The latest issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, edited by Daniel Hartley, is titled ‘Raymond Williams and World Literature’. We’re delighted to be able to share with you an extract from Daniel’s 6000-word introduction to the special issue which also includes essays by Sandeep Banerjee, Rena Jackson, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Virginia L. Conn, and Shintaro Kono. Many thanks to Elinor Taylor for overseeing the production of the issue. It will be posted out to members in the new year. To receive a copy make sure you have renewed your membership or joined the society by 31st December 2022. You can join here.
Daniel writes…
How would Raymond Williams have approached the question of ‘world literature’ in the early twenty-first century? First, the term itself would be subjected to a Keywords-style analysis. Williams’s account of the keyword ‘literature’ is well known [i]: from the Latin littera, meaning letter, it came into use in the fourteenth century to denote broadly what we now call ‘literacy’, narrowing down in the eighteenth century to mean ‘polite learning’ based on printed books, and then slightly later passing to an emphasis on ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing – a counter to the socially repressive reality of industrial capitalism. This went along with an implied value judgement, whereby not all writing was deemed ‘Literature’. Underpinned initially by an ideology of ‘taste’, with ‘criticism’ as the latter’s guarantor, and by the development of national selective traditions, ‘literature’ in its fully modern sense was a fundamentally bourgeois category determined by various phases of capitalist social relations. As Williams observed in 1977, however, while Marxists had developed various approaches to ‘literature’, none of them had posed a radical challenge to the category on its own terms [ii]. No one had taken the step Williams himself attempted, in Marxism and Literature and later texts, to move beyond the category of literature to a Marxist theory of verbal composition. His approach comprised three elements: firstly, an emphasis on writing as a ‘distinctive practice of the objectified material composition of language’ [iii], which is inherently multiple, consisting of a wide range of modalities that exceeds such simplifying (and often, for writers, paralysing) categories as ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’; secondly, a sublation of literature into what he called variously ‘literacy’, ‘language in history’ [iv], or ‘fully historical semiotics’ [v]; and, finally, an emphasis on new media and new relations of writing to orality (i.e., other historically specific formations of practical consciousness). Contemporary materialist theories of world literature have generally chosen not to follow Williams’s path, and have retained the bourgeois category of literature, but relate it in productive ways, via detailed formal analysis, to the capitalist world-system.
This then raises the question of the ‘world’ in ‘world literature’. Of Germanic origin, the early Old English word ‘woruld’ combines the Germanic root words wer, meaning ‘man’ (as in Latin vir), and ald (old), which together originally denoted ‘age of man’ [vi]. Temporally, it meant an age, generation, period or lifetime, while physically it denoted the region that contains all regions. It came to assume a powerful and enduring Christian legacy. It was used in Old English translations of the Vulgate to translate four separate Latin concepts, themselves renderings of four Greek terms: terra (earth), orbis terrae (the inhabited earth), saeculum (generation, age, period), and mundus (universe). Of these the most important were saeculum, a translation of the Greek αἰών [aion], and mundus, a translation of the Greek term κόσμος [kosmos]. Though now difficult for us to conceive, the concept of world has not always existed. It emerged slowly in Greek thought, present in Homer’s phrase kata kosmon (in good order), but only crystallising with Pythagoras. It is significant that the word kosmos – like the adjectival form of the Latin mundus –denoted both order and beauty (the latter lives on in the modern word cosmetics). Like the classical rhetorical rule of τὸ πρέπον [to prepon] (decorum, appropriateness), which imposed a strict discursive hierarchy on who could say what and how [vii], kosmos could be seen as an ontological transposition of a ruling social order whose hegemony shone forth in the harmony of ordered arrangement (as opposed to chaos) and the social prestige of beauty (as opposed to ugliness). By the time of the Christian era, however, a transvaluation of these terms was carried out, such that kosmos and aion, mundus and saeculum become increasingly equated with a sinful, fleeting, evil, world, as opposed to the eternal spiritual realm of God. ‘World’ was thus a spatial and temporal subordinate to the Kingdom of God, but imbued with its own powerful, negative order. This is the origin of ‘worldly’ in its pejorative sense.
Though ‘world’ has always had a sense of the physical arena inhabited by humans, the gradual spatialisation and neutralisation of the word, and the effective elimination of its temporal sense, are the result of capitalist modernity – not least the era of ‘photo-capitalism’ in which images of the earth taken from ‘space’ circulate on a daily basis. In everyday language, the ‘world’ can now just as easily denote the globe, the planet or the earth as a shared human realm. Indeed, the now canonical phenomenological gripe is that contemporary theories of ‘world literature’ uncritically reproduce the spatio-technical, cartographic imaginary of the globe intrinsic to ‘globalisation’ at the expense of the temporalising, cosmopolitan and normative force of the world. To counteract this, scholars such as Pheng Cheah invoke the Heideggerian conception of ‘world’ as the ecstatic temporalisation of being that is the precondition of human relationality as such, reading literature as a ‘worldly’ force in this precise phenomenological sense [viii]. It is then remarkable how quickly theories of ‘world’ and ‘world literature’ in this vein become, in effect, theories of worldlessness. From Heidegger’s notion of Entweltlichung (unworlding) induced by modern technology and mass media, through Hannah Arendt’s account of modern Weltentfremdung (world-alienation), all the way through – in a very different political and philosophical tradition – to Alain Badiou’s theory of the contemporary conjuncture as devoid of world, it seems that the ‘world’ under capitalist modernity, at least for those who philosophise it, is more honoured in the breach than the observance.
What, then, of the compound term ‘world literature’ or Weltliteratur? A fully adequate answer to this question would require a careful historical and philological reconstruction of the precise texts and contexts in which the term was developed, but that would exceed the scope of this introduction. Instead, I shall draw on three interconnected lines of thought in Williams’s work, particularly his late work, which speak directly to some of the principal concerns of contemporary theories of ‘world literature’: namely, a latent theory of ‘world’ that can be glimpsed in certain key passages, a theory of anti-imperial ‘high literacy’, and a critique of the Marxist concept of ‘mode of production’ in favour of ‘way of life’ or ‘livelihood’. The concluding chapter of The Country and the City (1973) contains vital clues to the first of these. Building on the analysis of imperialism in the previous chapter, Williams emphasises that it is not simply the country and the city that have been determined by the capitalist mode of production, but ‘the total character of what we know as modern society’ [ix]. In a passage on the urban-dominated ‘world of apparent strangers’, Williams identifies a ‘specific form of consciousness’ of ‘persistently external events’, mediated by the dominant media of television, radio, the press (and, in our own era, the Internet, especially ‘social media’): ‘Much of the content of modern communications is this kind of substitute for directly discoverable and transitive relations to the world’ [x]. This is a world ‘with which we have no other perceptible connections but which we feel is at once central and marginal to our lives’ [xi]. There is a real sense in which Williams is developing here a theory of worldlessness; that is, the ‘world’ exists primarily in a mediated, alien form which substitutes for the direct perception of, and transitive relation to, a world in the affirmative sense of an extended community in and to which we belong and to which we practically contribute. He also insistently draws our attention to the infrastructural embodiment of alienation: ‘The motorway system, the housing clearance, the office-block and supermarket replacing streets of homes and shops, may materialise in the form of a social plan, but there is no case in which the priorities of the capitalist system have not, from the beginning, been built in’ [xii]. Williams’s ‘world’ thus hovers between the mediated sociality of alienation (worldlessness), a latent affirmative extended community, and a physically actual geography which could, in principle, embody either meaning but is currently dominated by the alien infrastructure of capital. In the Christian cosmology, it was sin and the Devil that ruled the world; now it’s the capitalist value form.
It is then unsurprising that Williams reads the nostalgia that many writers project onto their idealised childhood memories of country or city as ‘the perception and affirmation of a world in which one is not necessarily a stranger and an agent, but can be a member, a discoverer, in a shared source of life’ [xiii]. Such childhood nostalgia is a displaced or prefigurative trace of a world in its full affirmative sense of a shared material space of belonging. Such a ‘working world’ must be made, but to do so, writes Williams, ‘would involve sharp critical consciousness and long active agency’ [xiv]. As we shall see, that ‘sharp critical consciousness’ is a feature of the ‘high literacy’ he will come to defend in his late work. Yet the necessary study of the ‘real social process of alienation, separation, externality, abstraction’ cannot, for Williams, be purely critical; it must also be carried out ‘substantially, by affirming the experiences which in many millions of lives are discovered and rediscovered, very often under pressure: experiences of directness, connection, mutuality, sharing which alone can define, in the end, what the real deformation may be’ [xv]. In other words, we have to seek out, analyse and affirm those experiences of ordinary world-making by which we can then measure the worldlessness of capitalist alienation. To push this logic to its conclusion, we could say that under capitalist social relations the ‘world’, insofar as it exists, is an ever-shifting Kampfplatz between two forces: the social and physical actuality created by our collective human labour under the yoke of capital – the embodiment of our collective power staring back at us like an alien force – and a counter-movement of socio-political and physical bonds and activities that seek to mitigate or break with the disoriented, individualised impotence to which we have been reduced. The former tendency knows its geographical apotheosis in the modern world-system, our kosmos; the latter is akin to what Louis Althusser once called those ‘islands of communism’ that punctuate the realm of capital. To distinguish, analytically, between these different meanings of ‘world’ is necessary, but to insist on one over the other (as the phenomenological approaches are wont to do) is to risk retreating into an anti-worldly theoreticism that withdraws from the immanence of ordinary, historical difficulties. Our experience of the world oscillates within and between them.
Daniel Hartley is Assistant Professor in World Literatures in English at Durham University. His first book, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Brill: 2017), developed a systematic theory of literary style through an immanent critique of the work of Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson. As well as editing the latest issue of Key Words, he gave a Raymond Williams Centenary Lecture for the Society which can be viewed here. Daniel has also written articles for Textual Practice, Historical Materialism, and Poetics Today.
[i] I draw here throughout on the account offered in Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) 45-54.
[ii] Ibid., 53.
[iii] Ibid., 146.
[iv] Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), 189.
[v] Ibid., 210.
[vi] I rely throughout the rest of this paragraph on several works: C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1967]), 214-268; Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984 [1978]), 170-185; Rémi Brague, La sagesse du monde: Histoire de l’expérience humaine de l’univers (Paris: Fayard, 1999); the entry on ‘world’ in the Oxford English Dictionary; and Kas Saghafi, The World After the End of the World: A Spectro-Poetics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2020), 3-18. I am grateful to Patrick Maiwald and Michael J. Huxtable for advice on the Old English etymology, which I have not always followed to the letter. All remaining errors are my own.
[vii] See Daniel Hartley, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017 [2016]), 34-37.
[viii] Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
[ix] Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 295.
[x] Ibid., 295.
[xi] Ibid., 296.
[xii] Ibid., 294.
[xiii] Ibid., 298.
[xiv] Ibid., 298.
[xv] Ibid., 298.
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