet to recognise no change at all, I would argue, might well be viewed simply as marking a poverty of conceptual rigour. The paucity of terminological discipline, while potentially liberating, might also be perceived as ultimately marking a limitation on Jameson’s standing. At the very least this is a position which, I suspect, scholars who approach these terms from the fields of political science and international relations (from which of course they ultimately originate) might adopt. World systems theory and uneven and combined development? Well, which is it? They are different theories with definitively different structures, and to conflate them under the rubric of cultural analysis in this way simply marks an absence of sufficient sociological and historical precision. It is for this reason, I would suggest, that the idea of a fundamental – if not always unambiguous – distinction between two stages within Jameson’s career offers a productive conceptual framework. What is then required in order to situate Jameson’s incorporation of these political concepts within a genuinely interdisciplinary framework that effectively accommodates cultural analysis and political theory, is a historical explanation for the transition from worldsystems theory as the dominant paradigm in ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ to the dominance of uneven and combined development in A Singular Modernity. The key question, in other words, is can a specific, concrete social and political change in Jameson’s object of analysis between 1986 and 2002 be identified which might provide a grounding framework for the occurrence of this technical shift in his theory? It is my position that such a concrete historical rationale can indeed be identified. ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ is based on a seemingly absolute epistemological rift between first world and third. For Jameson at this point in time the capitalist world system as a whole is thus subject to an irreducible rupture between its dominating and dominated regions. The key consequence of this is that, despite their co-existence within a single

as being defined by the fact that ‘in Japan these stages have been compressed into a century’ (Jameson 1993, p. ix).

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global framework, the third world comes to be constructed as a political and social space which is still able to preserve an existence outside the limits of the kind of total capitalism formulated in the postmodern first world: ‘the space that remains somehow untainted by and oppositional to those repressive social processes which have homogenized the real and imaginative terrain of the “First World” subject’.68 This is the ambiguity of Jameson’s identification of the third world as existing simultaneously within and outside the allencompassing logic of late capitalism. Again, the refusal to bridge this division in anything other than a highly provisional manner is a feature of Jameson’s argument which was earlier highlighted in Ahmad’s critique: ‘one could start from a radically different premise, namely the proposition that we live not in three worlds but in one … that societies in formations of backward capitalism are as much constituted by the division of classes as are societies in the advanced capitalist countries’.69 It is within the context of this division that Jameson then reaches for Wallerstein’s distinction between core and periphery. World systems theory is thus employed here in a way that reflects its relatively static conception of the core-periphery opposition, emphasising its focus on the slow, gradual evolution of the world system over long waves lasting centuries. William Robinson, for instance, highlights the sense in which world-systems theory is based in an experience of immovability: ‘the core-periphery divide as a territorial and specifically as a nation-state divide is immanent to world capitalism and an immutable structure from the world-systems perspective’.70 The structure itself is immutable, and the positions occupied within that structure shift only at a pace which is slow enough that it largely fails to register at an immediate or aesthetic level (instead only being representable through the abstract theorisation of ‘long waves’ of history). It is this focus on a predominantly spatial experience (Neil Brenner, in reference to Wallerstein, calls it ‘the spatial extension of social interdependencies on a worldwide scale’)71 which is then reflected in Jameson’s relatively static conception of the gap between the opposed regions of the world system; what Wallerstein himself terms ‘one capitalist economic system with different sectors performing different functions’.72 At this point, therefore, the separation between first-world subject and third-world text can only be overcome for Jameson through a utopian act of imagination which 68 69 70 71 72

Colás 1992, p. 258. Ahmad 1987, p. 9. Robinson 2011, p. 740; original emphasis. Brenner 2011, p. 104. Wallerstein 1979, p. 68; original emphasis.

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operates in pointed contrast to the historical reality: ‘utopias, no matter how serene or disembodied, are driven secretly by the satirist’s rage at a fallen reality’.73 However, it is precisely this gap, which in the mid-1980s appeared so stable, that is at least partially closed in A Singular Modernity; a closure which is then marked by the move from world-systems theory to uneven and combined development. Picking through the admitted verbal and theoretical complexities of Jameson’s later book, it is clear that the emphasis is no longer placed on an unbridgeable rift but rather on a singular and continually shifting network of international relationships, or continual ‘moments of radical structural change’.74 The underlying significance of the switch to the language of ‘uneven development’ on a ‘world scale’,75 ‘unevenness of development’,76 living ‘in two distinct worlds simultaneously’,77 the combination of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’78 nations, and an ‘aesthetic “uneven development” on a world scale’79 is that it marks the transformation of the relationship between first and third worlds from one of distance to one of integration. The conceptual framework of uneven and combined development thus allows Jameson to move towards a changed understanding of capitalist imperialism in which dominated and dominating regions, rather than existing in a state of geographical and cultural polarisation, continually interpenetrate each other. Modernity is emphasised as a unifying, rather than a fragmentary phenomenon: ‘all the viable nationstates in the world today have long since been “modern” in every conceivable sense’.80 This continuity is then reflected in the replacement of the ruptures which marked the earlier, third-worldist model of cultural analysis by a conception of modernism as a globally continuous cultural form. The static, spatial emphasis of world-systems theory as it is employed in the postmodernist paradigm of ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ is thus replaced by the predominantly temporal sense of an endlessly dynamic and changing modernity supported by Trotsky’s more fluid conceptualisation of international relations. In this sense Jameson’s implicit turn to Trotsky can be seen as being motivated by Trotsky’s ability to account for this underlying sense of temporal and spatial interconnectedness; what Justin 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

Jameson 1986, p. 80. Jameson 2002, p. 68. Jameson 2002, p. 37. Jameson 2002, p. 180. Jameson 2002, p. 142. Jameson 2002, p. 103. Jameson 2002, p. 167. Jameson 2002, p. 8.

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Rosenberg refers to as a ‘“real-time simultaneity” between societies which is the effect not just of interconnection per se, but rather of its altered social form’.81 Or, in Trotsky’s own famous designation of this compression of the unequal relationships between the different regions of the capitalist world system, ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’.82 The crucial question, though, is why this change of emphasis occurs. In other words, does there exist a historical backdrop which is capable of accounting for this movement from a model based in Wallerstein’s world-systems theory to one based in Trotsky’s uneven and combined development? Can this theoretical shift be located in any concrete changes within the structure of globalisation itself, which might thus serve to give it a more rigorous material grounding? I have argued elsewhere that the full significance of Jameson’s theoretical construction of third-world literature can only be understood by reconstructing the essay’s relationship with its own wider historical conjuncture.83 Specifically I have claimed that one must reconstruct Jameson’s own biographical relationship with American foreign policy during the Reagan era. In this sense the rift which is posited in his model between first and third worlds, and the consequent location of third-world culture partially outside the limits of global capitalism, is motivated by Jameson’s interaction with socialist states such as Cuba and Nicaragua where precisely this attempt to preserve a non-capitalist form of existence in the face of a US-led global capitalist imperialism was being carried out, and indeed was being actively perpetuated by the policy and rhetoric of the Reagan administration. The use of world-systems theory – characterised by relative stasis and a consequently deep rooted sense of polarisation – can thus be seen as emerging from the concrete situation of the early and mid-1980s, which were marked by this entrenchment of the Cold War’s opposition between US and Soviet power. This line of argument can then be extended further forward in time in order to account for the later evolution of Jameson’s geopolitical theory. For the change which occurs in Jameson’s theoretical model between 1986 and 2002 reflects a much wider change in the structure of American global power itself. Most significantly of course the Berlin Wall was brought crashing down in 1989, marking in irreducibly material form the collapse of the previously immutable boundary which had previously hived off an alternative to US capitalism’s worldwide jurisdiction. The symbolic erosion of that anterior space therefore 81 82 83

Rosenberg 2007, p. 466; original emphasis. Trotsky 1934, p. 27. See Christie 2015.

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offers a material foundation for the movement away from Wallersteinian deep structural divisions. The subsequent development of globalisation throughout the 1990s then means that the third-world nation state consequently loses much of its utopian potential as a space outside of, and resistant to, American power. All of the third-world states which had previously been under socialistic forms of government largely shed their revolutionary credentials, with the single exception of Cuba which was forced into a purely defensive isolationism. The replacement of a world geography of absolute rupture by one of ever closer integration between dominated and dominating regions is therefore a historical development within the progress of neoliberal globalisation which can be seen to exercise a direct and formative impact on the development of Jameson’s thinking. Especially significant in this regard is the model of free trade which played a central role in the reconstruction of the relationship between the USA and the third world following the collapse of Soviet power. Throughout the 1990s the ideology of distance, opposition and moral conflict which facilitated America’s domination of the third world during the Reagan era was replaced by the narrative of free trade utopianism. Instead of the characterisation of Soviet influences in Nicaragua or Cuba or Afghanistan as an evil ‘other’ which must be vanquished, American power and economic interest was instead justified by an idea of universal integration in which, as Anwar Shaikh puts it, ‘if markets were allowed to function without restraint, they would optimally serve all economic needs, efficiently utilise all economic resources and automatically generate full employment for persons who truly wish to work. By extension, the globalisation of markets would be the best way to extend these benefits to the whole world’.84 This replacement of an ideology of opposition by one of integration was then given material form through free trade agreements such as the NAFTA deal between the USA, Mexico and Canada signed in 1992, and the MAI deal which was subject to high-profile negotiations throughout the 1990s. At an ideological level such agreements obviously accorded with the ideals of nineteenthcentury liberal economics. They sought to remove restrictions on the equalising force of trade between powerful and peripheral nations including tariffs, taxes and union power, under the supposedly disinterested, market-led jurisdiction of newly empowered administrative bodies such as the IMF. Yet in practice, as numerous commentators have pointed out, the result was a restructuring of the inequality between dominated and dominating regions, rather than its

84

Shaikh 2005, p. 41.

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erasure. The non-capitalist regions of the third world were indeed finally fully integrated into the capitalist world system during the 1990s, but primarily as the site for exploitation and the accumulation of surplus value by predominantly US interests. As David Harvey states, any social formation or territory that is brought or inserts itself into the logic of capitalist development must undergo wide-ranging structural, institutional, and legal changes of the sort that Marx describes under the rubric of primitive accumulation. The collapse of the Soviet Union posed exactly this problem. The result was a savage episode of primitive accumulation under the heading of ‘shock therapy’ as advised by the capitalist powers and international institutions.85 This is also the understanding of globalisation which Joseph Stiglitz, speaking as a somewhat regretful former insider of the Clinton administration, has popularised: ‘part of the problem lies with the international economic institutions, with the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, which help set the rules of the game. They have done so in ways that, all too often, have served the interests of the more advanced industrialized countries – and particular interests within those countries – rather than those of the developing world’.86 Indeed, Jameson places this dynamic at the centre of his own work on globalisation during the 1990s, stating that ‘the more distinctively postmodern form of imperialism – even of cultural imperialism – is the one I have been describing, working through the projects of NAFTA, GATT, MAI and the WTO’.87 It is in A Singular Modernity, though, where this restructuring of global capitalism and American power explicitly registers in Jameson’s thinking in terms of uneven and combined development. What this later book reflects, therefore, is the extent to which the emergence of the free trade agenda of the 1990s can be described in terms of Trotsky’s theory. The collapse of the distance between the most advanced countries of the capitalist world and its peripheral, non-capitalist regions closely corresponds to the compression of advanced and backwards regions into a single spatial and temporal framework. The violently disorienting experience of the third-world nations that were subject to IMF’s structural adjustment programmes – or Harvey’s ‘shock therapy’88 – during this 85 86 87 88

Harvey 2005, p. 153. Stiglitz 2002, p. 214. Jameson 2000, p. 54. Harvey 2005, p. 153.

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period essentially echoes the description which Trotsky developed in the context of revolutionary Russia. It is that of the backward national space thrust into immediate contact with an advanced economic formation in a way that forces it to adopt the economic imperatives of advancement while simultaneously keeping it in a state of backwardness.89 As Jameson himself puts it, ‘you can still suggest that the so-called underdeveloped countries might want to look forward to simple “modernity” itself … what is encouraged is the illusion that the West has something no one else possesses – but which they ought to desire for themselves’.90 In this sense Jameson reflects the argument which has been presented, for instance, by Andreas Bieler. Bieler claims that the rationale of global free trade in general, and the intense form in which it as practised in the 1990s in particular, corresponds directly to Trotsky’s conception of international relations. Hence ‘this situation heralds a new, third period reconstituting the relationships of unequal exchange between spaces of the global political economy as a result of continuing and intensified uneven development’.91 For Beiler, consequently, it is the late, neoliberal stage of free trade dissemination which marks the true coming of age of Trotsky’s theoretical model: ‘how unequal exchange in “free trade” relations may be a key dynamic relating to overall processes of uneven and combined development’.92 From this perspective Jameson’s theorisation of modernity as the paradoxical re-emergence of incompleteness within the age of capitalist apotheosis, and its correlative in a globalised aesthetic modernism which ‘is very precisely a mode in which this transitional economic structure of incomplete capitalism can be registered and identified’93 can thus be seen as a direct response to wider developments in the structure of neoliberal globalisation. What A Singular Modernity thus marks is the deep affinity which exists between the current, late stage of the history of globalisation, the temporality of which can ironically be defined by regression, deterioration and a consequent sense of agedness, and the theoretical framework provided by U&CD. World systems theory and uneven and combined development should therefore not be seen as interchangeable terms within Jameson’s cultural analysis. Rather they belong to distinct if closely related historical conjunctures, marking a subtle response to the

89 90 91 92 93

See Jameson’s discussion of India in Valences of the Dialectic, pp. 41–2, for a particular national illustration of this process. Jameson 2002, p. 8. Bieler 2014, p. 42. Bieler 2014, p. 36. Jameson 2002, p. 142.

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material restructurings which took place between the use of the first model in 1986 and the second in 2002. As a consequence it becomes clear that Jameson does not appropriate either of these political frameworks in an ungrounded fashion: there is instead a dense sociological and political derivation which marks his engagement with world literature as a genuinely interdisciplinary conjunction of political and cultural theory.

part 4 Reading under the Sign of Uneven and Combined Development

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chapter 7

Late Capitalism in Contemporary Fiction Robert Spencer

Peter Boxall’s brilliantly suggestive essay on ‘Late: Fictional Time in the TwentyFirst Century’ argues that there is a connection between the late style of contemporary novelists such as Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, James Kelman, J.G. Ballard and J.M. Coetzee and what he calls late modernity. Theirs is work, Boxall argues, that conveys a sense of exhaustion and completion though definitely not of triumph or consummation, registering as it does, though in different ways and through various forms, the obsolescence of the older narratives of progress that were formerly used to make sense of the passage of time. These novels are often related from the point of view of narrators who are posthumous in some way, being of advanced years, incapacitated or actually deceased. Past-haunted, elegiac, angry, bitter, fixated with failure and with betrayed ideals and unrealised possibilities, these chroniclers of decline and disaster recapitulate their concluded or fast-shortening lives from the standpoint of their own deaths. Yet for Boxall this unflinching perspective on failure and on expiring time additionally illuminates the similarly miscarried and broken down epoch through which these writers have lived, which is also now breathing its last: ‘the disjointed temporal condition articulated in [Roth’s] late works’, for example, ‘is a historically specific one – one produced by both the turning phases of his career and by the particular historical forces operating in the twentieth century’.1 But what exactly are those ‘forces’? According to Boxall, novels such as DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) and Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost (2007) show that hitherto dominant ways of making sense of the past and of the past’s relationship with the present and with the future are no longer available to us. Yet they also contain tentative or oblique prophecies and explorations of new futures and even a new awareness or model of time. This ‘historically transitional mood’,2 in Boxall’s words, this ‘dissolving boundary between two temporal regimes’,3 is the result of these writers’ efforts to situate themselves in relation to the new century or even in relation to a perceived crisis in their relationship with modernity. Euphemisms aside, 1 Boxall 2012, p. 705. 2 Boxall 2012, p. 697. 3 Boxall 2012, p. 699.

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however, I believe it can be shown that in fact what is registered very powerfully in such works (and with comparable intensity in work from other parts of the globe) is a potentially terminal crisis in the contradictory and uneven process of a specifically capitalist modernity. It feels quixotic to put things so bluntly, but it is nonetheless in my view true that what these novels dramatise, at the level of their forms just as much as at the level of their content, is a prolonged and global and ultimately irresolvable crisis in the capitalist mode of production itself. They enjoin us to take seriously the idea that we are in the midst of ‘a transition in which the entire capitalist world-system will be transformed into something else’,4 as Immanuel Wallerstein puts it. Nothing lies in store for the world economy but slow growth, the piling up of debt, increasing inequality and further financial meltdowns. We are faced with what Andrew Gamble calls a ‘crisis without end’, the 2008 crash in his view being a structural and even existential rather than merely cyclical crisis.5 The bursting of speculative bubbles since 2008, along with the increasingly apparent ecological constraints to continuous capital accumulation, the final integration of the whole globe into a world market and the growth of active political opposition to this process, all mean that there may be no longer-term capitalist solution to this deep-rooted crisis. Neoliberalism, itself a counter-revolutionary effort to restore class and state power after the crisis of profitability with which the world-economy was assailed in the early 1970s, is bankrupt and discredited. Persistent stagnation and crisis are not the exception but the rule under what Ernest Mandel might turn out after all to have been quite correct to call late capitalism: ‘late’ not as in advanced or mature, which is what Mandel meant by the term, but rather ‘late’ as in full-grown, archaic, senescent and decrepit: ‘late’ because, touch wood, it is finally on the way out. If we are to explain what it is that makes novels by the likes of Kelman or Roth late then we need to look not, as Boxall does, at what their works have to say about a ‘transitional mood’ or, as most critics interested in particular writers’ late styles do, at the relatively uninteresting (at least for us) fact that the writer in question has reached the last phase of his life.6 We should examine instead their works’ relation to the perceived dilapidation of capitalism itself. If the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) is right, which I believe they are, in arguing that world-literature is ‘literature that “registers” the (modern capitalist) world-system’,7 then we scholars of contemporary world-literature need 4 5 6 7

Wallerstein 2003, p. 46. Gamble 2014, p. 6. See Said 2006. WReC 2015, p. 20.

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to go slightly further and state that the prolonged and now intensifying crisis in the capitalist world-system in recent decades has given rise, in all corners of the globe, to works that do as ever register that system’s congenital unevenness, as WReC contend, but that also reveal and explore that system’s increasing obsolescence as well. World-literature today, in short, is literature that registers the moribundity of the (modern capitalist) world-system. Contemporary fiction dramatises a sense of that system’s exhaustion therefore, but also, as a result, a simultaneous awareness of the emergence and availability of social and economic alternatives. It demonstrates, in David Alderson’s words, ‘that any progressive side to capitalism has long since played itself out’ and that the way has therefore been opened to ‘other narratives of progress’ and ‘other ways of making history’.8 These works are products of an ‘age of transition’,9 as Wallerstein calls it, of ‘capitalism’s last stand’ as the Filipino sociologist Walden Bello10 puts it more bluntly, or of the ‘apocalyptic zero-point’ of the global capitalist system, as Slavoj Žižek11 puts it more bluntly still. I am endeavouring to show how literary critics might start to respond to very topical concerns about the demise of capitalism and the prospect and shape of a putatively ‘postcapitalist’ social and economic order.12

1

Unevenness and Lateness

We should remind ourselves that Trotsky’s major contribution to Marxist political economy is a concept that makes a claim specifically about the nature and form of development. Under capitalism, development is, in a word, uneven.13 Trotsky’s somewhat scattered and unsystematic work on ‘combined and uneven development’ discusses the ways in which development is often undertaken in ‘backward’ economies by the ‘whip of external necessity’.14 Develop-

8 9 10 11 12 13

14

Alderson 2011, p. 235. See Wallerstein 2003. See Bello 2013. Žižek 2010, p. x. See Mason 2015 and Srnicek and Williams 2015. Ronald H. Chilcote (2009) has wondered whether the claim ventured in the 1960s by Latin American dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank that imperialism impeded development in dependent economies, in other words that development and underdevelopment were interlaced, was in part influenced by Trotsky’s thinking on this point. Trotsky of course spent his final years in Mexico and thought deeply about Latin America at that time. Trotsky 1934, p. 27.

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ment in such places, he argues, is rapid and uneven, usually calamitous and chaotic. This is because capitalisation, commodity production, technological innovations and new forms of social relationship are introduced, as it were, from the outside, hurriedly and in ways that do not supplant but rather exist alongside the quite different values, structures and forms of production carried on by the social orders that have been unceremoniously assailed in this way. For in WReC’s words, ‘capitalist development does not smooth away but rather produces unevenness, systematically and as a matter of course’.15 At best, a privileged section of society will benefit from this new commodity economy while the majority will subsist on its fringes. The economic structures, cultural assumptions and technological paraphernalia of monopoly capitalism will therefore coexist, incongruously and shockingly but in ways that are quite essential to the effective functioning of subordinate or peripheral economic formations, with what are essentially pre-capitalist cultures, technologies and forms of production. Hence the prevalence in Trotsky’s writing, particularly in the celebrated first chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, of those characteristic images of archaic agriculture cheek by jowl with modern largescale industry, of ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’.16 Development in economies like the ones Trotsky is describing is, first of all, intimately connected to the process of accumulation in more advanced capitalist economies. But development there is also profoundly lop-sided, in Russia before the revolution because the bourgeoisie was too weak to dismantle the feudal structures of Tsarism, and in colonised countries because the colonial powers have an interest not in enabling late developers to catch up but, to the contrary, in retarding and distorting the later starters’ development so that those economies will remain exporters of commodities and suppliers of cheap labour. As the Trotskyist Mandel explains: The historical specificity of imperialism in this respect lies in the fact that although it unites the world economy into a single world market, it does not unify world society into a homogeneous capitalist milieu. Although monopoly capital succeeds in extracting super-profits, directly or indirectly, out of most of the people on earth, it does not transform most people in the world into industrial producers of surplus-value. In short: although it submits all classes and all nations (except those which have

15 16

WReC 2015, p. 12; original emphasis. Trotsky 1934, p. 27.

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broken out of its realm) to various forms of common exploitation, it maintains and strengthens to the utmost the differences between those societies.17 Mandel’s is a neat summary of the claim that capitalist development is invariably jagged and uneven, with two qualifications: firstly, that of course no classes or nations have yet fully broken away from it, and secondly, that monopoly capital strengthens the differences between and within societies. With the rise and entrenchment of imperialism as the means by which dominant economies control and retard the development of peripheral economies the globe is integrated in a single world market. But that singular system is also inescapably heterogeneous, variegated and unequal. As Mandel puts it elsewhere, ‘[i]n the imperialist epoch, the Marxist evolutionary schema, according to which the advanced nations hold up to the more underdeveloped the image of their own future, is turned into its opposite. Imperialism blocks the radical modernization and industrialization of the underdeveloped countries’.18 Indeed for most of the Marxist literature on late capitalism, including Mandel’s seminal 1972 study Der Spätkapitalismus, late capitalism is late because of the unprecedentedly acute and intolerable nature of this very contradiction between development and under-development. Mandel ascribes the ‘long wave’ of postwar accumulation, which it is his book’s task to explain, to such factors as the revolution in technology, mass consumption, the expansion of global markets, the strengthening of the state and the rise of the multinational corporation. Yet Mandel characterises late capitalism not as an epoch of progress but one of explosive contradictions. Late capitalism is the era in which the contradiction between development and under-development or between unparalleled technological progress and a frustrating absence of social progress, great wealth and inordinate poverty, growth and stagnation, becomes truly scandalous and, Mandel hopes, intolerable. Late capitalism is capitalism in its mature or ideal form therefore, a state in which the forces of production and the relations of production are flagrantly at odds.19 17 18 19

Mandel 1970, p. 22; original emphasis. Mandel 1995, p. 1. Mandel is not arguing that capitalism was clapped out, but rather that in its late, or latest, form capitalism’s contradictions were exceptionally acute, barefaced and objectionable. Mandel acknowledged that capitalism might get a second, third or even fourth or fifth lease of life. His Long Waves of Capitalist Development, the last chapter in particular, analyses the political and economic means by which capitalism might enter on a new period of growth and profitability in the 1980s and 90s. The extraordinary prescience of his analysis can be seen in Mandel’s belief that a renewed phase of accumulation in the world

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Late capitalism is the epoch in the history of the development of the capitalist mode of production in which the contradiction between the growth of the forces of production and the survival of the capitalist relations of production assumes an explosive form. This contradiction leads to a spreading crisis of these relations of production.20 If we wish to conclude with Trotsky that development under capitalism is unavoidably incomplete, then we would do well to remind ourselves of the claim first ventured by the immensely productive Monthly Review strain of American Marxist economic theory, particularly Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, that stagnation is the default condition of advanced capitalism.21 Capitalism has always already outlived the heroic ideals of its youth (the universal realisation of liberty, equality and fraternity), but in Baran and Sweezy’s account it gets older and later still. They argue that a monopolycapitalist economy is unable to absorb its enormous and increasing surplus of capital through the usual channels of investment and consumption.22 This dearth of opportunities for profitable investment leads to lower incomes, unemployment and depression, which exacerbate the problem of surplus absorption and in turn give rise to expedient but ultimately ineffective stimulants like military spending, the growth of consumer debt and speculative

20

21 22

economy could only take place with the aid of a ‘worldwide offensive of capital against labor started under the sign of so-called austerity policies’, Mandel 1980, p. 112. Mandel 1975, p. 562. In his primer on Marxist economic theory, Mandel states that the ‘supreme contradiction of the capitalist system’ is ‘that between the effective socialisation of production and the private, capitalist form of appropriation’, Mandel 1968, p. 170; original emphasis. Production was becoming increasingly cooperative and sophisticated, in addition to being owned or at least underwritten and often controlled by the state. Ownership was still private meanwhile and the proceeds of accumulation were thus unequally distributed. Baran and Sweezy 1966, p. 108. According to Marx’s argument in the third volume of Capital about the ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall’, all crises result from the system’s tendency to accumulate capital beyond its own means of investing it. The argument is that rising productivity and the labour-saving tendency of technological progress mean that ‘constant capital’ grows more rapidly than ‘variable capital’. The ultimate cause of all crises (of over-production and under-consumption) is then the tendency of capital to grow beyond the means of investing it. In other words, more capital has been accumulated than can be profitably realised. The accumulation of capital therefore makes further accumulation more difficult so that periodic crises are inevitable. Indeed the whole purpose of the third volume of Capital is to show that capitalism is intrinsically or immanently prone to repeated crisis. In short, capital does not so much encounter limits as constitute its own limit: ‘The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself ’, Marx 1981, pp. 350, 358; original emphasis.

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finance. The financialisation of Western capitalism over the last four decades has therefore been only one response to, and is a phenomenon that must therefore be seen in the context of, the crisis of profitability that assailed the worldeconomy towards the end of the 1960s. Financialisation is a ‘sign of autumn’ in Fernand Braudel’s extremely useful and evocative phrase,23 a mark not of the strength but of the barely concealed weakness – that is, the increasing propensity to crisis – as well as the ultimate demise of the capitalist mode of production itself. Answering the question about how that system has become ‘weak’, how in order to continue to accumulate capital it has resorted in the last four decades to various wars against organised labour and to all manner of complicated speculative activities, is my next task. To be brief, I am pointing to what Immanuel Wallerstein calls, quite simply, the increasing difficulty that capitalists have in accumulating capital, at least within the territorial and political constraints of the US-centred regime of accumulation that has prevailed since the Second World War.24 Giovanni Arrighi has provided the most compelling and original analysis of how the larger global crisis of the 1970s has meant the onset of autumn in the world-economy. His narrative is without doubt an extremely complicated and multifaceted one but world history since the 1970s, if we are to believe Arrighi, is effectively the story of ruling elites’ concerted (but ultimately fruitless) efforts to combat a global crisis of profitability. The great strength of Arrighi’s work, especially The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and Adam Smith in Beijing (2007), his magisterial surveys of the expansive and uneven process of capitalist development, is that it not only addresses the most recent (as well as ongoing and also intensifying) crisis in the global economy but also manages to place that crisis in the context of the longer history of capitalism’s development and expansion. The Long Twentieth Century begins by tracing the successive cycles of accumulation from the European Renaissance to what Arrighi characterises as ‘the terminal crisis of US financial centrality and hegemony’.25 In the longue durée of capitalist development first Genoa (in alliance with the armed power of Portugal and Spain) and then the Netherlands, Britain and most recently the US have all presided over significant phases of material expansion in the world economy. Each hegemon has eventually succumbed first to structural weaknesses, then to a process of financial speculation, and finally to exhaustion and consequently the emergence of another hegemonic power able to renew the process of expansion on an even larger 23 24 25

Quoted in Arrighi 2010, p. 6. Wallerstein 2013. Arrighi 2009, p. 90.

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scale. The tendency for the accumulation of capital to outstrip what can be reinvested profitably within existing territorial systems results in idle liquidity and productive capacity. New hegemons then come into being with the financial and military capacity to preside over a further period of expansion. Debt forgiveness and Marshall Plan aid revived global effective demand after the Second World War and allowed American manufacturing to dominate the world market. Yet the US was assailed in the 1960s by intensified competition from Japan and West Germany, powers resurrected for political reasons by the United States’ own largesse in the years after the Second World War. Additionally, ruling classes throughout the first world were beset during the ‘golden age’ of capitalism in the three decades after the Second World War after 1945 by pressures exerted by a working class insistent, after its experience of depression and world war, on employment and extensive social services. The class war waged on trade unions and on welfare states in the 1980s in addition to the return of mass unemployment succeeded, for the time being, in reducing the capacity of organised labour to eat into corporate profits. The last four decades have therefore witnessed an effectively counter-revolutionary effort to revive profitability worldwide. The phenomena that we associate with the class war waged by the New Right to increase the freedom of capital by crushing the rights, traditions and bargaining power of labour in the so-called first world, such as mass unemployment, privatisation, low corporate taxation, the restriction of civil liberties and trade union rights, the growth of both public and private debt, the vast increase in speculative financial activities and so on, ought to be enumerated in the same breath as the associated war waged by the masters of the universe and their local accomplices in the so-called third world. The immiseration of the postcolonial world has been just one aspect of this ruling-class warfare. There the record includes the concerted sabotage and often overthrow of progressive governments as well as the effects of the ‘Washington consensus’ enforced by Western states, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These last have typically inflicted massive reductions in government spending on health, education and social provision, the removal of subsidies and tariff barriers, the deregulation of markets, the privatisation of state and parastatal industries and the removal of almost all restrictions on foreign investment. The result has been higher profits for the few but lower and sometimes negative rates of growth for the many as well as greater poverty and inequality. What is crucial to Arrighi’s account is the claim that these measures were responses to the protracted but terminal demise of the US-centred regime of accumulation. They are signs not of the system’s enduring strength but of its degeneration. Each of the phenomena that we associate with the neoliberal

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counter-revolution, which from one angle look like signs of the world-system’s strength or at least of a capitalism that is unimpeded and in the raw, such phenomena as financial speculation, the encouragement of a reserve army of unemployed workers in order to force down wages, the relocation of production to low-wage zones and so on, are in fact evidence of that system’s desperate and ultimately unavailing efforts to recover from the stagnation and the crisis of profitability that befell it forty odd years ago and from which it has yet to emerge. The crucial factor for Arrighi has been the increasing inability of the United States in the last four decades to control the expansion of the world economy. In fact those years have seen the decline of American economic centrality. The world’s most powerful nation, previously responsible for ensuring the system’s unprecedented growth in the decades after the Second World War, found itself from the 1970s onwards expanding debt and speculation instead in order to prevent a deep slump in the US itself. Neither growth nor a tolerably equitable kind of prosperity but instead extreme instability and equally acute levels of inequality have been the result at a global economic level. Arrighi returns time and again to two events in the 1970s that illustrated the precipitate collapse of US political and economic leadership: the defeat in Vietnam and the devaluation of the dollar under Nixon. The latter was the result of a fateful decision taken by the US government ‘to compete aggressively for capital worldwide, to finance a growing trade and current account deficit in its own balance of payments; thereby provoking … a major reversal in the direction of global capital flows’.26 From 1971 the dollar was no longer fixed to gold. Other currencies were no longer, through a system of fixed exchange rates, pegged to the dollar. What this means is that from being the world’s major source of direct investment the United States suddenly became ‘the world’s main debtor nation and by far the largest recipient of foreign capital’. Investment and demand were reflated in the United States and deflated almost everywhere else. The US was able to run massive deficits in its balance of trade, sucking in manufacturing imports but only at the expense of the permanent indebtedness of the state itself and of US consumers. Those parts of the globe that were well-positioned to compete for a share of expanding US demand, like China, prospered, others, like most of Africa, did not. The United States’ defeat in Vietnam, Arrighi argues, marked the weakening of that nation’s political hegemony just as surely as the ruinous expense of the war as well as the more or less simultaneous devaluation of the dollar and

26

Arrighi 2002, p. 21.

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the nation’s transformation into ‘the biggest debtor nation in world history’27 marked the waning of the US’s economic hegemony and of its profession to be able to ensure the continued expansion of the world economy. The defeat in Vietnam marked the ‘signal crisis’ of US hegemony. Thirty years later the defeat in Iraq marked its ‘terminal crisis’.28 The ‘Great Society’ programmes required to placate opposition to the war in Vietnam contributed to the empowerment of labour in the US and therefore to the squeeze on profits. The costs of the war also exacerbated the US’s fiscal crisis, leading to the devaluation of the dollar and the collapse of the US-led system of fixed exchange rates. The war in Vietnam proved ‘that in the global South the U.S. warfare-welfare state attained neither its social nor its political objectives … [;] the “Fair Deal” that Truman promised to the poor countries of the world in his 1949 inaugural address never materialized in an actual narrowing of the income gap that separated North and South’.29 The US-centric world-system certainly did not bring about the ‘improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas’ that Truman had forecast. To the contrary, that gap continued to widen. Arrighi therefore portrays the misadventure in Iraq as a last-ditch effort to reverse the verdict of the war in Vietnam, a failed gamble or ‘tactical move in a longer-term strategy aimed at using military might to establish U.S. control over the global oil spigot, and thus over the global economy, for another fifty years or more’.30 But the invasion of Iraq has not restored the credibility of the US’s armed power, alleviated its foreign indebtedness or prevented the emergence of viable alternatives to the dollar standard. The ignominious and ruinously expensive defeat in Iraq thirty years later indicated the definitive demise of this economic and political leadership role.31 Indebted and dependent, in hock to a reckless and unsustainable process of financialisation, resorting desperately to a ‘Project for a New American Century’ that nosedived almost as soon as it was launched, the US has succumbed in the 2000s to a series of catastrophic collapses, in its military prestige, in the Nasdaq and then much more disastrously in the housing market and ultimately, in what might prove to be the most calamitous failure of them all, in its pretension to exercise a kind of cultural or political hegemony. The last few years have witnessed the almost total discrediting across the globe of the United States’

27 28 29 30 31

Arrighi 2009, p. 83. Arrighi 2007, p. 185. Arrighi 2007, p. 155. Arrighi 2007, p. 190. The Costs of War Project, a team of legal experts, scholars and human rights practitioners, estimates the US Federal price tag of the war to be about $4.4 trillion (www.costofwar.org).

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claim to be able to guide the world economy in the direction of more freedom and more prosperity. The United States is no longer a power that aspires to hegemony and to legitimacy and therefore to the open or tacit consent of those whom its power affects, and instead moves toward a more or less brazenly exploitative domination. These events have confirmed the fundamental bankruptcy of the US-centred regime of accumulation that has structured the globe since the Second World War. Crucially, Arrighi wonders if American bankruptcy might preface not, as in previous such crises in world history, the emergence of a new hegemon capable of presiding over a process of accumulation on a larger scale but rather the advent of a wholly new way of organising the world economy. China, for Arrighi, is not so much auditioning for a role the United States is in the process of vacating, as a country whose economic rise is the sign of the emergence of a world market without a single hegemon. Adam Smith in Beijing, Arrighi’s final major work, argues that the rise of China, which possesses economic clout but little military power, does indeed offer an alternative not only to US hegemony but also to capitalism’s practice of ‘accumulation by dispossession’: the failure of the Project for a New American Century and the success of Chinese economic development, taken jointly, have made the realization of Smith’s vision of a world-market society, based on equality among the world’s civilizations, more likely than it ever was in the almost two and a half centuries since the publication of The Wealth of Nations.32

32

Arrighi 2007, p. 8. Richard Walker offers four convincing reasons for rejecting Arrighi’s claim that ‘the nature of Chinese development is not necessarily capitalist’ (Arrighi 2007, p. 24): an exploited proletariat now exists in China, a capitalist class is in charge there, a fully-fledged market in land has emerged and the Chinese state has been utterly instrumental in this process. For Walker, ‘all the earmarks [sic] of a transition [from communism to capitalism] are in place, however much they are embedded in the particular characteristics of Chinese civilization. Arrighi, in an echo of most China-scholarship, attributes too much to the singularity of China and is unable to adequately handle the dialectic of capital’s universal logic and its embedding in local conditions, which produces multiple paths to capitalism’ (Walker 2010, p. 68). It would be worth contrasting Arrighi’s imprudent claims about China’s putatively non-capitalist route to growth with his much more sceptical probing of Hardt and Negri’s facile assertion that the world economy’s former inequality and unevenness have been replaced by the ‘smooth space’ of ‘Empire’. Arrighi refutes this waffle by pointing to the persistent income gap between the Global North and South as measured by GNP per capita. That gap, he shows, is clearly not being closed by the limited mobility of labour from South to North (grotesquely exaggerated and even celebrated by Empire’s ecstatic rhetoric about the ‘multitude’) or by the even more limited mobility of capital in the other direction: ‘the road to global citizenship and to a

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Arrighi’s claim is slightly puzzling because China, as he of course knows and acknowledges, is fully integrated in a process of capitalist globalisation that has until now been led by the United States. The US has been able to run colossal deficits in its balance of trade only because the globe’s leading power has placed itself at the mercy of both China’s willingness to purchase US treasury bonds and the availability for import of cheap Chinese commodities. China’s continuing readiness to play this role can be explained by the fact that the US, which it thereby underwrites, now operates as a vast market for Chinese manufacturing industries. Just because China is outside the traditional ‘core’ of the capitalist world economy does not mean that it isn’t capitalist. A more egalitarian and democratic path of development, Arrighi acknowledges in his 2010 postscript to The Long Twentieth Century, ‘would require a fundamental departure from the socially and ecologically unsustainable path of Western development … This is an imposing task whose trajectory will in large part be shaped by pressure from movements of protest and selfprotection from below’.33 The last few years have witnessed the intensification of labour struggles in China in addition to the faltering performances of (as well as persistent inequalities in) the so-called BRICS economies. In Brazil and elsewhere, protest too is on the increase. It seems that we might be waiting an exceedingly long time for the legacies of unevenness inherited from the colonial period to be overcome within the constraints of a capitalist world economy. Since the 1970s we have witnessed an attempt to free capitalism from the demands of democracy, whether those demands have been pressed by social democratic movements in the Global North or in different ways and to varying extents by the myriad of reformist and revolutionary regimes that came to power in the postcolonial world. The world’s peoples have been asked to forfeit the civil and social rights they have fought for and dreamed of and in many cases that they have actually accomplished through struggle over the last hundred years or so. As the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has put it, they must now content themselves with ‘being turned into debtcollecting agencies on behalf of a global oligarchy of investors compared to which C. Wright Mills’s “power elite” must appear like a shining example of liberal pluralism’.34 What we are now faced with is the prospect of an inter-

33 34

guaranteed income for all citizens may be far longer, bumpier and more treacherous than Hardt and Negri would like us to believe’, Arrighi 2003, p. 34. The same thing is true of the views expressed about China at the end of Adam Smith in Beijing. Arrighi 2010, p. 383. Streeck 2013, p. 284.

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national system of states ‘insulated’, in Streeck’s words, ‘from democratic participation, with a population that would have learned, over years of hegemonic re-education, to regard the distributional outcomes of free markets as fair, or at least as without alternative’.35 Like Wallerstein and Arrighi, Streeck is convinced that we have entered a period of capitalism’s protracted but inexorable ‘decay’36 in which ‘disequilibrium and instability’ have become ‘the rule rather than the exception’.37 Where once there may have been a reasonable expectation that capitalism might preside over ‘[s]teady growth, sound money and a modicum of social equity’,38 there is now only a persistent decline in the rate of economic growth, an unprecedented and unsustainable rise in public and private indebtedness even in leading capitalist states in addition to massive and growing economic inequalities within and between states. Either neoliberal ‘reforms’ will protect profits and rents at the expense of democratic aspirations for redistribution and publicly funded services or explicitly socialist measures will defend and advance democratic aspirations for redistribution and publicly funded services at the expense of profits and rents. We can have a capitalist economy or a democratic polity, but we cannot have both. ‘In my view’, writes Streeck, ‘it is high time, in the light of decades of declining growth, rising inequality and increasing indebtedness – as well as of the successive agonies of inflation, public debt and financial implosion since the 1970s – to think again about capitalism as a historical phenomenon, one that has not just a beginning, but also an end’.39 Streeck therefore implores us to imagine the end of capitalism. But whereas he thinks that capitalism will ‘collapse by itself’ and that therefore we must ‘learn to think about capitalism coming to an end without assuming responsibility for answering the question of what one proposes to put in its place’,40 it is surely closer to the truth to suggest that capitalism will not jump and must be pushed and, moreover, that if the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy is the reason for the former’s impending demise then the question of what will be put in capitalism’s place has already received an answer. Indeed that question is daily receiving eloquent responses from groups and movements that are endeavouring to push back the undemocratic regime of capital with experiments in popular empower-

35 36 37 38 39 40

Streeck 2014a, p. 46. Streeck 2014b, p. 35. Streeck 2014b, p. 263. Streeck 2014b, p. 37. Streeck 2014b, p. 35. Streeck 2014b, p. 46.

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ment and workers’ control. These groups and movements belie Streeck’s worries about ‘the destruction of collective agency’41 and ‘the absence of a viable alternative’.42 Though it may have a beginning, a middle and hopefully an end, capitalism is not, as Paul Mason too contends, an ‘organism’43 that might expire without the aid of human agency and political struggle. Mason’s argument in Postcapitalism is that ‘capitalism is a complex, adaptive system which has reached the limits of its capacity to adapt’.44 ‘Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm’:45 collaborative forms of production, parallel currencies, cooperatives, self-managed spaces, new forms of ownership and lending, sharing economies, information technologies that are destroying ownership rights and dissolving markets, in addition to ‘networked’, non-hierarchical and non-market forms of organisation and subjectivity. But doesn’t Mason exaggerate the revolutionary potential of these developments? A legal temp with a smartphone may be a ‘universal educated person’ but she is still a legal temp. Chinese factory workers are ‘avidly networked people in their non-work time’46 but as Mason himself acknowledges, they face ‘stringent work discipline and long hours’ when they clock on. Google may have resigned itself to open source software but it shelters its revenues in Bermuda to avoid paying tax; in the words of its chairman Eric Schmidt the company is ‘proudly capitalistic’.47 Mason is in danger of underestimating the extent to which, as I have said, conscious political struggle is required in order to realise the potential of emergent practices and institutions and inaugurate a new form of ‘postcapitalist’ social and economic organisation. We would do better, in my view, to think of capitalism, à la Wallerstein, as a historical social system with consistent features and tendencies, the most important of which is the self-expansion of capital. We may concede that there are natural and spatial limits to that process of expansion and that capitalism is permanently bedevilled by internal contradictions that may become more and more acute, without accepting that capitalism will die a natural death.48 Capit41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

Ibid. Streeck 2014b, p. 47. Mason 2015, p. xiii. Ibid. Mason 2015, p. xv. Mason 2015, p. 115. ‘Google boss: I’m very proud of our tax avoidance scheme’, Independent, 13 December 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home‑news/google‑boss‑im‑very‑proud‑of‑ our‑tax‑avoidance‑scheme‑8411974.html [accessed 8 January 2016]. There is no reason, unless political and economic struggle should propel us in a differ-

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alism will not necessarily, as Mason assumes, somehow collapse in response to an external shock like climate change or the ‘demographic time bomb’ in the way that he claims the general crisis of European feudalism followed on the heels of the Black Death. ‘The issue is not, therefore, that capital cannot survive its contradictions but that the cost of it so doing becomes unacceptable to the mass of the population’, as David Harvey has written.49 The struggle to replace that exhausted system with something else is what the literature of late capitalism dramatises, in ways and forms that are as diverse as their content and provenance. Those works have no illusions about the prospects for development within the constraints of the world-system, for naïve and now totally discredited narratives of development have been replaced in these texts by images and chronicles of the manifest and congenital unevenness, the unprecedentedly acute contradictoriness and objectionableness as well as the sheer unnecessariness of that system.

2

Lateness and the Novel

Capitalism, like Mark Twain, has survived many greatly exaggerated reports of its demise. Granted, it might well be getting increasingly hard for capitalism to forestall crisis by locating profitable outlets for surplus capital, but capitalists, as Naomi Klein and others have shown, have never been slow to take advantage of crisis and even to manufacture crises in order to maintain and extend their sway. Capitalism is not about to die of natural causes. The protracted economic

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ent direction, why we might not see the advent of a nightmarish new world-system that claims legitimacy not from the promise of development but from the violent defence of existing privileges. The discovery that the ‘late’ in ‘late capitalism’ is not just a figure of speech but a forecast of capitalism’s imminent demise would be much more reassuring were it not for the fact that Wallerstein and Arrighi both state that capitalism’s expiry is as likely to issue in some sort of Hobbesian dystopia as it is to result in peaceful and democratic forms of organisation. As Arrighi acknowledges, the United States, which is still armed to the teeth and which spends more on arms than the rest of the world put together, might even survive the loss of its cultural and political hegemony by converting its massive foreign indebtedness into a kind of tribute payment or protection racket. ‘There are no credible aggressive new powers that can provoke the breakdown of the UScentred world system, but the United States has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative domination’, Arrighi 2003, p. 71. Military supremacy, as Dan Glazebrook reminds us, is the West’s only remaining ‘competitive advantage’, Glazebrook 2013, pp. 23–4. The global boom in ‘private security’ looks set to play a key role in protecting privilege and controlling social unrest. Harvey 2014, p. 264.

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crisis that has unfolded since 2008 has compounded a crisis of political authority and legitimacy, which, as Wallerstein and Arrighi warn, might result in new forms of tyranny and exploitation but which might equally, we must hope, result in political struggle towards more egalitarian ‘post-capitalist’ forms of social and economic organisation. To point to the quality of lateness in contemporary fiction is to identify the ways in which novels explore unevenness but it is also to start thinking about how those novels also dramatise the exhaustion of residual narratives of progress within the constraints of a capitalist system and the corresponding emergence of new forms of solidarity. I believe it can be shown that the novels in which Boxall is interested are not at all afflicted by a kind of fin-de-siècle angst but are preoccupied instead, manifestly and often quite self-consciously, as numerous critics have noted and discussed, with the various crises and opportunities attendant upon a perception of capitalism’s lateness. Take the work of James Kelman, one of Boxall’s examples, which as Aaron Kelly has argued is simply not comprehensible without thinking about the complex ways in which it dramatises the effects of the scorched-earth counterrevolution of Thatcherism and the exhaustion and defeat of the ‘developmentalist’ ideals of municipal Labourism. The very forms of Kelman’s novels remain, in Kelly’s words, ‘antagonistically non-identical to the prevailing logic of capitalism’ by disputing late capitalism’s modes of perception and by articulating excluded voices and experiences that together counteract neoliberal myths of consensus and shared purpose. Kelman’s fragmentary forms and interior monologues explore the manifold alienations of de-industrialisation, redundancy, insecurity and service sector work, the disintegration of older class loyalties and the manifold crises of national, ethnic, gender and sexual identity, as well as the persistently skewed development of the ‘stateless nation’ of Scotland. It is ultimately impossible to make any sense at all of even one element of Kelman’s work, at the interrelated levels of content or of form, without reference to what The Acid House, by Kelman’s contemporary Irvine Welsh, calls ‘the long dark night of late capitalism’.50 Much of this is evident from WReC’s own reading of Kelman’s ‘transcodings of the lifeworld of the (semi-) periphery’ of ‘one of the most developed and powerful states of the modern world-system’.51 But not only do Kelman’s narrators’ narratives of alienation point us to alienation’s origins in a restored and victorious (if perennially uneven) capitalism, they also remind us of the possibility of shared experience and insight and,

50 51

Welsh 1995, p. 240. WReC 2015, p. 138.

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indirectly, of the potential for new forms of solidarity and even new definitions of progress. In Kelman’s latest novel for example, Mo Said She Was Quirky (2013), the narrative voice moves continuously, often within the confines of single sentences, between a kind of disconnected, information-giving observation and a much more direct evocation of Helen’s insightful musings on freedom, family and memory in addition to her extremely perceptive though frustrated and angry dissection of all kinds of social ills from violence and poor housing to misogyny and alienating, service-sector work. Here the technique of free indirect narration becomes a sustained feat of empathy and even compassion and thus an instance or augury of the solidarity the novel shows to have been substantially eradicated by neoliberalism from institutions and social relations. I am trying to say something more about such work than that it is closely involved in contemporary history. It goes without saying that the ‘plot’ in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) refers not just to the imaginary presidency of the anti-Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh but also, allegorically, to the contemporaneous arrogation of power by the Bush administration. For such reasons I think we need to supplement Boxall’s observation that Roth’s work describes ‘the experience of entering into the twenty-first century’.52 There is more to say about Roth’s so-called ‘American Trilogy’ – American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000) – than that those novels inaugurate a surprising burst of productivity in the last period of Roth’s work. Rather, as David Gooblar suggests, they size up and take stock of the disappointments and dead ends of recent American history. Connoisseurs of the dream of social mobility, Roth’s protagonists, working-class sons of immigrants, are nonetheless all ‘[b]lindsided by the uncontrollability’ of history, class and fate, whose locks they are unable to spring, as the narrator and perennial Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman puts it in The Human Stain.53 Here individual tragedies are also social tragedies and national tragedies. The drama of self-making is thwarted by the tyranny of the collective, and while the enemies of individuality appear variously in the guises of McCarthyism, leftist terrorism and political correctness, endowing these extraordinarily intense and invigorating works with the liberal sensibility of an unreconstructed New Dealer and not at all that of a militant anti-capitalist, it is nonetheless true to say that it is the overbearing realities of recent American history (of moralistic censoriousness, ethnic discrimination, the dividing lines of class and so on) that repeatedly frustrate and come up against the persistent appeal of Amer-

52 53

Boxall 2013, p. 701. Roth 2001, p. 335.

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ican political and cultural values. Or, to put it another way, the dream of a world in which ‘[n]obody dominates anybody anymore’54 is repeatedly wrecked on the rocks of a world in which domination continues unabated. Not only that of course, because Zuckerman’s rapt and lyrical narrations of these figures’ selfcreated lives register the continuing attraction of those ideals by enacting once again Roth’s work’s consistent preoccupation with the way in which the mutable stuff of subjectivity, far from being fixed, is shaped and endlessly reshaped through the compulsive telling of stories, a dream of subjective freedom that returns as many times in Roth’s sizeable oeuvre as it is denied by a world that cannot yet accommodate it. It is true that in Exit Ghost (2007) Zuckerman discovers on returning Rip Van Winkle-like from his hideaway in the Berkshires to the New York of 2004 that ‘he cannot extend his twentieth-century literary and political sensibility to the new millennium’.55 But the waning of that sensibility is even more meaningful than that. What Zuckerman’s now impossible sexual desire denotes and what the lushly autumnal background strains of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs as well as Zuckerman’s fixation with Conrad’s late novel The Shadow Line both signal, in my view, is the crumbling of a literary, sexual and political personality that is all of a piece. The identity of what has been lost and cannot be extended is that of a model of freedom that is being beset, at this late stage of Roth’s work and of American history itself, by its greatest and perennial enemies of moralism, censoriousness, chauvinism, political and class domination, not to mention new manifestations of the expansionist worldview registered by Conrad’s novel, all made flesh in Exit Ghost in the minatory figure of George W. Bush, whose catastrophic and, for Zuckerman’s idealistic young associates, utterly disillusioning re-election coincides with the action of the novel. The ‘historical disorientations’ narrated by this novel, for which Boxall admits he has no vocabulary, do in fact have a name, for they are the explicit manifestations of capitalism’s lateness in an American context, the latest ascendancy of class power and imperial domination thwarting once again the liberal appeal of specifically American conceptions of progress. And doesn’t the extraordinary violence dramatised by Cormac McCarthy’s novels, another of Boxall’s examples, cry out for a similar kind of reading? Of course the title of No Country for Old Men (2005) points us most obviously to Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, a veritable epitome or archetype of individual late style, as does Roth’s The Dying Animal. Such allusions, like Exit Ghost’s know-

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Roth 1998, p. 311. Boxall 2012, p. 703.

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ing references to Strauss and Conrad, serve to underscore these texts’ interest in lateness at the level of the ageing artist’s characteristic (and possibly even slightly clichéd) preoccupation with what Yeats’s great poem describes as the paltriness and the evident mortality, though also the unseasonable lustfulness, of the ageing body along with the exceptional perspicacity of the ageing mind. But the other thing that is reaching an end in No Country for Old Men, or rather the phenomenon whose demise and imminent expiry is illuminated by these familiar metaphors of senescence, is again a certain narrative or conception of American history itself, the extreme and unremitting violence of which is of course the overt theme of all of McCarthy’s work. The ferocity of the violence that the decidedly unperspicacious sheriff is utterly unable to account for with his facile moral judgements does in fact have a specific cause or rather an origin: it is the same violence repressed by the memories of the novel’s befuddled and hounded protagonist, the Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss, and the same violence recalled for the reader by the pictographs etched on the rocks near the scene of the fateful massacre at the start of the novel. Of the men who drew those images ‘there was no other trace’,56 which is both an evocation of the founding violence of the United States and a characteristically Yeatsian reminder that whole ‘civilisations’, like individual human bodies, are begotten and eventually die. Is this not the most powerful riposte to the myth of progress or manifest destiny or whatever we wish to call it that ran aground in South East Asia? It is also a reminder that the qualities of enervation, exhaustion and disenchantment perceptible in so much contemporary fiction at the interconnected levels of theme and form are expressions of the perceived lateness and senescence of a whole social order, which is similarly moribund but also, paradoxically, full of a kind of destructive vigour. This is almost exactly how time is figured in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). What is noted too rarely about Sebald’s oeuvre is that its pervasive melancholy (evident above all in what James Wood has characterised as its pensive, ‘mildly agitated’, sotto voce narrative tone57) in addition to its veritable pasthauntedness (typified by its photographic memento mori and its extraordinary sensitivity to the ghosts and signs of past violence and suffering) are the result not of some sort of distinctive sensibility or even of Sebald’s lasting preoccupation with the Holocaust of the Jews but of what Austerlitz refers to as a whole civilisation’s ‘blind lust for conquest and destruction’.58 The sense of decline and loss can only be made sense of by looking, as that novel’s narrator 56 57 58

McCarthy 2006, p. 11. Wood 2011, p. 15. Sebald 2001, p. 236.

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compulsively does and as the novel implores its readers to, at the nightmarishness of history and the sheer rapacity of capitalist modernity itself, of which Auschwitz is the exemplar and the grim consummation. Obsessed with monumental public buildings such as law courts, railway stations, prisons, fortifications and lunatic asylums, on which he is collecting huge masses of material for a quixotic study that he will obviously never write, Austerlitz is at work on what he calls a theory of capitalist architecture that will seek to grasp bourgeois civilisation’s delusions of omnipotence, permanence, comprehensiveness and control. The novel is attuned, more importantly, to the presence of that civilisation’s victims, of death and of the dead, those who were, as Evan the Cobbler tells the young Austerlitz, ‘struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life’.59 Thinking of the poor souls confined in Bedlam, Austerlitz feels at Liverpool Street Station ‘as if the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing’.60 Capitalism’s mighty projects, its useless bastions and fortifications, the Gare d’ Austerlitz from which the protagonist’s father was transported to his doom, Mitterand’s massive and alienating Bibliothèque nationale, the absurd grandeur of Antwerp Central Station constructed under the patronage of Leopold II, where the Verdigris-covered black boy on a camel on the station façade points Austerlitz and his auditors to the grievous and still scarcely credible or quantifiable murderousness of Belgian colonialism, all obscure both the fact of death and, more literally, as it were beneath their very foundations, the fact and presence of the dead. These crimes and disasters are all of a piece, the novel invites us to conclude, their connections painstakingly revealed by Austerlitz’s oddly archaic and even antiquarian (as well as ornate and tremendously digressive) syntax. Time and history are emphatically not arenas of progress but of entropy, loss and disaster. Yet even here a capacity for empathy, an ability to enquire into and imaginatively inhabit other lives, is offered very tentatively as an alternative to bourgeois civilisation’s lust for conquest and destruction. Remembrance in Sebald’s work is an intensely political act, grief and mourning for the dead being a means for cultivating a certain way of seeing and feeling or, to put the case in a more political idiom, a lesson in how to see through capitalism’s official myths of consensus, progress and permanence and how to nurture, in Theodor Adorno’s words, ‘the sense of solidarity with what Brecht called “tormentable bodies” ’.61 59 60 61

Sebald 2001, pp. 74–5. Sebald 2001, p. 188. Adorno 1996, p. 286.

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Gwendolyn, the mysteriously distressed and disturbed woman in whose Welsh household the young Austerlitz found himself after escaping from Czechoslovakia on a kindertransport, a repressed history that Austerlitz will spend his adult life and the entire course of the novel unravelling, dies with this question on her lips: ‘What was it that so darkened our world?’62 It is not a rhetorical question. It may be too trite to answer ‘capitalist modernity’, since for Sebald as for Adorno and especially for Walter Benjamin (to whose work Sebald’s novels so openly allude) it is less the specific imperative to accumulate capital that is responsible for the calamities that his novels ponder and recollect than a much broader and older set of moral and intellectual practices that prepared those crimes and that inform conventional definitions of ‘progress’. Yet the answer is not only, as it usually is in popular or journalistic reception of Sebald’s work, ‘the Holocaust’.63 A great deal of contemporary fiction, I am contending, asks such consequential questions about endings and new beginnings. My final example then, is the Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel Wizard of the Crow (2006), in which the perennial and increasing unevenness of capitalist accumulation since the 1970s manifests itself in authoritarian state power and the repeated foiling of the utopian aspirations of anti-colonial liberation. Time, in a sense, has come to a stop in the composite postcolonial African state of Aburĩria, or rather the dreams and definitions of progress harboured by the radical liberation movements that came to power in the continent during the period of decolonisation have been stymied. Dreams of catching up with the West, of engineering social and economic development, democratising political institutions, removing the yoke of colonial subservience and restoring the dignity and selfgovernment of Africa’s peoples, have been scotched by the first-world’s offensive against Africa during this period. In the 1970s global elites contrived not only to ensure that Africa’s wealth continued to pour northwards but actively to increase the rate of flow, in what John Saul has referred to as the process of Africa’s ‘recolonization’.64 Neoliberalism has taken the form of the restriction of wages in the first world, the underhanded privatisation of publicly owned assets and the violent suppression of democratic and socialist movements. Viewing neoliberalism from an African standpoint, structural adjustment pro-

62 63

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Sebald 2001, p. 89. ‘[T]he roads in Sebald’s works do not all lead to Theresienstadt. The view of human devastation and darkness is much larger, at once geophysical and metaphysical, though their roots lie in a profound meditation on the violence of European modernity’, Anderson 2003, p. 125. Saul 2001, p. 25.

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grammes and other violently imposed neoliberal ‘remedies’ stand exposed as the prime examples of this process, the forcible suppression of alternative forms of production being perhaps the principal method by which global elites have sought to revive the world-system’s profitability and prolong its span. Since the early 1970s, as the Egyptian economist Samir Amin argues, monopoly capital has sought to counter stagnation through the ‘super-exploitation’ of labour in the periphery, an activity made possible there by authoritarian governments. This period has witnessed a colossal transfer of value from the global South to the global North via unequal exchange and ‘imperial rents’. Under-development has been a principal cause of dictatorial systems in Africa; the people must be kept in line so that returns can be guaranteed.65 Novels about authoritarian state power in Africa, such as Ngũgĩ’s, attest therefore to the miscarried or even abortive quality of Africa’s anti-colonial revolutions, one of the deepest aspirations of which was to construct egalitarian alternatives to the coercive nature of the colonial state and its postcolonial successors as well as to the exploitative economic system those states exist to superintend. The authoritarian state is a symptom of uneven development because Africa’s anti-colonial revolutions were defeated or rather they remain to be completed. Wizard of the Crow (2006) belongs properly to what has usually been seen as a predominantly Latin American tradition of dictator novels that includes Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) with its composite, Methuselah-like Caribbean despot; the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme (1974), which is ostensibly an elaborate evocation of the rule of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the eccentric despot who reigned over Paraguay immediately after independence, though it was written and published during the similarly protracted and brutal dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner; and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000) about the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Dictator novels offer a distinctive diagnosis and prognosis of the ongoing problem of political authoritarianism. Ngũgĩ’s novel performs dictatorial power and does so, moreover, in such a way as to allow readers both to interpret the origins of the crime of dictatorship in a durable system of colonial hegemony and to appreciate dictatorship’s vulnerability to democratic forms of government. Of course, all dictators are performers. 65

Trotsky makes this point, albeit in a slightly ‘one-sided’ manner, as Michael Löwy notes, in the ‘Manifesto of the Fourth International’: ‘the independence of a backward state inevitably will be semi-fictitious and its political regime, under the influence of internal class contradictions, and external pressure, will unavoidably fall into dictatorship against the people’, quoted in Löwy 1981, p. 91.

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However, Wizard of the Crow stages dictatorial power’s operations in order to dramatise power’s precariousness and expose it to opposition. In his critical writing Ngũgĩ has explored and extolled what he sees as the performative quality of art. He means by this something like the capacity of a musical score or the script of a play or even the text of a novel to stage its own contingency and adaptability. Such works call attention to the variety of ways in which works of art, through sound, language and visual imagery, can explore and represent and perhaps even help to construct the world or worlds with which they deal. A performative work of art, and for Ngũgĩ all works of art to varying degrees are performative since their explicit performativity is what distinguishes them from other forms of expression and communication, also enlists the involvement of its various audiences. Readers too are called upon to recognise and participate in the process by which established ways of seeing and interpreting the world of the dictatorship are starkly reperformed, exaggerated, derided and de-familiarised. The events of the novel are as outsized and ill-governed as the book itself, which is a rambling, drawn out, digressive and frequently disorderly (as well as repetitive and often seemingly extemporised) tumult of a thing. Everything from the murderousness and licentiousness of the Ruler to the diligent sycophancy of his hangers on and the avarice of the local bourgeoisie, from the scheming cynicism of an endless succession of American ambassadors and the calculating hypocrisy of the ‘Global Bank’, is subjected to laughter, mockery and profanations, a series of subversive Bakhtinian ‘bringings down to earth’ and ‘uncrownings’. But by referring to the performative quality of Ngũgĩ’s novel I am also pointing to its instructive or even pedagogical function since in fact Wizard of the Crow also re-performs conventional ways of understanding dictatorship in postcolonial Africa. Dictatorship is far from being a uniquely African malediction. It is not explicable without reference to the legacies and the current realities of colonial and neocolonial power and in particular to the continuation and even intensification of that power during the long crisis that has befallen the world economy since around 1970. Nor is dictatorship somehow inevitable or ineluctable. These performances of dictatorship alert us to the African state’s indebtedness, so to speak, to an ongoing and veritably global history of autocratic power precisely so that African dictatorship can stand revealed as a historical problem, not a cultural one. Dictatorships have been put in place and can be removed. By the end of Wizard of the Crow, the Ruler has been overthrown but the venal and empty-headed tycoon Titus Tajirika has just declared himself Emperor. Lest we look on such works and despair we must emphasise their capacity to encourage the kind of sharp-eyed, interpretative rigour that is fostered by the text’s fantastical metaphors and exaggerations and that is required to see through state

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power’s delusions of permanence as well as valuing the forms of democratic collectivity that emerge in the text in order to challenge state power’s delusions of omnipotence. The fact that authoritarian state power exists in order to facilitate the neo-colonial exploitation of Africa’s peoples certainly makes this novel one of the most acute and stark demonstrations of a conjuncture that has not only inflicted a form of prolonged under-development on Africa but in so doing has forestalled quite different, because autonomous and egalitarian, forms of development there.

3

Conclusion

World-literature, WReC argue, is literature that registers the modern capitalist world-system, the salient feature of that system being its congenital unevenness. I have sought to stress the ways in which contemporary fiction responds to and registers not so much the modernity of that system but, to the contrary, that system’s obsolescence and moribundity, its increasingly apparent inability to make good on the promise of universal modernisation. If modernism, in Marshall Berman’s classic account, was an attempt to expose the unevenness and contradictions of modernity, and if modernism therefore dramatises in Jameson’s words a kind of ‘existential uneven development’ and ‘a culture of incomplete modernization’,66 then WReC’s formulation needs to be revised to take account of the specificity of the context in which contemporary fiction is produced: today, world-literature is literature that registers the inescapably incomplete modernity of the capitalist world-system. Furthermore, contemporary world-literature registers the capitalist world-system’s consequent and now manifest lateness. The novels of Kelman, Roth, McCarthy, Sebald and Ngũgĩ, in addition to the novels of countless other authors from all corners of the globe, are late in the sense of expressing and encouraging attention to the definitive expiration of the narrative of modernisation that hitherto structured our understanding of the capitalist world-system. These novels are late because they renounce and discredit orthodox narratives of modernisation and development and because they reveal the availability or imaginative proximity of quite different narratives and definitions of progress. Immanuel Wallerstein characterises 1968 as an abortive world revolution, the moment when the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy, the impossibility of maintaining profitable conditions for the accumulation of cap-

66

Jameson 2003, p. 699.

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ital whilst satisfying the world’s people’s demands for equality, democracy and development, became for a short time quite obvious and thus produced, in Jameson’s words, ‘an immense freeing or unbinding of social energies’.67 1968 was principally a rebellion, an abortive, impulsive and uncoordinated rebellion as well as ultimately an unsuccessful and occasionally (as in China) positively disastrous one, but a rebellion all the same and therefore an expression of deeper disenchantments, against the authoritarian or bureaucratic state and against the unequal division of labour and wealth that those states upheld. From Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Rome, Paris, Turin, Prague and several points in between (including Africa, as Susan Andrade suggests),68 1968 took aim at states that had shown themselves incapable of fulfilling the political and economic aspirations of their citizens. For those demands to be met, the very existence of capitalism (and also of actually existing communism) had to be called into question. What Arrighi calls ‘the US-led capitalist counter-offensive of the late 1970s and early 1980s’69 was a partially or perhaps only initially successful effort to prevent this scenario from coming to pass. 1968 for Wallerstein marks ‘the end of the dream of modernity – not the end of the search for its goals of human liberation and equality, but the end of the faith that the state within the capitalist world-economy could serve as the facilitator and guarantor of steady progress towards achieving these goals’.70 Late capitalism’s manifest inability to foster development except in a way that is drastically uneven and that entails both violence and dispossession constitutes an economic crisis, though not necessarily a novel let alone a terminal one. The reason why Wallerstein might turn out to be right that this crisis is more significant than any previous one is that everywhere it has gone hand in hand with an even more protracted and deep-rooted political emergency. Capitalism’s progress and expansion can no longer be ensured or controlled by its manifestly floundering American hegemon. The true crisis is not so much an economic crisis, crisis being the norm and capitalism having weathered enough forecasts of its demise in the past before discovering time and again new means of adapting and prolonging its span. Instead we are witnessing a very profound (because settled and worldwide) and also unprecedented ‘legitimation crisis’, to use Jürgen Habermas’s term, or a crisis of hegemony, to stick with Gramsci’s, an effect of the ruling powers’ inability to claim that they rule in the general interest. Franco Moretti reminds us of Thomas Mann’s declaration 67 68 69 70

Jameson 1988, p. 208. Andrade 2012. Arrighi 2010, p. 328. Wallerstein 1996, p. 236.

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in 1932 that ‘the bourgeois is lost’, ‘not because capitalism is: to the contrary, capitalism is stronger than ever (if, Golem-like, mostly in destruction). What has evaporated is the sense of bourgeois legitimacy: the idea of a ruling class that doesn’t just rule, but deserves to do so’.71 If the bourgeoisie then escaped, as Moretti puts it, behind the political myth of democracy and therefore ceased to appear as a ruling class at all then that was because the system was now held in place by a new ‘principle of legitimation’: the belief that ‘capitalism brought a relative well-being to the lives of large working masses in the West’72 and might also spread that boon elsewhere. This belief has now been exploded. The ‘world revolution’ of 1968 was no such thing of course, but its aspirations retain their power and remain to be fulfilled; May 68, as one of the Parisian posters from that time declared, was truly le ‘debut d’une lutte prolongée’. It is this reality of crisis and struggle that so much of contemporary fiction brings to our attention. These are therefore works that, to use Georg Lukács’s splendid phrase, construe capitalism as ‘a historical phenomenon even while it exists’.73 71 72 73

Moretti 2014, p. 20; original emphasis. Moretti 2014, p. 21. Lukács 1971, p. 261; original emphasis.

chapter 8

Differential Time and Aesthetic Form: Uneven and Combined Capitalism in the Work of Allan Sekula Gail Day and Steve Edwards

In A Singular Modernity, Fredric Jameson argued that modernism might best be understood as ‘a mode in which [the] transitional economic structure of incomplete capitalism can be registered and identified as such’.1 In this way, he suggested, intellectuals and writers (Proust, Joyce, etc.) lived in two worlds simultaneously. The implication of Jameson’s statement is that our current world progressively converges as ‘completed’ capitalism. He is not alone in this assumption. Yet, it is doubtful whether capitalism should be regarded in this way. In this essay we focus not on ideal convergence, but on contradictions, combinations and unevennesses; to do so we draw on theoretical debates from contemporary Marxism, particularly those perspectives shaped by an understanding of ‘Uneven and Combined Development’ (U&CD). The question we explore is how the spatial and temporal complexities of modern capitalism are manifested aesthetically (‘registered and identified’) as cultural form. As Marx understood, the form of presentation is central to any representation of the modern world and in this sense discussions of global capitalism have much to learn from art and cultural theory.2 Our hypothesis is that Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘chronotope’ (chronos – topos, time – space) offers a useful way to understand this socio-aesthetic relationship.3 Our main discussion will focus on the work of artist Allan Sekula, a leading presence in art and photography since the mid-1970s. From the 1990s, until his untimely death in 2013, Sekula attained prominence for a series of artworks – exhibitions, books, videos and films – that took as their subject the sea; or, more precisely, the question of the labour process in the maritime economy. (See Figures 8.1 and 8.2) Over an extended period, he photographed or filmed aspects of: shipbuilding and

1 Jameson 2002, p. 142; Jameson 1992, pp. 309–10. 2 MECW 1999, vol. 35. 3 Bakhtin 1981b. The essay was written in 1937–8 as segments for a major study of the Bildungsroman. However, with a new concluding section added in 1973, the manuscript was assembled by one of Bakhtin’s executors to form the Russian volume Problems of Literature and Aesthetics in 1975.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384736_010

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figure 8.1 The Sea-Land Quality dockside at automated ECT/Sea-Land Terminal Port of Rotterdam Allan Sekula, Plate 41, Fish Story (1995). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

repair; the arduous work of seafarers and of dock labourers; fishing industries and fish markets; employees dealing with a chemical leakage and volunteers clearing a major oil spill. As was immediately recognised with the appearance of his extended photographic cycle Fish Story in 1995, his project presented a ‘detailed account of the general political and economic transformation brought about by the globalization of late capitalist rule’.4 The question for Sekula, as emphasised in his video-essay The Lottery of Sea (2006), was: how to reveal the ‘hidden hand’ of the global market?5 As we will see, it is not just Sekula’s thematic content that is important for our account; he applied his critical intelligence equally to the problem of form.

4 Buchloh 1995, pp. 198–9. 5 The Lottery of the Sea (2006) takes its title from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Chapter 10: ‘Of Wages and Profit in the Different Employments of Labour and Stock, Part I: Inequalities arising from the nature of employments themselves’. This interest in the critique of political economy also manifests in his essay and projects called ‘Dismal Science’ (Thomas Carlyle). Sekula 1995b; Sekula 1995c; and Sekula 1999.

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figure 8.2 Sugar Gang (Santos) 6, 2010 Allan Sekula, Ship of Fools (1999–2010). 76.2 × 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

1

Uneven & Combined Development

In the 1980s, debates on ‘uneven and combined development’, derived from the writings of Leon Trotsky, began to make their way from the organisations of the far left into wider intellectual circles, initially through the work of critical social geographers.6 This conception of capitalism was further developed by other Marxists in the fields of literature and international relations. In studies focused on the world-literature debates, postcolonial theory’s orientation towards local specificities and vernacular practices has been reconceived through U&CD. This approach has allowed scholars to attend to particular cultures while not losing sight of the forces of global power relations, thus avoiding those tendencies in the debate that emphasise cultural and religious pluralism and incommensurability.7 In international relations, theorists have employed 6 Trotsky 1962. See also: Trotsky 1967; Trotsky 1970; Trotsky 1973; Trotsky 1975; and Trotsky 1979. Basic further reading includes: Novack 1966; Löwy 1981; and Smith 2010. 7 Warwick Research Collective 2015; Bartolovich and Lazarus (eds) 2002: This includes Lazarus’s important essay ‘The Fetish of “the West” in Postcolonial Studies’, pp. 43–64; Lazarus

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U&CD to criticise ‘realist’ debates – as the mainstream pragmatism is known in that field – and to account for the relation between global capitalism and interstate competition.8 We build on these contributions in an attempt to extend the discussion to an engagement with recent practices in art. Even the briefest sketch of developments since 1973 indicates a new phase of global capitalism, which includes: a falling rate of profit and an offensive against the working class; financialisation and privatisation; high patterns of debt in the old capitalist core; capital flight and the development of low-wage production concentrated in Export Processing Zones and maquiladora industries. Writing in 1984, Neil Smith explained how the reconfiguration of the worldwide capitalist economy entails the re-spatialisation of production and consumption. The economy now embraces ‘subaltern centres of power’ such as Mexico City, Mumbai, Shanghai and Cairo, while simultaneously marginalising areas within the traditional hegemons, such as Harlem and the Parisian banlieues.9 Today, Smith’s picture would need further refinement to incorporate the BRICs (although Brazil is currently in deep crisis), and to distinguish between core EU states and the so-called PIGS, allowing us to grasp the grotesque exacerbation of social inequalities on scales ranging from the international to the neighbourhood.10 In 1905, Trotsky provided an invaluable way to assess this very process of simultaneous integration and differentiation:

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2011; Parry 2004; and the Deckard and Varma (forthcoming). The essays in the current volume present a selection of developing works by mainly younger scholars working within the framework. Davidson 2006; Barker 2006; Ashman 2006; Van der Linden 2007; Rosenberg 2005; Rosenberg 2009; Rosenberg 2010; Rosenberg & Callinicos 2009; Allinson & Anievas 2009; Davidson 2012; and Davidson 2010. This is probably the moment to note how ‘realism’ is an especially tricky term in cross-disciplinary discussions, carrying quite different meanings in various fields. Sekula, for example, conceived his own practice as a project of ‘critical realism’, alluding both to Georg Lukács’s account of literature and to the critical philosophical discussions that, although distinct, took that same name. In 1984, he referred to ‘a certain “realism”, a realism not of appearances or social facts but of everyday experience in and against the grip of advanced capitalism. This realism sought to brush traditional realism against the grain’. Sekula 1984b, p. x. For a discussion see Baetens and Van Gelder (eds) 2006; for Lukács on ‘Critical Realism’, see Lukács 1962, pp. 93–136; for critical-realist epistemology, see Bhaskar 1975; Bhaskar 1987; and Collier 1994. Smith 2010, p. 240. ‘BRIC s’ is used to categorise increasingly those powerful economies, which had formerly been part of the periphery of the system: Brazil, Russia, India, China. Sometimes, South Africa is included and the ‘s’ is capitalised. ‘PIGS’ refer to those troubled economies of the Eurozone: Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. On occasion it is written ‘PIIGS’ and includes Italy.

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Marxism takes its point of departure from world economy, not as a sum of national parts but as a mighty and independent reality which has been created by the international division of labour and the world market, and which in our epoch imperiously dominates the national markets. The productive forces of capitalist society have long outgrown the national boundaries.11 It is worth recalling that the theory of uneven and combined development arose from the attempt by Trotsky to conceptualise the possibility of revolution in Tsarist Russia (as a component of the theory of ‘permanent revolution’). Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, Trotsky rejected the Social-Democratic orthodoxy, which suggested that societies had to pass through a fixed succession of stages, and which believed that capitalism would be the essential precondition for developing the forces of production and creating a modern working class; only by taking this route, the theorists of Social Democracy argued, would socialism be economically viable. In contrast, Trotsky started from the world economy conceived as nonsynchronous, which is to say, containing national and regional economies at different points of ‘development’, and which were also synchronised under the economic and military hegemony of the imperialist powers. The ‘law of uneven development’, he wrote, ‘operates not only in the relations of countries to each other, but also in the various processes within one and the same country’; and yet the ‘reconciliation of the uneven processes of economics and politics can only be attained on a world scale’.12 Trotsky was suggesting that the world economy was organised according to an international division of labour, encompassing different production relations, varying types of work organisation, and multiple forms of labour exploitation. Pockets of capital-intensive production sat amidst tracts of peasant labour and other forms of petty-commodity production. (Although he did not make this point, Trotsky’s argument can be extended to recognise the possible coexistence of slavery or indentured labour with ‘free’ wage relations). This meant there was no need for all societies to pass through a ‘capitalist phase’. Those that were deemed economically ‘backward’ could be reorganised under socialism on the basis of the latest technologies and techniques that were already being employed by the most ‘advanced’ states. Trotsky’s insightful account of the world economy as the frame for any national development is not without its problems – historical, theoretical and

11 12

Trotsky 1962, p. 22. Trotsky 1962, p. 131.

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practical. Sometimes, Trotsky seems to see the world economy dominating the national component parts; on other occasions, he reverses the argument.13 The term ‘development’ continues to presume Western models of industrial capitalism as the advanced, or normative, stage against which other social formations must be measured and found wanting.14 As Marcel van der Linden has emphasised, while Trotsky did speak of the ‘law’ of uneven and combined development, it was primarily with George Novack’s systematic presentation in the postwar period that this idea came to be treated as law-like within international Trotskyism.15 In order to produce what Stuart Hall once called a ‘Marxism without guarantees’,16 the debate on U&CD needs to be stripped of the precipitates of ‘stagism’ and Eurocentrism adhering to the term ‘development’.17 Indeed, these residues have meant that postwar Trotskyism found itself bound, inadvertently, to the very presuppositions underpinning the intellectual ‘retreat from class’.18 If certain labour forms are tied ineluctably to the factory regime, then the decline of large-scale production in the Western metropoles can all too easily be interpreted as the demise of the working class. This ‘developmental’ conception, then, was and is vulnerable to critiques from those who claim that Marxism’s object has evaporated, and with it the possibility of another future. In the light of these problems, a number of political theorists have attempted to extend the central insights of Trotsky’s account in ways that ditch some of the ‘developmentalist’ baggage. Neil Davidson, in an important recent contribution to the discussion, has argued for a reversal of polarities, distinguishing the components of Trotsky’s argument so that U&CD is treated as the core heuristic, with permanent revolution offering a strategic horizon.19 Indeed, Justin Rosenberg and others have argued that unevenness is a transhistorical phe13 14

15 16 17 18 19

Ashman 2006, p. 95. Chakrabarty 2007, pp. 29–30. Even the idea of ‘deflected permanent revolution’ – coined in 1963 – presumes a swerve away from some ‘regular’ course. See Cliff 1981. What is more, the predictive power of the theory of ‘permanent revolution’ has been negligible. For some of the postwar left, it has functioned as a moralising account of roads not taken – for which the Soviet revolution and the necessity of party building provided the yardstick. Van der Linden 2007; Novack 1966. Hall 1986. To be clear, we acknowledge that without a high level of productive capacity, attempts to move to socialism are likely to generalise scarcity. Wood 1996. Davidson 2012; Davidson 2010. Davidson, we think, falters in his lack of attention to theories of time and his argument contains a latent developmentalism, but his contribution is of major importance. (Harry Hartootunian appears to misunderstand Davidson’s argument. See Hartootunian 2016.)

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nomena.20 Neil Smith has suggested that the ‘spatial or territorial differentiation of the division of labour is not a separate process but is implied from the start in the concept of the division of labour’.21 Meanwhile, Colin Barker has described ‘“inter-entity” social practices’ (the particular social arrangements of national or regional blocs) as being shaped and reshaped by the ‘external’ forces of the world market.22 What emerges from these reconsiderations is not an articulation of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production as adjacent social formations, inhabiting separate times, but rather a capitalist mode of production that recasts inherited practices under the dominance of the law of value and socially necessary labour time.23 Capital subsumes pre-existing or non-capitalist social forms, and remoulds them according to the forces of accumulation, internalising their contradictions and unevenesses, simultaneously resynchronising and redifferentiating cultures, societies and economies. These transformations take place not only at national and global levels, but also refigure particular practices, institutions and even ideologemes. We argue that U&CD can be productively reconceptualised and further refined by opening a dialogue with a number of recent debates in Marxism: work on Marx’s changing attitude to colonialism; key interventions in the debates over the mode of production; and studies into Marxism and time. Books by Teodor Shanin, Kevin Anderson and José Arico have shown how Marx transformed his earlier assessment of British colonial rule in India and Ireland.24 With these examples – along with his reflections on the American Civil War and his discussions with Vera Zasulich over the question of the Russian obshchina or village commune – Marx increasingly came to criticise those views that relied on an ‘historico-philosophical theory of the general path of development, imposed by fate …’.25 Marx’s method is not a philosophy of history, but a study of capitalist laws of motion. In his transformed perspective, colonialism was conceived not as a means to modern economic development, but instead hindered and obstructed the production of social wealth. British colonialism 20 21

22 23

24 25

Rosenberg 2009; Allinson and Anievas 2009. Rosenberg 2010. Paradoxically, this may draw Trotskyist thinkers closer to postmodernism than they realise. Smith 2010, p. 135. See also Massey 1984; Harvey 2006. Although subject to criticism in the context of social science, Harvey’s notion of ‘space-time compression’ might be considered in relation to the artistic chronotope. See Harvey 1990 and subsequent works. Barker 2006, p. 82. Here Jairus Banaji and Marcel van der Linden have played a key role, examining the multiple forms of labour organisation and routes for capital accumulation. Banaji 2010; Van der Linden 2008. See also the extensive debates in the Journal of Agrarian Change. Shanin 1983; Anderson 2010; Arico 2014; Hartootunian 2016. Hartootunian’s book appeared as we were completing our essay. MECW 2002, vol. 24.

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had a negative economic impact in Ireland, producing deteriorating conditions. Meanwhile, the village commune was not necessarily to be understood as a ‘pre-capitalist’ remnant that needed to ‘pass through capitalism’, but might itself suggest an alternative route to socialism. Secondly, in the context of the debates over the mode of production, Jairus Banaji has emphasised the varying trajectories of accumulation. Distinguishing between ‘modes of production’ and ‘modes of exploitation’, his account shifts attention away from the classic transition debate.26 His focus avoids the common idea of the bourgeois revolution as ‘Big Bang’, emphasising instead the ongoing processes of accumulation, whereby multiple local dynamics gain momentum to produce significant qualitative effects. His argument challenges linear conceptions of development and historico-economic change, particularly the assumption that equates certain forms of labour exploitation with specific modes of production (for example, the syllogism that is conventionally assumed between capitalism, large-scale industry and proletarianised free wage-labour). Banaji places at the heart of his analysis the role of capitalist subsumption. Thirdly, recent discussions of Marx’s temporality break radically with developmentalism and stagism.27 For instance, Daniel Bensaïd emphasises capital’s ‘asynchrony’ or ‘discordance of temporalities’, while Massimiliano Tomba calls attention to its ‘violent synchronisation’ of differences.28 Drawing on the above discussions, work in this vein has also incorporated, inter alia, Rosa Luxemburg’s and Vladimir Lenin’s ideas on imperialism; José Carlos Mariátegui’s considerations of the specificities of Peru; Antonio Gramsci’s writings on southern Italy; Walter Benjamin’s anti-historicism (and sometimes his messianism); Ernst Bloch’s notion of nonsynchronicity and non-contemporaneousness; Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of everyday life; or the aleatory materialism of the later Louis Althusser.29 This is, we realise, a heterodox list, and one would want to navigate its internal contradictions and tensions with care. It remains, of course, an open question whether the resulting account would still be on the terrain of ‘classic U&CD’. Be that as it may, we propose that a reconstructed version of the theory provides a critical basis for grasping the world economy and its cultures – able to attend to specificities and singularities of social formations without sidestepping the integrative dynamics of capitalism and imperialism.

26 27 28 29

Banaji 2010. Schwartz 1992; Osborne 1995; Bensaïd 2002; Löwy 2006; Tomba 2013; Tombazos 2014; and Haratootunian 2016. Bensaïd 2002, p. 4; Tomba 2013, p. 161. Luxemburg 2003; Lenin 1964; Lenin 1962; Mariátegui 2011; Gramsci 1971; Benjamin 2003; Bloch 2009; Lefebvre 1991; Lefebvre 1995; Althusser & Balibar 1978; and Althusser 2006.

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Trotsky’s conception of the global economy, then, provides an important point of critical embarkation for thinking about both the overarching power relations and particular instantiations of global capitalism. It articulates, as Sam Ashman has put it, ‘the complexity of different economic, social and cultural structures which are brought into contact with each other through the world economy’, while also showing that this ‘does not create homogenisation, but complex and varying amalgams between old and new’.30 Breaking with the idea of unilinear history, the theory of U&CD began – in the words of Michael Löwy – to pay attention to capitalism’s ‘innumerable combinations, fusions, discontinuities, ruptures and sudden, qualitative leaps’.31 Both as sociogeographic or economic topics to be explored and as questions of aesthetic form, these are exactly the qualities to which the work of Allan Sekula – the focus of our essay – is especially alert. Indeed, the characteristics of U&CD précised by Löwy are strikingly chronotopic.

2

Chronotope

Bakhtin’s long essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ offers a remarkably productive way to cast these political and economic issues in terms of cultural form.32 As Michael Holquist notes, the chronotope is an anamorphic term, a designation that draws its meaning via reference to other categories – time and space.33 If these other categories are understood as uneven and combined, then the chronotope might capture those same qualities. What interested Bakhtin was the ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ and he viewed the ‘chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature’.34 In art, Bakhtin argued, the formal separation of time and space (which he thought to be feasible in abstract thought) cedes to a ‘living’ union:35

30 31 32

33 34 35

Ashman 2006, p. 102. Cf. Raymond Williams on residual, dominant and emergent possibilities: Williams 1978. Löwy 1981, p. 27. Bakhtin 1981b. The Dialogical Imagination initiated a wave of interest in Bakhtin’s writings. We are going to sidestep the ‘Bakhtin Wars’ – the disputes over the interpretation of his writings between North-American humanists, Russian Christian nationalists and British Marxists. We are most in sympathy with Hirshkop 2002. Holquist 2010, p. 19. Bakhtin 1981b, p. 84. Bakhtin 1981b, p. 243.

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In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. The intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.36 In his essay, Bakhtin surveyed literary chronotopes from classical Greek literature to Rabelais (periods in which he believes the chronotope had a relatively stable typology), and from this basis elaborated his thoughts on subsequent literature. His key examples of chronotopes included the road as site of encounter (from classical authors onwards); the castle (in Gothic writing); the salon (for the early nineteenth-century novel); the provincial town (as in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary); the public square and threshold (in the writing of Dostoevsky). In addition to materialising time in space, chronotopes act as ‘organising centers’ for narrative events.37 They are ‘knots’ to be tied and untied, or the forces ‘giving body’ to a novel (in its specific narrative details as well as in its philosophical and abstract aspects). In principle, Bakhtin’s chronotopic analysis seems to be a promising model through which to figure aesthetically the socio-economic analysis of U&CD; however, we should note a problem. Specialist literary commentators and narratologists agree that Bakhtin’s idea is difficult to pin down. The chronotope is profligate, encompassing everything from trope to character to plot to genre. A distinction, perhaps, needs to be drawn between minor and major (or generic) chronotopes.38 Any particular narrative performance is bound to encompass multiple chronotopes at varying levels of analysis. Critics have noted that, after his initial remarks, Bakhtin tended to alternate between specific examples and generalisations.39 Bakhtin’s afterword of 1973, rather than clarifying the methodological issues, only deepened the problem by further broadening the chronotope’s range of application. Indeed, he suggested: ‘every entry into the sphere of meaning is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope’.40

36 37 38

39 40

Bakhtin 1981b, p. 84. Bakhtin 1981b, p. 250. Bemong and Borghart 2010, p. 7. In fact, the Marxist critic Darko Suvin has claimed that the ‘ “differentia generica” between metaphoric and narrative texts can best be grasped by formulating it in terms of Bakhtin’s chronotope’. Suvin 1986, p. 58. See also Suvin 1989. Morson and Emerson 1990, pp. 366–7. Bakhtin’s essay refers to a page where the concept is discussed, but no such consideration appears. Cf. Bemong and Borghart 2010, p. 5. Bakhtin 1981a, p. 258.

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Admittedly, this conceptual array is likely to be further stretched by our attention to Sekula: almost all photographs and films are chronotopic, anchored to definite places and moments. The photograph can be seen as a space-time package, producing what has been called the ‘photographic paradox’ – simultaneously there-then and here-now.41 The question, then, is how to delimit the issue; if all cultural forms manifest chronotopicity, we are faced with a concept that potentially defines everything and nothing, and its critical value is in danger of being emptied out. Bahktin himself knowingly exploited the multivalencies of the chronotope when he adopted the idea from its original sources in biology and mathematics.42 If we accept the chronotope’s profligacy as productive, then perhaps the important question to pose might be this: which chronotopes best allow for representations of the contemporary world ‘not as a sum of national parts but as a mighty and independent reality which has been created by the international division of labour and the world market and which in our epoch imperiously dominates the national markets’? The task of cultural intellectuals, the young Georg Lukács once said, is a matter of ‘form giving’; that is to say (in our context), of finding an imaginative structure that brings uneven simultaneity into view.43 In novels and narrative films, plot often provides the armature around which to hold diverse characters together. Artists generally have recourse to a range of different methods, and a number of noted recent projects have attempted to give form to the spatio-temporal dislocations of contemporary capitalism. Before focusing on Sekula, it is worth taking a brief look at how some other artists have tackled global contradictions. Prominent among these approaches have been focuses on the collisions highlighted by geopolitical borders; the unevennesses manifested by tracking particular commodity chains or by tracing the detailed life of a particular object or social phenomenon. As examples, we might mention the video-essay Europlex (2003, 20-minute video installation) by Ursula Biemann (working with anthropologist Angela Sanders), which shows how women in Morocco, close to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, become ‘timetravellers’. Biemann is interested in nonsynchronicity and assemblage – both in their social and aesthetic dimensions – as well as in the hypertextual leaps enabled by digitalisation. Literally moving between time zones, the female workers commute across the border to release Spanish women from domestic tasks, or work in factories where they reconfigure commodities to be suitable for the European market. Biemann’s Black Sea Files (2005, 43-minute video 41 42 43

De Duve 1978. See also Barthes 1977 and Barthes 1980. Bakhtin refers to Einstein’s theory of relativity and A.A. Uxtomskij’s biology. Lukács 1974a, p. 15.

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installation) uses the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline to connect interlinked themes, including an organised prostitution racket and the degradation of farming lands. The pipeline, then, is a type of geopolitical corporate thread, which Biemann counterposes with these ‘secondary scenarios’.44 The work also conveys Biemann’s reflections on her own role as an artist researching, filming, constructing and editing the video-essay, weaving a more open and non-linear narrative, and employing images in ways that resist ‘freezing the moment into a symbol’.45 In the installation Solid Sea 03 – The Road Map (2003), the Italian collective Multiplicity displays details of a journey from the vicinity of Hebron to the Kdumin area, a trip repeated twice over, once with an Israeli and once with a Palestinian traveller. Using diagrammatic maps and video recordings of the two simultaneous journeys, the work highlights the contrasting experiences and the opposing requirements of the same trip. The one-hour five-minute, unfettered motorway drive of the Israeli traveller is set against the ever-diverted and disrupted travels of the Palestinian, the latter taking well over five hours, and involving multiple modes of transport. The smoothness of the car on a highway contrasts with the bumps and jolts of the hand-held camera of those travellers taking the back roads or running across fields. These are literal recordings, but at the same time they employ – or rather, they entail – some very simple aesthetic qualities to underscore political and social inequalities; the single and holistic contrasts with the fractured and disjointed. And the livetime documenting of the two journeys holds some surprises: the motorway ride cannot conceal the supporting role played by the structures of separation; while the disjunctive passage of the Palestinian traveller reveals the intelligent social choreographies demanded by subaltern survival. Harun Farocki considers brick production and the associated social organisation of labour in two related works: Comparison via a Third (2007, a twochannel installation) and In Comparison (Zum Vergleich, 2009, 61-minute 16mm colour film). At a Swiss factory, a high-tech robot builds walls, contrasting with some different versions of industrial production in a number of other European locations. These are further compared to hand-made processes employed in India and Burkina Faso, with the latter especially evidencing a community-wide collaboration. The conjunctions are especially striking in the two-channel version. Among the footage from India, the film presents a difference between labour-intensive work and the construction of a high-rise. The bricks are made on site, with mud-blocks baked in the sun, and while male 44 45

From the essayistic voice-over to Black Sea Files. For Biemann’s work and publications, see www.geobodies.org.

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bricklayers create the infill for the concrete frame, working alongside them, a woman lifts materials while caring for a toddler. As Farocki’s titles emphasise, these contrasts are envisaged as comparative. He describes his intentions: ‘… I wanted to make a film about the concomitance and contemporary production on a range of different technical levels. So I looked for an object that had not changed too much in the last few thousand years … [T]he brick appears as something of a poetic object’. Comparisons are underscored by the works’ structural uses of repetition and variation associated with music or Minimalist art (Farocki talks of comparing A with A1).46 These are complex artworks, each deserving much deeper critical consideration than is possible here (and there are many more that could be cited), but hopefully they help to convey the attention being given to the phenomena described by U&CD. These examples also show the way in which spatial and temporal questions are brought together by artists and radical filmmakers – and it is notable how time-based media and the documentary mode have featured. The examples of Farocki and Multiplicity involve no explanatory overlay, the points being made entirely by the arrangement of footage or the components of an installation. Biemann adopts the essayistic mode (as, in other projects, does Farocki) to impart the subjective voice and the exploratory nature of her reflections.47 With Sekula, we can consider some related techniques and strategies in greater detail.

3

Sekula’s Chronotopes

Sekula’s major chronotope, at least since the 1990s, has been maritime in nature. This focus enabled him to make a particular intervention: to reject the fantasy of, what he called, ‘a world of purely electronic and instantaneous contacts, blind to the slow movement of heavy and necessary things’.48 Sekula railed against metropolitan intellectuals who seem to believe that all the world’s goods are transported via the Internet. His work was set in stark antagonism to the fetish of immediacy, virtuality, immateriality and ‘smooth space’ prevalent in much talk about globalisation. He wrote: 46 47

48

Farocki 2011. For good accounts of Farocki’s work, see Baute, Diederichsen and Sainsbury (eds) 2009; Elsaesser 2004. For the video-essay, see Biemann 2003 and Alter 2003. The themes are related to earlier discussions of the ‘essay as form’, see Lukács 1974b; Adorno 1991. Tom Huhn and Tom Eyers have insightful observations on the essayistic mode and formalisation. See Huhn 1999; Eyers 2016. Sekula 2003b, p. 297. For an earlier consideration of these themes, see Edwards 2015.

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The ‘forgetting’ of the sea by late-modernist elites parallels its renewed intransigence for desperate third world populations: for Sri Lankans, Chinese, Haitians, Cubans, for the Filipinos and Indonesians who work the sealanes.49 The shipping container became emblematic for him of a wider ‘capitalist disavowal’: hiding the commodities being transported; eliding the labour that produced them; displacing ports from their traditional urban and periurban locations; and transforming the labour processes of dock-workers, as well as the train drivers, bargers and truckers who transport freight inland.50 Sekula’s insistence on the role of ocean traffic, heavy cargo and the ‘invisible’ bulk ores51 – and on the physical and mental work that underpins the global economy – countered the ‘cognitive blankness’ of the dominant discourse.52 His account, then, also is a materialist critique of an idealist abstraction. Indeed, the container is not simply an emblem; its centrality for today’s logistics industry and ‘intermodal’ distribution makes it a key vehicle for the ‘violent synchronisations’ wrought by socially necessary labour time. And, as Sekula emphasised, this box has become something like a universal equivalent. Exceptionally well informed, Sekula was also familiar with both Trotsky’s account of U&CD and the linguistics of the Bakhtin School. Not only were the key books in his personal library, but these ideas were central to his own political formation. His proximity to the social, cultural and theoretical questions we are tackling here offers certain advantages: we can be sure that we are not considering his work through a grid of alien concepts. However, this very security produces its own risks: there is a danger of theory-matching, reading-off ideas in such a way that Sekula’s artworks become little more than illustrations for critical concepts. As already intimated, further difficulties are introduced by the shift from Bakhtin’s literary focus to the artistic realm (to the visual, plastic or fine arts). While the distinction between temporal and atemporal arts is, in many ways, rather dated (an ideological and historical construct, expertly 49 50

51 52

Sekula 1995b, p. 51. For Sekula’s commentary on photography and colonialism, see Sekula 1984e. Sekula in interview with Risberg 1999, p. 248. Sekula was profoundly influenced by Trotskyist seafarer and Los Angeles longshoreman Stan Weir, who developed a pioneering account of containerisation and the transformation of the labour process in dock work: Weir 2004. For an alternative account of changes on the Los Angeles waterfront, see Wellman 1995. Discussed in Sekula and Burch 2012. Sekula 1995b, p. 54. Cf. ‘The calculated amnesia of the world of international shipping’, Sekula 2002, p. 29.

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dissected by W.J.T. Mitchell), and while it would be tempting just to dismiss or ignore it, the tensions involved between word and image cultures nevertheless centrally animate Sekula’s practice.53 The anti-narrative, anti-temporal, anti‘theatrical’ accounts of painting and sculpture advanced by the high-modernist art critics in the late 1960s and 70s (above all, by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried – or, John Szarkowski’s high-modernist account of photography emphasising narrative and time), prompted a sharp reaction among many artists. These aesthetic disputes were intensified by the growing resistance to American involvement in the Vietnam War, and by the rise of the New Left and new social movements. Sekula’s allegiance to lens-based work and to conceptual art (with its refusal of the dichotomy between script and imagery) was part of that critical response. Indeed, he was among those artists who took these approaches – and ‘scripto-visual practice’ – in an emphatically politicised direction. Greenberg’s early essay ‘Towards a Newer Laocoön’ (written in 1940, while he was still broadly allied to American Trotskyism) makes explicit the connection back to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s eighteenth-century treatise, which codified the law of genres on the basis of space and time.54 As Mitchell argues, one can dispense with Lessing’s stark opposition of temporal and atemporal arts (his contrast between poetry and painting respectively) without at the same time collapsing all distinction between texts and images.55 The important point, Mitchell insists, is to reject not the distinction per se but rather the basis upon which Lessing (and others) have construed it as binary opposition – that is, to understand both literary texts and visual art as availing themselves of spatiotemporal constructions. Notably, in his essay on the chronotope, Bakhtin identifies Lessing as a key precursor in the consideration of the problem of historical time,56 as the thinker who ‘established the temporal character of [chronotopicity]’ and who explained the space-time principle within the literary image.57 Bakhtin’s comments on Lessing are brief, but his general argument seems broadly consistent with the relational conception advanced by Mitchell. Indeed, Bakhtin’s dialogic understanding of the novel and of language foreshadows Mitchell’s preference for ‘conceiving of the space-time problem in the arts, as a dialectical struggle in which opposed terms take on different ideological roles and relationships at different moments in history’.58 For Bakhtin, 53 54 55 56 57 58

Mitchell 1987. Greenberg 1988; Lessing 1984. Mitchell 1987, pp. 102–3. Bakhtin 1981b, p. 204. Bakhtin 1981b, p. 251. Mitchell 1987, p. 98.

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language takes shape in a concrete situation of two or more speakers; a word or statement always presupposes a response, and, in anticipation, is already shaped by it. This is what is understood as the principle of ‘dialogism’. In contrast, ‘monologism’ refers to a point of view imposed from above and which excludes other speakers. Bakhtin believed that the novel was the literary form best exemplifying the dialogic mode. Bakhtin’s examples of the chronotope are drawn from extended prose fiction. Sekula not only takes us to the plastic arts, he also mines therein an essayistic and documentary vein of lens-based work. Still, his practice is notable for its narratival conception, as is made explicit by a number of the titles he gives his works: Aerospace Folktales (1973) or Fish Story (1995). The tradition of the photo-story (in both its fictional and documentary modes) has shaped his approach, which he has compared at times to the making of a ‘disassembled film’. This Ain’t China (1974) is subtitled ‘A Photonovel’, and it stages yet further narrative forms: parable, psychological novel, political novel. Allegorical allusions have also been important. Ship of Fools – Sekula’s photosequence initiated in the late 1990s while travelling with the Global Mariner (the campaign ship of the International Transport Workers’ Federation) – is a direct acknowledgement of Sebastian Brandt’s late fifteenth-century allegory Das Narrenschiff (1494). Indirectly, Ship of Fools looks to Desiderius Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly (1511), adopting adoxography to speak truth to power, and appealing to Folly’s creativity in order to resist dogma.59 Sekula has said that the quotidian events captured by the camera already involve fiction and theatre, or else can be imagined ‘as if’ performance.60 Yet, if the maritime industries provide Sekula with his major chronotopic site, it is important not to mistake his work for a conventional project of photojournalism (after all, he wrote some of the first and finest Marxist critiques of the classic documentary mode).61 Fish Story, he said, is best understood as ‘a hybrid, “paraliterary” revision of social documentary photography’, which sought to dissolve the oppositions typically upheld between writing and the visual arts, or between the arts and critical-social investigations. Instead, it tries to exploit relations running across these practices: essay writing, the ‘poetics’ of sequential photographs, and research into cultural, economic and social

59

60 61

Sekula in Hanrou 2012. Elsewhere, Sekula asked: ‘Who would be foolish enough to view the world economy from the deck of a ship?’ Sekula 1995b, p. 48. The answer was evident: he was interested in ‘fools’. This is another example of adoxography – a mode in which high themes are addressed through a low voice. Sekula in Risberg 1999, pp. 240–1. Sekula 1984d; Sekula 1984c.

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history.62 This method applies to all of his works in photography and film. His projects combine complexly structured photographic sequences with texts (extended captions, epigraphs, and jokes). Insistently intertextual, the works are dense with connections and allusions, reflecting on representational traditions, such as the way the sea has been presented culturally – and stretching from Dutch maritime paintings to Popeye and Jules Verne, to mainstream narrative films and communist novels about seafaring. Thus, many of the devices associated with the chronotope might be reimagined through a number of displacements: the shift Sekula enacts from Bakhtin’s literary canon to photography; from Bakhtin’s address as a literary analyst (the critic addressing the aesthetic object) to that of the artist giving form to that ‘object’. Then there are the transpositions Sekula makes within photographic traditions, from art photography to photography’s ‘non-art’ or ‘anti-art’ modes; from photojournalism to a performative approach to documentary. When they first appeared in English, during the 1970s and 80s, the writings of Bakhtin, Vološinov and Medvedev provided ways to rethink aesthetic form for Marxist thinkers. They raised questions about the inherited opposition between Marxism and formalism – the legacies of socialist realism and the Cold War. They also helped side-step structuralism’s more ‘abstract objectivism’ and static conception of language, presenting instead a ‘dialectics of the sign’ in concrete and everyday use: the ‘sign becomes an arena of the class struggle’.63 Further, they allowed for a rethinking of ideology through representation. The Bakhtin School helped Sekula establish his transformatative understanding of photography – neither as ‘art-photography’ nor as conventional ‘documentary’, but as a socially reflexive and interventionary practice. The literal performances of his earlier work (for example, Meat Mass (1972) or This Ain’t China) were translated into photographs conceived dialogically – as enunciatory acts embedded within the relations of social interchange, and which were performatively effective.64 The important point for thinking about U&CD is that the focus on the maritime industries, with their international mediations and alternative connectivity, enabled Sekula to totalise the relations between dispersed nodes and aspects of the global economy, and to explore the way spaces are ideologically and economically determined ‘within the larger system of postwar development’.65 Photography’s descriptive power (famous, as noted earlier, for 62 63 64 65

Sekula 1995b, p. 52. Vološinov 1986, p. 23. Sekula 1984b, p. xiii. Sekula in Risberg 1997, p. 238.

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its temporally charged contradictions) allowed him to record these spaces as socially constituted sites. It also enabled him to draw on social documentary’s established tropes of capturing biographies and ‘idiosyncratic psychic investment[s]’, reading spaces as sites ‘of actions and materialized memories’.66 Notably, Sekula revives one of Bakhtin’s key examples: the device of the road. Bakhtin, as we saw, associates this particular chronotope with earlier literature, but its continued prominence as an established photographic genre (think, for example, of the work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore) – and also within paraliterature – makes it especially pertinent for Sekula. The ‘road’ here includes its maritime equivalents (the sealanes between ports). And, as is made explicit in Freeway to China, it includes a metaphorical extension: encompassing the organisational pathways of international solidarity connecting maritime workers.67 Sometimes, the parameters of the journey are limited. For example, Dead Letter Office (1997) explores the coastal zone that straddles the US-Mexico border, running south from San Diego to Tijuana-Popotla-Ensenada. In Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes (1997) – here, taking a non-maritime example – Sekula presents a comparison between Ottawa, the state capital and location of the Bank of Canada, and the small provincial town of Sudbury, a centre for the mining and smelting of nickel. Other journeys take the character of global wanderings: Fish Story transports us between Sekula’s home terrain of southern California, to the US East Coast, around Europe’s ports, to South Korea, Hong Kong and back to Mexico. The long video-essay The Lottery of the Sea (2006) voyages to Athens, Barcelona, Galicia, Lisbon, New York, Panama, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and a US naval base in Japan. TITANIC’s wake (2000) moves between the Loire valley, Bilbao, Novorossijsk, Limassol, Turin, Seattle, Vancouver, Istanbul, and Lisbon.68 Ship of Fools also includes Durban in South Africa and, with its later 2010 additions, extends to the port of Santos in Brazil. Sekula’s traversing of littoral spaces and their hinterlands provides the foundation for connections to be made between places and times. Take as an example this extract from one caption in Freeway to China (Version 2, For Liverpool), 1998–99 (see Figures 8.3 and 8.4):

66 67

68

Ibid. And yet it would be fair to say that – despite the overarching motif of the sea – what he mostly presents is its junctures with solid ground, its hinterlands and infrastructural networks. Only occasionally do his captions give properly maritime locations: ‘Mid-Atlantic’ (Fish Story, 1995); or ‘Off the Albanian Coast’ (TITANIC’s wake, 2000). Published 2003 and cited here as Sekula 2003b.

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figs 8.3–4 Above: Freeway to China 5. Below: Freeway to China 4 Allan Sekula, Freeway to China (Version 2, for Liverpool) (1998–9) Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

The Teal berthed at Pier 300 after unloading two of four German cranes transported across the Indian and Pacific oceans from a construction site in Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf, where they were manufactured by Filipino and other South Asian migrant laborers. Belgian-owned, the Teal is registered in the Netherlands Antilles, a pervasive legal ruse that permits the hiring of cheaper foreign crews.69

69

Sekula 2003b, p. 287; Cf. Sekula 1995, p. 12. Sekula is always on the side of the subaltern classes. Nevertheless, a shift can be detected from an earlier ‘trade unionist’ emphasis, which focuses on the cheapening of labour, to a more explicitly internationalist perspective on the integration of the global workforce.

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From a photograph of the Los Angeles harbour, the caption propels our vision outwards geographically and also back into this moment’s prehistory, helping us to grasp how the immediately given instantiates the impact of wider space-time conjunctures. The road is often used as an allegorical device. Conventionally, the passage along it enacts a spiritual or existential journey. Protagonists face tests along the way, but while they might be tempted to wander from the path, the journey described, chapter-by-chapter, usually has a direction and a final destination; this course in the story is generally shared with the narrative form. In Sekula’s work, very little is organised chronologically. It is not as if we as viewers ‘follow in his steps’ in any straightforward way. While journeys may be important, his works are not ‘travelogues’. The photographs do not function in the manner they might for a photojournalist: they have a different ‘density’; their role is accumulative and retroactive; interrupting, as much as carrying, a narrative. In Sekula, the ‘direction’ and ‘destination’ are cognitive in nature; they are less provided than they are posited, acquired through sustained reflection. His ‘voyages’ take on an allegorical dimension: the road of critical research. But they are more than that too; they are an allegory of the problems of understanding modern capitalism, the difficulties of representing that understanding and of comprehending its representational elisions and paradoxes. The point made here is important and recurs through his works, indicating the problems of a simplistic notion of ‘realism’ (a problem that is especially acute for a photographer). To recall the famous point made by Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s – the source is actually Fritz Sternberg, writing in the 1920s – a photograph of a factory shows us next to nothing of the social relations operating within and around it.70 That is: ‘reality’ eludes straightforward appearance; ‘social facts’ evade the powers of the camera. Indeed, Sekula has described capitalism as having an ‘attenuated or broken metonymy’ – that is, its relations of causality are not transparent.71 Conscious of the hiatus in metonymic contiguity, he grasps the representational problems presented by capital’s value-form and by the riddle of the commodity. Thus, Sekula’s challenge to the disavowal 70 71

Brecht 2000a, p. 144; Brecht 2000b, p. 164; Benjamin 1972, p. 24. Brecht always attributed the point to the Marxist sociologist Fritz Sternberg. See Sekula’s discussion in 1997a, p. 49. Sekula in interview with Beausse 1998, p. 26. This break, Sekula argues (in a discussion alluding also to Marx’s account of commodity fetishism), demands that we make a ‘jump in the imagination’ (Beausse 1998, p. 26). See also: ‘This labor is no longer proximate or contiguous – that is, no longer accessible through the realist rhetorical device of metonymy – except through some great imaginative geographical leap, the uncanny ability to wear Nike sneakers and jump in the imagination to an assembly line in Indonesia’. Sekula in Risberg 1999, p. 248.

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of the port and the occlusion of labour is simultaneously an allegory of this deeper epistemological or representational conundrum. As in the traditional allegorical journey, a series of encounters shape his narratives. Sometimes the people he meets simply embody roles, albeit situated ones: in TITANIC’s wake, ‘Machinist and apprentice’ in the SNCF workshops in Tours; in Fish Story, ‘Pipe fitters finishing the engine room of a tuna boat’ in San Diego or ‘Mother and child. Ilsan fishing village’. But equally the encounters take the form of portraits or portraits-with-text: ‘Pancake’ in Fish Story, a former shipyard sandblaster who turns to metal scavenging; in the film-essay The Forgotten Space (2012), Liu Han Hu and Wendy Lui, two members of China’s new generation of young-female migrant workers. Other figures include expert commentators, activists, the members of church-run seamens’ missions who act to defend the basic rights of maritime workers as in The Lottery of the Sea. In The Forgotten Space one such mission provides a temporary home and respite for the employees of cruise ships; Sekula memorably referred to these vessels as ‘floating apartheid machines of postmodern leisure’.72 Freeway to China is especially rich with individual stories of struggle, defeat and defiance, provided through long captions: Ray Familathe, the Los Angeles longshore worker who travels to Merseyside on six occasions in support of striking dockers; Mason Davies, a shop steward and former shipyard employee, who goes on to work there as a welder on temporary contracts before disappearing, reputedly to New York in search of work (see Figure 8.5); Louisa Gratz, president of International Longshore and Warehouse Local 26, just as she exits a tough negotiation meeting with management (see Figure 8.6); Liverpool strikers Mickey Tighe and Marty Size, watching from afar the scabs now at work in what had been their yard. And then there is John Stanson, a former merchant seafarer and dock clerk, who left the industry to work as a guard for Tate Liverpool (the art gallery occupying the former warehouses of the Albert Dock) (see Figure 8.7); in response to the artist’s query as to why the history of the dock is absent from the neighbouring Maritime Museum, Stanson asks Sekula ‘Are you familiar with Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony?’ Across Sekula’s works, individual lives – workers whose labour process has been radically transformed, migrant workers, trade unionists and activists, the dispossessed and vulnerable – condense social-historical transformations. Importantly, they do so not merely as the objects of social processes, but also as agents. In this, Sekula’s own role as ‘protagonist’ is conceived as dialogic: he is a witness – a medium – whose projects channel other people’s stories or sassy observations. And there seems to be something critical 72

Sekula 1995a, p. 51.

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figure 8.5 Freeway to China 2 (Portrait 1) Allan Sekula, Freeway to China (Version 2, for Liverpool) (1998–9). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

figure 8.6 Portrait 2 (Matson Terminal, Terminal Island, Port of Los Angeles, May 1998) Allan Sekula, Freeway to China (Version 2, for Liverpool) (1998–9). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

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figure 8.7 Portrait 3 (Albert Dock, Liverpool, July 1999) Allan Sekula, Freeway to China (Version 2, for Liverpool) (1998–9). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

about the various temporal registers allowed by these encounters. The captions (combining descriptions with testimonies) bring together recollections and anticipations; there are stories set in the past that have no known end, while others involve second-guessing or wagering on life decisions whose outcomes cannot be predicted. Reflecting on a series of disputes, Gratz warns that if the bosses are allowed to get their way, ‘Pretty soon we are all going to end up on the damned freeway homeless’.

4

Montage

Montage has been something of a privileged form for the cultural left – breaking apart the apparently seamless whole of appearance and allowing social contrasts and conflicts to be foregrounded. Sekula’s response to radical-modernist arguments for aesthetic ‘construction’ was to produce sequences of photographs that called attention to the editing process while maintaining his distance from the posed or staged tableau (an approach which came to be favoured in the 1980s and 90s).73 Sekula explicitly sought procedures that 73

Sekula 1997a, p. 49. See also Edwards 2004.

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would resist dichotomising ‘realism and modernism’. He wanted to create works that brought together the realist effort to weave a complex social totality with the modernist power of rupture and its attention to the ‘labour of the image’. While he challenged claims to documentary transparency, thus chiming with the rise of political modernism in the 70s, Sekula remained committed to developing a realist project, setting him apart from the dominant trends in critical art practice in the next decades. He opposed the preoccupation with the play of signs, quotations, appropriations and staging – approaches whose reflexivity he found too ironic, internalised and anti-materialist. Instead, Sekula aspired to develop an externally directed conception of reflexive practice; to maintain a connection – however troubled or problematic – between representation and reality. Here, Sekula adopts the spirit proposed by Jameson in the afterword to Aesthetics and Politics, where realism and modernism are extracted from their sterile stand-off and, if not actually reconciled, instead are brought into a more productive critical tension. According to Jameson, this ‘new realism’ would ‘resist the power of reification in consumer society’ and the associated logics of fragmentation by reinventing the ‘category of totality’, drawing out the structural relations of the world system. By emphasising the ‘renewal of perception’, it would also ‘incorporate what was always most concrete in the dialectical counter-concept of modernism’.74 Sekula was not a partisan of one position from the debates represented in Aesthetics and Politics; rather he worked through the problems and was happy to draw from its various participants.75 Sekula’s work combines the modernist practices of juxaposition, ensemble and reportage with a realist dynamic of social intertwinements.76 Montage has also been closely associated with allegory and in this it intersects with the chronotope of the road or journey.77 Interestingly, though, montage’s disjunctive logic diverges somewhat from Bakhtin’s emphasis on the ‘fusion’ of ‘the whole’, which reveals his early roots in Neo-Kantian aesthetics. Art, he suggests, ‘seizes on the chronotope in all its wholeness and fullness’.78 In this regard at least, Bakhtin’s conception of art displays a more affirmative and organic character; Sekula’s tends to adopt Vološinov’s stronger emphasis on social contradictions.79 As we have already seen, Sekula’s work demands to 74 75 76 77 78 79

Jameson 1977, pp. 211–13. Adorno appears less often than the others in Sekula’s writing and conversation, which is interesting given that he was taught by Herbert Marcuse. For intertwinement – ‘individual and social, physical and psychical, private and public’ – as a logic of realism, see Lukács 1950, p. 145. Honig 1959; Fletcher 1964; and Quilligan 1979. Bakhtin 1981b, p. 243. For Bakhtin’s relation to Neo-Kantianism, see Bakhtin 1990; Hirshkop 2002. The issues

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be integrated through the processes of our critical involvement, but this is a totalising process that remains fluid – motile, but materially grounded nonetheless. In this sense, then, the interplay of simultaneity and singularity, the integrative and the disjunctive, the synchronous and nonsynchronous – which characterise the ambitions of U&CD – might be understood to manifest in aesthetic form. Sekula specifically advanced a sequential model of montage (which drew on the traditions of the photo-story in magazine and book forms, and the idea of ‘horizontal montage’ associated with the work of filmmaker Chris Marker).80 His pictures are intended to be viewed not as isolated images, but as elements within carefully edited sequences. The constructive method applies not only to a single occasion (a page spread or a juxtaposition within a layout), nor simply to the relations within a particular work (a book or an exhibition cycle), but is also conceived as a ‘larger montage principle’81 that operates across and between all his works – as well as interacting dialogically with both intra- and extra-aesthetic concerns. These comparisons through immediate adjacencies as well as through inter-textual recollections help to summon forth the economic and historical integration of diverse locales – connections that might turn on some small anecdote or episode reported by those he meets, or on the artist’s own reflections, just as much as on socio-economic logic. The processes are interwoven. The caption about the Teal, for example, turns into a meditation on the colours blue and orange, prominent in Sekula’s photographs of berths in the Port of Los Angeles. He points to these colours’ ideological and historical significance in southern California (ocean, orchards, sunshine, optimism). Meanwhile, in the context of Liverpool, orange takes on an alternative valence due to its associations with Protestant Loyalism (dating from this community’s allegiance to King William of Orange). He also plays with orange’s use in the Day-Glo effects of Pop Art and in the poetic image of hellfire in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Sekula once said that horizontal montage – the interplay of juxtapositions in a photo-sequence – helped him to evade the tyranny of the film projector’s unilinear direction, which subjects spectators to its relentless forward drive from beginning to end. With his own film-works, he sought ways to complicate this

80 81

correspond closely to the allegory-symbol debate, where allegorical modes are closely associated with issues of temporality. Notably, these debates also became increasingly staked around the postmodern-modern distinction in the 1980s. Benjamin 1985; Benjamin 1976; De Man 1983, Owens 1980a; Owens 1980b; Buchloh 1982; and Day 2010. On Marker’s ‘horizontal montage’, see Bazin 1983 and 2003. Sekula in Risberg 1999, p. 238.

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figure 8.8 Good Ship (Limassol) 1 Allan Sekula, Ship of Fools (1999–2010). 101.6 × 154.9 cm. Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

momentum. Whatever his medium, most of his projects have an accumulative character, with each image or moment suggesting another association or reference, and opening onto the next reflection. At times, they resemble Melville’s Moby Dick as though reimagined by Brecht or Marker. If, as Sekula said, a ‘society of accelerated flows is also in certain key aspects a society of deliberate slow movement’,82 his own works also demand deceleration or the time-consuming process of reflective reconsideration. Lottery of the Sea runs for three hours, and, within it, a long segment exploits an extended temporality to convey the painstaking work of environmentalists and locals trying to remove an oil spill from the beaches and rocks of Galicia. His photo-books and exhibitions also demand repeated viewing, and turnings back to recover further connections – a process already thematised in his earlier installations-as-reading-rooms. The extensive reach of his projects is matched by intensifying strategies, and the measured pace finds its counterpoint in the sting of subaltern pithiness, or in those sudden conjunctions that constellate a moment of realisation. Often, his formulations condense into aphorism; posed somewhere between thesis or parable or riddle, they can feel very Benjaminian – as in the statement that

82

Sekula 1995b, p. 50.

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figure 8.9 Bad Ship (Limassol) 2 Allan Sekula, Ship of Fools (1999–2010). 101.6 × 154.9 cm. Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

forms part of Dead Letter Office or the wall-texts for Ship of Fools. Take these examples from the latter: ‘You can’t send a postcard from the bottom of the sea’; ‘Elites are stupider than need be. Everyone else is smarter than allowed to be’.83 As examples of Sekula’s montage strategies we might look at his diptychs or pairings of images, which allow for sharp contrasts and visual confrontations (although, in extracting these images, we must not forget that they are embedded in larger sequences). In Ship of Fools, the old psychomachic battles between Virtues and Vices materialise as the struggle between the campaign ship Global Mariner and, moored close by, a vessel operating under a flag-ofconvenience (see Figures 8.8 and 8.9).84 In Dead Letter Office, we are presented with a series of oppositions: between Mexico and the US; between Tijuana’s subcontracted labourers and the South Korean multinational Hyundai based there; between the Hollywood film-studios based in Popotla and local musselgatherers whose fishing grounds have been damaged during the making of the movie Titanic (1997) (see Figures 8.10 and 8.11). Meanwhile, a young hanger-on 83 84

The first is attributed to oral history; the latter is from the São Paulo iteration of Ship of Fools. See Van Gelde (ed.) 2015. The dodging of responsibility and breaches of labour rights through the ‘flag of convenience’ system was the target of the ITWF’s campaign ship Global Mariner. See Sekula 2002.

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figure 8.10

Hyundai container factory and trucker’s graffito, Tijuana Allan Sekula, Dead Letter Office (1997–8). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

figure 8.11

Twentieth Century Fox set for The Titanic and mussel gatherers, Popotla Allan Sekula, Dead Letter Office (1997–8). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

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at a Republican convention in San Diego, posing by a swimming pool, is set against an impoverished scavenger with his trolley outside the conference hall. This last opposition exploits a familiar visual trope from the traditions of critical photo-reportage and worker photography: ‘poverty in the midst of plenty’. This pairing creates a visual echo with the two exposed male bodies: the one, a young, toned and consciously aestheticised physique; the other, an aging torso that has been lived in. However, although he deploys this well-known rhetorical device, Sekula does not rest on the stark contrast, but draws out deeper political and economic power relations that shape this cross-border region. The point here is important. At one level, it is quite routine for photographers to expose the ‘uneven’ character of modern capitalism. There are a large number of images that (in another iteration of the wealth-versus-poverty motif) might set an informal shantytown against a distant conglomeration of skyscrapers – riffs on classic images by Andreas Feininger and Walker Evans that exploit the lens’s capacity for spatial compression. The cover of the 2010 edition of Neil Smith’s classic, with a striking image by Guardian photographer David Levene, is a fine example of this tradition. Another is Oscar Ruiz’s series of aerial photographs for the Erase the Difference campaign, from 2014, which uses the drama of physical adjacency (two neighbourhoods) – playing on the way reality itself can appear to be Photoshopped.85 Yet Sekula seeks to do more than demonstrate unevenness. His use of sequential montage and visual integration helps to draw out the less visible, and less readily visualisable, aspects of the social world: that is, it also aspires to capture the ‘combined’ dimensions associated with U&CD. Elsewhere, his montaged contrasts capture temporal processes, as in Fish Story, where the vista from a South Korean beach is shown from two perspectives: the fishing village of Ilsan, on the one side; and, on the other, the same village set against, in the distance, Ulsan’s Hyundai installation (see Figure 8.12). Again, emphasising their mutual imbrication, we learn that Ulsan is poisoning the waters and gradually swallowing Ilsan, physically and economically. Sometimes, the spatial contrast takes precedence, as in Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes where banking and state functions contrast to the nickel industry. Sekula specifically foregrounds the metaphorised contrast, one that is abroad in popular perception, which counterposes ‘brain’ (Ottawa) to ‘asshole’ (Sudbury). This, of course, is a barely disguised reference to mental and manual labour,

85

Erase the Difference was run by the ad agency Publicis, on behalf of the Mexican bank Banamex, as a social awareness campaign.

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and it also taps into Sekula’s recurrent interest in scatological motifs, for which Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais is central. Yet the work also reveals how, despite this sharp disparity, brain and asshole are related by the creation and distribution of wealth, and by the integration of banking capital with that of the extractive industries.86 Here, Sekula’s visual play with the mine’s sign ‘Big Nickel’ provides one of the keys for establishing this connection to the currency. TITANIC’s wake provides a particularly interesting example with a diptych capturing Bilbao in the midst of its transformation in the late 1990s (see Figure 8.13). The bi-partite structure is used to present us with a ruptured panorama, which evidences a visual archaeology of the urban fabric. This work proves not to be a demonstration of deindustrialisation-and-recovery (the over-familiar story of an industrial past replaced by service industries, tourism and consumer-based economies), but an exploration of and challenge to the neoliberal boosterist ideology that sustains precisely that unilinear emplotment. In his associated writings (and through to the film The Forgotten Space), Sekula considers how Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad edifice is repeatedly figured through vitalistic metaphors (from allusions to fishes and whales, or to streamlined submarines and aerodynamic forms, to the discourse of the so-called ‘Bilbao Miracle’). He also explores how the museum’s hyper-visibility is repeatedly used to position the city’s port and industries as a contrasting backdrop of ‘dysfunctional atrophy’.87 The Guggenheim offers a powerful fantasy of the financefuelled future that can dispense with labour. The ‘Bilbao Miracle’ provides an example of what Arantxa Rodríguez calls ‘uneven redevelopment’: the skewing of renewal projects away from urban neighbourhoods and towards high-profile central sites; the sinking of local and regional resources into prized locations, such as the Guggenheim; and the wider ideology of the ‘new’ (neoliberal) urban policy.88 Here, Sekula uses straight photography to proffer a rebus – one that poses the complicity of urban policies in strategies of deliberate disinvestment, and the siphoning of local public resources to subsidise international private capital. Indeed, this diptych is not a freestanding pairing, but is just the second moment of a long sequence of photographs. The Bilbao diptych thus functions

86 87

88

Sekula 1997b, p. 59. Sekula and Burch 2011, p. 79. The time contrast used in The Forgotten Space (the film Sekula made with Nöel Burch) in which we see the Guggenheim before and after the redevelopment of surrounding Abandoibarra. Rodríguez also appears in The Forgotten Space, interviewed from a prospect very close to the one Sekula gives in his Bilbao diptych. On ‘uneven redevelopment’, see Rodríguez, Martínez and Guenaga 2001; Rodríguez and Martínez 2005.

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figure 8.12

Doomed fishing village of Ilsan Allan Sekula, Plates 54–55, from Fish Story (1995). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

within a much larger framework, and, most immediately, within a sequence of images set around Saché, in the French Loire. Alluding to Lukács’s account of the genre, Sekula said that he conceived TITANIC’s wake as a kind of ‘historical novel’. He spoke of the ‘characters’ who appear – from the internationally recognised names of Frank Gehry, Alexander Calder, or Honoré de Balzac, through to the many individuals who Sekula met on his travels, thus bringing together figures of contrasting status. Through this interplay of the unknown with famous figures, and of textual narrative with visual record, we again sense Sekula’s attempt to combine modernist and realist logics, to deploy critical approaches to both assemblage and narrative integration.89 Specifically, he played off the way the historical novel could elicit epic resonances from quotidian scenes – in Sekula’s hands, from the modest, everyday, ‘diaristic’ character of his photographs.

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Sekula 2003d, p. 107. For further discussion of this project, see Day 2015.

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285

Coda

Finally, we should note another distinctive chronotope in Sekula’s work. As we have seen, from his quotidian photographs of the here-and-now he elicits other places and times. First, we have those experiences that break the ‘relentless synchronicity’90 of modernity. These defiantly challenge the dominant ideology – providing reminders of its one-sided perspectives; the fantasies of a frictionless digital economy being countered, for example, with the intransigence of geographical spaces for migrating workers. Secondly, he discovers those ‘materialized memories’ that draw the evidence of previous histories into the present. This second dimension has sometimes lured Sekula’s viewers into detecting a strain of melancholy – a problem that has, admittedly, been hard to avoid through the main periods of his working life, which roughly paralleled the rise and consolidation of neoliberalism. 90

Sekula 1995c, p. 130.

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figure 8.13

Bilbao (diptych) Allan Sekula, from TITANIC’s wake (1998–2000). 74 × 173 cm. Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

Yet, there is another temporal register that comes into view, one that projects forward. Or, to put it another way, it is a register that reaches back to us from a time that is ‘not-yet’, but which manifests in our present. We could call it a ‘materialised anticipation’; that is, not just a utopian anticipation, but a possible future that is already tentatively here. This itself could be understood as nonsynchronicity with the destinations and destinies projected for us by capital. Sekula’s slide-cycle of hybrid anti-global protestors in Seattle is one obvious example. Another is his travels with the crew of the Global Mariner, as part of a long-term campaign to draw attention to the gross breaches of workers’ safety allowed under the ‘legal ruse’ of the flag-of-convenience system. The specific friction he proposes, then, is not just with particular physical and social obstacles (whether rough seas, state borders or police lines), but with spacetime conjunctures determined by capital. This ‘ship of fools’ reminds us how such projects ‘are often pregnant with the future’.91 We can conceive many of 91

Sekula in Hanrou 2012.

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his other encounters – those in Freeway to China, for example – as belonging to that same crew. Lottery of the Sea includes an interview with an activist involved in building an international syndicalist organisation for maritime workers, one that might be capable of resisting capital’s globalised strategies. Dead Letter Office is supplemented by a scene from Tijuana, with metalworkers employed by a Hyundai subcontractor signing-up to form an independent union.92 In The Forgotten Space, we see an activist giving a lesson to truckers, on the economics of their status as ‘independent owner-operators’, a scene concluding with a memorable and questioning pause as the teacher invites his class to follow through the logic.93 Such chronotopes of asynchronous-and-synchronous contemporaneity are instances where the uneven-and-combined character of capitalism meets the current debate on temporality in Marx and Benjamin. It is worth recalling that U&CD was originally formulated as a perspective for

92 93

Sekula 1997c. Sekula and Burch 2012. References to a truckers’ dispute also appear in Sekula 2003b.

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revolution in Eastern Europe. In recent debates, perhaps unavoidably, it has become more of a diagnostic or interpretative tool. Artworks cannot substitute for substantive social change, but Sekula’s work sustains a futural and praxial gaze. In a time of amnesia, this alone marks out his work as extraordinary. As he put it in Freeway to China, internationalist solidarity ‘[sustains] hope for a future distinct from that fantasized by the engineers of a new world of wealth without workers’.94 Or, as he also quipped in Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes, ‘perhaps the asshole has a mind of its own’.95 The authors wish to extend special thanks to Sally Stein and Ina Steiner. 94 95

Sekula 2003b, p. 297. Sekula 1997b, p. 59.

chapter 9

Aesthetics of Uneven and Combined Development: Tanpınar and Dos Passos at a World Literary Conjuncture Nesrin Degirmencioglu

Pascale Casanova, in her seminal The World Republic of Letters, proposes a single autonomous world literary space with its own rules, in which authors from the centre and the peripheries share their inherited accumulated literary capital and enable its international distribution within a shared temporality and a literary present unique to that space. ‘Autonomy’, for Casanova, is ‘a fundamental aspect of world literary space’.1 She argues that: In the most autonomous countries, then, literature cannot be reduced to political interests or used to suit national purposes. It is in these countries that the independent laws of literature are invented, and that the extraordinary and improbable construction of what may properly be referred to as the autonomous international space of literature is carried out.2 Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, therefore, is an autonomous literary space governed by ‘literary laws’ that exist independently of the national and political circumstances of the states where they are invented. Such a claim, on the one hand, emphasises the necessity of liberating literature from serving the purposes of political and national propaganda; on the other hand, it restricts literature’s autonomous response to the political, historical, and economic conditions in which it was written. The latter concern indicates one limitation of Casanova’s presentation of the relationship between literature and politics. She claims that the long process in which autonomy is achieved ‘tends also to obscure the political origins of literature; and, by causing the link between literature and nation to be forgotten, encourages a belief in the existence of a literature that is completely pure, beyond the reach of time and history’.3 This 1 Casanova 2004, p. 86. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid; my emphasis.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384736_011

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claim, however, giving literature a transcendental quality, completely detached from political and temporal controversies of its time, raises challenging questions when Dos Passos and Tanpınar’s novels are taken into consideration.4 Casanova uses the term ‘literary Greenwich Meridian’ to indicate the measure of literary modernity within the world of letters, as it suggests ‘a common standard for measuring time’.5 For Casanova, ‘the Greenwich meridian of literature makes it possible to estimate the relative aesthetic distance from the centre of the world of letters of all those who belong to it. This aesthetic distance is also measured in temporal terms, since the prime meridian determines the present of literary creation, which is to say modernity’.6 ‘The only true moderns’, Casanova asserts, are the writers who go beyond the local norms and literary practice of their homelands and accept that ‘literary timekeeping’, as a result, acknowledges the aesthetic revolutions and international laws that shape and structure the world literary space, respectively.7 The Greenwich literary meridian serves as a regulator of modern time to which all other literary centres need to adjust their clocks. Paris, depending on its great ‘volume of accumulated capital’ and its incontestable literary domination in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards, positioned itself as the most autonomous of all literary spaces.8 French literary capital, imposing itself as universal and purely literary, ‘belonged not to France alone, but to all nations’, thereby denoted the ‘Literary Greenwich Meridian’.9 The original Greenwich Meridian was established as a scientific but arbitrary point for dividing global time zones. When it becomes a metaphor in Casanova’s terminology, however, it privileges Paris and, except for the Irish Paradigm and the case of Latin American literature, Paris sets the ‘tempo’ of the literary world.10 If the core regulates the tempo, this indicates that the literary time passes at a certain pace at the core. What is missing in Casanova’s theoretical approach, however, is that when the writers in peripheral locations that are keeping time with the core adopt and appropriate core aesthetic principles to produce innovative literary works, the pace of contemporary aesthetics accelerates in the works of these writers, outstripping the temporality at the core. The Greenwich meridian of literature, I argue, cannot be static, passing 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

For alternative approaches on Casanova, see Warwick Research Collective 2015 and Chrisite (in this volume). Casanova 2004, p. 87. Casanova 2004, p. 88. Casanova 2004, p. 94. Casanova 2004, p. 87. Ibid. Casanova 2004, p. 88.

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through Paris and privileging it over the rest of the world, but rather requires a more dynamic and flexible understanding that fluctuates within world-literary spaces, depending on where aesthetic innovations are taking place. Casanova acknowledges the domination of the core over the peripheries in her remarks on the universal aspect of the Nobel Prize. As she argues, ‘the dominant position of the Nobel Prize in the pyramid of literary recognition and publication … accords the work of European authors a central position while relegating to the periphery everything that comes from other parts of the world’.11 The nomination of Orhan Pamuk for the Nobel Prize in 2006 can be interpreted as a consequence of the Nobel committee’s recent efforts to internationalise the prize by exploring the peripheries of the world literature, or in Casanova’s terms, through the committee’s daring to ‘venture into the non-Western literary world’.12 At this point, however, translation emerges as a fundamental problem. As Casanova points out, translation of works into languages of ‘high culture’ – languages with a high degree of literary prestige such as French or English – endows their authors with ‘a kind of licence, a permit of circulation certifying an author’s membership into a literary circle’.13 In the case of Pamuk, the availability of a wide range of his novels in translation and the fluency of their English translations significantly affected their recognition and popularity abroad. It would be quite misleading, however, to regard Pamuk as the only author producing in universal standards within the Turkish literary space. Pamuk’s works, which reflect the clash of East and West, secularism and Islamism, and the identity crisis Turkish people have been facing since the founding of the Republic, are a continuation of the Turkish literary tradition seen in Tanpınar’s novels decades earlier. Tanpınar’s masterpiece Huzur (A Mind at Peace), though first published in 1949, was translated into English only recently, in 2008. Until Huzur gained its ‘permit of circulation’ with this translation, it was only analysed within the confines of Turkish literary studies. Although Casanova admits different literary temporalities may exist in a given national space14 without gaining a circulatory permit through translation, the core’s acknowledgement of innovative aesthetic forms emerging from the peripheral locations is very limited, which puts the periphery at the mercy of the core despite its potential superiority. Casanova’s acknowledgement that the periphery may overtake the core in aesthetic innovation is partly a response to the Latin American situation, where 11 12 13 14

Casanova 2004, p. 151. Ibid. Casanova 2004, p. 20. Casanova 2004, p. 101.

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magic realism emerged as a fully-fledged literary movement. She notes that the ‘emergence of an aesthetically coherent body of writing in Latin America in the late 1960s forced critics in the centre to confront the fact of a genuine literary unity on a continental scale that until then they had failed to notice’.15 The double-fold nature of the Latin American case, mediating between the internal and external literary sources, is broken, in Casanova’s analysis, in favour of the Parisian influence on the creation of this literary movement. Casanova’s emphasis, for example, is on Alejo Carpentier’s adoption of André Breton’s notion of the ‘merveilleux’ to contribute to the development of ‘magic realism’ in Latin America.16 She focuses on Carpentier’s circumstances as an exile in Paris and his ‘appeal for an entirely new direction in Latin American letters’ in the context of Parisian influence on his campaign to create a unique new literary movement for Latin America: All art requires a professional tradition … This is why it is necessary that the young [artists] of America have a thorough knowledge of the representative values of modern European art and literature: not in order to undertake the contemptible labor of imitation and to write, as many do, small novels lacking either warmth or character, copied from some model from beyond the seas, but in order to try to get to the bottom of techniques, through analysis, and to find methods of construction capable of translating with greater force our thoughts and sensibilities as Latin Americans … To know exemplary techniques in order to try to acquire a similar expertise and to mobilize our energies to translate America with the greatest possible intensity: this ought to be our constant credo for the years to come even if in America we do not dispose of a tradition of expertise.17 Carpentier’s focus above on the acquisition of modern literary techniques and their integration into national literatures to depict local circumstances reveals one of the limitations in her model of world literary space: the function of local content and a local literary legacy in the creation of innovative literary works. Casanova states that ‘[a] stock of national literary resources can be created only through the diversion and appropriation of available assets’.18 However, her focus on the superior aesthetic techniques of the core leaves the appropriation 15 16 17 18

Casanova 2004, p. 234. Casanova 2004, p. 232. Quoted in Casanova 2004, p. 233; original emphasis. Casanova 2004, p. 232.

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of the local assets as an ambivalent field that needs further investigation. She defines the rise of ‘magic realism’ in Latin America as ‘both a stroke of genius and a strike against international critical authority’.19 She praises the rise of ‘intellectuals and writers engaging in dialogue and debate across the borders of their native countries, defending political and literary positions that are invariably both national and continental’.20 Her argument, however, which focuses on Paris’s influence on the creation of a national/regional literature deemed worthy of recognition by the core, only provides the external side of the ‘dialogue’. Her emphasis is on ‘diversion of heritage’ through which ‘a distinctive and autonomous literature is able to appear’.21 In her argument, literary heritage appears as an asset that needs to be ‘diverted’ or ‘overcome’ by the techniques of the core. However, if all literatures become appropriations of the core techniques, how does innovation come about? Is it not reductive to claim that the literary heritage of the periphery exists only as national propaganda? Would not such an approach eliminate the uniqueness of each literary field’s accession to the world literary space, depriving it of the particular socio-historical moments that gave rise to the development of an ‘autonomous’ literature within national borders that would exceed the limits of the national literary space, and would catch up and perhaps exceed the pace of innovation at the core? Modernist writers, I suggest, are capable of distinguishing national propaganda from a literary heritage that can be traced beyond the formation of the nation states at the beginning of the twentieth century, and they can be traced from a centuries-old legacy and can nourish the creation of innovative forms of art through the combination of the core literary techniques with the appropriation of traditional techniques, narrative forms, or local content through the lens of innovative creation. ‘Local colour’, I argue, is not something that needs to be discarded in the periphery; just as French literary space appropriated the classics of antiquity, peripheral literatures gain autonomy and generate unique aesthetic movements to the extent that they succeed in uniting core aesthetic values with their own literary and cultural legacy. In the case of Turkish literature, both Tanpınar and Pamuk’s literary stances exemplify the writers’ attempts to irrigate the national space by nourishing their novels from both core literary techniques and local culture. Casanova’s unequal treatment of the core and the periphery on the appropriation of literary heritage, and assignment of Paris as capital of cultural 19 20 21

Casanova 2004, p. 234. Casanova 2004, p. 235; my emphasis. Casanova 2004, p. 234.

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capitals, raise questions about the legitimacy of privileging the core literary heritage over that of the periphery. Here, Tanpınar’s quest to create a revolutionary ‘national literature’ by repositioning the ‘national’ as part of the worldliterary space may be instructive. In a conference paper given in 1940, ‘Millî Bir Edebiyata Doğru’ (‘Towards a National Literature’), Tanpınar criticises the narrow scope of the Turkish literary canon for predominantly engaging with national problems and tries to provide a new pathway for the creation of an original national literature by grounding his thesis in Turkey’s literary legacy.22 This approach resonates with William Butler Yeats’s ‘invention of tradition’ by reviving legends and folk tales as part of the Irish Revival between 1890 and 1930.23 Tanpınar’s critique of the Turkish literary canon is that it has merely borrowed literary techniques from the core to create imitative novels, whereas he emphasises the importance of a ‘national literature’ founded on the country’s literary heritage: As we progressed in our apprenticeship period in Europe, we began not to take their literary masterpieces as isolated entities. We realized that they belonged to a civilizational and cultural tradition that was well established in history … Just like a fruit dangling on a branch or a blossoming flower connected with a thin stem to a tree, to an organism, these literary works were nourished by their roots engrained in rich soil that was beyond the perception of the eye. And we have noticed that literary works produced only by imitating them and by coveting their aesthetics have been deprived of such enriching roots. Then we understood that we were in pursuit of face-saving and all the ideals such as authenticity and aesthetics can only exist in the life and tradition of a nation.24 Here, through the metaphor of a tree, Tanpınar describes the core literatures’ dependence on their literary legacies, and in order to be able to create innovative works in Turkish, he emphasises the need to revive national literary and cultural roots. It is important, however, to situate Tanpınar’s quest for a ‘national literature’ within the world-literary system. Tanpınar’s emphasis on grounding the ‘national literature’ in the literary and cultural heritage of a nation is not about confining literature to national boundaries; on the contrary, it is a crucial aspect of creating an innovative literature within the Turkish literary space capable of gaining recognition at global level. Tanpınar states that ‘the 22 23 24

Tanpınar 2006. Casanova 2004, p. 305. Tanpınar 2006, p. 93, translation mine.

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national quality of a literature determines its international value … The opposite of this statement is true, too. Only a literature that has international value is worthy of being a national literature’.25 In other words, the gaze of a modernist writer transforms a national cultural and literary heritage into a resource that can nourish rather than limit modern art. Franco Moretti, in contrast to Casanova, understands ‘how the study of world literature is – inevitably – a study of the struggle for symbolic hegemony across the world’.26 Rather than conforming to the imposition of the core literary values on the periphery, as Casanova implies, Moretti develops an insight into how local material can play a crucial role in the peripheries’ adoption of the core literary forms; in a manner akin to their unevenly developed socioeconomic conditions, their local cultures play a crucial role in reshaping core literary forms. Moretti’s construction of his world-literary system modelled on world-economic theory endows his analysis with an insight into how a singular capitalist economy can manifest itself in unequal circumstances in different parts of the economic system. Just as each economic space is integrated into the capitalist economy in a unique way, determined by its social and historical circumstances, so too is there variation in the interaction between the core literary values and the peripheral (or semi-peripheral) spaces of the world-literary system. Moretti, going against the grain, shifts his focus from the core of the literary system, in particular French and British literatures, to the peripheries – in other words, to the world-scale. In order to exemplify his methodology of distant reading, he approaches the problem from the other side: by acknowledging the existence of a vast field of world literature (no matter how geopolitically peripheral), he provides a new perspective which marginalises the core: If the compromise between the foreign and the local is so ubiquitous, then those independent paths that are usually taken to be the rule of the rise of the novel (the Spanish, the French, and especially the British case) – well they are not the rule at all, they are the exception. They come first, yes, but they’re not at all typical. The ‘typical’ rise of the novel is Krasicki, Kemal, Rizal, Maran – not Defoe.27 The strength of Moretti’s argument derives from his refusal of the core’s aesthetic superiority and recognition of local influences as an element beyond 25 26 27

Tanpınar 2006, p. 299, translation mine. Moretti 2004, p. 64. Moretti 2004, p. 61; originial emphasis.

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national boundaries. His definition of the system as ‘one and unequal’ treats the core and the periphery of the unequal system on analytically equal terms by recognising the unique socio-economic circumstances that determine the different integration of each literary space into the world-literary arena. In contrast to Casanova’s Paris-centric approach, Moretti argues that ‘world literature was indeed a system – but a system of variations. The system was one, not uniform. The pressure from the Anglo-French core tried to make it uniform, but it could never fully erase the reality of difference’.28 What is missing in Casanova’s approach is an understanding of how the periphery and the core are part of the same economic system and how different economic circumstances that determine local reality have implications for the literary system, too. Here, I suggest the existence of a double leap: akin to the periphery’s attempt to catch up with the core’s modern technological advances; in the literary field, the periphery depends on the core for the importation of the literary techniques or genres that determine the world-literary space’s ‘modern time’. Moretti explains the latter situation thus: ‘This is what one and unequal means: the destiny of a culture … is intersected and altered by another culture (from the core) that “completely ignores it” ’.29 In order to gain recognition on a global scale, peripheral literatures need to find ways in which they can integrate the techniques of the core with their local reality to create innovative literary works. Moretti’s analysis acknowledges the variations in the periphery and gives them equal status with the core. If we attempt to restructure Casanova’s argument within the world-system economy, her focus on Paris parallels the economic inequality and uneven development in the world-literary system. Leon Trotsky’s theoretical framework of combined and uneven development may shed light upon understanding the world-literary system as ‘one and unequal’ as Moretti defines it, and may provide a way of perceiving the world-literary system not as a reinforcement of the core’s domination of the periphery, while also doing justice to the writers on the periphery – yet keeping pace with the core – by granting them the possibility of superseding it. Trotsky argues that: Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping

28 29

Moretti 2004, p. 64. Moretti 2004, p. 56.

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a whole series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past. The European colonists in America did not begin history all over again from the beginning. The fact that Germany and the United States have now economically outstripped England was made possible by the very backwardness of their capitalist development.30 Seen from this perspective, capitalism reveals itself through combined and uneven development by requiring the peripheral regions to jump to catch up with the ‘present’ of modernity produced at the core. When the world-literary system is seen in this light, the literary heritage that peripheries possess might be compared to raw materials and resources that require importation of technological advances from the core in order to convert them into valuable assets. In other words, the aesthetic techniques produced in the core are the assets that would make the resources at home (cultural and literary legacy) valuable on a global scale. There seems to be a parallel between the importation of technological advances from the core states, creating combined and uneven development at the peripheries, and the world-literary system in which the literary forms and techniques produced in the core are imported to peripheries of the literary system and create combined and uneven literary regions within it.

1

Repositioning Tanpınar within the World-Literary System

Moretti, developing Fredric Jameson’s insight into a ‘law of literary evolution’, states that ‘in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside Europe), the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials’.31 Moretti, grounding his argument on Ahmet O. Evin and Jale Parla’s works, offers Turkish literature as an example of such an evolution.32 There is a well-known debate concerning the Turkish literary canon, turning on the contention that the first Turkish novels relied so much on foreign techniques of novel-writing that they almost completely lost contact with local concerns, becoming in the process mere imitations of European novels.

30 31 32

Trotsky 1977, pp. 26–7, italics added. Moretti 2004, p. 58. Moretti 2004, p. 62.

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Nurdan Gürbilek, in her essay ‘Dandies and Originals’, examines ‘the specifically Turkish aspects of this desire for originality in the context of literary criticism and the novel’ and suggests that ‘the overemphasis on originality and the obsessive attempt to create an authentically Turkish novel itself is part of the impasse of belatedness rather than a way out, that the obsession with authenticity itself is the outcome of the very divide that compulsorily made some of us snobs and the rest unrefined provincialists in each other’s eyes’.33 Towards the end of her article, Gürbilek hints at the creation of an authentic literary field through the synthesis of both, by revealing the unique condition that the traumas of belatedness create in the present moment. She notes that Tanpınar ‘was for a cultural nationalism accompanied by the insistence to “go back to our own selves”’;34 however, her analysis escapes Tanpınar’s literary innovations which have questioned, sixty years earlier, the very point with which Gürbilek ends her article: synthesis of the cultural legacy and the core literary techniques in order to create an autonomous national literature. Orhan Pamuk, in ‘Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Türk Modernizmi’ (‘Tanpınar and Turkish Modernism’), ambitiously asserts that ‘The wind of modernist literature has never blown – I won’t even say strongly – in Turkish literature’ (‘Hiçbir zaman modernist edebiyatın rüzgarı bizde – güçlü bir şekilde bile demeyeceğim – esmedi’).35 Pamuk, with western modernists such as Joyce, Woolf and T.S. Eliot in mind,36 defines modernist literature through techniques of stream of consciousness, collage, and juxtaposition, and non-linear perception of time among others.37 Nonetheless, I see a discrepancy between the modernist techniques that Pamuk proposes and his methods of analysing Tanpınar’s work: starting from a preconceived idea that Tanpınar is not a modernist, he explores the traits of the nineteenth-century novel to be found in Huzur. This, however, shows only one side of the coin, and can also be seen as proof of the diversity of narrative techniques that Tanpınar uses in the novel. If an American counterpart, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, is considered, Peter Brooker notes that ‘a block of deterministic, naturalist narrative … runs in the novel beneath an accelerated, yearning impressionism’.38 Bart Keunen similarly points out Manhattan Transfer’s modernist form by emphasising its ‘protean style’.39 In

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Gürbilek 2003, p. 605. Gürbilek 2003, p. 607. Pamuk 2008, p. 458. Pamuk 2008, p. 447. Pamuk 2008, p. 448. Brooker 1996, p. 53. Keunen 2001, p. 422.

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the case of Huzur, I argue that the urbanscape of Istanbul that Tanpınar constructs in Huzur is highly enriched by the modernist techniques of juxtaposition and montage, and through the use of the objects that trigger Mümtaz’s memory, the linear perception of time is frequently broken by flashbacks and the past rendered through Benjaminian moments of epiphany, which make Huzur a Turkish modernist masterpiece. Pamuk pursues his argument by claiming that Tanpınar does not register the disorder of the world in the novel’s form; rather, like a Romantic novelist, he tries to create an order out of this chaotic urbanscape.40 It might be argued, however, that the creation of a totalising perspective out of the disintegrating fragments of the urban environment is an essentially modernist impulse. John Marin’s Lower Manhattan (1922) and Piet Mondrian’s New York City, New York, 1940–42, for example, capture urban totality through modernist abstraction.41 In the context of these paintings, I argue that Huzur is cluttered with the fragmentary remnants of the city’s historic past and modern present (which Pamuk himself would develop in his postmodern novels a few decades later) and Tanpınar’s literary struggle to create a totality out of the city’s diversity coincides with the modernist paradigm to overcome the challenge of representing the modern era that has grown beyond the subject’s cognition with its disintegrating urban and social fragments. As Richard Lehan states, ‘[t]wo kinds of urban reality emerged from literary modernism: the city as constituted by the artist, whose inner feelings and impressions embody an urban vision, and the city as constituted by the crowd, which had a personality and urban meaning of its own’.42 The difference between Tanpınar’s and Dos Passos’s narrative techniques epitomises these two kinds of literary modernism – Huzur can be associated with the former and Manhattan Transfer with the latter. Huzur is narrated in the third-person singular and the perception of the city is mainly constructed through Mümtaz’s subjective eyes as the reader follows him in the criss-crossed streets of Istanbul. By contrast, Manhattan Transfer registers the metropolis in the novel’s form by using fragmented life-stories of more than a hundred characters who are alienated from each other and cross each other’s path as ‘the man of the crowd’. Dos Passos constructs Manhattan Transfer’s experimentalist narrative under the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the modernist masterpieces that Pamuk has in mind when criticising Huzur. Nevertheless, I believe that it is misleading to associate Tanpınar’s writing with nineteenth-century novelists due to the 40 41 42

Pamuk 2008, p. 455. See Douglas Tallack 2005 for a detailed analysis. Lehan 1998, p. 71.

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lack of stark fragmentary narration in Huzur. In contrast, Tanpınar develops intricate methods of juxtaposition and montage by means of which he registers the co-existence of different levels of development in the novel’s form rather than merely describing as Pamuk claims. The main reason for choosing Tanpınar as a case study in this comparative research is his ambivalent position between tradition and modernity, which makes him a contradictory writer with a seminal role in the development of the modern Turkish novel. Tanpınar’s innovative approach to literature has been obscured by being confined to conservative circles, where his novels are read solely for their engagement with Turkish tradition and the past, rather than for the modernist techniques that enable him to create innovative ways of registering modernity in the Istanbul of the 1930s. My examination of Huzur stems from the need to fill in a gap in Turkish literary history: the modernist techniques that Tanpınar introduces into Turkish literary practice and his freeing of the field from its confinement to Turkish national borders. Because Huzur, originally published in 1949, was translated into English only very recently, in 2008, this novel has been omitted from comparative literary studies in the twentieth century. In this research, by contrasting Huzur with an American modernist masterpiece, Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, I aim to bring the former into the scope of world literary studies; and by examining both novels as part of the same capitalist system, I aim to shift the focus of the debates on modernity and modernism from Western Europe to a global perspective by providing a conjunctural analysis of New York and Istanbul in the 1920s and 1930s.

2

Towards a Singular Capitalist Economy: An Aesthetics of Uneven Development

In the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, with capitalism gaining momentum in Europe, the world-economic system was drastically transformed, changing the modes of production and reshaping urban space and class structures. In the Ottoman Empire, the administration of the state was different from the feudal system in terms of class structure, property ownership, trade, and tax regulations; thus, its accession to the capitalist economy has followed a different path from that of the core states of Europe.43 The lack of individual ownership of property, existence of free peasants rather than the serfs, and ‘absence of a well-defined commercial landlord class’ delayed the Otto-

43

Keyder 1987, p. 18.

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man Empire’s accession to the capitalist system.44 In 2010, Neil Smith, a social geographer, takes a step further and examines Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development not from the perspective of political sciences but mainly from a socio-geographic perspective, revealing the dynamics of uneven development all across the world on three levels: global, nation state and urban. His theorisation of uneven development on a global scale is illustrative of the capitalist cycle of uneven development that Ottoman Empire was dragged into: Capitalism inherits a geographical structure of city-states, duchies, kingdoms, and the like – localized absolute spaces under the control of precapitalist states – but as ever it transforms what it inherits. With the increased scale of the productive forces and the internationalization of capital, the capitalist state generally combines a number of these smaller states into a nation-state.45 Keyder explains that the ‘long standing capitulatory regime’ was ‘an instrument of absolute power’, as it enabled the Palace to ‘exercise strict control over external economic relations’ until the eighteenth century.46 The gradual weakening of power in the Ottoman state, however, accelerated the penetration of the core nation states into the Ottoman economy, in order to internalise it as part of their economic territory. As Neil Smith explains, the limits to the scale of the nation state are not only economically but ‘politically determined by a series of historical deals, compromises, and wars’.47 The weakening of the Ottoman Empire diminished the authority it exerted over its territory, and foreign political support to resolve internal conflicts resulted in capitulations in the economic field. Keyder, who regards the trade convention of 1838 with England as the first institutionalisation of the Empire’s integration into European capitalism, states that it was a quid pro quo for British intervention during the Mouhammad Ali uprising in Egypt.48 Since the eighteenth century, moreover, as a result of bilateral agreements, Naff explains that ‘Ottoman subjects could engage in business in Europe in exchange for the same right granted to Westerners in the Empire’.49 These

44 45 46 47 48 49

Ibid. Smith 2010, p. 190. Keyder 1987, p. 20. Smith 2010, p. 190. Keyder 1987, p. 29. Quoted in Keyder 1987, p. 20.

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agreements were the first steps that led towards a significant unevenness in commercial activities between Muslim and non-Muslim populations of the Empire. The nation states of Europe ‘distributed or sold’ passports to nonMuslim Ottomans – Greeks, Armenians and the Levantine population – and with the expansion of trade in the mid-nineteenth century, non-Muslims ‘developed as a class of compradors, mediating between peasant producers and foreign capital’.50 With the integration of the Ottoman economy into the worldcapitalist system, the class structure of the ‘classic agrarian Empire, consisting of independent peasant producers and a bureaucratic class’ was challenged by the emergence of a new class of ‘compradors’.51 This new class, constituted of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, accumulated capital and played a crucial role in the importation of goods and acted as shareholders of multi-national companies investing in the empire. The first tram service, Dersaadet Tramvay Şirketi (Istanbul Tram Company), for example, was introduced by a Belgian company with multi-national and non-Muslim Ottoman shareholders.52 Similarly, the first international railway in Istanbul was built by a company established by a Belgian-based banker with the further contributions from international capital.53 The infrastructural works and urban planning projects modernising Istanbul’s urban environment were mainly carried out after the Great Fire of old Istanbul in 1865 and the Great Fire of Pera in 1870 ‘when the Empire was surviving on borrowed European money’.54 In the postwar era, Turkey inherited a devastated and technologically backward state from the Ottoman Empire, economically burdened with debt and scarcity of capital. Even though modernisation imposed from above radically and briskly changed the state administration and reorganised social life, implementation of urban renewal projects required a few more decades. As Sibel Bozdoğan explains, ‘the inadequate resources of the country, especially the poverty of the construction industry in the 1930s, ruled out any substantial programme of housing, urbanism, and rationalized production’.55 Gül, furthermore, notes that ‘almost no new largescale public buildings were constructed in Istanbul until the 1940s’.56 The urban condition that Bozdoğan and Gül describe supports the premise that the ‘com-

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Keyder 1987, pp. 22–3. Keyder 1987, p. 22. See the official website http://www.iett.istanbul/tr/main/pages/kronolojik‑tarihce/32. Gül 2009, p. 53. Gül 2009, p. 54. Bozdogan 1997, p. 139. Gül 2009, p. 79.

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bined’ quality of uneven development in Istanbul until the 1940s was dependent on urban renewal projects implemented in the nineteenth century and enabled by the internationalisation of capital either in the form of debt or direct foreign investment. Trotsky defines ‘the law of combined development’ as ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’.57 Tanpınar’s intricate use of montage technique, juxtaposition of two material elements of the city belonging to radically different time periods, reveals the combined quality of uneven development in Istanbul. He registers the clash between the historic and the modern by setting modern methods of transport (trams, trains, cars) either alongside historic buildings or within historic urban settings: in Şehzadebaşı, which is an old Ottoman district, Macide is unable to sleep due to train whistles58 just as Mümtaz wakes up from his dreams because of them.59 In the Bayezid region, ‘the sounds of hammers’ rise from a group of trolley workers repairing the tramway, and there, Mümtaz hears ‘the rumbling passage of empty streetcars testing rails in the distance’.60 Tanpınar, moreover, juxtaposes a saint’s türbe (tomb) and a milkman on his mare with a car horn.61 In another instance, he depicts a tramway beside the Şehzade mosque, which dates from the sixteenth century.62 The depiction of these elements as an integral part of the daily routine – for example, hearing of the train whistles in Ihsan’s house opposite the Elagöz Mehmet Efendi Mosque – reveals the ‘combined’ quality of uneven development in the city. By juxtaposing elements from radically different time periods through montage, the novel reveals the traces of the global capitalist economy on the urban scale through the co-existence of incongruous material structures. The analysis of the use of montage in relation to forms of music also reveals the impact of inter-societal cultural interaction. Tanpınar, challenging the conventional geographical associations of the city’s districts, uses foreign and traditional forms of music interchangeably in the historic and westernised districts: in Beyoğlu (a westernised district) and in Emirgan on the European shore of the Bosphorus, Sufi music appears as a form of entertainment, while a Beethoven’s concerto is listened to in the old city. In the westernised districts,

57 58 59 60 61 62

Trotsky 1934, p. 27. Tanpınar 2008, p. 19. Tanpınar 2008, p. 9. Tanpınar 2008, p. 414. Tanpınar 2008, p. 437. Tanpınar 2008, p. 438.

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echoes of a piano lesson are heard,63 tango tunes crescendo in a bistro64 as well as a türkü (folk song) playing on a radio.65 Tanpınar registers the combined quality of urban and cultural development through the juxtaposition of local and foreign music in the same ‘shot’, challenging the dominant traits of both the westernised Beyoğlu and the historic peninsula. In the old city, a Nevâkâr song and a fox-trot are heard in the same little street.66 The clash of the songs in the same district emphasises unevenness, not only among the districts but also within them as an inevitable element of the modernising city.67 Although the foundation of the Republic in 1923 marked a sharp political rupture from the Ottoman past, the gap between the city’s historical past and modernising present is bridged by Tanpınar’s literary form. He juxtaposes the contradictory socio-cultural elements regardless of the regions’ historical connotations, highlighting the amalgamation of the western and Ottoman influences. Montage, the technique which Eisenstein would theorise in the 1930s, is key to understanding the formal registration of diversity and transitional change in modernism. ‘Montage is conflict’, Eisenstein declared in 1929.68 In ‘A Dialectical Approach to Film Form’, he gives an intricate analysis of the creation of conflict in film in relation to subtitle, shot and montage in the following three phases: ‘Conflict within a thesis (an abstract idea) – formulates itself in the dialectics of the subtitle – forms itself spatially in the conflict within the shot – and explodes with increasing intensity in montage-conflict among the separate shots’.69 Tanpinar’s use of montage techniques here evokes Eisenstein’s definition of montage as conflict in its origin that may manifest itself ‘within the same shot’ – a technique of bringing contradictory elements together to inflict an idea out of them – which as I read it here refers to uneven and combined nature of development in Istanbul. In contrast, New York that Dos Passos captures in Manhattan Transfer, shows the symptoms of urban development in a core city that David Harvey theorises under the concept of ‘creative destruction’ through which ‘[m]achinery, buildings, and even whole urban infrastructures 63 64 65 66 67

68 69

Tanpınar 2008, p. 352. Tanpınar 2008, p. 261. Tanpınar 2008, p. 356. Tanpınar 2008, p. 60. Nüket Esen in ‘Huzur ve Kara Kitap’ta İstanbul’un Semtleri’ (‘Districts of Istanbul in Huzur and The Black Book’) examines Tanpinar’s choice of districts according to the uneven development among them, dismissing the combined quality of unevenness within the districts. Eisenstein 1959, p. 38. Eisenstein 1959, p. 53.

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and life-styles are made prematurely obsolescent’.70 This dynamic of development, however, rather than consolidating the formation of a fully developed city, accelerates not only the turnover time from the fixed capital but also the rate of uneven development in the city. Dos Passos, for instance, registers this transformation by juxtaposing different levels of development: ‘Eleventh Avenue is full of icy dust, of grinding rattle of wheels and scrape of hoofs on the cobblestones. Down the railroad tracks comes the clang of a locomotive bell and the clatter of shunting freightcars’.71 The sentence describing ‘cobblestone roads’ is followed by another on ‘railroad tracks’ indicating the ongoing change and progress in the city by turning it into a site of unevenly developed infrastructures. The horse-drawn carts are described by fragmentary units of ‘wheels’ and ‘hoofs’ in line with Eisenstein’s montage technique in which juxtaposition of fragments of visual material brings about a thesis. In another instant, unevenness in the city could also be perceived by smell; it is embedded in the city’s dust, which can be breathed in from the air: ‘Trucks grated by along the avenue raising dust that smelled of gasoline and horsedung on the street’.72 On the one hand, Dos Passos draws the reader’s attention to the ‘trucks’ denoting economic and technological advances in the city; on the other, juxtaposing ‘gasoline’ and ‘horsedung’ stresses the co-existence of modern and archaic means of transport in the same environment. In the novel, Dos Passos’s use of montage technique reveals the accelerated rate of change by contrasting modern and archaic means of transport within the same urban spaces. Dos Passos’s extension of literary montage to the olfactory, auditory, and visual senses of the characters enables him to register the heterogeneity of urban experience by recreating the city as a place that can be perceived by a variety of characters in diverse and subjective ways.73 In Dos Passos’s registration of the city, transport provides the perspective from which an intricate use of montage brings together contrasting scenes, documents, and creates an aesthetic form that reveals the contradictory urban conditions of the 1920s. On a train departed from Penn Station heading towards Atlantic City, Elaine’s observation of the landscape of New Jersey from the window epitomizes the combined and uneven development in the city: ‘the brown marshes and the million black windows of factories and the puddly streets of towns and a rusty steamboat in a canal and barns and Bull Durham signs and 70 71 72 73

Harvey 1985, p. 27. Dos Passos 2000, p. 53. Dos Passos 2000, p. 148, italics added. See Bart Keunen 2001 and Marc Brousseau 1995 for the analysis of Manhattan Transfer through the use of Bakhtin’s chronotopes.

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roundfaced Spearmint gnomes all barred and crisscrossed with bright flaws of rain’.74 In this scene, through the use of montage technique and the new perspectives the train provides, Dos Passos juxtaposes the pre-capitalist agrarian forms of the landscape with capitalistic forms of development such as the factories and adverts, and the novel’s form becomes a striking document of combined and uneven development. Although the politico-historical conditions of Istanbul are completely different from New York where the founding of Turkish Republic denotes to a political rupture from the Ottoman past, in the literary realm a similar pattern in the use of transport motif could be traced. Tanpınar’s strategic choice of districts including Istanbul (the old city), Beyoğlu, Emirgan and Kandilli emphasises the dichotomies between the city’s historic heritage and its modernising present. In Istanbul, since the nineteenth century, with the introduction of the ferries and railways, and later with the introduction of the trams, subways (tünel) and automobiles, Istanbulites’ perception of the city altered with the reduced amount of time taken to traverse space. Tanpınar’s response to the city expanding as well as deteriorating beyond the compreshension of its citizens is by using the motif of means of transport to cement the diverse topography of Istanbul by enabling the characters to traverse within and between the unevenly developed districts of the city with an increased mobility. Tanpınar overcomes the disintegrating urban regions with different historical significance by creating a novel that compresses urban space though the use of the means of transport that enables the reader to cognitively map the city beyond the boundaries of the westernised quarters. This provides a vision which connects even the remote corners of the city – from the Princess Islands to Kandilli – to one another. The most significant of the day trips narrated in the first part of the novel is in ‘Section 13’ (Figure 9.1) as the means of transport highlights the ‘time-space compression’ in the city by enabling Mümtaz to traverse three historically significant districts within the course of a day.75 In the morning, he leaves Emirgan (on a ferry) for Şehzadebaşı in the old city, later passes over the bridge and goes to Beyoğlu by taxi, and in the evening by catching the ferry at Beşiktaş returns to Emirgan.76 Mümtaz’s elliptical journey beginning with a Bosphorus ferry from Emirgan to the old city and ending with a return journey from Beşiktaş to Emirgan, brings the remote districts along the Bosphorus into the orbit of economic

74 75 76

Dos Passos 2000, p. 111. For theorisation of ‘space-time compression’, see Harvey 2011. Tanpınar 2008, pp. 223–33.

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figure 9.1 An illustration of Mümtaz’s Elliptical Journey Courtesy of Tom Wong

and historic power centres of the city. The old city with its historic and deteriorating buildings, Beyoğlu as the Westernized quarters of the city with bistros and its Greek population, and Emirgan – where the nostalgia of the Bosphorus can still be experienced – are all combined together within the course of a day through the means of transport.

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Time-Space Compression: Music and Montage

With respect to Tanpınar’s use of songs and memory as way of compressing space and time, Bachelard’s definition of ‘space of imagination’ as ‘poetic space’ where memories become fixations in space might shed light on Tanpınar’s use of memory in the novel.77 Echoing Heidegger, Bachelard claims that ‘[s]pace contains compressed time. That is what space is for’.78 In Huzur, Tanpınar encapsulates compressed time at the present moment through the use of ‘Song in Mahur’, which is shared by successive generations. Mümtaz’s discovery of overlapping times in the city is in parallel with Benjamin’s perception of history in fragments and through a sudden spark-like revelation. Benjamin explains that ‘[t]he true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again’.79 It is important to note here that although Benjamin and Tanpınar use the same techniques to redeem individual historicity – through Proust’s ‘involuntary memory’ – Benjamin attempts to redeem the lost historicity of the oppressed classes, whereas Tanpınar attempts to excavate lost cultural values. As Nurdan Gürbilek explains in her insightful article ‘Tanpınar’da Hasret, Benjamin’de Dehset’ (‘Longing in Tanpınar, Horror in Benjamin’), Benjamin’s distrust of the ‘barbaric past’ of triumphalist history transmutes, in Tanpınar’s hands, into a cultural longing for the origins of the Ottoman past.80 Benjamin cites Proustian mémoire involontaire in discussing Proust’s view that the past is ‘somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some material object (or in the sensation which such an object arouses in us), though we have no idea which one it is’.81 The underlying logic of this premise is that past experiences are locked in material objects in the city and can be redeemed at random moments. During his wanderings in the city, Mümtaz’s recovery of individual and collective historicity through the material objects is in parallel with Proustian mémoire involontaire. The mother-of-pearl fan that Behcet Bey scrutinises in his hand82 triggers Mümtaz’s memories of Behcet’s tragic relationship with his wife, Atiye, and reminds Mümtaz of the ‘Song in Mahur’ as a dark side of Behcet’s past. The fan leads Mümtaz towards a chain of memories and the time gap between these memories is bridged by

77 78 79 80 81 82

Quoted in Harvey 2011, p. 217. Ibid. Benjamin 1999, p. 247. Gürbilek 2011, pp. 127–8. Quoted in Benjamin 2003, p. 155. Tanpınar 2008, p. 62.

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the use of the ‘Song in Mahur’ as shared cultural capital of different generations. At first Mümtaz remembers that Behcet Bey, who spent his whole life being jealous of his wife, was said to have caused her death by tapping her mouth at her deathbed while she was singing the ‘Song in Mahur’.83 Mümtaz’s following reminiscence enlightens the time that Nuran sings the song for Mümtaz and the song’s origins – which was composed by Talat Bey (Nuran’s greatgrandfather) for Nurhayat Hanım, who abandons him for another love affair that she is consumed by. At another instant, a türkü (folk song) that leads to Benjaminian revelation of the past is noted as ‘Imperilled between a rock and a hard place,/ One falls by bullet, another by knife wound’.84 When Orhan recites the lyrics to depict the World War II era, Mümtaz remembers World War I in a flashback and the soldiers who were singing the türkü then. In both of these instances where a türkü and the ‘Song in Mahur’ appear, by relating the songs with memory, Tanpınar overlaps disparate times and overcomes the time lapse between the two generations. Therefore, against the perception of the Republican Turkey as a modernist rupture from the Ottoman past, by using shared elements of culture, he creates cultural continuity between different generations. Tanpınar’s use of the ‘Song in Mahur’, moreover, is strategic as it functions as a device to connect districts of different historical significance and at different levels of development to one another (Figure 9.2). Each time the ‘Song in Mahur’ appears on the European side, for example, through flashbacks it is connected to the districts on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. In the first part of the novel, while walking in the old city, Mümtaz remembers the song and it reminds him of the time Nuran sang it for him on the hills above Çengelköy. The latter, which is a town on the Anatolian shore of the Bosphorus, can be regarded as peripheral to the old city. Through the use of memory and the song, Tanpınar compresses the two spaces together in the old city. In the second part, Nuran arrives at Mümtaz’s house in Emirgan, and through a flashback Emirgan, Kandilli, and a Bosphorus ferry are brought together. Through stream of consciousness technique, the linearity of the narration is interrupted and two shores of the Bosphorus are connected to one another by condensing various urban spaces into one district. The song traverses three disparate places at different temporal periods, and by using stream of consciousness technique Tanpınar condenses disparate times and places together in the present moment.

83 84

Tanpınar 2008, p. 56. Tanpınar 2008, p. 402.

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figure 9.2 An illustration of ‘Song in Mahur’ Note: This map indicates how memories of the song bring different districts into relationship with each other. Courtesy of Tom Wong

While doing so, however, Tanpınar does not provide a unified perspective on the city; on the contrary, he amplifies the subjective differences by revealing how the songs are perceived differently by various characters. On the ferry,

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when Nuran sings the song for Mümtaz, it becomes an implicit declaration of her love for him. In Kandilli, Nuran experiences an inner struggle between the traditional maternal role imposed on her by society and her taboo-breaking relationship with Mümtaz. When it appears once more in Kanilli, Nuran is on her way to Emirgan (to meet Mümtaz) and the act of singing it to herself gives her the pleasure of ‘playing with fire’ as she goes against the grain through her relationship with him. On the other hand, while Nuran leaves Emirgan, through Mümtaz’s remembrance, the song transforms into the agony of separation from the beloved. The ‘Song in Mahur’ captures the heterogeneity of the urban experience as the interpretation of the song alters from generation to generation and on a subjective level from individual to individual. Ihsan declares that ‘we are … this very Nevâkâr. This very “Song in Mahur”. And countless other expressions that resemble them! We are their semblances as they manifest within us, we are the ways of being they inspire within us’.85 By using this song, which is written in a classical Turkish musical form, Tanpınar bridges the gap between the generations of the Ottoman Empire and the modernising Republic by leaving room for change through its subjective interpretation. Both in Huzur and in Manhattan Transfer, music resembles a train which traverses the novels through disparate spaces and time periods. By that means, the function of music can be compared to the function of means of transport as they both bring together the uneven elements of the urban environment and amplify urban change by highlighting the city’s contradictory elements. In an interview, Dos Passos expresses the view that ‘[b]y that time I was really taken with the idea of montage I had tried it out in Manhattan Transfer – using pieces of popular songs’.86 He inserts fragments of the same songs into contrasting scenes, which opens the space up for further analysis of the conflicting class stratification in the city. In Manhattan Transfer, the song known as ‘One More River’ appears at various points either through a character’s remembrance or when it is heard within the urban environment. The appearance of the song in disparate spaces amplifies ethnic diversity and class differences in the urban environment. The line ‘The animals went in two by two/The elephant and the kangaroo’ appears twice and highlights uneven class stratification in the city. At the first appearance, Dos Passos juxtaposes the song with the movement of wealthy men and girls going into an association in couples,87 and the next time he juxtaposes the song with an Ellis Island tug.88 The song brings together the 85 86 87 88

Tanpınar 2008, p. 281. Sanders 1988, p. 247. Dos Passos 2000, p. 227. Dos Passos 2000, p. 229.

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luxurious dance club and the immigrants arriving in the city in squalid conditions; however, it would be misleading to claim that the song functions merely as a unifying element in the novel. The different lines of the song are used by different characters, and the song’s reception changes according to the individual circumstances of the characters. The use of the song is complex as its various lines appear twice in Ellen’s life, first when she is unhappily married to John and then when she falls in love with Stan. Also, Stan sings the line – ‘For I am a bachelor and I live all alone’ – to himself which contrasts with his situation as an unhappily married man. Therefore, rather than functioning as a unifying factor among disparate spaces and times, the song reveals the heterogeneity of urban experience by amplifying uneven social conditions in the city through the diversity of both its meaning and its reception. As the ‘Song in Mahur’ in Huzur and the recurring motif of ‘One More River’ in Manhattan Transfer show, the intricate use of the songs in these novels – just like the use of means of transport – compresses disparate time periods and, through the use of memory, compresses disintegrating spaces together at the present moment of the novels. In other words, by overcoming temporal limits, they create spatial simultaneity (similar to Picasso’s cubist painting’s spatialisation of time on the canvas), and by redeeming social and individual historicity through the use of material objects and the songs, both authors overcome the premise that modernity is a rupture from the past.

4

Conclusion

At the turn of the twentieth century, technological advances accelerated the pace of life by shortening the period required to traverse space and created a sense of space-time compression for the urban subject, making the registration of this experience one of the main concerns of modernist art.89 Capitalist urban growth, founded on creative destruction in New York and the deterioration of the historical power centre at the rise of westernised quarters in Istanbul, resulted in the subjects’ breaking of the bonds with the past that led authors to search for techniques of aesthetic representation to register the disintegrating and expanding urban space. At a time when the totality of the urban structure grew beyond the perception of the subject, aesthetic registration of the urbanscape underwent a transformation, creating innovative ways

89

See Harvey’s discussion of ‘space-time compression’ in The Condition of Postmodernity, Chapter 16, for a detailed analysis.

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of capturing the diversity and inequality of the newly emerging social order and urban infrastructure. In deploying the techniques of juxtaposition and montage, both Tanpınar and Dos Passos provide a synoptic overview of their disintegrating urban spaces. Huzur and Manhattan Transfer develop a similar logic in registering spatial simultaneity. From the vantage point offered by the means of transport, or by the use of songs to highlight or unite the conflictual elements of the city, they succeed in capturing a multitude of spaces and perspectives within a compressed timeframe. This registration enables the authors to provide both a synoptic vision out of the fragmentary elements in the city and an opportunity to capture the heterogeneity of urban experience. Both authors supply the reader with new perspectives – such as the artificial combination of disparate elements through the use of montage or by using means of transport to provide a cognitive map of the city that cements the unfolding urban structure. The characters’ interrupted relationship with tradition, or their individual or social historicity, is overcome by both Dos Passos and Tanpınar through the use of music and memory to compress time – individual or social historicity – within the present moment of the novels.

chapter 10

Demon Landscapes, Uneven Ecologies: Folk-Spirits in Guyanese Fiction Michael Niblett

‘Many a ridiculous thing concerning the interior of Guiana has been propagated and received as true, merely because six or seven Indians, questioned separately, have agreed in their narrative’. So opined the naturalist Charles Waterton in Wanderings in South America, an account of his various expeditions into the forests of Guyana between 1812 and 1824.1 Providing a few examples of the things he has heard ‘propagated’, Waterton mentions the Indian belief in ‘a horrible beast, called the watermamma, which, when it happens to take a spite against a canoe, rises out of the river, and […] carries both canoe and Indians down to the bottom with it, and there destroys them’. ‘Ludicrous extravagances’, is Waterton’s judgement: ‘pleasing to those fond of the marvellous, and excellent matter for a distempered brain’.2 This dismissive attitude toward Amerindian beliefs is hardly unique amongst colonial explorers, the rubbishing of native cosmology serving to refute the relationship to the land such cosmology implied in the interests of European claims to territorial possession. More unusual is the incident of the ‘Nondescript’, recounted by Waterton in his fourth ‘wandering’, in which the eccentric naturalist claimed to have encountered and shot a strange, half-man-half-ape-like creature, possessed of a ‘thick coat of hair and [a] great length of tail’.3 Having preserved its head and shoulders, Waterton subsequently exhibited his taxidermic specimen in Georgetown before transporting it to England. The Nondescript, however, was a fake. Fashioned out of a monkey’s skin (the mouth was originally probably the animal’s anus), Waterton’s creation was most likely meant as a satire on ‘the credulity of the viewing public and as a joke at the expense of other scientists and their preference for the classification of dead specimens over field naturalism’.4 1 Waterton 1903, p. 75. For ease and consistency I use the term ‘Guyana’ throughout this article to designate the country known as British Guiana until independence in 1966. 2 Ibid. 3 Waterton 1903, p. 328. 4 Henning 2007, p. 673.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384736_012

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On the surface, at least, the Nondescript has little to do with Amerindian cosmology. In Among the Indians of Guiana (1883), however, botanist and explorer Everard F. im Thurn, in a discussion of a folk-spirit he labels the ‘di-di’, claims that the latter should be of interest to English readers as ‘being probably that which suggested to the vivid and quaint imagination of Charles Waterton the idea of constructing’ his taxidermic hoax.5 Although the name ‘di-di’ suggests the Bush Dai-Dai of Guyanese folklore (a wild animal that can assume the form of a beautiful woman), im Thurn’s description of these creatures – ‘beings in shape something between men and monkeys, who live in the forests near the river banks’ – is more reminiscent of another folk-spirit, the massacouraman.6 In a typology of various Guyanese folk-spirits, Satnarine Persaud defines the massacouraman in general terms as male, slightly larger than human beings, very hairy, aquatic, found in deep interior waters, and inclined to topple the boats of travellers and eat the occupants.7 Waterton’s Nondescript lacks the massacouraman’s aquatic qualities, but is otherwise reminiscent of typical accounts of these ape-like beings. I emphasise the affinity between the Nondescript and the massacouraman since my intention in this chapter is to move from a consideration of Waterton’s joke as an unconscious expression of the anxieties provoked in colonial explorers by confrontation with the Amerindian spirit landscape of the Guyanese interior – anxieties that often revolved around the potential breakdown of received colonialist understandings of the relationship between human and extra-human natures – to an analysis of the very different significance of the massacouraman for postcolonial authors. In what follows, I first consider the way the Nondescript’s massacouraman-like scrambling of species boundaries and its allusive manifestation of anxieties over the organisation of nature might be viewed in relation to processes of uneven and combined development. Drawing on Stephen Shapiro’s claim that Gothic modes and devices tend to flourish during periods of transition in the capitalist world-system, I connect the element of Gothic grotesquerie that surrounds Waterton’s creation to the reorganisation of the global economy in the early nineteenth century and its implications for the peoples and landscapes of Guyana. I next examine a selection of Guyanese novels in which depictions of the massacouraman help mediate the felt experience of later periods of ecological change. Focusing on Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder (1964), Roy Heath’s From the Heat of the

5 im Thurn 1883, p. 385. 6 Ibid. 7 Persaud 1978, p. 68.

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‘Names of Folk-Spirits in Guyana’ by Satnarine Persaud A Festival of Guyanese Words, edited by John R. Rickford, Georgetown: University of Guyana, 1978, courtesy of Satnarine Persaud

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Day (1979), and Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl (1988), I show how such depictions respond to the upheavals involved in the reconfiguration of Guyana’s economy over the course of the twentieth century, from the decline and subsequent reorganisation of its sugar industry in the period 1920–60 to the impact of neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s. My analysis will be framed by the worldecology perspective, which posits reality as a historically and geographically fluid (yet cyclically stabilised) set of actively reproducing relations between manifold species and environments.8 In this perspective, historical systems are understood as co-produced by humans alongside the rest of nature, such that capitalism, for example, is to be viewed as a world-ecology – as a historically specific, systemically patterned bundle of human and extra-human relations.

∵ In his essay ‘The Function of Myth’ (1973), the Guyanese novelist Roy Heath describes the massacouraman thus: He is of vast proportions and rises suddenly out of black water rivers. His head towers higher than the trees on the river banks, while water reaches to his waist-line. He makes thunderous noises and his eyes flash fire. With long, gleaming teeth, the hair covering his bulking form is composed of excited venomous snakes. He is thought to be responsible for river deaths in the jungle.9 Although this creature would appear to have both Amerindian and African roots, its origins are obscure. There appear to be no direct references to ‘the massacouraman’ in pre-1900 colonial travel narratives, otherwise so full of the beliefs European explorers encountered – or thought they had encountered – amongst Amerindian peoples in Guyana’s interior. Nevertheless, certain of the descriptions by colonial writers of folk-spirits to which they give different names recall the massacouraman as it is now understood. Im Thurn’s aforementioned reference to the di-di is one such instance, as is Henry Kirke’s account in Twenty-Five Years in British Guiana (1898) of the Amerindian belief in ‘water-mammas’ with ‘snakes twined round their heads and bosoms’, who use their ‘huge claw-like hands [to] drag boats down and drown their occu-

8 9

See Moore 2015; Deckard 2012; Niblett 2012. Heath 1973, p. 92.

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The ‘Nondescript’: lithograph from the frontispiece of The Wanderings, 1825 Charles Waterton, Wanderings in South America, 1825. Illustration by J.H. Foljambe. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

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pants’.10 To these should be added reports of ‘wild’ or ‘hairy’ men of the woods, such as those recorded by Alexander Von Humboldt of a furry, flesh-eating creature known as the salvaje.11 It is perhaps significant that accounts of the massacouraman have been a staple of the stories and songs of Guyana’s pork-knockers – small-scale, independent gold and diamond miners. The rise of the pork-knockers can be traced to the 1890s, when a gold rush in Guyana’s North West region drew thousands of prospectors into the interior. The miners returned with a wealth of tales about the forest and its marvels, which helped to shape the image of the hinterland in the Guyanese imagination.12 Given how their work brought the pork-knockers into close contact with Amerindian peoples, it is possible that the now common view of the massacouraman dates from this period.13 Certainly, by the early twentieth century the term seems to have become more widespread. Describing an expedition into the interior in 1925, Matthew French Young makes detailed mention of the massacouraman. He recalls, for example, being warned to stay out of the river in which he has been swimming since ‘there were things under the water dangerous to anything moving, such as the “water tiger”, known locally as the “massacuruman”, something in the shape of a human form covered with hair, having small ears set in a head armed with the fangs of a tiger with webbed hands and feet having terrible claws and having a tail’.14 Before turning to fictional representations of this folk-spirit, I want to consider in more detail the depiction of Amerindian cosmologies in colonial travelogues and scientific surveys. As we have seen, it was common for explorers to misinterpret native beliefs and to confuse and conflate different spirit-beings. What they could not mistake, however, was the close relationship that existed for the Amerindians between these spirit-beings and the landscape. ‘Nearly every rock, cataract, and valley’, writes Graham Burnett, ‘was associated with Amerindian legends. Some places were possessed by particular spirits; many rock formations were thought to be the petrified remnants of animals, plants, men, and food from a heroic age of giant ancestors. … No nineteenth-century

10 11 12 13

14

Kirke 1898, p. 176. Von Humboldt 2009, p. 270. Creighton 2014. See Heath 1973, p. 89: ‘From the pork-knocker saga came shanty songs, stories, the fearful Amerindian Dai-Dai and Masacurruman. The Afro-Guyanese saw nothing bountiful in the jungle; its terrors were ever present. On land roamed the Bush Dai-Dai, and beneath the river waters lurked Massacurraman’. Young 1998, pp. 12–13.

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explorer of British Guiana failed to mention that the landscape of the Amerindian was suffused by spirit presences’.15 So struck was the colonial surveyor Robert Schomburgk by what he regarded as the Amerindians’ ‘perpetual fear’ of the ‘evil spirits’ supposed to inhabit the landscape that he designated ‘the Indian’ a ‘professor of Demonology’.16 The attitude of colonial explorers to this ‘demon landscape’ was often ambiguous. On the one hand, by rubbishing the native meanings associated with certain topographical features, they asserted mastery over the terrain. However, it was important that the ‘demonology’ of the land not be dismissed too swiftly. Explorers had at least to hint at the potency of Amerindian beliefs in order to burnish their own image as courageous adventurers into the unknown. This acknowledgement of the ‘demon landscape’ was inseparable from a genuine fear of the forest as a ‘green hell’ in which one could easily become disoriented amidst the trees and end up lost, mad, or dead.17 As Burnett observes, the ‘recognition of the hallucinatory power of the landscape placed the explorer at risk; it was a short step from empathy to the kind of collapse – the “going native” (or mad) – that disqualified the explorer’.18 Neil Whitehead concurs, noting that in the writing of Schomburgk the forest becomes not only a spirit landscape, but also a spirit-being in its own right.19 To encounter this adversary is to ‘risk a loss of humanity, or going “bush” in the “demon landscape”’.20 At this point, Waterton’s Nondescript re-enters on the scene. For Burnett, this ‘disturbing taxonomic monster’ represents ‘an allusion to the threat of collapse into a spirit landscape’.21 It is easy to see why: in its disruption of classificatory norms and blurring of the boundaries between different species, it gestures to the dislocation of the explorer’s sovereign selfhood and the scrambling of epistemological certainties that a descent into the ‘green hell’ of the jungle would entail. Such a reading reinforces the connection between the Nondescript and the massacouraman: not only is the latter one of the spirit-beings that endows the landscape with its ‘demonic’ character; it also embodies an entanglement of different orders of existence – human, animal, and supernatural. As such, it hints at the threat posed by the ‘demon landscape’ to the ideology of nature

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Burnett 2000, pp. 183–4. Quoted in Menezes 1979, p. 16. On this point, see Burnett, who notes the ‘oppression and anxiety interior explorers described feeling when they were deprived of [landmarks]’ (2000, p. 175). Burnett 2000, p. 184. Whitehead 2002, p. 84. Ibid. Burnett 2000, p. 184.

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instantiated under capitalism, in which human nature (in the form of the isolated individual – here, the pioneering colonial explorer) is posited as radically separate from extra-human nature (understood as an external object). But if the massacouraman-like Nondescript implicates the colonialist fear of a fall into a world governed by an alien social logic, it might also be said to speak to the processes of uneven and combined development unfolding in the period in which Waterton was ‘wandering’ across South America. The Nondescript’s scrambled, topsy-turvy features (an anus for a mouth) suggest the contradictions generated by the movement between two phases of capitalist development. To clarify this assertion (and to begin to relate such concerns to aesthetic practice) I want to turn to the category of the Gothic. Stephen Shapiro has argued that ‘generic inscriptions of Gothic narratives and devices tend to re-emerge in swarms at certain discrete periods’.22 Capitalist commodification, he writes, produces an intrinsically Gothic experience: as human energy ‘becomes invested in commodities made for surplus value, rather than the satisfaction of living needs’, an ‘occult transformation arises with the commodity fetish. … The human creator now seems to be simply the bearer of a commodity’s social energy, rather than its originator, [while] the object appears autonomous and self-creating, like an awful, supernatural alien towering before its human meat-puppets’.23 That said, the intermittent clustering of Gothic tales – at moments like the 1780s/90s, 1880s/90s, 1950s, and 2000s – suggests that ‘the oscillating pump of Gothic emissions reveals a more specific, albeit recurring representational purpose beyond its application as a general thematic for describing capitalist-induced phenomenology’. Specifically, Gothic’s periodicity suggests that ‘these narrative devices seem particularly to sediment during the passage between two phases of long-wave capitalist accumulation. Gothic representational devices become recalled and revitalized in the synapses that both link and distinguish the dendrites of two timespaces of capitalist development and its reformation of inter-regional trade relations’.24 Shapiro’s argument can be extended by way of the world-ecology perspective, for which the transitions between different modes of capitalist development are simultaneously transitions between different ways of organising nature. Capitalism, argues Jason W. Moore, is ‘constituted through a succession of ecological regimes that crystallize a qualitative transformation of capital accumulation – for instance the transition from manufacture to large22 23 24

Shapiro 2008, p. 30. Ibid. Ibid.

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scale industry – within a provisionally stabilized structuring of nature-society relations’.25 These ecological regimes emerge through revolutions in socioecological relations, such revolutions tending to occur as a result of a breakdown in the capacity of the dominant ecological regime to maintain the conditions for extended accumulation. Against this backdrop of stagnancy, ecological revolutions create the conditions ‘for new long waves of accumulation’ by ‘expanding the relative ecological surplus’, reorganising the production of nature in such a way as to generate new sources of cheap labour power, food, energy, and raw materials.26 Such revolutions thus help drive down production costs and restore profitability. If, therefore, ecological revolutions are central to the transition between two phases of long-wave accumulation, then they too, following Shapiro’s argument, lurk behind those periodic moments when Gothic narratives tend to emerge in a swarm. Broadly speaking, this can be attributed to the way Gothic forms and motifs provide a useful means of expressing the felt experience of the convulsions unleashed by ecological revolutions and the often intensely visible forms of uneven and combined development through which they unfold. As the existing ecological regime is overturned, the anamorphic and catachrestic features of Gothic texts register the feelings of rupture, strangeness, and irreality engendered by the scrambling of economic hierarchies, the coexistence of residual and emergent social formations, and the uneven transformation of human and extra-human geographies. With this in mind, it is significant that Waterton’s ‘wanderings’ were undertaken during a period of restructuring in the capitalist world-ecology that was both cause and consequence of a transition from one systemic cycle of accumulation to another. Following Giovanni Arrighi, we can designate these cycles as the Dutch and British respectively, in reference to the hegemonic powers associated with each.27 The Dutch cycle lasted from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century; it was superseded by the British cycle, which lasted from the 1770s to the early 1930s.28 The passage between the cycles was marked by the exhaustion (sometime after 1760) of the ‘first’ agricultural revolution of the long seventeenth century, and by subsequent efforts to resolve this ecological crisis. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, observes Jason Moore, ‘a new wave of capitalist agrarian transformations swept over the core, and the world-economy again expanded dramatically, producing major 25 26 27 28

Moore 2011, p. 34. Moore 2011, p. 25, p. 23. Arrighi 2010, pp. 28–59. Arrighi 2010, pp. 219–22.

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transformations of agrarian life in the new peripheries’.29 The colonies through which Waterton travelled (at that point Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice had yet to be united into the single colony of British Guiana) were very directly affected by these changes: as the global balance of power fluctuated in the late eighteenth century, they passed from Dutch to British control and back again, before falling definitively under British dominion in 1803. The final decade of the century, moreover, witnessed a ‘feverish’ burst of speculation and expansion in the region with the export of plantation staples rising steeply (between 1789 and 1802, for example, the export of sugar rose by 433 percent).30 With Britain’s reoccupation of the colonies in 1796, a flood of planters poured in from the insular Caribbean, fleeing the increasingly degraded soils of the islands to the north.31 The boom soon turned to bust, however: by the early years of the nineteenth century, ‘the heady conditions of the 1790s’ had been replaced by ‘an atmosphere of gloom and chronic crisis’.32 The planters’ woes were compounded by the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and the increasing moves towards ending slavery and reducing the protective tariffs on sugar entering the British market. The sense of Gothic grotesquerie evoked by Waterton’s Nondescript, therefore, can be read in light of the anxieties provoked by the conditions of flux and uncertainty he encountered on his travels. (Significantly, perhaps, the dates of Waterton’s ‘wanderings’ – 1812–24 – overlap with a surge in the publication of Gothic narratives between 1790 and 1815).33 The Nondescript’s scrambling of species and the fear to which it alludes of a collapse into the demon landscape (and hence of the breakdown of a social logic predicated on the subject’s separation from extra-human nature) register an apprehension over the scrambling of social relations and the future of the colonies given the ongoing historical turbulence. We might also read both the volatility of the narrative voice in Wanderings, which shifts between first, second, and third person, and Waterton’s frequent exhortations that the forested interior be properly managed and made productive, in a similar light. There is one further aspect of Gothic’s periodicity I would like to consider here. In responding to the convulsions unleashed during the transition between two long-waves of accumulation, Gothic devices and motifs frequently work to encode the violence wrought upon labouring peoples by the 29 30 31 32 33

Moore 2000, p. 143. Adamson 1972, p. 24. Ibid. Ibid. Moretti 2007, p. 14.

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penetration or intensification of capitalist regimes of exploitation. Irreal stylistic mannerisms and images of the grotesque, deformed or monstrous register the felt experience of communities exposed to the often savage transformations in social relations, bodily dispositions, and psychic structures attendant on the expansion or reorganisation of the capitalist world-ecology.34 Now, it is not easy to read the Gothic undertones of the Nondescript in this light given Waterton’s class position and ideological investments as a member of the landed gentry. Indeed, Wanderings as a whole largely elides the colonial violence upon which the naturalist’s presence in the region ultimately depended.35 Nevertheless, one might still venture to discern in the Nondescript something like an unconscious projection of this violence, the creature’s bizarre juxtaposition of discordant features an intimation of the brutally disruptive coercions visited on the Amerindian societies whose customs Waterton was otherwise so keen to document. It is possible to view the invocations of a demon landscape found in many of the explorers who followed Waterton in similar fashion. Take, for example, the surveyor Charles Barrington Brown, whose Canoe and Camp Life in British Guiana documents his travels through the colony between 1867 and 1872. Brown’s repeated references in his writings to the violence associated with the Amerindian folk-spirit kanaimà stand as a displaced expression of the devastating consequences of colonial intrusion into the interior, from which his own surveying mission was inextricable. The same could be said with respect to Schomburgk’s emphasis on the ‘demonology’ of the Amerindians, not least since elsewhere he was fairly explicit about the forcible restructuring of native lifestyles and social formations necessary to ensure their incorporation within a market economy as ‘consumers’ and ‘cash-crop agriculturalists’. ‘[I]t would be advisable for [the Indian’s] advancement in civilization’, he wrote, ‘to awaken in him a demand for decent apparel and other comforts of civilized nations, and by exalting him in his own opinion and increasing his self-respect, his industry would be called forth to keep up the standing he had acquired’.36 What Schomburgk calls for here is the intensive reorganisation of human and extra-human nature – an ecological revolution, in other words. If the violence of such transformations is generally downplayed or repressed by explorers like Waterton, Brown, and Schomburgk, for many later Guyanese 34 35

36

On this point, see for example McNally 2011. A few brief mentions are made of the sufferings endured by the Amerindians and the enslaved, but this bitter pill is swiftly sweetened by sentimental odes to the kind-heartedness of British planters. Quoted in Burnett 2002, p. 27.

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writers the impulse has been precisely to uncover and document this violence, as well as to project the transcendence of its pernicious legacies. In the effort to do so, the literary mobilisation of folk beliefs (such as the massacouraman legend) has been crucial. In the work of such authors as Wilson Harris, Roy Heath, and Pauline Melville, for example, the juxtaposition of modernist narrative techniques alongside folk forms and contents (oral tales, magicoreligious traditions, etc.) both registers and provides a means to critique the forms of uneven and combined development through which capitalist imperialism manifests itself in Guyana. Such amalgamations of literary idioms are often categorised under the rubric of magical realism, which as Jameson once observed ‘depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features’.37 In a commentary on the figure of the zombie in Caribbean literature, Kerstin Oloff contends that in works like Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960), Frankétienne’s Dézafi (1975), and Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988), ‘the gothic mode is often subsumed by, or is employed alongside, magical realism, which is, like the gothic, a style of disruption growing out of capitalist unevenness subjectively experienced as ruptures in time’.38 In the following section I track a similar kind of transition to that which Oloff identifies between the colonial Gothic and an indigenised magical realism. In moving from Waterton’s Nondescript to fictional evocations of the massacouraman we pass from a figure suggestive of the racial anxieties and eco-phobia of the colonial Gothic imaginary to a figure whose blurring of the boundaries between the human and the extra-human becomes emblematic of the potential transformation of the co-production of nature in emancipatory ways.

∵ If, for colonial explorers like Waterton and Schomburgk, the demon landscape is an adversary to be exorcised, in Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder it functions as a vital ‘catalytic agent of consciousness’.39 Harris emphasises the animacy and invasiveness of the jungle. But for him the dissolution of the boundaries between the human and the extra-human is a necessity, something to be embraced in the quest to rethink the nature of existence. Whereas Waterton’s Nondescript alludes to the threat to colonial subjectivity of collapsing into the green hell of the forest, Harris writes affirmatively of the jungle’s power 37 38 39

Jameson 1986, p. 311. Oloff 2012, p. 39. Maes-Jelinek 2005, p. 249.

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to undermine the blinkered perceptual frameworks of the modern isolated individual: ‘The Wilderness comes into its own as extra-human territory which unsettles the hubris of a human-centred cosmos that has mired the globe since the Enlightenment’.40 In The Secret Ladder, the protagonist Russell Fenwick’s journey into the interior involves just such an unsettling of anthropocentric hubris alongside a radical transformation in consciousness. The novel registers more than just a change in Fenwick’s psyche, however. Set sometime in the mid-twentieth century, it mediates the localised expression in Guyana of the revolution in world-ecology underway in the postwar period as the core capitalist powers sought to expand the supply of ‘cheap’ nature in the interests of accumulation. Following the Second World War, large parts of the Caribbean underwent economic modernisation, encouraged to an extent by the colonial powers as they sought to recalibrate their hold over the region. In Guyana, the 1950s and early 1960s saw the restructuring of the struggling sugar industry. Transnational corporations intensified the process of land and capital consolidation. Sugar output was boosted by the modernisation of factories, transport links, and storage facilities, as well as the greater application of science and technology to the production process.41 Work routines were rationalised, most notoriously via the switch from the ‘cut-and-drop’ method of harvesting sugarcane to the more onerous ‘cut-and-load’ method.42 This ratcheting up of the exploitation of human and extra-human natures contributed to the creation of a worldwide ecological surplus that helped drive the expansion of the capitalist worldeconomy between 1945 and the early 1970s. In The Secret Ladder, Fenwick is a government surveyor leading a crew of men up the Canje River in order to chart its flow. Reflecting the greater application of science and technology to sugar production, his efforts form part of a scheme to build a reservoir designed to aid the irrigation of coastal estates. The scheme will have inimical consequences for a community of peasant farmers that occupies the land earmarked for the reservoir. Descendants of runaway slaves, the community is led by the elderly Poseidon. For Fenwick, at least initially, the peasants’ resistance to the flooding of their territory is misguided. Stressing that they will be compensated, he maintains that ‘ “[t]he land isn’t all that rich up here – in fact it’s a mess – and they wouldn’t want to keep it in face of a scheme that would do untold benefit to the sugar estates and rice-lands of the Courantyne and Berbice coasts” – he found himself speaking as if he were 40 41 42

Harris 1996, p. 97. Thomas 1984, p. 145. Spinner 1984, pp. 26–7.

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recounting an obsession and a lesson – “which draw their irrigation supplies catch-as-catch-can mostly from an unaided river now.”’43 Fenwick’s attempts to downplay the dispossession of the peasants only draw attention to the way his expedition reproduces the colonial-capitalist dynamics of past intrusions into the interior. When Fenwick and his surveying team ‘invade’ the community’s land, therefore, they do so as agents of the latest in a series of ecological revolutions aimed at appropriating fresh streams of nature’s bounty. It is in this context that the massacouraman makes an appearance in the novel. The occasion is Fenwick’s first encounter with Poseidon; and it is the old man himself who takes on the appearance of the folk-spirit: There was the faint hoarse sound of an approaching body swimming in the undergrowth. Fenwick adjusted his eyes. He could no longer evade a reality that had always escaped him. The strangest figure he had ever seen had appeared in the opening of the bush, dressed in a flannel vest, flapping ragged fins of trousers on his legs. Fenwick could not help fastening his eyes greedily upon him as if he saw down a bottomless gauge and river of reflection. … The old man’s hair was white as wool and his cheeks – covered with wild curling rings – looked like an unkempt sheep’s back. The black wooden snake of skin peeping through its animal blanket was wrinkled and stitched together incredibly. … Poseidon addressed Fenwick at last. His mouth moved and made frames which did not correspond to the words he actually uttered. It was like the tragic lips of an actor … galvanized into comical association with a foreign dubbing and tongue which uttered a mechanical version and translation out of accord with the visible features of original expression. 371

The way Poseidon (whose name, of course, alludes to the Greek sea-god) ‘swims’ out of the bush to confront Fenwick brings to mind the massacouraman’s tendency to erupt out of the river. The old-man’s hairy, part-human, part-aquatic appearance reinforces this association, as does the reference to his ‘wooden snake of skin’, which not only emphasises his connection to the landscape, but also recalls the frequent descriptions of the massacouraman as having snakes entwined in its hair. Poseidon’s body thus displays that same conjunction of different orders of existence that characterises the folk-spirit.

43

Harris 1985, p. 381. Hereafter cited in the text.

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In contrast to the contained corporeality of the isolated individual of capitalist modernity (represented here by the bourgeois Fenwick), this is a body open to the world, blended with its surroundings, and at odds with the separation of the human from the extra-human. No wonder Fenwick, facing a ‘reality that had always escaped him’, struggles to comprehend Poseidon’s ‘visible features of original expression’. Indeed, the gap between this expression and the ‘mechanical version’ heard by the surveyor underscores the disjunctive quality of their encounter. Fenwick, working in the interests of the coastal estates, and Poseidon, as leader of the peasant community, embody the historic tension between plantation and plot, sugar and subsistence crops. But the gap in understanding between them also stands as a sign for the disjunctions that will accompany the ecological revolution with which Fenwick is associated. The discontinuity between their modes of discourse suggests the particular breaks and ruptures attendant upon the disaggregation and reorganisation of existing ecological unities in this period. The encounter, then, between Fenwick (representative of the modernising state) and Poseidon (representative of an alternative social logic) is emblematic of the new and highly visible forms of unevenness generated by the postwar ecological revolution. Poseidon’s embodied amalgam of multiple orders of existence, moreover, speaks to the felt experience of the period as one in which human and extra-human natures are being re-combined in strange new ways with the reorganisation of work routines and environments. The allusion to the massacouraman is entirely apposite in this context since its conjoining of human, animal, and vegetable qualities gestures to the very thing at stake in an ecological revolution: the re-making of the whole web of life. Indeed, this is one possible reason why writers responding to such revolutions are drawn to the massacouraman as a rhetorical figure. During an ecological revolution, the disaggregation and reconfiguration of the existing structure of ecological relations makes the historicity of the intertwining of human and extra-human natures more readily apparent than it might have been while the preceding ecological regime was firmly in place. Shapiro suggests that in the transition between long-waves of accumulation, the paradoxical foreclosure and return of a capitalist-driven cycle ‘enables a spatial telethasthesia, the ability to apprehend what is beyond the immediate reach of the empirical senses, because the large-scale nature of dramatic changes momentarily facilitates a greater perception of the world-system’s effects in ways otherwise unavailable to individual subjects within the mental horizon of that system’.44 For world-system

44

Shapiro 2008, p. 43.

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here read world-ecology, so that the massacouraman might be said to function as a figure for the phenomenal experience of such moments of transition: its intermixed form, suggestive of the web of life, offers a means by which to register the alteration in structures of feeling brought about by the access to a greater sense of the co-production of nature enabled during ecological revolutions. It is worth comparing the massacouraman-like Nondescript with the massacouraman-like Poseidon. As noted, the Nondescript can be viewed as representing something like a return of the repressed, with its bizarre scrambling of body parts serving as a displaced expression of the violent scrambling of bodies associated with the colonial intrusion into the Guyanese interior. Poseidon, too, albeit in a very different way, represents a return of the repressed and alludes to the brutal reorganisation of bodies under colonialism. By way of his difference from Fenwick’s surveying crew, the old peasant’s corporeality indirectly registers the deformations wrought on the working classes by the ecological revolution of the mid-twentieth century. The crew bear the disciplined, isolated bodies imposed by capital to ensure they function as productive units of exploitable energy. Reflecting the increasing atomisation and rationalisation of work routines in this period, the crew have been reduced to their allotted, specialised roles: foreman, boatman, cook, and so on. Commenting on his own experience of surveying teams, Harris writes of how each member ‘operated within a rigid function and … were excellent within that function’, yet in order to exercise it had to ‘eclipse a great deal’: they ‘accepted themselves within a certain kind of hierarchy … [and] to extend themselves beyond this was a matter that aroused uneasiness’.45 In The Secret Ladder, Fenwick’s men are similarly unable to ‘extend themselves’ beyond their isolated individualism; the social relations that determine their interactions remain obscure to them, as does their connection to the landscape in which they work. Poseidon, meanwhile, stands as the determinate negation of this enclosed, monadic condition, his massacouraman-like blurring of species boundaries and the openness of his body to the environment gesturing to all that has been suppressed in the crew. In this regard, the return of the repressed represented by Poseidon is of an alternative history and a radically different social logic, one resistant to the reifying thrust of capitalist development. As Fenwick himself comes to recognise: ‘in this creature …, the black man with the European name, drawn out of the depths of time, is the emotional dynamic of liberation that happened a

45

Harris 1999, pp. 77–8.

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century and a quarter ago … Something went tragically wrong then. Something was misunderstood and frustrated’ (385). This submerged history of liberation – Fenwick seems to be talking specifically here about emancipation and its unrealised promise – is presented in the novel as a legacy that must be brought to light and concretised. Significantly, at least part of what went ‘tragically wrong’ at the time of emancipation was the failure to pursue genuine land reform and break the stranglehold of the plantations. This would have necessitated supporting, rather than stymieing, the peasantry and the communal village movement, the potential of which is emblematised by Poseidon’s group of subsistence farmers. Poseidon-as-massacouraman, then, might be read as signifying the possibility of a form of the production of nature different to that instantiated under the plantation regime, his body a figure for a way of organising nature in which the human and the extra-human are experienced as a dialectical unity. With this in mind, I want to turn to Roy Heath’s From the Heat of the Day, in which a brief reference to a massacouraman-like figure assumes similar significance. Set in the 1920s and early 1930s, Heath’s novel registers the unravelling of the ecological regime that preceded the emergent postwar dispensation to which The Secret Ladder responds. On a global scale, the economic slump of the late 1920s marked what Arrighi calls the ‘terminal crisis’ in the (British) systemic cycle of accumulation of the long nineteenth century.46 For Guyana, this slump manifested itself in a ‘period of depression and severe crisis for the sugar industry’, which lasted until World War II.47 Moore has drawn attention to the way capitalist regimes of commodity production periodically exhaust the whole range of socio-ecological conditions – the ‘very webs of life’ – that had originally sustained them. These conditions are not simply biophysical; scarcities emerge through ‘the intertwining of resistances from labouring classes, landscape changes, and market flux – all specific bundles of relations between humans and the rest of nature’.48 Certainly Guyana’s sugar industry had reached something like this point of exhaustion by the 1920s, with the result that the planter class was forced into a restructuring of its economic model, the uneven effects of which were felt throughout society. As Clive Thomas observes in a compelling summary: [T]he long period from emancipation to the end of indenture (1838–1921) saw attempts by the planter class to resist the final collapse of a mode 46 47 48

Arrighi 2010, pp. 220–1. Thomas 1984, p. 23. Moore 2011, p. 46.

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of production based on legally sanctioned servitude. In the process, its policies on immigration, its struggle against the peasantry, and the intimidatory use of state power were to become the source of most of the present contradictions within the sugar economy, the rest of the rural economy, and the national economy of Guyana. With the final defeat of this modified form of slavery, the period up to World War II witnessed attempts to convert absentee landlordship into modern capitalist corporations. In this the planters were successful. A labour market, consolidation of land and capital, diversification, the greater use of scientific cultivation practices and factory processes all heralded new departures in plantation organization. But among the newer forms, the old bases of exploitative social relations continued.49 In narrating the gradual decline of its protagonist, Sonny Armstrong, From the Heat of the Day speaks both to the enervation of the ‘webs of life’ that had underpinned the economic organisation of Guyana, as well as to the new forms of uneven and combined development that emerged as a consequence of efforts to stave off the sugar industry’s collapse. Not only does the novel make explicit reference to the impending crisis: ‘Armstrong told his wife that there were rumours of the sugar market collapsing. … Several sugar estates were in danger of closing down and the government had drawn up plans for retrenchment and suspended recruitment to the Civil Service’.50 The text is also infused with an atmosphere of decay and degeneration, of suppressed violence and thwarted desire, of the ‘dark angst’ that characterises Heath’s work generally.51 Equally characteristic of Heath’s work is his combination of social and psychological realism with mythic and folkloric idioms and materials, such that he ‘creates his own form of “magical realism”’.52 Thus, the plot of his first novel, A Man Come Home (1974), is structured around the fairmaid legend of Guyanese folklore, while in The Shadow Bride (1988) the character of Mrs. Singh is associated with the blood-sucking witch Ol’ Higue. In From the Heat of the Day such explicitly mythical devices are largely absent. Nevertheless, in its depiction of the psychic deformations of its protagonists, its accumulation of descriptive detail, and its ‘abrupt and frequent shifts in point of view’, the text assumes a hallucinatory, estranging air.53 49 50 51 52 53

Thomas 1984, pp. 25–6. Heath 1994, p. 49. Hereafter cited in the text. James 2009, p. 73. James 2009, p. 74. Boxill 1989, p. 110.

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Tellingly, this hallucinatory quality is at its most intense at a pivotal moment both in Armstrong’s decline and in the unravelling of the prevailing ecological regime; and it is at this point too that the massacouraman is invoked. Armstrong is rushing down the street, following a sudden urge to visit a prostitute, when he collapses and has ‘a vision of himself lying on a bed, arms crossed on his chest, being stared at by his wife’s relations. … Without warning [his sisters-in-law] both bent over and placed flowers on his eyes, on his cheeks and on his mouth, yellow daisies that grew in profusion by the roadside’ (125). The vision climaxes (literally) when the eldest sister-in-law puts her hand around ‘his ungodly erection’ (126). On regaining consciousness, Armstrong recalls ‘a curious conversation’ he heard when he was younger between his father and a fisherman friend, in which the fisherman explains how ‘one night we haul up the net and what you think we find inside? Something looking just like a man, but with webbed feet’: Those words had aroused something slumbering deep within Armstrong, which he could share with no one else. It was as if someone inside him had spoken, uttering hidden feelings. And this second experience, the one he had just had [the vision in the street], far from frightening him, had comforted him, reassuring him, as it were, of the continued existence of an inward companion, who was still capable of asserting his presence. 126

Immediately following Armstrong’s musings, the next chapter, ‘Retrenchment’, opens with the declaration that: ‘The wind of fear was blowing through the post office and government departments. … Retrenchment was in full swing’ (128). As the restructuring of socio-economic relations gathers pace, Armstrong loses his job, which further disrupts his mental equilibrium. His wife, meanwhile, becomes increasingly emaciated as the family struggle to survive in reduced circumstances. She begins to suffer from dizzy spells before collapsing and dying on the kitchen floor, ‘her face ashen grey and her hands dry as tinder’ (143). This series of odd, discontinuous episodes – climaxing, significantly, with the image of Gladys Armstrong’s devitalised and ‘desiccated’ body (144) – emphasises the sense of fragmentation and confusion engendered by the exhaustion of the dominant ecological regime. The reference to the massacouraman-like creature in the fisherman’s net is less obviously associated here with a radical transformation in the co-production of nature than is Poseidon in The Secret Ladder (perhaps reflecting the fact that Heath’s novel, set in an earlier historical moment, is more attuned to the fading of the established order, rather than the emergence of the new). Nonetheless, Heath’s allusion to

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the massacouraman still brings with it a suggestion that the unravelling of the dominant ecological regime opens up the possibility of perceiving reality anew. Armstrong’s enigmatic statement that the web-footed being in the net aroused ‘something slumbering’ within him recalls how Poseidon represents a return of the repressed, a figure for that which has been destroyed by the reifying thrust of capital over the course of successive ecological revolutions. In oblique fashion, Heath’s massacouraman-like creature signals the memory or the hidden possibility of a different kind of existence – a different way of being human. Specifically in this instance, it might be understood to manifest Armstrong’s suppressed desire for freedom from the cloistered world of middle-class mores in which he became enmeshed with his marriage to Gladys. In the carriage on the way to the latter’s funeral, Armstrong thinks back to the evening when he had stood on the edge of a crowd of people who were taking part in a Salvation Army meeting in Bourda. Carried away by the infectious singing and the sounds of tambourines he forgot for a while that he was waiting to make his first visit to Gladys’s house in Queenstown. … No, her family would not have approved of tambourines or singing at street corners. Yet, such things stirred his heart. And these very things that separated them, these impulses, he suppressed for her sake, or perhaps for his own, believing that they were the signs of a defective upbringing. 147

This suppressed longing for collectivity, for escape from the disciplined, isolated subjectivity of the bourgeois individual, is implicitly connected to the massacouraman-like figure as a similarly suppressed ‘inward companion’. This connection strengthens the inference that the web-footed creature Armstrong evokes is representative of an alternative social logic. Like Poseidon, it flashes up at a moment of crisis, at a moment when the kind of collectivity Armstrong desires yet resists is rendered even less attainable as a new ecological revolution intensifies the atomisation and reification of ecological relations. The implication in Harris’s and Heath’s novels that their massacouramanlike figures represent a suppressed part of oneself receives explicit elaboration in Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl (1988). Set in a Guyanese East Indian village in a remote part of the Canje, Dabydeen’s narrative features a European naturalist, usually referred to as ‘the stranger’, who has arrived in the region to collect specimens of the local fauna. After a village boy, Josh, and later his father, Ghulam, catch sight of the massacouraman in the village creek, the stranger sets about trying to capture it, hoping to send it back to a zoo in Europe or the United States. That the massacouraman appears in response to the naturalist’s incur-

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sion into the region suggests that this folkloric figure is again being deployed to mediate the experience of an ecological revolution. Certainly Dabydeen’s novel makes plain that the twinned appearance of the stranger and the folkspirit is tied to a moment of transition in the life of the villagers: ‘Ghulam was involved with his own thoughts, the feeling that he was changing, becoming closer to the outside world. They were all changing …. But if they were changing, was it because they were being touched by all that was bad and evil in the outside world?’54 The naturalist’s plundering of specimens from the local environment is plainly indicative of the colonial penetration of Guyana, its forcible integration into the capitalist world-ecology, and the ransacking of its ecological resources. But it might also be read as mediating the impact of a more recent ecological revolution: that associated with the emergence of the neoliberal regime of accumulation in the 1970s. Faced with falling profit rates in the late 1960s, the core capitalist powers unleashed a new imperialist offensive against peripheral regions, seeking to secure an ecological surplus in the form of cheap food, energy, raw materials, and labour power. Much of this was carried out under cover of IMF and World Bank initiatives such as Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP s), which, among other things, required countries to slash government spending and to pursue export-led growth by substituting agro-exports for staple foods and prioritising the extraction of raw materials. Guyana was subject to the depredations of structural adjustment in the late 1970s, when a balance-of-payments crisis and mounting arrears on its external debt forced the government of Forbes Burnham to seek financial assistance from the IMF.55 The subsequent aid package entailed a series of demanding austerity measures, including public sector cuts, the removal of food subsidies, and the driving down of wages.56 Burnham, however, resisted the call to open the country to foreign capital, a stance that contributed to the IMF terminating its support in 1983.57 Following Burnham’s death two years later, his successor, Desmond Hoyte, ‘came under heavy pressure from the international development agencies to liberalize the economy’ and to promote ‘non-traditional’ exports, specifically gold and timber.58 Seeking a rapprochement with the IMF, Hoyte launched a liberalisation programme in 1986, which saw the rapid expansion of logging and mining concerns. 54 55 56 57 58

Dabydeen 1988, p. 62. Hereafter cited in the text. Gafar 1996, p. 43. Spinner 1984, pp. 167, 184; Colchester 1997, p. 38. Spinner 1984, p. 206. Colchester 1997, p. 2.

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Dark Swirl seems to register the impact of these policies, although it was published so soon after they took effect as to make such an interpretation potentially problematic. That said, even if Dabydeen’s novel is not a direct response to the neoliberal revolution, its clear evocation of the colonial penetration and plunder of Guyana resonates with this later moment of ecological restructuring. If the naturalist stands for the long history of resource imperialism in the region, the consternation caused to the villagers by the massacouraman’s appearance suggests the disruption to communities and environments this history has entailed, including in its most recent, neoliberal guise. At the level of form, the generic discontinuities generated by the narrative juxtaposition of folkloric and fabular elements with more realist techniques emphasises the violent, disjunctive effects of imperialist plunder. In this regard, it is worth highlighting a number of references in the text to the villagers suffering from dry throats and strained speech, which tend to feature in conjunction with references to the naturalist’s removal and cataloguing of the local fauna. After encountering the stranger’s crates full of specimens, for instance, the villagers look to Ghulam for advice: ‘“Speak, Ghulam, speak,” they urged, their throats dry, their voices rasping like sandpaper rubbed against glass’.59 Similar descriptions are present throughout the text: ‘Ghulam rasped’;60 ‘sand-paper voices’;61 ‘He clutched at his throat as he felt an intense pain there’.62 Such imagery suggests the depletion of human and extra-human nature – the sapping of vital energies – as exploitation is ratcheted upwards under conditions of ecological revolution. Dabydeen’s novel thus underscores the ecological weight of the massacouraman motif. The eruption of this strange, anxiety-inducing creature from the village creek bespeaks the uncertainty and sense of unreality generated by the disaggregation and reorganisation of existing ecological unities. Simultaneously, however, the massacouraman comes to figure the possibility of resistance to the imposed ecological regime. This is suggested initially by the effect had on the naturalist by his encounter with the creature: There were eyes, like those of an old man’s with corrugated skin around them, webby eyelids like flaps. His heart beat faster; he looked carefully. He studied what ought to have been a mouth, but was merely a crevice. A nose, the contours of a face. … He saw the outlines of an entire body; a 59 60 61 62

Dabydeen 1988, p. 61. Dabydeen 1988, p. 48. Dabydeen 1988, p. 62. Dabydeen 1988, p. 72.

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huge protuberant stomach like a giant black tube, floating. An extended torso next, a back, and a tail wagging lazily, creating bubbles all around it.63 The massacouraman throws the naturalist’s taxonomic model into confusion. ‘How could he measure or classify what was before him?’ he wonders.64 This confirms a nagging doubt that has arisen in him since he first heard about the massacouraman, and which finds fullest expression just prior to his encounter with it in the creek. He is in his hut, studying a captive monkey: [A]s he looked at the range of expressions on the monkey’s face, he saw himself as in a mirror. … He checked himself; he was a man given to empirical investigation; to the study of habitats, measured, documented, recorded in a journal at regular intervals. He didn’t try to wrestle with the deeper meanings of objects, with the value of existence. … But like an ingrained habit, he returned to the immediacy of his specimens, to the monkey’s facial twitches so like his own …. His mind hummed with such correspondences. He felt troubled because he had always wanted things defined, pigeon-holed, classified. What was happening to him?65 The breakdown in the stranger’s classificatory mind-set is exemplified by the blurring of the boundaries between himself and the monkey. The recognition of his ‘correspondence’ to the animal disrupts his radical separation – as the archetypal isolated individual of capitalist modernity – from a ‘nature’ posited by this very separation as an alien externality. The disruption to the naturalist’s self-understanding, and beyond this to the form of appearance of nature under capitalism, is underscored by the feeling he experiences of being drawn inexorably into the creek on seeing the massacouraman. The scene is redolent of the colonial explorer’s fear of being sucked into the green hell of the jungle. For a moment the naturalist is tempted to let himself be ‘pulled down into the miry depths’, before the ‘instinct to survive, ingrained in him from early’ reasserts itself.66 One might read this ‘ingrained’ survival instinct in light of Fredric Jameson’s gloss on Theodor Adorno’s construal of humanity’s history of ‘mutual aggressivity, inevitable misery and unwarranted triumph’ as being ‘grounded in the seemingly 63 64 65 66

Dabydeen 1988, p. 75. Ibid. Dabydeen 1988, p. 73. Dabydeen 1988, p. 76.

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biological and Darwinian instinct of self-preservation’. The ‘philosophical subtext of this startling suggestion’, argues Jameson, ‘lies in the proposition that “self-preservation” is not an instinct at all, but rather something like an ideology, or at the very least an ideological mechanism’: All human societies, necessarily organized around scarcity and power, have had to program their subjects in such a way as to construct some seemingly primordial effort to preserve one’s self at all costs, which is to say at the cost of other people. This ‘self’, which one then jealously hoards and protects against incursion, is something like a form of property, the very first form perhaps, around which all our personal and social struggles are organized. Adorno’s speculations thereby unexpectedly renew their ties with the oldest and most tenaciously rooted Utopian traditions: to abolish private property. Yet it is now the private property of the self which is to be abolished.67 The abolition of the private property of the self would clearly entail the transformation of societies organised in such a way as to produce that ideological mechanism of self-preservation in the first place. Indeed, it implies a Utopian vision of the emergence of some radically new form of ‘human nature’, a possibility alluded to, suggests Jameson, in Adorno’s ‘only partly ironic ethical ideal’: ‘to live like good animals’ – an ideal that resonates with the emphasis in Dark Swirl on the import of the naturalist’s recognition of his correspondence to the monkey. Thus, when the naturalist is pulled into the creek – when he is almost sucked irretrievably into the Guyanese landscape and the histories and cosmologies it contains – not only does it signal a potential loss of self; it might also be understood to gesture towards the possible breakdown of the specific organisation of human and extra-human natures upon which that self is predicated. As with Harris’s Poseidon, Dabydeen’s massacouraman embodies an amalgam of multiple orders of existence (man, fish, ape, plant) that points beyond the reifying thrust of capital. Significantly, the appearance of the massacouraman also encourages Ghulam and the other villagers to reflect on their own connection to the landscape. Contemplating the folk-spirit, Ghulam in particular comes to see that ‘this thing was theirs’68 and not the naturalist’s to capture and export. Once again, therefore, the massacouraman is associated with

67 68

Jameson 2007, p. 174. Dabydeen 1988, p. 72.

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the possibility of an alternative mode of life and of a form of the production of nature conducive to self-determination. Dabydeen’s novel brings together in relatively explicit fashion the various connotations attaching to representations of the massacouraman as charted in this article. From Waterton’s Nondescript, with its allusion to colonial anxieties over the jungle environment, to Dabydeen’s massacouraman as the embodiment of a different relationship to nature, images of this folk-spirit take on a peculiar significance in cultural responses to periods of ecological revolution. The creature’s admixture of species provides a means to express the felt experience of such revolutions, which are moments of historical transition marked by intense and highly visible forms of uneven development, as well as the recombination of human and biophysical natures in strange new ways. Precisely because ecological revolutions involve the disaggregation of existing ecological unities, however, they are also periods in which the potential for new modes of existence becomes more obviously apparent than it might otherwise have been. Again, the massacouraman is a highly apposite figure in this regard since it embodies a logic at odds with capitalist reification, not only preserving an alternative history, but also projecting the Utopian possibility of a different way of being human.

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General Index Absolutism/Absolutist 22 See also feudalism See also China See also Russia In Europe 111, 145–146, 148 In Iran 131 Adaptation 30, 43 Addison, Joseph 152, 156–157 Adorno, Theodor 139n4, 183, 246–247, 336– 337 adoxography 268 Afghanistan 68, 220 Africa 235, 248–251 See also colonialism Ahmad, Aijaz 201, 207, 211–213, 217 Alderson, David 229 Allinson, James C. 6, 13 allegory 268, 272–273, 276 allegory-symbol debate 277n79 Das Narrenschiff (Brandt) 268 In Praise of Folly (Erasmus) 268 journey as device 272 psychomachia 279 road as device 270 temporality 277n79 National Allegory 201–206, 210–212 Al Qaeda 68–71 Althusser, Louis 260 Amerindian 90–98, 102–103, 105, 107–108, 314–320, 324 Amin, Samir 248 Anderson, Kevin 259 Anderson, Perry 19–20, 148, 168, 169–70, 184, 193–4, 195 Anievas, Alex 3, 6, 13, 134–136, 141n23 Appleby, Joyce 32 Apter Emily 200, 211–213 Arico, José 259 Arrighi, Giovanni 233–239, 242, 251, 322, 330 art and language 192 Ashman, Sam 261 anticipation see temporality assemblage see montage Auerbach, Erich 201 avant-garde 186

Bakhtin, Mikhail 253, 269, 276, 283 Bakhtin School 266 chronotope 253, 261–262, 265–275, 287 dialogic 267–8, 269, 273, 277 neo-Kantianism 276 Ballard, J.G. 27, 227 Banaji, Jairus 260 Baran, Paul 232 Barker, Colin 259 Batatu, Hanna 30 Baudelaire, Charles 168 Baudrillard, Jean 7 Bauman, Zygmunt 42 Bayly, Christopher 29, 40 Bazaar 126, 127, 130, 133 Beckett, Samuel 11 Beethoven, Ludwig van 183 Bello, Walden 229 Benjamin, Walter 190, 278, 247, 308–09 And Bertolt Brecht 272 On anti-historicism 260 On Moscow 46 Bensaïd, Daniel 260 Berlin 174 Berman, Marshall 170, 174–5, 194, 250 All that is Solid Melts into Air 194 Bhabha, Homi K. 87 Bieler, Andreas 222 Biely, Andrei 25 Biemann, Ursula 263–265 Bin Laden, Osama 69 Blaney, David L. 113 Bloch, Ernst 44, 260 Bolivia 63 Bolshevik/Bolshevism 66 1917 revolution 5, 18, 24, 37, 127 In China 75 October Revolution 39, 45 Borges, Jorge Luis 14 Boston 174 Bourgeoisie/bourgeois 18, 39, 163, 246, 252, 328 American 37 And democracy 20–21 British 36

377

general index English revolution 117 European 142, 144–145, 147 Individual 333 Iranian 130–131 Japanese 41 Kenyan 249 Revolution 260 Russian 230 See also Public Sphere Boxall, Peter 227–228, 242–244 Bozdoğan, Sibel 302 Branch, Jordan 106, 108 Brandt, Sebastian 268 Braudel, Ferdinand 233 Brazil 56, 238 Brecht, Bertolt 272, 278, 246 Brenner, Neil 217 Britain 119, 145, 148, 233, 322–223 Eighteenth Century 138, 142–143, 151– 153, 156–163 Brooker, Peter 298 Brown, Charles Barrington 324 Brown, Kate 48 Buck, Daniel 77–78 Bulgaria 179 Burke, Jason 68n152 Burnett, Graham 319–320 Burnham, Forbes 334 Bush, George 243–244 Calhoun, Craig 35, 138 Callinicos, Alex 5, 7, 46, 134n62 Canada 220 Casanova, Pascale 200, 202, 207–211, 289– 296 Casas, Bartolomé de Las 93–94, 97 Caute, David 191 Cecil, Sir William 106 Chakrabartty, Dispesh 86, 96, 258n14 Chatterjee, Partha 86 Chesneaux, Jean 28 Chicago 174 Chilcote, Ronald H. 229n13 China 53–54, 172–173, 235, 237–238, 251 1920s 51 As ‘Absolutist State’ 26 And ‘adoption’ 30 Communist Party 27–28

And development 60 And U&CD 72–79 Choonara, Joseph 58–59 Christianity 65, 89–91, 94, 96n78, 105 Christendom 89–90, 106, 145, 158 chronotope see Bakhtin Citizenship 63, 139 Citizen-subject 131–133 Clark, Timothy 187 Cleary, Joe 11 Coetzee, J.M. 227 Cognitive mapping 206 Colas, Alexander 65 Colonialism 86, 126, 144, 209, 230, 238, 248– 249, 259 See also Africa See also postcolonial See also Europe And ‘dual economy’ 50–51 And Europe 103–104, 106–107 And International Relations 83–84 And U&CD 17, 88–92 Colonial subjects 100–102 Colonial powers 110 Explorers 314–321, 324–325 In Guyana 326–327, 329, 334 In India 31 Rivalry 108 Spanish 94–95 Conrad, Joseph 244–245 Constructivism 167, 190, 197 Cooper, Frederick 87 Cowan, Brian 155 Cox, Anthony 30–31 Cox, Robert 139 Critical Theory/Critical Theorist 138–142, 144, 150, 158, 163 Cuba 219–220 Dabydeen, Cyril 315, 333–338 Dalrymple, William 52 Damrosch, David 200 Davidson, Neil 14, 258 Davis, Mike 54, 61, 64–65 Day, Gail 12, 167, 196–197 D’Costa, Anthony 52 Defoe, Daniel 152, 156–160 Degirmencioglu, Nesrin 12 Delillo, Don 14, 227

378 Denis, Eric 62 Desai, Manali 64 De Vitoria, Francisco 91–92, 104–106 dialogic see Bakhtin Dictatorship 42, 69, 78, 248–249 Distant reading 202–205 diptych see Sekula Dobb, Maurice 147n52 Dos Passos, John 298–300, 304–306, 311, 313 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 262 Double relationship 136–137 Doward, Jamie 70 Dublin 195 Eagleton, Terry 196, 197–8 Ecology/ecological 228, 314–315, 332–333, 335 Ecological revolution 327–329, 334, 338 World ecology 317, 321–322, 324, 326, 329–330, 334 Economic crisis, 2008 139, 228, 242 economic growth 172–3 Edgerton, Samuel 107 Edwards, Steve 12 Egypt 62 Eisenstadt, Schmuel 170 Eisenstein, Sergei 304–305 Empire 29 See also Imperialism Empire-building 83 Russian 26 Spanish 35, 95 Engels, Friedrich 34, 136, 175–6 England 22, 28, 40, 44, 159, 314 And capitalism 104, 110, 125, 127, 129 And industrialisation 35–39, 46 As exception 31–32 Coffee Houses 157 Elizabethan 157 Post Restoration 154 Enlightenment 23, 55, 91n41, 99–100, 139n4, 326 As colonialist 102 As Eurocentric 92, 97 As European 114 Erasmus, Desiderius 268

general index essay essay as form (Lukács) 265n47 essayistic photography 268 video-essay 263–5 Europe/European 84–87, 89–91, 95–96, 98–99, 101, 107–108, 110–111, 113–116, 124–125, 142, 145–152, 156, 159 See also Eurocentrism And capitalism 17 And colonialism 123, 126, 314 And development 78, 112 And International Relations 83 And modernity 39, 103, 118, 141 And revolution 126 And space 106–107 And temporality 119 Backward regions 28 Competition 105 Conflict in 149–150 EU 256 European states 104 History 114 Universalism 113 Western 127 Eurocentrism 84–87, 89–92, 95, 104, 111–112, 117, 119–120, 125, 137, 258 Evans, Richard 42 Ezzouek, Mohammad 70 Fabian, Johannes 96n78 Farocki, Harun 264–265 Fasolt, Constantin 99n93, 100n96 Faulkner, William 10n20 Fascism 42, 45 Ferguson, Adam 96 Feudal 42 Feudal Absolutism 24 Feudalism 23, 85, 145–147, 241 In Austria-Hungary and Russia 40 In Italy 35 Documents 106 Financialisation 233, 236, 256 First World War 26, 31, 41–42, 73, 127 Flaubert, Gustave 262 Fordism 57, 59 form aesthetic form 277 cultural form 253–254, 261, 263 essay as form (Lukács) 265n47

379

general index form giving (Lukács) 263 formalism 269 of presentation (Marx) 253 of the novel 228, 242, 245, 335 Foucault Michel 114–118, 120, 133 France 119, 145, 148, 162 See also Revolution Freeman, Elizabeth 11n22 French Revolutions 190 1789 190 1848 190 Fried, Michael 267 Frisby, David 169 Fundamentalism/fundamentalist 44 In Iran 117 In Islam 72 Futurism 167, 179, 197 Gamble, Andrew 228 Gehry, Frank 283–4 Geopolitical accumulation 126 Germany 38–39, 44, 145, 162, 180, 234 And capitalism 148 As backwards 119 Fascist regime 42, 78 Industrial revolution 43 Pre World War One 117 Glasgow 176 Globalisation 4, 8, 9–12, 163, 203, 214–215, 219–221, 265 See also neoliberalism Global South 17, 20, 27, 46, 48, 60–61, 86, 89, 178, 236, 248 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von 201–202 Gooblar, David 243 Goody, Jack 168 Gonda, Yasunosuke 45 Goodwin, Jeff 20 Gothic 315, 321–325 Gramsci, Antonio 18, 251, 260, 273 Gray, John 44, 54, 69, 70 Great Depression (1870s) 17 Greenberg, Clement 180, 186, 190, 191, 192, 193, 198, 267 Avant-Garde and Kitsch 186–7 ‘Modernist Painting’ 188–9 Greene, Jody 159 Grotius, Hugo 90 Groys, Boris 168, 190

Guha, Ranajit 86 Guilbaut, Serge 190 Guldin, Gregory 60 Guyana 314–338 Gül, Murat 302 Gürbilek, Nurdan 298, 308 Habermas, Jürgen 138–163, 251 Habjan, Jernej 213 Hall, Stuart 258 Halliday, Fred 67–68 Hardt, Michael 57n120, 58–59 Hartog, François 99 Hartwell, Ronald 174 Harootunian, Harry 38, 45 Harris, Wilson 315, 325–326, 329, 333, 337 Harvey, David 221, 241, 304 Haynes, Mike 47 Heath, Roy 315–317, 325, 330–333 Hintzian 103 Historical materialism 5–6, 8, 9, 13, 120, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 207 Hobsbawm, Eric 27n32, 29 Holocene 174 Holquist, Michael 261 Hoogvelt, Ankie 68n151 Hore, Charlie 77 Horkheimer, Max 139n3n4 Hoyte, Desmond 334 Humboldt, Alexander Von 219 Huntington, Samuel 69 Hybridity 86–87, 144 Hybridization 52 Hybrid 58, 88 Ibsen, Heinrich 181 Inayatullah, Naeem 113 India 29, 50–53, 259, 264 And gender 64 Bengal 1890s 30–31 Indonesia 61 Industrialisation 17, 34, 39–40, 46, 173–174, 231 And urbanisation 26–27, 34, 48, 49, 60 Capitalist industrialisation 23, 35, 66 In Britain 161 In India 29 In Italy 58 In the USA 38

380 In France 38 In the West 61 Industrial Revolution 33, 35, 99 International Monetary Fund 220–221, 234, 334 International Relations 3–5, 8, 83–84, 136, 138–139, 222, 255 And Fredric Jameson 199, 216 And Habermas 142–143, 161, 163 Realist 101 Imperialism 17, 22, 26, 38, 102–103, 111, 126, 203, 209, 218–219, 221, 231, 260, 325, 334–335 Internalism/Internalist 84–85, 116, 120, 141– 142, 148–149, 158, 163 Iran 26, 56, 65–67, 114, 117–118, 124–126, 128– 131 See also modernity See also modernization See also revolution Iraq 30, 236 Ireland 197–8, 259–260 ISIS 70–72 Islam 31 And modernity 29 Political Islam 60, 67–72 Populist Islam 65 In Iran 116–117, 125, 131–133 Istanbul 299–300, 302–304, 306, 312 Italy, 57–58, 167, 180 James, Henry 185 Jameson, Fredric 5n4, 169, 180, 185, 193–4, 195, 228, 250–251, 336–337 And mode of production 6 And modernism 253 And new realism 276 And postmodernity 56–57 And World Literature 119 And Third World Literature 201– 222 And Magic Realism 325 Japan 40–41, 45, 127, 234 Jones, Gareth Stedman 37 Joyce, James 183, 189, 195, 196 Ulysses 183, 189, 195 Finnegan’s Wake 189 Just War 94, 103, 105–106

general index Kahlo, Freda 179 Kant, Immanuel 13 Kelman, James 14, 227–228, 242–243, 250 Kelly, Aaron 242 Kelly, Brian 38 Kemp, Tom 51 Keunen, Bart 298 Keyder, Çağlar 300–302 Khomeini, Ruhollah 67, 132–133 Kirke, Henry 317 kitsch 187 Knei-Paz, Baroch 123 Klein, Naomi 241 Koselleck, Reinhart 100 Krishan Kumar 33 Kumar, Krishnan 173, 197 Kunzu, Hari 70 Labriola, Antonio 23 Lakatos, Imre 134–136 Late Capitalism 9, 11, 131–132, 216–217, 227– 228, 241–242, 251 Latin America 62–63, 65 Lash, Scott 174, 175 Lazar, Sian 63 Lazarus, Neil 6n11, 212 Lee, Ching Kwan 74–75 Lefebvre, Henri 5n4, 260 Lehan, Richard Daniel 299 Lenin, Vladimir 41, 124, 260 Leninism 66 Lerner, Ben 14 Lessing, Gottholt Ephraim 267 Levene, David 282 Lewin, Moshe 47, 49 Lewis, Bernard 30 Lin, Kevin 73 Linear developmentalism 84–85, 96–97, 112 Linklater, Andrew 139–141 Lister, Jeremy 21 Llosa, Mario Vargas 248 Locke, John 96, 98 London 34, 37, 174, 177 López, Silvia L. 213 Löwy, Michael 5n4, 11, 261 Lu Xun 14, 206 Lukács, Georg 180–6, 193, 196, 252

general index critical realism 256n8 essay as form 265n47 form giving 263 historical novel 284 Lunn, Eugene 189 Luttwak, Edward 55 Luxemburg, Rosa 260 MacIntyre, Alistair 49 Magri, Lucio 57–58 Makki, Fouad 25 Manchester 34, 175 Mandel, Ernest 7, 38, 193, 228, 230–231, 232n20 Mann, Thomas 183, 196, 251 The Magic Mountain 183 Mariátegui, José Carlos 260 Marker, Chris 277, 278 Márquez, Gabriel García 14, 248 Marx, Karl 32, 55, 65, 113, 136–137, 170, 180, 184–185, 221, 253 in Capital 232n22 on colonialism 259–260 on German uneven development 38 on Russian obshchina 259 Marxism/Marxist 5, 38, 55, 79, 103, 110, 121, 133–134, 139, 229, 231, 253–257, 259 And International Relations 118 And literary criticism 8, 10, 200 And temporality 23 And World Literature 201, 207, 212 As Eurocentric 119–120, 137 Classical tradition 18, 141 In China 28, 75 In Iran 132 In Iraq 30 In Russia 37, 47 Political Marxism 171 Mason, Paul 78, 240–241 Massacouraman 315, 319–321, 325–338 Massey, Doreen 10 Matin, Kamran 13, 84 McAllister, Carole 50–51, 54, 71 McCabe, Colin, 189–90 McCarthy, Cormac 11, 244–245, 250 McCarthy, Thomas 162 McDaniel, Tim 26, 65–66 Medvedev, Pavel 266, 269

381 Meek, Ronald L. 7 Melville, Herman 278 Melville, Pauline 325 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 153, 155 Metacommentary 204, 206 Methodological Fix 134 Mexico 220 Middle East 26 Mill, John Stuart 55 Mills, C. Wright 238 Mitchell, WJT 267 Mode of production 5–8, 33, 98, 233, 259– 260 modernism 43, 177–198, 250, 253, 275, 276, 284, 299–300, 304 Eighteenth Century 155 Global 222 high-modernist critics 267 modern-postmodern distinction 277n79 Narrative technique 325 political modernism 276 Third World 209 Modernity 7, 17, 30, 84, 99–100, 112, 114, 142, 163, 218, 222, 250–251, 285, 290, 297, 300, 312 And backwardness 58 And Eurocentrism 84, 117 And Habermas 151, 158 And the French Revolution 70 And U&CD 84 Capitalist Modernity 29, 42, 54, 65, 69, 86–87, 89–90, 97, 100, 103, 112–113, 129, 168–77, 216, 227, 246–247, 328, 336 Communist 48 Global 215 In Britain 36 In India 53 In Iran 119–120, 133 In Italy 39 Late 227 Non-Eurocentric 89 Of Islamism 69 Pre-modernity 42 See also Europe/European See also modernization Socialist 72 Western 85–88 Modernization 124–125, 231, 250

382 And Marxism 122 Capitalist 38 In Guyana 326 In Iran 117, 126–128 Mohamed Reza 128 montage 275–84 horizontal 277 sequential 277, 282 Mooers, Colin 62 Moore, Jason W. 321–322, 330 Moretti, Franco 6, 8, 200, 202–207, 211, 213– 215, 251–252, 295–297, 323 Morocco 263 Multiplicity (collective) 86, 121, 133, 136–137, 264–265 Political 84–87, 112 Societal 116 Socio-political 5, 13 NAFTA 220–221 Nairn, Tom 42 Nationalism/Nationalist 22, 49, 145, 152– 153, 156, 158–159, 161, 205 Indian 31 Ethno-nationalism 42 Hindu 64 Muslim 69 Iranian 128–129 Native Americans 179 Negri, Antonio 58–59 neoliberalism 12, 55, 285, 222, 234, 239, 242– 243, 285 And globalisation 9, 214, 222, 228 And cultural studies 10 As urban policy 283 In Africa 247–248 In China 73, 75, 77–78 In Guyana 334–335 In Latin America 63 Restructuring 317 Netherlands 233 New York 180, 300, 304, 306, 312 Newman, Charles 11 Niblett, Michael 11 Nicaragua 219–220 Nixon, Richard 235 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 247–250 Norway 181 Novack, George 258

general index Oloff, Kerstin 325 Orwell, George 177n38, 189, 191n83 Osborne, Peter 169 Osterhammel, Jürgen 29n40, 34, 174 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah 67 Pamuk, Orhan 291, 293, 298–300 Papacy/Papal/Pope 90–91, 100, 106 Paraguay 248 Parham, Baqir 115 Paris 174, 175, 180 Parkinson, George 182 Parla, Jale 297 Parry, Benita 6n11 permanent revolution 14, 18, 31, 257–8 deflected 258n14 Persaud, Satnarine 315 photography diaristic 284 documentary 265, 268, 269, 270, 276 essayistic 268 paraliterary 268, 270 performative 268–9 photographic paradox (Barthes) 263 photojournalism 268, 269, 272 photo-reportage 282 space-time package 263 spatial compression 282 worker photography 282 Pieterse, Jan Nedervee 59 Plebbian 32 Poland 56 Pollard, Sydney 33, 36 Pollock, Jackson 179, 183, 192 Autumn Rhythm 183 Pomeranz, Kenneth 172 Portugal 108, 233 Post, Charles 37 Postcolonialism/Postcolonialist 56, 86–87, 144, 199, 201, 315 And Marxism 119 In Africa 247–248 literary criticism 4, 11 Postcolonial World 234, 238 Writers 143 postmodernity 7, 56, 205 postmodernisation 58 postmodernism 199, 206–207, 216

general index postmodern/postmodernist 209, 215, 217–218, 221 Prendergast, Christopher 200 Proletariat 34, 121, 132 Public Sphere 138, 140–141, 145–146, 150– 155, 158–163 Qajars 126, 127 Rabelais, Françoid 162, 283 Race/Racism 89–90, 97–98, 111 White Supremacy 102 Readings, Bill 11n22 Reagan, Ronald 219–220 realism 11, 180–186, 272, 276, 284, 256, 335 critical realism 256n8 Magical realism 325, 331 metonymy 92, 272 new realism (Jameson) 276 socialist realism 269 structural realism 83 Third World 209 Reiss, Tim J. 200, 213 Ren, Hao 75 Reuschemeyer, Dietrich 21 Revolution See also Bolshevik/Bolshevism 1848 39 England 1688 35, 40 France 1789 70, 99, 117 In Egypt 62 In Iran 65–68, 114–118, 120, 125, 127–128, 129, 131, 133 In Russia 117, 124, 127 Socialist 121, 125 Reza Shah 128, 130 Richetti, John 159 Robinson, Kim Stanley 78 Robinson, William 217 Rodríguez, Arantxa 283 Romanov, Nicholas 67 Romanticism 186 Rome 177 Rosenberg, Justin 3, 15, 117, 123, 134, 142, 173, 219, 258 And 1995 Deutscher Memorial Prize Lecture 17 And the International 5

383 Roth, Philip 11, 227–228, 243–244, 250 Rothko, Mark 190 Roy, Arundhati 50 Roy, Olivier 68–69 Ruiz, Oscar 282 Russia 24–25, 45–46, 127, 131, 167, 180, 181, 222, 230, 259 See also Revolution 1915–17 18 1970s 50 And Cold War 48 And development 123 And Iran 65–66 And Marxism 37 As Absolutist State 22, 29, 40 As example of adoption 30 Tsarist 121, 257 Safavis 125, 126 Said, Edward 4, 178 Sanders, Angela 263 Sanders, David 311 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 92 Saul, John 247 Sayer, Derek 169 Schomburgk, Robert 320, 324–325 Schwarz, Roberto 12, 211 Scotland 39, 242 Scruton, Roger 69 Seabrook, Jeremy 52, 60–61 Sebald, W.G. 245–246, 250 Second World War 38, 46, 58, 62, 128–129, 233–235, 237, 326, 330–331 Sekula, Allan 253–288 Aerospace Folktales 268 anticipation 286 critical realism 256n8 Dead Letter Office 270, 279, 287 diptych 279, 283–4 Fish Story 254, 268, 270, 273, 282 Freeway to China (Version 2, For Liverpool) 270, 273, 287, 288 Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes 270, 282, 288 Meat Mass 269 melancholy 285 Ship of Fools 268, 270, 279 The Forgotten Space (with Noel Burch) 273, 283, 287

384 The Lottery of the Sea 254, 270, 273, 278, 287 This Ain’t China 268, 269 TITANIC’s wake 270, 273, 283–4 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 92–93, 96–97 Shaikh, Anwar 220 Shanin, Teodor 259 Shanghi 27, 35 Shapiro, Meyer 192–193 Shapiro, Stephen 315, 321, 328 Shari’ati, Ali 131, 133 Shenker, Jack 62 Silver, Beverley 55–57 Simmel, George ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ 176 Skocpol, Theda 66, 116 Smith, Adam 55, 237, 254n5 Smith, Godwin 31 Smith, John 108 Smith, Neil 256, 259, 282, 301 Smith, S.A. 25, 27, 49 Soseki, Natsume 14 Sovereign states/sovereignty 83–84, 89–90, 102, 110–111 And space 107 And statehood 103–105 Capitalist sovereignty 101 In Europe 145–146 In Iran 126 Sovereigns 91, 100, 108 Space 56, 84, 99–100, 106–107, 112, 143, 261 See also Sovereignty See also Europe And globalisation 221 And Marxism 118–119 Decentred 110 Demarcation 101 Eighteenth Century 157 Empty space 108, 110 photographic paradox, see photography smooth space, fetish of 265 space-time 267, see also Bakhtin chronotope space-time compression 259n21 space-time conjuncture 272, 286 space-time package 263 spatial compression 282 Spain/Spanish 89, 91–97, 102, 105, 107–108, 233

general index Spencer, Robert 11, 12 Spitzer, Leo 201 Stagist/Stagism 85, 88, 98 Stalinism 46, 49, 79 Stallabrass, Julian 195–6 Steele, Richard 152, 156 Sternberg, Fritz 272 Stiglitz, Joseph 221 Stone, Norman 36 Streeck, Wolfgang 238–240 Structuralism 115–116, 269 Substitution 123, 124, 125, 131, 132 Substitutionism 127 subsumption of labour 171–2 Surrealism 189 Suvin, Darko 262n38 Sweezy 232 Syncretism 54 synchronicity/asynchronicity 257, 260, 277, 285, 286, 287 nonsynchronicism 44, 48, 100, 263 resynchronisation 259 violence 260, 266 Syria 65, 69 Szeman, Imre 12 Tallack, Douglas 299 Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi 14, 290–313 Temporality/time 112, 116, 209, 218, 227, 245, 261 See also allegory, see also synchronicity/asynchronicity And development 88–89, 96 And globalization 221–222 anticipation 286 coexistence of 23 demarcation in 101 European 84 immediacy, fetish of 265 in Marx and Benjamin 260, 287 in Shanghai 27 Linear 99 multiple 25 nonsimultaneity 7, 100 photographic paradox, see photography simultaneity 277 temporal/atemporal arts 266–7 time/space 88, 119 see space, see Bakhtin chronotope

385

general index Territory/territorial/territorialism 26, 28– 29, 32, 38, 45, 63, 77, 89–90, 95, 100, 106–108, 110–111 Thailand 60 Thatcherism 242 Third International 23 Thomas, Clive 330 Thomas, Petea 19n, 21, 39, 167 Thompson, Edward 32, 34 Thompson, James ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ 176 Thurn, Everard F. im 315 Tomba, Massimiliano 260 Tolstoy, Leo 181, 185 Trotsky, Leon 3–5, 9, 11, 17–26, 31, 43– 44, 54, 57–58, 78n176, 132, 177, 179, 195–6, 255–7, 261, 266, 120–125, 136, 218–219, 221–222, 229–230, 248n65, 255–258, 266, 296–297, 301, 303 And China 28, 59, 73 And Iran 132n61, 133–134 And Japan 40–41, 49 And modern supporters 51 And permanent revolution 14 And Russia 37, 45 And Scotland 39 And World Literature 214–216 Trotskyism 9, 258, 266n50, 267 Truman, Harry 236 Tsarism 24, 230 Tsarist Empire 26 Turkey 128 Twain, Mark 241 United States of America 43, 78, 98, 129, 178, 180, 219–221, 234–238, 243–245, 249, 251, 267 Urbanization 34, 48, 61–62, 174–7 Van Der Linden, Marcel 258 Vienna 174 Vietnam 235–236, 267 Vološinov, Valentin 266, 269, 276 Vries, Peer 172 Walker, Richard 77–78 Wallerstein, Immanuel 3, 8, 202, 204, 206,

214–220, 228–229, 233, 239–240, 242, 250–251 Warfare 142–143, 149–150, 152, 156–157, 160– 162 Warwick Research Collective (WReC) 6n11, 10n20, 9, 177, 200, 208, 228–230, 242, 250 Waterton, Charles 314–315, 320–325 Weberian 103, 110 Weir, Stan 266n50 Weller, Chris 60n129 Welsh, Irvine 242 The West 22, 50, 69, 98, 112, 222, 252 And Africa 247 And capitalist states 21 And development 29 And free markets 9 And Iran 114–115 And Japan 45 And the state 18 And Russia 40 Europe as 111 Fredric Jameson on 57 Perry Anderson on 19 Western capitalism 54 Western self 83 Whitehead, Neil 320 Wight, Martin 101 Williams, Gareth 177 Williams, Raymond 187n58 Wise, Christopher 200, 204 Wolf, Eric 178 Wollen, Peter 178–9 World Bank 221, 234, 334 World Literature 4, 8, 199–202, 205, 209– 214, 223, 228, 250, 255 World Systems Theory 19, 104, 199–202, 206, 214, 216–219 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 169n11, 174–5 Wood, James 185, 245 Yeats, William Butler 244–245 Young, Matthew French 319 Zasulich, Vera 259 Žižek, Slavoj 11, 229 Zola, Emile Germinal 191