Literary Studies and Collective Life

Abstract

Literary studies has repeatedly justified a diciplinary focus on the small scale. Both our most conventional objects—the novel and the lyric poem—and our most conventional methods—close reading, historical analysis, and an attention to surprises and exceptions—lead us away from a focus on large scales of collective life. This essay argues for a different starting point, making a case for a metadisciplinary formalism that can join literary studies and many other fields in the work of responding to global poverty and climate change. Reading Henry Mayhew and Rodrigo Nunes, Levine makes a case for the hinge as a crucial aesthetic and political form.

What does literary studies mean by "collectivity"? It is one of those words that appears a lot but remains—often deliberately—capacious, open, nebulous. The Keywords Editorial Feminist Collective say that they opted not to include the term "collective" as one of their 2021 Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, preferring to foreground the word "race," so that they would not risk romanticizing the struggles entailed in assembling and collaborating in the context of white supremacy.¹

I want to begin with José Esteban Muñoz's understanding of collectivity in Cruising Utopia, which I take as representative of the wider fields of literary and cultural studies.² For Muñoz, collectivity is an emergent relationality that presses against the constraints of our current social worlds, a set of possibilities for shared life that can only be glimpsed, not fully sketched out or realized in the "prison house" of the here and now.³ Muñoz, like many other literary and cultural studies scholars, defines a genuine collectivity by what it is not. It is not the autonomous individual or the married couple. It is not the regimented and violent organization of people by nations or empires. It is not the hierarchical distribution of power and resources based on race, gender, citizenship, sexuality, or ability. It is not an ideal, abstract, or exclusively human grouping.

What particularly draws my attention here is that the literary moments that allow Muñoz to catch a glimpse of collectivity remain remarkably small in scale. The texts that he reads in Cruising Utopia gesture to large, unrepresentable collectivities mostly by way of a single queer pair—Frank O'Hara's sharing a coke, James Schuyler's "A Photograph," John Giorno's description of sex in public with Keith Haring—where the focus remains on the two men, even as they are surrounded by a shadowy crowd of others. In this respect, as in his definition of collectivity, Muñoz is typical of literary scholarship in our time. Despite its frequently articulated longings for collectivity, that is, literary studies has mostly—and deliberately—remained attentive to the scale of a few persons: the single speaker, a pair, a household, a network of friends, a small community. While some texts and some critics certainly strain beyond this scale to the very large, most do so, like Muñoz, evocatively, gesturing outward to bigger collectivities but rarely staying for longer than a glimmer.

All of the major literary critical methods also explicitly favor the small scale. Close reading of course has long demanded a "temporally extended attention to the very small."⁴ Aesthetic critics have long prized the singular moment of alterity or disruption—the startling generic innovation, the subtle shift, the swerve from expectation.⁵ While cultural and historical approaches might at first seem more expansive, they, too, often call for beginning from "exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters," as Clifford Geertz puts it.⁶ György Lukács trained the field's attention on the ways that that the novel uses a single character's situated experience to convey social totalities, the "typical hero" who "reacts with his entire personality to the life of his age."⁷ Erich Auerbach insists that the only way to study world literature in a context of increasing homogenization and standardization is to start from a concrete and particular Ansatzpunkt, or point of departure, which then radiates outward to give us a sense of larger historical formations.⁸ In our own time, politically minded scholars, including feminist, critical race, Indigenous, and disability studies critics, many of whom reject the category of the aesthetic, are just insistent as traditional aesthetic critics on the importance of exceptional instances. The focus here has been on subversive desires, refusals of conventions and norms, and extraordinary bodies. Only an attention to concrete, specific, and situated experience can challenge false universalisms and ahistorical generalizations. Thus, the politics that goes along with the resistance to western imperializing knowledge, capitalism, and patriarchy also entails a turn to the small—to close reading, to situated bodies, to detail.

Across literary studies, then, it is not surprising that the most urgent political questions of our time—the hugeness of climate change and global wealth inequality, for example—have seemed out of reach of our objects and methods. The sheer size of injustice has for some critics been an argument for keeping our eyes on the small and the local. "The anthropocene is no time for transcendent, definitive mappings, transparent knowledge systems, or confident epistemologies," writes Stacy Alaimo. "Surely all those things got us into this predicament to begin with."⁹ For many critics, the only large-scale politics that will not merely reentrench existing oppressions is the spontaneous global revolution that cannot be represented or imagined in the present. In Jack Halberstam's words, "We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming."¹⁰ From this perspective, any alternatives we might try to plan or sketch in the present would merely reinforce the dominations of the here and now. And so, as we saw in Muñoz, hints or glimpses of a different world are the best political work the field can do.

To attend to large scales, it would seem, is to abandon all of our most cherished values: aesthetic subtlety and complexity, historically grounded interpretation, and radical political engagement. And so, it is not surprising that arguments against computational methods so often turn on a struggle to reassert the importance of the small scale. Wai Chee Dimock warns against distant reading, with its "overcommitment to general laws, to global postulates operating at some remove from the phenomenal world of particular texts," because, she claims, "the loss of detail is almost always unwarranted."¹¹ Emily Apter argues that all attempts to work on a "gargantuan scale" must always turn us into "flimsy" and "superficial" readers.¹²

But it is precisely on political grounds that I want to make the case here that literary studies needs to address large numbers. There is a whole register missing between dreams of a total global revolution and the small group, and that is the polis—the scale of collective life. Politics is the hard, messy work of living in common with lots of others. Its scales are always larger than a tiny few. For the ancient Greeks, the city was of course the definitional scale for politics: larger than a few households or a village, it gathers people who are not already intimate or connected as kin. In this sense, the city is the realm of res publica—public things. These days, public things are organized at even larger scales than the city-state: the nation, the region, the world. Literary critics tend to work from the assumption that these political structures are necessarily oppressive and in need of resistance and dismantling, or else we zoom past these scales altogether, moving from the tiny few in a novel or film to unknowable, unrepresentable vastness.

Effective political power, according to political theorist Rodrigo Nunes, happens between these two scales.¹³ Leftists, he maintains, have long been caught between longings for a total global revolution and dispersed, uncoordinated local initiatives that do not build substantial enough collective power to bring about substantial change. On the one hand, we too often resort to the faith that at some hazy future moment when conditions are somehow and suddenly right, a vast mass of people will rise up and change everything. This account is troubling, Nunes claims, because it persuades us that history will unfold without our participation here and now. This frees us from the responsibility to take political action and allows us to comfort ourselves with the fantasy of the absolute break to come. "A potential that remains indefinitely open will always be more radical than whatever actually exists," Nunes writes. "By not being invested in anything finite and limited, it excludes no possibilities and cannot be subject to perversion or decay" (NV 273). On the other hand, when we insist that political actions must remain decentralized and local, we must either hope that separate actions will somehow aggregate to create collective effects or give up on the possibility of political change and move directly to mourning, as many literary critics have done.¹⁴ What is most importantly missing, Nunes argues, is collective organizing, working together to build and sustain large and effective movements: "It is neither a matter of waiting for dispersed local initiatives to suddenly click into producing desired results, nor of building a single powerful global collective force to take the appropriate action, both of which are extremely unlikely. The challenge instead is to have sufficiently strong and coordinated focuses of collective action at the local and intermediary scales so as to produce global aggregate effects" (NV 33).

Drawing on Nunes, I want to make the case that when we move between local, intimate particulars and glimpses of a revolutionary collectivity to come, we leave out the process of getting from here to there, which is the work of political change. And when literary studies disconnects small from large scales, our own political impacts necessarily remain dispersed, isolated, and ineffective. Or to put this another way: our usual practices of aesthetic attention actually reinforce one of the dominant ideologies of this neoliberal moment: a withdrawal from the public sphere.

Numbers do matter to the work of revolutionary social change. Size is not the only ingredient for success, to be sure: small groups of armed rebels managed to overthrow Cuban President Fulgencio Batista in 1958, and, conversely, millions of Chinese people resisted the Japanese occupation in the 1930s and 40s to no avail.¹⁵ Still, large movements have structural advantages over small ones. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan have argued, the larger and more diverse the campaign in terms of gender, age, religion, class, and ethnicity, the harder it is to isolate and discredit protestors, and the more likely participants are to bring a range of effective strategies and skills to the work.¹⁶ As the crowd of protestors grows, the chance of retribution against them declines and momentum intensifies. When police and security forces are connected to protesters through kinship or social networks, they are less likely to commit violence against them for the sake of the regime. And the more widespread the sympathy and support for the campaign, the more likely those in power are to make concessions or to become divided.¹⁷ It seems urgent, then, to build political movements that can operate at large scales, exerting real political force.

What does this account of political action have to do with literary studies? According to a long history of thinkers, from Théophile Gautier to Anahid Nersessian, we critics do not have the tools or the expertise to participate in the active, practical, strenuous work of politics on the ground. What the encounter with art objects does best is to teach us to dwell in opacity and ambiguity and to open us up to radical imaginings that disrupt and resist the constraints of the status quo.¹⁸ We can celebrate moments in texts that open us to the possibility of new forms of collectivity, but working strategies and practical programs to materialize those collectives seem much too clunky and prosaic for art. And yet, this leaves the field, I think, in an odd political place: we must come to the brink of political action, and then stop. We can gesture and hint, but we cannot plan, design, and build.

In this essay, I want to propose a different analytic and methodological starting point. Rather than beginning from a field of objects defined in advance as aesthetic and from that point trying to cross the gap between art and politics, I will propose a formalist analysis of the affordances of many discursive and material forms, both those that are conventionally aesthetic and those that are not. My goal here is not to analyze forms as particularly innovative or interesting objects in themselves or as expressions of a specific historical context, but rather to understand them as workable blueprints for the future. What collectives is it possible to know or build with different forms?

This method will allow us to see how some forms are more useful for some collective tasks than for others. The pie chart readily conveys the unevenness of resources but cannot itself tell a story about how that distribution came to be. The public square affords visible mass gatherings, including speeches, protests, and riots, but it does not yield a nuanced understanding of the many differences among participants. I will argue here that for an effective politics, we will need both of these—and more.

This method will also allow us to focus on the specific kinds of political work that literary texts can and cannot do. It invites us to consider what aspects of collective life a particular literary form can help us to address, and what political tasks it may consistently struggle or fail to do well. From this perspective, categories like the "aesthetic" or "literature" are both too broad and too narrow: on the one hand, they lump too many different forms together, as if drama and lyric poetry had the same affordances for collective life; on the other hand, they unnecessarily exclude a huge range of other, not traditionally artistic forms that can help us to understand collective life and take political action.

In the first section, I suggest that what D. A. Miller calls "the traditional novel," which is structured by two major forms—an overarching plot and a small number of protagonists—has serious limitations when it comes to the project of politics on the large scale.¹⁹ I then read Henry Mayhew's sprawling, formally inventive work, London Labour and the London Poor, which deliberately steers clear of plots and protagonists in order to experiment with a range of forms Mayhew sees as better suited to the task of conveying the vast scale of urban poverty. I argue that large-scale problems like global poverty and climate change require methods that will allow us to understand both the powers and the limits of all these forms, rather than separating them into distinct disciplines. In the final section, I ask which forms work best to organize people at scales large enough to have a significant political impact and suggest that literary critics have the analytical tools to participate in this work.

I. The Limits of the Traditional Novel

My own disciplinary training has taught me to focus my attention on the novel, and in the past I, like many other critics, would have thought it was my job to ask how the novel seeks to understand and respond to a whole range of political problems, from gender inequality to racial capitalism. But now I want to think as much about the limits as the capacities of the novel and to see it as one form among others, with constraints that may be obstacles to thinking, knowing, and reshaping the polis.

Storytelling, according to David Herman, is "optimally calibrated for person-level, that is, human-scale, events."²⁰ He calls this the "meso-scale." Herman argues that some narratives do stretch beyond the meso-scale, but even when they do, interhuman engagement typically remains "a home base for exploratory probes into micro- and macrophysical domains."²¹ For some, this may seem like an advantage: stories are calibrated to the ordinary register of human experience and so allow readers to grasp and resolve problems in ways appropriate to our cognitive capacities. Yet the scale of a few persons is also, as I have been arguing, the register best suited to political powerlessness—the separation of individuals and families from larger collectives.

The person-level scale is certainly the most common for the nineteenth-century European novel, which, as Alex Woloch has argued, even when it has grand social aspirations, necessarily narrows its attention to a small number of richly rounded protagonists.²² A huge range of novels since then, from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable to Toni Morrison's Beloved and Yuri Herrera's Señales que precederán al fin del mundo, train our attention on a single protagonist or two in a specific historical situation. Many novels work in the Lukácsian mode, using the main character's experience to convey social structures or conflicts. Sometimes the novel uses specific characters to stand for whole populations. The postbellum American novel, to give just one example, repeatedly joins a Southern man with a Northern woman in its marriage plots, recruiting this narrative arc as an illusory resolution to the ongoing problem of national disunity.²³

Quite a few fictions scale up as far as a handful of protagonists and use this set of relations to gesture to larger collectivities. Katie Trumpener argues persuasively that the female bildungsroman is more collective than the critical tradition has recognized. In her account, collectivity remains modest in size, however—a "small sibling or friend group."²⁴ And while some novelists have been inventive in expanding their casts of characters—from Honoré de Balzac's sprawling, multivolume La Comédie humaine to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, Helena María Viramontes's Their Dogs Came with Them, and Richard Powers's The Overstory—it is surprising how difficult it has been for the novel to organize itself around large numbers. These remain experimental outliers, notable for their differences from the vast mass of novels. Even the vast and teeming Bleak House, which yields a powerful sense of crowding and excess life, "turns out to be so small as to consist of only one poor crossing sweep in the whole of the place, so findable that Lady Dedlock alights upon him the instant she tries," as Anna Kornbluh points out.²⁵ And while Judith Paltin gives a powerful account of the modernist fascination with the dynamics of crowds and groups, the novels she reads remain organized around protagonists—whether the central characters are surrounded by crowds, infected by them, or seeking to understand them.²⁶ In short, it is a challenge for novels to avoid engaging primarily with a small group of central characters, even as they may use that scale as a way to convey macro and micro forces. Janice Ho defines the novel tout court as "a genre preoccupied with the relationship between the protagonist and the social contexts in which he or she exists."²⁷

So: how do other discursive forms capture and convey large collectives? Let's take the political problem of wealth inequality. The traditional plot-and-protagonist form of the novel is good at exploring some aspects of this problem—and bad at exploring others. Capitalism and urbanization clearly shape experience in Charles Dickens's Britain and Chris Abani's Nigeria, for example, but Oliver Twist and Graceland tell us little about the forces, structures, and political decisions that produce these effects. What we do learn from the novels is what it is like to struggle to survive in these conditions, with desires repeatedly thwarted and serious dangers alays threatening.

Contrast the novel's accounts to a very different form, a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities bar graph (Fig. 1) presentation of wealth inequality at the national scale.²⁸ It shows average gains and losses in

Fig 1.

US incomes between 1979 and 2007, dividing the population into five groups and focusing on a single variable across those groups. Keeping wealth itself constant, it brings out the differences in gains and losses across time. Graphs like these seek to convey not the textured experience of living in poverty but simplified general trends that gather together huge numbers—reducing vast quantities of people, jobs, and dollars to one stark comparison. What is most striking, of course, is not the specifics of the numbers but the remarkable contrast—the Gestalt: incomes lagged for the bottom four fifths of the population, while skyrocketing for the top 1%. The graph uses color to set off the top 1% as a separable category: blue bars mark all five quintiles, but then an extra bar in red registers a single percent within the top quintile. This contrast in color foregrounds the startling difference—with red evoking stop signs and emergencies—between the 1% and the rest.

There is a powerful and striking—even, one might say, aesthetically compelling—account of widening wealth disparities at the national scale in this bar graph that the novel form does not afford. Of course, the graph has limitations too: it cannot produce an account of what it feels like to live within and against the many structural barriers of poverty, daily bumping up against obstacles to decent transportation, adequate nutrition, racial justice, safe shelter, and high-quality education. And neither the novel nor the bar graph shows us how structural inequality came to be: that is typically the work of historical narrative.

While some critics might insist that the novel does intrinsically better political work than the graph because it keeps us attentive to difference, refusing to agglomerate a vast range of situated experiences into knowable and governable categories, such as "nation" or "population," I want to make the case that a politics of social justice needs both. To understand poverty as a consequence of structural forces, rather than individual moral failure or bad decision-making, we need to grasp obstacles that constrain the lives of the pluckiest of characters. At the same time, any single case of hunger and hardship could be an anomaly; to understand the reach of powerful structures like race and disability across social groups, we need to be able to recognize large-scale patterns. Both the novel and the graph thus afford a knowledge as well as an ignorance. And each reveals the limits of the other.

II. Forms for Knowing Poverty

Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, a messy, sprawling text from the Victorian period, helps me to make my argument for combining literary forms with big data to understand mass poverty. Throughout his life, Mayhew dabbled in lots of discursive forms: he worked as a journalist, he wrote novels, he performed chemistry experiments, he worked in the theater and wrote several plays, he was one of the founding editors of the satirical magazine Punch, and he wrote children's books and cheap pamphlets and educational treatises.²⁹ London Labour and the London Poor is a hodgepodge that swallows up many of these forms and others, because, as I argue here, as each form reaches its limits, Mayhew turns to another. I read Mayhew as a canny reader of the limits of the traditional novel but also, more broadly, as an astute critic of the affordances of different discursive forms for understanding and responding to large-scale structural injustice.

Mayhew first ventured into poor households in London as a journalist in the late 1840s. He had been hired to write about the London cholera and typhus epidemics for the Morning Chronicle. The challenge was not to capture the individual life, he soon realized, but a mass tragedy. To grasp this meant tracking large-scale patterns, including mapping the path of the disease. A typical sentence reads: "Out of the 12,800 deaths which, within the last three months, have arisen from cholera, 6,500 have occurred on the southern shores of the Thames; and to this awful number no localities have contributed so largely as Lambeth, Southwark and Bermondsey, each, at the height of the disease, adding its hundred victims a week to the fearful catalogue of mortality."³⁰

As he began to compile London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew preserved this attention to big data. To convey the economic structures that shape the work of survival for the urban poor, he put together tables that show the quantities of goods that change hands; average prices and earnings; the money needed to start in each business; the hours the poor must work; and the numbers of men, women, and children working in each sector (Fig. 2).³¹ Mayhew is clear that he needs these tables to convey the enormity of the city's suffering: "When the religious, moral, and intellectual degradation of the great majority of these fifty thousand people is impressed upon us, it becomes positively appalling to contemplate the vast amount of vice, ignorance, and want, existing in these days in the very heart of our land" (LL 1.6). His focus is on "bestirring" comfortable readers, whom he calls "the public," to change the economic conditions that keep so many people suffering (LL 1.xvi). For these crucially collective reasons, then—to give an accurate account of large-scale economic conditions, to register the sheer magnitude of the distress of the poor, and to motivate the public to act for change—Mayhew needs data.

But like many literary critics working now, Mayhew realizes that numbers alone will not yield an understanding of what it is like to struggle to survive and make a life in these conditions. After all, even when they knew the extent of urban poverty, plenty of comfortable Victorian readers blamed the poor for their own suffering—assuming that individual moral failures like laziness or improvidence were at work, rather than structural obstacles. Mayhew knows that his charts cannot unsettle those assumptions. And so, he adds another set of forms. A chapter about asylums for the "houseless" begins with numbers, as Mayhew counts the places where those seeking shelter originate—forty-two from Shropshire, 8,068 from Ireland, twelve from Africa (LL 3.406–7). He then goes on to give a detailed description of the "sad and weary crowds" longing for a bed and a meal, including boys who walk the streets at night because they have nowhere else to sleep (LL 3.407). After this, Mayhew gives several first-person accounts in the words of individual workers. He asks

Fig 2.

them to describe their labor conditions and home lives, drawing out the obstacles and hardships that face them. One of his most famous subjects is an eight-year-old girl who sells watercress to survive. She is too tired to play games and has never heard of public parks. Mayhew describes her "thin cotton gown" and "threadbare shawl" (LL 1.151). He then gives us an account of her working days in her own words:

It's very cold before winter comes on reg'lar - specially getting up of a morning. I gets up in the dark by the light of the lamp in the court. When the snow is on the ground, there's no creases. I bears the cold—you must; so I puts my hands under my shawl, though it hurts 'em to take hold of the creases, especially when we takes 'em to the pump to wash 'em. No; I never see any children crying—it's no use. … Mother gives me two slices of bread-and-butter and a cup of tea for breakfast, and then I go till tea, and has the same. We has meat of a Sunday, and, of course, I should like to have it every day.

(LL 1.151–52)

On the one hand, this is a description of the most ordinary routines—getting up in the morning, going to work, eating meals—but on the other hand, there is no moment in that routine not marked by physical suffering: the cold is so bitter that it literally inflicts pain, and every meal but one in the week leaves the child hungry. Mayhew tells us that he wants to rebut the common middle-class assumption that the poor are responsible for their own suffering, and this kind of textured account of a child's hardships neatly affords this knowledge: in her life, there is no waste, no idleness, and no vice. Hers is only one case, but even a single instance of a struggling, suffering, irreproachable child who faces no alternatives disproves the argument that the poor are always and necessarily answerable for their own poverty. Lists of numbers do not—and cannot—readily make such an argument.

London Labour and the London Poor has often been cast as novelistic.³² With its focus on struggling individuals, such as the watercress girl, it certainly influenced major novelists of the period, including Dickens. Yet Mayhew is quite deliberate about avoiding the two major structuring forms of the traditional novel: protagonists and plots. His many accounts of impoverished Londoners follow one another in a series; each is equal to the next in terms of importance to the whole; none forms the major focus, and so none is more "minor" than others either. The sequence thus affords a democratization that the novel, as Woloch argues, does not. The collection is also potentially endless; there is no plot to organize all these people and scenes into a coherent story, to bring them into contact, or even to propose ways to resolve the difficulties facing them. London Labour and the London Poor has no logical end point, and, in fact, it came to an arbitrary conclusion when Mayhew ran out of resources.

Instead of relying on popular forms like plots and protagonists for his account of urban poverty, Mayhew actually invents a new form: the ethnographic interview, a form often still used in our own time by qualitative social scientists. In the first few chapters of London Labor and the London Poor, Mayhew presents his interviews as dialogues, as parliamentary investigators at the time routinely did, but then he starts to include long monologues entirely in the voice of the person interviewed. That is, he takes out the voice of the interviewer, leaving only the words of the poor. A blind street seller says, "My husband was a costermonger, and we didn't do well. Oh, dear, no, sir, because he was addicted to drinking" (LL 1.393). "Oh, dear no, sir" is clearly a response to the interviewer, but none of Mayhew's words is recorded. If he has asked a prompting question, the text does not give us access to it.

The form Mayhew favors, then, is a series of first-person speakers addressing a silent audience. For literary readers, this may sound strangely familiar. That is, Mayhew seems to be experimenting with his own prose version of a new poetic genre that is beginning in exactly the moment he starts writing—the dramatic monologue.³³ Formally speaking, the blind street seller is oddly like the egomaniacal duke in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" or like Tennyson's restive Ulysses, speaking to an audience who is present but says nothing.

So: why this form? Literary critics have long noticed that there is a kind of paradox—or contradiction—in the idea of a dramatic monologue. Monologues are single voices, while dramas depend on dialogue. The genius of the dramatic monologue is that it manages to enter deeply into a first-person perspective while also embedding that experience in a world populated by others. It is a form that refuses to imagine the individual voice apart from its role in collective life. Allowing a single person to speak at length about her own experience, it reveals both the powers and limits of the self in a world of others. Browning's duke, for example, shows us the terrible violence that can come from hearing the sound of only one's own voice in a world full of others. But the dramatic monologue is also a democratizing form, a way to give voice to those who are usually silenced by other, more dominant voices; thus, it is the form that the poet Augusta Webster chooses for her poem, "A Castaway," where she invites us to understand the perspective of a woman driven into prostitution; and it is the form Elizabeth Barrett Browning uses to imagine an enslaved woman in the US fleeing her captors after killing her infant.

We can guess why this form particularly appeals to Mayhew. On the one hand, he wants the poor to give voice to their own experience. He likes the democratizing affordances of the form.³⁴ It allows a sequence of people to speak for themselves, none becoming more central than the others. But at the same time, Mayhew does not want to erase the social situation of the interview. He marks the fact that his monologues are not really single voices but words spoken in a social and dialogic situation with an interviewer. Thus, what seems to draw Mayhew to the form is its insistence that the self is never solitary: the "I" is always embedded in a collective, a social fact. With Mayhew, then, Victorian poetry meets social science on formal grounds.

Still, as quantitative social scientists will often charge, the ethnographic interview always risks too much attention to the exceptional instance, occluding large structures and patterns. It turns out that Mayhew worried about this too. As time went on, he developed an idea for yet another form that could help him to convey collective life at the large scale. He began to publicize events where groups could come to talk about a shared experience. In one example, he gathers one hundred fifty young male "thieves and vagabonds" in a large room in a nondenominational school to ask them questions (LL 1.418). He collects statistics about the whole group, including the number of orphans (there are eighty), the number of times they have been in prison (twelve have been once, while three have been incarcerated fourteen times), and the number who know how to read and write (sixty-three of the one hundred fifty) (LL 1.419). Then, he invites a few to tell their individual stories on stage, one by one:

A lad about twenty was here about to volunteer a statement concerning the lodging-houses, by which he declared he had been brought to his ruin, but he was instantly assailed with cries of "come down!" "hold your tongue!" and these became so general, and were in so menacing a tone, that he said he was afraid to make any disclosures, because he believed if he did so he would have perhaps two or three dozen of the other chaps on to him [great confusion].

Mr. Mayhew:

Will it hurt any of you here if he says anything against the lodging-houses [yes, yes]? How will it do so? …

A Voice:

If they shut up the lodging-houses, where are we to go? If a poor boy gets to the workhouse he catches a fever, and is starved into the bargain.

Mr. Mayhew:

—Are not you all tired of the lives you now lead? [Vociferous cries of "yes, yes, we wish to better ourselves!" from all parts of the room.] … And do not the parties who keep these places grow rich on your degradation and your peril? [Loud cries of "yes, yes!"].

(LL 1.421)

Suddenly, the text looks a lot like a drama, moving back and forth between voices on a stage. Two anonymous individuals express feelings of fear. Then, many voices speak together of a common urge to silence them, and finally, like a chorus, express a mass shared desire—"yes, yes, we wish to better ourselves!"

Here we see how the forms of drama, including its conflicting voices and large, live audience, both afford and bespeak a restless, angry crowd. To be sure, this is hardly an ideal collectivity: the majority are deliberately intimidating the young man who wants to give the interviewer information. And yet the shared cries of the assembled group do afford a mass correction to the specific perspective. As the text moves back and forth between the individual testimony and the joining of many voices in a single space, we gain insight into the dynamics of the crowd itself, including the intimidating expression of mass feelings such as desire and fear and a willingness by the many to silence outliers and whistleblowers. Turning to the form of drama, Mayhew thus reveals the limitations of both first-person accounts and the collective voice of the large group. Neither is in itself adequate, and so he suggests that we need both, in tense and unresolved dialogue, to gather our understanding of the London poor.³⁵

III. Metadisciplinary Formalism

Mayhew's formal experiment in conveying urban poverty at the large scale includes not only statistical tables, monologues, and the dramatic chorus, but histories of immigration and language, still visual images, and descriptions of places where the poor gather, such as markets and lodging houses. And it is important, I think, that he does not seek to merge these into a new whole. He keeps them separate, side by side, so that each form can keep doing what it does best. London Labour and the London Poor thus gives us the close and the distant, the singular and the general, the monologue and the dialogue, sympathetic suffering and the abstraction of large numbers, poetry and drama, and history and sociology. And as each form gives us access to some aspect of urban poverty, it also invites us to recognize the limits of the other forms.

In the university today, our disciplines typically divide Mayhew's forms from one another—we put statistics in one department, historical narrative in a second, poetry in a third, visual images in a fourth, and ethnography in yet a fifth. Even within English departments, we have experts in poetry who do not study drama, and vice versa. Of course, scholarship routinely combines forms—a historian will use statistics in a narrative account, for example, or an ethnographer will interpret works of visual culture. But many students and scholars also argue that their chosen forms are the best, even the only proper ways of knowing: we hear arguments all around us for the value of quantitative over qualitative social science, or for the danger of data over stories, or for the competing claims of empiricism and theoretical abstraction. My argument here is that this separation of forms prevents us from thinking about how each form has capacities and limits that suit it to some collective tasks better than others.

Rather than imagining that we are each responsible for specific disciplinary forms as we bring our own separate expertise to the table, then, I am following Mayhew in making the case that we need to move across many forms so that we can grasp both their capacities and their constraints. What can lyric poetry allow us to do, know, and think about collective life that a regression analysis cannot, and vice versa?

From this perspective, formalism has the potential to be a useful metadisciplinary method. Since all our knowledge of the world comes mediated by discursive forms—graphs, narratives, photographs, computer models, couplets—formalism can help us to grasp the limits and the possibilities of representational forms used across disciplines. Or to put this another way, we need multiple forms to address the urgent challenges of collective life, and we need formalism to know what it is—and how it is—that we know.

This brings me back to the question of literary studies and the challenge of politics at the large scale. Both literary studies methods and some of our preferred literary forms, such as the novel and the lyric poem, are well suited to a focus on the distinctive and exceptional in both art and politics—the moment of textual surprise, the glimmer of possibility, the radical outsider. Many critics then argue that this is the only proper scale of analysis. This focus on the specific instance, we often say, is what differentiates the humanities from the sciences and quantitative social sciences. Jan Parker, Chair of the International Humanities in Higher Education Group, writes, "Particularise … that is what the humanities do—mount arguments from particulars and highlight and give narratives to the singular."³⁶

Parker is not wrong. While quantitative scholars often search for the predictable pattern or norm, literary scholars draw us to the exceptional instance.³⁷ But when it comes to understanding massive injustices like wealth inequality, I follow Mayhew in arguing that we really do need both. In order to recognize structural inequalities, we need to see the patterns at work across groups. To understand poverty in the US right now, for example, it is crucial to recognize that wealth is distributed unevenly across gendered and racial categories, that Black men are disproportionately incarcerated, and that those who start life in the lowest economic strata have the least access to higher education and professional careers. But in order to understand how these large structures unjustly constrain some people and not others—that is, not to accept these differences as static, brute facts but as shaping forces—we need unfolding narratives that show the impact of structures on particular lives: the barriers a Black woman will face, including prejudices that begin in early childhood, that will push her away from or out of a career in science or politics; the routine harassment and brutality a man of color will experience at the hands of the police; and the obstacles put in the way of poor children, even those who are hardworking and intellectually gifted, if they try to make their way to college.

Both humanists and scientists are prone to forget that neither norm nor deviation is possible without the other. And in this, I want to suggest, both are missing something politically important. Scientists and quantitative social scientists risk failing to recognize the occlusions and marginalizations at work in dominant structures—the exceptions that might point beyond current systems of domination altogether and remain unrecognizable within them. In this respect, literary studies has the potential to provide a valuable corrective to the work of these disciplines. In practice, however, this critique often fails to reach scholars in the STEM fields because of the ways that our research mostly speaks within, rather than across, fields. Thus, the dangers of dominant patterns and norms we have recognized in literary studies tend to remain isolated within a discipline that already understands this very well. From this perspective, it is important to move across scales, if only to show scientists and policy-makers what their large-scale accounts obscure.

At the same time, literary studies has built its own political stumbling block. By narrowing our definition of collectives to glimmers and gaps in texts, our attention remains trained on small moments and discrete gestures, and this prevents us from analyzing and deploying those forms that could help us to build collective power. Literary scholars know a lot about how structural injustices punish and constrain, but we know much less about how to go about gathering in large numbers to fight for better alternatives.

Scholars of the arts have long traditions of analyzing form, and I have argued elsewhere that we can and should bring this set of methods to objects not traditionally defined as aesthetic. Specifically, we have the tools to connect forms across scales, although we do not usually put our work in these terms. As a literary critic links subtle uses of syntax or rhyme to large structures of historical oppression, she is already moving between forms, some small and aesthetic, others large and social.³⁸ The challenge is to turn our focus more deliberately and explicitly to the social forms, to move away from the common humanistic assumption that these are all massive, oppressive, and inert "prison houses," and instead to pay a careful formalist attention to the ways that the forms of these structures and institutions actually operate. This does not require us to invent new methods but to understand how formalism already gives us the tools to understand the work of social organization and to bring into focus the best strategies for social change at large scales. The idea that we only prize the exceptional detail releases humanists from the hard work of figuring out—and fighting for—better collectives.

IV. Forms for Collective Action

How might formalism help us to make meaningful political change? I have suggested that the graph is especially well suited to conveying wealth distributions on a massive scale and that the traditional novel gives us a textured sense of a life unfairly constrained by historical and structural forces. Both lead us to understand something about inequality. But neither form readily invites us to gather or act together.

Typically absorbed in silence and solitude, the material form of the traditional novel famously affords isolation and separation—even a temporary retreat from social pressures and responsibilities.³⁹ Novels can, of course, be read aloud in classrooms, clubs, pubs, and other collective spaces, and the serialized novel and unfolding news story afford the interruption of private absorption with pauses for collective reflection, as audiences gather over the water cooler or on the Internet between episodes to reflect on the work so far and to speculate about what is coming. But other forms more readily afford the production of collectives. Live theater, for example, joins audiences together in groups. Brought together into a shared space, audiences may be prompted to act together, sharing contagious laughter, applause, or song, and sometimes even erupting into riotous violence. The conflictual and dialogic forms of dramatic plots also afford radical questionings of authority and sovereignty, which, together with its crowds, have made drama seem like an especially threatening political form over the centuries.⁴⁰

Poetic and musical performances, too, have the capacity to join large numbers of bodies and voices together in a feeling of unified collective purpose. Friedrich Schiller's "An Die Freude" ("Ode to Joy"), for example, set to music in the soaring chorus of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, speaks to the joys of a "brotherhood" united against tyranny. This call to solidarity proved inspiring to Chilean protestors, who sang the "Ode to Joy" during demonstrations against Augusto Pinochet.⁴¹ During the Cold War, the "Unified Team of Germany" played the "Ode to Joy" at the Olympics instead of the national anthems of East and West Germany. And in 1989, Chinese students rigged up loudspeakers to broadcast the Ode loudly as the military descended on Tiananmen Square. "We used the Ninth to create an ambience of solidarity and hope, for ourselves and for the people of China," explained Tiananmen leader Feng Congde.⁴² More recently, Black Lives Matter protesters have turned to Kendrick Lamar's 2015 song "Alright" as an anthem for the movement.⁴³ The line—"We gon' be alright"—reportedly electrified the first Black Lives Matter conference at Cleveland State University. "The whole damn place went nuts," said one of the attendees. "You were moved. There was no way you could just sit back and not feel the effect of that song. Everybody was singing in unison. It was like being at church."⁴⁴ Now called the "unifying soundtrack to Black Lives Matter protests nationwide," "Alright" is sung repeatedly at protests against police brutality from Ferguson to Sacramento.⁴⁵

None of these large-scale, musical-political gatherings would have been possible without another, less conventionally aesthetic form—the public square, which has afforded many of the most famous political protests of recent years, including Tiananmen, Tahrir, and Trafalgar Squares, and New York's Zuccotti Park. Because these public spaces afford highly visible vast crowds, they are well suited to putting the sheer enormity of collective resistance on display. In these examples, then, the forms that enable large-scale political collectives are both aesthetic and social—rousing and repetitive sounds, the joining of voices, and large spaces for bodies to come together in shared political purpose.

A formalist analysis shows us not only how forms work together for large-scale politics, but also how the material and the ideological affordances of forms do not always work seamlessly together. Percy Shelley's "Song To The Men of England," for example, was often read aloud in socialist clubs in the nineteenth century, but it was also anthologized in elocution textbooks, including a 1949 Macmillan textbook called Voice and Diction, which purported to furnish "abundant practice materials for self-development" to help "the business or professional man who wishes to improve his daily speech habits, on the telephone, in conference, on the speak's rostrum."⁴⁶ Or take the example of the same-sex wedding ceremonies that have repeatedly taken place in the center of the District of Columbia's World War I Memorial in recent years. Celebrations of queer love have made excellent use of a designed space that is perfectly suited to a wedding—elegant marble, a raised platform visible from all around, a beautiful park setting.⁴⁷ Yet the monument also, of course, explicitly celebrates the nationalist, xenophobic, imperialist, and heteronormative project of the US military. It would be a mistake, I think, not to recognize that most forms—including the public square, which has often enough been put to use for displays of military and police power—afford multiple and often contradictory uses, which means that no form will ever be simply repressive or simply emancipatory. But it also means that it is possible to make use of lots of forms, including the prison houses of the here and now, to craft new collectives.

My own approach, then, focuses less on the values and associations a form has accrued in the past and more on the new collectives we can make with it. Although both the radical poem and the national monument seek to promulgate an explicit political message, people have successfully redeployed their forms for other collective ends. How might we, here and now, make use of the many social forms around us to create more just new worlds? The most serious challenge, it seems to me, is to work at a much bigger scale than the individual or the queer pair. What forms might afford the building of large-scale political power?

V. Formalism and Power

Spontaneous taking to the streets has been the model of politics that the left has valued most highly in recent years. Haunted by the traumas of overcentralized and totalitarian models of left politics in the twentieth century, activists in recent years have embraced spontaneity, leaderlessness, and the refusal of all hierarchy and organization, deliberately favoring groups that are "small, … multiple, … diffuse" (NV 29). But in practice the form of the spontaneous protest has serious limits too. As Nunes argues, these uprisings have not in fact led to sustained and effective mass movements, suffering instead from "fitfulness" and an "incapacity to sustain themselves over time," an "inability to scale up in a viable way, and a tendency to fall apart when they tried to do so," and a "propensity to demand large investments of time and energy from participants in return for little by way of clear strategy and decision-making" (NV 1). Jodi Dean argues for the importance of moving from "crowds"—"temporary collective being[s]"—to "party"—a durable form that "fits issues into a platform such that they are not so many contradictory and individual preferences but instead a broader vision for which it will fight."⁴⁸ The party is precisely not a spontaneous coming together but an organizational form, one that provides knowledge apart from what any single person can know and offers the lasting infrastructure for action. "Crowds amass," Dean argues, "but they do not endure."⁴⁹

This analysis suggests that collective power is a formal problem: what are the best ways to organize groups at scales large enough and with enough staying power to exert real pressure on decisions about climate change and global poverty? Literary studies, as I have suggested, tends to opt either for the emergence of a vast collective revolutionary subject than can overturn the status quo or for resistant actions that remain deliberately small and local. But it is my argument here that we can use the skills and methods our own discipline has developed to think about organizing collective power differently, and more effectively.

I am going to introduce a specific form to think with—one that crosses domains of technology, social relations, and the arts. We give different names to it in different fields, but here I will refer to it as the hinge. Bruno Latour points out that ordinary household hinges solve a very basic problem: "Walls are a nice invention, but if there were no holes in them there would be no way to get in or out—they would be mausoleums or tombs. The problem is that if you make holes in the walls, anything and anyone can get in and out (cows, visitors, dust, rats, noise …)."⁵⁰ So, Latour explains, "architects invented this hybrid: a wall hole, often called a door." But the door is not enough in itself: "The cleverness of the invention hinges upon the hingepin: instead of driving a hole through walls with a sledgehammer or a pick, you simply gently push the door. … furthermore—and here is the real trick—once you have passed through the door, you do not have to find trowel and cement to rebuild the wall you have just destroyed: you simply push the door gently back."⁵¹ The hinge is a double connector: it is the piece that joins the wall to the door, and it is designed so that the door can open, connecting inside to outside.

There are many different ways to use this word metaphorically: a text can act as a hinge between periods of literary history, a country can work as a hinge between geographical regions, and an argument can hinge on a concept. Rather than understanding these usages only as tropes, I want to suggest that these are all ways of referring to a particular form that organizes materials across different disciplines and domains. As a noun, a hinge is a site that links two distinct things or spaces, each with its own identity. And the verb—to hinge on—refers to a process that cannot occur without a particular connector.

I draw attention to the hinge here because I want to suggest that it is a crucial form for scaling up political actions to sizes larges enough and durations long enough to change dominant structures and systems. Nunes argues for hinge between groups as the best form for massive expansion on the political left. When it comes to climate change, for example, no single activist group is likely to make revolutionary change on its own, and even a vast aggregation of specific actions will probably fail to add up to systemic transformation. For many of those watching the climate crisis, this is cause for despair. But many separate campaigns and actions can have major structural impacts if they can be linked and coordinated, amplifying and extending each other to shared ends. This work of coordination does not have to be totally streamlined or even fully intentional. As Nunes argues, drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the French Revolution was on the one hand the eruption of lots of "molecular" events, small peasant groups resisting in particular places, but on the other hand these would have been frustrated and powerless without an increasingly collective use of "molar" organizations to inscribe these molecular events into new legal and political forms. It is always the combination of "aggregate and collective action," Nunes argues, that makes a revolution (NV 24–25).

What does this mean in practice? It means neither valorizing the small, local action over the massive revolutionary subject, nor vice versa, but rather paying attention to the linkages between them. It means focusing on the form of the hinge. Political theorists have long argued that social movements are most successful at recruiting new members when they tap into existing networks: families, workplaces, friendships, neighborhoods, unions, churches, schools, and colleges. A person might bring her new neighbor to a meeting, for example, and that neighbor will tell her cousin about it, who in turn gets so excited about the experience that she invites her whole youth group. As the social movement grows, its events and organizations create a vibrant new network of their own, which carries a sense of purpose and belonging that can make it attractive to new members who are interested in having a collective purpose or sense of belonging.

The neighbor who invites the newcomer along acts as a hinge that links two small networks—the neighborhood and the activist organization. And that invitation, social scientists have argued, may be much more important to political action than we might think. Conventional wisdom assumes that strong feeling and belief—our concern about a particular issue—is the most important spur to political engagement. But Ziad Munson learned from interviews with pro-life activists in the US that participants often joined the movement before they had developed strong views on abortion.⁵² Many had vague or abstract opinions to start with, and some had even been pro-choice. The vast majority of activists who spoke to Munson said they first attended for social reasons. The pro-life movement has been good at welcoming new people, regardless of their beliefs, and this hospitable, inclusive gesture itself has been a powerful engine of expansion. Movements that demand major sacrifices, risks, or litmus tests, by contrast, tend to stay too small to have the powerful effects afforded by widespread participation.⁵³ The pro-life case shows that just making contact with the movement—even among those who have little or no commitment to its ends—can spark long and dedicated activism. It also suggests that in many cases the form of the hinge comes first, and ideology follows.

What matters for my purposes in this essay is that hinges between networks afford expansion to very large and politically significant scales. My example here is 350.org and the fossil fuel divestment movement. In July 2012, Bill McKibben published an article in Rolling Stone magazine called "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" and took the argument on a lecture tour around the US, appearing in city convention centers and on college campuses with celebrity speakers, including Naomi Klein and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and coordinating with local and national organizations to plan each event, from Earthjustice to Occupy Columbus.⁵⁴ The following year, 350.org convened a gathering of young climate activists from around the world in Istanbul, offering trainings, support, and opportunities to connect. The resulting campaign has not been a single, tightly structured operation, nor has it been an agglomeration of entirely separate actions. Rather, 350.org acts as a hinge, encouraging, training, and linking local divestment groups as they build their own campaigns, and then sharing accumulated lessons and contacts with all new groups that emerge. At the time of this writing, more than a thousand institutions—churches, colleges, governments, and pension funds—have committed to divesting nearly forty trillion dollars from fossil fuels.⁵⁵

The hinge is a form that connects local, situated groups in order to gather collective power on large scales. It moves between the small and the large, preserving identities at both ends. Individuals can be hinges—two scholars can connect separate university programs, for example—but so can whole organizations. Sociologist Christian Smith coins the term movement midwives to refer to groups that "help in the 'birthing' of movements while retaining identities distinct from those of the resultant organizations."⁵⁶ In the climate movement, Stop the Money Pipeline is a coalition of 175 different organizations that have the common goal of stopping banks, pension funds, investment firms, and insurance companies from financing climate destruction.⁵⁷ The member organizations are ideologically various, including such groups as the Union of Concerned Scientists, One Earth Sangha, the Lakota People's Law Project, and Greenpeace.

When it comes to climate change, humanists have often been quick to critique environmental groups because they are not revolutionary enough or because they sustain the long history of Euro-American colonialism.⁵⁸ This has produced a widespread "left pessimism" on climate, leading away from action and toward mourning. The hinge gives us a way forward. That is, while it is true that different environmental programs have been troubling and partial when considered separately, the power they have built together over a short period is worthy of our notice. As Kai Heron and Jodi Dean argue, scientists, social justice activists, and Indigenous leaders have managed to create a compelling coalition for environmental justice, despite differences in epistemic positions and methods.⁵⁹ "Allied with science, environmentalists shed their eco-hippy personae to become representatives of a fact-based critique of mass consumption."⁶⁰ Meanwhile, "the leadership of indigenous people [grew] to national and international prominence as they forged collective opposition to pipelines and fracking."⁶¹ And then "attention to sacrifice zones, slow death, and the persistent deprivations of environmental racism helped environmentalists move beyond the elitist image long associated with conservationism."⁶² This coalition of groups has successfully shifted the whole mainstream of public opinion away from climate denialism.⁶³ In other words, different environmental movements, each marginal or troubling in isolation, have actually strengthened, sustained, and transformed each other, providing momentum for larger and larger scales of change.

What these cases make clear is that hinged organizations can succeed, even if they are ideologically composite or even incoherent, because of their massive size. There is no need for purity or consistency. In fact, precisely the reverse may be true: movements grow large and powerful in part by linking groups with views that do not necessarily align perfectly. This conclusion may come as an unwelcome claim to activists on the left, many of whom have warned that we must radically remake our relations to ourselves and the world before we can have any meaningful effect. But how are we to get from here to there? I propose that we start by focusing on forms that can join us together in powerful and meaningful numbers.

This is a challenge for literary studies, as I have suggested, in part because both our objects and our methods have so long valorized the distinctive moment, the exception, the minor gesture, as the only site of both aesthetic and political value. But the hinge can be useful to us in this context, it seems to me, since it is the form whereby the small and the singular opens into the collective or the general. And many of us have already thought about this form at work. After all, it is one of the core assumptions of literary pedagogy that close reading a passage in the classroom acts as a hinge to an informed and responsible citizenry—that it can spark a set of recognitions about dominant values, collective life, and the operations of power that students will carry with them into lives beyond the literature class. Formalist methods have already trained our attention, too, on the hinge as a literary form. Narrative, as Roman Jakobson argued long ago, is particularly well suited to "association by contiguity," the work of linking separate moments, agents, and ideas.⁶⁴ Emily Dickinson's dashes have been read as hinges too, alongside her repeated and explicit invocation of the word hinge ("Noon—is the Hinge of Day—").⁶⁵ For Nathaniel Mackey, the breaks, stutters, and limits in poetic language are hinges to possibility of change outside of language.⁶⁶ The closing line of a recent introductory chapter of his is itself a hinge. "Doors are for going through," he writes, inviting us into the rest of the volume.⁶⁷

Each literary reading might be small-scale and specific, then, confined to expert readers and classroom discussions, and for this reason it is tempting to retreat to modesty as the proper scope of the discipline, but it is my argument that a formalist training—in literary studies as well as other disciplines—equips us to analyze and understand the importance of connecting forms, hinges between agents and sites that can gather our power on large scales rather than insisting on our continuing isolation and separation. This is a different kind of hinge to citizenship from the one we most often invoke in the discipline. It is not a spark to consciousness but an invitation to analyze and address the practical problem of collective action. And it is this metadisciplinary method that we need to make a more just polis now.