Adam Smith (1723-1790) is widely known for his economic writing and is regarded the world over as the first theorist, and most ardent proponent, of the modern capitalist system. But Smith did not obey the conventions of disciplinary specialization. His non-economic writing and lectures—indeed, the vast majority of his work—focuses on ethics and morality, astronomy, law, history, linguistics, patriotism, the fine arts, and other topics. This talk focuses on Smith’s epistemology, specifically, how it helps explain the historical origins of Literary Studies.
A fundamental aspect of Smith’s theory of knowledge concerns the imagination. According to Smith, our knowledge of the world is riddled with what he calls “gaps.” The philosopher must think creatively in order to make bridges between what appear to be disparate kinds of objects. However, Smith is not making the idealist claim that empirical knowledge is impossible, or that—according to the forms of scholasticism that so bothered the Enlightenment figures of Bacon and Newton—reality is whatever way we merely say or believe that it is. Rather, Smith is making a more complicated claim: we can know the world in ways that are better than what Johnson (contra Berkeley) called “ingenious sophism,” but what is “real” is precisely that which retains “a tendency to absence.” There is always more-than-meets-the-eye in Smith’s theory of knowledge, and it is precisely this empirical vastness—often disruptive and even painful—that solicits new ways of knowing things and acting better.
The first part of this talk will establish the connection in Smith’s work between knowledge, absence, and the quantitative nature of the real, using several key-words from his vast and varied corpus (e.g. “multitude,” “substance,” “work,” “corporeality,” “invisibility,” and “ideas”).
Part two homes in on how Smith proposes to solve the knowledge-numbers-absence enigma, specifically, his reliance on what Althusser calls “the omnipotence genus.” Smith’s knowledge system is above all a genre system. He proposes that we use the imagination to divide objects from each other, as well as put them together, which as has a political-economic analogue in the way he conceived of commercially-based social relations in his most famous book, The Wealth of Nations. Thus, both class and classification are significant here. In the case of the former, the “invisible hand” of the market points to the “majority of laboring men [and women]” whose collective power is erased by individualism and the commodity form; in the latter case, what remains absent to philosophical consideration is another form of “multitude,” this one defined as a similarly paradoxical kind of absent presence, reality with too much variability and at too large a scale to fit within a given genre system.
In part three of the talk I want to propose that we think of genre-making in the same way we think about the history of disciplines: both are ways of organizing our knowledge of the real world according to divisions of kind. Since the most important of the modern disciplines where imagination is concerned is the discipline of “English Literature,” my focus shifts here to its historical origins. Why English, and not—as Franco Moretti proposes—World Literature instead? And why Literature, instead of writing, media, technology, or even “data,” as suggested by the latest disciplinary disruption of the Digital Humanities (and long held within communication studies)? Could we say, again following Moretti, that the origins of literary studies are computational, rather than deeply subjective, individualistic, or other-worldly, as is traditionally assumed in the West? I propose that we think about the discipline of English Literary Studies in both a quantitative and materialist way. With its popularity among the lower orders, the ordinariness of its subject matter, its sheer massiveness both as an object and a generator of multiple kinds of experience, the realist novel is the classic location for explaining how the imagination, absence, and the computational origins of English are intertwined.
因其在经济学领域的写作，亚当·斯密（1723-1790）作为现代资本主义体系第一位理论家和最热烈的支持者广为世人熟知，然而，他涉猎的领域远不止于此。事实上，经济学以外的写作和演讲才是其著作的主体，论题涉及道德伦理、天文、法律、历史、语言学、爱国主义、美术等等。本演讲主要聚焦于斯密的认识论，特别是如何借助这一认识论来解释英语文学研究的历史起源。
想象是斯密知识论的基本概念之一。他认为，我们对这个世界的认知充满了他所谓的“缝隙”（“gaps”）。哲学家应当创新思维，以便在那些看似毫不相干的事物之间建立关联。但是，他并非理想主义地认为经验知识是不可能的，或者现实仅限于我们所说或所相信的那样——后者出自经院哲学，培根和牛顿这些启蒙时期思想家曾深受其扰。相反，斯密的观点更加复杂，他认为我们可以通过比约翰逊（Johnson，而非伯克莱Berkeley）所言的“巧妙的诡辩”更好的方式去认识世界，只不过所谓的“真实”依然“倾向于缺席”（“a tendency to absence”）。斯密的知识论中，总是超越于人们亲眼所见的东西，而正是这种巨大的、具有颠覆性甚至令人痛苦的经验主义，要求人们采用新的方式去认识世界和改善行为。
本演讲的第一部分，将借助若干庞大的斯密语料库中的关键词（如“multitude”“substance”“corporeality”“invisibility”“ideas”），将其有关知识、缺席和真实世界的量性本质的论述联系起来；第二部分将着重分析斯密试图解决“知识-数字-缺席”之谜的方法。斯密的知识体系首先是一种类型系统（genre system），他主张人类运用想象力去进行事物的分类和关联，类型和分类都很重要。在他最著名的《国富论》中，就按照他所设想的基于商业的社会关系建立了一个政治-经济模拟体；在第三部分，我将提议以分类的方式去思考学科的形成史：二者都是根据某种类型去构成我们对真实世界的认知。英语文学研究作为一门学科，我认为应当从计量的（quantitative）和唯物的（materialist）两种角度去加以思考，并以现实主义小说为例加以说明。
