“World Theory”

“World Theory” is a ridiculous construction, but so is the concept of “World Literature,” which it is meant to invoke and perhaps adapt for its own purposes. In the larger field of literary and cultural studies, there are more and more projects that are looking to reposition theory on the geopolitical map, much as we saw in the 1990s with the expansion of the concept of “World Literature” from Goethe’s canonical Weltliteratur to include noncanonical and non-Western literatures. What I’m proposing is that the field of East European ¹ literary studies take note, and/or promote, a similar broadening of scope in terms of methodology and theoretical framing. This is a different claim than the equally valid and important call to translate and teach more literature from the region, and to defend the tiny slices of territory that East European literary studies (outside of the region itself) now occupy within Slavic, Comparative Literature, and occasionally Modern Language Departments. While that is a worthy goal, we must also be realistic about the future of national literature departments in environments like the North American university, where there are the increasingly bitter battles for enrollments and faculty lines. The approach I’m suggesting is directed more towards the audience outside of our enclaves, to scholars in other departments across the humanities and social sciences who share our conceptual frameworks, politics, or simply sensibilities. It is time to remind them of the role that our region has played in “world theory,” and to introduce new voices from Eastern Europe, both historically and in the contemporary, postsocialist period. Using a few case studies below, I will try to show how this has already been happening over the last decade, as well as some important trajectories for future work in this area.

Why “world” and not “global”? In addition to the intentional parallel with world literature, I’d also like to distinguish this set of scholarly practices from the tendency to treat all contemporary issues through the lens of globalization. ² While there is no point in trying to ignore or avoid the effects of globalization on contemporary culture, the theoretical apparatus that describes these effects has its own genealogy with a different geographic logic, which is in fact designed for export. In other words, while globalization theory is in fact a very useful approach to studying Eastern Europe, it can be easily customized to do so, as it was developed with the postsocialist landscape in mind. The various approaches that I’m grouping under the rubric World Theory, by contrast, have their roots in the era of the Three Worlds, and are still grappling with the ghosts of borders and regimes that diverted and marked their paths. “World” in this sense denotes a historicized theoretical lens, much as the “world” in world literature corresponded to a deep historicization of the literary canon.

The prosthetic construction “World [X]” does not come without baggage, however. To start with, there is the implicit presumption that “theory” without qualifiers is a Western institution while “world theory” designates everything else. This is in fact exactly one of the ideas that “world literature” was supposed to challenge. Postcolonial theory and its descendants blazed a similar trail decades ago, reversing the center-to-periphery path of theory with institutionalized responses from decolonized zones. ³ In our field, there is now a satisfyingly long trail of studies that try to work out how and when one might apply postcolonial theory in Eastern Europe; in literary studies these efforts date back to the mid-1990s, though the first prominently placed article was David Chioni Moore’s 2001 essay “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique.” ⁴ Perhaps the most interesting and complex treatment of this question can be found in Anita Starosta’s 2009 dissertation Eastern Europe, Literature, and Post-Imperial Difference, in which she works through all of the existing literature and arrives at the term “post-imperial difference” as the best marker of how exactly postcolonial and poststructuralist theory can be expressed in East European terms. ⁵ By extending that approach to include the rest of the critical theory canon, and rigorously examining its relationship to the so-called Second World, we can recover a muted history of intellectual exchange and transfer of knowledge between East and West that helped to form the concepts that make up that canon (subsequently rebranded as a German, French, British, and American endeavor). What World Theory calls for is a reintegration of such lines of inquiry that were overshadowed first by the chaos of the Second World War and then by the politics of the Cold War. There is a new generation of scholars in the region (and beyond) that is the most active in recovering these threads, and it is their work that will create new bridges and connections to the wider field of literary and critical studies.

Another problematic aspect of World Literature associated with the Cultural Turn in theory is that it simply became a new canon. ⁶ David Damrosch, whose name has become almost synonymous with the concept, has warned us of the danger of certain World Lit luminaries (such as Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe) eclipsing lesser-known writers from the same national or linguistic tradition (such as R.K. Narayan or Amos Tutuola, respectively). ⁷ This pattern faithfully repeats the original paradigm that World Literature was intent on subverting, when non-Western writers were eclipsed by the European and American canon. If we put this into World Theory terms, it becomes a question of not letting the superstars—Lukács, Bakhtin, Žižek, to name three—stand in as the sole representatives of the East in the theoretical canon (e.g., we might supplement those three with figures like György Márkus, Valentin Voloshinov, and Rastko Močnik). As hard as it might be to avoid, diversifying the canon in this way should never be a defensive gesture, feeding the understandable desire for each East European nationality to lay claim to the world tradition. Rather, such explorations should always be research-driven, a natural by-product of deepening the context in which we understand the aesthetics of revisionist Marxism, or structuralist theories of culture, or that distinct flavor of Marxist-grounded psychoanalysis that flourished in Ljubljana in the 1980s.

Beyond these cautionary tales from the archives of World Literature, why does the concept of World Theory potentially help East European literary studies to continue its story? Another important contribution comes from Caryl Emerson, in her essay “Answering for Central and Eastern Europe,” in which she responds to the 2006 Saussy report on the state of comparative literature:

The second impression leaping out of the report was the prominent role played in the elaboration of “comparative ways of thought” by Russian and Central European literary theory. What had broken the visibility barrier was not the languages themselves and (except for the eminently translatable Great Russian Novel) not their classic literary texts, but an arsenal of devices, methods, and rationales (such as “literariness”) for linking all literary products at some higher level, independent of particulars but made common, and thus comparable, by a set of universal constants. ⁸

Emerson is inspired here by Galin Tihanov’s work, another example of someone practicing World Theory. Since his brave and much-cited 2004 article, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?)” Tihanov has published a series of texts and ultimately the co-edited volume Critical Theory in Russia and the West, which traces the path of theory from East to West. ⁹ This is a distinct practice from the application of various Western-branded theories (queer, postcolonial, geocritical) to East European texts, because Tihanov insists that the entire animal we call critical theory is always already from both sides of the formerly divided Europe. He satisfyingly destroys any premise of an East/West time lag, re-historicizing the development of theory according to what he calls “regimes of relevance.” ¹⁰

Meanwhile, what Tihanov is doing with one path of critical theory, others such as Imre Szeman, Rossen Djagalov, and György Túry are doing with another: that of cultural studies and the legacy of the left after 1989. ¹¹ One example of this conversation in World Theory was a set of roundtables at the 2011 MLA titled “Cultural Studies in Post-Socialist Spaces.” ¹² In this setting and elsewhere, scholars have been trying to retrace the intertwined histories of the study of culture in East and West, with a particular interest in how the legacy of kulturologia is reconciled with “cultural studies” today. In its historical dimension, this means recovering a lost history of academic exchange and translation during the Cold War, which researchers like Túry are painstakingly reconstructing through libraries, archives, and personal interviews. ¹³ They have found that key texts of the Birmingham School along with contemporary research on mass media were in fact read by Hungarians and Poles in the 1960s and 1970s, understood in the context of revisionist and alternative marxisms of that time, and then blended with the Study of Culture as it was formally institutionalized in Eastern Europe. ¹⁴ At the same time, Western marxist critics were reading translations of selected texts from the East. There is one story to be told about how the development of Cultural Studies is indebted to the dialogue and exchange among the transnational, alternative left—this would be a parallel project to Tihanov’s account of the path of critical theory through the East. And there is yet another, intergenerational, story which is still being written about the interaction between Western-branded “cultural studies” and the remains of kulturologia in today’s Eastern Europe. For example, we might look at the special issue of the Hungarian journal Helikon published in 2005 in which the editors summarize:

When introducing cultural studies and its success story in the 1990s, the authors of this issue aimed to represent the different traditions of cultural studies with an eye on the Hungarian context. . . . [W]e wished to present the success and the crisis of expansion in the US, the complexity of influentual French authors both in their own and in an international context, the current developments of kulturwissenschaft in German-speaking countries, attempts similar to those of cultural studies in the Hungarian context, together with the formation of a European cultural studies. The overarching aim was to inform and contribute to a conscious reception of cultural studies in Hungary, both in the humanities and the more restricted area of literary studies. ¹⁵

There is an important juxtaposition here between the larger field of cultural studies and literary studies in particular. In fact, that is part of the institutional history of the region: after 1989, critical and literary theory traveled back from West to East via departments of English or aesthetics (Hungary), or via newly established programs such as gender studies, minority studies, or similar (Poland, Czech Republic). ¹⁶

One last example of how World Theory is being practiced today is the recent PIASA publication New Perspectives on Polish Culture. ¹⁷ This is a much more conservative idea than the two previous ones, but still important if the goal is to keep the field of East European literary studies alive and vital. New Perspectives represents a stitching together of contemporary Polish literary criticism in Poland, the UK, and North America. It acknowledges one of the basic truths about our field: that it was artificially divided by the Iron Curtain, when Polonists in the West did not directly engage with literary criticism as it was practiced in Poland during the Cold War. For a few years after 1989, the hangover from this division meant that the two academic contexts continued on slightly separate trajectories. But now we have an entirely new generation of scholars in the region, and we in the dwindling field of Anglophone East European literary studies need to turn to our colleagues “in-country” in order to reinvigorate our thinking and refresh our approaches to our work. To practice World Theory is, of course, to read theory around the world wherever our linguistics abilities permit; we can take this one step farther and bring theorists from the world into our academic context and into English. That’s what New Perspectives has done (and they have another volume planned on culture), and as a result I can now introduce my Polish literature students to the work of Przemek Czapliński, Tomasz Bilczewski, and Jerzy Jarzębski in English. My suggestion is that we could do this thematically as well (e.g., a volume on animation and the grotesque), crossing national literature boundaries, but insisting on including leading critics from both sides of the former divide—wherever they happen to have ended up.

The proposed neologism World Theory needs no afterlife beyond this short essay. Its role here is simple: to highlight and encourage a nascent trend that moves beyond the North American canon of theory and criticism, both by revisiting its genealogy and by diversifying its participants. In the context of East European literary studies, this re-framing has become necessary in research, teaching, and institutional contexts alike. To summarize, there are several things at stake: (1) we need to recuperate lesser-known approaches and figures from Eastern Europe whose theoretical trajectories cross paths with canonical Western theorists and/or those already canonized by the West (Lukács, Žižek); (2) by engaging contemporary scholarship from the region that already takes this into account, we can introduce these lesser-known voices to the rest of Anglophone academics; (3) it is time for us to turn to theory and theorists from Eastern Europe for a greater purpose than simply testimony about Eastern Europe; (4) we should broaden the field of cultural studies to include the stories not told about the study of culture in the former socialist states. If in doing so, we can raise the visibility of our region in the wider domain of literary and cultural studies, then we are helping to ensure its survival beyond the next time a faculty line in Czech literature is not renewed, or an entire Slavic Department is collapsed into a larger Modern Languages and Literatures Program. More importantly, we can give scholars with no particular connection to Eastern Europe, or no particular connection to literature, a good reason to learn about the role that people from this region have played in the world of theory, and in the world itself.