Commentary

Commentary Fredric Jameson Global pluralism today presumably means not merely one nation — one vote, as in the United Nations; but also that even those language groups without a nation state of their own are entitled to . . . what exactly? esteem? consideration? their legal rights? liberal tolerance? self-determination? A number of complacent answers could be devised on the political level (that overlook the tougher crises and contradictions of the contemporary ethnic and national conflicts); but for those of us interested in the forms of a new global culture, not to speak of Goethe's old concept of a world literature, even these solutions are somewhat suspect. Self-determination, for example generally means leaving other people alone; even tolerance contains this essential grain of a salutary indifference, in which we let the other, as Heidegger liked to say, "be in his being." "Let them have their culture" generally comes with a rider attached: "just so we don't have to be interested in it." On the cultural level, then, global pluralism—for those of us in the superstate—means, How many of these cultures do we have to be interested in? really interested in, in a more than passing tourist/culinary way? Even among the "other" ones (that we generally call Third World), are there also majors and minors? Big minor languages and small minor languages? A Romanian mystic once observed that one could never believe in Hegel's theory of history if one spoke a small power language (such as Hungarian or Finnish, Korean or Tagalog): Spanish and Arabic, Chinese and English, will still be around at the end of time, but not necessarily those other ones. This is at least the framework in which I would like to approach this exciting symposium, which refracts these and related issues and concerns through the unusual twin focus of modern Greek literature and the Deleuze/Guattari conception of the "minor" (as staged in their Kafka book). As the Deleuze reference suggests (along with any number of other ones), the focus is essentially postmodern: indeed, at the Journal of Modem Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 135 136 Fredric Jameson very outset, Gregory Jusdanis treats us to a veritable tour d'horizon of virtually all the current versions of theories of subversion, or of the resistance to the Universal, among which Deleuze and Guattari occupy a significant but by no means exclusive place. The lineup of the various "authorities" for the anti-authoritarian or anti-canonical is rather indiscriminate for my taste; and enthusiastically overlooks what Mary Layoun observes to be the "preeminently negative" stance of this family-related set of critical categories. But the real paradox is the reappropriation of a genuinely "minor " national literature in the light of the postmodern reversal and the newly valorized category of the minor itself. All the participants, indeed, are keenly aware of another crucial feature of the postmodern which is the emphasis—not merely on groups and their plurality— but on the institutions that structure such groups, above all, in the present context, in which intellectuals are addressing other intellectuals , the university as such and the system of the disciplines (and the departments). They understand very well that from one perspective their enterprise is that of teachers of modern Greek literature finding new ways of peddling their wares (which, with the signal exceptions of Cafavy and Xenakis, Kazantzakis and a few recent film-makers, along with Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri, are not or not yet household words). The paradox is an even deeper one: for the "minor literatures" and their departments (when they had departments at all, and were not added into "major" ones, in the way in which Swedish might intermittently be done in a German department or Hungarian in a Slavic one) were not merely parochial and provincial (from the standpoint of the "metropolis" and its capitals, Paris, New York, London ), but also proved, even with the onset of the mildest forms of self-conscious literary criticism and theory (as in the New Criticism), to be bastions of the most drearily old-fashioned historical, biographical , and "philological" approaches. The revolution proposed here, then, and outlined articulately and with the appropriate sense of all these...