Quantifying Culture?: A Response to Eric Slauter

When I first read the phrase "quantitative cultural history," I was tempted to reach for my revolver—or, perhaps more productively, for my copy of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1982). For at first glance, this paradoxical moniker seems to channel just that reduction of quality to quantity that the Frankfurt School thinkers, with a little help from their friends Max Weber and Georg Lukács, condemn as reification.¹

For intellectual, institutional, and political reasons that I will elaborate briefly, I remain somewhat skeptical about the "quantitative turn." But there is no doubt that Eric Slauter's essay "Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics," as well as a key chapter of his recent book The State as a Work of Art (2009), makes a provocative and often convincing case for the benefit of considering cultural history from a quantitative perspective. Slauter's essay takes us through three developments in the recent study of early American politics—technological, methodological, and ontological or categorical. In three persuasive movements, he demonstrates the kinds of insights made possible by the digitization of early American texts; draws our attention to the way close consideration of the materiality of the book and its circulation transforms our thinking about politics; and makes a suggestive, if underdeveloped, link between the politicization of everyday life during the American Revolution and in the last decades of humanities scholarship. Slauter further points out that, with the exception of the last point about politicization, these revolutions in early Americanist methodology remain largely absent from later Americanist work. His focus, then, is less explicitly on what early Americanists can offer later Americanists than on how later technologies and sensibilities remediate and reconfigure early moments. Still, the richness of these new developments makes it worth reversing the time vector and asking how scholars of the contemporary should respond to this revisionary early work. What is a later Americanist—or, in my case, a later comparatist—to make of these developments and Slauter's account of them? How can we draw on the insights of our early Americanist colleagues to open up new paths for the understanding of contemporary literature and politics? Here, I want to focus on some preliminary methodological issues that might guide us as we assess the quantitative turn. Developing the quantitative approach sketched by Slauter without falling into the trap of reification will require, I argue, three forms of self-reflexivity: increased theoretical elaboration, consideration of current contexts of textuality, and caution about the institutional climate of humanities research.

In order fully to appreciate the possibilities of the quantitative approach, I would want to know more about its theoretical underpinnings. Consider, for example, a more theoretically elaborated quantitative project—Franco Moretti's ambitious and controversial attempt to chart world literature through a practice of "distant reading." Not strictly parallel to the kinds of projects outlined by Slauter, Moretti's sketch of his approach nevertheless raises critical theoretical and methodological issues that might supplement the discussion begun by Slauter. Moretti's most significant intervention is to draw attention to the problem of reconceptualizing reading and interpretation in the face of a shift in the level of data. Once we have created new kinds of data—whether through digitalization or through the kind of comparative, canon-opening project Moretti outlines—the problem becomes, in Moretti's words, not "what we should do," but "how" we should do it (54-5). Moretti cites Weber, who pertinently warns, "It is not the 'actual' interconnection of 'things,' but the conceptual interconnection of problems which define the scope of the various sciences. A new 'science' emerges where a new problem is pursued by a new method" (qtd in Moretti 55). The projects Slauter introduces here are without doubt on their way to the conjunction of novel method and novel problem Weber calls for, yet in Slauter's own summary sketch, theoretical reflection on the categories and conceptual interconnections at stake remains underdeveloped. If, as Moretti argues following the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz, "forms are the abstract of specific social relationships" (65), it becomes all the more crucial to be...