Abstract
Taking its cue from the notion that “competition” as a concept continues to be at the centre of vigorous debate within political and social theory, this curated collection introduces “competition” as essential to literary community-building. It suggests considering “competition” as a fruitful tool that helps analyse the performative habits of literary communities—conceptualised as ‘networked structures’, as connections that are being established all the time as having an interest in their own existence and persistence—and their ideas and practices of globality. “Competition” thus emerges as an extended and transtemporal concept that is not only tethered to but also highly mediated by notions of “community” and “communication”.
Competition as a concept continues to be at the centre of vigorous debate within political and social theory. Conceived as the dominant mode of interaction in Western societies in the course of modernisation and economic globalisation, competition is often understood as displacing previous, alternative modes of traditional allocation, associative cooperation, authoritarian-hierarchical regulation or unregulated (antagonistic) conflict over roles, resources and privileges in an increasing number of fields of social life Full reference in Zotero Library. Competition has been described, discussed, and criticised as an ubiquitous organisation principle, even as an epochal paradigm shift, since cooperation theories provide patterns of explanation that transcend nature and society Full reference in Zotero Library. If we follow Georg Simmel Full reference in Zotero Library, the activity of (at least) two competitors vying for one and the same goal, the agonal organisation of a social sphere, and the competition between producers or philosophers and artists increases productivity or creativity, ‘content promotion’ (inhaltliche Förderung) or ‘value enhancement’ (Wertsteigerung) in line with a liberal tradition, prominent since Adam Smith and the eighteenth century, that describes markets as an invisible hand Full reference in Zotero Library. While the Physiocrats and Adam Smith pointed to the significant role of competition within the particular sphere of the economic, Karl Mannheim Full reference in Zotero Library suggested that they in fact discovered only a general social relation:
[From] the point of view of the social sciences, every historical, ideological, sociological piece of knowledge (even should it prove to be Absolute Truth itself), is clearly rooted in and carried by the desire for power and recognition of particular social groups who want to make their interpretation of the world the universal one. Full reference in Zotero Library
In our context of doing literature, Mannheim’s extended concept of competition in a programmatic linkage with the community concept easily enters into conversation with sociological or media-historical accounts of literature such as conflictive fields Full reference in Zotero Library or pragmatic networks Full reference in Zotero Library. Forms of competition in literary praxis can be traced not only in, for example, literary prize competitions, where poets sometimes compete for prize money as well as fame, or in the tradition of courtly poetry, which stages the literary competition for the favour of an often-fictitious lover. Such forms can also be traced diachronically in the anxiety of influence of younger poets before their predecessors and in every self-assertion against tradition (Full reference in Zotero Library; see also Full reference in Zotero Library). Or more broadly, the intercultural competition over resources via contests for symbolic capital and literary currencies offers ‘semiotic alternatives to violence in managing intergroup tensions’ Full reference in Zotero Library—one can think here of ‘memory wars’ between national or ethnic groups, ‘canon wars’, or methodological debates about curricula at the service of agents of culture planning and fights over possessing and monopolising the same symbolic assets Full reference in Zotero Library.
The research program of Research Area 1 ‘Competing Communities’ focuses on analysing performative habits of literary ensembles understood as temporal communities, and it theorises those along the lines of competition as part of literary community-building. In doing so, we embrace an extended and transtemporal concept of competition, and we do not limit ourselves to the connection between competition and modernity, the transition from a pre-modern ascription pattern to a modern achievement pattern, and the discursive ties of the competition-concept to Social Darwinism and its socio-political and socio-cultural applications. Such a temporal perspective allows us to pay close attention to the praxeological aspects of aesthetic self-performance and aesthetic self-historicisation. A multitude of potentially conflicting interrelations is thus addressed by competition between communities and competition within self-aware communities: agonality and aemulatio, querelle and paragone, imagined collectivities such as competing ‘republics of letters’, arrangements or assemblages that include both hegemonic claims and resistant stances, based in strong notions of solidarity or dedicated to interested expressions of identity. To trace concrete examples of transcultural and transtemporal entanglements in literary history, we thus ask: what role does competition play in the constitution of temporal communities? How does one study the concept of competing communities from a literary studies point of view? Which conceptualisation of competition in relation to literary communities may prove fruitful?
The reciprocal entanglement of the community -concept with a concept of competition in the title of this Research Area — ‘Competing Communities’ — highlights the internal and external conflicts of two modern analytical concepts that always also reach beyond (or beneath or above) modernity. Since the proclaimed task is ‘to honour and utilise a community’s historical reflexivity without confusing a community with its evolving self-descriptions’, and to analyse the acts of ongoing self-constitution of literary communities—which ‘should not be misunderstood as expressions of holistic cohesion’, and which ‘never embody ‘true’ communion’ (Kelleter/Albers)—the heuristics of an analytical competition-concept allow us to examine and unpack the shape of temporal communities that constitute literatures in praxeological terms. Those heuristics allow us to consider the agonistic structure of “doing literature” as a multitude of communicative practices; that is, as competing social and aesthetic practices that generate, canonise, or challenge competing ideas and performances of the literary. In other words: competition becomes a fruitful analytical tool that helps us consider, criticise, and theorise literary communities—conceptualised as ‘networked structures’, as connections that are being established all the time as having an interest in their own existence and persistence—and their ideas and practices of globality.
As an effect of communicative practices, temporal communities are therefore per definitionem sites of multiple forms of competition: between different notions of the literary, discourses, material and artistic practices, gendered concepts of literature, as well as between linguistic, cultural, and literary groups and circles. For what we actually observe by focusing on transcultural and transtemporal entanglements in literary history, on temporal communities permeated by questions of power, are literary communities in competition; both explicitly and implicitly, they make claims to their own ‘globality’ in time, generating exclusion as much as inclusion. By this route, global literary interdependences are likely to express themselves in conflictive actions, such as acts of strategic self-universalisation and strategic counter-particularisation. To study competition from a literary studies point of view thus means to examine the competitive nature of literary community-building and to think about transtemporal literary communities as competing communities. This research programme presupposes a conceptualisation of competition and competing communities that stresses communication or, rather, the communicative structure of competition itself.
Following Georg Simmel’s ‘sociology of competition’ and its reformulation as a communication theoretical model by Tobias Werron Full reference in Zotero Library in this way, constellations of competition can be conceived—for our purposes of examining literary ensembles and their ideas and practices of globality in time—as an effect of public communication processes. Such conceptualisation emphasises Simmel’s understanding of competition as a triadic structure, as an interaction of at least two opponents constituted to acquire the favour of a third party. This competitive relationship is not only constituted by the third party; it also is entirely mediated by it and, thus, needs to be understood as an indirect relationship Full reference in Zotero Library:
The antagonistic tension of opposition to competitors sharpens the sensitivity on the part of merchants for the preferences of the public to the point of a nearly clairvoyant instinct for the impending changes in its tastes, fashions, interests; but not only with merchants but also with journalists, artists, booksellers, politicians. Modern competition, which is identified as the conflict of all against all, is at the same time, though, the conflict of all for all. Full reference in Zotero Library
Werron draws on Simmel’s rendering of competition as ‘the conflict of all for all’ to propose the public (Das Publikum), the sphere of imagined spectatorship and accompanying fiction of public communication processes, as the Third within the interaction between competing parties. Public processes of communication here not only set the pace and rhythm for this kind of competitive interaction, but they also are responsible for the complexity and dynamics of universalisation and globalisation of modern competition. As Werron explains, ‘the entire constellation of competition then appears as an artifact of public communication that owes its existence to the rhythm, complexity, and memory of public communication processes’ (Full reference in Zotero Library; transl. Miltos Pechlivanos and Samira Spatzek).
If we follow this theoretical model, communication and medialisation need to be understood as crucial elements within competitive social interaction, and they therefore are essential to the competition-concept as an analytical lens for the purposes of examining and theorising competing literary communities in time as a struggle for a Third. Transcending Werron’s emphasis on modern competition, the figure of the public opens various avenues to explore the ever-shifting relations of transtemporal competitive entanglements, not least since it points us to the concept of communication. To study how specific literary collectives thought and wrote about themselves, and performed themselves as communities, thus also means to study the communicative structures and practices adopted by them. However, this also bears the still to be elaborated set of questions: how does one temporalise the notion of the public within the wider framework of temporal communities? What does it mean to think about competing communities as always entangled in the past, present, and future and as intricately connected to the public? How can we think about competing communities in relation to other conceptualisations of the public, of Publics and Counterpublics Full reference in Zotero Library or of theorisations of the public along transnational lines Full reference in Zotero Library?
Competing Communities: Case Studies and Insights
Shuttling between various conceptualisations and praxeologies of competition, community and, indeed, communication, the contributions of this curated collection either stem from our landmark, postdoctoral, and doctoral research projects based in Research Area 1 or are offered by collaborating researchers and scholars, whose perspectives on competing communities provide important additional input. The task taken up by the respective case studies and insights, then, is to unearth, examine, and theorise the diverse praxeologies of competing communities and the agonistic structure of ‘doing literature’ through which literature becomes global, and also to place these in relation to the respective contributions to the ‘Community’ curated collection (2024). The case studies and insights elaborate on competing communities along the lines of five perspectives, which foreground contact problems in the interplay between writing as art form and public critical practice; shifts from aesthetic competition to national pseudo-competition; claims to world authorship in world literary canonisation programmes; antagonistic languages of rescuing the tradition and planning a salvation; and, last but not least, stories of phantasmagorical disparity. The common thread running through these insights and/or case studies is the competitive dynamic of negotiations within literary communities, entangled in their pasts, presents, and futures, and intricately connected to temporalised (Counter)Publics.
Ana Rocío Jouli’s insight, entitled ‘Competition and the Poet-Critic’, focuses on the role played by competition in the critical writings of poets. Jouli (CONSTELLATIONS, EXC 2020 professional-track postdoc) suggests that the poets’ critical discourse mediates in their relationship with tradition—through self-positioning mechanisms, canon-building strategies, and the advocacy of their own poetics (whether explicit, concealed, or inadvertent). Competition is a constitutive element of this relationship: as a way of building communities, as a way of reading, and as a way of contesting tradition. Reflecting on the role played by competition in poets’ literary practice allows for a conceptualisation of competing communities as disputed territories. Here, ‘the editorial line of a magazine, the catalogue of a publisher, the ways of doing literature that certain theories allow us to read, the construction of an author figure around the affiliation to a certain literary movement, [and] the ways of doing criticism with and within literature’ emerge as possible sites for competitive literary negotiations that are ‘always open to future interpretations’. Jouli suggests that the critical writings of poets and ‘contact problems’ (Jorge Panesi) created by their simultaneous literary practice of ‘doing criticism’ and ‘doing literature’ are formative of literary traditions, (national) canon negotiations and formations, and the interplay between writing as art form and public critical practice.
The Soviet Armenian literary field of the 1920s and 1930s is particularly instructive in this context as well, as Sona Mnatsakanyan (RA 1 member, FSGS doctoral candidate) shows in her case study entitled ‘From Aesthetic to National Competition’. Building on the research of her doctoral research project ‘The Topos of Yerevan’ (2020–2024), Mnatsakanyan reminds us from the very beginning of her contribution that the idea of competition was always at the heart of the Soviet Union, finding its expression in all spheres of life, including in Soviet literature. Since the latter was attributed with an exclusive position among other forms of art, its examination gains quite important potency to question its role both in shaping the Soviet community and in propagating the idea of community itself. Turning to a variety of literary productions including newspapers, manifestos, and speeches, this case study suggests that there were two types of literary/artistic competition. Mnatsakanyan conceptualises the first one as aesthetic competition: this was prevalent after the Revolution up until 1932 when the decision by the Central Committee of All-Union Communist Party to ban literary associations and establish one general Union of Soviet Writers was put into action. The second one, starting from the 1930s, can be called national competition, based on the rules of Socialist realism and its credo ‘Socialist in content, national in form’. The shift from aesthetic to national competition meant a shift in the agency of literary actors. They were deprived of the opportunity to compete through various aesthetic forms and poetics; instead, ‘national forms’, that is to say, national literatures, would compete within the Soviet national-public sphere. As this case study shows, this kind of national competition can generally be considered as ornamental ‘pseudo-competition’ because both the rules and competitors were imposed from above, and the hierarchy among them was clear in advance.
Susanne Frank (RA 1 Moderator, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) examines competing claims to ‘world authorship’ in three novels focusing on China by Sergei Tret’jakov, Pearl S. Buck, and André Malraux. Her case study ‘Competing for World Authorship in 1930, Or: Who May Write about China?’ brings those works into conversation and turns to their reception on the global scene. The concept of ‘world authorship’ has become an important instrument of literary sociology in recent years, focusing on the constitution and changes of the international or global literary field as well as on the conditions to obtain recognition in this field. Frank’s case study critically supplements recent theorisations of this concept (for example, Full reference in Zotero Library; Full reference in Zotero Library) by drawing attention to world literary canonisation programs as they were developed in early twentieth-century Russia and, subsequently, in the Soviet Union. The case study crucially also reconsiders the world literary field in the early 1930s by tracing the publication, translation, and reception of three novels on China—an American, a Russian, and a French novel. The texts emerged more or less simultaneously and independently of one another but were exceptionally well received, awarded, and translated into several world languages both nationally and internationally. They thus contributed to the world literary canonisation of their authors, while also drawing global attention to (the topic of) China. Frank analyses their competition for world authorship and demonstrates that the dynamics in the international literary field were more symmetrical and less West-Euro-centric than one could expect.
In the case study ‘The Language of Salvation’, Michail Leivadiotis (RA 1 Postdoc) examines the terrain of European humanisms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, focusing on the ways those Byzantine and Italian humanisms stood in intellectual as well as epistemic competition with one another. As increasing numbers of refugees streamed westwards after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Westerners began to view them more critically and even hostilely. Byzantine scholars in the West and Western humanists adopted an often antagonistic approach not only to cultural heritage but also to the distribution of resources, patronage, and teaching positions. Italian cultural hegemony catalysed the emerging competition among European humanists. Byzantine scholars in Italy entered the emerging competition with an obvious dichotomy: their own binary cultural reference to both Rome and Greece; they appeared to abandon their Roman claim in order to embrace their Greekness as their distinguishing feature and advantage. At the same time, a public dispute over Platonism revealed the internal contradictions and divergent orientations within the communities of Byzantine scholars, but also their intention to control and monopolise epistemic orientation in their new cultural environment. The harsh reaction to such intentions came in the form of anti-Greek polemics by Western scholars such as Annius of Viterbo or Poliziano. This kind of competition between and within a wide range of groupings and allegiances was channelled into the rhetorical confrontation of two cultural and linguistic areas, emphasising their similarities, commonalities, and functionalities within the cultural project of humanism. The competition then not only took the form of a conflict between Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking intellectuals; it was also a competition between natives and refugees, cultural intruders; a competition between scholasticists and Platonists; a competition between Latin Catholic culture and Greek paganism. In the case study, Leivadiotis examines the narratives, rhetoric, and argumentation of various communities and groupings that defend Greek in the West as competing communities for access to a heritage and the formation of a canon: not only in the form of a rescue programme, but also in the aspect of a grand and rather vague future plan for “salvation”, culturally or metaphysically conceptualised or alluded to.
In ‘Competing Ghosts: Zackige Männer, Viscous Monsters and Other Perimetral Creatures. The Political Bestiary of the Spanish Civil War’, Miguel Rivas Venegas (RA 1 associated member, University of the Basque Country) shifts attention to what could perhaps be considered the most extreme form of literary competition—‘memory wars’ and/or the ‘war of ideas’. This insight thus considers adversary practices and antagonistic relationships in narratives of competition during the Spanish Civil War and in the post-war period, which were ‘marked by the dramatic Nachleben (post-life) of certain paradigms of alterity that were spectacularly deployed in images, visual dispositives, artworks, literary and political texts to exemplify the impossible, the monstrous character of those who opposed themselves—either by the use of force or simply through their mere existence as unorthodox individuals—to the Francoist Weltanschauung’. Venegas’s condensation points us towards the conflictual forms that competing communities can take. At the centre of this argumentation is the insight that notions of difference and ‘agonistic competition between two incompatible perceptions of […] identity’ can delineate competition as phantasmagorical stories of disparity.