Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History
Few things seem to us as natural as the multiplicity of vernacular languages that different peoples use for making sense of life through texts, that is, for making literature. And few things seem as unnatural as their abandonment and gradual disappearance in the present. In fact, literary language loss is often viewed as part of a more general reduction of cultural diversity, one considered as dangerous as the reduction of biological diversity to which it is often compared. The homogenization of culture today, of which language loss is one aspect, seems without precedent in human history, at least for the scope, speed, and manner in which changes are taking place.
This commonsense view of the world needs two important qualifications. First, the vernacular ways of being that we see vanishing everywhere were themselves created over time. These are not primeval ways of autochthons, for autochthons (like the Spartoi of Thebes, “the sown people” born from the dragon teeth planted by Cadmus) do not exist outside their own mythical self-representation. Second, by the very fact of their creation, the new vernaculars replaced a range of much older cultural practices. These earlier practices, which seemed to belong to everywhere in general and nowhere in particular, affiliated their users to a larger world rather than a smaller place. They were, in a sense to be argued out in this essay, cosmopolitan practices. These great transformations in the course of the last two millennia—from the old cosmopolitan to the vernacular, and from the vernacular to the new and disquieting cosmopolitan of today—resulted from choices made by people at different times and places, for very complex reasons. Studying the history of such choices may have something important, perhaps even urgent, to tell us about choices available to us in the future.
In earlier work I have studied the period following the old cosmopolitan epoch, which I called the vernacular millennium.1 This began in southern Asia and western Europe with remarkable simultaneity in the early second millennium, and it developed with equally striking parallels over the following five centuries. I say “began” emphatically: vernacular literary cultures were initiated by the conscious decisions of writers to reshape the boundaries of their cultural universe by renouncing the larger world for the smaller place, and they did so in full awareness of the significance of their decision. New, local ways of making culture— with their wholly historical and factitious local identities—and, concomitantly, new ways of ordering society and polity came into being, replacing the older translocalism. These developments in culture and power are historically linked, at the very least by the fact that using a new language for communicating literarily to a community of readers and listeners can consolidate if not create that very community, as both a sociotextual and a political formation.
While the literary-cultural processes of this reshaping are remarkably similar in southern Asia and western Europe, the political logics they followed appear to have differed fundamentally. In Europe, vernacularization accompanied and enabled the production of the nation-state; in India, it accompanied and enabled the production of a political form we may neutrally call the vernacular polity, in order to signal its difference. In both worlds, however, vernacularization helped initiate an early-modern era, each again marked by its specific type of modernity. And it is only now for the first time, when this epoch seems to be drawing to a close as vernacular modes of cultural and political being are everywhere coming under powerful pressures from an altogether new universalizing order of culturepower (call it globalization, or liberalization, or Americanization), that we may begin to conceive of this past history as a whole and make some sense of it for cultural and political theory.
I would like here to elaborate on these earlier arguments by situating the vernacular millennium within a comparative-historical account of the cosmopolitanisms that preceded it. These, too, comprised forms of identity that reveal themselves as produced and entirely provisional; they are located securely in time and in the choices made by the producers of culture to participate in new frames of reference, routes of circulation, and kinds of community. And each had its own specific political logic. My concerns will be, first, with tracing the parallels between these cosmopolitan formations, as well as the dramatic differences that become perceptible when we place them side by side; and, second, with considering the ways they may have contributed to shaping the vernacular varieties that replaced them (whose histories, for their part, I can only briefly summarize here). Very different cosmopolitan and vernacular practices have existed in the past, and these may have important implications for future practices in the face of what often seems to be the single, desperate choice we are offered: between, on the one hand, a national vernacularity dressed in the frayed period costume of violent revanchism and bent on preserving difference at all costs and, on the other, a clear-cutting, strip-mining multinational cosmopolitanism that is bent, at all costs, on eliminating it.
Let me take a moment to explain how and why I proceed as I do in my historical analysis of cosmopolitan and vernacular ways of being and the kinds of cultural and political belonging to which they have related, as well as my purpose in trying to make sense of this history. First, my intention here is to think about cosmopolitanism and vernacularism as action rather than idea, as something people do rather than something they declare, as practice rather than proposition (least of all, philosophical proposition). This enables us to see that some people in the past have been able to be cosmopolitan or vernacular without directly professing either, perhaps even while finding it impossible rationally to justify either. By contrast, the attempt to vindicate cosmopolitanism or vernacularism—the production of the very discourse on the universal or the particular—seems to entail an objectification and abstraction, and their associated political practices, that have made the cosmopolitan so often take on the character of domination and the vernacular, that of inevitability.
Second, the specific practices I have in mind are those of literary culture, by which I mean most simply how people do things with texts: writing, reciting, reading, copying, printing, and circulating texts. These may be expressive, discursive, or political texts, but I am interested at present, above all, in the first kind. For purposes of our discussion here, cosmopolitan and vernacular can be taken as modes of literary (and intellectual, and political) communication directed toward two different audiences, whom lay actors know full well to be different. The one is unbounded and potentially infinite in extension; the other is practically finite and bounded by other finite audiences, with whom, through the very dynamic of vernacularization, relations of ever-increasing incommunication come into being.2 We can think of this most readily as a distinction in communicative capacity and concerns between a language that travels far and one that travels little.
Doing things with texts, the practices of literary culture, may seem a long way from the desperate choice mentioned above. And yet the communication of literary culture importantly shapes the social and political sensibilities that make such choices possible. Literature, in particular, constitutes an especially sensitive gauge of sentiments of belonging: creating or consuming literature meant for large worlds or small places is a declaration of affiliation with that world or place. The production and circulation of literature, accordingly, are utterly unlike the production and circulation of things. The universalization of particular technologies or the particularization of universal ones that characterize a dominant form of contemporary globalization carries no hint of belonging; the practices of literary culture, by contrast, are practices of attachment.3
As for the “literary” in particular, let me stress that this was no open category in the worlds and places under consideration here, but something reducible and reduced to a theoretical and practical system of differences from all other kinds of texts, a system of conventionality and intentionality. Although people who think about such things now can perceive the literary in all sorts of texts and all sorts of texts in the literary, in these earlier systems not everything could be literature and literature could not be everything. At the beginning of the first millennium, Sanskrit and Latin writers had yet to read Derrida, and so they failed to grasp that there is no way to identify the literary object, that literature has no essence, that the documentary is irreducibly rhetorical. Quite the contrary, Sanskrit literary theorists were true essentialists in their search for what they called the “self” of poetry. If they failed to agree on what it was, they had no doubt it existed. Accordingly, the instability of textual types that to our eyes may be phenomenologically obvious was to theirs ethno-epistemologically impossible—and therefore historically irrelevant to us except as a second-order problem.4
Third, I consider the cosmopolitan and the vernacular comparatively and historically, and I axiomatically reject the narrow European analytical and temporal frameworks that are usually thought to contain them. The absence nowadays of any interest in the macrohistorical reconstruction and analysis of these matters is little short of astonishing. No doubt it is another consequence of what Norbert Elias once identified as the social science “retreat into the present”—this despite the fact that social science is premised on a narrative of the pre-present, especially the pre-modern, that is still only partially written.5
The practices of literary communication that actualize modes of cosmopolitan and vernacular belonging to be examined here are those of southern Asia and western Europe. And since the analytical framework is comparative and the temporal framework is vast, we need to think in terms of elementary practices and to be drastically schematic and shamelessly reductive. There exists a remarkable parallel in the historical development of literary communication in these two worlds, where a long period of cosmopolitan literary production was followed by a vernacularity whose subsequent millennium-long ascendancy now everywhere shows signs of collapse. This historical symmetry, along with a very wide range of formal congruences, distinguishes the southern Asian and western European cases sharply from others. Contrast, for example, the wide sphere of Chinese literary communication, where the vernacular transformation in places like Vietnam or Korea occurred so late as to appear to be the project of a derivative modernization.6 That said, profound differences are to be found in the ideological forms and in the modalities of social and political action to which these communicative practices relate and which they underwrote. One world presents—and here are two sweeping generalizations for which some substantiation will be provided in what follows—what we may identify as a coercive cosmopolitanism and a vernacularism of necessity, where participation in larger or smaller worlds is compelled by the state or demanded by the blood; the other world presents a voluntaristic cosmopolitanism and a vernacularism of accommodation, where very different principles are at work inviting affiliation to these cultural-political orders.
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Notes
I am grateful to Benedict Anderson for his meticulous and constructively contentious reading of the essay. Homi Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Caitrin Lynch, and Mica Pollock helped me sharpen a number of the arguments and bear no responsibility for those that have remained dull.
- 1. Sheldon Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity 1000– 1500,” in Early Modernities, ed. Shmuel Eisenstadt, Wolfgang Schluchter, and Björn Wittrock, special issue of Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 41–74.
- On the important idea of incommunication and its history (exemplified in the case of Bangla and Oriya), see Sudipta Kaviraj, “Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the Historical Formation of Identities in India,” in Nationalstaat und Sprachkonflikt in Süd- und Südostasien, ed. Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam and Dietmar Rothermund (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992), 25–65, especially 26.
- See Roland Robertson, “The Universalism-Particularism Issue,” in Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 102.
- For Derrida’s unhistorical essentialization of the nonessentialized nature of literature, see his Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Atridge (London: Routledge, 1992), especially 40–49.
- See Norbert Elias, “The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present,” in Modern German Sociology, ed. Volker Meja, Dieter Misgeld, and Nico Stehr (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 150–72. The greater part of what is purveyed as the “pre-modern” in a work like Anthony Giddens’s The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), finds little support, and much contradiction, in the historical record of southern Asia.
- Sejong’s demotic reforms in Korea in the mid–fifteenth century, and the development of chu-nom script in Vietnam around the same time, did not produce anything remotely comparable to what we find in fifteenth-century southern Asia or western Europe. Instead, the innovations in both Korea and Vietnam appear to have been largely instruments designed for the promulgation of neo- Confucianism. Nor does anything of the same cultural or political order pertain to the “vernacular” novel in China, where vernacularization of the sort considered here never occurred.