World Theory as Reading Method

The usefulness as well as the ambition of Eli Jelly-Schapiro's Moments of Capital: World Theory, World Literature becomes fully apparent in its closing pages through the positing of two hypotheticals. The first wonders what it would mean for literary critics to be able to confidently incorporate a mainstream American novel like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom into the same interpretive system as the Congolese novelist Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83. The second cites Stuart Hall's call for a postcolonial studies that can see Nigeria and the United States both as part of the postcolonial world, albeit in radically different ways, rather than the former being the exception to the latter's normative rule: “They [the United States and Nigeria] belong, commonly, to the capitalist modernity shaped by the history of Empire and its afterlives” (214). The juxtaposition of these two seemingly unlikely analytical pairings encapsulates a key part of the book's central argument: that the development of a “world theory” will illuminate the field of “world literature” and vice versa. Far from systemic thinking being “totalitarian” and unable to incorporate difference, as was argued by critics of Marxist theory in the 1980s, Jelly-Schapiro asserts with compelling force that only a totalizing, Marxist approach can hold radically disparate phenomena in the same analytical frame. If this sounds very much like a restatement of the core tenets of that subfield of world literature that uses the theory of “combined and uneven development” to provide analytical clarity to the study of world literature, then this is by design. Jelly-Schapiro's touchstones are the work of Franco Moretti, the Warwick Research Collective, and Fredric Jameson's notion of a “singular modernity.” The originality of the argument is not, though, the “world theory, world literature” component of the book's title. Rather, the originality is to be found in the notion of “moments of capital”—the creation, out of Marx, of a new conceptual map that promises to give methodological clarity to what can sometimes seem a hopelessly unwieldy endeavor.Despite opening with the obligatory reference to Marx and Engels's comments on world literature in The Communist Manifesto, Jelly-Schapiro subsequently anchors his critical approach in Marx's Capital. In its simplest form, Moments of Capital extracts from Marx's tome three moments—not stages, for reasons that will become clear—in the systematic unfolding of the logic of capital and its development into a world system. The first, primitive accumulation, names the original seizing of capital by means of theft (through the colonization and expropriation of land and labor), leading to Marx's vivid description of capital coming into being “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx 834). The second, expanded reproduction, identifies the implementation of a fully capitalist society and the emergence of a bourgeoisie with its attendant ideologies and institutions. Finally, what Jelly-Schapiro labels “synthetic dispossession” (3), the only term of the three not taken directly from Marx, marks the inevitable moment of crisis, when capital seeks its renewal through the destabilization or destruction of its own social and ecological fabric. The grounding theoretical claim of the book is that these three moments are not stages that follow one another like dominos but perpetually recurring and interlocking phenomena: “I am interested, throughout the course of this book,” Jelly-Schapiro asserts, “in revealing the synchronic interrelation of these ostensibly discrete and diachronic moments” (33). Because these are not directly historical moments but rather recurring and simultaneous facets of a world system, they allow Jelly-Schapiro to forge connections across not just literary history but across literary space: thus the book's closing provocation that both Franzen's and Mujila's novels are expressions and symptoms of the same world system, even as they represent different moments within it. To return to the example that concludes the book: Mujila reminds us of the ongoing nature of primitive accumulation (better to just call it accumulation then, or perhaps extraction), and Franzen allegorically encapsulates the ongoing expanded reproduction of capital in the Global North with his dramatization of the psychic crises of the contemporary bourgeoisie (to the extent that one still exists).This emphasis on synchrony over diachrony implies that a kind of intellectual blockage occurs in the reading of Marx's Capital as a self-contained narrative, and that this emphasis on the stages of history (the ever-present strawman of the vulgar Marxist reading) robs us as critics of connecting historical and cultural phenomena across time and space. Although this is never directly stated in Moments of Capital, the problem of reading the history of capitalism diachronically seems to emerge from the very narrative structure of Capital itself, which proceeds from a set of abstractions—the laborer and the capitalist meet at the market, commodities exchange hands, absolute surplus-value is produced before relative-surplus value proceeds in its stead, the state gets involved, and on and on—before, in the form of a prequel of sorts, turning to the moment of primitive accumulation only at the end of the first volume. Jelly-Schapiro advances a familiar critique here—that there is a “faint” Eurocentrism to Marx's dramatization of capital's “real” history as occurring primarily on the European stage while the precursory events happen offstage in the distant climes of colonial conquest (10). Jelly-Schapiro joins the school of thought that has argued that this framing by Marx was partly responsible for the historic political blunders of Marxists who saw revolution as a European prerogative. Moments of Capital engages the eventual scholarly corrections of Eric Williams and C. L. R. James, who “illuminated the centrality of the periphery” (10) both in the development of apparatuses of coercion that would be replicated in European factories and in the emergence of modes of resistance developed in response—and this is not even to mention the obvious, which is that the major communist revolutions of the twentieth century came from the periphery or semiperiphery, not Europe or the United States.Jelly-Schapiro's approach, which is the reason for the book's lengthy engagements with avenues of Marxist debate not directly linked with literature, sets out to establish the theoretical, historical, and political grounds for connecting disparate works of fiction in a single critical approach or methodology, thus correcting the Eurocentric bent of world literature in much the same way as “world theory” sets out to correct the Eurocentrism of certain strands of historical materialism. Before setting out the questions and problems raised for literary critics by Moments of Capital, then, it is important to recognize the ambition of this slim volume's attempt to advance a workable interpretive meta-key that is not just Marxist in attitude or approach but genuinely grounded in the language of Marx himself and his most rigorous posthumous interlocutors, all the way from Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin to Hall and Antonio Negri. Such attempts at methodological renewal in our discipline often seem to be more about professional branding than anything else, but in Jelly-Schapiro's case there is a deep intellectual and political commitment to the mode of reading being advanced. The idea is that no critic should any longer be able to justify working diligently in their own geographic or even generic niche, because they now have the means and impetus to connect novels with “stark differences of form and content” through their “co-belonging within the capitalist world-system—the entanglement of freedom and unfreedom, ideology and violence, overdevelopment and underdevelopment” (213). The idea of teaching a class on contemporary fiction that focuses solely on this or that national context seems, at least following the logic laid out here, to be bordering on a dereliction of duty.The book's critical attitude, its unapologetic embrace of a world-systematic approach to world literature, and its surprising capacity to connect the novel with concepts from Marx almost directly, without much mediation from literary-critical Marxist debates (there is minimal talk of reading methods), are all to be lauded. But what of the novels themselves, the rationale for their selection, and the readings of them? It is here that Jelly-Schapiro raises questions that one senses he is not fully conscious of. It is taken for granted, for example, that the novel remains the privileged form of world literature, and, indeed, that contemporary novels are the best exemplars of the capitalist world system's interconnectivity. If we accept for argument's sake that privileging the novel in this way is legitimate (an idea that readers of this journal will surely happily entertain), the question of the contemporary is more troubling. Why, given that Jelly-Schapiro eschews periodization in favor of systemization, does the book's treatment of world literature remain almost exclusively focused on novels published in the twenty-first century? Moments of Capital is making a periodizing argument, it seems, without consciously doing so. Is the contemporary novel more aware, somehow, of its integration within the capitalist world system than its precursors? Has the novel itself changed? Jelly-Schapiro's argument is that these moments of capital have always been synchronic phenomena, and thus, by extension, we might assume that the novel has always been engaged in the project of revealing their interrelation.The book's final chapter, titled “Interrelations,” suspends the independent analysis of each moment of capital to analyze novels that produce the picture of the three moments in their simultaneity—Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers (2013), Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others (2014), and Pitchaya Sudbanthad's Bangkok Wakes to Rain (2019). Jelly-Schapiro shows how these novels reveal that “[p]rimitive accumulation, expanded reproduction, and synthetic dispossession belong, equally, to modernity and the present” (187). It would seem, then, from the selection of these three novels, published six years apart, that the capacity for the novel to illuminate these “interrelations'' is something it has acquired only recently. And yet, consider that C. L. R. James's work is so prominent to the sections of Moments of Capital that are dedicated to intellectual history, and recall that James's study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, sees Moby-Dick as modeling the image of an emergent world-system alongside modes of resistance to it, similar to what Jelly-Schapiro finds in contemporary fiction of all stripes. With all this in mind, the absence of any mention of James's literary scholarship, considering he is so central a theoretical interlocutor for Jelly-Schapiro, is glaring. Perhaps the focus on the contemporary is arbitrary, a result of the pressure of professional subfields requiring a periodizing coherence to one's work. Either way, it is also strange that there is almost no engagement with studies of contemporary fiction that have argued for its distinctive qualities as contemporary fiction.1Moments of Capital does make clear at points how the “interrelation” of the three moments of capital becomes more apparent in our moment as a result of the intensification of capital's world system, with its attendant ecological crises, deterioration of social fabrics, and deepening ideological internalization of what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism.” But in terms of engagement with what has happened to the inner form of the novel in response, how it has mutated, there is no major systematic attempt at explanation. The closest we get to an engagement with this question is in the chapter on expanded reproduction, which charts the fate of “the contemporary bourgeois-realist novel” (79). Jelly-Schapiro surveys the critical debates over nineteenth-century realism's politics, namely the “discordance” (78) between its apparently reactionary focus on the surface of bourgeois domestic life at the same time as this very focus turns our critical attention to the fundamental disjuncture between appearance and reality. Jelly-Schapiro cites Jameson's Antinomies of Realism in this regard, before arguing for the political import of twenty-first-century realist fiction. What is skipped over, though, is Jameson's insistence on the migration of the realist novel's critical, historicizing function to science fiction. It is not that Jameson's argument needs to be agreed with (for it is obviously controversial), but it seems a shame that engagement with this question of genre goes almost undiscussed.I want to emphasize at this juncture that these frustrations are not unique to Moments of Capital. Rather, they reflect anxieties that apply to all novel criticism today, particularly, I think, to those of us who study mostly contemporary fiction. One cause of this, of course, has to do with concerns about the novel's import to contemporary culture. When Jelly-Schapiro identifies a “contemporary bourgeois-realist novel,” for example, it is hard not to wonder whether such a thing can exist. One of the defining features of diagnoses of postmodern culture, after all, was precisely the decline of the bourgeoisie as a distinct class, perhaps best articulated by Perry Anderson's observation in 1998 that “in place of that solid amphitheatre” of class society, divided into bourgeois and proletarian, “is an aquarium of floating, evanescent forms” (85). Thus, when Jelly-Schapiro invokes a meaningfully “bourgeois” contemporary novel, even as such novels thematize anxieties about that class's myriad crises, it is hard to feel that fiction of this sort has the same import as its historical predecessors even when it does ultimately smuggle in its critiques of neoliberal capitalism and thus “reclaims the possibility of its transformation or transcendence” (119). If the realist novel is no longer the dominant cultural form of the dominant social class, then how are we to read realism across time periods and incorporate its social function into a transhistorical schema of capital's moments? And, in turn, what are we to make of the significance of its critical function when its object of critique has rendered it a minor cultural form?It is on precisely this issue of the novel's function as critique that Moments of Capital stages its most significant (and most intellectually vexing) claims. For Jelly-Schapiro, as with many other critics today, the novel as a form seems to do two things: it reveals things about this world, and it imagines or intimates other possible worlds. In other words, the novel is its own form of critique. It is hard not to think here of Anna Kornbluh's 2017 polemic article, “We Have Never Been Critical,” in the pages of this journal on this very topic (indeed, Kornbluh provides one of Moments of Capital's blurbs). Kornbluh's correction to the naive optimism of surface reading and other methods designed to do away with symptomatic reading was to advance her own vision of a Marxist literary criticism that disavowed the centrality of the critic and showed the novel's own inherent critical function in uncovering the workings of ideology and the historical forces that make its up world. The novel, for Kornbluh, is its own form of critique, capable of “utopian” imaginings alongside its dissection of the existing state of things (408).“How,” asks Kornbluh, “might the novel's capacity to improvise worlds instruct us in how to build this world with more commons?” (405). Reading Moments of Capital, one is left unsure how exactly to answer, despite Jelly-Schapiro's diligent following of the critical methodology Kornbluh lays out. The novels he surveys certainly do what Jelly-Schapiro claims: they genuinely are mostly conscious of connections across time and space, of the impending ecological crisis, of economic precarity, and they do feature characters who experiment with new ways of living. Nowhere, though, do these novels seem to offer anything that the theory Jelly-Shaprio surveys has not already made apparent. This is always especially evident because of the structure of Moments of Capital. Each chapter begins with a long exegesis of a different theoretical landscape and then concludes with a survey of novels that illuminate the theoretical insights just surveyed and imagine alternatives that were already established by summaries of either actual political movements or by the writings of revolutionary thinkers. This problem is further compounded by a cross-pollination of novel and theory in some of the novelists themselves. Most notably, Jelly-Schapiro's analysis of Ben Lerner's 10:04 concludes by claiming that the novel “without . . . fully realizing” ushers in a new “structure of feeling” that both reveals the world system's emergent crises while simultaneously conveying utopian possibilities that exist beyond it (119). The problem here is that a mere page earlier Jelly-Schapiro cites an interview with Lerner in which the novelist asserts that “there is a sense in which community is already here . . . in the circuits of global capital” and that “even if those are deeply perverted forms of interconnectedness they nevertheless already have a utopian glimmer” (qtd. 118). It would seem, then, that Lerner does “fully realiz[e]” the critical valence of his own novel. In other words, is 10:04 a novel that really needs a critic, if the critic's task is only to reveal a politics that the novelist has already explicitly stated is there to be found?By way of conclusion, I want to assert again that my claims above are not designed to find any specific fault with Jelly-Schapiro's overarching argument concerning the need to map capital's world system onto the cultural logic of world literature and vice versa. Rather, it is to raise more-general questions about the task of literary criticism. It is almost as if Jelly-Schapiro's selection of novels is too good, and that these novels, often by dint of the novelists’ imbrication in the very theory in which Moments of Capital is interested, do not reveal how the book's promising critical method can be applied to novels whose content have nothing obviously to do with the history or present of capitalism. Funnily enough, it is when Jelly-Schapiro performs a more conventionally critical analysis of Franzen's Freedom—in which he reads it very much as ideological symptom, not utopian his reading method really For here we see the novel as of of of that need to be in to reveal what the novel that despite and bourgeois vision and it nevertheless the of freedom in its neoliberal a novel like so deeply can be read to reveal its with to its own and is a one that should to us the that sometimes we need the critic to provide the critique.