Table Of ContentCircuits in Motion
Polysystem Theory
and the Analysis
of Culture
Edited by
David Souto
Aiora Sampedro
Jon Kortazar
CIP. Biblioteca Universitaria
Circuits in Motion [Recurso electrónico]: Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture / editors,
David Souto, Aiora Sampedro, Jon Kortazar. – Datos. – Bilbao : Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal He-
rriko Unibertsitatea, Argitalpen Zerbitzua = Servicio Editorial, [2021]. – 1 recurso en línea: PDF (191 p.)
Modo de acceso: World Wide Web.
ISBN: 978-84-1319-288-8.
1. Literatura – Filosofía. 2. Lenguaje y lenguas – Aspecto político. 3. Cultura. 4. Even-Zoar, Itamar.
Polysystem studies. I. Souto, David, ed. II. Sampedro, Aiora, ed. III. Kortazar, Jon, ed.
(0.034)82.09
(0.034)008
This book has been published within the framework of the LAIDA Research
Group (Literature and Identity) (IT 1397/19, GIU 20/26), recognised entity of the
Network of Research Groups of the Basque Government and recognised by the
University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea.
Cover design: José Antonio Morlesin.
Economically supported by the Vice-Rectorate of the Campus of Biscay of the
UPV / EHU and the Vice-Rectorate of the Research Area.
© Euskal Herriko Unibertsitateko Argitalpen Zerbitzua
Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad del País Vasco
ISBN: 978-84-1319-288-8
Contents
Introductions
Circuits in Motion: Mapping Heterogeneity in Culture
Thomas Harrington, David Souto and Jaume Subirana (ISPS) .................... 6
Pensamiento Fuerte: Polisistemas y Filología
Darío Villanueva (RAE) ................................................... 10
Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Institutionality
and of the Political Dimensions of Power
Who Profit From Heritage (And Who Loose)?
Itamar Even-Zohar ....................................................... 23
Polysystem Theory: A Versatile, Supra-Disciplinary Framework for the Analysis
of Culture and Politics
Thomas Harrington ...................................................... 32
The Appeal of Environmentalism and Managing Marginalized Identities Between
Culture Conservation and Change. Examples from Arab society in Israel
Rakefet Sela-Sheffy ...................................................... 42
The Covid-19 Crisis and The Emergence of Digital Ultra-Liberalism. An Approach
to Republicanism from Polysystem Theory
David Souto Alcalde ..................................................... 59
Tensions in Literature, Language and Translation Revealed
Through the Lense of Polysystem Theory
Language as a Space for Collision
Simona Škrabec ......................................................... 79
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Circuits in Motion. Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture
ConTenTs
National Literary Awards And The Basque Literary System
Jon Kortazar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Tensions Between the Navarrese and Basque Literary Systems in the Last Quarter
of the 20th Century and the Beginning of 21st Century
Asier Barandarian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Three decades of Polysystem Theory at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF)
Carolina Magaldi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Polysystem Theory as a Platform for Transversal Studies.
On the Intersections of Nature and Urban Spaces in the Global World
Polysystem of Resilience in the Anthropocene. Understanding the Role
of Heterogeneity in Human-Nature Systemic Interactions
Roel During and Rosalie Van Dam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Polysystem Studies, Ecocriticism and the Homogenization of Biocultural Diversity
Frederik Verbeke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Polysystem Theory and Research Applications: Planning and Social Research
Commitment in an Analysis of the Expositive and Dissemination Project
The City, the Way and Us as a Case Study
elías J . Torres Feijó . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Tourism and Gastronomy in Santiago de Compostela (Galiza): A Case Study Under
Polysystem Perspective in Relationship with Other System Analysis
emilio V . Carral Vilariño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
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Circuits in Motion. Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture
Introductions
Circuits in Motion:
Mapping Heterogeneity in Culture
Thomas Harrington
Trinity College
David Souto
Trinity College
Jaume Subirana
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
F or all its members’ many and often quite noisy pretensions of being on the vanguard
of social thought, the academy is actually quite conservative in its day-to-day, and
year-to-year, comportments. This aversion to change is, at least on one level, readily
understandable. After all, the contemporary university was founded during the 19th century
to serve, as much as anything else, as a repository of the central semiotic treasures of the
nation-states of Europe and the Americas, and to spread this supposed symbolic koine
among the often quite heterodox populations under their nominal political authority.
In other words, the rigorous replication of ideas and attitudes among the upper socio-
economic strata of the national community is —especially in the humanities— what the
contemporary university has often been largely about.
While this is not, in and of itself a bad thing (indeed Even-Zohar suggests it is a flat-
out inevitable thing), it nonetheless engenders no small amount of collateral damage
in the realm of analytical practices. If a prime goal of the institution in question is the
establishment and perpetuation of the national faith and the reproduction of canons, what
incentives do its members have to adopt critical paradigms that might more accurately
illuminate the ever-changing and often bumptiously untidy reality of the national
community?
In short, they have almost none.
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Circuits in Motion. Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture
CIRCUITS IN MOTION: MAPPING HETEROGENEITy IN CULTURE
And it is for this reason that so many of the recent calls for greater inter-disciplinarity
in the humanities have ended in disappointment, if not outright failure. By the time an
academic is installed in a paid position, he or she has been thoroughly acculturated to,
and shaped by, the central presumptions of his or her of often statist-inflected discipline.
Moreover, their future advancement in the academy will be governed by people who have
been similarly shaped by the often claustrophobic parameters of the same “field”. Is it
thus any wonder that such people who, like most of us, desire stability and security, fail
miserably when asked to think, teach and write in interdisciplinary terms?
It would be tempting to characterize Itamar Even-Zohar’s extraordinary body of
work as a rare triumph of interdisciplinarity. But to do so, would be to miss the core
audaciousness of his intellectual project. Though it obviously partakes of knowledge
produced by myriad academic fields, it is not conceptually bound by any of them. While
Even-Zohar is fully cognizant of the ability of these existing paradigms to generate useful
artefacts of knowledge, he is deeply suspicious of their often impressionistic and self-
referential frames of analysis.
His solution?
To essentially “leap over” them when generating his own framework for the analysis
of heterodoxy in culture. In this sense, we see the term “supra-disciplinary” as perhaps the
best way of describing the nature of his work.
But how does one “leap over” existing disciplines without falling into the abyss of
meaninglessness, or academic bubblingbabbling? His answer is to go back to the most
basic form of analysis, and the one that, at least in theory, still predominates in the so-
called “hard-sciences”: empirical observation of the functional properties of a given cultural
artifact or set of cultural artifacts in time. And please keep in mind this “in time”.
Key to this approach is a recognition of a number of things that are often overlooked
or obscured by more traditional practitioners of textual (understood here in its broadest
possible sense) analysis.
The first is that no cultural artifact is ever imbued with a stable or constant cultural
value. Rather all such semiotic elements derive their value, as Saussure showed us in the
more limited realm of phonemic analysis, from the set of relations they maintain with
other similar elements in their proximity in a given moment in time. (And, again, the idea
of this “set of relations” is a key one).
The second postulate, which flows logically from the first, is that the passage of
time inevitably affects the nature of the relationships between such elements within the
synchronic “snapshot” alluded to above.
The third is that, however much cultural institutions of a national or tribal cast seek to
obviate it, no cultural system or field is, or can ever be, fully isolated from other internally
cohesive repertoires of culture. They are, in fact constantly interfering with each other,
and in this way, perpetually facilitating change through the transfer, of ideas, images and
models between them. And, thus, change.
A fourth premise is that those who used to be called “lettered elites”, and whom
Even-Zohar has termed “socio-semiotic entrepreneurs” at various moments of his work,
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Circuits in Motion. Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture
THOMAS HARRINGTON, DAVID SOUTO AND JAUME SUBIRANA
play an outsized role in both generating repertoires of culture (and from there, notions of
what constitutes “reality” in society) as well as the traffic of cultural artifacts and cultural
models between both discrete internal repertoires of a social entity, and other recognizable
national systems of culture.
As Thomas Harrington mentions in his contribution to this volume, “To begin to
think in this way is, in a sense, to embark on a program of observational detoxification”.
Rather than starting from the premises that the often nationalistically-oriented and power-
diffident gatekeepers of the academy have suggested are the driving forces of cultural
production (e.g. individual genius, a desire to harness the voice of the people, vague
notions of intertextuality, the pure pursuit of beauty), Polysytems Theory invites us to ask
questions like the following:
— How did this particular artifact or repertoire of artifacts come into being?
— Who can be said to have “invented” them?
— Who launched it, or them, into circulation?
— Why, and why here, and at this moment?
— Was their appearance in the system where it now resides facilitated by the
importation of texts (again understood in the broadest possible sense) and/or textual
models imported from other repertoires and systems?
— If so, who exactly were the importers, and what were their strategic goals in
initiating the transaction or transactions that made this happen?
— Why, did they do so at this particular moment of history?
— What actor or set of actors is currently managing the invented or imported
repertoire’s survival and maintenance in its current site of “residence”?
— How proximate or distant are these discourse managers —and hence the semiotic
products under their effective control or influence— to the centers of social power
in this particular place?
We view this last point as particularly important, and see it as a key reason for
believing that Polysystem Theory is probably still much closer to the beginning of its arc
of prominence than to its effective end. Although Even-Zohar himself has not made any
clear or consistent claims in this direction, we believe that this emphasis on dissecting
how “idea-makers” interact with society’s prime centers of power suggests that perhaps
the greatest benefits of his theories lie in their ability to help citizens gain a much clearer
understanding of the political conditions in which they live and work.
As Even-Zohar points out in his masterful “Culture-Planning, cohesion and the making
and maintenance of entities”, power elites first employed cultural goods, then a relatively
scarce resource, to induce a sense of awe in the population under their nominal control.
And this practice of flashing “cultural bling” still exists in many social and economical
circles today. However, it is, in our view, being rapidly supplanted by a model of culture-
planning rooted not in the logic of scarcity, but rather the logic of abundance. Again a
bling?
Idea makers allied to centers of power today are able to flood the citizenry with a Nile-
sized flow of images each and every day, a current so large and seemingly untamed that it
robs many otherwise perspicacious people of their ability to remember a key, and we
believe, unassailable postulate of Even-Zohar’s critical outlook: that there is no cohesion,
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Circuits in Motion. Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture
CIRCUITS IN MOTION: MAPPING HETEROGENEITy IN CULTURE
and therefore no recognizable schemas of meaning in culture without the “curating” of
extant cultural inventories. In short, Even-Zohar teaches us that, however invisible their
presence might seem to be in a given moment, there are always relatively small groups of
people working in concert with key power holders to generate and maintain elite-friendly
concepts of “reality” for the rest of us, and that with a little bit of searching, we can actually
locate and expose to others exactly who they are, and how they work their semiotic magic
on the majority.
In a time, especially in the humanities, when the word empowerment has been
rendered banal by overuse and the promulgation of haphazard critical approaches produced
in its name, Even-Zohar’s body of theory texts provides us with real tools for fighting back
against the many induced distortions and slumbers of our time.
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Circuits in Motion. Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture
Pensamiento Fuerte:
Polisistemas y Filología
Darío Villanueva
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela/Real Academia Española
E l objetivo de este artículo es contraponer en el ámbito de los estudios literarios
el pensamiento fuerte, representado por la teoría de los polisistemas y otras
orientaciones similares de inspiración sociológica y fundamento fenomenológico,
frente al pensamiento débil que, a causa del triunfo de la deconstrucción sobre todo en los
Estados Unidos, ha dado paso a la sustitución de la Filología y de la Literaturwissenschaft por
los llamados Estudios culturales.
Como es bien sabido, desde la década de los años ochenta del pasado siglo pensiero
debole es un concepto característico de la Posmodernidad, que fue promovido por el filósofo
italiano Gianni Vattimo. Según él, frente a una lógica consistente y unívoca representada
por el Racionalismo, el pensamiento débil reivindica la necesidad de dar libre curso a la
interpretación.
Su relativismo abre paso al triunfo de la multiculturalidad frente al canon occidental,
y se alinea con la deconstrucción de Jacques Derrida por compartir con ella el principio
exacerbado de la libertad de la interpretación no sujeta a una lógica, en la línea de una
auténtica «hermenéutica negativa».
El Pensamiento débil es un pensamiento antimetafísico, entendiendo por metafísica
la idea de que existe un orden objetivo del ser. El pensamiento metafísico resultaría ser,
así, el pensamiento de los vencedores, interesados en mantener vigente el orden dado.
El pensamiento débil, por el contrario, es el de los desfavorecidos, no el de las clases
dominantes, que siempre han actuado para para mantener y no poner en cuestión el orden
establecido del mundo.
La quiebra de la racionalidad que estos planteamientos promueven da lugar
también a la denominada «Modernidad líquida» de Zygmunt Bauman y se ve favorecida
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Circuits in Motion. Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture
