8/6/2019 comparibility culler

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/comparibility-culler 1/4

University of Oklahoma

ComparabilityAuthor(s): Jonathan CullerSource: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Comparative Literature: States of the Art(Spring, 1995), pp. 268-270Published by: University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151134

Accessed: 23/12/2009 01:30

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=univokla.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of 

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Oklahoma is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World 

 Literature Today.

8/6/2019 comparibility culler

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/comparibility-culler 2/4

Comparability

By JONATHANCULLER What makescompar-ison possible? If wearereflecting heoret-

icallyon the nature of comparative iterature, henwe need to attempt o workout the basisof compar-ison in literary tudies,the nature of comparabilityitself. Althoughthe questionis not often explicitlydebated, it underliesimportantshifts in the disci-

pline. Everyoneinterestedin the field is likely toknow one storyof comparativeiterature: nce upona time, comparative iterature ocused on sourcesand influence,bringing ogetherworks wherethereseemed a direct inkof transmissionwhich subtend-ed and servedto justifycomparison.But then com-

parative iterature iberated tself from the study of

sources and influence and acceded to a broaderregimeof intertextual tudies broaderbut less welldefined where n principleanythingcould be com-

paredwith anythingelse. At this point we begantohear talk of a "crisisof comparativeiterature,"nodoubt because of the difficultyof explaining he na-ture of the new comparabilityhat served to struc-ture and, in principle, o justify comparativeitera-ture as a discipline.

The problem of the nature of comparabilitysrenderedmore acuteby the shift of comparativeit-eraturefrom a Eurocentric o a global discipline,thoughthatmay not appear o be the case. We arenow in a phase,it seems,wherethe problemcanap-

parentlybe set aside, because a good deal of newworkin comparativeiterature s focusingon cross-cultural contacts and hybriditywithin postcolonialsocieties and within the literatures of colonizingpowers.There is a sense in whichthe most excitingwork in the field is based on a modernizedversionof the study of sources and influences:insofar as

comparative tudy is based on the diverse literaryand cultural nfluences at work in Derek Walcott's

Omeros,r SalmanRushdie'sSatanicVerses,r Ous-mane Sembene's Les bouts de bois de Dieu, or

Rodolpho Gonzalez's I Am Joaquin I Yo soy Joaquin,comparisons basedon direct culturalcontacts andtraceablenfluences.But in principle he problemof

comparability emains unsolved more acute than

ever.What, in this newly globalizedspace, justifiesbringing wo ormoretextstogether?

In this brief paperI can

scarcelydo more than

pose the problem, but I propose to approachit

obliquely, n homageto a brilliantyoung compara-tist, a teacher in the Departementde Litterature

Compareeat the Universitede Montreal,who waskilledin the crash of an AmericanEagle plane out-side Chicago n the fall of 1994. His name was Bill

Readings.Educatedat Oxford,he hadtaughtat theUniversitede Geneve, SyracuseUniversity,and theUniversite de Montreal.If I approachmy topic byaskingwhat Bill might have said about it, I do sowith the realization hat in losing Bill Readingswehave lost someone whose responseto a particulartopic couldnot be predicted,exceptthatit would be

enormously hrewdandinteresting.

At the time of his death Bill was finishingrevi-sions to a book on the university not the most ex-

citingof topics.Most booksabout the university rewritten by retiring university administratorsandseem destinedfor the remainder able even as theycome off the press.And perhaps his one will be no

different,but it does take as its point of departurethe fact that today the tone of self-satisfactionhathas markedso manybooks on the university, rom

Jacques Barzun to JaroslavPelikan, is no longeravailable.Today, Readingswrites, "No one of uscan seriously maginehimself or herself as the heroof the storyof the university,as the instantiation fthe cultured ndividual hat the entiregreatmachinelaborsdayandnightto produce. . . The grandnar-

rativeof the universitycentered on the productionof a liberal,reasoning ubject, s no longeravailableto us."1This is in part,of course,becausewe havecometo see that the subject s gendered,racialized.

Kantgaveus the model of the modernuniversityorganizedby a single regulatorydeal, the principleof Reason. Humboldtand the GermanIdealistsre-

placed the notion of Reason with that of Culture,centering he universityon the dual task of researchandteaching,the productionand inculcationof na-tional self-knowledge.But now the model of the

Universityof Culture, he universitywhose task wasto produce cultured individuals, citizens imbuedwith a national culture,has in the West been re-

placed by what Readingscalls, in a phrasethatres-onates for those of us in the Americanacademy,"TheUniversityof Excellence."

The crucial hingaboutexcellence,he pointsout,is that it has no content (thereneed be no agree-ment about what is excellent). In that sense, it islike the cash nexus. It has no content and thusserves to introduce here we come to my topiccomparability.As Readings explains,"Itsvery lack

Jonathan Culler is the Class of 1916 Professor of English andChair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell

University. Author of On Deconstruction nd other books on criti-cal theory, he is at work on A VeryShort Introduction o LiteraryTheory or Oxford University Press and a longer study of Baude-

laire, The Devil's Part: Baudelaire'sPoetry.

8/6/2019 comparibility culler

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/comparibility-culler 3/4

CULLER 269

of referenceallows excellence to functionas a prin-cipleof translatabilityetweenradicallydifferent d-ioms."2As British and American academics hear

endlessly romadministratorshese days,everyunitof the university,from Classics to TransportationandParking, an and will be judgedby its successinachievingexcellence. And excellenceis determinednot by intrinsiccharacteristics f one's activity,nor

by a relation to some externalpurpose,but, mostoften, by something ike polls: ratingsof some sort,where people supposedto be more or less knowl-

edgeable,usuallyotheradministrators, re asked to

producerankingsbased on theirperceptionsof ex-cellence. And if you are asked to fill out such a sur-

vey, you are likelyto do so (howevermuch or little

knowledge you may possess) by asking yourself,"Well, et's see now. Which are the departmentsn

my field that people generally hink are the best?"Excellence s determinedby whatpeoplethink other

people mightthink excellent.I am reminded of a remarkin George W. S.Trow'swonderfulbookIn the Context fNo Context,whichdeserves o be better known as a guideto ourcondition. Trow identifies as a crucialthough un-

recognizedwatershedin the history of American

modernity "the moment when a man namedRichard Dawson, the host of a program called

'FamilyFeud,' asked contestants to guess what a

poll of a hundredpeople had guessedwould be the

heightof the averageAmericanwoman.Guess what

they'veguessed.Guess whatthey've guessedthe av-

erage s."3This about our invention of processesof

producing rankings while evading problems of

knowledgeandreferentiality.

In the Universityof Excellence the questionbe-comes, "Areyou in the top ten or twentyor fiftyofwhateverit is you are?" judged by criteria thatneed not be specified,so accustomedare we now tothis abstract, nonreferential idea of excellence.

(Even surveys hat seek to be more seriousby refin-

ing theirquestionsmust, in order to retaincompa-rability,make themessentially mptyof reference o

anyspecificstandard.Thus a questionaboutthe ex-cellence of units andprogramsmightbe broken nto

questionsabout the excellence of faculty,the excel-lence of students,the excellence of facilities,and so

on.) The idea of excellenceenablesus to make com-

parableentities which have little in common as tostructureor function, input or output. But that is

onlyhalf of its bureaucratic sefulness. t also makespossible the avoidance of substantive argumentsabout what teachers, students, and administratorsshouldactuallybe doing.Everyone's askis to striveforexcellence,however hatmightbe defined.

For example,our Departmentof TransportationandParkingat Cornell receivedan award or excel-lence from its professionalorganization,apparentlyfor its success in discouragingparkingon campus(success in "decreasingdemand,"they call it) by

charging ncreasinglyhigherfees and progressivelyeliminatingconvenientparking paces.But it is notutterly impossibleto imagine that excellence heremight have been assigned precisely the oppositecontent: excellence might conceivably consist ofmaking it easier for faculty to park on campus,thoughI agree hatthis is not very ikely.

At the moment I am servingon a task force ongraduateeducation, with representativesrom theschools of law, business,veterinarymedicine,engi-neering, and hotel administrationon my campus.We have very different deas, I would guess, aboutwhat the goals and means of educationshould beand aboutwhat sort of thingsourgraduate tudentsshould be doing, but all this seems to be bracketedas irrelevant s we all agree hat"excellence" houldbe ourgoal and (alas!)thateverybody houldbe re-viewed to see that they are workingtoward it. AsBill Readingswrites, "Excellenceshares with Ma-

chiavelli'svirtu he advantageof permittingcalcula-tion on a homogenous scale." It is a principleofaccountingand bureaucraticcontrol. Bureaucracyworks more efficiently f it can avoidbecomingin-volved in argumentsabout the contents of variousactivitieswith people who know more than the ad-ministrators, f it can operate at the level of thequantification f excellence,where the comparabili-ty it establishesprovides ustificationor the alloca-tion of resources.As a principleof unrestrictedac-counting, excellence draws only one boundary,writes Readings, "the boundarythat protects theunrestricted owerof the bureaucracy."

But it is important o stress,I think, that excel-lence is not an idea foisted on universitiesby corpo-

rate managementand its representatives n boardsof trustees. It has, on the contrary,come to be the

way in which the university, n the United States,achieves he self-consciousness upposedto guaran-tee its intellectual autonomy. Unlike business,which is interestedonlyin the bottomline,we in the

university redefinedby ourpursuitof excellence.Athousandreportsand brochures ell the same tale.Contentless xcellence ourcomparability.

I am interestedin the relationshipbetween the

comparabilityof comparative literature and the

comparability nstituted by excellence, which, tosum up, has the followingcharacteristics: ) it pur-ports to have content but actuallydoes not; 2) it

grantsgroupsconsiderable reedom(it doesn't mat-ter what you do so long as you do it excellently),whichis crucial o bureaucratic fficiency;but 3) ul-timately t is a mechanismfor the reductionor ex-clusion of activities hat do not succeedby this mea-sure. How does the comparabilityof comparativeliterature omparewiththis?

The intertextualnatureof meaning the fact that

meaninglies in the differencesbetweenone text orone discourseand another makes iterary tudyes-sentially, fundamentally comparative,but it also

8/6/2019 comparibility culler

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/comparibility-culler 4/4

270 WORLDLITERATURE ODAY

produces a situation in which comparabilityde-

pends upon a culturalsystem, a generalfield thatunderwrites omparison.The meaningof a text de-

pends on its relations to others within a cultural

space,such as that of WestEuropeanculture,whichis in part why comparative iteraturehas been somuch inclined to remainWestern and European nits focus. The more sophisticatedone's understand-

ing of discourse, he harder t is to compareWesternand non-Westerntexts, for each depends for its

meaningandidentityon its placewithin a discursive

system disparatesystems that seem to make the

putativecomparability f texts eitherillusoryor, atthevery east,misleading.

What sort of comparability,hen, couldguidethetransformation f comparativeiterature roma Eu-rocentricdiscipline o a moreglobalone? There is adifficultproblemhere, it seems to me. On the one

hand, as my colleagueNatalie Melas argues,com-

parisonsuch as justifiesa disciplineconsolidates astandard r normwhich then functions o givevalueto works that match up to it and to exclude thosethat do not, so that comparison the principleof

comparability rather than opening new possibili-ties for culturalvalue, more often than not restrictsandtotalizes t.4But, on the otherhand,aswe trytoavoid this impositionof particularnorms, we mayrisk alling ntothe alternative ractice,whichRead-

ings's account of excellence describes, where thestandard s keptnonreferential vacuous so thatitis not imposingparticular equirementsbut where,in the end, it providesa bureaucraticather han anintellectualmechanism orregulationand control.

The problemof comparison s that it seems in-

evitablyto generate a standard,or ideal type, ofwhich the texts comparedcome to function as vari-ants. And comparatists odayareeagerto avoidthis

implicitresult of measuringone culture's texts bysome standard extrinsic to that culture. Yet themore we try to deploy a comparabilityhat has no

implicitcontent,the more we riskfalling nto a situ-ation ike that of the Universityof Excellence,wherean apparent ack of concern for content your de-

partment ando what it likes,provided t does it ex-

cellently is in the end only the alibi for a controlbased on bureaucratic ather hanacademicand in-tellectualprinciples.

The virtue of a comparabilitybased on specificintellectual norms or models

generic, thematic,historical is that they are subjectto investigationandargumentn waysthat the vacuousbureaucraticnorms arenot. One solution, then, is to attemptto

spell out the assumptionsand norms that seem tounderwriteone's comparisons, o that they do notbecome implicit terms. A model here might beErich Auerbach'sconceptionof the Ansatzpunkt: .

specificpoint of departure, onceived not as an ex-

ternalpositionof masterybut as a "handle"or par-tial vantage point that enables the critic to bringtogethera varietyof culturalobjects."The charac-teristic of a good point of departure,"writes Auer-bach in his essay "Philologyand Weltliteratur"is

its concretenessand its precisionon the one hand,and on the other, its potentialfor centrifugal adia-tion."5This mightbe a theme, a metaphor,a detail,a structuralproblem, or a well-defined culturalfunction. I can imaginebasing cross-cultural om-

parison on linking principleswhose very arbitrari-ness or contingencywill preventthem from givingrise to a standardor ideal type, such as comparingworksby authorswhose lastnamebeginswithB>orworkswhose numericalplacein a bibliographys di-visible by thirteen. I confess, though, that this is

scarcely he sortof thingAuerbachhad in mind andnot a generalor principledsolutionto the problemof comparability.A furtherpossibility s to attempt

to locate the comparative erspectivegeographicallyand historically:nstead of imagining he compara-tive perspectiveas a global overview, one mightstress the value, for instance, of comparingEuro-

pean literaturesromAfrica, or their relations o thecultural productions of a particularAfrican mo-ment. Better such points of departure hat imposecriteria and norms than the fear that comparisonswill be odious. The danger,I repeat, is that com-

paratists'fear that their comparisonswill imposeimplicitnorms and standardsmay giverise to a vac-uousnessthat is as difficult o combat as is the no-tion of excellencewhich administratorsreusingto

organizeandreorganizeheAmericanuniversity.The difficultyof the problemmakesme regret he

more thatBill Readings,who mighthavehad entic-ing suggestions o offer,is no longerwith us. I hopethat his book will help us to thinkabout compara-tive literatureas well as about the institutionsinwhich we labor and to which he devoted so much

energyandintelligence.CornellUniversity

1William Readings, The UniversityBeyond Culture:The Idea ofExcellence,ambridge,Ma., HarvardUniversityPress, orthcom-

ing.The quote s frompage17 of themanuscript.2Furtherquotationsare all from "The Idea of Excellence,"

chapter2 of TheUniversity eyondCulture.3GeorgeW. S. Trow,In theContextfNo Context, oston,Lit-

tle, Brown, 1981,p. 58.4See Natalie Melas'spaper,"Versionsof Incommensurabili-

ty,"elsewheren this issueof WLT.5ErichAuerbach,"Philology nd Weltliteratur,"r. Marie and

EdwardSaid, Centennial eview,13:1 (Winter 1969), p. 15. Iowe this reference o David Chioni Moore'sstimulatingdiscus-sion in "Comparative iterature o Weltkulturwissenschaft:eme-

dyinga FailedTransition," paper or the TwentiethSouthern

Comparative iteratureAssociationmeeting,October 1994. Seealso his unpublishedDuke Universitydissertation,"Geo/graphyWithoutBorders:Metaphors f Structuren 20thCenturyWorldLiterature ndCulture."