University of Oklahoma

Comparability
Author(s): Jonathan Culler
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Comparative Literature: States of the Art
(Spring, 1995), pp. 268-270
Published by: University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151134
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Comparability
By JONATHAN CULLER What makes compar-
ison possible? If we
are reflectingtheoret-
ically on the nature of comparativeliterature,then
we need to attemptto workout the basis of compar-
ison in literarystudies, the nature of comparability
itself. Although the question is not often explicitly
debated, it underlies importantshifts in the disci-
pline. Everyone interested in the field is likely to
know one storyof comparativeliterature:once upon
a time, comparativeliteraturefocused on sources
and influence,bringingtogetherworks where there
seemed a directlink of transmissionwhich subtend-
ed and servedto justifycomparison.But then com-
parativeliteratureliberateditself from the study of
sources and influence and acceded to a broader
regimeof intertextualstudies- broaderbut less well
defined- wherein principleanythingcould be com-
paredwith anythingelse. At this point we began to
hear talk of a "crisisof comparativeliterature,"no
doubt because of the difficultyof explainingthe na-
ture of the new comparabilitythat served to struc-
ture and, in principle,to justifycomparativelitera-
ture as a discipline.
The problem of the nature of comparabilityis
renderedmore acute by the shift of comparativelit-
erature from a Eurocentricto a global discipline,
though that may not appearto be the case. We are
now in a phase, it seems, wherethe problemcan ap-
parentlybe set aside, because a good deal of new
work in comparativeliteratureis focusing on cross-
culturalcontacts and hybriditywithin postcolonial
societies and within the literatures of colonizing
powers.There is a sense in which the most exciting
work in the field is based on a modernizedversion
of the study of sources and influences: insofar as
comparativestudy is based on the diverse literary
and culturalinfluences at work in Derek Walcott's
Omeros,or SalmanRushdie'sSatanicVerses,or Ous-
mane Sembene's Les bouts de bois de Dieu, or
Rodolpho Gonzalez's I Am Joaquin I Yo soy Joaquin,
comparisonis based on direct culturalcontacts and
traceableinfluences.But in principlethe problemof
comparabilityremains unsolved- more acute than
ever. What, in this newly globalizedspace, justifies
bringingtwo or more texts together?
Jonathan Culler is the Class of 19 16 Professor of English and
Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell
University. Author of On Deconstructionand other books on criti-
cal theory, he is at work on A Very Short Introductionto Literary
Theoryfor Oxford University Press and a longer study of Baude-
laire, The Devil's Part: Baudelaire'sPoetry.
In this brief paper I can scarcely do more than
pose the problem, but I propose to approach it
obliquely,in homage to a brilliantyoung compara-
tist, a teacher in the Departement de Litterature
Compareeat the Universitede Montreal,who was
killed in the crash of an AmericanEagle plane out-
side Chicago in the fall of 1994. His name was Bill
Readings.Educatedat Oxford,he had taught at the
Universitede Geneve, SyracuseUniversity,and the
Universite de Montreal. If I approachmy topic by
asking what Bill might have said about it, I do so
with the realizationthat in losing Bill Readingswe
have lost someone whose response to a particular
topic could not be predicted,exceptthat it would be
enormouslyshrewdand interesting.
At the time of his death Bill was finishingrevi-
sions to a book on the university- not the most ex-
citing of topics. Most books about the universityare
written by retiring university administratorsand
seem destined for the remaindertable even as they
come off the press. And perhapsthis one will be no
different,but it does take as its point of departure
the fact that today the tone of self-satisfactionthat
has markedso many books on the university,from
Jacques Barzun to JaroslavPelikan, is no longer
available.Today, Readings writes, "No one of us
can seriouslyimaginehimself or herself as the hero
of the story of the university,as the instantiationof
the culturedindividualthat the entiregreatmachine
laborsday and night to produce. . . . The grandnar-
rative of the universitycentered on the production
of a liberal,reasoningsubject,is no longer available
to us."1This is in part, of course, because we have
come to see that the subjectis gendered,racialized.
Kant gave us the model of the modernuniversity
organizedby a single regulatoryideal, the principle
of Reason. Humboldt and the GermanIdealistsre-
placed the notion of Reason with that of Culture,
centeringthe universityon the dual task of research
and teaching,the productionand inculcationof na-
tional self-knowledge.But now the model of the
Universityof Culture,the universitywhose task was
to produce cultured individuals, citizens imbued
with a national culture, has in the West been re-
placed by what Readingscalls, in a phrasethat res-
onates for those of us in the American academy,
"The Universityof Excellence."
The crucialthing about excellence,he points out,
is that it has no content (there need be no agree-
ment about what is excellent). In that sense, it is
like the cash nexus. It has no content and thus
serves to introduce- here we come to my topic-
comparability.As Readingsexplains, "Its very lack

of referenceallows excellenceto function as a prin-
ciple of translatabilitybetween radicallydifferentid-
ioms."2As British and American academics hear
endlesslyfrom administratorsthese days, everyunit
of the university,from Classics to Transportation
and Parking,can and will be judgedby its success in
achievingexcellence. And excellence is determined
not by intrinsiccharacteristicsof one's activity,nor
by a relation to some externalpurpose, but, most
often, by somethinglike polls: ratingsof some sort,
where people supposed to be more or less knowl-
edgeable,usually other administrators,are asked to
produce rankingsbased on their perceptionsof ex-
cellence.And if you are askedto fill out such a sur-
vey, you are likelyto do so (howevermuch or little
knowledge you may possess) by asking yourself,
"Well,let's see now. Which are the departmentsin
my field that people generallythink are the best?"
Excellenceis determinedby what people thinkother
people mightthinkexcellent.
I am reminded of a remark in George W. S.
Trow's wonderfulbook In theContextof No Context,
which deservesto be better known as a guide to our
condition. Trow identifies as a crucial though un-
recognized watershed in the history of American
modernity "the moment when a man named
Richard Dawson, the host of a program called
'Family Feud,' asked contestants to guess what a
poll of a hundredpeople had guessed would be the
height of the averageAmericanwoman. Guess what
they'veguessed. Guess what they'veguessedthe av-
erage is."3This about our inventionof processes of
producing rankings while evading problems of
knowledgeand referentiality.
In the Universityof Excellence the question be-
comes, "Areyou in the top ten or twenty or fifty of
whatever it is you are?" - judged by criteria that
need not be specified,so accustomedare we now to
this abstract, nonreferential idea of excellence.
(Even surveysthat seek to be more seriousby refin-
ing their questionsmust, in order to retain compa-
rability,makethem essentiallyemptyof referenceto
any specificstandard.Thus a questionabout the ex-
cellenceof units and programsmight be brokeninto
questionsabout the excellence of faculty,the excel-
lence of students,the excellenceof facilities,and so
on.) The idea of excellenceenablesus to make com-
parableentities which have little in common as to
structureor function, input or output. But that is
only half of its bureaucraticusefulness.It also makes
possible the avoidance of substantive arguments
about what teachers, students, and administrators
should actuallybe doing. Everyone'stask is to strive
for excellence,howeverthat mightbe defined.
For example, our Departmentof Transportation
and Parkingat Cornellreceivedan awardfor excel-
lence from its professionalorganization,apparently
for its success in discouragingparkingon campus
(success in "decreasingdemand," they call it) by
CULLER 269
chargingincreasinglyhigher fees and progressively
eliminatingconvenientparkingspaces. But it is not
utterly impossible to imagine that excellence here
might have been assigned precisely the opposite
content: excellence might conceivably consist of
making it easier for faculty to park on campus,
thoughI agreethat this is not verylikely.
At the moment I am serving on a task force on
graduate education, with representativesfrom the
schools of law, business, veterinarymedicine, engi-
neering, and hotel administrationon my campus.
We have very differentideas, I would guess, about
what the goals and means of education should be
and about what sort of things our graduatestudents
should be doing, but all this seems to be bracketed
as irrelevantas we all agreethat "excellence"should
be our goal and (alas!)that everybodyshould be re-
viewed to see that they are workingtoward it. As
Bill Readings writes, "Excellenceshares with Ma-
chiavelli'svirtuthe advantageof permittingcalcula-
tion on a homogenous scale." It is a principle of
accounting and bureaucraticcontrol. Bureaucracy
works more efficientlyif it can avoid becoming in-
volved in argumentsabout the contents of various
activitieswith people who know more than the ad-
ministrators,if it can operate at the level of the
quantificationof excellence,where the comparabili-
ty it establishesprovidesjustificationfor the alloca-
tion of resources.As a principleof unrestrictedac-
counting, excellence draws only one boundary,
writes Readings, "the boundary that protects the
unrestrictedpowerof the bureaucracy."
But it is importantto stress, I think, that excel-
lence is not an idea foisted on universitiesby corpo-
rate managementand its representativeson boards
of trustees. It has, on the contrary,come to be the
way in which the university,in the United States,
achievesthe self-consciousnesssupposedto guaran-
tee its intellectual autonomy. Unlike business,
which is interestedonly in the bottom line, we in the
universityare definedby our pursuitof excellence.A
thousand reports and brochurestell the same tale.
Contentlessexcellence- our comparability.
I am interested in the relationshipbetween the
comparability of comparative literature and the
comparabilityinstituted by excellence, which, to
sum up, has the followingcharacteristics:1) it pur-
ports to have content but actually does not; 2) it
grantsgroupsconsiderablefreedom (it doesn't mat-
ter what you do so long as you do it excellently),
which is crucialto bureaucraticefficiency;but 3) ul-
timatelyit is a mechanismfor the reductionor ex-
clusion of activitiesthat do not succeedby this mea-
sure. How does the comparabilityof comparative
literaturecomparewith this?
The intertextualnatureof meaning- the fact that
meaning lies in the differencesbetween one text or
one discourseand another- makesliterarystudy es-
sentially, fundamentally comparative, but it also
270 WORLDLITERATURE
TODAY
produces a situation in which comparabilityde-
pends upon a cultural system, a general field that
underwritescomparison.The meaningof a text de-
pends on its relations to others within a cultural
space, such as that of West Europeanculture,which
is in part why comparativeliteraturehas been so
much inclined to remainWestern and Europeanin
its focus. The more sophisticatedone's understand-
ing of discourse,the harderit is to compareWestern
and non-Western texts, for each depends for its
meaningand identityon its place within a discursive
system- disparatesystems that seem to make the
putativecomparabilityof texts either illusoryor, at
the veryleast, misleading.
What sort of comparability,then, could guide the
transformationof comparativeliteraturefrom a Eu-
rocentricdisciplineto a more global one?There is a
difficultproblemhere, it seems to me. On the one
hand, as my colleague Natalie Melas argues, com-
parison such as justifies a discipline consolidatesa
standardor norm which then functionsto give value
to works that match up to it and to exclude those
that do not, so that comparison- the principle of
comparability - rather than opening new possibili-
ties for culturalvalue, more often than not restricts
and totalizesit.4But, on the otherhand, as we try to
avoid this imposition of particularnorms, we may
riskfallinginto the alternativepractice,which Read-
ings's account of excellence describes, where the
standardis kept nonreferential - vacuous- so that it
is not imposing particularrequirementsbut where,
in the end, it providesa bureaucratic ratherthan an
intellectualmechanismfor regulationand control.
The problem of comparisonis that it seems in-
evitably to generate a standard, or ideal type, of
which the texts comparedcome to function as vari-
ants. And comparatiststoday are eagerto avoid this
implicit result of measuringone culture's texts by
some standard extrinsic to that culture. Yet the
more we try to deploy a comparabilitythat has no
implicitcontent, the more we riskfallinginto a situ-
ation like that of the Universityof Excellence,where
an apparentlack of concern for content- your de-
partmentcan do what it likes, providedit does it ex-
cellently- is in the end only the alibi for a control
based on bureaucraticratherthan academicand in-
tellectualprinciples.
The virtue of a comparabilitybased on specific
intellectual norms or models- generic, thematic,
historical- is that they are subject to investigation
and argumentin ways that the vacuousbureaucratic
norms are not. One solution, then, is to attemptto
spell out the assumptionsand norms that seem to
underwriteone's comparisons,so that they do not
become implicit terms. A model here might be
Erich Auerbach'sconception of the Ansatzpunkt:a.
specificpoint of departure,conceived not as an ex-
ternalposition of masterybut as a "handle"or par-
tial vantage point that enables the critic to bring
together a varietyof culturalobjects. "The charac-
teristic of a good point of departure,"writes Auer-
bach in his essay "Philologyand Weltliteratur" "is
its concretenessand its precisionon the one hand,
and on the other, its potentialfor centrifugalradia-
tion."5This might be a theme, a metaphor,a detail,
a structural problem, or a well-defined cultural
function. I can imagine basing cross-culturalcom-
parison on linking principleswhose very arbitrari-
ness or contingencywill prevent them from giving
rise to a standardor ideal type, such as comparing
worksby authorswhose last name begins with B>or
workswhose numericalplace in a bibliographyis di-
visible by thirteen. I confess, though, that this is
scarcelythe sort of thing Auerbachhad in mind and
not a generalor principledsolution to the problem
of comparability.A furtherpossibilityis to attempt
to locate the comparativeperspectivegeographically
and historically:instead of imaginingthe compara-
tive perspective as a global overview, one might
stress the value, for instance, of comparingEuro-
pean literaturesfromAfrica,for theirrelationsto the
cultural productions of a particularAfrican mo-
ment. Better such points of departurethat impose
criteriaand norms than the fear that comparisons
will be odious. The danger, I repeat, is that com-
paratists' fear that their comparisonswill impose
implicitnorms and standardsmay give rise to a vac-
uousness that is as difficultto combat as is the no-
tion of excellencewhich administratorsare using to
organizeand reorganizethe Americanuniversity.
The difficultyof the problemmakesme regretthe
more that Bill Readings,who might have had entic-
ing suggestionsto offer, is no longerwith us. I hope
that his book will help us to think about compara-
tive literatureas well as about the institutions in
which we labor and to which he devoted so much
energyand intelligence.
CornellUniversity
1William
Readings, The UniversityBeyond Culture: The Idea of
Excellence, Cambridge,Ma., HarvardUniversityPress,forthcom-
ing. The quoteis frompage 17 of the manuscript.
2Further
quotationsare all from "The Idea of Excellence,"
chapter 2 of TheUniversity BeyondCulture.
3
GeorgeW. S. Trow, In theContextof No Context,Boston,Lit-
tle, Brown,1981, p. 58.
4See Natalie Melas's
paper, "Versionsof Incommensurabili-
ty," elsewherein this issue of WLT.
5ErichAuerbach,"Philologyand Weltliteratur," tr. Marieand
EdwardSaid, CentennialReview,13:1 (Winter 1969), p. 15. I
owe this referenceto David Chioni Moore's stimulatingdiscus-
Reme-
sion in "ComparativeLiteratureto Weltkulturwissenschaft:
dying a Failed Transition,"a paperfor the TwentiethSouthern
ComparativeLiteratureAssociationmeeting,October 1994. See
also his unpublishedDuke Universitydissertation,"Geo/graphy
WithoutBorders:Metaphorsof Structurein 20th CenturyWorld
Literatureand Culture."