Critical Theory,Comparative Literature,and Dialogue between Theories:Interview with Peter V.Zima

ZHANG Cong Social Sciences in China Press

Peter V.Zima University of Klagenfurt

Abstract:As one of the most eloquent voices on critical theory,sociological aesthetics,and comparative literature in the German-speaking world,Peter V.Zima shared in this interview his idea about these fields.He explained how he has tried to reconstruct both critical theory and world literature by giving them a sociosemiotic basis.More interestingly,he demonstrated his attempt at a dialogue between theories by juxtaposing Adorno and Bourdieu in the common context of the literary market.

Keywords:critical theory;comparative literature;Adorno;Bourdieu;dialogue between theories

Zhao Bing (Hereinafter referred to as ZHAO):Professor Zima,thank you very much for doing this interview.

Peter V.Zima (Hereinafter referred to as PVZ):My pleasure.

ZHAO:You have been invited here as the lecturer of the Senior Seminar on International Literary and Cultural Theories in 2019.Speaking of cultural theories,critical theory is obviously too important a tradition to ignore.In fact,it is also one of the theoretical sources you draw on.

PVZ:Right,another source is Formalism.But what I want to do is to change critical theory and make it more concrete by giving it a sociological and semiotic basis,especially the latter.Adorno talks a lot about language,but not in a semiotic way.He talks about language as a philosopher.But I would like to develop a critical theory which is at the same time semiotic.

ZHAO:How?

PVZ:By introducing semantic level,semantic ambiguity,and by introducing discourse that is a narrative.All sociological research is just a form of narrative.What I want to do is to test different narratives through dialogue and comparison in order to discover the strengths and weaknesses of each theory.There are two types of discourses:ideological discourses and theoretical discourses.Both discourses are based on social values.The essential difference lies in the fact that ideology is dualistic and therefore turns into a monologue and because of this,it identifies with reality.Think about Adorno’s “identity thought.” Ideology forgets it is just one possible perspective,a construction.Theory,however,takes into account the ambiguity,polysemy of reality;theoretical discourse admits different constructions and no single discourse is identical with reality.But we have to admit that it is difficult to separate theory from ideology as ideology always interferes with theory.Critical theory,for example,is not free from value judgment.What underlines it is individual autonomy,the question of how the capitalist society can be overcome;how the subject and human thought can be reconciled with nature.

ZHAO:Yes.You just mentioned Adorno.Interestingly,both of us have always been intrigued by him and the Frankfurt School.Would you say that literature is important for him?

PVZ:Yes,but Adorno doesn’t deal with literature in between high literature and low.He focuses on difficult,demanding and serious literature rather than trivial or entertaining literature.But I think literature can indeed be popular without being reduced to trivial;it can be both entertaining and experimental.For example,I know a French writer who is quite entertaining but at the same time experimental.His novel has three possible endings.But this of course depends on the readership.Literature doesn’t have value in itself;it is valuable to different groups.

ZHANG CONG (Hereinafter referred to as ZHANG):Professor Zima,What you said about Adorno’s approach to low culture reminds me of the complex relationship between critical theory and British Cultural Studies.You know,Stuart Hall,the famous theoretician in cultural studies,called the genesis of British Cultural Studies a “break from the Frankfurt School.” How do you understand this?

PVZ:Well,I think he has a point there.Let me give you the example of a biologist.A biologist has to study the weeds as well as trees and flowers.And sociology deals with all social phenomena.There,British Cultural Studies is completely right.You have to analyze working-class literature,popular literature,etc.It depends on how you do it.It depends on what function it has.True,critical theory and British Cultural Studies are different,but I think they are also complementary in the sense that somebody who represents critical theory would say:“yes,you have to analyze trivial and commercial literature,all kinds of literature,and see what function it fulfills.” But I think there is a moment in cultural studies which I agree with less.That is,they want to reevaluate popular culture.For example,there is an attempt to say in pop culture there is also a critical moment.This is something Adorno would contest.The question I want to ask and leave open is to what extent popular culture can be critical.Of course not all popular culture is simplistic as that.One of my colleagues argues that there are rebellious subcultures;they contest official culture,etc.But they are also full of clichés.They wouldn’t change the society.So how critical pop culture can be remains an open question.

ZHAO:But does Adorno’s critical theory change anything in society?

PVZ:No,I don’t think so.It’s a problem.The problem with Adorno is that he suggests very sophisticated highbrow literature,but the problem consists in the fact that nobody reads it.If this literature is read at all,it is only in universities,by a very small minority.That’s why it won’t change society.This is one of the problems.Another problem with Adorno is that he suggests this paratactic (opposite to hierarchical) structure of theory,a complementary moment to mimetic art.I don’t think that will change anything.This is why I suggest a dialogical theory which I outlined just a while ago,a theory open to dialogue and critical in the sense of Adorno.This concept of dialogism is derived from Bakhtin and I try to apply it to theory.Of course you could ask what have you changed,but I believe through dialogue we can test theories.You make certain progress if you have the means to test theories,especially by relating theories in social sciences to each other critically.Compared to Adorno,my aim is more modest.I want to promote the dialogue between social sciences.

ZHAO:Right.It is both necessary and important to collide one theoretical field with another in order to open a dialogue between them.Of course,it is no easy job.But your idea about the sociology of aesthetics and aesthetics of sociology seems to be a case in point.

PVZ:This is a kind of dialogue.The question is how these two are related and which theory encompasses the other.One of my specific dialogues is between the feminists and critical theory.Critical theory is not specific about the beginning,the form of man’s domination of nature.Negative dialectics mentions theOdyssey.But the feminists’ question is more concrete:when did man’s domination over women begin? Their idea of men’s domination over women is more concrete than Adorno’s idea of man’s domination over nature.They do say reason became instrumental and began to dominate nature,but they don’t really show how it came about.They do show how it works,technocracy,but they don’t really show how it came about.

ZHAO:Right.And you even compare and contrast Adorno and Bourdieu.To someone reasonably familiar with the theories of these two thinkers,this might be surprising.I mean,how could Adorno and Bourdieu be treated in one context? How is your comparison and contrast possible?

PVZ:I think Adorno and Bourdieu have one important problem in common:the problem of communication.To put it more specifically,I mean artistic and aesthetic communication in a market or capitalist society.They both take the view that art (artistic communication) is highly commercialized in contemporary society and that a work of art is not there in itself and for itself because it is being treated as a commodity:something that is being exchanged at a profit or at a loss.At the same time,however,there is an important difference between the German philosopher and the French sociologist.Unlike Adorno who adopts an aesthetic point of view,trying to show how and to what extent critical works of art resist commercialization (i.e.,the heteronomy of the market),Pierre Bourdieu is not interested in the critical or aesthetic value of literary texts,but exclusively in the way they function within the aesthetic system of communication within “the intellectual field of art” (“le champ intellectuel de l’art”).

ZHAO:You believe that the aesthetic underlying Bourdieu’s sociology of art is an aesthetic of heteronomy.Can you elaborate on this?

PVZ:To put it simply,an aesthetic of heteronomy means art is being used as an instrument for artistic career purposes.Unlike Adorno,Bourdieu does not seem to believe that certain works of art contain more truth,more social criticism than others.He renounces all aesthetic value judgements.For him,aesthetic value judgements are themselves an object of the sociology of art.In this respect he is in agreement with the empirical sociology of literature as proposed by Escarpit and Silbermann.Bourdieu assumes that art,like other cultural phenomena,is an instrument of social,of class domination.He shows,among other things,how the bourgeoisie as ruling class consolidates its power by accumulating “cultural goods,” or as he himself puts it,symbolic capital,and how it excludes the dominated classes from the possession of these goods.Now with the concept of symbolic capital,Bourdieu believes that the market and the circulation of symbolic goods can be compared but not reduced to the market of material goods.And in different social contexts those who possess symbolic and cultural capital find it easier to obtain credit than those who own nothing.This is what he means by “capital moves towards capital.” One form or example of symbolic capital is linguistic competence.This linguistic competence acquired by daughters and sons of the bourgeoisie are indispensable for their social and economic careers.

ZHAO:Speaking of linguistic competence,how does Bourdieu’s concept of this differ from that of Noam Chomsky?

PVZ:They are quite different.Actually,Bourdieu criticizes Chomsky’s concept of “linguistic competence” as being too abstract and too formal.Far from being a purely formal matter,he contends,linguistic competence or competence in the national language is one of the most fundamental aspects of symbolic capital,which makes it easier for the competent speaker to climb higher on the “social ladder.” This is the reason why Bourdieu suggests that we should exchange the term “linguistic competence” for the term “linguistic capital.”

ZHAO:What can be learned through the juxtaposition of Adorno and Bourdieu?

PVZ:By doing this we can detect the gap in both Adorno’s and Bourdieu’s approach.Take Adorno.As I said earlier,he does not deal with “minor” writers and “minor” works of art whose intentions can be explained within Bourdieu’s “strategies” of a particular field.This is the first thing.Secondly,as a sociologist of art Adorno neglects the literary and artistic context in which works of art are produced.By focusing on the critical works which negate the social mechanisms of domination and integration,he isolates these works from the multitude of artworks that make up the artistic communication system-and are neither negative nor critical.He neglects the dialectical relationship between the commercial and ideological works on one hand and the critical works on the other.In short,what is missing in his aesthetic theory is Bourdieu’s sociological component.As for Bourdieu,his approach neglects an important question:the cognitive,critical,and aesthetic dimension of art and literature.And it seems to me that in his theoretical lecture “Lecon sur la lecon” (“A Lecture on Lectures”),Bourdieu finds it difficult to answer the question what constitutes the value of the theoretical discourse.Naturally,as a sociologist and a theoretician,he cannot possibly argue that the cognitive criteria applied to theories are fiction or class snobbery.That would be the end of theory.

ZHAO:What are these criteria then? F.R.Leavis,the British literary critic,argued that four or five novelists formed the “great tradition” of British novels and the rest were simply minor or insignificant writers unworthy of attention.For him,literature appears as a hierarchy that is founded on taste,morality,and pro- or anti-life.Would you say it’s the same with Bourdieu? Since we are talking about the dialogue between theories,it would be no harm to compare F.R.Leavis and Bourdieu here.

PVZ:In Bourdieu’s perspective,the benchmark for literature and art is not quality or aesthetic value like aesthetic truth in the sense of Adorno,but the position a cultural object occupies in the market place of cultural goods.The rules and laws of this market are dictated,according to Bourdieu,by the ruling class or the ruling classes—i.e.,their literary or art critics.They decide whether a style is valuable,refined,sophisticated,distinctive,etc.In the case of F.R.Leavis,Bourdieu would be interested in how Leavis,as the spokesman of the ruling class or classes,dictated the rules and laws of the literature market in his time.

ZHANG:Interesting.Just now you used the phrase “the end of theory.” To me this sounds like your paraphrase of the famous term “post-theory” or “anti-theory.” So how do you look at the idea of post-theory or anti-theory?

PVZ:I wrote a book calledWhat is Theory?It exists in German and English.At the beginning of the English version I made reference to Eagleton.He talks about “after-theory.” By theory he means exclusively literary theory.And above all,he doesn’t say what theory is.So my argument varies in two ways.What is the point of talking about after-theory if you never talk about what it is? Again,for me theory is a discourse which is not dualistic but takes into account ambiguity of reality.I also want to show the sociological theories,what focalization they are based on.Focalization means from whose point of view the narrator looks at the world.I could show focalization plays an important part in sociological theories.Take Marx:who is his focalizer?The proletariat.He tells the story from their point of view.Narrative theory distinguishes internal and external focalization.And it’s very interesting in Marx.At one point,Marx looks at his hero,the proletariat,from the external point of view.He compares the proletariat with other groups of society.But then he knows some proletariat things;he becomes an insider,which is not legitimate because his idea was not based on research,or experiential,ethnographical research,but on speculation.Yes,this is it.I think narrative theory can do a lot in sociology as well.But what does all this mean? It means that each sociological theory is a narrative,a semantic and narrative construction.And the focalizer of critical theory is the critical individual,an outsider.Because Adorno believes that consensus of the break between theory and practice,criticism is an individual;autonomous critical individual is the decisive instance of criticism,not the social class or a party or movement.

ZHAO:Right.And you believe Adorno is no Marxist because he doesn’t believe in the unity of practice and theory.

PVZ:Yes.And I agree with Adorno.I don’t believe in the unity of practice and theory.Marx believes what he does or his theory corresponds to reality.He identifies his discourse with reality.That is an ideological moment.In proposing,he also identifies his thought with the fate of the proletariat.He believes his philosophy will be realized by the working class.In contrast,I believe theory is just one possible construction.By making it collide with other theories,we can test it and find something about your own theory critically.

ZHAO:Besides,you hesitate to call Adorno’s aesthetic theory “Marxist” or “Neo-Marxist.”Why?

PVZ:First of all,exaggerating slightly,one might even argue that there is no such thing as Marxist aesthetics and that all aesthetic theories within Marxism are of Hegelian origin.Their Hegelianism comes to the fore whenever authors such as Goldmann,Lukacs,or Henri Lefebvre try to translate literary works into philosophies,ideologies,or “world views.” Adorno,however,is against Hegel in this respect.He claims that the critical work of art cannot be conceptualized because it resists all attempts to translate it into conceptual,philosophical or ideological language,or to exploit it for commercial purposes.In Adorno’s aesthetic theory,the word “mimetic” means,among other things,the non-conceptual.Opposite to Hegel,Adorno defends the ambiguous and the polysemous character of art,and this character enables certain works of art to resist a translation into ideology.

ZHAO:For Adorno,the “mimetic” means the non-conceptual.Can you elaborate on this?

PVZ:The non-conceptual character of art and literature is specifically due to the fact that literature is using signifiers in the sense of Saussure and not on the signified,that it doesn’t work with concepts like Adorno’s theory but with signifiers marked by polysemy.They are ambiguous.Whereas theory always tries to define concepts,but in literature,especially in poetry,it’s different.

ZHAO:Adorno is famous for his difficult style.How do you look at this?

PVZ:Well,some authors are easy to read but superficial.Terry Eagleton,for example.He unfortunately lumps together Iser and Jauss.Iser takes the phenomenological approach and focuses on the text,especially its semantic potential and ambiguity.However,Jauss is concernd about how texts are actually read and historically received.So his is more of a receptionist approach.Eagleton may be easy to read,but he bypasses this critical difference.

ZHANG:Besides mimesis,particularity is another key term for Adorno.And if we wish to open a dialogue between theories,the relationship between particularity and universality is a question that cannot be avoided.

PVZ:Exactly.In conjunction with Adorno,his idea of particularity,the emphasis is on individual.He doesn’t believe like Hegel in the general development of history,or like Marx,that the general idea is realized by the proletariat.He believes in the particular individual.That is why when I wrote ages ago a book on the Frankfurt School,I gave it a subtitle,“Dialectics of Particularity.”And of course the mimetic moment of art is also the particular,specific,and non-conceptual because the concept is always universal.So Adorno doesn’t want works of art to be reduced to concept.He emphasizes the particularity or I would say the semiotician,the structure of signifiers,and not signifieds.So from the individual to the particular work of art,Adorno emphasizes particularity.In my case,particularity,also in the dialogue of theories,means that each theory is based upon a specific and particular group language and that dialogue between theories has to take this into account.Individual represents universal reason and can communicate spontaneously.You can see in this discussion that’s not the case.

ZHANG:How important is universality then?

PVZ:I think it’s very important.By dialogue,by comparing theories,by having a discussion,you aim at a universal agreement.It is not like what Lyotard believes,that the particular languages are always fighting with each other and can’t be compared.But I think certain consensus can be reached.It is part of this particularity.So I aim at the universal through the particular even if some people don’t think there is such a thing as particularity.

ZHANG:You are said to have taken an unconventional approach to comparative literature in order to bring comparative literature to the forefront of social sciences.So what is this unconventionality about?

PVZ:The unconventionality lies in some theoretical and semantic components.Comparative literature scholars don’t like social sciences because philology in Europe has a long and idealistic tradition.So they don’t like sociology,they don’t like critical theory,and they know nothing about semiotics.So they reject it.That’s why they think my approach unconventional.

ZHANG:Because of the strong philological tradition,the history of comparative literature is a scientific discipline,right? Can you elaborate on this?

PVZ:Comparative literature developed in the nineteenth century,both in Britain and in France,as a philology based on positivism.What is positivism? Positivism is a philosophy founded by the French philosopher Auguste Comte,who was the first thinker to use the word sociology.His ideal was the natural sciences,especially biology,and he mapped out a sociology geared towards the natural sciences in general and biology in particular.For him,sociology was a branch of biology.The second basic tenet of his philosophy was the orientation towards facts:scientific statements and theories have to avoid speculation and should be based on facts.The third basic tenet of his philosophy was causality:science ought to be primarily interested in causal links and in causal relations between facts.Comte’s philosophy came to be known as positivism and was extremely influential in France and other European countries.It did not only influence sociology but also comparative literature,whose proponents pleaded in favor of an orientation towards literary facts.Both Hippolyte Taine in France and Wilhelm Scherer in Germany were advocates of positivism,which they tried to apply to comparative literature.

ZHANG:But this positivism was soon challenged by comparative scholars from different theoretical camps.

PVZ:Exactly.In the USA there was René Wellek,whose thought was close to that of Czech Structuralism.He criticized in the 1960s and 1970s the “fact-finding fetish” of French comparative literature by arguing that a literary work was a structured whole which could not be reduced to an influence and to contacts between writers.And in Germany,French positivism was challenged early on in the 1920s by philosophical hermeneutics and figures like Friedrich Gundolf who believed,among other things,that literature could not be reduced to facts like the objects of natural sciences,because it was a living organism that kept raising questions and suggesting answers which new readers and new readerships continued to repeat,to rephrase and to fill with new life.This train of thought was later on revived by German aesthetics of reception or readerresponse criticism,which was developed by the so-called Constance School represented by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser.This school of thought is also anti-positivistic in the sense that it refuses to view literary works as facts,but tries to find out how questions raised by literary texts are dealt with by generations of readers or by the contemporary readership.For comparative literature this means that this kind of reader-response criticism would like to know how literary texts are read in other cultures.Of course you still have Marxist scholars like Viktor Zhirmunskij in the former USSR and Dionýz Ďurišin in Slovakia.Their criticism of French positivism was that you cannot understand literary influence as long as you don’t take into account the typological similarities between the writers’ historical and social situations.The other argument is that important similarities between literary works exist which cannot be traced back to influence.Such similarities,they believe,are due to similar social structures,institutions and developments.

ZHANG:You just mentioned “typological similarities.” Related to typological comparison,you believe that,more often than not,genetic comparison presupposes typological comparison.Why is that?

PVZ:Let me explain this by way of an example,the typological comparison between the Irish-British author Oscar Wilde and the Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal.In Wilde’s dramas and novel,the conversation or witty talk of the upper classes of London society play an important part.In fact,one could argue that witty talk is the gist of Wilde’s plays and even of his novel.This dominance of conversation is also obvious in the plays of Hugo von Hofmannsthal,especially his“comedy”Der Schwierige(A Difficult Person).In this drama,conversation is not only the gist of the matter,but becomes one of the main topics.So how can these similarities between Oscar Wilde and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s drama be explained? Although Hofmannsthal knew Oscar Wilde’s work,these similarities cannot be explained on a genetic level.The explanation can only be sociological and typological in the sense of Zhirmunskij and Ďurišin.The structural similarities are due to the fact that Wilde’s and Hofmannsthal’s dramas came about in similar social milieus in London and Vienna in the British and Austrian leisure class whose group language was conversation or witty talk.It is the historical and social context of the turn of the century (1900)which explains the similarity of the dramatic structures.

ZHAO:Group language? This is a very interesting term.And I noticed you used it several times in this interview.What do you mean by this?

PVZ:Another name for group language is sociolect.Sociolects or group languages refer to the many different collective languages—religious,political,philosophical,scientific,and technical—that coexist and interact in the social and linguistic situation we live in.And it is from these sociolects or group languages that our horizon of expectations emerge,the expectations that condition our interpretations of literary works.

ZHAO:I gather this is what you mean by saying you have tried to reconstruct comparative literature on a sociosemiotic basis.

PVZ:Yes.We need to locate literary texts and their translations in particular socio-linguistic situations where meanings can change according to cultural particularities,group languages,and ideologies.If we adopt a sociological and semiotic point of view,we can be more precise as far as the “horizon of expectations” is concerned.

ZHAO:Precisely.Thank you very much for this informative and inspiring interview,Professor Zima.

ZHANG:Thank you very much.

PVZ:My pleasure.