Notes on Susan Stanford Friedman's "Why Not Compare?"

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Why Not Compare?” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 3, 2011, pp. 753–762., doi:10.1632/pmla.2011.126.3.753.

Friedman's article is coming out of comparative literature, which has, I suppose, a longer institutional history than comparative rhetoric; not surprisingly, then, scholars in comparative literature (as her bibliography shows) have been thinking for a longer time about what comparison is and what the ethics/politics are of comparison. 

Friedman begins this article by listing out some arguments against comparison, which mainly have to do with epistemological (?) and political concerns, such as the unequal relations that often characterize the things being compared. She gives an example from Radhakrishnan, who, hearing his language described as "the Italian of the East," wondered why Italian wouldn't be called "the Telugu of the West" (754). As Friedman writes, "In making Italian the basis for knowing Telugu, the comparison replicates a system of dominance on a global scale" (754). 

She goes on to point out an argument that comparisons might also suffer from an "epistemological instrumentalism build into metaphoric thought as a form of analogy" (754). This she explains in terms of I. A. Richards' analysis of metaphor into the "vehicle" and the "tenor," suggesting that the tenor (the concept being explained) takes precedence over the vehicle (the image or figure used to explain the tenor). The question is whether in the case of a comparison of literary (or rhetorical) texts, the tenor is the "other" text or the familiar one.

Another point against comparison is that it tends to decontextualize both things being compared. I guess the idea is that doing comparative work makes it impossible to provide all the historical and cultural specificity needed to truly understand the things being compared in their totality (or makes it difficult? or is it just that scholars don't usually go into that depth?).

[All this reminded me of a passage from Georgius Candidius' comparison of Sirayan eloquence to the rhetoric of Demosthenes: "At their eloquence I have been thoroughly astonished, for I actually believe Demosthenes himself could not have been more eloquent of have had a greater selection of words at his command" (15, translation from Formosa under the Dutch by William Campbell). In this case, we have a representative of a colonial power (the Dutch) comparing the Sirayan people to a classical Athenian orator; this clearly suggests Candidius' familiarity with the classical tradition (and assumes that his readers would also be familiar with that tradition), assuming, not surprisingly, a closer connection to the ancient Greeks than to the Indigenous Formosans. So in thinking of this in terms of vehicles and tenors: in this case, it seems to me that the tenor is Sirayan eloquence and the vehicle is Demosthenes. 

In looking for this quote, I came across an article by Christopher Joby, called "The Reception of Classical Authors in Taiwan," from the International Journal of the Classical Tradition. Joby makes the interesting point that Candidius might have been making this comparison to challenge the perception that the Siraya were "savages"--"[h]e probably hoped that he could use this argument to justify attempts to convert the Siraya to Christianity, which was his main purpose in engaging with them" (331). ]

Friedman goes on to list reasons for comparison, which include the "cognitive imperative," "the social of cultural imperative," and the "epistemological and political consequences of not comparing." The last one includes the idea that comparing "enables theory" by allowing people to generalize based on patterns observed. It also includes the value of defamiliarization as a way of realizing the cultural practices of one's own community or group are not necessarily universally practiced. She also argues that the value of the "decontextualization" mentioned earlier is that things being compared can be recontextualized: "A literary text, for example, has many potential contexts, not just linguistic, national, temporal, or generic. The refusal to compare texts from different places, times, or cultures privileges one kind of context (temporal-spatial) and renders other contexts invisible" (757).

Finally, she describes three approaches (adding that these are not the only approaches) to comparison that might avoid the dangers discussed above and (on the other hand) the dullness of the "standard pedagogical exercise of 'compare and contrast'" (757). She suggests "a comparative methodology that is juxtapositional, contrapuntal, and reciprocal, thus opening the possibility for a progressive politics of comparison" (758). The idea here is to put things next to each other ("collision"), problematize both objects of comparison in connection to each other ("reciprocal defamiliarization"), and/or create a "cultural collage" that "radical[ly] juxtapos[es] ... texts from different geohistorical and cultural locations ... Put side by side, each in its own distinctive context, but read together for their in/commensurability, texts in collage produce new insights about each, as well as new theoretical insights" (759). 

One point she makes in an endnote made me think of something I was thinking about in relation to the article by Escobar. He had mentioned that the MC project argues that power should be considered when thinking about cultural difference, rather than ignoring the fact that comparisons of culture have often (usually? always?) been done in relations of asymmetric power relations. In one endnote, Friedman points to studies that "see comparison as an agent of both colonization and decolonization" (760, n. 5); in another, she argues, "Arguments that regard comparison as the product of a post-1500 Western modernity (e.g., Harootunian; Chow; Layoun; Shih) ignore how the mobility and intercultural contact that characterize millennia of human history have always engendered comparison" (760, n. 8). This point led me to think about the potential value of pointing out the differences between what has "always engendered comparison" and the "post-1500 western modernity" type of comparison that occurred in contexts of colonization. In other words, compare the different motives for comparison!