World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time

Filippo Menozzi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030416980
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on a Marxist concept of world literature, this book is a study of the manipulations of time in contemporary anglophone fiction from Africa and South Asia. Through critical work and literary reading, this research explores the times other than the present that seem to haunt an era of capitalist globalisation: nostalgic feelings about bygone ideals of identity and community, appeals to Golden Ages, returns of the repressed and anxious anticipations of global extinction and catastrophe. The term non-synchronism explored in this book captures these dislocations of the present, while offering a critical lens to grasp the politics of time of an era marked by the continuing expansion of capitalist modernity. Most importantly, non-synchronism is a dialectical paradigm charged with antagonistic political valences.The literary analysis presented in the volume hence connects the literary manipulation of time to discourses on extinction, accumulation, nostalgia, modernity and survival in global politics and literature.

© The Author(s) 2020

F. MenozziWorld Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of TimeNew Comparisons in World Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: World Literature Beyond Synchronism

Filippo Menozzi¹

(1)

Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, Merseyside, UK

Filippo Menozzi

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The introduction situates the concept of non-synchronism in current debates in world literary studies. Drawing on the Warwick Research Collective’s concept of world literature, non-synchronism is presented as a dialectical and materialist way of thinking the temporality of literary expression from peripheral formations of the capitalist world economy. In its aesthetic and social aspects, the temporal dimension analysed in the introduction is affiliated to discourses on a singular modernity, the questions of totality and of peripheral modernism, the antinomies of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy, and debates on culture and politics at the heart of literary criticism after postcolonialism. Non-synchronism opposes both teleological views of history and the relativism of ideologies of multiple modernities, illustrating how heterogeneous temporalities need to be located within the systemic frame of reference imposed by the accumulation of capital.

1 The Antinomies of World Literature

In a recent book titled The Ministry of Nostalgia, writer and journalist Owen Hatherley sketches telling reflections on the resurgence of a wave of nostalgia in contemporary Britain. He observes that the insecurities of the current historical moment have provoked a widespread yearning for the times of post-war Austerity, a “nostalgia for the state of being repressed – solid, stoic, public spirited, as opposed to the depoliticised, hysterical and privatised reality of Britain over the last thirty years” (21). This nostalgic feeling, Hatherley continues, at the same time “as it evokes a sense of loss over the decline of an idea of Britain and the British, it is both reassuring and flattering, implying a virtuous (if highly self-aware) consumer stoicism” (ibid.). Contemporary nostalgia surfaces in the recycling of symbols and maxims of times past as political weapons to address the crisis and impoverishment determined by the rise of the neoliberal economy. Nostalgia feeds on a perception of the present as hopeless, unstable, insecure and puzzling; it nurtures the longing for stable, clear and solid old times. It hence implies a fascination with the past—often an idealised, mythical, never-really-experienced past—as a symptom of discontent in the present, and it is not limited to Britain. In countries as distant and different as India, the USA, Italy and Egypt, for example, the political stage is increasingly dominated by emergent political forces built on explicitly nostalgic agendas, such as “taking back” national borders and the purity of national communities, the ideal of making nations great “again,” the rise of fundamentalist rhetorics, localisms, neo-fascism and religious orthodoxies, accompanied by enduring states of emergency. These trends seem to reveal a quite depressing historical conjuncture in which, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts it, people had better reject any uplifting narrative and embrace instead the “courage of hopelessness.” Many political movements, today, seem to express hopelessness through a retrospective gaze summoning the past, rather than the future, as blueprint for imagining the present. Thus, anti-immigrant rhetoric in Britain after the Brexit vote, for example, envisions life outside the European Union by turning to a concept of the nation as white and mythical imagined community pre-existing Britain’s joining of the European Union in 1973, but also by threatening the legal status of the so-called Windrush generation which settled in Britain from the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s. The act of looking back towards the past in order to respond to an uncertain present is not, of course, a new thing exclusive to the regressive and conservative populism of twenty-first-century Europe.

The return of the past as form of political mobilisation is a very peculiar fact, though, which cannot be explained away by recourse to developmental or teleological concepts of history, whereby these revenants would necessarily be overcome once the entire planet has been rationalised and disenchanted. The re-enchantment of the world seems to occur, today, in non-Western societies as among the wealthiest, supposedly most “modern” societies of late capitalism, at the centre of technological advancement and the capital flows of the world economy. Transgressing the binary of West vs Rest, or South vs North, these emergent phenomena suggest that geographical and historical distinctions might not be entirely sufficient to explain how the world is changing today: atavistic social formations pop up everywhere, from Paris to Mumbai, and communication technologies make the drawing of boundaries increasingly difficult; community and society, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft constantly merge and overlap. As Harry Harootunian writes in his compelling analysis of the global expansion of capitalism in Marx After Marx, “the supposed unity of time projected by capital and nation-state is a masquerade that invariably fails to conceal the ceaseless confrontation of different times” (23). Capitalism’s global remit has not resulted in a total synchronisation leading to the disappearance of the past or the full realisation of a homogeneous, empty time. In fact, capitalism’s becoming produces what Harootunian describes as “uneven temporalities” (26): “contretemps, simultaneous nonsimultaneities … contemporaneous noncontemporaneities or uneven times … time’s turmoil, times out of joint, multiple temporalities,” and forms of untimeliness “fully immanent to what constitutes normative social time” (23).

The current wave of nostalgia is a symptom of how global capitalism has entailed a reconfiguration of the historical consciousness whereby multiple times are constantly revived, reconstructed and appropriated. For this reason, these returns reveal a specific kind of unevenness at the core of globalisation itself—a social and temporal unevenness affecting structures of feeling within the world economy. Capitalism does not produce homogeneity; instead, it triggers planned obsolescences, externalities, under-development, residual formations and invented traditions that vividly disrupt any linear narrative of betterment. Accordingly, the re-emergence of the past as contemporary political idiom opens crucial questions about the intersections between politics and culture: Are these calls and returns to an imagined past a by-product of modernity or are they survivals of pre- or non-modern societies? Do the expansion and development of capitalism necessarily provoke these returns, or are these symptoms of a possible resistance to capitalism, a new Romanticism set against what Michael Löwy has called the “tide of modernity”? Is the return of the past ideological mystification or does it manifest the critical consciousness of a real social condition? Can the sudden appearance of untimely times inspire progressive change in the present or, as Hatherley observes, when “it comes to treating the past as a weapon, the Conservative Party are, and always have been, the experts” (12)?

The main argument of this research is that the appearance of non-contemporaneous elements in the present should not be dismissed as nostalgic survival or retrospective longing, a mere sign of obscurantism and regression. The idioms of nostalgia, Golden Ages and romantic populisms are all expressions of deeper and wider dynamics of historical capitalism. Indeed, the emergence of non-contemporaneous remnants—the conjuncture of diverging temporalities in the present, what in this book will be defined “non-synchronism”—testifies to the way in which the global expansion of capitalism has redefined the very concept and experience of time. What non-synchronic emergences reveal is that, in peripheral zones of global capitalism, the temporal consciousness of the present is inhabited by multiple layers and strata: capitalism produces a sort of political unconscious of time itself, which can be reactivated at any time and in many different guises. Non-synchronism, in other words, would allow to rethink current discourses about nostalgia, the return of the past, the survival of atavism as well as utopian anticipation s of the future in the present. Instead of seeing these aspects as aberrations or deviations from the norm, the concept of non-synchronism allows to grasp that a multi-layered notion of the present is a constitutive dimension of capitalist modernity. Most importantly, non-synchronism is a productive critical tool that, as it will be shown, avoids either celebrating or condemning any non-contemporaneous element by situating it in an open-ended and dialectical concept of history. As a conjuncture of incommensurable times, non-synchronism captures basic structures common to a wide range of events and phenomena of the present which, in spite of their coevalness and presence, are perceived to belong to another temporal frame.

This book explores these themes in relation to the emerging field of world literature and, more precisely, in order to build on central issues opened by an important publication by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC 2015), that is, how the paradigm of world literature affects the very concept of time in the humanities, and the relationship between time and literary representation. In an important passage of their volume Combined and Uneven Development, WReC points out that the concept of world literature is neither a mode of reading nor a canon of works but rather a literature that “registers” the modern world system. WReC suggests that “the effectivity of the world-system will necessarily be discernible in any modern literary work, since the world-system exists unforgoably as the matrix within which all modern literature takes shape and comes into being” (20). Some key elements seem to animate WReC’s formulation: firstly, a concept of modernity understood as the historical regime produced by the global expansion of capitalism as hegemonic mode of production. This historical regime is uneven, incomplete and non-synchronous because it is still expanding, intensively as well as extensively, through the constant activation of the process of the accumulation of capital. Secondly, a vision of literature as archive and record of the social, political and spatio-temporal dimensions of this system from the periphery rather than the centre and, thirdly, the creation of a new critical space addressing a level of experience that is common to all literature of modernity.¹ WReC’s definition does not fragment the experience of capitalist modernity in a plurality of modernisms emanating from untranslatable cultural sites. Furthermore, WReC’s perspective on world literature does not restrict the term to a canon of globally circulating and translated works: WReC’s emphasis on peripherality entails a shift from globalism, circulation and exchange to internationalism, labour and production. The systemic dimension creates a structure of commensurability and...