kamelia spassova The Return to/of Theory I n the prologue to The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond, Galin Tihanov formulates the major questions of his study as “what happens once literary theory is no more, [and] how can one capture its elusively seminal afterlives?” (1). These questions are driven by his belief that literary theory’s proper “regime of relevance”1 has been replaced by, as he reiterates in his epilogue, a novel “regime of relevance that thinks literature through its market and entertainment value,” engendering “an interpretative framework that has recently grown and gained enormous popularity, not least in the classroom, as ‘world literature’ ” (175). Tihanov’s vision of literary theory’s being “no more” and his search for its dispersed “afterlives” in the new interpretative framework of world literature raises a host of questions:2 How should we reflect on the encounter and confrontation between modern literary theory and present debates about “world literature”—in terms of continuity or discontinuity; as a survival legacy or oblivion; as a shared epistemic framework or a paradigm shift? Does the birth of world literature rely and insist on the death of literary theory? What is Tihanov’s book not about? What has been left aside and why? Volume 32, Number 1 doi 10.1215/10407391-8956960 © 2021 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu 75 d i f f e r e n c e s I attempt to answer these questions in a montage of three heterogeneous parts. The first part tries to follow the basic argument of the method of radical historicity by considering how epistemes are chronotopically shaped and what social conditions underlie them. This query narrows down to the dependency of theory on literary examples. In what follows, I turn to François Hartog’s idea of regimes of historicity in order to show how crises of time—discontinuities and ruptures in temporality—are a constitutive part of the idea of history. The paradoxical figure of “discontinuous continuity” addresses the central issue of recognized and unrecognized legacies, leading to the realization that the rupture between literary theory and “world literature” is not only a discontinuation but also a continuity. The second part of my essay opens a map of the past, more specifically, the past preceding the birth of literary theory. The humanistic tradition of philology is not explored by Tihanov; it is one of the discourses he leaves aside. It is not ignored, however, by the discourse of world literature, which appropriates the work of Erich Auerbach and of Goethe and the project of philology in new neoliberal terms, while leaving Russian literary theory out of the picture. Tihanov endeavors to restore the “dissipated” legacy of Russian literary theory by focusing on the work of Viktor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, while leaving out Roman Jakobson. According to Tihanov, Jakobson’s “linguistic fundamentalism”—insisting as it does on the original language of the literary work and its untranslatability (see Kalinova)—is foreign to the contemporary scene, with its emphasis on translatability. By connecting the legacy of philology to a “slow reading” of Jakobson’s article “On Realism in Art,” the third part of my essay outlines the possibility for a return to philology that does not preclude a return to theory; in fact, it facilitates it. Literature Comes First: The Poetics of Examples What touching examples of faithful servants giving themselves up to danger and death for their masters? —Goethe Announcing the death of theory is neither a traumatic nor an elegiac gesture for Tihanov’s radical historicity; it is something beyond both enthusiasm and anxiety. His approach is radical because it has the courage to outline the precise boundaries marking the birth and death of modern Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu 76 The Return to/of Theory literary theory, which thus acquires a precise chronotopical shape. The Foucauldian premise here is that each discursive formation functions within certain social conditions. Hence there can be no such thing as timelessness in literature or in literary theory; there is only the threat of a naturalization of a historical perspective. Discussing Bakhtin’s legacy in what he sees as the new framework of the Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature, Tihanov evokes the eventual death not only of theory but of classic literature as well: “We know by now that ‘great literature’ is a historically attestable category that has both a birth and an expiry date” (“Ferrying”). I believe the figure of the end has constructive potential for drawing attention to the time-limited dimensions of each episteme, or its context-dependent design. The figure of the end opens up the question of legacy, allowing retrospective reflections on the effects of the early stage of literary theory on our contemporary situation—the recognized as well as the forgotten episodes. Although not explicitly discussed in the book, we might keep in mind the title of Hans Robert Jauss’s 1967 inaugural lecture “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” In it, Jauss contends that the aim of literary history is to bridge the gap between historical knowledge and aesthetics (7). Tihanov’s book draws on this gap, constructing and subverting the foundational narratives of literary theory. Radical historicity is a challenge to literary theory, a daring proposal to rethink its genesis, its legacies, and its possible regimes of (ir)relevance. Literary theory, as captured by Tihanov, is not completely independent; it is coupled with or subordinated to literature itself. The task of defining theory starts with the very definition of literature. Related to this, theory is shaped by its own historicity, its paradigm shifts and critical thresholds that rely on changes within the axis of time. Russian formalism is embedded within the context of Russian futurism, the Prague Linguistic Circle is entwined with Czechoslovakian surrealism, Bakhtin and Olga Freidenberg are seen through the prism of premodern folklore and marginal genres. Thus Tihanov pairs “substantive parallels between intellectual and artistic developments in Russia, Germany, and Eastern and Central Europe” (Birth 5). This coupling between theory and literature is the first important condition for a theory whose metalayers are not universal meditations, but are instead grounded in concrete literary examples and their historical environments. The bond between a particular literary theory and a particular work of art can be explored in terms of the poetics of example and the three major modes of exemplification this poetics involves: generalization, interpretation, and paradigmatization.3 Generalization excludes superfluous Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu d i f f e r e n c e s details and subordinates the work of art to the logic of abstraction and reduction. It is a deductive way of illustrating from above. Interpretation, with its hermeneutic background, is a reading practice on the level of the literary work per se. Its strategy navigates the balance between lucidity and opacity, simplicity and ambiguity, as it has the capacity to reveal hidden, diminished, or forgotten aspects at the price of obscuring others. The third mode establishes a perfect link between literary theory and literature. Binding the conceptual and the concrete levels, it makes possible the paradigmatic singularity that possesses the capacity to govern its own modes of relevance (Agamben). The paradigmatic method—neither induction, nor deduction—does not treat the literary work reductively. Rather, it endows the work with the status of an event that exhibits itself as an exceptional case. This third mode is thus capable of producing paradigm shifts: it can bring about a hybridization between the core and the periphery of the work and cause a cultural “explosion” (vzryv), to use Lotman’s term,4 by using the “revolutionary potential of poetic language” (Kristeva, Revolution).5 Following the logic of examples, Tihanov is especially meticulous in showing what kind of literary examples were used by different scholars: examples can reveal different stories and hidden dynamics. As Goethe puts it, let us be guided “according to his theory and his example” (306). The genealogical connection between Russian theory and Romanticism is grounded in the central thesis of literature’s autonomous status, but it is also based on the paradigmatic reading of Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov made by the Russian formalists; Shklovsky’s reflection on Novalis; and Jakobson’s credit to Fedor Buslaev and the Romantic tradition (Tihanov, Birth 19). Tihanov’s elegant definition of world literature highlights its hidden energies: its concealed revolutionary layers and its dynamic aspects. “[W]orld literature functions as a historically shifting constellation of discourses that is chronotopically constructed, with social and ideological energies bubbling underneath and shaping this construct” (“Location” 478–79). This definition could easily be attributed to literary theory as well. The task of radical historicity and its discourse on theory is to reveal series of recontextualizations, to recall what has been forgotten, to give shape to hidden energies and forces, and to follow uncanny afterlives of the extinct.6 Moreover, its implicit premise is that attributing a proper beginning and a clear end to a form or structure facilitates the narrative of their existence, with its diverse plotlines. Marking distinctive points (departure and dissolution) in terms of space and time could prove quite useful for the process of uncovering hidden ideological and intellectual forces at work. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu 77 78 The Return to/of Theory The limits of Tihanov’s epistemological project, outlined by the concept of regime of relevance, are implied by the etymology of the word regime. It derives from Latin, meaning “diet,” but also “the act of governing self and others.” Thus, the very word regime has provided us with a Foucauldian interpretative key. In the famous article “What Is an Author,” Michel Foucault reflects on Samuel Beckett’s question: “[W]hat does it matter who is speaking?” and suggests a reversal of the tradition—a shift from author to discourse. He analyzes the author function as a historical construct, a technology to exercise different types of power over discourses: “[T]he author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of signification” (118). Tihanov uses the idea of regime of relevance in an early article in Bulgarian exploring the concept of the author as historically situated. After Foucault, he explores the function of the author, with its power to organize and control knowledge (“Literary” 28). Thus, the author’s multiple regimes of relevance raise a question about what Foucault describes as “the founders of discursivity” (“What” 114); he points out that the founders of modernity are Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In a similar manner, Tihanov in his most recent book identifies the founders of modern literary theory as Shklovsky, Bakhtin and Jakobson. The regimes of relevance of literature change in conjunction with the shifting status of the author: the Romantic genius governed literature in the nineteenth century, the autonomous literariness of the work prevailed in the beginning of the twentieth century, and the market dominates today. Tihanov situates modern literary theory in Russia and Eastern Europe during the interwar period. Its specificity requires its emancipation from the discourses of aesthetics and philosophy (mainly Marxism, phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism) and is grounded in the autonomy of literature. Within the paradigm of literary theory, “language and its peregrinations are a major protagonist” (Tihanov, Birth 7). Before the birth of theory, the protagonist was the author; after its death, the market is ascendent. Thus the discourse of theory is defined by a terminus post quem and a terminus ante quem and is situated between Shklovsky’s “resurrection of the word” of 1914 and Juri Lotman’s death in 1993. The previous regime, that of the Romantic paradigm (1813–1913), gave birth to a rethinking of literature as an autonomous discourse, which it achieved by conceiving of the author as an outcast, madman, genius, parrhesiastes, or some other figure of exemplary exception. Tihanov takes into consideration the prehistory of modern literary theory in the Romantic tradition while marking the rise of nationalism and national canons, the comparative principle, and the exceptionality of the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu d i f f e r e n c e s authorial figure as specific features of Romanticism. The regime of relevance of literary theory, with its emphasis on literariness, the literary device, and the materiality of language, is hence situated between Romanticism and the Anglo-Saxon liberal episteme of world literature that is dominant today. In Tihanov’s book, consequently, modern literary theory as a distinct epistemological object is defined not only by the dates of its birth and death but also by its past and its future, that is, by its Romantic prehistory (the antecedent paradigm) and its world literature afterlives (the subsequent paradigm). One of the epistemological effects of this approach is to open up the legacy of Russian formalism and the very origin of literary theory to contemporary debates on world literature. As things stand at present, the seminal bond between literary theory and literature is severed with the paradigm shift effected by the contemporary regime. The prevailing discourse of world literature regards the work of art mainly as a tool of global politics, cultural exchange, and perfect translatability. The importance of literature as an art form is rendered irrelevant in this perspective. By turning to certain neglected ideas of the early stages of theory, Tihanov asserts a view of world literature that is both more comprehensive in time and space and more nuanced in its approach to literary art. Summoning the long shadows of Shklovsky, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Roman Ingarden, and Lukács (to name a few of the book’s protagonists), Tihanov proposes a way of taking advantage of the situation and opening up future trajectories for world literature as well as its theoretical background. The three paradigms with their respective modes of reflection— Romanticism, literary theory, world literature—provoke some questions. Do different regimes of relevance depend on different forms of temporality, which demonstrate the lack of unilinear history? Is the concept of the regime of relevance thus revealed to be inconsistent, discrepant, driven by divergent experiences of time? At this point, it is worth evoking the concept of “regime of historicity” as it was developed by François Hartog. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck, Hartog differentiates three regimes of historicity: the premodern regime; the modern regime, involving national histories after 1789; and the rise of presentism after 1989. This differentiation allows the investigation of the plurality of temporal orders and discontinuities in history (Hartog). How do different regimes of relevance intersect and merge with different regimes of historicity, thus establishing an unpredictable hybridization of “regimes within regimes” (Nikolchina)? Is it possible for the dominant regime to be subverted and undermined by the latent intellectual forces of subjects faithful to the past event (Badiou 41–42)? Does literary theory have Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu 79 80 The Return to/of Theory the potential to reorder or to reconceptualize the contemporary project of world literature? How do we reflect on ruptures, discontinuities, and the demise of epistemes? How might the logic of continuity and discontinuity be organized within the narratives of intellectual history? How do we think grosso modo about history after Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, or after Foucault and the figure of “discontinuous continuity” (Heller-Roazen 145)? A possible answer involves a history constituted by a series of breaks, gaps, lacks, and caesuras. With this in mind, it is better not to rush into conclusions but to take a step back in time. I intend to return to a crucial historical rupture that happened before the birth of literary theory and involves an old-fashioned mode of reflection on literature. The Task of the Mature Philologist: Festina Lente People in general think that philology is at an end—while I believe that it has not yet begun. —Nietzsche Tihanov’s methodological apparatus invites us to think through a narrative that is parallel to literary theory but that also affects its fate. The story is about an academic discipline that is dominant throughout the nineteenth century and whose main domain is, as with literary theory, language, so the birth of modern theory contests its terrain.7 The story is about philology: not the formal Hellenistic type (organized by the principle of grammatical structures), but the historical type (organized by the principle of process and change) that determined the logic of comparative literature, established the dynamics between ancient and modern, built the national canons, and opened the horizons beyond them. The narrative about the birth and death of philology could be situated in Germany between Friedrich August Wolf and Nietzsche (Efal 1–14; Gildenhard; Holquist; Pollock, Introduction). In 1777, Wolf began his studies at the University of Göttingen, where he insisted on obtaining a diploma as a studiosus philologiae although at the time there existed no proper philological department there. Wolf’s act of selfannouncement and his institutional graduation as a philologist marks the birth of classical philology and the establishing of its autonomy. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is fond of marking ends. Approximately a century later in 1879, after having become—at the age of twenty-four—the youngest chair of classical philology ever, he gave up on philology and chose the role of a Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu d i f f e r e n c e s philosopher. The interesting question here is why Tihanov does not reflect on the clash between philology and theory as part of the emancipation of the new regime of discursive autonomy. It is important to keep track of the historical perspectives Tihanov includes in his account of the birth and death of literary theory, but it is perhaps even more telling to take into consideration the discourses that have been left out. Apart from the American traditions of close reading and distant reading, we can think about the practices of slow reading or the stakes of the philological longue durée. Modern and Alexandrian philologists share the same passion for slow reading, for categorizing, editing, and reinventing the past, for diving into the depths of always fragmented legacies of writing on papyruses, parchments, printed paper, or digital books. This presupposes meeting the past neither as monumental nor as antiquarian history, but as a reflection on the restless contemporary horizon and as a critical form of questioning the present (Nietzsche, On the Advantage). Since philologists by default live simultaneously in two different times, they have to serve two different contexts in at least two different languages. The philologist’s merit is in dealing with heterogeneity, with the controversial dynamics of old and new, of classical and Christian, of canonical and peripheral, of ancient and modern languages. In contrast to world literature, the recognition of incommensurability underlies the very concept of comparative literature: there is always something untranslatable, something radically different, something inaccessible to any known matrix.8 The awareness of this rupture of times, contexts, and languages insists on the element of “an invention (Erfindung), a sleight-of-hand, an artifice (Kunststück), a secret formula” that should bridge the time gap through an interpretation or a conceptualization (Foucault, “Nietzsche” 141). Including the fate of philology on the map sheds light on some implicit trajectories in the narrative of The Birth and Death of Literary Theory. The modal disparities between formalism and Marxism in the twenties and thirties, around which the book is organized, are predated by the clash between philology and theory. Tihanov features the prominent role of German-Jewish philologists between the wars and the invention of the modern history of literature: “[M]odern comparative literature begins life in exile, with the Istanbul works of Auerbach and Spitzer and their postwar continuation in the United States” (Birth 13). All the premises for the birth of modern literary theory are present in the work of Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Karl Voßler:9 exile, heterocultural environment, heteroglossia, and the transformation of the philosophical metadiscourses.10 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu 81 82 The Return to/of Theory Tihanov notes that he will not proceed in this direction because a lot of research has already been done on the topic (188); however, there is more here than meets the eye. Going back to the problem of exemplification, as discussed above, the devil is in the examples. References, quotations, and illustrations can transport invisible intellectual forces. Tihanov refers to David Damrosch’s 1995 “Auerbach in Exile,” considered a point of departure for the third regime of relevance, that is, as marking the precise moment in which the neoliberal discourse of world literature started gaining power. This fact could explain the overexposure of the topic “Auerbach in exile” for the past twenty years as Auerbach has been recognized as the true ancestor of world literature discourse. His essay “The Philology of World Literature” (1952), where the future of these disciplines is being discussed, can be regarded as the most direct connection between the German philologist and current developments. Yet there are also substantial differences between Auerbach’s concept of Weltliteratur and contemporary attempts to return to philology and world literature. In contrast to Damrosch’s project, Auerbach’s pattern of thought is deeply rooted in the humanistic tradition and indebted to Giambattista Vico as precursor of historical relativism and of philology as a new science, and to German Romanticism and Hegel (Auerbach, “Epilegomena” 15, “Giambattista,” and “Vico”). Auerbach predicted that “the notion of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed” (“Philology” 3). The simultaneous processes of homogenization and standardization, driven by the European-American and Russian-Bolshevist domination, would lead to a world literature, realized in “a single literary language” without historical diversity. As it turns out, the last paradigm shift both realized and discontinued Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur.11 It dissociated itself from the anachronistic legacy of the individual-Bildung as an aesthetic and political program. Today’s Anglo-Saxon regime of relevance is dominated by the idea that literature is a mode of reading and circulation in translation, predominantly in English.12 It strictly sets itself apart from Auerbach’s attempt to save language diversity, including classic languages as the foundation of European philology. All this is, as Tihanov points out, well known. But while Auerbach is overexposed today, some of his ideas (humanistic values, historical relativism, multiplicity of languages) are being replaced and abandoned. At the price of a reductive reading—or indeed, a misreading—of his work, Tihanov grants Auerbach the role of mediator between the national-based comparative studies of the nineteenth century and the present market-based adaptation of literature in terms of Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu d i f f e r e n c e s globalization, transnationalism, and translation—the accelerated perpetual flow of information and capital.13 Tihanov’s return to the prominent role of literary theory in Russia and Eastern Europe can be regarded as a response to this simplified narrative and as a move that allows insight into the legacy we carry and the legacy we forget. He prefers to undertake a return to theory rather than a return to philology.14 Literary theory gains its autonomous regime of relevance when it is neither philosophy nor philology, and yet both disciplines continue to disturb its epistemic boundaries. In the cluster of literary studies, the separation between theory and philology was part of the process of emancipation through which theory acquired its methodological power and specific techniques. Nineteenth-century historical philology, with its roots in the humanities, relies on the concept of the individual and on rational control. Nietzsche, as the last philologist, discontinues this tradition and opens another critical episteme. Tihanov points out the pivotal role of Foucault in this agency shift—from author to discourse: “All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur” (“What” 119–20).15 In The Birth and Death of Literary Theory this “anonymity of a murmur” is recognized in the experience of the Russian formalists. No longer is the individualism of the author important (the general framework of the human sciences is abandoned in the past): “Formalism insisted that the writer is unseated from her writing desk by forces that are perhaps not transparent to her, but nevertheless totally amenable to scientific study and rationalization: what governs her work are the intrinsic laws of plot, device, rhyme, and rhythm” (32).16 Shklovsky and his circle gave us an earlier version of this approach to literature that goes beyond authorial agency and by far predates the Foucauldian turn. On a metalevel, Tihanov recalls the larger paradigm of literary history without names, “driven by anonymous discursive powers stronger than the individual writer” (28). Chapter by chapter, he traces how the idea of history without names was embraced by formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, Bakhtin, and semantic paleontology. Literary theory is no longer wholly grounded in the humanistic tradition because it appropriates the methods of the strict sciences. It goes beyond Wilhelm Dilthey’s division of Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, refusing to be classified as a humanistic discipline. It decisively displaces the methods of nation-based philology by revising the heterotopic territory between the host and foreign languages. In addition, among the scientific tools that can be used in literature, it includes models developed Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu 83 84 The Return to/of Theory by logic, information sciences, physics, and mathematics.17 These models aim to develop new methods and vocabulary in order to reach beyond the desk of the author toward the inner microstructures, forms, and phonemic patterns in the literary work. The ambivalent dynamic (antagonistic and yet complementary) between theory and philology materializes in the curious attribution to Jakobson of Nietzsche’s definition of philology as the art of slow reading by Calvert Watkins and Sheldon Pollock. In his 1886 preface to Daybreak, Nietzsche has not completely divorced philology: “[P]erhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading. [ . . . ] [T]o go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento” (5). The very same sentence is attributed to the Russian theorist: “[T]he definition of philology that my teacher Roman Jakobson gave (who got it from his teacher, who got it from his): ‘Philology is the art of reading slowly’ ” (Watkins 25).18 The American Indologist, Pollock, in addressing the new world philology,19 recognizes Nietzsche’s phrase in Jakobson’s definition and then notes that Jakobson was “a major figure in the twentieth-century twilight, [ . . . ] a ‘Russian philologist,’ as he described himself” (“Future” 933). Is Jakobson a Russian philologist, a Slavicist, or is he a literary theorist who is taking part in the process of “the exchange of ideas between metropolitan and émigré Russian culture” (Tihanov, Birth 12)? Nikola Georgiev, one of the most brilliant intellectuals during the communist regime in Bulgaria, cited Jakobson’s self-identification as philologus sum (100).20 The Bulgarian theorist expands this definition by paraphrasing Terence: philologus sum, philologie nihil a me alienum puto (I am a philologist, and I think nothing philological is alien to me). My point here is that there is a perspective in which theory and philology are not in conflict and do not contradict each other but, rather, mutually enhance their power. The return to theory is a sort of synecdoche for the return to philology. Although certain humanist values are set aside and individual authors have lost their status, some philological techniques are being recharged by theory. In many aspects Auerbach’s slow reading of literary works in their original tongue stands a lot closer to Jakobson’s approach than the discourse of world literature might expect. Tihanov’s book comes to show that these intellectual trajectories are more complex because what happens between philology and today’s world literature is nothing short of the birth, the death, and the return (?) of theory. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu d i f f e r e n c e s In order to rethink critically the concept of world literature as a contradictive construct together with its specific ideological sublayers, Tihanov elaborates an epistemological grid of “four major reference points: time, space, language, and, crucially, what one could term self-reflexivity” (“Location” 468). He underscores the possibility of addressing the concept in its plural form simply because there is no single world literature, but rather copresent alternatives. In parallel to the neoliberal transnational global version, we can conceive of world literature as a premodern and preEuropean phenomenon (semantic paleontology), or as a worldwide traveling juncture shuttling between East and West, not confined to the European tradition. The critical assessment of contemporary trends investigates “how premodern forms persist within modernity” (Tihanov, “On the Significance” 424) or unveils the uncanny temporal mechanism whereof contemporary phenomena have already existed in premodern conditions.21 In Tihanov’s conceptual grid, the spatial dimension (the heterotopia of exile and heterocultural environment) is therefore important, but the temporal dimension plays an even more crucial role as the copresence of different historical layers (heterochronia, accumulating time). The uncanny effects of afterlives of circumvented phenomena constitute different trajectories of discontinuous continuities (including the continuity of literary theory today after the paradigm shift). Like Bakhtin, Tihanov is fascinated by the “multitude of previously concealed horizons and voices,” by the diverse semantic deposits of past forms and their use and abuse in the present situation. Of course, the main plotline in The Birth and Death of Literary Theory is the vector of language, or the condition of heteroglossia as a pivotal point for modern literary theory. The act of traversing the chronotopic dimension comes with the ability to switch between languages and transcend national boundaries, which prevents the naturalization of any cultural environment. This traversal produces the estranging distance of self-reflexivity (the heterogeneity of the self as haunted by otherness) that makes possible the questioning of any discursive formation as a conditioned construct. Thus we can suggest the four-dimensional epistemological grid, which includes heterotopia, heterochronia, heteroglossia, and self-reflexivity as methodological instruments for exploring the future of world literature and the uncanny return of literary theory. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu 85 86 The Return to/of Theory Jakobson’s Green Herring: On Self-Reflexivity “It hangs in the drawing room and is green; what is it?” The answer: “A herring.”—“Why in a drawing room?”— “Well, why couldn’t they hang it there?” “Why green?”—“It was painted green.”— “But why?”—“To make it harder to guess.” —Jakobson Jakobson’s “linguistic fundamentalism” is an exemplary case of the regime of discursive autonomy in which literature is approached from the vantage point of its poetic function grounded in language. The poetic function facilitates the conception of literariness neither as public utility nor as individual entertainment. Jakobson explores literature not in translation, but always in its original language so that the linguistic organization of poetry is analyzed through figures of sound and euphonic devices, meter, rhyme, repetitive alliteration, and assonance. Whether the text should be studied in translation or in its original language is the point of a pivotal division among the Russian formalists. Shklovsky (having identified the device of estrangement) and Bakhtin (who theorized the contextual-dialogical pattern) argue that literariness exists regardless of the original language of the work. Jakobson, unlike Shklovsky and Bakhtin, “believed that literariness is lodged in the intricate, fine-grained workings of language. To him, only the language of the original matters, because this intricacy cannot be captured in translation. It was not by chance that Jakobson spent his entire career (when it comes to his work as a literary scholar) analysing texts written in verse, basing these analyses on the language of the original” (Tihanov, Birth 181). In the book’s epilogue, Tihanov explicitly states that the present-day discourse of world literature is anticipated by Shklovsky and Bakhtin’s perspective. Conversely, Jakobson’s theoretical stance has faded, which might explain why there is no separate chapter on his work in the book. And yet, it seems to me that something else is going on. It could be unraveled as a Derridean premise: the key chapter on Jakobson is absent, but traces of his legacy have been disseminated throughout the study.22 What is more, the resurrection of Jakobson (or linguistic fundamentalism) is a palpable factor in Tihanov’s own approach, relying as it does on the climate of polyglossia that was the most important condition in the early stage of literary theory. The intellectual effort to mediate between languages and cultures without erasing their native environment is a significant aspect of Tihanov’s work. One readily notices that his account is situated between Jakobson’s linguistic fundamentalism and Bakhtin’s metalinguistic dialogue Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu d i f f e r e n c e s (apart from English, Tihanov’s articles can be read in several languages, including Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Polish). Tihanov’s sympathy is more with the earlier “fully bilingual existence” of intellectuals in exile than with the scholars of the second wave of French theory in the 1960s and ’70s who discarded the bilingual requisite (Birth 13). One way to tell the story of the fate of literary theory is by following the trajectory of Jakobson’s “peregrinations from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Prague, New York, and other cities, mapping his participation in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and opoyaz, meeting Shklovsky, Troubetzkoy, and Lévi-Strauss, gathering up and synthesizing all the conceptual components defining the structuralist sense of theory and its reconfiguration of the human sciences through the twinned enterprises of linguistics and anthropology” (Rodowick 98). In many ways, Tihanov’s study fills the map of these peregrinations. As already pointed out, The Birth and Death of Literary Theory is focused on the clash between formalism and Marxism and on the mediated forms and fluctuations between them. The antagonism between formalism and Marxism can be traced back to Jakobson’s early article “On Realism in Art” (1921), written in Russian, first published in Czech (1921), and forty years later, finally published in Russian (1962). At the time of its writing, Jakobson was a daring twenty-five-year-old scholar actively involved with the Russian avant-garde: with Aleksei Kruchenykh’s experiment with poetic sound, Velimir Khlebnikov’s invention of the zaum language, and the artistic explorations of futurism and Dada. In the article, Jakobson postulates manifold dispersive layers of realism and asserts “the extreme relativity of the concept of ‘realism’ ” (24), differentiating various attributions and contextualizations of the term depending on the theoretical paradigm. He thus advances the idea of the plurality of realism and anticipates the 1930s Lukács-Brecht debate on real realism.23 As Tihanov points out, this early formalist work can be seen as offering avant la lettre a critique of and an alternative to the Marxist debate on realism. Jakobson insists on strict scholarly terminology in order to avoid the habitual repertoire of positivist historians of literature who shared chatty and charming anecdotes about “life” under the umbrella of realism (Tihanov emphasizes the insistence on scientific rigor as a major feature of the formalist legacy). Instead of the uncritical usage of literary terms, Jakobson demands self-reflexive observation of the multiple uses of the notion of realism. He provides exact definitions of nine forms of realism, endowing them with precise theoretical frameworks and almost mathematical formulas by focusing on the figure of the author (A 1; A 2 ), the reader/critic (B1; B2 ), the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu 87 88 The Return to/of Theory context (C1; C 2 ), the device (D1; D 2 ) and the code (E). In this disposition of the different types of realism, we can retroactively recognize the six communicative functions of language elaborated by Jakobson in “On Realism in Art.” For the purposes of my discussion, the crucial moment concerns two tendencies synchronically operating within the entire model: 1. 2. The typical mode: Its main operators are naturalization and faithfulness to already established conventions of reality. This is the conservative, traditional, canonical trend characterized by its claim to genuine realism. The atypical mode: Its main operator is deformation. Its ruling principles are anomaly and novelty, along with the denial of current conditions and conventions. This mode is representative of revolutionary trends and avant-garde art. Jakobson emphatically separates conservative realism, with its denial of “the self-sufficient aesthetic value of deformation” (24), from higher realism, with its punch for anomaly and distortion of already established verisimilitude. The former is characterized by its resistance to novelty, while the latter insists on its self-reflexive capacity to recognize and discard traditional poetic laws. Both modes can be related to the author, and thus we have the realistic author (A 2 ), who opts for maximum fidelity to truth and accurate depiction of nature or reality, or, conversely, the modern author, with their impetus to be realist but only in a higher sense of the word, as sur-realist, or hyper-realist (A 1 ). This “higher sense” requires the deformation of words and the violation of the common rules and norms of art. The model can also be attributed to the reader’s horizon of expectation, from which there emerges the conservative reader (B 2 ), who expects the familiar deployment of old literary techniques, and the rebellious reader (B1 ), who recognizes the automatization of devices. The conservative reader or critic points out the deformation of established artistic codes as a “distortion of reality” while the rebellious reader recognizes the deformation of the familiar code as a better rendition of reality. On the level of context, we have the historical trend of nineteenthcentury Realism and the subsequent naturalization of this understanding of realism by an accompanying production of the illusion of timelessness, to use Tihanov’s account. As a result, there is progressive, or even avant-garde atypical realism (C1 ), and classic realism (C 2 ). The avant-garde tendency deforms reality, while the classic tendency follows the logic of identification and authenticity. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu d i f f e r e n c e s Not to miss the forest for the trees, the core point of Jacobson’s brief and dense essay has to do with the device. The differences between Shklovsky and Jakobson regarding the status of the device marks the distinction between the theory of estrangement and the poetic function—and the different politics behind them (Tihanov, Birth 39).24 The mode of deformation corresponds to the atypical abnormal device, the mode of naturalization to the typical normal device. Normality or deviation is taken into account with regard to the author, the reader, and/or the context and can match present aesthetic conventions or be in discord and conflict with them. Discussing the different ways of naming the sexual act, Jakobson observes that the process of deformation is always present: there is no zero level of deformation in language. To use the “real names” of copulation is to deform established euphemisms or to skip already accepted metaphors. Thus, in art per se it is not possible to represent an object without deforming it—the shape, the color, the distance, the zoom in and zoom out techniques. Deformation is inevitable in art, but it can be either naive and unaware of its procedures or self-reflexive, manifesting its own principle of refracting reality. The dogmatic East European Stalinist “theory of reflection,” which will take the upper hand and be enforced as the norm in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, definitely represents the naive concept of realism, with its requirements for authenticity and its instructions for maximum verisimilitude by representing typical heroes and typical circumstances. Lukács, as one of the most prominent Marxist advocates of genuine or real realism, contends that there is an authentic homogeneous immediate contiguity between art and reality. In his book on Lukács and Bakhtin, Tihanov studies this debate in detail, noting, “For Lukács, language is completely neutral to the process of reflection” (Master 59). On the other side of the Marxist debate on realism stand Valentin Voloshinov and Mikhail Lifshitz with their concept of mediated realism, a realism refracted by language.25 They insist on a nonauthentic heterogeneous logic involved in the verbal code of production and in the techniques of art. This conceptual discord provided the theoretical framework for battles in which aesthetic considerations were directly intertwined with ideology and politics. Anticipating the debate, Jakobson denies the possibility of one real realism. Scholars who subscribe to the idea of a single genuine realism, he claims, make a reductive generalization, as in the sentence: man, or even better, woman, is typically twenty years old. Apart from demonstrating the heterogeneous uses of the concept, he defines realism on a metalevel as “the requirement of consistent motivation and realization of poetic devices” (27), stressing techniques in art Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu 89 90 The Return to/of Theory and their transformative revolutionary forces. The debates on realism can consequently be structured around the consideration of language: whether its role is recognized (Jakobson, Voloshinov) or ignored (Lukács). If we return to the Armenian riddle in the epigraph, above, the herring is green so as to make us focus on language itself.26 The greenness of the herring is atypical, thus it makes visible the code of the work of art. We are not blindly succumbing to the transparency of poetic devices (as in Barthes’s reality effect). The self-reflexive gesture of art opens it toward its own techniques and makes the code visible; the deformation becomes more palpable. It uncovers the critical potential of art. The self-reflexive function in literature always puts an emphasis on language and discredits naturalization. Jakobson’s article “On Realism in Art” denaturalizes realism, revealing that the very concept of realism is multiple because it implements artistic, ideological, and political premises pertaining to different historical contexts. In a similar manner, Tihanov’s radical historicity discloses the naturalization that produces the effect of timelessness in historical phenomena. “The vector of self-reflexivity [ . . . ] helps us to capture a different set of phenomena: here, literature still engages earlier texts, but it does so in order to ponder the very idea of world literature, not with triumphalist confidence in its own powers of regeneration, but in the low key of skeptical reflection” (“Location” 475). The birth and death of literary theory set limits, allowing precisely this type of low-key skeptical reflection that questions the past in order to face the future. To conclude, Jakobson’s theory and Auerbach’s philology are not opposed to one another. On the contrary, they share common ground in the historical relativity of theoretical concepts, the analysis of style, and the slow reading of literature not in translation but in the original language. The return to philology does not contradict, but rather implies, the return to theory. kamelia spassova is an assistant professor in the Literary Theory Department at the University of Sofia. Her book on the poetics of the example, Event and Example in Plato and Aristotle (Literaturen vestnik, 2012), deals with the tension between literary examples and theoretical discourses. She is currently working on transformations of the concept of mimesis in the twentieth century. Notes 1 For a more detailed account of Tihanov’s concept of regime of relevance, see Nikolchina; and Paskaleva. Tihanov’s key concept is introduced as follows: “The Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu meaning I invest in the term “regime of relevance” harks back to Foucault, but here it has a more specific semantic compass: it refers to a historically available 91 d i f f e r e n c e s constellation of social and cultural parameters that shape the predominant understanding and use of literature for the duration of that particular constellation” (Birth 1–2). 2 Tihanov does not oppose literary theory to world literature as conflicted epistemes; in fact, he insists in the book’s epilogue that the contemporary discourse of world literature is an unreflected-on continuation of the fundamental questions of classical literary theory, mainly the question of language. In this essay, I argue for the unreflective background of so-called world literature and the self-reflective mode of literary theory. 3 I deal in greater detail with the problem of philosophical and theoretical exemplification in Sabitie i primer u Platon i Aristotel (Event and Example in Plato and Aristotle). See also Bové. 4 Lotman conceives the structure of the text as heterogeneous because it is at least dually coded. Semiosis is the process of inner hybridization, which has an automodeling capacity to bring novelty. For a discussion of the limits of self- or metadescription that considers the center-periphery relation in Lotman, see Kliger. 5 Julia Kristeva wrote a short essay on the legacy of Juri Lotman in 1994 that was published in pmla (“On Yury Lotman”). A bright and innovative founder of the TartuMoscow Semiotic School, Lotman had died just a few months earlier, in October 1993. Kristeva points out her theoretical connection to Lotman, comparing her notion of intertextuality to his idea of a secondary modeling system. 6 The fact that Tihanov refers to Benjamin and his idea of history in the end of the prologue is already Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu telling (Birth 7). For Tihanov, it is crucial to deconstruct the illusion of timelessness in any discursive formation. For further reading on the structural and conceptual characteristics of afterness and afterlife (Nachleben) in Aby Warburg and Benjamin, see Richter 2–7). 7 Turner’s short introductory definition of philology emphasizes language: “Philology referred to all studies of language, of specific languages, and (to be sure) of texts. [ . . . ] The word philology in the nineteenth century covered three distinct modes of research: 1) textual philology (including classical and biblical studies, ‘oriental’ literatures such as those in Sanskrit and Arabic, and medieval and modern European writings); 2) theories of the origin and nature of language; and 3) comparative study of the structures and historical evolution of languages and of language families” (Turner x). 8 For further conceptualization of incommensurability and untranslatability in the notion of comparative literature, see Derrida. 9 For the notion of European philology as a humanistic tool, see Angelov. 10 The letters between Auerbach and Benjamin offer a remarkable critical reflection of the human sciences and their potential to become a bridge between modern Turkey and the classic European heritage. Kemal Atatürk’s reforms were seen as antitraditional nationalism, “the establishment of a fantastic relation to a primal Turkish identity, technological modernization in the European sense, in order to triumph against a hated and yet admired Europe with its own weapon” (Barck 82). The paradox is that between the wars, Western philology and 92 The Return to/of Theory humanism were sheltered in pro-European Turkey. For further reading on the situation of the German- Jewish intellectual between East and West, see Konuk. 11 Said’s role is that of a mediator between Auerbach’s legacy and the post-postcolonial studies of literature. The transition between them is crucial. 12 Of course, different voices with their own theoretical backgrounds can be discerned in the contemporary discourse of world literature. One of the most vital attempts is Apter’s project focused on language zones. She reflects on the politics of untranslatability in the frame of Benjamin’s translation theory by placing it between Auerbach’s philology and the historical materialism of the Frankfurt School. See Apter 7–9. 13 Vilashini Cooppan marks two perspectives on the new cosmopolitan world literature: either the utopia of economic and cultural exchange or the dystopia of homogenization (“World” 15). While definitely siding with the first option, Vilashini looks for a balancing point between global omnipresence and local exoticism precisely with Theory (specifically, poststructuralism) as a tool. I find her return to the Freudian concept of the uncanny (das Unheimlich) and its Romantic genealogy productive. The uncanny effect, as Cooppan points out, makes differences in the very act of repetition, but more importantly it also temporalizes those differences. “The literary zone of ‘what is like-but-unlike’ marks out a strikingly similar space to the uncanny’s disjunctive merging of the familiar and the strange, the present and the past, the repressed and the returned” (“Ghosts” 21). Such a mode of reading demands double vision, the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/32/1/74/925734/0320074.pdf by BROWN UNIVERSITY, differences@brown.edu recognition of similarities, and the awareness of eventual misrecognition (negative anagnorisis) of what only seems to be similar, but is not, in geopolitical and historical terms. Notably, the practice of uncanny reading implies estrangement of the familiar, suggesting the pertinence of Shklovsky’s theory to the uncanny. 14 In the short essay “The Return to Philology,” Paul de Man reflects on practices of teaching literature. He argues that the time has come to go beyond the clash of philology and theory, contending that the two discourses should be opponents no more, but partners instead—as were poetics and rhetoric in the past: “[T]he turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces” (26). He insists that the partnership of theory and philology goes beyond the humanistic and historical disciplines, that is, the entanglement between philology and hermeneutics. The slogan the return to philology was also proclaimed in 1987 at the What Is Philology? conference organized by Jan Ziolkowski at Harvard University. De Man thus seems to have anticipated the new wave of returning to (digital) philology (Ziolkowski). 15 Tihanov does not, however, delve further into how the founders of modernity, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, were modified by Lacan and Althusser and then by Foucault, Kristeva, Todorov, and French theory after 1968. This intriguing scenario, he alludes, will be developed in another project. For the Second Golden Age of Theory after May ’68, with its complex trajectory between Western Europe and America, see Tihanov, “Romanticism’s.” 93 d i f f e r e n c e s 16 These tools of literariness are compared with the dreamwork and the verbal lapsus in Freud’s method because they mark the semiotic and poetic layers of language (to use Kristeva’s terminology). 17 De Man emphasizes metalanguage as a major premise for the occurrence of literary theory (8). 18 The phrase was mentioned by Watkins at the What Is Philology? conference and repeated there by Jonathan Culler, Barbara Johnson, and Jan Ziolkowski. 19 Pollock is a coeditor, along with Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang, of the fine volume World Philology, which merges the discourses of world literature and the new philology. 20 For more on Jakobson’s lecture in Bulgaria, see Nikolchina, “Of Bugs.” 21 The idea of persistent forms in the tradition of historical poetics (through the prism of Alexander Veselovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg) is a promising project driven by Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov. 22 The Derridean tendency in Tihanov’s book is thoroughly developed by Tenev. 23 Works Cited Lukács’s position on reality was clearly manifested in his critique of Bloch and expressionism in “Realism in the Balance” (1938), where he criticized the technique of montage in Joyce, a technique incapable of giving a total and coherent view of reality, although it could offer fractions of reality: “Such effects arise from its technique of juxtaposing heterogeneous, unrelated pieces of reality torn from their context [ . . . ]. However, as soon as this onedimensional technique—however legitimate and successful it may be in a joke—claims to give shape to reality (even when this reality is viewed as unreal), to a world of relationships (even when these relationships are held to be specious), or of totality (even when this totality is regarded as chaos), then the final effect must be profound monotony” (Lukács 43). The axis of homogeneity and heterogeneity is an important distinctive symptom in approaching different mimetic concepts. 24 For further details about the internal debate on poetic function and especially Mukařovský’s dissatisfaction with it, see Stoyanov. 25 On Voloshinov’s theory of refraction as a more complex dynamic between the work of art and the outer world, see Kalinova. Voloshinov’s theory demonstrates the wager of a completely different mimetic theory based on a Marxist theory of language. 26 For Jakobson’s metacritical position in the debates of realism as a linguistic construct or a faithful representation, see Herman. For reading Jakobson’s metalingual function as a metapoesis, see Finke. Agamben, Giorgio. “What Is a Paradigm?” The Signature of All Things: On Method. New York: Zone, 2009. 9–32. Angelov, Angel. “Erich Auerbach’s ‘European Philology’?” Philosophising in Exile. Spec. issue of Divinatio: Studia culturologica series 28 (2008): 51–86. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton up, 2006. 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