Distant and close-reading in the Anthropocene

One of the key skills I try to impart and model as a tutor of literary studies is close-reading technique; looking closely at a text and slowing down and magnifying its linguistic features, so that the smallest of effects can be examined and interpreted, considered and held still, enabling a looking under and around its features. By drawing new lines between a set of minute effects a reader can begin to lever a text open to produce or discover how its formal characteristics force themselves on its significations: how form and meaning entwine and ramify.

Close-reading—slowing, magnifying, seeking depth in and layers of meaning—is to some extent a secularization of biblical study where allegorical meanings and revelation are slowly extracted through opening oneself to the Word. Close-reading privileges the individual text, a solitary reading, poetry, and the transformation of interpretation through repeated encounters with and reflections on the text.

Such skills aim at practising the self as an ethical subject. This technique of self-government (I’m leaning here on Ian Hunter’s notion of English as governmentality) marshals the recognition of formal effects in the text to serve the building of an aesthetically complex ethical position within a specific milieu. The goal of the close-reading is a practice of self which, however much it is ideally solitary, is learnt and supervised in the social scene of the classroom and the tutorial. The sociality of the induction into these techniques points to the institutional and disciplinary frameworks upon which the student uses to climb up or down into the ethical self that the lecturer, writer or tutor is conducting them towards. The various forms of post-colonial literary close-reading techniques, are often modelled as the means into taking up ethical positions on nationalism, racial, ethnicity, empire, history, reconciliation and so on. The recent emergence of so-called animal studies has its close-reading literary component, too. The self that practices close-readings of texts which seek through an engagement with levels of such texts’ formal features to locate an ethical position on ‘animals’ (I put this term in inverted commas because I like Timothy Morton‘s substitute term for animals: strange strangers), is similarly a self seeking reconciliation within a milieu where food, environment, extinction, ecology and so on become the rationalities within and through which the self is to be governed.

Recently, there has been a move away from the practices of close-reading. This shift has been brought about by a sense that the psychoanalytic model, in which a deeper allegorical meaning—whether this be one of liberatory pleasure or contradiction—could be uncovered and made available to an ethical-political movement or project, has been narrowly fixated on individual texts and has proven inadequate to the materiality of a literary history interested in what and how people were reading, rather than focused on new close-readings of singular texts. This shift away from literary close-reading towards the type of materialism and empiricism sought in such re-emergent and new studies as history of the book, publishing histories, and data analysis, can be understood as a consequence of the repositioning of literariness—literary value, English as governmentality—within cultural and historical sociology.

An interesting development in the shift away from close-reading is of course Franco Moretti’s practice of distant reading. Although this term encompasses a range of practices, all of which might not be worthy of the term distant, the key characteristics of Moretti’s project are the visual presentation of data sets, such as bar graphs of the rise and fall of novel sub-genres over centuries, and a model of history taken from Darwin’s theory of evolution. Moretti is interested in both the rise and fall of species of literary form over long periods of time and in the emergence of morphological innovations, such as free-indirect-discourse. Ultimately, his interest in Darwinising literary history is aimed at positioning it alongside, or as a way into, historical sociology. Literary value thus becomes a contingent social institution that can itself be studied historically (as Bourdieu does in The Rules of Art); literary form and literary product are thereby not the means to an exemplary ethical-aesthetics but provide one way among many into an historical sociology.

But does this recent shift away from close-reading into the new empiricism spell the end for the slow, magnifying allegorical reading practices that dominated not only the New Criticism but also Theory’s various branches? I don’t think so. And my reasons for maintaining that close-reading skills are still valuable, although they need to be accompanied by distant reading and new empirical methods, are based on the demands of the present and the possibility that these might be met, even in some minor way, by literary product. In particular, I think that the conjuncture of political and ecological forces acting on the Darwinian turn in Moretti’s practices of literary history are also calling out for literary texts which narrativise and give form to a thinking together of individual human experience and history (which is the forte of novels and poetry), species experience and history and natural experience and history. I am taking my cues here from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent essay on historical practice in the face of climate change, where Chakrabarty argues that once you accept anthropogenic climate change and the force of human activity on climate, you will be ready to periodise the current condition of the earth as the anthropocene. Moving on from the holocene, the anthropocene is when human species activity is no longer simply performed on the earth as though on a natural, enduring stage, but is reshaping the stage in fundamental ways we can’t predict the consequences of.

Chakrabarty’s essay is a set of reflections on the consequences of such conclusions for history and historical understanding. He argues that once you accept these two propositions, the boundary between human and natural history collapses. He also claims that the history of capital is necessary but not sufficient for explaining climate change and what might be done to mitigate or control it. Most significantly for the discussion of literary history and close-reading advanced above is Chakrabarty’s lament for the lack of a way of breaching the lacuna or gap between the experiential historical understanding that most human history and, I would argue, literary narrative offers us, and the ‘sublime’ time-frames and scope of species history: a history which is tied, now, to geological phenomena and time.

This gap is, as Chakrabarty observes in his essay, one that has urgent political consequences. Climate scientists convinced of AGW (anthropogenic global warming), who are specialists in so-called natural history, have yet to find a popular cultural form through which their explanations can work alongside and with the phenomenological experience that is the basis of human understanding. In the language of Hans Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Chakrabarty argues that historical understanding comes from relating our individual experience to that of others, whereas historical explanation arises from empirical and quantitative data. In terms of the urgent problem of climate change, interpretation and explanation are incommensurable and thus responses to climate change are open to dissembling and populist denial. To take one example, our quotidian experience is of weather rather than climate (which, as Tim Morton explains, is a derivative of weather in the same manner that acceleration if a derivative of velocity), so when the daily experience of weather points to no serious change, people are inclined to treat climate science sceptically. Another problem is that the tone of urgency cannot match the slower durations of climate change, leading people to dismiss climate science as alarmist.

I think these problems of the distinction between understanding and explanation and incommensurable histories and experiences in the face of climate change, have a homologue in the current shifts in practices of close- and distant-reading in literary studies. The search for and practices of a new empiricism in literary studies are driven perhaps by a drive toward historical explanation: a seeking out of the forces and matter that shaped reading, book industry and book culture. There is in some new empiricism a sense that the scales of literary studies have been so heavily tipped toward the politics of textuality and close-reading in the twentieth century that such practices can be left aside and surmounted without overbalancing the other way. But I think it is the pressure of the present in literary studies that calls for close reading. The literary imagination might be moribund, but if no one is reading its contemporary instances closely, how would we know?

This post is going somewhere! And that is towards the next post in which I’m going to apply some of Chakrabarty’s ideas to Andrew McGahan’s latest novel Wonders of a Godless World. My claim in this reading will be that the novel is an interesting attempt to bridge the gaps between human individual, human species and geological time. How successful this attempt is I’m still working through, but I think McGahan’s novel can be read through Chakrabarty’s recent essay so as to think both texts in interesting ways. In particular, I’m interested in trying on the notions of the geological sublime in relation to Wonders.

 

Australian literary studies: boundary work and the new empiricism

I think we’ve begun to see Australian literary culture in historical perspective [. . .] especially since the end of the 1990s [. . .] as a discipline whose origins lie in a period that in certain respects we no longer feel to be contemporary. This has to do, among other things, with our changing attitudes to issues of nation, race and gender. On the other hand, many commentators are now saying that for the last ten years of so we have been living through a major reconfiguration in the broader field of knowledge production, pre-eminently in the science and technology, but also in the humanities and social sciences. (Dixon 2004:  twenty eight)

Robert Dixon’s 2004 essay “Boundary Work: Australian Literary Studies in the Field of Knowledge Production” makes its claims for a positive re-negotiation between Australian literary studies and an institutionally driven paradigm shift in the production of knowledge out of the intersection of four main discourses. Firstly, Dixon provides a mixture of anecdotal moments in the history of Australian literary studies in order to force the point about the contingency and exhaustion of the cultural-nationalist paradigm in the field and of the emergence of a more transdisciplinary approach in the last decade (35). Dixon’s cogent argument here, like David Carter’s in his 2007 essay “After Post-Colonialism,” which extrapolates from Dixon’s, is that approaches in Australian literary studies divide between nation-centred critiques and textual politics – which “feels like a discipline from an earlier historical moment” – and studies that are transnational and focus on print cultures (Carter: 114). For Dixon the sense of exhaustion with the “national paradigm” is being replaced by studies, “placing Australian literary culture in national-comparative, transnational, imperial or global contexts” which can “go beyond the literary by drawing upon the discourses and in many cases the methodologies of neighbouring disciplines, including history, cultural studies, art history, politics, ethics and anthropology” (35).

Next, Dixon summarizes and evaluates two books pertinent to the technologies, rationalities and models emerging in the field of knowledge production. The first, by a team led by Michael Gibbons, casts its polemic in terms familiar to students of modernity and postmodernity: there is on the one hand an outdated set of institutional practices, languages, and modes of research that is embedded, hierarchical, elitist and unlikely to survive recent changes in technology and governmental practices – Mode 1 – while on the other hand there is a new, emergent set of practices and modes that are more democratic, more conducive to the innovative production of new knowledges – Mode 2 (29-31). The key term here is “transdisciplinarity” and Dixon, while acknowledging the necessity of aspects of modernizing an outdated tradition, is, like Julie Thompson Klein, skeptical about the use of a semantics of modernization to license a wholesale movement into trans-disciplinarity rather than something more piecemeal as suggested by a term like boundary work (33).

Indeed, and thirdly, Dixon’s second text in the field of the social epistemology of knowledge production is by Klein who is more cautious than to mirror the zealous advocacy that Gibbons and his team produce for moves to flatten the hierarchical structures within and between university researchers, and to promote networks of research clusters (30-31). Klein’s studies, as Dixon summarizes them, maintain an interdisciplinary, rather than transdisciplinary, focus in so much as Klein argues for the importance of knowledge produced on the boundaries of ‘traditional’ disciplinary structures:

Klein’s argument is that at present new knowledge is most often produced by boundary crossing in the form of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research, and that this tends to be located in the shadow structures – the dynamic, informal networks and collaborations that form beneath and across the surface structures. (32)

These boundaries, “are open, their cognitive border zones ragged and ill-defined” (32). Dixon points out that,

In contrast to Gibbons, [Klein’s] preference is for a field in which boundaries are not dissolved, but maintained and at the same time constantly transgressed. Understanding the boundary better, she argues, is likely to produce more informed collaboration, not a wide-scale breakdown of boundaries. The term “boundary work” as Klein uses it, then, does not simply mean either the policing of disciplinary boundaries or their collapse, but is meant positively to embrace the sum-total of all boundary work, including boundary crossings, especially between disciplinary neighbours. (33)

Finally, Dixon returns to the implications of both these books for Australian literary studies as mediated by the models promoted by the ARC, and for moving beyond exhausted cultural-nationalist paradigm in Australian literary studies. These implications revolve around not only new research problems and questions, but also around how best to form the organizational structures required to work with the demands that the ARC is making on Australian literary studies specialists, and on establishing a historical continuity with aspects of Australian literary studies as a resource both to resist extravagant claims to any wholesale paradigm shift while providing practical models to draw on in future practices (33-37). As a model for Australian literary studies, Dixon’s explication of boundary work as a shuttling between, rather than dissolution or fervid defence of, disciplinary boundaries that brings new knowledge forward, centrally informs the method through which this thesis proceeds. Working the boundaries between the political and literary discourse of the long Labor decade that is the focus of this thesis seeks to draw out aspects of the textuality of this period that models drawn only from within political science or literary studies find opaque or find themselves silent before.

The trajectory of Dixon’s thinking on these matters can be seen in a subsequent essay published in 2007 “Australian Literature-International Contexts.” Here he fine-tunes his periodisation of Australian literary studies: “constituted at different phases of its fifty-year history [as variously and sequentially] Cultural Nationalism, Projecting Australia Abroad, and Internationalising Australian Literature” (14). The last of these phases, also referred to as “a transnational practice,” is the emergent one for Dixon and one that not only promises to enable the survival of Australian literary studies, but to deliver creative and exciting international networks and opportunities for researchers and teachers who practice it (26).

More pointedly, Dixon’s recent career trajectory concretizes the technologies and rationalities of Australian literary studies research-based knowledge production through the Resourceful Reading Project (Bode, 2008: 189). This ARC backed Project can be seen as a culmination of the new transnational and interdisciplinary forces on Australian literary studies. In terms of transnationality the Resourceful Reading Project seeks not to remove but to loosen the centripetal pull of the nation so as to re-place the Australian literary field into global, imperial and regional networks: “Just as a literary text is intrinsically part of a system, national literatures do not stand alone, but operate in the context of other-national and trans-national texts, movements and trends” (189). The interdisciplinary focus of the Resourceful Reading Project is formed through the use of computer and internet-based databases collection and analysis, alongside research problems and questions that seek empirical rather than hermeneutic answers, in the first instance (190-91).

A forerunner of this interdisciplinary approach is Stanford University literary historian Franco Moretti who, in his Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2007), advocates a quantitative method, iconoclastically heralded as counting rather than reading books, and engaging not in close but distant-reading (Moretti, 2000b: 56-57). Appropriating Moretti’s models for practices of “quantitative analyses have the potential to more fully investigate global literary culture, as well as to situate Australian literary culture in relation to it” and “allow us to ask broader temporal and comparative questions – and find answers – than is possible or defensible based on close readings of individual texts or oeuvres.”(Bode: 189, 187-88). Distant reading thereby permits both a move beyond the exhausted cultural-nationalist paradigm in Australian literary studies into a transnational one, and continues that “shift [that occurred] in the 1980s [. . .] from literary criticism to textual politics” continuing then again “from textual politics towards various forms of cultural history and print culture studies [by which] to recover the worldly condition of the text’s production and consumption” (Carter, 2007: 118).[i]

Katherine Bode makes a balanced argument for the Moretti-influenced use of quantitative analyses in Australian literary studies. Balanced, as she argues that close-reading need not be sidelined for distant-reading but that this binary of methods can be complementary and brought to bear at different moments in the research sequence:

Resourceful readings use strategies such as quantification to identify and pose new and innovative research questions and problems, to discern and understand trends and turning points, and to provide and test emerging hypotheses. At the same time, resourceful readings incorporate traditional, text-based analyses to allow for more detailed explorations of particular moments, movements and shifts. Importantly, however, the objects of close, textual analysis in such studies are selected not on the basis of aesthetic or qualitative judgements, but for their relationship to or within the overall patterns and trends discernible through quantitative studies. In other words, traditional modes of analysis are at all times integrated with quantitative and empirical approaches, such that these text-based analyses constitute a method for assessing how external factors are inscribed thematically and/or stylistically within individual texts. (189-90)

This is certainly an ambitious and modernist manifesto that will tested in the practice. The theory-laden status of ‘data’ is one of the first trips that philosophers of science place on the path to scientific knowledge so I wonder how this project will justify its selection and measurement of data (Chalmers: 41-58). Similarly, does the ‘integrated’ use of ‘text-based’ analyses which constitute a method for evaluating external factors really depart from formalist readings that also read form as historically contingent? Is there much innovation in these terms, or is it the dialectic between the close and distant readings that comprises the innovation? Further to this last sceptical point about the theory-laden nature of data John Frow’s review in New Left Review of the 2 volume English translation of Moretti’s edited collection of essays The Novel makes the point about the dangers of positivism in this way:

A further difficulty raised by quantitative analysis has to do with the constitution of its units of analysis. Zwicker sets up a useful contrast between two ways of theorizing a historical series: on the one hand, historians of a nominalist bent like Skinner or Pocock would argue that in tracing the history of concepts such as the state (or, by analogy, ‘the novel’) it is only ever possible to construct a history of the range of uses of those terms. On the other hand, however, Zwicker invokes Koselleck’s argument for a history of structures that would treat terms such as ‘the novel’ as structurally real: instead of a series of more or less discrete semantic events, taking ‘the novel’ (or ‘the state’) as a real phenomenon underlying its historically and various manifestations allows one to elaborate common structures across very different kinds of society.

Such an approach repeats the essentialism that informs both Lukács’s and Bakhtin’s conception of the novel, and it continues to depend upon the initial assumption of generic unity. It repeats, too, the core methodological move Moretti makes in Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), of taking genres or forms as given and then deriving structures from large data sets based on them in such a way that literary history can be conceived as an objective account of patterns and trends. Moretti does in fact recognize that quantitative research ‘provides a type of data which is ideally independent of interpretations [. . .] and that is of course also its limit: it provides data, not interpretation’. Thus he argues, correctly, that ‘a formal concept is usually what makes quantification possible in the first place: since a series must be composed of homogeneous objects, a morphological category is needed – “novel”, “anti-Jacobin novel”, “comedy”, etc. – to establish such homogeneity’. But he proceeds nevertheless to ignore the crucial point that these morphological categories he takes as his base units are not pre-given but are constituted in an interpretive encounter and by means of an interpretive decision. (2008: 141-42)

Frow’s incisive analysis of the precarious constitution of “base units” that are formed in “interpretive encounter” gives force to the argument that close-reading, including attention to the finely grained morphological features of a text, can guide the formation of these “base units” themselves. In the section of this thesis titled “Frank Moorhouse’s literary-Libertarianism and Amanda Lohrey’s literary-Labourism: a distant reading of the long Labor decade” where a distant-reading is applied, the base-unit of governmentality is one generated out of initial close readings, shuttling back and forth between levels and types of text, yet basing the unit of data formation on a series of interpretive encounters which proceed by way of literary critical practices that seem hardly exhausted or redundant.

*

While I largely agree with Davis’ arguments [see previous post] about the decline of the literary-Liberal formation and the necessity for critical theorists to forge rapprochements with the literary-liberals in the face of the Neoliberal-Neoconservative onslaught, I think that the reduction of this discursive formation to a core of Whiteness ignores the significant complicities between Liberalism and capital. In order to tease out this blindspot I will explicate the sorts of historical sociology of literary forms that Franco Moretti practices below. While Dixon’s advocacy of boundary work and of an internationalism that seeks to displace rather than remove the nation as locus of research, in Australian literary studies, is not as revolutionary as the term paradigm shift might connote, both Dixon and Davis are seeking to articulate ways to understand new conditions in Australian literary culture. In the main chapters of the thesis I will adopt a number of methods for studying texts and cultures that are in keeping with the boundary work that Dixon advocates, performed through an application of Morreti’s distant-reading and articulate political public culture with literary texts and literary culture in ways suggested by Davis’ recent and older work.

 

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[i] This thesis situates its boundary work, in Carter’s terms, at the interface between practices of literary criticism and textual politics applied to both literary and political texts. Whether this is a redundant approach or not can’t be prophesised. However, Carter’s advocacy for research “that pursues the life of books into the marketplace and public domain” rather than that older work of “formal literary criticism performed [. . .] on texts necessary to move them into the academy” must surely be only part of the work of Australian literary studies, as this putatively ‘academic’ work is part of the forcefield by which the market in texts operates (2007: 119). Part of the “public life of literature” is the system of consecration and indeed canonisation, that the academy, in part, struggles over and bestows (Carter and Ferres, 2001). To disavow this central function of the literary studies academic in this aspect of the literary field appears as an act of bad faith.