Problems of Comparability Possibilities for Comparative Studies

Contents Harry Harootunian and Hyun Ok Park / An Editorial Note / 1 Peter Osborne / On Comparability: Kant and the Possi...

Author: Xudong Zhang | Marilyn Ivy | Michael Dutton | George Steinmetz | Peter Osborne | Rebecca E.Karl | Manu Goswani | John Kraniauskas | Hyun OkPark

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Contents Harry Harootunian and Hyun Ok Park / An Editorial Note / 1 Peter Osborne / On Comparability: Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies / 3 Harry Harootunian / Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem / 23 John Kraniauskas / Difference Against Development: Spiritual Accumulation and the Politics of Freedom / 53 Xudong Zhang / Political Philosophy and Comparison: Bourgeois Identity and the Narrative of the Universal / 81 George Steinmetz / The Genealogy of a Positivist Haunting: Comparing Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology / 109 Marilyn Ivy / In/Comparable Horrors: Total War and the Japanese Thing / 137 Michael Dutton / From Culture Industry to Mao Industry: A Greek Tragedy / 151 Rebecca E. Karl / On Comparability and Continuity: China, circa 1930s and 1990s / 169 Manu Goswami / Autonomy and Comparability: Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial / 201 Hyun Ok Park / Repetition, Comparability, and Indeterminable Nation: Korean Migrants in the 1920s and 1990s / 227 Books Received / 253 Contributors / 257

An Editorial Note

Harry Harootunian and Hyun Ok Park

The essays assembled in this special issue were first presented at a workshop held at New York University in March 2002, sponsored by the Program of East Asian Studies and the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. They do not, in any way, represent an agreed-upon line or singular method but rather offer only a number of different possibilities that might be productively pursued. If there is any informing theme, it is the conviction that the vocation of comparability must always account for the temporal dimension and follow a more modest agenda. In this respect, the more empirically oriented papers show how the compass of comparability might be constrained by constructing and comparing two different moments within the unit of national space, a unit already mediated by the processes of capitalist modernization. In this regard, the essays stage only a variety of suggestive silhouettes of comparison, rather than a determined program of typologies, and strive to open up possibilities accompanied by a willingness to always recognize limits and limitations. We want to thank New York University and all those who made the workshop a worthwhile endeavor, and the editorial board of boundary 2 for their enthusiastic support.

On Comparability: Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies

Peter Osborne

This essay reflects on some philosophical aspects of comparability in the hope of providing theoretical resources for rethinking the conceptual grounds of comparative/area studies. As I understand it, the diagnosis of the current crisis of comparative/area studies largely depends upon whether it is understood as a crisis in the empirical content of a particular model of comparison (modernization theory)—which could be resolved by the development of a new set of comparative measures, or a new model—or whether it is conceived as a theoretical crisis of a more fundamental kind, which throws into doubt the very possibility of ‘‘comparison’’ as such. If the former position appears overly optimistic about the prospects for critical reconstruction (because theoretically naïve about the depth of the problems with the old model), the latter is perhaps too sanguine about the implications of deconstructive critique.1 Thanks to Christian Kerslake for his critical comments on an earlier version of the material on Kant presented in this essay, which has consequently been significantly reworked. 1. For a spirited struggle with this latter issue, see Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

4 boundary 2 / Summer 2005

What follows proceeds from a consideration of the transcendental status of the concept of comparability—as the condition of possibility of comparison—toward the concept of modernity as its privileged secular historical form. The approach is Kantian in its starting point, since comparability presents itself as a transcendental-logical concept par excellence. Indeed, I shall argue, it is intrinsically connected to ‘‘determinability,’’ that ‘‘third logical value’’ which Gilles Deleuze considered sufficient ‘‘to make logic a transcendental instance,’’ and which, for him, thus constituted Kant’s discovery of the transcendental itself.2 However, as the reference to Deleuze indicates, what sets out from a Kantian position is not necessarily recognizably Kantian in its results. Rather, I shall suggest, it is in Deleuze and Walter Benjamin that one finds the most productive, competing critical transformations of Kantianism of relevance to current theoretical problems in a globally oriented, transnational social and cultural theory. In fact, this essay may be considered a preliminary exploration of a particular topic (‘‘comparability’’) within the pursuit of that broader claim.3 The main section—an attempt at a transcendental analysis of comparability as space, time, and idea—is in certain respects unavoidably technical in its mining of the Kantian problematic for materials for the construction of a concept of ‘‘objective comparability.’’ The final part begins the task Press, 2001), chap. 2, where the deconstructive machine consumes a spatialized conception of cultural difference, only to spit it back out again in order not to be left without an object. But is a deconstructively masticated cultural difference (renamed here ‘‘critical regionalism’’/‘‘Second Latin Americanism’’) really so different from the original—other than in being accompanied by a new and discrepant theoretical desire? The problem derives from the transposition of a practice of reading philosophico-literary texts onto other kinds of cultural ‘‘text,’’ whereby the principled distinction between deconstruction and critique necessarily breaks down, forcing deconstruction to confront critical criteria that it cannot meet. For the distinction between deconstruction and critique and the insistence that ‘‘You can’t say . . . that [deconstruction] allows you to practice better,’’ see ‘‘An Interview with Gayatri Spivak,’’ Radical Philosophy 54 (Spring 1990): 32–34; reprinted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 135. On the other hand, the ‘‘singularizing dreams’’ (Moreiras) of non-deconstructive accounts of the illegitimacy of comparison remain eminently deconstructable—indeed, open to destructive dialectical critique. 2. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 86. 3. For the background to this conjunction, in a reading of Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s common opposition to a linguistically based semiotics, as variants of a post-Kantian metaphysical pragmatism of the image, see Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), chap. 2, ‘‘Sign and Image.’’

Osborne / Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies 5

of mediating this philosophical conception with a thinking of the global social whole. Transposing the philosophical concept of objective comparability into the domain of comparative/area studies, it suggests a conception of global modernity as immanent difference. If, as I argue here, objective comparability is an irreducible aspect of all objects of knowledge, ‘‘modernity’’ is the concept through which a secular form of global historical comparison becomes possible. The key to the differential structure of the concept of modernity will thus lie in a more adequate philosophical understanding of its comparative functions. Transcendental Analysis: Comparability as Space, Time, and Idea The concept of comparison can be found at work in three different places within the architectonic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. First, it is deployed explicitly, with particular reference to space, in the discussion of transcendental reflection in the appendix to book 2, chapter 3, of the Transcendental Analytic, On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection. Second, it is deployed implicitly, with reference to time, in the discussion of the transcendental unity of apperception (the ‘‘I think’’ that accompanies all mental representations as a condition of the possibility of experience), in the second-edition version of the Transcendental Deduction. Finally, and once again largely implicitly, it figures in the discussion of the regulative use of ‘‘ideas’’ of pure reason—concepts of totality or the unconditioned—in the appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, as well as later, in the Critique of Judgement and elsewhere. Space In the first case, Kant is concerned to distinguish what he calls ‘‘logical reflection’’ from ‘‘transcendental reflection’’ as two distinct types of ‘‘comparison’’ or acts of determination of ‘‘the relation in which concepts in a state of mind can belong to each other.’’ Comparison, for Kant, is about the ‘‘belonging together’’ of concepts and as such is an aspect of all thought.4 4. In his Logic ([1800], trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz [New York: Dover, 1974]), Kant presents comparison and reflection as distinct ‘‘logical acts’’ by which all concepts are ‘‘generated according to their form,’’ in a sequential process completed by abstraction. There, comparison is ‘‘the likening of presentations to one another in relation to the unity of consciousness’’; reflection is ‘‘the going back over different presentations, how they can be comprehended in one consciousness’’; while abstraction is ‘‘the segre-


In the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, Kant presents eight concepts of comparison (conceptus comparationis) arranged as four conceptual pairs: identity and difference, agreement and opposition, the inner and the outer, the determinable and determination (further specified as ‘‘matter’’ and ‘‘form,’’ respectively).5 The first two pairs are presented as common to logical and transcendental reflection, the second two as specific to transcendental reflection. The difference between the two types of reflection, or forms of comparison, is that logical reflection is what Kant calls a ‘‘mere comparison,’’ in which ‘‘there is complete abstraction from the cognitive power to which the given representations belong, and they thus have to be treated the same as far as their seat in the mind is concerned,’’ while the function of transcendental reflection is to distinguish between the ‘‘sources of cognition’’ or cognitive faculties to which the representations belong. Transcendental reflection thus ‘‘goes to the objects themselves’’ (a strange and potentially misleading formulation in the context of Kant’s thought) and so ‘‘contains the ground of the possibility of the objective comparison of the representations to each other’’ (A260–63/B316–19). So, for Kant, while logical reflection is comparison in general, it is only in the additional act of transcendental reflection that comparison becomes a condition of cognitive, rather than merely formal, import. Every act of cognitive judgment requires transcendental reflection. In its epistemologically significant or ‘‘objective’’ sense, then, comparison always involves the (subjective) capacity for transcendental reflection upon the component sources or elements of cognition.6 gation of everything else by which given presentations differ’’ (100). The first two acts are described as ‘‘positive,’’ while the last is ‘‘negative.’’ The notion of ‘‘concepts of comparison’’ or ‘‘concepts of reflection’’ (Kant uses the two phrases interchangeably) in the Critique of Pure Reason refers to the concepts that guide this threefold process as a whole. As Beatrice Longuenesse has argued, these concepts thus guide both the comparison of concepts in judgments and the initial generation of concepts from the sensible given. See Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1998), chaps. 5 and 6. 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), A262–68/B317–24. Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically. 6. Kant’s concept of objectivity is, of course, itself essentially ‘‘subjective,’’ in that it is constituted by the universality and necessity of a set of subjective conditions. However, this does not mean that Kant’s transcendental analysis has no empirical import, since these conditions constitute the form of all possible empirical knowledge. For a brief discussion of the foundational significance of Kant’s subjective concept of objectivity for the field of


This is clear from the context of Kant’s discussion: a critique of ‘‘the amphiboly of the concepts of reflection through the confusion of the empirical use of the understanding with the transcendental.’’ 7 This confusion is exemplified in Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles, which, because of its failure to distinguish representations presented by sensibility from those presented by the understanding, fails to grasp that ‘‘multiplicity and numerical difference are already given by space itself as the condition of outer appearances’’ (A263–64/B319–20). Purely conceptual indiscernibility is an insufficient criterion of identity. Contra Leibniz, the comparison of appearances always involves numerical difference, however identical things might be in regard to their determinations. Hence the importance of space (‘‘the outer’’) as a condition of objective comparison or an objective aspect of comparability. For Kant, space is a condition of objective comparison. What, though, of time? In the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, the transcendental opposition between ‘‘outer’’ and ‘‘inner’’ as different sources of representation implicitly places time (as inner sense) alongside the understanding, in opposition to space (as outer sense). It uses space, exclusively, as the mark of sensibility or the ‘‘givenness’’ of appearances, despite its formal equality with time, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, as an a priori form of sensible intuition. This identification of the sensible givenness of objects of knowledge with space is the result of the fact that all representations (including objects of the pure understanding) are subject to time, as the form of inner sense. We relate to our own mental representations phenomenally or sensibly, for Kant, as representations ‘‘given’’ in time, whatever their transcendental source, since he denies the existence of a purely intellectual intuition. Givenness in time thus fails to distinguish the transcendental source of representations. It does, however, according to Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, itself depend upon the independent existence of objects in space, insofar as all representation involves apperception. Kant’s Refutation of Idealism proceeds from ‘‘consciousness of my own existence as determined in time’’ to ‘‘the existence of objects in space outside me’’ as that ‘‘something permanent in perception’’ which ‘‘all determination of time precontemporary European philosophy, see Peter Osborne, ‘‘The Reproach of Abstraction,’’ Radical Philosophy 127 (September–October 2004): 23–24. 7. This is the full title of the appendix. An amphiboly is an ambiguity arising from the equivocal arrangement in a phrase of otherwise unequivocal terms. It is one of the six forms of philosophical fallacy listed by Aristotle in his On Sophistical Refutations as arising from the sophistic misuse of language.


supposes’’ (B275). Kant’s empirical realism is thus first and foremost a realism of ‘‘objects in space.’’ It seems that it is only because ‘‘the I’’ orders representations in time that objects given spatially are also necessarily given as ordered in time. The Refutation of Idealism, then, does not refute but rather appears to confirm the ideality of time. (This is the Kantian basis of Bergson’s concept of duration.) Nonetheless, there is another, more complicated, yet also more fundamental, sense in which it can be argued that time should be considered as necessary an aspect of objective comparison within Kant’s thought as space is. This is a sense in which it is prior to the transcendental-logical distinction between the inner and the outer within sensible intuition. It emerges from within the second-edition version of the Transcendental Deduction. Time On Deleuze’s reading of the second-edition version of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction (which I shall broadly follow here), in the account of the ‘‘I think’’ as the ground of synthesis, there appear four distinct aspects of a single transcendental-ontological structure or movement: (1) the discovery of the transcendental as the immanent or ‘‘internal’’ difference between determination and the undetermined; (2) the identification of this difference with the ‘‘third logical value’’ of determinability; (3) the uncovering of the metaphysical structure of determinability as time; and (4) the demonstration of the consequences of this temporal-metaphysical structure in a fault or fracturing of the I, produced by time, correlated to a passivity in the self, as the phenomenal object of the I’s self-knowledge. To sum up the conclusion of this complex argument from the standpoint of time: in the Transcendental Deduction, time appears as ‘‘the form of the determinable’’— that immanent difference between determination and the undetermined that separates thought and being in the form of an a priori relation and, in thus separating and relating, fractures the I, revealing a passivity in the self in the very mode of representation of its spontaneity. As the productive difference between determination and the undetermined, time thus determines itself as a mode of givenness of its own enactment. As Deleuze puts it, in this respect: ‘‘I is an other. . . . The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effects rather than initiates it, and which lives it like an other within itself.’’ 8 Hence the ‘‘givenness’’ to the I of its internal 8. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 86. The crucial passage in Kant comes in the note to section 25: ‘‘The I think expresses the act of determining my existence. The existence


representations in time as inner sense. Consideration of the role of the transcendental unity of apperception as the ground of synthesis thus reveals that time is ontologically doubled in its relation to the subject. It is this doubling that splits the I. Time is ontologically doubled as (1) determinability, the production of temporal and hence ontological differences (registered in the objectless ‘‘pure self-affection’’ of the I’s immediate feeling of itself qua ‘‘I’’ in the act of thinking), and (2) that form of intuition through which the I represents to itself, in inner sense, the terms thus differentiated, including itself as a phenomenal form. Now, if we transpose the results of this argument into the context of the discussion of the concepts of comparison in the Amphiboly, we find that Kant’s treatment there of both ‘‘the inner’’ (in its transcendental opposition to ‘‘the outer’’) and ‘‘the determinable and determination,’’ as ‘‘matter and form,’’ falls well short of the conceptual and metaphysical sophistication of the discussion of time as ‘‘the form under which undetermined existence is determinable’’ in the Deduction. In particular, in the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, the treatment of determination as ‘‘form’’ elides the transcendental question of determinability—‘‘the form of the determinable’’—as a third logical value. This affects our understanding of the concepts of both form and matter, the difference between which is presented in the Amphiboly as a transcendental difference between faculties as sources of representation. Kant follows Aristotle in giving both a merely comparative or relative (merely logical) sense to the distinction between form and matter and also a more substantial meaning to ‘‘matter’’—albeit in a manner ‘‘internalised to representation’’—as ‘‘the determinable in general’’ (A266/B322), while form is associated with the act of determination.9 (Later, in the appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant retrieves the more fully metaphysical meaning of this definition in calling the highest genus that gives unity to the systematic apprehension of nature a ‘‘fundamental power’’ or ‘‘matter in genis thereby already given, but the way in which I am to determine it, i.e., the manifold that I am to posit in myself as belonging to it, is not yet thereby given. For that self-intuition is required, which is grounded in an a priori given form, i.e., time, which is sensible and belongs to the receptivity of the determinable. Now I do not have another self-intuition, which would give the determining in me, of the spontaneity of which alone I am conscious, even before the act of determination, in the same way as time gives that which is to be determined, thus I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being, rather I merely represent the spontaneity of my thought, i.e., of the determining, and my existence always remains only sensibly determinable, i.e., determinable as the existence of an appearance. Yet this spontaneity is the reason I call myself an intelligence’’ (B157–58). 9. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, 149–52.


eral’’ [A648–51/B676–79].) Matter is thus at once the undetermined (subject to form as an act of determination) and the determinable in general (the highest genus). From the point of view of Deleuze’s reading of the Deduction, however, this conflates the undetermined and its determinability within the concept of matter—the very difference that, in the treatment of time in the Deduction, establishes the transcendental, formally, as immanent difference. There are two points of significance here. First, for Kant himself, the logical meaning of ‘‘matter’’ can become a truly transcendental meaning only insofar as reason presupposes generic unity in appearances (i.e., insofar as nature conforms to logical form).10 But this is a merely regulative postulate of Reason. The argument regarding the transcendental significance of form and matter as concepts of reflection, in the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, thus depends upon the presupposition of the unity of nature under empirical laws, which is only subsequently justified, as a regulative principle, in the Transcendental Dialectic. Second, and more fundamentally, Kant’s presentation of the concepts of matter and form in the Amphiboly neglects the unique transcendental significance attached to ‘‘form’’ in the presentation of time as determinability in the Deduction. Analogously to the argument about the transcendental meaning of ‘‘matter’’ (above), we might say that the logical meaning of ‘‘form’’ becomes a transcendental meaning, not merely—as it does for Kant himself—via a ‘‘subjective’’ conception of determination but, more fundamentally, insofar as time is grasped as ‘‘the form under which undetermined existence is determinable’’ (i.e., is grasped as transcendental difference itself). Another way of putting this is to say that the discussion of concepts of comparison in the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection fails to reflect on the temporal conditions of objective comparisons. If we import the more sophisticated account of time as the determinability of the determinable from the Deduction, on the other hand, then the couplet determinable/ determination—now better described as the undetermined/determination— becomes a description of the two poles of the ‘‘separated relation’’ of time itself. Time joins space as a condition of objective comparison or an objective aspect of comparability—not because time is a criterion for distinguishing the source of representations (it is not) but because time is determinability or representability itself. In fact, as the ‘‘original’’ transcendental10. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, 151. This is one reason that Longuenesse is justified in extending Kant’s treatment of the concepts of comparison in the Amphiboly beyond the range of Kant’s own discussion (the critique of amphibolous usage) to include their role in empirical knowledge.


ontological movement that produces both subject and object as poles of its immanent difference, time is ontologically more fundamental to objective comparability than space, although it is also formally equally necessary, in its secondary ontological sense, as an ordering in succession of what is given to outer sense.11 This ‘‘discovery’’ by Kant of time as immanent transcendentalontological difference (in contrast to time as the inner sense of the preconstituted or merely assumed subject of the Transcendental Aesthetic, with its ready-made ‘‘faculties,’’ which appears now as its subjective side only) achieves an extended elaboration in Martin Heidegger’s famously ‘‘violent’’ reading of Kant in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). There, Heidegger reads the interpretation of the transcendental unity of apperception as ‘‘time itself’’ back into the threefold synthesis of the first-edition Deduction, in order to expound immanent transcendental difference as originary temporalization, in the form of the three temporal ecstases. The synthesis of apprehension appears as making-present; the synthesis of reproduction appears as having-been; and the synthesis of recognition appears as the unity of the futural. Heidegger thereby retrospectively derived much of the structure of temporalization expounded in Division Two of Being and Time from a reading of Kant.12 11. One of the problems with the metaphorics of ‘‘inner’’ and ‘‘outer’’ here is that space cannot ‘‘give’’ anything to consciousness outside of time. The idea of a purely spatial ‘‘object’’ of perception is a fictional construct of the analytical method, which Bergson, for example, mistakes as real. In this respect, Kant’s transcendental distinction between outer and inner as concepts of comparison cannot be sustained on the basis of the distinction between outer and inner sense (space and time), in anything like the way his analysis suggests. Rather, it is the comparison/reflection/abstraction of the spatial and temporal aspects of intuitions that is itself the source of the representability of both space and time, as outer and inner sense. This is to extend Bergson’s argument about the representability of time to include space as well. See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910), 110. 12. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 118–33. As Heidegger points out, Kant himself drew attention to the temporal aspect of this trinitarian schema in his Lectures on Metaphysics. Heidegger and Deleuze have essentially similar readings of the structural contradiction between the treatment of time in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Schematism in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. However, whereas Heidegger considers the Transcendental Aesthetic to be ‘‘fundamentally unintelligible’’ outside of the perspective of the Schematism, and thus subordinates the Aesthetic to the Schematism, Deleuze reverses the movement and reads the Schematism ontologically through the Aesthetic, sensualizing what appears in Heidegger as an ontologically pure


The significance of Heidegger’s reading to a transcendental treatment of comparison concerns the further differentiation that it provides of the structure of comparability immanent to time as temporalization (the production of temporal difference) and, in particular, the emphasis it places on the qualitative character of the threefold difference. This is especially important with regard to the futural aspect, reduced by Kant to ‘‘recognition’’ in concepts—a prospectively retrospective reduction of futurity to a chronological extension of the present’s relationship to the past. Temporality as a whole, for Heidegger, it should be remembered, is unified by the anticipation of death. It has ‘‘the unity of a future which makes itself present in the process of having been.’’ 13 From this conjointly Kantian-Heideggerian standpoint, then, the temporal dimension of comparability, as determinability, is unified by the future. That is to say, empirical comparisons are not merely inherently fallible or hypothetical, in any particular instance, with respect to possible experience; they occur within the dynamic horizon of the speculative projection of an end. Objective comparison is not only necessarily both spatial and temporal (that is, necessarily spatiotemporal) but, because of this futural aspect, it takes place within the horizon of what Kant called ideas: concepts of pure reason that extend beyond possible experience to the unconditioned totality of its conditions—time as a whole.14 Ideas The qualitative futurity implicit in ‘‘time as determinability’’ paradoxically projects objects of comparison beyond possible experience in Kant’s restricted sense of experience as cognition of spatiotemporal givenness. or absolute production. The inspiration for this move would appear to be the homology between the transcendental-ontological structure of time and psychoanalytic theory: specifically, Freud’s ‘‘economic’’ redefinition of the object as the aim of a drive, prior to the distinction between subject and object as different kinds of ‘‘object’’ in the economic sense. See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1970), 122–34. Interestingly, in his Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), Adorno relegates the Transcendental Aesthetic to the twenty-third and final lecture, despite his own emphasis on sensible intuition in Negative Dialectics and his general antipathy to Heidegger’s reading of Kant. 13. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 374. 14. That is to say, Heidegger’s analysis of the anticipation of death has implications for the concept of history—and in particular, historical totalization—quite different from those explored by Heidegger himself. See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 54–81 and 113–59.


There is a contradiction here between the two ontological forms of time. For the problem of objective comparability now appears as an aspect of the problem of the systematic unity of knowledge, or, less formally, of the coherence of the world as an object of knowledge—what Kant called ‘‘absolute totality in the synthesis of [possible] appearances’’ (A408/B434). Purely formally, all representations are, in principle, comparable—in Kant’s sense of logical reflection—but objective comparability (comparison of spatiotemporal objects) is also dependent upon the coherence of the empirical content of experience, and not simply in space, at any particular time (within inner sense), but as projected into the future, and hence in principle. As Kant put it in the appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic: ‘‘Just as the understanding unites the manifold into an object through concepts, so reason on its side unites the manifold of concepts through ideas by positing a certain collective unity as the goal of the understanding’s actions, which are otherwise concerned only with distributive unity ’’ (A644/B672; my emphasis). The justification of the presumption of collective unity increasingly preoccupied Kant in the aftermath of the Critique of Pure Reason, since the need to assert the unity of nature as a teleological system (as a condition of knowledge in general) threatened to collapse the critical project back into a form of ontological rationalism. Indeed, in the Opus Posthumum, this collapse—or, more generously, this return to Kant’s rationalist roots at a ‘‘higher level’’—became explicit. In the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgement, however, it remained a problem: For although experience forms a system in terms of transcendental laws, which comprise the conditions under which experience as such is possible, yet empirical laws might be so infinitely diverse, and the forms of nature which pertain to particular experience so very heterogeneous, that the concept of a system in terms of these (empirical) laws must be quite alien to the understanding, and that the possibility—let alone the necessity—of such a whole is beyond our grasp. And yet for particular experience to cohere thoroughly in terms of fixed principles, it must have this systematic coherence of empirical laws as well.15 Kant addressed this problem at three levels: (1) purely philosophically or transcendentally, via what he called the ‘‘regulative use’’ of ideas, as indemonstrable but nonetheless subjectively necessary presuppositions of the 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 392.


unity of experience; (2) through the principle of teleology, in the Critique of Teleological Judgement and the writings on history; (3) within the regional domain of the anthropological, in his construction of the concept of race, in order to distinguish between ‘‘permanent’’ and ‘‘variable’’ differences amid the diversity of appearances among members of the human species.16 This latter project was by no means a diversion from, or merely contingent empirical application of, Kant’s philosophical writing, since the unity of the human species was a presupposition of his moral philosophy, which increasingly served as the guiding force of his critical system. Unless this unity could be demonstrated, in the face of the growing awareness in the Europe of his day of the diversity of the human, his whole system was in danger of collapse. The transcendental argument for the hypothetical necessity of the unity of nature in general politically required a concrete demonstration in its applicability to human life. Hence Kant’s attempts at a hierarchical classification of ‘‘human races’’ (Menschenrasse), which fed back into his philosophical concept of teleology.17 Viewed from the standpoint of the qualitative dimension of the threefold difference constitutive of the temporal aspect of totality (past-presentfuture), Kant’s ‘‘humanity’’ (Menschheit) is not just an empirical concept in a pragmatic anthropology but a world-concept or ‘‘idea’’ in his own technical sense.18 Furthermore, ideas are, in Kant’s own word (of which Deleuze makes much), not merely ‘‘regulative’’ but also, thereby, in principle ‘‘problematic’’: ‘‘I call a concept problematic that contains no contradiction but that is also, as a boundary for given concepts, connected with other cogni16. See Robert Bernasconi, ‘‘Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,’’ in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); ‘‘Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism,’’ in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, ed. Julie K. Ward and Tommy Lee Lott (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002). The two most significant pieces by Kant here are ‘‘Of the Different Human Races’’ (1775; 1777) and ‘‘On the Use of Teleological Principle in Philosophy’’ (1788). An English-language translation of the 1777 version of the former appears in Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lee Lott, eds., The Idea of Race (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2000); the latter is in Bernasconi, Race. See also Emmanuel Eze, ‘‘The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,’’ in Anthropology and the German Enlightenment, ed. Katherine M. Faull (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995), reprinted in Philosophers on Race. For a broader contextualization of the philosophical rationale of the metaphor of organism in this period of German philosophy, see Pheng Cheah, ‘‘The Rationality of Life: On the Organismic Metaphor of the State,’’ Radical Philosophy 112 (March/April 2002): 9–24. 17. See Bernasconi, ‘‘Who Invented the Concept of Race?’’ 15. 18. See Bernasconi, ‘‘Who Invented the Concept of Race?’’ 29, on Kant on ‘‘the chain of being’’ as a regulative principle.


tions, the objective reality of which can in no way be cognized . . . we have an understanding that extends farther than sensibility problematically . . .’’ (A254–55/B310).19 The notion of the problematic marks the requirement of transcendental philosophy that conceptual construction be immanent to experience, even when the result transcends experience. This is the critical heart of Kant’s philosophy, the source of the existential notion of finite transcendence, and an ongoing challenge to the Spinozist aspects of Deleuze’s concept of immanence.20 The context of Kant’s discussion here is the introduction of the concept of the noumenon, but he returns to the concept of the problematic four times in the Transcendental Dialectic, and it is clear that all ideas are problematic in their application as regulative. That is, in order to function legitimately as postulates, although indemonstrable, they must nonetheless be consistent with the given. Their possibility, he writes, ‘‘has to be investigated’’ (A419/B446n). Kant develops a notion of the ‘‘hypothetical’’ employment of reason here that prefigures Popper’s falsifiability criterion (A646–47/B674– 75). Problematic concepts depend upon an ‘‘as if’’ (A681/B709)—Kant calls them ‘‘heuristic fictions’’ (A771/B800)—which experience must not contradict. Yet such concepts ‘‘regulate’’ experience. Global historical comparison, as comparison at the level of the whole, is a problematic enterprise in this precise sense. But how can ideas be contradicted by the given if they are regulative conditions of the manner in which the given is given as ‘‘experience’’? It is precisely this difficulty—the problematic function of anomalies in their relation to interpretations of the whole—that makes such concepts problematic in a deep sense.21 19. Earlier on, in the Transcendental Analytic, Kant writes of ‘‘problematic judgements’’ as ‘‘those in which affirmation or negation is taken as merely possible (optional)’’ (A74– 75/B100). 20. See Christian Kerslake, ‘‘The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence,’’ Radical Philosophy 113 (May–June 2002): 10–23, and the subsequent exchange between Kerslake and Peter Hallward, ‘‘Justification or Affirmation?’’ Radical Philosophy 114 (July–August 2002): 29–33. 21. Historically, it led to Hegel’s dialectical hermeneutics of the absolute. In Hegel’s dialectical reworking of transcendental logic, Kant’s ‘‘concepts of reflection’’ reappear as ‘‘determinations of reflection’’ and within ‘‘ground’’ in the first section of the Doctrine of Essence, ‘‘Essence as Reflection within Itself,’’ with the notable omission of the inner and the outer. See Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. Arnold V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989), 393–478. As we have seen, this was the key pair for Kant for discriminating between ‘‘an object of the pure understanding’’ and ‘‘a substantia phaenomenon in space’’ (A265/B321). In Hegel, transcendental reflection was thus transformed


Twentieth-century French thought was increasingly preoccupied with the idea of science as the construction of fields of problematic concepts— problematics—which are constantly reinterpreted and reconstructed in the light of their internal consistency and their relations to practice and to other bodies of knowledge.22 Comparative/area studies is an anthropological problematic in this sense. Within it, the concept of race has not been an intellectually plausible candidate for the analysis of human diversity for many years, but its history nonetheless offers a clue to the construction of comparative concepts, insofar as it was a response to a (colonial) encounter between peoples that produced a certain ‘‘incomparability,’’ or lack of identity, relative to existing conceptual schemes. If objective comparison is inherently problematic, because of its relation to the whole, then it is the instances of incomparability, heterogeneity, or essential difference, relative to existing concepts, which will be the epistemologically privileged moments motivating new conceptual constructions to try to restore consistency within ideas (such as ‘‘humanity’’) between the totality of their instances. In this respect, incomparability is the life of comparison. Such constructions will always be the result of a relational ‘‘encounter’’ (however heavily weighted toward one side such encounters may be in their military, political, and cultural effects) rather than a purely onedirectional generation and imposition of conceptual form—at least, if they from consciousness of the relations of representations to ‘‘sources’’ of cognition into consciousness of their logical relations to truth (absolute identity). The epistemological distinction between sources of representation was transformed into an ontological distinction between forms of being: nature and spirit. This generalization makes transcendental reflection the phenomenological motor of the dialectical derivation of categories. In Hegel, one might say, all philosophy is a (transformed) form of transcendental reflection, and hence an infinite—indeed, absolute—process of comparison, culminating in speculative experience of the absolute as the (purportedly immediate) apprehension of the unity of the system of relations. As we shall see, it is harder to escape this model than one might think, even when one rejects the idea that it can culminate in absolute knowing—as the recurrent return to Hegelian modes of thoughts within the intensifying anti-Hegelianism of twentieth-century French philosophy shows. 22. The main figures in this French thinking of the problematic—increasingly in dialogue with a Heideggerian ‘‘questioning’’—are Bachelard, Canguilhem, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Laplanche. See Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1975); Peter Dews, ‘‘Foucault and the French Tradition of Historical Epistemology,’’ in his The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London and New York: Verso, 1995), chap. 1; Michael Schwartz, ‘‘Critical Reproblematization: Foucault and the Task of Modern Philosophy,’’ Radical Philosophy 91 (September–October 1998): 19–29.


are actually to function comparatively, as forms of knowledge rather than as mere markers of specific absences, or registrations of difference in itself. In this respect, the generality of anthropological and social concepts is necessarily translational or transcultural in character. Whether it knows it or not, the whole of the human sciences is a field of comparative studies. As such, its concepts are open to constant reinterpretation and ‘‘reworking’’ as their translational or transcultural contexts are varied or expanded.23 Incomparability is thus a relative term designating that degree of nonidentity, within the relevant field, that marks the limit of the intelligibility of a particular comparison. Strictly speaking, the incomparable is the unthinkable. This is the insurmountable critical difficulty for all notions of singularity, however plural.24 One can think of/about singularity as the nonconceptual/unthinkable element in experience (pure aesthesis, ontological difference, and the rest), but one cannot experience it cognitively qua singularity. As such, it cannot form the basis for either a knowledge or a politics, except mystically, as an affirmation of transcendence within immanence (prophesy), which is indistinguishable in practice from a premodern religious transcendence.25 23. For a brief sketch of a translational model of theoretical generality, see Peter Osborne, ‘‘Modernism as Translation,’’ Traces 1 (2000): 319–29; reprinted in Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, chap. 3. On the notion of ‘‘working a concept,’’ see Canguilhem: ‘‘To work a concept is to vary its extension and comprehension, to generalize it through the incorporation of features outside it, to export it outside its region of origin, to take it as a model or inversely to find a model for it, in brief, to confer on it gradually, through regulated transformations, the function of a form’’ (epigram to the first issue of Cahiers pour l’analyse [Notebooks for Analysis], January 1966). The present essay, one might say, begins ‘‘to work’’ the concept of comparability. 24. See, for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Bryne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 25. Such is the status of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ‘‘multitude’’ in their Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). The ‘‘merely historical’’ construction of immanence there, as secularization, leaves them without a philosophical account of the structure of immanent difference. The attempt to make the multitude the constitutive principle of such difference, as ‘‘time beyond measure’’ (402), fails, since it is not qua multitude (as yet unconstituted) that there is a social basis to absolute productivity within empire, but in labor-power qua variable capital. Hence the equivocation between immanence as a ‘‘plane’’ and as ‘‘a field to be adopted’’ (377). In this respect, Hardt and Negri regress philosophically behind Deleuze’s recognition of the need for a critical construction of immanence, although Deleuze is himself inconsistent on this matter. It is the tension internal to Deleuze’s treatment of the problem of immanence, between an affirmation of the formal consistency of absolute difference, on the one hand, and a recognition of the necessity for its construction as a critical concept, on the other—played out in the tension between his relations to the thought of Spinoza and Nietzsche, and Kant,


To sum up so far: objective comparability is spatiotemporal determinability within the horizon of problematic concepts or ideas. It is the condition of the possibility of objective comparison—hence of empirical knowledge— yet it rests on no more than an indemonstrable, subjectively necessary postulate. Philosophically, the problem of comparability is thus an instance of the problematic ontological status of the objects of regulative ideas. Alternative theoretical approaches to the problem of comparability will reflect more general philosophical approaches to what Kant called ‘‘ideas.’’ More concretely, the problem of objective comparison will be the problem of the construction of immanence via spatiotemporal forms of determinability. In comparative/area studies, this will be a global historical immanence: planetary history. It has the global interconnectedness of social practices (‘‘worldhistory’’) as its interpretative horizon and (tendential) historical condition. Geo-historical Analysis: Global Modernity as Immanent Difference At the level of the human, objective comparison involves an ongoing articulation of the spatial unity of the world as a system of social practices with the temporal or narrative unity of history. Reflection on this proposition leads to the following thesis: as the world-historical projection of the structure of temporalization, ‘‘modernity’’ is the ground or fundamental articulating concept of comparative/area studies. As a constantly self-differentiating temporal production, ‘‘modernity’’ is the historical register of the immanence of being to time. More particularly, the concept of modernity functions to articulate the spatial dimension of human comparability with its futureoriented temporalizing function, at the level of the planet, within an internally differentiated, dynamic present. As such, it is more or less pure form. It derives its content, in any particular instance, from the designation of a geopolitically particular present as the basis for a performative, discursive process of historical self-definition, through differentiation and identification, which transcends the order of chronology in the construction of a meaningful present out of the projection of a possible future.26 I have discussed the general structure of the concept of modernity, in its relation to ‘‘tradition,’’ elsewhere. I shall restrict myself here to a brief respectively—that is at stake in the exchange between Kerslake and Hallward cited in note 20 above. 26. See Osborne, The Politics of Time, 14.


account of the conceptual relations through which it immanently connects time to space. For although modernity is fundamentally a temporal category, it is also necessarily spatially articulated. Indeed, it is in its often-repressed spatial premises that its political logic is most frequently to be found. However, it is from its peculiar temporal immanence—its historical projection of the ‘‘ontological doubling’’ of time (above)—that its spatial articulations must be derived, as a condition of immanence itself. Time, I have argued (extrapolating from Deleuze’s reading of Kant), is ontologically doubled as (1) determinability (the production of temporal difference) and (2) that form of intuition through which the I represents to itself the terms thus differentiated, as inner sense. Now, as we have seen, Kant also argued, in his Refutation of Idealism, that all determination of time presupposes ‘‘something persistent in perception’’ as the relational measure of change. ‘‘[S]ince my own existence in time can first be determined only through this persistent thing,’’ he maintained, this ‘‘persistent thing’’ can only refer to ‘‘the existence of actual things that I perceive outside myself.’’ The experience of time (as inner sense) thus reciprocally presupposes objects determined in space (outer sense) ‘‘outside of me’’ (B275–76). That is, there is a necessary locational presupposition to the I that is determined in time (a spatial ‘‘me’’), despite the nonspatial character of its relations to the representations given to it by time as inner sense. Time as determinability, on the other hand, is a non locational movement of absolute and immanent production, which renders spatial determination (as temporal simultaneity) possible. The ontological doubling of time is thus matched by an ontological doubling of space. The spatiality of objective comparability is split between the locational perspective of the subject of utterance and the a priori form of spatialization itself. As the world-historical projection of the structure of temporalization, ‘‘modernity’’ necessarily involves both an irreducibly subjective spatial differential (onto which the internal temporal differentials of the modern are mapped—most crudely, and most frequently, as so many forms of ‘‘development’’) and a projection of spatiality itself as temporally indifferent form. The temporal dialectic of modernity as discourse (utterance) and narrative (inscription) is thus matched by a spatial dialectic between ‘‘place’’ and ‘‘space.’’ And just as we may distinguish competing conceptions or articulations of the temporal dimension of ‘‘modernity’’ (and hence competing forms of comparability), within the envelope of its most abstract form, so each will involve correspondingly different articulations of spatial forms. Thus, for example, we may distinguish between an interruptive articu-


lation of the temporality of modernity, on the one hand, and the historicist restoration of ‘‘homogeneous empty time’’ in the ‘‘bad modernity’’ of modernization theory.27 The former privileges the ‘‘discursive’’ moment of the production of temporal difference over its narrative reinscription; the latter subjects the productivity of difference to the regulative ideal of a measurable continuity. The former thereby depends upon—but generally represses— the spatial particularity of the location of utterance (Benjamin’s ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘then’’ must always also be a ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘there’’).28 The latter enacts a generalized spatialization of narrative time. The problem with modernization theory here is not spatialization as such but the specific temporal mode of its overdetermination: the negation of immanent spatial difference—the coeval—by a narrative time; the lack of reflective mediation with a ‘‘discursive’’ spatial particularity. Similar problems effect Marxist(-Hegelian) narratives of world-history. However, given the increasingly global immanence and inherent territorial unevenness of capital accumulation, and the correspondingly increased immanence of modernity to capital, there is reason to suppose that the colonial spatial distribution of social differences upon which modernization theory was previously based is being transformed into a new kind of more internally complex globally immanent modernity. The question thus arises as to how to theorize the spatiotemporal differences immanent to this global modernity, without the simple spatial ‘‘outside’’ of a precapitalist ‘‘tradition.’’ For the spatiotemporal logic of this more integrally global modernity derives less from the geopolitical hegemony of the modernity of ‘‘the West’’ than from the logic of capital accumulation itself, of which the former is a (declining) historical instance. The spatial logic of an immanently global— rather than specifically colonial—modernity is no longer that of center and periphery (modernity and tradition), but that of places and non-places, or places and flows.29 Transnationalism is not a condition but a process: a process of de- and renationalization in which new forms of interconnectedness are established as passing resolutions of the contradictions between place and non-place, place and flow. 27. Osborne, The Politics of Time, 134–59. 28. See John Kraniauskas, ‘‘Beware Mexican Ruins! ‘One-Way Street’ and the Colonial Unconscious,’’ in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Peter Osborne and Andrew Benjamin (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), chap. 5. 29. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). For an attempt to articulate Castells’s account of places and flows with the concept of non-place, see Peter Osborne, ‘‘NonPlaces and the Spaces of Art,’’ Journal of Architecture 6 (Summer 2001): 183–94.


As to how the multiplication of modernities that this involves is to be theorized, three alternatives present themselves: (1) a comparativist conception of ‘‘alternative’’ modernities; (2) a Deleuzean notion of purely distributional differences, or multiple singularities; (3) a Benjaminian practice of constructing juxtapositional differences or encounters within the speculative unity of a singular history. The problem with the first of these, as Harry Harootunian has argued, is that it tends to reinscribe the historically received geopolitical particularisms of the modernity/tradition binary of colonial difference, via a simple quantitative multiplication of the sites of the first term. This generalization via a regionalization of modernities thus leaves the basic conceptual schema of modernization theory intact.30 The theoretical task, rather, is to come to terms with the more complex distributional logic and forms of unity of an immanent production of social differences that appropriate and refunction existing forms of difference according to a logic in which their very resistance to appropriation is functionally incorporated, while nonetheless at the same time producing (system-transcendent) differential social effects.31 The attraction of deriving alternative theoretical models from Deleuze and Benjamin, respectively, is that their philosophical constructions are both based on systematic (metaphysical and epistemological) transformations of Kant’s concept of ‘‘ideas.’’ Each takes seriously the challenge of heterogeneity posed to thought by Kant’s conception of ‘‘distributive unity,’’ while metaphysically recasting ‘‘ideas,’’ so as to make distributive unity ‘‘thinkable.’’ For it is the paradox of Kant’s conception of ‘‘distributive unity’’ that it has no ‘‘unity,’’ strictly speaking. It is, rather (like the noumenon), a negative construction or limit concept, produced by intellectually abstracting the subjectively necessary presupposition of ‘‘collective unity’’ imposed by ideas. If this collective unity cannot be plausibly constructed, counterfactually, the logic of distribution tends instead (as in Deleuze) to a multiplication of singularities. Yet if there are to be subjects and objects of knowledge and experience, in whatever secondary or derived form, the ‘‘belonging together’’— that is, the comparability—of these multiple singularities must be in some way maintained. Thus, the rhetoric of ‘‘multiple singularities’’ cannot do away with the philosophical requirement of a demonstration of the possibility of 30. Harry Harootunian, ‘‘Ghostly Comparisons,’’ in ‘‘Impacts of Modernities,’’ ed. Thomas Lamarre and Kang Nae-hui, special issue, Traces 3 (2004): 39–52. 31. This is essentially what Hardt and Negri attempt, but fail to achieve, in Empire, for the related reasons of their refusal of all concepts of mediation and their abstraction from the particularities of the history of capital.


unity in distribution. It is this requirement that is addressed by Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, and by Benjamin, in his attempt at a modernist historiography of ‘‘correspondences’’ or constructions of juxtapositional differences, within the speculative horizon of a messianic conception of the historical whole. Each attempts a negative (non-Hegelian) mediation of pragmatic contingencies with the conditions of experience themselves. Each thus promises a further theoretical elaboration of the extended Kantian account of comparability offered here.

Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem

Harry Harootunian

The primacy of space over time in general is an infallible characteristic of reactionary language; beginning with . . . illustrated supplements which call themselves ‘‘Nation and Space’’ (supplements of left-wing papers were called ‘‘Nation and Time’’) down to . . . ‘‘spacehistorical method’’ and geographical mediations. —Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times ‘‘Space, the Final Frontier’’ In this essay, I am primarily concerned with exploring the increasing contemporary turn toward space and the resulting strategies of this move based on the elucidation of spatial categories in the interpretative sciences. This particular awareness has been manifested in the now overwhelming interest in tracking what moves between discrete spatial boundaries and across them. By the same token, I would like to address the question of temporality and the consequences of its recession from social and historical analysis and perhaps suggest possible ways for a reunion with its spatial boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.


complement. In short, I would like to look into some of the afterlives of area studies and how its inaugural impulse for holism and comparison has been reconfigured in such ways as to retain and even privilege the spatial. I want to reflect on what, in effect, has enabled precisely those strategies that have led to considerations of diasporic bodies and their movements crossing borders, in-between states exhibiting hybrid combinations, the inside and outside, and newer, enlarged bounded entities such as globe and empire. On the deficit side, I am thinking about the shifting relationship between the present and the past, and its intimations for a future, and how the withdrawal of time, as such, affects our capacity for comparative study. But it is important to add that I am not simply making a plea for a return to history, as it is so often invoked in the wake of the now-old new historicism, but rather calling for a restoration of considerations of the crucial spatiotemporal relationship that must attend any explanatory program. Part of this impulse has been prompted by the desire to reconsider the possibilities that attended area studies at its inception, as well as the conviction that comparability is too important a consideration to be left to disciplines such as comparative literature. With the spatial turn and the resituating of its leading categories, such as culture, civilization, modernity itself, center and periphery, global and empire, which bring with them fixity, positionality, location, and asynchrony, the spatiotemporal relationship seems to have disappeared under the weight of these virtual continents. Perhaps this move represents a ‘‘spatialization of social theory’’ authorized by the retrospective discovery of the centrality of space and communication in the constitution of social orders.1 What once was seen as a division of continents lying at great distances from each other has now been overcome: socially produced distances such as state borders or cultural barriers appear as secondary effects of speed. By appealing to enlarged, singular spatial categories—currently the global and empire dominate our agendas—the arena of social action has broadened and displaced other kinds of causality traditionally employed to account for social phenomena. What had once been conceived as the things to be explained—the outcome of a historical process—has now been transformed into the explanation’s premise. It is the larger, encompassing spaces, such as the globe and empire, that now explain the changing world of modernity rather than the reverse and that work against making a spatiotemporal problematic the basis of any explanation. 1. Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalization (London: Verso, 2000), 1.

Harootunian / Comparability and the Space-Time Problem 25

Any discussion of modernity and its identification with change will lead to construing the historical process reflexively—temporalizing a moment that immediately and, perhaps, necessarily marks off its location from what came before and distinguishes discontinuous times contained within the same chronology.2 Reinhard Kosellek, quoting from J. G. Herder’s Metakritik of Kant, reminds us that ‘‘in actuality, every changing thing has the measure of its own time within itself. No two worldly things have the same measure of time. . . .There are, therefore, . . . at any one time in the universe innumerably many times.’’ 3 This is, I think, one of the great, generative insights of the modern era that established for the first time a temporal matrix that was able to mark out multiple moments and temporalities demanding an awareness of simultaneously differing forms of temporalization within a single space, despite the nation-states’ effort to obliterate them. With this insight, Kosellek proposes that the late eighteenth-century perception already prefigured the practice to investigate historical events and sequences for their own ‘‘internal time.’’ 4 Yet he could have added (and did elsewhere) that the discovery of internal time—identifying the unique point of time for a specific temporal period—authorized a comparative perspective that would define the vocation of the human and social sciences, and thereafter bind its practice to it. It will be, therefore, my intention first to briefly rehearse some of the familiar consequences of this comparative framework for practice and to show how, conversely, it has encouraged strategies that have ultimately privileged space at the expense of effacing precisely those 2. Reinhard Kosellek, Futures Past, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 94. But it should also be said that Kosellek is aware that ‘‘we are always using concepts that were originally conceived in spatial terms, but that nevertheless have a temporal meaning.’’ See Reinhard Kosellek, The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6–7. This observation also implies the hegemony of space over historical time, which, as we shall see, was repudiated by writers such as Bakhtin, who, with his mathematically inspired concept of the chronotope, insisted on differing modes of relating between space and time according to shifting periods of history found in the appearance of different forms or genres of writing. It should also be pointed out that the vocation of national history, which constitutes the principal preoccupation of historical practice down to the present, is, as the epigraph above suggests, more spatial than temporal, inasmuch as a completed past is fixed to a particular geographical place. See Harry Harootunian, ‘‘Shadowing the Past: National History and the Persistence of the Everyday,’’ Cultural Studies 18, no. 2/3 (March/May 2004): 181–200. 3. Kosellek, Futures Past, 247. 4. Kosellek, Futures Past, 247.


different temporalities produced by capitalism’s capacity for serializing and segmenting a cumulative temporal process defined by its irreversibility. The Spatial Ambition of Area Studies Before I turn to this theme, however, I would like to take a slight detour and say something about the importance of area studies for the comparative project and how it has induced people to embark upon the study of societies and cultures other than their own—distant, different, psychologically remote, always escaping one’s reach, ultimately obliging them to spend entire lives in the precincts that are often alien and alienating and always other. I think we need to revisit the conditions attending that decision in order to understand the stakes that might have propelled this commitment because, as it is well known now, area studies originally promised to provide the framework and perspective for the establishment of a proper study of comparative societies. One of the more remarkable but unobserved occurrences invariably effaced by area studies is the obvious fact that the peoples of the world outside of Euro-America have been forced to live lives comparatively by virtue of experiencing some form of colonization or subjection enforced by the specter of imperialism. This experience of living comparatively inevitably disclosed the instrumentalizing force of classificatory strategies promoted by the imperial dominant that invariably hierarchized relationships everywhere colonialism and imperialism spread. The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro, recognizing in the consequences of this assault in the 1930s the formation of a ‘‘double life,’’ developed a theory of ‘‘layering’’ ( jusosei ) that supposedly characterized Japan’s history since the time of origins to explain why Japanese were compelled to live comparatively— life in double time—as a condition of their modern transformation. Yet it must also be said that this move to study foreign and remote cultures was institutionalized in colleges and universities at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, to become a permanent fixture in the academic procession, even though it remained at the end of it. Until the work of scholars such as Edward Said and the explosion of colonial and postcolonial studies, area studies had successfully displaced the fact that much of the world it studied had been dominated by imperial and colonial powers. And this immense sleight of hand was consistent with the goals of new area and regional programs organized after World War II to supply the new national security state with useful information and knowledge about America’s enemies and potential trouble spots around the globe. These


regions were principally former colonized societies that came to constitute the Third World. It—area studies—would create a space for encouraging such study and providing the resources to enable a generation of students to plunge into the acquisition of impossibly difficult languages and seemingly arcane cultures in order to enable encounter with and even residence in regions of the world that had only been imagined in exotic (and erotic) fantasies or experienced as zones of military combat. By the same measure, it would be wrong to conclude that people entered into the study of remote regions of the world only because fellowships were plentiful, the opportunity for foreign travel and residence an attractive necessity, and the prospect of academic or government jobs a promising certainty. The first recruits were usually men, and a few women, who, through military service, had been trained to be interrogators of prisoners; interpreters of captured documents and intercepted communiqués; and translators, who, after the war, made available a large pool of linguistic talent and who, with additional training, could become instant area specialists ready to reproduce the new academic organizations once they acquired teaching posts. The offspring of missionaries who had lived in Asia and Africa constituted another source of recruitment, numerically smaller than former service language officers but probably more influential in the long run. Still later, there was a fairly large cohort of enlistees from the Peace Corps experience. For those without military or missionary inducements, there was the naïve appeal of working in newly opened areas, which, as I look back now, was not only wrong but a bad idea that was constantly fated to fail to satisfy even the slightest intellectual expectation, since it could not help but continually clash with the sensibilities and purpose informing area studies agendas and their custodians. In any case, this singular experience, probably replicated endlessly, dramatizes the need to know why people would be willing to spend so much time, effort, and energy to learn languages over which it would ultimately take a lifetime and more to secure control, when they could have mastered several European languages in a fraction of the time. What earthly reason would send young people on this academic ‘‘children’s crusade,’’ scurrying to remote regions of the world and convincing them to make accommodations to living conditions, customs, and cultural patterns they could not have known at the time, and whose mastery would also take a lifetime and yet would never fit like a second skin much less become a habituated second nature? To be sure, there were those who flocked to Asia for adventurous exotic opportunities and erotic possibilities (both of which are still included in the desire to learn the martial arts), for religious desire, for the


multiple illusions (delusions?) of ‘‘passing’’ and its unfilled promises—for all kinds of reidentifications. Still more others shored up their wobbly sense of stakes by marrying into these cultures. These and other impulses were fulfilled by an agenda that approached an area or region holistically (often read off the boundaries of the nation-state), privileging spatial dimensions over the temporal and inserting a country or culture into a geographic location but rarely considering its relationship either to the world or time. In fact, regions and areas were simply seen as singularly spatial and often timeless entities that were in the world but were not treated as if they belonged to it. This sense of the timeless was often pressed by historians as well, who appeared fixated on the figure of tradition and continuity, which always seemed to be another way of positioning the spatial over the temporal. If such an approach, still prevailing in colleges and universities, aimed to provide an understanding of the totality of a culture, echoing the older obsession with extracting an unchanging and essential national character promised by the study of national literatures and histories, the spatial privilege persisted like an impregnable mountain keep against all and any effort to promote a perspective capable of articulating the specific space-time relationship that would have undermined the claims of holism and transparency at the same time it resituated the area in multiple histories. Instead, this effort to rethink a perspective based on acknowledging the space-time relationship was delayed and even displaced by the move to hermeneutic social science (in the United States), which sought to emphasize the primacy of meaning in the ‘‘interpretation of cultures.’’ The moment was famously exemplified by people such as Clifford Geertz and Robert Bellah (both former students of Talcott Parsons) and enthusiastic camp followers among historians and anthropologists. The task was either to find ways to comprehend native sensibilities by seeking to occupy the place they were experienced, in the hope of securing an empathic identification that would have made Wilhelm Dilthey blush (after all, as a German national, he was not concerned with ‘‘natives’’ but only with Germany’s historical horizon), or, worse, to discover analogies to Weber’s Protestant Ethic in Asia, which would make such regions easier to grasp since their cultural particularity was annexed to and assimilated into a system of values we not only already understood (like second nature) but actually had originated. What seems important about this intervention—for our purposes—is that it managed to forcefully reinforce the spatial prerogative of the area by positing the possibility of empathetic enactment in a static spatial location (Balinese cockfight, Indonesia, Tokugawa Japan) rather than


the temporalities that must have attended the formations of the place under consideration and accompanied whatever processes were being identified with it. Too often such an approach led to a concern with producing place rather than the place of production. That is to say, the operation of getting into the shoes, of standing tall in them, so to speak, or of stepping into the footprints of the ‘‘native’’ (in marked contrast to both Dilthey and R. G. Collingwood, who advised historians of getting into the mind[s] of the past), implied entering an atemporal and anahistorical zone—anytime, no time in particular—and made no effort whatsoever to account for the agency of time—the moment—whether present or past. The apparent price paid for this insensitivity to the mediation of time was the transmutation of space into a nonplace, without duration and context. In area and historical studies, Geertz was the social scientist of choice, and the invocation of his name reverberated with totemic force the sound of scientific veracity and seriousness. It is interesting to observe that despite the vast distance between his moment in social science and postcolonial discourse, they both share the same spatial terrain, inasmuch as the former works to transmute an area into textual space to be read while the latter empties the postcolonial of its timefulness—as implied by its reliance on the prefix post-, thus transmuting chronology into cognition and a knowledge whose discursive utterances must constantly be read for slippages and what they say about the not said. What area studies, in its many incarnations, failed to provide was a persuasive attempt to account for its privilege of space (and place) and its apparent exemption from an encounter with time. Part of this failure stems from losing its calling for comparability. The Specter of the Colonial Unconscious: Classification and Comparison While area studies was explicitly implemented after World War II to encourage and even foster the development of new comparative perspectives across disciplines and between different culture regions, it was diverted from this vocation by the desire to supply information crucial to the interests of the national security state and then, later, private businesses. Instead of envisaging genuinely interdisciplinary agendas capable of integrating different disciplines, area studies often settled for the regime of a simple multidisciplinarism as the sign of a comparative method that masqueraded coverage for the work of comparison, language acquisition for method, the totality of the nation-state for theory. Too often, area studies


became captive of a particular kind of social science which promoted a form of cultural holism that was made to stand in for a broader region, even though its true focus was the nation. Moreover, this social science, usually some variant of structural functionalism, invariably aimed to ‘‘naturalize time’’ 5 in such a way as to affirm the primacy of the spatial and the operation of distancing in the classification of societies. The inevitable impulse to compare fused with a strategy to classify and categorize according to criteria based upon geopolitical privilege. As a result of this principle of classification, societies were invariably ranked according to spatial distance from an empowering model that radiated the achievement of industrial and technological supremacy—namely, the countries of Euro-America—and expected identification with it. In a sense, this was simply a replication of the hierarchization of political power that froze positions and history during the Cold War. This classification strategy, itself signifying the static synchronicity of the spatial, was mapped onto an evolutionary trajectory that succeeded in apotheosizing the model of natural history and thus defining the task of a comparative agenda, which, according to Johannes Fabian, constituted a vast, ‘‘omnivorous intellectual machine permitting the ‘equal’ treatment of human culture at all times and places.’’ 6 But evolutionary time transmuted politics and economics, both intimately concerned with human time, into a natural plot line that organized past culture and living societies according to a temporal grid called ‘‘the stream of time,’’ where some managed to move upstream while others were drawn back downstream. In spite of appealing to such concepts as evolution, development, industrialization, modernization, we must observe that these totalizations were more often than not spatially configured rather than temporally marked (recalling Kosellek’s observation), functioning as more ‘‘natural’’ determinations than historically produced forms. Often, the units employed to measure the movement in time as a signification of political and cultural meaning that denoted intervals between events resulted in fixing the quality of states rather than the actual lapse of time. In this way, comparison, implied by the apparatus of ‘‘integrating’’ several disciplines into a unified approach and a diversity of regional units, was driven by a logic that worked at naturalizing and spatializing conceptions of time to confer meaning on the distribution of societies in space. Yet the spatial distribution signaled by distancing was a transformation of earlier views that had defined temporality as both exclusion and 5. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 6. Fabian, Time and the Other, 16–17.


expansion. More importantly, the sense of otherness that must be conceptualized within a theory of knowledge based upon natural history (an Enlightenment project that made possible the comparative method itself) emplots all societies in all times on an arc that must designate relative distance from or closeness to the present. ‘‘There would be no raison d’être for the comparative method,’’ Fabian writes, ‘‘if it was not the classification of entities or traits which first have to be separate and distinct before their similarities can be used to establish taxonomies and developmental sequences.’’ 7 Hence the time of the observer’s present must be distinguished from the time of the observed, even though the act of observation might be contemporaneous with the object of observation. Even though the object of knowledge must be expressed as a temporal categorization, the referent is not, strictly speaking, an object or class of objects but a relationship. This is especially true of ethnographic and historical accounts, and indeed of any discipline that is implicated, as we are, with the task of elucidating a momentous fissure between what once was described as the ‘‘West and the Rest.’’ This divide was early conceptualized in European social thought, but no thinker gave greater force to it than Max Weber in his theory of comparative religious formations and his typology for a proper historical sociology. Weber not only widened the putative cleft between an implied unified West and the world outside it but made it the basis of a comparative strategy that was both spatial and atemporal. (It is possible to see behind this ‘‘new’’ typologizing the lengthening shadow of the ‘‘Asiatic Mode of Production.’’) A contemporary of Lenin, writing before World War I, Weber constructed a powerful argument that countered and ultimately replaced the Marxian idea of the capitalist mode of production and the revolutionary break it established in European life. His intervention intended to upset a ruptural version of social life and its breach with the past that thinkers and writers had already acknowledged and instead proposed, as early as his book on Protestantism and capitalism (1904), a cofiguration between the capitalist spirit and a religious ethic. In this work, Weber sought to demonstrate how religion—the carrier of cultural meaning—easily guaranteed continuity rather than a permanent pause in the line and that capitalist rationality derived from the resources available in the cultural endowment. Europe’s modernity was always already there. Instead of recognizing the actual fissure marked by capitalism, Weber mapped it on the world outside Euro-America, propos7. Fabian, Time and the Other, 27.


ing that the Chinese and Indian religious traditions may have evolved some form of rationality but not one capable of producing capitalist calculation. In this way, Weber transmuted the rift between past and present in European life into one between the West and the Rest, and thus cast out the Rest from history as surely as Hegel had before him. At the same time, he moved to repair or displace an internal rupture and temporal boundary separating present from past by appealing to the continuity of cultural/spiritual resources to project a split between Euro-America and the world beyond, usually the domain of colonies. With Weber, colonization revealed the mark of advanced modernity, while Germany’s late arrival to this scene was a worrisome reminder of insufficient rationality. By the same token, it was an easy step to turn colonies into sites of premodern culture, whose distance could only be overcome by rejecting an indigenous heritage and embracing the promise of modern rationality. Modernity, rather than capitalism (and accumulation), was thus fixed to place and was distinguished by its distance from the space of the nonmodern. The irony is that Europe was exempted from breaking with its past, while the rest of the world could claim no such immunity. What this substitution of modernity for capitalism represented was the consequential replacement of culture (now seen as value) for capitalism and the social relations of production and exchange value. In this way, the deployment of comparative indexes immediately called attention to a classifying system that ranked societies on the principle of gauging distance and separation.8 The less developed a society, the more distinct it will appear from the modular paradigm employed to structure the relationship in order to affirm difference. The concept of late developer, as it was used in modernization studies to describe societies such as Japan, China, and India, is an example of this strategy of distancing, which transmuted what, in fact, was a chronological and quantitative marker into a qualitative one: simple chronology into an attribute. What seems to have been left out of this comparative agenda is history, to be sure, but also a politics of time capable of locating practice immanently within a modernity that housed the temporalization of new cultural forms developing everywhere. Such forms constituted coexisting and coeval equivalents, despite the apparent differences among them. But received comparative approaches have consistently denied a relationship of coevality to precisely those societies targeted for study, misrecognizing a coexistent present we all inhabit by demanding a perspective located in a different temporal regis8. Fabian, Time and the Other, 26.


ter from those societies and cultures we are seeking to understand, making them outside to our inside. The disavowal implies a refusal to acknowledge that all temporal relations, including contemporaneity, are embedded in socially, economically, and culturally organized practices coextensive with capitalism. If area studies has failed to deliver on its initial promise to produce a viable agenda for comparison, the newer cultural studies has offered, in its effort to avoid totalities and essentialisms, to rethink the ground of comparability by appealing to referents that exceed the units of the nation-state that dominated the older approaches. Poststructuralism and post-Marxisms have so overdetermined the text that it probably is no longer necessary to search for a logic competent to integrate the disciplines into a unified approach. In our time, we have the appeal to larger units, regions, transnationality, globalization, hyperspace, where the diasporic flows of people are said to move across what are misrecognized as ‘‘porous’’ borders but actually attest to the vast deterritorializing force of capital and labor. Regardless of its offer to implement new interpretative modes promising to avoid the problems manifestly dogging the older developmental model and its binary logic, the new cultural studies has often and unwittingly recuperated the aporias of the older approach it wishes to succeed. This is especially evident in the way cultural studies has taken a spatial turn and in its evasion of the role of time. Even among such Marxists as Fredric Jameson, time seems to get lost in the spatial fixity of an untranscendable mode of production despite its status as a primary temporal category, as he has recently disclosed in an essay on the ‘‘end of temporality.’’ 9 Fearful of slipping into subjectivistic voluntarism, Marxists inadvertently risk robbing the mode of production of its 9. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘The End of Temporality,’’ Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 695–718. It is hard not to conclude that Jameson, equating time with modernism, and space with postmodernism, is still trying to find a place for the latter in his scheme of periodization. In this scheme, modernism represents a ‘‘culture of incomplete modernization,’’ whereas the postmodern signifies full modernization and the disappearance of temporality (becoming?) and the dispossession ‘‘of a differential sense of that deep time’’ lived and expressed by the moderns. The logic of this formulation suggests a shift from recognizable unevenness, denoting an awareness of the force of time, to the establishment of an even ground announcing its end. Here, Jameson comes close to recuperating a paradigm advanced by structural-functional social science during the Cold War by presuming an automatic (and necessary) transposition from formal to real subsumption. This argument has been proposed by Hardt and Negri recently, making ‘‘Empire’’ and ‘‘the Postmodern’’ members of the same family, but overlooks the palpable fact that capitalism is always devoted to producing unevenness.


fundamental timefulness by replicating arguments for ‘‘alternative modernities’’ and their spatial fixation. Cultural studies, especially its postcolonial inflection, has responded to the rapid development of a variety of programs concentrating on globalization, neoliberalism, post-Fordism—in fact, to all those recent signs of the restructuring of global social relations in our time and their consequences for social identity. Spurred by a special urgency provoked by the perception that the nation-state is in the process of withering away before the forces of globalization, postcoloniality has turned increasingly toward trying to fix identity in an age when older certainties once offered by the nation-state seem to be disappearing. This effort has often been accompanied by a transfer of investment to ‘‘subjects of metahistory and the politics of space and place, and away from their older concerns with (post)colonial subject constitution in psychoanalytic epistemological senses.’’ 10 Here, Foucault and de Certeau have been hoisted up to replace an earlier privilege accorded to Lacan and Derrida, genealogy and the specificity of place elevated over subjectivity as the principal element in the construction of identity. Yet we must recognize in this repositioning the primacy of space, especially as it is worked out in the fetishization of place and the lessening importance of forms of temporalization. While there are undoubtedly a number of reasons for bracketing the temporal (and thus the historical), it principally reflects the proliferation of subject positions required by consumption on a global scale, which, at the same time, works to mute the subjectivity of the worker and the subaltern. But the really important aspect of this postcolonial preoccupation with space and place is in the privileging of the conceptual figure of modernity as the sign of a ‘‘hegemonizing socio-historical project’’ of modernization. In this view, modernity is identified with a specific place that is more important than its status as a secular and historical form of temporalization. For the historian of subalternity Dipesh Chakrabarty, the categories of ‘‘capital’’ and ‘‘bourgeois’’ are simply alternative readings for ‘‘Europe.’’ The same could be said of ‘‘modernity.’’ 11 ‘‘‘The modern,’ then, he writes, quoting Meaghan Morris, ‘‘will be understood ‘as a known history, something which has already happened elsewhere and which is to be reproduced, mechani10. Neil Lazarus, ‘‘Hating Tradition Properly,’’ in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28. 11. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?’’ in A Subaltern Reader, 1986–1995, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 267.


cally or otherwise, with a local content.’’’ 12 Like Partha Chatterjee, Chakrabarty rightly worries that this form of modernity will smother native imagination only to recuperate ‘‘‘the project of positive unoriginality.’’’ 13 What this program entails is a strategy of envisaging the modern—the new—as an ideological misrecognition of the reproduction of capital accumulation and the deterritorializing force of both capital and labor. More importantly, it actually accepts the Weberian maneuver to overlook capitalism as a temporal category—where deterritorialization refers to the velocity of movement in a particular space—by installing cultural space in its place in the effort to secure the effect of bracketing time. But the process is surely as temporalizing—occurring through time—as it is a fixed spatialized identity associated with place. Although postcolonial discourse is correct to argue that modernity, as such, is fully compatible with imperialism, it often sacrifices the force of this insight by seeing capitalism (sometimes dismissed as another Western metanarrative) as a movement in space rather than time that might disturb local certainties but not necessarily reproduce its original conditions of social existence imperially and mechanically. In the end, postcoloniality has failed to conceal its identity as a wholly owned subsidiary of poststructuralism, as Neil Larsen has proposed, that has offered to displace its disappointment in the failure of Third World nation-states to the spatial terrain of the text as something to be read rather than lived. By hypostatizing the unity of the ‘‘West’’ or even ‘‘Europe’’ as the place of modernity, postcolonial discourse has inadvertently recuperated some of the more baneful features of the very binarism that has imperially reduced the rest of the world to the status of a second term. Paradoxically, this tactic incorporates the idea of late development as a guarantee of qualitative difference that allows its proponents to envision something called an ‘‘alternative’’ modernity. What distinguishes this alternative modernity is its spatial location, a place that is not Euro-America, and thus the authority of its claim to an identity that is uniquely different. Once this door is opened, it is possible to imagine all forms of native interiority that have succeeded in remaining immune to the deterritorialization forcibly imposed from without, which, as Fanon presciently observed, destroys all cultures of reference. Such appeals to cultural resources undisturbed by modernization—a folkloric fiction not worth keeping, Fanon also remarked—are made to offer the surety of an unmovable ground of authenticity on which to construct an iden12. Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,’’ 283. 13. Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,’’ 283.


tity capable of preserving the autonomy of genuine difference. The appeal to this illusionary authentic ground, as Japanese misconstrued it in the interwar period, seems to offer the promise of ‘‘overcoming the modern,’’ as they called it, which will configure an alternative to a modernity made in the West. Moreover, the presumption of an alternative modernity reinforces the temporal difference between a putative original and now its ‘‘alternative,’’ as if the first term will always remain prior, full, and primary, while its subsequent ‘‘revisions’’ can only resort to the consolations of difference rooted in a different past and place claiming native cultural authenticity. In order to offset this spatially inspired asymmetry, some advocates of an alternative modernity have looked to forms of identitarian anticolonial nationalism as evidence of difference resting on the claims of authentic cultural resources that have managed to remain free from contamination. Here, it seems to me, the fixity of a cultural endowment not only recalls Weber’s perspective but matches perfectly a view that has privileged the stolidity of an enduring and apparently unchanging spatialscape where time is rooted in a primordial and infinite repetitiveness. But even here, we can see the shadow of the time lag and the curious way that the present, a temporal category, conjures up the past. Anderson’s Haunt The status of a muscular modular metonym dwarfing all before it has been dramatically put into question in recent discussions concerning the prospect for a proper comparative approach occasioned by the work of Benedict Anderson. Targeting the influential Imagined Communities, which put into play the repetition of a mode of modern nationalism based on the agency of print capitalism, Anderson’s account was more about print than capitalism, more about communication than the deterritorializing forces of capital and labor. Misrecognizing late nineteenth-century European liberal nationalism based upon middle-class literacy as the model of nationalist modernity exported to the Third World, Anderson qualified this fundamentally culturalist interpretation by proposing that it—the model—could be ‘‘pirated.’’ His accusers, however, have condemned his conception of modularity for having suffocated native imagination and reducing all to ‘‘consumers of modernity.’’ 14 What seems to have been at stake was the con14. See Partha Chatterjee, Fragments of the Nation and Its Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5.


viction of an ‘‘alternative’’ modernity that needed to be released from the iron cage of Anderson’s Eurocentric model and that could claim for itself the authority and originality of the inner resources supplied by native culture, which, perhaps miraculously, had remained undisturbed by modular forms devised elsewhere and imposed by colonial violence. Yet, it is hard not to conclude that the figure of an alternative modernity resembles the reified conception of tradition once confidently embraced by enthusiasts of modernization theory. While some of the charges against Anderson border on the tendentious, the critique of an all-empowering model for comparison is on the mark. In his work The Spectre of Comparison, Anderson alerts us to one of the excluded possibilities lived by societies outside of Europe but implicated in its imperial expansion, whose modern forms were introduced through the export of capital and colonial deterritorialization. Through a reading of José Rizal’s late nineteenth-century novel Noli me tangere, Anderson is able to demonstrate how the author has perceived that the gardens of Manila were ‘‘shadowed . . . by images of their sister gardens in Europe. They can no longer be seen in their immediacy but only from a perspective simultaneously close up and faraway.’’ 15 The novelist names this doubling the ‘‘spectre of comparison,’’ as Anderson translates it, perhaps, too, a bedeviling comparison, carrying with it the association of a bad or difficult comparison, the dilemma of not knowing which way to look, what I have called cultural diplopia. Moreover, Anderson, with Rizal’s help, designates Southeast Asia as the site of this ‘‘haunting,’’ or devilish vision, housing the specter, the ghosts of Europe’s modernity in replicated forms, and thus sees it as the primary place where this ambiguous optic and the difficulty of comparison have materialized. The haunted house, so to speak, is always the place where the specters of modernity have taken up residence, which is, at the same time, the site of comparison. But Anderson could just as easily have seen in the novelistic form itself the sign of the devilish doubling that would prefigure the dilemma of subsequent sister images. Concerned with situating the region of Southeast Asia, which, like most of the Asian and colonial worlds, remained Europe’s dimly seen outside in contemporary analysis, the doubling effect (noted also before the war by Watsuji, who could not have read Rizal) necessitated thinking simultaneously about Europe and its outside, and mandated the establishment of a comparative perspective 15. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison: Politics, Culture, and the Nation (London: Verso, 1998), 6.


in which the act of comparison was always identified with a haunting, the ghostly. Sustaining this strategy, Anderson further employs the metaphor of the inverted telescope (an up-to-date revision of Marx’s camera obscura), which reinforces a comparative method driven by distance and exclusion. By looking through the large lens of the telescope, he perceives another image of Southeast Asia that must be smaller, miniaturized, distant. Since he is in the position of the subject who is gazing through the telescope, he has, I believe, magnified his own position at the expense of miniaturizing and diminishing the scene he is viewing. In fact, the distancing implied by the gaze resembles the spatial distance necessary for the formation of the exotic program of an earlier generation of Europeans such as Victor Segelan, who always insisted on keeping the object at arm’s length. Under this arrangement, there cannot be an equal doubling but rather only a hierarchization between what appears to be a larger original and a smaller copy, the putative ‘‘sister’’ image. The determination and distancing of the image means only that it has won its apparent difference from an original by sacrificing the equality of scale and size. Even if Anderson warns us that he is not trading in ‘‘imitations,’’ ‘‘copies,’’ and ‘‘derivative discourses,’’ his appeal to the trope of the inverted telescope more than offsets his logic of ‘‘bound and unbound seriality’’ and its goal to dispel unwanted ‘‘bogeys.’’ To be sure, he reminded us in the earlier Imagined Communities that the idea of ‘‘nation’’ could claim no patent since it was continually ‘‘pirated’’ by different people with often ‘‘unexpected’’ results. Yet Anderson is closer to his critics than either suspects. If, on the one hand, he wishes to propose an approach that must take into consideration the role of some form of repetition in the migration of his model to enable the late developed to embark upon the course of capitalist modernization and national liberation and, on the other hand, his critics put forth the opposing proposition of an alternative modernity and antimodern communitarianism free from the corrosions of colonial and thus Western mediations in figuring a modern, national identity, both risk recuperating the second term of the very binary they are attempting to avoid. Both, moreover, manage to sustain the primacy of a relationship in space as the primary vocation of comparative study. At the heart of these interpretative strategies is, as I have suggested, the relentless spatialization of time that has prompted Anderson and his critics to privilege place. Both approaches are rooted in the priority of the nation-state, which, apart from being fixed in space, means a commitment to a unit that is ‘‘incomparable,’’ inasmuch as it has claimed to derive its difference from irreducible and essential elements (in Comparer l’incomparable,


Marcel Detienne proposes that because of the nation-state’s insistence on irreducible uniqueness, the act of carrying out comparison would mean matching two incommensurables that could produce only an acknowledgment of simple differences 16). With Anderson there still remains the inordinate emphasis on the origin of capitalism and nationalism, and it hardly matters if it appears in Western Europe or the North and South American colonies of the eighteenth century. Despite his disclaimers of modularity, he is still convinced that subsequent transformations constitute ‘‘piratical’’ plundering of the original model. What he overlooks is how the model is rooted in a place rather than a process that cannot know an original from a copy, since instantiations will always be original. The importance of this move is to thus fix origins in a place and to fixate on the force of its geospatial location. It is, I believe, this fetishization of origin in place/space that subsequently prompts discourse to imagine and identify places that might constitute an alternative. In more recent times, even some anti-postcolonial critics have turned to place as a political sanctuary and refuge against a heartless globalization. When we interrogate this bonding of place and origins, in any case, we discover that it is simply a transformation of older spatialized categories that shrilly announced the unity and universalism of the West over an incomplete East, what Bloch once called ‘‘cultural gardens’’ or ‘‘souls’’ ‘‘without windows, without connection,’’ 17 masking the horror of, and anxiety over, a deeply embedded relativism. Time’s Envelope What Anderson, Chakrabarty, and others have not provided in their determined preference for space and spatial categories, which either dramatizes the location of difference or situates place boundedness as an asylum for political and cultural resistance to globalization, is an adequate account of the crucial space-time relationship. Too often their strategies have ignored the relationship of these categories itself and risked simply sliding into a morphology of spatial forms. It is almost as if these writers have succumbed to a globalizing ideology that calls for the constant condensation of time into space in order to proclaim its final banishment from all sub16. Marcel Detienne, Comparer l’incomparable (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), 9–11; see also François Hartog, Regimes d’historicité (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003), 54ff. 17. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 296. See also Fabian, Time and the Other, 44–45.


sequent considerations of determination. This request resembles capitalism’s own refusal to envisage a time beyond its moment, which, ideologically, appears as an endless present, as Georg Simmel once described it, where time enters a permafrost state to become space. By contrast, we have available a number of examples that have made the question of spacetime relationship fundamental to any social, cultural, and historical analyses that manage to remind us of both the different ways this connection has been conceptualized and how we might seek to restore this lost unity in our own efforts to envisage comparative strategies. Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space attempts to envision how time is linked to space, despite the latter’s presumed hegemony in modern capitalist society; Bakhtin’s conception of the chronotope authorizes the construction of a typology of historical poetics based on delineating different articulations between space and time as manifest in different literary forms (implying but not foregrounding the temporal and spatial dimensions of successive modes of production); and Nikos Poulantzas imaginatively analyzes the nation-form in terms of specific temporal and spatial matrices introduced by capitalism. With additional time, we might also fold into this mix Moishe Postone’s illuminating but complex discussion of abstract and concrete time in Marx—the former supplying an ‘‘absolute frame’’ but remaining constant despite changes in productivity, retaining this constancy by occluding its ‘‘historical redeterminations’’ in the form of present time; the latter constituting the ‘‘flow of time’’ and the continuing transformation of work, production, social life, and forms of consciousness. What seems significant in Postone’s account is his insistence to call ‘‘abstract time’’ what others have referred to as space and its capacity to incorporate time.18 For Lefebvre, the advent of modernity, which includes the installation of capitalism, announced the disappearance of time from social space. Lived time forfeits its form of social associations, except for time spent while working. Here, he argues that space subordinates time to itself, as both economics and politics thus seek to expel it as a force that has the capability to threaten political power and the circulation of commodities. Accordingly, this process of spatialization, undoubtedly connected to an incipient capitalism, was, in Hegel’s account, actually produced by historical time, which the state eventually commanded. Because History failed to realize the archetype of the reasonable subject in the individual, it seized upon institutions, 18. Nikos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2000), 110. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as SPS. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).


groups, and systems—law, morality, family, the city, trade—to embed time within a rationality immanent with space. Hence, History was transformed from action to memory, production to contemplation—and time was hostaged to repetitious circularity, overwhelmed by the establishment of a fixed space that becomes the locus and environment of a now realized reason.19 Marx sought to defetishize space and restore time by identifying it with the revolutionary moment, while Lukács saw space as an instant of reification, a frozen, spatial countenance that a rediscovered sense of time—directed by class consciousness—promised to break the spell of its spatial primacy. Nietzsche, in turn, promoted the primordiality of space by giving preferentiality to the problematic of circular repetition and simultaneity, an argument later expanded by Heidegger when he posited the unavoidable primordiality of everyday life. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Lefebvre argued, the state was reconfigured on a world scale, furthering the logic of rationality, which opened up the possibility of transgression—a new negativity, as he put it. But time still remains bonded to the working class and the promise of struggle now focused on bringing about the eventual ‘‘withering of work.’’ In this connection, Lefebvre offered the category of ‘‘social space’’ as a product now inseparable from its production, which is never entirely mastered by the forces that have engendered it, because it is lived, in multiple manifestations, ‘‘before it is conceptualized.’’ The past leaves imprints in this space, which might take the figure of the urban or even the everyday, since time has its own script. What Lefebvre meant is that the historical consequences, the particular ‘‘etymology of locations in the sense of what happened’’ at a place, and ‘‘thereby change,’’ is invariably deposited and ‘‘inscribed in space’’ (PS, 37). And this space is foremost temporal, inasmuch as it is always ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘formerly’’ a present space. When social space is envisaged as everydayness, it no longer qualifies as a spatial category (even though its specific location lends a spatial dimension to it) but rather assumes the status of a primary temporal category—the now time, the present, whose apparent even surface is periodically rumpled, unsettled by the recognition of uneven intensities, discordant rhythms, that call attention to moments of difference revealing a society’s position in the developmental arc (PS, 65). These rhythms, which Lefebvre classified bodily as instants of eurhythmia, arrhythmia, polyrhythmia, invariably represent those 19. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 21. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PS. See also Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), and Rhythmanalysis, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004).


moments that break the spell of routine to introduce different but coexisting temporalities best exemplified by Bloch’s recognition of ‘‘contemporaneous non-contemporaneity,’’ where fragments of the past unexpectedly and suddenly rise up to impinge upon the present. This unevenness, perhaps lived more intensely in the space and time of everydayness, is precisely what the nation seeks to efface through a diversity of devices, beginning with the construction of a national narrative. But its signs are everywhere in the everyday, which, accordingly, houses the multiple rhythms and their different but coexisting temporalities. In this connection, Lefebvre also proposed that the ‘‘production of space, having attained the conceptual and linguistic level, acts retroactively upon the past, disclosing aspects and moments of it hitherto uncomprehended’’ (PS, 65). The past thus appears not only in a ‘‘different light’’ but also looms up unpunctually to disturb the images of the process whereby it—the past—becomes the present. It should be pointed out that Lefebvre was convinced that the ‘‘law of unevenness’’ was becoming worldwide in its application and was presently dominant in the globalization of the world. While Lefebvre strove to demonstrate the unity of space-time in the new, altered circumstances of late twentieth-century capitalism and tried to restore what capitalism and the advent of modernity had sundered—even ‘‘murdered’’ (PS, 96), a ‘‘unity long misapprehended’’ and ‘‘superceded by the rash attribution of priority to space over time’’ (PS, 219)—Bakhtin reformulated this reunion into a principle for classifying or typologizing literary genre. With the concept of chronotope, Bakhtin was able to offer a powerful way of connecting temporal and spatial into a specific but changing relationship artistically expressed in literature at certain moments in human development. He suggested that even though the process of assimilating ‘‘real historical time and space’’ is complicated, it was still possible to refract aspects of it—‘‘those available in a given historical stage of human development’’ that have been assimilated and match generic techniques devised for such ‘‘appropriated aspects of reality.’’ 20 Hence, the chronotope represented a formally constituted category that fused spatial and temporal indexes into a unity—where ‘‘time,’’ as it were, ‘‘thickens out, takes on flesh, and becomes artistically visible, likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.’’ 21 Without ever saying so or reducing 20. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 21. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84.


the chronotope to prior determinations, it is not difficult to conclude that Bakhtin’s conceptualization was read off from the modes of production and performed similarly, or at least formed a kinship with them. ‘‘These generic forms,’’ he wrote, ‘‘at first productive, were then reinforced by tradition; in their subsequent development they continued stubbornly to exist, up to and beyond the point at which they had lost any meaning that was productive in actuality. . . . This explains the simultaneous existence in literature of phenomena taken from widely separate periods of time, which greatly complicate the historical-literary process.’’ 22 In a sense, the concept resembles Poulantzas’s ‘‘spatial and temporal matrices’’ that characterize precapitalist and capitalist modes of production and their capacity to surpass their generating impulses to be reworked in new and different situations. For Bakhtin, the ‘‘realist’’ and folkloric chronotopes possessed special meaning. As for the realist chronotope, with its weaving of historical and sociopublic events together with the personal and even deeply private side of life, the ‘‘socio-quotidian’’ mingles historical sequences with ‘‘everyday and biographical sequences.’’ Biographical and everyday time are condensed, concentrated, interconnected, merged in ‘‘unitary markers of the epoch.’’ 23 In the Bakhtinian perspective, the novel ultimately becomes the privileged form of modernity and novelization, in all aspects permeates, and is penetrated by, everyday life in such a way as to become virtually indistinguishable from it, an argument made by the Japanese literary critic Kobayashi Hideo and authors Shiga Naoya and Kikuchi Kan, who, before World War II, described the ‘‘I novel’’ (shishosetsu) as the meeting of ‘‘art and life.’’ Hence, the epoch becomes not only graphically visible (space) but narratively manifest (time). For Bakhtin, Balzac actually ‘‘sees’’ time in space and supplies as proof the author’s description of houses as materialized history, of streets, cities, rural landscapes as manifesting how time and history have worked upon them. In Flaubert, he continued, the provincial town is the locus for cyclical everyday time, with no events, no advancing ‘‘historical movements,’’ and is often used for contrast with temporal sequences that are more charged with eventfulness. What seems important in Bakhtin is the chronotopic unification of a specific space and temporality—a locus, place, and a particular temporality, in the moment of everydayness—whose combination demands specificity. Neither space nor time is essentialized, as such, or hierarchized but is related in a specific way to constitute a configu22. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 85. 23. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 247.


ration. The folkloric chronotope works comparably to Benjamin’s conception of remembrance and recalls in the present a consciousness of a preclass agrarian stage and the consciousness of the collective experience of work. Unlike Benjamin, Bakhtin stopped short of showing how this cyclical and repetitive rhythm that constrained time’s forward movement might be mobilized in a later present, apart from its appropriation in more modern novelistic chronotopes. But his chronotopic observations and their relationship to the production of genre save us from the imperialist effect risked by Franco Moretti’s spatial and distributional model, since the appearance of new and different generic forms will constitute specific inflections of a type to reflect when and where the new space-time pattern is established. In this scheme, novel and the replication of a ‘‘normative’’ model on a global scale are less important than the process of novelization, whereby the form undergoes constant modification and mutation by practices from the received culture to convey the historical difference of a coeval modernizing experience. Finally, with Poulantzas we have the combinatory of the nation-form, as a specific spatial site, and the determinations of the modes of production which signal specific matrices that the categories of space and time will assume. Even though Poulantzas positioned the nation-state as a privileged space, the temporal and spatial matrices it relays are presumably embedded in other social spaces—namely, the everyday—but do not, indeed cannot, completely penetrate and master them. The importance of his account emphasizes how the social formation—‘‘the nodal point of expanded reproduction of social relations’’—intersects the boundaries of the nation-state. Moreover, the very unevenness that has attended capitalism since its inception is now inscribed in the nation-state and acts to orchestrate their inter-relationship (SPS, 95). What he wished to clarify is how capitalism mediates and changes received temporal and spatial meanings, and produces an unevenness that is now one of the ‘‘historical moments’’ capable of ‘‘affecting differentiated, classified and distinct spaces’’ called the nation. Like Bakhtin’s chronotope, meanings are produced with the emergence of a new mode of production that now authorizes changes in the received ‘‘conceptual matrices of space and time.’’ Hence the modern nation is a product of the state and is assigned to embody precisely all those temporal and spatial matrices it has established as networks of power and domination. In this way, the nation represents the modified constituent elements, such as the economy, territory, and tradition, that state activity has implemented to organize materially social space and time. Capitalist social space, because of the worker’s separation from the means of labor, is fractured,


serialized, and made irreversible, in contrast to premodern modes of spatial organization. This new spatial configuration fixes the boundaries between inside and outside, within which the reproduction of capital takes place. The state acts to monopolize the organization of social space in such a way as to materialize its various apparatuses—‘‘army, school, central bureaucracy, penal system’’—and thus ‘‘pattern[s] in turn the subjects over whom it exercises power.’’ While this space splits the labor process into capitalist units of production and reproduction, the particular ‘‘discontinuous morphology’’ is, in effect, ‘‘consubstantial’’ with the uneven development in its spatial dimension (SPS, 104). Like space, the new temporal matrix seeks to unify and homogenize as it segments, divides, and makes the movement of time a one-way street, all directed toward the product. One of the seeming paradoxes of both temporal and spatial matrices under capitalism seems to be the persistent segmentation and proliferation of multiple spaces and temporalities that, through the mediation of state and nation, manage to homogenize and even universalize their apparent dissociations. Through the action of diverse state apparatuses, according to Poulantzas, national social formations constitute both the ‘‘principal roots and focal points’’ (SPS, 106) of the uneven development of capitalism. With the installation of a new temporal matrix, with the production process and expanded reproduction and capital accumulation as its unlimited goals, time is submitted to strict measures of control by means of the clock, calendar, time-study regimes, and the like. Yet such splitting and fragmenting raise anew the problem of unification, which diminishes the differing temporalities by reducing them to simple distances. But significantly, this ‘‘temporal matrix, for the first time, marks out the particular temporalities as different temporalities’’—variations of a single, cumulative, and irreversible time. As a result of this transformation, we have available a conception of time that opens up the possibility of comparability no longer simply rooted in spatial differences between discrete nation-states whose claim to irreducible uniqueness leaves only the recognition of trivial differences as the basis of ‘‘comparing the incomparable’’ (SPS, 110). Under the circumstance of this unifying impulse, successive moments accumulate and are totalized in such a way as to differentiate the present from what preceded it and what comes after. In Poulantzas’s view, the unevenness of capitalism peculiar to each formation (obviously referring to Althusser’s idea of semi-autonomous domains constituting the social formation, i.e., economic, political, ideological) connects with the state’s temporality, which seeks to unify it and realign the asymmetries produced by


differing (or uneven) and coexisting temporalities. The importance of Poulantzas’s explanation is not so much his imaginative treatment of nationform and its implied relationship to the commodity and value, which loses its force and risks self-limitation in its desire to privilege the nation-state, but rather the way his decision to combine spatial and temporal matrices of capitalism is able to demonstrate both how the spatial unevenness of diverse spheres of the formation and the respective coexistence of different temporalities constituted a function whose relationship is articulated by the state— a relationship between history (time) and territory (space) (SPS, 114). While it was undoubtedly important for him to see how the modern nation supplies the occasion for the intersection of these matrices—to produce a ‘‘historicity of territory’’ and ‘‘territorialization of a history’’—we need not restrict this momentous conjunction merely to the nation-state and national history (a social space and narrative time, if I can rephrase Lefebvre, which is thought before it is lived). What, I think, this formulation manages to offer is a grasp of the complex interrelationship between spatial densities and temporal indexes and its possible utility for envisaging a ground of comparability, without reducing one to the other or displacing one by the other. If nothing else, Poulantzas reminds us of how all of these writers were concerned with addressing the complexity of temporal/spatial interactions and the necessity of trying to think through a strategy based on their reunion, in order to counter the specific ideological valence signified by the prominence of space in current discussions. Non-Contemporaneous Rhythms If we can now return to and revisit Anderson’s identification of the ‘‘ghostly’’ as the object of comparative study and juxtapose it to those strategies that have sought, as we have seen above, to find ways to articulate a relationship between time and space, we can see that the spatially contained idea of a spectral vision refers not to the past of the Asian or African (in Anderson’s case, Southeast Asia) but rather to an original and its reflection, a copy, nonetheless, that is a reminder of another’s past and place, not the past or place that is made into its telescoped projection. What Lefebvre, Bakhtin, and Poulantzas have all insisted on is the importance of trying to show how time, usually history, has interacted with a specific space to form an identifiable relationship. In Anderson’s reckoning, there are only spaces distinguished by distance and scale. The consequence of this strategy is to bypass instances in which a specific present animates and conjures up the


past to supply it with a new configuration. What Anderson risks ignoring is the operation of a mutual negotiation between past and present, materialized in the figure of an untimely appearance of the revenant in the present. This ghostly apparition appears less as a repetition of the past than as a reminder of an intention that points to the future. In this way, the appeal to a putative tradition in a specific time and place takes the form of deferred action, reflecting a nonlinear conception of lived time in which the past produces itself retroactively in the present. There is, paradoxically, a glimpse of this conception of time and space in the diaries of Soetomo, the turn-ofthe-century Indonesian nationalist, on whom Anderson has written so eloquently, and, of course, in Watsuji’s double life and its necessary recognition of living in double time—comparatively—in one place, that is to say, unevenly. In other words, there is, I believe, the larger and more important spectrality of societies deeply involved in fashioning a capitalist modernity coeval and coextensive with Euro-America, yet whose difference neither a simple nor mechanical reproduction manages to capture. These experiences dramatize a different kind of haunting and the unscheduled migration of ghosts of what have been past, now forgotten, that will insist on coexisting with the new in the present of everyday life. How could it be otherwise for such societies? Unlike Anderson’s specters, which behave more like faint shadows and ambiguous silhouettes, these ghosts of a surviving past—the premodern culture of reference—return from a place out of time or a different temporality to haunt and disturb the historical present, to trouble the stable boundaries between past and present, subject and object, interior and exterior. This relationship requires a willingness to envision a structure of comparability that recognizes the role played by temporally rooted forms in the present and what Bloch referred to as non-contemporaneous synchronisms, where past and present are not necessarily successive but simultaneously produced, or coexist as uneven temporalities, just as the here and there of modernity are coeval, even though the latter is forgotten in the former. What comparative practice has excluded in its desire to narrativize a cultural aspiration associated with Euro-America is the relationship between its modernity and the modernities of the world outside of it that must share the same ground of temporality and agencies of transformation. This means addressing the question of how our present shows itself to us and finding in it a minimal unity provided by everyday life that has organized and condensed the experience of modernity. But it also invites a further breaking down of this unity represented by the everyday into smaller units,


what Lefebvre once called ‘‘moments’’ and then later ‘‘rhythms,’’ reflecting ‘‘strong times and weak times, which return in accordance with a rule of law—long and short times, recurring in a recognizable way.’’ 24 By doing so, we confront the larger and immanent framework of capitalist modernity and its incessant transformations. Such an approach has the advantage of redirecting our attention to the role of capitalism, instead of a culture of rationality, in its many manifestations throughout the world and the diverse historical routes it has taken; it also avoids displacing it to modernity or repressing it by alerting us to the relationship between lived experiences of everydayness and the regime of the commodity form as the principal structuring agent in the production of contemporary historical formations. Taking this step allows us, moreover, to bypass making the dangerous misrecognition that identifies capitalism with universalism, or the triumph of real subsumption. Everydayness, thus, constitutes a social space of unevenness and a cultural form that shares with modernity the experience of capitalism since it is coeval with it; it is also a primary temporal category that signifies its broader importance as a specific historical form. With everydayness, there is a social space that is produced, which suggests both a fixed space and a temporality implicated in the producing process. Yet if we can represent modernity as the ever new, everydayness then must be seen as the durational present, the site of vast temporal economic and cultural unevenness, incomplete but ‘‘situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in the processes known as ‘rational.’’’ 25 According to the prewar Japanese thinker Tosaka Jun, everydayness displayed a form of temporalizing that departed from the category of the modern and combined the presentness of the Heideggarian Now with the repetition of pasts. For him, everydayness constituted the domain of a specific spatiotime relationship that behaved very much like the commodity form, inasmuch as it ‘‘shelters’’ the ‘‘crystal’’ or ‘‘germinal kernel’’ of historical time, the mystery of time’s difference in the repetitive routine and unfolding of one day after another. At one level, everydayness thus served as the intersection of all repetitions both received and recent, past and present, and encompassed the site of ‘‘recurrences,’’ which means ‘‘gestures of labor and leisure, mechanical movements both 24. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 78. 25. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinowitz (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 24–25.


human and properly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions.’’ 26 It is also ‘‘material culture,’’ clothing, especially for Tosaka, life, furniture, houses, neighborhoods, environment—the solidity of filled space, Heidegger’s ‘‘there’’ (Da), the world of the present. This veiled, hidden, fugitive, and shadow existence contrasts sharply with Anderson’s ghosts, and what he designated as the haunt, the place of comparison, by offering the candidacy of the everyday present as a ground of comparability. Its claims are no less spectral since the shadows of another life constantly act upon and are acted upon by the new, the modern, to produce the narrative effect of a continuing but dappled montage. The modern reveals this everydayness in its immediacy, while this everydayness is constantly mediating the new. Moreover, the everyday, as ‘‘practically untellable,’’ meets the modern, which now flashes before the present as the endlessly novel, worldly, transitory, and spectacular. In this momentous encounter, the new, now strategically misrepresented as modernity, functions as ‘‘repetitive gestures’’ masking the regular cycles of everyday as the monotony of everydayness contains the new. Tosaka precisely saw this explosive encounter as one filled with ‘‘possibility’’ (unintentionally echoing Benjamin’s conception of ‘‘actualization’’), while Lefebvre discerned in the repetitions the place where ‘‘everything changes.’’ Although the figure of unevenness stands at the heart of everyday life, it is, as Marx observed, the insertion of capitalism into societies at differential moments and different rates of velocity that accounts for the coexistence of different forms of economic and cultural practices. It is possible to agree with Lefebvre and David Harvey that capitalism in the twentieth century has survived principally by necessarily expanding into space, ‘‘by producing space.’’ But its success has been based upon its capacity to generate vast temporal unevenness along its route, not just between societies but within them. In fact, it would be wrong to overlook the fact that the process of expansion occurred in time. In other words, this spatial movement demands a reconfiguration of the relationship between time and space in any effort to construct a comparative framework capable of grasping the manifestation of capitalist modernities. Hence, the expansion of capitalism, whether carried on within a national society or overseas, is inextricably linked to the production of unevenness (noted by Lefebvre but articulated earlier by Bloch in the concept of a contemporary non-contemporaneousness—Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen). It seems to me that one of the ways of thinking 26. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 24–25.


about this new reconfiguration is to concentrate on how unevenness, the experience expressed paradigmatically in the Blochian idea of contemporary non-contemporaneousness, is actualized in those places and spaces that have committed their resources to the transformations of capitalist modernization. What I want to propose is that the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous allows us to return to the question of temporality and the temporalization of forms through which it is expressed in those social spaces whose appearance have been spatialized by the capitalist nationstate. Initially resulting from overseas expansion, this sense of a dissonant temporal asymmetry as it is experienced in the everyday supplies a possible suggestion for constructing a comparative framework on a global scale that might account for local differences without exceptionalizing the location of a space as an ‘‘alternative’’ to a prior, original model.27 The geographic opening of the globe and its subsequent colonization brought the recognition of coexisting cultures that, through a kind of synchronous classification, were ordered diachronically—to make a ‘‘civilized’’ Europe appear ahead of an ‘‘uncivilized’’ Asia and Africa from a backward glance. But if such comparisons promoted the emergence of an experience of a possible world history in terms of ‘‘development’’ and ‘‘progress,’’ they also set the stage for reconsidering and reconfiguring the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous in such a way as to highlight the production of difference any society would experience in confronting the unevenness caused by the interactions of its past in its present and confronting the odd temporality of a lost but now recovered intention from the past. It was, I believe, precisely this observation that led Bloch to account for the arrival and success of fascism in Germany, even though his analysis never exceeded this cultural and historical horizon or even acknowledged the larger geographical origins of this perception. More significantly, his unit of analysis for capitalist reproduction and accumulation remained riveted to the nation-state rather than the everydayness of capitalist society. For Bloch, the argument stalled in a comparison of Germany, France, and England, which performed more as alibi than explanation. German capitalism, he was convinced, was hostaged to late development and failed, therefore, to integrate the social, political, and economic realms, thus opening the way to the continuous surfacing of older practices and residual mentalities—the non-contemporaneous—that fascism successfully appropriated and Marxism misunderstood, even though he acknowledged the persistence of an ‘‘unequal rate of development’’ in Germany for a long time. 27. Kosellek, Futures Past, 256.


Yet, by confining this form of temporalizing to Germany, he unintentionally and inadvertently exceptionalized the German experience of modernization (Sonderweg) (actually inhibiting the possibility of further comparison already prefigured in his emphasis on the nation-state, despite the promise of his conceptualization of the non-contemporaneous) and reinforced an argument already made by the fascists he was holding up for derision. On the other side of the world, Tosaka was observing a similar phenomenon in Japan that he called ‘‘archaism,’’ but he clearly recognized in it merely a local manifestation and variation of a wider experience found throughout the industrializing world of the 1930s. And in Italy, Gramsci’s theorization of hegemony barely concealed a disguised recognition of the continuing and irresolvable nature of unevenness. If, in any case, the instance of unevenness invariably accompanies the historical spread of capitalism everywhere, it must still continue to occupy a commanding ‘‘space of experience’’ because it constitutes one of its principal conditions of reproduction. In other words, unevenness is not a developmental stage that eventually is to be overcome but a principal condition that capitalism must constantly produce and reproduce. But when Bloch’s conception of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous is coupled with Lefebvre’s perception of ‘‘rhythmanalysis’’ of the everyday, we have, I believe, the possible beginnings of a productive way of envisaging comparisons. What I am referring to here is Lefebvre’s observation of the ‘‘double measure.’’ ‘‘Rhythm,’’ he wrote, ‘‘brings with it a differentiated time, a qualified duration. The same can be said of repetitions, ruptures and resumptions. Therefore a measure, but an internal measure, which distinguishes itself strongly though without separating itself from an external measure, with time (the time of the clock or metronome) consisting in only a quantitative and homogenous parameter.’’ The external measure superimposes itself on the internal measure but can never assimilate it, since they do not share either the same beginning or end. Hence, the double measure enters into the definition and character of a rhythm and, accordingly, is ‘‘irreducible to a simple determination, implying . . . complex (dialectical) relations.’’ 28 In this scheme, only ‘‘non-mechanical movements’’ are capable of having rhythm and thus quality, as against the purely quantitative, mechanical, and abstract domain standing apart from it. But everything is grasped ‘‘symphonically.’’ In this regard, Bloch envisioned a double gesture in the contradictions of the non-contemporaneous contradiction. ‘‘Thus,’’ he 28. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 78.


wrote, ‘‘the contradictory element is here, inwardly or subjectively, a muffled remnant,’’ a ‘‘non-desire for the Now,’’ and ‘‘accumulated rage.’’ But corresponding to this ‘‘is the objectively non-contemporaneous element . . . of older circumstances and forms of production,’’ ‘‘older superstructures,’’ and that ‘‘which is distant and alien to the present.’’ Above all, it ‘‘embraces’’ ‘‘declining remnants,’’ embodying different temporalities, and, more significantly, an ‘‘unrefurbished past ’’ that has not yet been resolved in capitalist terms.29 Lefebvre could easily agree with Bloch, as we could, that ‘‘History is no entity advancing along a single line, in which capitalism . . . as the final stage, has resolved all the previous ones; but it is a polyrhythmic and multispatial entity, with enough unmastered and as yet by no means revealed and resolved corners.’’ 30 In the 1920s, nevertheless, the Japanese native ethnologist Yanagita Kunio named this combined development he was already recording in Japan as ‘‘mixed or hybrid civilization,’’ which could be found throughout East Asia, at the same time the Indonesian nationalist Soetomo was acknowledging the constant unevenness of life produced by the interaction of the past with his present. But both could just as easily have been describing that process everywhere by which modernity and everyday life were responding and corresponding to each other. While a focus on the development of uneven temporalities within modernities easily replaces the space occupied by a fixed place that still fails to conceal its status as the second term, it also diverts our attention away from the singularity of the nation as such, and its counterclaims to uniqueness, which, it now seems, have all along been trying to bridge the difference between modernity and everyday life. If, in any event, our strategies of comparison are to have any utility at all, they must be embedded in specific temporal and spatial forms, in which social space is lived and experienced to write its own history everywhere, perhaps as a history of dissonant rhythms, as a continuing and never completed conjuration of the past in the present.

29. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 108. 30. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 62.

Difference Against Development: Spiritual Accumulation and the Politics of Freedom

John Kraniauskas

Paul Ricoeur’s account of the end of Hegelianism in his Time and Narrative is summarized in the following paragraph: ‘‘It now seems to us as though Hegel, seizing a favourable moment, a kairos, which has been revealed for what it was to our perspective and our experience, only totalized a few leading aspects of the spiritual history of Europe and of its geographical and historical environment, ones that, since that time, have come undone. What has come undone is the very substance of what Hegel sought to make into a concept. Difference has turned against development conceived of as a Stufengang [a ‘‘succession of stages’’].’’ In Ricoeur’s statement, the historical experience of postcolonialism critically encounters Hegelian dialectics, reducing its claims to universality back to particularity in a gesture Dipesh Chakrabarty has referred to as ‘‘provincializing Europe.’’ 1 There has been a crisis, both historical and philosophical, in the Eurocen1. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 204–5; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Hereafter, Ricoeur’s work is cited parenthetically as TN. boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.


trism (‘‘spirit’’) that upholds Hegel’s concept of reason and its developmental unfolding (which, as we shall see, is an unfolding of freedom), a crisis that has not only interrupted philosophy’s (Hegelian) realization but also revealed its constituent unrealizability.2 Ricoeur is referring to the combined effects of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as to the emergence of anticolonial struggles in Africa and Asia. All have combined to produce an effect of decentering and the independence of ‘‘difference’’ from dialectical capture. This is one of the main reasons why so much contemporary philosophy and theory defines itself as explicitly anti-Hegelian. Although, alternatively, in Hegelian mode, one might also suggest that this ‘‘turning against’’ may be nothing more than the cunning work of reason. What follows are a series of reflections on Ricoeur’s statement. I begin with a description of Hegel’s philosophical prose of world history as contained in his most popular work, The Philosophy of History, in an attempt to unpack the political significance of the idea of ‘‘development’’ in history. This is crucial, because what is ‘‘developed’’ in Hegel’s world history is the history of ‘‘freedom.’’ Second, I will outline other kinds of conceptual interruption of Hegel’s temporalization of history associated, in particular, with the idea of its materialist ‘‘inversion’’—those of Marx, Adorno, and Mario Tronti—focusing especially on Louis Althusser’s direct confrontation with the Hegelian side of Marxism contained in his demand to think history differentially and conjuncturally. This account provides the occasion to question Ricoeur’s statement and suggest instead that difference turns against development as more development (arguably the more important postcolonial experience). This, I argue, is the implication of the most radical aspects of subalternist critique, which emerges from such a historical recognition in neocolonial times to present itself as what might be described as a disjunctural critique of the total apparatus of development conceived as the imperial time of capital. In Spectral Nationality, Pheng Cheah has suggested that subalternism is characterized by an antiphilosophical outlook.3 I will argue, in contrast, that the work of critics such as Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, and 2. In his Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), Theodor Adorno registers this historical moment as follows: ‘‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’’ (3). 3. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). The difference between Cheah and radical subalternism is his defense of the nation-form.

Kraniauskas / Spiritual Accumulation and the Politics of Freedom 55

Gayatri Spivak constitutes an intense engagement with the philosophy of history (particularly historicism), reconceived from the standpoint of the cultural politics of historiographical and literary form and its colonial/imperial content. The key (and most insistent) question articulated by their disjuncturalist critique is: What kinds of subjects are ‘‘possible’’ subjects of freedom? Insofar as their work poses such a question anew from an antidevelopmentalist perspective, one might suggest that they also posit the conditions for a possible new subaltern post-Hegelian world history. From this perspective, what is at stake in Hegel’s philosophy of world history is the question of emancipatory political subjectivity. Development ‘‘A State is a realization of Spirit, such that in it the self-conscious being of Spirit—the freedom of the will—is realized as Law,’’ writes Hegel in his discussion and comparison of Chinese and Hindoo [sic] civilizations.4 This definition of the state is important for a number of reasons, the most important being that it helps us understand that, in offering it, Hegel is comparing a civilization that has history with another that does not. China, he insists, has a state. Indeed, as a despotic state, in Hegel’s view, it ‘‘may be regarded as nothing else but a state’’ (PH, 161). ‘‘Hindoo’’ civilization, on the other hand, may constitute a people, but it is not a state. This is because, he insists, Indian society has not been established on the basis of law (that is, freedom as abstract will) or of spiritual self-consciousness (subjective freedom) in opposition to nature. China, it follows from this argument, has history, while India does not—the historicity of each (or lack of it) established in relation to predominant forms of political subjectivity (the selfconsciousness of freedom—even if this refers, as in Hegel’s China, only to the ‘‘freedom’’ of an emperor—as expressed in state form). What is the relation Hegel establishes between history and the state? It is clearly fundamental, for the state form establishes a principle of freedom that becomes history’s condition. In this respect, Hegel is a state thinker, history emerging in this first stage of its development in China as the history of despotic ‘‘freedom’’ (and ‘‘law’’) experienced, he also notes, as unfreedom (because, Hegel is clear, history is not a ‘‘theatre of happiness’’ [PH, 4. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 160. This English translation is based on Karl Hegel’s German edition of 1840. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PH.


26]).5 This also means, however, that history is a social institution, in which what has happened and its experience and narration—that is, history in both its meanings as a concept—are gathered together in writing. The stately archive, so important to Michel de Certeau’s analysis of the emergence of modern history writing, thus has a history too.6 In Ricoeur’s words, the state is ‘‘the historical configuration where the idea and its satisfaction [‘‘the cunning of reason’’] come together’’ (TN, 197). Hegel writes: [I]t is the State which first presents subject-matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the production of such history in the very progress of its own being. Instead of merely subjective mandates on the part of the government . . . a community that is acquiring a stable existence, and exalting itself into a State, requires formal commands and laws . . . and this produces a record as well as interest concerned with intelligent, definite . . . lasting transactions and occurrences; on which Mnemosyne, for the behoof of the perennial object of the formation and constitution of the State, is impelled to confer perpetuity. (PH, 61) This is the place, therefore, as Ricoeur notes, where historical time becomes one—as a collective singular—uniting the freedom of the Spirit with the passion of individuals (TN, 197). From this point of view, the state is a recording machine, and all of history’s determinations, such as time and freedom, pass through it. The state contains and orders the former—because, left to its own devices, time, like Chronos, devours, it is a force of nature (PH, 75– 76)—while it enshrines freedom as law. ‘‘The State,’’ writes Hegel, is ‘‘the embodiment of rational freedom, realizing and recognizing itself in an objective form’’ (PH, 47). The history of freedom, in turn, is the history of spirit—the objective content of Hegel’s secular history—which realizes itself in and through itself, for itself, as freedom.7 As Cheah has shown, this idea of spirit is ‘‘organismic’’ and derived from Kant’s notion of culture as formation (Bildung), outlined in the second part of his Critique of Judgement, ‘‘Critique of Teleo5. Crucially, for Hegel, freedom is not merely an individual attribute but a social condition that must be instituted. 6. See Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Such a gathering in the state produces a subject position, that of the absolutist monarch—whose temporality, with Machiavelli, becomes secular (7)—and its documentation (or archive) (74). 7. See Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 47.


logical Judgement,’’ and which takes the life of the self-recursive organism as its model. In opposition to mechanical natural causality, the organism is self-originating and self-organizing, positing its own limits and setting its own ends. Nature’s teleological end, according to Kant, is the happiness of ‘‘man,’’ and this organicizing power (the ‘‘aptitude’’ of ‘‘determining ends’’ out of itself) is ‘‘nature’s gift’’ to the human race. Kant refers to it, following Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, as a ‘‘formative drive,’’ or Bildungstreib.8 According to Cheah, this is an ‘‘incarnational’’ and ‘‘self-originating’’ conception of culture, which in Kant becomes the model of autonomy, moral freedom, and the transcendence of finitude, as well as the ontological ground for ‘‘culture’s cobelonging with politics’’ as Bildung. And since for Kant ‘‘the constitutional political body is culture’s highest achievement,’’ its ‘‘organismic causality’’ becomes ‘‘the ontological paradigm and ultimate end of the ideal constitutional state.’’ 9 The writings of Fichte and Hegel give sociological shape to Kant’s abstract cosmopolitanism, incarnating freedom in either the people-nation (Fichte) or the ideal state as the unity of sovereign will and political constitution (Hegel). However, such an organicist process of self-positing, differentiation, and mediated self-unification (the positing of ends and their immanent transcendence: Spirit-as-Freedom-in-State-as-Right-is-History . . .) is perhaps one of the reasons why Adorno, for his part, suggests that when, in Hegel’s panlogistic prose of world history, we read the word freedom, we would do better to read ‘‘big guns’’: ‘‘the idea of a positivity that can master everything that opposes it through the superior power of a comprehending spirit is the mirror image of the experience of the superior coercive force inherent in everything that exists by virtue of its consolidation under domination. This is the truth of Hegel’s untruth.’’ 10 The fact that in Hegel’s philosophical history, world history emerges in despotism and ‘‘ends’’ in constitutional 8. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 92–97, paragraph 83. Culture, in turn (and this is the beginning of Cheah’s deconstruction of Kant’s account), depends on a founding ‘‘ingratitude’’ toward nature’s gift, which, since it ‘‘cannot give itself to us in any other way but mechanically,’’ takes the form of a retroactive anthropomorphism or mimeticism that paradoxically erases human heteronomy (its finitude) with regard to the contingency of nature’s gift conceived contradictorily as ‘‘inhuman techne’’ (Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 110–11). 9. Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 61–113. See Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,’’ in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 31–34. 10. Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 87.


monarchy would seem to confirm Adorno’s truth. Which brings us back to Hegel’s comparison of China and India. Hegel’s world history is not, however, just a history of the state as an administrative or repressive apparatus. As the conceptual affinity between Kant’s idea of culture and Hegel’s idea of spirit suggests, it is a history of spirit as state form from the point of view of its constitution—despotic, aristocratic, republican, and monarchic—as politically mediated subjectivity.11 If India is a ‘‘people’’ without a state, China is a state without a people, for there is no ‘‘free will.’’ Paradoxically, this is what constitutes India’s advance on China with respect to its ‘‘political life’’ (PH, 144). Hegel’s explanation of China’s underdevelopment in this regard is that the unity of China’s despotic state is not mediated by the ‘‘divergence into difference’’ that ‘‘free subjectivity’’ (PH, 144–45) entails and that would make it into a social system. China has a vast and meticulous archive, but it reflects only the limitless power of the emperor.12 India, on the other hand, has great poetry, in Hegel’s view, reflecting the power of an ‘‘untamed’’ popular imagination still, however, in thrall to nature. And, famously, for Hegel, the idea of the ‘‘people’’ ‘‘refers to that category of citizens who do not know their own will.’’ 13 Thus, history emerges with despotic state form, rather than with a people constituted ‘‘irrationally’’ through castes—which betrays a lack of self-differentiation from nature in its constitution—and whose subjective relation to ‘‘freedom’’ thus remains unmediated and unbound by the abstract(ing) quality of law. India’s historical advance therefore does not constitute a development and so remains, paradoxically, ahistorical. In this sense, Hegel’s comparison also reveals how development in the course of history ‘‘is not a chronological sequence’’ (nor an evolution) but what Ricoeur refers to as ‘‘a winding up that is at the same time an unfolding, a process of making explicit, and a return upon itself of the spirit’’ (TN, 201), that is, a realization. It is thus not the case that Hegel’s prose is indifferent to difference as such. His state-centered account of Spirit, rather, incorporates difference into its plot so as, for example, to leave it behind as prehistory. From this 11. For Gillian Rose, Hegel’s concept of spirit is cultural insofar as it is actualized in a dialectics of recognition and misrecognition. See her Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981). 12. For which, see Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi, The First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (New York: Autonomedia, 1992). 13. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 340.


point of view, difference is fundamental to the idea of development in history, establishing a temporal principle of comparativity necessary to charting its ‘‘course’’ through stages. Hegel’s prose is rather indifferent to the difference of difference from the point of view of the present realization of Spirit— insofar, that is, as the present state form constitutes a synthesis of the different moments of the development of Spirit as freedom (everything else remains unhistorical, even if contemporary). History therefore becomes a formative process, a Bildung, into freedom. Hegel’s definition of the state in his account of the historicity of the Oriental World thus works retrospectively, arranging it in critical and historical perspective, and prospectively, so as also to illuminate the ‘‘modern’’ Northern European endpoint from where World History is articulated. China and India (as well as Greece and Rome) qua civilizations are definitely past, but they also embody identifiable stages (at times emplotted in the form of a maturation: childhood, boyhood, manhood, old age) leading up to the present. In terms of its defining politicojuridical values, then, Hegel’s philosophy of history is present-centered— the ‘‘end’’ that receives the past, provides perspective, and from where it emplots its own realization. In other words, it is a genealogy that, as Adorno notes, ‘‘takes the side of what exists.’’ 14 The idea of development thus gives cultural and political shape to the history of spirit—as subjective freedom—as it is ‘‘incarnated’’ (to use Cheah’s term) in state form, that is, as right. In response to Joseph McCarney’s insistence that ‘‘. . . racist assumptions are not merely otiose in Hegel’s argument and lacking in textual warrant . . . [t]hey would also directly contradict the universalism of his philosophy of spirit with its central themes of freedom as the birthright of all . . . ,’’ 15 Robert Bernasconi has insisted, on the contrary, that it is precisely this contradiction—between freedom (universality) and its (racist and/or culturalist) limitation—that characterizes the philosophies of both Hegel and Kant (among others).16 More 14. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 85. 15. Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 145. 16. Robert Bernasconi, ‘‘Hegel’s Racism: A Reply to McCarney,’’ Radical Philosophy 119 (May/June 2003): 35–37. See also his ‘‘Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up: The Challenge of Enlightenment Racism to the Study of the History of Philosophy,’’ Radical Philosophy 117 (January/February 2003): 13–22, where he points out the importance of ‘‘investigating Kant’s racism in its coexistence with cosmopolitanism’’ (17). In his A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), Howard Caygill has also noted that Kant’s concept of culture as Bildung is also socially divided between those who have it through ‘‘discipline’’ and those who service the latter with their ‘‘skill’’ and are not so blessed (145–50). See Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 95–96.


specifically, Hegel’s well-known expulsion of a supposedly uncivilized Africa from world history and his suggestion that slavery ‘‘frees’’ Africans from subjection to their own environment are shown, through a detailed reading of his sources, to be based on highly exaggerated accounts of fetishism and cannibalistic colonial fantasies, as well as on the deliberate ignorance of alternative contemporary accounts. ‘‘The principle of Development,’’ Hegel writes, ‘‘involves . . . the existence of a latent germ of being—a capacity or potentiality striving to realize itself.’’ This is a potentiality—or, in Kant’s terms, ‘‘nature’s gift’’ qua self-formative drive—that Africans are denied in his philosophy. ‘‘This formal conception,’’ he continues, ‘‘finds actual existence in Spirit, which has the History of the World for its theatre, its possession and the sphere of its realization’’ (PH, 54). Which is also why, in Hegel’s view, America has no history either, because it belongs to a future which has as yet no claims on his present. It ‘‘performs’’ still, in his example of the Jesuit civilizing mission in Paraguay, to a colonial—that is, European—bell.17 Bernasconi points out that Kant’s teleological account of culture in the Critique of Judgement extends and transforms ideas first established in Kant’s production of the modern concept of ‘‘race’’—for example, in ‘‘On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy,’’ written in 1788—and, as we have seen, this is the organismic account taken over by Hegel into his spiritualized conceptualization of freedom in history.18 Bernasconi concludes that ‘‘questions remain about the extent to which contemporary ideas, for example of social development, remain tied to a model that can best be described as colonialist.’’ 19 Although he breaks off from demonstrating precisely how Hegel’s racist and colonialist use of sources marks his conceptual production and his ideas of spirit, freedom, and universality as such, 17. Hegel writes: ‘‘When the Jesuits and the Catholic clergy proposed to accustom the Indians to European culture and manners . . . they commenced a close intimacy with them, and prescribed for them the duties of the day, which, slothful though their disposition was, they complied with under the authority of the Friars. These prescripts (at midnight a bell had to remind them even of their matrimonial duties), were first, and very wisely, directed to the creation of wants—the springs of human activity generally’’ (PH, 81–82). 18. See Robert Bernasconi, ‘‘Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,’’ in Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 41–63. See also ‘‘Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,’’ in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 11–36. Bernasconi shows that Kant’s scientific concept of ‘‘race’’ both ‘‘secured the unity of humanity as a natural genus’’ and established ‘‘deviations within this genus which maintain themselves over protracted generations’’ (22). 19. Bernasconi, ‘‘Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,’’ 63.


he more or less hints at its certain presence. In my view, there can be little doubt that Hegel’s idea of development—as set out in The Philosophy of History—constitutes such a key philosophical site in which the contradiction between universal freedom and racism is played out, conceptually managed, and given historical form. From this point of view, the concept of development is haunted by a racialization of spirit and freedom that is enacted through an originary and founding expulsion.20 Like the idea of culture itself, however, ‘‘development’’ arguably remains an important, even necessary, concept (it has sedimented itself into so many theoretical discourses that it is extremely difficult to dispense with), which, if irreducible to its racist history, nevertheless bears such historical experiences that it demands both theoretical and historical reflexivity in its use. In other words, thus ‘‘scarified’’ by history, it acquires a historicity of its own and articulates a need for a politics of theory. The idea of development is crucial to the prose of world history, providing it with an Imperial grammar of spatiotemporal organization and comparison. First, according to Hegel, development implies ‘‘perfectibility’’ and ‘‘gradation’’ in the history of spirit: ‘‘a series of increasingly adequate expressions or manifestations of Freedom, which result from its Idea’’ (PH, 63)— which also implies inadequate expressions. Second, development gives direction to history’s movement and change: self-determining and ‘‘at war with itself’’ (PH, 55), writes Hegel, spirit ‘‘assumes successive forms which it successfully transcends; and by this very process of transcending its earlier stages, gains an affirmative, and, in fact, a richer and more concrete shape’’ (PH, 63). The idea of development emplots each stage geohistorically, joining and separating the history of ‘‘worlds’’ across space and time into a narrative full of cultural and political meaning. It is in contemporary, ‘‘modern time’’—where Hegel’s history ends—that the final ‘‘shape’’ of spirit and freedom are realized. And as Hegel brings his history to a conclusion, he makes an important point that foregrounds the ‘‘cobelonging of politics and culture’’ as Bildung: ‘‘For it is a false principle that the fetters which bind Right and Freedom can be broken without the emancipation of conscience—that there can be Revolution without Reformation’’ (PH, 453). Revolution—the French Revolution 21—has produced new bourgeois juridico-political structures, and 20. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). It seems to me that one of the key implications of this book is the warning that whenever one says ‘‘culture,’’ one is also saying ‘‘race.’’ 21. Susan Buck-Morss has recently suggested that Hegel might also have been influenced by the Haitian Revolution, such that with the section on the master-slave dialectic in his


Reformation—the Protestant Reformation—has produced new free subjects. In Germany, they have come together in a particularly happy way, producing its constitutional monarchy and Hegel’s own Philosophy of History. As mentioned above, this would constitute an ‘‘adequate’’ expression of the freedom of the spirit. In other European nations (and beyond), however, for example in Spain, the imposition of postrevolutionary law is resisted by unreformed subjects—an ‘‘inadequate’’ expression of the freedom of the spirit. This disjuncture between right and culture, between enlightened law and subjectivity, remains crucial as a historical experience: the supposed mismatch (‘‘uneven development’’)—the product of such a developmentalist imaginary—a central concern for many nation builders and postcolonial thinkers as they seek to impose ‘‘modern’’ states and bourgeois ‘‘freedoms.’’ Finally, the idea of development also points to a moment of selfreflexivity in history’s unfolding as it turns back on itself to recover the historical within history from the point of view of state form (or instituted freedom). In this sense, ‘‘development’’ captures time, reducing it to mere means, and eternalizes the historical present by erasing the impact on it both of the past as past—that is, as different from the present because, now, unhistorical—and of the future. Developmentalism may thus be conceived, in Hegel’s account, as the geohistorical consciousness of modernity, which, on the one hand, takes the form of its tradition and, on the other, is promoted as policy. In other words, it is a ‘‘bad modernity.’’ 22 From a subalternist point of view, insofar as Hegel’s idea of development provides the present with a myth of politico-cultural spiritual accumulation, it is also a powerful ideology. Materialist Inversions From its beginnings in China and India, the first two steps taken by Spirit, Hegel traces the history of the development of world history as the Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘‘philosophy burst out of the confines of academic theory and became a commentary on the history of the world.’’ See Susan Buck-Morss, ‘‘Hegel and Haiti,’’ Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 852. By the time of the Philosophy of History, however, Buck-Morss notes that Hegel, who was ‘‘always a cultural racist if not a biological one,’’ had conceded to ‘‘slavery’s continuance’’ (864). There is some debate, however, about whether Hegel’s model is not in fact based on feudalism and its political overthrow. For an alternative view on Hegel and Haiti, see Sibylle Fischer’s recent Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 24–33. 22. See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 115–16. This book has been important for the writing of this essay.


development of the ‘‘State as a realization of Spirit.’’ This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why Hegel recapitulates it at the end of his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, for world history is a matter not only of historical form but of state and subject forms, too. The power and attraction of Hegel’s argument is intimately tied to its totalizing intent and to its ability to combine history, politics, and culture: his philosophically reflexive history of history is simultaneously a history of the reconfiguration of subjects as they are institutionalized juridico-politically in family, civil society, corporations, and state. The idea of development, moreover, endows the ‘‘cunning of reason’’—the unintended consequences of actions—with dynamic continuity in change (necessity). This is the point of Hegel’s history (as against ‘‘original’’ and ‘‘reflective’’ history): to reveal its rational character.23 But this is also the point—Hegel’s panlogism—at which the criticisms of Adorno and Ricoeur coincide, although for different reasons. As we have seen, Adorno inverts the significance of the unfolding of the history of spirit in Hegel’s prose, making it instead a history of the subordination of particulars by right. He suggests, in other words, that we read Hegel’s work not as a history of freedom’s realization but as a history of repressive state apparatuses. In this, Adorno follows Marx’s methodological injunction to ‘‘invert’’ Hegel’s dialectic, which he does so literally by applying it to the work of Hegel himself. Marx, however, did not merely invert, or materialize, Hegel’s idealist history; his ‘‘translation’’ (for want of a better word) also displaces it both socially and politically, shifting attention away from spirit as state form and juridico-political subjectivity, first to civil society (for example, in his ‘‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’’), subsequently to a notion of economic structure conceived as the contradictory combination of forces and relations of production (in The German Ideology—where Marx insists that world history is the product of the market and an international division of labor 24—and the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy ), and finally to capital and the commodity form (in the Grundrisse and Capital ). A constant theme of Marx’s ‘‘inversion’’ is that Hegel’s own philosophical system is itself the product 23. In Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes, ‘‘The necessity in ideality is the development of the Idea within itself; as subjective substantiality, it is the [individual’s] political disposition, and as objective substantiality—in contrast with the former—it is the organism of the state, the political state proper and its constitution’’ (288). For a good account of ‘‘original’’ and ‘‘critical’’ histories in Hegel’s text, see McCarney, Hegel on History, 10–15. 24. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 58.


of uneven development: the economic underdevelopment—or ‘‘backwardness’’—of Germany compensated for in thought.25 Nevertheless, not only does Marx outline his own developmentalist world history, which passes through the same ‘‘worlds’’ as the ‘‘course’’ of Hegel’s, but now as a series of stages conceived as modes of production (oriental, slave, feudal, and capitalist); he also at times seems to have been overcome by Hegel’s prose, substituting capital for spirit or Idea in his account of its logic and development.26 This kind of ‘‘inversion’’ of Hegel is the source of Althusser’s complaint: it is not materialist enough, and Hegelianism remains (although ‘‘on its head’’). Like spirit, for example, capital is fundamentally—that is, substantively—temporal, it ‘‘strives . . . to annihilate this space [the ‘‘whole earth,’’ says Marx] with time’’ 27—its time: in the reality of exchange, the value form is indifferent to difference, that is, it is actualized in difference (which it thus simultaneously erases and maintains).28 On another level, Marx also refers to ‘‘the great civilizing influence of capital,’’ 29 a sentiment that echoes similar ‘‘developmentalist’’ comments made about the French imperial campaign in Mexico, the British in India, the independence campaign of Simón Bolívar in South America, among others, in which European colonial powers act as formative spiritual influences (by bringing their recipients up to date—for example, economically).30 As Arthur notes, Marx’s work is characterized by a fundamental tension between the historicist (developmentalist) and systematic sides of its dialectic—the site in his thought, perhaps, of the contradiction between uni25. For a critique of this position, see Cheah, Spectral Nationality. 26. The experimental Grundrisse’s (trans. Martin Nicolaus [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977]) historical contents on precapitalist modes of production closely follow the ‘‘course’’ of Hegel’s history. See also Marx’s systematic dialectical account of the value form—passing through the commodity, money, capital, and back—in Capital, whose key intertext is probably Hegel’s Science of Logic. See Christopher Arthur’s important The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Boston: Brill, 2002). 27. Marx, Grundrisse, 539. This is an idea recently taken up by Antonio Negri in his account of the crisis—of measurability—in Marx’s labor theory of value in a context of the total subsumption of the social by imperial capital. See his Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2003). 28. At this level, the commodity form needs difference. Thus, contra critics such as Althusser, Arthur, in The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘‘Capital,’’ shows how, from the perspective of Marx, Hegel’s ‘‘Idea’’ is a fetishized rendering of self-valorizing capital. 29. Marx, Grundrisse, 409. 30. Interesting, more or less defensive accounts of which are to be found in Ahmed Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992); and José Aricó, Marx y América Latina (Mexico City: Alianza Editorial Mexicana, 1982).


versality and its limitation referred to by Bernasconi. But Marx is also writing from a newly temporalized world-historical perspective, relocating ‘‘universality’’ as an emancipatory horizon beyond the here and now of capital-andspirit: ‘‘Furthermore,’’ he points out, ‘‘the universality toward which it [capital] irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will strive towards its own suspension.’’ 31 The crucial question here is what kind of subject will secure the historical movement into such a future. Two important ideas suggest that Marx models this account of the expanding developmentalist logic of capital (‘‘it’’) on spirit: first, capital seems to develop out of and through itself (the self-valorizing logic of accumulation) across barriers of its own making; and, second, it strives toward universality and freedom. Both ideas, moreover, combine to produce a developmental logic with emancipatory intent: freedom out of necessity. They do so, however, by negating the eternalized present of capital in the name of a different future present. This is because capital is only self-realizing as exploitation, producing an alienated social totality. In other words, Marx inverts (philosophically), relocates (socially), and retemporalizes (politically) Hegel’s dialectic—such that today, for example, in times of the ‘‘no-time’’ of network capitalism, we might want to think of ‘‘the cunning of capital.’’ 32 At this point, however, Marx’s negation of the present of capital from the perspective of a different future—his ‘‘translation’’ of Hegel—vacates the historical and philosophical locus of both spirit and capital, potentially replacing it with another grounding idea: labor.33 History can now become the ‘‘course’’ of the realization of its principle as freedom. Within Marxist traditions, labor, in a world-historical sense, has usually been represented socially and politically as an embodied subject—the proletariat—considered negatively, that is, as both the product of capital and as its negation (the ‘‘negation of the negation’’ on which capital depends), and thus the subject of a postcapitalist development in history. In Hegel’s words again, only this subject would be an ‘‘adequate’’ expression of such an idea. An important 31. Marx, Grundrisse, 410. 32. See Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). 33. In Spectral Nationality, Cheah shows how labor is the conceptual heir of the organismic concepts of ‘‘culture’’ (Kant) and ‘‘spirit’’ (Hegel). He does not include ‘‘capital’’ in this history.


aspect of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire is to suggest retrospectively that the political figure of the proletariat qua industrial worker, so privileged as the subject of freedom in communist traditions, in fact reified and imposed a specific historical incarnation of capitalist labor as universal (one that, moreover, also functioned as a powerful modernizing image). As we shall see below, such a hypostatization of the subject of freedom—and its cultural implications—is crucial for subalternist criticism, too. Negri’s postMarxist thought, however, also gives the so-called materialist inversion of Hegelianism a further twist. Indeed, in his view, ‘‘living labor’’ (and its political correlate, ‘‘the multitude’’) is a founding ontological force, a constituent power (the power of labor power). Rather than a negativity, it is an autonomous positivity. This is the basis of Negri’s subjectivist (and ontologizing) criticism of what he considers the objectivist teleological trend in Marx’s Capital: in his view, the multitude—neither capital nor the Imperial state—is the real subject of value and social cooperation.34 If, in one move, Negri thus retreats from a positive account of historical development through a succession of stages conceived as modes of production, it returns in another, now political, tone, as he takes over, romanticizes, and ontologizes Mario Tronti’s original worker-centered philosophy of history, conceptualized as ‘‘refusal.’’ In ‘‘The Strategy of Refusal,’’ Tronti observes that ‘‘capitalist power seeks to use the workers’ antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor of its own development . . . exploitation is born, historically, from the necessity of capital to escape from its de facto subordination to the class [of] workerproducers.’’ And more: ‘‘it is the directly political thrust of the working class that necessitates economic development on the part of capital.’’ This ‘‘political thrust’’ is what Tronti refers to as ‘‘refusal’’: ‘‘What are workers doing when they struggle against their employers? Aren’t they, above all, saying ‘No’ to the transformation of labour power into labour?’’ The always-alreadygiven potentiality for refusal is the living reminder that, in fact, the working class, while not the ruling class, is most definitely the historically dominant one; it simultaneously ‘‘provokes’’ the bourgeoisie into existence as a class beyond competition and ‘‘provides’’ capital with its laboring subject. Capital, meanwhile, responds to refusal ‘‘with continual technological ‘revolutions’ in the organisation of work,’’ that is, by generating ‘‘development’’—because, for capital, less (class) is more (value).35 Capitalist development, in Tronti’s 34. See my ‘‘Empire, or Multitude: Transnational Negri,’’ Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000): 29–39, from which I have adopted these two paragraphs. 35. Mario Tronti, ‘‘The Strategy of Refusal,’’ trans. Red Notes, in ‘‘Italy: Autonomia; PostPolitical Politics,’’ special issue, Semiotexte 3, no. 3 (1980): 29–31. ‘‘It is the workers’


view, is thus the result of bourgeois resistance to the power of labor and can be tracked in its tendential subsumption to fixed capital in the form of machinery and planning, the attempt by the bourgeoisie to do away with the labor it depends upon. However, in both Tronti’s and Negri’s texts—including Empire—the figures of the mass and socialized worker-militants have a tendency to become entrapped in the negative—technological and modernizing—image of labor and the multitude’s own historical positivity, that is, in a developmentalism that focuses on and generalizes the experience of workers of the most ‘‘advanced’’ capitalist sectors to the political detriment of others. Development in history thus paradoxically reappears through the back door of the political avant-garde as the future realization of the given.36 For his part, Ricoeur takes little note of Marx’s critical inversion of Hegel’s history in the collective singular, and includes him only in a general ‘‘exodus’’ from Hegelianism. His criticism focuses, first, on the postphilosophical character of modern history and its relation to narrativity, and, second, on the contemporary impossibility of totalization. Both are related, he suggests, in the idea of the rationality of the real, which ‘‘alone authorizes’’ positing an ‘‘ultimate goal’’ unfolding out of spirit’s self-realization as freedom (TN, 195). Scientific history cannot accept such a teleological presupposition, that is, it cannot be so conceptually linked to future freedom (which, in turn, is Walter Benjamin’s complaint 37). Actions and their meanings, Ricoeur insists, can never be read off from the present that produced them, no matter how ‘‘cunning’’ the interpretation: their ‘‘otherness’’ in this respect must be recognized. If this opens up to thought a domain of indeterminate political action, it is not one that Ricoeur seeks to occupy—unlike struggle that materially imposes reformism on capital . . . ,’’ says Negri in ‘‘Labor in the Constitution,’’ written originally in 1964 but not published until the mid-1970s. In this essay, Negri develops the political side of the effects of refusal: ‘‘Labor, as a source of complete social production, becomes a source of the State. . . . Not even right and law can escape its power.’’ In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labour of Dionysus: A Critique of State Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 82. 36. Indeed, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), constantly tends—historically and politically—toward the philosophy of world history it nevertheless refuses, retreating—or breaking down—into a descriptive empiricism of what it asserts to be a unified multiplicity (‘‘the one and the many’’). For Marx, furthermore, especially in Capital, labor is only constituted as a subject by capital (as variable capital); which means that it is only in this form that labor occupies the same conceptual space as Hegel’s ‘‘spirit.’’ 37. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1979).


Althusser. Most important, as we have seen, however, is the crisis in Eurocentrism that upholds both Hegel’s concept of reason and his developmentalist narrative. What Ricoeur’s statement misses, however, is the historical emergence of development as imperial state policy in the years immediately following the Second World War in the United States, from where new—neocolonial—totalizations of the world might be produced, that is, an ongoing history of ‘‘freedom’’ as imposed reformation—more development. As we have seen, the modern idea of development has been central not only to the prose of world history, endowing it with a civilizational grammar and direction, but also to the inter- or transnational experience and administration of capitalism as it ideologically captures historical time and deploys it as means. Recent work on ‘‘developmentalism’’ has tended to privilege this administrative dimension, concentrating particularly on post– Second World War international policy, beginning, for example, with the Truman Doctrine of 1947, which was drafted and imposed in the context of the Cold War and widespread anticolonial struggles, within the parameters of U.S. national security considerations. In such a milieu, according to Arturo Escobar, combating hunger and malnutrition in newly conceptualized ‘‘underdeveloped societies’’ located in ‘‘the South’’ became the prime concern of an emerging power-knowledge formation that would include, for example, area studies, as well as a whole set of knowledges and practices marshaled as ‘‘rational techniques’’ for their ‘‘construction and treatment.’’ 38 In the words of Edward Said, on whose Foucaultian account of Orientalism this critique of developmentalism is modeled, such a knowledge formation is not merely a discourse but rather a world-wide ‘‘corporate institution.’’ From this perspective, the Imperial dimension of developmentalist policy, intimately tied to theories of modernization—such as the well-known ‘‘stages theory’’ of W. W. Rostow, so important for the formulation of Kennedy’s policy response to the Cuban Revolution, the Alliance for Progress— is foregrounded and perceived as a form of neocolonialism in biopolitical mode: it seeks to manage ‘‘life’’ in the so-called Third World. This is the context for the writing of many of the authors considered here, from Althusser to the subalternists, passing through Ricoeur’s recognition of the connection between colonialism and development, as well as Adorno’s own writings, including the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which, from this perspective, arguably constitutes a critical rewriting (in the form of an ‘‘inversion’’) of Hegel’s 38. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3–20.


philosophy of history, as a history of domination, from the point of view of a post-European ‘‘new world.’’ 39 Althusser’s Interruption Althusser was one of the foremost and influential critics of Hegelianism, especially as it had impacted Marxism and the Communist movement. Writing in the 1960s, his work constitutes one of the great structuralist rereadings of the time—in his case, of Marx. Although not engaged with a critique of Eurocentrism, Althusser was, nevertheless, interested in the logics of uneven development. Under the sign of scientificity, his engagement with Marx’s work was designed to constitute historical materialism as a science of the history of social formations established on the basis of its own concepts, free, especially, from Hegelian interference. His anti-Hegelianism was thus central to such a constitution. Two ideas are particularly important here. First, ‘‘overdetermination,’’ which is a transitional concept, Althusser insists, since it is borrowed from psychoanalysis. It is, nevertheless, crucial to thinking his second anti-Hegelian idea, ‘‘uneven development,’’ taken from the Leninist tradition of political Marxism, especially as it was reemerging as a key contemporary concern with Maoism.40 Both these ideas of overdetermination and uneven development then combine to produce the idea of differential historical temporalities—a radical denarrativization of historical development from within a single identifiable temporal matrix (as is the case in Hegel’s world history). Althusser’s conceptual ‘‘development’’ takes place in the shift from the predominantly political tone of For Marx to the predominantly philosophical tone of Reading Capital, and back. One of the central concerns of Althusser’s For Marx is the character of the dialectic that emerges from Marx’s injunction to ‘‘invert’’ and materialize Hegel’s version, and within that, the character of the contradiction(s) that informs and makes a social totality. Althusser insists that, in its Marxist sense, contradiction is never simple, nor is it defined by relations of interiority (that is, as a self-relation) that unfold their essence teleologically. Instead, the ‘‘complex whole has the unity of a structure articulated in domi39. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1979). 40. In my view, Althusser is the theoretician of political Marxism conceived as the expression of the experience of uneven development. Paradoxically, in this regard, one might say that he is rethinking Marxism from within a tradition that emerged from what Gramsci referred to as the ‘‘revolution against Capital.’’


nance.’’ 41 Althusser’s approach thus intends to definitively take us beyond the Hegelian paradigm. Each of the levels of the social totality—economic, political, ideological—is defined with a degree of relative autonomy, and so in multiple relations of exteriority. The idea of overdetermination is crucial here, since it provides for the ‘‘merging’’ of different contradictions in structured relations of dominance and subordination such that ‘‘it cannot be claimed that these contradictions and their fusion are merely the pure phenomena of the general contradiction’’ (FM, 100). In other words, the ‘‘simple’’ contradiction that structures the relations of production, for example, cannot provide the key to contradictions operating at other levels of the social, for example, in the superstructure, because the latter have their own ‘‘consistency and effectivity’’ (FM, 100) (hence, too, the idea of the ‘‘articulation’’ of predefined elements rather than their mediated constitution). In For Marx, Althusser is thus making desperate theoretical attempts to escape ‘‘determination in the last instance’’ by the economic (from this philosophical point of view, a specter of Hegelian simplicity that haunts Marxism’s desire for analytic complexity). In Reading Capital, meanwhile, the ‘‘consistency’’ of each of these levels of the social formation, further complicated by the copresence of different modes of production, is endowed with its own specific temporality. Althusser insists that none may be translated back into a single, all-defining historical time: ‘‘We should not deduce from this that history is made up of the juxtaposition of different ‘relatively’ autonomous histories, different historical temporalities, living the same historical time . . . the ideological model of a continuous time subject to essential sections into presents.’’ 42 This is because the idea that an ‘‘essential’’ spirit may define the whole is, of course, a mark of the Hegelianism he opposes. The social formation is here defined by its radical temporal heterogeneity, whose historical unity qua social formation it is, however, difficult to conceive. Althusser goes on to develop this idea further as an ‘‘aleatory materialism’’ in his studies of Machiavelli.43 Thus, difference buries development—but only for it to reappear, as we shall see, in another political form. As Perry Ander41. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977), 206. I will refer in particular to the essay ‘‘Contradiction and Overdetermination,’’ 87–129. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as FM. 42. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979), 104. 43. Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, trans. Gregory Elliot (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 18.


son suggests, the lack of a principle of unification around a shared ‘‘societal time’’ threatens to leave Althusser with ‘‘a mere empirical pluralism: a variegated host of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents.’’’ Anderson’s alternative is twofold. First, he proposes the formal but ‘‘scientific’’ idea of chronological time. Second, and most important here, he proposes the experience of unevenness in the development of capitalism, which traverses and structures all social formations considered mainly as separate nation-states. He will go on to flesh out this position, for example, in his response to Marshall Berman’s account of modernity, producing a historically more nuanced account of an ‘‘overdetermined configuration’’ characterized by the copresence of ‘‘different temporalities.’’ This is the significance of the idea of ‘‘conjuncture.’’ Coined by Althusser, it gives uneven development a momentary, political unity.44 The concept of overdetermination constitutes an attempt to unify the centripedal logic of uneven development in Althusser’s sense, and does so politically in the related idea of ‘‘conjuncture’’—in other words, it provides for a political totalization of the social.45 In For Marx, Althusser counterposes Lenin’s analyses of the political conjuncture that made the Russian Revolution possible to the antipolitical historicism of Hegel’s analysis of the Roman World in The Philosophy of History. The problem with Hegel’s dialectic is that it is moved by a simple contradiction. And it is simple because it is structured by relations of interiority. Complexity in Hegel’s account, even the multiplicity of determinations configuring any particular ‘‘world,’’ is an illusion, since spirit is self-positing and self-centered. For Hegel, Althusser notes, the ‘‘mighty history’’ of Rome is ‘‘nothing but the temporal manifestation of the internal principle of the abstract legal personality and then its destruction’’ (FM, 102). Furthermore, each present may contain the past, but not as an ‘‘effective determination different from itself ’’ (FM, 102). This is the moment of eternalization referred to above. The concept of overdeter44. Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), 77–78; and ‘‘Marshall Berman: Modernity and Revolution,’’ in A Zone of Engagement (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 25–55. For an overall critical commentary on Althusser and Anderson, see Osborne, The Politics of Time, 1–29. For its subsequent appearance in Néstor García Canclini’s notion of ‘‘hybridity,’’ see my ‘‘Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin Americanist and Postcolonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies,’’ in The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Ana del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 736–59. 45. As Osborne has shown in The Politics of Time, this totalization is a synchronic one, defined by the temporality of the ‘‘instant.’’ Hence the notorious difficulty in Althusser’s account of thinking historical change.


mination, in contrast, refers to a complex unity of contradictions defined by relations of exteriority, mutual determination (in dominance), and thus irreducibility. He writes, ‘‘This is what is irreplaceable in Lenin’s texts: the analysis of the structure of a conjuncture, the displacements and condensations of its contradictions and their paradoxical unity’’ (FM, 179). But Althusser, symptomatically, misses an important aspect of Hegel’s internalizing principle of simple self-realization. In his account of the Roman World, Hegel does indeed foreground abstract legal personality, as follows: The course of Roman History . . . involves the expansion of undeveloped subjectivity—inward conviction of existence—to the visibility of the real world. The principle of subjective inwardness receives positive application in the first place from without—through the particular volition of the sovereignty, the government, etc. The development consists in the purification of inwardness to abstract personality, which gives itself reality in the existence of private property; the mutually repellent social units can then be held together only by despotic power. The general course of the Roman World may be defined as this; the transition from the inner sanctum of subjectivity to its direct opposite. (PH, 281; my emphasis) Abstraction, in Hegel’s history, always implies a form of social abstraction, and is thus very concrete. Here, in particular, ‘‘abstract legal personality’’ refers to the emergence of the principle of private property and its political institution—individual freedom mediated by right. It is the latter, however, that is abolished by imperial despotism. The legacies of both sides of this relation—private property and empire, endowed with lives and a ‘‘consistency’’ beyond the ‘‘simple contradiction’’ noted by Althusser—are, of course, still crucial today, although Althusser may have missed them, blinded by Lenin’s revolutionary conjuncture and the possibility of their abolition.46 The keyword, however, is development. For it is what gives Hegel’s simple contradiction, qua the history of spirit as the history of freedom, the unity and temporal logic of an immanent principle of self-realization. In other words, it temporalizes his history, accounting for what is passed on from one World (‘‘civilization’’ or ‘‘mode of production’’) to the next. Althusser, in other words, misses the very term that structures Hegel’s ‘‘simple’’ contra46. See Hardt and Negri, Empire; and William Spanos, America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). As Spanos shows, private property is not the only legacy of the Roman Empire.


diction, and it returns to haunt his own account of the historical conjuncture. The problem is that such a developmentalist temporalization also structures Lenin’s account of the conjuncture of the Russian Revolution, as well as both Althusser’s and Anderson’s conceptualization of the overdetermined unity of a conjuncture defined by ‘‘uneven development.’’ Conjuncture and Disjuncture The time of the conjuncture is punctual, defined by its discontinuity. This is its political and philosophical point. But it also, arguably, subordinates historical analysis to the instrumental requirements of the balance of political forces (rather than, for example, to the principle of freedom). At the same time, however, a form of Marxist developmentalism threatens to return to temporalize the uneven present with regard to the future. If, on the one hand, Althusser’s politicization of history restores the present’s link to the future-as-other (de-eternalizing the present of development), on the other hand, it reintroduces a continuity—the idea of a revolutionary subject—founded on the developmentalism it negates. Lenin, he shows, was confronted by a complex situation defined by its uneven development: Russia was characterized by the coexistence of the most ‘‘advanced’’ with the most ‘‘backward,’’ and thus was ‘‘pregnant with two revolutions’’ (FM, 97). Althusser lists the different elements that, according to Lenin, characterized the overdetermined moment of the revolutionary conjuncture in an attempt to account for the success of the Bolsheviks: industrial cities, with an organized militant working class, existing alongside the ‘‘medieval state of the countryside’’; contradictions within the ruling classes: aristocratic nobility, lesser nobility, big and liberal bourgeoisie; as well as ‘‘an enormous mass of ‘ignorant’ peasants’’ (Althusser is quoting Lenin), a ‘‘circumstance which dictated a singular association of the peasant’s revolt with the worker’s revolution’’ (FM, 96). As each aspect of the social formation is described, each social class (or fraction of class) is endowed with historicity: some are associated with the persistence of the feudal past in the present, while others represent possible futures. The peasantry, in particular, is emptied of history, because their ‘‘ignorance’’ (lack of political Bildung) means they cannot constitute possible subjects of historical transformation, that is, of freedom, unless ‘‘associated’’ with the industrial workers, who thereby transform mere revolt into social revolution. Proletarian historicity thus depends on a narrative ordering and temporal reconstitution of the conjuncture (connecting it to both past and future), precisely what it was designed to forestall; and so


the ‘‘simple’’ principle of development returns, allocating political roles and organizing the conjuncture historically. In other words, the political and cultural work of ‘‘development’’ appears here to resolve a tension of its own making (to become a materialist development in and of ‘‘development’’): on the one hand, it needs to think emancipation temporally beyond the present, in a way that allows for future difference, while on the other, simultaneously depending on that very same present for the subject of such a future. Two of the latest works by historians to engage with these issues directly are Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe and Harry Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity. If their intellectual horizon is constituted by the concept of modernity, what they in fact offer are not only the usual accounts of ‘‘the experience of modernity in . . .’’ (Bengal or Japan, in these cases) but also a set of detailed, complex reflections on the politics and culture of historical spatiotemporalization. In both works, the issue of ‘‘development,’’ as a key—but ideological—configuration of the time of capital on, and across, an inter- or transnational scale, is central to their critical concerns. Thus, empire also looms large, although differently—since India was colonized and Japan became a colonial power. In this respect, Chakrabarty and Harootunian are cultural historians with theoretical intent. The figure of Althusser, and his critique of Hegelian-inspired historicism, is crucial to both historians’ works. This means that their critiques of the idea of development have both political content and philosophical implications. Via the generalization of Anderson’s conjuncturalist account of modernism in Europe, for example, and with a little help from the likes of Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre for his concept of ‘‘everydayness,’’ Harootunian remains on a transnationalized Althusserian (and Marxist) terrain: the concept of overdetermination is fundamental to Overcome by Modernity ’s theoretical edifice, and the concept of the ‘‘everyday’’ is what gives it concretion as a cultural experience. In Provincializing Europe, however, Chakrabarty takes the criticism of historicism further and arguably looks if not to abandon Marxism’s theoretical terrain definitively, and what he terms ‘‘a politics of despair,’’ at the very least to severely relativize and problematize it (revealing its provincialism), taking flight from Marxism’s own teleological narratives—that is, its ‘‘developmentalism’’ (a sign of Empire)—into the hands of a culturalist Heidegger and reflections on questions of cultural ‘‘belonging.’’ Chakrabarty thus attempts radically to relativize (and spatialize) this tradition’s notion of freedom and its emplotment. The importance of Althusser lies also, therefore, in that he provides the occasion to note a substantive theoretical difference in approach between Provincializing Europe and Overcome by Modernity with regard to thinking the poli-


tics of modern historical time and its historiography: although the concept of historical conjuncture as it is used by Harootunian, as well as the postcolonial concept of difference mobilized by Chakrabarty, marks the limits of historicist (and Imperial) narratives of the temporality of capital, that is, of development, it does so in a different way. Which is to say that if Harootunian advances a critical, cultural Marxist perspective on the temporal experience of modernity, Chakrabarty, for his part, engages with the cultural and political limitations of such a perspective. This, in other words, is the difference between conjunctural and disjunctural critiques of development. Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe emerges from his long association with the increasingly influential South Asian subaltern studies group of historians and critics, whose most well-known members have included Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, and Gyanendra Pandey. According to Guha, the practice of history emerged in India as a colonial project of juridico-political administration and state consolidation, tracing genealogies, lineages, and traditions all the better to recodify them, for example, along the lines of ‘‘the rule of property.’’ In this sense, history has a clear disciplinary ‘‘civilizing’’ character. This is perhaps most clearly apparent in the historical treatment of peasant insurgency, assiduously tracked and documented by the state, for which, in Guha’s words, ‘‘causality was harnessed to counter-insurgency and the sense of history converted into an element of administrative concern.’’ 47 History is, therefore, linked to the state, the colonial state. The point of departure of such a critical ‘‘subalternist’’ perspective, its own key political concern, was that such a disavowal of peasant political subjectivity in history (both historically and historiographically), however modified, subsequently characterized both the nationalist and communist movements, too. The peasantry, and other mainly rural intermediate not-quite class formations, including so-called prepolitical banditry, and their varied forms of consciousness, were denied political agency or ‘‘maturity,’’ that is, they were ‘‘subalternized’’—put into the past for their lack of futurity as their very presence was traced (that is, narrativized out of history, only to be re-presented as ‘‘people without history’’). The work of spectralization, indeed. The sustained reflections of Guha (and other subalternist writers) engage with the European philosophical history of this developmentalist paradigm in Kant, Hegel, and Marx, at both political and philosophical 47. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 2–3.


levels.48 But if, for example, Spivak’s subalternist-Marxist critique of Marx in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason reveals the latter’s developmentalism through a critique of his hesitant ‘‘civilizational’’ use of the idea of ‘‘the Asiatic mode of production,’’ 49 Chakrabarty aims not only at Marxist narratives of transition to capitalism, including such ideas as ‘‘incomplete’’ and ‘‘uneven’’ development, but also at the related ‘‘economic’’ heart of Marx’s Capital itself: the theory of value and the social logic of abstraction. This, of course, is where he follows and exceeds—with a fundamental postcolonial twist— Althusser’s own critical gesture. The idea is to show that ‘‘abstraction,’’ like Hegel’s ‘‘spirit’’—whose history is the history of freedom—has determinate cultural-political content (and is thus not so abstract) that encodes the experience (and, arguably, the misrecognition) of the history of capitalism in Europe as a general emancipatory imperative—the form taken in subalternism of the idea that difference turns against development as more development. This is the sense in which their critique of development is also a critique of the imperial time of capital—its ‘‘spirit’’—and its implications for political subjectivity. If Chakrabarty would seem to retreat from emancipation in his response to such a myth of politico-cultural spiritual accumulation, Guha insists instead on the historicity of that political subject originally expelled from history (if not from poetry) by Hegel in his state-centered account: ‘‘the people.’’ In Guha’s view, the subaltern Indian people, as well as their political practice, exist ‘‘at the very limits of translatability of Western codes,’’ that is, at ‘‘the historic threshold that the so-called universalism of a Eurocentric reason and its engine of global expansion—capital—failed to cross in the age of colonialism.’’ 50 For Guha, the misrecognized ‘‘people’’—the objects of both colonial and postcolonial nation-states, their historical narratives, and their policy (that is, the objects of the total apparatus of development)— nevertheless established an ‘‘autonomous domain’’ from which to historicize anew with political intent. Their ‘‘subaltern’’ character is not just an effect of their apparent subordination and ideological desubjectivization in colonial and nationalist perspectives but also emerges from their nonidentity with the class-based (and industrialized) subject positions of classical commu48. Both Guha and Chakrabarty also criticize the developmentalism of radical historians such as E. J. Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson along similar lines. 49. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1999). 50. Ranajit Guha, introduction to A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xx.


nist theory and practice. For Guha, the notion of a subaltern ‘‘people’’ thus provides for both an alternative emancipatory political rationale and its historicity. It is this latter step that Spivak, for her part, refuses to make, suggesting that its danger may be to relocate the subalternized as subjects back inside the terms of a developmentalist script defined by their exclusion. From this perspective, Spivak insists on an epistemological break that, on the one hand, responds ethically to (and learns from) the political agency of the subalternized, while on the other, refuses to proceed to fabricate a new world-historical subject from them. Translated back into Hegel’s terms, subalternism, at its most radical, constitutes a critique of a political rationality that endows historicity and of a historicity that endows political rationality. That is, of a Bildung in which a particular history as a formative process is generalized as the universal condition of freedom and its subjects in the form of development. Such history, as posed by the logic of capital, says Chakrabarty, is the modern history of ‘‘Enlightenment universals,’’ universals that are fundamentally constitutive of the modern world, of thought, and of futures that ‘‘will be.’’ This he refers to as History 1. Albeit dominant, however, this is only one of the ‘‘many modes of being’’ in the world, of inhabiting a fundamentally— because, according to Heidegger, futural in a plurality of undisclosed ways— heterogeneous present: ‘‘futures that already are there, the futurity that humans cannot avoid aligning themselves with.’’ This he calls History 2. The function of Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘‘difference’’ thus becomes clear in his nonhistoricist history: it seeks to reconnect the ‘‘local,’’ the affective experiences of ‘‘dwelling’’ and ‘‘belonging’’ to universality in a relation of disjuncture: these experiences ‘‘are what makes it impossible to sum up a present through any totalizing principle. They make the ‘now’ constantly fragmentary, but the fragments are not additive; they do not suggest a totality or a whole. The constant and open-ended modification of the future that ‘will be’ by the futures that ‘are’ parallels the ongoing modification of History 1 by History 2s.’’ With regard to Marx: one of Chakrabarty’s suggestions to recover ‘‘difference,’’ a sort of culturalist kernel or ‘‘life-world,’’ within the logic of abstraction in Marx’s Capital, is to read concrete, real labor (History 2)—a labor that ‘‘belongs’’ and ‘‘dwells,’’ stubbornly refusing dedifferentiation, and that lives, so to speak—against the developmentalist grain of the logic of abstract labor (History 1).51 51. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 47–51. As I have suggested above, however, the in-difference of value—including that of commodified (abstract) labor—works through (in-)difference.


In Overcome by Modernity, Harootunian also denarrativizes, and delinks the spatial connections of the ‘‘imperialist chain’’ that attempt to explain the emergence of Japanese fascism from the point of view of the ‘‘exceptional’’ character of its experience of capitalist modernity. His book ferociously criticizes such notions as ‘‘alternative modernity’’ and ‘‘uneven development’’ because, in the guise of radical criticism, they in fact sustain the normative myths of a ‘‘model’’ modernity or of ‘‘even’’ development. A study of Japanese interwar modernism, Overcome by Modernity does not provide an account of the rise of fascism as such but of one of its cultural and ideological conditions: a strong modernist antimodern intellectual formation responding to Japanese rapid industrialization, urbanization, and massification with thoughts of empire, militarism and communalism, authenticity and revolution. Harootunian insists that insofar as modernism expresses a crisis of both political and historical representation (denarrativization and respatialization were, Haroootunian reminds us, modernist tropes) in a context whose horizon is defined by war, conservative and ethnically absolutist critiques of modernity are not intrinsically exceptional and/or specifically national. They occurred not only in Japan (and India, Chakrabarty might add) but also throughout Europe (and not only in Germany, Italy, or Spain) and the Americas. This idea is crucial to his overall theoretical argument. For one of the key points Harootunian makes is that there is only uneven capitalist development. Which means that the capitalist world cannot be spatially divided according to nations that develop either evenly or unevenly, because this would imply the existence of an embodied and locatable model ‘‘true time’’ (an idea, for example, of European nations held by implication in some forms of dependency theory). Uneven development is thus a matter of rates and speeds, but within and across each nation-state, rather than just between them. Japanese modernity is an ‘‘inflection of a larger global process,’’ a ‘‘co-eval modernity,’’ its modernisms (both revolutionary and conservative) the product of ‘‘the jarring co-existence of several pasts and the present in the now of everydayness, often in a relation of unevenness.’’ 52 From Harootunian’s point of view, one might say that in fact the discourse of exceptionalism is itself a powerful form of reactionary modernism. How does Harootunian put the idea of conjuncture to work in Overcome by Modernity ? By limiting, denaturalizing, and repoliticizing the nor52. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). See, in particular, his methodological preface, ‘‘All the Names of History,’’ ix–xxxii.


mative effects of the rhetorics of development (which Harootunian himself at times maintains—he speaks of ‘‘late-developers,’’ for example) such that, now, with Chakrabarty’s work in view, possible futures emerge, first, from a present in which overlapping historical temporalities are gathered (that is, Anderson’s overdetermined conjuncture in which the past persists, the present is in flux, and the future uncertain),53 and, second, from political and ideological conflict, where, the Japanese example makes clear, the ‘‘enlightenment universals’’ associated with the progressive developmentalist history of History 1 will not necessarily ‘‘be,’’ because a mobilized alliance of History 2s—a veritable war machine—might subordinate it to militarism, empire, and the ‘‘communal body.’’ The concept of conjuncture thus relocates difference, and History 2, alongside a dethroned History 1, in a complex and uncertain field of political possibility. From the point of view of Provincializing Europe, however, Harootunian’s work would seem to re-present—and not only in its underlying narrativization of the overlapping temporalities that constitute the space of the present (past, present, and future with their corresponding social and political agencies)—an urban and Fordist-centered conception of modernity that may re-subalternize and ignore, for example, rural laborers (including peasants), who belong neither to a persistent ‘‘agrarian political order . . . with its semi-aristocratic ruling class (in Japan marked by the entrenchment of the emperor, the court, and those oligarchs who could claim the right domainal credentials)’’ nor to an urban-centered ‘‘emergent industrial capitalist system with its incipient labour movement.’’ 54 It is not that those so excluded necessarily represent an alternative, privileged subject of history in this context; it is, rather, that the temporalization involved within the overdetermined conjuncture thus fashioned writes them out of consideration as mere representatives of the past. Harootunian’s response might be, first, to question the ways in which Chakrabarty’s History 2 would seem to be ‘‘immune to the social abstractions of capitalism,’’ 55 that is, to what I have termed the ‘‘in-difference’’ of capital (particularly in its idealized conception of con53. See Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity : ‘‘But what distinguished this conjuncture most in Japan, and undoubtedly elsewhere, was the co-existence of the place between pre-capitalist pasts that had not yet disappeared with capitalism, industrialization in an indeterminate present being lived by large numbers of people in the cities, and, finally, an unenvisaged future that thinkers were trying to imagine on the basis of what had already changed’’ (xviii–xix). 54. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, xix. 55. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, xxvi.


crete labor, whose cultural embodiment only seems to signify disjuncture), and, second, to insist on the resistance to narrative generalization that the idea of conjuncture entails, its sensibility to ‘‘difference,’’ as well as to the political correlation of forces that establishes what ‘‘will be.’’ That, in other words, disjuncture needs conjuncture (which, as we have seen, also seems to need development). What both conceptions reveal, however, is the continuing ideological and conceptual power of the idea of development and the difficulty in theoretically overcoming the contradiction between the promise of freedom and its restriction that it bears.

Political Philosophy and Comparison: Bourgeois Identity and the Narrative of the Universal

Xudong Zhang

1. The Legitimacy of Comparison: Historical, Political, and Philosophical Questions of comparison and comparability emerge whenever interactions between different socioeconomic, political, and cultural systems take place. Whether driven by competition and conflict or inspired by desires for and possibilities of mutual understanding and benefit, questions of comparison and comparability, much like those of politics and law, are existential rather than normative, political rather than formalistic or ‘‘methodological,’’ value driven rather than value neutral. Based on this intuition, my arguments and analyses that follow are premised on the observation that the culturalpolitical struggle for self-recognition and self-identity of the ‘‘bourgeoisChristian form of life’’ (Karl Lowith) after the demise of the Hegelian system serves as a crucial frame of reference, theoretically and politically,1 to con1. See Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). The title of the weighty part 2 (235–388) is ‘‘Studies in the History of the Bourgeois-Christian World.’’ The demise of this world, and overcoming its meaninglessness, is the particular focus of the sections on Nietzsche. boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.


temporary comparative thinking than do propositions of analytical methodologies and disciplinary procedures that purport to bridge, interpenetrate, or transcend social and cultural unevenness and differences from an ‘‘objective,’’ ‘‘neutral,’’ or ‘‘value-free’’ standpoint of ‘‘reason’’ or ‘‘universal history’’ in the Kantian sense. My specific goal in this essay is to offer a historical examination of our assumptions regarding comparative social and cultural studies by placing these assumptions in the older questions—what Georg Lukács still calls the ‘‘great philosophical debates’’ 2—of Self and Other, universal and particular, identity and difference. This is not to give undue credence, let alone ontological immanence, to those largely nineteenth-century German philosophical issues and ideas, but to rethink twentieth- and twenty-first-century problems in their historical and political substance throughout the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, problems with their origins in the epoch of the making of Western bourgeois social, political, and cultural identity. The mutual relevance of political philosophy and questions of comparison and comparability lies in the following observations made by Carl Schmitt in his critique of liberal legal theory in Weimar Germany: ‘‘Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. The norm requires a homogeneous medium. This effective normal situation is not a mere ‘superficial presupposition’ that a jurist can ignore; that situation belongs precisely to its immanent validity. There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.’’ 3 Similarly, for meaningful comparison to come into being, there must be a recognized common ground that allows both agreement and difference to be registered, understood, and acted upon. Such common ground, homogeneity, or unanimity is not something to be wished into being but, as Schmitt describes the ‘‘general will of people,’’ is ‘‘either there or not there’’;4 in other words, it is something to be decided upon by the sovereign of a form of life in relation to its power and legitimacy, as well as vis-à-vis other social beings in the world-historical space. There is no meaningful comparison without the pre2. Georg Lukács, Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin Press, 1980). 3. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 13. 4. Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 14.

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existence of some version of the normal. Under the modern conditions, and in all actuality, whether one likes it or not, the normal can be decided only by the self-recognition and self-regulation of the bourgeoisie as a ‘‘worldhistorical class’’ (Marx). To say that is not to subject comparative studies of societies and cultures to the self-narrative of the bourgeois form of life and concept of right but, rather, to reopen an increasingly homogeneous and normative selfunderstanding of the contemporary capitalist form of state and sovereignty to a history of difference, heterogeneity, and multiplicity that it has never fully conquered, or conquered only in name and form but not in substance. Indeed, to compare, in the fullest philosophical sense, is to face a normdefying chaos, in which what is brought into focus is the Self as well as the Other; it is to introduce, once again, the dialectic of the universal and the particular beyond any ‘‘homogeneous medium’’ and venture into the uncharted waters of ‘‘exception.’’ In this context, exception does not mean exceptionalism as it is used in ‘‘Chinese exceptionalism’’ or ‘‘American exceptionalism’’ but the cracks, gaps, ruptures, and crisis of legal-constitutional rule that reveals the historical, political, and existential conditions of possibility as well as the fundamental continuity of legitimacy and power.5 Thus, what I am discussing here is not only how political philosophy matters to comparison but also how comparison and the sustained study of the Other—the foreign and the alien—matter to political-philosophical explorations of identity, selfhood, and law. In this light, critical-oriented comparative studies is not about describing different stages of rational human strivings toward a Kantian universal history underscored by the metaphysics of bourgeois morality, nor is it a happy, refreshing ‘‘fusion of horizons’’ (HansGeorg Gadamer) naturally taking place along the evolution or expansion of a certain universal Self or self-consciousness. Rather, comparison is, ultimately, about returning to the profoundly political struggle for recognition, power, or self-assertion of one’s collective being, while engaging in a 5. As a ‘‘dialectician of the Right,’’ Carl Schmitt offers a sweeping but useful periodization of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries of the bourgeois legal notion of exception, which is not only specific to debates in philosophy of law but relevant to the larger questions of bourgeois identity formation: ‘‘The exception was something incommensurable to John Locke’s doctrine of the constitutional state and the rationalist eighteenth century. The vivid awareness of the meaning of the exception that was reflected in the doctrine of natural law of the seventeenth century was soon lost in the eighteenth century, when a relatively lasting order was established. Emergency law was no law at all for Kant. . . . That a neo-Kantian like [Hans] Kelsen does not know what to do with the exception is obvious’’ (Political Theology, 13–14).


struggle of existence, reinforcing one’s own myth of identity and social reality in terms of law and state-form. In other words, intersubjective understanding is derived not so much from the hermeneutic model of reading and interpreting a text, or from individual experiences worthy of a bildungsroman framed in single if not homogeneous socioeconomic and religious settings. Rather, it has to involve an extralegal, extranormative, irreducibly historical and ultimately political self-identity vis-à-vis the different, the foreign, and the chaotic. To compare, therefore, is to form, to organize, and to articulate a collective Self in reference to the Other. Thus, comparison in all actuality observes and follows the logic of the political in its utmost philosophical sense. It does not alter the work of such logic in the realm of comparison, for example, if a particular Self claims itself to be truly universal and therefore beyond the dialectic of the Self and Other, universal and particular, that is, beyond politics. Consider the following two polar opposite examples. Marxism searches for a truly world-historical—in other words, postbourgeois—universal in the realm of economy and production. It defines capital as the organizing principle for understanding and changing the modern world. Thus, Marxism’s contribution to comparative thinking lies largely in its emphasis on close analysis of concrete national situations and contexts determined by their own respective historical developments. Such developments, theoretically and politically, are not to suspend, or invalidate, any normative notion of universal law. Therefore, Marxism’s general principles and political agenda acknowledge no irreducible specificities and singularities save those that are determined by capital itself. Theories or methodologies of comparison thus can be derived from Marxism only from sources prior to, beyond, and unlimited by Marxism as social-historical formations and moral-political constitutions. In this observation lies Marx’s recognition of his own situatedness and specificity defined by modern socioeconomic development and political forms of Western Europe. For Marx, any attempt to turn his theory into a general law of historical development is to ‘‘[do] me too much honor, and yet [put] me to shame at the same time,’’ as he remarks in his letter to the Russian journal Otechestvenniye Zapiski.6 It is noteworthy, however, 6. Karl Marx, ‘‘Letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski,’’ in Completed Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1989). Marx’s context is comparative in nature and in reference to Russia’s purported destiny in becoming a capitalist nation on the model of Western Europe. In this letter, Marx criticizes his critic, Russian populist intellectual and editor of Otechestvenniye Zapiski (Notes on the fatherland) Nikolai Mikhailovsky, for attributing to him ‘‘a historico-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on all


that it is precisely Marxism’s analytical and critical rigor derived from and directed toward historical substance, specificity, and situatedness, rather than its general, normative prescriptions, that rendered Marx a powerful and indispensable tool in socioeconomic and political assessments—all of them comparative in nature—which constituted the intellectual core of state formation and the great revolutions of the twentieth century, such as the October Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s battle cry for myth, origin, and the ‘‘eternal return of the same’’ registers a singular rejection of the KantianHegelian notions of universal identity or agreement, be it the metaphysics of bourgeois morality or the Christian theology of ‘‘world history.’’ Rather than recycling the concept of the Absolute as an allegory of bourgeois right, Nietzsche affirms the politics of being of the ruling class, understood in terms of culture, value, and physis. Against the grain of abstract forms of freedom and equality, Nietzsche seeks to transcend historicism and nominalism by tragedy and ‘‘reevaluation of all values.’’ Such an attempt is by no means ‘‘cultural’’ or ‘‘poetic’’ but is fundamentally political, pertaining to the same dialectic of the Self and Other, universal and particular, that corresponds to a radically different historical situation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century than in the age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Lukács, for example, has no trouble seeing through all those ‘‘subtleties and fine nuances’’ 7 of a philosophical genius and finds a decadent and desperate desire to arrest Western imperialist order as immanent in the heightened struggle for the ‘‘great politics’’ that is the ‘‘struggle for dominion over the earth’’ by the so-called master class of the so-called master nations.8 Nietzsche’s class politics and cultural politics interpenetrate each other to such a degree that he is able to define identity and cultural politics in terms of one’s value and one’s ‘‘grateful[ness] to his existence.’’ 9 This is but a way to ontologize political subjectivity through ‘‘cultural greatness,’’ and social change through existential nonchange. But even Nietzsche’s ‘‘eterpeoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are placed,’’ whereas Marx regards his own work as only a ‘‘historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe’’ (200). 7. Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 315. 8. Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 340. Thus, for Lukács, Nietzsche’s effort at overcoming European nihilism by means of ‘‘will to power’’ and ‘‘eternal return’’ hinges on a ‘‘mythicizing of capitalist competition.’’ See Destruction of Reason, 328. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000), 19.


nal return’’ has to be staged in a comparative framework of world culture and difference, referring to the ancient Greeks’ confrontation with Oriental cultures and political forms foreign to themselves; their politics of identity informed by the Apollonian imperative of ‘‘know yourself’’; and their epic struggle to ‘‘organize chaos’’—a chaos that is not just the only ‘‘normal’’ state of the universe but, more specifically, a state of being overdetermined by the irreducible presence of the Other, the heterogeneous, the diverse and alien, the impure, the false necessity of the Self, and so on.10 Lukács’s powerful and brilliant historicization of Nietzschean philosophy as a call on the modern bourgeoisie, which in its decline ‘‘was forced on the defensive,’’ 11 to rise to the challenge in the face of the modern masses demanding their freedom and equality (a trend made explicit by the events of 1848 and 1871), should not merely nudge the reader into a textbook example of Marxist reading of history of ideas, but, more importantly, it reminds us of the specific historical contentions that mark the outer as well as inner boundaries of the moral-political identity of the bourgeois form of life. The Nietzschean ‘‘eternal return’’ is therefore a political construction or invention of the family resemblance between the ancient Greeks and the modern superman as they face their respective challenges—challenges to their identity, their form of life. Here, too, a politics of being simultaneously dissolves, indeed negates, the universal framework of comparison and comparability, and constitutes the historical and political substance of comparative social and cultural critique by affirming the ‘‘will to power’’ of contending parties in the perennial conflict of values and interests. In their radically anti-Kantian and anti-Hegelian drives, the leftist and rightist attempts to overcome the internal contradictions of the bourgeoisChristian world order constitute the political and philosophical core of all questions of comparison, which themselves are a powerful Western philosophical enterprise in the effort to install global control and commensurability of the modern/bourgeois world, an exercise Edward Said eloquently 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,’’ in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 166–67. Nietzsche writes, ‘‘There were centuries in which the Greeks found themselves threatened by a danger similar to the one we face today, the danger, namely, of perishing in a flood of things alien and past, of perishing of ‘history.’ . . . But despite this, and thanks to that Apollonian imperative [‘‘Know thyself’’], Hellenic culture did not become an aggregate. The Greeks gradually learned how to organize chaos by concentrating . . . on themselves, that is, on their genuine needs, and by letting those pseudoneeds die out’’ (166). 11. Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 395.


analyzes in terms of the Orientalist enterprise.12 In today’s ideological and discursive environment of multiculturalism, globalization, flexible or negotiated identity, and universal rights and freedom à la free market, the original homogeneity and intensity of power and human groupings that underscore, support, and drive today’s ‘‘interconnected’’ world start coming back to haunt us not only in the form of political philosophy but in the form of real and vivid executions of power, war, propaganda, police actions, and of the semi-ritualistic ways in which we uncritically attend to the calls of ‘‘daily demand’’ in a consumer-professional society. If those of us who are engaged in cross-cultural and cross-societal understandings complacently indulge ourselves in recognizing similarities or differences in a normative world of, say, ‘‘rational communications’’ (Jürgen Habermas), we risk glossing over the political fault lines along the colliding sociogeological plates that underlie the ‘‘universal’’ world picture—underscored by liberal democracy, individual freedom, universal right, and so forth. We would then lose sight of the substance of comparative thinking and thus its intellectual and political relevance in today’s world. Before turning to more concrete discussions, let me explain two throw-away adjectives used at the beginning of the essay. When I say questions of comparison are always more existential than normative, by ‘‘existential’’ I do not mean ontological claims on essence, truth, and collective selfhood. Rather, the essential is the original (Ursprünglisch); it is something shaped by changing historical situations, as immediate responses to particular passions and recognitions of the age, as well as political and mythological formulations of deep-seated convictions that are themselves crystallizations of historical experiences and anxieties. The very historical and historically determined nature of the ‘‘existential,’’ however, does designate a concrete realm of being, form of life, or ‘‘sudden intensity of human groupings,’’ 13 in which comparative perspectives are embedded in economic, political, religious, and cultural substances. To compare is, sometimes inevitably, a violent process of thinking involving two or multiple contexts, situations, genealogies, histories, and value judgments in their irreducible foreignness to each other and against their comfortable, narcissistic instincts. What the contending parties bring into comparison is, in short, their opposing and antagonistic self-affirmations and self-assertions 12. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 13. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 62.


comprehended in thought in dialectical simultaneity. What is to be achieved in this ‘‘struggle for recognition’’ is a relational truth, not a subjective one. Nonetheless, rather than pointing to a new universal framework of rational agreement, this relational truth, as a temporary overcoming of subjectivism, belongs to the same historical agency or politics of collective being. By ‘‘normative,’’ on the other hand, I refer to rationalistic-formalisticpositivistic thinking in various modern and contemporary fashions, which invariably maintains the validity of atomic-individualistic universality that provides an epistemological and moral ‘‘unified field’’—to borrow the concept from modern physics—upon which comparative study of societies and cultures establishes itself as something scientific, at least rational. However, when it comes to questions of comparison, normative thinking cannot function, indeed does not exist, without reducing concrete human domains and historical formations to various neo-Kantian or Weberian ‘‘ideal types,’’ to be subject to an overall organization of rationality or purposiveness. In such a reduction, the ideological, political, cultural, and religious undertones of the rhetoric of the universal are concealed not so much by its own claim of universality but by suppressing and denying the universal notions of Others now as idealized and abstracted particularities. In this light, to return to questions of comparison, ultimately, is to return to one of the central contentions of modern times over social plurality and unevenness amid global transformations of capitalism; it is to account for the intensified—not decreased or tamed—ideological and political battles between contending parties for power as it manifests itself in terms of class, nation, religion, or culture. 2. Reason, Right, and the Particularities of Universality in Kant and Hegel The Kantian assumptions of the bourgeois Self, in their fervor toward establishing something autonomous and normative, as Nature and Reason, property and right, in one, lie at the heart of the question of comparison, that is, as an often invisible political-philosophical core of identity that gives meaning, albeit a negative one, to difference, disorder, and conflict in reality. At the beginning of his ‘‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,’’ Kant writes, ‘‘History . . . allows us to hope that, if it examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to discover a regular progression among freely willed actions. In the same way, we may hope that what strikes us in the actions of individuals as confused


and fortuitous may be recognized, in the history of the entire species, as a steadily advancing but slow development of man’s original capacities.’’ 14 This paragraph does not explicitly deal with the question of comparative social and cultural studies, but in its normative definition of man’s free will, in terms of slow development of the ‘‘entire species’’ and the realization of its original capacities, the Kantian notion of history marks its totality, which absorbs, indeed suppresses, the question of comparison and comparability. What Kant had in mind, to be sure, is not merely a description or narrative of the slow movement of human development but a formalistic account of the moral imperative that defines the very self-understanding of the bourgeois social being as it is bound by its own particular historical and political development. The centrality of this understanding is stipulated in the fifth proposition of the same article as follows: ‘‘The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally’’ (PW, 45). Kant elaborates: ‘‘This purpose can be fulfilled only in a society which has not only the greatest freedom, and therefore a continual antagonism among its members, but also the most precise specification and preservation of the limits of this freedom in order that it can co-exist with the freedom of others. The highest task which nature has set for mankind must therefore be that of establishing a society in which freedom under external laws would be combined to the greatest possible extent with irresistible force, in other words of establishing a perfectly just civil constitution’’ (PW, 45–46). The historical and political substance and specificity of Kant’s arguments are not to be found anywhere within the legal-philosophical space of ‘‘a perfectly just civil constitution’’ that can reconcile individual freedom of a civil society with ‘‘external laws’’ and ‘‘irresistible forces.’’ Rather, they can come only from an extralegal presupposition of the actual agreement between private property, ownership, right, and law, a presupposition that is historical and political in nature. The Kantian assumptions of ‘‘freedom of the will’’ and ‘‘man’s original capacities’’ have long been subject to critical scrutiny on that initial, idealistic moment of bourgeois self-conception of right as something natural and rational all at once. The proposed Kantian norm and universality of bourgeois reason, once viewed in the politicized social space, once apprehended in thought form, always turn out to be a romanticized, ideological narrative of bourgeois selfhood, right, and subjec14. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41; my emphases. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PW.


tivity. To problematize the notion of universal history cannot but always be a critique of bourgeois identity or self-recognition that serves as the point of departure for any comparison. That explains why, since the late nineteenth century, after every age of revolutionary upheaval and expansion of democracy, there followed a philosophical ‘‘return to Kant.’’ 15 The Kantian motif in bourgeois legalphilosophical self-determination also sheds fresh light on the Hegelian dialectic that at once subjects bourgeois identity to historical contradictions and seals these contradictions within a teleological-narrative enclosure. What remains comparative in Nature has come to be absorbed by the new universal-dialectic development of a state-form as the rational/actual articulation of bourgeois legal and political rights. Precisely because Kant lived in an earlier stage of capitalist development in Germany, he bore witness to a less homogenized realm of value the same way Hobbes bore witness to the early history, even prehistory, of the bourgeois political state. Whereas Hobbes (along with Machiavelli) finds his attentive reader in the twentieth century in Schmitt, Kant has only an absentminded reader amid the liberal rhetoric of inclusiveness, value pluralism, and identity politics in today’s world. At any rate, while confronting legal positivism in early twentieth-century Germany, which was closely connected to philosophical neo-Kantianism, Schmitt was forced to revisit the history of bourgeois legal and political theory, and came up with his own periodization of the concept of bourgeois right and law. Whereas seventeenth-century political thinkers, above all Hobbes and Machiavelli, had a ‘‘vivid understanding’’ of natural law, which defines the modern concept of the political in terms of one’s fear of sudden death, Schmitt observes that this historical substance of politics was lost among eighteenth-century political thinkers, who developed a rational, formalistic, and normative concept of the political around the epochal belief in the Enlightenment. Throughout the nineteenth century, according to Schmitt, various kinds of schematic and programmatic thinking moved modern legal-political frameworks further away from the seventeenth-century natural law (or natural right) tradition and firmly planted them in various ideologies of ‘‘world-historical mechanisms’’ and universal rights. Thus, for twentieth-century positivist-formalist theorists of law and state, such as Hans Kelsen, an exception to bourgeois public and consti15. The case in point would be the ‘‘return to Kant’’ in post-Mao China pioneered by Li Zehou, who, in his Pipan zhexue de pipan [Critique of Critical Philosophy (Beijing, 1980)], offered the first philosophical articulations of some of the central social-political themes of the Chinese 1980s.


tutional laws was not only inexplicable but indeed inconceivable. Yet, as Schmitt maintains, ‘‘rule proves nothing; exception proves everything,’’ since it is in exception that the sovereign reveals its presence, and it is in the extralegal state of emergency, where law and constitution are suspended, that the state reveals the historically embedded continuity of political form and political power that defines a collective social being and its moral identity.16 Such an argument, which, in its concrete historical situation, was made against the liberal faith in the procedural objectivity and autonomy of bourgeois law/right, a faith that seemed to Schmitt to be oblivious and incompetent before the rising threat of ‘‘mass democracy’’ in Weimar Germany, particularly that of National Socialism, is highly relevant to comparative social and cultural studies, which evolve around questions of self-recognition and identity, and which must derive their perspectives from experiences and intuitions prior to and outside of the homogeneous space of the rationalnormative concept of the bourgeois universal. In this light, it is important to remember that Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral-political philosophy is not directed against the Kantian notion of reason, even though Hegel’s political and legal philosophy has much closer ties to the Hobbesean concept of the political. Quite the contrary, Hegel accepts it as a decisive turning point in the history of the modern world, which is, for both Kant and Hegel, a world shaped according to the selfimage and self-recognition of the bourgeoisie as a ‘‘world-historical class’’ (Marx). In Hegel’s Aesthetics, one can find perhaps the best summary of his affirmation of the Kantian position as the ‘‘absolute starting point’’ of modern bourgeois subjectivity, the crucial ‘‘turning point’’ of modern philosophy, and thus ‘‘not to be refuted.’’ 17 Keywords such as will, rationality (in this context, meaning something closer to ‘‘purposiveness’’), and freedom in Hegel’s homage to Kant suggest that what is for Kant a metaphysical question of formal autonomy and moral norm is for Hegel a matter of historical, political, and cultural formulations of a particular social and class consciousness. For Hegel, the challenge of the time was no longer to declare the right (Recht ) of bourgeois subjectivity as both natural and rational, but to seek its dialectical self-realization and expansion through concrete reality. In the face of the concrete dialectical possibilities and complexities of such struggles, Hegel relegates Kantian morality to the categories of ‘‘formal and abstract 16. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 15. 17. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 56.


right,’’ that is, as ‘‘the first mode of freedom.’’ 18 Indeed, he accuses Kant of being indulgent in the subjective sphere but indifferent to social reality (‘‘externality’’). For Hegel, this constrains rather than liberates the development of the bourgeois Self by preventing it from confronting and conquering its otherness, obstacles, and opposition in ‘‘external existence.’’ 19 The route from civil society to universal order is, for Hegel, marked by the intensification and swelling of all social spheres by democracy, individuation, and capitalist division of labor, a journey that includes constant confrontations with the new, the alien, and the chaotic. A theological-narrative organization is thus called into being to provide continuity and coherence to the outward thrust of civil society toward national competitions, overseas conquest, colonialism, international law, and, finally, ‘‘world history.’’ The Hegelian narrative is, therefore, in every sense, a Hegelian management of comparative social-cultural studies in terms of the dialectic of Self and Other, and of the universal and the particular. In this process, what determines the content of bourgeois identity is not the metaphysics of morality but the ethical and political struggles mediated by the bourgeois state. The structural equation between state-form and bourgeois self-recognition and identity in Hegel’s narrative clearly indicates a political-philosophical understanding of questions of comparative study of different social, political, and cultural systems, if only because the presence of the Other is something to be confronted en route the universal development of the bourgeois form of life, something to be acquired by bourgeois political self-consciousness as the content or knowledge of a comparative history of progress and backwardness, movement and stagnation, spirit or concept and dead materiality, freedom and despotism, individuality and undifferentiated collectivity, binaries around which Hegel organizes his by now infamous Philosophy of History. 18. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 63. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as EPR. 19. The sentences Hegel clearly directed against Kant are worth quoting at some length: ‘‘I am then free no longer merely in this immediate thing, but also in a superseded immediacy—that is, I am free in myself, in the subjective realm. In this sphere, everything depends on my insight, my intention, and the end I pursue, because externality is now regarded as indifferent. But the good, which is here the universal end, should not simply remain with me; on the contrary, it should be realized. For the subjective will demands that what is internal to it—that is, its end—should attain an external existence, and hence that the good should be accomplished in external existence. Morality and the earlier moment of formal right are both abstractions whose truth is attained only in ethical life’’ (EPR, 64).


Even here, however, Hegel’s treatment of the histories of nonWestern societies in Philosophy of History can be seen as somehow prefigured in his discussions of ‘‘immature’’ or ‘‘imperfect states’’ in Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The following passage, at the beginning of the section on constitutional law, is particularly noteworthy: The idea of the state in modern times has the distinctive characteristic that the state is the actualization of freedom not in accordance with subjective caprice, but in accordance with the concept of the will, i.e. in accordance with its universality and divinity. Imperfect states are those in which the Idea of the state is still invisible [eingehüllt ] and where the particular determinations of this Idea have not yet reached free self-sufficiency. In the states of classical antiquity, universality was indeed already present, but particularity [Partikularität ] had not yet been released and set at liberty and brought back to universality, i.e. to the universal end of the whole. The essence of the modern state is that the universal should be linked with the complete freedom of particularity [Besonderheit ] and the well-being of individuals, and hence that the interest of the family and of civil society must become focused on the state; but the universality of the end cannot make further progress without the personal [eigene] knowledge and volition of the particular individuals [der Besonderheit ], who must retain their rights. Thus, the universal must be activated, but subjectivity on the other hand must be developed as a living whole. Only when both moments are present [bestehen] in full measure can the state be regarded as articulated and truly organized. (EPR, 282–83) This paragraph—its underlying political-philosophical identity as well as its comparative perspective—has been kept alive in virtually all analyses (including self-analyses) of social-political forms on the periphery or outside the advanced Western European states, particularly non-Western states and what was once called the ‘‘Third World.’’ It is also, not surprisingly, at the center of the ideological struggle between capitalist and socialist state-forms that spanned most of the twentieth century, especially the Cold War period, when ‘‘modernization theory’’ took shape and gradually became a predominant discourse of social development, and when ‘‘area studies’’ as an academic institution and research paradigm was established in the United States, coordinated and largely funded by the national-security mechanisms of the state. By dividing the Self and the Other as ‘‘mature’’ or ‘‘perfect’’ state-forms and ‘‘immature’’ or ‘‘imperfect’’ ones, Hegel’s reflec-


tions on the development of ‘‘civil society’’ and the bourgeois constitutional state reveal the legal and political-philosophical prefigurations for the ‘‘comparative’’ perspective to be applied to the formulations of bourgeois ‘‘world history.’’ The productive ambiguity in Hegel’s passage is more productive when it is concerned with the ‘‘particular’’ rather than the ‘‘universal,’’ if only because the universal, as it is embodied by the ‘‘essence of the modern [read ‘‘bourgeois’’] state,’’ does not have any substance or specificity without ‘‘complete freedom of particularity and the well-being of individuals.’’ In other words, the progress of the universal is defined in real terms by ‘‘the personal knowledge and volition of the particular individuals, who must retain their rights,’’ as ‘‘subjectivity . . . developed as a living whole.’’ In this context, the particular means both particularity and individuality in their unmediated, unreflected state of civil society, which Hegel calls the battleground of private interest, where ‘‘everyone is against everyone else’’ (EPR, 282– 83), and which, on the whole, is regarded as the universal as such. Such a wholesome or holistic picture is attainable only by means of a political conception that integrates civil society and the constitutional state into a union, and by means of an invisible yet crucial division of the inside and outside: inside civil society, particularity and individuality are particular; looking from outside, they are universal. The identity and self-recognition of the modern bourgeois form of life rely on the concept of this political-philosophical unity as much as on that inside/outside division, since the two categories depend on each other. Thus, what is abstractly and formally universal in Kant’s metaphysics of morality and its normative notion of autonomy and law is transformed in Hegel’s philosophy of right into the self-affirmation of the particular, into a narrative of will, action, and poetic disharmony of bourgeois life, as presented in the opening pages of the section on civil society in Elements of the Philosophy of Right: ‘‘Since particularity is tied to the condition of universality, the whole [of civil society] is the sphere [Boden] of mediation in which all individual characteristics [Einzelheiten], all aptitudes, and all accidents of birth and fortune are liberated, and where the waves of all passions surge forth, governed only by the reason which shines through them. Particularity, limited by universality, is the only standard by which each particular [person] promotes his welfare’’ (EPR, 220–21). This is Hegel at his most Kantian moment, talking about the rationalnatural right of self-expansion and projection of power and productivity of the bourgeois form of life, along the course of which everything is rendered particular in ‘‘comparative’’ terms. The affirmative nature of the Hegelian dialectic may be obscured by its internal motion of negation and sublation, and


hence is tilted toward a quick and slippery succession of world-historical procedure, but it was to be recovered by Nietzsche through a ruthless critique of world-historical (bourgeois) ‘‘becoming’’ and his call for ‘‘the eternal return of the same.’’ In contemporary cultural theory, from Heidegger’s return to Being to Deleuze’s philosophy of affirmation, we witness a subversion of the Hegelian system, but only as an internal coup aimed at setting free precisely the same, if not more, historical and political selfdetermination, self-assertion, and creativity thought to be within the original concept of the bourgeois form of life whose experience and time have been rendered increasingly ‘‘homogeneous and empty’’ by the world-historical realization of capitalist ‘‘civil society.’’ The Hegelian narrative might be questioned and rejected at a rhetorical level, but it is bound to repetition and reiteration over and over again in various forms in correspondence with the continued struggle for self-identity of the bourgeois world of life now rendered ‘‘decentralized’’ and ‘‘multicultural.’’ It certainly would recognize its own recapitulation in Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where the dialectic of the particular and the universal, the Self/Other division, along with an anxiety over and obsession with the identity of the bourgeois form of life, is reformulated in terms of Occidental uniqueness and cultural-religious continuity, of the wholeness of the bourgeois form of life as a combination of uniqueness and universality in one. This idealized version of bourgeois universality is presented against the general backdrop of accidental or arbitrary failures of its value and ethic systems, which must be made compatible and in accord with the rational, capitalistic organization of labor (now understood, against Marx, in cultural terms).20 What is consistent between Hegel and Weber, a neo-Kantian, is the willingness to apply the same ‘‘standard’’ of the par20. One will recall the beginning lines of Weber’s introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), arguably his most famous and influential work, which also serves as a prototype of comparative studies across social-scientific, even humanities, disciplines. Weber writes: ‘‘A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural [my emphases] phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value’’ (EPR, xxiix). From this starting point, Weber goes on to offer a series of sketchy but highly illustrative comparisons of Western and non-Western art forms (music, architecture), science and technology, accounting methods, business organizations, legal institutions, and state-forms. The introduction to Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, along with Hegel’s introduction to his Philosophy of History, resides at the innermost core of modern Western ‘‘comparatology.’’


ticular when they confront other social-cultural forms and systems. In this light, every modern study of cross-societal or cross-cultural comparison and comparability measures, implicitly or explicitly, the extent to which nonbourgeois forms of life are articulated and organized according to this politicalphilosophical self-recognition of the bourgeoisie, an identity declared to be the essence of modern political, social, and cultural life. Most contemporary studies of historical, social, and cultural comparison decry such an approach as Eurocentric, racist, and essentialist generalizations. But as long as there is basic continuity of the bourgeois stateform and form of life, the political-philosophical determination of questions of comparison and comparability, much like those of identity, value, law, and politics, is real and substantive, and is not going to be erased by cosmopolitan or border-crossing experiences, mutual respect, liberal sensitivity, political correctness, and discursive performances of hybridity and constructedness. What is problematic in the aforementioned approaches is not their attitude as such but the potential risk of oversight of the historical determination of what is being examined, compared, and theorized. Social and cultural systems, like political forms, legal structures, and philosophical discourses of identities, become meaningful objects of comparative studies only if they are substantively, qualitatively different from what defines the active subject or viewpoint of such a study in terms of its fundamental identity, values, and politics of being. In other words, the object of comparison must qualify as a subject, as something sovereign in its understanding of the universal and its self-recognition. Throughout the history of the modern West, nonWestern societies, as the objects of Western will, suffered from its worldhistorical dominance and universal claims. What is equally important, however, is that as subjects of its own will (to freedom, to property, to global dominance), the modern West suffers from the same forces, historical or ideological, that at once substantiate its claims to the universal and abstract it out, turning it into a formalistic, normative coding of ‘‘universal’’ right (such as equality in name) that does not correspond to its historically inherited circumstances (such as inequality in reality).21 In fact, one of the most powerful 21. It is from this angle that Schmitt drives a critical wedge between liberalism and democracy, arguing that universal equality reflects a modern liberal idea, while democracy exists only where there is a homogeneous, exclusive social being whose internal agreement forms the moral, legal, and political foundations of a state. Schmitt’s famous—or infamous, depending on where you stand—line is ‘‘not only is there equality among equals, unequals will never be treated equally.’’ Radical and alarming as it may sound to the ears of twentyfirst-century scholars, the line is almost a repetition of one of Aristotle’s propositions in Politics. See Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 9.


trends of modern thought, initiated by Nietzsche and continuing through to contemporary debates, is aimed precisely at restoring and ‘‘de-concealing’’ the authenticity of Being—value-driven experiences and beliefs of one’s collective life-form—which seems lost in what Weber has termed the ‘‘disenchanted world.’’ 3. Of Value and Happiness: Universality and Incomparability A different challenge to Kant’s notion of autonomous rationality and universal history comes from German romanticism in general and Herder in particular, which may explain the reason why his influence as a political philosopher was largely eclipsed during the age of German nationalism between the Napoleonic War and the Second World War. While most of the proposals for a ‘‘return to Kant’’ we have seen since the disintegration of the Hegelian system are politically conservative and intellectually mainstream, Kant’s debate with Herder does seem to capture the question of comparison and comparability in its initial freshness and may serve as another point of entry for our critical reflections on ways political philosophy and comparative studies of culture and society intersect in the cultural sphere more narrowly defined. In ‘‘Reviews of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind,’’ Kant warns against ‘‘one-sided accounts’’ of others and calls for more ‘‘ethnographical descriptions or travelogue’’ and ‘‘all the reports in these which can be presumed to shed light on human nature, those in particular which are mutually contradictory,’’ in order to ‘‘plac[e] them side by side and supplement them with comments on the credibility of their respective authors’’ (PW, 217). But the empirical approach does not propose to question the moral-political constitution of bourgeois subjectivity or collectivity but, rather, takes the latter as its ‘‘absolute starting point.’’ The Kant-Herder debate, quaint as it may look to contemporary scholars of area and comparative studies, is in fact a relevant one. True, the question about whether or not ‘‘Americans, Tibetans, and other genuine Mongolian peoples are bearded and merely pluck their hair out’’ (PW, 217) becomes an easily empirically verifiable one, and we do have more exact, even precise, knowledge in those matters. But it was an empirically verifiable problem in Kant’s time, too, and that is precisely the point Kant makes while attacking German romanticism’s ‘‘cursory and comprehensive vision and a ready facility for discovering analogies,’’ and its ‘‘bold imagination in putting these analogies to use’’ (PW, 201). Even though Kant’s call for ‘‘logical precision in the definition of concepts or careful distinctions and consistency


in the use of principles’’ has long lost its philosophical urgency, the precautions he took against subjectivism remain valid and important, as subjectivism tends to ‘‘[arouse] sympathy for his subject—which is always kept at an obscure distance—by means of feelings and sentiments; and these in turn, as the product of weighty thoughts or as highly significant pointers, lead us to expect more of them than cool assessment would ever be likely to discover’’ (PW, 201). In a more rigorous methodological sense, what is problematic in this approach is not so much feelings and sentiments per se but that ‘‘obscure distance’’ they create in separating the subject of study and its own concrete historical conditions. Apart from empirical and methodological questions of gathering and processing ethnographic and travel materials, there are more philosophical questions regarding sameness and difference in studying the Other. Here, as Kant notes, ‘‘the philosopher is at liberty to choose whether he wishes to assume natural differences or to judge everything by the principle tout comme chez nous, with the result that all the systems he constructs on such unstable foundations must take on the appearance of ramshackle hypotheses’’ (PW, 217). Kant’s polemics visà-vis the romantics embodied by Herder are not limited to issues of natural history, to be sure. What troubles Kant is not the romantics’ unchecked empathy, compassion, and curiosity about Others, but rather their less-than-‘‘rational’’ moral and political identity when it comes to questions of community, tradition, culture, and value. But the philosophical crack in Kantian philosophy lies precisely in its failure to provide a rationalist discourse on human happiness, since even Kant was forced to accept that ‘‘it is not even possible . . . to draw a comparison between the respective degrees of happiness or to define the advantage of one class of people or generation over another.’’ Kant calls happiness ‘‘that shadowy image’’ which ‘‘each individual creates for himself.’’ Still, he indicates his faith in ‘‘the ever continuing and growing activity and culture,’’ namely, what Hegel later calls ‘‘world history’’ of the bourgeois class, which is set in motion by and finds its ‘‘highest possible expression’’ in what Kant calls ‘‘a political constitution based on concepts of human [read bourgeois] right’’ (PW, 219). It is in Kant’s early debate with German romanticism (and nationalism) that the missing link between an autonomous bourgeois individual (as abstract property and right in one) and the political constitution of the universal state can be detected. This is the process of that ‘‘ever continuing and growing activity and culture’’ before they, in concept or in reality, reach their ‘‘highest possible expression.’’ The perennial interval of uncer-


tainty, conflict, and contradictions manifests itself in terms of uneven development, class struggle, and cultural politics, which in actuality constitute the substance and specificity of nineteenth-century European discourses of perpetual peace and universal history. The romantic challenge to Kant is, in some ways, not unlike Hegel’s critique of Kant’s lack of a notion of reality, if only because reality as such has a different meaning for the German romantics. Rather than refuting the Kantian notion of autonomous reason and freedom of the will, the German romantics sought to twist the law of enlightened subjectivity toward their own community- and culture-based interpretations.22 When Friedrich Schlegel examines the notion of universality, he sees a ‘‘false tendency’’ in which one’s self-understanding does not go hand in hand with his understanding of others. Thus, ‘‘false universality is that which grinds off all the individual forms of culture and rests upon the mediocre average’’; and ‘‘[true] universality can arise when a simple ray of religion and morality touches and impregnates a chaos of combinative wit.’’ 23 Just as Herder’s belief that one cannot measure or compare happiness according to some rational, neutral, and universal standard, romantics such as Novalis and Schlegel think an individual’s well-being can be achieved only through participation in concrete forms of culture, value, and everyday life, in other words, through communal and collective identity. There is a clear lineage of critique of Kant’s moral principles running from Friedrich Schiller to romanticism, and, from there, mediated and intensified by Nietzsche’s intervention, to Weber’s tragic call on the German bourgeoisie to become a ‘‘politically mature nature.’’ This romantic and existential lineage is summarized by Novalis’s assertion that ‘‘action according to principles is not valuable on account of the principles but on account of the constitution of the soul that it presupposes. Whoever can act according to principles must be a worthy person. But his principles do not make him a worthy person. What does so is only what his principles are according 22. For instance, when Novalis, in his political aphorisms, asks, ‘‘But does not reason demand that every one should be his own lawgiver?’’ he is not embracing the notion of autonomy and rationality in an unqualified fashion but is setting the stage for romantic opposition to Revolution and Enlightenment, more specifically, to civil society and its attendant individualism, and to the rise of industrial-commercial rationality. See ‘‘Political Aphorisms,’’ in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 55. 23. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘‘Ideas,’’ in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, 136.


to him: concepts of his manner of acting, forms of thought of his being.’’ 24 What the German romantics express here is a resistance to the onslaught of rationality as an impersonal, normative, abstract, and homogeneous rule. If Schmitt sees in this universal urge the desire to suspend and negate politics as such, then a comparatist should see in it a tendency to eliminate all that is there to compare, namely, difference based on collective—thus necessarily political—identities. For the German romantics, as for Schiller before them, the fundamental moral question is not about following certain principles and norms but about becoming a certain kind of person. Similarly, when Weber confronts questions of German political economy and German state-form at the end of the nineteenth century, he turns the polemic radically to the sphere of value judgment and cultural identity, and maintains that ‘‘the question which stirs us as we think beyond the grave of our own generation is not the well-being human beings will enjoy in the future but what kind of people they will be.’’ 25 The German romantics, many of them passionate translators and interpreters of foreign and ancient cultures, were themselves practitioners of their beliefs in the multiplicity of communal life and the infinite fullness, openness, and uniqueness of individual experience. The anti-Kantian ideal of romantic life, however antibourgeois (at least in the bohemian sense of the word) in reality or in potentiality, historically does not go beyond Christian divinity in its embrace of a pluralistic and singular universe, as Friedrich Schleiermacher’s writings would testify. Rather than relativizing bourgeois morality, they made it more absolute in order to accommodate the world of existents beyond the Kantian autonomous reason and universal sameness. In this respect, the romantic critique of the universal remains a tacit model and inspiration for multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and bohemian subculture in metropolitan centers of the West today. In more rigorous philosophical and political terms, however, it was absorbed by the Hegelian dialectic in its narrative of the world-historical enterprise of civil society and, in its reluctant combination with modern liberalism, historicism, and formalism, was suspended, if not completely overcome, by the Nietzschean ‘‘evaluation of all values’’ and the radical critique of Christian morality as a form of nihilism. 24. Novalis, ‘‘Philosophical Studies,’’ in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, 83. 25. Max Weber, ‘‘The Nation State and Economic Policy,’’ in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15.


In Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s dialectical narrative functions simultaneously as the political self-narration of an evolving bourgeois subject and as a comparative study of state-forms across human history. The overlap, which is by design rather than by accident, is most stunning in the last sections of the book, which completely melt or metamorphose into the opening sections of his Philosophy of History. In his legal philosophy, while the journey of time begins with property as reason in its abstraction, ‘‘ethical life,’’ or the history of human freedom, moves through family and civil society to the state. This is a process, as Hegel, Weber, and Habermas would all agree, completely and uniquely Occidental. Conceptually speaking, the encounter with the Other, and hence the question of comparison and comparability, does not emerge until after the establishment of the bourgeois constitutional state but consists as an important part of its operation. The Hegelian state, which is the rational actualization or actual rationalization of the bourgeois right, contains in its own dialectic three stages: constitutional law, international law, and ‘‘world history.’’ It is only in the very last stage, namely, ‘‘world history,’’ that the Other comes into the historical and political horizon of the bourgeois subject and collective identity. The last sections (§341 onward, but particularly §355–58, concerning the Oriental Realm, the Greek Realm, the Roman Realm, and the Germanic Realm, respectively) form an outline of the Hegelian account of world history developed further in his Philosophy of History (EPR, 377–80). ‘‘World history’’ thus conceived is indeed contained within the concept of the bourgeois right and the capitalist state, as a mere function of human— bourgeois—freedom. 4. Struggle for Recognition and the Politics of Being With respect to Hegel’s dialectic of Self and Other, comparative thinking, when it reaches its political-philosophical intensity, will necessarily entail a ‘‘life-and-death struggle’’ for survival, freedom, and mutual recognition between two ‘‘self-conscious individuals’’ as figures of competing historical claims of the universal: They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth, both in the case of the Other and in their own case. And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it


appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-itself. . . . Just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek the other’s death, for it values the other no more than itself; its essential being is present to it in the form of an ‘‘other,’’ it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its selfexternality. The other is an immediate consciousness entangled in a variety of relationships, and it must regard its otherness as a pure being-for-itself or as an absolute negation.26 The moral significance, for both political philosophy and comparative social and cultural studies, to be sure, lies in the understanding of the natural-law determinations of so-called world-historical or universal processes. Hegel did not shy away from stipulating his method of comparison with reference to this world-historical framework: [Legal determinations and objective institutions of the absolute right of the Idea entitle] civilized nations to regard and treat as barbarians other nations [Nationen] which are less advanced than they are in the substantial moments of the state (as with pastoralists in relation to hunters, and agriculturalists in relation to both of these), in the consciousness that the rights of these other nations are not equal to theirs and that their independence is merely formal. . . . Consequently, in the wars and conflicts which arise in these circumstances, the feature which lends them significance for world history is the fact [Moment] that they are struggles for recognition with reference to a specific content [Gehalt ]. (EPR, 376) This is, of course, a familiar statement and an easy target for contemporary liberal discourse of inclusion and respect, something today’s postcolonial discourse seeks to critique by appealing to racial, cultural, and religious equality, in fact, to the Kantian idea of universal civil society, yet without touching on the political-philosophical core of the sovereign bourgeois subject as a class-based, value-driven identity or self-consciousness.27 It is important for contemporary critical practices to force the egocentric discourse of the bourgeois subject into the culturally, racially, and religiously 26. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 113–14. 27. See Dipesh Charkrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).


diverse and pluralistic sphere of comparison. Yet to understand political intensity and moral-religious idiosyncrasy of the bourgeois subject is not merely to see it, ultimately—politically—as both homogeneous and exclusive, as Schmitt argues, but also to capture its politico-economic truth in a more or less classical Marxist fashion. It is important to remember that Hegel not only formulates the ‘‘content’’ of the bourgeois form of life in political terms, that is, in terms of state-form; he also offers a narrative of the world-historical expansion of civil society running parallel to Adam Smith’s political economy of modern times. It is no exaggeration to say that the following passages on civil society from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right prefigure Marx’s presentation of world capitalism in the Communist Manifesto: The inner dialectic of [civil society] . . . drives it to go beyond its own confines and look for consumers, and hence the means it requires for subsistence, in other nations [Volkern] which lack those means of which it has a surplus or which generally lag behind it in creativity, etc. . . . Just as the earth, the firm and solid ground, is a precondition of the principle of family life, so is the sea the natural element for industry, whose relations with the external world it enlivens. By exposing the pursuit of gain to danger, industry simultaneously rises above it; and for the ties of the soil and their limited circles of civil life with its pleasures and desires, it substitutes the element of fluidity, danger, and destruction. Through this supreme medium of communication, it also creates trading links between distant countries, a legal [rechtlichen] relationship which gives rise to contracts; and at the same time, such trade [Verkehr ] is the greatest educational asset [Bildungsmittel ] and the source from which commerce derives its world-historical significance. (EPR, 267–68) Hegel’s marvel before modern capitalist economic activity conceals in itself a prototype of modern and contemporary comparative studies. In fact, a comparative world picture comes into being only through the enterprise of modern bourgeois nations that suture the isolated forms of life together in their subject-space. Hegel goes on: . . . river basins are inhabited by a single tribe or people, but also, for example, from the relations which existed in former times between Greece, Ionia, and Magna Graecia, between Brittany and Britain, between Denmark and Norway, Sweden, Finland, Livonia, etc.; it is also particularly clear when we contrast this with the lesser degree


of contact between the inhabitants of coastal territories and those of the interior. But in order to appreciate what an educational asset is present in the link with the sea, one should compare the relationship to the sea of those nations in which creativity has flourished with those which have shunned navigation and which, like the Egyptians and Indians, have stagnated internally and sunk into the most appalling and miserable superstition; one should likewise note how all great and enterprising nations push their way to the sea. (EPR, 268–69) In other words, economic globalization engaged by the capitalist energies of civil society, compounded by the homogenization and intensification of value judgment and the ‘‘politics of being’’ of a form of life bound by the bourgeois Rechtstaat, constitutes the duality and internal differentiation of the bourgeois subject, for which a comparative study of world history and a narrative account of its own ‘‘phenomenology of mind’’ are one and the same thing. Therefore, a rigorously critical account of Hegel’s philosophy of history must focus on the political-philosophical identity of the bourgeois form of life as a whole, more precisely, on such identity’s absorption of historical time and historical reality into its self-narration, universalization, and the normativization of its subject-position and value system, rather than rely on a simple rejection of the nation-state as the unit or building block of historical analysis. Even though various illegitimate claims of bourgeois universality are formulated through the bourgeois nation-state and its colonial, imperialist, or imperial expansion, they are nevertheless rooted in social beings or forms of life in their irreducible concreteness and complexities, and thus are themselves existential-political rather than normative, formal, abstract, and mechanical. Questions of comparison and comparability, by shifting their perspectives from those linear, teleological, and mono-contextual problematics, discourses, procedures, and schemes—in other words, the purely economic frame of reference—are well positioned to take on the tasks posed but unfinished by modern and political philosophy, such as identity, value judgment, struggle for recognition, power, self-affirmation, and politics of being-in-the-world. Undertaking such an intellectual task requires comparative thinking to be able to unpack the historical and ideological construct of the nation-state, not to take it at face value, disapprovingly or not. That would mean capturing the political-philosophical contradictions of the historical substance, for which the nation-state has been but an expression and orga-


nization of the collective will of a collective being. The abstraction and formalization of that will and being are the work of modern capitalist society and its normative, positivistic, and formalistic thought forms, which offer little to a historical or political understanding of the bourgeois Self and its Others. This, however, offers insight into the prehistory or universal norms available to the great bourgeois thinkers at those transitional moments of the great bourgeois revolution and social upheaval but, alas, denied to those whose worldview is shaped by a relatively long period of bourgeois peace, order, prosperity, and growth. Yet, comparative thinking requires constant revisit, if only at the conceptual level and in a historiographical manner, to those moments of crisis, instability, conflict, contention, and contradictions in order to claim its true content out of those reinforced boundaries and ossified spaces, revealing those unsettled contested borders, confusing or conflating identities, painful losses and precarious victories that sustain the universal claims of nation-states, empires, and civilizations. When Hegel narrates the world history of the bourgeois subject, the nation-state is neither the organizing principle nor the narrative viewpoint. As a mere character in the drama of world spirit, the nation-state is by no means an autonomous, formalistic entity obeying its own principles but, rather, a medium of historical forces, in the same way that individual heroes are mere agents of forces not so much larger as often invisible to themselves. The sovereign nature of the nation-state, as well as the state of Nature in which nation-states exist, is but a recapitulation of the riot of disharmonious energies of civil society beyond the borders of the constitutional state. Instead of making a fetish out of the nation-state, Hegel prefers to talk about the ‘‘ethical world,’’ a world that consists of ‘‘particular entities in their mutual relations,’’ which ‘‘encompass the ceaseless turmoil not just of external contingency, but also of passions, interests, ends, talents and virtues, violence [Gewalt ], wrongdoing, and vices in their inner particularity’’ (EPR, 371). He continues: In this turmoil, the ethical whole itself—the independence of the state—is exposed to contingency. The principles of the spirits of nations [Volksgeister ] are in general of a limited nature because of that particularity in which they have their objective actuality and selfconsciousness as existent individuals, and their deeds and destinies in their mutual relations are the manifest [erscheinende] dialectic of the finitude of these spirits. It is through this dialectic that the universal spirit, the spirit of the world, produces itself in its freedom from all


limits, and it is this spirit which exercises its right—which is the highest right of all—over finite spirits in world history as the world’s court of judgment [Weltgericht ]. (EPR, 371) Even though Hegel accepts Kant’s notion of autonomous reason as an absolute starting point of modern philosophy, the Hegelian concept of the universal is different from Kant’s notion of ‘‘universal history’’ and ‘‘perpetual peace’’ in a crucial sense. It refutes Kantian idealism as abstract and normative, and regards Kantian universal law, or the ‘‘so-called law of reason,’’ as hopelessly relying on a ‘‘formal identity’’ that is the ‘‘consonance of the arbitrary will of one individual with that of the other’’ (EPR, 58). Unlike Kant, who wishes to secure the autonomy of reason against the assault of a hostile Nature—a social allegory for the arbitrary power of monarchy—Hegel insists on the significance of historical and cultural continuities, and on viewing law or science of right as ‘‘[having] a determinate starting point, which is the result and truth of what preceded it.’’ For Hegel, ‘‘the concept of right, so far as its coming into being is concerned, falls outside the science of right; its deduction is presupposed here and is to be taken as given’’ (EPR, 26). This is to maintain the validity of extralegal and nonnormative origins and conditions of modern bourgeois institutions of law and state. The word deduction may sound modest for someone of Hegel’s philosophical ambition, but in fact it highlights one of the most confident, even arrogant features of classical bourgeois thinking based on a politically real and historically substantial concept of the subject. The concept of the bourgeois subject, along with the so-called world history created after its own image, must be accepted by today’s scholars in comparative and area studies as a given, a historical and philosophical starting point even for the radical critique and subversion of the universal claims of such subject. This is not merely negative determination. Cross-societal and cross-cultural comparisons are not something to be prescribed by a universal framework of meaning, normality, or neutrality, and they are not something automatically produced by an intersubjective position or perspective. It is not intersubjectivity, Habermasian or otherwise, that guarantees new understanding and harmony through rational and transparent communications. Rather, at the intersection of political philosophy and questions of comparison, one realizes that true critical comparative thinking must already be requiring, anticipating, prefiguring, even formulating a new subjectivity beyond the political and cultural identity of the bourgeois Self. By translating between


different forms of life and different historical situations, comparison, as a part of the narrative of totality, must always be listening to another ‘‘national allegory’’ 28 and hearing ‘‘our own collective story vibrating within it.’’ 29 To compare, ultimately, is to collect and absorb the longing outcries from distant horizons into a new politics of being for the here and now.

28. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,’’ Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–88. 29. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.

The Genealogy of a Positivist Haunting: Comparing Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology

George Steinmetz

This essay asks two related questions about the discipline of sociology in the United States during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The first of these questions is historical and comparative, and relates to the dominant epistemological 1 orientation in U.S. sociology in the two decades after World War II. What accounts for the postwar narrowing of sociology’s epistemological and methodological diversity, or more precisely, for the shift from a relative balance between nonpositivist and positivist orientations in the interwar period to a clear positivist dominance of the discipline? A second and related problem is a counterfactual one and concerns U.S. sociology’s substantive geographic focus, its emphasis on the United States to the relative exclusion of the rest of the world. Why did U.S. sociI would like to thank Hyun Ok Park, Harry Harootunian, and Craig Calhoun for comments on an earlier version of this paper. 1. I will use the adjective epistemological in this essay as shorthand to encompass ontological and methodological issues as well, except when specified; see my ‘‘American Sociology’s Epistemological Unconscious and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Case of Historical Sociology,’’ in Remaking Modernity, ed. Julia Adams, Elisabeth Clemens, and Ann Orloff (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 109–57. boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.


ologists remain focused on their own country, or treat the rest of the world in ways that disavowed or obliterated its difference from the United States? Why did they persist in this provincialism during a period in which the geographic reach of U.S. global empire was expanding exponentially? In approaching the history of a discipline such as sociology, it is best to examine both the ‘‘internal or autonomous forces that shape the development of scientific inquiry on the one hand and those that arise externally in the cultural or social milieus of that scientific enterprise on the other.’’ 2 More specifically, I will theorize sociology here ‘‘internally’’ in terms of its fieldlike qualities (or lack thereof) in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, asking about the emergence of recognized or agreed-upon definitions of unequally distributed social-scientific capital. But such a field-level analysis cannot explain why one particular definition of scientific distinction—in this case, the methodological-positivist definition—was able to ascend to paramountcy only after World War II. By the same token, Bruno Latour’s approach can tell us what sorts of strategies scientists are likely to use in seeking scientific capital, but it cannot explain why the same techniques fail in one historical period and succeed in another. The external determinant that is emphasized in most of the literature on the sociology of the social sciences is money. The story of the rise of scientism and ‘‘big social science’’ has often emphasized the influx of federal funding after 1945.3 While this was certainly part of the conjunctural mix that helped the methodological positivists achieve preeminence, it was not enough. The explosion of funding for social science framed as a natural science was itself part of a broader societal-level formation that arose after the war: Fordism. Analyzing the relations between social science and Fordism is a corrective to the rigid distinction between ‘‘internalist’’ and ‘‘externalist’’ approaches in science studies, insofar as the internal workings of social science were directly linked to some of the more encompassing patterns of social life. Yet even this is too one-sidedly economistic. An additional process that prepared the ground for positivism’s sweeping victory inside sociology after 1945 has to do with the spontaneous social epistemologies that 2. Neil Smelser, ‘‘External Influences on Sociology,’’ in Sociology and Its Publics, ed. Terence C. Halliday and Morris Janowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 43. 3. See especially Stephen Park and Jonathan H. Turner, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990). For a parallel analysis of anthropology in this period, see David H. Price, ‘‘Subtle Means and Enticing Carrots: The Impact of Funding on American Cold War Anthropology,’’ Critique of Anthropology 23, no. 4 (2003): 373–401.

Steinmetz / Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology 111

were encouraged by Fordism. Sociologists were themselves participants in everyday forms of Fordist societalization (Vergesellschaftung) and individual structures of socialization. Sociologists’ intuitive images of the social became more closely aligned with positivism than had been the case before the war.4 1. Methodological Positivism in U.S. Sociology Before and After World War II: From Epistemological Diversity to an Organized Field U.S. sociology before 1945 already had a powerful positivist wing. By ‘‘positivism’’ I am referring neither to the philosophical doctrines of logical positivism nor to Auguste Comte’s version, but instead to a historically specific set of practices, conventions, and assumptions about knowledge of the social. Elsewhere I have argued that this cluster can best be characterized as ‘‘methodological positivism.’’ 5 This formation emerged between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, and it continues to evolve and flourish in the social sciences today.6 Its most important features are (1) an epistemological commitment to covering laws, that is, to the identification of Humean ‘‘constant conjunctions’’ of empirical events; (2) an empiricist ontology (although this aspect has become somewhat less central in recent decades with the ascendance of rational choice theory, which is often anti-empiricist); and (3) a set of scientistic assumptions stemming from the belief that the methods of the human and the natural sciences should be identical. This third premise has meant that the objects and practices studied by sociologists were treated as brute material facts whose identity was independent of what people thought about them. It also meant that ‘‘social facts,’’ like natural ones, were subject to ‘‘invariable natu4. This resonance between positivism and environing patterns of social regulation has come partly out of joint under present-day post-Fordism, a problem I address in ‘‘Scientific Authority and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Plausibility of Positivism in U.S. Sociology Since 1945,’’ in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). 5. Alternative terms that attempt to capture a similar cluster of disciplinary characteristics include instrumental positivism and objectivism. 6. For a comparative account of the versions of positivism that have prevailed in the various U.S. social science disciplines, see my introduction to The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences. See also the recent work of Immanuel Wallerstein, which has stimulated some social scientists to rethink their ‘‘nineteenth-century’’ assumptions.


ral Laws’’ (Comte) independent of time and place. Methodologically, scientism also suggested that the human sciences should strive to become quantitative and experimental. Finally, it was held that normative evaluations should not (and do not) impinge on social facts. This complex of elements constituted sociology’s prevailing version of methodological positivism. Certain features were stressed more than others by different sociologists and in different times, places, and texts. But the core of this formation, the element without which it could not be called positivist in an epistemological sense, was the commitment to the discovery of general laws of social action. With respect to this, the positions of the ostensibly antipositivist sociologist Talcott Parsons and his explicitly positivist opponents between the 1930s and the 1950s were indistinguishable.7 Just as Rudolf Carnap and other logical positivists began to distance themselves from strict empiricism by the end of the 1930s, acknowledging that scientific concepts could not be reduced to ‘‘sense-data,’’ social scientists have been happy to reconstruct the idea of the general law as linking a depth-realist ‘‘mechanism,’’ such as human rationality or the ‘‘mode of production,’’ to surface-level events in a regular, lawlike way. And epistemically dissident movements in sociology have been repeatedly channeled back in the direction of the ‘‘natural sciences’’ approach. Some have argued that a positivist syndrome already dominated U.S. sociology during the first half of the twentieth century.8 According to Stephen Turner, positivist premises have been passed on tacitly from generation to generation, starting with the founder of Columbia University’s sociology department, Franklin Giddings, through to the leading figures of present-day sociology.9 During the interwar period, an increasing number of sociologists 7. Contrast, for example, Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, vol. 2 (1937; repr., New York: Free Press, 1949), 774, and the writings of George Lundberg, including ‘‘The Natural Science Trend in Sociology,’’ American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (November 1955): 191–202. 8. See Robert C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Christopher Bryant, Positivism in Social Theory and Research (New York: Macmillan, 1985); and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9. Turner stresses that Giddings trained numerous students who then went on to occupy leading roles in sociology departments around the country; see ‘‘The Origins of ‘Mainstream Sociology’ and Other Issues in the History of American Sociology,’’ Social Epistemology 8, no. 1 (January–March 1994): 41–67. The other leading early sociology department, at the University of Chicago, was founded by Albion Small, who had been exposed to the ‘‘humanistic’’ side of the nineteenth-century ‘‘methods struggle’’ in Germany but later


endorsed the idea that sociology should pattern itself on the natural sciences. In his presidential address to the American Sociological Society in 1926, for example, John L. Gillin declared that ‘‘the application of the scientific method and the increased emphasis upon objective data have been acting as selective agents in consigning these enemies of sociology’’—social theorists and social activists—‘‘to a deserved innocuous desuetude.’’ 10 Viennese logical positivism began making inroads into the sociological scene, even if the philosophers’ more explicit appeals to social scientists came after World War II (culminating in Ernest Nagel’s widely read The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation [1961]).11 Sociology textbooks from this era also typically recommended emulating the natural sciences.12 A closer examination suggests, however, that positivism was far from hegemonic in U.S. sociology before 1945. The discipline was particularly riven during the ideologically turbulent 1930s, which saw discussions of the putative links between positivism and fascism and of the need to reconnect sociology with the humanities and social activism.13 In addition to the wrenching social disruptions and vibrant political movements outside the academy and the new ideas brought by exiles from Europe, the discipline was also diversified somewhat in terms of its personnel, which became less rural and Protestant (even though it remained overwhelmingly white and embraced a scientific naturalism; see E. R. Fuhrman, ‘‘Images of the Discipline in Early American Sociology,’’ Journal of the History of Sociology 1, no. 1 (Fall 1978): 91–116. 10. At http://www.asanet.org/governance/GillinPresidentialAddress.pdf. 11. See Jennifer Platt and Paul Hoch, ‘‘The Vienna Circle in the USA and Empirical Research Methods in Sociology,’’ in Forced Migration and Scientific Change: Émigré GermanSpeaking Scientists and Scholars After 1933, ed. Mitchell G. Ash and Alfons Söllner (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1996), 224–45. 12. E. Doyle McCarthey and Robin Das, ‘‘American Sociology’s Idea of Itself: A Review of the Textbook Literature from the Turn of the Century to the Present,’’ History of Sociology 5, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 27–30. 13. On arguments for a connection between fascism and positivism in this period, see Robert C. Bannister, ‘‘Principle, Politics, Profession: American Sociologists and Fascism, 1930–1950,’’ in Sociology Responds to Fascism, ed. Stephen P. Turner and Dirk Käsler (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 172–213. Many writers acknowledge sociology’s epistemic rivenness in the 1930s but treat it as a sign of the field’s immaturity or as an ‘‘identity crisis’’; see Henrika Kucklick, ‘‘A ‘Scientific Revolution’: Sociological Theory in the United States, 1930–1945,’’ Sociological Inquiry 43, no. 1 (1973): 3–22. I discuss the 1930s in more detail in my article ‘‘American Sociology Before and After World War Two: The (Temporary) Settling of a Disciplinary Field,’’ in The History of Sociology in America, ed. Craig Calhoun (Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association, forthcoming).


male). The methodological domination of U.S. sociology by the Chicagostyle case study declined in this decade, ushering in a theoretical interregnum.14 The positivists clamorously attacked ‘‘grand theory’’ (which usually, after 1937, referred to Parsons) and interpretive case studies, and promoted quantitative analyses based on surveys or experiments. Physics began to replace biology as the obscure (or not-so-obscure) object of desire. But the field remained in an unsettled, pluralistic state until after 1945. In retrospect, it is also clear that this was one of the more fruitful periods for sociology in the United States, yielding such classics as Robert S. Lynd’s Knowledge for What? (1939), Robert K. Merton’s essays on Puritanism and modern science, Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, and C. Wright Mills’s early essays on theory. U.S. sociology before 1945 was not a well-ordered or hegemonized field. But the difference from the postwar period does not have to do with the availability of the ideas and procedures that would become dominant. These were all present in the interwar era. What differed was the effective deployment of methodological positivism as a general measure for scientific capital. During the two postwar decades, positivist definitions of fieldspecific honor came to be universally recognized by all members of the disciplinary field, even if they did not adopt or appreciate it. The dominated sectors developed a ‘‘feel for the game’’ and a ‘‘sense of their place’’ (Bourdieu). Edward Shils stated explicitly what usually remained tacit knowledge, that, with respect to the discipline, ‘‘inferiors, however much they scoff, know their betters.’’ 15 Decades later, Bourdieu described U.S. sociology in similar terms (although he was critical rather than celebratory), concluding that ‘‘a survey on power in the scientific field could perfectly well consist of . . . epistemological questions alone.’’ 16 It is important to emphasize that a settled field is not internally homogeneous, contrary to strong arguments about paradigms or hegemony. 14. Norbert Wiley, ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Dominating Theories in American Sociology,’’ in Contemporary Issues in Theory and Research, ed. William E. Snizek, Ellsworth R. Fuhrman, and Michael K. Miller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), 47–83; and Patricia Madoo Lengermann, ‘‘The Founding of the American Sociological Review : The Anatomy of a Rebellion,’’ American Sociological Review 44, no. 2 (April 1979): 185–98. 15. Edward Shils, ‘‘The Calling of Sociology,’’ in Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, ed. Talcott Parsons et al. (New York: Free Press, 1961), 1405, 1410. 16. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘The Specificity of the Scientific Field,’’ in French Sociology: Rupture and Renewal Since 1968, ed. Charles C. Lemert (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 257–92.


Instead, a certain multivocality of discourse, perception, and practice is one of the very preconditions for the organization of power differentials within any field. All social fields operate via universally acknowledged definitions of distinction and scientific capital. Without some intellectual diversity, such as disagreements on epistemology, methodology, and theory, there would be no raw materials that strategies of domination could sink their claws into and wield as weapons of differentiation or distinction. Indeed, it is likely that new differences will be invented even in fields in which old inequalities have been eradicated. The opposite of a well-structured field is not a more heterogeneous one but rather a congeries of practices that are not governed by any one definition of symbolic capital. This means that a historical sociology of sociology cannot demonstrate the existence of a genuinely open state of affairs simply by pointing to divisions, conflicts, or dissidents such as Mills after 1945. The fact that there were as many opponents as supporters of the ‘‘natural science’’ approach among presidents of the American Sociological Society/American Sociological Association does not tell us much about the field’s internal power structure. The situation in sociology before 1945 was not just internally ‘‘diverse.’’ This was also a period in which vigorous criticism by respected intellectuals outside the field, such as John Dewey, was directed against methodological positivism. Friedrich von Hayek warned against the dangers of ‘‘scientism,’’ which he summarized as a ‘‘slavish imitation of the method and language of Science.’’ 17 Even the Sociological Research Association— an invitation-only professional group formed in 1936 in response to battles within the American Sociological Society—was divided between ‘‘valueneutral’’ positivists and more interpretivist types.18 The leading departments in this period—those that produced and exchanged the most PhD’s and were ranked highest—were epistemologically divided.19 Sociology’s lack of ‘‘fieldness’’ before 1945 is also revealed by the contents of the American Sociological Review, where the representation of theoretical articles 17. Friedrich A. von Hayek, ‘‘Scientism and the Study of Society (Part 1),’’ Economica 9, no. 35 (August 1942): 268. 18. Richard Evans, ‘‘Sociological Journals and the ‘Decline’ of Chicago Sociology: 1929– 1945,’’ History of Sociology 6–7 (1986–87): 123; Bannister, Sociology and Scientism, 189, 218. 19. These departments were at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and (before 1945) the University of Minnesota. I discuss these departments and Berkeley’s new sociology department, which was created after World War II, in ‘‘American Sociology.’’


declined only gradually and articles appeared on topics such as psychoanalysis, ‘‘imagination in social science,’’ Lenin’s theory of revolution, and anthropological theories of culture.20 Widely read texts were epistemically ambivalent or multivocal. Parsons rejected ‘‘positivism,’’ but at the same time he insisted that sociology’s goal should be the discovery of ‘‘analytical laws’’ that state ‘‘a uniform mode of relationship between the values of two or more analytical elements.’’ 21 Parsons’s ego ideal for sociology was economics (and after the war, physics).22 Lynd’s Knowledge for What? criticized positivism and scientism but at the same time rejected ‘‘theory.’’ Pitirim Sorokin’s Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937–1941) rejected empiricism but viewed societies as progressing through a predictable inner logic of cultural development. But Sorokin went against the grain in more ways than one; his 1956 book Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences was one of the first full-scale attacks on the postwar positivist settlement, written several years before Mills’s more famous assault on ‘‘abstracted empiricism’’ in The Sociological Imagination. Another sign of sociology’s epistemically labile state during the 1930s was its relationship to Freud. Although psychoanalytic theory was always open to biologizing and repressive interpretations, it posed a challenge to sociology’s empiricism and behaviorist aculturalism. Founding American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley had already argued at the first meeting of the American Sociological Society in 1906 that the ‘‘social mind’’ had to be seen as encompassing an unconscious dimension. The American Journal of Sociology published a special issue on psychoanalysis and sociology in the year of Freud’s death, 1939, with essays by leading analysts and literary critics. One contributor to this issue remarked that ‘‘sociology is sufficiently mature to adopt the methods of contemporary psychological science,’’ adding that the ‘‘phenomenon which Freud called the return of 20. Patricia Wilner, ‘‘The Main Drift of Sociology between 1936 and 1982,’’ History of Sociology 5, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 16, table 10. 21. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 2:622, my emphasis. Despite his emphasis on values or norms, Parsons also fell into an objectivist analysis of the subjective, reducing it to the single category of the means-ends schema; see Charles Camic, ‘‘Structure After 50 Years: The Anatomy of a Charter,’’ American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 1 (July 1989): esp. 64–69. 22. See Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward A. Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953); see also Jennifer Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America: 1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 102.


the repressed’’ was ‘‘of particular importance to sociology.’’ 23 Needless to say, the concept of the return of the repressed did not play a central role in postwar sociology. Parsons had opened his Structure of Social Action (1937) by asking why the ‘‘positivistic-utilitarian tradition’’ had died, but it was this imperfectly repressed tradition that returned with a vengeance after the war. Where prewar sociology had been distinctively polyvocal, this splintered situation had disappeared by the 1950s. Methodological positivism was a form of scientific capital that was increasingly recognized by its opponents, however much they disliked it. The shift to a more ordered field was established in several ways. Explicit methodological positivism now prevailed in the sociology journals, in the most widely used textbooks and introductions to theory and method, in the personnel of the leading departments, and in the relevant funding agencies. In addition to the continuing efforts of the prewar camp, an entirely new cast of characters entered the discipline from wartime and government agencies, and from backgrounds in private industry, advertising agencies, and survey institutes.24 U.S. sociology’s own view of itself in this period followed a narrative of steady progress from social meliorist beginnings toward scientific maturity. The main historical treatment of the field from the 1950s described the discipline as becoming ever more focused on ‘‘scientific method,’’ which was identified with the quest to discover laws of behavior and a ‘‘preference for concrete, empirical work.’’ 25 Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University was an exemplary center of methodological expertise pursuing an explicitly empiricist and positivist style of sociology. According to James Coleman, C. Wright Mills ‘‘seemed to matter little’’ in the local ‘‘social system of sociology’’ at Columbia in the 1950s, or ‘‘mattered only to those who themselves seemed to matter little.’’ This provides a pungent sense of the marginalization of one of the most creative U.S. sociologists of the twenti23. Gregory Zilboorg, ‘‘Sociology and the Psychoanalytic Method,’’ American Journal of Sociology 45, no. 3 (November 1939): 341. 24. See Stephen Turner and Jonathan Turner, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology (Beverly Hills, Calif., and London: Sage, 1990), chap. 3, on this influx. One autobiographical account of the transformation of a chemist at Eastman Kodak into a sociologist who carried his self-described ‘‘positivist orientation . . . from the physical sciences’’ into the new field is given by J. S. Coleman, ‘‘Columbia in the 1950s,’’ in Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists, ed. Bennett M. Berger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 75, 93. 25. Roscoe C. Hinkle and Gisela J. Hinkle, The Development of Modern Sociology, Its Nature and Growth in the United States (New York: Random House, 1954).


eth century.26 Lazarsfeld and Morris Rosenberg’s extremely influential Language of Social Research (1955), with its title redolent of the Vienna Circle, concluded with a long section on the ‘‘philosophy of the social sciences’’ that was based exclusively on the deductive-nomothetic approach, a child of logical positivism. Harry Alpert, who held a PhD in sociology from Columbia, went to the newly created National Science Foundation, where he organized the conditions under which sociologists could attain federal funds. These conditions included ‘‘the criterion of science, that is, the identification, within the social disciplines, of those areas characterized by the application of the methods and logic of science’’; belief in the ‘‘convergence of the natural sciences and the social sciences’’; and attention to the ‘‘national interest.’’ Sociologists were expected to draw predictive and practical lessons from their research, while ‘‘value neutrality’’ was to remain blind in one eye.27 Sociology departments at the other leading universities also came to be dominated by methodological positivism, although the timing and modalities of this shift differed from case to case. At the University of Chicago, representatives of the new paradigm were not solidly in control of a highly factionalized department until the mid-1950s; by that time, it had become ‘‘scientific, modern, positivist,’’ and ‘‘mainstream.’’ 28 A 1958 report by chairman Phil Hauser spoke of ‘‘the complete disappearance of the earlier bipolar division of departmental interests.’’ 29 William Sewell Sr. ‘‘was instrumental in building the University of Wisconsin’s powerful and notoriously positivist sociology department and in obtaining a place for sociology at the federal feeding trough, especially at the National Institutes of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation,’’ according to his son, historian William Sewell Jr.30 Ironically, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno returned to Frankfurt with the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) in the same year that the identically named positivist Institute for Social Research was founded at the University of Michigan, growing out of a previously established Survey Research Center. By the early 1950s, Michi26. Coleman, ‘‘Columbia in the 1950s,’’ 77. 27. Harry Alpert, ‘‘The Social Sciences and the National Science Foundation,’’ American Sociological Review 20, no. 5 (December 1955): 656, 660. 28. Gary Alan Fine, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9; see also Andrew Abbott, Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 29. Quoted in Abbott, Department and Discipline, 59. 30. William Sewell Jr., ‘‘The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian,’’ in The Politics of Method.


gan’s sociology department was dominated by adherents of the ascendant approach. The 1956 Michigan textbook, Principles of Sociology, which defined sociology’s objects as ‘‘subject to study by the same methods as other natural phenomena,’’ replaced an earlier, much less ‘‘scientific’’ textbook by Robert Cooley Angell and Lowell Juilliard Carr based on the writings of Charles Horton Cooley.31 The leading department after 1945, at Harvard University, presents a slightly more complex picture. The common view is that ‘‘the occupational roles of theoretician and bureaucratized research worker became entirely distinct’’ after 1945, and the former refers to Parsons.32 But this ‘‘distinction’’ was a conscious division of labor rooted in deeper agreements about basic principles. The struggle between statistical ‘‘operationalism’’ and theoretical ‘‘functionalism’’ in the postwar period did not trouble this more fundamental consensus about what counted as scientific capital. Parsons also moved toward more scientistic formulations in his own writing during this period. His supposed ‘‘lack of methodological commitments’’ did not mean that his influence had no consequences for method, if we define method broadly in terms of the classical Greek méthodos, originally meaning ‘‘following after, pursuit,’’ and in philosophical contexts referring to the ‘‘pursuit of knowledge, investigation,’’ and, by further extension, to ‘‘a plan or strategy for carrying out an investigation.’’ 33 By 1964, Parsons had been replaced by a Harvard colleague, George Homans, as the most-cited sociologist in the United States. Homans invoked Ernst Mach in insisting that science consists of the ‘‘careful and complete description of the mere facts’’ while avoiding ‘‘why’’ questions and ‘‘grand theory.’’ 34 Three arguments have been mobilized against the thesis of postwar 31. According to the 1956 text, sociology’s aim was to ‘‘discover systematic . . . observable relationships between . . . phenomena.’’ The discipline was ‘‘nonethical,’’ although its findings could be used in ‘‘instrumental’’ ways. Ronald Freedman et al., Principles of Sociology (NewYork: Holt, 1956), 5, 6, 12. Compare Charles Horton Cooley, Robert Cooley Angell, and Lowell Juilliard Carr, Introductory Sociology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933). 32. Kucklick, ‘‘A ‘Scientific Revolution,’’’ 16. 33. Quotes from Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, 202–3; and William H. Baxter, ‘‘Where Does the ‘Comparative Method’ Come from?’’ in The Linguist’s Linguist: A Collection of Papers in Honour of Alexis Manaster Ramer, ed. Fabrice Cavoto, vol. 1 (Munich: LINCOM), 42–43. 34. James J. Chriss, ‘‘Testing Gouldner’s Coming Crisis Thesis: On the Waxing and Waning of Intellectual Influence,’’ Current Perspectives in Social Theory 15, no. 3 (1995): 3–61; George C. Homans, ‘‘A Conceptual Scheme for the Study of Social Organization,’’ American Sociological Review 12, no. 1 (February 1947): 14.


dominance of positivism in U.S. sociology. Some point out, quite correctly, that sociologists interact with people and ideas from other disciplines and are hardly restricted to sociology departments. This no more challenges the fieldlike character of sociology than does the presence of dominated dissidents. Moreover, sociology was shaped by an entire array of ‘‘outside’’ influences, including all of those discussed by ‘‘social epochal’’ approaches to the sociology of knowledge, such as Marxism. But this does not mean that the external determinants were part of the sociology field proper, in the Bourdieuian sense. Fields are located within other fields, like Russian dolls. But sociology departments and the discipline as a whole were to some extent autonomous, with their own internal definitions of capital. Sociologists had their own professional associations, annual meetings, job markets, and journals, and some shared culture. All sociologists recognized, for example, what another sociologist meant when praising an argument or model as ‘‘elegant’’ or dismissing another as ‘‘journalism.’’ A second argument can also be quickly rejected. This concerns the lack of explicit reference to positivism by those associated with the tendencies I am calling positivist. American sociologists at the time recognized this object. In addition to explicit discussions in the main journals and presidential addresses to the professional conventions by people such as George Lundberg, the widely used 1944 Dictionary of Sociology provided a concise definition of the term.35 Sociology students at Columbia took seminars that were jointly taught by Lazarsfeld and Nagel.36 Although Raymond Williams remarked in 1983 that positivism had become ‘‘a swear-word, by which nobody is swearing,’’ he also acknowledged that ‘‘the real argument is still there.’’ Moreover, these pejorative connotations were only weakly developed in the 1940s and 1950s. Another rejoinder is that unnamed and unperceived structures exist and influence empirical events. Even though the term positivism was largely replaced by substitutes such as ‘‘nomothetic-deductive’’ or simply the ‘‘philosophy of science,’’ or by doctrines such as Popperian ‘‘falsificationism,’’ the basic assumptions remained intact. A third argument is that there is a lack of fit between positivist philosophical doctrine and sociological research practices.37 Some assert that ‘‘the simple fact is that almost no theories of this kind [positivist ones] were 35. Henry Pratt Fairchild, Dictionary of Sociology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 226. 36. See Coleman, ‘‘Columbia in the 1950s,’’ 88. 37. See Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, for this argument.


ever tried in sociology.’’ 38 But this assumes that the only relevant definition of positivism is to be found in some philosophical urtext. One distinction that is sometimes made contrasts inductivism and deductivism: positivist positions in the twentieth century were deductivist, but in mainstream sociology, it was standard practice to throw data into a statistical procedure (or later into a computer program) and then to invent ad hoc theoretical explanations for any empirical relationships that could be discerned. But the patron saint of scientists’ spontaneous positivism is Hume, for whom inductively discovered regularities were the sole source of knowledge.39 Direct critiques of methodological positivism within sociology were almost imperceptible in the 1950s, aside from Mills and Sorokin. Most sociologists whose work diverged epistemically from the dominant model simply carried on.40 Alvin Gouldner inched up to his full-blown epistemological critique of U.S. sociology only gradually after the 1950s, and in 1954 he quoted Homans to the effect that ‘‘sociology may miss a great deal if it tries to be too quantitative too soon,’’ implying that quantification was the ultimate telos.41 The antipositivism of Hans Gerth at the University of Wisconsin had to be gleaned from his decisions about what to translate and from his teaching, since he published so little.42 Adorno’s writings from the early 1960s were the most sophisticated critiques of positivism in this entire period, but they were not translated into English until 1976. Marcuse worked as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army during the war and headed up the Central European Section of the Office of Intelligence Research afterwards, and when he finally returned to teaching in 1951, it was in philosophy rather than sociology. Some earlier critics toned down or subtly adjusted their former antipositivism in ways that made their work more compatible with the reigning framework. Sorokin turned sharply against what he called ‘‘sham38. Nicholas C. Mullins and Carolyn J. Mullins, Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 218. 39. On this, see the work of Roy Bhaskar, especially The Possibility of Naturalism (New York: Humanities Press, 1979). 40. I am thinking of sociologists such as Leo Lowenthal, Harold Blumer, Erving Goffman, Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moore Jr. 41. Alvin W. Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954), 17, my emphasis. 42. But see Gerth, ‘‘The Relevance of History to the Sociological Ethos,’’ Studies on the Left: A Journal of Research, Social Theory, and Review 1, no. 1 (Fall 1959): 7–14. See the bibliography of Gerth’s work in Politics, Character, and Culture: Perspectives from Hans Gerth, ed. Joseph Bensman, Arthur J. Vidich, and Nobuko Gerth (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 275–83.


scientific slang,’’ ‘‘the cult of numerology,’’ ‘‘pseudo experimentation,’’ social ‘‘atomism,’’ and sociological ‘‘simulacra’’ of the natural sciences,43 but he did not break with doctrines of predictability or uniform social laws. Even Mills, whose 1959 critique of U.S. sociology in The Sociological Imagination is often seen as a heroic cri de coeur from the scientistic wilderness, had drifted slowly toward the epistemological mainstream. Whereas in the 1940s Mills had criticized the ‘‘low level of abstraction’’ in sociology textbooks and bemoaned the fact that U.S. sociology had ‘‘lost touch with the grand tradition’’ of European sociology, in 1959 he cast aspersions not only on ‘‘abstracted empiricism’’ but on ‘‘grand theory’’ as well.44 2. Fordism and the Spontaneous Social Epistemology of Sociologists What accounts for the postwar consolidation of the sociological field? We cannot explain this change in terms of the turnover of generations or the ‘‘maturation’’ of a science. Another explanation that has been offered is that new sciences tend to emulate the currently most prestigious discipline. The problem here is that other newcomer disciplines that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, most notably anthropology, did not follow the same epistemic path as sociology. Moreover, if we place sociology in a higher-order metafield of the sciences, it is not obvious that sociologists would necessarily experience ‘‘physics envy’’ as opposed to, say, ‘‘philosophy envy.’’ Bourdieu seems to promise some level of generality with respect to these questions by arguing that the most distinguished positions in any given field will be those which exhibit the greatest ‘‘distance from necessity.’’ In the arts, this points toward more abstract or minimalist forms, or to a style of viewing that privileges form over content, as more distinguished. In 43. Several years later, Sorokin ended his autobiography with the suggestion that the empiricist ‘‘sensate order’’ was leading to the destruction of mankind and an ‘‘abomination of desolation.’’ See A Long Journey: The Autobiography of Pitirim A. Sorokin (New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1963), 324. This lent ammunition to those who dismissed him as increasingly ‘‘shrill,’’ ‘‘eccentric,’’ and motivated by personal bitterness. Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 508. 44. C. Wright Mills, ‘‘The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists,’’ American Journal of Sociology 49, no. 2 (September 1943): 166; and ‘‘International Relations and Sociology: Discussion,’’ American Sociological Review 13, no. 3 (June 1948): 271.


sports, distance from necessity might accrue to bodily movements that are more artificial and more clearly distinct from natural or everyday gestures, or to games that are wasteful of time (e.g., sailing) and space (e.g., golf). But how could Bourdieu’s theory account for the prestige of positivism in sociology? While empiricism is certainly more concrete than depth realism, and thus in certain respects closer to necessity, positivism can be construed as less concerned with the messy details of the specific individual case, which it tries to subsume under covering laws. Quantification might be described as a substitute for the cruder ‘‘classification of events which our senses provide,’’ in von Hayek’s words.45 Although ‘‘distance from necessity’’ need not be defined in aesthetic terms, it is remarkable that positivists in the social sciences spontaneously adhere to an aestheticizing language of ‘‘elegance’’ when describing statistical models. The problem with this approach is its ad hoc and portmanteau quality. One could just as easily tell a story according to which nonpositivist approaches are more disdainful of necessity than positivist ones and hence more distinguished. It could be emphasized that the parsimonious accounts preferred by positivism are actually closer to commonsense understandings of social causality. Bourdieu’s framework is best equipped to account for the workings of consolidated, settled fields, but its analyses of the origins or the substantive contents of any given settlement are less compelling. Bourdieu indicates how practices and perceptions are likely to be framed, the general kinds of arguments that will be mobilized by anyone trying to control a field, but he cannot explain why certain projects of distinction will be more successful than others, without falling back into an economism that he wants to avoid. So why was sociological positivism so successful in its bid for leadership and prestige after 1945? The most significant and all-encompassing development after the war was the consolidation of the social patterns that retrospectively have come to be known as Fordism. The Fordist ‘‘security state’’ relied to a greater extent than previous state forms on the skills of social scientists, and this entailed an enhanced level of public funding for sociological research. By the 1950s and early 1960s, the intellectual, financial, and political forces that had existed before 1945 were combining with the ideological effects of the newly consolidated Fordist mode of regulation to catapult the methodological positivists to victory.46 45. Von Hayek, ‘‘Scientism and the Study of Society (Part 1),’’ 275. 46. I cannot address other elements of the overdetermining conjuncture that led to the


3. The Resonance of Fordism with the Positivist Vision of the Social Regulation theory has described Fordism as an integral form of societalization, that is, as a temporarily stabilized system for producing and reproducing (capitalist) society in spite of its ‘‘conflictual and contradictory character.’’ 47 Fordism was geared specifically toward maintaining a certain ratio between capital accumulation and consumption. Because this particular combination of mass production and consumption was pioneered by Henry Ford, his name became associated with the more general social form, which was not, however, limited to the economic level. Fordism also entailed Keynesian-style policies aimed at smoothing economic cycles; welfare-statist programs that partially socialized the costs of reproducing labor power; mass culture, which offered a homogeneous fare and eroded distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture; a family form organized around the male single breadwinner and located within privatized singlefamily housing, at least as a sociocultural ideal; and a tendency for economic and social practices to be located within the ‘‘container’’ of the nation-state and evenly distributed across its surface. Each specific ‘‘national mode of growth’’ (Bob Jessop) emphasized some of the elements from this menu of Fordist practices and omitted others. The social patterns grouped by regulation theory under the heading of Fordism helped to make positivist approaches to social explanation more plausible on a mass level, both to sociologists and to others exposed to the new logics governing activity in the advanced capitalist world. By contrast, positivism had been experienced as a less plausible description of the crisis-ridden conditions of the interwar period. After the war, social reality appeared increasingly to conform to the positivist expectation that social practices could be subsumed under covering laws, falling into patterns that were the same everywhere and always. Social actors now seemed atomized, rational, and interchangeable, lacking any distinctive cultural peculiarities; social practice was more predictable, repetitive, and controllable. The effects of postwar Fordism on the enhanced plausibility of sosuccess of positivism, one of which was the heightened level of anxiety around totalitarian irrationalism. 47. Alain Lipietz, ‘‘Akkumulation, Krisen und Auswege aus der Krise: Einige methodische Überlegungen zum Begriff ‘Regulation,’’’ Probleme des Klassenkampfes 15, no 1 (1985): 109.


ciological positivism can be summarized under the following five broad categories. Science and the Fordist State Sociological positivism was buttressed first by the greatly enhanced role of science (including social science) in the Fordist form of governmentality. While significant private foundation funds were offered previously to sociologists willing to configure their work in the image of the natural sciences, the postwar period saw an unprecedented influx of new government resources to universities, think tanks, and individual researchers. In addition to military support for research on psychological warfare, which channeled money to social scientists involved in programs such as Project Troy, Project Camelot, and the Special Operations Research Office,48 the domestic Keynesian branches of the security state drew on social science to track the economy, regulate business cycles, survey the population, and bring social practices into line with the serialized rhythms and desires of mass production and mass consumption. The National Science Foundation (NSF), created in 1950, was the single largest nonmilitary source of funding for sociological research (although the Defense Department offered twice the amount of the NSF to social scientists in 1965), and, because of its orientation toward ‘‘pure science,’’ it was more immediately relevant than ‘‘think tank’’ research for defining scientific capital. Parsons insisted that ‘‘the same philosophical principles that guided the natural sciences were at the heart of the social sciences’’ in arguing for an expansion of the NSF mandate to encompass the social sciences, agreeing with operationalists such as Phil Hauser.49 Along with the availability of funds from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Mental Health, the State Department, and an indeterminable thicket of initiatives funded by the Department of Defense, this NSF funding greatly enhanced the resources for positivist forms of sociology. In 1958, government at all levels contributed about 27 percent of all 48. On Projects Troy and Camelot, the Special Operations Research Office, the RAND Corporation, and other militarily funded social science during the Cold War, see the essays in Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967); and Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York: New Press, 1998). 49. Samuel Z. Klausner and Victor D. Lidz, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Nationalization of the Social Sciences (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), vii.


social science funds; by 1976, the rate was around 56 percent.50 In 1966, the federal government spent $26,621,000 on ‘‘basic and applied sociological research’’ alone, and the Department of Defense spent $34 million on behavioral and social science research; by 1970, the Department of Defense was spending almost $50 million.51 Before 1930, only 1.3 percent of articles in the American Journal of Sociology acknowledged financial support from any outside source at all, but by the 1960–64 period, the percentage of articles acknowledging financial support in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociology Review, and Social Forces had risen to 52.5 percent.52 The proportion of total revenues at Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research coming from government sources rose from 0 to 91 percent between 1945 and 1974.53 Methodological positivists were being offered unprecedented resources and allies in their intradisciplinary struggle, from the 1940s through the mid-1970s. The integration of sociology into the Fordist scientific infrastructure seemed paradoxically to validate the claim that science was ‘‘value-neutral’’: social scientists could now conceive of themselves as a separate and autarkic ‘‘scientific community,’’ after having freed themselves from dependence on the corporate funding that dominated interwar science.54 As autonomous professionals, social scientists felt released from responsibility for the ways policy makers would use their research.55 State Fordism thus supported the fact/value dichotomy, a mainstay of methodological positivism. By the 1950s or 1960s, social policies whose original historical roots lay in socialist, corporatist, or religious traditions were being implemented by ‘‘postideological’’ 50. Michael Useem, ‘‘State Production of Social Knowledge: Patterns of Government Financing of Academic Social Research,’’ American Sociological Review 41, no. 4 (August 1976): 613–29; Harry Alpert, ‘‘The Funding of Social Science Research,’’ in Trends in Social Science, ed. Donald P. Ray (New York: Philosophical Library, 1961), 152–66. 51. James L. McCartney, ‘‘The Financing of Sociological Research: Trends and Consequences,’’ in The Phenomenon of Sociology, ed. Edward A. Tiryakian (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1971), 385; and Ellen Herman, ‘‘Project Camelot and the Career of Cold War Psychology,’’ in Universities and Empire, 126n22. 52. McCartney, ‘‘The Financing of Sociological Research,’’ 387–88. 53. Allen Barton, ‘‘Paul Lazarsfeld and the Invention of the University Institute for Applied Social Research,’’ in Organizing for Social Research, ed. Burkart Holzner and Jiri Nehnevajsa (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1982), 28–29. 54. Philip Mirowski, ‘‘How Positivism Made a Pact with the Postwar Social Sciences in America,’’ in The Politics of Method. 55. Freedman et al., Principles of Sociology, 12; also Herman, ‘‘Project Camelot.’’


governments, and sociologists were becoming the organic intellectuals of this burgeoning sector. Fordist Economy Another way in which Fordism contributed to positivism’s plausibility was by dampening economic turbulence and crisis, through fiscal policy, and by lessening some of the economic upheavals in the individual life course through wage and welfare state policies. These developments, which particularly affected the middle wage-earning classes (including many sociologists), made it seem more conceivable that social practices did, in fact, repeat themselves in ways that could be represented by covering laws, statistical models, and replicable experiments. Steady improvements in the standard of living and the thickening of the welfare-statist safety net lent credence to the idea of social regularities. The relatively generous protections against the risks of unemployment, sickness, and poverty in old age allowed the better-paid sectors of the working and white-collar classes, for the first time in capitalist history, to develop a horizon of stable expectations for the future. Increases in real wages were pegged to increasing productivity. The social ontology of the Fordist subject was aligned with security. Historical analysis became less significant for sociology now that the world seemed to have become ‘‘synchronic.’’ Long before Francis Fukuyama, social scientists were urged to ‘‘go beyond history.’’ 56 Culture and the Fordist Ideoscape A culture and an ideoscape that was increasingly replicated across regions and social groups began to make models of economic and developmental modernization seem more convincing, predicated as they were on a picture of universal, interchangeable subjectivity. Arjun Appadurai’s notion of an ideoscape suggests that ideologies will be understood differently depending on one’s position in social space, just as a landscape looks entirely different depending on the viewer’s spatial location. Thus, some social scientists resisted the turn to methodological positivism even during the 1950s, while others were positioned to profit from the new perspective. But even those who initially resisted the new course were more likely to gravitate toward it because it resonated increasingly with their own experience of the sociotechnical world. The depthless culture of Fordism seemed to substan56. Bernard Brodie, ‘‘Strategy as a Science,’’ World Politics 1, no. 4 (July 1949): 474.


tiate behaviorist and empiricist models of subjectivity. Social-psychological experiments that drew conclusions about human behavior from research on American college students began to seem less far-fetched. The positivist impetus to abandon all analysis of subjective meaning resonated with a wider culture that really did seem to have transcended ideology. The postideological character of the American citizen was demonstrated in numerous sociological studies of voting. Interpretations of culture in the sense of a deep structure (Claude Lévi-Strauss) or the unconscious were rare.57 Fordist Geospace The refusal of hermeneutic or cultural interpretation was paired with a denial of the importance of spatial or geographic difference. Two aspects of the Fordist manner of configuring social space contributed to this change in social epistemology. First, the concentration of economic development and transactions on the scalar level of the nation-state and the relative evening out of regional developmental differences encouraged social scientists to take this level for granted as their unit of analysis.58 The containment of most practices within the boundaries of the nation-state made it seem more selfevident that they could be described by general laws. By contrast, where practices are objectively more dispersed among multiple and shifting sites and scalar levels, as in present-day post-Fordist ‘‘globalization,’’ they confound simple dichotomies of local and national. Countries no longer appear to be the natural units of comparative analysis. Fordism’s relative homogenization of domestic space also underwrote the positivist disavowal of the cross-cultural variability of concepts and causal mechanisms. The tendency to seek universal laws of human behavior, to disavow cultural difference, was opposed to the humanist and historical-hermeneutic emphasis on the unique and idiosyncratic. For behaviorists in the 1950s, including those social scientists who adopted a sci57. According to the new division of academic labor, anthropologists were to focus on (post)colonial peoples, while sociologists would attend to the metropoles, and, after the 1940s, only the former were seen as having ‘‘culture’’ in the anthropological sense. See my ‘‘Culture and the State,’’ in State/Culture: Historical Studies of the State in the Social Sciences, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1–49. 58. On Fordism and space, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Neil Brenner, ‘‘Between Fixity and Motion: Accumulation, Territorial Organization, and the Historical Geography of Spatial Scales,’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998): 459–81.


entistic version of psychoanalysis, there were no salient differences between the United States and the rest of the world. Modernization theory treated the poorer zones simply as less-developed versions of the United States, and ‘‘foreign nationals’’ were regarded as ‘‘underdeveloped Americans.’’ 59 Sometimes it was impossible to overlook the fact that ‘‘culture and ideology’’ were impeding ‘‘modernization,’’ as in Vietnam, China, the socialist bloc, and parts of postcolonial Africa. But the eventual telos for all nations was identical: a condition exemplified by the United States, located beyond ideology and culture, in which social action could be distilled down to the interactions among rational individuals pursuing wealth, status, and power. Alex Inkeles, a leading sociological modernization theorist, insisted that there ‘‘cannot be one social science for the study of one’s own country and a different one for the study of other nations.’’ 60 Fordist Imperialism Of course, the collapse of Fordism was not the only reason for the erosion of faith in the universal applicability of U.S. social science categories. A final structural characteristic of the postwar period that was closely linked to the fate of methodological positivism in sociology was the emerging role of the United States as imperialist global hegemon. U.S. imperialism cannot be equated with Fordism, even if it was entwined with it in this epoch; indeed, we are currently in the midst of a rearticulation of U.S. imperialism with post-Fordist neoliberalism.61 Two aspects of the cold war global configuration tended to work in favor of sociological positivism: the U.S. orientation toward an ‘‘imperialism of free trade’’ rather than colonialism, and its emphasis on counterinsurgency research, spawned by the rivalry with the Soviet Union. 59. Edward Twitchell Hall, The Silent Language (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 13. 60. Alex Inkeles, ‘‘Understanding a Foreign Society: A Sociologist’s View,’’ World Politics 3, no. 3 (April 1951): 269. 61. See Naomi Klein, ‘‘Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in Pursuit of a Neocon Utopia,’’ in Harper’s 309, no. 1852 (September 2004): 43–53; see also my ‘‘The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,’’ Public Culture 15, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 323–45. The founder of regulation theory, Michel Aglietta, insisted that ‘‘it should never be forgotten . . . that the rise of the United States to world hegemony forms an integral part of the social transformations’’ of Fordism, but he then proceeded to bracket this global aspect entirely; see A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience, trans. David Fernbach (London: New Left Books, 1979), 32. Alain Lipietz discussed only the economic aspects of ‘‘global’’ and ‘‘peripheral’’ Fordism in Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis in Global Fordism (London: Verso, 1987).


U.S. imperial hegemony after World War II, like today, was oriented mainly toward making the world into an ‘‘open’’ capitalist marketplace. The United States increasingly struck an imperialist but anticolonial stance. This reflected the shift in priorities toward anticommunism and ‘‘containment,’’ and a preference for free trade as against the more protectionist type of relationship that prevailed between metropoles and their colonies. Because the United States generally eschewed direct colonization, it was not compelled to enforce a formal ‘‘rule of difference’’ (Partha Chatterjee) in its peripheral dependencies, which were treated as self-governing. Unlike colonial powers, for whom, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, assimilation ‘‘taken to its extreme meant, quite simply, the ending of colonialism,’’ U.S. imperialism sought convergence between peripheral polities, cultures, and economic approaches and the American model.62 Without gainsaying the exploitative, manipulative, and violent character of U.S. interventions, we cannot ignore the fact that the postwar United States had fewer opportunities than European colonial powers to intrude racist views of ‘‘native’’ life directly into the global peripheries. Postcolonials were increasingly treated as a mass of interchangeable potential customers, as junior Americans in the making; social scientists were enlisted in promoting this transformation. The organization of core-periphery relations in the period from the 1880s to 1945 had encouraged the development of separate theories and even separate sciences for the colonized (anthropology) and the colonizer (sociology). The U.S.-dominated postwar global regime reinforced the positivist program of seeking a single model for ‘‘other nations’’ and ‘‘one’s own country.’’ The pressure to develop a generalizing approach to the non-West also stemmed from national security interests. Faced suddenly with the problem of managing a world of former European colonies and the ‘‘presumed imperial ambitions of the Soviet Union,’’ a core substantive focus of social science research was counterinsurgency.63 Walt Whitman Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth explicitly drew lessons from U.S. economic development for ‘‘the men in Djakarta, Rangoon, New Delhi, and Karachi; the men in Tehran, Baghdad, and Cairo; the men south of the desert too, in Accra, Lagos, and Salisbury,’’ as well as Mexico, China, and India.64 As in 62. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘‘Colonialism Is a System (1956),’’ in Colonialism and Neocolonialism (London: Routledge, 2001), 46. 63. Carl Pletsch, ‘‘The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950– 1975,’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (October 1981): 568. 64. Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 166, xii.


U.S.-occupied Iraq in 2003 and 2004, universal models, rather than models tailored to an ‘‘Arab mentality,’’ were generally preferred. Other aspects of the U.S.-dominated postwar world order were corrosive of the positivist unity of science program. Once the periphery is regarded from the standpoint of production rather than trade, for example, it immediately takes on a very different appearance. First, Fordism was just one of the many forms of societalization, and usually a minor one, in the global South. The social complexity that resulted from the articulation of differing ‘‘modes of regulation’’ and ‘‘modes of production’’ in the peripheries seemed to defy generalizing social science laws. The somewhat disparaged essay entitled ‘‘The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism’’ at the end of Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar’s Reading Capital (1968) may have proposed a universal classification of ‘‘elements of the structure,’’ but here, and in For Marx, Althusser explicitly rejected uniform models of social development. The real differences between the (post)colonies and their former metropoles made the application of universal models to peripheral societies much less compelling for those social scientists who actually lived in (or studied in detail) the so-called Third World. The complex forms of cultural hybridity in postcolonial sites made generalization even more difficult, whether we are talking about resistance to Western-style ‘‘development’’ or the problems of converting labor power into labor. But among the shrinking numbers of sociologists who attended to the world outside the United States, many did so from the vantage point of Berkeley or Ann Arbor, where they were unlikely to be confronted with these shocks to their homegrown epistemologies. Generalizing approaches were also undercut by the pervasive ‘‘three worlds’’ model, which was predicated on the division between the communist, advanced capitalist, and postcolonial sectors of the world system. This mental map called attention to the instability of the third category, which was associated in this scheme with ‘‘tradition, culture, religion, irrationality, underdevelopment, overpopulation, political chaos, and so on,’’ and was permanently susceptible to the lures of communism, which was usually seen as an ‘‘ideological’’ system rather than a ‘‘rational-natural’’ one.65 Another barrier to the universalization of general models was racism, despite the countervailing impetus of U.S. imperialism to assimilate the foreign Other.66 65. Pletsch, ‘‘The Three Worlds,’’ 574. 66. Seen most recently in Bush’s ridiculous tarring of opponents of the Iraq War as racists for supposedly seeing Arabs as unsuited for democracy. While this was obviously motivated by domestic politics, Bush’s ‘‘antiracist’’ stance also reflects the universalism of


A common response to the scientific difficulties of folding the periphery into general developmental schemas has been to fall back on discourses of cultural essentialism. Thus, for example, a team of social scientists sponsored by the army-funded Human Relations Research Office to study Korean and Chinese POWs during the Korean War pointed to the ‘‘unchanging behavioral traits of ‘orientals’’’ (e.g., authoritarianism, adaptability) as reasons for communist organizational success. Another group of social scientists insisted during the Vietnam War that the Vietnamese were ‘‘peoples of the past,’’ unsuited for modernization, with ‘‘no example, tradition, training, or even psychological aptitude for such an achievement.’’ 67 Thus, even while the American variety of liberal imperialism underwrote a universalizing variant of positivism, other forces located partly in the ‘‘Third World’’ and partly at the junctures and seams between core and periphery undercut this subsumption of the postcolony under general laws. It is no coincidence that the discipline dedicated to studying the periphery— anthropology—was not captured by positivists after 1945, despite equally lavish offers of funding, and that it continued to emphasize relatively ungeneralizable research on specific places and peoples.68 Social scientists who set out with a universalizing approach to the (post)colonial world sometimes experienced an epistemological change of heart (as did some of the participants in the Camelot Project). Sociological discourse on the nonWest was thus polyvocal even during the Fordist period, fluctuating between ‘‘nomothetic’’ approaches and ‘‘idiographic’’ essentialisms that attributed unique and timeless traits to the traditional other. 4. Conclusion Fordism resonated powerfully with U.S. sociology’s positivist unconscious after World War II and promoted positivist social research directly. But to claim that sociologists’ spontaneous images and theories of the social were influenced by the wider social structures they inhabited does not mean American empire, analyzed trenchantly by Carl Schmitt in The Nomos of the Earth (1950), trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003). 67. Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the MilitaryIntellectual Complex (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 149; Herman Kahn, ‘‘Toward a Program for Victory,’’ in Can We Win in Vietnam? ed. Frank E. Armbruster et al. (New York: Praeger, 1968), 340–41. 68. Webb Keane, ‘‘Estrangement, Intimacy, and the Objects of Anthropology,’’ in The Politics of Method.


that these representations accurately reflected social reality, any more than the field-specific status of methodological positivism meant that positivists were better sociologists. The Fordist mode of regulation was accompanied by a theater of relatively uniform self-interpretations that guided its subjects’ understanding of their own society. The core components of U.S. Fordism were broadcast to the denizens of the Fordist cities and suburbs as the American Way of Life. When positivists pointed out the connections between existing social patterns and their preferred manner of studying society, reality seemed to directly ratify their approach.69 One result of this conjuncture after 1945 was the firm implantation of methodological positivism as doxa within the field of sociology. Despite differences of taste or viewpoint, most of the players in this field recognized common stakes and agreed on common definitions of distinction. Symbolic or reputational capital, like research funds, tended to accrue to the more positivist positions. ‘‘Fluency’’ in these codes functioned as a field-specific form of scientific prestige. Even those who disagreed with positivist positions tended to collude in their dominance; those who did not adjust to the new regime were often channeled into less rigidly positivist fields or into poorly ranked departments. Sociology had at last become a well-structured field. By returning to this period, we may begin to understand the ways in which contemporary sociology continues to be haunted at every turn by specters of a seemingly obsolete epistemology. Settlements like the one I have discussed here are more fragile and internally heterogeneous than they appeared at the time. Indeed, the same can be said of all modes of societalization, regulation, or governmentality, including Fordism: they are inherently tenuous and prone to dissolution. But while poststructural theories have been salutary in calling attention to the inherent instability of social life, we should also recognize the existence of temporarily and partially stabilized patterns of social practice. The intensity of agreement on the basic features of social ontology varies both historically and spatially, among ‘‘lay’’ actors as well as professional analysts of those same social actors. Temporarily stabilized patterns are not the positivists’ ‘‘constant conjunctions of events,’’ however. They are both more elaborately woven and more fragile than is suggested by languages of general theory or probabilistic laws. 69. A further element of U.S. culture in this period that tended to strengthen the positivist position in the social sciences was the discussion of the role of antiscientific sentiment in the rise of Nazism and Stalinism.


Looking to the future, the question is whether the collapse of Fordism and the emergence of post-Fordist conditions that are less stable and less centered on the nation-state will undermine the natural plausibility of methodological positivism. Although this problem cannot be addressed here in any detail, let me briefly sketch some of the arguments favoring change and some of the countervailing tendencies. On the one hand, faith in the idea of ‘‘social laws’’ would seem to be undermined by the more ephemeral character of social relations today and the fragmentation of markets and lifestyles. The increased pressure on individuals to become self-promoting and the collapse of standardized models of the self might be expected to erode sociologists’ faith in universal models of subjectivity and to underscore the need to develop greater interpretive skills. Similarly, the enhanced importance of cultural commodities in the overall mix of capitalist production in the United States, discussed by Fredric Jameson and others, seems to account in part for the burgeoning interest in cultural studies and for the cultural turn in some of the extant social sciences. At the same time, neoliberal capitalism erodes differences to a greater extent than ever before, imposing a more uniform model of development and suggesting implicitly that culture is everywhere the same. The effects of current tendencies of macrosocial regulation for spontaneous social epistemology are, thus, far from uniform. The other question I asked in this article was why U.S. sociologists have tended to focus so strongly on the United States in a century of everincreasing international involvement in overseas empire. The substantive reorientation of U.S. sociology from the colonized peripheries to the ‘‘metropole’’ had already started in the early twentieth century,70 and this contraction likely had as much to do with the social origins of sociologists in that period, who were mainly rural, Protestant, midwestern men, as with the various enticements that were offered to the discipline to become a domestic Polizeiwissenschaft. But even when U.S. sociologists turned to the topics of ‘‘development’’ and ‘‘modernization’’ after 1945, they tended to view the rest of the world as a mirror of their own society. This was undoubtedly a reflection of the increasingly imperial character of the United States. Like classical empires, the United States was both expansive and encompassing, but its tolerance for diversity was hindered by the fact that another empire, the USSR, was competing on a global level for the allegiances of the diverse peoples. Social scientists often adopted this imperial standpoint 70. See R. W. Connell, ‘‘Why Is Classical Theory Classical?’’ American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 6 (1997): 1511–57.


spontaneously, coding all deviations from the American way of life as variants of tradition that should, and would, eventually crumble. How might U.S. sociologists’ disinterest in and disavowal of the rest of the world be changing? Contemporary U.S. empire is no more inclined toward an official racism than was the liberal empire of the postwar period, so that form of differentiating essentialism is unlikely to make inroads into sociology. The neoliberal institutions that have been introduced in postwar, U.S.-occupied Iraq and in other countries subjected to ‘‘structural adjustment’’ policies have universal models of human subjectivity as their premises. At the same time, neoliberal post-Fordism introduces a whole array of social destabilizations and fragmentations in these zones of imperial pressure, as in the imperial ‘‘homeland.’’ Peripheral Fordism was certainly less prosperous and less homogenizing than Fordism in the global core, but the change in the peripheries is still marked. Fundamentalism and neotraditionalism are flourishing in part due to the resulting social dissolution. This makes it much more difficult for area specialists simply to overlook political ‘‘irrationalism’’ and cultural incommensurability. Like the social scientists focused on the global North, those who work on the global South are also facing contradictory epistemic pressures. Whether the positivist domination of U.S. sociology will persist in the discipline’s third century is still, it appears, an open question.

In/Comparable Horrors: Total War and the Japanese Thing

Marilyn Ivy

Perhaps no other national formation has troubled the demands of international comparison as much as Japan, occupying, as it has, a place of exaggerated cultural incomparability at the same time as it has functioned as the modal case of successful comparative modernization. Culture is the term that has served to suture the aporia of modernization theory, in that it allows national formations to claim incomparability as cultures while otherwise assimilating them to the rigors of a comparativist schema. A culture on the edge of comparability—and therefore all the more intriguing to anthropologists—Japan inspires political fantasists such as Samuel Huntington to claim that the ‘‘most important lone country is Japan. No other country shares its distinct culture. . . . Japan’s loneliness is further enhanced by the fact that its culture is highly particularistic and does not involve a potentially universal religion (Christianity, Islam) or ideology (liberalism, communism) that could be exported to other societies.’’ 1 With apologies for including Huntington in my opening paragraph (and with eternal puzzlement when 1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 137. boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.


I think of Buddhists, Marxists, and liberals in Japan—no universal religion or ideology?), his influential writings on civilizations and world order negatively clarify the work of culture in much of comparative politics. What eludes Huntington are the intimately entwined histories of modernity that fatefully articulate Japan—lonely or not—with every other country in the world, and most fatefully with the United States. The incomparable horror of 9/11 brought up, almost immediately, a series of associations that would firmly locate it in a matrix of comparativity. The singularity of 9/11 was not allowed to stand for long, and the drive to compare the event to something else evoked one precedent: Pearl Harbor, the only other time, it was said, the United States had been attacked on its own soil (and attacked, indeed, by an enemy who would use suicide bombers as the war progressed). The need to bring together terror and war, to find the analogy with a previous war and thus validate these events as acts of war, points to the rhetorical and practical efficacy of war as a crucible of comparisons, invidious and otherwise. As the image of the Taliban stretched the limits of American comparative comprehension to their farthest extremities, so Japan at the time of Ruth Benedict and her The Chrysanthemum and the Sword seemed to defy comparativist inclusion (and thus could be included only through the magic of anthropological comparison: Japan is comparable because it’s so singular, and it’s so singular because all cultures are singular, thus comparable—as cultures). Benedict’s classic was written expressly to ‘‘explain’’ Japan to the West in the midst of wartime, as war mobilizes the intent to bring together incommensurabilities: KNOW YOUR ENEMY. Japan and its suicide missions became, during war, the name for evil irrationality, matched and perhaps exceeded only now through Bush’s rhetoric of ‘‘evildoers’’ as part of a religio-civilizational entity, that of (militant) Islam. The gruesome starting point for a renationalized discourse of a perpetual, total war against evil, 9/11 sustains its force only if it can be seen in the comparative context of a war to (have) come and of a war that has come before. The war that has come before, here, is World War II, with Pearl Harbor as the only time the war came home to the United States, despite the interceding Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf Wars (and despite the fact that colonized Hawai‘i could only be imagined as ‘‘home’’ through violent acts of denial). These wars imply a seriality, a succession of wars, with the war against terrorism, in its mutability and extension, marking a perverse culmination in the guise of war in perpetuity. For Japan, in its strange occupation of both ends of the continuum of alliance with and opposition to the United

Ivy / Total War and the Japanese Thing 139

States, war becomes the starting point (and end point) for a repetitive discourse on the constitution of the nation (and here I mean ‘‘constitution’’ in two senses: that of the structure of the nation and that of the politico-legal charter for the nation-state). The extent to which war, to which the ‘‘previous war’’ (saki no sensō), as the critic Katō Norihiro repeatedly refers to Japan’s Pacific War, has shaped Japan and its possibilities for comparative location in modernization theory is remarkable. Katō’s much-debated work Haisengoron (On Postdefeat) lays out the minimum terms necessary for understanding Japan’s much-remarked status as an ‘‘abnormal’’ nation-state, an abnormality founded essentially on its constitutional prohibition on war making.2 Japan is a nation-state unable to wage war, unable to go to war, and that inability, enshrined in its famous ‘‘peace constitution,’’ marks it as lacking parity with other nation-states of the world. Katō’s work on Japan’s defeat and the meaning of ‘‘postwar’’ has attracted a multiplicity of critical reflections on what have been called his neoconservative perspectives.3 The question he asks, however, is fundamental: Why is the designation of Japan as ‘‘postwar’’ (sengo) so tenacious? Why do many still regularly refer to Japan as ‘‘postwar Japan’’ when such a designation has long been abandoned elsewhere? Despite the repetitive gestures toward abandoning the idea of the postwar, despite the repeated attempts to locate the punctum when the postwar would have definitively ended, sengo has an uncanny life of its own. For Katō (and it should be remarked here that his reflections are by no means unambiguously original), the tenacity of sengo indexes the fact that Japan’s defeat in the war is the very basis and foundation of contemporary Japanese state and society, that, in fact, no Japan as such exists now outside its origin in war, in war defeat. Thus, the use of sengo must remark, with necessary compulsion, Japan’s originary point of departure, which the term haisengo (postdefeat, or ‘‘after defeat’’) reveals even more starkly. There can be no post-postwar, no temporality outside the postwar, unless a series of rehabilitative moves— 2. Katō Norihiro, Haisengoron [On Postdefeat] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997). 3. I cite here only English-language critiques concerned with Haisengoron: H. D. Harootunian, ‘‘Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 715–39; J. Victor Koschmann, ‘‘National Subjectivity and the Uses of Atonement in the Age of Recession,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 741–61; and Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 207–10.


which Katō proffers—is completed. Those rehabilitations involve reconstituting the Japanese nation-state as a ‘‘normal,’’ unitary state, able properly to mourn its own war dead and then—and only then—to mourn the some 20 million non-Japanese war dead of Asia. Katō writes of an originary twist, or deviation, in the very foundation of Japanese nation-statehood born of its formation in war defeat and, equally crucial, its constitutional incapacity to engage in war again. It is not only that it was defeated in what is now commonly claimed, both in Japan and elsewhere, to be an ignominious war of aggression in Asia (and thus perpetually judged an unjust war) that forever marks Japan as ‘‘polluted’’ (yogoreta) at the origin. But Japan is uniquely forbidden to rehabilitate that war through another war in its Constitution and its Article 9, which expressly prohibits Japan’s maintenance of war-making capabilities. The seriality of war has been foreclosed to it, and the ‘‘previous war’’ must always refer to the one that concluded in the atomic ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America has the Vietnam War and its recuperation in the Gulf War (not to mention, now, the current war) to interpose, even in the registers of defeat or inconclusiveness, between the present moment and 1945. Japan, however, is doomed to a nightmare of repetitive referencing to the ‘‘previous war’’ as the only war allowed to inhabit national memories (the wound of Vietnam stands, for Katō, as the break in a conception of postwar temporality for the United States). That war will always be a war of defeat, of national ignominy. Forever doomed to a frozen relationship to national origins in defeat, and forever kept from producing a new national narrative through a fresh war, Japan is thus twisted in its very essence by an originary nejire, ‘‘deviation.’’ This nejire, however, is doubled. Not only is there the fundamental perversion of its national origins in defeat and its twinning with a twisted foreclosure of war-making potential, the constitutional prohibition on war was forced on Japan by the American occupiers after defeat. Far from being a choice imagined by Japanese framers, the postwar Constitution was a forcefully imposed creation of the American occupation. Along with its liberal safeguards for human rights, gender equality, and land reform came the famous assertions of the ‘‘symbolic’’ nature of the emperor (with sovereignty resting in the people) and the fateful Article 9. Defeat in war brings a ‘‘different temporality’’ (chigau jikan) to the defeated country, according to Katō. The time of sengo is a different, special temporality (ishitsuna jikan), always defined in reference to a primal blot (yogore) at the origin. The end, the terrible end, becomes the beginning that must always be temporally indexed, and the end can never end because it


is always the last war. The time of the postwar is an incomparable time, a time without movement, and thus a kind of false temporality that operates spatially.4 Behind this defeat in war, and the impossibility of future war, lies the injustice of the war itself as a war of aggression. Katō speaks of Vietnam as an unjust war, as a war whose wound in the American psyche lies in this unjustness. Japan’s war, too, it has been said, was unjust, a war of aggression. Because of that, he continues, the deaths of Japan’s soldiers—those who thought they were fighting a war to liberate Asia, a just war against colonial domination—become deaths ‘‘without meaning’’ (muimi to naru). Japanese must somehow make these deaths meaningful through proper mourning, as Katō tries to develop a politics of mourning that does not fall into jingoistic nationalism. The false temporality of the postwar subsists for another reason in Katō’s tracing of the originary deviation in Japan’s National Thing (indeed, this deviation is Japan’s National Thing): Japan has not taken responsibility and apologized for the atrocities of the war of aggression.5 Japan cannot, in fact, take responsibility because Japan is a thing which is not one. It is a divided unity, ‘‘a split personality’’ ( jinkaku bunretsu), split from the catastrophe of war defeat and its occupied aftermath. Katō, in keeping with the theme of monstrosity that ineluctably shapes his rhetoric, refers to the two personalities defined by this split as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Once more, we are reminded of the cliché of the Japanese double psyche, the ‘‘chrysanthemum and the sword’’ again being only the most memorable image of dichotomy (and an image, it should be remembered, that was produced by Benedict during the ‘‘last war’’ as an explication of Japan’s inexplicable perversity). Only a unified nation-state, one which ‘‘we Japanese’’ fully inhabit, can submit an apology with any performative efficacy. Harry Harootunian has pointed to the persistence of the trope of the ‘‘double life’’ in Japanese thought. Japanese folklorists such as Orikuchi Shinobu and others found a fundamentally doubled, and essentially archaic, structure in Japanese folklife: an interior gaze turned into the community as opposed to an exterior perspective, symbolized by gods who descended from afar, however rarely, to visit the community. Katō recuperates the fundaments of this structure with his idea of an outward-facing Jekyll and an 4. See Harootunian, ‘‘Japan’s Long Postwar.’’ 5. On the idea of the National Thing, see Slajov Žižek, ‘‘Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,’’ New Left Review I/183 (September–October 1990): 50–62.


inward-facing Hyde, who emerges to blurt out the inner feelings of the Japanese psyche (for example, that the massacres of Nanjing never took place). Yet in Katō’s image of postwar Japan as a split personality, we have the language of ego psychology without a political unconscious. Instead, with Katō we find something akin to the ‘‘national character’’ developed by Benedict at the time of the last war. Katō assumes, thus, that the normal state of the nation should be a unified, nonschizophrenic one. There should be a nation and a nationalism without deviation and without perversion. Instead, in Japan, a primal blot (yogore) results in abnormality, pathology, and perversion. Yet what would a nation-state without perversion be? We could argue, along the lines of Žižek’s discussion of capitalism, that there is no normal state of nationstatehood, other than the normalcy of founding violence and originary deviations. In an advanced capitalist nation, one wonders what the straightening of the twist would entail. And one wonders about the dream of a purification that would erase the stain at the origin. Katō fantasizes a nation and thus a nationalism without excess, without deviation, a normal nationalism (and this discourse on normalcy has to be articulated within the hysterical field of capitalism as defined by unevenness). These reflections are not so far from the fantasy of fascism, in which social antagonisms and splits are sutured in order to have a nation-state without difference. Katō and other nationalists of varying persuasions are obsessed with an origin that is not one, with an origin that is alien. From this split origin comes the direct effect of a split national ‘‘constitution’’; thus Katō’s fixation on the Constitution and its Article 9. Since the Constitution is the ‘‘work of an alien intruder, its elimination would enable us to obtain again a stable social organism whose parts form a harmonious corporate body.’’ 6 This dream of elimination harbors the dream of a unitary national subject (shutai ), one who could decide and choose its own Constitution. Takahashi Tetsuya speaks of Katō’s rehabilitative solution: let the Japanese voters decide. If the peace article is thrown out, then so be it. The purity of the origin, then, is more important for Katō than the effect of the Constitution—a peace constitution, which has, in many regards, facilitated postwar peace.7 This wholly Japanese origin would thus allow the nation-state to overcome its location within the immutable temporality of the postwar. 6. Slajov Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 210. 7. Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo sekinin ron (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999), 134. The title of Takahashi’s book, which is a compilation of previously published essays (several of which circle


Prewar and wartime attempts to situate Japan outside the limitations of the imperializing West produced discourses on ‘‘overcoming the modern’’ through philosophically establishing a Japanese sovereign subjectivity. These attempts, not accidentally, work as ghostly precursors to the efforts of Katō and others. In this earlier endeavor, philosophers and critics were aided by the thought of the emperor as the meta-subject of Japan. And as the thought of empire evolved along with that of the absolute emperor, the necessity of total and perpetual war as both the performative guarantor of the pure imperium and the very sign of its already-accomplished purity evolved as well. With Katō and the spectrum of new nationalists inhabiting Japan today, we have instead what we might call an attempt to overcome not only the postwar but also the postmodern. As long as the Japanese economy was performing as spectacularly as it was before the early 1990s, calls to reconstitute Japanese subjectivity with reference to war were not as widely consolidated (it is true that these calls have never been entirely absent from the postwar scene). A certain celebratory, if always nervous, relationship to the wild proliferation of commodities and signs in Japanese high capitalism signaled a time hailed by many as high postmodernism. Since then, the deep recession has pulled out the primary support for Japanese national subjectivity in the postwar period: the economy itself had functioned as the forcefully empowered and proper stand-in for the ‘‘improper’’ and split nation-state itself. Without the miracle of the economy, postmodernity no longer retains the force even of a postideology. Capitalism’s excess, now under the sign of recession and deflation, demands to be reinscribed within the register of a stabilized ‘‘Japan.’’ And in a similar fashion to earlier attempts to overcome modernity by total war, the thought of war (and its subterranean implications of war as totality) is necessary to secure this resubjectification of Japan. Returning to prewar and wartime texts reminds us of the extremity of the philosophy of perpetual war. Not exceeded by F. T. Marinetti in their exaltation of the fecundity of war, many of these texts find an uncanny reprisal in the apparently more temperate calls for revisions of the peace constitution today. A celebrated symposium in Kyoto brought together philosoaround Katō’s theses), is a play on the canonical phrase sensō sekinin, ‘‘war responsibility.’’ Here, he presents us with ‘‘post war responsibility,’’ the very theme of Katō’s varied reflections. Katō proposes that there be a national election so that the Japanese can ‘‘rechoose’’ (erabinaosu) the Constitution so that it can truly become, for the first time in the postwar period, ‘‘our own’’ (wareware jishin) Constitution.


phers of empire to discuss Japan’s role in world history and the philosophy of ‘‘total war’’ (sōryoku sensō); transcripts of the session were published in the important journal Chūō kōron in the early 1940s. As the postwar critic Takeuchi Yoshimi revealed in a 1959 essay (and from whose critique I draw on here), this ‘‘discussion’’ skillfully wove together the ideology of ‘‘total war, perpetual war, and the ‘eternal founding nation.’’’ 8 Takeuchi maintains that resistance to war during the war was exceedingly rare, and that it could not ‘‘exist logically because the war was in reality a total war and in ideology a perpetual war. . . . Not only did a philosophy of resisting total war not arise during the war, but it also has yet to be found even after the war’’ (OM, 52). Takeuchi startles by his assertion that the resistance to total war has not occurred even after the war, in the sengo, with its perpetual peace forcefully mandated. Thus, the concluding lines of the first discussion read: ‘‘The task of the eternal ‘founding nation’ . . . is the cleansing of evil. . . . When the people are enraged, they are seething to their core. . . . It’s the same in war. Heaven and earth are enraged alike. Thus the spirit of humankind is purged. For this reason, the important junctures of world history are decided by war. Therefore, war is . . . the expurgation of evil’’ (OM, 53). In the final installment of the ‘‘discussion’’ published in the January 1943 issue of Chūō kōron as ‘‘The Philosophy of Total War,’’ the three themes of total war, perpetual war, and the eternal founding nation are prominent. Let me quote from an English-language translation of Takeuchi’s ‘‘Overcoming the Modern’’ with its copious quotations taken from that issue: War is the most vital force in history. . . . Generally, total war lies in the deadlocked points of modernity. That is to say, total war is the overcoming of modernity. War is definitely not a transient phenomenon. War does not return to its origin through negotiations, but goes on to something new. 8. I have relied in this instance on an unpublished English-language translation of an essay by Takeuchi Yoshimi entitled ‘‘Overcoming the Modern.’’ The original title is ‘‘Kindai no chōkoku,’’ published in 1959 in volume 7 (Kindai to dentō) in the book series Kindai Nihon shisōsha kōzai (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1959). The essay was translated in 1988 by a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago, with Martin Pierce Griggs bearing the final responsibility for the translation. Hereafter, this essay is cited parenthetically as OM.


Total war is a manifestation of ongoing change in everything. Not only is war something necessary, it is something perpetual. It is as mistaken to extol war as it is to praise peace. Most importantly, it is a crude notion to choose between war and peace as being dichotomous. If we simply accept war as the fundamental leader, then the crude opposition of war and peace disappears. Peace which is truly profound is unopposed to war. The glory of Japan eternal had been determined. . . . Japan’s national essence is truth. . . . This war will certainly triumph. (OM, 63–65) Despite Takeuchi’s strangely sympathetic reading of these Kyoto philosophers’ capitulation to total war, he nevertheless retains a powerful grasp of its implications. He states that ‘‘the Japan-Sino incident was irresoluble, and thus the Pacific War began as a means of indefinite postponement. Therefore the war had to be a perpetual war’’ (OM, 68). Postponement as time without end, as eternity, as a totalized spatialization (here, war as world war, history as world history): total war is necessarily perpetual and perpetually necessary. There can be no redoubt outside this war, and no peace ‘‘unopposed’’ to war itself. Total war began in an irresoluble contradiction—the invasion of Asia by Asians in order to liberate ‘‘eternal East Asia’’ from Western imperialist invasion. And we can see the irresoluble origin repeated, again, in the twisted origins of the post war as a perpetual, spatialized Japanese ‘‘peace.’’ Soft nationalists like Katō imagine that the origins of the postwar lie in the doubly deviated origins of a constitutional peace forced by the enormity of atomic horrors and martial occupation. But he imagines this without thinking through the seriality of the aporia that forced a previous generation of prewar and wartime thinkers to think of war as totality. The collapsing of the triumphant Japanese economy as the basis for the proliferations of postmodernity has led to a repetition of the fantastic necessity of total war. In Katō, this necessity is framed as an overcoming of the postwar, in its frozen abjectness, and of the postmodern, as a name for the unbridled circulations of consumer capitalism. The only way to overcome (post)modernity is through total war. Some of the most transparently fixated supporters of total war are


those who call for a revision of Japanese history textbooks. Their calls center on a rehabilitation of the Japanese war past, of a straightening of the ‘‘masochistic slant’’ of portrayals of Japan’s history (‘‘masochistic slant’’ is not too distant from Katō’s nejire). Much of their ire focuses on photographic evidence of Japanese war atrocities, both in textbooks and elsewhere, evidence they consider spurious. But it is the more generalized claim that the Japanese committed war atrocities that enrages them; they claim in a wellknown English-language pamphlet that ‘‘in actuality, there is no evidence proving that Japanese war crimes were any more heinous than those committed by citizens of other nations.’’ I have written in an earlier essay about the logic of the ‘‘no worse than,’’ a logic that allows Japanese nationalists to push the logic of comparative horror to its frightful conclusion: Such is the power of the ‘‘no worse than’’—no worse than the Holocaust, than My Lai, than Indonesia 1965, than . . . what? The agreement of the reader can be obtained, but what is the conclusion? We are all monsters (‘‘they [students who read these textbooks] are bound to believe that their ancestors were murderous monsters’’). The fact that monstrosity is shared, that it is international, should pay for its erasure: we are not monsters. And what allows the paradise of shared monstrosity to emerge? Nothing but war. In the motif of ‘‘no worse than’’ one sees the justification for war, when we can all legitimately become monsters and thus escape our monstrosity. . . . Thus the necessity to return to Japan’s war in a compulsion of repetition. Only by justifying the war—and by sharing out atrocity under erasure—can Japan revivify its moribund national body.9 Japan’s previous war must be recuperated, if not as just, then as no worse than any other war, than any other participation in any other war. Atrocity shared as ‘‘no worse than’’ is no longer atrocity, since the perpetrators are equalized. And atrocity is not atrocity in war, in total war, because total war is precisely a paradise of horror, in which atrocity escapes its designation as atrocity. There are two contrary compulsions, then, that lead neonationalists to deny war atrocities and crimes (and these include the massacres of Nanjing and the claims of the ‘‘comfort women’’). One is to deny atrocities as such (‘‘We didn’t kill those people in Nanjing’’). The other is to say, ‘‘Even if 9. Marilyn Ivy, ‘‘Revenge and Recapitation in Recessionary Japan,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 822–23.


we did kill all those people, those deaths don’t count as murders because it was war.’’ The logic of no worse than sutures the two compulsions. In what approaches Freud’s kettle logic, the thinking goes as such: (1) Japanese war atrocities are spurious—we didn’t commit any atrocities; (2) our atrocities are no worse than anyone else’s; (3) they were performed during the war, so they’re not atrocities.10 This logic of comparative horror is developed along with the inevitable path to total war in the massively consumed manga of the pop writer Kobayashi Yoshinori in his Sensōron (On War). A scurrilously blatant apologist for war, Kobayashi is also deeply involved with the textbook revisionists. Chapter 10 of his Sensōron is entitled ‘‘Takoku no gun to no zangyakudo o hikaku suru’’ (Comparing [Japan’s] Degree of Atrocity with the Armies of Other Countries). The very idea of comparing the ‘‘degree of atrocity’’ (zangyakudo) reveals the extent of desperation involved in any attempt to cleanse the National Thing of originary pollution. The chapter, indeed, is preoccupied with documenting the atrocities of Chinese, both civilians and soldiers, during the time of the war. Not content with reporting Japanese reports of Chinese cruelty, Kobayashi also resorts to cultural assertions of inherently deep practices of cruelty by the Chinese, practices revealed during wartime. Here, the performing of atrocities is pushed onto the erstwhile victim of the atrocities, as the ‘‘Chinese’’ (he uses the prewar shinajin to refer to the Chinese, now most commonly referred to in Japan as chūgokujin) are revealed as those who have tricked the world into thinking it was the Japanese who were monsters. The additional implication of this recuperation of comparative atrocity in the ‘‘last war’’ is the necessity of another war. The possibility of another war has to be held open for the ‘‘previous war’’ and the postwar itself to be resolved. Without another war, the Japanese Thing can never be reconstituted as unitary. And so the current postwar peace under the Constitution stands revealed as a falsity, an ersatz peace predicated on the ‘‘crude opposition’’ of peace and war. Thus the uncanny appropriateness of the rhetoric of Aum Shinrikyō in 1995 (the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war) and its visions of ‘‘final war’’ (saishū sensō) as a total war, a veritable World War III. Aum’s attack on the Japanese state was read by many as precisely a reprisal of World War II and was excitedly analyzed as such by Koba10. Freud’s ‘‘kettle logic’’ goes as such: (1) I never borrowed your kettle; (2) it was in perfect condition when I gave it back to you; (3) it already had those holes in the bottom when I borrowed it.


yashi, who claims that the Aum incidents were ‘‘war’’ and that what Japanese called ‘‘peace’’ was nothing but a sense of ‘‘order.’’ For true peace to exist in a world of comparative unevenness—the eternal, ‘‘great peace of Yamato,’’ as the Japanese imperial declaration of war described it in 1945— there must be war. War—total war—is the way to overcome unevenness, the inevitable hierarchy of comparisons, whether the hysterical (ab)normalcy of capitalism or the racialized differences of a world order propped up by the culturalist clichés and comparativist methodologies of area studies. The efficacy of war is the inevitable conclusion to draw from even the seemingly temperate nationalism of someone such as Katō. With this logic of total war we come perilously close to the formulations of jihad that we encounter through the press and elsewhere. And through a reading of Japanese philosophers of total war and the compulsive reprisal of their logics in the eternal postwar, one can grasp how inescapable and ‘‘proper’’ the totalizations of jihad might seem as the way—the perpetually necessary way—to overcome postmodernity. So it is to post-9/11 that many nationalists in Japan look for a resolution of the irresoluble postdefeat at the origin of the postwar and its postmodernity. In the slippage from total war to terror to ‘‘infinite justice’’ and back again, post-9/11, with its American-led ‘‘war on terrorism’’ (akin to a notion of a ‘‘war on war’’) and the ‘‘axis of evil’’ (what does ‘‘axis’’ conjure?), lays a template for a newly necessary and perpetual war, here virtually globalized and individualized even beyond the concept of a world war. Post-9/11 provides Japan the opportunity to make good its inability to participate in the Gulf War. As a recent article in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review states: In the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks on the United States, observers of Japanese politics were astonished to see the decisiveness with which Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi acted to lend Japanese support to the U.S. war on terrorism. . . . Koizumi called the attacks ‘‘unforgivable’’ and followed with a seven-point emergency plan committing the Japanese military to support U.S. activities in Afghanistan. Most notably, he pushed forcefully for the dispatch of members of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces . . . to the Indian Ocean to provide intelligence support. These actions stood in stark contrast to decades of Japanese pacifism and public ambivalence about the nation’s military stance, and Koizumi certainly expected to meet serious resistance from dovish members of the Japanese gov-


ernment. . . . Although some argued that Japan would never be a ‘‘normal’’ country, Koizumi’s determination and the Japanese Diet’s relatively speedy passage of his legislation together indicated that Japan had done the seemingly impossible.11 By performing the ‘‘seemingly impossible,’’ the Japanese state is empowered to reenter, through counterterrorism, the precincts of war and thus reestablish its normalcy (although the author of the above essay argues that Japan is not prepared to engage in counterterrorism). The author speculates that ‘‘Japanese might be safer if the government tries to fly under the radar of terrorist groups . . . than if it cooperates with the United States.’’ Nevertheless, he continues, ‘‘this is not to argue that Japan should necessarily continue its ambivalent approach to international terrorism. Perhaps a genuine war, built at least in part on military engagement, is necessary, and the Bush administration’s program might be effective. . . . For decades, Japanese politicians have debated what it means for the Japanese constitution to have Japanese troops on or near the front lines. Now they will have to consider how their nation will enter a war without fronts, in which all civilians are themselves part of the campaign.’’ 12 How is a war without fronts to be distinguished from a war on all fronts? In a collapsing of spatial distinctions, of differences between civilians and soldiers, nation-states and religions, with only a final, brute comparison left—that of Us and Them—the war on terrorism promises to hold out a chance for Japan to overcome postdefeat, not by rehabilitating national subjectivity as imagined by Katō but by submission (yet again) to the American imperative. Thus, in its very overcoming of postdefeat, Japan will repeat its abject relationship to the United States, unless Japan can transform the war on terrorism into its own ‘‘genuine’’ war with what must be its own ‘‘genuine’’ deaths. The alternative to authentic deaths in war would be, resolutely, to forego the pleasures and horrors of the National Thing in joining others, perversely postnationally, in finding nonviolent ways to resecure security in what might be, finally, the end of the (post)war.

11. David Leheny, ‘‘Tokyo Confronts Terror,’’ Policy Review, no. 110 (December 2001 and January 2002): 37–38. 12. Leheny, ‘‘Tokyo Confronts Terror,’’ 47.

From Culture Industry to Mao Industry: A Greek Tragedy

Michael Dutton

Essentially, there are two ideal types of politics in this world, one that intensifies political conviction and ‘‘throws’’ the subject, the other that ‘‘grounds’’ the subject and keeps him or her grounded through instrumental reason and endless consumer distractions. A politics of the first type produces intensities worthy of Martin Heidegger’s Dasein but organizes these around the single life-affirming/threatening dialectic of friend and enemy. This then becomes the basis of a political dialectic that rechannels all desire into a political quest for the affirmation of self within a collective notion of the good or the true. The other type of politics inhabits a vastly different world. It offers a far more modest set of claims about its ontological and ontic value. Indeed, it is built around an attempt to rechannel every possible desire away from the aggregated political form that produced the life-and-death rendering of the political dialectic. Instead of channeling everything into an either/or quesI would like to thank Shaorong Baggio for her help in researching and preparing this article, Deborah Kessler for checking it, and the Australian Research Council for funding the research. boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.


tion of politics, this more modest political form pushes everything that might ‘‘throw’’ the subject out of the reach of politics. Because of this, one can say that this type of politics grounds the flight of our desires, and as it does, we are in a very Heideggerian way, thrown back into the world of the mundane and the everyday.1 In this world, political intensities are either repressed through instrumental reason or transported into the realm of the commodity fad. Desire is therefore either repressed or commodified. Theodor Adorno once noted that it is just this form of politics that draws us away from those critical situations in which ‘‘strong impulses’’ or intensities produce ‘‘Truth.’’ 2 While both Heidegger and Adorno speak of these things under the code of Reason, I suspect that their real motivation lies in the reason of politics. It is with Adorno in mind that I have begun this interrogation of the move away from a politics that ‘‘throws’’ the subject to one that distracts him or her. Recent events in China show this most graphically, for China has undergone this transformation from one form of politics to the other. Read in this larger frame, therefore, this is a tale of relevance to all forms of politics. In the work of Adorno and Max Horkheimer, we are led through this transformation, not, I should hasten to add, under the banner of politics but in the name of Enlightenment Reason. Little wonder, then, that their work speaks to the world from the West and, like many good Western narratives, begins with allegories drawn from ancient Greece. In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe warns Odysseus of the dangers of the hypnotic sounds of the Sirens. Odysseus’s overwhelming desire to hear the Sirens is tempered by Circe’s warning that their song will lure him and his men to their death. To avoid this, Odysseus has his oarsmen plug their ears with wax. With ears plugged, they are not tempted by the Sirens and continue to row on unaffected. Odysseus, however, wants to hear the Sirens, so he orders his oarsmen to tie him to the mast so he cannot move. He thus hears the Sirens’ song but avoids the fate of all those who have heard their bewitching yet tormenting sounds. Emotionally ‘‘thrown’’ into bliss, but physically unable to move, he begs his men to untie him, but with wax in their ears, they are deaf both to his calls and to the Sirens’ song. In this way, Homer tells us, Odysseus is able to listen to the Sirens’ song, yet saves himself and his shipmates from a terrible fate. 1. Magda King says that Heidegger’s notion of the everyday is that which turns the potential Dasein in all of us away from such concerns. See Magda King, A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. John Llewelyn (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 81. 2. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 606.

Dutton / From Culture Industry to Mao Industry 153

Enter the cultural theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer. For them, ‘‘the Odyssee [sic ] is the first document on the anthropology of man in the modern sense, that means, the sense of a rational enlightened being.’’ 3 This reading is predicated upon their Kantian-inspired understanding of the Enlightenment 4 and the fact that Odysseus employed reason in outwitting the Sirens. In plugging the ears of his oarsmen and lashing himself to the mast, Odysseus produced, they claim, the perfect allegoric form of a contemporary dilemma. Here is a mythic beginning that also flags the ontic end of what they famously label the ‘‘dialectic of enlightenment.’’ This familiar Greek tale becomes the story of our own modern fall from grace, with contemporary workers taking on the role of the oarsmen and the modern bourgeoisie as the perfect counterpart for Odysseus. In this reading, the oarsmen, like contemporary workers, are shortchanged, for they are offered nothing other than a continuation of their (boring) lives. There is no joyous rapture awaiting them. Instead, they function and focus, much like contemporary workers, only on the practical tasks at hand. Yet it is in their very practicality that they are deaf to other possibilities. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, they follow a logic dictated by the factory bench, the movie theater, or the collective (DE, 34). In effect, the workers are deaf to the Sirens’ song. If this is the destiny of the oarsmen as modern worker, what twisted fate awaits the contemporary analogue of Odysseus? For Adorno and Horkheimer, Odysseus, like the contemporary burgher, is alive to the Sirens’ song but too tightly ‘‘tied down’’ by innumerable restraints to answer the call. Where Odysseus is held in place by rope, the modern bourgeois classes are restrained by the instrumental logic of a system of their own making, namely, capitalism. For worker and burgher alike, therefore, all that is left is a ‘‘Taylorism of the mind’’ (DE, 242). Locked into a world of instrumental reason that offers no opportunity for enchantment, the Sirens’ song no longer offers the possibility of enlightenment. Instead, enchantment is reduced to ‘‘art.’’ Yet even here, it is ‘‘art’’ on its way to the slaughterhouse. 3. Letter from Horkheimer to Friedrich Pollock, March 20, 1943, cited in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 323. 4. Adorno and Horkheimer make this clear when they point out that for Kant, enlightenment was man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity. The immaturity lay in an inability to use our own understanding without the guidance of another. To be without the guidance of another was, for them, liberating, for it was understanding guided by nothing other than reason. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), 81. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as DE.


In a world dominated by instrumental reason, argue Adorno and Horkheimer, art is drawn into the realm of commodity relations and, in this form, is increasingly standardized, routinized, and made imitative of ‘‘real life.’’ It no longer has the ability to transcend reality and enchant the subject, much less offer social critique. Even when it attempts critique, the form of ‘‘dissonance’’ it produces is little more than ‘‘the trademark of anyone who has a new idea in business’’ (DE, 132). Ultimately, art becomes industry— the culture industry—and, as such, forfeits any real possibility of effecting change (DE, 130–31). I have taken this detour through Greek mythology, German cultural theory, and questions of the Enlightenment in order to highlight what is at stake in the development of a culture industry in China. Moreover, the overtly political theme of key elements of the Chinese culture industry, coupled with its relative newness, enables a series of novel arguments to be proffered in relation to Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis. China proves particularly important because the emergence of its culture industry correlates with the development of what Chinese refer to as the ‘‘red industry,’’ and what I have called the ‘‘Mao industry.’’ The strength of this linkage is such that it enables me to point not to Enlightenment at a standstill but to the political role of the culture industry in reducing politics to a form of distraction. What this Chinese example shows is that the Sirens’ song that enchanted Odysseus, but also threatened his life, wasn’t the sweet lyrical rhyme of Enlightenment Reason. To enchant and to ‘‘throw’’ a subject, the Sirens’ song invokes something more than reason. To enchant, the call of the Sirens must, in part, flirt with the poetic and the emotive. In revolutionary China, that which enchanted and would ‘‘throw’’ a social subject into a Daseinian world of selfunderstanding and inspection was always coded politically. With the transformation of the iconography of this form of politics into a commodity form, however, we begin to see how this new ‘‘art form’’ (which was once political) is now transformed into a form of distraction. Revolutionary China once reified the political, transforming all aspects of the social world into a form of political Daseinianism. Reason did not propel this dialectic of enlightenment, politics did. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that any dialectic is always a dialectic of struggle. The struggle for enlightenment, therefore, is always a political struggle, and there is no better way to understand this than to examine the process through which Chairman Mao was transformed into a commodity. The reemergence of Mao as commodity is of special significance, not because his face, posted on billboards, watches, and cigarette lighters,


threatens a new wave of radicalism but because it does exactly the opposite. Mao, who once offered the Sirens’ song of revolution to the Chinese masses, was, after 1992, transformed into an icon that further distracted the populace from any intense engagement with politics. Transformed into a commodity shell, this ‘‘after-life’’ shadow of the chairman allows a powerful and quite directly political light to be shone on Adorno’s notion of the culture industry. It is for this reason that the Mao industry offers a revealing way to reinterrogate Adorno’s notion. In tracing the development of this industry in China, we are, in effect, plotting the life cycle of Siren politics as it nears death. In tracing the post-Mao uses of the Mao image within the red industry, we are able to recognize the nature of the problem. As economic reform developed into a consumer revolution, Mao’s image was transformed from Great Helmsmen into the great logo. He became, if only momentarily, the fashionable embodiment of that massproduced art form of the common and the everyday. The importance of such kitsch forms of Maoism lies in the fact that they are not just born on the gravesite of the ‘‘Siren politics’’ of Mao Zedong Thought but actually constitute one of its most determined gravediggers. Gravediggers of Another Kind: Two Stories, Two Times In 1984, I was a student at Beijing University. At that time, the official de-Maoification program was at its height. Statues of the chairman were being torn down throughout the city. Indeed, it was as though the sanqikai (70% correct, 30% incorrect) assessment of the Chairman’s Thought being proffered by the then new, reform-era Central Committee was now being transformed into an urban renewal plan. The cult of Mao that this new Central Committee was fighting had left China awash with images of the chairman. There was a Mao statue in every town square, another at every work unit entrance, and, once inside these compounds, a statue in every office and home. Sanqikai, therefore, involved more than a reassessment of Mao Zedong Thought; it also required the party to do something about this physical domination of public and private space by the late chairman. It was at this time that a Slovenian friend discovered something that she knew would interest me. At the back of the university campus, outside an old 1950s-style administration building, was a huge pile of smashed white plaster statues. On closer inspection, the pile turned out to be the university’s own contribution to the de-Maoification program. On the ground in pieces lay hundreds of little Mao statues that had been taken down from


their exalted positions in the administrative offices and unceremoniously dumped into piles awaiting rubbish collection. What my Slovenian friend had discovered was not the burial ground of Chairman Mao but the graveyard of his symbolic power. As foreigners, however, this dumping ground of the chairman’s fractured plaster body parts held no symbolic power over us, so we had no qualms about looking through the pile, collecting body parts for souvenirs. Soon we were joined by inquisitive primary school children. They asked us what we were doing, and when we told them, they joined in. Before long, we were happily trading body parts: ‘‘I’ll give you an arm and a leg of the chairman for his nose,’’ said one kid. ‘‘No, I want his ear,’’ came my reply. Such irreverence did not last long. A Communist Party ‘‘responsible cadre’’ came out of the administrative building, yelling, ‘‘You are not allowed to touch the chairman’s parts. It’s disrespectful.’’ The kids ran off, but we held our ground. ‘‘We’re not being disrespectful,’’ we responded. ‘‘That honor goes to the cadre who had the chairman’s statues removed from administrative offices, smashed to pieces, then shoveled into this pile.’’ Our response did little to assuage his anger. Instead, he ordered us off his little Mao Mountain, warning us that Security was on the way. He then turned and offered his final remark, which was delivered like a coup de grace: Our university department would be told of our reprobate behavior, because, as he put it, we were ‘‘here to study, not fossick around in other people’s affairs.’’ ‘‘Ah, but we are studying,’’ answered my quick-witted Slovenian friend. ‘‘We are from the Archaeology Department!’’ As the security guards began to arrive on bikes, we beat a hasty retreat. Gathering up what booty we could, we loaded it onto our bikes and tried to make a run for it, but, followed by a detachment of security officers, in what became a Keystone Cops bicycle pursuit around Weiminghu (the lake with no name), we didn’t stand a chance. Finally caught, we were ourselves ‘‘de-Maoified,’’ sent back to our respective university departments, and criticized by teachers and our own ‘‘responsible cadres.’’ That was China in 1984. Less than ten years later, it was a very different story. The chairman’s image was not so hard to find on the campuses of Beijing in 1993. He was, once again, just about everywhere. This time, he reappeared as part of the ‘‘Mao craze’’ that was sweeping China as it prepared for his one hundredth anniversary celebration. Ten years later, in 2003, he would return once more, but this time, with the help of marketing strategists and advertising executives. Where the ‘‘craze’’ of 1993 still had


an air of consumer spontaneity and the hint of trouble, 2003 had only the hallmark of a well-oiled advertising campaign within an established industry, the Mao industry. There is something perversely ironic in this regular reappearance of the chairman at a time when the new long march toward consumerism was hurling China away from everything the chairman stood for. Perverse ironies aside, however, one needs to recognize that this continual return of the chairman was more a sign of his fall from grace rather than any lingering sense of revolutionary devotion. Mao returns not as revolutionary leader but as commodity spruiker. The Mao Industry No one really knows how this process began. One starting point would be to interrogate the origins of the 1993 Mao craze, and on this most commentators agree. It probably all began after a multicar pile-up on a Guangdong highway in 1989. Fatal for many, the only person to walk away unscathed from this horrific crash was the driver of the car with a Mao talisman.5 As word of this story spread, the image of the mystical Mao, who had powers to protect those who possessed a representation of him, was born. Transformed from revolutionary leader into god of good fortune, Mao became a soothsayer for troubled times. From then on, other ‘‘miracles’’ confirmed his beatification. His shadowy apparition appeared on the surface of a pebble drawn from the waters of the Yangtze River;6 it appeared as a ghostly apparition on the surface of a peasant’s wall where his portrait had once hung;7 and it even surfaced as nature’s own handiwork, etched onto the rock face of a mountainside on Hainan Island, which became known as Mao Mountain (Maogongshan). Many different forms of Mao began to appear in what was the early phase of the Mao craze. Popular movies and books about Mao also emerged at this time, but these portrayed the chairman not as a mystic who saved the driver in Guangzhou but in more mortal ways. 5. Zhou Qun and Yao Xinrong, ‘‘Xin jiu Maozedong chongbai’’ [Mao Worship Old and New], Twenty-First Century 21 (December 1993): 37. 6. Zhang Guozhu, ‘‘Xide maozedong xiangzhang’’ [The Lucky Stone with Mao Zedong’s Image on It], Paimai shoucang Zhoukan [The Weekly of Auctions and Collections], no. 6, November 18, 2001. 7. Zhang Fangyu, ‘‘Maozhuxi qiguan zaixian, shijian jue wu jiyou zhenwen’’ [Mao’s Image Reappeared, This Is Rare News], Sanmenxia Public Security, January 28, 1994.


Like the mystic Mao, this other, more sentimental representation of Mao came to light in 1989. In that year, a new postscar 8 literary trend described as a ‘‘search for Mao’’ emerged.9 This new literary trend broke the mold of Mao writing, for rather than adding to the chairman’s mystique, as both scar literature and party hagiography had done in almost opposite ways, it offered a radical denouement. Works by such authors as Quan Yanchi, by Mao’s former bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, and by his former head of security, Wang Dongxin, all personalized the chairman and suggested that his was a simple life, free of the desires of the consumer society yet rich with the same emotions and dreams that the common people had. Greatness (hagiography) and great excess (scar literature) were now replaced by a focus on the everydayness of Mao. A tabloid voyeurism determined to reveal the intimate details of a private life combined with a youthful nostalgia for simpler times to produce this new and highly popular genre. Perversely, this nostalgia began with a political face, and this again reached its apogee in 1989, in the protests that took place at Tian’anmen Square. While students chanted the new Sirens’ song of democracy and liberty in their fight against party corruption, the pragmatic worker participants pulled on the oars of nostalgia, resurrecting the image of the chairman that, at that time, remained political. Mao’s image was used to remind the party of their now forgotten obligations to their working-class constituency. In the early years of economic reform, the chairman became the symbol under which labor activists dramatized the loss of worker security and welfare provisions. With the Tian’anmen Square protests, this well-worn weapon of worker protest reappeared in the heart of the capital. From the political nostalgia of the protesting worker emerged another more widespread and genteel form of longing for the past. Former Red Guards, now middle-aged and remembering their youth, developed a form of revolutionary nostalgia. This relatively well-off group was, by this time, an important niche market for movies, magazines, and novels about China’s revolutionary past and the 8. Scar literature (shanghen wenxue) was the name given to a trend that emerged in China after the demise of revolutionary realism. After 1976, revolutionary realism gave way to a less romantic form. Concentrating on the nightmare experiences of those who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution, it focused on the pain and suffering of rustified youth, of intellectuals, and also of the common people. The most important work in this genre comes from Liu Xinwu. See Liu Xinwu, ‘‘The Classroom Teacher,’’ Renmin wenxue, no. 11 (1977). The term itself came from Lu Xinhua, who named one of his stories ‘‘Scar.’’ See Lu Xinhua, ‘‘Scar,’’ Wenhuibao (Shanghai), August 11, 1978. 9. Geremie Barme, Shades of Mao (New York: M. E. Sharp, Armonk, 1996), 4.


chairman. By the early nineties, all these aberrant and contradictory trends started to congeal. What tied them together wasn’t Mao but the growing entrepreneurial realization that ‘‘Mao sells.’’ Slowly, the hallowed images of Mao and the revolution were being transformed and were now well on their way to becoming pure commodities. This process of commodification began innocently enough. During the spring festival of 1990, a number of publishing houses discovered that the republication of Mao’s official portrait had a bigger market appeal than they had initially anticipated. Approximately 3.5 million copies of Mao’s official portrait were sold in that first year of republication, and, in the three years that followed, over 11 million copies were sold. Realizing that this was an opportunity to profit, other entrepreneurs joined in with their own tokens of Mao. Indeed, almost anything revolutionary now seemed to have a market. Even revolutionary-era songs were revived. A 1992 disco remake of revolutionary tunes was an overnight Karaoke sensation, selling seventy to eighty thousand copies in its first week of release, and over 1 million copies in its first month.10 Long-neglected revolutionary sites became popular tourist attractions. By 1990, Shaoshan, the place of Mao’s birth, boasted around twentyfive hundred visitors per day, reaching a peak of nearly three thousand per day the following year. As this ‘‘love of Mao’’ grew, so, too, did the fears and suspicions of party cadres, who were still mentally held hostage to the belief that any revival of Mao’s image must also be a revival of his politics. Reading the various heterodox trends that fed into this craze, not as fashion or as fad but as a potentially troublesome return of Siren politics, the party leadership was initially suspicious of this Mao craze. They were afraid that they could be facing a backlash against their liberal economic reform policies and that Mao’s image might well become the symbol around which the masses would rally to revive the revolution once more. They were not the first ruling class to be worried about mass entertainment providing the venue for popular unrest and revolution. Indeed, from the very first moment business began promoting mass entertainment and the mass tourist industry, political leaders worried about their effects. Perhaps the reason for this lies in the arguments of Roger Caillois. If read politically, Caillois’s extraordinary study of the ancient art 10. Xinlang Dushu, ‘‘‘Mao Zedong re’ xianxiang’’ [The Phenomenon of ‘‘Mao Craze’’], Sina, March 24, 2003, available at http://book.sina.com.cn/2003–03–24/3/2502.shtml (accessed March 24, 2004); see also Zhou and Yao, ‘‘Xin ju Maozedong chongbai,’’ 38.


of festivals gives us some indication as to why such events could evoke fear. Drawing a picture that combines the notion of resistance operative within Mikhail Bakhtin’s assessment of the carnival and Georges Bataille’s focus on excessive expenditure and sacredness, Caillois creates an event in which, he asserts, the world renewed itself. Festivals enabled ‘‘creative licence,’’ 11 allowing a return to the sacred world of ‘‘intense emotions’’ that transform us (F, 282). They were a key technology that gave access to the realm of the sacred, which Caillois calls the Great Time and Great Space (F, 288), the time and space of an ‘‘inversionary order’’ in which ‘‘[e]very effort is made to behave in a manner that is exactly the opposite of normal behaviour.’’ Over time, according to Caillois, the festival waned, fading first into parody, then culminating in the symbolism of the medieval European festival of fools (F, 298–99), before ceasing altogether in our time to be replaced by the vacation. ‘‘Vacation is the successor of the festival,’’ writes Caillois (F, 302). As vacations become the norm, the inspired collective gives way to atomized individualism, paroxysm gives way to relaxation, excess gives way to respect, and frenzy gives way to work. We are no longer spiritually uplifted through ‘‘events’’ like the festival but are instead physically transported into those atomized sites of collective leisure that ground our desires and transform them into material consumption. It is easy to see the link between the paroxysm of the festival and the intensities of Siren politics, just as it is clear that the deracinated state that the culture industry produces is but another word for vacation. Read in this way, we can, in fact, make a clear link between the work of Caillois and Bataille and what I am calling Siren politics. When leaders develop an ‘‘affective flow’’ with their people, when they stand out as something ‘‘other,’’ when they speak in a voice that mutes utilitarian judgment and produces a desire for the lofty and the exalted, they are like the festival, flirting with the heterogeneous, claims Bataille.12 Mass rallies and political protests, therefore, share the same disruptive potential as Caillois’s festivals of old. No longer would these festivals be organized around the Great Time and Great Space. Nevertheless, the enchanted Sirens’ song of the political rally still has the potential to produce a political intensity that 11. Roger Caillois, ‘‘Festival,’’ in The College of Sociology, 1937–39, ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 291. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as F. 12. Georges Bataille, ‘‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’’ New German Critique, no. 16 (Winter 1979): 71–72.


could lead a collectivity to take extreme political action. Perhaps it was an understanding of this relationship between the excessive exuberance of the festival and the possibility of revolutionary action that squelched enthusiasm for the festivals of industry when they first began in London in 1852. When the first World Trade Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace opened its doors, the ruling classes awaited the consequences with some trepidation. It was, to be sure, a new type of festival that celebrated work and industry rather than gods and magic. Nevertheless, how could one be sure that this collective congress of workers would, in fact, bow before the greatness of capitalism? They could, after all, turn against this machinery of their own oppression and rebel against the order being celebrated. Little wonder, then, that the English ruling classes, fearful of so many proletarians coming together in leisure rather than work, tried to limit entry. Such fears very quickly proved unfounded. Very soon it was discovered that far from fermenting revolution, such mass entertainment actually quelled it. Once the mesmeric effects of the burgeoning culture industry began to be appreciated, entrepreneurs stepped in. Realizing that workers would pay for their enchantment, Thomas Cook, in conjunction with the Midland Railway Company, organized excursion tours of the exhibition site and, in so doing, initiated the modern tourist industry.13 By the time of the Exposition Universelle in 1889 in Paris, even bourgeois governments had to admit that these events were merely a form of distraction. In Paris, foreign workers who attended the exhibition were housed at the expense of the French government, while French workers were given free entry tickets.14 It was just these sorts of lessons that the Chinese Communist Party would learn. They never gave away free tickets, nor did they provide free accommodation, but they did recognize a commercial opportunity when they saw one. By the time of the 110th anniversary of Mao in 2003, the Communist Party was even hiring marketing consultants to ‘‘manage’’ and advise them about this burgeoning market opportunity. By this time, the Mao craze had developed into a full-blown industry, the so-called red industry. This new industry was brought to you not by the bottlers of Coca-Cola but by those who would bottle the revolution, the Communist Party. 13. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21. 14. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 86.


With the official endorsement of Shaoshan as a national tourist site in 1993, the party embraced both the Mao craze and its development into the red industry. Now, almost anything that made money seemed to be permissible. Even the most heterodox and mystical of Mao sites suddenly seemed able to gain official endorsement. In November 1992, the State Environmental Protection Bureau recognized Hainan Island’s Mao Mountain and upgraded it from a county- and provincial-level site to one of national significance. Like the cat theory of Deng Xiaoping,15 pragmatism ruled, and anything that promoted local tourism seemed to be acceptable. Mao Mountain was certainly doing that.16 Indeed, Hainan’s Mao Mountain became something of a trendsetter for ‘‘Mao Mountains’’ generally, with at least three other rival bids for the title now coming from other parts of China.17 None of this would have been possible had it not been for the helping hand of petty-bourgeois capital. While the party had shown an initial reluctance to embrace the Mao industry, Chinese entrepreneurs, much like their earlier European counterparts, showed no such hesitation. For them, the growth of Mao iconography and paraphernalia was simply another marketing opportunity. Old Lady Tang of Shaoshan, for example, became one of the earliest entrepreneurs to cash in on the earning potential of the late chairman by renaming her small restaurant ‘‘Maoist.’’ Beginning as a humble green bean noodle soup stall owner, she ended up repackaging her business as a ‘‘Mao restaurant’’ and made a small fortune. Having successfully marketed her business to tourists in Shaoshan, she then set about broadening her market opportunities by opening up a chain of Mao restaurant franchises across the country.18 She was but one of the many new ‘‘Mao merchants’’ helping to repackage the chairman. Whether because of 15. Deng famously made the remark that it doesn’t matter what color the cat is, just as long as it catches the mice. 16. Baoguo State Farm of Hainan, ‘‘Maogongshan chuanqi’’ [The Romantic Legacy of Maogongshan], available at http://baoguo.chinafarms.net/luyou.htm (accessed May 27, 2004). 17. Of these rivals, the three most famous are the one near the Three Gorges, the one in Heilongjiang, and finally one that is just outside Lushan. See Guojia Xingwang, ‘‘Renmin xinzhong de maogongshan’’ [Maogongshan in the People’s Heart], Xinhuanet, December 23, 2003, available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/forum/2003–12/23/content 1244323.htm (accessed May 27, 2004). 18. Gu Shihong and Bai Zuxie, ‘‘Tafang shendi: kai Maojia fandian de Tangdama [Visiting a Sacred Place: The Mao Restaurant Owner Old Lady Tang], China News, June 8, 2001, available at http://www.chinanews.cn/2001–06–08/26/96655.html (accessed June 11, 2004).


increased party sponsorship or the canny business efforts of little old ladies like Ms. Tang, Mao was back and tapping into a market desire for nostalgia, mysticism, and youthful romanticism. In the process, the Sirens’ song became just another hit single. Like the chairman himself, this ‘‘Siren’’ form of politics, a form in which millions expressed complete faith in their political leader and were willing to die for him, was reduced to an ‘‘artless’’ art form that merely entertained. To borrow a line from Ulrich Beck, we could say that we are currently witnessing in China a very political form of depoliticization.19 In this sense, one can indeed say that political reform has come to China. It came not in the form of an officially promoted institutional transformation of the state-based political system, nor as a revolution that would sweep away the Communist Party and introduce democracy, but in a far more subtle yet profoundly lifealtering way. Effectively, this political reform has unconsciously transformed the Chinese lifeworld into one in which money, not politics, dictates desire. In this new environment, desire itself is commodified, politics is marginalized, and the populace is effectively depoliticized. No longer enthralled by politics, the Chinese people are instead bombarded by consumer trends that seem capable of turning even the most taboo of political topics into an object of consumer desire. Indeed, there is no better example of this than the once taboo subject of the Cultural Revolution. Cultural Revolution as Culture Industry In 1986, the famous Chinese author and critic Ba Jin called for a Cultural Revolution museum to be built along the lines of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. History, he argued, must never be allowed to repeat itself, and a museum where ‘‘real objects’’ and ‘‘striking scenes’’ would bring forth feelings of discomfort offered the best guarantee of ensuring that there would be no return of such extreme politics. ‘‘Masks would fall, each will search his or her conscience, the true face of each one will be revealed, large and small debts from the past will be paid,’’ and ‘‘the flowers that bloom in blood,’’ which appear ‘‘bright and beautiful’’ but are ultimately poisoned, will never be planted again, he said.20 For years, Ba Jin fought strident official opposition to his idea. The Communist Party wanted no part 19. Ulrich Beck, Democracy without Enemies, trans. Mark Ritter (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 1998), 5. 20. Ba Jin, Suixianglu [Random Thoughts], vol. 5 (Hong Kong: Joint Pushing Co., 1986), 137.


of his museum project, for they did not want the catharsis it would induce to lead people to question the wisdom of the party. Silence reigned while the party struggled with the fear that any revival of that memory spelled trouble for them. By 2004, all such fears were gone. What swept such thoughts from the party’s collective mind? Nothing other than the profit motive and the new mind-set. In April 2004, entrepreneurs in Dayi County, Sichuan Province, broke ground on a site that is to become China’s first Cultural Revolution museum complex. Consisting of a restaurant, a hotel, and a teahouse, this museum, when completed, will be part of a broader theme-park experiment designed to create a nostalgia for the memory of revolutionary extremism without the actual excess and violence. Promoting nostalgia rather than revolution, this museum is designed to appeal to the tourist in need of a break from the capitalist rat race. With suitably attired staff and the accoutrements of the Cultural Revolution adorning every wall, the buildings will resonate with the memories of past events. The restaurant will be a perfect simulacrum of the ‘‘worker-peasant-soldier large canteen’’ (gong-nong-bing dashitang); the hotel will represent a Red Guard ‘‘reception center’’ (Hongweibing jiedaizhan); and the teahouse will be named Spring Cometh (Chunlai ), after a teahouse made famous in Jiang Qing’s Cultural Revolution model opera, Shajiabang. Yet the only thing revolutionary about this venture is the business concept. ‘‘This venture definitely isn’t just about offering social services, but about remembering the past, and, most importantly, managing a museum business,’’ said one of the investors bankrolling the project. As a reporter from the Qianlong news service cynically noted when he came to cover the opening of this new museum project, ‘‘It was more than social services all right, it was all about profit!’’ 21 Perversely, it is the very profit orientation and theme-park quality of this proposed museum that makes it so politically powerful, but always in an antipolitical way. What might at first appear as little more than a perverse and ironic parody of Ba Jin’s solemn and heartrending vow to remember the victims proves to be the very best antidote to the infectious allure of the Sirens’ song. In a rather curious way, his gravity is part of the problem: Ba Jin’s earnest statements are simply the other side of the anger displayed by 21. Zhu Shengguo, ‘‘Wenge bowuguan zai ‘jingying’ shenme?’’ (What Is Being Managed at the Cultural Revolution Museum?), Qianlong on the Web, April 22, 2004, available at http://review.qianlong.com/20060/2004/04/22/[email protected] (accessed May 27, 2004).


the ‘‘responsible cadre’’ who pulled me from the Mao rubbish pile at Beijing University. Like scar literature and its opposite—Mao hagiography— these forms all continue to reify the ‘‘auric’’ quality of the chairman’s politics. Whether in reverence or revulsion, the ‘‘aura’’ of the Siren still pervades these ‘‘events’’ and genres in a way that future tourists at the Cultural Revolution museum, the crooners of the Mao songs at karaoke bars, and diners at Old Lady Tang’s Mao restaurant chain can no longer fully understand. While Ba Jin would still pick at the scars of Siren politics and call for a new Sirens’ song, the politics of the commercial museum lead consumers to a place where they can relax in sites that sit at the crossroads of distraction and nostalgia. Fear and enchantment are both replaced at this point by fetishization, as the distractions that Adorno calls the culture industry grow in importance. These forms do not just attract paying customers; they produce a consumer reality, and this, in turn, produces a mentality that proves to be a far more effective and life-changing antidote to the Cultural Revolution than Ba Jin’s solemnity or the cadre’s anger ever was. In speaking to an everyday ‘‘antipolitics’’ of fashion and fad, such solemnity and seriousness is always caught off guard. It is, literally, caught on the hop. Yet there is a high price to pay for such antipolitical subversion. It comes only with the reification of the commodity form, which it relies on and cannot break from. It is this paradoxical effect, I would argue, that offers the commodity form the ability to transform even an event such as the Cultural Revolution into an item that can be enjoyed. And it is in this ability to transform even the greatest expressions of political commitment and terror into items of enjoyment and distraction that one can see the power of the culture industry. This power to diminish our capacity to be thrown by the Sirens’ song of politics lies precisely in the culture industry’s ability to make even the most horrendous political event seem, in the eyes of we moderns, not only unrepeatable, but unthinkable. This commodified simulacrum of the Cultural Revolution museum makes the past unthinkable as a horrendous event by remembering it nostalgically and by offering it to moderns as a light-hearted form of distraction. To attempt to correct the record and remember ‘‘Truth,’’ as Ba Jin wants to do, simply opens the way for disputation. Truth, after all, can be countered and contradicted. It points back to a potential politics of friend and enemy. The commodity form seduces rather than challenges. One can challenge a claim to truth, but how does one challenge a theme park? How does one reverse the trend that makes the remnant shell of Siren politics a vehicle of the fashionable and ‘‘cool’’ without itself being rendered unfashionable


and uncool? In transforming events such as the Cultural Revolution and figures such as Mao Zedong into forms of consumer distraction and nostalgia, the commodity form robs them of their original transformative ability. In making everything into a commodity, those things that are commodified are themselves transformed. No longer is every event the basis of a political question as it was when the Sirens sung of Mao. On the contrary, now every event is a question of market opportunity. As the cash registers ring up sales, our ears become plugged to the music of the political, precisely because we are deafened by the hip-hop or disco versions of the revolutionary song. Increasingly, even when we desire change, we become tied to the very logic that stops it from taking place. It is this political reform that the Mao industry has brought to China. It is this industry that has helped solidify the reform process and, as a result, has become the central political legacy of economic reform, even if it is only as allegory. What makes it significant, theoretically, is the light it shines on the politics of the culture industry. Mao as industry, as culture industry, helps us rethink Adorno and Horkheimer and appreciate them anew. In this revision of their argument, we humans are weakened, not because we have lost our foothold on Enlightenment Reason, but because we are losing touch with that force within us that can produce political enchantment. Conclusion In 1992, Deng Xiaoping undertook his now famous southern tour, launching what became a new consumer revolution in China. With this in mind, the dates of the Mao craze suddenly take on added significance. Arguably, the Mao craze constitutes the first postliberation consumer fad to take place in China. The leader who once made the Sirens’ call to politics and then directed it against capitalism was now the image form leading the counterrevolution. In this new consumer counterrevolution, forms of enchantment remain. Nevertheless, like migrant workers with nowhere to go, they have left the tightly knit village of commitment politics and moved to the ‘‘polymorphous’’ consumer capitals of the eastern coastal cities. These are the places of seduction which offer forms of enchantment that do not confront the political. Instead, they ‘‘morph’’ politics into a safer form of dreaming. They do this by ‘‘bleaching away’’ the ‘‘primordial’’ power of the political and replacing it with the ‘‘afterlife’’ power of the simulacra. The aura remains, but the passion is drained away. In each and every domain, and irrespective of their own particular localized distinctions, the practices once


undertaken out of a passionate commitment to a political program are forgotten. Instead of political distinction, we now have economic distraction; instead of being uplifted, we are now stupefied. Caught between the Scylla of passion and excess and the Charybdis of alienation and order, China is drawn to the latter, and, as it is, it increasingly faces the dilemma that confronts all liberal democracies, disenchantment. It is the Mao industry that puts this all into focus, for it is the Mao industry that has led the charge. In this new, passionless world of the commodity, the life-affirming/life-threatening exhilaration of revolution gives way to the artificial excitement of manufactured desire. The political excesses of the past have gone, but so too have the life-affirming victories of the revolutionary line. Perhaps this is the cost of any ethic of limit. Life-threatening intensity can only be limited by limiting life itself, but it takes the reason of Adorno and Horkheimer, and the ‘‘phantasmagoria’’ of the Chinese Mao industry, to show us this in such a clear fashion.

On Comparability and Continuity: China, circa 1930s and 1990s

Rebecca E. Karl

Commenting on François Furet’s book on the French Revolution, Jacques Rancière notes that Furet’s antirevolutionary account is premised upon the conviction that ‘‘the historical actors live in the illusion of creating the future by combating something that, in fact, is already in the past.’’ Rancière continues, ‘‘And the Revolution is the generic name of this illusion, of this false present of the event that is the conjunction of a misapprehension and a utopia: the misapprehension of the past character of what one believes to be present, the utopia of making the future present. The Revolution is the illusion of making the Revolution, born from ignorance of the Revolution already made.’’ 1 The illusion is that the Revolution was a Revolution, because the event can be dissolved by the historian into a scientific precision that demonstrates the Revolution to have been unnecessary, since the State against which it was waged died long before the Revolution ostenUnless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 39. boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.


sibly killed it. In this abolishing of the revolutionary event, those who thought they lived and acted in a revolutionary present are relegated to a nonexistent temporality: thus is the lived temporality of historical actors flattened into scientific Time, which crowds out politics ‘‘by prematurely imposing,’’ in Peter Osborne’s words, ‘‘the perspective of a future which absolutizes existing relations to the past.’’ 2 Rather than be dissolved into scientific Time, lived histories can also be figured as endlessly particular and continuous. As Rancière notes, in Jules Michelet’s hands the Revolution can be absorbed seamlessly into the realm of mentalités, assimilated into that utopian present projected from and into a timeless past and future consisting of ‘‘uninterrupted discourse’’ that territorializes meaning by ‘‘leaving no spoken word . . . without a place.’’ 3 For Michelet, lived temporality is doomed to endless reproduction as a form of spatiocultural coherence and normative desire: the event’s potential ruptural significance domesticated, the heretical voices raised in its making efficiently contained to their proper place. Thus is the propriety of place restored to a class-specific form of sociocultural property, and mentalité linked to a reaffirmation of homogeneous localities and class-specific cultures in a tight nexus of mutually reinforcing sociological reproduction. Mentalité is that which traps peoples in the timelessness of culture and place, apolitically deflecting and deferring history. Rancière succinctly reveals that scientific Time and mentalités are compensatory gestures that dehistoricize and depoliticize by effecting displacements that leave us with an attenuated spatiocultural tautology: ‘‘the place is what gives a place.’’ 4 They hence become important ways of making possible claims of temporal continuities tied to bounded culturalist essences. They also inform a Weberian method of comparison that displaces the global historical rupture of capitalism unto an ahistorically, spatially differentiated world. In what follows, I wish to foreground some problems raised by willed displacements in recent historiography and film by working through the explicit and implicit comparisons made between the 1930s–1940s and the 1990s in China.5 In the first section, I examine how 1990s’ historiographical 2. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (New York: Verso, 1995), 44. 3. Rancière, The Names of History, 24–41; 58–59; 66. 4. Rancière, The Names of History, 67. 5. The 1930s could be dated 1928–1937, from the violent dissolution of the first United Front to the Japanese invasion; and the 1990s, from the 1987 ‘‘primary stage of socialism’’

Karl / China, circa 1930s and 1990s 171

debates on the concept of semicolonialism recuperate, albeit significantly transform, aspects of the originary 1930s–1940s’ debates on the topic. The 1990s’ version depoliticizes the earlier debates by reading semicolonialism through the lens of today’s preoccupation with transition to capitalist-style modernization. Indeed, the contemporary consensus labeling of China’s current moment as a ‘‘transitional social formation’’ (zhuanxing shehui xingtai ) or ‘‘transitional period’’ (zhuanxing shiqi or guodu shiqi )—codified in official doctrine as the ‘‘primary stage of socialism’’—effectively evacuates any critical or conflictual dimension from semicolonialism, a dimension of primary concern to 1930s’ theorists, who most often used the term to analytically name the nature of global and national unevenness. Semicolonialism is thus displaced from the global processes in which the concept was originally embedded and from which it originally emanated as a historical problematic, and is relocated to the level of the continuous national State. In the second section, I consider two films—Zheng Junli’s Crows and Sparrows (Wuya yu maque, 1948–49; hereafter, C&S), and Peng Xiaolian’s Once Upon a Time in Shanghai (Shanghai jishi, 1998; hereafter, Shanghai )—both of which emplot the city of Shanghai as a site of revolution and liberation. I explore the ways in which Peng’s contemporary enactment of Shanghai’s modernity proceeds with ostensibly direct reference to its prerevolutionary Other through appeals to the city as a stable place embodied in bourgeois mentalité, whose lure is inscribed in a past to which the present inevitably returns. In this vision, Shanghai and its past resemble a form of what Marx called a ‘‘self-valorizing value,’’ a closed circuit of reproduction representing a stable exchange between value and place, past and present.6 In Shanghai, that is, the city is construed via a past episode of sociopolitical imbalance (the 1940s); it is liberated (in the 1990s) when the ruptural decades of socialism are disappeared and the city is enabled to return to its supposedly original values. As counterpoint, I explore how Zheng’s prerevolutionary filmic enactment of Shanghai in C&S constructs an urban lifeworld through an account of a historical experience of modernity figured through what Harry Harootunian has called ‘‘everydayness.’’ 7 theory (see below), or from the 1989 Tian’anmen events, or from Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 ‘‘Southern Tour.’’ 6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 711. 7. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).


In this version, Shanghai is construed as an uneven space of production—economic, historical, cultural, social—not as an endlessly reproduced place, and the city’s sociopolitical upheavals in the late 1940s are figured as moments of intense struggle in the context of total crisis. Liberation in C&S is thus an open-ended opportunity to create anew the practices of the everyday by imagining a history and a futurity that has not yet been and yet could be: the 1940s is not an era whose end is foretold by the imposition of managerial control in the 1990s but rather an era of crisis whose resolution is in an ongoing process of sociohistorical becoming. 1. Semicolonialism: From Crisis to Transition Defining Semicolonialism The concept of semicolonialism originally derives from Lenin’s usage in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, where it is located as a way station to full colonization. This definition foretold the modern passage of all non-Western peoples into complete colonization, or, through revolution, into national sovereignty. Indeed, the Baku conference of 1920 (the First Congress of the Peoples of the East), convened by the nascent internationalist wing of the new Soviet state (the Comintern), was informed by Lenin’s binary formulation: at Baku, semicolonial countries were categorized with colonial ones. This formulation was primarily intended as a rethinking of national liberation projects and the necessity of class coalitions among nonsovereign peoples in light of the projected Bolshevik victory in the Russian civil war (then ongoing). However, as national and global social, political, cultural, and economic disintegrations became more acute, and hence as the field of the social itself became more contested in political theory and practice, the concept of semicolonialism also underwent a transformation. New articulations and theorizations increasingly focused not only on the problem of sovereignty in the global arena but on the historical-analytical problem of social formation, which included uneven economic structures and internal power relations, and the everyday cultural conditions produced in the micro- and macro-interactions of capitalism with received cultures in different localities. Thus, if Lenin’s (and later Stalin’s) emphasis on modern colonialism/ semicolonialism focused on the nationally constitutive role of uneven global power, local rearticulations and reconceptualizations added a concurrent concern with uneven social relations at the local level that, while not separable from the global/nation-state arena, were nevertheless also not redu-


cible to it. This refocusing helped contribute to widespread research on the specific socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes structuring everyday life. Semicolonialism therefore became an analytical mode of specifying temporal asymmetry, or what Henri Lefebvre calls ‘‘desynchronization’’;8 it provided an analytical optic on the problem of the incommensurate constitutive temporalities of modern social formations at global, regional, national, and local levels simultaneously. As semicolonialism became a way to figure this simultaneity in temporal terms, it also became necessary to understand how temporal asymmetry was established historically.9 For this, semifeudalism came to be the concept most closely allied with semicolonialism in the specification of modern China’s condition.10 Guomindang (GMD, or Nationalist Party) theorists of the 1930s, such as Tao Xisheng, used the term fengjian shili (feudal forces), a concept that revolved around the problem of the residues or remnants (canyu) of feudalism in the political arena: a uniquely Chinese cultural asymmetry established between a putative advanced politics of the urban/global in confrontation with the agrarian backwardness still dominant in politics. Meanwhile, Communist theorists used the term fengjian zhuyi (feudalism), which was defined in terms of the socioeconomic relations characterized by the overlapping and mutually reinforcing surpluses (guosheng; shengyu) of two types of socioeconomic and political exploitation: feudal (extraeconomic) and imperialist-capitalist (surplus value).11 In combination, semicolonialism-semifeudalism was articulated around problems of residue, surplus, and excess. 8. Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity (London: Verso, 1995), 206. 9. One of the only English-language theorizations of semicolonialism as an economic form is Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘‘Semi-colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis,’’ in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 290–314. Osterhammel’s theorization is vitiated by his assimilation of semicolonialism to the spurious notion of ‘‘informal empire.’’ 10. Each of the ‘‘semis’’ emerged in the 1920s; in February 1929, they were combined by the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee in its 28th directive (‘‘Strategies for the Peasant Revolution’’). The formulation was codified in Su Hua’s (1933) and Zhang Wentian’s (1934) usage, and by Mao Zedong starting in December 1936 (‘‘Zhongguo geming zhanzheng de zhanlüe wenti’’ [Strategy of the Chinese Revolutionary War], Mao Zedong Xuanji [Selected Works of Mao Zedong], vol. 1 [Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1967], 154– 225). 11. See Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 96–97.


Semicolonialism and Incompletion Largely following Lenin, many Chinese in the 1930s saw semicolonialism as a temporary political condition marked by the semiautonomy of the State. For example, in 1937, Chen Hongjin, summarizing the most commonsensical view, specifies the parameters and special characteristics of semicolonialism in a popular booklet: In general, semicolonial countries have a colonial character. Precapitalist social relations are superior [zhan youshi ] in their social formations, and imperialism is in the dominant position [zhan tongzhi diwei ] in their national politics, economics, and societies. Yet, aside from these general characteristics, semicolonial countries also have their particularities. . . . These can be encapsulated in the following six points: 1. The transitional nature of semicolonialism; 2. Formal political sovereignty; 3. The importance for imperialism of capital export; 4. The demand for national unification and the establishment of state capitalism; 5. The vacillation between dictatorial and democratic politics; 6. The role played by the rejection of global capitalism by semicolonial revolutions.12 In further explanation, Chen clarifies that the transitional nature (guoduxing) of semicolonialism is attributable to semicolonial spaces being a remnant (canyu) of the imperialist struggle to partition the globe. (He names Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Siam, the South American nations, Egypt, and Mexico as the major semicolonial countries of the time.)13 This remnant character, according to Chen, informs not only the current international situation of the national people (semisovereign) but also the future of the global sphere itself. Thus, the resolution of semicolonial situations would decide whether semicolonies would become full colonies, allowing imperialist-capitalism to extend its temporal and spatial dominion completely over the globe, or whether semicolonial peoples became independent, thus contributing to the differentiation of global space and time at the level of the nation-state. Whatever the outcome, Chen insists that a semicolony is not and cannot be an 12. Chen Hongjin, Zhimindi yu banzhimindi [Colonialism and Semicolonialism] (Shanghai: Heibai congshu, 1937), 44–45. 13. Chen Hongjin, Zhimindi yu banzhimindi, 45–64.


enduring or autonomous global formation; rather, it is a temporary or transitional formation, constituted by and a remnant of modern imperialism’s inability to complete itself, as it were.14 It is also possible to see incompletion through what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘‘the logic of systemic or structural totalities,’’ and it is in this fashion that the 1930s–1940s’ economist Wang Yanang designates not political sovereignty but compradore-bureaucratic capitalism as the most important aspect of the semicolonial condition. Conceiving of the imperialist-capitalist globe as an extended historical moment of tendential unity necessarily characterized by incompletion at any given level, Wang sees semicolonialism as a form of primitive capital accumulation in the context of a crisis in capitalism.15 For Wang, semicolonialism is hence not a problem of remnants in an already constituted global realm of capitalism emanating from a EuroAmerican/Japanese center, as with Chen Hongjin’s and cognate conceptualizations; rather, semicolonialism is a problem of a locally instantiated global formation characterized by a surplus (shengyu) that exceeded or escaped the capacity of total accumulation. Commenting upon the relationship of China’s feudal form to other versions of feudalism, Wang notes, ‘‘Other feudal formations were erected upon the basis of feudal land relations, where land was not alienable and where labor’s relationship to the land rendered it unfree. The foundations of Chinese feudalism, however, were built upon a landlord economy, where land was generally alienable and where labor was generally free to move. Where there is free exchange between land and labor or labor power, there is the basic premise for the development of a capitalist commodity economy’’ (40). In this light, he continues, the Trotskyists and bourgeois economists who emphasized that China’s semicolonial-semifeudal economy was a commodity economy built atop an incipiently indigenous capitalist economy were partially correct, even if one had to disregard what he calls ‘‘the reactionary services they have rendered on behalf of imperialism, compradores, and feudal landlords’’ (40). Thus, putting aside the political implications of such a position in the fraught context of the time and looking at the situation from the perspective of alienable land, free labor, and a welldeveloped market, China’s economy from the Song dynasty onward could 14. Chen Hongjin, Zhimindi yu banzhimindi, 46–48. 15. Wang Yanan, Zhongguo jingji yuanlun [Elements of the Chinese Economy], 2nd ed. (Shanghai: Shenghuo shudian, 1947), chaps. 1–2. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically by page number only.


indeed appear in the guise of an incipiently capitalist economy. And yet, he argues, The kind of freedom that emerged from this not only is quite distant from the kind of freedom demanded by capitalism. In its very essence [zai benzhi shang], one could even say that it wasn’t the kind of freedom demanded by capitalism at all. For this reason, its progressiveness is contained within feudalism at best, and cannot be encapsulated within capitalism. It is thus progressive only within feudalism and remains feudal; under that external appearance of freedom are hidden all sorts of obstacles to the development of the reality of capitalism. (41–42) It is thus beneath the appearance of ‘‘free land and labor,’’ which, in any case, he notes, have been fetishized in bourgeois economics as atomized attributes rather than structural aspects of a socioeconomic formation, that Wang seeks the affinities and structural correspondences between feudalism and its semicolonial-semifeudal instantiation. The key resides in what he calls the ‘‘compradore-bureaucratic class’’ (maiban guanliao jieji ) as a structurally necessary element of China’s interactions with capitalism. This structural necessity does not vitiate for Wang the utmost importance of struggles over political ideologies and the State; however, his recognition of such a structural element does prevent him from displacing the historicized and politicized products of China’s particular situation completely unto the global sphere of imperialism, and from mischaracterizing China’s preimperialist economy as bearing the sprouts of capitalism. Hence, while recognizing the integral role of capitalist-imperialism in producing China’s modern socioeconomic formation, Wang insists that this formation cannot be reduced either to its global or to its local aspects.16 It is for this reason that Wang, unlike many CCP (Chinese Communist Party) theorists in the 1930s, rejects the notion that there were neatly demarcated foreign and Chinese economic sectors in spatially distinct realms, while also not accepting the Trotskyist position that there is no point in distinguishing between foreign and Chinese economic sectors at all. Wang, unconcerned with CCP or Trotskyist orthodoxy instrumentalized as revolutionary practice, argues instead that the particular historical formation of capitalism in its semicolonial form had demanded structural revisions 16. For a comment on Wang that downplays his politics, see Osterhammel, ‘‘Semicolonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China,’’ 296–97.


in capitalism itself at the same time as it forced structural revisions in China’s relations of production/social formation. Given this complexity, he argues, ‘‘capitalist economics can assist only to a certain degree in the understanding of China’s economy’’ (43). Indeed, as he specifies, ‘‘with the deepening of the semicolonial situation, even our ‘compradore’ economists have progressively lost the vitality of the reformist wealth and power economics of several decades ago; like fanning dying embers on the current situation, they occasionally spout a few phrases about [economic] construction that have nothing to do with the real situation in order to animate the scene. This explains how deeply we have fallen into the poison of consumer economic theory, which has continuously submerged our understanding of our own economy in a dense fog of pretense’’ (44). That is, ‘‘consumer economic theory,’’ which attempts to understand the workings of the economy through the ideal type of supply/demand and consumption models, fails to comprehend the peculiar structural totality of a local economy in a particular global historical context. In such a light, neither the ‘‘mechanical instrumentalism’’ of Stalinist economics nor the ‘‘opportunism’’ of what Wang calls ‘‘vulgar mainstream economists’’ was good enough to produce a real understanding of the semicolonial situation. This is because China’s economy cannot be ‘‘managed as if it were a capitalist commodity economy,’’ a position perversely arrived at by mainstream economists through their dismissal of the historical particularity of the modern situation and through their use of ‘‘citations from the classics to explain that China has already been a commodified society [for a long time]’’ (46). According to Wang, therefore, it was necessary to recognize that ‘‘feudal relations have been compradorized [maiban hua le], and [that] the activities of compradore capital also experience the special characteristics of feudal exploitation’’ (48). This recognition, in turn, required a recognition that, not only is ‘‘China’s economy constantly under the influence of the . . . situation of the global capitalist economy; . . . but, by the same token, the global economy is also directly or indirectly influenced by the Chinese economic situation’’ (50). Only with such a dual recognition would it be possible ‘‘to expose the real mutual relations between economies’’ (50). In this regard, Wang notes, ‘‘evidently, the residual elements of the traditional economy are being restructured by the capitalist commodity economy, and at the same time, they constantly act as a series of constraints upon the elements of the capitalist economy, either by contesting or adapting to them’’ (52–53). This leads him to see semicolonialism as a moment of primitive capital accumulation on a global and local


scale simultaneously, an accumulation effected not under the direction of an independently constituted or constitutive bourgeoisie but rather under the constituted and constitutive class of ‘‘compradore-capitalists,’’ a class that corresponds to and is created by the structurally necessary alteration of capitalism in its semicolonial moment. Moreover, this primitive capital accumulation should not be understood through a chronological confrontation expressed as a transition from ‘‘primitive accumulation’’ (yuanshi jilei ) to proper capital accumulation (ziben jilei ), as separable temporalities of activity that mutually exclude one another. Rather, in keeping with Marx’s concept of primitive capital accumulation understood as the basic condition of possibility for the continuous movement of capital around the globe,17 Wang’s concept of primitive capital accumulation articulates the excess of feudal exploitation (its extraeconomic dimension) to the surplus value demanded by capitalism as the historical socioeconomic form of semicolonial society. In short, Wang’s conceptualization of the semicolonial did not reduce the so-called feudal elements of the Chinese economy to a past temporality that corresponded to an endlessly reproduced spatial locatedness comprised of mere residues, nor was the semicolonial-semifeudal form a uniquely Chinese form of global or national incompletion. Even less did he reduce the urban/global to a concept of the modern that corresponded to either an ahistorical essence or a historicist standard of scientificity divorced from a structural totality. Rather, he recognized these spheres as mutually productive of the unevenness of the semicolonial moment, as a local and global formation dominantly characterized by the restructuration of capitalism at all levels through the ongoing process of primitive capital accumulation. In this sense, for Wang, capitalism and feudalism were cotemporal and mutually productive of one another; and it was precisely this structural totality that characterized modernity in general as a lived everyday of imperialism that exceeded the constraints of its local and global instantiations. Hence, Wang’s concept of incompletion is far different from the incompletion that connotes a fundamental lag or lack; for him, incompletion was the condition of primitive capital accumulation on a world scale. Unwilling to settle for unevenness and incompletion, Mao Zedong, who was responsible both for the further theorization of semicolonialism and its codification as revolutionary strategy, wrote in December 1935, ‘‘One 17. For the centrality of primitive accumulation to Marx, see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 30–31.


of the main political and economic characteristics of a semicolonial country is the weakness of its national bourgeoisie.’’ This weakness, he pointed out, was one major manifestation of ‘‘China’s uneven political and economic development [which] has given rise to the uneven development of the revolution.’’ It would be the task of revolutionary strategy to change the revolutionary situation ‘‘from a state of unevenness to a certain degree of evenness . . . [from] a localized one into a nationwide one.’’ 18 For Mao, then, semicolonialism was a form of revolutionary tactics (cilüe) that broadly specified the temporally uneven dimensions of the current situation, understood as a tendentially unified but dispersed social and historical struggle. That is, the semicolonial was a tactical and ever-changing temporalized conflict. This conflict was part of not only a struggle for the State and its relationship to the nation but also of a global struggle against capitalism. As an effort to specify a revolutionary praxis, Mao’s theory went a long way; it soon became an incantation, however, and was dogmatized. It is against this dogmatization that contemporary debates on semicolonialism were joined in the 1980s and 1990s. Semicolonialism as the Scientifically Displaced Temporality of Transition In recent decades, the problem of contradictory temporalities of historical experience has been reconceived as a problem of national historical obstacles and radical particularities to be eliminated rather than as the very stuff and process of historical struggle and of historicity itself. That is, while contradictions previously were instrumentalized as revolutionary strategy and targeted for eventual transcendence, nevertheless, they were seen as the site of the historical itself. These days, history seems to happen elsewhere. On the contemporary view, China has emerged from the nowcondemned anachronism of revolution and socialism, which can be cast out of world historical and national time and recast as remnants of a particularistic time informed by the persistence of feudalism in the political sphere. China in the 1990s can thence be figured as returning to an originary modern transition to capitalism felicitously located as immanent in the 1930s’ semicolonial formation but blocked, as China was hijacked first by the Japanese and then by socialist revolution. In this climate, by the late 1980s and 1990s, after a half century of appearing as talismanic incantation, the semicolonial-semifeudal char18. Mao Zedong, ‘‘Lun fandui riben diguo zhuyi de cilüe’’ [On Tactics against Japanese Imperialism], in Mao Zedong Xuanji, 1:133, 137, 138.


acterization that had authorized and analytically underpinned the revolution and its major historical tasks and agents since the 1930s was not immune to interrogation.19 These interrogations enabled historians if not to outright repudiate ‘‘semi-semi’’ in its minimal aspect as nominalism 20 at least to evacuate the concept by reconstruing it through the lens of transition, thereby to argue for an essential historical continuity between the 1930s and the 1990s. In this vein, one participant in the last decade’s debates, historian Ma Min, called China’s ‘‘semi-semi’’ society of the 1930s a ‘‘lopsided’’ structural totality that resulted from ‘‘the confrontation between the universalization of modern capitalism and the narrow tracks of feudal society.’’ 19. The initial moments of this debate emerged with the theory of the ‘‘primary stage of socialism’’ promoted at the 1987 Thirteenth Party Congress. First in newspapers and later in academic journals, this new theory spawned controversy over China’s choice in the 1930s and 1940s to take a socialist rather than capitalist path. See Yan Sun, The Chinese Reassessment of Socialism, 1976–1992 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), chaps. 7 and 8. Wang Jinglu first reopened the question of the ‘‘semi-semi’’ formulation in an essay published in 1986 in the venerable journal Lishi yanjiu [Researches in History]. A rejoinder to Wang was published in the same journal in 1988—after the primary stage theory debate had begun; it took Wang to task for his notion that semifeudalism indicates progress (beyond feudalism). From 1989 through 1998, the debate proceeded in various other journals, including Jindaishi yanjiu [Researches in Modern Chinese History), Xueshu yanjiu [Scholarly Researches], and Makesi zhuyi yanjiu [Researches in Marxism]. After 1989, the link between ‘‘semi-semi’’ and the primary stage theory became less overtly the point of departure. For the textual origins of the two ‘‘semis,’’ see Chen Jinlong, ‘‘‘Ban zhimindi banfengjian’ gainian xingcheng guocheng kaoxi’’ [Considerations and Analysis of the Formation of the Concept of ‘Semicolonial Semifeudal’], Jindaishi yanjiu 4 (1996): 227–331; and the response by Zhang Qinghai, who disputes whether semicolonial indicates the problem of social formation (Chen believes it does; Zhang maintains it does not), or whether it is only ‘‘semifeudal’’ that has this significance. Zhang’s comment at the end of his essay summarily undermines ‘‘semi-semi’’ as history: ‘‘This author believes that ‘semi’ is merely an empty word and has no real meaning; it is not like a method that would make the colonial question into a problem of social formation. Thus, in historiography, it is perhaps more scientific to not use the ‘semi’ prefix. . . . But this author also believes that whether or not one uses ‘semi’ is not a question of principle and that it is not necessary to seek unanimity on the issue.’’ See ‘‘Lun dui ‘banfengjian’ banzhimindi’ liangge gainian de lilun jieding’’ [On the Theoretical Specification of the Two Concepts Semifeudal and Semicolonial], Jindaishi yanjiu 6 (1998): 233. 20. See Rancière, The Names of History, where he argues that historical nominalism is inextricably related to political ideologies of class. Also see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 53–59.


For Ma, semi-semi is most properly understood as a ‘‘special transitional social formation’’ (yizhong tesu de guodu xingtai shehui ) that accounts for ‘‘the bizarre contradictions that arose and developed from the structure and movement of modern Chinese society [which] all revolve around the combination of its continuous transition to capitalism and its ultimate inability to complete this transition.’’ 21 Ma goes on to explain that transition must be understood as a historical process that ‘‘leads from the partial to the complete qualitative transformation of society’’; and whereas some transitions have been ‘‘spontaneous’’ (the Euro-American variety), others have been ‘‘coerced.’’ 22 Japan and Russia are examples of those that completed the latter process, while China and India are examples of those that have yet to complete any process. Japan and Russia, Ma concludes, powerfully demonstrate that ‘‘if one can correctly take up the challenge, without losing time and wasting the opportunity, and if one relies upon the power of the state to promote reform and to boldly transplant capitalist modes of production, then less advanced nations are completely capable of realizing social transformation and leaping into the ranks of advanced industrialized nations.’’ Needless to say, those who did not take up the challenge correctly remained mired in transition or, worse, regressed.23 On this account, China failed the historical test because of its inability to complete a spontaneous or coerced transition to capitalism. In Ma’s estimation, the ‘‘semi-semi’’ condition yielded neither historical regression nor progress, a situation from which the socialist state was born and which it, too, failed to overcome, sending China into a further half century of fruitless searching, not for the correctly mandated transition to capitalism but rather for a historically aberrant transition to socialism. Thus, for Ma, the failure to complete the capitalist transition either before or out of the ‘‘semisemi’’ condition confirms the correctness of the post-Mao Dengist theory of the ‘‘primary stage of socialism,’’ which assigns China to a special stage of transitional development intended to get the nation off its distorted historical track back onto a normal (zhengchang) path of development.24 Partially refuting the logic, although joining in Ma’s assessment of the 21. Ma Min, ‘‘Guodu tezheng yu zhongguo jindai shehui xingtai’’ [Special Characteristics of Transition and Early Modern China’s Social Formation], Lishi yanjiu 1 (1989): 47, 51. 22. ‘‘Spontaneity’’ refers to the assumed smooth internalist transition in ‘‘normal’’ capitalism from merchant to industrial capital. 23. Ma Min, ‘‘Guodu tezheng,’’ 48–49. Ma’s essay was written prior to the USSR’s dissolution. 24. Ma Min, ‘‘Guodu tezheng,’’ 58.


significance of ‘‘semi-semi’’ as a blocked transitional formation newly invigorated by the primary stage theory, Nie Xiwen rejoined that both ‘‘semis’’ had their advanced and regressive aspects, as any transitional social formation would have. Indeed, as Nie points out, the very definition of a transitional formation presupposes both residues of older (outmoded) formations and sprouts of newer (progressive) ones.25 Nie recounts that it was, in fact, precisely out of the recognition of the combined unity of regression and progress (transition) that the historic Third Plenum of the Thirteenth Party Congress (November 1987) fashioned the primary stage theory. He cites the conclusion on this question adopted by the congress: ‘‘Because our socialism emerged from the womb of a semicolonial-semifeudal society, the level of our productive forces greatly lagged behind that of advanced capitalist countries. This determined that we have to go through a relatively lengthy primary-stage period in order to realize what many other countries have achieved under capitalism in industrialization: commodification, socialization of production, and modernization.’’ 26 A strong displacement of contingent historicity unto a scientific teleology of transitional stagism marks both Ma’s and Nie’s commentaries. Indeed, both rely for intelligibility upon a normalization of the concept of transition as transition to capitalism, where the revolution and Maoism appear only as aberrant. This normalization rejects transition as a socially immanent process; for the State, whose form and function comprised an important object of revolutionary struggle during Mao’s time, turns out to have been there all along, not as the object of struggle but apparently sufficient unto itself. In this, these theories of transition are utterly unlike Mao’s earlier theory of new democracy (despite occasional rhetorical bows): Mao’s new democracy was an attempt to deal with the problem of China’s situation with a theory of the immanence of social conflict in the historical determination of State-form itself. By contrast, current theories of transition assume an untheorized transhistorical State, which is not a product of but above the historical process. While this State bears a superficial resemblance to the Leninist revolutionary State, it bears an even stronger resemblance to that State posited in the once-discredited Asiatic Mode of Production theory.27 It 25. The dispute over the progressive and regressive nature of imperialism/capitalism/ feudalism in China echoes the 1930s’ debate, although in the latter case the debate shaped up between the CCP and Trotskyists. See Dirlik, Revolution and History, chap. 3. 26. Nie Xiwen, ‘‘Dui Zhongguo banzhimindi banfengjian shehui de xin renshi’’ [A New Understanding of Semicolonial, Semifeudal Society], Xueshu yanjiu 1 (1992): 69, 66. 27. See my ‘‘The Asiatic Mode of Production: National and Imperial Formations,’’ Historien (Greece) (forthcoming).


is upon this premise that the primary stage of socialism theory (which scientifically secures history through the State), in its link via a transitional formation to the ‘‘semi-semi’’ formulation, provides the historico-ideological bridge over which the 1930s and the 1990s can be spatiotemporally reconnected as an apparently continuous historical process. Current appeals to transition thus produce a mode of global and intranational historical comparability based on the well-known Weberian method that secures comparability between two (or more) already constituted commensurate entities. Just as the State (and the nation-state) is central to the theories of primary stage and of transition, while remaining untheorized, modernity ( jindai or xiandai ) is also central to these articulations, but reduced to a straightforward acceptance of capitalist-style modernization ( jindaihua or xiandaihua) as its exhaustive content. Thus is historicity displaced so as to reaffirm national-global continuity as temporal universality through the recuperative gesture of science secured by the State, hence to reconfirm a supposed universal transhistorical and comparable desire named modernization. The ‘‘Case’’ as Grounds of Comparison In the introduction to his book about China in the 1990s, cultural theorist Wang Xiaoming observes that current paradigms are wholly inadequate to an investigation of contemporary Chinese society. He writes, How can we state anything clearly about contemporary China by using mechanical binary concepts alone? It [China] is clearly not a capitalist nation, but it is also quite clear that it is no longer the socialist nation it was previously; it is just in the process of forming a ‘‘market’’ that is not ‘‘planned,’’ but this really has little to do with a capitalist market of ‘‘free competition’’; it is in the process of importing Western technology, management systems, cultural products, and values systems, but it would be quite difficult for it to ‘‘transform’’ itself into some type of ‘‘modern’’ Western nation in any foreseeable future. From this series of negative determinations, Wang observes that ‘‘it is really impossible to know how to define today’s China, as it conforms in not one respect to any theoretical model, whether one already well known to us, or a newer one imported from Euro-America.’’ 28 28. Wang Xiaoming, Zai xin yishi xingtai de longzhao xia: 90 niandai de wenhua yu wenxue fenxi [Under the Glare of the New Ideology: Culture and Literature in the 1990s] (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2000), 15.


Consciously or not, Wang’s observation echoes left-Guomindang theorist Tao Xisheng’s question of late 1928 that was at the heart of the social history controversy of the ensuing years: ‘‘What kind of society is China’s anyway [zhongguo daodi shi shenma shehui ]?’’ 29 As Arif Dirlik has noted, the investigations into Chinese history undertaken by Tao, among many others, in an attempt to answer this question ‘‘resulted in the rather unfortunate description of a major portion of Chinese history as transitional’’ 30—transitional, that is, from an imperfect model of feudalism to an unfulfilled model of capitalism. While Wang Xiaoming resists the temptation to exceptionalize contemporary China, the question he raises, in its resonance with Tao’s, is indicative of how the 1990s can sometimes appear as a repetition of the 1930s. Indeed, similar experiences of historical and social dislocation in the 1990s have led to a seemingly repetitive posing of the same questions as those of the 1930s. Repetitiveness poses problems in thinking about comparability between the 1930s and the 1990s. As we have seen, many simply reconceal the problem under the pseudoanswer provided by transition. With this answer, scholars have found themselves in the peculiar conundrum of revisiting the problem of social specification first opened in the 1930s, while simultaneously upholding the designation of China as transitional in the current period. This depressing repetitiveness is effected by eliding the very revolutionary years that supposedly did nothing to correctly bring the social formation and mode of production into a harmonious correspondence. Indeed, to the contrary, the Maoist period is usually seen as having precipitated an untenable noncorrespondence between social relations and productive forces, and, equally importantly, a noncorrespondence between China and the global capitalist economy. This construction of the problem leads to a denegation of the revolutionary period as a historical attempt to come to terms with contradictions within and between the Chinese social and global formations of the 1930s– 1940s in the context of crisis. It displaces the revolutionary period and the whole project of socialism as an Other to Chinese and global history proper. In this regard, Tao’s and the contemporary insistence on a ‘‘transitional’’ formation—of two thousand years’ or one hundred to one hundred fifty years’ duration, respectively—could remind us of Etienne Balibar’s attempt to argue for the necessity to conceive a social formation in transition as governed by a transitional mode of production (where the two in 29. Tao Xisheng, ‘‘Zhongguo shehui daodi she shenma shehui?’’ [What Kind of Society Is China’s, Anyway?], Xin shengming [New Life] 1, no. 10 (October 1928): 2–14. 30. Dirlik, Revolution and History, 119.


‘‘normal’’ circumstances would be conceived as mutually reproductive internal effectivities of a single expressive structure).31 As Balibar elucidates, in a transitional social formation, relations of production and productive forces do not correspond. And, as Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst elaborate in their critique of Balibar, the relations and forces of production in Balibar’s theory are related in the mode of noncorrespondence, where ‘‘each moment of reproduction is also a moment of dissolution of the structure of the mode of production; the concept of a transitional mode of production is also the concept of its suppression.’’ 32 In the contemporary case, the resort to transition under the primary stage theory constitutes both a political and a quasi-theoretical effort to turn the ‘‘irrational’’ preoccupation and policy of the Mao years on transforming relations of production before the productive forces were fully developed into a more ‘‘rational’’ policy of building the productive forces in a context defined by the noncorrespondence of the two. In this, the theory closely mirrors the formalist and idealist conception of the structure of the economy, which is precisely one of the most problematic aspects of Balibar’s theory. That is, as Hindess and Hirst put it, in Balibar, variants in mode of production are disallowed, as all variation must be conceptualized as external to the theory of correspondence; as such, variations appear as real, empirically given variations for an ideal, or theoretical, model. The mode of production is then conceived as an ideal type.33 By contrast, the 1930s’ debates, in the course of providing an unacceptably diachronic account of China’s national history through an account of successive modes of production tortured into unrecognizable forms so as to conform to China’s revolutionary situation, nevertheless connected that history structurally to histories outside China. As such, the 1930s’ debates created an understanding of China’s situation in connection to the world’s situation via a recognition of the global-level crisis in and of capitalism that was the historical context for the social history controversy—and for the 1930s as an era—to begin with. In this, unlike Japanese Marxist theorists of the same period, Chinese theorists did not produce an exceptionalist 31. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970), 273ff. 32. Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge 1975), 264, 265. 33. Hindess and Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, 267. Never mind that Hindess and Hirst themselves have no way to theorize noncapitalist non-European social formations other than as a mode of production that precisely isn’t a mode because modes of production, on their account, are inherently Eurocentric.


account of China; the intent was precisely the opposite. In connection to current debates, then, despite the superficially similar tendency toward the reification of ‘‘China’’ both then and now, among 1930s’ theorists of semicolonialism there was an explicit commitment to a dialectical understanding of national/social becoming and global transformation that endowed those theories with an expansive concept of history: of Chinese history as a particular problematic in a global theory of capitalist crisis. Semicolonialism appeared as an extended conjunctural moment during which a commodification of labor power was achieved through the violence of the primitive accumulation of capital in its imperialist form and its partial collusion with the State as well as with the compradore-bourgeoisie. As Wu Qingyou wrote in 1937 with regard to distinguishing semicolonialism from Kautskian theories of ultraimperialism (and, by extension, from Sun Yatsen’s concept of hypoimperialism [ci zhimindi ] 34): The point of departure for theories of organized capitalism and of ultraimperialism are logically connected. They both consider that it is possible to draw a boundary around the nation and to develop capitalism within those boundaries. When they analyze developmental trends within capitalism, they isolate particular key aspects of it. They do not understand that within the developmental process of capitalism itself are expressed interlocking contradictions, which are the result of uneven development. Unevenness itself, as a process of capitalism, thus includes the sum total of the mode of production and its anarchic character. This type of unevenness does not weaken in the imperialist era, but rather strengthens.35 In this vein, the thorny issue dealt with in many semicolonialism theories in the 1930s was the question of the role played by imperialism in the dissolution of China’s old relations of production (no matter whether those were called feudal or not) and their relationship to the State.36 It was, hence, precisely the issue of the relations of production that was of primary concern at the time, which was not coincidentally taken up by Mao Zedong later on. 34. Hypoimperialism asserts that China is the common colony of all imperialists and is thus in a more subordinated and more complex situation than full colonies. 35. Wu Qingyou, Ziben zhuyi fazhan de bu pinghenglü [Uneven Rates of Capitalist Development] (Shanghai: Shenghuo shudian, 1937), 8. Wu is following Bukharin relatively closely. 36. See Su Hua, ‘‘Zhongguo ziben zhuyi jingji de fazhan’’ [Development in China’s Capitalist Economy], Zhongguo jingji [China’s Economy] 1, no. 6 (September 1933): 1–19.


Conversely, today’s reduction of the concept of semicolonialism to the status of aborted transition to capitalism proposes that the rectification of the imbalance requires a commitment to a normative tipping of history toward a sociopolitical elite, which allies itself with the State and with forces of global capitalism in the restructuring of the Chinese nation as a fully commodified labor force. In the 1930s, this social element was called, however inadequately, the compradore-bureaucratic class; today it could be called, in Wang Xiaoming’s terms, ‘‘successful personages’’ (chenggong renshi ).37 Semicolonialism-as-transition is thus offered in the 1990s as a seemingly commensurate comparative object to semicolonialism in the 1930s, China in the 1990s as seemingly commensurate to China in the 1930s. Yet, these should more appropriately be seen as incommensurabilities that are at best a packaging device concealing the ongoing production and reproduction of global unevennesses consequent upon accelerating transformations within capitalism both inside and outside of China, which also mystify the internal social consequences of the commodification of labor power through violent State-sanctioned primitive accumulation of capital, and which, among other things, has recently led to the categorization of a large portion of the (rural and urban) Chinese population as either redundant (people) or surplus (labor). In short, ‘‘semi-semi’’ in the 1930s, despite its inadequacies as theory, at the very least recognized the temporal disjunctures consequent upon the shared embeddedness of all within a global capitalism in crisis. By contrast, in the 1990s, the acceptance of the inevitability of capitalism through the mutation of semicolonialism into a theory of perpetual transition presents little in the way of a critique of either imperialism or contemporary globalization; it is, rather, a form of recolonization. Thus, following Rancière: transition is dead; long live transition! As potential remedy, comparison of the 1990s and 1930s could perhaps best be conceptualized through the notion of the historical case. As James Chandler elucidates for a different context, the ‘‘very concept of the case becomes salient for the work of representation,’’ 38 as ‘‘a ‘case,’ most simply understood, is a represented situation.’’ 39 Chandler’s linking of the 37. It may not be immaterial to note here that in July 2001, capitalists began to be formally accepted as members of the Communist Party. 38. Chandler’s discussion of the case draws upon Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the situation, itself derived from a particular reading of Jean-Paul Sartre; it is through this history that Chandler links his discussion of ‘‘England in 1819’’ to ‘‘English in 1981.’’ See England in 1819, 39, 40. 39. Chandler, England in 1819, 195.


‘‘case’’ to ‘‘casuistry’’ makes clear that ‘‘configurations of circumstance [are] identified as such in relation to some normative domain, to a principled notion of ‘rightness,’’’ or, of the ‘‘discourse of the application of principle to circumstances.’’ 40 In this light, again drawing on Chandler, we could say that the 1930s’ moment sought to make ‘‘the case of the nation’’ for China, where the 1990s’ moment has sought to ‘‘alter the nation’s case’’ through appeals to transition theories grounded in dehistoricized historicism.41 His distinction is as follows: ‘‘When you understand the kind of case you confront, when you have classified its species, you know how to deal with it. The case is not as yet organized as a historical state of affairs. . . . The alteration of the case . . . involves just such new modes of organization and identification. It involves the naming of cases. . . . It involves the identification of cultural conjuncture in terms of the chronological code.’’ 42 In an altered case, then, the 1990s names the 1930s as its originary moment and organizes that era as its historical point of departure: the contemporary resort to transition alters the case of the nation by relocating the nation’s case within the failure of the Chinese socialist project qua misrecognized case of the nation. Yet, presenting the 1930s and 1990s through the problematic of the case as a principle of comparability based upon incommensurability rather than on claims to continuity can help elucidate how the historical immanence that was the basis of 1930s’ theorizing came to be absolutized in the 1990s as a historicism named transition. 2. Liberation, Then and Now Comparability as Historico-cultural Mentalité In the introduction to his anthology on Chinese film, Yingjin Zhang proposes that a proper archaeology of knowledge about prerevolutionary Chinese cinema—proper, in the sense that it would dispense with the politicization that has generally contained film study to its leftist manifestations— would enable one to ‘‘understand better the persistent nature of certain types of mentalités.’’ As he explains, ‘‘the revisiting of cinema and urban culture in Republican Shanghai . . . encourages a rethinking of China’s changing film culture in the new fin de siècle.’’ 43 Zhang’s archaeology is intended 40. Chandler, England in 1819, 198, 39. 41. Chandler, England in 1819, 6. 42. Chandler, England in 1819, 227–28. 43. Yingjin Zhang, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 22.


to link Republican-era Shanghai to present-day Shanghai through an exhumation of continuities in meaning and signification long masked by the ruptural orthodoxies of leftism: it mobilizes ‘‘mentalité’’ to restore propriety to its proprietary place. Zhang’s can be considered an important gesture only insofar as it efficiently and succinctly reflects the growing trend in today’s scholarly and state-ideological world that similarly conspires to establish a direct link between the 1930s and 1990s in China. As suggested above, this link works on one level to displace an uneven dynamic temporal relationship between politics and history in favor of a universal global diachrony embodied by the State; yet, in the realm of culture, it proposes a static spatiotemporal mentalité as the basis for comparability. This methodological presupposition authorizes an erasure that reflects a more profound desire than one simply to recuperate lost voices from the suppressions promoted by the (valorized) revolutionary-leftist/(unvalorized) popular culture–bourgeois binary hitherto dominating histories of Chinese film (and of Shanghai studies more generally). For, as confining as that older binary is, and as necessary as it is to seek new analytic frameworks derived from a more complex conceptualization of history/culture, Zhang’s project merely seeks to substitute a utopian futurity—that Michelet-style restoration of every voice to its proper place—for a contingent and tortured past process of political and economic struggle. This futurity renders that struggle into a mirage conjured by a massive historico-ideological hoax. Placing Shanghai in History Any cursory viewing of Zheng Junli’s Crows and Sparrows and Peng Xiaolian’s Once Upon a Time in Shanghai immediately reveals that they are polar opposites of one another—notwithstanding the fact that the latter appropriates the former through extensive quotation. At the material level, the conditions of the production of each film could not be more different. Zheng’s film was produced on a shoestring budget, mostly underground and through subterfuge, in an effort to evade the radar of GMD censors, who would have objected violently to Zheng’s stringent critiques of a regime in its death throes. Indeed, C&S was postproduced and released only upon the capture of Shanghai by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).44 By con44. For conditions surrounding the filming, editing, and release of Crows and Sparrows, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, ‘‘The Tradition of Modern Chinese Cinema: Some Preliminary Explorations and Hypotheses,’’ in Chinese Cinema, ed. Chris Berry (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 10–11.


trast, Peng’s film was commissioned by the CCP as an official commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of their liberation of Shanghai from GMD control; she was given a huge budget, as well as massive cultural, political, and technical assistance in filmically reconstructing Shanghai in the late 1940s.45 Supported by the Shanghai Film Studio, Shanghai was the winner of a major prize for best dramatic film in 1998. As the studio’s director, Zhu Yongde, later wrote about the film’s appeal, ‘‘the unique perspective selected by Shanghai jishi allows this film, which describes the liberation of Shanghai, to distance itself from the conventions of revolutionary historical topics; it thus has a charm all its own.’’ 46 Shanghai is a beautiful, coherent, technically accomplished and monumental tribute to its sponsors and to the historical moment they wanted Peng to commemorate—which turns out to be the present, not the past. That the present is more at issue is initially revealed in the glowing scenes of contemporary Shanghai, presented through the return of the protagonist, Shaobai, to the city after a fifty-year absence. The opening sequence situates the viewer in the safe place of an already constituted present viewed through the windows of an airplane circling the skyscraper-strewn, neon-lit skyline of Pudong/downtown Shanghai. After lingering briefly but dramatically in the airspace over the city, the film moves smoothly to a linearly rendered narrative of Shaobai’s past in the city during the crucial final years (late 1948 through early 1950), when the CCP/PLA was wresting political and economic control of the city from the GMD. The main characters in the historical narrative—Shaobai and his lover, Li Huirong—are both offspring of the ‘‘national bourgeoisie’’: their parents are co-owners of a textile factory that has patriotically resumed productive activities amid the chaos of the city after the defeat of Japan. The narrative follows three main strands: the attempts by Shaobai to rescue the textile factory from inflationary disaster; his concurrent attempts to convince Huirong to leave Shanghai with him, as the city becomes increasingly dangerous; and the course taken by Huirong’s conflicted and simultaneous loyalties to Shaobai, the factory/her parents’ trust, and the CCP, for which she serves as an underground operative and 45. Most information on the making of Once Upon a Time in Shanghai was obtained in conversation with Peng Xiaolian, who also helpfully supplied me with a videotape of the film. 46. Zhu Yongde, ‘‘Nongmo zhongcai you yi zhang: Shang ying guoqing 50 zhounian huoli yingpian paiying huigu’’ [Another Chapter of Dark Ink and Bold Colors: Reviewing the Making of Prize-Winning Shanghai Studio Films for the Fiftieth Anniversary], Dianying xinzuo [New Films] 1 (2000): 9.


for which her family background and privileged social status provide cover. The privileged social background combined with Huirong’s correct politics also provide cover for the filmmaker to depict many scenes of the alluring bourgeois lifestyles of the Shanghai elite during the 1930s and 1940s— those lifestyles diligently being replicated in Shanghai in the 1990s—without betraying any hint of the contradiction between the lifestyle and the politics. Despite the intimacy of the story—which soon devolves into a series of melodramatic romances (Shaobai’s with Huirong; Huirong’s with the CCP; Shanghai’s with the bourgeoisie)—the narrative of the city in the 1940s is carefully contained, sealed off, as it were, from the protagonist’s present (1998) by the nightmarish sequence of events that is the reason both for the protagonist’s flight from China in early 1950 and for his return in 1998 from abroad. Indeed, that which might materially link the past to the present is nowhere presented or represented, other than obliquely in the modernized prospects of the current-day metropolis and in Shaobai’s frozen memories. Thus, the end of the film—which returns to the beginning, when Shaobai has arrived in Shanghai after the fifty-year interval—has Shaobai strolling along the Bund in the late 1990s gazing over to the new Pudong district, with the Oriental Pearl TV tower looming large in the night. Pausing to admire the now-iconic scene of the city’s resurgence in the 1990s, Shaobai remarks that his lost love, Huirong, who was killed in February 1950 by a counterrevolutionary during the GMD’s final attempt to destabilize the city, ‘‘will always be young and smiling’’ despite the passage of time. Another detail: Shaobai, who is returning in 1998 from the United States to remember his forever young and smiling lover and to enjoy the new Shanghai, was also returning to Shanghai in 1948 from the United States in order to marry her. He has, then, always been an outsider to Shanghai, absent from its history of becoming. According to the film, Shaobai can render his past into Shanghai’s (absent) history only because he has been away from the aftermath of events, and because Shanghai has now become his ideal city: the young, smiling lover of his eternal longing. This distance and idealization are marked by an apparent spatiotemporal continuity, as present-day Shanghai effortlessly metamorphoses into a past Shanghai, and vice versa, a spatial continuity that allows Shaobai/the filmmaker to return to the exact same place by inscribing it with an unchanging meaning (the young and smiling face of his lover; the bourgeois comforts to which he is entitled). In Shanghai, therefore, it appears that we are to understand that the condition of remembering/rendering pasts into history is the complete occlusion of the


passage of conflictual historical time in favor of a rendition of history as smooth continuity. Relatedly, we are to understand Shanghai as a stable place that can be fully appreciated/apprehended only from the overarching perspective of a completed present, whose teleological realization of the transition from the past is produced in and through the returnee’s fantasies of a romance reflected in Shanghai’s alluring iridescence. As such, Shanghai appears as a place and space of endlessly reproduced romantic longing/desire, a space where value and place are one. Put differently, Shanghai can be seen as an emblematic modern trope and site for what Carl Schmitt calls ‘‘political romanticism,’’ as realized through a type of ‘‘subjectivism’’ directed ‘‘not to concepts and philosophical systems, but rather to a kind of lyrical paraphrase of [individual] experience.’’ 47 Zheng’s 1948 film presents an utterly different aspect: that of a revolutionary everyday being produced slowly, painstakingly, and painfully from the materials at hand. These turn out to be a four-story house and a selection of Shanghai citizens inhabiting it, whose positions in the socioeconomiccultural hierarchy of urban life are differentially marked but commonly characterized by marginality from an economic and political center, however collapsed that center may be. In the steadily worsening socioeconomicpolitical conditions of Shanghai in the late 1940s, all of the solidities that might make up a routinized lifeworld—tins of (American) evaporated milk, gold jewelry, residences, property, professions, work, identities, money, relationships—almost literally melt into air in the process of their historicization (or, in their realization as value). Overdetermined as this process might be, Zheng’s film nevertheless understands that liberation needs to be construed as a topos of everydayness: that is, it must be understood in intimate relationship to particular histories, for which there is no return as such. Thus, unlike in Peng’s Shanghai, the present in C&S is anchored neither in a teleological narrative of revolutionary liberation by the party nor in a nostalgia for a history/politics that could have been and now finally is, nor in a sense of an eternally stable spatiality whose essential return is always already foretold. Rather, inherent in C&S’s present is, in Harootunian’s words, the ‘‘coexistence of different forms of economic life [that] came to signal an experience that was both modern and distinct.’’ 48 To be sure, one could see C&S as an urban ethnology that catalogs 47. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 159. This is what he also encapsulates as ‘‘subjectivist occasionalism’’ (17–20). 48. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 64.


‘‘friends’’/potential ‘‘friends’’ and ‘‘enemies’’ with reference to a stable center of the revolution according to strict Maoist criteria. Indeed, each character, or cluster of characters, can easily be read as representing a recognizable urban type of the 1930s–1940s—intellectual, teacher, petty bourgeois peddler, rural migrant laborer/servant, GMD official/landlord, bourgeois modern girl/mistress/wife, etc.—and, with the exceptions of the official/landlord and his mistress/wife, each of them is a potential revolutionary friend who must first recognize his/her true social relationship to the collective. At this level, the film easily can be deconstructed as an anatomy of the coming into being of an urban revolutionary consciousness—the formation of the urban revolutionary ‘‘masses’’—in a linear time marked by the rumored progress of the PLA toward Nanjing/Shanghai, where the tendential unity is provided by the (party-led) revolutionary movement itself. However, while the utopian conceit of the film is no doubt that the everyday disjunctness represented through the initially conflictual relations among the house’s inhabitants can be overcome through collective action, nevertheless, what the resulting unity might be or do is less clear. For even though the film begins and ends in the tendentially unifying space of the same house, the meaning of that house is utterly transformed, and the meaning at which we arrive at the end of the film has not been foreclosed by the putative unity of a revolutionary center. Thus, the return of the house to its rightful owner, Mr. Kong, from whom it had been seized after the war by Mr. Hou (‘‘Monkey’’), who hides his prior collaboration with the Japanese in order to gain his position in the GMD, is figured not as a return to the past, nor as a return to a stable place/space of private property, nor even as a blinding recognition of the revolutionary task in the present. Rather, the return of the house forms the pretext and premise for an open-ended new beginning. Indeed, the return has been effected not by Mr. Kong alone but by the transformation of atomized citizens—the residents and accidental neighbors—into a collective. And the house—as ostensibly stable place, not to mention as private property—is, by the end of the film, transformed into a potentially revolutionary space, with its internal relationships utterly reconfigured. Nevertheless, the insistent dynamic of everydayness as history imposes no closure on either. Here, then, the meanings of return—of Shaobai in Peng’s film and of the house to Mr. Kong in C&S—could not be more differently construed. In the process of tracking the reconfiguration of the sociality of the house—the contingent conditions of possibility for the social itself—it is interesting to note that Shanghai is never represented as an urban totality or


national microcosm in C&S but rather as a series of lived spaces, or spaces of life. Far from an arbitrary choice of location, of course, Shanghai nevertheless is not made to fetishistically stand as a self-contained entity or a self-valorizing value whose meaning is only proper to itself.49 The majority of the action occurs in ‘‘Hou’s residence’’—as it is identified in the opening shot of the film, which comes after a credit sequence projected upon photographic stills of Shanghai’s densely built alleyways (lilong). Sometimes the action is depicted in one continuous shot and sometimes through editing— from one space of this residence to another: top to bottom, bottom to top, roof, courtyard, entranceway—where different lives take shape, lives that are increasingly brought into historical relationship with one another not by the mere fact of proximity but by the impending sale of the house, which problematizes all of the lives in a similar way in relation to history, commodities, property. As such, while all of the individual lived spaces are contained within the house itself, the ceaselessly produced unevenness of that space is immediately presented as the historical problem at issue. In other words, rather than, as in Peng’s film, unevenness being understood as the static center, in C&S, unevenness is given a dynamic history, it is the dynamic of history itself. The endlessly produced unevenness— attributable to capital/property as processes—is underscored by the occasional moves away from those densely lived spaces. Yet, the forays into the city do not so much trace a unified metropolitan space as they are intimately tied to the fragmentary ways in which each inhabitant experiences the larger city, and how each of these experiences contributes to the ongoing production of unevenness. The teacher, Mr. Hua, goes to his school, where he reluctantly gets caught up in a political movement against the school’s newly imposed principal, for which he eventually gets arrested by the GMD and its gang sponsors; the peddlers, Mr. and Mrs. Xiao (Little Broadcast and his wife), go to the marketplace, where they attempt to maneuver through the minefields of inflation, or to the gates of the bank, where they unsuccessfully attempt to capitalize on the instability of the official gold market; Mrs. Hua, the teacher’s wife, goes to various uncaring and imposing government offices in her effort to retrieve her arrested husband; Mr. Kong ventures to the newspaper office, where he resignedly participates in the creation 49. According to William Pietz, reification is one of four characteristics of the fetish, as it comes to be articulated in European thought through the pre- and post-Enlightenment periods. The Origins of Fetishism: A Contribution to the History of Theory (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1988), 34.


of disinformation on behalf of the GMD censors; and Mr. Hou proceeds to his office at the Ministry of Defense, where he uses his official position to manipulate markets in rice, money, and gold. Through all of these comings and goings, Shanghai is represented only in fragments, through trajectories that are tied together by the needs of each inhabitant’s life. The fragments, however, are not merely individuated parts of an ‘‘urban ‘text’’’ written blindly, as Michel de Certeau has put it.50 Rather, the trajectories produce overlaps that unify as they disaggregate the temporalities of lives in crisis. Thus, one of the most interesting dynamics of C&S is how these trajectories figure the immanence of temporality that provides the structure for the film. Productive and Reproductive Economies The most dramatic turning point in C&S—and one of its most famous sequences—is the climactic queuing for gold at the bank by Little Broadcast and his wife (a scene reprised almost frame for frame in Peng’s film, albeit to little dramatic effect). In one sense, the drama of this moment in C&S is purely visual: it comes as a startling contrast to the minutiae of everyday life struggles that make up most of the film. The sheer size of the framing, which takes in the monumentality of the bank, the forces that control it, the crowds that besiege it, all underscored by the violently heavy rainfall, comes as a visual surprise. This contrast between monumentality and the everyday is underpinned by the insistent distinction made throughout the film between capitalist and simple reproductive economies, which coexist while producing different temporalities of lived experience. In C&S, the capitalist economy that is underwritten by the GMD and its gangs is ardently figured as ‘‘theft,’’ the premise of which is none other than primitive accumulation based upon pure expropriation. It is based, in other words, upon a prior act, whose historicity must be erased for the arrangement to be normalized in the present as property. This is clearest in Hou’s relation to the house, which he has expropriated from Mr. Kong; it is also evident in the accounts of Hou’s attempts to corner the rice market, and in the GMD’s and its gangs’ manipulations of the price of gold. As regards the house, the insistent memory of Mr. Kong and the other residents blocks Hou’s efforts to impose forgetting as the normalization of his property rights. (This forgetting is crucial to the nostalgia of Peng’s film, where the origins of the modernized present in corruption and the privatization of 50. Michel de Certeau, ‘‘Walking the City,’’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93.


public/party property is buried by bourgeois normality.) As such, Hou’s life is structured temporally by the instability of its premise (the imminent collapse of the GMD/the historicity of the prior theft) and spatially by the trajectories he traces between the house, Nanjing (offscreen), and the Ministry of Defense office in Shanghai, which doubles as his company headquarters. Thus, in temporal terms, Hou attempts to erase the memory of expropriation/the historicity of his own becoming, while in spatial terms, he attempts to normalize and inscribe his status through his connection to centers of political and economic power. However, the supposed linear temporality of capital and its assumed ahistoricity refuses to resolve itself: its contradictions and its bloody origins, as Marx put it, are continually exposed through historicization. Meanwhile, the location of an economy of simple reproduction—Little Broadcast’s economy—in such a structure is what exposes the contradictions in the coexistent temporalities of life under capital’s own attempt at ahistorical narrativization. Specifically, as Little Broadcast prepares to go to the bank, he first has a daydream in which he calculates in simple reproductive fashion how his ‘‘capital’’ (benqian) of one ingot of gold will soon yield two; and two, four; and four, eight; and eight, sixteen; and so on, until his chair breaks beneath him and wakes him from his reverie. Here, the gap between a capitalist economy of theft and a reproductive economy of use value is alluded to. To be sure, Little Broadcast’s dreams, if brought to successful fruition, could not end with mere reproduction—as Marx writes of the process, ‘‘although this reproduction is a mere repetition . . . this mere repetition, or continuity, imposes on the process certain new characteristics.’’ 51 Indeed, Little Broadcast’s intent all along is to buy the house in order to prevent his family’s eviction from it upon its sale by Hou. His dreams of simple reproduction yielding property are dashed, however, because his capital (benqian) melts into thin air through government-manipulated market machinations that render his money/goods worthless—‘‘balanced away,’’ as he says. In short, Little Broadcast’s benqian (capital) cannot become ziben (capital in the capitalist sense). It is at the bank that Little Broadcast and his wife realize their error and the hopelessness of their dreams. For, crucial to the inadequacy of his reproductive dream is his tragic misrecognition of the bank: a citadel of ziben capital—monopoly, finance, bureaucratic, it matters not what type— the bank is certainly not a site of simple reproductive dreams. Yet, it is pre51. Marx, Capital, 1:712.


cisely the unity and disjunctness between the temporalities of these two modes of life/production that provide the film’s motor, even while it is the crisis in both types that yields the utopian potential for a new economy of the revolutionary everyday, where desire and value would be unified. In Peng’s film, by contrast, we are to understand that the crisis of Shanghai/China in the late 1940s is containable within the realm of the proper management of capital, where ‘‘normal’’ life—the bourgeois life of Shaobai, Huirong, and their set—is continuously disrupted by the machinations of the GMD and its corrupt henchmen. This view not only leaves capitalism itself unproblematized and unhistoricized, but it leaves the impression that the crisis is a crisis in management rather than a politico-economic struggle over the meaning of the future. For, in Shanghai, capital has no history, and its disruption merely requires documentation and propitious management for a return to normal functioning. Indeed, Shaobai’s curious reaction to his and Huirong’s difficulties with their factory is to ally himself more closely with the American consulate in Shanghai, believing that if only the Americans knew the true situation in China, they would cease providing support for the GMD. In contrast, then, to C&S, where all forms of information are untrustworthy, in Peng’s film, there is a touching belief in the possibility and effectivity of truth. Through the escalating violence of 1949 and 1950, Shaobai takes pictures of the events in the streets to document the moment. The following exchange between him and Huirong is critical to understanding his logic here: Huirong: Do you believe that the Chinese Communist Party can build a new China? Shaobai: I’m just an objective observer, a journalist; while I trust that the Communist Party is doing the right thing, I cannot be their mouthpiece, as then, who would believe me? . . . . Shaobai: We are common people; we should just live our own lives [guo ziji de rizi ]. This quintessential voice of liberalism, whose only desire is to return to the normalcy of the status quo ante by denying the structures that rendered it problematic to begin with, is by far the most persuasive voice in the film. Relatedly, the logic of liberation turns out to be merely a desire to liberate bourgeois mentalité/capitalist strength from the chaos of crisis. Through Shaobai’s own rendering of his past/desire into Shanghai’s history/present, then, Shanghai comes to stand as the iconic expression and reflection of a present figured as a return to the normal living of ‘‘our’’ lives.


Shanghai in Transition or Crisis? In C&S, rather than the metropolis as a universalizing space unto itself, the fragmentation of the city serves to underscore the contingent temporalities, or even the residual temporalities of the urban in China in the late 1940s out of which a new everyday would need to be fashioned. Indeed, the proposed return to normalcy with the reclaiming of the house at the end of the film is no reinscription of Mr. Kong’s former socioeconomic status (as property owner); the penultimate shot of Mr. Kong’s photograph being hung in the upper level of the house to replace the sneering photo of Mr. Hou, who has fled to Taiwan, is thus not to be understood as a static replacement of one owner for another in a universal regime of property. It signifies, rather, the ineluctable historicity of the everyday, where the celebration of the spring festival is a ritual, but also a break from the ritualized past that leads elsewhere. In Peng’s film, while the desire for return is surely not a desire to return to the chaos of 1948–50, it is just as surely a desire to return to a class-specific utopian futurity foretold in the past through a teleologically understood history of capitalist modernization finally being fulfilled in the present under the aegis of the Communist Party. This figuration dovetails remarkably well with Yingjin Zhang’s call for a return to spatial continuities through an investigation of mentalité, as well as with current CCP desires. Indeed, it is here that history/politics is neatly erased in an ideology of historicist continuity, and that spatial stability and temporal continuity merge into a perhaps persuasively closed circuit of reproduction that mirrors and reflects capital’s own dehistoricized liberatory narrative of itself. The displacements effected by Peng’s film thus appear as displacements of a multifaceted crisis unto a linearly construed notion of transition, a moment that, in Zheng’s film, is understood as a cataclysmic crisis that yields an opportunity to reconstruct the lifeworlds of historical actors. Indeed, on the one hand, Zheng’s film is clear that, having passed through the crisis, there can be no return to an original point because life has been irremediably transformed; yet, on the other hand, this transformation works itself out not in the time of the State but in lives colliding with forces beyond individual control. This, then, is history as unceasing conflict between an everyday that is necessarily politicized through participation and struggle in the moment, rather than through the reproduction of certainty. Meanwhile, it is precisely the displacement of crisis unto a national politics understood as primarily about the state management and control of capitalist transition, which depoliticizes the everyday and evacuates it of historical significance,


that in Peng’s film figures so well the contemporary calls in China for depoliticization of society in the name of capitalist modernization. Here, the crisis of Zheng’s semicolonialism is transformed into the 1990s’ transition to capitalism of Peng’s Shanghai. 3. Conclusion By way of brief conclusion, I would suggest that the problems articulated through contemporary theories of transition and those taken up through postcolonial theories of alternative modernity can be connected. Indeed, the revaluation of semicolonialism in China in the 1990s, which yields a narrative of failed transition and blocked history now being fulfilled, proceeded just as semicolonialism was being discovered to identify something akin to an alternative modernity for China, or, at least, for Shanghai and its environs. This coincidental convergence is not fortuitous, for, as argued above, it is precisely through a displacement of history and politics that semicolonialism can be transmuted into a blocked transition; a similar sort of displacement transmutes semicolonialism into a wished-for alternative form of modernity. The convergence seems to be founded upon an implicitly shared sense of the nation-state as a failed historical project. In today’s China, that failed project is usually said to inhere in the failure of the Maoist years to properly recognize the historical task, which turns out not to have been social revolution but capitalist modernization. As elucidated, this position displaces the complexities of the global and national conjunctural moments of the 1930s–1940s unto the 1990s, when the post-histoire promise of Chinese socialism was repudiated; it refashions that crisis into a version of proper and proprietary history. In the case of ‘‘alternative modernity,’’ the failure of the nation-state project has gone in various directions: for Indian historiography, it has led to the repudiation of the postindependence nationstate as an inadequate expression of the authenticity of the people’s diverse voices; for China, it has led, contrarily, to the enhancement of the claims to the nation of the contemporary state, where the spirit of the genuine Chinese State is said to be embodied in its post-Maoist form. Perhaps most salient to this view is how China’s commercialized noncapitalist past is held up as a model that is particularly Chinese (that is, culturally so), and, in this sense, an ‘‘alternative’’ to Eurocentric capitalist modernity, but also, miraculously, how this past is deemed particularly suited to the contempo-


rary demands of globalization. Here, we can see how the incommensurability signaled through the representative case is recuperated as a transhistorical ideology and method of comparability eternally fixing desire for an apolitical, nonantagonistic path of State-led transition to modernization with Chinese characteristics as its essential foundation.

Autonomy and Comparability: Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial

Manu Goswami

On the eve of his departure for a tour of Southeast Asia in July 1927, Rabindranath Tagore addressed a group of nationalists assembled at Calcutta University. He began by charting the familiar lines of his opposition to what he had elsewhere called the mechanistic ‘‘logic of the Nation.’’ 1 Blinded by the ‘‘dust storm of modern history,’’ Indian nationalists had succumbed to the global ‘‘hunger’’ for the central ‘‘political feast’’ of the age, namely, the goal of a sovereign nation-state.2 Seduced by a statist imaginary, they were in danger, Tagore warned, of eclipsing ‘‘the eternal grace of India [Bharat ]’’ (198) that lay in the capacity to ‘‘see all as part of ourselves’’ (199) (its imminent universalism) and its ‘‘acceptance of sacrifice’’ (198) (its spiritual essence). At the turn of the century, in the context of the swadeshi (home manufactures) movement—the first attempt by the colonial middle class to 1. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917; repr., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 60. Also see Rabindranath Tagore, Greater India (Madras: S. Ganesan, 1921). Hereafter, these works are cited parenthetically as N and GI, respectively. 2. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘‘From Greater India,’’ in A Tagore Reader, ed. Amiya Chakravarty (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 198, 197. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically by page number only. boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.


effect a nationalist mass mobilization—Tagore had helped author the vision of autonomy that anchored popular visions of Bharat as an organically constituted nation. In his post-swadeshi antinationalist incarnation, he sought the ‘‘inner truth’’ (198) of India in a literal and imaginative Greater India that was roughly congruent to a Pan-Asian world. Tagore urged a realignment of nationalism beyond the ‘‘barriers of external geography’’ and the nation form toward this imagined, organically interlinked Pan-Asian world, one built on an ‘‘ethic of sacrifice’’ rather than the ‘‘infliction of suffering’’ (198). Tagore’s address powerfully articulated the spectral predicament of societies who bore the ideological stigmata of being historical ‘‘latecomers’’ in an era that seemed for many colonized intellectuals as that of the mechanical reproduction of European domination. Doomed to play a game of catch-up not of their own making, colonial subjects ‘‘had to imagine ourselves to be dream-made Mazzinis, Garibaldis and Washingtons; in our economic life we were caught in the labyrinth of imaginary Bolshevism, Syndicalism or Socialism’’ (197). Entranced by the phantasmagoria of a globally ascendant national ‘‘dream-cinema’’ that was, for Tagore, irreducibly European in origin and content, Indians qua nationalists would remain passive spectators and consumers of histories and products ‘‘Made in Europe’’ (198). From this perspective, the estrangement of thought forms and subject constitution wrought by colonialism was indistinguishable from the European/Western intellectual genealogy of certain modern concepts and projects. The felt stigmata of derivativeness, the longing to overcome the ‘‘mirage’’ of Europe, expressed itself in a self-understood anticolonial epistemology that privileged acts of conceptual innovation over those of appropriation. Within the term of this schema, the index of autonomy was the relative indigeneity of everyday concepts and practices rather than the substantive transformations of received worlds of value and meaning. Nationalism, in this view, could only ever be a spectacular act of colonial ventriloquism, the bastard child of European hegemony. Tagore’s turn-of-the-century envisioning of a swadeshi samaj, an autonomous national society, had long morphed into a liberal internationalism. Yet his address captures, in a poetic register, the long echo of swadeshi : the intimacy between a political-economic vision of autarky (made in Bharat ) and a substantively autonomous cultural space (whether located in the bounded national community of Bharat or in a wider Pan-Asian arena). His liberal internationalism shared with swadeshi discourse the categorical ideal born of an encompassing ethic of indigeneity and the self-conscious pursuit of forms of sociality and personhood untouched by the abstract logic

Goswami / Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial 203

of capitalism and exempt from the geographies of domination that constituted colonial worlds. What held together these apparently distinct formations beyond their common intellectual genealogy was their roots within the historically specific problem of colonial unevenness, the shared grappling with the mundane and spectacular differentiations wrought by the making of a colonial space-time. The attempt to secure an autonomous space-time, one not beholden to what Tagore identified as the ‘‘mirage’’ of Europe, resonates with many of the normative and conceptual impulses that inflect recent subalternist works. For many subalternist historians, the specter of Europe names the developmentalist historicism that imbues modernization theory and orthodox Marxist approaches and that replicates the originary epistemic violence enacted by colonial pedagogy. Yet, more often than not, this recognition of the limits of the specific epistemology of comparison associated with modernization theory and orthodox Marxism has taken the form of repudiating comparatist frameworks as such in favor of a focus on forms of heterogeneity that supposedly exceed modern representational frameworks. The seductive pull of Tagore’s quarrel with ‘‘Europe,’’ uncannily echoed in recent postcolonial iterations, stems from its chimerical promise of containing, indeed of bracketing, the multitemporal and multispatial dynamic of capitalism and the transformations wrought by colonialism. The impossibly overburdened category of ‘‘Europe’’ not only works as the site of this willed containment but propels the complementary move of positing an indigenous realm as a pure externality, a simple outside, to capitalist modernity. Yet claims of the existence of a privileged point outside, whether in the form of an inner spiritual sphere, untranslatable alterity, irreducible difference, or an ‘‘alternative modernity,’’ unwittingly preserve, even as they attempt to overcome, the ideological coding of Euro-America as the hegemonic site of a noncontradictory and undifferentiated modernity.3 It would seem, at first glance, that there is a determinate convergence in the epistemology of comparison that framed swadeshi nationalism and recent subalternist perspectives, a convergence that goes beyond, for instance, their almost exclusively Bengal-centered and Bengali provenance. But the signification of autonomy in the early twentieth-century con3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Dilip Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); and Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).


text of anticolonial struggles bears a deceptively isomorphic relationship to its contemporary status as an ontological claim about the singularity of colonial and postcolonial formations. Autonomy, during the swadeshi era in colonial India, signaled a collective political-economic and cultural project that sought to actualize the perceived organic character and imminent universality of indigenous practices and categories on the terrain of the everyday. Subalternist assertions of an alternative modernity, radical singularity, incommensurability, and the like bear an affective affiliation to this anticolonial struggle for autonomy. But unmoored from a concretely political project, they elide a critical analysis of autonomy as a distinctive anticolonial project for an ontological claim about the presumed underdetermination of indigenous subjectivities and cultural forms. While these works might share the utopian surplus of swadeshi discourse, they also enact a willed forgetting of their own conditions of possibility. For what makes possible the long-run history of both projects and claims of radical autonomy and ideal-typical, teleological accounts of the replication of social and cultural forms is the historically specific dialectic between the universalizing drive of capitalism and the multiple forms of unevenness that are its internal supplement. While capitalism might have the determinate appearance—like a mirage—of constituting an ‘‘empty, homogenous time’’ and an ‘‘abstract homogenous space,’’ it also contains within itself the principle of its own negation in the form of internal differentiation and fragmentation.4 The problematic of unevenness—uneven development, the presence of contending temporalities and spaces, the lived ‘‘synchronicity of the nonsynchronous’’—is a constitutive element of the doubled dynamic of capital and the phenomenological experience of modernity.5 Yet it also assumed an exaggerated form in colonial contexts, where the articulation of cultural and economic relations was overlaid, even overburdened, by the fractious interplay between received and transposed practices. This was expressed in colonial India in the particular relationship between the state and the imperial economy, in the temporally accelerated articulation between novel 4. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 261; and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 287. 5. Ernst Bloch, ‘‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,’’ New German Critique 11 (1977): 22–38. For an exemplary study of unevenness, see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).


and received forms and idioms, in the disjuncture between the space of the production of value and the space of its realization, and in the simultaneous homogenization and differentiation of socioeconomic relations on multiple spatiotemporal scales.6 As a lived reality, colonial space-time was a multiply refracted force field. Its effects were manifest in the making of novel conceptions of space and time, in the radical re-signification of a range of locally inflected sociopolitical categories, in the forging of an insurgent nationalist political economy, and in the utopian amplitude of swadeshi visions of autonomy. We cannot assimilate the anticolonial project of autonomy to its postcolonial career as an ontological claim without performing another act of epistemic violence. The casualty in this instance of epistemic violence is not an imagined indigenous outside to modernity but the irreducibly material and global—in both its origin and scope—valence of the improvisational politics and thought that marked anticolonial struggles. I make this argument in two steps. The first part of this essay explores the epistemological debates that have preoccupied studies of anticolonial nationalism. The second part elaborates the epistemology of comparison that defined the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century swadeshi nationalist project of autonomy and situates it within the lived experience of colonial unevenness. My analysis is motivated by the conviction that it is not enough to mark the inadequacy of conceptions of indigeneity as an external standpoint for the critique of modernity. Rather, the task concerns historicizing the emergence of indigenism, as a standpoint of critique and a self-understood insurgent idiom, and demonstrating its imminence within the contradictory structures and thought forms characteristic of a global, and profoundly uneven, modernity. The Problematic of Anticolonial Nationalism Given the historical centrality of nationalism to the narrative of South Asian modernity, it is not surprising that it has been a principal focus of particularly vexed epistemological questions about autonomy and comparability, difference and identity. In his brilliant 1986 work, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, the subalternist theorist Partha Chatterjee lambasted both sociological determinist accounts of anticolonial nationalism as 6. For an elaboration of this argument see Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).


flawed replicas of European models and normatively conceived renderings of it as a dangerous problem in the world-at-large.7 Taking as his object of analysis the epistemological tensions of anticolonial nationalism, Chatterjee sought to explain how and why Indian nationalism legitimized its claims of cultural particularity within the terms of a universalistic post-Enlightenment discourse that was indissolubly tied to colonial domination. From this perspective, in order for anticolonial nationalism to be authentically anticolonial, it would have had to liberate itself from post-Enlightenment rationalistic frameworks of thought or the ‘‘cunning of reason.’’ Its relationship to colonial discourse would have had to take the form of a determinate negation. But therein lay the rub. Chatterjee argues in no uncertain terms that despite liberal-rationalist claims to the contrary, ‘‘the cunning of reason has not met its match in nationalism. On the contrary, it has seduced, apprehended and imprisoned it: this is what this book is about’’ (17). Starting from this arresting, if politically bleak, premise, Chatterjee narrates the relationship between the colonial ‘‘cunning of reason’’ and nationalism as a tragedy in an almost classical sense. His analysis underscores the ‘‘fatal’’ failure of Indian nationalism in general and of such nationalists as Jawaharlal Nehru in particular to think beyond the horizon of colonial discourse. This failure is what Chatterjee calls the ‘‘blocked dialectic’’ between nationalism and colonialism (169). The indelible stain of colonial discourse imparted, he argues, a particular social and ideological cast to the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial national state in India. Indian nationalism sought the nationalization of the colonial state without attempting a substantive transformation of its administrative, juridical, and institutional structure, and without mounting a radical challenge to existing class configurations. While bourgeois nationalists, from Gandhi onward, found it necessary to mobilize the largest popular element of the colonized—the peasants—against the colonial state, they did so without handing over effective sovereignty to those in whose name they spoke. Thus, rather than establishing a form of universality grounded within the nationalpopular (i.e., the peasantry), the profoundly statist and reformist orientation of bourgeois Indian nationalism merely reproduced the global union between ‘‘Reason and capital’’ and authorized the continued marginalization of subaltern social groups in the postcolonial national era (168). 7. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1–35. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically by page number only.


Motivated by an acute unease with the inequities of the contemporary Indian nation-state, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World is both an argument for and an example of a critical history of nationalism. There is, however, a central tension within Chatterjee’s analysis of anticolonial nationalism. On the one hand, he locates the contradictions of nationalism in terms of the hegemony of post-Enlightenment universalistic epistemologies that are seen as constitutive of colonial domination. Yet he criticizes specific nationalists for remaining within the hegemonic sway of colonial/postEnlightenment discourse. Such a framework of analysis presupposes, without accounting for, the possibility that we can think ourselves outside of the dialectic of universality and particularity that structures the doubled character of the modern nation form. By identifying the problem of nationalism only in terms of the formal constraints of its discursive content, Chatterjee overlooks the wider sociohistorical and historical-geographical contexts of its production. His reading of the ‘‘logical sequence in the evolution’’ of nationalism’s ‘‘ideological structure’’ as moments within a ‘‘blocked dialectic’’ does not differentiate between a logical, deductive sense of necessity (e.g., certain premises have strict logical entailments) and a nondeterministic, historically specific conception of necessity (43). The problem, I suggest, consists in a one-sided formalistic reading of the tensions of anticolonial nationalism. By analyzing the inner tensions of nationalism only in relation to a reified conception of post-Enlightenment epistemologies, his account ignores the ways in which both the emergence and the contradictions of nationalism were embedded within a specific sociohistorical configuration. Such a narrowly discursivist reading ultimately renders arbitrary the internal tensions of nationalism. For they are conceived as a discursive effect of the hegemony of European/colonial frameworks of thought rather than as socially embedded within the contradictions of the late colonial era. Chatterjee’s later work, The Nation and Its Fragments, attempts to undo the theoretical impasse of the ‘‘blocked dialectic’’ between colonialism and nationalism that his prior work presented. In this work, Chatterjee locates the emergence of Indian nationalism within an autonomous ‘‘inner spiritual’’ realm that bears an ambiguous relationship at best to what he calls a ‘‘material’’ colonial domain.8 The exact relationship between colonialism and nationalism is left ambiguous because there is a slippage between an ontological claim about the existence of separate material/colonial and spiritual/indigenous domains and an analysis of this opposition in terms of 8. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6.


the conceptual idioms and performative self-fashioning of colonized elites against colonial rule. Whereas his first work on nationalism castigated Indian nationalists for remaining within the framework of colonial discourse, his second work posits a pure, autonomous, ‘‘spiritual’’ domain apparently untrammeled by colonialism and capitalism. Although this might appear to cleanse anticolonial nationalism from the stigmata of its derivative character as posited in his first work, it does so only at considerable conceptual expense. Chatterjee’s second work tends to reify an indigenous domain as the repository of a pure difference. But there are good empirical and conceptual reasons to question the claim of a static and pure indigenous sphere untouched by colonial and capitalist transformations. Chatterjee’s theory of anticolonial nationalism fails to take into account the qualitative reconstitutions of social practices during the late colonial era. In Chatterjee’s schema, however, lies the basis for a more historically specific approach to anticolonial nationalism. In a striking passage, which contravenes the overarching thrust of his argument, he asserts that if ‘‘there is one great moment that turns the provincial thought of Europe to universal philosophy, the parochial history of Europe to universal history, it is the moment of capital—capital that is global in its territorial reach and universal in its conceptual domain.’’ 9 An acknowledgment of the imbrication of modes of colonial domination and forms of anticolonial nationalism within the global history of capitalism poses a major methodological challenge. This recognition would make it impossible to restrict analysis to discursive domains divorced from structuring social practices and socioinstitutional contexts. Chatterjee, however, only gestures toward this alternative approach; it does not inform his larger argument. Instead, his analysis tends toward an embrace of a particularistic difference (variously coded as an ‘‘inner sphere,’’ ‘‘spiritual domain,’’ and a logic of community grounded in the vernacular imagination of jati ) conceived as outside the historically constituted field of colonial sociospatial relations. Positioned against various modes of ‘‘elitist historiography’’ in the South Asian context and Eurocentric epistemologies in the Western academy, the subalternist project of rendering tangible the uneasy coexistence of forms of difference signals a political intervention in the field of knowledge production. Yet attention to historical and cultural particularity does not require the strong claim of a radical, pre-given, or static field of difference. In the last decade, there has been a discernible proliferation of claims 9. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 235.


of an incommensurable difference and radical singularity registered in the shifting categorical fortunes of the term subaltern, which has long lost its initial Gramscian sociohistorical referent and increasingly stands in as a sign of untranslatable alterity and incommensurability as such.10 Yet such claims not only risk a general inaudibility in political terms but are ultimately unintelligible even to themselves. The notion of singularity is necessarily relational. It can mark the limits, within a particular intellectual and social field, of the intelligibility of specific concepts and tropological forms. But we cannot cognitively grasp, much less experience, singularity as such. The subaltern studies collective has sought to revise ‘‘elitist historiography’’ from what Gyan Prakash has called the ‘‘place of ‘otherness.’’’ 11 Yet their positing of a privileged point outside has also led to an epistemological impasse of their own making. The discourse-centered preoccupations of recent subalternist works are part of a wider shift within colonial studies away from an older fixation on uneven development, center-periphery relations, and the lived reality of material exploitation toward a focus on colonial dialogics, cultural hybridity, and symbolic politics. The recent course of colonial studies attests to the growing analytical dominance of what Jean and John Comaroff aptly name the ‘‘voice-over of a postcolonial discourse’’ that has been beset by the conviction that attention to large-scale socioeconomic processes and the material underpinnings of colonialism serves only to legitimate Euro-American imperial narratives.12 Against the representational glare of this discursivist turn, we need to reassert that a focus on the global historical-geography of capital does not require us to reify the economy, to treat it as an ontological given, as a self-regulating, autonomous sphere, or as determinative in some dreaded last instance. The discrediting of the teleological and Eurocentric axioms of many iterations of dependency frameworks, world-systems theory, and orthodox Marxism need not sink us into the paradoxical predicament of excising the socioeconomic coordinates of colonialism. Such attempts not only fly in the face of the lived testimonies of anticolonial intellectuals and activists, 10. The most provocative instance of this argument is Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. Also see Gyan Prakash, After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 11. Prakash, After Colonialism, 5. 12. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 18.


but overlook the dialectical relationship between colonialism and capitalism as global social forms. They paradoxically have acquired ascendancy in a historical moment—saturated as it is by a global neoliberal order—that is uncannily similar to that of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial era. The making of a global space-time during this era was a dialectical, contradictory, and doubled process. It was generated by and expressive of the simultaneous deterritorialization (the acceleration of ‘‘space-time compression’’) and reterritorialization (the production of relatively fixed material infrastructures and state forms that enable the accelerated circulation of capital) of multiple socioeconomic fields and cultural imaginaries.13 But the universalizing drive of capitalism succinctly expressed in Marx’s statement that ‘‘the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself’’ did not mean, either then or now, the realization of a unified and homogenous space-time.14 This was a consequence of both the internal contradictions within capitalism that impose structural limits on the homogeneity toward which the value form tends and the efficacy of historically diverse forms of resistance. The constitution of a global space-time carries within itself the principle of its own negation. On the one hand, capital, as Marx argues, drives ‘‘beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproduction of old ways of life.’’ Yet, as he continues, ‘‘from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.’’ 15 The internal contradictions of capitalism, or the ‘‘barriers in its own nature,’’ continually produce new forms of spatiotemporal difference. These forms of unevenness are ‘‘actively reconstituted features’’ rather than ‘‘historical residuals’’ of an anterior space-time.16 An emphasis on the production of an uneven global space-time 13. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (1982; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Midway Reprint, 1984); and The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990). 14. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (1857; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 408. 15. Marx, Grundrisse, 410. 16. Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 416.


enables us to foreground the historically doubled dynamic of capitalism without insisting on an absolute opposition between what Dipesh Chakrabarty names as ‘‘History 1’’ (universal logic of capital) and ‘‘History 2’’ (histories outside the logic of capital).17 From this perspective, ‘‘History 2’’ represents an internal dimension of ‘‘History 1,’’ not an absolute outside that episodically interrupts the supposedly homogenous, linear progression of an abstract logic of capital as such. We need, then, to distinguish between the inflated, utopian self-presentation of capital as abstract and homogenous and the contradictions internal to historical capitalism that produce a global, differentiated, and hierarchical space-time. ‘‘Provincializing’’ Political Economy The broad contours of what was to remain the dominant nationalist argument against colonialism emerged during the 1870s and 1880s. It was during this historical conjuncture—marked by the intensification of colonial socioeconomic domination, devastating famines, deepening impoverishment, high inflation, and the sharpening of the lived unevenness of colonial space-time—that a distinctive political economy of nationhood was forged. The formation of a strongly autarkic, idealist, and idealizing nationalist political economy—one that adopted and enriched the political signification of the central categories of the German historical school of political economy, especially the work of Friedrich List—constituted the positive content of the economic critique of colonialism and the normative basis for institutional nationalism (associated with the Indian National Congress). The authors of Indian economics, an anticolonial disciplinary formation rooted in the everyday experience of colonial unevenness, posited the nation as the natural scale of capital accumulation and the institutional means for overcoming the problem of colonial unevenness. They did so in and through an engagement with the problem of unevenness on multiple spatial scales and in different spheres. Dadabhai Naoroji, among others, focused on the extractive relationship between Britain and India (one commonly figured as that between bloated city and bleeding countryside). The celebrated ‘‘drain thesis’’—the foundational category of the economic critique of colonialism—inverted the claims of progress generated by the colonial state and provided such positivist indices as national per capita income estimates in order to render palpable the impoverishment of 17. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 47–71.


what was seen as a bounded national space and economy.18 M. G. Ranade, and later G. V. Joshi and Vaman Kale, analyzed the generation of ‘‘dependent’’ colonial economies in relation to the international division of labor that underwrote relations of unequal exchange in terms that contested and exceeded the axiomatic presuppositions of classical political economy.19 Others, such as Radhakamal Mukherjee and Romesh Dutt, directed attention to the deepening internal differentiation of the imagined nation evinced in the violent articulation of local economies with the world market, accelerated urban-rural polarization, the reified separation between intellectual and manual labor, and the toll wrought by recurrent devastating famines.20 In their attempt to envision a nationalist and historicist political economy against the abstractions of classical political economy and the contradictions of colonial space, they proffered a concretely political and strongly autarkic vision of the nation as the natural scale of capital accumulation and as the collective embodiment of indigenous labor. They also explicitly thematized the intrinsic links between the epistemological coordinates of classical political economy and of colonial rule. For one of the self-assigned burdens of Indian economics, taken up with particular fervor during the swadeshi era, was the formulation of a framework adequate to the perceived inner dynamic of indigenous social institutions and practices. The swadeshi intellectual and activist Mukherjee provided one of the strongest articulations of this project in his magisterial study entitled The Foundations of Indian Economics (1916). His analysis—from the violence intrinsic to exchange relations, the positing of village-communities as the normative exemplar for a national economic space, and the emphasis 18. Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901; repr., Delhi: Govt. of India Publications, 1962); Indian Exchange and Bimettalism (London: Longmans, Green, 1886); and Speeches and Writings (Madras: G. Natesan and Co., 1917). 19. M. G. Ranade, Ranade’s Economic Writings, ed. Bipin Chandra (Delhi: Gian, 1990), and Essays on Indian Economics (Madras: G. Natesan and Co., 1906); G. V. Joshi, Writings and Speeches of G. V. Joshi (Poona: Aryabhushan Press, 1912); and Vaman Govind Kale, Introduction to the Study of Indian Economics (Poona: Aryabhushan Press, 1918). 20. Radhakamal Mukherjee, The Foundations of Indian Economics (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1916), Economic Problems of Modern India (London: Macmillan, 1939–41), and The Indian Working Class (Bombay: Hind Kitab, 1945); Romesh Dutt, The Economic History of India under Early British Rule (1902; repr., New York: Augustus Kelly, 1969), The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age (1904; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India (London: Trubner, 1900), and England and India (London: Chatto and Windus, 1882). Hereafter, Mukherjee’s Foundations of Indian Economics is cited parenthetically as FIE.


on decentralized institutions of political and economic governance—prefigured the conceptual armature of Gandhi’s critique of modernity. The specific burden of Indian economics—articulated in the idealist inflection of the swadeshi era—resided in the selective appropriation of modern economic institutions toward the ‘‘expression of the Indian genius, of the particular phase of universal humanity which the Indian people are unfolding’’ (FIE, 9). Writing with a profound sense of urgency, Mukherjee held up contemporary village communities as the archetypical casualty of colonial development. The ‘‘great economic revolution’’ wrought by colonial spatial-economic restructuring was nowhere more apparent than in the intensified differentiation, the spectacular ‘‘contrast between city life and village life’’ (FIE, 5). Although it was ‘‘still almost self-sufficing . . . as an economic unit’’ (FIE, 3), the village was rapidly assuming its assigned status in the dominant ‘‘system of production’’ as merely a ‘‘field of exploitation’’ with no ‘‘separate existence of its own’’ (FIE, 402). The fate of the village community was, for Mukherjee, exemplary of the constitutive inequalities intrinsic to ‘‘a system of production [where] the worker is a mere servant to machinery’’ such that in the corresponding ‘‘system of social organization the village’’ could exist only as ‘‘a slave of the city’’ (FIE, 402). His account of the rapid evisceration of the autonomy of village communities, their formal subsumption within the urbancentered logic of colonial state space, resonates with theories of uneven development formulated during the 1930s and 1940s from outside ‘‘EuroAmerica,’’ from the Japanese Marxist Kozo Uno to the more well-known tradition of Chinese Maoism.21 The convergence on the problematic of urbanrural differentiation expressed the historical and experiential specificity of colonized, semicolonial, and so-called late-industrializing social formations. Whereas Naoroji’s neomercantilist drain thesis had focused on modalities of financial domination in the sphere of circulation and between Britain and ‘‘India,’’ Mukherjee broadened the drain thesis to emphasize the ‘‘drain from the village to the city’’ of ‘‘all skill, enterprise, knowledge and wealth’’ in the sphere of production and within the imagined national economic space (FIE, 415). This intranational drain was producing a highly differentiated economic and social space evinced in intensified rural migration, the exponential growth of landless classes, and the flight of the ‘‘natural guardians, the [rural] middle class,’’ from villages to cities in order to find employment in an ‘‘unfruitful’’ and unproductive colonial sphere (FIE, 415). 21. Kozo Uno, Principles of Political Economy: Theory of a Pure Capitalist Society, trans. Thomas T. Sekine (1945; repr., Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, Atlantic Highlands, 1980).


For Mukherjee, the internal drain was part of the social process of reification constitutive of modernity itself, that is, the ‘‘separation between village and city, the laborer and the employer, the specialist and layman, the multitude and the genius, the brain worker and the manual laborer’’ (FIE, 449). While such differentiations were intrinsic to the dominant ‘‘system of production,’’ the violent agency of colonialism had ensured an especially painful articulation of village communities bathed, in Mukherjee’s work, in an eternal present of custom and endogenous reproduction with the concentrated and accelerated time of the world market (FIE, 5). Although Mukherjee’s analysis emphasized the historical production of forms of unevenness on multiple scales (urban/rural; metropole/ colony) and spheres (intellectual versus manual labor), it also simultaneously sought to recover a self-sufficient, self-moving village economy based on cooperative principles and a regulated hierarchy of social differences based on ‘‘caste, jati ’’ (FIE, 464). His emphasis on the village as the normative model for an Indian national economy prefigured Gandhi’s anxiety that under the sway of modern national developmentalism the imagined village economy and community would become a permanent subaltern remainder in the anticipated national state. Both Mukherjee and Gandhi regarded village communities as the principal casualties of colonial capitalism and rejected urban-centered national industrialization on that basis. Yet, the precise spatiotemporal referent and meaning of villages was, then as now, a contested question. There was a decided oscillation in this strand of nationalist economic thought and practice between a vision of village communities as a reservoir of indigenous institutions that had to be restored and/or preserved wholesale and a more futurist attempt that sought their transformation, that imagined villages of the future in the present. Mukherjee, like many other swadeshists, established a range of cooperative enterprises in rural Bengal. These enterprises sought to foster autonomous village economies oriented toward an anticipated national space devoid of internal differentiations and inequalities. Yet the futurity of such projects coexisted with practices that reactivated the disciplinary and scopic regime which marked and made the everyday experience of caste-as-lived. Mukherjee insisted that the ‘‘joint-Hindu family and caste or jati ’’ were and should remain the ‘‘ethical and social basal factors’’ of an Indian economy and society, and he characterized his own institutional experiments as exemplary in this regard (FIE, 464). The deeply troubled implications of this vision lay not only in its attempted transformation, to borrow a phrase from Theodor Adorno, of a ‘‘bad empirical reality into transcendence’’ but in its endorse-


ment of an upper-caste Hindu ideology as the normative content of an autonomous national space and economy.22 Yet, at the same moment, the attempt to fashion a nationalist political economy attentive to indigenous institutions represented a sharp riposte to Eurocentric frameworks that homogenized and repressed forms of historical difference. Mukherjee unequivocally characterized dominant theories of ‘‘social evolution,’’ as elaborated by ‘‘Western sociologists,’’ as ‘‘essentially false’’ (FIE, 328). At issue, for him, was not only the deployment of an ‘‘abstract and arbitrary standard deduced from the evolution of Western civilization’’ in order ‘‘to judge the progress of different peoples’’ (FIE, 328). The problem concerned the ideological moorings of theories of social evolution. For Mukherjee, there was little doubt that social evolutionary perspectives were direct expressions, the normative ballast, of European colonialism. He specifically identified theories that ‘‘regarded the HebraicGraeco-Romano-Gothic civilization as representing the culmination of cultural progress’’ and construed ‘‘the eastern types of culture as if they were either monstrous or defective forms of life, or only primitive ancestral forms, the earlier steps of the series that have found their completion in European society and civilization’’ as the ideological scaffolding of colonial domination (FIE, 328). Drawing on the work of the Hegelian philosopher Brajendranath Seal, Mukherjee prefigured key themes of contemporary colonial historiography and postcolonial theory—the intimacy between colonial power/ knowledge, the ideological moorings of teleological assumptions, the denial of coevalness and the like—by over half a century. It was, he proclaimed, a ‘‘gross and stupid blunder’’ not only to link ‘‘Chinese, Hindu, Semitic, Greek, Roman, Gothic, Teutonic in one line of filiations’’ but to ‘‘reduce each living procession to a punctual moment in a single line’’ (FIE, 329). For ‘‘universal humanity’’ could not be ‘‘figured’’ as ‘‘occupying but one place at any moment and leaving all behind at a dead level,’’ but rather was ‘‘immanent everywhere and at every moment’’ (FIE, 329). The insurgent field of Indian economics rejected the territorialization of modernity in specific regions by directing attention instead to what Mukherjee called the ‘‘multiform geographical and historical conditions’’ that underwrote a single yet internally differentiated global formation (FIE, 329). The critique of dominant evolutionary frameworks stemmed, in part, from a recognition of the concrete multiplicity of differential and contending times 22. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 116.


and spaces that coexisted and constituted a global space-time. But rather than simply affirming or celebrating a particularistic difference as such, nationalists sought the actualization of the universalistic promise of development and the realization of forms of universality rooted in the particularity of indigenous institutions. Grounded in social categories of the universal (capital, economy, state), nationalism couched its very claims to autonomy in a self-consciously modernist idiom. If the project of Indian economics was a product of the lived contradictions of colonial space, it was also inseparably part of the transnational ascendancy of statist developmentalist frameworks in the late nineteenth century. These presented a profound challenge to the political-economic imaginary and regulatory order that underwrote Britain’s globe-spanning imperial economy. The promise of state-directed economic development conjured by the German Historical School and by List was explicitly intended for aspiring imperial powers (‘‘civilized nations’’ such as Germany and the United States) suffering under the perceived dual yoke of classical political economy and Britain’s global economic hegemony. Indian nationalists, especially swadeshi activists, did more than simply extend the categories of Listian developmentalism and the German Historical School beyond the Atlantic circuit of its initial formulation. By reworking the problem of autonomy and development with specific reference to colonial unevenness, they radicalized its political signification, deepened its social reference, and transformed the ‘‘original’’ in turn. Listian developmentalism as recast in a range of colonial and peripheral contexts—from late nineteenth-century India to twentieth-century Korea and Kemalist Turkey—had a socially radical afterlife outside its original constituency precisely because of its articulation with distinctive forms of spatial unevenness and experiences of temporal nonsynchronicity. Ironically, an exploration of the insurgent nationalist political economy forged by Indian nationalists returns to focus the now-forgotten origins of the term postcolonial. The term was first employed in the context of debates about modes of articulation and state forms in South Asian political economy of the early 1970s.23 This is ironic in light of not only the decline of political economy in South Asian historiography and colonial studies more generally but the prevalent epistemological and discourse-centered preoccupations of postcolonial theory. This is a point not just about the speci23. Hamza Alavi, ‘‘The Postcolonial State,’’ New Left Review I/74 (July–August 1972): 59–81.


ficity of anticolonial significations of autonomy but about the dangers of eclipsing from view the profound rupture from the anticolonial that the contemporary valence of postcolonialism represents. Pursuing Autonomy The nationalist critique of colonialism shaped, in a relation of reciprocal determination, the turn-of-the-century swadeshi movement. Swadeshi practices such as the boycott of British products, the fostering of indigenous capital and enterprise, the valorization of a productive, self-sacrificing laboring subject as the normative national, the institution of a range of nationalist cultural and social organizations, and the like sought to secure the autonomy of the imagined nation. Within the more abstract argot of nationalist political economy, autonomy had signaled a modern developmentalist project grounded in conceptions of the nation as the natural scale of capital accumulation. The meaning of autonomy, as recast by swadeshi activists and intellectuals, came to occupy a more expansive semantic and social field. Autonomy entailed the actualization in everyday practices of the presumed organic character and universal logic of indigenous practices, institutions, and categories of understanding. The central task concerned concretizing, in the here and now, what Tagore, the poet-philosopher of the movement in its initial phase, called a ‘‘swadeshi samaj,’’ or an autonomous society constituted through collective and individual practices of self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and sacrifice. In a famous July 1904 public address, ‘‘Our Swadeshi Samaj,’’ Tagore elaborated the lineaments of an ethics of indigeneity that shaped the everyday politics of the swadeshi movement. Key elements of this vision included the organization of cooperative enterprises, the critique of consumption practices, the emphasis on labor practices oriented toward the accumulation of spiritual and material shakti (power), the forging of rural grass-roots development projects, and mass education schemes through received folk media. While Tagore would later become one of the most committed critics of nationalism as such, and would especially abjure the exclusionary Hindu underpinnings of dominant nationalism, there was in this early moment no hesitation about proclaiming that the ‘‘common ground’’ for the envisioned swadeshi samaj would ‘‘not be un-Hindu, it will be more especially Hindu’’ (GI, 32). It was precisely the perceived humanist kernel of Hinduism that would ‘‘unite us in concrete relations with this Bharatvarsha of ours, the resort of our gods, the retreat of our rishis [Hindu sages], the motherland of our ancestors’’


(GI, 21). The establishment of early colonial rule had, he noted, coincided with the protracted loss of Bharat’s former glory marked by a resistance to novelty, the substitution of a ‘‘womanish shakti of thrift and conservation’’ for a ‘‘masculine adventurous curiosity’’ (GI, 29), and a pervasive succumbing to a ‘‘policy of funk’’ (GI, 31). Tagore observed, ‘‘At his onslaught [of the Britisher] the defensive barriers of our crouching, run-away samaj [society] began to give way in places, and through the gaps the Outside, in dread of which we had shrunk into ourselves, came hurtling in upon us. Now who shall thrust it back? With this breaking down of our enclosure we discovered two things—how wonderfully strong we had been, how miserably weak we have become’’ (GI, 30). Collective acts of sacrifice, likened to the ‘‘vast Yajnas’’ (Vedic ritual sacrifices) of ‘‘old days’’ (GI, 19), would work as a national barricade against the ‘‘fatal embrace’’ of colonial domination that had ‘‘introduced its tentacles through and through our social fabric, from our educational institutions to the shops dealing with our daily necessities’’ (GI, 23). The adoption of renunciatory practices conjoined with a productivist ethic would constitute the specifically swadeshi strategy for national material and spiritual accumulation. Such efforts would gather the fragmented energies of what had become a ‘‘broken-up samaj ’’ (GI, 20) and unleash the ‘‘undying shakti [power] of Bharat ’’ (GI, 32). The swadeshi movement did not represent a retreat from or of the political. It contested both the narrow institutional understanding of politics and the formalistic conception of rights enshrined in classical liberalism and permanently deferred in a colonial state. What it rejected outright was the relegation of the political to the ‘‘speechifying’’ sanctified precincts of the Indian National Congress, what Tagore called the ‘‘book-learned . . . watchand-chain-bedecked assembly’’ (GI, 19). It was precisely because the colonial state had no organic affiliation with indigenous society that attempts to seek transformations in state policy entailed only the successive loss of autonomy—‘‘the government in our country, the Sarkar, has no relations with our social organizations, the Samaj, so that whatever we may seek from the former must be paid for out of our freedom’’ (GI, 6). The reformist, state-centered orientation of institutional nationalism simply affirmed the intimacy between a neglect of the inner logic of indigenous institutions and the condition of bondage. For as Tagore suggested, ‘‘have we not signed away our birthright to the white man—are not our very tastes put for sale in his shops?’’ (GI, 8). Swadeshi samaj was envisioned as at once a space of refuge from an increasingly interventionist colonial state, a site of resistance to the further loss of the distinctive destiny, the ‘‘God-given function


of India,’’ and a space for redeeming the inner logic of indigenous institutions and practices (GI, 32). The practical activity of establishing substantive autonomy required nothing more, and nothing less, than becoming ‘‘our true selves, consciously, actively and with our full strength (shakti )’’ (GI, 31). One of the most commonly invoked examples of an organic national society and economy within swadeshi discourse was Japan. Within the geopolitical imaginary of swadeshi, Japan occupied, especially after its victory over Russia in 1905, a central normative significance. It figured prominently—in economic, philosophical, and literary texts; folksongs; and popular discourse—as an example of a society that had achieved capitalist development without surrendering its unique cultural essence and autonomy. Tagore held up Japan as an archetypical instance of a nation that had resisted the totalizing sway of a formal, instrumental rationality that ceaselessly converted the other into the same, transformed organic relations into a mechanical social cement, and attenuated the individual into ‘‘a machine, a tool, for the furtherance of some interest’’ (GI, 16). While Japan’s victory had been waged through the ‘‘mechanical’’ means of war, its nationals had not become ‘‘parts of a machine,’’ for ‘‘every Japanese solider was something more than a machine . . . they all remained related to their Mikado and their country in a reverential self-dedication’’ (GI, 16). Japan’s ‘‘efficient modern war’’ did not translate into a battlefield peopled by automatons blindly fulfilling an imposed logic and going to ‘‘their death like pawns moved by an unknown player.’’ The instrumental, life-destroying, and mechanical orientation of an alien and alienating colonial modernity could be overcome only through a willed embrace of the animating sociocultural spirit common to both Japan and Bharat, namely that of ‘‘sacrifice’’ and ‘‘selfimmolation’’ (GI, 17). In his post-swadeshi liberal internationalist incarnation, Tagore would rethink this fantastic misrecognition of Japan’s imperial war machine and emergent fascist ideologies of a homogenous national-social body. During his travels to Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and the United States in 1916– 17, he emphasized the complex imbrication of self-understood antihegemonic nationalisms within the alienating structures of modernity. Driven by a ‘‘desire to turn themselves into a machine of power’’ (N, 39) in a world-historical context defined by the proliferation of ‘‘national carnivals of materialism’’ (N, 141), Japan was for Tagore only one more instance of the disastrous ‘‘logic of the Nation’’ (N, 60). Instead of the embodiment of organic solidarity or genuine autonomy, Japanese society stood for an ‘‘allpervading mental slavery’’ (N, 39) manifest in the ‘‘voluntary submission of


the whole people’’ to the ‘‘clipping of their freedom by their government’’ (N, 141). In a controversial public address in Tokyo, he argued that the hegemonic aspirations of the Japanese national-imperial project rested on a doubled conflation of modernization (capitalist development) with modernism and Europe. Its ‘‘modernizing’’ (N, 93) ambitions represented the substitution of a genuine modernism of autonomous thought and action with a project of mere ‘‘mimicry,’’ one that was ‘‘louder’’ and more ‘‘literal’’ than the original (N, 94). While Japanese newspapers praised the ‘‘poetic qualities’’ of this address, they also relegated it, as Tagore ruefully observed, to the ‘‘poetry of a defeated people’’ (N, 53). The self-conscious celebration of the subject-position of those without a nation, the valorization of the special destiny of ‘‘we of no nations of the world,’’ was, unlike the Swadeshi Samaj address of 1904, explicitly antinationalist (N, 60). From this standpoint, the nation form was both an expression and product of the abstract structure of capitalist modernity that everywhere ‘‘turned souls into commodities and life into compartments, which, with its iron claws, scratches out the heart of the world and knows not what it has done.’’ The consolidation of the nation form, the ‘‘advent’’ of more ‘‘people into the arena of nationality’’ (N, 54), only increased the numbers of ‘‘bond-slaves’’ of a globe-spanning and mechanistic capitalist modernity (N, 60). Tagore’s critique of the exclusionary ‘‘civilization of power’’ instantiated in the nation form carried a distinctively utopian imprimatur (N, 33). In this regard, Tagore’s early swadeshi formulations of autonomy and his subsequent antinationalist liberal humanism were both steeped in a resolutely utopian understanding of collective and individual practices of autonomy. However, the politics of autonomy as enshrined in dominant swadeshi practice and discourse, from which Tagore decisively broke by 1907, was more firmly rooted within an avowedly nativist and nationalist episteme. It was during the swadeshi era that radical nationalists recast the notion of Bharat Mata (Mother India) in an explicitly idealist philosophical framework, one whose underlying epistemology of comparison bears an uncanny resemblance to contemporary theorizations of difference. From the 1870s onward, conceptions of Bharat Mata in popular geo-historical discourse had borne an unmarked relationship to everyday Hindu devotional practices. It was swadeshi activists such as Bipin Pal and Aurobindo Ghose who self-consciously elaborated its meaning in idealizing and idealist terms, welding together upper-caste Hindu philosophical traditions of thought and popular Shakta devotional practices. Within the terms of this high philosophical nativist discourse, Bharat Mata was posited as an archaic spiri-


tual essence, a transcendent ‘‘regulative Idea of the universe,’’ expressive of the universality of Hinduism and Indian nationhood.24 While conceding the formal similarity between notions of Bharat Mata and contemporary German nationalist notions of the ‘‘Fatherland’’ and older European notions of ‘‘patrie,’’ Pal insisted that the ‘‘nation as mother,’’ as ‘‘applied to India by its children,’’ was radically distinct in substance and could not, therefore, be grasped with reference to European concepts and histories (Soul, 83). What distinguished the Indian concept of nation-as-mother from apparently similar European formations was that it ‘‘had no metaphor behind it.’’ It was not a ‘‘mere idea or fancy’’ (Soul, 84), nor could it be reduced to the ‘‘mere civic sentiment’’ that underwrote what he called the ‘‘secular patriotism of Europe’’ (Soul, 108). Yet, despite this strong assertion of radical difference, Pal invoked Giuseppe Mazzini’s definition of nationality as the ‘‘individuality of peoples’’ to suggest a singular self-conscious being or personality particular to every national formation (Soul, 94). In other words, a singular selfconscious being marks out ‘‘different human units from one another,’’ and, on a global scale, ‘‘this differentiation between the collective life and character of different social units constitutes the very soul and essence of the nation idea.’’ 25 The ‘‘mother’’ in ‘‘motherland’’ was such a ‘‘distinct personality,’’ in the specifically Hegelian sense of a conscious, self-mediating Spirit that evolves through a succession of its temporal forms toward absolute knowledge of itself and that was conceived by ‘‘the Hindu . . . [as] behind his own history and evolution’’ (Soul, 94). As a lived actuality rather than a conceptual abstraction, Bharat Mata was at once a ‘‘physical and spiritual, geographical and social’’ entity, and what is more, the ‘‘cult of the Mother among us . . . our love of the land and people’’ was an ‘‘organic part of our ideal of the love of God’’ (Soul, 108). The concept of Bharat Mata was rooted, according to Pal, within the ‘‘old universal’’ (Soul, 87) principles constitutive of all systems of HinduBrahminical philosophical thought: the structuring dynamic of Purusha (the principle of change coded as a masculine essence) and Prakriti (the principle of permanence coded as feminized nature or earth) (Soul, 88). The relationship between these two principles was, for Pal, that of a fundamental unity of opposites that structured in common the otherwise distinct Vedantic, Vaishnava, and Shaivite traditions. The conception of mother ‘‘asso24. Bipin Pal, The Soul of India (Madras: Tagore and Co., 1923), 90. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as Soul. 25. Bipin Pal, Nationality and Empire (Simla: Thacker, Spink, and Co., 1916), 75.


ciated with our geographical habitat,’’ that is, the ‘‘Personality behind [Hindu] history and evolution,’’ represented Prakriti as Shakti (primordial, universal power) (Soul, 88). Drawing a parallel between Hegel’s conception of the unfolding of reason as one where ‘‘the self separates itself from itself to return to itself to be itself,’’ Pal suggests that Bharat Mata, the embodiment of Prakriti, was ‘‘that through which the Divine realizes Himself in His Own Being’’ (Soul, 89). Pal transposed Hegel’s idea of the Absolute as the subject-object of history unto nation-as-mother, which was identified as the ‘‘dynamic element in our ethical consciousness . . . as providence in history . . . as that which works out different changes through which the universe is evolving itself. . . . It is Raciality in the history and evolution of races. It is the spirit of Nationality in national life and evolution’’ (Soul, 92). Pal insisted that the conception of Bharat Mata was not, as Britishcolonial ideology averred, a ‘‘rank superstition’’ or ‘‘sinister fanaticism’’ (Soul, 106–7). Nor was it an instance of what Hegel called a ‘‘Pure Being,’’ equivalent to a ‘‘Pure Nothing,’’ which severed from the particular remains an empty abstraction. Quite the converse; Bharat Mata embodied, for Pal, the fact that the ‘‘universal cannot exist without the particular’’ (Soul, 94). Unlike the ‘‘worldly, merely political aspirations’’ of European nationalism that could not grasp the unity of the universal and the particular, and consequently could never attain ‘‘the dignity of a philosophy, or the sanctity of religion,’’ the Indian concept of nation-as-mother was a lived actuality, one that was at once universal and particular, abstract and concrete. More crucially, it was a constitutive element of the phenomenology of Hinduism-as-lived, of the performative logic of everyday Hindu devotional practices. Tied to the ‘‘peculiarly Hindu conception of the Motherhood of God,’’ it was continually enacted in the ‘‘concrete experiences of motherhood in our own mothers first, dimly, as through a glass, and next in the motherhood of our own wives . . . that we can see and seize the Motherhood of God’’ (Soul, 107). Given this dense philosophical-religious referential context, it was not surprising, Pal argued, that ‘‘outsiders’’ who know Bharat Mata only as India could apprehend her only as ‘‘a mere bit of earth . . . as only a geographical expression’’ (Soul, 106). It was ‘‘absolutely impossible for the European or American to clearly understand . . . this strange idealization of our land . . . the Cult of the Mother among us’’ (Soul, 107). Pal acknowledged the novelty of the constellation of nation and mother, the fact that it was only in recent decades that ‘‘all these old and traditional gods and goddesses who had lost their hold upon the modern educated mind have been reinstalled with new historic and nationalist interpretations in the thoughts and sentiments of the people’’ (Soul, 105).


Yet he nonetheless presented his project as the recovery of the original pure meaning of Bharat Mata. In a move paradigmatic of modern idealist and nativist projects that slide from a critique of the present to a promised escape from history as such, Pal sought to endow the concept of Bharat Mata with a transcendent meaning by retrieving its original, and therefore final, reference. The generalization of Bharat Mata in repertoires of mass mobilization had, he argued, resulted in the denudation of its original meaning as the ‘‘idealization and spiritualization of the collective life and functions of our society . . . as the apotheosis of our Race-Spirit and National Organism’’ (Soul, 109). Against this debasement of Bharat Mata born of the ‘‘imitation of foreign ideas and ideals’’ and the ‘‘uncritical study of European histories and concepts,’’ Pal strained to redeem its auratic value (Soul, 109). He attempted to secure for his fellow nationals—especially ‘‘modern educated’’ members of the Hindu middle classes, whom colonialism had severed from the ‘‘ancient realities of their language and literature’’—the ultimate guarantee of the organic and the originary (Soul, 83). Yet such an attempt only reinforced the status of Bharat Mata as exemplary of ‘‘frozen emanations,’’ namely, words ‘‘that are sacred without sacred content.’’ 26 For one of the constitutive contradictions of the ‘‘jargon of authenticity’’ and other cognate projects of modernist reenchantment is that they gather force precisely with the disintegration of auratic values and meanings in everyday life. The swadeshi-era signification of Hinduism as a ‘‘unique Universality’’ anchored the claim that the immediate particularity of Indian society was sublated by a deeper, fundamental universality.27 Indian nationhood was therefore not a particularistic concern but rather in the very interest of ‘‘Universal Humanity.’’ By this same logic, a Bharat or India foreign to itself, as was the case under colonial rule, was the very sign of alienated humanity. While this line of reasoning shaped the persistently universalistic self-understanding of swadeshi nationalism, it neither did nor could smooth over its multiple internal contradictions. One of the deep tensions within the swadeshi political-economic imaginary was that the productivist economic strategies advanced threatened to undermine the assumed ‘‘synthetic’’ and organic character of the Indian nation. On the one hand, nationalists pitted the assumed ‘‘synthetic’’ organic unity of indigenous institutions against 26. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 9. 27. Bipin Pal, Swadeshi and Swaraj (1907; repr., Calcutta: Yugayatri Prakashak, 1954), 106–7.


the ‘‘analytical, mechano-centric’’ character of Western society (FIE, 463). This fissure parallels the specifically modern binarism between Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft—the traditional, organically linked community versus the alienated society engendered by the dissolution of all organic links. On the other hand, nationalists sought capitalism without Gesellschaft, industrial development without the attendant structural tensions. The constitutive elements of Indian nationalism—the nativist envisioning of Bharat as an organic national whole; the tension between a universalistic conception of development and a particularistic vision of nationhood; the swadeshi-born faith in forging a uniquely pacific path of industrialization that would yield capitalist development without Gesellschaft— were expressed and shaped through particular cultural and social logics and categories of understanding. Yet Indian nationalism was not a singular formation set apart from the global field of its emergence and constitution. The attempt to secure an alternative gestalt grounded in the assumed singularity of indigenous institutions and practices was a historically determinate response to the perceived abstract and deterritorializing dynamic of capitalism. The idea of nationhood as the culmination of an inner dialectic, as an organic formation, had become a key motif of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century nationalist discourse across diverse regional contexts. Confronted with the convulsive transformations wrought by colonialism and capitalism, many nationalists in colonial India, as elsewhere, translated the historical dislocations of the present in and through a nativist, historicist, and idealist categorical idiom. l l l l

There may well be, as David Harvey argues, ‘‘no outer resolution to the inner contradictions of capitalism,’’ no stable institutional and spatial fix to the contradictions that have shaped its dynamic historical geography apart from a thoroughgoing internal transformation.28 Yet, in a specific historical conjuncture and global field, the nation form came to represent for many anticolonial activists in South Asia, as elsewhere, the embodiment of a form of universality grounded in particularity, of sustained economic growth, and the institutional medium for either resolving or regulating socioeconomic unevenness. In our current historical moment, the spectral gathering of imperial projects, revisionist apologias for empire, and the prox28. Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 414.


imate aftereffects of neoliberal restructuring threatens to bludgeon the critical legacy of anticolonial struggles. Indian nationalists, like many anticolonial activists in East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, had sought to realize the dream of autonomy, to overcome what Gandhi called the khudaro, or barbarism, of colonialism and capitalism, to achieve a substantively noncolonial future. We know all too well, of course, the shattering of this promise by both internal tensions and external constraints, of the transformation of utopian visions into legitimating ones, of the hollowing out of the radically futural impulse of diverse anticolonial imaginaries. Yet anticolonial movements—from the Haitian revolution of the 1790s to the twentieth-century era of decolonization to the nonaligned movement that transposed swadeshi’s vision of autonomy unto a wider geopolitical field—did secure the right of collective self-determination, if only in a formal sense, beyond the particular regions of Europe and America. The proximate conjunction between imperial projects and neoliberal economic fatalism seems poised to render debates on ‘‘postcoloniality,’’ especially those that bracket political economy, ever more scholastic. The point here is not to embrace an uncritical view of anticolonial struggles; rather, it is the importance of not confining our analysis to what Adorno identified as the historicist underpinnings of the ‘‘loathsome question’’ of what is ‘‘living and what is dead’’ about past works and struggles, of their meaning for the present.29 We might ask instead the antihistoricist question of what our shared neoliberal global present signifies from the standpoint of anticolonial struggles for autonomy.

29. Theodor Adorno, ‘‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,’’ in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 1.

Repetition, Comparability, and Indeterminable Nation: Korean Migrants in the 1920s and 1990s

Hyun Ok Park

This essay concerns the national mediation of capitalist expansion. As capitalist expansion simultaneously draws on and exceeds national boundaries, it renders the nation indeterminate. I specifically focus on the repetition of this universal dynamics of capitalist modernity and its implications for comparability and comparison, and take as examples the social lives of two groups of Korean migrants: Korean settlers in northeast China from the late nineteenth century until 1931, and their and their descendants’ return to work in South Korea since the 1990s. My comparison takes as the defining social experience of the Korean migrant laborers the duality of displacement—both national and capitalist corporeality. In the study of diaspora, migrant laborers are invariably understood as others of nation-states who disperse across states, live in interstitial spaces of states, make no fixed commitment to either home or host states, and instead develop multiple, hybrid identities.1 The literature of dias1. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Aihwa Ong, ‘‘Chinese Modernities: Narratives of Nation and boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.


pora attends to the lure of transnational migration and the place consciousness of migrants. It considers diasporic individuals as transnational subjects whose identities are separated from specific local and national boundaries. The nation supplies a primary analytical framework for such an approach to diaspora. However, the national approach to diaspora obscures the role of commodification—the dynamic social form of displacement. Thus, displacement is a different aspect of capitalist corporeality. It is not static, directionless, or timeless corporeal movement. Instead, displacement is a movement with a clear force and effects. It is the moment of unequal exchange, in which laborers work without adequate compensation and proper rights. It is a process in which surplus value is created and, when repeated, becomes a process of capital accumulation. Each moment of displacement is ever new, since labor produces a new value every time. The corporeal movement of migrant laborers metabolizes the exchange of labor and capital, bursting through temporal, spatial, and personal barriers, when unfavorable infrastructural conditions are imposed. The rhythm of this movement is not governed simply by the physical endurance of migrant laborers, their psychic determination, or the ethnic and familial resources they draw on to negotiate constraints posed by the guarded borders of nation-states. This rhythm is also governed by the time that capital takes to maximize the return on its investment. In order to understand social experiences of migrants, the duality of displacement requires an analysis of the contradictory relationship of the nation and capitalist expansion. My analysis of the comparability of displacement in two historical moments does not take the nation per se as a unit of comparison that either homogenizes displacement in different times or differentiates in terms of colonial experience, nation-state system, national culture, regime of capitalist production and consumption, and historical contingencies. Although the historical specificities of each period and place are important, I focus on the repetition of the contradictory relationship of the nation and capitalist expansion. Indeterminable Nation The desirability of a return to Marxist analysis on the question of the nation lies in its tradition of investigating the relationship between the nation of Capitalism,’’ in Ungrounded Empire, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1996), 171–202.

Park / Korean Migrants in the 1920s and 1990s 229

and capitalism. Despite its crucial contribution to a new understanding of nation, for example, the critique of linear narratives of the nation, the cultural turn in the study of the nation and nationalism, has dissociated the nation and capitalism instead of reformulating their relationship. Revisiting ‘‘preculturalist’’ debates, this essay rethinks the relationship between the nation and capitalism, enhanced by the insights of cultural studies. The exclusive concern of the Marxist analysis of the nation is the effect of the nation on capitalism, rather than vice versa. Accordingly, Marxist studies takes the categories of the nation as pregiven, rather than as historically constituted through its interactions with capitalist development. For this reason, the Marxist approach focuses less on the ‘‘contents’’ of the nation, such as tradition, language, and memory, than on the ‘‘form’’ of the nation, for example, its ideological roles and the state’s mediation of the relations with capitalism. The revision of the perspective on the nation revolves around the relationship between the ideological/political and the economic. I compare three revisions that differ in their contributions but nevertheless share a similar tendency to spatialize the nation at the expense of the analysis of its temporality. One revision rethinks the concept of the political. It reconceptualizes the modern state as capitalist and territorial, and relegates the nation to the domain of the modern state’s territorial sovereignty. For Etienne Balibar, there is no inherent logic of capitalism that calls the nation and the national state into existence.2 Instead, the consolidation of the nation and the national state is a historical product of the competition among the bourgeoisie in the core power to expand capital to the periphery of a world capitalist economy. The national bourgeoisie won this competition because of its ability to mobilize the state and its legal and coercive apparatuses, such as the armed forces, both ‘‘externally and internally,’’ so as to incorporate the peasantry into the new economic order and turn them into consumers and a reserve army of ‘‘free’’ labor. In this formulation, Balibar echoes a well-known Marxist account of the national state, namely, the thesis that postulates the role the state plays in creating the economic unity called the ‘‘internal market.’’ In this instance, the state takes the necessary measures to ensure free commodity exchange within a given territory. This includes integrating currencies, estab2. See Etienne Balibar, ‘‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology,’’ in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 86–106.


lishing uniform property laws, and eliminating custom duties within and between the metropole and its colonies. Yet, despite this crucial role of the national state in commodity exchange, Balibar refuses to relegate the former to the requirements of the latter. Instead, he argues that the national state is a historical contingency that can be replaced by a different type of state in the upcoming phase of the world capitalist economy. The current national state in the periphery, which is incomplete and lacks independent sovereignty of its own vis-à-vis the core, attests that the national state is neither unavoidable nor necessary for capitalist development. Another revision in understanding the relationship of the nation and capitalism centers on the notion of class hegemony. The invocation of the nation by fractions of a class or by groups enables them to mobilize the dominated and establish a new hegemonic bloc. Once conjured up, nationalism lays the basis for creating the unitary category of ‘‘people’’ and a new hegemonic bloc. A dominant power bloc is the group that identifies itself not as a class but as ‘‘the other’’ of the opposed power bloc and presents its class objectives as the cultivation of the national-popular against common enemies. For Ernesto Laclau, the discourse of a nation is one distinctive kind of populism, not the mirror of bourgeois domination or a project of the state per se.3 Like other populist discourses of democracy, liberty, and equality, the notion of the nation is an empty, floating signifier whose contents are less relevant than the agents who articulate it, since discursive construction determines its actual meaning and political value. Depending on the nature of its class politics, the discourse of a nation could become a rhetorical abstraction for intellectuals only or a basis for the formation of a national-popular power bloc. Nation is not a thing but a process in which its precise meaning is consigned and contested within a specific historical context of class politics. In Laclau’s analysis, the notion of ‘‘people’’ is constructed by political and ideological relations, not just by relations of production. He, thus, seeks to elaborate the relative autonomy of the ideological struggle from economic relations, although he never ties his analysis of the political and ideological to relations of production. When examining ‘‘relative autonomy,’’ he focuses on ‘‘autonomy’’ rather than ‘‘relative,’’ leaving unaddressed the way the material shapes the political and the ideological. Laclau’s later works have further removed the political and the ideological from the material 3. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1977), 167.


domain. Shifting toward social constructionism, Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategies, see hegemonic struggle not as ‘‘classes in [ideological] struggle’’ but as discursive struggles among dispersed groups and fragmented individuals.4 Since every subject position is a discursive position and unstable, the various positions of a subject cannot be fixed in a closed system of difference such as class antagonism. More recently, Laclau has explored this discursive analysis from a Lacanian perspective, stating that the various discourses of ‘‘the people’’ are ‘‘phantasmatic investments’’ whose acceptability as discourse depends on their ‘‘credibility.’’ 5 A well-known consequence of social constructionism is the remapping of the socialist project onto the struggle for democracy, a struggle based on the plurality or multitude of identities of individuals. This move is a trend among leftists to find the commensurability of pluralism and socialist struggle capable of resolving the class contradictions of capitalism. In State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas offers a distinctive conceptualization of the social that enables him to construct a social analysis of the nation.6 He inscribes the political and ideological on the social relations of production, attending to the interpenetrating articulation of the economic, political, and ideological with the relations of production, where the state and ideology intervene, constitute, transform, and reproduce economic relations. He locates both capitalist state and national ideology at the realm of production. The state also plays an equally key role in organizing ideology. For him, ideology does not merely consist of ideas and representations that ‘‘mystify,’’ ‘‘conceal,’’ or ‘‘invert’’ social relations; rather, they enact material practices to constitute property relations and the division of labor. Poulantzas distinguishes his perspective from many competing views, taking his conception of the social as a guiding principle. Balibar, and some postcolonial theorists who seek to connect the nation and the economy, locates the individualization and ideological work performed by the nation in the political field of commodity exchange, where individuals are ‘‘private’’ commodity owners who abide by juridical laws. Rejecting such views, Poulantzas finds the basis of individualization in the spatiotemporality 4. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 5. Ernesto Laclau and L. Zac, ‘‘Minding the Gap: The Subject of Politics,’’ in The Making of Political Identities, ed. Ernesto Laclau (London: Verso, 1994). 6. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2000). See also his Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978).


of social relations of production, understanding nation as an ideology that constitutes, not merely reproduces, social relations of production.7 Whereas Laclau limits the nation to hegemonic struggles of classes and groups in the ideological sphere that reproduces the economic relations, Poulantzas understands that class hegemony is predicated not merely on symbolic and political consent, no matter how important it is, but also on material practices, such as the state’s economic interventions through its policies on employment, welfare, and housing that organize relations of production and disorganize the dominated classes. The emphasis on material practices also distinguishes Poulantzas’s perspective from Žižek and other theorists who use a Lacanian framework. Poulantzas refutes such analytical categories as inversion-concealment and repression-prohibition on the grounds that they merely subjectivize the reasons for consent in terms of ideological delusion or the ‘‘wish for repression and love of the Master.’’ The three main revisions to the modern nation examined thus far share an important problem: the primacy of space over time. The spatial conceptualization of the nation confounds spirituality with stability. As the nation must appear to remain stable in order to perform its unifying effects, its ideological effects are confused with its stability. The discussions of the nation and capitalism examined above presume that national boundaries of inside and outside are durable. Spatial metaphors have become a primary means by which national experience is understood. For example, free laborers are ‘‘displaced’’ from the means and objects of production, while they are ‘‘reterritorialized’’ as free individuals in an internal market or as sovereign people of a national community vis-à-vis outsiders. The axiom of the stabilizing effect of the nation tends to equate the social with society. Capitalism is an inherently global process in which influxes of labor and capital transgress territorial boundaries of national states, while maintaining unevenness between places. The canonical function of the nation in integrating, inverting, and articulating capitalist processes is, therefore, by no means absolute. The conception of society as a self-contained entity is nothing but a desired effect of the nation in its process of containing and stabilizing the dynamism of global capitalism. When the nation is imagined to maintain equilibrium and assimilate external forces in a given society, this effect is more about the requirements of capital than about historical events. When the instability of hegemonic leadership is recognized, it is 7. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 50–51, 95–97.


often ascribed to interstate dynamics or intrasocietal politics. For Laclau, class politics never completely determines the meaning of the nation. A certain openness in the ideological domain makes it impossible to settle the notion of a specific nation in hegemonic politics. Even when Poulantzas notes that global capitalism simultaneously requires and transcends spatial restrictions imposed by national frontiers, his pathbreaking study does not address the implications of the contradictory dynamics of global capitalism for national-popular politics. A critical problem of the spatial turn is its prevailing inadequacy for recognizing the global terrain of the social and for interrogating the contradictory relationship of the nation and capitalism. The issue of the temporality of the nation, therefore, remains largely unaddressed. Capitalist expansion reconfigures national boundaries and thus reorganizes social structures. This capitalist expansion crosses existing national boundaries, demanding new ones and rendering nation formation incoherent and unstable. In uneven capitalist expansion, an intricate, disordered process transforms the social structure as a new spatial structure of capital. An adequate understanding of the spatiotemporality of the nation must begin with the recognition that the social is a global problematic. As the national state’s mediation is crucial but intrinsically partial for capitalist expansion, social relations are neither reducible to national collectivity nor posited as an antithesis to the global. It is necessary to rethink the dynamics of global capitalism in order to analyze the ways that social relations are shaped by global forces, such as a new international division of labor, production chain, and the like, and by national forces that treat social relations as local problems of society. The instability of the nation, which is implied in the uneven development of capitalism and the disunified state, requires a conjunctural analysis that depends on historical contingency and moment-to-moment negotiation among different actors. The spatial configuration of the nation, in tandem with other social relations, is contingent on other factors, such as social practices and negotiations among the actors, including the state, employers, laborers, and financiers. The disunity of the state and its incomplete mediation of global capital and local society are other reasons for the necessity of performing a conjunctural analysis. In analyzing two historical moments, I examine the state’s strategies through which it seeks to resolve global problems—for example, capital flight from the domestic market, inflow and outflow of labor—with national resolutions, such as welfare policy and the state’s reorganization of indus-


try and production. I also document the symptoms of such open struggles among global capital, local groups, migrant laborers, and the state, including the impossibility to mend rips in the fabric of social relations and reassert balance in unstable national boundaries. I show that the comparison of localities needs to be conducted not at the national-societal level but at a global level within which uneven capitalist expansion shapes social experiences. Koreans and the Chinese Nation in the 1920s The Chinese nation was constituted by the interaction of the national imaginary and social practice. New social relations were conceived in accordance with the national imaginary and actualized in unintended ways by those who lived in specific historical contexts and drew on cultural referents to interpret and react to such conceived ideas. Two moments of the metamorphosis were the formation of the Chinese national state (in northeast China, called Manchuria) and the lived experience of Chinese nationalism by Korean migrant peasants, whose migration to Manchuria had increased to 2 million during the Japanese colonial period. The provincial government of Manchuria during the Republic period (hereafter referred to as the northeast government) represented itself as a national state and regulated the transactions of land between Chinese landowners and foreigners, mainly Korean migrants. Korean migrants were moving constantly within Manchuria in a cycle of migration, cultivation of wasteland, loss of the land due to their uncertain property rights and citizenship status, and further migration. Their continuous migration, or displacement, embodied various meanings—a product of the exploitation by Chinese, an unforeseen mechanism of capital accumulation, and a seditious moment of their own hope for a better life. A National Imaginary of the Social A primary debate about Manchuria’s political economy concentrates on the question of whether the northeast government under a powerful warlord (Zhang Zuolin) during the Republic period was modern, national, or capitalist. Historiography characterizes the Manchurian economy under warlord rule and Japanese encroachment as semifeudal and semicolonial. According to a major Chinese publication, The Economic History of Northeast China (Dongbei jingjishi, in Chinese), the despotic power of the warlord and his collaboration with Japanese power thwarted the initial role of


Chinese merchants in commencing capitalist development of Manchuria in the Qing period.8 The Manchurian economy was bifurcated by feudalistic agriculture and capitalist commerce and industry under the control of domestic landlords and colonial capital respectively. The Manchurian economy is seen to be as anything but capitalistic. The productivity of agriculture increased not by improving methods of production but by feudalistic exploitation of cultivators. Nepotism prevailed, rather than the prescribed distribution of land; landlords who owned land but resided in cities lacked entrepreneurial spirit, considering land a source of wealth rather than a form of capital.9 The dichotomy of the Zhang Zuolin government and merchants, a central construct of the historiography, elides the fact that both the warlord power and the merchant bourgeoisie pursued capitalist development. The conflation of the Zhang government with Japanese power obscures their complex relationship with Chinese merchants. Instead, a triangular relationship characterized the interactions of Zhang, the merchant bourgeoisie, and Japanese power. The material basis of the northeast government reveals the structural basis of its alliance with the merchant bourgeoisie. Zhang, his family, and the northeast government under his leadership invested in land and, often in partnership with the merchant bourgeoisie, established their own banks and other financial organizations throughout Manchuria.10 As the main investors in key sectors of the economy, the military power had a vested interest in developing Manchuria’s economy, including the promotion of national industries against Japanese competitors. The tension between persistent warfare and economic development, therefore, signified an internal contradiction within the military power, not just a conflict between the military and merchants. The ambiguous relationship between Japan and the merchant bourgeoisie completed the triangle of relationships. Joint ventures between Japan and the Chinese bourgeoisie in Fengtian Province predated 8. Dongbei jingjishi [The Economic History of Northeast China] (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1986). 9. On the dual economy of Manchuria, see Herbert Bix, ‘‘Japanese Imperialism and the Manchurian Economy, 1900–1931,’’ China Quarterly 51 (1972): 425–43; and Owen Lattimore, Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict (New York: Macmillan Publisher, 1935). Ronald Suleski elaborates the skillful strategies of the warlord in turning Japan and the merchant bourgeoisie against one another, while receiving the support from both. See Ronald Suleski, Civil Government in Warlord China: Tradition, Modernization, and Manchuria (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). 10. Dongbei jingjishi, 136–50, 178–285. For a detailed list of personal property of Zhang and his close associates, see Li Hongwen et al., Xiandai Dongbeishi [The Modern History of Northeast China] (Harbin: Heilongjiang jiaoyu chubanshe, 1986), 60.


the Treaty on South Manchuria and East Inner Mongolia of 1915, although they expanded after the treaty.11 Despite their differing goals and purposes, they shared the intention to separate Manchuria from China proper and to halt Zhang’s military buildup.12 These triangular politics anchored national and colonial politics in the social sphere. The balance of power translated incompatible territorial politics of Chinese and Japanese forces into the competing formations of their sovereignty over land and people. Japan adopted a strategy of gradual colonization in which it sought to ensure Koreans’ access to land and expand its military forces in the name of protecting Koreans and their assets. To counter the Japanese strategy, the northeast government tried not only to evict Koreans from Manchuria but also to consolidate its sovereignty over Chinese migrants and their landed property. Chinese nation formation encountered hurdles not just because of unstable relations between merchants and the northeast government but also because of the contradictory territorial and capitalist aspirations of the northeast government. Given the dynamic of the triangular politics concerning the relations of property, an exclusive focus on military expansion and economic instability would dissociate the formation of the Japanese empire and the Chinese nation from the construction of national subjects and their social experiences. The national and colonial disputes at the social sphere defined the triangular politics. The Treaty on South Manchuria and East Inner Mongolia delineated landownership and leasing rights of Japanese subjects as a primary site of contention between Japan and China. Although there was political opposition to the treaty, until 1931, the more persistent anticolonial politics concerned the transaction of land between Chinese and Japanese (Korean) subjects. After Japan and the Beijing government signed the treaty that would grant Japanese subjects in South Manchuria the right to lease land, their conflicts developed over the issues of whether the treaty would permit unconditional and continuous renewals of contract, whether it would 11. For more information on joint ventures prior to the treaty, see Fengtiansheng yihui ziliao JC 10–1695 [Records of the Parliament of Fengtian Province], 2378–2386; and Dux Uncheng, Riben zaijiu zhongguode touzi [Japanese Investment in China] (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1986), 401–8. The proportion of Japanese investment in joint ventures increased from 63 percent in 1907 to 90 percent of the total capital of joint ventures in northeast China. 12. For more on these attempts to separate Manchuria from China proper, see Kim Ki-pong et al., Ilbon chegukchuuiŭi tongbuk ch’imnyaksa [The History of the Japanese Invasion of Northeast China] (Yanji: Yanbian People’s Publishing Company, 1987), 50–89.


endow the lessee with the right to sell the leased land during the lease period, and whether Koreans were Japanese subjects.13 The disputes occurred as Japan sought to use sovereignty over Koreans as a means to establish de facto sovereignty over Manchurian territory. As the treaty granted Japanese subjects extraterritoriality, extraterritoriality of the lessee meant that Japanese consulates would hold sovereignty over both lessee and the leased land itself, unless the terms of the lease were clearly divorced from that of landownership. Representing itself as the Chinese national government, the northeast government under Zhang’s rule transformed Chinese migrants into its nationals, as opposed to Japanese ‘‘others.’’ The new relationship of the northeast government with its people not only involved political discipline, such as the punishment of those who violated nationality laws and policies, but also constituted the national hegemony by providing the Chinese nationals with social programs. The social production of national subjects was intended to homogenize political, economic, and cultural unevenness among migrants, whether Korean or Chinese. The hallmark of the Chinese nation formation in the 1920s was the legal attempts to clarify the distinction between nationals and nonnationals concerning landownership. The Chinese nation formation consisted of shifts from cultural to legal and social national membership and from the inclusion to the exclusion of Koreans. From the late nineteenth century, the adoption of Manchu customs signified naturalization as Chinese nationals. Some Koreans listed an unmarried son as head of household and secured their landownership, because unmarried Korean males had the custom of wearing long hair, similar in appearance to the Manchu hairstyle.14 While adoption of Manchu customs was continuously imposed as a marker of naturaliza13. Liaoningsheng danganguan bian [Archives of Liaoning Province], Zhonghua minguo shizi liaoconggao diangao fenzi junfa mi dian [Collections on Historical Documents of the Chinese People’s Republic, Feudal Warlord Secret Telegrams], vol. 1 (Shenyang: Zhonghwa shuju, 1987), 1919. For an excellent summary of the disputes over sangjo, also see Son Ch’un-il, Manjugugŭi chaeman hanine taehan t’ojichŏngch’aek yŏn’gu [A Study of the Manchukuo Policy on the Land Right of the Koreans in Manchuria] (Seoul: Paesan Charyowon, 1999), 55–56. 14. For these customs, see Son Ch’un-il, Manjugugŭi chaeman hanine taehan t’ojichŏngch’aek yŏn’gu, 38; Pak Il’cho, ‘‘Yŏnbyŏnesŏ sŏnghaengdoen ‘Chŏnminjedo’’’ [A Popular Practice, Chŏnminje, in Jiandao], in Chungguk Chosŏn Minjok Palchach’wi Ch’ongsŏ [History of the Korean Chinese in China], vol. 2, Pulssi [Kindling] (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 1995), 110–15.


tion, it became a supplementary measure during the 1920s. The distinction between Chinese nationals and nonnationals came to be legislated in the social domain, as the terms of transactions of land and labor defined the legal obligations of nationals. While Koreans had been mandated to become naturalized as Chinese nationals, various prerequisites for naturalization now constrained their Chinese national membership. Nonnaturalized Koreans were barred from owning and leasing land. Their customary rights to reside and work were also threatened.15 The northeast government restricted the naturalization of Koreans. It scrutinized Korean applicants suspected of buying land for Japanese. It also reversed its previous promotion of naturalization for exiled Korean rebels. While it encouraged rebels to settle in Manchuria, in the 1920s the northeast government feared that Japan would bring military forces to suppress anti-Japanese Korean movements. In 1925, the Fengtian provincial government ordered county magistrates to prevent both pro-Japanese and anti-Japanese Koreans from becoming naturalized. A year later, it raised the bar for Korean naturalization by requiring that each applicant receive approval from the provincial government instead of the county magistrate.16 Moreover, the northeast government demanded that Koreans submit proof that they ‘‘renounced registration as Japanese subjects’’ (Ch’ulchŏk).17 This requirement of Ch’ulchŏk hampered Koreans’ naturaliza15. On Korean oppression by Chinese officials and cases of Koreans’ return to Korea, see Zaiman Senjin Appaku Jijō [The Conditions of Korean Oppression in Manchuria] (Minami Manshū Tetsudō Kabushiki Gaisha, 1928), 17–22. 16. Chōsen Sōtokufu Keimukyoku, Zaiman Senjin to Shina Kanken [Koreans and Chinese Officials in Manchuria] (Keijyō: Gyōsei Gakkai Insatsujo, 1930), 201. According to Lee Hungu, there were 181 cases of oppression of Koreans by Chinese officials in 1927, with fortytwo cases of forced naturalization and seven cases of the confiscation of residence permit. Although Lee does not specify where the oppression occurred, there was great regional variation in Chinese policies on Korean naturalization. Although vague, Lee’s figures suggest incoherence of Chinese policies on Korean naturalization in southern Manchuria. See Lee Hun-gu, Manjuwa Chosŏnin [Manchuria and Koreans] (Kyongsŏng: Hansŏngdosŏ chusikhoesa, 1932), 241–45. 17. For details on the three required forms of naturalization, which included the application form, the form proving an applicant’s qualifications, and the form documenting that the applicant had renounced his or her original citizenship, see Yang Zhaoquan and Li Tiehuan, Dongbei diqu manxianren geming douzheng ziliao xuanji [The Archives of the Revolutionary Struggle of Koreans in Northeast China] (Shengyang: Liaoningsheng minzu chubanshe, 1992), 63–65. For detailed accounts of the politics of Chinese nationalism, Japanese imperialism, and Korean migration in Manchuria, see Hyun Ok Park, Two


tion, because Japan refused to supply the documents Koreans needed to verify that they were no longer Japanese subjects. The construction of the Chinese people in opposition to Koreans presumed a natural unity of Japan and Koreans. It obscures the fact that the relationship between Japan and Koreans was not only social but also unstable—a relationship that could be severed by an alternative social program. In fact, Korean representatives in vain urged the Fengtian and Jilin provincial governments to provide Koreans with social programs, such as the distribution of land and low-interest loans. For these representatives, only financial assistance comparable to the financial support of Japan would discourage a close relationship between Japan and Koreans. Underscoring Koreans’ contribution to Manchuria, they also called for the promotion of Korean naturalization by canceling the application fee for naturalization and establishing a special office to expedite naturalization. A petition stated their entitlement for social programs and naturalization: ‘‘Whether naturalized as Chinese nationals, most Koreans . . . have observed Chinese laws and fulfilled their duties. They have paid all taxes, such as the land tax, household tax, donation to the military, local security fee, and education fee. In addition, Koreans have paid extra fees, such as fees for relocation, for the residential permit, for use of roads, and for postal service. . . . Koreans have also cultivated an enormous amount of wasteland.’’ 18 The issuance of similar decrees on national membership throughout the 1920s suggests that the northeast government made persistent yet unsuccessful attempts to regulate land transactions between Chinese and Koreans. The repetition attests to the difficulty of fixing social relations according to national politics. This difficulty was affirmed by the other trend in which the government often issued other decrees to override its own regulations of rights relating to Chinese landowners and Korean migrants. The ineffective enforcement of rules of national membership might indicate the administrative incapacity of the Chinese government. More importantly, the simultaneous enforcement of and retreat from the rules of the national membership reveal the predicament of the northeast government, which was caught between its territorial and capitalist desires.

Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). 18. Yang Zhaoquan and Li Tiehuan, Dongbei diqu manxianren geming douzheng ziliao xuanji, 94–96.


Social Actualization of the National Imaginary Territorial politics of the northeast government embedded the production of people as nationals in the realm of social relations of production and exchange. As territorial politics shaped social relations of production and exchange, it generated an unexpected effect on capitalist politics. In turn, territorial politics of distinguishing nationals and nonnationals was simultaneously regulated by capitalist imperatives that governed social relations of production. National and territorial politics did not necessarily facilitate capital accumulation, and vice versa. For instance, when Chinese national politics nationalized property ownership of Chinese landowners and excluded Koreans, in principle it posed a barrier to the capitalist development of agriculture. This barrier was especially significant, since the Manchurian economy was built upon agricultural production. The exclusion of Koreans meant less labor power available for reclamation and rice cultivation. With the fanfare of rice farming, Koreans were integrated into both Japanese and Chinese communities as tenants and agricultural laborers. The Asia Development Company (Tōa kangyō kabushiki geisha, in Japanese), the largest Japanese land company, hired primarily Korean tenants for rice farming, although some Chinese tenants were also hired. A defining mode of including Koreans into Chinese communities was the increasing demotion of Koreans from independent farmers to tenants and agricultural laborers. This pattern of partial inclusion resulted from the northeast government’s attempt to resolve the tension between its national and capitalist desires. However, it is not clear how systematically it was applied across Manchuria. Although the northeast government was determined to eradicate Korean landownership and residence, it still permitted the employment of nonnaturalized Koreans as tenants with restrictions on length of tenancy and the number of tenant households per landlord. According to a 1925 decree, a tenancy contract was not to exceed one year, with seven to eight years as the maximum period for renewed contracts. In a 1928 decree, the tenancy contract was reduced to five years for reclamation of wasteland or three years for rice farming. The maximum number of Korean tenant households per each Chinese household was limited to ten. Landlords were obliged to evict at least three tenant households every year if they had hired more than the maximum number of tenants permitted by law. In addition, the rights of Korean tenants were circumvented from time to time, as they were required to pay higher rents in 1924, an additional fee for a long-term lease of land in 1925, and new taxes in 1927. To prevent Koreans from overstay-


ing or paying rent late, in 1928 they were required to register at local offices their conditions of employment with the date of hire and the amount of land under their care.19 Between the nationality law and partial inclusion in markets, the number of Korean migrants swelled several times, even when swarming throngs of Koreans continued to fuel apprehension among Chinese government officials. About 38 percent of the total 1 million Koreans remained in South and North Manchuria (excluding Jiandao) by the end of the 1920s. Chinese nation formation was actualized in the domain of social relations of agricultural production and market exchange. It obscured the unequal relationship between (Chinese) landlords and (Korean) tenants/agricultural laborers. Japan and the northeast government were the bedfellows whose shared capitalist dream constrained their opposed territorial politics. National and capitalist politics were contradictory to each other, as one simultaneously contributed and constrained the other. National politics could have circumvented the process of capital accumulation in two major ways. The contention of Japan and the northeast government could have curbed the influx of labor power from Korea. It could have also discouraged Chinese landowners from further investments in land and, thus, threatened the whole economy, such as commercial activities in market trades and food-processing factories, which depended on beans, rice, millet, and other crops. However, whether such threats to accumulation were in reality actualized is a historical question explained by historical contingency. An important contingency was the continuous displacement of Koreans, which worked as ‘‘social metabolism,’’ removing barriers to production and market exchange. Koreans migrated at least three or four times to escape oppression and exploitation from the northeast government and landlords. A paradox is that their spatial praxis exerted a concrete effect on capital accumulation. The combination of state oppression and Korean migration unfettered the movement of capital from barriers such as the lack of transportation and communication. Korean migrants cultivated untilled lands and raised the market value of lands where they settled, even if they were often not able to claim it for very long. When Koreans migrated, Japanese capital resumed its movement by following the itinerary of Koreans and their quest to purchase land. Chinese capital also became contingent on Koreans, as Chinese claimed land cultivated by Koreans. The cycle of migration, cultivation, eviction, and another migration brought more peripheral land under cultiva19. Chōsen Sōtokufu Keimukyoku, Zaiman Senjin to Shina Kanken, 242–47.


tion, expanded the market, disseminated Japanese capital, and homogenized Manchuria for capitalist development. Capital accumulation set limits on territorial and national politics that were embedded in the social processes of exchange of land and labor. A primary relationship between Japan and Koreans was forged through the exchange of Japanese capital and Korean labor. Japan’s sovereignty over Koreans, therefore, depended on the viability of social relations of production, which was governed not just by global market forces but also by the northeast government. Capital accumulation also interfered with the northeast government’s pursuit of sovereignty over national territory, since capitalist interest encouraged the government to retreat from a national policy designed to circumvent the encroachment of Japanese power. The simultaneous enforcement and retreat from nationalist policy points to the inherent tension between the imaginary national communities envisaged by national powers and the economic basis of their existence, given that the government was the primary investor in agriculture, commerce, and finance. When the northeast government envisioned regulating property rights and relations of exchange regarding land, its own interests in agricultural development undermined this very effort of making the modern Chinese nation. Korean Chinese and the Korean Nation Since the 1990s Of the population of 2 million Koreans, about half remained in northeast China after liberation from colonial rule. About five decades later—from the early 1990s—Korean settlers and their descendants began returning to South Korea as migrant laborers. About 70 to 80 percent of the total 2 million Koreans in China have at least one person per household who either worked or is now working in South Korea. Korean Chinese comprise about 65 percent of a total 400,000 migrant laborers in South Korea. Their earnings from South Korea are the engine of the vibrant consumer economy in the Korean community in northeast China. Once they returned to China, many ventured into small business, opening Karaoke bars, coffee shops, restaurants, and spas. It is not unusual for them to come back to South Korea after spending their savings. As Korean migrants in China (hereafter referred to as Korean Chinese) remained unsettled during the colonial period, current returnees in South Korea also generate disquiet. A comparison of these two historical moments delineates the ways that indeterminable nation formation, a universal dynamic of capitalist modernity, are shared by northeast China during


the colonial period and South Korea in the present. In other words, this comparison reveals not only the distinctive politics of the present moment, for example, cosmopolitanism and the declining appeal of nationalism, but also the commonality of the two historical experiences. In addition, I do not take two historical moments as separate from each other but instead consider the ways that the memory of the former moment is mobilized to constitute the latter. South Korean Economic Restructuring and Ethnic Networks A new phase in the economic and cultural globalization of South Korean capital began in the late 1980s. Overseas investment and production have increased dramatically, circumventing regulation by developed countries for Korean products and curbing the cost of production. By 2004, about 400,000 foreign workers had been hired to meet the labor shortage in the low-wage sector known as 3-D work (dirty, dangerous, and physically demanding), as well as in the service sector. At the juncture of this transformation, South Korean officials and capital began to pay new attention to the Korean diaspora, who, in their initial assessment, could not only mediate the economic relationship between South Korea and their host countries but also perhaps directly participate in South Korean economic activities. When they compared the size and input of the Korean diaspora and the South Korean economy to that of the Chinese diaspora and the Chinese economy, South Korean state officials found some basis for reassurance, since the smaller Chinese diaspora had brought an economic boom to China’s coastal region. This desire to profit from the Korean diaspora was symptomatic of the anxiety of South Koreans about sustaining economic growth. The South Korean state had launched various efforts to establish South Korean culture as legitimate, sending cultural troupes and textbooks to Korean diasporic communities.20 A new drive for economic and cultural globalization in South Korea since the early 1990s has transformed the Korean nation from a territorial to 20. Cho Kwang Dong, ‘‘Kyop’o esŏ tongp’oro [From Koreans Living Abroad to Blood Kin],’’ Chicago edition of Han’guk Ilbo, May 7, 1996. A century after the first separation from the homeland, Koreans abroad numbered about 5.23 million, approximately 8 percent of the combined population of North and South Korea, with 37 percent in China, 13 percent in Japan, and 9 percent in former Soviet territories. These colonial diasporas with colonial origins outnumbered those new diasporas who emigrated from South Korea since the 1960s—34 percent to the United States, and 1.2 percent to Central and South America (the Chicago edition of Han’guk Ilbo, March 30, 1996).


a deterritorialized form. Casting aside the previous focus on territorial disputes with North Korea, South Korea in the post–Cold War era construes the Korean diaspora as an enormous asset capable of advancing Korea on the global stage. South Korea’s new relationship with the Korean Chinese community surpasses its relations with other members of the Korean diaspora, including Korean Russians and some Korean Japanese who used to embrace North Korea. An intraethnic relationship mediates the new economic relations between South Koreans and Korean Chinese. South Korean overseas investment in China has drawn on the invocation of ethnic ties with Korean Chinese, who have provided services such as translation, networking, buying property, and supplying labor. Fanning the Korean dream among Korean Chinese, this capitalist investment has brought Korean Chinese to South Korea. Because they are able to communicate in vernacular Korean and their facial features resemble those of South Koreans, Korean Chinese are favored by employers in South Korea for jobs in construction, restaurants, and domestic service, where they are exposed to the public. Such jobs are better paying than those in small factories, which are given to migrant workers from elsewhere, including the Philippines and Indonesia.21 The versatile institutional status of Korean Chinese demonstrates the unstable temporality of the new Korean nation, stemming from the inherent paradoxical relation of capital with nation formation. The disputes over the rights of Korean Chinese are marked by the disparity between law and state policy. On the one hand, the Law on Overseas Koreans passed in 1999 in South Korea, which is an emblem of the inclusive ethnic Korean nation, grants overseas Koreans (Chaeoe Tongp’o) the right to invest capital, own property, and be employed in the private and public sectors. At controversy is the definition of ‘‘overseas Koreans,’’ as the 1999 law categorized them as those that once lived within South Korea as citizens, as well as the descendants of such persons. This definition excludes Koreans in China, as well as other members of the colonial diaspora in Russia, Sakhalin, and Japan. On the other hand, the state’s policies recognize Korean Chinese as ethnic Koreans, allowing family visitation of Koreans. In an attempt to broaden family visitation, the Ministry of Justice has lowered the age restric21. A regulation of the Departments of Justice and Labor permits the employment of Korean compatriots with foreign nationality in the service sector (restaurants, construction, cleaning, housekeeping, and nursing). See the Departments of Justice and Labor, Oeguk kukchŏk tongp’o yŏrŏbun, Han’gugesŏ ch’wiŏp hasiryŏmyŏn ìgŏtmanŭn kkok kiyŏk haseyo!!! [Korean Compatriots with Foreign Nationality, Please Remember This If You Seek Employment in South Korea], December 2002.


tion for family visitation from fifty-five years of age and older in the late 1980s to thirty years of age and older in 2003. The modification of this rule does not benefit many Korean Chinese who have lost contact with their relatives during the colonial and Cold War periods or whose relatives are in North Korea. The training program for factory employment, another legal form of migration, is also too restrictive, with its limits on the annual number of trainees and on wages, which are only 60 to 70 percent of a domestic worker’s wages. Korean Chinese have thereby come illegally, paying brokers to purchase legal invitations to work in South Korea, like any other foreign worker. The ethnic national network mediates capitalist expansion. Enacted during South Korea’s financial crisis in 1999, the Law on Overseas Koreans is widely regarded as an expedient mechanism to attract Korean American capital. Specifically, the law embraces Korean American capital rather than Korean Americans themselves. The exclusion of Korean Chinese from the benefits of the law enables South Korean employers to utilize Korean Chinese as illegal laborers, whose rights are not always protected by the labor laws of South Korea. The law is bold testimony to the ways the Korean nation was transformed by mediating the interests of capital and the capitalist state. The law has become detrimental to the South Korean economy: although increasing the supply of cheap illegal migrant labor, the high turnover rate threatens the stability of production and profits. Small factory owners have appealed to the government to increase the stability of the foreign workforce. History repeats itself for Korean Chinese. A revision of the Law on Overseas Koreans proposed by the Department of Justice in September 2003 parallels the practice of national membership in Manchuria in the 1930s. The proposal establishes family registration (Hojŏk ) as a new criterion for national membership. It also assigns the rights to only two generations—those who left Korea and their children. The Department of Justice presents it as an inclusive measure that would endow Korean Chinese with the right to free visitation and employment in South Korea. However, this new criterion of family registration, let alone the generational restriction, has backfired. Institutionalized in 1922 under Japanese colonialism, the system of family registration has negative historical associations. Furthermore, the majority of Korean Chinese does not enroll in the family registrar in South Korea. This replicates the thorny predicament of Koreans in Manchuria seventy years ago. When Koreans held dual nationality during the Manchukuo period as members of Korea and Manchukuo (the state of


Manchuria), their Korean membership was based on enrolling in the family registrar in Korea. Many Koreans in Manchuria could not prove their Korean membership because they had migrated to Manchuria prior to the legislation mandating the family registrar system in Korea. This problem posed a barrier for Koreans to exercise rights of private property ownership in Manchuria, since proof of registration was required for filing a land title. The fact that Korean Chinese have been subject to similar discriminatory practices of national membership in Manchuria and South Korea at different historical moments suggests that the illegality of migrant labor is not a historical anomaly. Instead, it is produced by the incomplete national mediation of capitalist expansion. As argued in this essay, national mediation does not denote a functional affinity between nationalism and capitalism, but rather the intrinsic tension between them. For some critics, the Law on Overseas Koreans and its proposed revisions aim to sustain conditions advantageous for South Korea’s economy, such as the utilization of Korean Chinese as illegal laborers and the protection of the domestic market from abrupt changes in labor demand. However, the exclusion of Korean Chinese from the new Korean nation exceeds its functional effects for the South Korean economy. While employers of small factories, construction sites, and restaurants have demanded the expansion of the migrant workforce in order to curb labor shortages, the policies have not yet realized their expectations. Rather, the coexistence of the appeal for a new deterritorialized ethnic nation and the continued discrimination of Korean Chinese point to the elusive practices of South Korean capital that have simultaneously postulated borderless capitalist expansion and re-created the ethnic nation, utilizing the Korean diaspora for its purposes. History, Politics, and Korean Chinese The illegitimate position of Korean Chinese has been tackled by two social movement organizations—the Committee for Reforming the Law on Overseas Koreans (Chaeoe tongp’obop kaejŏng taech’aek wiwŏnhoe, hereafter referred to as the Committee) and the Joint Committee for Migrant Workers in Korea (JCMK)—that have categorized Korean Chinese as compatriots and foreign workers, respectively. The debates developed by the JCMK continue to disquiet the Korean nation. A focal point of the contention between the two organizations concerns a national consciousness in the age of neoliberal capitalism. The Committee is fixated on reinventing the nation, while the JCMK seeks to transcend it. Their differences notwithstanding, the two organizations have common features. In their perspec-


tive, the nation is an artifact of the past that needs to be either overcome by resolving historical faults or left behind by adopting cosmopolitanism; and national history is a memory of the past. Furthermore, they focus on either the nation or capitalist economy and, thus, fail to address the contradictory relationship between the two. These two organizations accomplished some partial success in reforming the Law on Overseas Koreans and a major law on migrant workers. Nevertheless their accomplishments do not address the social experience of Korean Chinese, which arises from the interaction of national and capitalist politics. In its strategic appeal to the public and to lawmakers, the Committee characterizes Korean Chinese as ‘‘returnees,’’ whose historical past has remained a forgotten national history of Korea. Its representation of the Korean Chinese is dichotomous: they are both colonial victims and heroes of the anti-Japanese struggle. The Committee maintains that if South Korea claims to be the legitimate heir of the Korean nation, in contrast to North Korea, the South Korean state has the responsibility to embrace Korean Chinese who were forced by the colonizer to migrate to Manchuria. This representation counters the way that Manchurian history has been incorporated into Chinese national history. Since 1951, when an autonomous prefecture for Koreans was established in Yanbian (previously Jiandao), the history of the Korean minority has incorporated the anti-imperialist struggles of Koreans in Manchuria into the process of the Chinese revolution, and not the liberation of Korea. Through its emotional appeal to discredit the opposition, the Committee accentuates the continued national heritage of Korean Chinese. In the words of Lim Kwang Bin, the head of the Committee, ‘‘Korean Chinese are overwhelmed to see persimmon trees still standing in their own houses that they had left behind during the colonial period. Korean Chinese hold rights to live in the houses that they and their parents used to live in. Tombs of grandparents who had raised them [still] exist in mountains near their houses. They, therefore, have the right to live and work in this homeland. How could anyone say that they do not have the right to work in South Korea.’’ 22 Lim also likens Korean Chinese to family members who leave home during a family crisis to go abroad to earn money, or to a daughter who is married to a poor family and now wishes to return to her natal family to earn money necessary for survival. Representing Korean Chinese as ethnic subjects, the nationalist poli22. Lim Kwang Bin, ‘‘A Draft Proposed by the Committee to Reform the Law on Overseas Koreans,’’ unpublished document, 2003.


tics of law does not articulate the complex nature of the synergy of ethnic nationalism and capitalist transformation in China and South Korea. The Committee’s national approach considers the nation and nationalism as the past whose fallacies and legacies must be resolved in the present. It does not recognize that the nation and nationalism continue to work as an organizing principle in the present. The exchange of capital and labor brought them to interact with South Koreans and simultaneously reinforces and transcends ethnic nationalism. The JCMK, an umbrella organization of about forty NGO centers representing (foreign) migrant workers, includes Korean Chinese in the category of migrant workers. For the last ten years, the JCMK has engaged in various reform movements, pushing for laws to protect migrant workers and their human rights. Its advocacy establishes foreign workers as a minority whose rights are increasingly recognized in South Korea. The JCMK particularly has concentrated on abolishing the industrial training program that was the primary legal channel through which foreign workers could come to South Korea. The training program defines foreign workers as trainees, whose wages amount to only 70 percent of the amount earned by workers, prompting foreign workers to leave their assigned workplaces and seek better wages elsewhere. This industrial training program has created a group of exploited illegal workers who become subject to many violations of labor laws. The JCMK led the movement to rationalize the recruitment and employment of foreign workers.23 The JCMK seeks vainly to forge an alliance with labor movement. It also anchors the issue of migrant workers within the framework of transnational time, which is equated with current processes of globalization. It describes nationalism as a relic of the past that South Korea must leave behind if it is to reinvigorate its culture and economy. In such an approach, migrant laborers are marked as cosmopolitan subjects whose national differences are muted. Espousing a multiethnic society or borderless community, the movement in support of migrant workers confounds national dif23. For the major publications of the JCMK, see Oegugin ijunodongja in’gwŏn paeksŏ [The Report on the Human Rights of Foreign Migrant Workers] (Seoul: Tasankŭlbang, 2001); and Oegugin sanŏp kisul yŏnsusaeng in’gwŏn paeksŏ [The Report on Oppressed Human Rights of the Migrant Trainee Workers] (Seoul: JCMK, 2000). For comprehensive research on the economic conditions of the migration of foreign workers at home and in South Korea, as well as on their working conditions in South Korea, see Seol Tong-Hoon, Oegukin nodongjawa Han’guk sahoe [Foreign Workers and the Korean Society] (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 1999).


ference and discrimination. Opposing nationalism to transnationalism, the movement advocates equal rights of all migrant workers regardless of their origins and nationality. It is the UN resolution on migrant labor, not the national concerns of South Korea, that orients the movements for migrant workers. Confusing difference and discrimination, it refuses to make any distinction between Korean Chinese and other foreign workers. For the movement, differentiation on the basis of ethnic ties or national history would lead to discrimination against other foreign workers, since it would increase the number of Korean Chinese at the expense of other foreign workers. According to an activist, the preference for Korean Chinese over other foreign workers must be abandoned as a manifestation of nationalist and racial discrimination against other ethnic groups and nationalities. In his view, the preference for Korean Chinese resembles nationalist practices in Japan that have discriminated against Korean Japanese.24 The movement took its case on Korean Chinese to the National Commission on Human Rights (Kukka inkwŏnwiwŏnhoe), which affirmed the preference for Korean Chinese as a form of racial discrimination. The problematic conflation of ahistorical sameness and equality renders the movement’s politics oblivious to practices of capital that mobilize both ethnic solidarity and transnational globalization. It also obfuscates nationalism as a necessary condition for the transnational migration of laborers. Nationalism homogenizes wages, other costs of production, and conditions of market exchange within the territory of a nation-state. Thus, nationalism contributes to maintaining the differences between home and host countries in terms of the costs of both the production of commodities and the reproduction of labor; and guest workers live in the interstices of national differences, trying to use the differences to their advantage. If guest workers recoil at acknowledging the national character of the Korean Chinese experience, this equates with their refusal to recognize their own national condition as an essential basis for their transnational migration. The JCMK’s opposition of nationalism and transnationalism mystifies the similarities and differences of Korean Chinese and other migrant workers. Even when Korean Chinese comprised more than 60 percent of the total foreign workforce, the JCMK maintained ambiguous relations with 24. Pak Sok-wun, ‘‘Nodong hŏgaje toibŭi panghyang (2000 July)’’ [The Direction of the Implementation of the Labor Permit System],’’ in Oegugin nodongja munje [On the Problems of Foreign Workers], ed. The National Congress Committee of Health and Welfare (Seoul: The National Congress Committee of Health and Welfare, 2001), 18.


Korean Chinese. It has not completely excluded Korean Chinese from its movement, especially as Korean Chinese increasingly participate in protests, nor has it offered explicit support for the movement to reform the Law on Overseas Koreans. Conclusion The displacement of workers is a form of capitalist accumulation. The repetition of displacement in the two historical moments that I have compared in this essay reveals the intricate dynamics of nation formation and capitalist expansion, which is expressed in the disjuncture between the national identity and work experience of Korean migrants. When Koreans in these historical moments worked as migrant workers, the unresolved disputes over their national membership and ethnic belongingness were symptomatic of unstable nation formation in its mediation of global capitalism. National mediation is not the functional resolution of the social crisis of accumulation by the institutionalization of a new boundary of citizens and noncitizens. Instead, it is the impossibility of a newly imagined and enacted nation to fulfill such capitalist desire. It is not that the nation remains an ideological imaginary. Rather, it exerts concrete effects on the social as it constitutes the relations of production and exchange. The recurrence of undeterminable nation formation demands a new strategy for comparison. The literature of economic globalization and diaspora centers on the differences between the two historical periods of the twentieth century: the declining appeal of the nation-state system at least since the 1980s; different strategies of capital accumulation shaped by Fordist and flexible regimes of production and consumption; and disparate cultural politics that pit a universalizing projection of social change across the globe against distinctive paths of modernity reflecting unique history and culture in a place.25 The comparison of differences masks the logic of capital that authorizes the repetition of history. Delineating historical specificity only partially elucidates the complex dynamics and relations of global capitalism and nation formation. The universal dynamics that run through the periods 25. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, ‘‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,’’ in ‘‘Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism,’’ ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, special issue, Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2003): 291– 343; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), and The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).


concerns the unstable formation of the nation resulting from the contradictory relationship of the nation and global capitalism. The comparability of the two historical moments lies not in the consideration of these moments as disparate and independent but in the recognition that they are historical manifestations of capital expansion mediated by the nation.

Books Received

Aggarwal, Ravina. Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Arjouni, Jakob. Idiots: Five Fairy Tales and Other Stories. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Other Press, 2005. Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Aesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Benhabib, Seyla, and Nancy Fraser, eds. Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Brennan, Karen. The Garden in Which I Walk: Fictions. Tallahassee, Fla.: Fiction Collective 2, 2004. Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Convergences: Inventories of the Past. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Cheng, Sinkwan, ed. Law, Justice, and Power: Between Will and Reason. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Collins, John. Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency. New York: New York University Press, 2004.


Crane, Stephen. Great Short Works of Stephen Crane. Perennial Classics. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2004. Davis, Leith, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen, eds. Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2. Trans. Jan Plug and Others. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Di Leo, Jeffrey R. On Anthologies: Politics and Pedagogy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Easthope, Antony, and Kate McGowan, eds. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Q Series. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Habib, Jasmin. Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging. Cultural Spaces. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Religion and Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Hirsch, Marianne, and Irene Kacandes, eds. Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust. Options for Teaching. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004. Hirsh, Sharon L. Symbolism and Modern Urban Society. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Khan, Aisha. Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad. Latin America and Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Kinsella, John. Doppler Effect. Salt Modern Poets. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2004. Kruger, Loren. Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Lock, Norman. A History of the Imagination: A Novel. Tallahassee, Fla.: Fiction Collective 2, 2004. McWilliams, Jim, ed. Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004.

Books Received 255

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation. Modern & Contemporary Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Paton, Diana. No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870. Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Perloff, Marjorie. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Modern & Contemporary Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Ponzanesi, Sandra. Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture: Contemporary Women’s Writing of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Scott, David. Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Singer, Alan. Dirtmouth: A Novel. Tallahassee, Fla.: Fiction Collective 2, 2004. Stimilli, Davide. The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism. Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Tazi, Nadia, ed. Keywords: Identity. The Keywords Series. New York: Other Press, 2004. Tazi, Nadia, ed. Keywords: Truth. The Keywords Series. New York: Other Press, 2004. Trafton, Scott. Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania. New Americanists. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Van Cauwelawert, Didier. Out of My Head: A Novel. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Other Press, 2004. Walkowitz, Daniel J., and Lisa Maya Knauer, eds. Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space. Radical Perspectives. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Yip, June. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. Asia-Pacific. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Zandy, Janet. Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Contributors

Michael Dutton is a reader/associate professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia. He is coeditor of the journal Postcolonial Studies. Author of Policing and Punishment in China (1992) and Streetlife China (1998), his most recent book-length work is a Schmittian history of Chinese politics entitled Policing Chinese Politics: A History (Duke University Press, 2005). He is the author of numerous articles, the most recent being ‘‘Mango Mao: Infections of the Sacred’’ (Public Culture). This is part of an ongoing project on passion, the gift, and the nature of political commitment. Manu Goswami is an assistant professor of history and East Asian studies at New York University. She is the author of Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (2004). Her work has also appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of Historical Sociology. Harry Harootunian is professor of history and East Asian studies at New York University. He has written widely on Japan’s modern cultural and intellectual history, questions relating to historical theory, postcolonial discourse, and area studies. His most recent book is The Emperor’s New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained (2004). Marilyn Ivy teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, where she is an associate professor. She is the author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (1995), and her current work continues to address the aesthetic, technological, and political conditions of late modernity in Japan. Rebecca E. Karl is an associate professor of history and East Asian studies at New York University. She is the author of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2002), and coeditor (with Peter Zarrow) of Rethinking the 1898 Reforms: Cultural and Political Change in Late-Qing China (2002). John Kraniauskas is a senior lecturer of Latin American literature and cultural studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is an editor of the Journal of Latin


American Cultural Studies and is currently completing a book titled The Work of Transculturation. Peter Osborne is professor of modern European philosophy and director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London, and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time (1995), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), and Conceptual Art (2002). Hyun Ok Park is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University. Her book on global capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria, will be published by Duke University Press in 2005. She is also working on a new book, A Hierarchical Community: Korean Diaspora and Unification, which includes discussions on history, democracy, and the Korean unification in the context of the current neoliberal reforms in Korea and East Asia. She has published articles in South Atlantic Quarterly and Radical Philosophy. George Steinmetz is professor of sociology and German studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (1993); Precoloniality: Ethnographic Discourse and ‘‘Native Policy’’ in the German Overseas Empire (Southwest Africa, Samoa, and Qingdao/ China) (forthcoming in 2005); and editor of State/Culture: State Formation After the Cultural Turn (1999) and The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others (forthcoming in 2005). With Julia Adams, he coedits the book series Politics, History, and Culture for Duke University Press. He is currently making a documentary film called Living among Ruins: Detroit (USA) with Michael Chanan. Xudong Zhang teaches Chinese and comparative literature at New York University. He is the author of Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms; Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China, 1989–2002 (forthcoming); and, in Chinese, Traces of Criticism and Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book manuscript on Hegel’s aesthetics and is preparing another on the rise of the modern Chinese essay.

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