Over at Mildly Malevolent, Franco Moretti’s current project was characterized as"fun but silly". I look at it differently: I think it’s absolutely essential, a key way to address some of the major issues missing in the writing of cultural history.

You don’t have to buy all of Moretti’s project or his vision of what he’s doing to see the immense value of it. I found Moretti’s essay in the New Left Review frustrating in its application of world-systems theory, becaue I think that the world-systems approach is one of the most ill-suited slants for a systematic approach to cultural history that I can think of. Moretti’s ambitions to rid literary analysis of sticky questions of interpretation, which I take to be somewhat exaggerated for effect, aren’t that useful either, largely because they're unnecessary. (More on that in a minute).

But what Moretti generally proposes to do speaks exactly to one of the areas where cultural history is typically weak, and that is the inability of cultural historians to make meaningful or confident statements about what is typical or proportionate with regard to any given kind of text or cultural practice, and equally, their inability to offer large-scale or systematic accounts of the circulation and consumption of particular cultural works in relation to all other cultural works in a given era or society.

Some cultural historians do a good job of finding quantitative or systematic information about their particular object of study—a particular kind of publication, text or cultural work, a particular genre, a particular site of cultural consumption. Sometimes cultural historians are able to offer tentative characterizations of the relationship between one form or type of cultural work and other forms, or of relations to the totality of popular culture, but these statements are usually just educated guesswork.

Moretti is perfectly right that if you take any given chronological slice in any given modern nation, our knowledge of the total range of what was published (just to stick to books) is actually strikingly absent, and I strongly suspect that there are many surprises to be found in a more systematic, quantified account of that range. There are a lot of things that I’d like to be able to say with confidence today about American television in the last fifty years, or about the totality of the printed material in circulation in southern Africa between 1890 and today (both locally published and imported), and I simply can’t based on available scholarship.

Of course this information alone doesn’t resolve an equally important and always debatable set of questions. Even if we find out that novels in England in the last century are a much less predominant form of publication than the body of literary criticism might lead one to believe, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be spending most of our analytic time on novels.

There are only a few questions or problems that turn on the frequency or quantity of publication, only a few assertions that need grounding in that systematic, quantified account. You could still easily argue that a cultural form which occupied a miniscule slice of the total cultural activity in a given era was nevertheless the most powerful, influential or hegemonic cultural form in that time or place, or that it was the key or linchpin of popular culture in that era. You can still say that certain kinds of exemplary or highly particular works somehow best represent the spirit of a particular culture, or best problematize some of its characteristic internal struggles and contradictions. You can still do close reading of a single text (as either a historian or a literary critic) and find it valuable. But both cultural history and historicist literary criticism could benefit enormously from a truly systematic, carefully quantified account of the totality of cultural work in any given moment and place.