Pamphleteering

Pamphleteering is a mainstay of intellectual history, cultural history, and social history. Émile Zola’s “J’accuse” (1898), published in defense of both Alfred Dreyfus and the republican ideals of the Third Republic, led to the introduction of the term “intellectuel” in common public discourse.

The pamphlet has hence been discussed as a form of “militant” or “effective” knowledge which can prompt decisive opinion and policy changes. The Arts of Autonomy broadly redefines the pamphlet as any text that fulfills four taxonomic criteria:

1) Pamphlets must address the public at large in a concise manner,

2) they must radically contest an established normative order and simultaneously uphold the value of normativity itself, that is, they must argue, polemicize, or campaign in favor of a normative change,

3) they must address the present, even when they draw on the past in order to support their claims with historical arguments, or when they make prophetic, projective, or conjectural claims about future consequences of past and present actions,

4) pamphlets must be recognized as pamphlets by the reading and deliberating public.

Popular Philology

The ERC Research Project “The Arts of Autonomy“ studies the forms of literacy and interpretative competence, i.e. the forms of “popular philology” that are distributed among the reading public and which enable the discussion, evaluation, and critique of massively polemical or militant texts.

We produce bottom-up analyses of how militant literary statements are subjected to discussion, discursivization, critique, evaluation, or realization by the general reading public. This process is both individual and collective and casts literature and literacy at the center stage of contemporary social history.

The pamphlet’s political agency has increasingly engaged our general conception of what counts as “literature” and what does not: the contemporary pamphlet directly engages the disciplinary outlines of the philological humanities and their legitimate objects of inquiry.

We develop an account of the various forms of popular, non-specialized literacy involved in the evaluation, normalization, radicalization, or actualization of militant literary claims by describing how communities of interpretation and communities of actualization autonomously make social sense of pamphletary claims.

The Public Sphere

Our reserach group argues that militant short-form writing is one of the crucial discursive forms in contemporary Western public discourse, and that its systematic study as a literary and rhetorical form is essential in order to gain an understanding of the formation of opinion and policy in Europe and the United States. We study the interconnection of virality, radical polemical writing, and the dialogical possibilities offered by generalized access to the internet.

The classical, Habermasian model of doxological formation in liberal societies is predicated on social institutions (the press, reading groups and clubs, learned societies, public debate) the access to which is structured along the lines of income, gender, and ethnic or religious belonging. The Arts of Autonomy studies the pamphlet’s ability to seep through social walls and to produce a reading and deliberating public across previously constituted social groups.

Short-form militant writing enables those who often have limited access to public discourse to participate in the public sphere: because of its propensity to become viral, and because of its material feasibility, the pamphlet vouchsafes a high degree of productive autonomy to its practitioners, and demands a high degree of collective and individual interpretative autonomy from its addressees.

We use both classical philological methods and Digital Humanities tools to map out the trails left by pamphletary events evolving in the public sphere. We use “virality” as a structuring concept in the selection of our primary sources and second-order responses: we trace pamphletary events along their spread and penetration in the public sphere.