The Perils of the “Digital Humanities”: New Positivisms and the Fate of Literary Theory

Abstract

This essay situates the rise of the so-called digital humanities within earlier theoretical trends and methodologies. Taking as its focus the impact of digital techniques on literary studies, the essay argues that advocates for the new digital methods often lapse into an uncritical positivism at the moment that they espouse an apparently critical historicism. In assessing the shortcomings of the confluence of digital and historical approaches, the author outlines an alternative critical epistemology of the humanities through an engagement with the writings of Louis Althusser, gesturing toward a renewed, “speculative” formalism that may account for the mutabilities of form and history alike.

Digital Humanities Today

Humanities scholarship in the United States and the UK is perhaps more fragmented now than at any time in recent memory, at least since the popularization of higher education in the mid-twentieth century. Arguably, no dominant school of thought or trend has succeeded in converting significant numbers of scholars since the heyday of deconstruction in the early 1980s, a period that also saw the more modest ascendency of numerous theoretical subcultures, from post-colonial studies to psychoanalytic criticism. Many of those tendencies had their roots in earlier interpretive traditions; deconstruction, at least as it was absorbed into literary studies, bore a debt to the attentive textualism of the New Criticism. Psychoanalytic criticism, while largely framed within the terms of Lacanian metapsychology by the mid-1980s, had a previous and fecund life in the rather orthodox Freudianism of Lionel Trilling and in the slightly looser psychologism of Norman O. Brown. All of this is to say that so-called high theory was, as often as not, a matter of the heightening and radicalization of previous trends, newly wrapped in the clothing of oppositional politics and in an attention to the marginal, to what had fallen out of hegemonic constructions of the canon. The fading of high theory, then, is to be understood less as the decline of a radically new, insurgent movement in the humanities. Rather, it marks the wider eclipse of older, variegated forms of analysis and critique that found their apogee, but certainly not their inception, in the moment of heightened theoretical self-understanding and reflexivity that characterized interdisciplinary humanities scholarship from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. This essay will address an emerging paradigm, one that marks a sharp break with that previous critical constellation.

In contrast to “Theory” and its intellectual prehistories, the contemporary academy is bearing witness to a truly radical movement, defined by new techniques in digital computation and analysis. To give only a hint of the prodigious growth of neo-positivist methodologies in the humanities: at the Modern Language Association’s national convention in 2010, there were but twenty-seven sessions on the “digital humanities”; after only three years, that number had jumped to sixty-six (Sample). The concentration of grant funding in digital projects in the humanities is now well established.¹ There is, to be sure, a danger of confusing cause with effect here, and the so-called digital humanities should be understood less as an invader arising ex nihilo in the academy² and more as a symptom of broader social and political trends, albeit a symptom in the process of gaining its own autonomy, fortifying in turn the managerial and bureaucratic imperatives that framed its emergence. I use the term “digital humanities” in an especially capacious sense, although I limit my focus here to literary studies, where the incursion of digital methods has been perhaps most keenly felt.

In grant applications and workshop proposals, the “digital humanities” have come to mean various amorphous combinations of archival preservation, cataloguing, “text-mining” (a variant of “data-mining”) and the use of temporally and spatially broad-range content analysis.³ My aim here is neither to deny the huge variation in motives and applications fuelling the current vogue for computation, nor to catalogue in minute detail the wide panoply of different techniques available to digital humanists. There is an inevitable flattening of approaches in the analysis that follows, and I recognize that individual practitioners of the trends I critique often have laudable motives, and frequently combine their quantitative researches with qualitative finesse. Nonetheless, my aim is to identify and disassemble an ambient mood in the humanities, one that hangs over what is an admittedly catholic set of analytical procedures.

What I place myself in qualified opposition to here is thrusting, confident, often garlanded with money, and finds an especially welcoming home in those largely private universities that snap at the heels of the very top tier of institutions of higher learning, a tier still dominated in the US by the Ivy League.⁴ Yale and Cornell were at the forefront of some of the more radical trends in theory prior to the emergence of the new orthodoxy I discuss, although they have since largely laid down the banner. In the United Kingdom, University College London has found an especially entrepreneurial advocate for hyper-positivist methods in Semir Zeki, who has used fMRI scans to explain the neuronal basis of aesthetic appreciation. His faith – for it is a faith – in the commensurability of aesthetics and neurology is best expressed, without further comment, in his claim that “the overall function of art is an extension of the function of the brain” (71). It is far more difficult to generalize about Cambridge and Oxford, whose feudal structures generally militate against popular movements and fads; nonetheless, the presence of a Digital Humanities Network at Cambridge no doubt heralds things to come. This growing equation of the quantitative with the professional makes Jonathan Gottschall’s claim that the “young scholars … who should be questioning the yellowing scripts of their seniors dare not do so” all the more questionable (171); there is no doubt a quanta of jouissance to be extracted from falsely positioning oneself in a rebellious minority.⁵

Although what follows is principally negative (but not, I hope, emptily polemical), I also suggest what an alternative, progressive trajectory in literary analysis might look like.⁶ In this way, I make clear that the technology as such – the scanners, digital records, fMRI machines, and the lavishly funded Web sites — is not at fault; far from it. The slimmest adherence to an historical materialist perspective, of which I am more than guilty, must convince that technological advancement almost always has a progressive and enlightening potential, even if such advancement is, in actuality, put to a less consequential use. There are undoubtedly highly commendable ways in which data mining or patterning may be incorporated into humanities scholarship, and the truly profound benefits of the digitization of decaying archives hardly need restating.

My argument proceeds through two case studies of digital approaches to literature, the first by Franco Moretti of the Stanford “Literary Lab” and the second by Stephen Ramsay of the University of Virginia. A middle section draws out the lessons of the undeservedly unfashionable Louis Althusser for any philosophically responsible approach to the epistemology of the humanities, to textual history, or to critical epistemology more generally. Moretti, in particular, is shown to have committed to an often uncritical positivism at the very moment that he affirms an apparently critical historicism, albeit one that has come to place, in the manner that Althusser detected in the historicisms of his time, an inflated methodology where theory in its fullest and most useful sense once lay.⁷ The firm link between a quasi-teleological historicism and the rise of the neo-positivists is, therefore, a central preoccupation of this essay. Ramsay has attempted to construct a genuine critical theory of quantitative methods in the literary humanities, one that resists the attempt to squeeze the digital turn into a narrowly empiricist frame. But even as I think we can learn much from his account of “algorithmic criticism,” I show that his constructions of criticism and science are both too abstract and underdetermined. Both scholars are of significant learning and influence, however, and I single them out only because they are especially symptomatic and thoughtful examples of a much broader and sometimes less impressive trend.

I both build upon and distance myself from many of the extant critiques of neo-positivism in the digital humanities that have accumulated in journals and in the academic press in recent years. While the limits of space prevent me from engaging comprehensively with most of these critiques, it’s fair to say that a majority of them fall into two, broadly defined categories (often combined): the first laments the loss of humanist sensitivity in the face of technological anonymity, pitting a renewed, broadly neo-Romantic aestheticism against the growth of number-crunching;⁸ the second discusses the proliferation of positivist methods as another face of the neo-liberalization and corporatization of the university. My reservations about the first approach become clear in my comments below about humanism and historicism. The second is best summarized by a single quote from a panel, blessed with the pleasingly ominous title “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,” that took place at the MLA convention in Boston in January 2013. The comment comes from Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of Brown University: “The humanities are sinking – if they are – not because of their earlier embrace of theory or multiculturalism, but because they have capitulated to a bureaucratic technocratic logic.” Chun is quick to defend aspects of the digital humanities that are not so easily mapped onto this broader attack on the corporatization of the university, but the pithiness of her perspective serves our purposes. I sympathize entirely with Chun’s materialist optic, although what I attempt here is much broader and more philosophical in its scope. Put simply, I challenge the model of scientific rationality underpinning much that falls under the banner of the digital humanities and its cognate frameworks, and I actively seek alternative models, even if only in germinal form, for thinking the scientificity of literary theory and criticism.

This isn’t to say that practitioners of the digital humanities haven’t considered the perils of scientism; Stephen Ramsay, my interlocutor in the latter third of this essay, has been especially explicit in his contention that what he calls an algorithmic approach to literature “deforms” its objects—all the better, however, to open them out to pluralistic interpretative agendas. Yet such concessions leave intact the underlying epistemology, or, at best, they fail to consider the crucial conflict between the methodology employed and the wider, catholic form of interpretation argued for; this is the flaw that most undermines Stephen Ramsay’s otherwise perspicacious work. But what follows is not an attack on scientific rationality as such. Even as proponents of literary-critical positivisms so often falsely accuse critical theorists of disdaining science,⁹ the crux of my argument here is that the vision of science upheld by the new positivists is ahistorical, Anglocentric in its theoretical assumptions (if not in its choice of data), and inadequate to the kinds of formal objects that literary and cultural texts are — an inadequacy that should, but rarely does, put into question such a vision’s very status as science if the latter is understood in its full complexity.

Moretti

The influence and prestige of Franco Moretti hardly needs repeating. For those of us with a passion for Marxist literary history and criticism, Moretti is something of a paragon. His Signs Taken for Wonders is deservedly considered a classic of critical, comparative historical scholarship, one that engages literature not as a self-enclosed form preserved in aspic, but as a dynamic process that opens onto a reflection upon, and an urge to change, the conditions that serve or try to block its emergence. Moretti’s turn to quantitative methods, and his accompanying commitment to “distant reading,” or the graphing of multiple sources of historical literary consumption in place of the close reading of a small canon, has already provoked a slew of commentary—some of it positive and a significant portion less so.

Of the latter, the most persuasive critique to date is Christopher Prendergast’s careful essay in the New Left Review (NLR) — the same journal that first hosted Moretti’s three-part article “Graphs, Maps and Trees.” The latter essays by Moretti are my principal focus in this section, but I first lay out how and why my criticisms are distinct from most of those published since the original appearance of “Graphs, Maps and Trees” in the NLR in 2005. Prendergast provides the most distinguished example of an evaluation that has since been reiterated in varying forms, and I therefore contrast my approach with his, whilst nonetheless agreeing with many of his conclusions.¹⁰ To preview, I contend that Moretti has adopted such an anemically empiricist and partial definition of science that science per se, in all its richness and heterodoxy, to say nothing of literature, suffers under his lights. Prendergast, and many of his fellow critics, have limited themselves to uncovering the aporias in Moretti’s logic, of which there are many, but my broader case concerns the glancing generalizations about the objects and purposes of literature that underlie Moretti’s project and that render it especially symptomatic of a much broader tendency in the contemporary academy.

For Prendergast, the signal flaw in Moretti’s appeal to the natural sciences for a model of literary history is his refusal to provide full, philosophical argumentation for his reduction of literary consumption to a singular model developed for quite different purposes. Each of Moretti’s essays takes a branch of empirical, social, or natural science as a freestanding model for a new literary history, one that would, in its final synthesis, resist what he laments as the previous dominant trend of close reading, apparently limited to a selected few canonical texts in their varying historical contexts. The three sciences appealed to are quantitative history (“Graphs,” the first essay), geography (“Maps,” the second), and evolutionary theory (“Trees,” the third). Prendergast’s analysis focuses largely on the third essay, where the resources of evolutionary theory are used to chart the “survival of the fittest” in particular literary genres over time, with the detective novel taken as a central example. (My own approach ranges freely and unevenly over all three essays.) As Prendergast notes, the apparent positivist glean of Moretti’s impressive visuals is quickly dirtied by some basic epistemological confusions. Prendergast objects especially to Moretti’s argumentative elisions around causality, and the latter’s argument that it was “likely” Conan Doyle’s innovative use of the “clue” in his detective narratives, more than anything else, that allowed his novels to attain a popularity denied numerous other crime writers of his time.

As Prendergast summarizes,

Research into the varying modalities of the clue produces a hierarchically organized ‘tree’ on whose top branch—clues that are both visible and decodable—there perches, and then somewhat precariously, only Doyle. Conversely, those writers who did not hit upon this ‘technical law’ sank without trace into the dustbin of literary history. From this account is thus extracted an implicit syllogism: Doyle was to prove the most popular of the thriller writers; Doyle comes to use clues in a uniquely special way; therefore the way he uses clues explains his enduring popularity.(“Evolution” 49)

Prendergast is quick to question the self-evidence of this syllogism, in so far as it relies on an implicit premise – the clue as an easily generalizable formal device – that prepares its conclusions in advance. Moretti’s subsequent imputation of a causal relation between the “clue” (the tantalizing signs that lead the detectives down paths both fruitful and blind) and Doyle’s dominance relies on a fictive model of the average reader and their patterns of consumption, expressed as follows: “Readers discover that they like a certain device, and if a story doesn’t seem to include it, they simply don’t read it (and the story becomes extinct)” (“Graphs 3” 48). Moretti assumes that readers who read detective novels do so because they are singularly attracted to their “devices”—the tricks and sleights of hand by which the author produces suspense and diversion—while these devices, in a circular fashion, have already been foregrounded in Moretti’s sifting of the possible variables that explain his “tree.” Thus, what Moretti calls the “pressure of cultural selection,” the abstract law that produces success and failure over large tracts of time, is, on his account, guided by the popularity of a single formal device – an ahistorically rendered one at that, and one that seems arbitrarily foregrounded for especial consideration (48).

I return to this construction of reading, and its attendant subjects, presently. Moretti briefly considers one other possible variable in explaining Doyle’s success over others, namely, the more obviously Marxist explanation of the latter’s social prestige and access to wide networks of distribution, but he dismisses this as available to any number of other detective authors of the time. The confusion of correlation with causation here hardly needs stating: Moretti’s location of a correlation between the seeming popularity of a distinctive formal device, the clue – in fact already presupposed by Moretti’s analysis as its founding axiom – and the wider popularity of a particular writer is just that: a correlation, and potentially even a contingency. It would require the elimination of many more alternative causal variables for Moretti’s single variable to be remotely plausible as a cause in the fullest sense. But there’s a much wider problem here, one that remains unexplored by Prendergast, namely the very philosophical model of rationality upon which Moretti tacitly relies, the very manner in which he constructs the text, the reader, and the historical time in which both exist as objects of analysis.

A first and obvious objection would be to the distant and uniform model of literary consumption that underpins the large scale of Moretti’s optic. There are, of course, multiple instances in the writing of history when one must generalize beyond the complexities of individual subjectivities; how, otherwise, to explain the power and value of Marx’s Capital (to name only one obvious and canonical example)? But Moretti makes much of his refusal of the text’s permutations as a central determinant (the individual text being an object that induces irresponsible, close “interpretation,” and thus blocks any rigorous explanation of literary diffusion over time), while skating over the question of his derivation of individual reading mentalities and habits; we’re meant to pass over a whole history of reader-response theory and psychology in favor of his singular variable explaining the success of Doyle over his competitors in the “struggle for survival.” In Moretti’s response to Prendergast’s criticisms, he invokes cognitive science as the domain where this variable might be more firmly confirmed. In at least partially conceding the weakness of his explanation for the predominance of the clue as causative variable, Moretti assures us of “a small consolation”: that “we have an idea of what may be ‘in’ the box [the box used as a figure here to invoke the mystery of causation]: the mental mechanisms – perception, processing, pleasure, cognition – through which a form interacts with its environment (and whose clarification may well come … from cognitive science)” (“The End” 75). The lightfooted manner in which Moretti switches his scientific allegiances here, from evolutionary theory to cognitivism, should give us pause.

Moretti’s reference to readers’ tastes for the trickeries of detective fiction makes one wonder whether a vicarious appetite for the description of crime might not be an equally convincing subjective explanation. Indeed, any number of explanations of this type is plausible, whether buttressed by the cognitive sciences or not, and, without reference to the dense specificities of individual texts as they coagulate over time into a genre, one cannot fully adjudicate that such a “‘thing”‘ might subsequently be mapped according to its (market-defined) consumption. To restrict oneself to the strictly extratextual is to disbar potential answers to the complex questions of readerly subjectivity, and the latter’s multiple instantiated interactions with, and transformations of, the text in question — the text that in any theoretical framework deserving of the designator “literary” must surely be granted some autonomy and efficacy of its own, no matter how decentered, striated, or contradictory it might be conceived as.

In defense, Moretti highlights what he calls the “non-homogeneous geography” of his large-scale approach, where a non-unified space of analysis, in principal worldly in scope, meets multiple temporalities, all drawn together to reorient what we might mean by the increasingly contested term “world literature,” a term that has come to mark the anxieties of comparative literature as it recomposes itself after “Theory” (“Graphs 3” 62).¹¹ In the third essay, Moretti tracks the development of free indirect style in modern narrative across both spatial and temporal axes, from 1800 to 2000. The style, understood as an instance of literary form especially amenable to cross-spatial and cross-temporal analysis, is tracked as its modus operandi shifts from the “‘objective’ pole of its tonal scale”, dated around 1900 and part of the buildup to high modernism, to its utilization in the exploration of the singular or the radically subjective (60). Moretti demurs from offering any real explanation of the shifts that he neutrally charts, ranging from the “silent, interiorized doxa of large nation-states” to the “noisy, multi-personal ‘chorus'” of the global South (59-60); what explanation we do get leans heavily on the idea of the “dependence of morphological novelty on spatial discontinuity,” which is to say, the apparent necessity of an increasingly large and diffuse space of distribution for the fullest mutation of a style or device (62).

No doubt Moretti wishes this aspect of his quantitative project, the point where literary form at least gets a look in, to quell any skepticism as to his lack of care for the singularity of literature as a distinct cultural object.¹² There are no appeals here to a privileged variable as the prime cause of a historical trend, as in the example of the detective novel above. Instead, we read of the “perpetual uncertainty between history and form” (62). It may well be symptomatic that such a tone of caution creeps into Moretti’s discourse the moment he considers the up-close ambiguities of form as it shifts historically. But we should ask again whether the spatial and/or temporal correlation of a particular version of a literary style’s emergence tells us much about why it emerges at that particular time and in that particular space. To get those answers would mean shortening the distance of one’s gaze so as to understand the specificities of the political and historical moment in question. It would also mean resorting to a close reading of the texts themselves, if only to clarify what the form or device being tracked across time and space is, and, just as importantly, to clarify how it interacts with other devices and styles within the same literary object; this latter interaction is as important in judging the specificity of the original device in question as it is in clarifying its relationship to the others that surround it.

The New Positivism and “New Historicism”

In his rejection of close reading, disdained as a “secularized theology” emanating from New Haven, Moretti joins a significant minority in contemporary literary studies, gathering pace at least since the late 1980s (“Slaughterhouse” 208). As the “new” historicism lapsed into something resembling the “old,” the kaleidoscope of significance and a-significance, of sense and non-sense generated at the level of the sentence, faded just as starkly as upon the more recent impress of digital techniques. This was not because the new historicism explicitly disavowed the close reading of texts, but because it only pursued close reading as a means to access the cultural variables that could subsequently be foregrounded at the expense of the text itself. Moretti is keen to endorse this eclipse of close reading. As he wrote in an essay responding to criticisms of his article “Conjectures on World Literature,” “‘Formalism without close reading’… I can’t think of a better definition [of the project]” (“More Conjectures” 81).

One might respond that it was exactly close reading that made the various sins of the older formalisms redeemable (their holism and organicism especially).¹³ It’s worth pondering also whether what Moretti has achieved can be considered a formalism in any meaningful sense. To what extent does graphing the temporal and spatial distribution of a commodity count as a formalism, if such graphing pays no mind to the internal ambiguities of the form in question, the very ways in which that form is formative at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the stanza, and so on? The analysis of free indirect style in the third essay perhaps comes closest to acknowledging the ramifications of form, or what Moretti calls its “morphology.” In that instance, though, he tracks the different uses of a form over space and time, rather than offering a theoretically precise construction of what that form is in textual terms and how it re-forms itself—not just over the large canvas of time on which he focuses, but also within the equally teeming borders of a single text, perhaps even a single sentence, line, or stanza, to say nothing of the transformations of that intimate level of form as it enters the consciousness of a reader.

Moretti’s global positivism is, however, only one star in a much wider constellation. Since the irruption of the “new historicism,”¹⁴ the fine-grained mutations of a sentence in a novel or the subtle shift of rhythm in a poem have been much less likely to be invoked as a clue that might give us a sense of a literary work’s efficacy, or the ways in which it resists, rather than simply mirrors, its surrounding cultural determinants. Instead, every possible causative variable outside the actual materiality of the text has been polemically foregrounded. The reasons for this are internal to the original theoretical manifestos laid out the new historicist stall. In his hugely influential “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” Stephen Greenblatt insists upon the creed as a “practice” rather than a “doctrine,” implicitly enjoining us to leave behind endless theoretical navel-gazing. Indeed, he makes much of his previous unwillingness to live or die by theoretical precepts, preferring instead to “go about and do [literary work], without establishing first exactly what my theoretical position is” (3).

There’s something a little belle-lettrist in all this, resisting the vulgarization of literature that would inevitably result from its rigorous analysis. But presuming Greenblatt believes that at least some positive theoretical reflection is necessary if literary study is not to repeat the errors of the “old” historicism, however they may be defined, it is nonetheless telling that such a sketching out as is to be found in the essay is principally negative, reacting against other, more elaborately (one might say responsibly) defined theoretical approaches. Of Fredric Jameson’s cultural Marxism, Greenblatt writes: “History functions … as a convenient anecdotal ornament upon a theoretical structure, and capitalism appears not as a complex social and economic development in the West but as a malign philosophical principal” (7). What Greenblatt has overlooked here is that Jameson, far from merely paying lip service to history in the service of a broader theoretical abstraction, is precisely in the business of carefully rethinking what “history” might actually mean after the critiques of history as historicism that one finds in Althusser and elsewhere, more of which anon.

That the new historicism generally, and Greenblatt in particular, have rhetorically resisted the lures of a totalized understanding of historical context is without question, but what remains, as anecdotal as it so frequently is, lacks a sufficient sense of its a priori theoretical investments. Jameson has himself referred to this obscuring of a priori theoretical commitments as an insistence on immanence over the transcendence of abstract analysis and interpretation, even as transcendent principles – not least the very transcendentality of the injunction to reject the transcendental – persist beneath the cover of darkness. It might even be possible to refer to the very latest positivisms as just one more mutation in this process of the denial of the transcendental, one that uses the digital technologies, as Jameson puts it apropos new historicism, to “keep the mind involved in detail and immediacy,” the better to disbar the ungainly abstractions of theory proper (188).

The disavowal of the inevitability of a transcendental position behind any interpretative act whatsoever has, at any rate, perhaps led to new historicism’s attraction to the internally heterogeneous school of the digital humanities, which has similarly made a virtue of its “detail” and eclecticism. Each builds a vision of context that is often radically different in its scale and composition, but both are nonetheless prone to what Dominick LaCapra has usefully described as “overcontextualization,” a process that “often occludes the problem of the very grounds on which to motivate a selection of pertinent contexts… The farther back one goes in time, the less obvious the contexts informing discourse tend to become, and the more difficult it may be … to reconstruct them” (qtd. in Jay 560). The “grounds” invoked by LaCapra are precisely transcendental, in so far as they act as the condition of possibility for the interpretation that results. Even as Moretti multiplies the possible scales, temporal and spatial, within which context may be constructed, their permeability to analysis is rarely questioned; instead, one gets a sense of the alluring transparency afforded by the sharp technological lenses at his disposal, lenses that then fill in for the occluded transcendental frame of analysis. As he writes, “[d]istant reading, I have called this work elsewhere; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Patterns” (“Graphs 2” 94). But it may be worth reconsidering the ways that obstacles can be productive and the manner in which a text’s self-enclosure, its formal indifference or even resistance to its context, might be the very source of its power. I consider a rather different account of the benefits of obstructive constraint in my reading of Stephen Ramsay below.

When viewed from a distance, then, texts seem attractively delineable and open to analysis, as mere coordinates on a map, lacking in resistance to their conscription in webs of historical causation, even as those webs are described, at least for the new historicists, as conflicted, power-laden, and non-unitary, in a rhetorical dressing that draws sparingly from Foucault. Rarely are questions asked about the epistemological problem of aligning empirical history with the difficult formal terrain of a text’s inner productivity, its dissimulations and readerly reproductions, its retroactive refigurations of its grounds; if Moretti’s quantitative fireworks are one way to deny the actuality of a text, to dim its speculative resources, this fetishization of “context” is surely another. I would go so far as to suggest that, in its valorization of the “anecdote” or the especially particular historical detail, new historicism has simply served to reverse the tacit assumption of older historicisms: where once it was the broadly conceived cultural and political surroundings that explained the contours of a cultural object, now it is frequently a single event or moment that is worked from within in order to explain a whole plethora of emergent cultural forms, forms thus denuded, as in the old historicism, of their formativeness, their capacity in the last instance to override their determining coordinates. The latest and most extreme expression of this is the growth of conferences and books that take a single year as their focus, the assumption being that it is enough to make the general emerge out of the particular in order to avoid the smothering of the particular by the universal.¹⁵

Back to Moretti, who takes rhetorical pleasure in asserting his own particular kind of quantitative antihumanism – “human history is so seldom history,” he quips in the third essay (“Graphs 3” 56). Nonetheless, one can detect a residual, “contextualizing” humanism that grounds his approach to history, one that seems stubbornly to have refused, as in Greenblatt, the lessons of the critiques of historicism that characterized the best of twentieth-century critical theory. While Moretti’s appeals to Fernand Braudel in the first essay suggest that a broadly structural, cyclical vision of history will prove the most amenable to his aims, as his argument progresses we find repeated appeals to a most teleological vision of correlation and even of causation within his account of the consumption of differing literary genres and their historical importance.

Without specifying his analytical methodology (again, we should ask, what understanding of readerly subjectivity is assumed here?), Moretti writes: “When one genre replaces another, it’s reasonable to assume that the cause is internal to the two genres, and historically specific: amorous epistolary fiction being ill-equipped to capture the traumas of the revolutionary years, say – and gothic novels being particularly good at it” (“Graphs 1” 82). The problem here is not so much the casual reductiveness of this explanation; there must be an element of reduction in any attempt to make a causal connection across such broad swathes of space and time, and reduction is not in itself an obstacle to nuanced analysis – indeed, it is sometimes its necessary condition. Neither is the problem the immediate assignation of causality to what seems to be a mere correlation, although the move is far too quickly made. Rather, it’s the tacit and humanistic assumption that history progresses towards a goal, with cultural form allegedly perspiring on cue to changes in the political temperature that are charted from the perspective of their already having happened, and thus, we may say, from the purview of the victors.

There’s an irony in Moretti’s admonition that literary academics should avoid the temptations of German and French metaphysics; arguably, it’s an implicit Hegelianism, if not an outright teleology, that fills in the gaps in causal explanation that riddle Moretti’s analysis (Graphs 2). Moretti defends himself against such accusations by highlighting the equal importance of divergence and of convergence in his analysis, which is to say, the equal analytical weight placed on moments of disparity and on moments of parity in the distribution of literary trends. As he writes in his discussion of detective fiction, “[i]s divergence a factor, in literary history? These first findings suggest a cautious Yes” (“Graphs 3” 50). But measuring the reversal of a teleology does not undermine the assumptions upon which that teleology is built. Divergence as understood in evolutionary theory, whereby populations gradually accrue differences over time, seems fated to lapse into a negative providentialism when wrenched into the context of literary history.

Consider the interpretation of Braudel’s historiography that peppers Moretti’s first essay. There, Braudel is described as offering a vision of the longue durée that is “all structure and no flow,” with structures serving to “introduce repetition in history, and hence regularity, order, pattern” (“Graphs 1” 76). Other scales of analysis when filtered through Braudel offer Moretti the sense of fluidity that this emphasis on structure may otherwise preclude. But Braudel and the Annales school are not immune, in their use of apparently new scales of historical analysis, to the teleological errors of previous historicisms, or even to the siren songs of the Hellenic epic, with its underflows of fate and providence; as Miriam Cooke has phrased it, Braudel’s work is characterized by a tension between “the teleology of temporal fixity and the randomness of spatial fluidity, [and] teleology wins out in the end” (292). As she also notes, this has much to do with Braudel’s importation of a sense of a broader historical permanence and progression associated especially with the figure of the Mediterranean and derived from the structure of the Greek epic as its necessarily occluded origin. We may speculate that the telescoping capacities of the digital make this kind of quasi-dialectical history – from structure and fixity to fluidity and back again – especially attractive to the new positivisms, providing as it does readymade frames within which to slot endlessly proliferating data. But there is none of the true dynamism of the dialectic in this shuttling back and forth between fixed coordinates, which seems to fix in place the poles that it may otherwise have been assumed to overcome.

Moretti goes on to argue that the simultaneous disappearance of a cluster of literary forms can be explained in terms of generational succession and the replacement of one generation’s cultural tastes with that of another. But again, while it may well be true that different generations consume different cultural products, the fragile correlations established by Moretti and his collaborators’ research do not explain why one genre rather than another would be appreciated by a specific generation in all its internal complexity. We can think of this, again, in terms of scales of analysis. Moretti remains at such an abstract scale of situated patterns of consumption and distribution that he is prevented in advance from being able to understand the more obscure kinds of cultural forms that pool between the cracks of those patterns. “Books survive if they’re read and disappear if they aren’t,” Moretti claims, but what he really means to say is that the expanding market, under certain historical conditions, supported the sale of some books over others at different times and under different conditions (“Graphs 1” 16).

Prendergast is right to accuse Moretti of treating the market as an equivalent, within the realm of culture, of the nature that is the concern of evolutionary science, assuming in turn a similar predictability to evolutionary patterns in literary history (“Evolution”). And here we come across another parallel between the new digital positivisms and the new historicism, namely, the reliance upon the language of the market in place of a refined and precise analytical language proper to the complexities of literary texts; as Prendergast notes of Greenblatt’s work, “history itself is conceived … through models and metaphors to do with the market, the social as a space of transactions or deals between players in the marketplace” (“Circulating” 94). Suffice it to invoke Marx on the tendency to naturalize the “insights” of one discourse (in his case, political economy, in Moretti’s case quantitative modeling) as if they were unproblematically generalizable across craggy, unsurpassable discursive borders. Even if one were to stick to the positivist model endorsed by Moretti, one would need a more tiered and mediated account of the ways that global consumption influences markets as much as it is led by them, in order to make good a number of the claims he advances.

Emily Apter is surely right when she laments the “dangling participle” in Moretti’s world-systems approach to the diffusion of global literatures, the favoring of “narrative over linguistic engagement” and the lack of “an approach that would valorize textual closeness while refusing to sacrifice distance,” but the problem is far wider and pertains to now-dominant constructions of history, text, and method in the humanities (256). However unfashionable, it is nevertheless useful to resurrect Althusser’s stringent critique of teleological historicisms and positivisms in order to access the broader ramifications of the shift in academic culture that Moretti embodies in impressive miniature.

Althusser and the Limits of Moretti’s “Materialism”

If Moretti’s vision of quantitative, large-scale analysis seems predicated on an unapologetically empiricist variant of scientific rationality, what alternative models might one appeal to without lapsing into prior humanisms or rejecting entirely the appeal to the resources of science? Moretti’s impatient positivism implicitly imposes a forced choice: either the testable insights of broad-brush quantificatory analysis, or a muddle-headed, idealist textual solipsism that reifies the individual book over its multiple contextual histories. But there are other ways of approaching the scientificity of literary form and history that refuse such a binary and that significantly deepen what we might mean by literary-critical rationality. Jonathan Gottschall refers to such previous attempts as “authentic antisciences” that have “innoculate[d] themselves against negative evidence” (12). But what kind of “evidence” is particular to the field of literary forms, and might it be the neo-positivists such as Gottschall who have imposed on culture epistemic models that smother its complex internal nature – smothering, in other words, that which makes it a distinct object for a certain kind of scientific appraisal and analysis?

In his collaborative work Reading Capital, Louis Althusser outlines with some precision what he takes to be the central philosophical error of empiricism as it is applied to the science of history. In doing so, he constructs his own account of the ways that objects and subjects of scientific knowledge relate: “Knowledge never, as empiricism desperately demands it should, confronts a pure object which is then identical to the real object of which knowledge aimed to produce precisely … the knowledge [of]” (43). Knowledge is never the simple transposition of predicates or essences from a single, stable object in the world to a progressively unfolding account of its unchanging structure, which lies passively in wait to be discovered. Rather,

knowledge working on its “object” … does not work on the real object but on the peculiar raw material, which constitutes, in the strict sense of the term, its “object” … That raw material is ever-already, in the strong sense Marx gives it in Capital, a raw material, i.e., matter already elaborated and transformed, precisely by the imposition of the complex (sensuous-technical-ideological) structure which constitutes it as an object of knowledge.(43)

There is a profound argument here that sidesteps the false choice of empiricism or rationalism, an argument that the undue haste of Althusser’s exposition may tempt us to overlook. For Althusser, the object of knowledge is always already, from the moment one approaches it scientifically, an impure object, neither “real” in the sense of being empirically self-present and symmetrically situated in an empirical field external to the subject, nor conceptually pure in the sense of being absolutely abstracted from the “raw material” of the empirical field. “Raw material,” for Althusser, is another name for the messiness and impurity that confronts all knowledge and that scientific processes of purification can never fully expunge; indeed, to fully nullify that impurity would be to confront the scientific method with its own exhaustion. One needs to be careful here; Althusser is very far from endorsing the commonsensical, humanist view that conceptual rationality is compromised and humbled by the density of the phenomenal world. Rather, scientific conceptuality must itself bear and incorporate the internal, dialectical impurity of the objects that it analyzes.

Thus, the labor of science is, by definition, never over; it is, as Gaston Bachelard averred, something that has no absolute purity of origin, something that “continues but never ‘begins'” (qtd. in Lecourt 52). To have ever “begun” would suggest an orientation to an ending, the implicit teleology of which discounts in advance the constitutive complexities with which scientific knowledge must deal, and that are re-produced and refined by their conscription within a scientific project. It is, incidentally, within the epistemological dynamism of Bachelard’s and Althusser’s takes on the elasticity and impurity of scientific form that the wellspring of later, so-called poststructuralist accounts of the impossibility of absolute origins, as much as of absolute ends, are to be found.¹⁶

Here we may usefully supplement Claire Colebrook’s recent reflections on Paul de Man’s brand of materialism as “neither empirical – that is, available to experience – nor ideal (a consequence of the human organism’s way of mapping its world)” (Cohen 16). By the same token, Althusser’s epistemology asks us to dialecticize our understanding of scientific knowing in a manner that refuses both strong constructivism – scientists construct their object of knowledge even as they think they are receiving its truths empirically – and Moretti-like positivism, which entirely discounts the efficacy and agency of the object itself in favor of its statistical capture, its passive inscription in a technological or teleological apparatus. Rather, texts on an Althusserian account sit always in complex relation with multiple intersecting fields of ideological, empirical, and conceptual forces that are, in turn, refigured by the text’s own internal resources of speculative possibility.

Such intersecting, impure fields are precisely irreducible to what Greenblatt’s new historicism would wish to call “context,” a term that, for all of new historicism’s rhetorical distancing from a notion of unitary historical causality, nonetheless implies a symmetrical division between a text and its surrounding determinants along with a retrospective causality moving from culture to word. This is not, again, to suggest that Greenblatt and his collaborators have self-consciously produced a reified, unified vision of historical causation; far from it. But the anecdotal eclecticism that is the true final product of much new historicist scholarship does little to avoid what Greenblatt himself, erroneously and fatally, accuses Marxism of, namely, invoking capitalism (qua context) as a “unitary demonic principle” (7). The Marx that emerges in Althusser as well as in Jameson and others is precisely a thinker of the heterogeneity and non-totalizability of any historical moment or conjuncture. But such thinkers are also keen to grant the object of contextualization its due, its right to be contradictory, uncanny, and difficult in dialectically reforming the “context” that is, from a certain angle, the (Aristotelian) material cause of its existence.

In the final section of this essay, I read the work of someone who has more responsibly than most raised precisely these questions about the disjuncture between literary-critical interpretation and the quantitative process of data analysis, albeit in a way that ultimately falls short of its commendable goals.

Reading Machines – On Stephen Ramsay

The publication in 2011 of Stephen Ramsay’s Reading Machines: Toward An Algorithmic Criticism heralded a significant advance in critical and theoretical reflections on the digital humanities. Ramsay wishes to advance a theory of digital humanities practice that is attentive to the epistemological peculiarities of its object and to the productive gap between quantitative positivisms and the formal ambiguities of literature. His aim, he writes, is to “locate a hermeneutics at the boundary between mechanism and theory,” which is to say, in the interstice between the boosted methodologies of the digital and the prior, conceptually oriented critical humanities, with their emphasis on textual undecidability, on the motivations of gender and race, and on the multiple meanings produced by the juxtaposition of different literary devices (x).

Ramsay’s approach is, to be sure, substantially informed by the earlier work of Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann. The latter have influentially advocated for what they call the interpretative “deformance” of a textual work, which is to say, for the ways in which the rearrangement, diagramming, or foregrounding of certain nonsemantic aspects of the work reveals “how its pretensions to meaning are not so much a function of ideas as of style” (37). Such an argument is premised on the claim that all interpretation is, at least to some degree, a replacement of the original text with a new one. Critics, as Ramsay has it, “who endeavor to put forth a ‘reading’ put forth not the text, but a new text in which the data has been paraphrased, elaborated, selected, truncated, and transduced” (16). Ramsay wishes to highlight the ways in which quantitative methods perform their own “defacement” of literary texts, opening those texts to what remains a fundamentally subjective and subsequent practice of interpretation. As such, the “algorithmic criticism” he advocates is one that uses quantitative methods for ends that are assuredly not to be located in the narrow digital parameters that define the mere beginnings of such a process.

Underpinning Ramsay’s theory is the notion that “[t]he digital revolution, for all its wonders, has not penetrated the core activity of literary studies, which … remains mostly concerned with the interpretative analysis of written cultural artifacts” (2). Instead, the radical disjunction between what we might go so far as to call the quantitative ontology of digital methodologies and the subtleties and nuances of literary analysis must be admitted, even if the former may give us access to aspects of the latter that were up to now unavailable. Digital textual analysis, then, “must endeavor to assist the critic in the unfolding of interpretative possibilities” (10). The evidence that might be accrued from the data mining of texts and so on “is not definitive, but suggestive of grander arguments and schemes” (10). The technology available to the digital humanist interested, for instance, in crisscrossing discourses of gender in the fiction of Virginia Woolf (an example employed by Ramsay himself, as we see below) may take advantage of the “rigidly holistic” manner in which computation transforms the text, allowing a sound empirical assessment of repeated phrasings and words, the better to root the necessarily speculative work of interpretation to come (16). “It is one thing,” Ramsey avers, “to notice patterns of vocabulary, variations in line length, or images of darkness and light; it is another thing to employ a machine that can unerringly discover every instance of such features across a massive corpus of literary texts” (16-17).

At the root of this argument is the thesis that the artificial constraints of computation, stripping away the usual boundaries of the text within which multiple interpretative strategies usually bloom, is paradoxically enabling, allowing less obvious meanings to emerge across multiple sources. Such constraints, compared elsewhere in the book to the formal experiments of Raymond Queneau and the OULIPO group, are rendered equivalent to “what the Russian Formalists called ostranenie – the estrangement and defamiliarization of textuality” (3). For Ramsay, “the narrowing constraints of computational logic – the irreducible tendency of the computer toward enumeration, measurement and verification – is fully compatible with the goals of criticism” (16). This is because “critical reading practices already contain elements of the algorithmic” (16). Here, Ramsay evokes again the “deformance” thesis of McGann and Samuels, whereby the very act of interpretation, in its selectivity, deforms or even recreates the text in question. This is as true, for Ramsay, for older interpretative practices as it is for those enabled by computation.

While a cursory reading of Althusser’s comments on the distinction between the real and theoretical object discussed above might suggest a striking parallel with Ramsay’s claim, whereby the real object qua text is replaced by the text produced by an act of interpretation, some caution is required here. For whereas French epistemology is concerned to emphasize the pushback of the real object upon attempts to conscript it within the terms of an interpretation, a pushback Bachelard memorably called a “co-efficient of adversity,” Ramsay, while acknowledging the fundamental discrepancy between the act of computation itself and the subsequent act of critical interpretation, nonetheless considers the gap easily and unproblematically surmountable (39). In surmounting that gap, further, one gets little sense of the ways that either the object itself or the critical possibilities attendant to it have changed; it is not clear, that is, how the movement from a computationally rendered disfigurement to a computationally enabled critical reading has altered the internal composition of the text, not simply in an empirical sense, where one is left with data sets that bear an obvious and marked difference from the original text, but in a theoretical sense, where the formal possibilities available to interpretation have radically shifted. Indeed, when Ramsay gives a glimpse of how his deformative criticism might function in practice, the results seems little different from standard liberal-humanistic content analysis. For example, in his use of “information retrieval” to transform Woolf’s The Waves into “lists of tokens” in order to establish the most and least distinctive words uttered by each of the novel’s characters, we find a “gender divide” among the characters in their language use, a result that supports the insights of numerous earlier critics. Characters associated in the narrative with contemplative occupations like writing are shown to use words associated with thinking: “[f]or Bernard, the aspiring novelist who some say is modeled on Woolf herself, the top word is ‘thinks'” (13).

Here, the constraints of computation, rather than enabling a more experimental criticism, seem rather to have constrained Ramsay’s critical range, allowing him merely to confirm, through lists of information, basic insights already adumbrated by past close readings of Woolf’s novel. This is surely a symptom of what Herman Rapaport has usefully referred to as the trend to “replace interpretation with information.”¹⁷ But the reason for Ramsay’s fall back onto humanistic character analysis must also be related to his theoretically underdetermined notions of constraint and defamiliarization. While he refers to the Russian Formalists, there seems to be little in common between what Shklovsky referred to as the effect of “particularization” attendant to literary form, and the readily predictable deformations of the computer that so preoccupy Ramsay. Indeed, Shklovsky actively opposed what he called “generalization” in literary criticism, defined by its “creating, insofar as possible, wide-ranging, all-encompassing formulas,” in favor of what he called “particularization” as the essence of art (22). Art, on this reading, is “based on a step-by-step structure and on the particularizing of even that which is presented in a generalized and unified form” (22). It is precisely this effect of a singularity, of the moment at which a text shakes loose from its context and effects a spontaneous change in the interpretative temperature, that Ramsay’s and Moretti’s lists and graphs constitutively foreclose. Instead, they remain firmly within what Shklovsky disdains as “generalization,” the straightening out of a text’s formal folds, incommensurabilities, and contradictions into neatly managed data sets.

Ramsay’s analysis of the necessary disjuncture, then, between objective computation and subjective interpretation is mitigated by the recrudescent humanism that enables him to distinguish so easily between the “subjective” and the “objective” in the first place. For what Althusser, Bachelard, and Shklovsky insist upon in their different ways is that any separation of subject from object is an agonistic, ongoing process submitted to the resistances of the object and to the ideological valences that color the subject’s perspective and that taint, in turn, the object of analysis. In short, we can say that the capacious, active formalism of Althusser et al. seeks to underline the dialectical dynamism that threatens always to render impure the very distinction between subjective and objective, with the establishment of such a distinction being the perpetual and always only partially successful labor of science itself. Contemporary literary studies, in its rush to embrace the reified objectivism of the digital, may have much to learn from a reconsideration of the sources of the critical theory that it seems so quick to leave behind. What should result is a speculative and critical formalism, one that respects the ambiguities and stubbornness of its objects of interpretation, objects that may prove to be less readily assimilable to the clean lines of technological positivism than has recently been assumed.

The positive details of such a formalism must be outlined elsewhere, but for now it is worth mentioning that, in addition to attending to the multiple effects of specific literary devices when considered up close, such an approach must take account of what Peter Osborne has adroitly called “the utopian horizon of global interconnectedness,” a horizon that only capital, in its contemporary manifestation, seems able to create (34). Osborne distinguishes between modernity as the periodization of avant-garde possibilities and the contemporary as the distinctly post-conceptual moment of an abstract globalism. Such a globalism can “exhibit the structure of a subject (the unity of an activity) only objectively, in [its] product, separated from individual subjects and particular collectivities of labor” (35). It is surely this abstract objectivity, one that nonetheless attempts to produce a sense of the subjective as its static opposite, that one finds in differently coded forms in Moretti’s and Ramsay’s positivisms. Ramsay, for example, uses the opposition between contemporary digital techniques and older, subjective humanisms as a means of arguing for the easy compatibility of the former with the latter. But the consequence of the epistemology that underpins these new methods seems to be precisely the shallow, objectified or reified subjectivity that Osborne so acutely diagnoses, one that is deaf to the dynamic interpenetration of subjective and objective forms that marks all relatively autonomous acts of artistic production. Identifying this as a problem is the first step toward producing an alternative critical theory of the contemporary in its relation with literature, one that might truly be able to encapsulate the peculiarities of the admixtures of subject and object and of form and history that literary language has the potential to manifest with especial force.

Tom Eyers is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He is the author of two monographs: Lacan and the Concept of the Real appeared with Palgrave in 2012, and Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology and Marxism in Postwar France was published with Bloomsbury in 2013. His current book project is entitled ‘Speculative Formalism: The Poetics of Form in Literature, Philosophy and Science.’

Footnotes

1. Private companies, including Google, are increasingly the source of funding for digital projects. For Google’s spin on the digital humanities and their importance, see Orwant. It is hard to imagine Google funding an inquiry into the politics and anti-aesthetics of the language poets, although stranger things have transpired.

2. A characterization parodied by Stanley Fish when he wrote of this “new insurgency … What rough beast has slouched into the neighborhood threatening to upset everyone’s applecart?”

3. The website Sample Reality has a useful list of topics and paper titles given at Digital Humanities related panels at the MLA convention in the last few years (Sample). See THATCamp’s glossary of the often intimidating jargon used in digital humanities circles (jargon no less recondite than that associated with prior movements in critical theory) (Humanities).

4. My claim is less that a digital humanist is guaranteed a job in today’s perilous academic marketplace, and more that the set of skills increasingly asked for in job advertisements, in fellowship descriptions, and in the criteria for grant competitions are more and more impacted by the language of the new digital positivisms. For an alternative perspective that makes clear that a diploma or certificate in digital techniques is by no means a route to guaranteed employment, see Liu.

5. Gottschall’s book outlines an extreme defense of the new literary positivism, advocating for literary studies to adopt wholesale a deductive empiricism conditioned by the experimental sciences.

6. This alternative is outlined in much more detail in my forthcoming book, Speculative Formalism: The Poetics of Form in Literature, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis.

7. See Althusser.

8. Stephen Marche neatly summarizes this take, writing that “Literature cannot meaningfully be treated as data. The problem is essential rather than superficial: literature is not data. Literature is the opposite of data” (Marche). Representative of this general re-entrenchment of literary humanism is Curtis White, albeit without an explicit focus on the digital humanities.

9. There are numerous such careless if eminently marketable polemics, but for a representative example see Sokal or Lehman.

10. For a good cross-section of responses, the more critical of which often come close to Prendergast’s analysis, see J. Goodwin and J. Holbo (eds.), Reading Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Responses to Franco Moretti (Anderson: Parlor Press, 2011).

11. For a more consequential reframing of the problem of “world literature,” see Apter.

12. For an excellent account of the kind of singularity that literary language embodies, see Attridge.

13. There are some pungent remarks on the links between formalism, organicism, and the politesse of anti-theoretical literary-critical eclecticism in T. Eagleton, “Liberality and Order: The Criticism of John Bayley” in New Left Review 1:110, July-August 1978, 29-40.

14. This is, by necessity, one of the moments in this essay where I am unable to account for the internal heterogeneity of what comes under an indifferently general theoretical label, if “theoretical” is even the right term. Jameson is right, I think, when he calls the new historicism less a theory or set of theories than a “shared writing practice” (184). For an insightful essay on the movement and one that starts by distinguishing between American and British instantiations, see Prendergast.

15. An especially sophisticated example of this trend can be found in Rabaté.

16. See Eyers.

17. See Rapaport’s excellent comments on the eclipse of theory.

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