Written by Roberto Dainotto, Department of Romance Studies, Duke University
In a note on “Methodological Questions” penned in his Prison Notebooks around 1933, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “If one wants to study the conception of a world-view that has not been exposed systematically… (and whose essential coherence is to be found not in a single essay or in a series of essays, but in the entire development of [a body of] intellectual work in which the elements of such view of the world are implicit), we need to do careful, preliminarily philological work…”
Philology may well have been, in Gramsci’s time as in our own, “the least sexy” of disciplines and methods of inquiry, as Edward Said reminded us only a few years ago in his “Return to Philology.” Yet, what philology helped Gramsci to do, and can still help us in doing, is to “better understand the concept a word means to express: the concept can be brought back to the historically determined cultural world that conceived it. Similarly, it can be useful specifically to determine the limit of the word, thus avoiding the almost mechanical reification of that word” into truth statements.
Europe (in Theory) begins with a set philological hypotheses: that the word “Europe” alludes, more than to a specific geographical fact (which is notoriously difficult to define: is Turkey Europe? And what about Russia?), to certain “conceptions of the world” which are “historically determined”; that these “conceptions of the world” are immanent to certain historical situations, and therefore change when the situation changes even if the word remains the same; and that all of these “conceptions of the world” determine specific “limits” to what the word, in each different historical setting, signifies.
Through this set of philological hypotheses, I looked at the origin of “Europe”: the word, once relegated to mythology, emerges “as a moral and political concept” (Chabod) in the context of the Persian Wars. It is in that context that “Europe,” whose geographical extension is limited to the Greek city-states around the Mediterranean, starts meaning nothing else than the antithesis of Asia. Aristotle’s Politics, for instance: “The nations in cold regions, particularly in Europe, are full of [courage]... which is why they continue to be comparatively free... . By contrast, those in Asia... lack [courage]; which is why they continue to be ruled and enslaved.” “Us,” not surprisingly, is defined by an opposition to “them.”
Yet, what for me was more interesting than this original conception of Europe, was a shift in what Europe started to mean in the Eighteenth Century. Not only the territory of what “Europe” supposed to cover had extended far beyond the Greek city-states. What was more curious was the antithetical principle to Europe (Asia as non-Europe) had been, so to speak, internalized. It is not that an opposition of Europe to Asia was ceasing to exist. Rather, this opposition was being supplemented by a new—modern—one. In Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Law, in fact, the essence of Europe—its progress from a state of nature to the modernity of social laws—relied on antithesis that was internal to Europe itself—on its south, a sort of pathological, backward non-European Europe; a Europe (in theory), that is to say
It is not surprising that the cowardice of the people of hot climates has almost constantly rendered them slaves, and that the courage of the people of cold climates has kept them free…
You will find, in the climates of the north, peoples who have few vices, many virtues, and much sincerity and candor. As you move toward the countries of the south, you will believe you have moved away from morality itself…
What “conception of a world-view,” what “historically determined” concept was being re-articulated in such shift and re-orientation of what “Europe” was starting to signify? Certainly, the fact that Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Law was written at the heyday of a controversy between ancient and moderns was likely to mean that “Europe” expressed now a faith in progress and modernity of which the ancient and classical south could only be an “origin”—an imperfect beginning, that is, impervious to the magnificent progress of history, and closer still to a state of nature—a club Mediterranée, indeed. And the fact that the Spirit of the Law was written at the moment in which capitalist and mercantile classes were already waiting to displace the old aristocracy, was likely to hint at a new conception of economic and political power—a power no longer dependent on feudal and territorial accumulation, but on the exploitation of natural resources (the plentiful south), and on the exploitation of labor (a labor whose ethics, before being Protestant, was already antithesis of the “lazy” south).
The larger, and most problematic theoretical shift (by “theory” I mean, again, a “conception of a world-view”) engendered by the internalization of the (Asiatic) Other into the (European) South, however, remains one: the shifting signification of Europe points to a reform of classical dialectics (Aristotle’s) into a modern dialectics that, starting from Montesquieu, finds its systematic theorization in Hegel. This is a dialectics of the same. The Other, in this dialectics, is no longer something external to the self, but, at best, a previous developmental stage in the progressive unfolding of the self towards the end of history. In this dialectical shift lies, in my opinion, the pernicious essence of what we often refer to as “Eurocentrism.” Eurocentrism, in this reading, is not the alleged centrality of Europe, but its totalizing spread. Non-Europe, to put it differently, is no longer the “other” of Europe, but a stage of Europe itself yet to be Europeanized—or modernized, or democratized, or rendered free, and so on.
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Written by Katia Curbelo (ICR/Cultural Studies/Italian and Spanish) and Amauri Serrano (Italian/MSLIS)
In Europe (in Theory), Roberto Dainotto traces theorizations of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, singling out the surfacing structures and paradigms that have shaped current ideas of Europe and its cultural identity. He does so by attempting to provide a “genealogy of Eurocentrism.” He argues that modern theories of Europe cannot be explained by the antithesis between Europe and Asia; rather Eurocentrism begins with a modern theory of identity, specifically identity as dialectics of the same, which according to Dainotto begins with Montesquieu and finds its final nineteenth-century form in Hegel’s Europe as the “end of history.” Therefore modern European cultural identity begins when Southern Europe becomes the internal Other. He cites the writings of the philosophes and even Rousseau to illustrate how the south was seen as a “distant fantasy of primitivism – nature; past – against which modern and northern Europe, with nostalgia and pride could theorize itself.” Dainotto further utilizes the noncanonical writings of Juan Andrés, a literary historian, and Michele Amari, an Orientalist, to describe the Other Europe, a Europe theorized for and from the south. Both Andrés and Amari see the Orient as an integral part of European history and identity, and the analysis of such sources challenges current and past depictions of southern Europe.
Professor Dainotto presented his book at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory’s roundtable discussion last Monday night by outlining his motivations for writing the book. He described the book as an end product of multiple anxieties: being called ‘PIGS’ (Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain), becoming European as well as a teaching and researching in a humanities under seige. The book itself, according to Dainotto, is a justification of the humanities; however it is not meant to propose a clash of the disciplines. Rather its purpose is to show how different mythologies, in the case of Europe (in Theory) – a philological approach – are all part of a larger whole. The constant questioning of the humanities led Dainotto to question another area of personal identity: his (trans)formation into a European citizen, not only an Italian. It is here that he looks at his Europeaness from his point of origin – that of a southern Italian. As he explains, he starts where everyone else ends – in Southern Europe. Europe divides itself from the external Other (Asia) because it has the Other contained in itself (South). In Dainotto's words: " [There was a] latitudinal shift: it's not East and West anymore, but North and South. A shift that reconceptualizes Europe […] a shift that is not finding its other in Asia, but looking for its Orient in its South".
During the discussion several interesting comments and questions were made that were briefly addressed but would be worth discussing further.
How can we produce a new vocabulary to speak about what 'Europe' and 'Europeaness' should 'look like', if we were to take the Other out of the idea of 'the Southern Other'? What other terminology would we use to refer to 'the South'? Can we apply concepts drawn from postcolonial studies? What about migration—or the 'networks of migration', to cite directly from the roundtable—that are present in the EU? The continuous monitoring of the European Union over certain 'borders'? Who gets to pass, who gets to stay behind?
What terminology (i.e. in Italian as 'ex-comunitari') would mark those countries geographically seen as Southern? How would Europe define itself if the internal Other, just like its external Other, became nonexistent and/or could not be racialized anymore? Can we think of an Arabo-Islamic approach to speaking about the beginning of Europeanness?
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Written by Lauren Goodlad, Interim Director, Unit for Criticism
On Monday September 15th the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory held the first of three Author's Roundtables: a discussion by Roberto Dainotto, professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, of his recent book Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007). The event also featured three respondents: Elena Delgado (Spanish), Manuel Rota (Italian), and Carl Lehnen (English).
Dainotto begins his book by situating himself as a Southerner—an Italian—addressing the moment of European Union. In offering up the genealogical backstory of this European apotheosis the book does not simply transpose the logic of Orientalism to a latitudinal axis; it also tells a complicated story about internal otherness within Europe, describing the various ways in which Southernness—both like and unlike Orientalism—becomes aligned with historicity and particularity in a Eurocentric imaginary dominated by, but also unsatisfied with, its prevailing Northern polarity.
We have invited two guest bloggers—Katia Curbelo (ICR/Cultural Studies/Italian and Spanish) and Amauri Serrano (Italian, MSLI) to write on the roundtable and have also posted the responses by Manuel Rota and Carl Lehnen as well as a final reply from Roberto Dainotto.
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posted under
Author's Roundtable
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Dainotto
,
Rota
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Emanuel Rota, Italian
In his latest book, Roberto Dainotto argues that, with the rise of modernity, European identity, hegemonized by French authors, acquires a Northern/Southern opposition, next to the traditional Orient/Occident opposition. Inspired by Gramsci, Dainotto uses his sharp philological tools to identify the emergence of such a tradition, convincingly showing that this new narrative, and a few counternarratives, take shape in the French Enlightenment and become part of the ideological debate of the 19th century. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws and its theory of climates were, in Dainotto’s convincing account, the original formulation of this new Northern disdain for the South of Europe. In my response, thinking with professor Dainotto’s excellent book, I argue that labor and the new work discipline required by the emerging capitalist production constitute one of the central subtexts of this North/South opposition.
Montesquieu's elaborate theory of climate is a logical necessity of his philosophical construction. He believed in natural laws, monogenesis, and on an idea of Europe based on the notion of the Ius Publicum Europaeum. These three elements could on ly work together thanks to his theory of climate. Monogenesis, which Montesquieu inherited from the biblical tradition, asserts that human nature is one and the same everywhere. Natural laws were supposed to be laws that stemmed directly from nature and existed in an extra-juridical space, independent from the sovereign's will and as natural as the laws of physics. The Ius Publicum Europaeum was the specific form that natural laws had acquired in the European territory and that governed the inter-European international relations despite the absence of a European sovereign. Why, if human beings were the same everywhere and natural laws came from nature, was the Ius Publicum Europaeum European and not worldwide? Montesquieu's answer was that human nature did not change, but natural climates did, hence climates were responsible for the differences.
This weak argumentation, which would be attacked, within the borders of liberal ideology, by racists--human nature change--and by legal positivism--might makes right--serves the ideological purpose of limiting the power of the sovereign without putting the existence of the state at risk. Laws are natural; they exist above the king, who becomes a despot if he wants an absolute power, and also above the multitude, who becomes an unruly mob and gives birth to ochlocratic governments if it does not respect natural laws (including private property, of course).
Thus, Montesquieu’s book always serves two purposes: challenge absolutism while keeping a watchful eye on the multitudes and its desire for democracy. With this in mind, we can try to interpret the emergence of a Southern narrative as brilliantly highlighted by Dainotto. The Occident/Orient binary opposition perfectly serves the purpose of attacking absolutism as Oriental despotism, but what about the North/South distinction?
Let’s hear from the French Enlightenment. Here is Montesquieu (most relevant parts in Bold, a summary of the points at the end of the quotes):
In Europe there is a kind of balance between the southern and northern nations. The first have every convenience of life, and few of its wants: the last have many wants, and few conveniences. To one nature has given much, and they demand little from nature; to the other she has given but little, and they demand a great deal. The equilibrium is maintained by the laziness of the southern nations, and by the industry and activity which she has given to those in the north. The latter are obliged to undergo much labour, without which they would want everything, and degenerate into barbarians. This has naturalized slavery to the people of the south: as they can easily dispense with riches, they can more easily dispense with liberty. But the people of the north have need of liberty, for this can best procure them the means of satisfying all those wants which they have received from nature. The people of the north, then, are in a forced state, if they are not either free or barbarians. Almost all the people of the south are, in some measure, in a state of violence, if they are not slaves.
Here is Voltaire:
The Oriental climate, nearer to the South, obtains everything from nature; while we, in our northern West, we owe everything to time, to commerce and to a belated industry.
And here is Rousseau’s Social Contract:
Luxury in clothes shows similar differences. In climates in which the changes of season are prompt and violent, men have better and simpler clothes; where they clothe themselves only for adornment, what is striking is more thought of than what is useful; clothes themselves are then a luxury. At Naples, you may see daily walking in the Pausilippeum men in gold-embroidered upper garments and nothing else. It is the same with buildings; magnificence is the sole consideration where there is nothing to fear from the air. In Paris and London, you desire to be lodged warmly and comfortably; in Madrid, you have superb salons, but
not a window that closes, and you go to bed in a mere hole... To all these points may be added another, which at once depends on and strengthens them. Hot countries need inhabitants less than cold countries, and can support more of them. There is thus a double surplus, which is all to the advantage of despotism.
If you did not have the patience to read the quotes, here is what they all say: Northern people have to work because nature does not give much; Southern people don’t have to work because nature is generous there. Only necessity makes people work, whereas abundance makes them lazy. Lazy people are prone to despotism, hard working people, instead, are good for the rule of laws. Abundance leads to despotism, scarcity of resources leads to good citizens.
Really? Were people in Southern Europe, not just the aristocrats, everybody, so rich that they did not have to work? Fortunately, what the French philosophes managed to obscure with their elaborate constructions, is readily revealed by English sources: (don’t skip this one):
The industry of the people was considered extraordinary, their peculiarity of life remarkable. They lived like the inhabitants of Spain, or after the custom of the Orientals. Three or four o'clock in the morning found them at work. At noon they rested; many enjoyed their siesta; others spent their time in the workshops eating and drinking, these places being often turned into taprooms and the apprentices into pot boys; others again enjoyed themselves at marbles or in the skittle alley. Three or four hours were thus devoted to play; and then came work again till eight or nine, and sometimes ten, the whole year through.
Birmingham Journal, 26 Sept. I855, “Hints for a History of Birmingham”
The Birmingham Journal uses 18th century sources to describe the life of the Birmingham workers who, thanks to the abundance created by their successful work, have the freedom to organize their time according to their desire: they work and they play, they take siestas, like the inhabitants of Spain, or after the custom of the Orientals. Abundance creates a non European space.
Here is another, even more revealing quotation: (Hutton, An History of Birmingham (I78I), p. 69)
The men... [are] regulated by the expense of their families, and their necessities; it is very well known that they will not go further than necessity prompts them, many of them.
As economic historians have pointed out, workers, in the early stage of the capitalist reorganization of production, refused to work more than they needed to support their standard of life. They preferred lower pays and more leisure time than higher pay and no free time. Montesquieu and the other philosophes provided a philosophical justification for the predatory instincts of the early capitalist owners: abundance will make you lazy and slaves: work all day long to earn the bare necessity and you will be free. The European South, with its preindustrial life style had to be racialized and moralized so that the Northern European workers could be threatened with the early stage of a racial division of Europe: overexploit the workers because necessity is Northern Europe, whereas abundance is the degenerate South. Learn this work discipline because exploitation and work will make you free. From the early stages of the original accumulation of power and capital, one can almost imagine a world where in all the factories of Europe one cold write: Work Makes You Free.
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Written by Carl Lehnen, English
One of the primary goals of postcolonial studies has been to deconstruct articulations of cultural difference that depend on binaries like East and West, primitive and modern, colonizer and colonized. Such scholarship has shown that Europe does not exist in splendid isolation, but in complex networks of migration, imperialism, and capital. Yet, insofar as postcolonial studies has tended to put Europe’s internal divisions in brackets, it risks leaving unrealized its insight that “Europe” is as much a rhetorical invention as “Africa.” As such, Professor Dainotto’s genealogy of the idea of Europe offers an excellent opportunity to rethink how such articulations of cultural difference operate both inside and outside of Europe. What’s important here is not just the assertion that Europe had internal as well as external others, thus giving us a bigger pool of “others” to apply our critical tools to, but that this genealogy questions the Europeanness of Europe, or the identity on which such a logic of othering depends. In shifting our attention from an inter-continental distinction between East and West to an intra-continental distinction between North and South, I think this book raises a number of important questions for how we think about culture, geography, and history, and in the remainder of my response I’ll try to sketch out just a few of them.
First, if the European south takes the place of the Asiatic east in the dialectic of European self-definition, then what’s at stake in this substitution? In other words, does making the negative term internal to Europe just change one of the terms of the dialectic, or does it change the way the dialectic itself works? In some ways, Greece or Italy could be quite convenient analogues to the Islamic world. Both are the sites of civilizations that, so the theory goes, gained the benefits of civilization quite early because of their hospitable climates, but were then unable to develop any further. On the other hand, whatever the attempts of writers like Montesquieu and Staël to define the origin of modern Europe as Franco-German rather than Greco-Roman, it simply wasn’t possible (or perhaps even desirable) to exclude the south from a history of Europe in the same way that it was to exclude Africa and Asia.
Which brings me to a related concern about method and terminology. Given the widely recognized cultural heritage of places like Greece and Italy, and given the southern “periphery’s” proximity to the northern “center,” does it even make sense to call the south an “other,” or do we need some new vocabulary to discuss its position? I would argue, as I think Europe (in Theory) also implies, that we do need such a vocabulary, and that the language of othering is not just tired but also inadequate to describing many articulations of cultural difference. The essential question here seems to be, how are cultures narrated in history and mapped onto space? In the story that this book tells, it turns out that “Europe” doesn’t just come into being through some primal encounter of self-definition and negation, but through an ongoing process of self-narrating and self-mapping. Europe and its others aren’t just like or unlike, but temporally and spatially situated: young or old, developing or decadent, near or far, here or there.
A third question that this attention to space and time raises for me is how we might extend Europe’s insights in order to make sense of writers who not only position the south as under-developed, static, or decadent, but who also seem to find this underdevelopment attractive. That is, instead of getting caught in an unfruitful opposition between “othering” and “identification,” perhaps the language of past and present selves can give us a better way of explaining this variant of romantic primitivism. Of course, Europe gives ample attention to those like Juan Andrés and Michele Amari who challenge Montesquieu’s narrative of historical development, but these writers seem less interested in questioning the desirability of modernity than they are in redefining the south’s relationship to it. What, then, about writers like Staël or Byron who more or less accept Montesquieu’s version of a modern north and a pre-modern south, but for whom this denial of coevalness does not necessarily constitute a denial of the possibility of dialogue?
Finally, I can’t help but think about the historical aporia with which the book ends. Amari, hoping to rescue Sicily from northern denigration through an Arabocentric approach, finds that the real Sicily remains as much an obscurity in the Islamic archive as in the European. Given this failure, should we take a moment to reflect on our own methodologies? If, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, historicism “posit[s] historical time as a measure of cultural distance,” then can its contradictions and exclusions be remedied through more historicism? What does the framework of history reveal, and what are its limits?
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posted under
crisis
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Dainotto
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humanities
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Rothberg
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Michael Rothberg, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Is there a crisis of the humanities? If so, how do we characterize it and what can we do about it? If not, why is the rhetoric of crisis so persistent?
Duke University Romance Studies scholar Roberto Dainotto takes an approach to these questions that I think runs nicely against the grain of current common sense. In his recent book Europe (In Theory)—which is not primarily about the crisis of the humanities, but rather, as its title suggests, about the construction of Europe—Dainotto writes: “The problem . . . is no longer whether the humanities with their tools—rhetoric, philology, historicism—will be adequate or relevant to the technologized, quantified, and statistic-oriented sciences, but whether the latter are still capable of responding to the humanities” (9).
Is this a useful starting point for considering either the crisis of the humanities or the rhetoric of crisis? How can we reframe the rhetoric so as to avert the crisis?
The questions I’ve posed here are not meant simply as “rhetorical” questions, although questions of rhetoric are obviously at the heart of the issue of “crisis.” University administrators, state legislatures, and that vague entity known as “the public” are constantly asking us to justify ourselves—and not just in Illinois, I’m sure.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be attending the first meeting of a Humanities Board convened by our Provost. We need to develop lines of argument adequate to these times without betraying the importance of what we do. This ought to be a collective effort, so please let me know what you think.
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