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This broad argument, resting on the notion that there is a self-evident difference between a product and a project, is for me a crucial signal that the narrative of world literature’s market readiness entails a limited form of materialism. It seems to suggest that the market for world literature could be improved by the incorporation of works written in a different style, thus raising the crucial question: if the market could be reoriented in such a way that this preferred internationalism, or untranslatability, became the dominant taste, would the problem of world literature no longer exist? Moreover, what would be involved in changing the market to make it able to accommodate the kinds of writing that these critics prefer? Isn’t it the case that, far from resulting from the insistent interventions of a few vocal intellectuals, some fundamental reorientation of the class dynamics of writing, publishing, and reading would be necessary in order to make different sorts of aesthetic objects circulate successfully? In other words, isn’t it a matter of the material constitution of the industry itself?
Motivated by these questions, the remainder of this essay attempts to broaden the terms of the materialist critique of world literature beyond the story of commodification outlined above. Part of what I suggest is that the very story of world literature’s market incorporation is actually itself symptomatic of a broader set of tendencies that have become characteristic of cultural and intellectual work today. While I cannot fully elaborate my argument here, I discuss briefly how laments about the commercialization of culture have become an important motor within the cultural and academic industries. Certainly the dominant literary cultures produced in the advanced economies have become definitively self-questioning and self-critical. Writers and critics are expected to bemoan the fact that literary work is compromised by the commercial necessity of appealing to a broad readership, and so, in effect, these laments are generative concerns for the industry’s commerce.
Consider for a moment that one of the likely authors of “World Lite” is n+1 editor Benjamin Kunkel, a successful novelist and critic who published in the same year, to much fanfare, Utopia or Bust: a Guide to the Present Crisis, described by Verso as a “tour through the world of Marxist thought”; his likely co-author is Chris Harbach, also a successful novelist and critic, whose widely read article, “MFA vs. NYC,” which gave rise in 2014 to a successful collection of essays, laments that the NYC novelist’s imagination “is shaped by the need to make a broad appeal, to communicate quickly, and to be socially relevant in ways that can be recreated in a review.” These men are not marginal to the industry. They and their anti-market—even anti-capitalist—views are central to a key niche within it. Articulations of the idea that the product is too easy, too palatable, too lacking in the necessary complexity and restive force, are a key part of what the product is today.
A fuller materialist account of world literature is necessary in order to understand why market dynamics matter. If we are concerned about the dominance of literary products over literary projects, we cannot begin to understand and contest this dominance without outlining and critiquing the political economy of literary production. This is a topic that the critics I have been discussing leave entirely untouched. Primary to this economy is the deceptively simple fact that reading and writing literature are elite activities. The majority of the world’s inhabitants do not imagine that it will be possible in life to become authors or readers of literature. Nor would it be possible for them to imagine themselves as authors or readers – or, what is far more likely, as film directors or pop stars – so long as they have other more pressing priorities fundamentally determined by their position within the global economy.
To be clear, I am not lamenting the fact that they are not reading and writing literature; that would be pure elitism. What I am lamenting is the persistence of the exploitative capitalist social relations revealed by the fact that participation in the literary economy is a mark of privilege. To repurpose a point that John Guillory made about the canon debates of the 1980s, it hardly matters how representative our marketable literature is, and how attentive to the cultural particularities and nuances of identity we like to see forcefully on display in our art, if access to classrooms and other sites of literary reading is so limited, and literature itself is mainly a privileged articulation of a classed sociolect. That is, for any concerns about the commercial delimitation of literary writing to be actually pressing, we would have to assume first what Guillory calls “a universalized literacy not exhibited by any social formation, including the present one” (485). Given that not everyone reads and writes, and that only a relatively elite group of readers would ever access the better kind of writing that Apter and the n+1 editors would promote, preferences for one sort of writing over another come to seem precisely aesthetic, and the limitations of the common anti-market positioning become apparent. This position fails to acknowledge that the production of literature is itself fundamentally determined by capitalist social relations. This determination means, moreover, that literature’s production is fundamentally unavailable for any sort of redemptive reform while those relations persist.
It follows of course that it is capitalism itself, and the realities of combined and uneven development, that make it the case that only a select group of people read and write what will sell as literature. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously wrote that an imperative to expand markets “chases the bourgeoisie over the surface of the whole globe,” and so they “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere” (84). They argue that the rise of a genuine Weltliteratur—an international literature moving easily across hazy borders—would parallel the expansion of the world market and the intrepid travels of its bourgeois beneficiaries. More recently, Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova have formulated the most influential expansions of this kind of claim, arriving at theories of world literature that are attentive to the imbalances and inequities that determine the distribution of cultural and economic resources, and cognizant of the ways in which economic unevenness impinges upon the literary field.
