Band 19, Heft 1 - Special Issue: Writing the Social Guest editors: Carolin Amlinger, David-Christopher Assmann, Urs Büttner

Before the foundation of sociology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, both social scientific and literary scholars sought to provide tools for navigating increasingly complex societies and ever-more pressing social issues. More than providing a fixed set of definitions, literary texts excelled in theorizing the social in the sense of the Greek theōrein , meaning to consider or speculate. However, due to growing disciplinary specialization, sociology began mimicking methods of the sciences, becoming more plausible in delivering social knowledge. The relationship between sociology and literature has mainly become one of a knowing subject and a passive object – hence the preposition »of« in the sociology of literature. Contemporary sociology of literature has predominantly focused on literary production, subordinating literary works to social interactions and institutions – the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his follower Gisèle Sapiro being prime examples. Even sociologists who recognize the usefulness of literature for its intrinsic qualities often view literary texts as passive objects to be translated into sociological discourse. I propose a cultural sociology of literature to remedy this epistemological asymmetry. Following the Yale School of Cultural Sociology, the proposed model refuses to reduce literature to a mere epiphenomenon of its social dimensions. Instead, it recognizes literary works »as relatively autonomous cultural entities« possessing their own agency. The key is a symmetrical analytical focus on the inner structures of literary texts as well as their social surroundings. To secure this principle, I employ two concepts. First, I adopt the concept of iconic experience, which the Yale School developed to grasp the nondiscursive, aesthetic dimensions of social life. I employ the iconic experience to account for the meaning-making as it occurs within a spatio-temporally unique reading experience while also being navigated by persistent cultural patterns and norms. Second, I operationalize the concept of structures of feeling to tackle social phenomena broadly shared over time yet lacking more explicit discursive definitions. These nondiscursive collective representations – sometimes called Zeitgeist or generational feeling – can be captured intelligibly by literary forms and aesthetic devices, as these can easily signify ambiguity and openness of meaning. I argue a combination of sociological and literary theoretical discourse is needed to capture aspects of the social-literary interaction usually »lost in translation« between literary and sociological genres. I develop this research model through a case study of the Irish author Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People . The goal is to trace how the »literary« and the »social« mutually constitute each other and partake in the overall process of meaning-making. What is the role of Normal People’ s literary form in creating a well-marketed book product, connected with its supposed extraordinary intellectual merits as a »generational novel«? Thanks to its aesthetic devices, Rooney’s novel presents social relationships as a social fact that escapes discursive definition yet heavily impacts social action. On the one hand, the characters have the intellectual and reflexive capacity to perpetually evaluate and categorize their actions when navigating the turbulent waters of romance and intimacy. On the other hand, the prevalent emotional culture makes them yield their agency to social norms and the normalized ideal of social relationships as effortless and natural. Unlike scholarly accounts, reading Rooney’s novel can account for social relationships both as a unity – relatively stable structures of feeling upon which all social relationships feed – and as a polyvalent ambiguity – experiencing social relationships as self-contradictory, volatile, and tacit. That is possible due to the iconic experience of reading, which renders social theorizing through novels as a condensed and indivisible blend of sensual immediacy and abstract representations.

In literary sociology, texts have often been treated as a product of human history, and therefore as symptoms of the forces that have shaped them. This essay considers a single strain of computational literary studies that uses predictive modeling to locate differences between two corpora of texts, determining, for example, what makes a text literary, reviewable, or prize-worthy. This type of computational literary studies is sociological in nature but changes the epistemological status of the text from a symptom of the conditions of its production to a source of evidence supporting claims about human selection. In the ongoing »method wars«, some proponents of postcritique have allied themselves with computational literary studies due to its perceived machinic ability to read objectively and on the surface of texts; however, as this essay argues, the scale of computational methods and their ability to produce strong, generalizable theories complicate not only this alliance, but also the distinction between critique (characterized in this essay with reference to Jameson) and postcritique (characterized in this essay with reference to Sedgwick, Latour, Felski, Love, Best and Marcus), which rests on what role the text should play in our accounts of history. This essay responds to the seemingly confounding position that computational literary sociology takes within this debate by arguing that the relationship between the text and history is accounted for in predictive modeling in the first instance through a statistical hermeneutic. This hermeneutic, as is shown through a historization of computational literary sociology’s assumptions about humans and their relationship to the world, is inherently paranoid, imagining that human behavior emits historical signals that are retrievable from amidst the noise of the data. This essay pays particular attention to this construction – »signal in the noise« – in order to argue that computational literary sociology is fundamentally concerned with demystifying and finding meaning within the randomness of human behavior, which is why it cannot be so easily divorced from the tradition of critique. By conducting a brief survey of work in computational literary sociology (Dalen-Oskam, English, Moretti, So, Underwood), the essay argues that there are numerous ways of making meaning of the signal in the noise. One of these is to treat it as a symbol requiring interpretation, usually leading to an explanation that relies on the existence of something like the political unconscious. Another is to refuse critique in order to trace or assemble the actions that manufactured the appearance of the signal. In either case, the second instance of hermeneutical maneuvering that occurs in computational literary sociology is an answer to the question: how did the signal get into the noise? Also revealed through this survey is that attending to the noise, rather than the signal, is a productive way to leverage a unique affordance of computational literary sociology – its visualization of the relationship between the corpus and the signal that appears to order it. Ultimately this essay argues that despite computational literary sociology’s reconsideration of the role of the text, it continues to, in the critical tradition, treat the text as a material instantiation of history. Although computational literary sociology is not as postcritical as some might have thought, it still enables postcritical readings of a model’s outputs. Furthermore, the essay finds that what can become visible in computational literary studies is, first, the way that statistics has come to act – like ideology critique before it – as a nearly ubiquitous and therefore infrequently questioned tool for understanding human behavior and, second, that what is valuable in thinking computationally is the ability to pay attention to the »noise«, without which statistical models would necessarily flounder.