[D66] McKenzie Wark on The Bourgeois

[Nord]

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1730&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint


    McKenzie Wark <http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?cid=787>onThe
    Bourgeois : Between History and LiteratureandDistant Reading


      The Engine Room of Literature: On Franco Moretti

June 5th, 2013RESET 
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IT USED TO BE a terrific insult, to call someone or something 
“bourgeois,” but it doesn’t work so well these days, since nobody seems 
to know what it means. While pretty much everyone, from left to right, 
agrees that our world is a capitalist one, the notion that the culture 
of those who rule it is “bourgeois” seems no longer to hold. The 
bourgeois was always, as Franco Moretti puts it, “an enigmatic creature, 
idealistic and worldly,” and the form that best mapped out the 
boundaries and the gray compromises between these poles of bourgeois 
identity was the realist novel. In/The Bourgeois: Between History and 
Literature/, Moretti shows how the novel as form served as the capacious 
and adaptable home within which the bourgeois could both assert and 
camouflage itself.

The word “bourgeois” came late to English, where the more discreet term 
“middle class” has long prevailed. But the bourgeois could only pose as 
a representative of the “middle” so long as an aristocracy held the 
formal reigns of power. With the passing of the last remnants of feudal 
society, bourgeois culture had the difficult job of asserting its 
specificity while finding a language through which to speak for the 
whole social order. Moretti tracks the evolution of this attempt through 
the form of the novel. Like the great Marxist literary theorist György 
Lukács before him, Moretti thinks, as he puts it, that “forms are the 
abstract of social relationships: so, formal analysis is in its own 
modest way an analysis of power.” Moretti has curiously little to say 
about narratives or characters. His method is to track the significance 
of particular keywords, and the texture of particular kinds of 
grammatical form — methods that are controversial, at least in the small 
world of literary studies, but that, as I will attempt to show shortly, 
may be emblematic in their own way of our times.

But first, the 19th-century novel. It has to be said: the realist novel 
can be frightfully dull. Bourgeois form is above all/prosaic/. It lacks 
the transcendent leap toward the heavens of its ancestors, the epic and 
the romance, the tragic glamour of regicide or the passion of the savior 
passing between worlds. The bourgeois realist novel is as horizontal as 
a pipeline. Its momentum is usually heavy, a slow accumulation in the 
face of obstacles. It is about making something of this world, not 
transcending it in favor of another. As Moretti shows, bourgeois prose 
changed the whole meaning of adventure. The adventurer was once a 
merchant who set out not knowing to whom he would sell or from whom he 
would buy. Fortune was once the Goddess of uncanny weather. But the 
bourgeois makes her over into a figure whose odds can be calculated. The 
bourgeois turns adventure into the calculus of arbitrage, of the canny 
knack of buying cheap and selling dear.

Daniel Defoe’s/Robinson Crusoe/(1719) is a precursor here. Crusoe’s 
adventures are on the cusp between the older, wilder sense of adventure 
and a new sensibility. The shipwrecked Robinson does not depend on God 
or Fortune for help; he helps himself. He sets himself to work, as if he 
were both boss and laborer. Here we strike one of Moretti’s keywords for 
the bourgeois sensibility:/industry/. It is hard work, being shipwrecked 
— but it’s a steady job. There’s no spontaneous bravery, no tests of 
honor, no looking upwards to the heavens. The feudal sense of adventure 
melts away in the island sun.

Long before the pioneering sociologist Max Weber identified 
“instrumental reason” as a key characteristic of bourgeois culture, 
Defoe created a syntax for it. Robinson’s labors are nothing if 
not/efficient/. What is useful is beautiful on the island of bourgeois 
thought, and what is both beautiful and useful is without waste. The 
world is nothing but a set of potential tools and resources. “The 
creation of a culture of work,” Moretti claims, “has been, arguably, the 
greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class.”

Crusoe’s industry and efficiency produces, surprisingly, a modicum 
of/comfort/, or ethically permitted expenditure of rest and relaxation, 
treating the body well — all of this is quite justifiable if it means an 
increasing or sustaining of industry. What he enjoys on his island isn’t 
luxury, because it isn’t useless. It is play, repose, indulgence — made 
useful and ordinary. It is neither aristocratic dissolution nor puritan 
self-stricture. A little reward for the self is legitimate at the end of 
a day’s labors if it makes body and mind fit for more labor the next.

Moretti’s formal analysis tracks how Defoe organizes the bourgeois 
worldview with a forward-slanting grammar in which time is segmented and 
arranged serially. Robinson confronts this, does that, attains this 
benefit. Here’s a characteristic sentence from Defoe’s novel: “Having 
mastered this difficulty, and employed a world of time about it, I 
bestirred myself to see, if possible, how to supply two wants.” As 
Moretti comments: “Past gerund; past tense; infinitive: wonderful three 
part sequence.” It’s the “the grammar of growth.” Bourgeois prose is a 
rule-based, but open-ended, style.

This grammar creates a whole new visibility for/things/. In John 
Bunyan’s/Pilgrim’s Progress/(1678), objects are still impediments to the 
pilgrim’s upward reach towards the sacred. In Defoe, things can be 
useful in themselves. They are connectable only sideways, to other 
things. With this you get that, with that you make this, and so on. 
Things are described in detail. Everything appears as a potential 
resource or obstacle to accumulation. What is lost, as Moretti notes 
(following Lukács) is the totality. The world dissolves into 
particulars. The bourgeois self sees a world of particular things as if 
they were put there to be the raw materials of the work of accumulation.

It is remarkable how much of/Robinson Crusoe/is already composed of what 
Moretti calls “filler.” In between the big narrative turning points, the 
bourgeois novel stuffs in more and more filler, where the background 
creeps into the foreground and our characters and their actions seem to 
get lost in a welter of things. “[F]illers rationalize the novelistic 
universe,” Moretti writes, “turning it into a world of few surprises, 
fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.” This is the world that Marx 
describes, in/Capital/Volume 1, as appearing as an “immense accumulation 
of commodities.” The creeping welter of filler, present in Defore, will 
reach its apogee in Flaubert. It is the bourgeois novel’s one great 
narrative invention.

In the novel, subjectivity decreases and objectivity increases. 
Description becomes analytic rather than romantic, induction rather than 
ornament. Or so it appears. Moretti: “description as a form was not 
neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply into 
the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable.” This is the 
novel’s conservative side. While the bourgeois in the economic sphere is 
a demiurge of industry and accumulation, in the political and cultural 
sphere he stands, above all, for the solidity and persistence of all things.

The bourgeois novel as form combines two apparently contradictory 
impulses: the capitalist drive toward rationalization (in its 
forward-slanting plot), and a kind of cautious conservatism (in the 
intractably thick descriptions of the fillers). Marx thought that 
economic rationalization would strip the halo from old cultural forms, 
but if anything the reverse was the case: while the bourgeoisie were 
dynamos of the economic sphere, in the cultural sphere they collected 
museums-worth of bric-a-brac.

Bourgeois cultural stolidity was the very condition of accumulation. As 
Moretti puts it, the bourgeoisie was “the first/realistic/class of human 
history,” but only in economic matters. Victorian Britain was the most 
advanced and dynamic capitalist economy of the 19th century, but in 
cultural matters, it preferred sentiment and medieval ginger-breading. 
The last thing the Victorians wanted was for all that was solid to melt 
into air when it came to the political and cultural institutions that 
protected the very possibility of accumulation. Far from becoming more 
transparent in its moment of victory, as Marx predicted, capitalism 
became more and more opaque. The “real” bourgeois spirit of aggressive 
iconoclasm vanished the moment the bourgeoisie triumphed. Theirs was not 
an ideology for the whole of society. The bourgeois loved creative 
destruction in the economic sphere, but in culture, it came to see the 
merit of restorations of all kinds. The Victorian legacy was “a 
modernizing world, enveloped in historical screens.” Western Marxist 
critics, from whom Moretti descends, have long been alert to this 
screening out of raw accumulation and have sought analytic tools for 
poking at least a small hole or two in the scrim.

Like any other culture in its moment of ascendance, the Victorians 
mobilized existing things, borrowing and refashioning them for their own 
purposes/./Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 
the specifically bourgeois note in culture becomes fainter, but 
bourgeois social control grows stronger. A displaced aristocracy can now 
be absorbed and its relics treasured, after a fashion. What matters more 
is securing working class consent to bourgeois rule. The bourgeois has 
to learn/influence/; raw power on its own won’t do. One of the great 
themes of the bourgeois novel in full bloom is what Antonio Gramsci 
called “hegemony,” or rule through the consent of the ruled.

How does this bourgeois hegemony show up in the novel at the level of 
style? Moretti traces it through/adjectives/. It is sometimes thought 
that, as the novel becomes a specifically bourgeois form, its 
descriptive detail increases. Moretti takes that intuition as a testable 
hypothesis. Using databases of thousands of novels, Moretti is able to 
disprove it. Its more a question of the work adjectives are doing. They 
start to have a strangely metaphorical character. Adjectives like 
“hard,” “fresh,” “sharp,” or “dry” express a judgment without a judge, 
the author having retreated behind the screen of her or his putatively 
neutral prose. This, for Moretti, is the real significance of the 
bourgeois novel’s free indirect discourse, that strange point of view 
characteristic of the novel, which hovers close to a character but is 
not identical to it: “It is as if the world were declaring its meaning 
all by itself.”

In the novel, the world is re-enchanted at the granular level of the 
adjective describing the thing. Every tiny thing is imbued with 
hegemonic bourgeois morality. The morality itself is not all that 
interesting: a mixture of sentimental Christian dross and bare 
calculation. What’s more interesting is how it comes to saturate 
fictional language, and thence the world that language both names and 
modifies.

Once again breaking out his quantitative toolkit, Moretti demonstrates 
this via the rise of the adjective “earnest.” Its utility lies in the 
way it goes both ways: on the one hand, it connotes a serious and 
business-like demeanor; on the other, it points to a certain spiritual 
self-discipline. It is perhaps the perfect Victorian word. Moretti does 
not mention Oscar Wilde’s famous play, but surely Wilde, writing in the 
death throes of the Victorian era, was on to something./The Importance 
of Being Earnest/sums up in a phrase the Victorian form of bourgeois 
sensibility. (Of course, for Wilde, “earnest” was also a code word for 
“homosexual” — a dimension that Moretti does not touch.)

When not drilling down into the formal details of fictional form, 
Moretti manages a broad and clear synoptic sweep. The bourgeois realist 
novel went through three phases: ascendant, hegemonic, and a third, 
where it falls apart. The boom in the novel corresponds to the aftermath 
of the French Revolution; its decline to the rise of imperialism, and 
the emergence of social questions that — with rare exceptions, like 
Conrad’s/Heart of Darkness/— it was not able to encompass. The novel 
then split into two parallel streams. On the one hand, the genre novel, 
which presses on into uncharted territory, addressing a mass audience on 
themes the realist novel had only touched on: class struggle, the death 
of God, the industrial revolution, the colonial other. On the other, the 
modernist novel, from Joyce to Platonov, plays out a series of 
variations on the formal properties inherent in the novel as form, while 
at the same time trying to speak to the shock of the historical event 
which now outstrips the speed and scope of the trauma of the French 
Revolution. “That such an extreme tension would not last long,” says 
Moretti, “is hardly surprising. Yet that this phase would also be the 
last creative drive of European literature — this was a surprise for 
everybody.” Initially unacceptable to bourgeois audiences, modernism 
clears a space where the novel can utter the unutterable, but this 
iconoclastic literature matters less and less to the wider culture. For 
Moretti, modernism is less forward-looking than was thought at the time. 
“The museum and the avant garde” he calls “unsusceptible accomplices in 
a violent reorganization of the past.” Modernism recuperates the past in 
order to let it go.

And after that? While Moretti gestures to a decentering of thinking 
about the novel in a postcolonial context, his bailiwick is Europe, and 
he leaves the periphery to those who, like the great Brazilian critic 
Roberto Schwarz, have spent lifetimes putting European cultures in their 
proper (provincial) place. Meanwhile, back in the old world, the 
European novel runs out of steam — or rather, the reading culture that 
sustains it does. Moretti: “A continent that falls in love with Milan 
Kundera deserves to end like Atlantis.”

¤

Explicitly evaluative remarks like this are rare in/The Bourgeois/(and 
not often that sharp or funny). Moretti’s work is Marxist in filiation, 
and there’s a strong emphasis on historical analysis. While he draws on 
all of the Marxist critical tradition’s great exponents, from Lukács and 
Gramsci to Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes, Moretti’s main 
progenitors are little known Italian Marxist thinkers such as Galvano 
Della Volpe and Lucio Colletti, whose work was vigorously 
anti-dialectical. Della Volpe had no time for supposedly ineffable 
depths of meaning, even in poetry, and sought to put the analysis of 
literary discourse on a soundly materialist basis. His intellectual 
descendant Colletti also eschewed elaborate but evidence-free cultural 
critique. “Methodology is the science of those who have fuck all,” is 
how one might freely render one of his famous remarks.

 From Della Volpe and Colletti, Moretti takes a preference for 
“falsifiable criticism,” constructed so as to be sensitive to knowable, 
empirical facts. To their legacy he adds what he calls a “formalism 
without close reading.” Moretti pulls novels apart like steam engines. 
He is interested in answering questions as to how texts work, not in 
perpetuating their mystery. In that sense, his own work partially, and 
in the best sense, partakes of the spirit of of bourgeois culture 
itself. His method is summed up by the titles of two of his 
books:/Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History/(2005) 
and/Distant Reading/, the newly released companion volume to/The 
Bourgeois/. For Moretti, there’s too much of the whiff of the sacred 
about close reading; as he puts it in his 2000 article “Conjectures on 
World Literature” (reprinted in/Distant Reading/): “At bottom it’s a 
theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very 
seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: 
we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” In 
most modern academic criticism, the novel stands in for the holy book 
and the literary reader becomes the guardian of some special essence 
known only through patient exegesis. Moretti’s disregard for such 
pretensions is a breath of fresh air amid the incense.

Surely, Moretti is right that the idea of the literary critic as 
catechist of the bourgeois theology of the secular canon is surely in 
terminal decline — and the passing of that model of the literary is of a 
piece with the decline of “the bourgeois” as a cultural archetype. 
Capitalism no longer has much need of such Sunday servicing. The 
Victorian aggregate of aggressive economic expansion and pious 
conservatism is a thing of the past. In the 21st century, aggressive 
accumulation has no need of a cultural alibi.

The Situationists had a useful term for the time and place that others 
have messianically dubbed “late capitalism”: they called this “the 
overdeveloped world.” It is as if capitalism in the West overshot the 
point where its internal conflicts might have transformed it into 
something else. Now it can only feed on itself. One of capital’s few 
remaining growth strategies is to colonize from within those cultural 
bulwarks which, in Victorian times (or even in postwar America), seemed 
to be the noncapitalist stabilizers of capitalist accumulation. And so 
we get the whole of culture — education, communication, even religious 
faith — recapitalized, via charter schools, MOOCs, private contractors, 
social media, the megachurch.

Such a world has no place for either the bourgeois novel or the keeper 
of its hermeneutic flame, the literary critic, for the simple reason 
that it is no longer a bourgeois world. Our ruling class still lives by 
exploiting labor, but in cultural terms it is not bourgeois. The 
literary form in which it reveals itself best is probably the self-help 
book or the business biography. Such forms would probably yield 
interesting insights if amassed together and studied as one vast 
database, except that such texts, unlike the largely forgotten and 
out-of-print novels Moretti analyzes, are zealously guarded 
“intellectual property.”

In this post-bourgeois cultural context, Moretti’s work is a terrible 
provocation to literary critics. He is not only indifferent to the 
residual theological function of close reading: he is a practitioner of 
the characteristic arts of post-bourgeois life. What, after all, does 
the post-bourgeois reverence above graphs, maps, trees, algorithms, 
infographics, and other examples of so-called “big data”? The delight we 
once took in the skill of the novelist, or the literary critic, is today 
elicited by the extraction of patterns from vast swaths of texts and 
other sources, via the kind of perceptive operations that machines 
perform much better than people.

The difference, of course, is that Moretti’s project is a critical one, 
and though this work is historical through and through, it does have 
consequences for our present political moment. Take European identity, 
for instance. As a comparative literature scholar, Moretti is interested 
in the novel outside its role in national cultures. The map of the novel 
(and, thus, of 19th-century bourgeois culture) is not identical with the 
map of the nations. The European space — and Moretti is most at home 
here — is a field of only relatively autonomous national terrains of 
unequal sizes, within which the novel has spread and evolves in quite 
different ways. Moretti’s Europe has no essence or unity. It is 
polycentric, and defined by its conflicts and changes. European space 
allowed forms to speciate and find different niches. Bigger cultural 
spaces will likely have more diversity not only of particular titles but 
also of forms. The cultural ecology of the provinces is always more 
restricted.

In Moretti’s evolutionary model for thinking about the novel, forms 
bifurcate. The tree of literature is constantly sprouting new branches, 
but some die off, taking their place in the fossil record of “the great 
unread.” The readers have spoken. This postulate makes many of Moretti’s 
colleagues particularly squeamish, since it suggests that the market is 
the determinant of culture. Literary critics (even Marxist ones) like to 
think we have in the literary work some relatively autonomous object not 
completely subsumed within the system of capitalism. We even like to 
think there could be resources of resistance in the old classics, or at 
least a counter-canon of neglected radical works. But, for Moretti, 
“[t]heories will never abolish inequality: they can only hope to explain 
it.”

One thing his theory explains very well is how the market feedback loop 
exaggerates differences in success between the more and less fit kinds 
of literary form. But his indebtedness to evolutionary models perhaps 
combines with the economism that afflicts to many of his fellow Marxist 
thinkers to create a blind spot in his work. In biology it is 
practically impossible, once one animal or plant species branches off 
from another, for these lines to reconnect. But in culture there is no 
structural reason why branches cannot rejoin and form a network rather 
than a tree. Moretti is rather resistant to turning his tree-like 
history of the novel into a network-like one. Moretti is no 
postmodernist: forms, individuate; they don’t come back together. There 
isn’t so much recombination going on, in other words, although he does 
note that successful new forms often borrow not from previous canonic 
works but from low or neglected ones. He is a little leery of this 
détournement as a general, and generative, principle, however — perhaps 
because it would take his own moderate dissolving of the boundaries of 
book and author too far. One wonders how much Moretti’s findings have to 
do with certain methodological assumptions rather than with evidence. If 
you begin with “realist novel” or “detective story” as a unit of 
analysis, you are naturally going to see how one version of this generic 
form differs from another more than how it draws into it materials from 
other kinds of writing entirely.

Still, it is undeniable that Moretti’s body of work is one of genius. He 
has retrieved the depth and shape of the invisible literary field, that 
trace of the infrastructure of literacy itself. His distant reading 
brings into focus both bigger and smaller textual units, some visible to 
the “naked eye” as it were, some only revealed via machine-assisted 
“distant reading.” His data-mining work is of a kind more common and 
accepted in media studies — such as in the work of Henry Jenkins and Lev 
Manovich — than in literary scholarship, but with the added virtue of 
retaining some link, however attenuated, to the critical project of his 
Italian Marxist ancestors. He adds a sturdy branch to that old elm tree.

It has to be said that all of literary criticism participates, whether 
wittingly or not, in the matrix of bourgeois culture. What is 
interesting about Moretti is that his work has more to do with the 
workings of texts, with their description and evaluation, than on hiding 
that labor behind decorative screens of elaborate exegesis. His work is 
the dialectical counterpart to what the New Critics and Derrideans hath 
wrought. It is not that it would ever in any sense replace close 
reading, as some critical deacons fret. But by furnishing us with 
information about how bourgeois literary culture functions as a whole, 
he reveals the critics’ complicity in it. Up above, it may be all 
high-minded talk of resistant readings and counter-canons, but down in 
the engine room the business of literature is all about making variants 
on products for a panoply of markets.

There is a strand of Moretti’s work that is symptomatic of our 
post-bourgeois epoch, one more interested in patterns than passages, for 
which culture is no more mysterious a continent than any other. Moretti 
acknowledges that critique is not his long suit, and it is therefore 
tempting to read him as a bearer the bad news of contemporary capitalism 
rather than an analyst of its history.

And yet Moretti’s influence is enormously enabling for the critical side 
of critical theory. This is because he clears away some of the illusions 
of the power of critical reading to effect any change all on its own. It 
must surely pass through the minds of many professional readers of 
Moretti that our works, too, are just variations of forms, thrown on the 
market, where a fickle readership — mostly of grad students — decides 
for itself whether the form addresses the actual tensions they 
experience in everyday life. Moretti will not be thanked for disabusing 
us of the illusions of the modest power of critique. But his books might 
be profitably used to advance the critical project onto the 
post-bourgeois terrain. At the very least, I predict, there will be 
reprints.

¤

/McKenzie Wark is the author of T 
<http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428>/he Beach Beneath the 
Street <http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428>, 
<http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428><http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428>Telesthesia, 
<http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428>/and<http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428>/A 
Hacker Manifesto <http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428>/, among 
other things. He is working on a book about Andrey Platonov and 
Alexander Bogdanov. He teaches at the New School for Social Research in 
New York City. <http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428>/


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