Nutshells and Infinite Space: Totality and Global Culture Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Oded Nir, MA Graduate Program in Comparative Studies The Ohio State University 2014 Dissertation Committee: Philip Armstrong, Advisor Leo Coleman Ethan Knapp Fredric Jameson Copyright by Oded Nir 2014 Abstract In my dissertation, “Nutshells and Infinite Space: Totality and Global Culture,” I reformulate the Marxist concept of totality in response to the economic and cultural transformations brought about by globalization. The dissertation is divided into three parts. In the first part, I trace the lineage of Marxist thinking about totality through the writing of Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and Jameson. Through addressing critiques of totality, I develop a conception of immanent totality that reconciles Hegelian Marxist thinking on totality with the critiques of the concept elaborated by Spinozist Marxism, Lyotard, and others. In the second part of the dissertation, I argue that attempts to theorize globalization from the late 1980s until the early 2000s (in the work of Ronald Robertson, Arjun Appadurai, Leslie Sklair, Kenichi Ohmae, Ulrich Beck and others) constitute an unconscious search for a subject of history, or for a universal agent that can exert control over globalization. This unconscious search is conducted in globalization theory’s attempt to relate systematic changes brought about by globalization to the subjective experience conditioned by such changes. I argue that in a first moment, globalization theories attempt to construct new discursive contradictions in order to describe their new phenomena. In a second moment, these contradictions tend to collapse, marking the failure of the search for a subject of history. I conclude by arguing that the nation- ii state remains a suppressed object of desire for globalization theory, one that marks the possibility of future collective projects. In the final part of my dissertation, I present a typology of World Literature theories. I argue that early World Literature theories include an unintended rejection of totalizing aesthetics. In contrast, I argue, more contemporary discussions of World Literature look for ways in which totalizing aesthetics are reinvented to take into account cultural transformations that result from processes of globalization. I then introduce a case study of Israeli literature. I present a short history of totalization in Israeli literature, showing how contemporary attempts to reinvent totalizing aesthetic strategies modify older totalizing imaginaries in order to address the specific effects of globalization in the Israeli context. I argue that these attempts to reinvent totalizing representational strategies point to possible directions for reconstituting radically transformative collective political imaginaries in the Israeli-Palestinian context. iii Vita 1997……………………………………………………………Ort Ma’alot High School 2005……………………………………………………………B.S. Physics and Philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2008……………………………………………………………M.A. Comparative Literature, Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2009, 2012…………………………………………………..Distinguished University Fellowship, The Ohio State University 2009-Present……………………………………………….Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Comparative Studies iv Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................................... ii Vita............................................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ......................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Totality Today .................................................................................................................... 8 Lukács and Immanence ................................................................................................................. 13 Sartre and Transcendence ........................................................................................................... 47 Adorno and the System ................................................................................................................. 69 Jameson, or the Persistence of Totality .................................................................................. 83 Chapter 2: The Ideologies of Globalization .............................................................................. 106 Theorizing the Global Generally .............................................................................................. 115 Social Polarization, or, the Hermeneutic of Flexibility ................................................... 132 The Nation-State and its Global Inadequacies ................................................................... 146 Chapter 3: Literature and the World .......................................................................................... 164 Theoretical Beginnings ............................................................................................................... 167 The Distribution of Utopia in Modern Hebrew Literature ............................................ 197 From Utopian Project to National Ideology .................................................................... 218 From National Hegemony to Globalization ..................................................................... 231 v Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 276 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................................... 279 Appendix: “On the Night before the Morning, All Power to the Communes” ............. 292 vi List of Figures Figure 1: “Declaration Flowchart” ............................................................................................... 103 Figure 2: Mapping World Literature Theories ....................................................................... 175 vii INTRODUCTION The aim of this dissertation is to argue for the necessity of retaining a totalizing horizon in any critique of the present. Two questions therefore deserve some preliminary attention, the first having to do with the insistence on what the Marxist tradition has called totality or totalization, and the second having to do with its pertinence in the present conjuncture or situation. To be sure, the urgency of political critique today, obvious as it may be, does not seem to demand a return to what is still surely viewed as part of an outdated Marxist vocabulary, one that we often associate with revolutionary failure, totalitarianism, or - in a more historical vein - with Stalinism. Associating totality with totalitarianism is of course not some natural tendency but rather a historical result – one having to do less with the “facts” of Stalinism than with the coming into dominance of what we call “French theory” in the American academy in the 1980s and 90s, and the latter’s emergence out of intellectual disappointment with the French Communist party in the 60s. We will therefore return to four moments of Marxist staging of totality: Georg Lukács and the totalizing standpoint of the subject of history; Jean Paul Sartre’s distinction between totalities as the product of past praxis and the opposing living process of totalization; Adorno’s system of exchange value and its antagonist in the form of the non-identical of use value; and Fredric Jameson’s unconscious totality, or 1 totalization’s persistence under postmodernism. If the writing of the first three authors has been many times “adapted” to postmodern concerns, Jameson’s writing has “French theory’s” attacks on totality as its immediate context. Thus, in the case of the first three authors, we will have to contend with their historical distance from us and their contemporary readings. The opposite will prove to be the case for Jameson’s writing: we will try to generate some historical distance from his work, where it seems not to exist. Even if the age of high theory in the American humanities has to a certain extent ended, it has left behind an anti-Marxist residue, one whose origin can be traced to the French political context of the 1960s and 70s. In the first chapter, therefore, we will address not only Marxist writing on totality but also some of totality’s most well known antagonists: from Lyotard’s “let us wage war on totality” and Foucault’s critique of continuous history, to Spinozist post- marxism’s suspicion of transcendence and Latour’s rejection of any totalizing social perspective. In each case, we will show that the critique leveled at totality is actually a moment in the process of totalization itself. Thus, it is through showing how totalizing critique includes Lyotardian, Foucauldian or Spinozist moments that we will be able to begin answering the double question of totality’s pertinence today. As we will argue in the beginning of the first chapter, totality does not designate