Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana (Routledge Contemporary Asia Series) 0367474026, 9780367474027

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Contributors
1. Introduction: Epistemic Decolonization during the New Cold War
2. Area Studies and Civilizational Transference: Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana
3. The Third Nomos of the Earth: The Decline of Western Hegemony and the Continuity of Capitalism
4. Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction: Colonial Continuities, Postcolonial Assemblages of Power, Anti-colonial Struggles
5. The Ambiguous Status of Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism in Europe
6. Feeling Freedom: Japanese and American Wartime Films on the Liberation of the Philippines, 1943–45
7. What Comes after “Area”?: The Nomos of the Modern in Times of Crisis
8. Theory, Institution and the North American Field of Modern Chinese Literary Studies: Some Preliminary Reflections
9. Between Studium and Punctum: Tomatsu Shomei and Nakahira Takuma between “Japan” and “Okinawa”
10. Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies in White Settler Colonialism
Index

Citation preview

Routledge Contemporary Asia Series

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND EPISTEMIC DECOLONIZATION AT THE END OF PAX AMERICANA Edited by Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon and Peter Button

Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana

This book critically analyzes the global hegemony of the United States – a hegemony whose innovative aspect consists in articulating postcoloniality to imperial control – in relation to knowledge and knowledge production. Through targeted case studies on the historical relationship between regional areas and the United States, the authors explore possibilities and obstacles to epistemic decolonization. By highlighting the connection between the control of work and the control of communication that has been at the core of the colonial regimes of accumulation (‘classic colonialism’), they present an entirely new form of disciplinary practice, not based on the equation of evolution and knowledge. An extensive introduction outlines the historical genealogy of Pax Americana epistemic hegemony, while individual chapters examine the implications for different regions of the world and different domains of activity, including visual culture, economy, migration, the arts, and translation. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to students and scholars in many fields, including Asian studies, American studies, postcolonialism, and political theory. Naoki Sakai is a distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Asian Studies Emeritus at Cornell University, USA, and has published in the fields of comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, and the histories of textuality. Jon Solomon is a professor of Chinese literature at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, France, and a researcher attached to the Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires et Multilingues, Université de Paris Nanterre, France. Peter Button is an independent researcher living in New York City, USA. He has published Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity (2009).

Routledge Contemporary Asia Series

77. Whole Person Education in East Asian Universities Perspectives from Philosophy and Beyond Edited by Benedict S. B. Chan and Victor C. M. Chan 78. Air Pollution Governance in East Asia Edited by Kuei-tien Chou, Koichi Hasegawa, Dowan Ku and Shu-Fen Kao 79. Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Asia Edited by Akihiro Ogawa and Anthony J. Spires 80. Asian Sound Cultures Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology Edited by Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene and Martyn David Smith 81. Indigenous Reconciliation in Contemporary Taiwan From Stigma to Hope Edited by Scott Simon, Peter Kang and Jolan Hsieh 82. Memory and Fabrication in East Asian Visual Culture Ruinous Garden Dennitza Gabrakova 83. The Geopolitics of Health in South and Southeast Asia Perspectives from the Cold War to COVID-19 Edited by Vivek Neelakantan 84. Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana Edited by Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeContemporary-Asia-Series/book-series/SE0794

Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana Edited by Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon and Peter Button

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon and Peter Button; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon and Peter Button to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-47402-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-54258-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03666-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of contributors 1 Introduction: Epistemic Decolonization during the New Cold War

vii 1

NAOKI SAKAI, JON SOLOMON, AND PETER BUTTON

2 Area Studies and Civilizational Transference: Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana

43

NAOKI SAKAI

3 The Third Nomos of the Earth: The Decline of Western Hegemony and the Continuity of Capitalism

89

WALTER D. MIGNOLO

4 Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction: Colonial Continuities, Postcolonial Assemblages of Power, Anti-colonial Struggles

112

SANDRO MEZZADRA

5 The Ambiguous Status of Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism in Europe

135

MAJA VODOPIVEC

6 Feeling Freedom: Japanese and American Wartime Films on the Liberation of the Philippines, 1943–45

155

TAKASHI FUJITANI

7 What Comes after “Area”?: The Nomos of the Modern in Times of Crisis GAVIN WALKER

173

vi  Contents 8 Theory, Institution and the North American Field of Modern Chinese Literary Studies: Some Preliminary Reflections

199

PETER BUTTON

9 Between Studium and Punctum: Tomatsu Shomei and Nakahira Takuma between “Japan” and “Okinawa”

224

KAORI NAKASONE AND MAYUMO INOUE

10 Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies in White Settler Colonialism

240

JON SOLOMON

Index259

Contributors

Peter Button is an independent researcher living in New York City. He has published Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity (2009). Takashi Fujitani is the Dr. David Chu Chair in Asia Pacific Studies, University of Toronto. Books include: Splendid Monarchy; Race for Empire; and Perilous Memories (co-edited, 2001). Research interests include: race, colonialism, war, monarchies, transpacific, Japanese and U.S. history, film. Mayumo Inoue is an associate professor of comparative literature at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan. He has co-edited (with Steve Choe) Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019). His essays have appeared in Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Discourse, and Criticism among others. Sandro Mezzadra is Professor of Political theory at the University of Bologna (Department of Arts) and is adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society of Western Sydney University. He is best known in English for Border as Method, or, The Multiplication of Labor (2013) and The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (2019), both co-authored with Brett Neilson. Walter Mignolo, the William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University, is a leading thinker of decoloniality. His most recent work is The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021). Kaori Nakasone is a photographer currently residing in Tokyo. Her first photobook titled Temporality was published in 2023. Her essays on contemporary photography have appeared in Art Bridge, Ekkyo Hiroba, and the Okinawa Times. Naoki Sakai, a distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Asian Studies Emeritus at Cornell University, has published in the fields of comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, and the histories of textuality.

viii  List of Contributors Jon Solomon is a professor of Chinese literature at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and a researcher attached to the Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires et Multilingues, Université de Paris Nanterre. A monograph in Chinese titled, A Genealogy of Defeat on the Left: Transition, Translation, and Bordering in the Hong Kong Protest Movement of 2019 (2022), is soon to be followed by Spectral Transitions: The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethics of Area Studies (forthcoming 2023). Maja Vodopivec is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University. She has been trained in Peace and Conflict Studies and Japanese Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Her research interest lies in a critique of liberal peacebuilding and in postwar Japanese intellectual history. Gavin Walker is Associate Professor of History at McGill University. Major works include The Sublime Perversion of Capital (2016); The End of Area (2019, with Naoki Sakai); The Red Years (2020); Marx et la politique du dehors (2022), among others.

1

Introduction Epistemic Decolonization during the New Cold War Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button

Introduction As a new, not-so Cold War takes shape, Patrick Lawrence, a senior correspondent, urges us to bear witness: Remember this, too, and bear witness. It is the U.S. that has assiduously sought to kindle Cold War II, just as it, and not the Soviet Union, was responsible for starting Cold War I. I mention this because the origins of the first Cold War have been hopelessly blurred in the histories. We can watch this time. It is occurring before our eyes.1 The world’s peerless military superpower is not only gearing up to allocate unprecedented levels of otherwise desperately needed resources2 to develop, deploy, and profit from a militarized automaton at the planetary scale, but it is also pursuing policies and taking actions that tread dangerously close to incentivizing a new nuclear arms race and fear of nuclear war.3 The need for a critical reappraisal of the first Cold War and the seven decades of global governance under the shadow of U.S. financial and military hegemony has never been greater. Adding to the burgeoning interest in Cold War studies, this volume began with a call to look specifically at the politics of knowledge and the conditions of knowledge production in light of the experience of colonialism. Recognizing the stubborn persistence of institutional practices and methodological tropes contaminated by assumptions from the colonial-imperial modernity, this volume is focused specifically on the task of epistemic decolonization. The new Cold War and global instability during a period of multiple, large-scale transitions and challenges heightens the sense of importance and urgency for the project of epistemic decolonization. In the absence of such work, there is every likelihood that many of the mistakes made during the first Cold War will be repeated. Pax Americana and Epistemic Decolonization

Backed up by a global network of military bases that subvert the meaning of national sovereignty and by the leverage of monetary control assuring a steady flow of capital surplus to the United States from the rest of the world (first through gold, DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-1

2  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button then starting in the 1970s, through the purchase of U.S. debt), the postcolonial global order of Pax Americana was conceived within a new synthesis of territory and colonial government, captured by the trope of area. Yet, it is important to note that as a normative principle for both the organization of global populations and the disciplinary production of knowledge, area is the place where the epistemic is sutured to the political. Without doubt, the new global hegemony inherited the colonial-imperial order of the modern international world, but its departure from the old colonialisms of the Great Britain, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and so on were deliberately emphasized so as to allow America’s new global reign to appear as if it had been designed for decolonization, as if the area were not of colonial rule. By introducing into the international world, new institutional measures such as the United Nations with its headquarters in New York City and a new definition of state sovereignty—according to which foreign military personnel and facilities are allowed to be stationed on a semi-permanent basis within the territory of an independent state—the United States of America revised the concept of colonial governance radically. Yielding to the images of the post-WWII world propagated by the United States, some of us might well go along with the premises of the “postcolonial” world under Pax Americana and assume that the colonial-imperial order of modernity was literally over under the global hegemony of the United States. Overcome by the postWWII international order was the colonialist bifurcation of the international world on the one hand into Europe where the system of international law applied and on the other the non-Europe where international law was not valid. Hence, it was claimed that the new post-WWII world was literally a “postcolonial” world sanctioned by the new international law and that, under Pax Americana, modern colonialism had finally lost its legitimacy. Nonetheless, the so-called First World and some areas in the Third World were, indirectly and in the name of collective security, under a new reign of colonial control by the United States. In this introduction, we will remain skeptical of this particular use of the word “postcolonial” and, whenever necessary, we will use it in quotation marks. The essays collected in this volume investigate the theme of decolonization, particularly in the domain of knowledge production called “area studies.” After the Second World War, area studies were newly introduced as a disciplinary program in the humanities and social sciences in American higher education. It was instituted as a new form of knowledge production considered appropriate for the postcolonial world under Pax Americana. As we explore in this introduction, area studies was a success in many respects under the political climate of the first Cold War and played significant roles in transforming the humanities and social sciences at American universities. In the late 20th century, the idea of area studies gained international popularity and today many countries, including those in East Asia, have adopted the program as a guiding idea for university reforms supposedly demanded by globalization. Of course, we do not espouse this narrative concerning the formation and development of area studies, just as we do not trust the notion of postcolonial promoted in area studies. In the last two centuries since the inauguration of the modern university, the humanities or the human sciences have played an indispensable role in shaping

Introduction  3 knowledge production in the modern international world. Despite the astounding development of the natural sciences and the emergence of the social sciences, the humanities cannot be deemed irrelevant. It has been primarily in the domains of the humanistic sciences that the formation of modern national subjects has been inaugurated, planned, pursued, and propagated. The task of the humanities has been to envision the image of “civilized man” and to manufacture modern subjects suitable to and capable of the missions of territorial national sovereignty and commerce in the modern world as dictated by the evolving system of public international law (PIL). The constitution of the humanities reflects this juridical principle of the international world. The modern international world has been characterized by a colonial order which the plurality of formally equal nation-states has not, and arguably cannot, put an end. As a specifically modern concept, internationality hides the enduringly colonial aspect of the world system. At its root, the “world” as we know it is schematically composed by the bifurcation into two kinds of humanity, humanitas and Anthropos. As distinct normative orders, the two categories signify in the first instance different attitudes to knowledge, akin to what the epistemologist Bas van Fraassen has called, in a different context, epistemological “stances.”4 Where humanitas adopts a self-reflexive stance or attitude that aims to examine universal conditions for the production and evaluation of scientific knowledge with an eye to their continual innovation or renewal, anthropos is perforce committed to a particularistic stance defined with an eye to a delimited subset of humanity. The relation between the two terms is thus epistemological before taxonomic, yet taxonomy and power differentials are among the effects unleashed by it. This bipolar aspect of the modern international world is partially hidden – as well as supplemented – by an element of pluralism inherent in the distribution of populations into discrete nation-states. It is no surprise, in the last several decades, that the gradual receding of the colonial and international order of the modern world has been accompanied by the crisis of the nation-state. Broadly speaking, the process that is commonly referred to as globalization points to an ongoing process of collapse in the colonial-imperial order, along with the weakening of the nation-states born out of it, placing the need for decolonization at the center of reflections on the politics and biopolitics of knowledge during the age of globalization. Unsurprisingly, this bio/political crisis is accompanied by a parallel crisis that registers in the realm of the epistemic. In order to unpack the meaning of this crisis, it is necessary to trace the genealogical position occupied by “theory” within the multi-disciplinary configuration of the humanities and human sciences. The term “theory” is indeed a complex and multi-valent one, historically associated with the global hegemony of Western Europe and more recently that of the United States, both in the fields of knowledge production and image-representation often assimilated to each other. Theory originally referred both to the vaunted anthropocentric exception that distinguishes humans from other species as well as the infamous epistemological difference between humanitas and anthropos that supports the distinction among different human populations according to a relative index of anthropological superiority/inferiority and that attributes forms of the

4  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button particular or the universal to areas or regions of the globe. Yet it is also important to recognize that “theory” names the movement through which various attempts have been conducted by intellectuals, on both sides of the colonial-imperial divide, to come to terms with the political and epistemological legacy of the articulation between the anthropocentric exception and the anthropological difference upon which the modern world was built. Let us not overlook that “theory” had routinely been associated with the spiritual shape of European humanity in the 19th and 20th centuries, and that, even today, anthropological difference is frequently attributed to the presence or absence of an individual’s capacity for theoretical rationality. Ironically, what prevails is a peculiar use of the idiom “Western theory” among some intellectuals of the Rest, that indeed includes East Asia.5 Our recognition of the importance of knowledge production to Pax Americana hegemony begins with a look at what is most proper to “America” yet is generally thought to be peripheral by noting the new regimes of knowledge, generally referred to as “area studies,” that were established at American institutions of higher education after the collapse of the old colonial empires of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Japan. Beginning with the question of area studies, we attach particular importance to the legacies of the prior experience of colonialisms in the Western Pacific. Taking into account colonial histories in which modern educational systems were established by the British (in Singapore and Hong Kong), the Japanese (Taiwan, Korea, and Japan), and the American (East Asia in general since the end of the Asia Pacific War) colonialisms, we cannot overlook the overwhelming presence of the internationality of modernity in the formation of modern education and universities in this region. Parallel to the imagined division between humanitas and anthropos, Pax Americana knowledge production similarly bifurcated into two normative orders, managed by areal division. To understand the ramifications of this division, at once epistemological and geopolitical, it is necessary to take a detour into the intellectual history of the United States as it transitioned into a global empire of a new sort. Further investigation reveals that the area studies formation shares an epistemological genealogy and common historical origin with neoliberal economics and cybernetics or information science. Understood as historical trajectories, these three forms of disciplinary knowledge and the interrelations among them that developed in the transition to Pax Americana before, during, and after WWII constitute the core of the Pax Americana epistemic hegemony. The length of this introductory essay is partially justified by the need to outline each of these trajectories and their interrelations in as much detail as possible. Today, while it is widely recognized that area studies arose to consolidate the Cold War liberal internationalism of Pax Americana, it is also assumed with equal ubiquity that the successive waves of critique (of modernization theory, of U.S. imperialism, of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, etc.) and demographic democratization (such that claims to ethnic, institutional, and existential links to the communities under study now constitute the mainstream among area studies practitioners) have essentially accomplished the historical task of deep decolonization at the epistemic level, relegating it to the past. On that basis, scholars in the humanities

Introduction  5 and social sciences today regularly assume intellectual positions that implicitly lay claim to decolonial heritage and progressive liberal values yet are nevertheless contradicted by the persistence of colonial forms of sociality and practice in the institutions that govern the production and circulation of knowledge, as well as the mobilities of students and researchers. In effect, this contradiction sustains a colonial temporal fracture between the past and the present that prevents the emergence of co-temporality, the recognition of singularity, and new forms of comparison not based on externality. We are compelled to return to the question posed by Aziz Rana, a historian of U.S. constitutionalism, that is a clarion call for the project of epistemic decolonization: “what does it mean when a community adopts a postcolonial identity but denies the necessity for any systemic project of decolonization?”6 To Rana’s idea of the “systemic project of decolonization,” we share the enthusiasm expressed by Walter Mignolo and many others for a form of decolonization that is also epistemic. As we mull over the significance of epistemic decolonization at the “end(s)” of the horizon of Pax Americana, we should not lose sight of Rana’s astute observation, in the same essay, that it was none other than the originator of modernization theory in the United States, Seymour Martin Lipset, who tied American exceptionalism directly to its status as the “first postcolonial society”(emphasis in original).7 Given the now very well-known, outsized role of modernization theory in area studies (essentially forming area studies’ initial theoretical basis and first major theory), how much longer can we afford to ignore the much larger question of the role that theory has played (and continues to play) in the ongoing, collective abnegation in the United States of any comprehensive program for decolonization, especially since it was precisely the multiple emerging postcolonial societies that were the predominant objects of so much of Cold War areal knowledge production? Among the historically hegemonic forms taken by theory, that elaborated by American intellectuals under the rubric of creedal nationalism8 is of particular significance to understanding how the United States was able to transform its selfimage from a settler colonial state to a model of civic nationalism – a model that has served as an enduring inspiration for peoples across East Asia and elsewhere throughout the world – without undergoing a corresponding process of decolonization. Under Pax Americana, while coloniality under erasure was practiced overseas, the transition to civic nationalism without decolonization was practiced at home. As an ideology that reserves two different types of freedom for insiders and outsiders, U.S. creedal nationalism has exercised an extraordinarily powerful influence over our understanding and imagination of what civil society stands for. Decolonization is not just a question of knowledge but also a problem of affect. The continuous gradient or differential matrix enjoined by the desire for recognition in a cofigurative relationship (epitomized by the formula of “the West and the Rest”) continues to structure the affective investment in area. Epistemic decolonization urgently requires a cogent explanation of the mechanisms that distribute the affective investment in area among global populations on both sides of the former colonial-imperial divide. For instance, among the populations with imperial heritage, the persistence, and in some cases resurgence, of colonial consciousness is

6  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button remarkable. The disavowal of the comfort women issues in Japan; the persistence of an anachronistic imperial superiority complex amply demonstrated by the recent withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union; and the outbreak of white supremacy rhetoric associated with Donald Trump are but three of the most outrageous examples in recent memory of this general phenomenon. Meanwhile, among populations with a colonial heritage, the attachment to those forms of recognition and aesthetic community initially established by colonial modernity remains stubbornly institutionalized. At a global level, the tenacious refusal to fully decolonize among the populations with imperial heritage is paralleled by a concomitant unwillingness among populations with colonial heritage to pursue the project of decolonization down to a radical rethinking of the meaning of areas born out of colonial encounter. Despite considerable differences between the two, the desire to naturalize the areas born out of colonial modernity in the face of the increasingly visible instability of those areas – beginning with the West – effectively conjoins the two sides of the former colonial-imperial divide to an affective economy of loss and shame. Increasingly, the restoration of the presumed former greatness of national community has insinuated itself as a substitute for decolonization. The politics of victimization everywhere in evidence today invariably presents one of the crucial affective structures of the specific type of postcolonial modernity curated by the area studies, yet its mechanisms and effects with regard to the disciplinary divisions of the humanities as a whole are still poorly understood. It is, thus, of pressing importance to pair our critique of postimperial knowledge production with an understanding of postcolonial shame. Is it not the case that the intersection between patriarchy and the anthropological basis of the disciplinary divisions in the humanities inherited from the old colonial-imperial modernity has been instituted in a system of bordering and translation that mixes the epistemological and the anthropological with the economic? From this perspective, shame, which has today become one of the primary affective forces mobilized by both neoliberal and neofascist forces around the globe, thus names a complex intersectionality whose understanding requires a transnational approach. Anticommunism and Antiblackness: The Epistemic Ethos for Area Studies

For U.S. publics, the “creedal myth” of American exceptionalism has left the memory of its historical past profoundly “fractured.”9 U.S. political elites recognized in the early 20th century that the U.S. ascension to global authority required the erasure of what had always been affirmatively embraced, namely the role of settler colonization in preserving “white imperial authority.”10 This deliberate occlusion of that settler past by no means marked the emergence of a new “legal-political” order in the United States of the sort that might well have occurred had the project of Radical Reconstruction with its aspirations to create an interracial democracy oriented toward meaningful popular sovereignty not been crushed by the violent reassertion of white supremacy along with a property rights supremacism in the American South.11 Where Reconstruction might have facilitated a potentially decolonizing rupture with settler imperial legal and political practices, Rana argues the legal decisions

Introduction  7 regarding the “Insular Cases” in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War successfully advanced those practices onto a global stage. The anti-annexationists with their attendant, anti-imperialist rejection of colonial dependencies, were motivated above all by a desire to preserve, rather than in any manner dismantle, the “ethnoracial hierarchy” that had always been the defining feature of white settler conquest in North America.12 The “creedal constitutionalism”13 that emerged over the course of the American Century underwrote the ultimate consensus between the pro- and anti-annexationists who came to share the conviction that the United States must “impose order on a disordered globe.”14 One of those sites of disorder that was of paramount concern was necessarily, of course, the United States itself, where from the early 1900s on, Black radical thinkers and political activists like W.E.B. Du Bois had clearly identified the material conjunctures between Jim Crow racism at home and the colonialism abroad. Black radical thought would later be countered by what Charisse Burden-Stelly terms “Cold War Culturalism” defined as an epistemology according to which “Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material […] conditions of dispossession.”15 What is essential here is the identification of the emergence of American studies as an “interdiscipline” that would provide the “grammar, form and function” for both the area studies and Black studies.16 The “epistemic effect(s)” of Cold War Culturalism have been profound throughout the North American university, in large part because it drew upon the early 20th-century anticommunist reaction to the Black radical critique of the racialized legal-political order that sustained systemic dispossession at home and abroad.17 American studies thus served the U.S. creedal nationalist demand for the ongoing obliteration of the settler imperial past. No less decisively, it helped to efface what Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism nearly half a century earlier had already “rendered legible,” namely the “structural imperatives of decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean and the quest for Black self-determination and liberation in the United States.”18 If the Cold War “weaponization of culture start[ed] at Yale”19 in earnest in the late 1940s, it is precisely in Burden-Stelly’s sense as the “elision of political economy” through the interdisciplinary, methodological construction of the many rapidly proliferating postcolonial nations around the globe, as modular, self-identical, ethno-cultural units.20 They were further defined by their own unique internal narrative of self-realization, unfolding toward the mature capacity for a plebiscitary politics that over the course of the first few decades of the 20th century increasingly confined the exercise of popular will to periodic participation in “free and fair elections.”21 As Woodrow Wilson ensured beginning with the Dominican Republic in the early 20th century, the final determination of the democratic legitimacy of elections abroad would remain the sole imperial prerogative of U.S. executive power.22 U.S. constitutionalism came to play a decisive role in the shaping of “racial and economic policies pursued by American elites.”23 By 1935, what New Deal federal judge and Yale law professor Thurman Arnold called the “ideals of humanitarian imperialism” was understood to be the “general basis for social policy, both domestic and foreign.”24 In other words, Arnold endorsed what he saw as the necessity of a “fully realized imperial prerogative power, operating both at home and abroad.”25

8  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button As such, “anticommunism/antiradicalism” would inevitably require the categorical rejection and stigmatization of every impulse toward overturning a legal-political order, both at home and abroad, of “stratified subjecthood,” according to which different racial and ethnic groups occupied different points on a “continuum” that had always run from “free citizens (who enjoyed republican freedom) and [racialized] stratified subjects (under discretionary prerogative powers).”26 It is hardly surprising, then, that it would fall to radicals like the Black Panthers and their allies to register with clarity that the greatest “hindrance” to a comprehensive project of decolonization, both in the United States and around the world, was the U.S. Federal Constitution itself, hence their collective call for the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in 1970.27 If the area studies took up the epistemological gaze fashioned in part by American studies at Yale, it did so in the service of installing anticommunism as its foundational ethos.28 It is essential to emphasize the epistemic thrust of 20th-century U.S. anticommunism which from the early 20th century on was continuously engaged in neutralizing the decolonizing charge contained in Du Bois’s analysis of the international hierarchy of racial subordination and systemic dispossession that spanned the continents. During the Cold War, Du Bois’s color line was subjected to a violent epistemic displacement by modernization theory’s linear continuum of cultural and racial progress that disaggregated the collectively dispossessed darker races/peoples/nations of the world, redistributing each individually along that continuum in the form of discrete, ethno-cultural units. In place of the fixed hierarchy of racial ranks, modernization theory introduced the notion of “development,” thereby establishing a linear continuum from the underdeveloped to the developed in which ethno-cultural units were redistributed, only to reassert the pre-established pyramid of the modern international world. This perhaps accounts for the consistent emphasis in recent analyses of the rise of “Chinese nationalism” in the 1990s upon the discourse of “100 years national humiliation,” (bainian guochi) said to be utilized by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to consolidate its legitimacy. There is clearly a measure of truth to the claim that the Chinese government makes instrumental use of China’s colonial past to shore up its own authority. What is striking, however, is the way such analyses exclude from the outset any understanding of the historical presentation of the long series of foreign colonial interventions in China, from the Opium Wars to the Sino-Japanese War, as part of an ongoing and inevitable process of decolonization. Rather, what is observed is the refusal of the “Chinese national psyche”29 to properly work through the trauma of colonial violence and “become a ‘normal’ nation.”30 “Humiliation,” it is further alleged, “is a key part of modern Chinese subjectivity.”31 Thus, in keeping with the basic premises of modernization theory, China’s relationship to its past is cast in terms of a Bildunsgroman-style narrative about the “becoming-modern human personality” deemed essential to successful national development.32 Such a framing, however, clearly betrays all the signs of a “postcolonial” areal researcher positionality fashioned in the complete absence of any decolonial reckoning with the U.S. settler imperial past. Such contradictions between the posture

Introduction  9 self-fashioned by the U.S. creedal imperial nationalism and its colonial origins are in fact projected onto what is perceived to threaten the domineering position of the United States of America in the global scene. In such contexts, the image of Chinese, or Han, ultra-ethnonationalism fulfills expectations that CPC rule can best be understood as a typical ethnic particularism manipulated to extremes by an illiberal regime. The frequency with which the Orientalist translation of China as the “Middle Kingdom”33 now ruled by a “red emperor” occurs in both popular and savant discourses illustrates the affective roots of “postcolonial” positionality. One may be reminded of the historical circumstances under which the People’s Republic of China was established. Thanks to the Korean War, China was born into the so-called Second World, that is, outside the colonial sphere of the American Empire of Bases34; unlike Japan, Germany, South Korea, the United Kingdom, or indeed Taiwan, China has remained free of direct and indirect interference over domestic affairs by the United States since its outset. China’s ostensible independence is one of the reasons why it is often perceived as an imminent threat by American policy makers, conservative mass media, and elite capitalists. The apparently pitched affectivity of humiliation this kind of areal positionality registers is organized entirely around the logic of national sovereignty, a position from which it becomes impossible to entertain any type of comparativity or relationality in our understanding of Pax Americana’s mechanisms for managing massive historical transition – both in terms of the way Pax Americana’s origins were built on arrested decolonization and in terms of the way today’s version of Pax Americana looks to handle the series of transitions urgently required for planetary survival. Yet, the position assumed by the postcolonial areal researcher continues to be built upon the disavowal of the elementary fact that the very dichotomy of the West and the Rest would not make sense unless the two poles are postulated in comparison and that the West therefore cannot be identified as such without reference to the Rest. In short, the West and the Rest are cofigured, and the interstice between the paired figures is a locale where the microphysics of power relations is played out. Only by positing the existence of “others” as external to it, marking them as the non-West, can the West fashion itself. In effect, however, the areal positionality in vogue today establishes itself in the seat of judgment while enjoying de jure immunity from involvement. Such immunity excludes, first, the possibility that the discourse of Chinese national humiliation has always also drawn no less heavily on demands for popular sovereignty and international nondomination, such as were broadly shared around the world for over a century on the other, anticolonial, side of Du Bois’s color line. Second, it also excludes the possibility that the discourse of American decline/resurgence is an integral part of American multiethnic, plurisovereign universalism. What all this suggests is that the project of epistemic decolonization may choose to take a cue from another Black Panther proposal from the People’s Constitutional Convention, namely the establishment of “truth commissions” to document, adjudicate, and redress colonial crimes.35 Certainly under the increasingly perilous international conditions of the new Cold War and the exercise of U.S. imperial prerogatives both internally and externally, the elaboration of such

10  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button an orientation for epistemic decolonization remains speculative but nonetheless important. What is clear, however, is that an area studies that continues to remain beholden to U.S. creedal imperial nationalism precludes the possibility intimated by the Panthers of an epistemological and affective horizon within which a community’s experience of historical humiliation could be brought directly into relation contemporaneously with the experience of historical accountability and shame on the part of communities that were the perpetrators of harm. In short, the de-arealization of the distribution of affects generated by the legacy of colonial violence and domination would seem to be a necessary precondition for the decolonization of knowledge production. Such a possibility, however, can never emerge so long as the area studies remain complicit as an institution with the mystification of the U.S. settler colonial past. Civil Society and Global Genocide of the Left While it might be thought that the area studies, which originated as an outgrowth of U.S. strategic considerations during the Cold War, refer to an institutional and ideological configuration limited to a specific time and place, it should be apparent from the discussion above that the term covers a much vaster range of meanings. Essentially, we are dealing with both the normative geopolitical divisions of the postcolonial world and the institutional production of knowledge organized via areal disciplines. Clearly, the problematics associated with the area studies cannot be contained within a single nation (the United States), nor limited to a historical past (the Cold War), nor localized in disciplines that deal with specific areas or nations. In truth, the constellation of problems associated with area studies extends to the humanities as a whole, just as the political organization of populations via the normative unit of the nation-state extends to the entirety of the globe. If the tropic of area has lent an organizational principle to the postcolonial world and thought generated by Pax Americana, perhaps its most crucial area of exercise is to be found not, as might have been expected, in the realm of the state and state institutions, but rather in the realm of civil society. In East Asia, Pax Americana “hits the ground”36 not only in the politico-military spheres, but also notably in the spheres of “civil society,” in the shape of desires, aspirations, values, ideas, and the moral imperatives intimately lived by common peoples in everyday life. Countries and regions such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong may be singled out as typical cases of economic modernizations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but without exception, their success stories were initially inspired by the American narrative of modernization taking civil society as a barometer of success. As much as one might talk of American colonialism and imperialism in East Asia and the Western Pacific – not just in terms of direct colonial control and the presence of American military bases such as was exercised over the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, and so forth but also in terms of the broader arrangement of the so-called “hub and spokes” that accorded the United States an exceptional position of supra-sovereignty vis-à-vis other states in the region – it is important to remember that Pax Americana cannot be discussed as being one-sidedly oppressive and

Introduction  11 coercive. The issues of consumer capitalism, digital media, economic rationality, education, gender, and sexuality closely associated with it all call for a more nuanced analysis. In other words, Pax Americana should be examined for the manner it generates subjectivity within a given social framework whose power relations and economic relations are decisively hierarchical in ways that are reminiscent of old modern colonialism, yet whose coloniality cannot be understood via the classical model of conquest and coercion but must be understood instead via the appropriation of self-determination into structures of complicity and cofiguration. It should be remembered, at the same time, that the sphere of “civil society” was itself not simply an arena for, but also an object of, intense conflict. American support for postcolonial sovereignty and liberal democratic institutions designed to replace the old system of colonies, mandates, territories, etc. was consistently accompanied throughout the postwar period by covert security operations designed to manipulate public opinion, including the cultural and intellectual spheres. During the first Cold War, the United States deployed a wide range of covert actions throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America to prevent the rise of communism, principally to preserve civil society as a privileged sphere for private enterprise and private property. In many cases, such covert operations were even designed to produce overt regime change in the postcolonial and postimperial nations of the newly emerging world. At the extreme, this manipulation of the conditions of possibility for self-determination and autonomy played an extremely important and poorly understood role during the first Cold War in the global genocide of the left, for which Iran, Indonesia, and Guatemala would be the templates corresponding to three different continents.37 As the first Cold War approached an end, the CIA under the Reagan administration deliberately set up a vast, public network of international civil society organizations to create the social and political conditions for neoliberal “democratic” transition and a post-communist world order organized around the “freedom” of finance. As Asian societies in which the organized left had essentially been exterminated gradually moved away from rightwing repressive authoritarian control, Pax Americana began to develop new forms of consensual domination that rely on the image of self-determination, invariably cast as national rather than popular, sovereignty. Yet such a high level of voluntary complicity with, and self-recognition within, the Pax Americana “hub and spoke”-style arrangement of colonial power relations could not have succeeded and endured without the crucial role of knowledge production writ large. Amidst these contradictory tendencies of Pax Americana, the area studies were unsurprisingly founded on an equally contradictory series of exclusions, codified into hierarchically organized oppositions, and repressions of difference in historical memory. Perhaps the most important legacy of this global distribution of knowledge production lies in the successful creation of the image of the United States as an antifascist, anticolonial power. Yet, just as we have seen with the practice of “colonial governmentality under erasure,” the United States has never been fundamentally opposed to fascism and Nazism, either. Prior to the war, the Dulles brothers were responsible for funding Hitler’s rearmament. On the eve of war, the United States, following Britain and France, hoped until as late as the winter of 1939–40 – even

12  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button after the invasion of Poland – that Hitler could be used to fight Soviet communism. The story of “appeasement” that commonly circulates in the U.S. popular imaginary is a revisionist history that effaces the complicity with Nazism and the repeated refusals (particularly in 1938–39) to entertain a multilateral international front with Stalin against Nazi Germany.38 After the war, Allen Dulles used Reinhard Gehlen’s Nazi SS spy ring and numerous East European fascist remnants to fight the Soviets. Ukrainian Nazi partisans funded and armed by the CIA were active until 1956. The Marshall Plan is commonly depicted as a sign of U.S. generosity, yet it was designed to suppress communists in Western Europe – a mission that defined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) more than deterrence (Genser). A curious historical anecdote emblematizes these continuities and complicity, illustrating the significance for the postcolonial world: according to reports by East German filmmakers, the West German military adviser to the United States based in Saigon during the Vietnam war, who had previously been a decorated officer in the Nazi Wehrmacht, still wore his Nazi Iron Cross when the East German filmmakers visited him in 1977 and had earlier counseled U.S. military planners to find a “final solution” to the “Vietnam problem.”39 As the only political movement in most European countries that had opposed the Nazis prior to the war, communists enjoyed a certain political legitimacy in the immediate postwar period that none of the other political forces in Europe and Japan could claim. The criminalization of communism in Europe (and Japan) after the war was a policy actively pursued by the United States. Operation Gladio is the classic example of how the United States used fascist remnants after the war to reshape the political landscape of Europe. In truth, across the globe and particularly in the postcolonial nations, the United States instigated a veritable genocide of the Left, conniving to use fascist remnants to achieve its goals. The point is not to argue that a secret core of Nazi sympathizers directed U.S. policy or that behind the façade of democracy lay the reality of a fascist state (an argument sometimes put forth during the 1960s and 1970s), but to understand why the United States, as an anticommunist power, found Nazism and then postwar Nazi/fascist remnants to be extremely useful, both covertly and overtly (albeit for very different purposes). This understanding is essential if we are to recognize how the area studies, up until today, are still beholden to a narrative that elides the actual nature and history of U.S. anticommunism by presenting the rejection of communism as a generous and broadminded response to political forces that are simply incompatible with American values and hence, the human condition as such. The New Cold War: Crisis in the Apparatus of Area Today, we are witnessing a crisis in the hegemonic construction of area, yet, to our dismay, it is not recognized as such. In one way or another, this crisis raises anew the question of the end of the colonial-imperial modernity that has shaped the modern international world since the 18th century and the modifications to this international world brought about by Pax Americana. It would be misleading, however, to assume that the end of Pax Americana could be construed by the rise of a different imperial nationalism, reminiscent, for

Introduction  13 instance, of the replacement of British and Japanese imperial nationalisms by the American imperial nationalism that occurred in the 1940s and the 1950s. Contemporary warnings about a looming transition from Pax Americana to Pax Sinica exemplify the pitfalls involved. In such cases, our thinking is trapped by two mutually dependent, yet diametrically opposed options: either we view the non-West as an effective “outside” from which to seek inspiration for resistance to Eurocentric capitalism, or, alternatively, we recognize that the non-West is potentially or actually just as imperialistic and capitalistic as the West. Our choices thus seem to oscillate between romanticism and cynicism, or, if you prefer, between optimism and realism. At this juncture, it is often our failure to recognize in the tropic of area a historical apparatus for managing capital’s outside that leads to problems. Absent an account of the way capital is a social relation that both presupposes and reproduces its own spectral outside,40 we might be tempted to choose between such choices. To escape this dilemma, we need, methodologically speaking, a tool like Althusserian immanent causality to help us grasp how something “internal” can be both a cause and an effect of something “external,” or again, how something “external” can be posited as being intrinsically “internal.” Our friend Gavin Walker’s work in this direction has been pivotal to our own thinking about how to understand this crucial aspect of the apparatus of area, with broad implications, explicit in Walker’s own work, about the relation between the modern regime of translation, the postwar economic order of Pax Americana, and the organization of the modern university across neoliberal transition. This ostensibly external element could be, in relation to capital, civil society. It could also be, as is asserted with increasing urgency, “socialist” China’s relation to neoliberal capitalism. One does not need to romanticize “socialist” or “Confucianist” China (or, for that matter, liberal civil society), however, to recognize that a discourse of interstate imperial succession, from Pax Americana to Pax Sinica, mystifies the tropic of area precisely by claiming to “deconstruct” it while refusing to recognize its spectral character, i.e., its quality as both cause and effect of the systemic “inside.” Predictably, this discourse makes authoritarianism on either side of the Pacific look like the result of a local sovereign deviation or an inveterate cultural attribute while rendering invisible the term’s genealogy in historical liberalism’s repression of popular forms of sovereignty. The effects of such mystification are increasingly visible today. One of the best places to witness such mystification occurs in relation to contemporary debates about the Chinese presence in Western academia. The perceived threat to “academic freedom” localized in a particular areal configuration, attributed to “China” and concentrated particularly around “Chinese studies,” has led to increasing calls especially in Europe for academic freedom to be integrated into evaluation and ranking metrics.41 These struggles exacerbate the fundamental fault lines of a double crisis, at once political and epistemic. The target of the new Cold War consensus around academic freedom is not, epistemically speaking, China, but the relations of exteriority that constitute the template for the apparatus of area (e.g., between the West and the Rest, between thought and world, and between the present and

14  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button a future mediated by financial speculation). Seen from this perspective, calls for the defense of academic freedom against “authoritarianism” amount to little more than ideological mystification of the apparatus of area and the financialization of the university to the extent that they do not begin with the Panther-like premise of reconstitution and co-temporality rather than restitution and return. Joining our voices to calls for epistemic decolonization and de-financialization of the university, we might even take a cue from the otherwise stultifying consensus that dominates contemporary “offshore” China studies. If the relation between academic research and geopolitics is, as is widely accepted in China studies, both intrinsic and fundamental, the reason is not to be found in authoritarian threats to the liberal order but rather in the fundamental link between the epistemic and the political that has served as the basis for the presumed naturalness and logic of that order despite its innumerable double standards and exceptions. University-based studies of modern China have since their inception recognized the politics of knowledge, veering on occasion into paroxysms of exclusion, orgies of ideological self-justification, and industrial fabrication of pretexts for war, yet they have never felt compelled to pose the question raised by Nahum Chandler via the texts of W.E.B. Dubois, “On what basis and in what manner can one decide a being, and its character of existence, as of one kind or another?”42 Or again, “Is it possible,” as Richard Calichman asks, “to posit the existence of an entity called the ‘Japanese people’ in such a way as to entirely avoid entanglement with the interrelated problems of nation and race?”43 In one form or another, the distinction between anthropos and humanitas is foundational to the area studies institution. Let us recall here that the distinction between anthropos and humanitas is not initially concerned with either race or power but epistemological stance. Were the social and human sciences no longer organized around the series of exclusions that constitute the apparatus of area, it would be simply impossible to use the apparatus of area as a platform from which to interfere with and determine academic freedom. Epistemic decolonization demands not just sensitivity to the contemporaneity of politics and knowledge but attention to the point of suture between the two via the tropic of area. In the absence of such attention, area studies will continue to be an institutional space for the fabrication of subjects invested, either positively or negatively, in the fantasy of “the West” as the template of area. This type of epistemic investment leads inevitably to the complicity of apparently contradictory views, such as American universalism and Chinese particularism, that make it impossible to understand why ultra-ethnonationalism could also be understood as a feedback mechanism within a system, a response to, and delimited by, a certain kind of colonial internationality based on multiethnic pluralism and universalism. To speak of a transnational approach is another way to broach the question of the outside in relation to the apparatus of area. The transnational is precisely that which is logically and practically prior to the system of internationality based on the introduction of the modern nation-state. Yet, in the disciplinary understanding of the naturalness or givenness of area, we effectively lose sight of and forget about this aspect of the transnational common, projecting it instead as a utopian possibility ensconced in a distant and practically unrealizable future. As a result, we are

Introduction  15 left with an inverted perspective that takes a cause as an effect (and an effect as a cause). Following the sedimented appropriation of such spectral “outsides,” the areas, such as China, projected as previously “external” – both temporally with regard to the capital-relation and geographically with regard to the fantasy of “the West” – have now been reified as a first-order nature. Adopting this perspective means losing sight of the acts of bordering and translation that constitute these areas; such forgetting assists the continual reproduction of the area as a schematic target for social praxis in the present, positing what is essentially an imaginary future (such as the unity of “the West”) into the past. Against this inverted perspective, we insist that the “areas” covered by the interdisciplines writ large are an invention of the capital-relation projected onto the past (as “capitalist precursors”) while directing action in the present toward an imagined future (providing targets to guide and bind social praxis). Were an immanent critique now to seek to unmask the political romanticization of any specific outside, such as China, for not being a real outside, it would inevitably fall into the trap of naturalizing the Global Legal Order and capital’s spectral outside in general by attacking a false contingency.44 The Elimination of Dissensus Such diversionary attacks that leave the apparatus of area intact contribute, often unintentionally, to the ongoing elimination of dissensus and the institutionalized disavowal concerning transpacific comparability within the university, media, and public sphere. Possibly the most general form taken by such consensus is that of accepting as a horizon for thought and action the intellectual prejudice accumulated in the tropic of area and the notion of what constitutes a given area’s outside. This accumulation occurred notably through a succession of defeats experienced during the 20th century both within the left during a war that was hardly “cold” in many regions of the postcolonial world and among decolonial anti-white supremacy movements both before and after the end of the so-called “Cold” War. Foundational frameworks such as the tropic of area that we take for granted today on both sides of the former colonial-imperial divide are, as the working of the idiom “Western theory” noted above amply illustrates, the result of prior historical defeats that have now become part of the epistemic horizon. The point of denaturalizing this kind of horizon is not to revalorize discredited ideas and organizational forms of resistance from the past, such as national liberation, Third Worldism, or “socialism in one nation,” so much as to rethink, or perhaps think for the first time, about the profound consequences of an accumulated prejudice masquerading as a reasonable consensus drawn from painful historical experience. To put it in the most general terms, what has been lost to the present is (1) the possibility of a transition that does not take as necessary the postcolonial apparatus of area consolidated by Pax Americana hegemony; and (2) a production of subjectivity and knowledge not commanded by the tropic of area. Taken in this general sense, the loss of such possibilities constitutes the most profound and sustained repression of dissensus at work today. Despite the plurality associated with civil society against totalitarianism, the elimination of dissensus in the promotion of area as an apparatus for universal

16  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button transition continues to play an important role in neoliberal societies, much as coloniality does. Hence, the predisposition to search for the sources of authoritarian dictatorship in ultra-ethnonationalism begs the question of whether such formations cannot also coexist with apparent multiethnic diversity and an ideology of universalism? In the postcolonial context, we must pose anew the question that motivated an entire program of research for the Frankfurt School during the first Cold War: how can a system that features plurality and diversity nevertheless produce a form of consensus that reaches toward the authoritarian goal of the elimination of dissensus? Once we admit the recurrence of such a situation in the United States of America for the last two decades (since 9/11 and the invasion/occupation of Afghanistan), we are compelled to account for situations that are simply unintelligible from the perspective of a competition between democracy and authoritarianism. The “consensus” curated by the area studies is not one that can be attributed to specific political positions but rather concerns the establishment of a system of inclusion into mutually constitutive forms of anthropological difference. While these forms, such as anthropos and humanitas, can and do oppose each other, they never undermine each other. From this perspective, the area studies prioritize a principle of inclusion based on the putative assumption of the boundaries or borders distinguishing different subsets of a general humanity, beginning from the presumed distinction among epistemological stances codified into figures of anthropos and humanitas. What is excluded are not various “others” within the system of internationality but the possibility of a social and political organization based on transnationality; deliberately and systematically excluded are the incidents of heterolingual address where transnationality is rigorously distinguished from internationality by homolingual assumptions regarding the putative externality of one language to another, one nation to another, where the modern regime of translation is undermined.45 In contrast to the culture industry thesis advanced by the Frankfurt School, we hold that the template for this elimination of dissensus via a representational regime of plurality is to be found in the creation of national language within the global context of empire. Despite the myth of its origin, the national language is always a production of internationality, of a comparative procedure by which one language is posited as external to another. It does not derive from the past of a remote origin. Rather, it is constituted in relation to another language, through what has been called the schema of cofiguration.46 In truth, it would be impossible to recognize “another language” as an autonomous, discrete unity without engaging presuppositions that rely on translation while effacing it at the same time. The representation of this “other” language via the schema of cofiguration provides a template for the identification and management of exteriority via the technology of bordering commonly called translation. In general, borders refer to juridical apparatuses of control and their extrapolation to other social domains, eventually providing a hegemonic model for thinking about social difference in general. To avoid this trap, a useful distinction could be drawn between borders and bordering. This distinction is necessary to help us avert the error of assuming that the juridical model of border control emanates from the nation-state. The performative

Introduction  17 acts of bordering incessantly required to substantiate nationally configured borders are what creates the interiority necessary to the projection of national sovereignty. While the nation-state presents itself as the source or cause from which sovereign juridical limits emanate, it is as much an effect as a cause. As a downstream result of ontologically prior acts or events of bordering, the notion that the nation-state holds causal priority from which borders emanate and proliferate is an ideological inversion. Such inversion tends to erase the fact that acts of bordering invariably take place in the medium of transnationality, characterized by relational indeterminacy and non-relational discontinuity, that precedes internationality. Against this trend, we hold that decolonization must be articulated to the prospect of transition from internationality to transnationality. Decolonization at a linguistic level thus means liberation not just from the imposition of the colonizer’s language but liberation also from the type of cultural individuation and internationality favored by the modern regime of translation and the apparatus of area. Ultimately, the elimination of dissensus in the sense we intend is a recurring symptom of the contemporary crisis in capitalist transition and the epistemic management of the spectral “outside” to the capital-relation. In other words, the current return to a politics of the elimination of dissensus is symptomatic of an impending capitalist transition and the burgeoning political will to force the transition to conform to a narrow class interest and to profit from it, regardless of the cost (for others, for the planet). As a group of contributors with a common relation to the neoliberal university, we see in this forced transition not the harbinger of a longoverdue decolonization but the prolongation of an enduring crisis for the university that dates back over forty years. In The Postmodern Condition (1979)47, Jean-François Lyotard introduced the term “grand narrative” to distinguish the modern from the postmodern. The rejection of “grand narrative” that characterizes the postmodern era heralded an epistemic legitimation crisis for the university. Faced with this situation, Lyotard offered both a solution and a warning. The solution consists of critical “language games,” harkening to Lyotard’s later work on the différend (or discord) – a method perfectly adapted to break through the duplicity of normativity and false contingency. Regrettably, Lyotard’s advice has not been taken up in a programmatic way. Instead, the default option of the “decision makers” is, as Lyotard had foreseen, a policy consisting of determinability, commensurability, and programmable outcomes – i.e., all the metrics at the heart of the financialized university.48 As a new Cold War imposes the piety of consensus, there is an acute risk that the neoliberal uberization of science/knowledge will have become normalized. What Lyotard did not see within his Eurocentric horizon was that the crisis of legitimation in science/knowledge that he so presciently detected is a question of decolonial globalization at the end of a world schema defined by, variously, an opposition between the West and the Rest, the modern regime of translation, and the “color-line.” Unlike Lyotard, we can recognize today that so-called “language games,” such as the practice of discontinuity at the heart of translation, are perfectly capable of sustaining new forms of grand narrative to replace the alleged end of the “outside,” portending the transition to a new schema of the world and new institutions of humanistic knowledge production. Rather than accepting the

18  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button neoliberal premise of the university as a logistical center for managing flows of labor and knowledge via spectral outsides (“areas”) for the benefit of capital accumulation, we imagine that the university could be reconstituted instead as a site for the transnational, social practice of translation in a sustainably shared, common world. Area Studies as an Appendage of the Neoliberal Thought Collective Language provides an unlikely passageway for tracing the link between area studies and neoliberal financialization. Despite a parade of consecutive critiques of area studies culminating in various calls for universalizing both area and the practice of theoretical knowledge production, the constitution of area via the modern regime of translation remains intact. This limit can easily be perceived in the distribution of linguistic competence expected in the fields of East Asian area studies according to anthropological difference. A carte d’entrée to the field, linguistic competency is disciplined at the level of production. To acquire accreditation and expertise in the field does not require one to be able to write and publish professionally in the very “local language” that nevertheless serves, in ad hoc fashion, to define the objects considered legitimate by the field. Despite the rhetoric of a theoretical engagement in the medium of the universal accomplished “together with Asia,” area studies today, even in its critical versions, play a crucial role in maintaining and legitimating the complicitous desire for the naturalization of anthropological difference via differential inclusion of linguistic competence. That which is effaced is the political economy that sustains the field. The academic publishing industry is not simply a question of individual prestige and personal branding nor is it simply one of the power relations between universal and particular. Rather, it is also a key node articulating knowledge production to big finance and the state. The point is not just that differential inclusion rears its head via the distribution of linguistic competency according to anthropological difference but that the effect of naturalization curated by the area studies via differential inclusion of linguistic competency sustains a political economy linked to the financialization of knowledge and the transformation of the university into a knowledge corporation. At a time when area studies language training programs increasingly rely for their continued survival, like many humanities programs, on absorption into business-oriented degree programs, the debates over cultural essentialism vs. individual agency that mobilize passions and mediate the service provided to management programs effectively hide the fact that both positions (essentialist and agential) are complicitous with discourses promoting financialization. Decolonization bears an important relation to derivatives-based financialization as theorized by Randy Martin49 and explained by Max Haiven.50 When Martin speaks of the derivative as a method for controlling decolonization, he is referring both to the way in which emergent postcolonial autonomy was largely “sabotaged by the politics of debt” that benefitted postimperial states, corporations and institutions and to the liberation of subaltern bodies and communities from all forms of capture by authority. The first take away from this is that Martin’s notion of decolonization potentially operates on both sides of the

Introduction  19 colonial-imperial divide but unfortunately has no theory of how to make that differential commonality communicable. Hence, let us try to relate these two meanings of decolonization back to the movement of translation. Let us remind ourselves that the practice of translation always offers a point of intervention against the regime of translation.51 Translational practice places a demand for sociality that exceeds representational knowledge crystallized in the model of communication. The area studies have been constructed upon the premise of harnessing that excess to knowledge in the forms of sociality codified according to the modern regime of translation. At the risk of repetition, we would like to emphasize that the modern regime of translation may be understood as an apparatus for managing boundaries or frontiers that constitute the exterior of a language or a people. Historically, these forms of sociality have proven to be particularly advantageous to capitalist accumulation not just via the institutions of national markets and the international division of labor but also via the institutions of national methodology and epistemology, such as national history, national literature, and national sociology. In this context, what is normally called translation is an act in the reassignation of the referential function of language, presumably between code systems posited as external to one another. As a form of labor specifically devoted to the reassignation of referentiality, translation is, as we have seen, precisely the form of social labor that is reified – we might be tempted to say alienated – by the area studies. What binds these various discourses together is the self-referentiality of the object of area studies established on the basis of the area studies’ disavowed bordering practices. There are, minimally, two ways in which the problem of self-referentiality defines area studies. The first would be in terms of a logistical infrastructure of translation always linked to the production of anthropologically coded objects and the tropic of area. The second would consist in the relation between the area studies and what Philip Mirowski has dubbed the “neoliberal thought collective” (NTC). Although generally associated with the period after 1973, when Keynesianism gave way to the deregulation of financial markets, neoliberalism’s roots go much further back. In the genealogy developed by Mirowski et al. in the collective work, The Road From Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective,52 the precursors to neoliberalism are clearly evident before the Second World War, but only coalesce into an international, interdisciplinary, inter-institutional “thought collective” during the postwar period at the start of the “Cold War system.” In effect, the genesis of the NTC is concomitant with the formation of area studies in the transition to Pax Americana. But the connection is genealogical and conceptual as much as periodic. Between area studies and the NTC, there exist not only a number of important similarities, but also, above all, a series of integral, complementary links that make it difficult to imagine thinking one without the other. The interdisciplinary, transacademic nature of NTC, like area studies, spanned a network of partisan think tanks, new media, universities, and intelligence agencies, that combined private and public funding. Yet the most interesting point of convergence concerns the ability to “organize the power of

20  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button knowledge and ideas across borders.”53 In other words, the hegemonic dimensions of NTC as described by Mirowski et al. include an implicit element of translation and bordering. Given the fact that Mirowski and his associates do not focus on the areal aspects of the neoliberal hegemony, however, it is not surprising to discover that the actual responsibility for developing and managing the translational and bordering template of NTC ideological production has been parceled out to a realm intrinsically designed to develop an apparatus of translation, such as area studies, which takes borders, rather than bordering practices, as its primary concern. Conversely, the distribution of more overtly ideological features of the NTC, such as its understanding of the market as a transcendental “black box” that would process knowledge in a way superior to any possible state, corporate, or other “command post” imaginable, could also be effectively cordoned off from area studies, leaving it to focus on those parts of the ideological production directly related to social ontology that would be mirrored by its culturalist practices of anthropological difference and translation. Henceforth, ontology, politics, and history could be combined within an idealized template of the modern area – for which the putative unity of “the West” would provide a figure, despite the impossible definition and historical errancy of the actual entity designated by the term. This template would combine the notion of modern history as the progressive rationalization of terrestrial space advanced by legal positivism’s view of international law with an ontology of possessive individualism, an epistemology of the market black box, and a politics of “autonomous self-governed individuals, all coming naturally equipped with a neoclassical version of rationality and motives of ineffable self-interest, striving to improve their lot in life by engaging in market exchange.”54 As hegemonic institutions that developed in the transition first from Japanese and European Imperialisms to the Cold War version of arrested decolonial transition and then the from the Cold War to Neoliberalism, the co-evolution of area studies and the NTC requires greater attention. Logically speaking, the area studies prefigure the NTC, both in terms of the self-referentiality of its world model and in terms of the logistical operations that constitute the field. That there should be this kind of parallel between the area studies and the NTC – each understood as temporal trajectories rather than as object-specific disciplines – makes sense when one considers the strategic role of the apparatus of area within Pax Americana specifically, and capitalist geopolitical organization more generally. Deterrence, the quintessential concept of Cold War relationality, is one of the keys to understanding this symbiotic relationship. The self-referential narcissism that Brian Massumi detects at the heart of Cold War deterrence policy55 applies not just to relations between the First and Second, capitalist and socialist, Worlds, but also to those between the First and Third World, as well. During the arrested decolonial transition also known as the Cold War, the selfreferentiality of deterrence could be extrapolated to postcolonial global governance. As a useful way to manage the complicity between postcolonial national

Introduction  21 elites and U.S. imperial nationalism, a form of deterrence operated analogously in the cultural sphere. Based on the mutual destruction of desire for recognition in the event that the self-referential schema of cofiguration, the template of postcolonial governance, should be attacked, “cultural deterrence” under Pax Americana has worked above all to preserve the system of internationality composed through the modern regime of translation. If, as Massumi asserts, deterrence combines “a proprietary epistemology with a unique ontology,”56 then nothing exemplifies that combination more than the schema of the world constructed upon the presuppositions of the modern regime of translation and the apparatus of area. If the Cold War strategy of deterrence turned self-referentiality into both a business plan and a technology of global governance, it bears repeating that the problem of referentiality and challenges to its symbolic and social order goes well beyond the challenge to referentiality posed by poststructuralism – a challenge generally rejected by area studies during several decades prior to the former’s ultimate cooptation into the fields of area studies once the general implications for bordering practices (notably between disciplines) had been contained and domesticated. The proportions of the problem can be grasped, obliquely, by referencing the fundamental connection between Leo Strauss and John Foster Dulles’s ideology implicitly described by Lance deHaven-Smith in Conspiracy Theory in America: “For his part, Strauss did not use the term ‘conspiracy theory,’ but he advocated state political propaganda and covert actions to protect a society’s traditional beliefs and ongoing illusions about its origins and virtues from unrestrained inquiries or, in other words, conspiratorial theorizing.”57 The covert side of Dullesism, besides working primarily in the service of capital to open new markets, was also useful to preserve the capitalist state’s role as the guarantor – and enforcing authority – of the referential order of a society grounded in private property. This order would ‘explain’ why an international division of labor paired with a division of disciplinary knowledge orchestrated through the nation-state and anthropological difference was historically “progressive.” Covert action was not just a security operation in the narrow sense, nor was it directed simply at foreign governments; it was also related, within a domestic imperial space, to a certain historicity necessary to the maintenance of the commodification of labor in a “postcolonial” world. “Strauss’ thinking differed from much of Popper’s analysis but saw scientific criticism of official accounts of important historical events as a precursor to totalitarianism because it undermines respect for the nation’s laws and traditional beliefs; it ushers in, with philosophy and science, the view that nothing is true; and it unleashes tyrannical impulses in the political class as top leaders compete for popular support. Although Popper and Strauss arrived by different routes, they agreed that conspiracy theories can fuel totalitarian political movements that threaten respect for human dignity, popular sovereignty, and the rule of law.”58 In effect, long before poststructuralism had reached U.S. shores, the epistemic challenge to referentiality (à la Rey Chow59) had already been posed by attempts in the hard sciences to come to terms with it.60 Yet none of this

22  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button might have mattered outside of lab rooms, ivory towers, and debating societies had it not been for the fact that the problem of referentiality extends, crucially, to the operation of markets as a mechanism that institutes collective opinion as the reference norm. As autonomist-inspired economist Christian Marazzi explains: On the financial markets speculative behavior is rational because the markets are self-referential. Prices are the expression of the action of collective opinion, the individual investor does not react to information but to what he believes will be the reaction of the other investors in the face of that information. It follows that the values of securities listed on the stock exchange make reference to themselves and to their underlying economic value. This is the self-referential nature of the markets, in which the dissociation between economic value and exchange value is symmetrical to the disassociation between individual belief and collective belief.61 By casting the principal social antagonism of late imperial-colonial modernity in terms of an opposition between normativity and totalitarianism (Strauss), instead of seeing it in terms of the historical task of articulating the decolonization of language to the liberation of labor, Strauss’ work emblematizes the political suppression of a fundamental link between knowledge production and population management that passes through the labor of translation. It is precisely in that sense that the area studies operate within a Straussian space. It is no wonder that Mirowski concludes that “Leo Strauss had a detectable profound influence on the Neoliberal movement, mainly through getting them to confront more directly their endemic problem of needing to espouse a set of double truths.”62 The espousal of a set of double truths is an apt way to describe the role that the area studies have had to negotiate since the democratization of the field due to new migratory flows: through the regime of translation, a differential system of complementary referential systems, known as national language and national culture, is maintained and correlated. In the final analysis, the system of referentiality defended by the area studies’ attachments to their objects is intrinsically connected to the forms of sociality that occur under the growing epistemological hegemony of the market. Just as we speak of “colonial governmentality under erasure,” Mirowski speaks of the “Neoliberal Thought Collective under erasure.” The Financialization of Knowledge and the Area Studies as Spread Arbitrage In the late 1990s, a moment of historical transition in Pax Americana and the area studies alike, Bruce Cumings, a specialist of Korea and a member of the group who had coalesced during the Vietnam War around the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, lobbed a grenade at the cohort forming around Positions, a new journal representing a new form of critical position vis-à-vis both

Introduction  23 the Cold War configuration of area studies and the anti-imperialist critique of the 1960s and 1970s with which Cumings actively identified. Cumings noted that that the Positions group, unlike the BCAS group, did nothing in the 1990s to problematize the cross-institutional reconfiguration initiated by the National Security Education Act (NSEA) under which Title VI, born of Cold War politics, was subsumed. According to Cumings, the main ‘innovation’ produced by the NSEA was that massive, deep government involvement in the area studies would no longer have to be covert as it had been throughout the Cold War period. The becoming-visible of the state-knowledge-security-market nexus, of course, represents a significant transition in the operation of Pax Americana, suggesting the demise of a Dullesist ideology that relied on the Manichean opposition between overt recognition of postcolonial national sovereignty and covert transgression of all terrestrial borders according to the prerogatives of U.S. imperial exceptionalism. In practice, however, the changes of which the NSEA was symptomatic represent an intensification, rather than a demise, of Dullesism. Cumings’ account attracts our interest to the extent that it shows how the procedural was mobilized by an interventionist state to create substantive change – the retooling of area studies in the transition out of the Cold War. Cumings’ narrative homes in on the restructuring of the Social Science and Research Council (SSRC) in support of the Clinton Doctrine, “of promoting U.S.based global corporations and U.S. exports through the most activist foreign economic policy of any president in history.”63 The era of the Clinton Doctrine is precisely the era in which theory begins to earn limited acceptance within the area studies that had previously put-up stiff resistance while bemoaning “ghettoization.”64 Cumings highlights the role played by SSRC vice-president Stanley J. Heginbotham, who lauded the new NSEA-led re-purposing of area studies. Noting a certain tacit agreement between Heginbotham and Peter Gosling, secretary-treasurer of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS), Cumings points out that the first major point that the two shared in common (out of a total of three) was that their “analysis and recommendations [we]re almost entirely procedural.”65 Unpacking the notion of the procedural, we discover that it is being used in a deliberately substantive way. In effect, we are confronted with the operation of the “McUniversity”: “a fast-food outlet that sells only those ideas its managers believe will sell, that treats its employees as if they were too devious or stupid to be trusted, and that values the formal rationality of the process over the substantive rationality of the end.”66 It is useful at this juncture to recall that Daniel Bell, one of the leading American ideologues of the Cold War, insisted that a Kantian distinction between procedural law and substantive issues lies at the heart of American democracy. For the Neoliberal Thought Collective, this tenet is reworked into the presupposition of the formal freedom of the worker to choose his or her occupation – a presupposition that neatly mystifies the moment when labor is codified by anthropological and other forms of social difference that restrict actual choice. The NTC’s main point of conflict with the Keynesian policies that characterized the Cold War system was

24  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button thus focused on the actively constructive role that the state ought to play in developing the social conditions for the market to assume its proper function as a transcendental black box. Markets free of state intervention do not just happen; they paradoxically need state intervention to be put in place and maintained. Several decades after Daniel Bell had expressed faith in the “formal rationality of the process,” proponents of New Public Management theory had made it an institutional reality in the neoliberal university. Cumings begins to outline a sketch for combating this configuration in his critique of the “formal theory” and “rational choice theory” that forms the backbone of a general critique of neoliberal economics and its progressive invasion and occupation of the American university. Tani Barlow, one of the founders of Positions and its academic editor, was certainly correct to point out that Cumings’ critique missed the mark by taking aim at the discipline of Economics, which by the early 1990s was already in the process of being eclipsed by Business School programs. Barlow unfortunately did not spell out for her readers the difference between the two disciplinary configurations, a difference that hinges on the distinction between mathematical models of the constrained optimization of utility and a general philosophy of market society.67 Essentially, the difference between the two amounts to the reduction of economics to cybernetic and logistical models of communication and control. As implausible as it may sound, we can now see in hindsight that the restructuring of area studies was hitched to this transition precisely via the type of self-referential ideology shared equally by both the modern regime of translation and the optimization models at the heart of the new business schools. While Barlow and Cumings were trading jabs, Christian Marazzi, an economist steeped in Italian autonomist thought, had already embarked on a series of works beginning in the mid-1990s analyzing the role of linguistic phenomena in financialization. Many aspects central to the reproduction of social relations managed by the area studies were put into play during the process of financialization. Since “financialization depends on mimetic rationality”68 that occurs in the context of “structural information deficits” of all parties concerned, financialization is integrally connected to the essential problem of social relations in the colonial-imperial modernity: communication in the midst of a proliferation of discontinuities and antagonisms in the social. This is to say that, just as translation is neither regulated by nor grounded in the model of communication tacitly espoused by the modern regime of translation, the process of financialization can never be rationalized by referentiality to the financial markets. Cold War modernization theory, of course, was an attempt to collate mimetic rationality with structural information deficits inherent to global modernity in order to provide the legitimacy for a new global order not based on overt colonial control but rather based on postcolonial national sovereignty in the context of grossly unequal hierarchies of state-capital-military force. At the heart of this configuration lay the role of expert knowledge. Expert knowledge would be both a template for guided modernization in the postcolonial nations and a model for universal democratic participation among citizens of postimperial

Introduction  25 nations. Yet as the Cold War came to an end and the financialization of everlarger spheres of life started to accelerate, the former role played by expertise in the reproduction of the social conditions of capital accumulation experienced a crisis. Our concern in this introductory essay is to dial in our understanding of this crisis around the apparatus of area. If the ideological suppression of the labor of translation – the fundamental link between knowledge production and population management – was based on a logic of self-referential spheres bound to each other in a complicitous logic of mutual constitution (akin to deterrence), financialization signaled a profound disruption. While the selfreferentiality in question pertains initially to markets, we have already seen the extent to which the construction of markets within Dullesism was a quintessentially political, or parapolitical, affair of postcolonial international governance. Within this paradigm, the role of the area studies was to assure the global conditions of social reproduction minimally necessary for unimpeded accumulation. Yet in a globalized economy, where the Keynesian barriers have fallen and markets have been recalibrated to encourage rapid capital transfer and transnational supply chains, the task of social reproduction is complicated by the logistical demands of overproduction. As Marazzi points out, “the crisis of the financial markets [w]as a crisis of the overproduction of self-referentiality.”69 This state of affairs could not help but have profound implications for the area studies, throwing them into the frenzied state of simultaneous technological upgrade – the limited acceptance of theory – and doubling down on the modern regime of translation and the apparatus of area. Financialization, in other words, has not destroyed the closed totalities and self-referential spheres of the area studies any more than it has done away with the self-referentiality of speculative markets. On the contrary, financialization has stimulated an excess or surplus of referentiality, both in the market and, as we now argue, in the reproductive normativity of the area studies. Within universities, this can be seen in the discourse of New Public Management (NPM) that has essentially occupied and taken control of the institutions of higher education. In a piercing analysis of the ideology of NPM and its function within the neoliberal university, Chris Lorenz resoundingly calls our attention to the “hermetic, self-referential nature of the NPM discourse and the fact that NPM ideology has proved to be completely resistant to all criticism for over thirty years.”70 In Lorenz’s account, the ideological function of NPM operates around a metonymical association between self-financing and autonomy that turns the latter into the self-exploitation of intellectual labor. The name for this operation within the neoliberal university is Quality Assurance (QA). We are looking at QA in terms of its ramifications for subjective formation. As Lorenz pertinently reminds us, “Audits are checks on the validity and reliability of information. Audits are therefore also performed to evaluate the internal control of systems.”71 “Information” is the link between financialization and the regime of translation based on self-referentiality. This referentiality could be either linguistic or financial, simply because the financial includes a communicational, hence ultimately linguistic, element. What we have, thus, is an attempt

26  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button to control the excess of referentiality in a postcolonial, globalized world. The target for this control is the figure of labor, cofigured here through (representation of) the labor of translation. This excess of referentiality is seen most clearly in the crises related to a particular form of financial instrument most representative of the era of financialization – the derivative. Basically, the derivative is an instrument of public wager on a future price. But the derivatives in circulation today are far more complex than a contract between a potential buyer and a seller based on information related to the future. Their complexity concerns volume (“the volume of annually circulating derivatives represent somewhere between 70-700 times the earth’s productive activity”72), speed (most of the circulation is managed by algorithmic computing), distribution (derivatives are incommensurable forms of risk bundled together in complex ways); abstraction (of all possible future states), and infrastructure (the circulation of marketized risk requires new forms of border control). Added together, these elements spell a form of complexity shrouded behind specialist expertise. Derivatives are not simply a modern form of barter, and the untrained will find the ‘language’ of derivatives as impenetrable as non-specialists would find the languages of specific areas. For Max Haiven, the derivative above all is a technology of bordering, a technology for managing movement (which is risky) and deriving profit from that movement. Derivatives thus represent a de-socialization of risk, based upon their integration of risk into a market logic. But in a dialectical fashion, the effects of this initial de-socialization are borne by society. In the face of increasing volatility, derivatives become the final arbiter or value. Credit and debt flows, bond ratings, sovereign debt ratings, the health of a nation’s financial institutions, even corporate debt … all of these are measured and mediated by derivatives contracts that target and hence divide and affect populations in different ways. The transfer of risk, or again the hedging against risk, differentially ascribed to specific populations, is an idea that implicates the area studies both at the level of the object of knowledge and at the level of the reproduction of the social. Robert Meister summarizes the basis of this hedging mechanism and its implications for higher education’s role in social reproduction: Today, higher education claims credit for widening economic disparity, and is thus, implicitly, selling something like a financial product, a hedge against falling into the bottom twenty percent of the population, a segment that had not experienced any income growth since the 1970s. In other words, a university now presents higher education as kind of proxy for what might amount to a financial derivative that would protect you against the possibility that technology is generating growth in the economy and leaving people without education behind. (Imagine, instead, that the financial markets allowed you to buy a parametric option that hedges against a growing spread between GDP growth and the Gini coefficient of economic inequality, allowing you to bypass education altogether. The fact that you can’t do this gives universities an effective monopoly right to sell a proxy for that hedge.)73

Introduction  27 It is probably necessary to backtrack a bit here and explain that Meister, somewhat like Cumings but without the latter’s attention to area studies, sees the financialization of the university in the context of a crisis in the old Cold War-related federal funding model. Changes beginning in the 1970s culminate in the increasing reliance of U.S. universities upon globalized bond markets. We will have to skip this fascinating and complex history, which Meister narrates in relation to the specific experience of the University of California, in order to stick with our primary question: how did all of this affect those areas of research like the area studies that had initially expanded essentially under the mission statement of Dullesist Cold War imperatives? The effect of financialization was arguably to lend new importance to the traditional role of area studies. Minimally, this means that the sociality instantiated by the modern regime of translation, institutionally curated by the area studies, would henceforth be implicated in, and exposed to, the problem of risk and its financialization. If language and communication pervade the phenomenon of financialization, then it makes sense that we would need to re-evaluate the political position of institutional sites like the area studies devoted to the mobilization of linguisticocultural difference. Finance relies on the expectation of price increases and market expansion, and these expectations immediately call into question the status of communication. Arbitrage is the operation whereby financialized markets manage price differentials, or spreads, ascribed to different markets. Hence, arbitrage is not simply a financial technology; it is also a bordering technology that is eminently geopolitical. Beyond the geopolitical aspect, arbitrage is also a preeminent technology for subjective formation – what may be called a “subjective technology.” In today’s globalized context, the linguistic difference associated with the schema of the world that emerges out of the modern regime of translation becomes a new form of spread – both a source of crisis and a way of extracting additional value. The institutions of knowledge production, now financialized in the same way as the automobile industry, for example, are implicated in a new way. It is useful to refer here to Meister’s comments about the extraction of value from the financialization of higher education: “the current revenue model for tuition growth in higher education is really pricing in an embedded financial asset that can be separately traded on what is in effect a global options market.”74 Enrollment growth is inextricably tied to the role of transnational flows of students, who are themselves essentially forms of migrant labor. Such growth produces absolute surplus value for the university in the form of tuition, which in turn can be increased without limit, allowing the university a viable means for leveraging. In the meantime, distance-learning and MOOCs create a deterritorialized global market for debt-creating products that can also be leveraged into the liquidity of immediate wealth. Liquidity, as Marazzi explains, “requires the production of a reference value”75 organized by a market. Taking all of that into account, the “untethered” 76 quality of the area studies in the post-Cold War period astutely observed by Gavin Walker turns out to be, in fact, another source of absolute surplus value for the “knowledge corporation” that universities have become, while at the same time acquiring a new function in the surveillance or securitization of

28  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button various areal populations increasingly targeted for extraction through financialized flows as much as through traditional labor-intensive extractive industries. In the same way, that tuition increase is no longer justified by any economic exigency – it is, in fact, “untethered” – so, too, the power of the area studies to institutionalize the crisis of referentiality unleashed by financialization and to overcode that crisis via anthropological difference appears just as equally unlimited. While the area studies has always stood guard over the arealization of different regimes of referentiality – providing legitimation beyond any specific ideology on the left or the right – those regimes today connect directly to financialization. Inasmuch as financialization itself is a bordering technology, the effect is multiplicative. Together with the bordering technology of reified translation at the heart of the area studies, financialization creates a new form of colonization that is once again epistemic and subjective, as well as economic and political. If the logic of the derivative signals an irrevocable erosion in the status of knowledge within the paradigmatic realm of modern autonomy at which classical liberalism had always aimed, this situation has profound ramifications for the mission of the apparatus of area. “Poised between noise and information, between non-knowledge and knowledge, derivatives emerge from the space between the measurable and the immeasurable – not simply making a quanta actionable but changing the medium in which they move with certain qualities.”77 Part of the complexity of the derivative concerns the way in which it constitutes an abstraction of the future, which is not limited just to the forms of known unknowns (i.e., “risk”), but also to the forms of the unknowable unknown (“uncertainty”). While derivatives require specialist knowledge to operate, their operation includes a combination of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ that makes the distinction between knowledge and non-knowledge problematic. Drawing important conclusions from Randy Martin’s work, McKenzie Wark writes: “Expertise can no longer prevent volatility. There’s a link between a financialization of non-knowledge and the state attacks on expertise that accelerated under Reagan and Thatcher. They attacked the credibility of their own governing class. Knowledge no longer has an autonomous value. It has to show a return. The mass of knowledge on which finance rested became its impediment. There’s a loss of trust in the particular expertise that managed particular risks, in education, health or security, for example. Finance became the manager of generalized risk in the form of non-knowledge.”78 Wark’s comments are particularly pertinent in the context of the area studies, which were the site of intense political battles in the 1990s concerning the withdrawal of federal funding and the constitution of their object. The kind of areal expertise and the ethics of integrity defended by those who openly identify with area studies in the manner of a public confession of faith has to be measured against the increasing devalorization of expertise motivated by financialization. A fruitful parallel can be drawn between risk and uncertainty relative to financialization, on the one hand, and continuity and discontinuity relative to translation, on the other. When seen in terms of being a singular act that must be performed each time anew, translation operates in the medium of discontinuity

Introduction  29 shared by uncertainty. When seen in terms of bridging a gap between two or more unities of language, translation operates in the medium of continuity shared by risk. Intervening at the singular point where discontinuity is transformed into continuity, translation can only be understood as a bridging technology when viewed retrospectively. The projection of this retrospective view into a schema that guides social praxis, such as translation, is what we have termed the “schematism of cofiguration.”79 At a conceptual level, the unity ascribed to a language relies on an implicit operation of comparison in the mode of translation that is subsequently effaced by the representation of the unity of the language concerned. The challenge for theorizing this act (of transforming discontinuity into continuity) lies in devising a theory sensitive to the microphysics of comparison that accounts for discontinuity (“unknowable known”) without appealing to the “schematism of cofiguration.” From this perspective, the various defenses mounted today of the area studies are to be distinguished from the general disavowal of the modern regime of translation that has always proliferated within area studies. Whereas the deterrence characteristic of the first Cold War found an analogue in the cultural sphere via the schema of cofiguration, the preemption that is characteristic of the Global War on Terror (which has now morphed into the new Cold War) finds its own, new analogue in the cultural sphere via preemptive self-colonization. Such preemption works by claiming a position as if the area studies and the humanities writ large had already been decolonized. In order for this modification to the schema of cofiguration to work, it is necessary to preemptively domesticate the social element of non-knowledge, especially the practice of translation, always implicated in knowledge production. This aspect of the contemporary position of area studies reminds us of the workings of financialization. For Brian Massumi, the appropriation of non-knowledge by the financialized regime of capital accumulation is intimately connected to the ontology of preemption. Preemption is, according to Massumi, invariably invested in a logic of becoming other.80 In order to fight terrorism, you have to become like the terrorists, indeed, you have to actively produce terrorism. Massumi’s observations not only remind us that the Global War on Terror could be seen as an outgrowth of the logic of financialization, they also call attention to the way “becoming other” can be appropriated by self-referentiality. Becoming other, area studies in an ethically woke mode no longer claim to speak for the other but rather with the other. Yet this “other” is little but a figure that has been posited in advance by the self-referential schema of cofiguration. What is particularly preemptive about this newfound ethics of companionship is that it focuses exclusively on positions to the detriment of an inquiry about positionality. As a result, it denies the possibility of alternative futures not invested in area. The struggle inevitably has been displaced to the future. If debt is designed primarily as a preemptive means of controlling the future, then it finds a companion in the area studies, for which the future has always remained constitutionally unthinkable except in the mode of a Bildungsroman about “democratic transition.” Tied to the image of anthropological difference fabricated from traces of the past collected

30  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button and organized by the archive of colonial-imperial modernity and mobilized in the present to capture labor, the area studies are constitutionally incapable of imagining a world in which the future is the common and both the past and the present are equally transnational. Instead, area studies trades in prolonging the fantasy of “the West”. The fantasy of “the West” is a response to the essential incoherence and instability of the appellation itself. Ironically, this response is characterized by a repression of historicity in virtually the same move that establishes the unity of “the West” as something supposedly derived from the past. In other words, the distinction of the West from the Rest is reactive to vicissitude; it is an attempt to repress historical changes. No wonder that those who obstinately insist on their Western identity are more often than not those who feel most uncertain about their own qualifications to be Western. For what is preserved in the distinction are the historical conditions of the encounter of unequal powers which gave rise to bourgeois Europe, and in which colonial forces progressively dominated what would summarily be lumped together as the Rest. There is no doubt that the West is a historical construct and, as such, is constantly exposed to historical change, but the putative unity of the West which is also at work in that countervailing tendency is not historical in the sense of continually registering historical mutation. Rather it represses the historical. In short, the putative unity of the West is not in time.81 We cannot afford not to acknowledge a fundamental temporal discord at the heart of the fantasy of “the West.” As the unity of “the West” exists only at the level of the relational imaginary, its nature is essentially putative. Yet the futurity inherent in that putative, i.e., not-yet-realized, unity is contradicted by the repression of temporality necessary to sustain the inversion that makes it look as if the unity of the West had been given in advance by history. It is easy to see how management of the “as if” quality observed here could become an intellectual project motivating large amounts of intellectual labor across a panoply of domains (academia, media, think tanks, etc.) that together form the Imperial Spectacle Complex (ISC). What makes the ISC “spectacular” is not showmanship, but its investment in the curation of the curious temporality signified by the “as if.” This retroactive form of temporality is, as Gavin Walker has argued, essential to the parallel abstractions of social relations that constitute both “the West” and the commodification of labor.82 If, as Guy Debord indicated in his path breaking study of the “society of the spectacle,” the accumulation of capital reaches its zenith in the formation of an image, much the same can be said for the accumulation of difference curated by the area studies. As both a discursive construction that aids capital accumulation and a result of that very same process of accumulation, the epistemic image curated in different ways by area studies and big finance stands at the intersection between the mode of subjection and the mode of production. Analogous to the physical body said by Marx to be the “bearer” of

Introduction  31 labor power sought out by the capitalist, the epistemic image at the heart of the ISC is the vehicle for “the general shift from having to appearing”83 that links area studies to neoliberal financial speculation. On the side of the area studies, this is the labor of translation crystallized in the epistemic image of anthropological difference used to manage the “outside” and then financialized through levers such as evaluations, rankings, intellectual property regimes, and knowledge transfer. The epistemic image is thus not just the expression of a hegemonic consensus such as the West and the Rest, but it is also a bearer of traces of the repressed history of labor’s repeated defeats in the encounter with capital. The vast amount of intellectual labor commanded by the well-funded, well-established, well-staffed globalized networks, institutions, and conceptual frameworks of the Imperial Spectacle Complex dwarfs any comparable alternative. Underfunded and working at a huge numerical disadvantage in relation to capital, even critical theorists often end up inadvertently relying on such epistemic images mediated by ISC knowledge production without being aware of it or simply discounting their importance. The true significance of such compromises, which every humanist inevitably makes at one time or another simply by virtue of his or her implication in the area organization of the human sciences, lies in the normalization of the tropic of area. Hence, just as it is easy to see how the management of the “as if” quality of area can sustain a proliferation of disciplinary knowledge production defined by area, it is equally possible to see how a vocation curating the “as if” quality of area is intrinsically related to financialization. In the end, both the first Cold War system and today’s financialization are methods of arresting decolonial transition. Area studies historically played a key role in grounding this arrested decolonial moment in an apparatus of area that would capture labor and proliferate divisions of knowledge. Since the end of the first Cold War, it is not just the area studies that have become untethered, but the autonomy of every domain, including finally the economic. Financialization is the desperate response to this untethering, an attempt to appropriate the sociality revealed by untethering. Turning it into a source of fear (for labor) and moving from deterrence to preemption, financialization interdicts the passage that leads from the social to the common. The area studies today thus function like financialization as an institution of arbitrage that manages the spread between referentiality and the loss of referentiality. It manages the risk that objectivity could be permanently lost, rather than the risk of any particular political position or particular (postcolonial or postimperial) sovereignty. Against this regime, a translational practice of non-knowledge could become an alternative way to socialize the surplus that the regime of translation otherwise diverts into sustaining the reproduction of social relations necessary for capitalist accumulation. When Anthropos Becomes a Robot Before coming to a conclusion, we should note the existence of a third key element, cybernetics and information science, accompanying area studies and neoliberal economics in the epistemic hegemony of Pax Americana. Born in the heat

32  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button of WWII, cybernetics took shape in roughly the same gestational period as area studies and neoliberal theories. Just as many of the early practitioners of area studies in the United States received their language training in the U.S. Army or were called upon by the U.S. government to support various agencies in their wartime effort, the key progenitors of cybernetics, such as Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon, initially developed their ideas in the context of war. To each of these, three intertwined elements that compose the epistemic hegemony of Pax Americana correspond to different figures of humanity. For the area studies, it is anthropos and humanitas; for neoliberalism, it is homo economicus; and for information science, it is the robot. Regrettably, the military origin of each of these different figures or faces of Pax Americana epistemic hegemony is being renewed today by a new wave of militarization of knowledge. Such militarization represents a reactivation of what Lydia Liu, in her study of the cybernetic presuppositions, or “cybernetic unconscious,” identifies as the structure of knowledge production throughout the period since WWII in the “military-industrial-academic complex of the United States.”84 The difference is that today it is less “industrial” than informational. We take seriously Liu’s claim that cybernetics “set the course to conquer all fields of knowledge on behalf of imperial technoscience.”85 As a result, Liu claims, “all coding systems…have been subsumed under a single unified and universal system unprecedented in the history of world civilization,”86 such that, “we no longer have at our disposal a pure linguistic theory or semiotic theory across the humanistic disciplines that remains untouched by information theory or long-distance communication technologies.”87 When Gavin Walker elucidates the schema of the West and the Rest in terms of a binary system of coding and ciphering discussed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,88 we should recognize a meaning that is as much literal as metaphorical. Due to limitations of space and time, we are unable to chart here fully the historical trajectory of cybernetics and to unpack the consequences of its “universal system.” For our purposes, it will suffice to observe the following points: (1) information science began, notably in the work of Claude Shannon, as a theory based on a model of communication; (2) the theory of translation first developed by Eugene Nida, considered to be the inauguration of translation studies, drew its inspiration directly from the cybernetic model of communication; (3) the critique of the modern regime of translation and the theoretical innovations brought to translation theory by this critique effectively started with a critique of the model of communication in the realm of language and culture89; (4) ergo, our critique of the modern regime of translation is also simultaneously an implicit critique of the “imperial technoscience” that “conquered all fields of knowledge,” creating a military-industrial-academic complex. What we have tried to stress is that this disparate and somewhat amorphous “complex” is fully international in nature and that an analysis focused solely on the United States is woefully inadequate. In reflecting about the reasons why the modern regime of translation is so durable and politically persuasive across national borders, we cannot afford to discount the role played by the specific way the digital revolution has evolved in tandem with neoliberal financialization. Finance as we know it today would be impossible

Introduction  33 without information technologies and the two together are deeply enmeshed in the militarization of knowledge renewed by the Global War on Terror and now accelerated ten-fold by the GWOT’s prolongation and metamorphosis into Cold War 2.0. A concrete manifestation of the dialectic between militarization and knowledge is probably best seen in the type of liberal biopower being deployed today, and projected into the future, against China. The dystopian scenario everywhere in evidence today, as a teleological inevitability, is that robots will not only supplant Chinese labor in “the world’s factory” but, when armed and quite likely operating semi-autonomously, will also constitute the most fearsome type of army the world has ever seen.90 Swarms of drones powered by AI and biomimicry technologies will stand ready to suppress the inevitable insurrections and national resistance from the “yellow hordes” abandoned by the bioinformatics economy. The final irony of liberal biopower is not just that this plan will be executed in the name of freedom, but also that none of it would be possible without the massive purchase of U.S. debt by China and other Eurasian countries, who are at once the primary support for U.S. monetary imperialism and the principal targets of its global garrison military. Today, as the United States has embarked on its most ambitious restructuring of industrial/foreign policy since the era of Ronald Reagan, a form of “Yellow Peril” discourse is being mobilized anew to lend ethical and political legitimacy to such frightening militarization.91 Historically speaking, the older form of Yellow Peril discourse, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was primarily concerned, beyond an affective investment in racism, with normalizing the logic of species difference though the aesthetic exemplarity of the anthropological type. The thing about “Chinese” that was most frightening to those who sutured their positionality to the schema of the West and the Rest was not this or that specific characteristic, but rather their supposed lack of a fixed, identifiable national character. In this sense, what is most frightening about the “Chinese” is that it is becoming areal. Hence, Yellow Peril was used to function primarily to legitimate taxonomies of specific difference in terms of the universality of human essence as represented by an anthropological type associated with a supposedly superior area, i.e., “the West.” Today, the thing about “Chinese” is shifting discreetly from the realm of referentiality to that of self-referentiality. Attachment to this taxonomy of speciation has not waned, even as it increasingly reveals itself to be untenable. As Peter Button has argued, “the logic of the type has historically manifested itself in the West precisely in relation to what it [the West] conceived of (and viscerally feared) as an unassimilable exterior.”92 The crux of this fear – associated with essentially unstable borders (of the West, of the human, etc.) – lies in the “fear of the dissolution of history as the realization of the genre of the human itself.”93 From Ronald Reagan’s call in 1987 to “tear down this wall” to Donald Trump’s call in 2016 to “build the wall and have them pay for it,” the putative unity of the West remains unquestioned – sometimes even by those most intent on reversing Western hegemony – as if, in remaining unquestioned, the West could possibly monopolize the status of the areal positionality of self-referentiality. Poised as

34  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button we are on the cusp of an unprecedented transformation in warfare, a panoply of signs point to the contemporary reactivation of the context in which Yellow Peril discourse thrives: anxiety over the logical inconsistency of “the West” and the fate of the “genres of the human.”94 It is axiomatic that the “peril,” if there is one, stems not from a population improbably specified as “yellow,” but rather from the possibility, if not inevitability, that the appropriation of advances in biotech, information tech, and nanotech by finance capital, following a logic of militarization and securitization, is exercising profound effects on the generic living conditions on our planet.95 Neoliberalism colonizes time through the “cruel optimism” of a speculative future hedged against ever-deepening indemnity.96 Colonial-imperial Romanticism colonizes time through the tautological relationship between people and language. Combined, as they are, in the deployment of computational media to translational practice, the new, neoliberal Romanticism spells the beginning of a long war of attrition to realize capitalist modernity’s oldest dream: the hope that humanity’s self-production – enhanced by biotech, AI, and nanotech – will immediately and fully coincide with the accumulation of surplus value. It is important to remember that this is not the only version of a translationenabled futurity to have been imagined within the horizon of the colonial-imperial modernity that we still inhabit today. L. L. Zamenhof’s Esperanto and Qu Qiubai’s “common language” (putonghua) are two examples that were both conceived, albeit in different ways, to combat the dialectic of universalism and particularism, which became codified in the modern regime of translation associated with the birth of modern nation-state languages. This was a combat directly tied to the revolutionary creation of a “people-to-come” that could not be contained in the logical economy of species and genus. In other words, this would be a type of community whose foundational theory and praxis would not be based on the apparatus of species difference, the template of which would be that exceptional, yet ultimately incoherent, area known as “the West.” It should be apparent by now that we hold that the decolonization of knowledge can only occur with the disappearance not only of area studies but also of the area as a principle for disciplinary organization across the human sciences. In our struggle within and against area studies, we must seek alliances with those intellectuals, postimperial and postcolonial, who might consider themselves to work (about fields or areas) outside area studies. In pursuing those kinds of alliances necessary to simultaneously engage the international areal, financial, communicational, and military complex of Pax Americana, we would also be well advised to take heed of what Meister calls “the process by which financial assets are being created by the ability to manipulate and arbitrage spreads, both among universities themselves and also within universities, between and among departments, internally and externally – because this is how universities are now being managed.”97 Today’s disciplinary divisions are subject to a logic of financialization – the same logic that makes border conflicts of all types into a site of wealth extraction via risk management. How can crossdisciplinary alliances possibly avoid this logic? Perhaps our greatest hope lies

Introduction  35 in the type of analogous convergence that proliferates under financialization: as in the world of finance, so in the world of knowledge. There are deep infrastructural, affective reasons why language in the period after methodological nationalization is the worst thing on which to pin our hopes for change, but we might have precious little choice. We might as well try to benefit from that convergence in order to socialize the surplus that the modern regime of translation otherwise diverts into sustaining the reproduction of area. Via a reconceptualization of language as translation, that is to say, as a social practice of non-knowledge (where the prefix “non- “signifies a non-exclusive relationship much the same as that conveyed by the term “non-Euclidean geometry”), might we not move away from the internationality curated by area studies, aiming for nothing less than a concomitant decolonization of both the institutions of knowledge production and the geopolitical divisions of the world? Notes 1 Lawrence (2021). Ted Fertik notes that the Marshall Plan was a “policy that advertised itself as one of peace [but] was in fact a policy of war.” In breaking decisively with Roosevelt’s earlier policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union, the Marshall Plan effectively launched the Cold War (Fertik 2019). 2 Tooze (2021). 3 The recent agreement to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines and to base U.S. nuclear submarines in Australia, the successful test of a submarine launched (nonnuclear) ballistic missile by South Korea, and the first successful test in 76 years of an aircraft carrier, using an F-35 capable of carrying nuclear ordnance, by Japan, are all signs in the public domain of the breakdown of nuclear non-proliferation ethics in the Western Pacific. 4 Van Fraassen (2002, 47). 5 Sakai (2010). 6 Rana (2015). 7 Rana (2015, 267). 8 The term “creedal nationalism” is derived from the Swedish researcher Gunnar Myrdal’s analysis of the “American Creed” in the 1940s. It was taken up subsequently by Samuel Huntington, Seymour Lipset, and others to simultaneously describe both American exceptionalism and a redemptive narrative of civic inclusion. See Rana (2017). Rana redeploys the concept in a critical register, emphasizing the psychic costs for subordinated groups of being forced “as a condition of any reform, to accept and repeat self-validating majority narratives” (Rana 2015, 269). In his analysis of Standing Rock Sioux theorist Vine Deloria Jr.’s work, David Myer Temin argues that according to the redemptive narrative of creedal nationalism, past “oppression” is generally understood as a historical prior condition of “exclusion from the dominant modes of civic identity,” and therefore, not in terms of the ongoing “domination of colonized and racialized subjects” (Temin 2018, 8). 9 Rana (2016). 10 Rana (2015, 265). Rana quotes Stephen Douglas from 1858, “I hold that this government was made on the white basis, by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men and none others” (Rana 2015, 270). 11 MacLean (2017, 10). 12 Rana (2020, 319). 13 Bâli and Rana (2018, 268).

36  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button 1 4 Rana (2020, 328). 15 Burden-Stelly (2017, 216). 16 Burden-Stelly (2019, 74). Immediately prior to the deployment of American studies in the service of U.S. Cold War ideological needs, the American Studies Group at Yale had been proposed by the “History, Art, and Literature committee.” Tellingly, in its original conception the American Studies Group was designed to provide an opportunity for “foreign students to study, in close contact with American life, the institutions and principles of American democracy, a subject of worldwide interest” (Italics added.) It was initially launched in 1946 as a summer school program called the “Yale School of American Studies for Foreign Students.” From its inception, American Studies at Yale drew upon a strategy of cofiguration (Holzman 1999, 78–79). 17 Burden-Stelly (2017, 221). 18 Burden-Stelly (2019, 73). Burden-Stelly notes that the institutionalization of Black studies in the university coincided with a “turn away” from a focus on structural and material conditions towards the construction of “Black transnationality as a “culturally specified diaspora analytic” (Burden-Stelly 2019, 84). 19 Whitney (2012). See also, Holzman (1999, 83). 20 Burden-Stelly (2019, 73). 21 Rana (2014, 288). 22 Rana (2014, 288). 23 Bâli and Rana (2018, 264). 24 Rana (2014, 310). Italics added. 25 Rana (2014, 310). 26 Rana (2014, 159). 27 Rana (2015, 285). 28 Burden-Stelly (2017, 226). Holzman writes that “fundraising and anti-communism were pretty well interwoven for the purposes of American studies” (Holzman 1999, 93). While Yale accepted money from the principal donor to the American studies program, W. R. Coe, they ultimately denied his “request that the Professor to head the Program of American studies shall always be one who firmly believes in the preservation of our System of Free Enterprise and is opposed to the system of State Socialism, Communism and Totalitarianism, and that the portion of the income of the fund which is set aside for the Program of American studies shall be used for the furtherance of the System above referred to.” Holzman emphasizes that both American studies faculty and especially the senior administration were otherwise in full accord with Coe as regards the ideological mission of the program. In the context of Cold War 2.0, it is well worth noting that the Yale administration recently succumbed to pressure from donors to the Grand Strategy program to intervene in the curriculum in precisely the manner Coe had sought, in this case resulting in the resignation of its director, Beverly Gage (Mousavizadeh and Yu 2021). 29 Suh and Moon (2007, 45). 30 Callahan (2004, 214). 31 Callahan (2004, 206). 32 Slaughter (2007, 210). 33 “The Middle Kingdom” is a monosemic and orientalist translation of zhongguo that compresses the polysemic nature of the first sinogram, zhong, erasing a semantic range extending from equilibrium and the golden mean to concentration and centering. 34 Even such conservative scholars as Chalmers Johnson could see the global apparatuses of military networks by which the “postcolonial” global order of the United States was maintained as well as its devastating consequences. In many respects, the birth of the People’s Republic of China coincided with the birth of the Empire of Bases. See Johnson (2001, 2005). 35 Rana (2015, 286).

Introduction  37 36 We owe our conception of how global power proceeds via localization to the work of Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra. See the discussion of the image to “hit the ground” in Neilson and Mezzadra (2019, 3). 37 In the United States, we would have to distinguish between the Weathermen/SDS on the one hand, and Martin Luther King/Malcom X/Fred Hampton on the other. In the former case, there is plenty of evidence that the neither the CIA nor the FBI was particularly concerned. They were, however, very afraid of black radicals, the most prominent of whom ended up murdered. 38 Jones “Stalin, appeasement, and the Second World War.” 39 Alter (1997, 69). 40 Cf. Nagahara (1998); Read (2003); Solomon (2012); Walker (2018). 41 Refer to the Academic Freedom Index developed via a public-private partnership: https://www.gppi.net/2021/03/11/free-universities. 42 Nahum (2014, 22). 43 Calichman (2021, 183). 44 Marks (2009) and Marks (2011). 45 “The modern regime of translation” (initially coined as “the regime of translation” and later “modern” was added as Sakai acknowledged the necessity to mark the historicity of “the regime of translation”) and “hetero-lingual address” are inherently associated with one another. For further elucidation of the terms, heterolingual and homolingual addresses, see Sakai (1997. 1–17); concerning internationality and transnationality, see Sakai (2021). 46 Ibid. 47 Lyotard (1984). 48 Hall (2016); Mirowski (2011). 49 Martin (2015). 50 Haiven (2016). 51 Sakai (2009). 52 Mirowski and Plehwe (2009). 53 Mirowski and Plehwe (2009, 7). 54 Mirowski and Plehwe (2009, 437). 55 Massumi (2015, 15). 56 Massumi (2015, 14). 57 deHaven-Smith (2013, 78). 58 deHaven-Smith (2013, 78). 59 Chow (2006). 60 Solomon (2020). 61 Marazzi (2008, 26). 62 Mirowski (2014, 28). 63 Cumings (1997, 24). 64 See Button’s essay in this volume. In addition to the example – important for its early occurrence – cited by Button, “ghettoization” is a recurring theme taken both as an object of critique, see Miyoshi and Harootunian (1991, 5), and as a thematics of deplorability (similar to what Button cites Drake and Hilbink (2004); Shohat (2001, 1269); and Kuei-fen Chiu’s remarks about the “ghettoisation” of Taiwan studies in Shih, Harrison, Chiu, and Berry (2018, 219). 65 Cumings (1997, 21). 66 Parker and Jary (1995, 329). Cited in Lorenz (2012, 608). 67 Mirowski (2014, 8). 68 Marazzi (2008, 21). 69 Marazzi (2008, 35). 70 Lorenz (2012, 601). 71 Lorenz (2012, 618 note 52). 72 Haiven (2016).

38  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button 7 3 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 9 2 93 94 95 9 6 97

Meister (2017). Meister (2017). Marazzi (2008, 24). Walker (2019, 80). Martin (2015, 116). Wark (2017). Sakai (1997). Massumi (2015, 24). Sakai (2005, 191). See Walker (2018). Debord (2014, 5). Liu (2010, 71). Liu (2010, 33). Liu (2010, 12). Liu (2010, 22). Walker (2018, 216). Sakai (1997). The recent call by Giselle Rampersad (Associate Professor in Innovation with experience in the defense industries among others) to catapult Australian industry into the fourth industrial revolution through investment in a new generation of informationtechnology powered weapons illustrates one way in which a dystopian scenario can become national industry and defense policy. The pretext for intense Australian government investment in its defense capabilities, particularly naval capability, is, of course, a perceived threat from China. This pretext has become such an integral part of contemporary Australian public discourse that it hardly needs to be mentioned. The only direct reference to China in Rampersad’s appeal concerns the introduction of industrial robots that are said to be “even cheaper than a Chinese worker.” Rampersad stresses that “Another feature of industry 4.0 [i.e., industries associated with the fourth industrial revolution] is the digitisation of the supply chain.” She concludes that “If done well, defence investment will make as powerful a contribution to the nation’s economic prosperity as its military security.” Rampersad’s article thus argues implicitly for a scenario in which security is guaranteed by IT-fueled weapons systems in a world characterized by robots replacing “Chinese” (i.e., cheap) labor (Rampersad 2018). A thorough account of the transformation initiated under Ronald Reagan in the economic, scientific, monetary, and discursive basis of U.S. Imperialism can be found in Cooper (2008). See also, Cowen (2014, 1); Hartung and TomDispatch (2018). See Button (2006, 443). Button (2006). Wynter (2006, 117). For a discussion of the central role of the color yellow in representing the violent ambiguity of modern visual culture, see Doran (2013). Cf., Berlant (2011). Meister (2017).

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Introduction  39 Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011. Burden-Stelly, Charisse. “Cold War Culturalism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches.” Souls 19, no. 2 (2017): 213–37. Burden-Stelly, Charisse. “Black Studies in the Westernized University: The Interdisciplines and the Elision of Political Economy.” In Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, edited by Julie Cupples and Ramón Grosfoguel. Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2019. Button, Peter. “(Para-)Humanity, Yellow Peril and the Postcolonial (arche-)type.” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 4 (2006): 421–47. Calichman, Richard. Before Identity: The Question of Method in Japan Studies. Albany: SUNY Press, 2021. Callahan, William A. “National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism.” Alternatives 29, no. 2 (2004): 199–218. Chandler, Nahum. X – The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Chow, Rey. The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006. Cooper, Melinda. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 2008. Cowen, Deborah. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Cumings, Bruce. “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies During and after the Cold War.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, no. 1 (1997): 6–26. Debord, Guy. 2014. The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets. deHaven-Smith, Lance. Conspiracy Theory in America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Doran, Sabine. The Culture of Yellow, or, The Visual Politics of Late Modernity. New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Drake, Paul, and Lisa Hilbink. “Latin American Studies: Theory and Practice.” In The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by David Szanton, 1–27. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Fertik, Ted. 2019. “Geopolitics for the Left.” n+1 March 11, 2019. https://www.nplusonemag. com/online-only/online-only/geopolitics-for-the-left/. Accessed 3/12/19. Genser, Daniele. NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. London & New York: Routledge, 2004. Haiven, Max. “‘The Corollary of the Derivative Is the border’: Visions for the Democratic Control of Movement.” OpenDemocracy. 2016. https://www.opendemocracy. net/can-europe-make-it/max-haiven/corollary-of-derivative-is-border-visions-fordemocratic-control-of-mo. Accessed 11/22/16. Hall, Gary. The Uberification of the University. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Hartung, William D. and TomDispatch. 2018. “The Pentagon’s Cunning Plot to Militarize the Economy,” Truthdig November 1, 2018, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-pentagonscunning-plot-to-militarize-the-economy/. Accessed 11/4/18. Holzman, Michael. “The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale.” American Studies 40, no. 2 (1999): 71–99. Johnson, Chalmers. Blowbacks: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001.

40  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button ———. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. Jones, Mark. “Stalin, appeasement, and the Second World War.” https://web.archive.org/ web/20220327190214/http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mark_jones/appeasement.htm. Lawrence, Patrick. 2021. “The Empire’s Last Stand.” Consortium News Sept. 21, 2021. https://consortiumnews.com/2021/09/20/patrick-lawrence-the-empires-last-stand/. Liu, Lydia. The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Lorenz, Chris. “If You’re so Smart, Why Are You Under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management.” Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012): 599–629. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Viking Press, 2017. Marks, Susan. “False Contingency.” Current Legal Problems 62, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. DOI: doi.org/10.1093/clp/62.1.1. ———. “Human Rights and Root Causes.” The Modern Law Review 74, no. 1 (2011): 57– 78. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2230.2010.00836.x. Martin, Randy. Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. Marazzi, Christian. Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Translated by Gregory Conti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. Massumi, Brian. Ontopower. War, Powers, and the State of Perception. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2015. Meister, Robert. 2017. “Confronting the Corporate University: From Cold War Federalization to Financialized Higher Education.” http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/03/confrontingthe-corporate-university/ Accessed 03/29/17. Mirowski, Philip. Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. ———. 2014. “The Political Movement that Dared not Speak its own Name: The Neoliberal Thought Collective Under Erasure.” https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/ research-papers/the-political-movement-that-dared-not-speak-its-own-name-theneoliberal-thought-collective-under-erasure Accessed 04/16/17. Mirowski, Philip, and Dieter Plehwe. The Road From Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge and London: Harvard University, 2009. Miyoshi, Masao, and Harry Harootunian. “Japan in the World.” boundary2 18 (1991): 3. Mousavizadeh, Philip, and Isaac Yu. 2021. “After Donor Pressure, Beverly Gage Resigns as Grand Strategy Director.” Yale Daily News vol. CXLIII, September 30, 2021. https:// yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/09/30/beverly-gage-resigns-as-grand-strategy-programdirector-after-donor-pressure-on-curriculum/. Nagahara, Yutaka. “A Sketch on the Hauntology of Capital: Towards Theory of Community.” The Hosei University Economic Review 66, no. 2 (1998): 143–162. Neilson, Brett, and Sandro Mezzadra. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019. Parker, Martin and David Jary. “The McUniversity: Organization, Management, and Academic Subjectivity.” Organizationi 2 (May 1995). Cited in Lorenz 2012. Rampersad, Giselle. 2018. “Building Our Own Warships Is Australia’s Path to the Next Industrial Revolution,” The Conversation November 23, 2018, https://theconversation.com/ building-our-own-warships-is-australias-path-to-the-next-industrial-revolution-105984. Accessed 12/2/18.

Introduction  41 Rana, Aziz. “Race and the American Creed: Recovering Black Radicalism.” n+1 Magazine. no 24 (Winter 2016): https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-24/politics/raceand-the-american-creed/. ———. 2020. “How We Study the Constitution: Rethinking the Insular Cases and Modern American Empire.” The Yale Law Journal Forum. Last modified November 2: 312–34. ———. The Two Faces of American Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. ———. “Colonialism and Constitutional Memory.” U.C. Irvine Law Review 5, no. 2 (2015): 263–288. ———. 2017. “Decolonizing Obama,” n+1 Magazine. Issue 27, Winter. https://www. nplusonemag.com/issue-27/politics/decolonizing-obama/. Read, Jason. “A Universal History of Contingency: Deleuze and Guattari on the History of Capitalism.” Borderlands 2, no. 3 (2003). https://web.archive.org/web/20200715200421/ http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no3_2003/read_contingency.htm. Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism, 1–17. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. “The West—A Dialogic Prescription or Proscription?”. Social Identities 11, no. 3 (2005): 177–95. ———. “How Do We Count A Language? Translation and Discontinuity.” Translation Studies 2, no. 1 (2009): 71–88. ———. “Theory and Asian Humanity: on the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos.” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (December 2010): 442–64. ———. “The Individuality of Language: Internationality and Transnationality.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization, edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsakis, 31–54. London: Routledge, 2021. Shih, Shu-mei, Mark Harrison, Kuei-fen Chiu, and Michael Berry. “Forum 2: Linking Taiwan Studies With the World.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 1 (2018): 209–27. Shohat, Ella. “Area Studies, Transnationalism, and the Feminist Production of Knowledge.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, no. 4 (2001): 1269–72. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Solomon, Jon. “Another European Crisis? Myth, Translation, and the Apparatus of Area.” Transversal (July 2012): 1–22. https://transversal.at/transversal/0613/solomon/en; ———. “Beyond a Taste for the Dark Side: the Apparatus of Area and the Modern Regime of Translation Under Pax Americana.” In The Dark Side of Translation, edited by Federico Italiano, 19–37. London & New York: Routledge, 2020. Suh, Seung-won, and Chung-in Moon. “Burdens of the Past: Overcoming History, the Politics of Identity and Nationalism in Asia.” Global Asia 2, no. 1 (2007): 32–48. Temin, David Myer. “Custer’s Sins: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Settler-Colonial Politics of Civic Inclusion.” Political Theory 46, no. 3 (2018): 1–23. Tooze, Adam. “Chartbook #36 After Afghanistan: No Post-American World,” AT Chartbook (2021). Last modified Sept. 12. https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-36after-afghanistan-no. Van Fraassen, Bas. The Empirical Stance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Walker, Gavin. 2018. “The Postcolonial and the Politics of the Outside: Return(s) of the National Question in Marxist Theory.” Viewpoint Magazine. Last modified February 1. https://viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/postcolonial-politics-outside-returns-nationalquestion-marxist-theory/.

42  Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button Walker, Gavin. “The Schema of the West and the Apparatus of Capture: Variations on Deleuze and Guattari.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 12, no. 2 (2018): 210–35. ———. “The Accumulation of Difference and the Logic of Area.” Positions Asia Critique 27, no. 1 (2019): 67–98. Wark, McKenzie. 2017. “After Capitalism, the Derivative. For Randy Martin.” http://www. publicseminar.org/2017/04/derivative/ Accessed 04/12/17 Whitney, Joel. 2012. “The Paris Review, the Cold War and the CIA.” Salon. Last modified May 27. https://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/exclusive_the_paris_review_the_cold_war_ and_the_cia/ Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook The Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” In Not Only The Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Gordon Jane Anna, 107–169. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

2

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana Naoki Sakai

Area studies designates a disciplinary formation that was institutionalized at the higher education level in the United States of America in the late 1940s. Soon after the end of WWII, the very idea of area studies was put forth in order to supplement the forthcoming international order, to be summarily called Pax Americana. Area studies has contributed much to this multi-faceted global hegemony of the United States of America, and in this respect, this disciplinary formation of knowledge has reconfirmed rather than dispensed with the colonial-imperial order of the modern world. The old conventional bifurcation of the modern world into two contrasting positionalities, the West and the Rest, where the West represented the subject of knowing, while the Rest was designated exclusively as a positionality affiliated with the object of knowing, has not been thematically called into question. Even today the disciplines of area studies are still believed to be constructed on the basis of the colonial difference between the West and the Rest, between the Western portion of humanity and the rest of it, thereby preserving the colonial-imperial bifurcation of the modern world. Part I focuses first on two intellectual figures of the early twentieth century before WWII, Edmund Husserl and Watsuji Tetsurô; both participated in the discourse of the West and the Rest and were captive to the rhetoric of colonial/ anthropological difference. Husserl asserted the historical mission of European humanity, while Watsuji insisted on the perspective of Japanese culturalism which was supposed to distinguish the Japanese from Europeans as well as from other Asians. Part II examines an article written by sociologist and Japan expert, Robert Bellah, on Watsuji Tetsurô, a Japanese cultural historian who was very popular among American and European area experts on Japan, so as to illustrate the discipline of area studies that was institutionalized at American universities under Pax Americana. Bellah regarded Watsuji as a representative intellectual of Japan for his explicit orientation toward ‘particularism’ and his hostility to certain values and attitudes most often attributed to Western modernity. Both Bellah and Watsuji participated in what Stuart Hall called ‘the discourse of the-West-and-the-Rest,’ but they occupied polar opposites in the bipolarity of the West and the Rest, respectively; DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-2

44  Naoki Sakai they were opposed to one another, but, nonetheless, supplementary to each other. Through a comparative approach to these two cultural historians, I will disclose the racism inherent in the epistemology of area studies and Japanese cultural nationalism. Today the disciplines of area studies face tremendous challenges, and in this chapter, this crisis is investigated from the perspective of colonial/anthropological difference and the dynamics of civilizational transference; it addresses the question of the modern international world and the post-WWII arrangement of Pax Americana. PART I

Area Studies and the International World A new disciplinary formation generally referred to as area studies was institutionalized in the United States of America in the late 1940s. Already during the Second World War, the lack of a system of colonial-imperial knowledge, by means of which to manage the relationship between the United States and other foreign and exotic regions such as Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America, was keenly felt. By the end of the war, it was evident that, with the demise of the old colonial empires of Western Europe and Japan, the United States would be the most dominant of the remaining superpowers—the other superpower was the Soviet Union but in its military and economic capacities it was no rival to the United States—capable of dominating the rest of the world in the post-WWII era. Unlike the old colonial powers, however, the United States did not have an established system of intelligence and research with which to coordinate its colonial and imperial operations on a global scale outside its territory.1 No doubt, the introduction of the disciplinary formation of area studies helped to change the character of the United States in the view of the international world and established it as the ultimate archive where all the objective and most reliable knowledge about the Rest of the world could be found. But it is important to keep in mind that area studies also served to transform American society domestically in such a way that American university education was radically converted into the model of the ‘democratic’ university which other countries could later emulate. In so many ways, the disciplinary formation of area studies symbolized this status of the United States in the post-WWII international world as the prominent new colonial-imperial power. Of course, it was appreciated that the old systems of colonialism had proved to be neither effectual nor legitimate; it was anticipated that its classical colonial techniques be substantially revised so as to maintain Eurocentric privileges. In this respect, area studies emerged in tandem with the re-definition of the colonial-imperial order. Hence, area studies is often noted for its postcolonial characteristics. It is imperative, however, to underline this ambiguous word ‘postcoloniality’

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  45 since, in spite of the prefix ‘post-’, it should not be taken to literally mean ‘what comes after colonialism,’ since colonialism has remained, even if largely revised. After WWII, the United States attempted to resurrect the system of international law, but with major alterations. It was often claimed that the United States was opposed to the old system of international law that sanctioned modern colonialism, the system thanks to which the world was divided into two major regions in modernity: one region called ‘Europe’ where people and land were to be regulated by the system of international law (originally Jus Publicum Europaeum) with each state claiming its own sovereignty, clearly defined territory and population, and the other region often referred to as ‘non-Europe’ or ‘the Rest of the world,’ where territories and peoples were deprived of their state sovereignties and were vulnerable to colonial appropriation. Under the old system of international law,2 the overwhelming portion of the world outside Europe—strictly speaking, ‘Europe’ meant Western Europe, while Eastern Europe along with certain portions of Western Europe were not included in the international world—was eventually conquered and colonized. At the end of WWII, the United States decided to abolish this bifurcation of the world and instead introduced a revised system of international law by which peoples and land surfaces outside ‘the West’—‘Europe’ was gradually replaced by the new label of ‘the West’ in the early twentieth century—were also entitled to their sovereignty and territory. Thus, the term ‘postcolonial’ was promoted to characterize the new international order launched by the United States. Area studies played an important role in this propagandist use of the word ‘postcolonial.’ Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that the colonial-imperial order of the modern world, the bifurcation of ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest,’ actually remained intact under the new arrangement of America’s global hegemony that was sustained by means of arrangements such as collective security systems and the status of forces agreements. Area studies contributed much to this set of arrangements, and in this respect, this disciplinary formation of knowledge did not contradict the colonial-imperial order of the modern world at all. In foreign and remote countries now designated as ‘areas,’ area experts participated in intelligence gathering, interfered in local political decision-making processes, and assessed economic and political strategies for the United States and its allies. Just like the old colonial administrators overseeing colonies, area experts who were knowledgeable about native populations and their histories operated in a covert way to promote American interests in these foreign settings. Not to be overlooked is the role that area studies played in the identity politics of the United States—and the West at large—in the sustenance of the colonial-imperial order of the modern world; but for this the civilizational index of the West could not have functioned as an apparatus of human speciation. 3 Initially when the very idea of area studies was proposed at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in the late 1940s, not all the land surface

46  Naoki Sakai of the earth was designated as ‘areas’; certain portions were designated this way, while others were excepted from it. Of course, North America (excluding Mexico) was not included among the geographic regions designated as ‘areas.’ ‘Area’ signified a geographic space or region where the objects of area studies—the inhabitants, their culture, their political institutions, their history, and so on—were allocated. North America was the place reserved for the subject of knowing in area studies, where the agents of study and research on areas were located or originated; indeed it was not included among the objects that area experts were expected to study.4 Interestingly enough, in the original Social Science Research Council proposal, Western Europe was included as one of the areas, reserved for an object rather than a subject of area studies.5 In accordance with the American rhetoric of anti-colonialism, it was expected that, as far as ‘area studies’ was concerned, the old conventional bifurcation of the modern world into two contrasting positionalities, the West and the Rest, where the West represented the subject of knowing, while the Rest was designated exclusively as the object of knowledge, would have been rejected in the initial design. However, in the subsequent development of the academic disciplines of area studies at American universities, not a single area studies program was built in which Western Europe was predicated with the objectal positionality of knowledge production, and registered as an area. From the late 1940s through the 1980s, in any area studies program at American universities, Western Europe was never treated as an area at all. Hence, even today, the United States (including Canada but not Mexico) and Western Europe are excluded from the list of areas. Moreover, none of the disciplines such as English, French, or German literatures is included in area studies. In other words, the concept of the area has continued to mark the Rest of the world as a territory and population distinct from, and objectally studied by, the West. It must be unambiguously ascertained that the disciplinary formation of area studies has been couched in what Stuart Hall called ‘the discourse of the-West-and-the-Rest.’6 Even today, the disciplines of area studies serve to endorse the anthropological difference between the West and the Rest—Europe and non-Europe, in the classical phrasing—thereby preserving the colonial and racial bifurcation of the modern world.7 What is at stake is the very idea of European humanity, which has played such a significant role in the development of the humanities and the social sciences since the eighteenth century. Of course, the problem of theory, and, by extension, of philosophical rationality, has had much to do with this postulation of European humanity, even though the topic of European humanity in relation to theory has been carefully avoided in the fields of area studies. The term ‘postcolonial’ which was supposed to mark the newness of ‘area studies,’ in fact, continues to endorse the anachronistic conviction of the colonial-imperial order of the modern world, namely, that European humanity should be inherently and traditionally distinct from the rest of humanity because of its commitment to ‘theoretical rationality.’ It is in this particular sense that the disciplinary formation of area studies has served to sustain the institutional desire for anthropological difference, even

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  47 though ironically those working in area studies are often noted for their antitheoretical attitude. This is to say that the form of knowledge production concretized in area studies is nothing but a desire or prescriptive anticipation that European humanity—believed to include the majority population in North America when area studies was first proposed in the late 1940s—ought to be distinct from the rest of humanity. The disciplines of area studies introduced a new disciplinary arrangement generally termed ‘interdisciplinarity,’ and it transformed the fields of the humanities and social sciences in American higher education. Toward the end of the twentieth century, an increasing number of universities, first in East Asia and later in Europe and other places, adopted this disciplinary model. Furthermore, since the 1990s, an increasing number of students from these countries classified as areas have enrolled in area studies programs at American universities. In other words, the flow of students from areas in Asia and Latin America has given rise to a constant confusion and irregularity at the heart of this disciplinary formation; the students from China and India, for example, were supposed to be objects of knowing, to play the role of indigenous people to be studied, rather than to act as the subjects of knowing in ‘area studies.’ Initially these foreign and nonEuropean students were treated as if their contribution to academic scholarship would never go beyond that of ‘native informants.’ However, some outstanding students from such backgrounds have begun to undermine some of the rules that covertly endorsed this anthropological difference between the West and the Rest. Included among them are such people as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Rey Chow, even though it has been in the field of comparative literature rather than in area studies that these scholars have been allowed to manifest their talents. What we can observe today is ‘the crisis of area studies’; this in turn indicates the crisis of the modern bifurcation of the world between the West and the Rest. It is, first of all, a crisis of the disciplinary formation involving human and social sciences, but it also offers and marks an opportunity to re-consider and re-evaluate the status of theory/philosophy in the humanities. As a matter of fact, the crisis in this disciplinary formation suggests the possibility of its collapse in the near future, but, more importantly, it also intimates its insurgency or renaissance which requires a critical doubting or theoretical reflection. In this context of ‘the crisis of area studies,’ a question must be posed. Can we continue to assume that, as far as the human sciences are concerned, theory means ‘Western theory,’ and that philosophy is nothing but ‘Western philosophy’? Allow me now to focus on two corresponding fields of area studies, those on and in Japan. Philosophy and the National Studies of Japan Area studies, under the rubric of which so-called Japanese studies or national studies of Japan is conventionally subsumed nowadays, is a relatively recent invention in Japan. As I have already noted, it was after WWII that the disciplinary program

48  Naoki Sakai of area studies itself was initially institutionalized in higher education in the United States. Since the United States and Japan were engaged in the Pacific War during WWII, long before area studies was institutionalized in the 1940s and 1950s, many American policy makers already recognized the need for an apparatus of education and intelligence gathering on Japan. During the war, it was deemed absolutely necessary to create a pedagogical system by which to teach young soldiers and to nurture expert knowledge on Japan in order to build effective and successful intelligence operations against Japan. In many respects, this Japanese language training program served as a prototype of area studies in general both during the periods of war with Japan and the subsequent Allied Occupation of Japan from 1945 through to 1952 and beyond.8 Nonetheless, within Japan, the term ‘Japanese studies’ is a comparatively recent labeling; historically a group of diverse disciplines focusing on the Japanese people in Japanese academia—Japanese literature, history, linguistics, and ethnology—preceded it but, in contrast, these or their equivalents did not exist as academic disciplines in American higher education before WWII. At American universities, the study of Japan was non-existent as a specialized discipline until the war broke out. It must be noted that, in Japanese academia, the diverse national and humanistic—and social scientific in some cases—disciplines that focus on Japan did not become integrated into one large program of area studies until near the end of the twentieth century. At Japanese universities, area studies programs were introduced only when what was often referred to as the globalization of academic studies of the non-Western world became popular. As the national studies of Japan were replaced by, and integrated into, area studies on Japan, the country of Japan was registered as an area under Pax Americana, as a unified target of systematic inquiry about which human and social scientific knowledge was to be strategically organized and accumulated. Perhaps, this transition toward area studies was most glaringly marked by the 1987 inauguration of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (国際日本文化研究センター) in Kyoto. Long before the era of globalization, the old national studies of Japan were created in the late nineteenth century, in the process of Japan’s entry into the modern international world. The introduction of such disciplines as Japanese literature, Japanese history, Japanese linguistics, and Japanese ethnology was an integral part of the establishment of the system of universal national education and academia. Modern universities were introduced in Japan for the first time during the Meiji period (1868–1911) as an essential component of Japan’s modernization; national disciplines in the humanities and social sciences were viewed as absolutely necessary for the transformation of the Japanese population into a modern nation. Until the end of the Asia Pacific War (1945), these Japanese national disciplines continued to be transformed as circumstances changed, but they were fully established and integrated into the system of universal national education and higher education in the Japanese Empire, including annexed territories, such as Korea and Taiwan.

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  49 It is noteworthy that it actually took many decades to establish humanistic and social scientific disciplines at Japanese universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In most cases, disciplines in the humanities accepted the principle that the value of each discipline could be measured by the extent to which it would help in the modernization of Japanese society and its population. First of all, the national literature of European colonial power was valued as something for the Japanese to emulate. Furthermore, one cannot overlook the general design that operated in the creation of the humanistic sciences in Japan’s national education: literary disciplines only encompassed the peoples or territories in Western Europe/ North America and Japan. Undoubtedly what was operating even in the early phase of Japan’s modernization was ‘the discourse of the West-and-the-Rest.’9 Given the power balance of the times in international politics, the English, French, Russian, German and Japanese languages were recognized as worthy of disciplinary consideration.10 It was presumed that, in addition to Japan, only global colonial powers such as the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and Germany were considered worthy of attention. Underlying these obsessive concerns with the European powers was the acknowledgment that the European nation-states were to epitomize the modern society and that the Japanese State was expected to play the leadership role to institutionalize social, political, economic, and cultural formations similar to those already realized in Western Europe and the United States in order for Japan to be recognized as an authentic member of the international world. One State of the crucial issues in Japan’s modernization was the establishment of the national language, which was perceived absent at the time of the Meiji Restoration. It goes without saying that, in the late nineteenth century, the disciplines of English, French, and German literatures were taken by the Japanese intellectuals to testify the presence of national languages in those countries11; the national language of Japan was recognized as something essential for the modern Japanese nation to come, but it was absent. Thereupon many attempts were made to create the Japanese language, and it took more than a few decades before the universal system of national education was established by which every child was educated in the medium of the standard national language.12 China used to play such an important role in the literary culture in Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration (1868), but Chinese literary heritage was scarcely mentioned, and the range of scholarship present in what had been traditionally referred to as scholarship on China (漢学) was interrupted and did not transform into either the modern discipline of Chinese literature or history. Consequently, as Takeuchi Yoshimi （竹内好）remarked on Japanese academia in the 1930s, the disciplinary field of Chinese studies avoided contemporary China or modern China in general because it was generally considered that China was a thing of the past; even a national language did not exist in China; modern China was not recognized as worthy of intellectual effort. China was not acknowledged as belonging to the modern world; rather it was to be studied just like Greco-Roman antiquity, as a symbol of obsolescence. The discipline of philosophy must be located in this historical context. Prior to the introduction of the modern educational system, no scholarly discipline known

50  Naoki Sakai as philosophy existed in Japan. Since the Meiji Restoration, there have been many attempts to assert that something like philosophical argument or thinking existed in the Japanese archipelago, but as an academic discipline, the field of Japan’s national philosophy has never existed. Genres of modern academic study attributed to the word ‘philosophy,’ such as ‘Indian philosophy’ and ‘Chinese philosophy,’ existed, but, despite the noun ‘philosophy,’ they were not accepted as belonging to the discipline of philosophy itself. These topics were taught in the departments of ethics, ethnology, or others such as cultural anthropology, religious studies, or Indian or Chinese history. Usually in the department of philosophy, modern European languages and classical Greek and Latin are accepted as the media of study and research, but Asian or African languages are not registered as official media in its curricula. Of course, it has been an implicit assumption since the late nineteenth century that students enrolled in courses registered in the department of philosophy in Japanese universities are capable of reading, writing and conversing in modern Japanese, but, more explicitly, they are expected to learn at least two of the modern and classical languages of Western Europe—English, French, German, Latin, and Greek, and occasionally Italian or Spanish—in order to meet the classroom requirement to read and discuss texts written in one of those languages. What is striking about the disciplinary formation of philosophy in modern Japanese academia is that Japanese philosophy was exempt from the curriculum. Of course, what is meant by the designation ‘Japanese philosophy’ is already problematic all. Just like Indian or Chinese philosophy, ‘Japanese philosophy’ was supposedly to be taught outside the field of philosophy. The prevailing convention was that no part of Japanese thought was qualified to be treated as being of philosophy, and there were indeed many young students of philosophy who wanted to challenge this prejudice against non-Europeans. As I will return to this question in this presentation, it is no coincidence that the scholarly work of Watsuji Tetsurô (和辻哲郎), perhaps the most popular ‘philosopher’ of Japan among foreign or non-Japanese area experts, is usually classified in the fields of ethics—or ethical thought—Japanese intellectual history or Japanese cultural history. As a matter of fact, after returning to the University of Tokyo from Kyoto University, Watsuji was hired in the discipline of ethics rather than philosophy. In order to elucidate the status of ‘Japanese philosophy’—the national philosophy of Japan, by implication—with regard to the disciplinary genre of ‘philosophy’ at large, we must consider two initial questions: 1 Philosophy was regarded, perhaps until the early twentieth century, as the core discipline among the humanities. It has been nationalized in specific ways as the education of the national population became regulated by the idea of the national language in modern times. Increasingly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, philosophy constituted itself as a humanistic discipline conducted not in Latin but in

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  51 national languages in Europe: French in France, English in the United Kingdom, was German in Germany, and so on. This did not necessarily imply that the topics to be discussed in philosophy were limited to those taken from the national history, but the language in which philosophy was taught had to be the national language of the nation-state, and humanities departments were expected to contribute to the nationalization of the population. Hence, how should we understand the new relationship encouraged in Japan between the national language and the discipline of philosophy? 2 Indian or Chinese philosophy was not included in the curriculum of philosophy departments. In other words, it was presumed that philosophy originated and developed only in Europe or the West, and that, essentially, any intellectual tradition born or developed outside Europe or the West could not be regarded as belonging to the discipline of philosophy. From the outset, it was presumed that philosophy was European or Western. Even if this field of humanistic inquiry was not specifically modified by the adjective of ‘European’ or ‘Western,’ it was inherently a form of rationality to be found only in Europe or the West. In other words, to borrow Edmund Husserl’s expression, philosophy was destined to be ‘a spiritual shape of European humanity’; it was a manifestation of a ‘theoretical attitude’ that belonged exclusively to the European tradition.13 Therefore, philosophy and theory were often almost interchangeable in many contexts. So, how do we deal with Japanese philosophy in this regard. Was it not an oxymoron from the outset? Let me note that these two questions were posed in the past tense, implying that they were relevant in the historical contexts of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Edmund Husserl and Watsuji Tetsurô were active. However, I am not absolutely sure that they can not be posed in the present tense. Is it still possible to take for granted the bifurcation between the West and the Rest so as to organize our philosophical investigation? But, at the same time, we must not forget that the discourse of the West and the Rest is still dominant in area studies. In the process of building its modern education system, the Japanese State adopted from Europe and North America many rules and regularities required for its institutionalization in general; indeed these included the formation of the national language and the institutionalization at university level of the disciplines in jurisprudence, natural sciences, mathematics, engineering, medicine, social sciences, and the humanities. In Japanese academia, it took a number of political reforms and struggles before the very idea of the national language of Japanese was implemented. Until the late nineteenth century, there was no national language that scholars could rely upon in Japan,14 and, as Nishida Kitarô (西田幾多 郎) recalled later in his life, many young intellectuals were determined to write their essays and treatises in the modern Japanese language when the discipline of philosophy was established at newly created universities. To write a philosophical argument in modern Japanese or the modern vernacular language (口 語) was a great challenge that they aspired to. They could no longer rely upon classical Chinese or kambun (漢文) which they had depended on until the onset

52  Naoki Sakai of modernization in Japan. They were forced to abandon the legacies of the old Sino-centric world and enter the forum of the international world which was regulated by the system of international law. Instead of texts written in classical Chinese, they had to read modern European texts in English, French, German, and so on, and they were fully aware that newly formed arguments had to be presented in the standard language of modern Japan in the fields of academic knowledge, including philosophy. Nevertheless, we cannot overlook a set of questions left unanswered by those Japanese intellectuals of the late Meiji (1868–1912) and Taisho (1912–1925) periods. It is a group of related questions concerning the positionality which those intellectuals15 occupied in connection to the academic discipline of philosophy. No doubt they studied philosophy, but could their very arguments, ideas, and insights be registered as belonging to the discipline of philosophy? Normally, to study philosophy means both to engage in the discourse of philosophy, in which the discipline is institutionalized, as well as to become active members of this discipline, to contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of this genre of intellectual work. In this context, philosophy might be comparable to other disciplines in the humanities. Let me pose French literature in Japanese academia, as an example. Just like philosophy, French literature was established as a humanistic academic department at university and was most frequently institutionalized in the Faculty of Letters (文学部), together with other similar genres of humanistic pursuit such as German, Japanese, English literatures, European history, and ethnology. Many students and scholars read, deciphered, commented on, and translated French literary texts and wrote extensively on French literature, but did they actually participate in French literature? Is it possible to claim that they were in fact active participants in the production and reproduction of French literature? In passing, I would like to emphasize that these peculiar features in French literature as practiced in Japan are in fact neither particular nor unique to Japan. There are a huge number of scholars who devote themselves to the study not only of French literature but also of English, German, and Russian literatures all over the world. The popularity of these humanistic disciplines stems from the spatial structure of the modern world, according to which the so-called West has produced the forms of knowledge that ought to be studied, appreciated, and emulated by the rest of humanity. Peoples of the so-called underdeveloped world had to learn things Western in the domains of natural sciences, mathematics, engineering, law, economics, medicine, social sciences, business administration, and the humanities in the modern international world, for the sake of modernization. It has been proven time and again that those who refused to respect and adapt themselves to modern disciplines of knowledge were intellectually defeated by progressive forces, militarily conquered by the colonial powers and administratively subjugated by developed countries. The privileging of the literature of European colonial powers was part and parcel of the scheme of modernization; it was accepted globally that, unless one was submitted to it, one would never have been modernized. As a matter of fact, what is discovered as an institutional dynamics of human science in Japanese academia is the general condition in

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  53 knowledge of modernity that is globally shared. I will not pursue this argument further in this chapter, but it is very important to note that the Eurocentric structure of area studies we have so far acknowledged is the other side of the same coin, or an equivalent in the logical sense to the contraposition in the institutional dynamics of human sciences. The situation of philosophy may not be drastically different to that of French literature. Those who belonged to the department of philosophy, either as faculty members or as students, read so-called Western philosophical texts and evaluated, criticized, and compared different interpretations on them, but could their thinking be identified as philosophical? Frankly speaking, can the Japanese be philosophers be, just as philosophy students working at European universities are presumed to be, potentially and institutionally philosophers of the future? In the remainder of Part I, I would like to focus on two prominent figures, Edmund Husserl on the European side, and the already mentioned Watsuji Tetsurô on the Japanese side. Husserl emphasized the tradition or mission of philosophy—or theory—that he claimed European humanity had inherited from Greek antiquity, asserting that European civilization had miraculously continued to exist for the previous twenty-five centuries. Watsuji wrote extensively about the cultural, ethnic, and racial character of the Japanese nation, which, according to him, necessarily made the Japanese inherently different from Europeans and other Asians. I do not claim that there are many issues on which these two authors agreed, even though both were engaged in the discipline of philosophy. However, there is one topic on which they seem to form a mutually complementary relationship in a peculiar way. That is the presumption of anthropological difference, a sort of prescriptive anticipation, that insists that European humanity is inherently and historically distinct from the rest of humanity. And, especially for Husserl, anthropological difference is closely affiliated with the general theme of ‘theory’ and ‘theoretical attitude’ that marks the European tradition of philosophy. A Crisis of European Humanity If not completely oxymoronic, the pairing of theory and Asia, as in Asian Theory for instance, may strike many readers as a sort of quirk or a defamiliarizing trick, or as an exoticizing curiosity like ‘Zen theory.’ At best it can have the effect of exposing the presumption often assumed in academic fields in dealing with some aspects of what we understand by the term ‘Asia,’ namely, that theory is something we normally do not expect there. Precisely because this sense of oddity invoked when theory is associated with Asia is no more than a certain presumptive or conditional reflex, neither theory nor Asia receives rigorous scrutiny; both remain mostly vague in conceptual articulation. Rarely have we asked ourselves why we are not unsettled about this feeling of incongruity; where this discomfort originates; or how one could possibly explicate reasons for our taking this underlying presumption for granted. I suspect that, as long as it remains presumptive and refuses to be further examined conceptually, or reflected upon theoretically, it becomes something one

54  Naoki Sakai might well call a ‘civilizational spell’ that will continue to cast a curse on us. In other words, we will remain haunted by this presumption about theory and Asia. Of course, this is a definite sign that we are captive in the discourse of the West and the Rest. Here we will undertake a brief meditation on how we might disentangle ourselves from this spell. So, why do we feel odd about the unexpected combination of theory and Asia in the first place? Or, with more of an emphasis on our analytical attentiveness, how can we manage to evade a sense of oddity about the fact that we are accustomed to feeling strange about the combination of theory and Asia? In the early twentieth century, a number of prominent intellectuals addressed the question of Europe’s commitment to theory. Immediately Edmund Husserl and some figures like Paul Valéry come to mind. For example, Husserl argued that Indian or Chinese philosophy could hardly be regarded as authentically philosophical because the life attitude that Indian and Chinese philosophers embodied was not genuinely ‘theoretical.’16 For him, Europe was not merely a geographic category. Unlike ‘empirical anthropological types’ such as the Chinese, Indians, Eskimos, or even the Gypsies roaming through territorial Europe, he continued that Europe is more than a geographic space. It is a historical unity of peoples who share a certain kinship or modality of being human, a European humanity, that distinguishes them from general humanity. And it is absolutely impossible to conceive of this European ‘man’ without his commitment to theory, without the sense of mission handed down from the ancient Greeks through to the twentieth century in the name of philosophy. In his insistence on the historical mission of European ‘man,’ one might detect not only the difference in terms of geopolitical origin and residence—the geographic areas of Europe distinct from those of non-Europe—in the modern world, but also the somewhat more tangible perception of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the intimately human and the equally intimately non-human. As I have argued elsewhere too, the teleology of reason that Husserl advocates does not make sense unless Europe is closely affiliated with the dichotomy of humanitas and anthropos, two distinct statuses in the general category of humanity, namely, ‘man’ or human being in general.17 Of course, this is an archetypical declaration of anthropological difference, without which the idea of European humanity would not be intelligible. For Husserl, theory was unquestionably something that characterized the European spirit or the spiritual shape of Europe. He referred to the crisis of theoretical or philosophical reason on the grounds that Europeans could not fashion themselves as such without a commitment to theory. What he perceived in the 1920s and 1930s was a crisis of the European man, the widespread reality across Europe that Europeans were ceasing to be European in this specific regard.18 In other words, he was horrified that Europeans were getting less and less spiritually distinguishable from such anthropological types as the Chinese and the Indians.

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  55 To my knowledge, the statement that we normally do not expect theory from Asia has been put forth on a number of occasions, and some people—including Husserl—have wanted to raise this issue as part of their critical assessment of the contemporary world. For Husserl, in his later works, notably in his posthumous work collected and compiled under the title of the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, what is significant about the historical mission of European humanity, for instance, is that the entire venture of his phenomenology was reformulated as a historical movement of the European spirit, as a teleological project; this is, concurrently, a recourse to the past origin of European humanity on the one hand, as well as an infinite ecstatic self-overcoming in the future, on the other. Clearly just before his death, under extreme political adversity, Husserl wanted to present his phenomenology as a historical embodiment of the mission for European humanity; he attempted to speak as the ultimate representative of ‘the spiritual shape of Europe.’19 Let me offer a brief—and admittedly rather sketchy—historical assessment of Husserl’s ambiguity on racism and the international background of the early 1930s. We cannot ignore the fact that he wrote about the crisis of European humanity in the political climate of fascism and antisemitism. It is more than probable that he offered his diagnosis of the crisis of European sciences as an implicit condemnation of antisemitic jingoism in Europe. As soon as the Nazi Party dominated the German Reichstag in March 1933, it passed many pieces of legislation including the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Barufseamtentums). These were measures aimed at excluding anti-Nazi and non-Aryan elements from public institutions such as the civil service, schools, the judiciary, and universities. These Nazi policies were in accordance with the populist outcry for ‘Europe for the Europeans,’ that was spreading throughout Europe at that time. Indeed the life of Edmund Husserl, an internationally renowned philosopher at Freiburg University, was severely affected, even though as of 1928 he was already in retirement from his position as professor in philosophy; it was then inherited by his equally renowned student, Martin Heidegger, himself a Nazi Party member. Being a Jew born in Moravia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Husserl was no longer allowed to publish or lecture in public in Germany with the arrival of these newly implemented Nazi policies. In May and November of 1935, Edmund Husserl was invited to give lectures outside Germany, in Vienna and Prague. According to Ludwig Landgrebe, Walter Biemel and others involved in the deciphering and compilation of stenographic manuscripts and notes left behind by Husserl—he died in 1938—these lectures marked the beginning of the unfinished work we now know as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. One may well recognize in these writings an expansion of the themes that Husserl had already discussed in his previous works, including Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, based upon lectures he delivered in Paris in 1929. What distinguished the

56  Naoki Sakai Vienna lecture from those in Paris was his open confrontation with the political climate of the time as well as the domination of positivism in natural, social and human sciences. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl addressed the question of modernity in philosophy, while in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, he reorganized his discussion of a set of topics on philosophy’s historicity under a new directive or problematic which he summarized as ‘the crisis of European humanity.’ The rise of National Socialism in Germany, or more generally of fascism in many European countries, Americas, and Japan, provoked a widespread fear, not only within Europe and the Americas, but also in Northeast Asia. As I have discussed elsewhere,20 for instance, a nationwide anti-fascist movement was organized over the dismissal of Takigawa Yukitoki （瀧川 幸辰） in Japan, only two months after the Nazi ascendency to the national state. The Minister of Education, Hatoyama Ichirô （鳩山 一郎—the grandfather of Hatoyama Yukio（鳩山 由 紀夫）, a recent prime minister of Japan (2009–10)—dismissed Professor Takigawa Yukitoki from the Faculty of Law at the Kyoto Imperial University both for his alleged sympathy with Marxist scholarship, and his supposedly critical attitude toward family morality. In the same month of that year—May 1933—Heidegger’s Rector’s address was widely covered by Japanese mass media; leading intellectuals of the day, Tanabe Hajime（田邊 元）, Miki Kiyoshi（三木 清）, Tosaka Jun（戸坂 潤）, Shinmei Masamichi（新明 正道） and others wrote in alarm about the rise of fascism in Europe. It is easy to detect the sense of urgency with which Japanese intellectuals received the news of a National Socialist insurgency—around this time ‘fassho’ （「ファッショ）） was first coined in the Japanese vernacular and began to be used to denote contemporary global trends toward ultranationalism and doctrines of racial purity—and, for the rest of the 1930s, the topic of fascism continued to dominate Japanese mass media. The public debates on fascism endured until the Japanese State officially endorsed the leading regimes of fascist ideologies, Germany and Italy, by signing the Axis Pact in September 1940. A few months later other countries, including those of so-called clerical fascism joined this Pact, although the Japanese leadership was hesitant to openly endorse the ethnic nationalism and racist doctrines especially prevalent in National Socialism. Even during the war, Japanese intellectuals and reform-minded bureaucrats— except for a few ethnic nationalists such as Watsuji Tetsurô, who played particularly significant roles in the intellectual scene of postwar Japan—remained critical of the racial policies of Nazi Germany and the antisemitism of clerical fascism. Of course, Nazism’s outright disdain for the yellow race made it hard for the Japanese to accept it. But, more importantly, many Japanese bureaucrats and intellectuals could not accept the basic tenets of National Socialism because they cared for the imperial strategy of the Japanese Empire and were concerned about the multi-­ ethnic colonial-imperial order that Japan was creating in East Asia; they advocated for the ideas of the East Asian Community—later the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere—by claiming that it was Japan’s mission to liberate Asian peoples from the shackles of white supremacy.

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  57 It was in such a political climate that Husserl delivered his lectures in Prague and Vienna. He was a victim of the populist demand for ‘Europe for the Europeans,’ but he did not hesitate to endorse the rhetoric of Eurocentric exclusionism when it was an issue of the spirit of European humanity. In more ways than one, Husserl’s assertion of the historical mission of European humanity was closely associated with an idolization of European humanity and, ironically, it endorsed the institutional framework within which the discipline of philosophy was couched in Japanese academia. In an unexpected and paradoxical way, Husserl’s teleology of reason resonated with the academic formation of the humanistic sciences at Japanese universities. By raising the issue of European sciences in crisis, he tacitly but unambiguously demonstrated that he was entitled to speak as a European genuinely committed to the historical mission of European humanity—all the achievements of transcendental phenomenology should serve as its testimonial. He may have advocated for the denunciation and correction of the typically antisemitic notion of Europe widely propagated in the campaign for ‘Europe for the Europeans,’ which not only excluded but also targeted European Jewry as an intrusion from non-Europe, but an explicit denunciation of antisemitism cannot be found in his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology or in his lecture in Vienna. Perhaps he wanted to perlocutionarily establish that he could speak as an authentic European by indicating that many who claimed to be European in fact failed to live up to the expected standard of European humanity. Obviously Husserl was convinced that he could still position himself on the side of Europe, and in opposition to the side of the Rest of the world. Such a privilege was unavailable to Japanese intellectuals like Watsuji Tetsurô. Interestingly enough, Husserl further argued that it was not sufficient to be born, raised, and reside in Europe, a geographic territory, in order to be identified with Europe. For example, Gypsies were born, raised, and living in Europe, but they did not qualify as Europeans, since it was implied that being European required a certain historical resolution. In this regard, Europe was much more than a geographic index. For Husserl, what was expected of a European was nothing but his commitment to the teleological mission of European rationality.21 Does Husserl’s insistence upon Europe’s historical mission not imply that, as a matter of fact, the vast majority of people living in Europe failed to qualify as European, and that, even if they presumed they were European, they should have been denied historical identity as Europeans? Otherwise, can we really claim that the vast majority of the residents of territorial Europe did commit themselves to the teleological mission of ‘theoretical attitude’? Is it possible to discover the ‘spiritual shape of European humanity’ among them, even in excluding the Gypsies and first-generation immigrants from non-Europe? Were the vast majority of Europeans, in fact, no different from the Gypsies who might be physically located within Europe but never committed to the historical mission of European humanity? Then, the inevitable question follows: How should Europe—or the West—be identified? It is rather surprising that Husserl seemed to have few qualms about identifying himself as an authentic European, not as a nomadic figure like the Gypsies.22

58  Naoki Sakai Was this manner of asserting the authenticity of European identity not homologous to the most conventional tactic utilized by antisemitism to depict Jews as foreigners in the German land, as nomadic intruders in Europe from its outside? Did he not reproduce an exclusionary rhetoric not dissimilar to antisemitism, by claiming that the project of phenomenology that he had initiated and pursued for most of his professional career testified to European identity? What is his relationship to antisemitism, as a version of anti-­immigrant racism on the one hand, and to the dichotomy of the West and the Rest for the sustenance of which anthropological difference is repeatedly invoked on the other? Regrettably I will not be able to address a number of problems that are intimately connected to the prescriptive imperative of anthropological difference in this chapter.23 Before moving to the topic of Watsuji Tetsurô, allow me to underline the guiding thread throughout the discussion above: the discipline of philosophy is in an ambiguous relationship to the dichotomy of the West (or Europe) and the Rest, to the prescriptive desire of anthropological difference. While claiming to be a universal science that ought to be open to every human being, philosophy seems to be foreclosed to those who are not European, thus unequivocally privileging European humanity. Nevertheless, it is not clear how an individual can be a European, can identify him or her with European humanity. What is the mechanism or institutional arrangement by which an individual is classified alternatively into European or non-European? How can we possibly explicate those who belong to Europe against those who do not? How is it possible to draw a line or border between Europeans (or Westerners) and non-Europeans (or the Rest)? Let us keep in mind that the disciplinary arrangement of area studies repeats and reproduces some basic premises inherent in ‘the discourse of the West-and-the-Rest,’24 precisely because this disciplinary formation is the contraposition of the Eurocentric dynamics of the humanities. Civilizational Transference and Area Studies One reason why I wanted to focus on Watsuji Tetsurô is that he has probably been one of the most popular Japanese figures among area experts in North America, Europe, and East Asia. Of course, he also used to be very popular among certain Japanese readers; even today many people at least know his name, if not his publications on ethics, Japanese culture, Japanese religions, Japanese national character, the Japanese emperor system, and pre-modern theaters in Japan. Although he did not always construct his narrative strictly within the genre of philosophy, his philosophical writings appear very accessible to a relatively large number of people in Japan who do not necessarily have an specialized knowledge of philosophy; he is known for his ability to produce a lucid and easy-to-comprehend argumentation. Already in the 1960s, Watsuji was recognized as one of the leading historians of Japanese culture, and there are obvious reasons why Robert Bellah, an American sociologist who studied

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  59 Japan’s modernization, singled him out for a discussion of Japanese culture for being well-known as the most typical ideologue for Japanese cultural nationalism. Moreover, we cannot overlook the circumstances of the academic publishing industry under which Watsuji was known as a very popular public figure, particularly among the followers of ‘nihonjin-ron (日本人論, discourse on Japanese uniqueness) around the time when Bellah’s essay was first published. The first outstanding publication of the area studies on Japan, whose institutional foundation was laid during WWII, was The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict. The English original was published soon after the end of the Asia Pacific War and its Japanese translation became available a few years later. It was based upon Benedict’s wartime research and collaboration with the United States Department of War for which she interviewed Japanese prisoners of war and resident Japanese Americans. The book impacted not only American readers but also many Japanese intellectuals, including such leading scholars as Yanagita Kunio （柳田國男, 1875–1962） and Watsuji Tetsurô. The main topic of the book is the national character of the Japanese. Benedict did not hesitate to postulate what she regarded as ‘the Japanese culture’ in the singular, as if the Japanese national community had been constituted as an organic and homogeneous unity, but implicitly it was assumed to be comparable to tribal communities among native Americans that the cultural anthropologist had previously studied. In her book, often characterized as a work of anthropology at distance, there is hardly any methodological or theoretical reflection as to whether or not the modern national community of Japan could be posited as an equivalent to a tribal community in anthropological field work. Indisputably she upheld that ‘we’ consisting, on the one hand, of the author/ anthropologist together with American or Western readers at large, and ‘they’ the Japanese people who are a singular object of this study, on the other, are unambiguously distinct from one another, as the subject of knowing and the object of knowing, respectively. The earliest phase of area studies on Japan is usually characterized by ‘National Character Study.’ It offered the dominant pattern of area studies on Japan partly because the mission of the wartime propagandist campaign was to explain to the American and Allies’ audience the unique feature of the Japanese people so as to better understand them as the enemy. Of course, intelligence gathering was performed within the framework of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ our ally versus our foe. Area studies on Japan was indeed invented postwar, but, as a discipline, it inherited many features of the wartime intelligence service. Consequently, without hesitation or any sense of skepticism, a very simplistic dichotomy between the subject who studies and the object who is studied was superimposed upon the dichotomy of the friend and the enemy; ultimately this binary opposition between area experts who study an area and the indigenous people of the area studied by them is assumed as the basic

60  Naoki Sakai epistemic configuration, generally known as ‘Orientalism,’ in terms of which knowledge on the area is produced. Now I would like to add to what Edward Said explicated with respect to ‘Orientalism’ in area studies (Said’s focus was on the studies of the Orient or area studies on the Middle East). What Said did not cover was to show the transferential constitution of the positionalities of knowledge production in Orientalism. What is undertaken in area studies is much more than the fetishization or exoticization of the East or the Rest of the world. Without Orientalism, the identification of the West as the West would never be accomplished: area experts can give themselves the identity of Westerner only in reference to ‘areas’; they identify themselves with the West only in relation to the area that by definition is outside the West. In this task, two options are usually available: one is the typical field work reportage or what Johannes Fabian refers to as “the denial of coevalness” in cultural or social anthropology.25 Whereas the positionality of the researcher in anthropology is omnipresent or totally detached from the presence of the indigenous people about whom the field work is conducted, the structure of the address in the anthropologist’s reporting narrative is designed in such a way that the natives or the indigenous people who are the subject-matter of the report are never spoken to or addressed. The native people are reduced to the object of observation and description. Another option is the narrative format in which area experts are referred to, together with the natives or indigenous people of the area, but the anthropological difference between area experts and the natives or indigenous inhabitants of the area is presumed from the outset. In other words, even when co-present to each other, area experts and the indigenous are of different sorts of humanity; from the start, scholars of area studies are distinguished from native inhabitants by anthropological difference, thanks to which there should be no sociality or interaction between them. I have to issue a warning disclaimer here. Some of the epistemic presumptions I am to uncover in Benedict, Watsuji, and Bellah may be particular to area studies on Japan, but it is misleading to say that these same presumptions cannot be found in areas beyond Japan, or even in fields outside area studies. Undoubtedly a set of routinized operations are particular to area studies on Japan but some others are shared by those area studies such as South Asia, the Middle East or West Africa. Furthermore, some assumptions are shared by other disciplines beyond area studies, such as cultural anthropology, and even philosophy. Thus, a number of dichotomies that have functioned implicitly or explicitly in modern human and social sciences are often articulated to one another. Of course, these dichotomies vary widely: I have already mentioned the bipolarities of the friend and the enemy, the subject of knowing and the object of knowing, the migrant observer and the indigenous, and so forth. And, probably the most significant dichotomy that cannot be overlooked is that of the West and the Rest.

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  61 PART II

Robert Bellah on Watsuji Tetsurô Robert Bellah’s ‘Japanese Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of Watsuji Tetsurô’ was published in 1965, five years after Watsuji’s death, and nineteen years after Benedict’s monumental book.26 The Allied Occupation of Japan, which started in 1945 when Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers, ended nominally in 1952, and the essay appeared one year after the first Tokyo Olympics, in the midst of Japan’s high economic growth. Not surprisingly his essay inherited many of the methodological presuppositions which Benedict put forth in her analysis of Japanese culture. From the start, Bellah points out that the national culture of Japan is postulated as an organic unity in Watsuji’s work as a whole. But, he hesitates to query either the historicity of this specific kind of cultural formation conventionally designated as ‘national culture’, or whether or not Watsuji’s transhistorical use of national culture could ever be acceptable outside the very limited scope of Japan’s history. What is immediately obvious is that a nation is a community whose unity is extremely unstable, and that it is an organization whose identity and unity constantly change historically. But, in his article, Bellah pays little attention to the vicissitudes of the unity of the Japanese nation. In a sense, Bellah welcomes Watsuji’s treatment of Japanese culture as a transhistorical entity that has endured throughout the last twenty-six centuries, as proof of his irremediable particularism. Can we claim that Bellah was heavily influenced by Watsuji? I am certain that he would have dismissed such a suggestion out right; supposedly there was no room for counter-influence in Robert Bellah’s approach to the Japanese people and their culture, since the relationality between Bellah and Watsuji was preliminarily determined as an epistemological one between a subject and an object, between a visitor to an area, who studies the indigenous people and makes a judgment on them, and the native inhabitant. His essay on the work of Watsuji Tetsurô is organized with a certain division of labor, by which the group of people who study and the other group of people to be studied are assumed to occupy two distinct positionalities. This division of labor, which also follows the pattern of a dichotomy, reproduces an epistemological perspective that operates in modern human and social sciences—the representative case can be found in social and cultural anthropology, so it is no surprise that the first prominent author in the National Character Studies on Japan was a cultural anthropologist, Ruth Benedict—by which the notion of the native or indigenous people, who are stationary and bound to their residential places is invented, in contrast to the mobile and iterant adventurers, colonizers/settlers who visit local sites of indigenous peoples. One wonders on what grounds the peoples of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and other non-European regions could be determined as stationary and be judged as unable to detach from their birthplaces.27 One could guess that such a dichotomous stereotyping was probably invented during the Age of Discovery

62  Naoki Sakai when Europeans traveled across the world, discovered new territories, and colonized them. Surprisingly enough, this dichotomy between the visitor and the native is present not only in Bellah’s article on Watsuji, but also in one of Watsuji’s most popular publications, Climate and Culture （『風土』）. No matter when and how such a distinction between the Europeans and the rest of humanity was established, this dichotomy confirms one of the rules of conduct upon which the disciplines of area studies have been pursued. The discourse of the West and the Rest has served as the basic condition of possibility for the disciplines of area studies. Bellah was not as naïve as Watsuji with regard to the political implications of such an epistemological perspective, but he could never escape the discourse of the West and the Rest; it is precisely because of his internalization of the positionality of the West that Watsuji Tetsurô appeared as an alluring object of study for him. Watsuji presented himself as an ideal object for Bellah’s inquiry, a fascinating object that allowed him to speak from the positionality of the West about an object, a most typical representative of the Rest. Against this epistemological setting, Watsuji implicitly fulfills Bellah’s surreptitious wish to occupy the positionality of the West. Unless the desire for such a positionality is thematically analyzed, however, the very structure of the civilizational transference within which Bellah became intrigued by the work of Watsuji would never be problematized; unless an area expert’s desire to identify with the West is explicitly thematized, Bellah’s identification with the West would be taken for granted and, subsequently, overlooked. In many respects, Watsuji’s culturalism is an archetypical response to Bellah’s desire for civilizational identification: his explicit desire for Watsuji to be a representative of Japanese civilization, as well as his implicit desire to identify himself as a representative figure of Western civilization. Bellah saw the embodiment of what he wanted Japanese people to be like in Watsuji; Watsuji was a figure whose work fulfilled exactly what Bellah wanted to find in the Japanese culture. In this way, he could imagine himself as occupying the positionality of the American or the Westerner, in contrast to such a fetishized image of the Japanese and Asians in general.28 Except for some area experts with an inbred hostility toward humanistic and social scientific theories, what is generally referred to as ‘Modernization Theory’ was widely accepted in the 1950s and 1960s among American students of area studies on Japan and Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Remarkably this theory’s development in the United States had its parallel in Japan. During the inter-war period, some Marxist scholars attempted to synthesize what they learned from Marx’s analysis of capitalism with Max Weber’s sociological thesis on modernization and Protestant ethics. After the war, this approach became the mainstream view on modernization in Japan. On occasion Bellah attempted to distance himself somewhat from the American followers of Modernization Theory, and to side instead with the Japanese version. In the 1930s and during the Asia Pacific War, Watsuji was known as a leading anti-communist ideologue, and he openly expressed his rejection of the Weberian

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  63 vision of modernity. Together with his publications on the Imperial Heritage or ‘the Emperor System’—Watsuji would have rejected the idiom ‘Emperor System’ (天皇制) since it was coined by Marxist scholarship and strictly censored by the Japanese Government until its surrender—I suspect that Watsuji’s extremely conservative or reactionary posture persuaded the General Headquarters of Allied Occupation to pardon him for his wartime activities and co-opt him as useful for the Allied Occupation of Japan as a leading figure of Japanese discourse on culture and the emperor system. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Bellah was initially interested in Watsuji. Bellah was known as a Communist Party member during his college days and studied under Talcott Parsons at graduate school. Undoubtedly through Parsons, he owed much to Max Weber’s scholarship. His first published monograph Tokugawa Religions presents a Weberian attempt to interpret Japan’s modernization during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868). Unlike many of the followers of Modernization Theory who simplemindedly internalized the anti-communist propaganda of the McCarthy era, he did not overlook Weber’s pessimistic view of capitalism and its consequences. In this sense, he felt much closer to some Japanese intellectuals, such as Maruyama Masao （丸山眞男, 1914–96） and Ôtsuka Hisao （大塚久雄, 1907–96）.29 One of the conceptual schemes in Modernization Theory applied extensively to the analysis of modernization in non-Western societies is the dichotomy of universalism and particularism.30 After the fantasized image of American society, it was argued that people of the United States, purportedly the most advanced society in the world, had a general tendency to adopt whatever was most rational and acceptable to the widest variety of people, in contrast to some other societies in which people valued tradition, communal harmony, and existent social hierarchy over rationality. The former tendency was then named ‘universalism,’ whereas the latter was ‘particularism.’ Under the former, the social transformations necessary for the modernization of a society are enhanced, while transformations are often blocked under the latter. What was interesting from the perspective of the area experts of the 1960s is that universalism was not prevalent in Japan, yet it appeared exceptionally successful in modernization among other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In ‘Japanese Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of Watsuji Tetsurô,’ Bellah chose to focus on Watsuji because he was probably one of the most hostile to universalism. In this respect, he was an ideal representative figure of Japanese particularism. There were many Japanese scholars, religious thinkers, social critics, and public intellectuals with a strong orientation toward universalism. Bellah did not hesitate to admit that such Japanese figures as Shinran （親 鸞）, Ogyû Sorai （荻生徂徠）, Uchimura Kanzô （内村鑑三）, and Nishida Kitarô（西田幾多郎）undoubtedly belonged to the universalist group, but Watsuji stood out in his rejection of universalistic ideas and displayed a particularistic insistence upon the uniqueness and internal harmony of Japanese culture. Unlike many others, including Bellah himself, and some progressive Japanese intellectuals, Watsuji was only interested in Japan and did not show any genuine ‘interest in

64  Naoki Sakai understanding other societies for their own sake.’31 When he was young, Watsuji was interested in Western culture and studied such figures as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, but as he aged, his Western veneer peeled away; he returned to a more deep-seated layer of Japanese culture, and his orientations toward particularism all manifested. It was in the work of Watsuji Tetsurô that Bellah thus discovered what he sought for in the Rest. In this respect, Watsuji was an ideal representative of Japanese culture, in contrast to which Bellah was able to surreptitiously assert his Western identity. Of decisive importance in this inquiry is that what is revealed in Bellah’s discussion of Watsuji’s work must never be attributed to him alone, since this form of reciprocity of desire can be found generally in the discipline of area studies on Japan, and moreover, in the disciplines of area studies at large. This is the problem of what elsewhere I have called ‘civilizational transference’. National Culture and Comparative Method Among Watsuji Tetsurô’s works, Fûdo (『風土』 or Climate and Culture) is perhaps the most popular and was originally published serially in the monthly journal Shisô （『思想』）. The essays are partially based upon what he observed in several places during his journey to Germany in 1927, and they were collected into one monograph Climate and Culture consisting of a preface and five chapters, eventually to be published in 1935.32 After being awarded a three-year study-abroad scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Watsuji left Japan in February of 1927. His passenger ship Hakusan-maru anchored in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, some ports in India, and Aden, and then continued to sail through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean Sea. He arrived in Marseille on March 27, 1927, and traveled on to Germany by train, finally reaching Berlin in early April. In building a system of thought on climate, cultural tradition, and ethics, Watsuji tried to show that there is a close complementarity in human existence between ethical conventions and climatic conditions. By ‘the spatial structure of human existence,’ he wants to highlight the social and communal dimensions of an individual’s life; he implies that individuals are already and always engaged in their relations to other humans. The individuality of the human being is meaningful only against the backdrop of the simultaneous copresence of other human existence. Hence, he argues, individuality and communality are in a dialectic relationship and supplementary to each other. In dismissing the basic vision of modernity promoted by Liberalism or Japanese Marxism (after the Asia Pacific War, the Japanese version of Modernization Theory), he rejects the idea that individualism is a sign of modernity that functions as a moral incentive as well as an epistemological framework. Hence, he insists that the Heideggerian existential analysis of Dasein overlooks the important aspects of human existence as Mit-dasein or ‘being-with’ （共存在）, and he claims that the priority of time over space in Being and Time assumes the standpoint of individualism from the outset. I do not know to what extent Watsuji’s reading of early Heidegger can be tolerated, nor do I second his use of the term ‘dialectic.’ Certainly Watsuji is not known

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  65 for his theoretical rigor, and I would not rely too much on either his reading of Heidegger or his uses of the philosophical terms mobilized in Being and Time. Instead, let me draw attention to the way in which Watsuji treats and objectifies those human beings who do not share Japanese nationality, particularly with regard to the sociality of ‘me’ in relation to ‘you’, in Climate and Culture (『風土』) and Ethics (『倫理学』). Judging from the design of the 1935 version of Climate and Culture, we are led to conclude that his discussion of the spatiality of human existence relies largely upon a presumption of the unicity of an ethnic national culture and justifies the notion of national character in terms of which a variety of peoples are described under different climatic conditions. First, Watsuji introduced three main climatic zones: monsoon, desert, and pasture (instead of pasture, ‘meadow’ is adopted in the English translation by Geoffrey Bownas).33 Within each of these, different cultural characters are postulated, but regardless of what sort of communal unity these people form—national community, ethnic community, race, clannish affiliation, or kinship—in its historical and geographic specificity, no clear distinction is drawn between the unity of a nation and that of a culture. As a result, ‘cultural character’ and ‘national character’ are almost indistinguishable. Interestingly enough, it is due to this confusion of culture and nation that his descriptions of the cultural/climatic characters of Asian peoples anticipate the National Character Study of postwar area studies. Apparently, by arguing ‘the climatic historicity manifesting itself in the spatial and temporal structure of human existence,’34 Watsuji seems to presuppose the national character, no matter whether the people in question constitutes a nation, an ethnos, race, tribe, or some other social group. For instance, within the monsoon zone （モンスーン域）, four distinct national characters, Chinese, South Sea, Indian, and Japanese, were proposed.35 Even though these peoples, except for the Japanese, had yet to be independent in order to form their own nations in 1927, when he briefly sojourned in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, a few ports in India, and Aden; his observations, descriptions, and analyses of them uniformly and perfunctorily follow the protocol of National Character Study. Thus, his argumentation is built on the procedure of comparison by which different (national) characters are compared with each other. Yet there is no argument as to how the communal unity, upon which each [national] character is predicated, can be identified in comparison to the others. Were there not many residents of Chinese and Indian origin among the people of the South Seas? Obviously in the world of Watsuji Tetsurô, the Chinese are Chinese transhistorically, independent of the history of migration; the Indians are Indians regardless of the history of colonial conquest. As we will see, he would develop the same transhistorical culturalism about the Japanese. How each national character can be postulated as a set of enduring features is justified first on the basis of his personal intuition about people in each climatic zone. However, he does not critically and reflectively examine whether or not what he projects onto these peoples is any more than his stereotypical prejudice about those peoples. Above all else, I cannot help feeling skeptical about his claim that he visited these places and

66  Naoki Sakai actually observed the inhabitants. Is what he designates by ‘the climatic character’ any more than a projection of racist stereotypes? If my suspicion is correct, the question we must be concerned with is not how accurately and objectively Watsuji observed and portrayed peoples in China, the South Seas, and India but what he expected from them, what he wanted to see in them so as to constitute his own positionality in relation to which the national characters of peoples in China, the South Seas and India were anticipated. In February and March of 1927, when he witnessed some residents in these places, the names of the Chinese and the Indians could not refer to nationality in the conventional sense, i.e., to the totality of a population under the jurisdiction of a sovereign state. What he deliberately overlooked is the whole process of people’s identification. For instance, people in China had to struggle among themselves and with foreign colonial powers in order to establish their identity or identities as a nation. By appealing to the reified notion of ‘culture,’ however, Watsuji neglects the entire argument about people’s communality and identification. What is knowingly disavowed in his argumentation on people’s cultural identity is that any community, including a national one, is something to be created, and that the rules and conventions of any community must be negotiated, agreed or disagreed upon, and institutionalized before they gain the power of enforcement for the members of that community. By essentializing ‘culture,’ he tries to deprive the nation of its historicity. For him, the nation is an eternal or ahistorical entity precisely because it is a stereotype projected onto the fantasized other, an image pre-formed according to his whim that is then stamped onto a figure of an Asian other. In short, what matters in his description of the national characters of those residents of the ports he happened to visit on his way to Germany is how he could position himself in relation to those objects of cultural observation, whether or not he could possibly assume the subjective position vis-à-vis those indigenous people of Asia. Immediately we are confronted with some misgivings about his observations of Asians. Does he not account for diversity within the group identified as Indian, for example? Can he explain how the Indian [national] character can be abstracted from the huge population of South Asia? The very unities of the Chinese, Indian, South Seas, Japanese, and Europeans are taken for granted simply because the very small number of local people Watsuji happened to see are pigeonholed conventionally or by hearsay. To put it more precisely, is it because in fact he did not observe or encounter actual inhabitants of these places he visited that he could speak so self-assertively of the cultural or national characters of the peoples in the South Seas, China, and India? Was what he informed us about the national characters of these peoples nothing more than his fantasies of what he expected them to be like? After all, what he sought was the assertion that he too could occupy the positionality of a European or Western observer in relation to those indigenous residents; he wanted to reproduce the configuration of epistemic positionalities in which Watsuji could see, speak, and observe, just like an English person or some other European confronting the natives of Asia.

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  67 The Denial of Coevalness Thus, one cannot help but notice a certain idiosyncrasy in the narrative that depicts his observation: it is characterized by a presumed distance between local folks and Watsuji as an observer/visitor to these foreign places. It is just like a typical touristic narrative depicting the scenery of a foreign land, and we find no description of interactions between the visitor and the local residents. More than a half century later, Johannes Fabian noted an epistemic attitude institutionalized in the disciplines of cultural and social anthropology that is somewhat similar to what one finds in Watsuji’s attitude toward the indigenous peoples he encountered on his foreign trip. Fabian observed that, in anthropology, anthropologists engage in personal relationships with native residents in their field work, but that, in their delivery of knowledge, the indigenous people are distanced or sometimes completely erased from the final products—books, conference presentations, book chapters, and so on—presented by those anthropologists. In their epistemological enterprise, they extract essential information by working with indigenous people but refuse to live and work together with them in the final presentation of knowledge. In their presentation of their scholarly research, anthropologists scarcely address the native people even though the content of their scholarship would never be obtained without the collaboration of native residents. Fabian called this forced absence of copresentation between anthropologists and the indigenous ‘the denial of coevalness.’36 Certainly Watsuji did not work in the discipline of anthropology, but what we find is that his attitude toward residents in those ports on his way to Western Europe was a more exaggerated form of it, something like ‘the fright of coevalness.’ In Watsuji’s description, the people assigned to the positionality of the object are deprived of their spontaneity and rendered totally passive; they are instead absorbed into the landscape. Granted that his stay in each place was relatively short, so we cannot expect a lengthy discussion from him. Nonetheless, his disregard of local residents as persons is really striking. It is as if the visitor stays inside his tour bus all the time, insulated from passersby on the street by thick glass windows, and as if he is determined not to exit the bus to interact with the so-called indigenous people. This tells us something not only about Climate and Culture but also about his entire endeavor to build the science of ‘ethics’ on the basis of the spatial structure of human existence. In Climate and Culture, the people with whom Watsuji engages in personal interactions, such as face-to-face conversations, are all Japanese. In the entire work, I could not find a single depiction of an incident in which Chinese, Indian, or European individuals were coeval with Watsuji or coexisted with him. From the start, he somewhat presumed that an individual is unable to socialize with another individual belonging to a different nationality, ethnicity, or race. Below we will examine his culturalism with regard to his arguments on ethics; what we notice in his attitude toward non-Japanese is exactly the contraposition of the statements he puts forth in terms of ‘mutual relationship’ or ‘betweenness’ (間 柄). It is assumed from the outset that no ‘mutual relationship’ can exist between Watsuji himself and the objects of his observation such as Chinese, Indians, South Sea people, or Europeans.

68  Naoki Sakai Even though Watsuji is spatially copresent with the indigenous for observation for his description of their national characters, he can be non-coeval with them; neither is he obliged to address them or simply speak to them. For, from the outset, Watsuji presumes that coevalness cannot exist between the Japanese and foreigners, between one nation and other nations, between one ethnic culture and another. To the degree to which Japanese identity is a pre-given, the Japanese are implicitly or explicitly juxtaposed with foreigners belonging to other nations. Since the unity of the nation is only viable in the modality of internationality, an individual can be classified into a nation only as long as one nation is distinguished and juxtaposed to others in imagination. The foreigners and the Japanese could see and recognize each other for the classification of individuals into the categories of nationality, yet the recognition of foreigners as belonging to a different nationality does not require that the observer interact with them; neither is he obligated to address them. It is possible for Watsuji Tetsurô to describe their national characters without socializing or ‘being in common’ with them. In other words, he postulates that aidagara (‘mutual relationship’ or ‘betweenness’, 間柄) exists exclusively among the people belonging to the same nationality or ethnos. Perhaps unwittingly, Watsuji illustrates what he means by ‘mutual relationship’ or ‘betweenness’ by way of its negative image; he demonstrates what aidagara is like when it is absent between him and the local residents whose national characters he wants to describe. According to Watsuji, it is somewhat assumed that aidagara cannot prevail among people belonging to different nations, ethnicities, or races. Humanity can be classified into species—the sets of the nation, the ethnos, and the race—but individual humans are supposedly confined to their national or ethnic categories, only inside of which coevalness is supposed to prevail. After determining the general character of human nature in the monsoon zone to be ‘submissive and resignational’ （受容的忍従的), he continues to discuss particular types within that zone one by one, the Chinese, the South Seas Islanders, and the Indian national characters. In reference to the absence of seasonal summer in the South Seas, Watsuji concludes: This factor helps us to understand why the people of the South Seas have never made any appreciable cultural progress. […] apart from the rare occasions when huge Buddhist pagodas were built in Java under the spur of Indian culture, the people of the South Seas have given birth to no cultural monuments. So they became easy prey for and ready slaves of the Europeans after the Renaissance.37 It is important to keep in mind that he is aware of the historical configuration under which such a stereotypical portrayal of people living in the monsoon climate has been created. It is a general condition called ‘colonialism’ under which the peoples of China, the South Seas, India, and so on are observed and depicted. Here ‘colonialism’ does not merely signify a particular structure of political governance

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  69 by which some people from a remote land conquer and rule local population and settle in that local land; it also means an epistemological framework, thanks to which visitors from a modern nation-state, like Watsuji, anthropologists from EuroAmerican nations, or colonial administrators of the suzerain state, feel entitled to look down upon the local population who have failed to form their own sovereign state. In this instance, colonialism manifests itself as an epistemological framework in which certain individuals are authorized to objectify certain others, in which a group of individuals is assigned to one positionality, while another group is postulated to occupy a different one. It is not particularly difficult to detect that Watsuji wished to observe from the positionality of the British who happened to rule Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, and Aden around the time of his journey to Europe. He makes a similar observation about the Indians: The structure of the resignation type, in the case of the Indians, is set in the mould [sic] of a lack of historical awareness, a fullness of feeling and a relaxation of will power.38 He continues his depiction of the Indian [national] character. Because of his receptivity and resignation, or, to put it another way, because of his lack of an aggressive and masterful nature, the Indian, in fact, prompts in us and draws out from us all our own aggressive and masterful characteristics. It is on such grounds that the visitor to India is made to wish impulsively that the Indian would take up his struggle for independence. …… In this sense, although his cotton may well glut the world’s market, the Indian is receptive and resigned as ever; — witness his policy of non-resistance and passive obedience. The physical strength of the Indian labourer is said to be far less even than that of the Chinese, and no more than a quarter or third of that of his West European counterpart; but neither this, nor his distinctive nature can be transformed overnight.39 In this quote, Watsuji is willfully oblivious to the fact that, under normal circumstances in this type of colonial narrative, visitors to India are ‘white.’40 Nevertheless he says ‘we’ to include Watsuji himself and some imagined tourists from Europe. He does not question whether or not he is entitled to be included among those ‘visitors’ who ‘are made to wish impulsively that the Indian would take up his struggle for independence.’ We will see what happens to him when he is confronted with the reality in which he may not be included among the particular group of ‘us’ in Europe. Meanwhile, a similar argument is put forth in determining the Chinese national character: There is here a close affinity with the anarchic tendency of the Chinese, who submit to no restraints other than those based in blood or regional

70  Naoki Sakai associations. The Chinese has no mind for tax burdens imposed by the state; he escapes his obligations in the matter of military service; he ignores orders and treats the law as scrap-paper; he gambles and smokes his opium. In short, he evades all state control and conducts himself at his own will. Of course, he acquiesces in any power that would be difficult to defy, but this is an outward acquiescence, a formal submission only; the heart remains untamed. This resignation that does not countenance submission is intimately linked with another characteristic of the Chinese—his lack of emotion.41 As if to justify the colonial administrations governing of those ports he visited, he attempts to focus on the shortcomings inherent in the local resident and argues that it was not violent conquest on the part of British colonizers—French, American, or Japanese, depending upon the conditions of particular areas42—that enslaved those peoples: their inherent shortcomings caused the colonization of China, Singapore, or India. Therefore, they had only themselves to blame! But why does Watsuji have to compose excuses on behalf of British or European colonizers? Why is he willing to find justification for Western colonialisms? Apart from the projection of racist stereotypes onto peoples of the South Seas, India, and China, what one can clearly notice in Watsuji’s attempts to describe the national characteristic of the residents of the Asian ports is the persistence of an underlining desire. Watsuji speaks as though he were a British administrator in these colonies. His entire narrative in Climate and Culture is underlined with the covert wish to observe Asians from the positionality of European visitors, to speak from the positionality of British colonizers. Of course, it is a surreptitious wish deliberately repressed, but its basic structure reveals itself when we analyze the performance of ‘civilizational transference’ inherent in the discourse of Japanese uniqueness（日本人論）below. The dichotomous co-figuration of the West and the Rest is operating here. In this respect, he is totally immersed in the rhetoric of modernization that is dominant in Japan in the early twentieth century. In popular discussion, modernization was hardly distinguished from Europeanization. In this respect, the Japanese desire to modernize Japan manifested itself in the Japanese desire to simulate Europeans. Because of its putative success in modernization, a certain rhetoric persuaded people within Japan proper that the Japanese were exceptional among Asian societies, among the peoples of the East. The same rhetoric was repeated by some followers of Modernization Theory after Japan’s surrender. One of the most popular mottos promoted by the postwar Modernization Theory was: ‘Japan is the only genuinely modern society in the entirety of Asia.’ In this formula of a modernization success story, two positionalities, the West and the Rest, are compared, and one is expected to emulate the values, institutions, and attitudes specific to modernity—both Japanese Marxists such as Ôtsuka Hisao (大塚久雄) and American advocates of Modernization Theory relied selectively upon Max Weber’s analysis of capitalism and Protestantism—while endeavoring to overcome the values, conventions, and traditional attitudes prevalent in pre-modernity, provided that the Modernization Theory promoted by some Japanese Marxists stressed the failure of Japanese

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  71 modernization rather than its success. It is known that Watsuji was generally hostile toward the vision of modernity promoted by so-called Enlightenment intellectuals like Fukuzawa Yukichi (福澤諭吉). But I do not believe that he was at all critical of the Eurocentric structure inherent in the discourse of the West and the Rest in general, or that he made any efforts to free himself from his idolization of the West in 1927 when he traveled by ship from Japan to Marseille. Resentment against the West The subterranean hostility toward the West or modernization detected by Robert Bellah in the work of Watsuji Tetsurô does not signal at all that Watsuji was outside the discourse of the West and the Rest. Regardless of whether Watsuji himself disliked such values and attitudes as Protestant ethics and individualism, he could not free himself from an obstinate idealization of European ways of life which Asian societies were supposed to emulate. Watsuji may have been resentful toward individualism and other so-called Western values, but that does not mean that he was either free of civilizational transference or unbound by the discourse of the West and the Rest. The idea of modernization implied a process and strategy whereby a pre-modern society of Asia was transformed into one similar to those of Western Europe and North America. From the Meiji Restoration onward, the consensus at least among the elites of Japanese society, and later among the general public as well, was that one must strive to emulate the so-called West and transform into somebody resembling a Westerner. Furthermore, it was a general perception that, unlike other Asian peoples, the Japanese succeeded in modernizing themselves by adopting European ideas and institutions, including modern sciences and technology, a national education system, universal conscription, parliamentarism, and, of course, capitalism. Some intellectuals went as far as to argue that Japan was entitled to help modernize other Asian countries by adopting a so-called missionary positionality, thereby assuming Europe’s mission of civilizing Asia. A decade after Watsuji’s journey to Berlin, the Konoe Cabinet （近衛文麿内閣） proposed the East Asian Order, which soon changed into the idea of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere （大東亜共栄圏）. In terms of his obsessive concern for the British perspective which Asians were viewed from, Watsuji was not an exception: best exemplified by the phrase ‘Exiting Asia and Entering Europe’ （「脱亜入欧」）, Japan’s modernization was guided by the desire to exit ‘pre-modern Asia.’ Clearly Japanese leadership took for granted the bifurcated spatial structure of the world between Europe and nonEurope or the West and the Rest. As we will see later, Watsuji did not endorse the multi-ethnic project of Greater East Asia promoted by Japanese imperial nationalism because of his hostility to the very policy of multi-ethnic imperial order, or his fear of the ethnic contamination of Japanese blood. Yet, he was neither reflective enough about his own aspiration toward the colonial positionality of Europeans nor about his contempt toward other Asians. By attempting to speak and view from the positionality of British colonizers, Watsuji endeavored to depict East and

72  Naoki Sakai South Asian peoples implicitly from the perspective of European colonizers, thereby internalizing the very attitude of the British looking at the colonized in Asia, as though he could occupy that supposed European standpoint. Let me stress once again that hostility toward the West or individualism does not guarantee that one is outside the discourse of the West and the Rest at all. Time and time again in the works of Watsuji Tetsurô we witness the copresence of a certain liberalism as well as an obsession with pure blood racism. During his short stay in Germany, his entire attitude toward Europe seemed to alter; his implicit idolization of the British disappeared. Some interruption must have taken place in his life during his shortened stay in Germany. According to the chronological table included in Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshû,43 he arrived in Berlin in early April but left the city as early as November 1st of the same year. His studyabroad scholarship issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education was to cover a three-year period in Germany. Yet he spent less than seven months there before starting his return journey home. Life there must have been unbearable for him. Instead, he shortened his stay in Berlin and spent a half year sightseeing in Germany, France, and Italy, and eventually arrived in Japan on July 3, 1928. Perhaps it was too embarrassing for him to return home nearly two years early, so he delayed it as much as possible. Judging by his correspondence with his wife included in his posthumous publication To My Wife in My Home Country,44 he went through some sort of mental breakdown while in Germany; this might well have been the reason for his decision to abandon his study-abroad plan.45 Interestingly, this abrupt change in his study plan seems to offer an opportunity to further comprehend his Ethics （『倫理学』）, whose central concept ‘mutual relationship’ or ‘betweenness’ (間柄) had already played a significant role in Climate and Culture. By including some insights he gained on his journey in February and March of 1927 (incidentally he never produced such an auto-biographical narrative about Asian places on his return journey46), Watsuji began to outline the project of his Ethics while publishing some of his essays serially in Shisô; these essays would later be collected, modified, and integrated into the final monograph version of Climate and Culture published in 1935.47 It now seems credible that certain problems that I detected in Climate and Culture are in fact intimately related to how his project of Ethics developed. More than two decades ago, I was invited to a workshop at a university in the United States about Japanese philosophy where I was fortunate enough to meet some Japanese scholars working on Watsuji Tetsurô. One of them happened to be a disciple of Watsuji who had studied Japanese religions and ethics under his supervision at Tokyo University. Coincidentally, he told the participants at the workshop that his mentor suffered from a certain psychopathological problem. Since our schedule was tight, he had no time to elaborate on it and said simply, ‘Professor Watsuji could not deal with white people’ （『和辻先生は白 人が駄目なんですよ。』）. However, his short comment helped to illuminate some of the conundrums I had always encountered in Watsuji Tetsurô’s ethical thought. One of which was his exceedingly simplistic conception of ‘spatiality in human existence.’

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  73 As soon as the spatiality of human existence is conceptualized in his Ethics and Climate and Culture, a number of elementary questions arise with regard to how Watsuji conceptualizes the social dimension of human existence. Let me briefly mention some of these. A human being is always committed to a ‘mutual relationship’ according to the overall design of his ethics. But, could a ‘mutual relationship’ or ‘betweenness’ (間柄) be determined in terms of one relationship of one person to another person? Is one person involved in many relationships with many different people simultaneously? Does the spatiality of human existence not imply the multiplicity of mutual relationships in which a human being is involved or situated? Is a human being preliminarily and already not involved in multiple relationships, so that s/he is always immersed in, committed to, and bound by many ‘mutual relationships’? This question is a sort of prelude to more basic questions about Watsuji’s project of ethics. Since a human being is involved in and committed to multiple relationships, how can we be sure that no conflict exists among the imperatives arising from one’s obligations to others? Are the mutual relationships harmonized in a pre-established order from the start? How can Watsuji ensure that the human being always exists in some pre-established harmony? Extensively he attempted to deal with this question, and the set of subsidiary questions, raised in his two-volume oeuvre Ethics. However, I do not believe that he could respond adequately to the following second dilemma. That a person is obligated by his or her ‘betweenness’ toward others does not signify that what a person can do in the mutual relationship is already fully determined. On the contrary, the existential situatedness of ‘betweenness’ does not eliminate uncertainty, anxiety, or futurity because one’s response to the other always takes the form of ‘an address,’ an act of appealing, to which the other can reply only in the future. To be in common with another is to wait for another in the time of future. The spatial existence of the other, by virtue of which ‘I’ am distanced from ‘you’ spatially, means an opening toward the future, that is, an opening toward uncertainty. This is to say, the spatial and personal distance between ‘I’ and ‘you’ always involves the temporality of future, because of which ‘I’ am unable to predict how ‘you’ will respond to ‘my’ address to ‘you.’ Does the spatiality of human existence indubitably invoke the temporal nature of human existence? It follows that it is impossible to conceptualize the spatiality of human existence without invoking indeterminacy or anxiety over uncertainty. It goes without saying that uncertainty, anxiety, or undecidability are incomprehensible without evoking the element of time. And finally, we must ask another question that is not unrelated to the above: what about people who are not situated within such a community of aidagara? What sort of relationship can one possibly have with another human being who does not belong to the same community or the same set of ‘mutual relationships,’ or with whom ‘mutual relationships’ are not yet fully subscribed? How can we conceptualize an inescapable moment in social encounter with others, namely, the unpredictability, uncertainty, or the state of incomprehensibility (wakatte inai 「分か っていない」) of other human beings? It is logically impossible to presuppose

74  Naoki Sakai that human beings are totally comprehended or allocated in the network of social relations all the time. At a certain point, you must get to know the other person; you must get acquainted with other people. In the final analysis, every human being with whom you are in common is a stranger, that is, a foreigner, so that the essence of our social existence could be summarized in the question: how to be in common with strangers/foreigners.48 Moreover, human existence is situated in the mutual relationship embedded in social formations that are always overdetermined. It follows that it is simply impossible to eliminate the aleatory moment of unpredictability, uncertainty, or wager from one’s social relation to the other. Even in your relation to the most intimately related person in your community such as your mother, wife, or child, there is always a moment of wager, unpredictability, or accident. And this is what the spatiality of human existence implies: human beings are distanced from one another. But for the aleatory moment in one’s relationship to others, ethics as a science of sociality is impossible; without the moment of unpredictability, it is utterly impossible to conceive of an ethical norm or declarative imperative, which Watsuji wants to reduce to the already existent relationships shared mutually between ‘me’ and ‘you.’ Precisely because I cannot preliminarily determine or predict how ‘you’ would behave toward ‘me,’ I have to rely on imperative prescription, which is a directive for my future—yet to be accomplished only in the temporality of future anterior—conduct, in my action toward you; the conception of imperative prescription necessarily contains the moment of temporality, an ecstatic moment toward the indeterminate future; Because ‘you’ are spatially distanced from me and are never totally known to ‘me,’ I cannot know in advance how ‘you’ will behave toward ‘me.’ Hence, my action toward you can necessarily take the form of wager. And my ethical conduct always takes the form of address, of speaking—not necessarily in the modality of verbal enunciation but in other modalities of gestures, facial expression, technologically mediated images, and so on—to a stranger/foreigner since I can never completely determine who and what you are. If uncertainty and indeterminacy are eliminated, there would be no encounter with others, no community with any person; then, what we customarily call ‘sociality’ would not exist. This is to say that the spatiality of human existence necessarily introduces the moment of temporality in our communal co-existence. In reference to Watsuji’s observation concerning Asian national characters in Climate and Culture, I have already hinted at certain persistent features of his narrative and argumentation. Now it seems much easier to understand what he struggled to evade: what we cannot help noticing is his tremendous difficulty in dealing with strangers. Already in his descriptions of local residents he encountered in his travels, they were not presented as human agents capable of approaching him; they were treated as things like furniture and more or less faded into the background; those ‘indigenous’ people were viewed, as if totally unrelated personally to the observer/narrator, as if they were deprived of the ability to address him, to converse with him, to approach him; they were just like trees and cattle in a distant meadow. Watsuji depicted Asian residents as if they were safe objects who would never address him, who would never speak to him as interlocutors, who would

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  75 never engage him in the community of ‘being in common.’ What was flatly denied was the potentiality that they could approach him and socialize with him. What is undeniably present throughout Climate and Culture and Ethics is the tremendous hesitation he feels toward strangers, people without Japanese ethnicity/nationality. In this regard, the ethical project proposed by Watsuji is a very strange kind of ethics, what I elsewhere called ‘Hikikomori Nationalism.’49 Civilizational Transference Perhaps, he wished to view the Asians and to speak about the world from the positionality of European colonizers, in the very perspective of the dichotomous cofiguration of the West and the Rest, but his aspiration was interrupted, rejected, and flatly denied. He could no longer adhere to the colonialist vision of modernization embedded in the discourse of the West and the Rest. Until then, he had believed that, coming from ‘the only genuinely modernized country in Asia,’ he was endowed with the right to assume the positionality of the West. But, living in Germany, he was forced to come to terms with the reality of the modern world in which he was seen as a person of color. Perhaps, for the first time, Watsuji found himself in the positionality of the colonized and was forced to come to terms with the incontrovertible fact that he too was a target of the racist gaze. No matter how much he wanted to escape that gaze of the Europeans, he could never escape the discourse of the West and the Rest. On the contrary, he would feel even more conscripted to the positionality of the Rest than before. Yet, the more he sensed rejection by the West, the further he was steeped in the discourse of the West and the Rest. In due course, what underlies the entire project of Watsuji’s ethics is an almost pathological dread of strangers or foreigners; it appears that his ethics embodies an intellectual attempt to build a system of ethics (the philosophy of morality or Sittlichkeit) in which the aleatory moment is eliminated as much as possible. In this respect, I do not hesitate to argue that Watsuji’s Ethics illustrates a deeply troubling attitude, one that refuses to admit the overdetermination, uncertainty, or unpredictability in sociality. In this regard, I would qualify him as an excellent philosopher of my aforementioned ‘nationalism of hikikomori (reclusive withdrawal)’.50 By way of a reading of Watsuji Tetsurô’s Climate and Culture and Ethics, I have introduced the idiom ‘civilizational transference,’ but I am not happy with certain of its connotations. Let me explain why I have decided to use it throughout the present chapter, even though I have a certain reservation in doing so. Both elements ‘civilizational’ and ‘transference,’ of which this idiom is a compound, are problematic, to say the least. I find it necessary to lay out an excuse for this term since it contains the word ‘transference’ which apparently comes from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. By ‘civilizational transference,’ I want to designate a phenomenon or performance of power in a social encounter in which one positionality or party is determined or identified in its paradigmatic relation to another positionality or party within the preconceived configuration of civilizations, such as the West versus Asia.

76  Naoki Sakai As I will explain, the adjectival ‘civilizational’ is not without problems, either. Far from being stable in its semantics, the word ‘civilization’ could mobilize all sorts of human classifications that I would rather evade. Just think about the notorious phrase ‘Western Civilization.’ Does it designate something determinate in a precise and unconfusing manner? It pretends to refer to something definite when we do not know to whom it belongs or who is entitled to own it. It is no accident that white nationalists frequently use the expression ‘love of Western Civilization.’ So, I will use this adjectival ‘civilizational’ with caution, fully aware of its sloppiness, sometimes in the sense of one nation against another, or even in the sense of one race against another. Yet, this idiom is handy to illustrate specific performative instances of power in the discourse of the West and the Rest. As a matter of fact, the occurrence of ‘civilizational transference’ involves laxity or slovenliness partly because it is affiliated with the operation of projection; often, as Watsuji’s selection of the ethnic/national collectivity for the description of their national character most typically illustrates, the target of projection is identified rather arbitrarily. First of all, it is necessary to underline two moments involved in an occurrence of civilizational transference. (1) One moment is that, in the incident of what can be diagnosed as civilizational transference, the configuration of positionalities or parties involved is immediately equated to that of civilization, cultures, nations, or races. It follows that the civilizational transference occurs on the occasion of social relationality between one person and another, between one group of people and another, but that the social relationality is supposed to signify not a personal encounter between individuals but rather a happenstance meeting between two groups or species. Thus, the encounter is construed as a meeting of persons, each of whom is a representative of a species, nation, ethnos, or race. In this respect, the civilizational transference takes the form of a comparative interpretation of species projected onto an incident of social engagement, and, insofar as it is an interpretation, it is always open to other interpretations or to re-interpretations. For example, an encounter of two parties casually described as one between the West and Asia may well be described variously, for instance, as a love affair between an officer in the United States Air Force and a local Asian woman working for a local education authority; the same encounter could be portrayed as one between a Protestant engineer and a Buddhist primary school teacher. As one can see, it is quite possible to construe the social encounter in terms of social positions devoid of reference to civilizations, nations, or races, but the civilizational transference takes place in a scenario that is insistent that a social encounter among strangers must be interpreted, first of all, as a relation between two positionalities with identities predetermined in terms of such species as civilizations, nations, or races. Characteristic of civilizational transference is this obsession and pre-judicial determination to interpret every social encounter as a happenstance of different species: civilizations, nations, ethnicities, or races. (2) The second moment not to be overlooked is that the configuration of civilizations consists of an assortment of definite and neatly classified characteristics: perhaps this is best exemplified by works belonging to the old school of ‘National

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  77 Character Studies’ in area studies, where each civilization is supposed to have a determined set of features in comparison to other civilizations. The idiom ‘civilizational transference’ is adopted precisely for this imaginary setting of comparative cultures or civilizations, thanks to which one party is identified as such in comparison with another party, and that each is identified in the very context of the comparative narrative on species or social groupings. Civilization is a term which eludes a precise conception and impalpably suggests some social formation that can be submitted to comparison with another formation of the same kind. Hence, something like the Chinese civilization is often postulated with the Western civilization, but its conceptual specificity is mythic at best. Unlike a psychoanalytic therapy, two parties thus compared in ‘civilizational transference’ do not necessarily engage in a face-to-face conversation or therapeutic session, and they do not need to engage in conversation in their personal proximity. For instance, the contrasting positionalities of the area expert, who purportedly represents Western civilization, on the one hand, and the indigenous inhabitant of an area, who represents the Chinese civilization on the other, are not necessarily in conversation or personal proximity, but they are situated within the discourse of the West and the Rest. For those of us who approach the disciplinary formation of area studies critically, therefore, neither the positionality of an area expert as a Westerner nor that of a native inhabitant of an area must be naturalized. In this instance, civilization means no more than the hypothesis that the agents who participate in this type of comparison are specified, constituted as two distinct groups in terms of which comparative operations are conducted. In short, ‘civilizational transference’ presupposes the speciation of humanity into the units of civilization, culture, or race. There are many discursive formations in which different forms of knowledge are produced with different conducts of power. The discourse of the West and the Rest is one of them, but insofar as the critical analysis of area studies and its disciplinary formation is concerned, the positionalities constituted in the discourse of the West and the Rest must not be confused with the positions operating in different discourses. This is why tentatively I introduce the two distinct concepts of ‘positionality’ and ‘position.’ What is at stake in our critical endeavor is that the structure of a social encounter that we examine with regard to the production of knowledge in the disciplines of area studies does not always entail an inter-personal proximity between one position and another. Broadly speaking, a social encounter takes place as long as one individual or a group of individuals engages in some social rapport with another individual or group of individuals. There is no guarantee that a social encounter between two parties or people occupying two distinct positions must occur in the element of what Émile Benveniste calls the I-you polarity of ‘an instance of discourse.’51 In other words, a social encounter does not necessarily give rise to the situation of inter-personal dialogue in which the addresser calls him or herself ‘I,’ while calling the addressee ‘you.’ As far as ‘transference’ in psychoanalysis is concerned, the framework of the inter-personal is absolutely necessary, so that

78  Naoki Sakai transference cannot happen or does not make sense when these conditions are not met. This is one reason why I have reservations about the use of this idiom ‘civilizational transference’ in the knowledge production of area studies in general. Some critical investigation was conducted in the fields of anthropology in the 1980s. In cultural anthropology, for instance, during his or her field work an anthropologist from the West may well have engaged in an inter-personal dialogue with the indigenous persons of a so-called primitive society, supposedly located in the Rest.52 But, in area studies at large, a general disciplinary critique of the inter-personal engagement between area experts and the indigenous population has rarely been launched, partly because such conditions of inter-personal conversation are not always met in area studies. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to remove the imaginary setting in which the civilization the area expert putatively belongs to and that of the native population of the area are compared with one another. In other words, we tend to rely upon a very imaginary scenario for civilizational comparison in which civilizational transference occurs. What Watsuji Tetsurô projected onto figures of the Chinese, South Seas, and Indians in his Climate and Culture was nothing but the consequence of civilizational transference that he was involved in, even though those national characters were depicted before these civilizational stereotypes were popularized in mass media in Japan, and then subsequently in the United States. Thus, the idiom civilizational transference should help us grasp a certain aspect of the micro-physics of power in knowledge production in such cases as National Character Studies, or more broadly in the types of area studies that have helped sustain the discourse of the West and the Rest since the end of WWII. Area Studies and Particularism Since the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese Empire has continued to transform its territory and population. Beginning with Hokkaido and Okinawa from the early Meiji period up to 1945, it used to re-define its territory and population each time the Japanese State acquired a new territory and population. So, in order to sustain its unity as a nation-state and to continue to integrate its population, it could never resort to the definitive and essentialized identity of the Japanese nationality; it could never naturalize what constituted the Japanese identity in Japanese nationality. In other words, it could not afford to entirely discard some pretention toward what Robert Bellah called ‘universalism.’ While imposing the idea of the national language on its continually expanding population through its system of universal education, Japanese imperial nationalism—just like American imperial nationalism—could not afford to ignore multi-culturalism or universalistic policies for minority integration, when governing not only Japan proper, but also such annexed territories as Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and some Pacific islands. It was absolutely imperative for the Japanese Government to encourage those not regarded as having Japanese ethnic origins to feel a sense of attachment to the Japanese nation, and also to implement legal and educational policies whereby minority groups were made to belong to the nation.53

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  79 It is not surprising that quite a few intellectuals advocated for the universalistic policies of minority integration during the inter-war period (1919–45). Immediately such names as Takada Yasuma （高田保馬）, Kôsaka Masaaki （高坂正 顕）, and Shinmei Masamichi （新明正道）come to mind. Many of them were critical of the pure blood bent of German National Socialism, and they willingly collaborated with the Japanese Government to advance the formation of a multiethnic empire to be dictated by ideas and visions which Robert Bellah would have considered ‘universalistic.’ Watsuji Tetsurô was clearly separate from those universalistic intellectuals. Even during the Asia Pacific War or WWII when the political slogan of the Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere was fervently promoted under the mythic vision of the Eight Corners under One Roof （八紘一宇）, Watsuji challenged the politics of a multi-ethnic empire. Just as he insisted on the unicity of an ethnic nation, he was openly hostile to the integration of different ethnic groups into the Japanese nation. It is not surprising at all, therefore, to find this inbred nationalist condemning the multi-ethnic nationalism in his Ethics: For a long time through human history, the sovereignty of the state was equated to the holiness of its commander. But there can be rare cases where one ethnic nation has reached the stage of development at which the totality of its ethnic unity is already grasped as a deity, yet has failed to constitute itself as a single state [おのれを国家にまで形成し得ず]. Such cases occur when one ethnic nation is conquered by another, and when a conquered nation has to survive dispersed under the reign of the conquering nation. Under such abnormal circumstances, the god of the ethnic nation is deprived of the possibility to align itself to the state sovereignty （その神は国家や主権 者と結びつく可能性がなく）. ……… The ethnic nation of the Greeks failed to constitute its own single state. Instead, the state was divided into plural city-states. But, then, the Greeks could manage to maintain the tradition of the synthesis of the totality of the nation and the holiness （国家の全体性と神聖性の合一の伝統）. ………. Taking over the cultural unity of the Greek nation, Alexander the Great attempted to unify the ethnic nation of the Greeks into one single state, but the Greek nation had already lost its ability to revive its traditional cultural unity by then. Confronting this situation, Alexander opted to bypass the transitional stage at which nations were divided into multiple states [一民族が多 数国家に分たれていた状態], and instead created the situation in which many ethnic nations were integrated under the single state [一国家が多

80  Naoki Sakai 数民族を包括する状態]. The Roman Empire inherited this situation from Alexander the Great. ……… It is the god of the Jewish nation that sneaked into this gap. That god pushed those of the other nations aside and became the god of trans-ethnicity, and eventually succeeded in dominating the entire territory of the Roman Empire.54 Of course, Watsuji sympathized with the National Socialist obsession with pure blood nationalism. Unlike Takada, Shinmei and many other intellectuals who promoted the idea of the multi-cultural empire of the Greater East Asia, Watsuji ostentatiously approved of the Nazis. However, beyond his endorsement of ethnic/racial nationalism, we must ask what his denunciation of the Jewry, who, he argued, caused the illegitimate mixing of ethnicities and from whose god the universal God of Christianity was concocted in European history, signified in the context of the Japanese Empire of the times? Hidden behind an obvious hostility toward Western modernity and the abhorrence of Christianity is a political message that addresses the situation of Northeast Asia around that time (1942).55 Watsuji was opposed to Japanese imperial nationalism in the Korean Peninsula. He claimed that, just as Alexander the Great caused a fatal mixing of ethnicities, Japanese colonialism gave rise to an illegitimate intermingling of ethnic nations. What is unambiguously expressed in these passages in his Ethics is not dissimilar to the flagrant sentiment of ethnic nationalism that exploded in the massacre following the Great Kantô Earthquake—it is said that some 6,000 Korean migrant workers were massacred in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area—and, in fact, this sentiment of ethnic nationalism became routinized in post-WWII Japan. Under the postwar Allied Occupation of Japan, those Japanese intellectuals with a universalistic orientation were not welcomed by the Office of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers. Many of them who supported multi-ethnic nationalism and advocated multi-culturalism during the war, such as Takada Yasuma and Shinmei Masamichi, were purged from their positions in government, private enterprises, and universities. In contrast, Watsuji seemed rather to be embraced by the American occupation authority. Despite his wartime activities, he was not purged from his university professorship and continued to teach at Tokyo University. Perhaps, in reference to his argumentation in his Ethics concerning Jewry and Christianity, we must examine the following two points with regard to his political and academic career, after Japan’s surrender to the Allied Powers. As is fairly well-known, he played the role of an ideologue supporting the American strategy for the Far East and offered a sociopolitical or religious justification for the American regime-change for the postwar Japanese Emperor System. In Ethics (published in three volumes: the first volume in 1937, the second volume in 1942, and the third in 194956), he argued that the Emperor was the symbolic representation of the cultural unicity of the Japanese ethnic nation as well as the commander in chief of the Japanese State. In his justification of ethnic nationalism and of Japan’s national body （國體）, the Emperor was conceptualized as a figure of the synthesis of the organic unity of the ethnic nation and the sovereignty of the State. In a series of articles collected in 『国民統合の象徴』 (The Symbol

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  81 of National Unity),57 he adjusted his argument by placing less emphasis on the aspect of the Emperor’s figure, which he conceptualized as an embodiment of state sovereignty, and he modified his pre-war argument about the Emperor System so as to accommodate the new definition of the Emperor offered in the Constitution of Japan, which was put in force on the 3rd of May in 1947. Thereby he endorsed the new governance of the Allied Powers in Japan and expressed his willingness to collaborate with the American Administration’s occupation of Japan. Nevertheless, I do not believe that his collaboration with the American occupation authority explains why Watsuji was embraced not only by the American technocrats involved in the management of the American reign in the Far East, but also by many area experts on Japan. In fact, he turned out to be the most popular of the Japanese intellectual figures among area specialists of the United States, Europe, and even East Asia. This is why I wanted to read Robert Bellah’s endorsement of Watsuji’s work. Another point I would like to draw readers’ attention to is that, as I have already suggested in my reading of some passages in Climate and Culture, in the 1920s, nearly two decades before the end of the Asia Pacific War, Watsuji Tetsurô introduced what in the 1940s and 1950s would be characterized as the analytical and descriptive formats to be used in ‘the national character study’ by the experts of area studies. Watsuji is known to be one of the first Japanese advocates for a national character study as an analytical and descriptive method for national culture. His wartime essay ‘American National Character’ (「アメリカの国民性」) published in Shisô in 194458 is probably the most notorious and is almost contemporary with The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Ruth Benedict published her book after the end of WWII, but it was based upon her wartime research for the United States Department of War. Although Benedict’s analysis was more sophisticated and vigilant than Watsuji’s, her attempts to describe the national character of the Japanese had much in common with his. Both Japanese cultural nationalism of the inter-war period and United States area studies on Japan manifested a fixated orientation toward the reification of Japan’s national culture. Yet, we must take note of one persistent allegation insisted upon by area experts on Japan, while it was totally overlooked by Watsuji, namely, the allegation that prevented area experts from comparing the Japanese national character with that of America. Or more generally speaking, it would never occur to those scholars working in area studies on Japan, China, Korea, and so on to capture American society in terms of a national character at all. Given this one-sidedness, one wonders what prompted Robert Bellah to focus on Watsuji’s discussion of Japanese culture and what forced him to take up Watsuji as the representative thinker of Japan. Only covertly, as his later career would show, was Bellah concerned with the American national character. What operates in his article on Watsuji is the binary opposition of universalism and particularism that was also frequently appealed to by the followers of Modernization Theory. Although very successful in its modernization, according to Bellah, Japan’s masses never shared universalism with the United States or the West. Most distinctly, the Japanese are differentiated from the Americans because

82  Naoki Sakai one cannot find a general endorsement of universalistic values and attitudes in Japanese society, except for some isolated individuals. He claims that Watsuji was the best representative of the overwhelming majority of people in Japan, as a figure unwaveringly hostile to universalism. Universalism may be summarized as the attitude and belief system of a collectivity or group whereby to accept and adopt any course of action or policy choice, as long as it appears generally applicable and rational in the pursuit of a set purpose. A society in which such an attitude is dominant is in due course expected to modernize itself more rapidly. In contrast to universalism, particularism may well be characterized by quite a different attitude through which the members of the collectivity respect inner group harmony or the existent hierarchy of authority and are hesitant to seek approval of those who do not belong to their community. Therefore, particularism esteems established routines rather than the pursuit of rationality. Thus, it is said to characterize traditional and restricted societies at large, while universalism is the general feature of modern and open societies. Bellah endorses Watsuji’s accounts of the Japanese culture and ethics, yet this does not mean that he accepts the general validity of Watsuji’s argument in cultural history, practical philosophy, intellectual history, theology, and so on. It is only within the field of Japanese national culture that his claims can be taken seriously. In this respect, one must admit that the reading of Watsuji’s work offered by Robert Bellah was well balanced and thorough. Of course, he would never claim that Watsuji’s ethics would present any valuable insight or lesson in the context of any event in American society or in the West. It follows that Watsuji’s insights are valuable only about the Japanese and in principle cannot be applied to any other societies. No matter whether the author of Climate and Culture was aware or not of the role he played in his discussion on Japanese culture, Watsuji was no more than an excellent native informant of it. All the significance accredited to his work on Japanese culture and history, after all, derived from the fact that Bellah found ‘the Expected Image of the Japanese’ （「期待された日本人像」59） there. It is undeniable that the overwhelming majority of area experts wanted to depict the American nation, and the West at large, as rapidly modernizing societies with explicit tendencies toward universalism. For them, the Japanese culture portrayed by Watsuji offered an expected image of a traditional society in contrast to which the fantastic vision of the typically modern social formation in the United States of America could be ascertained. Watsuji’s consistent hostility toward ethnic hybridization, his hatred of universal religion, his deification of the ethnic purity, his abhorrence of foreigners (particularly his discomfort toward Westerners), and, above all, his insistence upon particularistic values and attitudes in ethics must have provided area experts with superlative opportunities with which to overtly reify Japanese culture as an exemplary case of particularistic formation, while covertly asserting themselves to be representatives of universalistic modernity. What we see in this academic exchange between Watsuji Tetsurô and Robert Bellah is the exemplary case of what I discussed in terms of ‘civilizational transference’（文明論的転移）. But, there was a blind spot in Bellah’s interpretation of Watsuji’s cultural nationalism. He could have problematized why Watsuji’s cultural nationalism could appeal to American area experts, how Watsuji could play the role of forerunner in

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  83 the discourse of Japanese uniqueness（日本人論） among the Japanese readership, and ultimately, how the newly formed discipline of area studies served its functions in the performative of political power in the context of Pax Americana. In short, Bellah’s scholarly pursuit lacked a theoretical investigation into the disciplinary regimes of knowledge production and power, how the knowledge produced about an area—Japan in this case—could serve to respond to the demand of the self-assertion for both the subject of knowing—area experts who wished to identify with the West— and the object of knowing—those Japanese seeking to be identified as the Japanese. What I have outlined in this chapter with a view to ‘civilizational transference’ cannot be attributed to Robert Bellah or Watsuji Tetsurô as individual researchers; once again, it should be stressed that this is inherent in the disciplinary arrangement of area studies. An inquiry into ‘civilization transference’ is thus part and parcel of our response to the crisis in area studies that we face today. Notes 1 Because the United States grew out of a settler colonial arrangement, its colonies were not necessarily located in the geographic outside of its sovereignty. The locus of colonial studies could be found inside its territory and, as Peter Button argues in this volume, it was in the domain of American studies that knowledge concerning colonial management had been explored during the inter-war period. 2 It is important to underline that the European Public Law (Jus Publicum Europaeum) was not called ‘international law’ before the end of the eighteenth century. It was the system of inter-state agreements among the states in Europe, and the community of the nation or peoplehood was a new idea, an invention introduced in the eighteenth century for the first time in Europe. 3 For an extensive analysis of the dynamics of speciation, see, Jon Solomon, Spectral Transitions: the Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, forthcoming. 4 Strictly speaking, the West and the Rest cannot be differentiated from each other only in terms of territorial or residential geography of population; the bi-polarity of the modern world is also of racial bifurcation of the non-colored and the colored. In other words, the West and the Rest are civilizational, geopolitical, territorial, and racial categories that are conflated or overdetermined. 5 I have relied upon this excellent analysis of the institution of area studies. See Vincent Rafael, “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text, no.41 (Winter 1994): 91–111. 6 Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, eds. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson (London: Blackwell, 1996): 184–227. 7 The bifurcation of the world operates in multiple contexts which are overdetermined. In the context of speciation particular to the modern world, the bifurcation of the world between the West and the Rest corresponds to that of white people (the people of no color) and peoples of color. In this context, racial identity has little to do with the biological or physiological features of the human body. It has everything to do with the formation of the modern international world. 8 One of the significant critiques of area studies on Japan was launched by Harry D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, Learning Places (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

84  Naoki Sakai Two decades ago, the authors acknowledged that area studies was already an anachronistic being, exhausted in its own history. Their critique was informed by their participation in the creation of area studies in the early phases of post-WWII history. 9 See note 2. 10 Italian and Spanish literature departments were created later at some universities in Japan. To my knowledge, no Indonesian, Korean, or Indian literature department existed in pre-war Japanese universities. 11 It is important to emphasize that the national language—la langue in French—served as a significant marker of European colonialism in places such as Africa. In the nineteenth century, Japan managed to evade colonization and direct colonial government by EuroAmerican powers, but it was absolutely necessary to create the national language so as to sustain her independence as a territorial sovereign state. I learned much about the relationship between the national language and colonialism from Cécile Canut, Provincialiser la langue (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2021). 12 One thing to be noted in this respect: the Japanese national language is a modern invention, as I will repeatedly assert in this chapter. We must accept two distinct phases in the invention of the Japanese national language. In the eighteenth century, a small group of scholars, generally called National Studies Scholars (国学者) began to project an illiterate communal language in ancient times prior to the importation of Chinese writing and cultures. They acknowledged that the originary language of the Japanese could not remain in their contemporary world except as traces and fragments. The Japanese language that was newly created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the process of Japan’s modernization/nationalization is an entirely different thing. It was closely tied to Japan’s entry into the modern international world. See Naoki Sakai, Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth Century Japanese Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 13 See Edmund Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” included as an appendix in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970): 269–99. 14 See Naoki Sakai, The Still Birth of the Japanese as a Language and an Ethnos (『死産さ れる日本語・日本人』), Tokyo: Shinyo-sha, 1996 (Second edition, Tokyo: Kodansha, 2015.) 15 I ascribe two distinct conceptions to the terms, ‘position’ and ‘positionality,’ each of which is concerned with the particular manner by which an individual identifies her or himself with a social status, rank, station, or function. The position signifies the social role or status in relation to other social roles or statuses, such as the position of father in relation to son, or teacher in relation to student. These positions are paradigmatically organized in given social formations. What is suggested by positionality is determined as a political, social, or intellectual status in the medium of knowledge. Perhaps the best example can be found in social and cultural anthropology in which an anthropologist engaged in field work in a village of indigenous people occupies the positionality of anthropologist in relation to the positionality of the native. 16 Edmund Husserl repeatedly argued that theory is exclusively European. See, for instance, ‘The Vienna Lecture’ included as an Appendix in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, op cit. 17 Naoki Sakai, “Theory and Asian humanity; on the question of humanitas and anthropos,” Postcolonial Studies, 13, no. 4 (December 2010): 441–64. 18 A crisis of European humanity was always of the European man, rarely of the European woman. Edward Said illustrated this point convincingly in his Orientalism (Edward Said 1979); the gender dimension cannot be overlooked in our assessment of anthropological difference. Also important to note is that the word ‘theory’ is not free of gender bias. 19 Edmund Husserl uses the phrase ‘the spiritual shape of Europe’ in The Vienna Lecture op cit.

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  85 20 Naoki Sakai, “Transpacific Complicity and Comparatist Strategy,” Positions East Asia Cultures Critique, 17, no. 1 (2009): 159–207. 21 Husserl’s denunciation of the European political and cultural climate of the 1930s does not cohere in a number of points. We must take into account, first of all, the fact that he belonged to the minority explicitly marked by the political fiction of the German nation as well as European civilization. Above all, “Europe” is multi-valent and polysemic: this means many different modes of identification are possible in the name of Europe or the West. Particularly important is an analysis of the fiction/myth of the political pursued by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy （Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc Nancy, Le mythe nazi, Éditions de l’Aube, 1991). 22 For the question of the victim speaking for the victimizer, see my article which explored the case of Japanese Americans held in the US internment camps during WWII (Sakai 2004: 229–57). 23 Certainly it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the exceptionally ambiguous relationships among those mythemes, as implicated in the antisemitic exclusion of the Jewry. With antisemitism deriving from Europe’s or the West’s identity politics, it is absolutely imperative to comprehend how the figure of the Jew plays in the putative unity of Europe or the West. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that the term ‘Europe’ was increasingly replaced by the idiom ‘the West’ from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s, in Western Europe. Even today Europe is not clearly delineated from the West in so many contexts. On another occasion I would like to undertake a more thorough and extensive analysis of the dynamics of Euro-centrism in relation to antisemitic racism, but tentatively let me list these topoi/themes that need investigation in order to apprehend Husserl’s involvement, in anti-minority rhetoric, for example. 1 On what grounds is Europe or the West said to constitute a community? What variables—language, rationality, tradition, religious heritages, race, political sovereignty, and so on—serve to produce the figure of Europe as a community? 2 How is Europe or the West determined as a geographic unity in contradistinction to Asia, Africa, and the Americas? How are the Europeans distinguished from peoples of non-European territories, particularly when the Europeans were supposed to be the most mobile immigrants/conquerors to occupy and settle in so many different places all over the world? 3 How are ambiguous boundaries drawn between Europe or the West and its others? Where can such boundaries be drawn, on the geographic surface, or in terms of religious affiliation, of scientific rationality, of the level of social capital, or of racial constitutions? 4 What is the relationship between the national community such as Germany and Europe as a community of nations? Are East European nations less European than West European nations such as France? Is Turkey excluded from Europe, while Ukraine is included? What kind of criteria does one utilize in order to include or exclude some individuals in or from Europe or the West? Some of these topoi/themes are rigorously explored by Jon Solomon, in his Spectral Transitions (forthcoming). 24 Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power” op cit. 25 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 26 Robert N. Bellah, “Japan’s Cultural Identity – some reflections on the work of Watsuji Tetsuro,” first published in the Journal of Asian Studies, 24, no. 4 (1965): 573–94, and also reproduced in Imagining Japan – the Japanese tradition and its modern interpretation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 27 For a critique of this division of labor, one may well refer to this classical work: Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

86  Naoki Sakai 28 About Asian identity, see Naoki Sakai “What is Asia? – On Anthropological Difference” in 『普遍与特殊：何為亜州性』、華人作家協会出版社、2018. 29 In his recent publication 「ヴェバー入門」 (Introduction to Weber) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 2020), Nakano Toshio argued that, one year before the publication of Bellah’s article, Otsuka Hisao proposed a critical reading of Max Weber. In the history of Japanese scholarship on Max Weber, 1964 marks an important turning point. 30 I hesitate to endorse the use of terms such as universalism, universal, or universality in Modernization Theory. What is signified is the conception of generality within the classical logical formula of individual-species-genus. However, universality should be opposed to singularity not to particularity. For the question of universality must be comprehended outside the general-particular opposition. 31 Robert Bellah, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and its Modern Interpretation, op cit. P.115. 32 Watsuji Tetsurô, Fûdo (『風土』), in Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshû, vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962): 1–256 (English translation, whose original title was A Climate: A Philosophical Study, but later it was changed to Climate and Culture, Geoffrey Bownas trans. Tokyo: Japanese Ministry of Education, 1961.) 33 See note 20. 34 「風土的歴史性は人間存在の空間的・時間的構造として己を現してくる」, Watsuji Tetsurô, 『風土』(Climate and Culture) in Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshû, vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962): 15. 35 The ‘South Sea’（南洋） is a category under which Watsuji subsumed a certain population, but I am totally at a loss as to what kind of social grouping it designates. Does it indicate race, nationality, ethnicity or simply an administrative classification? It seems that Watsuji stayed in Singapore for a very short period of time, but did he mean by the ‘South Sea’ people the sort of people he came across in or around Singapore? But, it is not hard to imagine that the population of Singapore or its surroundings he probably encountered could have included many ethnicities with different religious affiliations and with a wide variety of languages. Peoples in East, Southeast, and South Asia were not independent in 1927, so strictly speaking they did not constitute nationalities in the sense of a population under the jurisdiction of a territorial state sovereignty. 36 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 37 Watsuji Tetsurô, 『風土』、Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshû, vol. 8, op cit: 28, Climate and Culture (A Climate: A Philosophical Study) Geoffrey Bownas trans.,, pp. 22–3. (A part of the English translation is altered because the English translator obviously wanted to avoid some offensive expressions.) 38 『風土』op cit : 31, [Climate and Culture, p. 26] 39 Ibid.: 42–3. [p. 38]. 40 Let us evade the essentialization of races as categories of human classification. We cannot overlook that whiteness, in terms of which a certain portion of humanity is identified or specified, is nothing essential or determinate. Historically and regionally, the species of whiteness changes. I would like to conduct a critical examination of racist classification, but due to the shortage of space, I regret that it cannot be demonstrated in this chapter. 41 Ibid. pp. 124–5. [p. 123]. 42 It seems that Watsuji did not visit the Philippines or Vietnam on his way to Western Europe. The ports he visited on the way were mostly located in British colonies. 43 Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshû, vol. 24 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991): 317–8. 44 『故国の妻へ』(To my wife in my home country) (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1965). 45 This explanation, however, is no more than a guess on my part, and until I research Watsuji’s biographical data in Europe, I want to say nothing more about his mental condition in Europe. But this incident is extremely suggestive in our reading of the Watsuji philosophy.

Area Studies and Civilizational Transference  87 46 One might include『イタリア古寺巡礼』(Pilgrimage to the Old Temples in Italy, Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshû, vol. 8, op cit: 258–408.), but in this piece he did not write much about peoples he must have encountered in Italy. In Pilgrimage to the Old Temples in Italy, there is no description of local people he came across, except for a very few references to his Japanese friends. 47 Once more, he revised a few parts of Climate and Culture when its 13th edition was published in 1943. 48 Two nouns, stranger and foreigner, designate some people or persons who cannot be allocated in the network of ‘mutual relationship’ or ‘betweenness.’ In the modern world, stranger and foreigner are differentiated because a foreigner is a person who cannot be classified in terms of nationality, an outsider of another nation, whereas a stranger is somebody who cannot be identified. Until the introduction of the speciation formula which I call ‘specific identity,’ the two nouns were not differentiated. For further explication on ‘specific identity,’ see Naoki Sakai, The End of Pax Americana – The Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022): 57–89. 49 For more explication for the phrase “Hikikomori Nationalism,” see my The End of Pax Americana: The Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism. op cit. 50 For more extensive discussion, see Naoki Sakai, ‘The Loss of Empire and Inward-Looking Society,’ Ibid. in The End of Pax Americana-the Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism, op cit. 183–267. 51 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gable: University of Miami Press, 1971): 223–30. 52 A classical critique of anthropology as a disciplinary formation has been offered by Johannes Fabian, to whom I owe much. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Fabian’s notion of ‘denied coevalness’ uses the two dimensions of anthropological knowledge production: one is postulated as an original scene of encounter between an anthropologist and the indigenous person/people in which the immediate proximity of encounter is imagined. The other dimension is the discourse in which knowledge about these indigenous people is formed and made available. In the final published form of knowledge, all the trace of the originary encounter is erased. This erasure of coevalness is not accidental; it is another form of civilizational transference in which anthropologist allows him or herself a positionality completely separated from the object of knowledge. In this respect, the erasure of coevalness is an expected result of the very civilizational transference through which the discipline of anthropology is conducted. 53 Of exceptional significance is Takashi Fujitani’s Race for Empire, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011] in which the new kind of imperial nationalism emerging in the 1930s and 1940s is investigated. In this book, the presence of minority population and the management of racism became the central issue for the building of imperial nationalism in Japan as well as in the United States of America. 54 Watsuji Tetsurô, 『倫理学』(Ethics), chapter 7, ‘State’, Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshû, vol.11, op cit. pp. 420–1. The passage underlined in this quote was underlined by the author in the original. 55 These passages were included in the 1942 edition of his Ethics. But, in the postwar editions, they were erased, so that it is impossible to find them in the editions of Ethics published after WWII. 56 Watsuji published in 1949 after Japan’s defeat a revised version of his Ethics in which certain parts were eliminated. For more details, see Musashi Kaneko’s postface (解説) in the volume 11 of Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshu, op cit. 449–502. 57 These five articles published from 1937 through 1948 were collected in 『国民統合の象 徴』(The Symbol of National Unity), Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshu, vol. 14 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962): 313–96. Except for the last chapter （「祭政一致と思慮の政治」）, which was originally published in October 1937, all the others were published after Japan’s defeat in August 1945.

88  Naoki Sakai 58 『アメリカの国民性』（American National Character）, Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshu, vol. 17 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1963): 451–81. Originally published in Shiso, in February 1944. 59 Ironically ‘the Expected Image of the Japanese’ was also the title of an ordinance concerning secondary education issued by Japan’s Ministry of Education in 1966.

Bibliography Bellah, Robert N. “Japan’s Cultural Identity – Some Reflections on the Work of Watsuji Tetsuro.” The Journal of Asian Studies 24, no. 4 (1965): 573–94. Reproduced in Imagining Japan – the Japanese tradition and its modern interpretation, Berkeley: University of ley: University of. Benveniste, Emile, Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gable: University of Miami Press, 1971. Canut, Cécile. Provincialiser la langue. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2021. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, 184–227. London: Blackwell, 1996. Harootunian, Harry D., and Masao Miyoshi. Learning Places. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Husserl, Edmund. “The Vienna Lecture.” In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by David Carr, 269–99. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Le mythe nazi. Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 1991. Raphael, Vincente. “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text 41 (Winter 1994): 91–111. Solomon, Jon. Spectral Transitions: The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, forthcoming. Sakai, Naoki. Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth Century Japanese Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. ––––––. “Two Negations: Fear of Being Excluded and the Logic of Self-Esteem.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 37, no. 3 (2004): 229–57. ––––––. “Transpacific Complicity and Comparatist Strategy,” Positions East Asia Cultures Critique 17, no. 1 (2009): 159–207. ––––––. “Theory and Asian Humanity; on the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos,” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (December 2010): 441–64. ––––––. The Still Birth of the Japanese as a Language and an Ethnos, (『死産される日 本語・日本人』), Tokyo: Shinyo-sha, 1996 (Second edition, Tokyo: Kodansha, 2015.) ––––––. “What is Asia? – On Anthropological Difference” in 『普遍与特殊：何為亜州 性』、華人作家協会出版社、2018. Nakano, Toshio. Introduction to Weber. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 2020. ––––––. The End of Pax Americana – The Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. Watsuji, Tetsurô. Watsuji Tetsurô Zenshû. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962. ––––––. Climate and Culture. Translated by Geoffrey Bownas. Tokyo: Japanese Ministry of Education, 1961.

3

The Third Nomos of the Earth The Decline of Western Hegemony and the Continuity of Capitalism Walter D. Mignolo

Uncoupling “capitalism” from (Neo) Liberalism The first version of this essays was written in 2017. I finished revising the manuscript for publication the 20th of March of 2023. The twentieth year anniversary of the US–UK combined invasion of Iraq has been denounced in its political and ethical principle by several European Union’s newspapers and the US The same day the paramount leader of China, Xi Jinping, arrived to Moscow in a landmark visit, that coincides with the anniversary of the Iraq invasion and the US military escalation in Ukraine. Furthermore, at the beginning of March of this year, all Western newspaper commented on China’s exceptional mediation to bring together Iran and Saudi Arabia. Last but not least, the 20th of March of 2023, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad visited the UAE in a historical re-establishment of mutual relations and understanding to secure the interests of West Asia (no longer the Middle East). All signs of the decay of Western hegemony and the US demising role as leader of the world order. The decay of Western civilization has been announced in the interiority of European history itself, memories, and subjectivities. Oswald Spengler published his classic The Decline of the West in 1918.1 Although it was planned before WWI, it was at the end of the war that his manuscript was published, meaning that it may have been finished some time in 1916. In 1923, Spengler published a follow-up with the publication of Perspectives of World History. In this, Spengler identified eight civilizations: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican (Maya/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman), Arabian, and Western or European. Notice that “Western or European” is one civilization in Spengler’s view. And Japan did not make the list. But Aztec/Maya (Mexican) made it. In retrospect, Spengler’s analysis in both volumes is quite interesting today for three reasons: (a) it dispenses with Hegel’s linear history of State formation and replaces it with civilizations; (b) while Hegel’s narrative frame is alive still today within the unconscious of the public sphere, Spengler’s narrative has vanished except for a counted number of scholars; and (c) it is more generous and open than the indirect sequel, published in the US in the mid-1990s: Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996).2

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-3

90  Walter D. Mignolo Huntington had a different idea of civilizations as well as their categorization. He, too, came up with eight civilizations, which in his view were necessary to replace the First, Second, and Third World division that became obsolete with the fall of the Soviet Union. However, Huntington acknowledged, like Spengler and later on French historian Fernand Braudel,3 the belief in Western exceptionalism in general and of American exceptionalism in particular. I quote Robert E. Merry, editor of National Interest in his 2013 balanced re-evaluation of Spengler’s thesis and Huntington’s follow-up: Citing Spengler, Huntington denounced “the myopic view of history prevailing in the West with its neat division into … phases relevant only to the West.” And he rejected the “widespread and parochial conceit that the European civilization of the West is now the universal civilization of the world.” In his famous book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington quotes with approval Braudel’s comment that it almost would “be childish” to think that modernization or the “triumph of civilization in the singular” would lead to the end of the plurality of historic cultures developed over centuries.4 Returning to Huntington, here are his own eight civilizations after the end of the Cold War: 1 By Sinic civilization, he grouped the common culture of China and Chinese communities in South East Asia, including Vietnam and Korea. He did not include Singapore. 2 Japan made its appearance in Huntington’s classification unlike Spengler’s, understandably so as Japan was not yet visible as a world power in 1922. For Huntington, Japan is significantly different from the rest of Asia. Huntington makes this assertion after Pearl Harbor, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after Japan’s political and economic submission to the US, leader of the Western civilization. 3 Hindu is for Huntington the long-lasting civilization of India; both Sinic and Hindu go back mutatis mutandis 3000 BCE. 4 Islamic has for Huntington a large and wide territory: From the Arabian Peninsula, where its origins had been located, it expanded to North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Central Asia. Complicating his definition further, Islamic civilization encompassed sub-civilizations, for lack of a better word: Arab, Turkic, Persian, and Malay. It is for the West a “dangerous” civilization. Huntington noticed this civilization doesn’t share most of the Western values. And though he is right, only his statement suggests that they should. 5 Orthodox civilization is centered in Russia and, Huntington specifies, is separated from Western Christendom, which implies that Western or European civilization, in his words, is also therefore Christian, Western Christian. 6 Western civilization is centered in the North Atlantic, Western Europe, and the US.

The Third Nomos of the Earth  91 7 Latin American is an interesting civilizational identification. He includes Central and South American countries with a past of corporatist (dictatorship imposed by force) and authoritarian (strong central power curtailing political freedom) cultures. Furthermore, the majority of the population adheres to Catholic Christianity. 8 Africa: In this case, a continent and a civilization are synonymous. Huntington noticed that, at his time, Africans had not yet built a sense of pan-African identity, but he also perceived that it was in the making. And he was right. After 9/11, many people reread Huntington asking themselves/ourselves if Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations was an educated guess about the future of the disguised justification of the West’s response to 9/11. Be it as it may, the prediction/ justification proved right. But as always, predicting where the future will go is a hard call, even if an event is planned to orient its direction: in this case, justifying war and the growth of military industry to provide labor and machinery to airport security control. Human beings can be manipulated to a certain point. And it has been obvious after the failure of the invasion of Iraq that if the clash of civilization was obtained (by “natural” history or by design), there was more than met the eye. The clash of civilization with China was not yet in Huntington’s periscope. Neither was a political and economic clash in his purview. He was just seeing the “clash of religious civilizations”: the West (Europe, the US, and Christianity) would clash with Islam (the Middle East and its oil region, Arab and Persian). Political-­ economic clashes may not yet have been apparent at that point in his prophecy or advanced justification. At this junction, Spengler’s Eurocentered prediction of the decline (not the end, just the decline) of the West, and Huntington’s clash of civilizations, shows the regionality of their thoughts: one in Germany during WWI and the other in the US during and at the end of the Cold War. In the Third World, there was a devastating critique of the logic of “Western civilization.” What I mean is that Jorge Luis Borges’ classification from “a certain Chinese Encyclopedia, titled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,” deviated, or better yet delinked, from the logic (the terms of the conversation) established and taken for granted by Western civilization in the process of constituting itself as such, and securing the hegemony of its own imagination (or the imagination of the intellectual leaders that were the makers of that imaginary construct). Here is the very much quoted and celebrated Borges’ classification of animals. What matters is the logic (or the terms) of classification (or of the conversation), not the content: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs,

92  Walter D. Mignolo 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

those included in the present classification, those that tremble as if they were mad, innumerable ones, those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, others, those that have just broken a flower vase, those that from a long way off look like flies.5

Borges’ parody erodes the assumptions on the reality and objectivity of world classifications invented by the West itself in the process of advancing an internal critique (Spengler and Huntington), that is, a Eurocentered critique of Eurocentrism, as Enrique Dussel has pointed out on several occasions. At the time Borges published this piece, it was an isolated and literary insight. Today there are many sign of the closing of Western epistemic hegemony which means the closing of Western civilization seen from outside the North Atlantic imaginary. Western civilization is nothing more than “an emporium of benevolent knowledge”: it created its own image among world civilizations until its decline, when disputes began to be announced in the regional history of Europe. While such debate could have its place in the North Atlantic, Borges, in the South Atlantic, announced its obsolescence and the need to delink from the epistemic mirage not only of Western exceptionalism, but of its epistemic and aesthetic universality of knowledge and regulations of knowing as well. We move now to look at the West (US, NATO, the heart of EU) from other civilizations’ points of view. Let’s move to South America, or “Latin” America, that is, in Huntington’s classification. Capitalism and Coloniality: Looking at the World Order from the South American Andes In a co-authored article published in 1992 at the closing of the Cold War, Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein wrote: The modern world-system was born in the long sixteenth century. The Americas, a geosocial construct, was born in the long sixteenth century. The creation of this geosocial entity, the Americas, was the constitutive act of the modern world-system. The Americas were not incorporated into an already existing capitalist world-economy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas.6 (Italics mine.) Today, the article carries the signs of both Wallerstein’s Modern World/System project and Quijano’s Colonial Matrix of Power project. The conjunction of these two projects in the same article, and in that article only, is essentially “the creation of a set of States linked together within an inter-state system of hierarchical layers.” Quijano introduced the power differential in the Modern⁄Colonial World System. It was further explained that “the hierarchy of coloniality manifested itself in all domains – political, economic, and not least of all cultural.” This is the power

The Third Nomos of the Earth  93 differential that structures the inter-state world order. The hierarchy established by coloniality was not rigid. It was possible for some States to change places in the hierarchy, going down or up. However, those changes did not alter the logic of the hierarchy. It changes the content but not the terms of the conversations, like in Borges’ Encyclopedia. That doesn’t change the logic of coloniality (p. 550). But the point to be underlined is the one in italics: there were no capitalist worldsystems before the invention of the Americas. And let me repeat, the Americas were not “discovered” because it was not Americas to be discovered, but rather invented and integrated into the Western Christian geo-political imaginary, next to Asia and Africa, since the invention was in European hands. It was an invention, not a discovery or a representation. Western hegemony was grounded in this cartographic classification and ranking: in many maps of the seventeenth century, the four corners of the flat map are occupied by a figure providing an image of each continent: Europe at the top left (the most important space in a civilization with alphabetic writing oriented left to right), Asia at the top right (second in ranking), and America and Africa either way, bottom left or right, both looking hopeless in European minds. This ranking appears in the cartouches of many world maps of the seventeenth century. Such cartography situating the Atlantic Ocean and Europe as the middlemost center of a round planet grounded in Western hegemony, calibrated first to Rome and later the Greenwich Meridian, is becoming absurd today. In Asia, as we know, the planet was mapped after Matteo Ricci’s visit in 1582 with the Pacific at its center. However, the world map with the Atlantic at the center is, if not hegemonic, nonetheless dominant.7 The economic boom that the invention of America generated was unprecedented in the history of humankind. Briefly outlined: (a) the massive appropriation and expropriation of lands of an entire continent never occurred before; (b) if the slave trade was already in place before 1500, and enslaved human beings were extracted (and I am using the word purposely) from several non-European locales during Medieval Europe,8 the scale of the transatlantic trade for three centuries was unprecedented; (c) massive land appropriation and expropriation, including extractions of gold and silver, needed massive exploitation of labor (slave trade, encomienda, and plantation economies) generated an unprecedented production of commodities; (d) the unprecedented manufacturing of commodities was tantamount to the creation of global markets made possible by the unprecedented navigation across the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean spearheaded by European emerging empires (Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, England); (e) the unprecedented manufacturing of commodities needed, beyond the global markets to place them, to reinvest the surplus to generate more wealth and increase the production of commodities. That was in a nutshell the type of economy that prevailed between 1500 and 1750, roughly. That was the formation of an unprecedented type of economy that today is identified as “capitalism.” That period is a chapter in economic history called “Mercantilism.” If we want to call it “Capitalism” today, the distinction shall be made with the economic transformation provoked by the Industrial Revolution. This significant transformation may not have been possible without two and a half

94  Walter D. Mignolo centuries of Europe’s increase of wealth not only via the Americas but also through the South and Southeast Asian territories plundered since the beginning of the seventeenth century by the British and Dutch East Indies Companies. My terminology makes of mercantilism and industrial capitalism, two faces of the same phenomenon: economic coloniality, meaning the drive toward accumulation regardless of the cost to human life, or to the life on the planet later on, with the increasing individualistic arrogance of the actors defending and leading it, justified by the rhetoric of modernity: progress, civilization, development, growth. The publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 changed the content of the conversation within Western civilization and provided Western economy with a different political narrative: he displaced the narratives (and the conception of economy) of mercantilism and introduced the narratives of liberalism which will become the foundations of the idea of progress and civilization, the banners of British and French expansionism. Progress meant material and economic wealth, and civilization meant cultural transformation of society to which progress will contribute to its material “advancements.” The material advancements were provided by the railroad and the steamboat, two basic consequences of the industrial revolution propelling expansionism. The civilizational consequences came about by the hegemonic principles of paths of knowing (epistemology) and sensing (esthetics) established during the Enlightenment by the intellectual elites of the bourgeois ethno-class. It was during the eighteenth century that the heart of Europe witnessed and experienced the advent of the bourgeois ethno-class, which was growing economically and already emerging in Europe before the invention of the Americas. Venice, Florence, and Genoa were three European cities looking south across the Mediterranean and east toward Asia. The foundation and addition of the British and Dutch East Indies Companies around 1600, contributing to the increase of Western European wealth from the three continents, consolidated their economic and civilizational hegemony (cultural, including its theology, science, philosophy, art, and cartography) The economic and civilizational (both cultural aspects created by human beings) wealth of Western Europe propelled and consolidated secular patterns of thought in philosophy, science, politics, art/aesthetics. Smith did not elaborate on “capitalism.” “Capital,” “wealth,” and “nation” (no longer “kingdom”) were key words in his narrative, which Karl Marx picked up and stamped in the title of his magnum opus, Capital. Whether the discourse, belief, reason, and sensing about the economy was positive (as with Smith and Ricardo) or critical (as with Marx), “capital” defined the new content of the conversation. It was not a key word in the narrative of mercantilism (that is why Smith used “wealth” although the logic of coloniality was the same. Smith’s changes to the content of the conversations maintained from 1500 to 1750 were significant on several fronts: economically, Smith introduced the market managed by an “invisible hand” and not by monarchs; politically, he displaced the role of the monarchy and drifted toward the management of the emerging bourgeois social class; and ethically, his arguments presupposed the honesty of the actors leading capital and these markets. When the industrial revolution was consolidated,

The Third Nomos of the Earth  95 Smith was the blue book to run the economy, to justify it politically and pretend that honesty of the managerial class was the principle of their own doing and saying. What came after was already anchored on the conjunction of liberal politics and economic production and distribution. When socialist and communist critique arose, the rules of the game were already defined. Their critiques consisted of disputing the contents that the liberal doctrine established for the regulation of “capital.” The original meaning of the word “oykonomie” was forgotten. Originally the word meant administration of scarcity in the household (which in non-Western and non-modern cosmologies includes the extended family and life beyond the human species, therefore, not only humans). By the eighteenth century, the growth of accumulation that blew up with the “discovery and exploitations of the Americas, land and people,” economy meant the administration of wealth instead of scarcity and accumulation and was left to the invisible hand. Markets rather than the household became the center of economic life, and accumulation was the goal rather than equilibrium in the administration of the household. Balance and harmony presupposed on the concept of “oykonomie” (administration of scarcity rather than taking advantage of it) and similar concepts in non-European languages (like Ubuntu in Africa, Suma Kamaña in the South American Andes, Harmonie of all under heaven in Chinese wisdom)9 were displaced and replaced by the accumulation, possession, control disregarding the disequilibrium, and disharmony that the rationalization of economy centered on “capital” implied. What Smith inaugurated was not only a set of distinct economic procedures (e.g., how to build the economy) but a distinct conceptualization of economic course of actions, according to his understanding of the economic domain of his time. He identified, legitimized, and encouraged distinctive economic procedures conceived later on as “capitalism.” Mercantilism was an economy regulated by monarchic States, while Smith, as it is known, fiercely advocated for free markets which were in the “hands” of the emerging ethno-class, who eventually created the nation-state, displacing monarchic forms of governance. Capitalism and the nationstate were the Spirit (as Hegel understood it) of bourgeois creations responding, obviously, to their own interest. And before Hegel, Kant captured the advent of the bourgeois Spirit promoting the liberation of Man that the Enlightenment was arguing. All in all, the “individual” (the ego-centered idea of Man, of humanity, and of lesser humans ranked by race or sexuality) took center stage as the ideal hero of both secular and modern Western paths of knowing and living. Smith, as the moralist he was, assumed that the “invisible hand” regulating the market would be that of honest bourgeois men. Though he framed a political conception of the economy motivated by wealth and a philosophical vision exalting the honest code of conduct, history has shown that honesty and the pursuit of wealth are as incompatible as capitalism and democracy. More recently, history has also shown that liberalism (and its conservative version, neo-liberalism) are no longer necessary for the pursuit of wealth. Capitalism escaped the management of Western civilization (founded on Christian theology, Greek legacy, bourgeois liberalism and neo-liberalism, Western Marxism, and neo-Marxism). But the end of Western hegemony doesn’t equal the end of capitalism. It means that liberalism and

96  Walter D. Mignolo neo-liberalism are narratives of and for the West and its allies, but not for China, Russia, Iran, perhaps now also India and Turkey. These are all capitalist States but not neo-liberal ones. Otherwise, they will have no problem with sanctions, hidden alerts, and Western harassments. Capitalism is alive, though perhaps not well, but with no signs yet of abandoning the scene. The current chaos in the European Union and the UK, as well as in the US, are signs that capitalism escaped their control and that neo-liberalism, the last chapter of Western hegemony, has failed to homogenize in certain places (e.g., Latin America) while rejected in others (China, Russia, Iran). It is a meaningful sign of the end of Western hegemony, quite distinct from the decline of the West perceived by Spengler 100 years ago. Huntington’s clash of civilizations came closer to what is happening today, although he had Islam in mind and did not anticipate (or was not as much concerned at that point by) China and Russia will lead the confrontation joined by Iran. Today Iran has the “disadvantage” for the West, to be Islamic and having oil under their territory, and being capitalist but disobedient. China is harassed by the West more so for economic reasons, but one cannot forget they are the “yellow race,” one of the four races pegged to continents according to classifications provided by Linnaeus (biological) and Kant (cultural).10 Russia, beyond its own version of capitalism, disobeying Western expectations after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been racialized not by skin color (Slavs are white), but for its grounding in Orthodox Christianity and a long history of Russia being a second class empire to the Western gaze. To better grasp the end of Western hegemony though not of capitalism, let’s briefly trace the history of the colonial matrix of power (CMP) in parallel to the advent of the second nomos of the earth in Carl Schmitt’s narrative.11 To be clear, the geo-politics and body politics of knowing and understanding is at stake here. It is not a question of which is the “real history” or the “true one,” nor even “what is the most appropriate narrative” of the period from 1500 to 2000, but who is telling the story and what for. The parallel however is pertinent because both the modern/ colonial world-system narrative and the second nomos of the earth coincide in the historical period (1500–2000). The key words of the decolonial narrative are coloniality of power and the CMP. The key word in Schmitt’s narrative is the second nomos of the earth. The CMP is a concept born in the South American Andes, while the second nomos is a concept born at the center of Europe, in Hegel’s narrative, and very much assumed in Heidegger’s philosophy.12 The Advent of the Second Nomos of the Earth Imagine the world order around 1500. Several civilizations co-existed, some with many centuries of history and others that were being formed by at that time (e.g., the Russian Tzarate, in which Ivan IV Vasilyevich was the first Tzar of Russia, reigning 1547–1584; and the Ottoman Sultanate was founded around 1300 and reaches its peak in the sixteenth century under Suleiman the Magnificent, the 10th Sultan between 1520 and 1566). In China, the ruling class was the Ming dynasty, which was in power from 1368 to 1644. China was then an important center of

The Third Nomos of the Earth  97 commerce and an ancient civilization. Around 200 BC, the Chinese Huangdi (or Huangdinate, often mistakenly called the Emperor and Empire)13 had co-existed with the Roman Empire. By 800 AD, the ancient Roman Empire had become the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nations, which by 1500 continued to co-exist with the Chinese Huangdinate ruled by the Ming dynasty. The Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo, going back to the Umayyad and the foundation of the Caliphate in the seventh century AD, lasted from 1261 to 1517, etc. We could go around the planet locating civilizations that were ending, beginning, or still ongoing in the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Sultanate of Anatolia, with its center in Constantinople before it was termed Istanbul, spanned the fourteenth to twentieth centuries; the Safavid Sultanate, with its center in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the Mughal Sultanate formed from the ruins of the Delhi Sultanate, which had existed from 1206 to 1526. The Mughals (whose first sultan was Babur, descendant of Genghis Khan and from Tamerlane) remained in power from 1526 to 1707. In 1520, the Muscovites had expelled the Golden Horde and proclaimed Moscow the “third Rome.” Thus, began the history of the Russian Tzarate, inaugurated by Ivan IV Vasilyevich or “Ivan the Terrible.” In Africa, the kingdom of Oyo (more or less what Nigeria is today), constituted by the Yoruba people, was the largest kingdom in West Africa that European explorers met. The kingdom of Benin, the second largest in Africa after Oyo, lasted from 1440 to 1897. Finally, but with equal importance, it should be mentioned that the Incas of Tawantinsuyu and the Aztecs of Anahuac were two high-level civilizations when the Spanish arrived. Hence, we can trace the locations and periods of the formation, decay, and end of many civilizations, some of them initiating, others ending, and still others ongoing through the sixteenth century. From Western’s historical perspective, this century became the date for the origination of modernity that would leave the rest of the world behind. The reference to the New World (the Americas) and the Old World (Asia, Africa, and Europe) was the signpost of the Western spatiotemporal idea of modernity. Before 1500, the world order was polycentric and none of the existing economies were capitalist in the sense that mercantilist⁄capitalist economy emerged in the sixteenth century. I explained above that the conditions under which a new type of economy, called at the time mercantilism and, later on, capitalism, were unheard and unknown before the sixteenth century. Many civilizations co-existed and many of them were connected through markets, and their leaders expanded their territorial domain subjugating and conquering. Otherwise, Smith would have no reason to devote many pages to Western colonialism since 1500 and forget about co-existing civilizations. Saying today that the Mongol Khanate was an empire, and Genghis Khan an Emperor, and his economy mercantilist would be to fall flat into Western epistemic Imperialism: Genghis was the founder of the first Mongol Khanate, not of the first Mongol Empire in the same way that August Caesar was not the first Khan of the Roman Khanate. Both the Khanate and the Empire were organizations driven by territorial expansion but grounded in local differential histories.. There is no reason to pretend that the Roman vocabulary is universal. All the formations mentioned in the previous paragraph do not really require a common name to group

98  Walter D. Mignolo them in an easy way to understand them. Suffice it to name them following the local vocabulary. As we will see below, this is a simple example of pluriversality coming into being. Carl Schmitt’s modern narrative the world order before 1500 was described as the “first nomos of the earth.” Nomos, like in the word auto-nomy, means regulating principles or organizations, sometimes translated as law in a loose sense. The first nomos was polycentric (that is, there were various co-existing nomos that I enumerated in the previous paragraph), not only one, although Schmitt is ambiguous in its formulation. No supreme ruler of the existing high-level organizations (e.g., civilizations, which have the same inconvenience as “empire”) assigned to themselves the right and the mission to intervene and dictate over others and much less all co-existing civilizations. That was the first nomos in Schmitt’s narrative, which the advent of the second nomos – that he locates around 1500 – superseded.14 For Schmitt, the Spanish colonization of the New World is the foundational event and the materialization of the second nomos of the earth. Hence, the narrative foundational event of the second nomos coincides with the narrative foundational event of the Colonial Matrix of Power. The foundational events in both narratives demanded ruling principles and argumentation that did not exist before. One of them was the foundation of international law. In Schmitt’s narrative, international law legitimized global linear thinking and the demarcation of lands and seas for European benefits. He recognizes that international law was Eurocentered (his word), that is, built on European interests. In Quijano’s narrative, international law legitimized expropriation and expropriation of land and justified the exploitation of enslaved human beings. In Schmtt’s narrative the second nomos was exhausted after the end of WWI, the same years that Spengler was sensing the decline of Western civilization. Both were German and Western modern thinkers. That is, theirs are narratives of and from Western modernity. In Quijano’s narrative, the CMP was not yet exhausted abut entered into trouble around 2000 when China and Russia began to dispute the legitimacy of its only Western management and the unipolar world order that CMP created. In the decolonial narratives initiated by Quijano after his long participation in the debates around dependency in Latin America, the signs manifesting the formation of the CMP around 1500 were the advent of a new type of economy, massive appropriation of land and massive exploitation of labor financial reinvestment of the surplus, political dismantling of local forms of governance and inserting European ones, and the establishment of epistemic regulations achieved by dismissing local knowledges and inserting European ones, from theology, to science, philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics. In the sphere of political ethics, the most significant sign was the concept of “race” with all its implications until today.15 Racism is the darker side of modern/colonial Western humanism. While human values are celebrated in the rhetoric of Western modernity, dehumanization became a generalized practice (from the invention of America to the invasion of Iraq) of the logic of coloniality. For decolonial narratives, the stories and periodizations are a little bit different in dates, emphasis, and outcomes. In these narratives, the cycle of Western civilization coincides mutatis mutandis with the formation and transformation

The Third Nomos of the Earth  99 of the CMP. As a matter of fact, the CMP is – decolonially speaking – the underlying structure of Western civilization. However, we should not confuse the end of Western hegemony with the end of Western civilization and, consequently, the end of the CMP. Neither Western civilization nor the CMP is “ending” today. The closing of the second nomos doesn’t mean the end of Western civilizations either. It means that a different nomos will emerge, although at the time Schmitt wrote the book (1950), it was not clear what the outcome would be. As for the CMP, it is today well and alive, but no longer controlled by the North Atlantic. While the decline of the second nomos was tantamount with the decline of Western civilization (and this was the time that Spengler perceived the decline of the West) and losing its hegemony, the CMP is becoming dominant (and with it also capitalism) but is under dispute. The dispute between the preservation of Western hegemony and unipolarity and the advent of de-Westernization and multipolarity, contrary to the second nomos that was built, transformed, managed, and controlled by key States of Western civilization, over the control of the CMP is today being disputed by China, Russia, Iran, and perhaps Turkey, with India always in an ambiguous position, and the growing affirmation of the BRICS, now enlarged with the addition of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey, and several others in the waiting list. Losing hegemony means losing also absolute control of the CMP, and losing the hegemony of a unipolar world order. And here is where “capitalism” and Western hegemony follow different paths. Capitalism is no longer exclusively controlled and managed under Western liberal and neo-liberalism principles. The end of Western hegemony is due precisely to the decoupling of capitalism from liberalism/ neo-liberalism. Let me say it once more: China, Russia, and Iran are capitalist, and so is Turkey. None of them are neo-liberal (and here is where India is ambiguous playing with neo-liberalism and promoting national fundamentalism). The goal of neo-liberalism was to homogenize the world economically, politically, and epistemically (science, technology, religion) according to the model of Western civilization. The State politics of Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey are based on their own local histories blocking Western hegemony and domination and rejecting the belief that Greek and Roman legacies are universal memories and the ground for any possible destiny of human political, economic, epistemic, ethic, and aesthetic praxis of living. That none of these States are “ideal” domestically is obvious, and I am not saying they are. But, neither are Western States domestically “ideal,” which is also obvious. Furthermore, it shall not be forgotten that the end of Western hegemony is tantamount to the end of Western epistemic hegemony, but not with the end of capitalism. The end of capitalism has also been announced for some time now but for the time being is alive, while Western epistemic hegemony controlled by modern vernacular imperial languages is already being discredited and mistrusted by re-emerging non-European path of knowing and existing local languages and knowledges.16 There are two (although not only two) visions (and hopes) about the end of capitalism I consider here. One is based on the history of the modern world-system (Wallerstein) and of the modern⁄colonial world system (Quijano) and the other is

100  Walter D. Mignolo based on the opening provided by technology. The first is premises on the assumption that no system lasts forever, and the current disorientation of the EU, and of the financial money-making of the US, are the irreversible signs of the end capitalism in the next decades, where 2050 is the estimated date. In the first narrative, the outcome at the end of capitalism is uncertain. Wallerstein’s concise formulation is the following: My analysis of the modern world-system argues that we are in a structural crisis, that the system is in fact unable to survive, and that the world is in a chaotic situation, which we will be in for twenty to forty years to come. This crisis has to do with the lack of sufficient surplus-value available and thus with the possible profit one can make. The system is bifurcating – referring to a situation in which there are two alternative ways of getting out of the present crisis in order to create a new, stable, world-system. 17 The problem with Wallerstein’s vision is that he is not considering coloniality and the CMP. When you bring coloniality and CMP into the picture, the modern world-system becomes the modern/colonial world-system and a lot of sidelined actors get into the picture. But let’s bring an op-ed version of serious (which doesn’t mean objective) journalism that has a wider (and larger) audience than academic writing. British writer and broadcaster Paul Mason offers another view out of the actual mess highlighting technology as a transforming agency Mason is not concerned about the end of capitalism, but rather with its “transition” to something else: the transition from capitalism to post-capitalism. It is not clear if post-capitalism announces the end of capitalism or its reconfiguration, as postmodernity also means a reconfiguration of modernity (a transition but not the end of modernity) and postcolonialism means also a reconfiguration of coloniality after the modern struggle for decolonization during the Cold War. Mason’s frame is not the modern world-system, like Wallerstein, but the linear history of Western civilization, which means linear narratives of whatever is narrated in whatever time frame the narrative is performed. In this case, if the narrative is on the economy, then the next stage is post-economy. If the narrative were development, then we are moving to post-development.18 Confident on the path technology is opening up for people to organize themselves in collaborative fashion, and encouraged by Karl Marx’s serious fictional scenario of the power of the machine and the power of knowledge, Paul Mason writes about the path opened by technology: But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labor, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The post-capitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening.19

The Third Nomos of the Earth  101 From here, I infer that post-capitalism is not necessarily the end of capitalism, but its mutation or transition into a “new” form: from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism made possible by technology. This formulation sounds to me compatible with Davos Forum and the arguments advanced by its creator, Klaus Schwab, in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution.20 Post-capitalism is, in Mason’s view, capitalism managed by “the people” instead of being managed only by the corporations. For that, Mason recognizes, State intervention will be needed to create a favorable framework. And here is where post-capitalism falls into liberal ethics expecting the State to work for the wellbeing of the people (e.g., the nation) and becomes wishful thinking: capitalism, whether industrial, financial, or cognitive (information), had already “colonized” the political State. The State is today an agent of capitalism, post or pre. However, Mason writes on the agency of post-capitalism: By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.21 The rest of post-capitalism (the million people that will and cannot be integrated to cognitive capitalism) is tantamount to the rest of capitalism. In my understanding, educated and connected human beings as envisaged by Mason are still in the orbit of capitalism which cannot integrate 100% of the population. Those educated that expand capitalism add a new agency, people’s organization of their own economy, in whichever way and place it would happen. Hence, post-capitalism is a new face of capitalism, as neo-liberalism is a new face of liberalism. Let’s go back to the experience and narratives from the Third World’s perspectives rather than relying on the North Atlantic narratives, be they by Wallerstein or Mason, and recall that at the end of the Cold War, Aníbal Quijano introduced two key and interrelated concepts: one, coloniality of power and colonial matrix of power. It introduced at the same time the question as I have already mentioned; the other, concomitant to the first, was the question of the totality of knowledge. By the same token, Quijano equated modernity with rationality. Hence, the title of his foundational article was “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.”22 Although he was engaged in the debates on dependency in Latin America in the 1960s, and his training in sociology was framed in Marxist system of ideas, he was radically critical of historical materialism. In this article, he did not highlight capitalism but, rather, the question of the totality of knowledge that involves economic praxes. Capitalism therefore became in Quijano’s argument one domain of CMP. From building, managing and transforming knowledge, to the control of education and institutions, the possession of the printed press and made possible to print and multiply the narratives, in book and pamphlet form, of their “discovery.” Map makers in Amsterdam made significant contributions by designing the images of the water and land, masses of planet earth, and by drawing and printing the first mapamundi (world map) naming what for them were four continents:

102  Walter D. Mignolo Asia, Africa, Europa, and America. Of course, it never was four continents beyond the Christian imagination and its aftermath. People living today in Asia may not know that in 1582 no one knew that they were living in Asia, for Asia was not a continent beyond Western imagination. But the fact that the continental names have been accepted by the people inhabiting the land named Asia by Western Christians, or Africa for that matter, and, of course, the invented America doesn’t change the fact that Asia was not an existing name of the Asian languages before 1582 and the European making of the mapa mundi. The invention of Orientalism in the eighteenth century is but one example of the Western hegemony of controlling knowledge, classifying and ranking. The invention of America was added to the three existing continents in the Christian imaginary, and the constitution of an image of “reality” through printed images of the planet complemented with narratives disseminated by the printing press, was tantamount with the advent of the new type of economy called capitalism. That is, in a nutshell, the question of the totality of knowledge. The closing of Western epistemic hegemony (and with it, its political and economic privileges) is manifested today in two different ways: on the one hand, the names of the continents are not changing. There are no claims that I know of to change the name of Asia and Africa for example or to dispute the continental lines that have been established since the sixteenth century. On the contrary, the names have been appropriated by Asian and African States’ officers and intellectuals to shift the geo-politics of knowledge and reconstitute their own local gnoseologies. The Americas is a more complex case, and I leave it aside this time. What I want to highlight is that today there are distinctive and irreversible signs of the shift toward the affirmation and recovering of continental pride, with due regional variations, that Western epistemic hegemony told them to despise.23 I would describe these moves as decoloniality of knowledge, although decoloniality may not be the word being used by the self-identification of several and diverse projects. It is my description of projects aiming at the reconstitution of destitute gnoseologies. The closing of Western hegemony is due to two sets of factors. Some are related to Westerners’ increasing lack of understanding and awareness of the non-intended consequences of the blind arrogance of its global designs.24 It was apparently assumed for a long time that all rebellion against Western (US, NATO, EU) designs could be controlled and dismantled. Two signposts in the twentieth century to stop Japanese imperial aspirations to contest Western hegemonic aspirations were controlled: first, by dropping two nuclear bombs killing about 500,000 in the first four months of the war, though we do not know how many more have died of involuntary exposure to nuclear radiation; and second by the most deliberate and political Western liberal victory over Soviet communism. The results were positive for the West at first glance. Japan mutated from rebellion to domestic reclusion and international submission until today. The consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union were different: the Russian Federation turned out to be a “rebel loser.” In fact, rather than nourish the Spirit of submission, the fall of the Soviet Union recast the right to difference that did not stop to be consolidated, until today. Ukraine is a turning point.

The Third Nomos of the Earth  103 In Africa, the reemergence of memories and history were found in researcher and intellectual giant figure Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986), as well as in political and intellectual leaders of decolonization during the Cold War (Nkrumah, Lumumba, Cabral, Biko, etc.); one can see the arts flourishing at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. The force, creativity, and optimism in the present are unmistakable there. That energy prompted reports such as The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics (2018).25 All of this is happening in parallel to the more complex scenarios of the economic growth of most African countries. Hegel’s dictum that oriented the Western perception of Africa is falling in desuetude, another sign of the West’s losing epistemic and aesthetic hegemony, not to mention ethic credibility. For Hegel, Africa was out of History, so no need to be concerned with it. And before Hegel, Kant quoting Hume stated that the most intelligent of the Negros (his word) cannot be equated with the least intelligent of the Whites. To give a better sense of what I am arguing, allow me a lengthy quotation of an interview by Ghanaian economist George Ayittey that he titled “Africa Through African Eyes”: Question: I am intrigued by the title you suggested for this interview. Can you explain it in more detail please? Answer: Much has been written about Africa by Western and other foreign writers. Though many of these books show brilliant scholarship, they tend to be condescending and propose solutions that are culturally inappropriate or impractical. Most Western writers on Africa are hamstrung by political correctness and a fundamental lack of understanding of African culture. They are reluctant to criticize inane policies of black African leaders for fear of being labeled racist. It is always important to distinguish between African leaders and the African people. Criticizing the failed policies of black African leaders does not mean one is a racist. Western solutions have not worked well in Africa.26 The observation could be generalized today. It suffices to read Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policies to see how many solutions Western writers have for China, Russia, the Middle East, and, sometimes, Latin America. The world is wrong, but the West have the solutions. Becoming aware of their unawareness is a widespread sign of our time and the closing of Western epistemic hegemony. These writers of these two magazines have not yet apparently internalized that what they say about different regions of the world is not what “really” is going on there and even less related to the solutions they need, but just what they think is going on there and what the solutions the writers think are good for people in other corners of the world, speaking different languages, being interfered with by the West, and now re-emerging from a long period of Western anesthesia. The closing of Western hegemony is manifested in two ways: one is still believing that the West has a solution for any problem the West has caused; the other is the unawareness of the powerful thinking that is at work in the former colonies and among former civilizations for a long time under a Western spell, both at the level of inter-state relations (Russia, China, Iran, Turkey) and at the level of the political society (ideas, arguments, creativity, research) emerging all over

104  Walter D. Mignolo the planet, as the example of cultural restitution and re-Africanization shows. At the same time that Western intelligentsia fails to accept the irreversible mutations in the political world order, there is a global turnaround of the people’s sensorium, their feeling and emotioning, thinking, and a growing awareness that Western solutions are no longer needed, if they were ever. Ayittey comes to the rescue once again as an African analyzing both Africa and the West: Question: So how do you tackle Africa’s problems? Answer: To move Africa forwards requires a new paradigm. At the center of this model must be the African people and how they view and analyze their own situation and problems. Ultimately, it is they who must save their own continent, not Westerners or Easterners. The West sees Africa’s problems differently from how Africans themselves see them. It was for this reason that I coined the expression “African solutions for African problems” in 1994, after Somalia imploded in 1991 and the international rescue mission led by the US failed. “African solutions” does not mean solutions crafted by an African. Rather, it means solutions anchored in or in consonance with Africa’s heritage.27 A different vision to the one offered by Paul Mason regarding the agency of the people. Western (North Atlantic) intellectuals, politicians, rulers found solutions to their problems anchored in Western heritage, but that do not authorize them to propose solutions for the rest of the world. The example is being followed all over, recovering the heritages that Western interventions disavowed. The closing of Western hegemony has much to do with this failure to understand that the 500 years of Western hegemony got to its closing chapter. Kishore Mahbubani, always perceptive and at the same time diplomatic, recently published a little book with a revealing title: Has the West Lost It?28 Most likely the West has lost it and the planetary “complement” is gaining it. Voices abound that have been shattered or derailed, but today they are coming to life with force if not with vengeance. In 1927, Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen expressed concerns similar to Ayittey’s years later, but also, I suspect, echoing a growing confidence in the Asian regions: If we want to realize Pan-Asianism in this new world, what should be its foundation if not our ancient civilization and culture? Benevolence and virtue must be the foundations of Pan-Asianism. With this as a sound foundation we must then learn science from Europe for our industrial development and the improvement of our armaments, not, however, with a view to oppressing or destroying other countries and peoples as the Europeans have done, but purely for our self-defense.29 The previous narratives are signposts of something else, which is neither the end of capitalism nor of information-cognitive economy labeled “post-capitalism.” It is rather the closing of the second nomos of the earth which is tantamount with the closing of Western hegemony.

The Third Nomos of the Earth  105 The Closing of Western Hegemony and the Advent of the Third Nomos of the Earth I have argued in the past decade that the reconfiguration of the inter-state world order after the end of the Cold War and of the Bush-Cheney era (2008) has been altered by many factors, one of them being the end of Western hegemony and, consequently, losing unilateral and unipolar management and control of the CMP. Therefore, the current global dis-order as I is one of the consequences of declining Western hegemony and consequently of the unilateral control of the CMP (the US, the EU, and the UK). We on the planet are witnessing the end of the monopolar inter-state world order of the last 500 years. On the other hand, losing epistemic hegemony is due to Western errors and blind decisions, by the inter-state growing influence of de-Westernization (and by the co-existing political society’s (the people acting and thinking beyond the State and the corporations) increasing their understanding of the consequences of historical colonialism within the frame of modernity/coloniality. This second force undermining Western hegemony is decoloniality at large. Like de-Westernization, decoloniality materializes delinking and rebuilding non-Western ways of knowing (gnoseologies) and aesthesis (rebuilding the sensorium): gnoseologies open the doors to non-Western ways of knowing and aesthesis opens the doors to non-Western ways of sensing and being in the world. While de-Westernization is disputing the control of the CMP in the inter-state relations and bringing forward a multipolar world order, decoloniality is delinking (not disputing the control) from the CMP and building pluriversal gnoseologies and aesthesis, disobeying the regulations of epistemology and aesthetics (disciplinary formations in epistemology; museums, biennials, and galleries in aesthetics).30 Delinking doesn’t mean ignoring epistemological and aesthetic regulations for both made it through the planet and infected (for better or worse) all co-existing civilizations. Delinking means disobeying, not ignoring. It means not believing in Western epistemic, political and ethics hegemony. De-Westernization and decoloniality are then two of the major forces contributing to ending Western hegemony. But not ending capitalism that has made possible de-Westernization and the multipolar inter-state world order in the making. If then Western hegemony is closing, it doesn’t mean that the West (the US, the EU, and the UK) vanishes as a political, economic, scientific, and aesthetic force. It doesn’t mean that and it doesn’t have that Western civilization has to vanish. It means that it has to be reduced to its own and well-deserved local size. It means that emerging forces and claims, such as de-Westernization and decoloniality, are at work in the process of affirmation and recovering their dignity, their belief in their own languages, memories, histories, and culture in general, and in their competence to organize themselves and flourish whether in the economic, political, and military forces of de-Western States or in the ethical, gnoseological and aesthetic praxes of living of the people taking their lives in their own hands. Decolonial visions and horizons are radically distinct from the post-capitalist society envisioned by Mason. However, both co-exist with de-Westernization and re-Westernization (the US effort to maintain hegemony). To think that it would be

106  Walter D. Mignolo or should be a winner and a looser is still to think and feel that all has to end in a zero sum-game Decolonial horizons are akin to the scenario described by Ayittey. While the post-capitalist scenario that Mason describes is still capitalist and therefore it remains within the sphere of Western civilization, decoloniality refers, in general, to the self-organization of the people who are rejecting the liberal-neoliberal conceptions of political management of capitalism, and working on the general principles (depending on place, local history, and potential) of sustainable economies rather than sustainable development. Regarding the upcoming inter-state world order, framing the issue in Schmitt’s vocabulary, what we in the planet are experiencing is the advent of the third nomos of the earth lead by de-Westernization in the inter-state system and by decoloniality in the public sphere. China has been and continue to be portrayed in the West as wanting to take over the role that the US has. These are signs of Western malaise and fear; these are not what China and Russia are aiming at. The third nomos is and will continue to be for at least the twenty-first century, one of co-existences in conflict with the hope that it will become co-existence in harmony and mutual respect. Let’s be clear that there are three main trajectories moving towards the third nomos today, as I said in the previous paragraph, Two of them are de-Westernization and decoloniality, both delinking from five hundred years of Westernization.31 The third trajectory not yet mentioned, co-existing with de-Westernization and decoloniality, is re-Westernization. Re-Westernization is the response in politics, economy, knowledge, and aesthetics to both de-Westernization and decoloniality. Re-Westernization responses to de-Westernization are located in the sphere mainly of inter-state politics, economic, and military. But they are also in the sphere of knowledge and aesthetics as can be seen at work in universities and museums. In this case, the de-Westernization is challenging the hegemony of Western cultural domains (all the spheres of knowledge, all the spheres of the arts and all the spheres of aesthetics, sciences, philosophy, and mainstream media). De-Westernization was at work at the Sharjah Biennial 11 and 14; at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and at the Asian Civilization Museum in Singapore.32 Decoloniality in the institutional sphere has been experienced in the last four years in South Africa in the continuous call of decolonizing the university and the curriculum.33 Similar claims and actions have taken place in the Netherlands and England.34 In sum, the contour of the third nomos of the earth, which all of us are experiencing, will not bring either a “new winner” or a “new single ruler of the world,” in which case it would still be unipolarity with distinct ruler, doesn’t matter who the single ruler could be if the world order is in the hand of a single ruler. That model of the second nomos with a single civilization declaring itself the observer that cannot be observed, with the right to intervene all over and whenever pleases, it is over and, again, there is no room for a “replacement.” Multipolarity is now, and will be, the institutional (states, museums, universities, research centers) world order brought about by de-Westernization and of epistemic, cultural, racial, and sexual pluriversality brought about by the decolonial emergence of the global political society, delinking from Western universal fictions.

The Third Nomos of the Earth  107 Closing Remarks and Opening to the Next Chapters A few years ago (2019), it was reported in different newspapers and blogs a statement made by French President Emmanuel Macron around the last meeting of the G7 in Biarritz, France. The Washington Post reported what they called a “sweeping” statement made by France President Emmanuel Macron: “In a sweeping diplomatic speech Tuesday, Macron said ‘we are living the end of Western hegemony’ in the world, in part as a result of Western ‘errors’ over past centuries.”35 For its part, Página 12, a newspaper from Buenos Aires, Argentina, added a few more sentences to that statement: “The international order rested on Western hegemony since the 18th century: in that case France, then, in the 19th century, Great Britain and the 20th United States. But that hegemony is in question today.”36 If you run a Google search in French, “Macron, la fin de l’hégémonie occidentale,” you will get plenty of entries in return.37 However, Macron did not announce the end of capitalism. And he was right in not mentioning it. For better or worse, the end of capitalism is not near, unless a Black Swan forces a shift that by today is difficult to foresee. The forces interested in maintaining capitalism, on both sides of de- and re-Westernization, are too solid for “the people” to dismantle. “The people” are not the main concern of either de-Westernization or re-Westernization (although in China and Lula’s Brazil raising the line of poverty has been noted) which is precisely why there is a growing awareness that our destiny (that of “the people” [us]) is in our own hands, which brings about the emergence of the global political society with their/our backs to the State, rebuilding their/our and orienting their/our lives around pluriversal horizons of meaning. The co-existence of these three conflictive forces outlines the advent of the third nomos of the earth, and the end of Western hegemony. Capitalism is another matter now that de-Westernization affirmed itself politically precisely by taking capitalism away from Western management. In other words, the promising narratives of salvation, progress, and development continue to hide the logic of coloniality, unavoidable in both re- and de-Westernization. However, a multipolar inter-state world order may create fissures to the advantage of the emerging (decolonial) political society. Notes 1 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, edited by Helmet Werner, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1926–28). 2 Samuel P. Huntington, Fouad Ajami, Robert L. Bartley, and Liu Binyan, The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate: A Foreign Affairs Reader (New York: Foreign Affairs, 1993). 3 Olivia Harris, “Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity,” History Workshop Journal 57, no. 1 (Spring 2004), https://www-jstor-org.proxy.lib.duke. edu/stable/pdf/25472731.pdf?refreqid= excelsior%3Aa7d125e7c0b0673e178dc179 65050eb6. 4 Robert W. Merry, “Spengler’s Ominous Prophecy,” The National Interest 123 (January/ February 2013), “Spengler’s Ominous Prophecy.” https://nationalinterest.org/article/ spenglers-ominous-prophecy-7878?page=0%2C3.

108  Walter D. Mignolo 5 In his 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” (El idioma analítico de John Wilkins), Borges describes ‘a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,’ entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into an arbitrary taxonomy. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). 6 Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal 134 (1992), accessed March 9, 2021, https://www.javeriana.edu.co/blogs/syie/files/Quijano-andWallerstein-Americanity-as-a-Concept.pdf. 7 For all of this, see chapter 5 in my book, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). A mandarin translation of this text came out in 2016. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Peking University Press, 2016). On the same topic, see Walter Mignolo, “The North of the South and the West of the East: A Provocation to the Question,” Ibraaz: Contemporary Visual Culture in the North Africa and Middle East (website), November 6, 2014, https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/108/. 8 Pauline Montagna, “Slavery in Medieval Italy,” The History Buff (blog), August 20, 2016, https://medium.com/the-history-buff/slavery-in-medieval-italy-cb189ae45933. 9 Tianxia (All under heaven) in China, Ubuntu in Africa, and Sumak Kawsay/Suma Qamaña in the South American Andes are concepts that provide the foundation bases to build balanced and harmonic societies. These concepts, like democracy, are all aiming the same way, toward living better and in competition instead of living well and in harmony. The problem with democracy is not the ends but the means: that to live in harmony and equity, it is necessary to have one vote per one person is one of the most unquestioned myths of our time. 10 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of Race in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997). 11 Carl Raschke, “What is the New “Nomos of the Earth”? Reflections on the Later Schmitt,” Commentary in Political Theology (blog), Political Theology Network, September 3, 2016, https://politicaltheology.com/what-is-the-new-nomos-of-the-earthreflections-on-the-later-schmitt-carl-raschke/. 12 On this point, see Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 13 Wang Mingming, “All Under Heaven (tianxia): Cosmological Perspectives and Political Ontologies in Pre-modern China,” Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 1 (2012), DOI: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau2.1.015. 14 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in International Law (London: Telos Press Publishing, 2006). 15 Margaret E. Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 16 See Walter Mignolo, Foreword to Can Non-Europeans Think? by Hamid Dabashi (London: Zed Books, 2015). 17 Peer Schouten, “Immanuel Wallerstein on World-Systems, The Imminent End of Capitalism and Unifying Social Sciences,” Theory Talks #13, 2008, https://www.files.ethz. ch/isn/155230/Theory%20Talk13_Wallerstein.pdf. 18 See “Sustainable Development or Sustainable Economies?” in this book. 19 Paul Mason, “The End of Capitalism Has Begun,” The Guardian, July 17, 2015, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun. 20 Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Business, 2017). 21 Paul Mason, op. cit.

The Third Nomos of the Earth  109 22 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007), DOI: 10.1080/09502380601164353. 23 Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia: Reinventer l’Afrique (Paris: Éditions Philippe Rey, 2019). 24 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 25 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics,” Restitution Report 2018 (website), November 2018, https://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf. 26 George Ayittey, “The Best Books on Africa Through African Eyes,” Fivebooks, accessed March 9, 2021, https://fivebooks.com/best-books/africa-through-african-eyes-georgeayittey/. 27 Ayittey, op. cit. 28 Kishore Mahbubani, Has the West Lost It? A Provocation (London: Allen Lane, 2018). 29 This quote has been included in Chapter 1 in this book. 30 Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds, Decolonial Healings.” Special issue of Social Text, Periscope (July 2013), https://www. udesc.br/arquivos/ceart/id_cpmenu/5800/Decolonial_Aesthetics_Colonial_Wounds_ Decolonial_Healings_Social_Text_15505156052623_5800.pdf. 31 Mignolo, The Darker Side. 32 Walter Mignolo, “Enacting the Archives, Decentering the Muses. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore,” Ibraaz: Contemporary Visual Culture in the North Africa and Middle East (website), November 6, 2013, https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/77. 33 Lazarus Donald Mokula “Oupa” Lebeloane, “Decolonizing the School Curriculum for Equity and Social Justice in South Africa,” KOERS – Bulletin for Christian Scholarship 82, no. 3 (2017), https://doi.org/10.19108/KOERS.82.3.2333. http://www.scielo.org.za/ pdf/koers/v82n3/05.pdf. 34 “Diversity Committee Presents Final Report ‘Let’s Do Diversity’,” News, The University of Amsterdam, October 12, 2016, https://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/news/2016/10/ diversity-committee-presents-final-report.html?1572524053861. 35 Associated Press, “The Latest: Macron Calls for New Relations with Russia,” Calgary CityNews Everywhere, August 27, 2019, https://calgary.citynews.ca/2019/08/27/ the-latest-macron-calls-for-new-relations-with-russia/. 36 Eduardo Febbro, “Cumbre del G7: la desigualdad como leitmotiv,” Pagina 12, Business edition, August 23, 2019, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/213904-cumbredel-g-7-la-desigualdad-como-leitmotiv. 37 Just one as example, Eduardo Febbro, “Cumbre del G7: la desigualdad como leitmotiv,” Pagina 12, Business edition, August 23, 2019, https://www.pagina12.com. ar/213904-cumbre-del-g-7-la-desigualdad-como-leitmotiv.

Bibliography Ahmed, Lassaad Ben. “France: Macron reconnaît ‘la fin de l’hégémonie occidentale sur le monde’.” Anadolu Agency. August 27, 2019. https://www.aa.com.tr/fr/politique/ france-macron-reconnaît-la-fin-de-l-hégémonie-occidentale-sur-le-monde-/1566215 Associated Press. “The Latest: Macron Calls for New Relations with Russia.” Calgary CityNews Everywhere. August 27, 2019. https://calgary.citynews.ca/2019/08/27/ the-latest-macron-calls-for-new-relations-with-russia/ Ayittey, George. “The Best Books onAfrica ThroughAfrican Eyes.” Fivebooks.Accessed March 9, 2021. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/africa-through-african-eyes-george-ayittey/

110  Walter D. Mignolo Bambach, Charles. Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” In Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger, 229–32. Translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. “The Color of Reason: The Idea of Race in Kant’s Anthropology.” In Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, 103–41. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997. Febbro, Eduardo. “Cumbre del G7: la desigualdad como leitmotiv.” Pagina 12. Business Edition, August 23, 2019. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/213904-cumbre-del-g-7la-desigualdad-como-leitmotiv Greer, Margaret E., Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds. Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Harris, Olivia. “Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity.” History Workshop Journal 57, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 161–74. https://www-jstor-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/ stable/pdf/25472731.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Aa7d125e7c0b0673e178dc17965050eb6 Huntington, Samuel P., Fouad Ajami, Robert L. Bartley, and Liu Binyan. The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate: A Foreign Affairs Reader. New York: Foreign Affairs, 1993. Lebeloane, Lazarus Donald Mokula “Oupa”. “Decolonizing the School Curriculum for Equity and Social Justice in South Africa.” KOERS – Bulletin for Christian Scholarship 82, no. 3 (2017): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.19108/KOERS.82.3.2333. http://www.scielo.org. za/pdf/koers/v82n3/05.pdf Mahbubani, Kishore. Has the West Lost It? A Provocation. London: Allen Lane, 2018. Mason, Paul. “The End of Capitalism Has Begun.” The Guardian, July 17, 2015. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun Merry, Robert W. “Spengler’s Ominous Prophecy.” The National Interest 123 (January/ February 2013): 11–22. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42896533?seq=1#metadata_info_ tab_contents Mignolo, Walter. “Enacting the Archives, Decentering the Muses. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore.” Ibraaz, November 6, 2013. https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/77 ––––––. Foreword to Can Non-Europeans Think? Edited by Hamid Dabashi, viii–xlii. London: Zed Books, 2015. ———. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. ———. “The Movable Center: Ethnicity, Geometric Projections, and Coexisting Territorialities.” Chap. 5 in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization, 219–258. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. ———. “The North of the South and the West of the East: A Provocation to the Question.” Ibraaz: Contemporary Visual Culture in the North Africa and Middle East (website). November 6, 2014. https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/108/ Mignolo, Walter, and Rolando Vázquez. “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds, Decolonial Healings.” Special issue of Social Text, Periscope (July 2013): 1–18. https://www.udesc.br/arquivos/ceart/id_cpmenu/5800/Decolonial_Aesthetics__Colonial_Wounds_Decolonial_Healings_____Social_Text_15505156052623_5800.pdf

The Third Nomos of the Earth  111 Mingming, Wang. “All Under Heaven (Tianxia): Cosmological Perspectives and Political Ontologies in Pre-Modern China.” Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 1 (2012): 337– 83. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau2.1.015 Montagna, Pauline. “Slavery in Medieval Italy.” The History Buff (blog). August 20, 2016. https://medium.com/the-history-buff/slavery-in-medieval-italy-cb189ae45933 Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 168–78. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601164353 Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal 134 (1992): 549–57. Accessed March 9, 2021. https://www.javeriana.edu.co/blogs/syie/files/ Quijano-and-Wallerstein-Americanity-as-a-Concept.pdf Raschke, Carl. “What Is the New Nomos of the Earth”? Reflections on the Later Schmitt.” Commentary in Political Theology (blog). Political Theology Network, September 3, 2016. https://politicaltheology.com/what-is-the-new-nomos-of-the-earth-reflections-onthe-later-schmitt-carl-raschke/ Sarr, Felwine. Afrotopia: Reinventer l’Afrique. Paris: Éditions Philippe Rey, 2019. Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics.” Restitution Report 2018 (website), November 2018. https:// restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in International Law. London: Telos Press Publishing, 2006. Schouten, Peer. “Immanuel Wallerstein on World-Systems: The Imminent End of Capitalism and Unifying Social Sciences.” Theory Talks #13. 2008. https://www.files.ethz.ch/ isn/155230/Theory%20Talk13_Wallerstein.pdf Schwab, Klaus. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. New York: Crown Business, 2017. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Edited by Helmet Werner. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. 2 vols. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1926–28. The University of Amsterdam. “Diversity Committee Presents Final Report ‘Let’s Do Diversity’.” News. October 12, 2016. https://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/news/2016/10/ diversity-committee-presents-final-report.html?1572524053861

4

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction Colonial Continuities, Postcolonial Assemblages of Power, Anti-colonial Struggles Sandro Mezzadra*

Structural Crisis, Systemic Chaos? Are we at the end of Pax Americana, or of U.S. American hegemony within the capitalist world system? While this book focuses on knowledge production and epistemic decolonization, I want to interrogate the present global conjuncture from the angle of the transitions and shifts that are reframing capitalism. I am indeed convinced that such an analysis is urgently needed not only because of the pressure that capitalism puts on knowledge production (e.g. through managerial discourses that pervasively penetrate even the humanities), but also in order to grasp the stakes and pitfalls surrounding contemporary projects and practices of epistemic and political decolonization in many parts of the world, from Latin America to South Africa and East Asia. It is definitely right to stress the ways in which the “international principle of the modern world” shaped the development of humanities bringing about a bifurcation of the world into two kinds of humanity, humanitas (the subject of theory production) and anthropos, the “suppliers of raw data and factual information.”1 The ensuing articulation between the consecration of the nation-state and the colonial order of the world has taken multiple and shifting forms in modern history, reproducing itself even beyond formal decolonization and invariably revolving around a European, or Western, center. What needs to be emphasized is the constitutive relation between the shifting forms of this articulation and capitalism, a mode of production that for the first time in human history takes since its inception the whole world as a crucial scale for its operations. “The tendency to create the world market,” Karl Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.”2 Like no other “classical economist” of his age, Marx was acutely aware of the relevance of these global geographical coordinates for the very definition of the capitalist mode of production.3 While he famously * As I explain throughout the essay the argument I develop here emerges from my collaborative work with Verónica Gago and Brett Neilson. Needless to say, I am the only responsible for the way in which the argument itself is articulated here. But I want to emphasize in a friendly and comradely way my debt to Brett and Verónica.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-4

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  113 emphasized in his analysis of “so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital, volume 1, the implications of colonial conquest for the opening up of the world market,4 his theoretical reflections on this latter concept laid the ground for following debates on imperialism5 and even for the development of “world system theory.6” In very general terms, one can say that what is at stake in these political and theoretical elaborations is precisely the relation between the “international” and colonial order of the world and modern capitalism. Giovanni Arrighi’s reflections upon the “territorial logic of historic capitalism” in his Adam Smith in Beijing7 are probably the most sophisticated attempt to come to terms with the complicated, tense, and nevertheless necessary relations between capitalism and “territorialism” – which means, with the problem of the political articulation and organization of the “world market.” There is no need here to go into the details of Arrighi’s well-known theory of hegemonic cycles (each revolving around the central position occupied in the world system by a European, or Western power, from the Republic of Genoa to the Netherlands, from Britain to the U.S.) and hegemonic transitions (starting in the “autumn” of a cycle, marked by processes of financialization). Suffice it to remember that world system scholars like Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein were among the first to diagnose the end of U.S. hegemony, challenging the blossoming rhetoric of a “new American century” since the late 1990s.8 What appears clear today is that the signs of a crisis of U.S. American hegemony at the world level multiply. However, it is very difficult to discern the traces of a linear hegemonic transition and of an incipient reorganization of the world system around a new center. If one takes China, long considered as a candidate to the hegemonic succession by world system scholars, it is quite clear that on the one hand its politics is focused on the consolidation of a regional space of influence, while on the other its “global” projection is epitomized by a project like the “new silk road,” or “belt and road initiative,” which follows a spatial and political rationality quite different from the one of “territorialism.”9 More generally, to put it quickly, “multipolar” scenarios are looming up for the next future, among commercial and traditional wars, geopolitical tensions and geoeconomic competition. New combinations of neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and nationalism emerge in many parts of the world, at once nurtured by and prompting these scenarios. In such a situation, in which the global power of the U.S. continues to decline but no hegemonic transition is in sight, Wallerstein insists that we are facing the end of the modern world system and of historical capitalism (adding, to be sure, that what comes next is going to be possibly worse than capitalism). A “structural crisis” and “systemic chaos” are, according to him, the defining features of the present global conjuncture.10 While I definitely acknowledge the relevance of crisis and chaos in the present world disorder, and even more so in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is difficult for me to follow Wallerstein, as well as other thinkers, in his diagnosis regarding the end of capitalism. Since the inception of the debates on “globalization,” I have rather been joining a different kind of analysis and conversations, which emphasize the profound transformations of capitalism and the ensuing challenges for any straightforward articulation

114  Sandro Mezzadra between capitalism and territorialism. The book by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Empire (2000), is particularly important in this respect, although many other names and works could be mentioned here and independently of what one thinks of their point regarding an emerging global sovereignty of capital and the end of imperialism. Focusing the analysis on the multiplication of borders as a distinctive feature of “actually existing global processes,” I have criticized in my work with Brett Neilson mainstream images of globalization and I have also attempted to move beyond such binaries as “smooth” vs. “striated” space, “space of flows” vs. “space of places,” to underscore the key roles played by myriad bordering devices in the articulation and grounding of global dynamics.11 Such an analysis has provided me with a pronounced sensitivity for the relevance of spatial formations and of their legal and political governance in the material constitution of capitalist globalization. It has also alerted me regarding the transformations of territory and territoriality in the present as well as the ensuing tensions and disconnections between capitalism and territorialism that make absolutely plausible the reproduction and further entrenchment of capitalism at the global level even without the emergence of a new hegemonic power at the center of the world system. Needless to say, such a scenario would imply a radical rupture with a centuries-old history, characterized not merely by the presence of a hegemonic power but – there is a need to repeat it – more precisely by a European, or Western, hegemony. This is a point that challenges anybody engaged in projects and practices of decolonization. Is it possible to imagine a capitalist world system without a European or Western center? Only in the West, to quote from Max Weber,12 could modern capitalism emerge and deploy its tendency to become universal and rule the world. Sure, Weber’s theory of capitalism could and should be critically discussed at length, both regarding the conceptual link he establishes between modern capitalism and “free” wage labor, following Marx in this respect,13 and regarding his underestimation of the constitutive role played by the Americas for the emergence of the capitalist world system.14 But the connection between capitalism, modernity, and Europe (or “the West”) is undeniable and reflected in the Eurocentric nature of the modern world system. Anti-colonial and anti-racist writers have obviously often emphasized that connection. “European civilization,” writes for instance Cedric Robinson in his rightly celebrated Black Marxism, “is not the product of capitalism. On the contrary, the character of capitalism can only be understood in the social and historical context of its appearance.”15 The question is whether this historical fact implies the impossibility to think of a capitalism delinked from Eurocentrism or whether it is possible and necessary to imagine the reproduction and mutation of capitalism beyond Eurocentrism (or at least beyond a world system centered upon Europe or the West). This is a more general problem, which regards the project of decolonization as such. Scholars working with a broad notion of “coloniality” strictly associated with Eurocentrism have been quick to identify the politics of Putin in Russia or the emergence of the “BRICS” as well as Iran and China as “the most imminent

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  115 forces of de-Westernization” and therefore, at least potentially, of decolonization.16 Reading such statements, one is reminded, among other comparable instances in the history of anti-colonial movements, of W.E.B. Du Bois’ blindness in front of the violence and ferocity of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s simply because it was a non-white and non-Western imperialism. His infamous endorsement of the Japanese occupation of China and his denial of the massacres following the taking of Nanjing in 1937 remain a dark spot in the life and work of this extraordinary scholar and activist.17 And it should alert us regarding the necessity to develop an understanding of the project of decolonization predicated upon a set of political and material criteria that go beyond the simple belonging of a certain country to a region outside of the West. As far as I am concerned, I join a line of reflection and political practice that, to quote for instance from feminist postcolonial thinker Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003, Introduction), emphasizes the nexus between “decolonization, anti-capitalist critique, and solidarity.”18 An analysis of contemporary capitalism is therefore particularly important in order to test and rethink the project of decolonization. In what follows I try to flesh out the “rationality,” or “logic” that characterizes current operations of capital in strategically important “sectors” (say, finance, logistics, biomedicine). This “rationality” eschews containment and articulation by the nation-state and has thus “global” characteristics, although the grounding and articulation of this global rationality in heterogeneous spaces and territories deserve a careful investigation. I am convinced that there is much to be learned regarding the contours of that rationality from an analysis of current developments of extractive activities, which means activities that played a pivotal role in the establishment of the capitalist world system in the 16th century and more generally in the history of modern colonialism and imperialism. And there are several good reasons to start with Latin America. Neo-Extractivism in Latin America Over the past decades, we have been witnessing a dramatic intensification of extractive activities in many parts of the world.19 Surrounded by ancient mythological resonances, colonial ghosts, and the epic of the miner as an iconic figure for the labor movement in many parts of the world, mining continues to be a crucial capitalist endeavor in our present. Precious metals or stones, copper or tungsten, are part and parcel of the core business of mining, which has nonetheless expanded to include new substances as for instance the “grey gold” lithium that powers rechargeable batteries or rare earth minerals essential to today’s miniaturized electronics. The new “ethereal” frontiers of digitalization, data storage, and processing are indeed intertwined with an unprecedented intensification of extractive dynamics and related processes of dispossession.20 On the other hand, a new extractive technique like fracking presents a cutting-edge extraction, allowing it to continue beyond the point at which the gases it seeks to remove from the earth have been otherwise depleted.21 The image of an expansive frontier of extraction is particularly effective to

116  Sandro Mezzadra grasp these developments, which include the widening of oil drilling and resource extraction in the Oceans onto the Arctic region and the extractive turn in agriculture, so apparent for instance in the extensive cultivation of oil palm or soy and so clearly connected with processes of dispossession and “land grabbing.” In the case of soy, in particular, companies such as Monsanto are frantically working to enable the cultivation of ever more marginal areas of the Latin American pampas as well as elsewhere in the world.22 The expansion of the extractive frontier complicates earlier geographies of extraction, superimposing new hierarchies and dependencies on older ones, both between and within countries and regions.23 But there is also a need to add that the intensification of extractive activities has been met by a multiplication of struggles and resistances across the world – from Northern Greece to West Africa, from India to Indonesia just to conjure up a couple of relevant instances. An important chapter in the history of social struggles of the past decades has been written along the extractive frontier, intertwining environmental questions with the battle for the commons as well as building impressive trans-local and trans-national coalitions. Indigenous communities have often been at the forefront of these struggles, for instance in the 2016 protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation or in the resistance against the building of a road through Bolivia’s Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (known as TIPNIS). My investigation of extraction is predicated upon this rich archive of struggles, which have radically tested the issue of property and the very meaning of “development” raising important question regarding colonial continuities in the present. Raw materials extraction has indeed been the hallmark of modern colonialism since its inception. In his analysis of the “so-called primitive accumulation,” mentioned above, Marx emphasizes “the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population” of America after the discovery of gold and silver.24 In a recent book, Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe allows us expanding the notion of extraction with respect to colonial history inviting us to consider even the Atlantic slave trade as an extractive endeavor. Underscoring the key role played by Atlantic slavery and the related plantation system in the Caribbean and the Americas for the emergence of modern capitalism, he focuses on the mutations of the figure of the “Black Man,” one “fated to become an essential mechanism in a process of accumulation that spanned the globe.” In order to be turned into a commodity (man-merchandise) and to spur the valorization of capital (man-of-money), the “Black Man” had to be first of all constructed as a mineral raw material (man-of-metal) to facilitate its extraction and removal from the African soil.25 Mbembe’s analysis is original and sophisticated. But there is a need to stress that the use of the language of extraction to describe the destructive impact and lasting influence of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa is widespread in anti-colonial and panAfricanist writings. One can find it for instance in the important book by Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), where “the extraction of slave labor from all areas (of Africa) to all destinations over the many centuries

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  117 that the slave trade exist” is linked to the predominance of “purely extractive” economic activities attached to foreign trade to genealogically explain the persistent underdevelopment of the continent.26 And indeed the continuity of extractive activities as privileged form of integration of formerly colonized countries and regions into the capitalist world market has been often critically emphasized after World War II in the debates surrounding underdevelopment, dependency, and uneven exchange. Within this history the position of Latin America is of course prominent, considering the constitutive role it played in the emergence of the modern capitalist world system. Such mines as the ones around the city of Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, where thousands of indigenous people worked and toiled under the system of forced labor known as the mita since the discovery of silver in 1545 is just a particularly impressive and well-researched instance of an economy of extraction and plunder, exploitation and dispossession that embraced the whole region. What marks the specificity of Potosí is precisely the arrangement of the mita, a system of forced labor and seasonal migration that reworked an Inca form of mandatory public service to target and exploit entire indigenous communities. Not only the maintenance and reproduction of the individual laborer were indeed relegated to his community of origin but, as historian Enrique Tándeter writes, “even the reconstitution of immediate labor power was covered insufficiently by the existing wages.”27 Far from being an “anomaly” or an “abuse,” the mita provided the basis for the colonial system in the Andes since the late 16th century and has left deep traces in the organization of labor in mines and more generally in the economic and social structure in a country like Bolivia. In a posthumous work, Lo Nacional Popular en Bolivia (“The National-Popular in Bolivia,” 1986), sociologist René Zavaleta Mercado set out to investigate the “strata” that shape the mottling of a society such as the Bolivian, where “free” wage labor was never hegemonic. In his analysis, the relation to the depths of extraction works as a metaphorical basin for Bolivia’s and even more generally for Latin America’s political constitution. Magical and devilish, the shadow of Potosí enshrouds the specific form of legal and territorial formations prevailing in Bolivia (epitomized by the enclave), the assemblages of postcolonial state and citizenship, as well as the articulation of heterogeneous forms of labor relations and exploitation, giving rise to a peculiar mix of formal and real subsumption of labor under capital. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) reminds us, the image of the motley (abigarrado) that Zavaleta Mercado forges for thinking about the coexistence of diverse societal organizing principles and temporalities, which are incapable of being made coherent in the modern state synthesis, and originates from the imagination awakened in his mind by the technical description of the mine’s veins.28 Such an analysis, as Verónica Gago emphasizes, provides us with an effective viewpoint to critically analyze the legacy of colonial plunder and extraction in Latin America.29 It points to the fact that extractivism is always something more than a mere economic mechanism. It rather has constitutive political and societal dimensions related to the establishment and government of capitalist relations in

118  Sandro Mezzadra constant mutation. In this sense, the continuity of extractivism in Latin America definitely includes the continuity of plunder and dispossession as well as of the subordinated integration of the region within the world market through raw materials export. But it also has wider implications, which include the rentier character of the creole elites and the ensuing colonial character that is transferred onto the new republican states since the early 19th century. In his 1971 book, The Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano summed up this predicament proposing a striking image of draining and using a medical allegory.30 It is important to note that Galeano’s book was in many ways connected with the development in the previous two decades of dependency theory, which nurtured several attempts to break with an economic model predicated on raw materials export and to prompt a process of industrialization through “developmental” state policies. Although according to Raúl Prebisch, the founder of dependency theory, there was no contradiction between the “industrialization of Latin America” and “the efficient development of primary production,” since the export of primary products (both agricultural and extractive) would “allow for the importation of the considerable quantity of capital goods needed,”31 the governments that actually adopted developmentalist politics in the region (e.g. the government of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, the one of Arturo Frondizi in Argentina, or the ones of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement in the wake of the 1952 revolution in Bolivia) were indeed limited but real attempts to open up new economic, social, and political avenues beyond extractivism. In the 1960s and 1970s, amid the tumultuous blossoming of revolutionary movements across the region, it was the establishment of new, often genocidal military dictatorships in several Latin American countries that abruptly put an end to these attempts. These dictatorships laid the ground for a new combination of financialization and extraction, foreshadowing the “Washington consensus” and the neoliberal hegemony in the 1990s (see Gago 2017, 1–28).32 The wave of struggles and real insurrectional movements that swept the region around the beginning of the new century opened up a completely new political horizon, within which new “progressive” governments emerged in a number of Latin American countries. “Post-neoliberalism” became the political catchword of the day, while lively debates surrounded the “return of the state” and the ascent of a specific form of left populism.33 A certain kind of “resource nationalism,” echoing dependency theory, was definitely widespread in struggles and political rhetoric of the Latin American left in the early 2000s. Claiming national control of resource extraction, however, rapidly led “progressive” governments to intensify extractive activities in unprecedented ways, both fostering megamining projects and prompting extensive cultivations like the one of soy. In a global conjuncture characterized in the first decade of the century by a commodity boom, with historically high prices for oil, minerals, and other primary commodities, a certain part of the extraordinary rent from natural resources was used and directed to finance social policies and to fight poverty. But the intensification of extractive activities also led to a multiplication of territorial conflicts and eventually to radical clashes with the indigenous movements that, in particular

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  119 in countries like Bolivia and Ecuador, had played crucial roles in opening up the spaces for the formation of “progressive” governments. Those clashes found an iconic expression in the opposition between “development” and buen vivir (“good living”) and they concurrently nurtured the emergence of the paradigm of “neo-extractivism” as one of the most widespread critical lenses with which to view wider transformations of capitalism even under the “progressive” governments in Latin America.34 Speaking of neo-extractivism implies of course an awareness of the long colonial and postcolonial history of Latin America’s insertion within the capitalist world system through violent forms of raw material extraction and related processes of dispossession. At the same time, it signals a shift toward Asia (and particularly toward China) as the main market for Latin American commodities, while it also refers to the “developmental” component of extractivism in the case of “progressive” governments – which means that it refers to the nexus between extraction (the “reprimarization” of economy) and social policies I just mentioned. Prompted by scholars like Arturo Escobar, Maristella Svampa, Eduardo Gudynas, Edgardo Lander, and Alberto Acosta,35 the Latin American discussion of “neo-extractivism” remains an important source for any critical discussion of extraction today. Connected with important social struggles across the region, where it is worth repeating that indigenous people are often at the forefront, and taking into consideration mineral extraction as well as the new extractive frontiers of extensive agriculture and agribusiness, that discussion raises crucial questions regarding the reproduction and postcolonial mutations of colonial logics and matrices of power, the relation between humans and the earth, self-government, and the issue of property. Moreover, the discussion of “neo-extractivism” sheds light on the limits that are placed upon the action of states, even under “progressive” governments, by their enmeshment within extractive operations of capital and the resulting dependence on the volatile and deeply financialized dynamics of the world market. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the narrow focus on literal extractive activities is a serious limit of these debates and this critical literature.36 There is a need to carefully investigate the ways in which the intensification of extraction is connected – in and beyond Latin America – with other operations of contemporary capital and with wider transformations of exploitation that are often obscured by the widespread use in theories of “neo-extractivism” of David Harvey’s notion of “accumulation by dispossession.”37 Extraction, Writ Large A criticism of the narrow focus of “neo-extractivism” on literal extractive activities does not necessarily requires moving away from the semantic field of extraction. I am convinced that the opposite is the case and that there is rather a need to expand the concept of extraction in order to get a privileged viewpoint on the workings of contemporary capitalism well beyond the worlds of mining, oil drilling, and agribusiness. Working with Verónica Gago to intervene in

120  Sandro Mezzadra Latin American debates, we have critically interrogated the implications of the definition of “neo-extractivism” in terms of a transition from the “Washington consensus” of the 1990s to a new “commodity consensus.”38 Our impression is that such an analysis paradoxically (and unintentionally) confirms the rhetoric of “progressive” governments and their claim to have inaugurated an age of “post-neoliberalism,” which relegates to the past neoliberalism and, even more importantly, the rule of finance. Both the analysis of the reproduction and mutations of neoliberalism and the investigation of ongoing processes of financialization are therefore particularly relevant for us.39 While we underscore the crucial importance of processes of financial manipulation of commodities to point to the structural interlocking between financialization and literal extraction, we also look at the concrete ways in which the social policies funded with the extractive rent work. And we shed light on the fact that the social policies of “progressive governments” have prompted a financialization of “popular economies” in the huge Latin American metropolitan peripheries through an unprecedented expansion of consumer credit due to the acknowledgment of state subsidies as collaterals.40 At the other end of literal extraction, we thus find a process of financialization of the economies of the poor that also works through an extractive logic, targeting, in a way from outside, wide and heterogeneous networks of social cooperation. And it is important to add that the defeat of “progressive” governments in such important countries as Argentina and Brazil does not seem to have changed much in this pattern of financialization of social policies that address poverty. Even beyond Latin America I am convinced that an expanded concept of extraction can shed light on important aspects of contemporary capitalism. I was stressing above that digitalization, data storage, and data processing are predicated upon a further expansion of the literal extractive frontier. What must be added now is that the capitalist valorization of the emerging digital worlds basically depends on increasingly sophisticated techniques of data mining. I will come back to this point later in this section. For now I just want to stress the symptomatic relevance of such phrasing (whose meaning is far from being merely metaphorical) to define practices and techniques of data analysis and manipulation that are radically reshaping security, media, and marketing as well as a huge variety of economic sectors, ranging from finance to “biocapital.” In a recent book, I wrote with Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism, we use an expanded notion of extraction to grasp the operative logic of capital in some of these domains of economic activity, focusing in particular on logistics and finance.41 In doing that we enter dialogues with other thinkers who emphasize the extractive dimension of contemporary capitalism, like for instance Saskia Sassen and Michael Hardt and Toni Negri.42 I will just give a couple of examples of the way in which an expanded notion of extraction allows shedding light on the operations of capital in logistics and finance. The new mobility paradigm brought about by the so-called “revolution in logistics” that took place in the 1960s, epitomized by the shipping container,

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  121 has enabled a radical reorganization of global economic spaces, most notably through the global stretching and reshaping of “supply chains.”43 This has led to dramatic transformations with respect to the relation between production and circulation pertaining at the height of industrial capitalism. To put it shortly, nowadays supply chain operations often tend to exercise command over processes of production and to extract value from heterogeneous productive environments. Examining the operations of inventory giants such as Walmart and Amazon, anthropologist Anna Tsing shows for instance how they push costs back to producers, who are allowed to use “any methods they want” to keep prices at a minimum. These methods usually involve “eliminating labor and environmental standards.”44 Production must be performed of course (and this is crucially important); how it is performed is however at the end of day indifferent. What is even more crucial for the practices of valorization pursued by companies like Walmart and Amazon is the “logistical” capacity to synchronize diverse modes of production along the supply chain, exploiting in a way from the outside heterogeneous productive processes. That Tsing uses the term “piracy” to describe the relation between supply chain operations and their surrounding economic and social environments shows just how close her analysis is to the semantic field of extraction.45 This extractive dimension of logistical operations of capital is confirmed under different circumstances by an analysis of the new frontiers of logistics. Particularly relevant in this regard is so-called platform capitalism, which is predicated upon “remote sensing technologies” and upon the “data mining” techniques that I mentioned earlier. As Trebor Scholz maintains, such platforms as Uber, Deliveroo, Airbnb, or Seamless (to mention just a couple of well know instances) can be defined as “extractive platforms” insofar as they rely upon a wider environment of social cooperation from which they extract labor and value without establishing formal labor relations with their workers.46 This is for us a very important point since it sheds light on a relationship of platforms with “living labor” that is once again radically different from the one that characterizes industrial capital. Nick Srnicek demonstrates in his recent book Platform Capitalism the pervasiveness, well beyond any sectorial boundary, of this business model, which is dependent “upon extracting and using a particular kind of raw material: data.” “Just like oil,” he significantly writes, “data are a material to be extracted, refined, and used in a variety of ways.”47 It is social interaction and cooperation that creates the huge deposits of data supplying the material that enables the valorization of capital invested in platforms, whose operations appear therefore characterized by an extractive logic increasingly inscribed onto the codes of the infrastructures that govern society. Let me now come to finance, which is of course crucially important for any analysis of contemporary capitalism and whose role I have underscored with respect to the critical analysis of “neo-extractivism” in Latin America I pursue with Verónica Gago. While there is obviously a need to critically take into account the roles played by sophisticated innovations like derivatives or high frequency trade in the investigation of global financial markets, I am

122  Sandro Mezzadra convinced that there is one point in Marx’s analysis of a completely different financial capital (“interest bearing capital,” as he had it) that continues to be challenging and retains its analytical productivity today. In Capital, volume 3, Marx stresses the accumulation of “claims or titles” to “future production” as a distinctive feature of the specificity of the financial moment in the series of transformations effected by capital.48 There are several comments to be made upon this definition, which significantly invites us to politicize the analysis of financial capital through the reference to claims and titles. First of all, the emphasis on the link between finance and a wealth to be produced in future challenges any interpretation of finance as self-referential, of financial capital as merely “fictitious” and opposed to “productive” capital. Second, it is important to reflect precisely upon the moment of “claim” associated with the property of financial assets according to Marx. This moment does not merely foreshadow a relation with “future production,” but it also anticipates a set of relations with subjects involved in such production in a subordinated position – with subjects whose life is shaped by the compulsion to work. Third, the link between finance and “future production” posits an abstract figure of social cooperation (a social cooperation that has not yet taken place and nevertheless is foreshadowed by finance) as the main source of financial value and characterizes financial operations as extractive precisely because they are not involved in the direct organization of that social cooperation. This excursus across the fields of logistics and finance should suffice to give an idea of the sense in which I think an expanded notion of extraction allows grasping the contours of the operative logic of contemporary capital in strategic economic domains. What matters more to me is the position of exteriority with respect to living labor and social cooperation occupied by capital in such instances. In the next section, I will have something more to say regarding this position of exteriority. For now suffice it to say that it points to a striking contrast with the pervasive organization of labor and cooperation by industrial capital at the point of production. And I need to add that extractive operations of capital target common resources and powers, be it in the form of mineral deposits, land, or social cooperation. It is against this background that I believe it is necessary to rethink the notion of exploitation as well as its relation with a set of other concepts, including dispossession, expropriation, power, and domination.49 I am convinced in particular that social cooperation emerges as one of the main productive forces spurring contemporary processes of capital’s valorization and accumulation. Nonetheless, this social cooperation is far from being smooth and subjectively constituted. It is rather crisscrossed by hierarchies, fault lines, and divisions, which not only revolve around such criteria as gender and race but also emerge from the multiplication of labor further intensified by the extractive dimensions of contemporary capitalism.50 While Brett Neilson and I emphasize the pivotal role of an expanded notion of extraction to understand the working of contemporary capitalism, we do not reduce the latter to its extractive dimensions. We rather forge the concept of operations of capital to stress at the same time the position of command that

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  123 extractive operations as the ones I singled out with respect to logistics and finance occupy in the composition of what Marx calls Gesamtkapital, “total,” or more accurately “aggregate capital,” and the necessary articulation of those operations with other operations of capital, whose logic can be significantly different.51 And this is the point in which our analysis differs from any attempt to make sense of contemporary capitalism by privileging or unilaterally focusing on developments within a single sector of the economy (be it through the notion of “neo-extractivism” or through the ones of “logistical capitalism” and “financialization”). Take for instance, to make the point more concrete, the recent critical move to place debt at the center of an analysis of the workings of capitalism, instantiated by the works of David Graeber and Maurizio Lazzarato.52 This move definitely registers the widening and further entrenchment of the logic of (private as well as public) debt in an age characterized by what Randy Martin effectively called 15 years ago the “financialization of daily life.”53 Nevertheless this critical move often leads to disentangle debt – and therefore finance – from the dense and heterogeneous fabric of social and economic relations within which they are enmeshed. In particular the emphasis on debt tends to obscure, once again, the persistent relevance and new qualities of exploitation. Once we consider debt as a form of financialization of what I called before the compulsion to work (which should not be surprising considering the manifold relations between debt and bonded labor that have shaped modern history, particularly although not exclusively in colonial settings), things begin to change. Debt (private as well as public) definitely appears as the specific relation of subordination connected to the operations of financial capital. In order to repay it, however, indebted people are compelled to enter multifarious relations with other figures (or “fractions”) of capital – industrial or illegal, commercial or otherwise –, whose modes of operation and exploitation are significantly different from those of finance, something that appears very clear once debt and the operations of finance are considered from “below,” as it is the case in the work on “popular economies” in Latin America I mentioned above. To investigate the articulation of these heterogeneous operations within contemporary “aggregate capital” is a crucial task. Our point is that such articulation today is presided and commanded by what we call extractive operations writ large, although these operations – I want to repeat it one more time – are far from being the only operations performed by capital today. This leads us in particular to contend that contemporary capitalism moved beyond industrial capitalism notwithstanding an unprecedented booming of industrial activities in many parts of the world. Colonial Continuities, Anti-Colonial Ruptures I was speaking before of the position of exteriority that capital occupies in the operations that Neilson and I attempt to grasp through an expanded notion of extraction. This is an important point in our work, which leads us to join a debate on capital’s relations with its multiple “outsides” that has been particularly

124  Sandro Mezzadra lively in recent years – involving, for instance, Marxist geographers like David Harvey, postcolonial critics of political economy like Kalyan Sanyal, and feminist thinkers like Nancy Fraser and J.K. Gibson-Graham.54 Particularly looking at operations of capital in such realms as finance and logistics, there is however a need to add that capital’s position of exteriority with respect to living labor and social cooperation takes on very peculiar characteristics and needs to be further specified. The “outsides” cannot be conceived of in these cases in literal terms (as indicating spaces that are to be found elsewhere with respect to capital’s rule), nor they refer to uncontaminated areas of solidarity, communitarian ethos, and resistance. They are rather often constructed as outsides by capital, which disseminates within the fabric of social cooperation specific devices of discipline and control (be it the compulsion to work corresponding to debt in the case of finance, logistical parameters and standards in the case of supply chains, or algorithmic management in the case of a platform like Uber). In Marxian terms, it is possible to make sense of such a situation speaking of a reemergence of defining aspects of “formal subsumption of labor under capital” on the terrain constructed by “real subsumption.” The moment of taking over from outside that characterizes formal subsumption is indeed constitutive of a specific set of operations of contemporary capital. These operations are haunted by the ghosts of dispossession and direct violence well beyond literal extractive activities, as it was for instance clear in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/08.55 The moment of takeover, to which specific antagonisms, tensions, and conflicts correspond, is a conceptually colonial moment whose salience and multifarious manifestations characterize contemporary capitalism. Not accidentally, due to its relevance for the understanding of colonialism, the reflection on “formal subsumption” has been particularly intense and original within non-Western Marxism.56 One can find the problematic of formal subsumption also in the work of Rosa Luxemburg, whose Accumulation of Capital (1913) was one of the first major Marxist efforts to emphasize the continuity of “so-called primitive accumulation” beyond the moment of transition to capitalism as well as the constitutive role of colonial expansion and imperialism for capital. Luxemburg’s elaborations remain today an important source of inspiration for any attempt to conceptually frame the question of capital’s relation with its outsides. “The existence and development of capitalism,” she famously writes, “requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends.”57 Luxemburg’s critique of the image of capitalism as composed only by capitalists and wage laborers leads her to stress, along with the historical relevance of colonialism and imperialism, what I was just calling a conceptual colonial moment at the very heart of capital. Sure, she had a literally geographical understanding of the “non-capitalist strata and countries” upon which the extended reproduction of capital was predicated in her account.58 Such an understanding leads Luxemburg to contend that once all those “strata and country” have been integrated into the accumulation process, capitalism as such would come to its logical end. This is apparently a serious flaw in her theory, but a

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  125 different reading of the notion of capital’s outsides – a reading that underscores both capital’s ability to construct its own outsides and the critic’s need to conceive of those outside in non-literal terms – allows reframing her point in more consistent ways for our present. While Luxemburg’s work is an obvious reference for any analysis of extraction and extractivism, she also invites us to widen the scope of our analysis of labor, going beyond “the various artificial divisions of labor created by capital” and their regimes of visibility, focusing in particular of “non-wage labor relations”59 and on the multifarious ways in which popular and subaltern strata are turned into consumers.60 As I already demonstrated, finance and indebtedness figure prominently in this respect. The huge heterogeneity of the composition of living labor, well beyond the boundaries of “free” wage labor, was a defining feature of capitalism under colonial conditions. Today, it has become generalized across diverse geographical scales, blurring the boundary between former colonies and former metropolises, between the “global South” and the “global North.” There are of course important differences among different locations and regions, but as I already stated I am convinced that the extractive dimension of contemporary capitalism further incites and accelerates processes of heterogenization and multiplication of labor that are often connected with movements of migration. The study of these processes, as well as of the fragments of colonial logics and assemblages they reproduce and disseminate across societies, is an important task for any project of decolonization. While the expansion of the literally extractive frontier in many parts of the world immediately conjures up colonial continuities, and in some cases even a return from “coloniality” to what Rita Segato calls “conquestiality,”61 it is for me crucially important to widen the scope of analysis and to connect literal extractive activities to the expanded notion of extraction that I have been sketching in this essay also to grasp the multifarious spectrum of colonial logics that haunt our present. From this point of view, there is a need to test the conceptual language we use to name colonial continuities. Postcolonialism, neo-colonialism, decoloniality are terms that have nurtured over the past decades alternative approaches and proposals. As far as I am concerned I think that the emergence of postcolonial criticism since the 1980s has made lasting contributions to critical debates, particularly through the emphasis on the many ways in which Empire strikes back, beyond the great divide between the colony and the metropolis.62 As Stuart Hall explains, “the subverting of the old colonizing/colonized binary in the new conjuncture” of decolonization – a conjuncture which, “like colonization itself, has marked the colonizing societies as powerfully as it has the colonized (of course, in different ways)” – laid the basis for a productive “postcolonial” rethinking of colonialism and of its continuities in a postcolonial age from the angle of the agency of the colonized.63 Having said this, I have the impression that the critical language of postcolonial critique is in some way exhausted today, probably due to an exclusive focus on cultural dimensions and to a certain reluctance to engage in analyses of structures of power and domination that should at least complement that focus. As far as the notion of “neo-colonialism” is concerned

126  Sandro Mezzadra it is well known that it was forged in the wake of independence in Africa to designate a situation in which formal sovereignty of a formerly colonized country is combined with a direction “from outside” of the economic system that ends swallowing up “its political policy.”64 “Neo-colonialism” has spurred and continues to spur important struggles, while from an analytical viewpoint it definitely compelling in specific cases. To provide an example from the field of finance and monetary arrangements, just think of the Western and Central African CFA franc, whose value and exchange rate is guaranteed and set by the French treasury. The notion of “monetary colonialism,” recently proposed by Pedro Biscay, is a quite accurate description of the ensuing neo-colonial relations between African countries and the old colonial master.65 More generally, however, the use of the notion of neo-colonialism can end up being generic and ritualistic, obscuring more than illuminating relations of power and domination. Decolonization, anyway, is apparently far from being over. Such an amazing movement as the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign in South African campuses, which gave rise to other struggles such as the one against the increase in tuition (“Fees Must Fall”), addresses in a powerful way the question of decolonization in the context of a general critique of post-Apartheid South African politics and society. In the U.S., African American scholars and activists increasingly frame their claims and struggles in terms of decolonization, joining Indigenous studies and politics that never stopped raising that question in many parts of the world and supporting Palestinian struggles for freedom under Israeli occupation. In Latin America, struggles surrounding neo-extractivism and more generally territorial conflicts often speak an anti-colonial language, as well as struggles of migration and anti-racist movements in Europe. Decolonial thinkers like Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo have made important contributions to the understanding of these movements, forging concepts like the “coloniality of power” and the “geopolitics of knowledge.”66 These theoretical frameworks help us shedding light on the political and epistemic stakes of decolonization, in particular insofar as they invite us to critically focus attention on the ways in which the adoption of the nation-state as structure of governance in the wake of “geopolitical decolonization” laid the basis for the reproduction of colonial logics in the newly independent countries.67 However, as I anticipated earlier, the specific critique of Eurocentrism pursued by decolonial theories often leads to reinforce rather than to deconstruct the border circumscribing Europe and the West from “the Rest”68 and to disentangle their interest in epistemology from an analysis of the materiality and mutations of capitalism. Moreover, such a critique locates the main line of antagonism at the level of civilizations – “the decolonial,” Mignolo writes, “confronts all of Western civilization, which includes liberal capitalism and Marxism”69 – which risks on the one hand reproducing the pitfalls of (European) civilizational thinking and on the other hand nurturing a merely moralizing critique. I am convinced that all the approaches I have synthetically sketched may contribute to critically shed light on the heterogeneous, and often far from obvious colonial continuities that are connected to the further entrenchment of capitalism

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  127 and its extractive dimensions. While in many conflicts surrounding the expansion of the literal extractive frontier continuities may appear as clean and straightforward (also due to the involvement of Indigenous people in many parts of the world), there is a need to focus attention also on what Ann Laura Stoler calls “strange continuities,” on a “recursion” that is something fundamentally different from imagining that “social and political processes ever play out in a repetitive and mimetic fashion.”70 The expansion of the notion of extraction to investigate the ways in which literal extractive activities articulate with finance in Latin American metropolitan peripheries is an attempt to move precisely in that direction. The conceptually colonial (and extractive) moment that presides over the workings of contemporary capitalism should more generally figure prominently in the agenda of any project of decolonization today. The mutations and further entrenchment of capitalism, possibly beyond any European, or Western hegemony within the world system, provide a crucial angle on the multifarious colonial continuities that are inscribed onto postcolonial assemblages of power and that often take forms quite different from the ones epitomized by the notion of neo-colonialism. In such a predicament reactivating the archives of anti-colonial struggles and thinking becomes a strategic task to rethink and further develop the agenda of decolonization. Internationalism, Reloaded The colonial history of extraction, be it in mines or plantations, is a history of dispossession and violence, forced labor and dread. Take rubber, for instance. The very existence of this “incredible commodity,” which epitomizes through its elasticity the “metaphysical subtleties and theological whimsies” attributed by Marx to the commodity form as such,71 was predicated upon processes of extraction and plantation economies whose geography stretched across Latin America and Africa, Asia, and Australia. Michael Taussig has eloquently traced the “culture of terror” surrounding rubber extraction in the Putumayo territories of the Amazon during the “rubber boom” between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.72 Indigenous people were forced to work day and night without any retribution, they were starved to death, flogged, tortured, castrated. Similar conditions prevailed in the rubber plantations in Congo, where the “rubber boom” provided Joseph Conrad with the background for his Heart of Darkness (1899), in Indochina, or in Papua, to mention just a couple of crucial sites in this specific geography of extraction. In the same years, the rubber industry – along with oil business, another extractive endeavor – was one of the best illustrations of the emergence of what Lenin would famously dub in 1916, in his Imperialism, monopoly capitalism. “Rubber firms such as Michelin, Goodyear, Dublop, and Firestone,” historian John Tully writes, “were among the first of the giant corporations to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century. Given that rubber is crucial for the modern economy, it is little wonder that at certain junctures the industry formed synergic bonds with the state.”73 This was particularly the case with the

128  Sandro Mezzadra chemical corporation IG Farben and the German state under National Socialism. The efforts to produce synthetic rubber for Hitler’s war machine ended up in 1941/42 in the construction of the “Buna plant” in Monowitz, close to Auschwitz.74 The IG Farben rubber plant in Monowitz quickly became the biggest chemical plant operative in Europe, its operations were predicated upon widespread use and ferocious exploitation of slave labor (prisoners of war, inmates, and civilians in occupied countries), and the plant itself was organically integrated into the system of concentration and extermination camps of Auschwitz. The colonial “culture of terror” had reached into the heart of Europe, one can say joining an anti-colonial interpretation of Nazism that was developed soon after World War II by W.E.B. Du Bois and Aimé Césaire.75 It was an uncanny inauguration of a “postcolonial” time under the sign of what Césaire called the “boomerang effect” of colonialism, indeed.76 But the history of rubber is not only a history of terror and violence. In South-East Asia, in particular, rubber plantations were part of a wider “plantation society” amply dependent on the indentured labor of “coolies.”77 As in the U.S. South before the civil war, rubber plantations were crisscrossed by multiple forms and practices of daily resistance, defiance, and sabotage, as well as by movements of “desertion, sometimes en masse.”78 And as in the U.S. South, according to the thesis of W.E.B. Du Bois,79 those practices of resistance laid the ground for the “general strike” against the slave system during the war, in many plantation societies, powerful waves of strikes dictated the pace of the emergence of the nationalist, labor, and communist movement in the first half of the 20th century. While for instance in the late 1920s the strike wave across the plantations of French Southern Indochina marked the beginning of the Communist Indochinese Party’s involvement in mass labor struggles, waves of strikes shook rubber plantations in Malaya between 1937 and 1940, positing severe challenges to the British authorities and shattering the myth of the “mild Hindoo” worker.80 There is much to learn from histories of labor struggles under such severe conditions as the ones prevailing in colonial rubber plantations, where the ghost of slavery and the direct use of violence from the bosses always haunted even the experience of indentured laborers. But there is also a need to remember that the rubber transformation industry was the scene of intense labor struggles and militancy in many parts of the world. The city of Akron, Ohio, is particularly relevant in this regard. Since the 1890s, this city of the U.S. Midwest began to be known as “Rubber’s Home Town” and housed the world’s greatest concentration of rubber factories. Goodrich and Goodyear, Firestone and General Tire had all their headquarters and run large factories here. The history of labor struggles in Akron reached in a way its peak in the famous, and victorious, strike of February–March 1936, which began at the Goodyear factory and then quickly involved the workers in the other rubber factories. What interests me here, however, is a previous strike, the strike of 1913 that was led by the wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).81 While this strike was eventually defeated, it provides us

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  129 with a remarkable instance of internationalist solidarity. “Big Bill” Haywood, the leader of the IWW, in the middle of the “rubber boom” and in front of its implications in the colonial world, was indeed able in one of the speeches he held during the strike to connect the struggle of (largely migrant) industrial workers in Ohio with the plague and pain of indigenous plantation laborers in the Amazon and Africa. Referring explicitly to Putumayo and Congo, he addressed the striking workers with the following words: “the rubber manufacturers do not cut off the hands and feet of your children, but they take the food from their mouths” (quoted in Wolf and Wolf 1936, p. 400).82 The history of rubber instantiates an amazing interlocking of processes, issues, and stakes revolving around the nexus between colonialism and extraction. It conjures up the culture of terror and the histories of bonded labor that surround the plantation system, as well as their displacement onto the very heart of the European space through Nazism during World War II. But it is also made up of multifarious struggles that challenged the plantation system and colonial rule in many parts of the world, while the rubber manufacturing industry has been a site of intense labor militancy, organizing, and strike. “Big Bill” Haywood’s speech was just an instance of an attempt to link the pains and movements of such diverse subjects as industrial workers in the U.S. American Midwest, Indigenous people in the Amazon, and indentured laborers in South-East Asia. There is no need to overemphasize the relevance of that particular speech. The point is simply to acknowledge the power of a discourse, internationalism, which independently of its shortcomings and pitfalls was effectively able to articulate the claims and to speak to the condition of a multitude of heterogeneous subjects across the world. While that particular discourse is historically exhausted, there is a need to invent an equivalent language of liberation, keeping in mind both the commonalities that shape our global predicament and the specific forms of oppression and exploitation – as well as the specificity of the vocabularies and claims that crisscross struggles in different parts of the world. This is even more urgent in a situation in which what I have called the conceptually colonial (and extractive) moment at the heart of contemporary capitalism spurs a reshuffling of geographical scales and increasingly inscribes the heterogeneity of conditions and subjects that once was the main question addressed by internationalism within the space of single cities. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Sakai (2011). Marx (1973, 409). See Mezzadra (2008). Marx (1977, vol. 1:915). See Ferrari Bravo (2018). See Wallerstein (2003). Arrighi (2007). See for instance Wallerstein (2003). See Grappi (2016, 153–173). See for instance Wallerstein (2017) and the critical comment by Balibar (2017).

130  Sandro Mezzadra 11 12 13 14 15 16

See Mezzadra and Neilson (2013). See Weber (2001, xxviii). See Mezzadra (2011). See Quijano, and Wallerstein 1992. See Robinson (2000, 24). Mignolo (2017, 16). Although Mignolo makes a difference between “de-Westernization” and “decolonization,” the former clearly contributes for him to lay the basis for the latter. 17 Levering Lewis (2000, 409–419). 18 Mohanty (2003). 19 See Mezzadra and Neilson (2017). 20 See for instance Mosco (2014). 21 See Neilson (2012). 22 See Cáceres (2014) 23 See Junka-Aikio and Cortes-Severino (2017). 24 Marx (1977, vol. 1:915). 25 Mbembe (2017, 47). 26 Rodney (1972, 97 and 106). 27 Tándeter (1993, 16). 28 See Zavaleta (1986) and Rivera (2010). 29 See Gago (2021). 30 See Galeano (2009) and again Gago (2021). 31 Prebisch (1950). 32 See Gago (2017). 33 See Gago and Mezzadra (2017a). 34 See Riofrancos (2017). 35 See for instance, Escobar (2012); Svampa (2015); Gudynas (2016); Lander (2016); Acosta (2016). 36 See Gago and Mezzadra (2017b). 37 See Harvey (2003). 38 See for instance Svampa (2015). 39 See also Gago (2017). 40 See Gago (2015) and Gago and Mezzadra (2017b). 41 Mezzadra and Neilson (2019). 42 See Sassen (2014). 43 See for instance Cowen (2014) and Grappi (2016). 44 Tsing (2012, 521). 45 Tsing (2012, 520). 46 Scholz (2016). 47 Srnicek (2017, 40). 48 Marx (1981, vol. 3: 599, 641). 49 See Mezzadra and Neilson (2018). 50 See Mezzadra and Neilson (2013, chapter 3). 51 See Mezzadra and Neilson (2015). 52 See Graeber (2011) and Lazzarato (2012). 53 Martin (2002). 54 See for instance Harvey (2003); Fraser (2014); Gibson-Graham (2006). 55 See Sassen (2010). 56 See Harootunian (2015). 57 Luxemburg (2003, 348). 58 Luxemburg (2003, 332). 59 Mies (2014). 60 Gago (2021). 61 Segato (2016, 621).

Exploring the Landscapes of Extraction  131 6 2 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 7 7 78 79 80 81 82

See Mezzadra (2008) and Walker (2011). Hall (1996, 246). Nkrumah (1966, ix). See also Rodney (1972, 26). Biscay (2017). See, respectively, Quijano (2008) and Mignolo (2002). Mignolo (2017, 14). See Mezzadra and Neilson (2013, 18). Mignolo (2011, xviii). Stoler (2016, 24–26). Tully (2011, 25). Taussig (1984, 467–497). Tully (2011, 14). See Roth and Schmaltz (2009) and Tully (2011, chapter 18). Du Bois (1946 [1992], 14–15). Mezzadra and Rahola (2015, 36–54). For a striking anticipation in the middle of the Great War (1916), see Luxemburg (2004, 339). Breman (1989). Tully (2011, 262). Du Bois (1935 [1998], chapter 4). See Tully (2011, chapter 16). See Tully (2011, chapter 10). Quoted in Wolf and Wolf (1936 [2009], 400).

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134  Sandro Mezzadra Sakai, Naoki. “Theory and the West.” Transeuropéennes (2011). http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/316/Theory_and_the_West, accessed 11 March 2018. Sanyal, Kalyan. Rethinking Capitalist Development. London: Routledge, 2007. Sassen, Saskia. “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation.” Globalizations 7, no. 1–2 (2010): 23–50. Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press, 2014. Scholz, Trebor. Platform Cooperativism. Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. New York Office: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016. Accessed 12 March 2018. http://www. rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/scholz_platformcoop_5.9.2016.pdf Segato, Laura. “Patriarchy from Margin to Center: Discipline, Territoriality, and Cruelty in the Apocalyptic Phase of Capital.” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 3 (2016): 615–24. Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress. Imperial Durablities in Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Svampa, Maristella. “Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1 (2015): 65–82. Tándeter, Enrique. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692-1826. Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1993. Taussig, Michael. “Culture of Terror – Space of Death. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 03 (1984): 467–97. Tsing, Anna. “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable To Precision-Nested Scales.” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (2012): 505–24. Tully, John A. The Devil’s Milk: a Social History of Rubber. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011. Walker, Gavin. “Postcoloniality in Translation: Historicities of the Present.” Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 1 (2011): 111–26. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Decline of American Power. The U.S. in a Chaotic World. New York: The New Press, 2003. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World System Analysis. An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Wallerstein, Immanuel. La gauche global. Hier, aujour d’hui, demain. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2017. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2001. Wolf, Howard, and Ralph Wolf. Rubber. A Story of Glory and Greed. Shawbury: iSmithers, 1936, reprint 2009. Zavaleta Mercado, René. Lo nacional popular en Bolivia. México: Siglo XXI, 1986.

5

The Ambiguous Status of Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism in Europe Maja Vodopivec

Eastern Europe has never been securely located inside Europe. Its status has been ambiguous, and, in this chapter, I will discuss how this ambiguity is reflected in the on-going historical debates in former Yugoslavia, as well as rest of East European post-communist world. I will place this discussion within a larger problem of revising history and criminalization of communism in Europe. My main emphasis will be on a problem that Dubravka Ugrešić has described in her “Archeology of Resistance” (2020) as “an army unqualified historians marching today, erasing antifascist history and legitimizing revisionist versions”. Most emphasis will be on Yugoslavia as a telling case because it was partially constructed in response to this status of ambiguity. Yugoslavia played a leading role in Non-Aligned Movement in the 1950s and 1960s and was a prominent member of the so-called Third World. Today, the Third World phrase carries a negative connotation, referring to underdeveloped parts of the world in South America, Africa, and Asia. During the early Cold War, it referred to a third way—not being a part of the Western capitalist states and NATO military alliance, nor part of the communist block and Warsaw Pact and, by no means, meant being “neutral” regarding the problems of the Third World, ranging from struggles for liberation from colonial oppression to the neo-colonial issues. The Third World contends Stavrianos in the Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (1981) has emerged in early modernity as the result of the rise of capitalism in northwestern Europe and subsequent overseas expansion. Nevertheless, the expansion of the West on Eastern Europe occurred before the discovery of the New World (Stavrianos 1981, 31). It was through the expansion of Western trade with Eastern Europe that Eastern Europe became dependent upon and subjugated to the West. West traded with textiles and other manufacturers in exchange for mass food, minerals, and naval stores. To the extent that the Third World connotes participation on unequal terms in global market economy, the Third World was born in the fifteenth century in Eastern Europe (ibid., 31). While the Third World emerged in this period, it was post-World War Two when the expression referred to the states who “clung to a precarious neutrality” (ibid., 33), most prominently Tito’s Yugoslavia, Nehru’s India, Nasser’s Egypt, Nkrumah’s Ghana, and Sukarno’s Indonesia (ibid., 33). In the 1960s and 1970s, DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-5

136  Maja Vodopivec the term referred to “developing nations” but primarily it was associated with anti-colonial nationalism and still, despite the debt crisis, it offered a viable political and economic alternative and a different world than the one brought by Reagan-ism, Thatcherism, and the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies (Kamola 2019, 64). Today, the term is denigrating, and it has been replaced with the Global South discourse. However, as Vijay Prashad writes in Darker Nations (2007), the Third World was not a place, but a project which has comprised grievances and dreams of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, who did not want to side with any of the sides in a bipolar Cold War and advocated nuclear disarmament and peaceful coexistence of all nations. Next to the question of world peace, the issues of poverty, inequality, and freedom from colonialism and neo-colonialism featured prominently (Prashad 2007, xv). Despite significant ideological differences, the Third World countries demanded an end to all forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism, redistribution of the world’s resources, and political equality on the world scene. Asian-American Conference held in Indonesia, Bandung, in 1955 is considered a landmark event for the Third Worldism. The Non-Aligned Movement was established in Belgrade in 1961, after Tito hosted Nehru and Nasser in Brioni in 1956. Although the movement is popularly understood as positive or active “neutralism”, it is better described as “insurgent neutralism” (Byrne 2015, 914), a “project distinct from, and to some degree competitive with, the Afro-Asian solidarity movement”, because it was understood more as a political project willing to include any country or non-state actor sharing the same goals (like the Algerian National Liberation Front) than the expression of an identity (non-white, poor, post-colonial) (ibid., 914). Creating a Shared European Identity through Criminalization of Communism Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe has seen a wave of historical revisionism and official criminalization of communism. While political, economic, and cultural ramifications of the collapse of a socialist country, once leader of the Non-Alignment and the “Third World” are still unfolding some three decades upon the recent “ethnic” war, it can be stated with certainty that the nationstates formed upon Yugoslavia’s destruction but also all former communist states of Eastern Europe are fertile soil for historical revisionism. The shame of those who once were on the wrong side of history has become the primary force of mobilization of neo-liberal and neo-fascist forces around the globe as well as in what once used to be Yugoslavia. Since beginning of the twenty-first century, there is a peculiar term referring to what was once Yugoslavia (but excluding Slovenia and Croatia as full-fledged EU states)—Western Balkans, and it relates to the states not yet being member states of the EU (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Monte Negro, Macedonia, and Albania). Croatia, in early days of its independence so eager to prove that it belongs to Central Europe and not the Balkans, since 2013 when it became the latest country to join the EU, is not considered Western Balkans anymore. Criminalizing communism

Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism  137 in Europe is intertwined with the politics of recognition of East Europeans. Equalizing the crimes against humanity committed under Nazism and Communism through lumping them together under the totalitarian regimes label, certain East European politicians and influential groups are “universalizing” the experience and the “lessons” in Europe and are working towards establishing “European mnemonic master narrative” (Mälksoo 2010, 85). The enlargement of the European Union was met with a need for construction of a shared identity, reflected in construction of a common European collective memory, primarily on the side of Eastern Europeans, as a proof of their belonging to a community of European nations. However, this was not an easy process, perhaps best exemplified in the case of a project of the European Parliament, The House of European History (HEH), opened in Brussels in 2017. To keep the focus on the argument, I will mention only here the Eastern European reception of the HEH, rather than another controversy that has aroused in the United Kingdom. As for the HEH project, Polish critics “recognized positive elements, such as the fact that in the section on totalitarian regimes Nazi and Stalinist crimes are comparable” (Garbowski 2020, 60),1 but they have not been satisfied with a lack of comparison of Nazism and communism (ibid., 60). Furthermore, the HEH, according to some Polish critics, with its “lack of sensitivity toward Eastern European historical experience at the HEH exhibition” is a “gross negligence toward a key part of European memory at its minimum” and “could indicate a partial form of cultural imperialism of the center toward the periphery” (ibid., 60). At the same time, these critics seem to have cared little about Poland’s Senate passing controversial Holocaust Law in early 2018. This is not surprising given that a 2008 initiative of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Latvia to criminalize the denial of crimes perpetrated by communist regimes in the same way as denying the Holocaust is criminal offense, had been rejected by the European Commission in 2010. The call for recognition of the “double genocide” model was criticized as an attempt of local ultranationalists to obfuscate a history of complicity in the Holocaust (Katz 2010).2 These attempts at equalizing Nazism and communism, including a threat of imprisoning those who would point to or investigate complicity of local forces in Holocaust, most prominently in Lithuania and Poland, are a prime example of ultranationalism and historical revisionism. Despite a halt by the European Parliament to this extreme historical whitewashing in 2010, The Commission on European conscience and totalitarianism achieved a major success with its agenda in June 2008 when the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism was adopted, after a hearing initiated by the Czech Senate and organized by the Commission and the Slovenian Presidency. With this declaration, the European Union has recognized, among other things, that “the Communist ideology is directly responsible for crimes against humanity” (Prague Declaration 2008), and that “consciousness of the crimes against humanity committed by the Communist regimes throughout the continent must inform all European minds to the same extent as the Nazi regimes crimes did” (ibid.). The Declaration is explicit in recognizing “substantial similarities between

138  Maja Vodopivec Nazism and Communism in terms of their horrific and appalling character and their crimes against humanity” (ibid.). The Declaration expands its statements beyond Europe and states that “Communist ideology has been used as a tool in the hands of empire builders in Europe and in Asia to reach their expansionist goals” and sees the remains of Communism in other parts of the world as a threat to well-being of people: “in different parts of the globe only a few totalitarian Communist regimes survive but, nevertheless, they control about one fifth of the world’s population, and by still clinging to power they commit crimes and impose a high cost to the well-being of their people”(ibid.). The Declaration sees an issue with the crimes of Communism still not being assessed from the legal, moral, political, and historical point of view and sees this as a key obstacle to European being united: “Europe will not be united unless it is able to reunite its history, recognize Communism and Nazism as a common legacy” (ibid.). According to the declaration, “different valuations of the Communist past may still split Europe into ‘West’ and ‘East’”, and the declaration’s “consciousness of the crimes against humanity committed by the Communist regimes throughout the continent must inform all European minds to the same extent as the Nazi regimes crimes did” (ibid.). The Declaration calls for “allEuropean understanding that both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes each to be judged by their own terrible merits to be destructive in their policies of systematically applying extreme forms of terror, suppressing all civic and human liberties, starting aggressive wars and, as an inseparable part of their ideologies, exterminating and deporting whole nations and groups of population; and that as such they should be considered to the main disasters, which blighted the 20th century” (ibid., point 1). The Declaration does not mention any colonial legacy of the West in similar light, but its final point calls for a “joint commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the killings in Romania” (ibid., point 19). The intensified attempts by East European actors at criminalizing communism through equalizing it with Nazi Holocaust and embedding it into a shared European memory is no less controversial thing for Western Europe because of it raising questions about West European complicity with Nazism, too (Mälksoo, 85). Thus, an equal condemnation of totalitarian regimes in Europe is inextricable from insufficient recognition of certain historical legacies, producing and legitimating a “particular regime of truth in the countries making the pertinent claims” (ibid., 85). With a request for equal recognition, Mälksoo contends, criminalizing communism is more a way of seeking equal standing in the European community and a right to be part of European memory and less about criminalizing communism as such. I would argue that as much as it could be a request for the illusive equality and unity of East and West within Europe, these calls for criminalization of communism are also an expression of historical loss and shame related to a lack of resistance and/or collaboration with Nazism. This shame has today become one of the primary affective forces mobilized by both neo-liberal and neo-fascist forces around the globe (Sakai, Solomon, Button 2024, 10)

Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism  139 and “thus, it names a complex intersectionality whose understanding requires a transnational approach” (ibid.). The tendency to revise history beyond the totalitarian regime paradigm goes as far as, for example, in the introduction of a reader for high schools “Lest We Forget: Memory of Totalitarianism in Europe: a reader for older secondary school students anywhere in Europe” (Purves 2013), the author, Stephane Courtois, claims that Lenin was responsible for introducing the totalitarian principles broadened by Stalin (Neumayer 2019, 213). Courtois brings forward Ernst Nolte’s thesis on Nazism being inspired by Communism (ibid., 213). The Eastern European quest for European identity was certainly not the only background to this trend. There was a significant interest on the side of Western liberal democracies to whitewash the history and unite the forces against communism. Ronald Reagan’s speech during his visit to Bitburg military cemetery where some 50 SS soldiers are buried (so-called Bitburg Affair) in 1985 emphasized a friendship between the U.S. and West Germany in their mutual unity in a commitment to “freedom”: “At the site of two former war heroes who met today at the Bitburg ceremony, each among the bravest of braves, each an enemy of the other forty years ago, each a witness to the horrors of war, but today they came together, American and German, general Matthey B. Ridgway and general Johannes Steinhoff, reconciled and united for freedom, they’ve reached over the graves to one another like brothers, and grasped their hands in peace” (Reagan Library 1985). Obviously, the commitment of the liberal world to freedom included at least partly forgetting about any past crimes. Only four years later, Communism collapsed, and the West triumphed with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 thesis on “end of history”. However, the prediction that the world will follow its future-oriented western liberal democratic path without the burden of history was arrogant and wrong. The world was anything but un-burdened with history and peaceful in the past decades. Liberal democracies, coupled with demand for liberalization of new markets and obligations imposed by liberal international institutions, provided us with ample evidence in the past 30 years of being addicted to wars and extremely aggressive towards non-democracies. Libricide or Book Cleansing in Croatia During the 1990s in Croatia, thousands of books from public, school, and private libraries have been destroyed because they did not fit the new nationalist discourse. A retired professor of economics, Ante Lešaja, wrote about this systematic cleansing of books in his 600-page long book Knjigocid: Uništavanje knjige u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih [Libricid: Destruction of books in Croatia in the 1990s], 2012. Lešaja documents the destruction of around two million of books in the period between 1990 and 2010. The books destroyed were considered “unsuitable” because they have been either in Cyrillic either by Serbian authors or published in Serbia and Bosnia even if by Croatian authors. Not a small number of classics (Tolstoy, Balzac, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Nietzsche, etc.) published in Serbia had the same fate of ending in garbage containers and dumps.

140  Maja Vodopivec Numerous books praising socialism, or the National Liberation War led by Tito and partisans were thrown away as well. Minister of Finances of the Republic of Croatia, Borislav Škegra, stated in Croatian Parliament in 1997 that funds from state budget will be secured for financing libraries to throw away books in “Serbian and similar languages” (Radio Slobodna Evropa 2013). In most of the instances, the cleansing lists were not made, and it was the main obstacle for Lešaja to gather the data. The first instances of the book cleansing Lešaja noticed in his hometown Korčula, in the local People’s Library where the main librarian, upon receipt of the government’s directive, removed around 550 books. The books could be found thrown away in the city’s garbage containers, and the act was justified with the books either being “damaged” or “obsolete and redundant”. Similarly, the elementary school director in Vrsar in Istria peninsula stated that what was thrown is “passe” literature, out of date and ideological. The school in Vrsar carries name after Croatian poet Vladimir Nazor (1876–1949), partisan and one of the closest associates of Josip Broz Tito. Nazor’s books also ended up being thrown away. Lešaja contacted many librarians throughout Croatia and found out that there were many similar incidents throughout Croatia. Some of the librarians were opposed to this, Lešaja will find out, but being under a pressure and fear of losing their jobs, they succumbed (Hayden 2013, 362). Lešaja gathered not only detailed data on destruction of books from school libraries, but he also documented destruction of public monuments, as well as a detailed documentation on a court case against Milan Kangrga (1923–2008), famous Croatian philosopher, most famous as founder of 1960s journal Praxis and the Korčula Summer School that gathered philosophers from the East and the West between 1964 and 1974. Kangrga published an article in independent satirical weekly Feral Tribune titled “Hrvatski knjigocid. Barbarizam i renesansa” [Croatian libricide. Barbarism and Renaissance] (March 30, 1998). Kangrga’s article, Lešaja documents, was met with a severe resistance, negation and accusation, and the librarian from Korčula has sued him for defamation. Kangrga argued in his article that Croatia is the only European country in which fascism is back into its original Croatian form, and that in that “madness”, not even books were spared as being proclaimed as being “ill-suited”. Kangrga referred to the parliament statement of Škegra, and also the article by journalist Lasić about the library in Korčula and its principal who self-initiatively threw the books in containers without any criteria (Kangrga 1998). Kangrga saw one of legal justifications for this mass practice in newly adopted Law on Libraries (Zakon o knjiznicama) and its article 46 which stipulates deposing books if they are seen as obsolete. Kangrga in his article shows that he is well informed and writes about shredding of 40,000 complete volumes of the Yugoslav Encyclopedia by its publisher, the Yugoslav Lexicographical Institute, founded in 1950 by one of the greatest Croatian writers, Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981). However, Lešaja argues, Kangrga did not say anything new (Lešaja gives us examples of articles published in the only respectable opposition weekly at the time, Feral Tribune by diplomat Darko Šilović (December 28, 1998), Viktor

Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism  141 Ivancić (November 14, 1994, Vladimir Primorac 1998 and 2000), and why was then, he sued? Lešaja sees two reasons for this: firstly, Kangrga described the issue of destroying books as national and societal problem of Croatia and the dominant political direction Croatia took, and secondly because Kangrga was one of the most significant intellectuals in Croatia and a philosopher of ethics by his professional and life vocation. The process lasted for four years, and the lawsuit was finally dismissed based on being “untimely submitted”. It is curious to note that the lawsuit could have been immediately dismissed if “untimely” submitted and that the librarian who filed the lawsuit was willing to dismiss it if Kangrga would publicly apologize to her, which Kangrga rejected. Lešaja further analyzes the lawsuit and argues that the process continued with numerous irregularities that he describes in detail precisely because it was important to shut down the critical voice of Kangrga and all other potential critical voices (Lešaja 2010). The Concept and Status of Middle/Central Europe Does not the fall into untruth begin precisely by the fact that people behave as those who hold and possess the truth? (Karel Kosik 2007, 350)

Owing to Ante Lešaja, the author of earlier mentioned book on Croatian libricide, the Croatian audience could read translation of Czech philosopher Karel Kosik’s essays.3 Kosik’s essays in Lesaja’s selection named On dilemmas of contemporary history discuss the notion of the Middle Europe and what it entails, “theee Munich betrayals” of Czech history (1938, 1968, and 1999) and the Czech government’s support for the NATO “humanitarian” intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999. One of the oldest Kosik’s essays in Lesaja’s selection is “What is Middle Europe” (1969). “Middle Europe is a contentious space and a space of disputes: the debate is about what that space really is”, writes Kosik (Kosik 2007, 52). Kosik gives three explanations about this contested space and contends that Middle Europe is an “arena in which those three explanations meet and clash in conflicts and struggles” (ibid., 52). The first is German “Mitteleuropa”, an expression which assumes that middle Europe is German area since always and that it falls under her rule and protection. In this area in which German talent, organizational skills, enterprise, diligence, discernment, perseverance are always superior to “eine tieferstehende Rasse” (a lower race), Germany brings an order, Kosik writes, and gives to the local population an example of discipline and diligence (ibid., 52–53). Not even the defeats in two world wars, Kosik argues, shaked the ingrained notion of Germany’s role as stabilizing factor in middle Europe (ibid., 53). Russian explanation of middle Europe, Kosik writes, is that middle Europe is a mere transit on the way to where Europe really starts: Paris or fictious “Roulettenburg”. It is an area of necessary stopping point where horses take turns and stare quickly from there and further toward the desired destination,

142  Maja Vodopivec deaf and uninteresting space, just a pure necessity (ibid., 53). A similar position the area has in Russian foreign policy: it is a defense wall that will prevent attack on the interior of the empire (53). For both powers, it is a mere service area whose value, meaning, and content are determined in their capitals and beyond this space (ibid., 54). The third explanation, according to Kosik, has been articulated for the first time and thought about in the interest of all peoples who inhabit this space by Czech historian Frantisek Palacky (1798–1876) and writer Karel Havlicek (1821–1856). They both argued that middle Europe is a historical space whose destiny and future can only be decided by those peoples who cultivated that land for centuries and built its cities, documented in their literature and historical documents, and most of all in those peoples’ mutual contacts and encounters (ibid., 54). Kosik concludes with the following words: “As a historical space, middle Europe is resistance which, in opposition to imperial aggression from two or more sides, defends, and through successful and unsuccessful attempts gradually achieves freedom and equality of all peoples” (ibid., 54). For Croatia, emphasizing the middle-European identity in the 1990s became a matter of distinguishing herself from the “Balkans” or South Slav identity. Even when this tendency is critically perceived by Croatian intellectuals, the identity is rarely named as “South Slav” (“Jug” means “south”) but “south-east European” identity. For example, historian Drago Roksandić in his 2012 article “Postoji li jos uvijek Srednja Europa?” [Does Middle Europe still exist?] notes that Croatian “negative attitude towards Southeast and especially Balkan” is a problem (Roksandić 2012, 190) but does not mention a single time “south-Slav identity”. Jugoslavija in Roksandić’s article is mentioned twice, in the context of “getting out of Yugoslav paradigm” and “Yugoslav formula of Croatian national question” (ibid., 189). The “exit from Yugoslav paradigm”, according to Roksandić, has “redefined, in an innovative way, the forgotten traditions” (ibid., 189). Among them, Roksandić continues, “the middle-European one has emerged as the most effective”. Roksandić is not explicit about what is this identity most effective for, but it is suggested that it was the most effective for achieving independence from the Yugoslav federation and distinguishing itself from the community of South Slav peoples. Roksandić summarizes: “A lot has changed in the past twenty, thirty years. Croatian public opinion today, more precisely, continuously since 1990, by its vast majority unquestionably considers Croatia a Middle-European country. Without such a conviction, there would hardly have been a plebiscite commitment to state independence in 1991. After 1990, in an accelerated process of disintegration of Yugoslavia, the ‘Middle-European Renaissance’ began in Croatia. It manifested itself in culture, for example—among other things—a kind of discovery of the Baroque, which took place simultaneously with analogous processes in other Middle European countries, of which all have experienced a Catholic renewal. It gradually spread to numerous other topics and areas. These were not necessarily the same ones that were inevitable in Middle Europe, like in Austria or the Czech Republic. For example, a deeper interest in Middle European, especially

Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism  143 Habsburg Enlightenment heritage, in contrast to Austria or the Czech Republic, is of more recent origin in Croatia” (Roksandić 2012, 189–190). And indeed, Croatia was rarely brought into context of Middle Europe even within Croatia herself before the mid-1980s. When Czech writer Milan Kundera published in the New York Review his 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe”, the Croatian national struggle in the nineteenth century was mentioned only once, in a peripheral way (Kundera 1984 in Albrecht and Segers 2016, 201). The nations Kundera had in mind were the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Poles (ibid., 197). These four nations of Central Europe, Kundera writes, “have never been entirely integrated into the consciousness of Europe, they have remained the most fragile part of the West—hidden, even further, by the curtain of their strange and scarcely accessible languages” (ibid., 197). Nevertheless, for Kundera, nothing coming from Russia is their heritage (ibid., 196) and the “Slavic soul” or language is actually “alien”. For Kundera, Russia is simply an “other civilization”. This Byzantine-Bolshevik civilization for Kundera is alien to Central European civilization (Bousfield 2014, 1), it abducted her, but Europe can’t see that it lost its most relevant part, contends Kundera. “Nothing could be more foreign to Central Europe and its passion for variety than Russia: uniform, standardizing, centralizing, determined to transform every nation of its empire (the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, the Armenians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and others) into a single Russian people” (Kundera 1984, 195). For Kundera, “Russian communism vigorously reawakened Russia’s old anti-Western obsession and turned it brutally against Europe” (ibid., 195–196). Kundera quotes Joseph Conrad who around the 1920s wrote that “nothing could be more alien to what is called in the literary world the ‘Slavic spirit’ than the Polish temperament with its chivalric devotion to moral constraints and its exaggerated respect for individual rights” (ibid., 198–199). “How well I understand him!”, writes Kundera, and adds that “I, too, know of nothing more ridiculous than this cult of obscure depths, this noisy and empty sentimentality of the ‘Slavic soul’ that is attributed to me from time to time!” (ibid., 199). Kundera quotes Polish writer Kazimierz Brandys’s Warsaw Diary in which he states: “Russia is foreign to us … it’s not our heritage. That was also my response to Russian literature. It scared me. Even today I’m still horrified by certain stories by Gogol and by everything Saltykov-Schedrin wrote. I would have preferred not to have known their world, not to have known it even existed” (ibid., 196). It is a world that—provided we are removed from it—fascinates and attracts us; the moment it closes around us, though, it reveals its terrifying foreignness” (196– 197). Kundera continues elaborating on the “horror of the world his (Gogol’s) art evokes. It is a world that—provided we are removed from it—fascinates and attracts us; the moment it closes around us, though, it reveals its terrifying foreignness. I don’t know if it is worse than ours but I do know it is different …” (197). And he concludes: “This is why the countries in Central Europe feel that the change in their destiny that occurred after 1945 is not merely a political catastrophe: it is also an attack on their civilization. The deep meaning of their

144  Maja Vodopivec resistance is the struggle to preserve their identity—or, to put it another way, to preserve their Western-ness” (ibid., 197). If there are differences between the small nations and big powers in Europe, Kundera then poses the key question: What is European unity based on? In the Middle Ages, he writes, it was based on shared religion. In the modern era (Habsburg monarchy), it was “culture, which became the expression of the supreme values by which European humanity understood itself, defined itself, identified itself as European” (ibid., 204). At the time of writing this essay, Kundera admittedly did not know what “realm of supreme values will be capable of uniting Europe? … Will it be the principle of tolerance, respect for the beliefs and ideas of other people?” (ibid., 204). A particularly interesting part (where perhaps, Kosik and Kundera will agree although coming from completely different starting points) is where Kundera elaborates on the “enormous relevance” of the culture of Central Europe (ibid., 203). Kundera compares here the fate of central-European “small nations” to the fate of the Jewish population in Europe: “Another thing (next to the Jewish genius and heritage) makes the Jewish people so precious to me: in their destiny the fate of Central Europe seems to be concentrated, reflected, and to have found its symbolic image” (ibid., 202). When speaking of the genius and heritage, Kundera notes that Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, and Gustav Mahler all spent their childhood in Moravia (ibid., 201). Interestingly, Kundera is not aware of the intellectual Eurocentrism and the issues related to racist pillars of (Western) Europe (and that actually Eastern Europeans, just like Jews, were always subjected to it). Neither did Edmund Husserl, Naoki Sakai writes, who “as a victim of anti-Semitic scapegoating” with his response entered a fundamental contradiction: “When he was excluded from the putative membership of European humanity, he protested such fascist populism by reasserting the mission of European humanity, by insisting on a teleological commitment to theory, which he claimed the Chinese or Indians could never afford” (Sakai 2018, 36–37). Kundera gives us an example of an Austrian writer, born in Prague, in a family of a Jewish merchant, Franz Werfel (1890–1945), who, according to Kundera, “took a stand not only against Hitlerism but also against the totalitarian threat in general, the ideological and journalistic mindlessness of our times that was on the verge of destroying culture” (ibid., 205). I could not find any of Werfel’s writings by which he condemned “totalitarian regimes”, including communism (as Kundera suggested). Werfel is most famous in the U.S. for his 1933 novel Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh) about the mass murder and expulsion of Armenians from Eastern Anatolia in 1915.4 Together with Franz Kafka and Max Brod, Werfel formed the Prague Circle of Jewish Writers in the German language. Werfel from his early days expressed his idealism about a brotherhood with all humankind, despise for nationalism, and he even proposed to establish a World Academy of Poets and Thinkers (Weltakademie der Dichter und Denker) at a 1937 conference organized by the League of Nations’s Organization for Intellectual Cooperation in Paris. In 1933, Nazi students at more than 30 German universities raided libraries to

Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism  145 “cleanse” them from books they considered to be “un-German”.5 Among the books they burnt were the works of Franz Werfel. In October 1940, Werfel dramatically fled to the U.S. after he first had to flee Austria and soon after France. Although Kundera gives us the information on Werfel’s cosmopolitanism, he did not see a need to inform us on Werfel’s books burning nor on the dramatic escape of Werfel in 1940. Kundera writes the following: “Franz Werfel spent the first third of his life in Prague, the second third in Vienna, and the last third as an emigrant, first in France, then in America—there you have a typically Central European biography” (ibid., 205). “Emigrant” seems too neutral word for what Werfel experienced. Werfel’s proposal for the world’s organization of poets and thinkers, Kundera sees as “naïve, and moving, because it revels the desperate need to find once again a moral authority in a world stripped of values. It reveals the anguished desire to hear the inaudible voice of culture, the voice of the Dichter und Denker” (ibid., 205). Immediately after the Werfel’s story, Kundera gives us a story of one of his friends, a famous Czech philosopher, whose manuscripts were confiscated by the police. Kundera writes: “We talked about the possibility of sending an open letter abroad in order to turn this confiscation into an international scandal. It was perfectly clear to us that he shouldn’t address the letter to an institution or a statesman but only to some figure above politics, someone who stood for an unquestionable moral value, someone universally acknowledged in Europe. In other words, a great cultural figure. But who was this person? Suddenly, we understood that this figure did not exist” (ibid., 205–206). Kundera does not name his friend but there is a high chance that the friend is Karel Kosik whose manuscripts were seized by the police in April 1975. Kosik actually did send an open letter to Jean-Paul Sartre, published in Le Monde in May 1976.6 The manuscripts were eventually returned to Kosik. From the correspondence in Le Monde, and from Kosik’s last essays, it is clear that Kosik has never shared a despise for communism with Kundera. In his letter to Sartre, Kosik addresses his “socialist, democratic and communist friends who are also friends of Czechoslovakia”.7 Middle European Concept as a Betrayal: On Humanitarian Bombing Kosik’s thoughts on Middle Europe were intertwined with another trope, called Munich syndrome. Although they always say that there will be “no new Munich”, Czech politicians do not fail to repeatedly let down—writes Kosik and gives three such historical moments: the original one from 1938, 1968 (where only one from the delegation to Moscow resisted), and 1999 when Czech president supported NATO bombing of Federal Republic Yugoslavia. “The Munich syndrome is tragedy in which there are four actors”, writes Kosik (2007, 75). The first is the aggressor, the second is the victim who cannot or doesn’t know how to defend herself, and the third is full of contradictions—those who do not agree with the aggressor but are ready to tolerate it or simply close their eyes when faced with it and do not have the courage or insight to recognize in the aggressor the fundamental evil of the time and resist it. This category of

146  Maja Vodopivec people tends to “utter moralistic sermons about how every time asks for sacrifice” (Kosik 2007, 75). “In Munich it shows what it means not to keep a word and break a promise” (ibid., 76). There are several historical moments in which Czech politicians let down the people: 1938 capitulation instead of resistance; in 1948 when Communist Party had an opportunity to show that communism brings more freedom, more democracy, better morale but the politicians became ward-heelers, in 1968 when only member of the delegation refused to sign the Moscow Protocol, in 1989 when Czechoslovakian federation was broken down without ever asking the people. Finally, Kosik argues, there was a big letdown when the Czech people were involved in “dirty war against Yugoslavia” in 1999. It was Serbs, Kosik writes, who “stood with us in our most important moments. They stood in 1938 and in 1968” (ibid., 426). He sees this as extremely miserable (ibid., 426), worse than Dubcek’s 1968 debacle in Moscow, because in 1968 there was one politician who protested, but in 1999 there was no one from the politicians on power who said: “I resign, protest against that war, that war is not good, is not just, is not decent” (ibid., 426). The term “humanitarian bombing” is often attributed to the Czech president and the most famous Czech dissident writer Vaclav Havel (1936–2011), who refuted that it is the phrase he coined (“I said that the reasons for the strike had been humanitarian”) and in his last interview said that it was a “tough decision” (2011).8 Next to this, Havel was one of the eight European leaders to sign the January 2003 letter supporting the invasion of Iraq, as the only president to do so.9 It is obvious that Kosik is referring to Havel when writing the following: “How many people started their political career with a furious shout: To hell with all the military pacts! Not much time has passed, the rebels have become wiser, they have come to their senses, and in old age, as serving bureaucrats, they have merged with the functioning system so much that their human rights coincide with the doctrine of the preemptive attack and, enthusiastically, welcome the bombing of Yugoslav cities” (350). Kosik addresses this in the same essay, under the subtitle “Betrayal”: “He who betrays surrenders to untruth …. The betrayal—abundant in the twentieth century, it followed one after another like plague wounds. Political parties spoke of peace and condemned militarism but when the moment of truth came, they supported the imperial war and completely failed. The intelligentsia praised reason and criticism, education and humanity, but the at critical moment it made itself unreservedly available to the warriors—and failed” (352). The following subtitle is “Unequal development” in which Kosik ironically notes that from the histories of America and Germany, we can conclude that there are two types of countries: “those who follow an ascending development: first (in far or recent past) killings and massacres, then enlightenment, arrival of democracy, and strict respect for human rights” (353). However, Kosik asks if “such norm applies only to white population, while other races and cultures are forever doomed to inhumanity and barbarism? Is humanity divided into two groups, completely different? One, by its own effort reaches and fights out for human rights (humanizes itself) while the other must be forced from outside to get liberated and democratize? And which

Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism  147 tribunal decides which category this or that country and culture belong to?” (353). This is, Kosik argues, a “seductive and dangerous illusion: it overlooks not only the unevenness of development, but especially the interference with and incompleteness of history. History does not aspire to a final ideal state of climax. At every stage, people face various threats and dangers; it is important whether they will timely recognize the threat and whether they will have the audacity and the strength to deal with it”. For Kosik, “American war against Serbia demonstrates such a menace, and it concerns the whole planet” (353). The war in Yugoslavia, Kosik argues, is of a historical significance not only because it was brutal but because it is also “revealing, exposing, and treacherous” (357). And it “brought to light the very essence of a world that adheres to Euro-American values” (357). While a lot is talked about the “humanitarian catastrophe”, Kosik further elaborates, little is talked about another catastrophe, more important and scarier, the catastrophe of humanities (357). “NATO airplanes were bringing higher, modern, universal values because the leadership in Belgrade (dictator and Balkan butcher) is stubborn, and the conflict was inevitable. “The aggression on a sovereign state is justified with higher values and the universality of human rights”, writes Kosik and then immediately points to a fundamental contradiction in the human rights doctrine: “what values are represented by ordinary people who are being bombed and their country devastated? Did they also participate in the clash of values, or they are excluded from it and were just bystanders?” (358). The Pax Americana has exhausted its historical possibilities, Kosik argues, and it is now “only surviving in its grandiose repetition of the same, in the senseless growth of helpless power, with its reason and its imagination it is nearing its end, and the only thing left to it is substitution. In that fall, there is no more power for sublime forms such as tragedy and comedy, and the appropriate expression of her state are kitsch and farce” (360). NATO’s war against Yugoslavia has affected the world in different ways. The war never received a mandate from the UN and, according to the international law, it was illegal. The war led to establishment of Kosovo’s sovereign state. Five EU countries do not recognize Kosovo’s independence declared in 2008, as well as many other countries in the world of which 16 countries, like Ghana in 2019, have withdrawn their recognitions.10 Russia justifies its annexation of Crimea in 2014 with a similar situation with Kosovo’s independence, while China keeps a bitter memory of the “accidental” bombing of its Embassy in Belgrade which has killed three and injured around 20 people. Bill Clinton decided to launch the attack and “plunge America into a military conflict that President Clinton said was necessary to stop ethnic cleansing and bring stability to Eastern Europe” (cited in Chomsky 1999, 3). Chomsky further cites Clinton’s words: “We are upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace. We cannot respond to such tragedies everywhere, but when ethnic conflict turns into ethnic cleansing where we can make a difference, we must try, and that is clearly the case in Kosovo” (ibid., 4). Vaclav Havel in his essay “Kosovo and the End of the Nation State” (The New York

148  Maja Vodopivec Review of Books, 1999),11 sees this intervention as an expression of a new world in which “a threat to some has an immediate impact on everyone” and that is why, Havel argues, “In such a world, the idol of state sovereignty must inevitably dissolve” because “Human freedoms represent a higher value than state sovereignty. International law protecting the unique human being must be ranked higher than international law protecting the state” (ibid.). Havel calls this an “ethical war” because “it is probably the first war not waged in the name of ‘national interests’”, argues Havel in the same essay (ibid.). The international law institutions, such as the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), found no ground to pursue an investigation of NATO war crimes. Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was in a stark contrast with a report by Amnesty International announced only a week later. Late law professor Michael Mandel concludes, it is hard “to read the two reports and conclude that the ICTY report is a fraud” (Mandel 2001, 96). Mandel provides sufficient evidence that the “Tribunal acted more like a NATO press office than a court” and for Mandel, the “failure to charge NATO” was the real proof. Among other points from the complaint for war crimes against 68 individual leaders of the NATO at the ICTY (damage to the environment, use of depleted uranium projectiles, use of cluster bombs, legal issues related to target selection, casualties), the complaint refers to specific incidents in which a number of civilians got killed among which the “accidental” attack on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade is prominent in terms of causing serious tensions between the U.S. and China. The ICTY found no reason to investigate it further. The ICTY was subject to another incident in 2013, the year in which the Republic of Croatia joined the European Union. The incident was triggered by the acquittal of the Croatian general Ante Gotovina, who (together with two other Croatian generals), in the first verdict was sentenced to 20 years of prison for the joint ethnic cleansing of the Serbian population in Croatia, to be completely acquitted after the appeal, just months before Croatia was admitted to the European Union in July 2013 and, therefore, entered a community of “civilized” nations and ceased being “Western Balkans” country. The Danish judge of the ICTY, Frederik Harhoff, sent his comment to 56 E-mail addresses of his friends and colleagues, expressing a “deep concern both for me and among colleagues here in the corridors of the court” (Anderson 2013) about the judgments who “brought me before a deep professional and moral dilemma” (ibid.) due to the “suspicion that some of my colleague have been behind a short-sighted political pressure” (ibid.) and a “pressure from the American presiding judge” (ibid.,). Neda Atanasoski characterizes the ICTY as a “permanent fixture of the postsocialist world” and “undeviating feature of the post-Cold War geopolitical landscape” (Atanasoski 2013, 1). She analyzes is it in the context of the racial reorientation of U.S. humanitarian (and post-socialism) imperialism. Atanasoski states that in the post-Cold War world, the “concept of collateral damage illustrates how certain acts of violence become intelligible as acts of atrocity,

Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism  149 while other modes of killing are comprehensible solely as acts of redemption” (ibid., 2). It is global humanitarianism that is an expression of the Western imperialism in the post-socialist world (ibid., 2). The West, through “military and juridical humanization of barbarous geographies” (ibid., 2), in the name of peace and liberal values (rule of law, tolerance, free market) is affirming its humanity. Atanasoski argues that Eastern Europe is a constitutive (though neglected) region in the American racial and imperial project (ibid., 3–4), where the “U.S. fantasy of militarism as morally multicultural” is produced (ibid., 4). It is America that is a model for racial democratization and multiculturalism, entitled to violently humanize those ethno-nationalist racist and intolerant leaders committing ethnic cleansing. As Atanasoski writes, “As a humanizing mode of governance, postsocialist imperialism is contingent on multiculturalism as a value system and mode of knowledge about the world that demands that individuals declare their faith in a global humanity made manifest in normative articulations of racial, religious, and cultural diversity enshrined as individual juridical rights” (ibid., 5). In this process of giving others lessons, ironically, it displaces its own racism and projects it onto the rest who are in a transition from the “terror of communism” to “free world”. The “rest” is, therefore, in a need to be “humanized” because of their ethno-national and religious-inspired atrocities. Ironically, the West is doing this through supporting the ethno-­ national wars of secession in a multicultural Yugoslavia, whose successor independent nation-states will in various ways be incorporated in Western civilized world or, as Boris Buden depicts it, “bath in the Atlantic Ocean” through their integration in NATO and the EU (Buden 2010, 3). Furthermore, socially disastrous economic transitions in Eastern Europe are pushed out of the international community’s discourse through emphasis on a global human rights regime, which facilitated transition to free-market economy (Atanasoski 2013, 17). Former communist emphasis on social and economic rights became secondary over the emancipation of the civil and political rights. Under Pax Americana, U.S. domestic issues with racism were displaced to Eastern Europe and its “totalitarian” regimes where communism was a synonym for “unfree” and evil world (Atanasoski, 19). With the end of the Cold War and American triumphalism about the “end of history”, this narrative of the illiberal, poor, ethnonationalist, homogenous (as opposed to diverse), backward Third World has been dominating the liberal discourse of so-called international community. It is especially Eastern Europe that has been associated with a political transition to democracy and (failed) economic transition to free market capitalism, less so China or Vietnam. And it is, additionally, Yugoslavia that figures as an important site of the triumph of a global ethic of humanitarianism and the racial progress narrative of multiculturalism versus primordial ethno-religious racialisms (Atanasoski, 28). The U.S. has emerged as a multicultural and diverse space able to offer and impose its standards of democracy (ibid., 36). The role of “humanitas” is to humanize the “anthropos” in a unilateral way, through freedom, democracy, and justice (Nishitani 2006, 270–271). Eastern Europe, as the Europe’s permanent anthropos is in a need to be “liberated” (from

150  Maja Vodopivec communism or ethno-national barbarisms), democratized, and ultimately civilized. This dynamics is illustrated well with the term “balkanization”. Maria Todorova in Imagining the Balkans (1997, 2009) traces the roots of the disparaging phrase “Balkanism” or “Balkanization” to the beginning of the twentieth century and the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) when atrocities in the Balkans disturbed the civilized Western world (Todorova 2009, 3). In the early 1990s, instead of fact-finding, Todorova writes, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace established in 1910, reprinted the 1913 report naming it this time “The Other Balkan Wars”, with a new introduction by George Kennan who, after praising development of peace movements in the Western World, contrasted it with “the same Balkan world” (cited in Todorova 2009, 5). The 1990s balkanization of Yugoslavia is a disparaging term created in the West, but it is also seen by the West as a way toward the emancipation of the oppressed parts from the evil center which is evil primarily because it stands on the way of capitalist global cartography based exactly on the “volatile, performative areas” (Solomon 2020). A similar pattern is observed by Solomon in the case of contemporary China and Sinophone studies, where an “apparatus of area and anthropological difference” emphasizes study of certain regions and ethnic groups within China (Solomon 2020). As Solomon puts it, “deliberately or not”, this epistemology of anthropos (and area study’s “anti-centrism”) is a “justification for the balkanization of the People’s Republic of China” (Solomon 2020). Zizek argues that “in our century, at least, the European political Unconscious is definitely structured like Balkan” (Zizek 1999, cited in Solomon 2020). In his essay related to understanding of the Transpacific, Solomon states that “If anti-centrism studies are any indication, the political unconscious of the transpacific is structured like Balkan, too”. Todorova shows that Balkan was always associated with the East, and especially with the cruelty of the East where “life is valued here almost as cheaply as in China and Japan” (cited in Todorova 2009, 118). This quote is from a book by Harry De Windt, Through Savage Europe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907). If there were any doubts about the “savageness” of the Balkans at that time, the ambiguity was pretty much gone in 1912–1913, during the Balkan Wars. What has removed all Western ambiguity concerning the Balkans was the 1914 assassination in a “mudcaked primitive village, Sarajevo” (John Gunther’s Inside Europe, cited in Todorova, 119). Gunther’s descriptions were preserved in the 1940 war edition of his book (Todorova, 119). “The snarls of Hitler were, obviously more intelligible to Western readers, because they were Western. It is only one step from here to the flat assertion that even World War II can be blamed on the Balkans. Admittedly, it is a difficult step to take, and over fifty years were needed for someone to take. Robert Kaplan, who openly aspires to become the Dame Rebecca West of the 1990s, maintained, in Balkan Ghosts, that ‘Nazism, for instance, can claim Balkan origins’” (Todorova, 119). One century later, the event in Sarajevo is widely seen as a terrorist act of nationalist Serbs, puppets guided from Belgrade. It is an interpretation that justified Austria-Hungary to start war against Serbia, inaccurate however (Bazdulj 2014, 7). Robert W. Seton-Watson,

Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism  151 historian of the Habsburg monarchy and the Balkans contended that “the triumph of the Pan-Serb idea would mean the ‘triumph of Eastern over Western culture and would be a fatal blow to progress and modern development throughout the Balkans’” (cited in Todorova, 118). Presenting Young Bosnians as Great Serb Nationalists suited all those who had a negative attitude to Yugoslavia, those two attitudes are inseparable, argues Bazdulj (2014, 6). Negative stereotypes about Young Bosnia are wrong in calling Young Bosnians nationalists in pejorative sense (Bazdulj 2014, 5). Majority of them were Serbs (many atheistic) but there were also Muslims and Croats. They were Yugoslav nationalists and majority (including Gavrilo Princip, the young assassinator) were also members of the association of Serbo-Croatian youth (ibid., 5). Ivo Andric, Croat born in Bosnia and the only Nobel-Prize-winning Yugoslav author, also a member of Young Bosnia, wrote about his generation as the “generation of rebellious angels, in that brief moment when they still had all the power and all the rights of angels and the blazing pride of rebels” (Andric 1982, 208, cited in Bazdulj 2014, 5). “Without much effort on their part, fate had granted these sons of peasants, merchants or craftsmen from a remote Bosnian town open entry into the wide world and the great illusion of liberty” (ibid., 5). In today’s mainstream discourse, Princip’s shot is depicted as “a shot fired at Freud, Musil, Kraus, Trakls, Kokoschka, Wittgenstein …” (ibid., 6), and the Young Bosnia Street is renamed to Ghazi Street, where ghazi is a warrior for Islam (ibid., 5) while, for example, Claudio Magris, Italian nostalgist about Central Europe, had a more sensibility for the historical context and depicted it as a “beginning of the liberation of the countries of Africa and Asia, which the old European powers, united, would have been able to continue to rule and exploit: (Magris 2007, 156, cited in Bazdulj 2014, 7). On the eve of the centenary of the assassination, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers (2012) was widely read, cited, and underpinned the self-righteous narrative of the humanitarian imperialism against Great Serbia or “Serbdom”, the phrase Clark extensively uses. The book’s Part I is even named one of the best studies of the Sarajevo assassination by Vladimir Dedijer (The Road to Sarajevo, 1969). However, Clark hardly sees in it something Magris does see, a story of “Yugoslavia, a country which came into being from the echo of Princip’s gunshot, as ‘the inheritor of the double-headed eagle, its supranational and complex state, its position as an intermediary between East and West, between different and opposing worlds and political blocks’” (Magris, 317, cited in Bazdulj, 7). Notes 1 Note that the name of this author (Christopher Garbowski) should not be mixed with the name of Prof. Jan Grabowski, a professor at the University of Ottawa, who recently sued in Poland for a libel. 2 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jan/08/holocaust-balticlithuania-latvia 3 Lesaja, as a child of 15, went to schooling in Prague in 1946, on scholarships from the Czechoslovakian government. He spent two years in Prague and was back in

152  Maja Vodopivec Yugoslavia after the Cominform Resolution in 1948 and Tito—Stalin split (or after, as in Yugoslavia, generations were taught, “Tito’s historical no”). These two years of Lesaja’s school in Prague explain a beautiful translation of a selection of Kosik’s essays by Lesaja (for which the foreword is written by the Praxis School philosopher Milan Kangrga). 4 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/franz-werfel 5 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/franz-werfel 6 The Kosik—Sartre exchange is available at http://kosikphilosophy.blogspot.com/2017/ 10/the-kosik-sartre-exchange.html 7 Ibid. 8 His full statement in Czech was the following: Domnívám se, že během zásahu NATO na Kosovu existuje jeden činitel, o kterém nikdo nemůže pochybovat: nálety, bomby, nejsou vyvolány hmotným zájmem. Jejich povaha je výlučně humanitární:[4] to, co je zde ve hře, jsou principy, lidská práva, jimž je dána taková priorita, která překračuje i státní suverenitu. A to poskytuje útoku na Jugoslávskou federaci legitimitu i bez mandátu Spojených národů. (English: I believe that during intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which are accorded priority that surpasses even state sovereignty. This makes attacking the Yugoslav Federation legitimate, even without the United Nations mandate. French: French: Dans l'intervention de l'OTAN au Kosovo, je pense qu'il y a un élément que nul ne peut contester: les raids, les bombes, ne sont pas provoqués par un intérêt matériel. Leur caractère est exclusivement humanitaire: ce qui est en jeu ici, ce sont les principes, les droits de l'homme auxquels est accordée une priorité qui passe même avant la souveraineté des Etats. Voilà ce qui rend légitime d'attaquer la Fédération yougoslave, même sans le mandat des Nations unies.—From Havel’s article in Le Monde, published on April 29, 1999). 9 https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/11/why-washington-needs-to-get-over-vaclav-havel/ 10 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/ghana-withdraws-recognition-of-kosovo-report/ 1643753 11 This was title of the talk Havel gave to the Canadian Senate of the House of Commons in Ottawa on April 29, 1999, later published in The New York Review of Books, June 10, 1999.

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Eastern Europe and Criminalization of Communism  153 Chomsky, Noam. The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo. Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1999. Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Allen Lane, Penguin UK: Penguin Books, 2012. De Windt, Harry. Through Savage Europe. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907. ––––––. European Conscience and Totalitarianism (Debate). 25 March 2009. European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/CRE-6-2009-03-25-ITM-010_ EN.html?redirect ––––––. Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. 13 June 2000. United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. https://www.icty.org/ en/press/final-report-prosecutor-committee-established-review-nato-bombing-campaignagainst-federal#IVB4 Garbowski, Christopher. “The Polish Debate on the House of European History in Brussels.” The Polish Review 65, no. 4 (2020): 60–70. Havel, Václav. 1999. “Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State.” The New York Review. June 10 Issue. ––––––. Interview with Havel. 2011 (December 29). Janda, Jakub is the journalist. http://www. eurstrat.eu/last-interview-with-vaclav-havel-to-bomb-belgrade-was-a-tough-decision/ Hayden, Robert M. “Knjigocid: Uništavanje knjige u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih by Ante Lešaja.” Slavic Review 72, no. 2 (2013): 361–4. ––––––. ICTY Judge Frederik Harhoffs Email to 56 Contacts, June 6, 2013. Kamola, Isaac A. Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of Global Imaginary. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019. Kangrga, Milan. “Hrvatski knjigocid. Barbarizam i renesansa.” Feral Tribune. 30 March 1998. Katz, Dovid. “Halting Holocaust obfuscation.” Guardian, 8 Jan 2010. Kelly, John D., Kurt Jacobsen, and Marston H. Morgan, eds. Reconsidering American Power: Pax Americana and the Social Sciences. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020. Kosik, Karel. The Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Observations from the 1968 Era. Edited by Jamese H. Satterwhite. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1995. ––––––. O dilemama suvremene povijesti. Izbor tekstova, prijevod i pogovor: Ante Lešaja. Zagreb: Razlog, 2007. ––––––. The Kosik—Sartre Exchange. Telos. September 21, 1975: 193–5. Available at http://kosikphilosophy.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-kosik-sartre-exchange.html Kundera, Milan. The Tragedy of Central Europe.” In Re:Thinking Europe, edited by Yoeri Albrecht, and Mathieu Segers, 191–215. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Lešaja, Ante. “Kulturocid: Sudski process protiv Milana Kangrge.” Republika/RES PUBLICA. : 490–1, December, 2010. ––––––. Knjigocid: Uništavanje knjige u Hrvatskoj 1990.-ih. Zagreb: Profil, 2012. Le Rider, Jacques. “Mitteleuropa, Zentraleuropa, Mittleosteuropa: A Mental Map of Central Europe.” European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 2 (2008): 155–69. Mälksoo, Maria. The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic PostCold War Security Imaginaries. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Mandel, Micheal. “Politics and Human Rights in International Criminal Law: Our Case Against NATO and the Lessons to be Learned From It.” Fordham International Law Journal 25, no. 1 (2001), Article 4: 95–128.

154  Maja Vodopivec Mandic, Danilo. 2006. “Interview with Noam Chomsky: On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia.” TRS Online, April 25. https://chomsky.info/20060425/ Matvejević, Predrag. Razgovori s Krležom. Beograd: BIGZ, 1987. Neumayer, Laure. The Criminalisation of Communism in the Euroopean Political Space after the Cold War. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Nishitani, Osamu. 2006. “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being.’” In Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference (259–73), Traces. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, June 3rd, 2008, Prague, Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. Available at https://www.praguedeclaration.eu/ Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York and London: The New Press, 2007. Purves, Gillian, ed. Lest We Forget: Memory of Totalitarianism in Europe. Prague: Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. 2013. Radio Slobodna Evropa. Knjigocid u Hrvatskoj: hronika sramnog vremena. 8. Oktobar 2013. https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/knjigocid-u-hrvatskoj-hronika-sramnog-vremena/ 25129713.html Reagan Library. “Trip to West Germany. Tape #2 Remarks by President Reagan. Bitburg AFB.” Date: 05/05/1985. Roksandić, Drago. “Postoji li još uvijek Srednja Europa?” Historijski Zbornik LXV, br. 1 (2012): 187–202. Sakai, Naoki. “What is Asia? On Anthropological Difference.” In Universality and Particularity: What is Asianness? edited by Naoki Sakai, and Sun Ge. Beijing: Inside-Out Art Museum, 2018. Sakai, Naoki, Jon Solomon and Peter Button. Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana. London and New York: Routledge 2024. Solomon, Jon.. “Transpacific Anxiety, Anti-Centrism Studies, and the Figure of the Balkan.” The Invisible Armada (2020). 2020/11/29. Stavrianos, Leften Stavros Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1981. Todorova, Maria. Imaginings the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ugrešić, Dubravka. “An Archeology of Resistance.” The New York Review (2020). November 16. Vitalis, Robert. “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (2000): 331–56.

6

Feeling Freedom Japanese and American Wartime Films on the Liberation of the Philippines, 1943–45 Takashi Fujitani

Introduction In the years around WWI, as nationalist movements throughout the colonized world (including Asia) took up the new mantle of self-determination, and the contradictions and impossibilities of formal colonialism became manifest to leaders of the U.S. and Japanese empires, it became necessary for these leaders to reimagine how they could sustain their capitalist empires while joining in the global call for ending colonialism. Thus, President Wilson is well known for trumpeting the goal of self-determination, while the League of Nations, with pressure from Wilson and others, came up with the idea of Mandates. The Mandatory system, it is important to note, took up the ideology of selfdetermination in that it promised eventual independence for the peoples living in these places even as it handed over the territories formerly controlled by the defeated imperialists to the war’s victorious empires. Under this arrangement, Japan received the former German possessions in Micronesia and treated these islands like a formal colony, although the Mandate naming implied that decolonization had begun. The U.S. imperialists made no claims to further territorial aggrandizement in the Pacific, even under the ruse of the Mandatory label. They did so not because they rejected empire but because the U.S. had long supplemented its territorial colonization with a type of non-territorial expansionism that depended upon the military securitization of overseas markets and trade. Even before WWI, architects of the U.S. empire such as Alfred Maher Mahan envisioned a militarized oceanic empire that required only limited points of terra firma support.1 Carl Schmitt long ago put it bluntly, “The imperialism of the United States of America, above all, counts in current thought and usage, as the most modern imperialism, because it is principally an economic imperialism….” that sometimes even distinguishes itself by “deny[ing] the fact of imperialism at all.”2 But most relevant to this chapter, in the wake of the global depression, from the 1930s, the U.S. and Japan executed concrete and parallel measures for capitalist and imperialist expansion that could actually celebrate self-determination and freedom for those who would remain under their hegemony. On the one hand, after taking Manchuria by force, the Japanese leaders did not incorporate the region into DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-6

156  Takashi Fujitani Japan as a formal colony. Instead, in 1932, they established Manchukuo as a nominally independent nation-state, while celebrating and performing this as liberation for the people of this region.3 Officially, the Japanese conquest and occupation of Southeast Asia was trumpeted as part of the process of constituting Burma and the Philippines not as new colonies, but as independent nation-states, with the Dutch East Indies soon to follow. Indeed, in describing the Dawn of Freedom, the film on the Japanese liberation of the Philippines that will be one of the main focuses of this chapter, the film journal Eiga junpō announced that the Japanese had ridden the Filipino people of the tyrannical American forces so that they could flourish as an “independent nation-state (dokuritsu kokka).”4 Around the same time, in 1934, through the enactment of the TydingsMcDuffie Act, the U.S. declared its plan to decolonize the Philippines in two stages – first by convening a convention that would draft a constitution for a newly formed Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands, and then allowing the Philippines “complete independence” ten years after inauguration of this new government. Noteworthy, however, is that the Act stipulated that the new Constitution required the U.S. President’s approval. Among many other conditions, it also reserved the U.S. right to maintain its military presence in the Philippines even after supposedly full sovereignty passed to the Filipino people. Indeed, the 1946 Treaty between the U.S. and the Republic of the Philippines that formally transferred sovereignty to the Philippines clarified the U.S. right to keep its naval presence on the islands.5 In other words, even as the 1946 Treaty was signed on the symbolically important freedom date of July 4, the US had no intention of relinquishing one of its primary military footholds in the Asia Pacific region. The heavily compromised sovereignty granted to the diverse peoples of Manchukuo and the Philippines in the 1930s necessitated not only formal promises of liberation, but also cultural productions meant to produce the amorphous feeling that the respective regimes would bring freedom rather than oppression to those they ruled. For Japanese and American cultural producers, film seemed to offer a powerful means to nourish such feelings of freedom, especially given that the American period had given rise to a very active film culture and a huge movie viewership on the islands. Not long after the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, a writer for the Japanese film journal Eiga junpō reported that Manila alone had 40 movie theaters, that the Philippines could boast some 350 movie theaters, and that some of these could hold as many as 2000 people. In short, within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere outside of Japan, the development of the Philippines film industry was second only to China’s.6 Transimperial Film Wars Compared to their American counterparts Japanese filmmakers did not produce many films about the Philippines during their period of occupation. The Imperial Army’s Philippines Propaganda Corps made one long and spectacular documentary edited by film critic and scenarist Sawamura Tsutomu titled Asia’s Victory

Feeling Freedom  157 Song (Tōyō no gaika, release date December 3, 1942) which recorded the Japanese capture of Bataan and Corregidor. They also produced two feature-length films: Three Marias (Sannin no Maria, release date late 1943 or early 1944) and Shoot that Flag or Dawn of Freedom (Ano hata o ute, director Abe Yutaka, release date February 10, 1944).7 The small number of films on the Philippines, however, does not mean that this U.S. colony was unimportant in the culture wars that the Japanese empire waged in Southeast Asia. In fact, it was central to the empire’s push south. For instance, Eiga junpō explained that Asia’s Victory Song deserved recognition as one of the Ministry of Education’s “recommended films” because it sought to lift the national or ethnic spirit of the Filipino people, a spirit that had been ruined by American civilization.8 Moreover, Dawn of Freedom was one of the four films considered crucial for advancing propaganda about the righteousness of the Japanese empire’s southward expansion, with the other three featuring Hong Kong, the Malay Peninsula, and Burma and received the “recommended film” recognition from the Ministry of Education for 1944.9 And as Sasagawa Keiko has already shown in her meticulous research, by the standards of the period and at least insofar as viewership is concerned, the film was a major hit. About one-tenth of Manila’s population watched the film, and by one measure ticket sales in the Philippines exceeded those for the second most watched Japanese film on the islands up to that date by 2.6 times. In Japan, Dawn of Freedom could boast the second largest sales receipts of films released in 1944 and continued to be screened even after MacArthur and the U.S. forces recaptured the Philippines in October 1944. 10 Planning for a film about Japan’s victory in the Philippines began at least by early February 1942 – that is, only two months after the invasion began and three months before full control had been established over the islands. In other words, plans for making a film about the victory preceded actual victory. After some difficulties in finalizing a script, Tōhō released the film in Japan on February (10) 1944, followed by a March release for the Philippines under the title Liwayway ng Kalayaan, or Dawn of Freedom.11 Past scholarship has rightly noted the Japanese and Filipino collaborations that went into making the film. Most notably, Dawn of Freedom featured the close cooperation of two major directors, the Japanese filmmaker Abe Yutaka and the great Filipino director Gerardo de Leon. Abe is known for his large body of work that includes such wartime masterpieces as Flaming Sky (Moyuru Ōzora, 1940) and his postwar film Makioka Sisters (1950), which was based on the famous Tanizaki novel. De Leon has collected the most awards in the history of the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences (FAMAS) and is sometimes called the Father of Philippine Cinema. The government of the Philippines has also recognized his achievements with the Order of Nationalist Artists. Moreover, the film used many Filipino actors, including the child star Ricardo Pasion, Norma Blancaflor, and the famous actor Fernando Poe, Sr., who had starred in such films Zamboanga, one of the earliest talkies produced in the Philippines.12 However, just as informative as the forced collaboration of the Japanese and Philippine film industries, are the less obvious ways in which this Japanese

158  Takashi Fujitani propaganda film would not have been possible without the people, technologies and film cultures that transgressed the boundaries between the American and Japanese nations and empires. The director Abe, for instance, who had an uncle who lived in Los Angeles, used this Southern California base to learn his craft in Hollywood as an actor while still in his teens, where he was known by the name of Jack Abbe or Jack Yutaka Abbe. One of the central characters in the film is a Japanese soldier, Private First Class Ikejima, who befriends a Filipino boy. The actor who played Ikejima and speaks superlative, native-sounding English was Ōkawa Heihachirō, who had otherwise been known as Henry Ōkawa. Like Abe, Ōkawa had started his film industry career in the U.S. where he had learned a variety of skills, including stunt man and actor. He joined Dawn of Freedom’s cast after having been drafted into service as a civilian worker (gunzoku) for the Japanese military. As a testament to another kind of trans-colonial movement, Ōkawa is known to have established a graphite mining company in colonial Korea. Another key Japanese character, the interpreter Lieutenant Nakamura, was a Vancouver-born Japanese Canadian who had immigrated to Japan and studied acting with the Nikkatsu Film Studio before becoming a contracted actor with Tōhō in 1942. These are just a few examples of the way in which the Japanese diasporic population participated in the projects of the Japanese empire, which is a topic that has been taboo in Asian American historiography for so long and which is only now becoming known through the efforts of such scholars as Eiichirō Azuma. Ironically, it also seems that Abe’s Dawn of Freedom, particularly the melodramatic style, was very much influenced by John Ford’s How Green was My Valley – this, even though Ford, as we shall see, played a central role in Hollywood’s film war against Japan. In short, the U.S. and Japanese empires, including their cultural productions, were mutually constitutive and comparable formations; and in this case, the U.S. transnational film world provided the training grounds for the making of Japan’s imperial films.13 In contrast to the meager quantity of Japanese films in the wartime Philippines, Hollywood produced no fewer than six such movies in the three years between 1943 and 1945. These were major feature films involving some of Hollywood’s most prominent directors, including John Ford and actors known to almost all Americans such as John Wayne (who made two Philippines films in this short period, Back to Bataan and They were Expendable), Anthony Quinn, Robert Montgomery, Donna Reed, Margaret Sullavan and Claudette Colbert. The number and quality of these films is testament to the importance of the region as both a formal colony that had anchored America’s imperialist ambitions in Asia since the turn into the twentieth century, as well as the new vision for a decolonized Philippines under continuing U.S. hegemony. The six films, in order of release date, are as follows: 1 Corregidor (release date, March 29, 1943), dir. William Nigh (primarily known for B movies, including Mr. Wong, Detective and several sequels with Boris Karloff) 2 Bataan (release date, June 3, 1943), dir. Tay Garnett (most famously known for The Postman Always Rings Twice and Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)

Feeling Freedom  159 3 So Proudly We Hail! (September 9, 1943), dir. Mark Sandrich (during his career one of Hollywood’s most influential directors – e.g., working with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on several films and Bing Crosby on the film that made the song “White Christmas” famous) 4 Cry ‘Havoc’ (release date, November 23, 1943), dir. Richard Thorpe (a prolific director known for the wide range of his work, including Caruso, Jailhouse Rock with Elvis Presley, as well as many westerns.) 5 Back to Bataan (release date, May 31, 1945), dir. Edward Dmytryk (one of the Hollywood Ten, a highly regarded Hollywood director whose works such as Crossfire and The Caine Mutiny have received critical acclaim) 6 John Ford, They Were Expendable (release date, December 19, 1945), dir. John Ford (one of the most highly regarded and influential directors of his generation who also served in the Navy during the War and was an advisor to the OSS and OWI) One final contextual note is that scholars of Japanese film policy during the Asia Pacific War have regularly commented on the state’s and military’s tight control over the content and distribution of films and have especially emphasized its similarities to film policies in Germany and Italy. Most pertinent is the notorious Motion Picture Law (effective on October 1, 1939), which not only included stipulations for preproduction censorship and control over distribution, but also required certification for the technical and ideological competence of directors, actors and cameramen.14 Moreover, those charged with producing Dawn of Freedom, most notably Abe and his screenplay writer Sawamura Tsutomu, were part of the Imperial Army’s Propaganda Corps. Yet as Nick DeOcampo has already noted, there is a danger in drawing too sharp a distinction between the Japanese and American film industries in this period. Based upon his own research and previous scholarship on wartime Hollywood, he has noted the strong direction and control that the Office of War Information imposed on wartime films in general and those produced about Asia in particular.15 Moreover, it is well worth noting that John Ford, who directed They were Expendable (one of the six films noted above), was a captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve at the time that he made this film. The film credits list him as well as a great many of those involved in making the movie with their military ranks (e.g., screenplay, Frank Wead, Comdr. U.S. N. [ret] and lead actor Robert Montgomery, Comdr. U.S. N.R.) and acknowledge the Navy, Army, Coast Guard and Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA) for their “splendid cooperation” in making the film.16 Although certainly not exactly the same, the close cooperation between the state and the military in overseeing the Hollywood film industry resonates with the tight control that the Japanese state and military exerted over film production in the Japanese empire. As in Dawn of Freedom, they often opened their films with grateful acknowledgment of support and direction from the military. Rather than focus exclusively on any one of these films, in the following I will focus on the four overlapping freedoms that run through the Dawn of Freedom

160  Takashi Fujitani and several of the Hollywood films: namely, freedom from imperial domination, freedom of self-sacrifice, freedom in romance, and freedom from racism. To be sure, there are some considerable differences between Dawn of Freedom and the American films, especially with regard to their nearly opposite representations of consumer capitalism. Nonetheless, these differences should not prevent us from recognizing the fundamental similarities or at least comparabilities in the Japanese and American films. Liberation from Imperial Domination The foremost and obvious theme of the Dawn of Freedom and its Hollywood counterparts is that of freedom and liberation from oppressive imperial rule, or national self-determination. Of course, the Japanese film called for liberation from U.S. imperialism and brutality while the American films condemned Japanese savagery, aggression and dictatorship while celebrating political freedom as a universal principle. To this extent, the two sides in the film wars produced mirroring if distorted images of each other, with each celebrating itself as the leader of a free world while disavowing its own ambitions for territorial aggrandizement. As Dawn of Freedom explained in great detail, the U.S. had taken the Philippines to establish a foothold for its invasion of Asia, while its simultaneous occupation of Cuba testified to the larger American desire for domination over the entire world.17 In the struggle against the invaders, the Japanese had come not to pick a fight with the Filipinos, but rather to help liberate them and the rest of Asia from the cruelty of American rule. For as several scenes try to demonstrate, the Americans show no regard for Filipino life and treat them as no better than animals. In one scene, the Americans talk of dropping bombs on a Filipino barrio with the logic that “if we can kill 10 Japanese soldiers at the sacrifice of 100 Filipinos it’ll be a great accomplishment.” In another, American soldiers take shelter from the overwhelming might of the Japanese attackers, but when the Filipino soldiers try to join them they are called “monkeys” and refused. Similarly, the Hollywood films show the Japanese as savage brutes who mercilessly murder Americans and Filipinos. Surprisingly, however, the Hollywood films are far less consistent on the theme of Philippine independence. In fact, the 1943 films have almost nothing to say about the independence of the Filipino people and instead emphasize abstract principles of democracy and freedom. To be sure, they celebrate the heroism of the Filipino soldiers. In So Proudly we Hail, the lead character John Summers describes the Filipino Scouts as the “bravest men I’ve ever even heard of….” “They don’t give quarter and they don’t ask for any….” After observing that “these fellas aren’t a bit afraid to die,” he wonders why they fight with such disregard for their lives, but the suggestion through the film is that they are fighting for the universal principles of freedom and democracy. This struggle is not explicitly connected to the concrete matter of Filipino independence.

Feeling Freedom  161 In the final scenes of the film, the lost hero John Summers tries to explain what all the fighting and dying has been about. Despite his distaste for war, he says, “there is good in this war.” As he explains to his lover in his parting letter, it is a good war because it is a “people’s war” in which people struggle to “live like men with dignity and freedom.” And it is a global war since, he says, “There’s a small voice whispering around the earth and the people are beginning to talk across their boundaries. This voice will grow in volume until it thunders all over the world.” Likewise, the film Bataan begins with a dedication to the Filipino soldiers: “the Philippine army which formed the bulk of MacArthur’s infantry fighting shoulder to shoulder with Americans. To those immortal dead, who heroically stayed the wave of barbaric conquest, this picture is reverently dedicated.” But the film does not mention the Filipino people’s struggle for self-determination and only abstractly suggests that they fought for freedom and democracy. The film has difficulty explaining why the Americans are in the Philippines in the first place and can only suggest in abstract ideals that they and the Filipinos are fighting for freedom. As Sergeant Dane explains, “maybe it don’t seem to do an awful lot of good, you know men getting killed in a place you never heard of, maybe you never will, but we figure the men who died here may have done more than we’ll ever know to save this whole world. It’s like Corporal Juan Katigbak said; He said it don’t matter where a man dies, as long as he dies for freedom.” After all, the Bataan film is in the end a story of American military victory reemerging after defeat, rather than the independence of the Filipino people. The film ends with the words, “So fought the heroes of Bataan. Their sacrifice made possible our victories in the Coral and Bismarck Seas, at Midway, on New Guinea and Guadalcanal. Their spirit will lead us back to Bataan!” Consistent with this celebration of freedom as an idea, the film Corregidor ends with images of the Statue of Liberty in the background (with a barely visible figure of MacArthur superimposed on the Statue) and the words, “Men of the blood red rock, Corregidor, the rock, the living rock for which you died, freedom still stands enthroned above the wall, no treacherous foe can scale that mountainside; your dying hands rebuilt above the world, a fortress for the unconquerable mind; a mountain with a sky of stars unfurled above it; and the hope for all mankind.” The 1945 films, produced after the return of Macarthur and the American forces to the Philippines (October 1944), are the only ones to resolutely, if in my view problematically, celebrate the independence of the Philippines. This is in large part because the 1943 films are most concerned to express the nobility of Americans who sacrificed themselves in defeat at the same time that they betray their own imperialist anxieties about the Japanese takeover of the U.S. colony. In this moment of defeat for the American empire, the U.S. bureaucracy, the military and the film industry did not prioritize the story of the Filipino people’s long struggle for independence against them. Even as these 1943 motion pictures struggled to logically explain to the American audience why fighting in the Philippines was so important for the

162  Takashi Fujitani universal ideals of freedom and democracy, through the use of stirring music and images of the American way of life, they attempted to produce what we might describe as a feeling or affect of freedom – a feeling worth dying for. The 1943 as well as 1945 films echo one of the freedoms articulated in FDR’s famous “Four Freedoms” of January 1941, in which he declared that the world must preserve “freedom from want,” by which he meant that the world must guarantee “economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world.”By this, of course, FDR meant a world secured for the system of global capitalism, the economic system that he claimed could secure a healthy peacetime life for all inhabitants of all countries. The films translate this general slogan of “freedom from want” based upon capitalism into freedom to pursue American family values, consumerism and romantic love. They translate the abstract principle of freedom into a feeling of freedom that made sense in everyday life and stood in for political freedom and democracy. While there is certainly mention of the right to free speech, amid battle the women in Corregidor obsess more about soap and a hot bath. A man dreams about a “great big juicy hamburger.” Everyone worries about rationing back home, including the rationing of sugar, which is contrasted with a scene of soldiers eating dried mule meat. Thus, the feeling of freedom means the opposite of rationing and the right to eat the apparently civilized foods of American consumer culture. Around Christmas time in So Proudly We Hail, even on the brink of defeat, one of the nurses announces that there are “only eighteen more shopping days till Christmas,” and a Chaplain explains tautologically that everyone must “have faith in those things in which we believe.” They must make belief in things like Christmas, a “reality forever,” he says. And when the leader of the nurses, Davy and her partner Summers find themselves not only seeking shelter but also snuggling up in a foxhole, they’re pleased to find that someone has put up a sign that reads “this foxhole approved by good housekeeping,” thus acknowledging that the war is dedicated to the values of American middle-class consumer culture. Freedom to consume American pop culture in the form of music is also celebrated in Bataan, where one of the highlights of the Puerto Rican Ramirez’s wartime experience is listening to Tommy Dorsey on the radio. One of the most lighthearted consumerist scenes in the Hollywood films takes place in Back to Bataan. Children in a school house are queried by their American teacher about what the Spanish and the Americans brought to the Philippines. A dutiful child responds sweetly that the Spanish brought the gifts of Christianity. When the teacher asks about the American contribution, a silly girl gleefully yells out, “soda pop,” and is followed by her playful classmates who, one after the other, shout out a litany of American consumer items: “hot dogs, movies, radio, baseball.” Of course, everyone in the film laughs, and the teacher asks if someone might have a better answer. An older man in the room pronounces that “America taught us that men are free. Or they are nothing. Since then we have walked with high heads among all men.” Of course, this simple lesson in American democracy requires considerable forgetfulness

Feeling Freedom  163 about the U.S. takeover of the Philippines and its brutal suppression of the Filipino struggle for independence after the end of Spanish colonialism. Just after this scene, there is an admission that the Filipinos fought against the Americans initially, but there is little consideration of the contradiction between the U.S. as occupier and as liberator. Nonetheless, the U.S. throughout the film is described, like the Japanese in Dawn of Freedom, as a mentor for Filipino independence. This school room teaching moment in the gifts of America as both consumerism and political independence is brought to an abrupt halt when the Japanese arrive to take over the school as a military billet. In short, the Japanese arrival means the end of this version of freedom. Unlike the Hollywood movies, Dawn of Freedom has nothing to say about Japanese consumer culture. This eschewal of consumerism under the general wartime slogan of “luxury is the enemy (zeitaku wa teki)” has nothing to do with an essential Japanese quality of stoicism, but rather with the still continuing effects of the Depression and the demand for individual sacrifice and privation that the total war economy required. In contrast, the war in Europe had infused the American economy with new vigor, stimulating genuine recovery and consumerist desires. And yet the imposition of the post-Pearl Harbor controlled economy had frustrated such desires by imposing rations on goods such as meat and soap, precisely those kinds of items mentioned repeatedly in the films. Thus, whether for Americans at home, the colonized or the newly liberated former colonials, the films emphasized that winning the war was essential to winning back the freedom to shop and consume.18 Dawn of Freedom almost relentlessly features the story of the Philippines’ and Asia’s political independence under Japanese tutelage, not the pleasures of consumer culture. The film’s primary theme is the Japanese military’s desire to assure the Filipino people’s security through the preservation of law and order and to lay the groundwork for their independence. The great drama in the film is propelled by two major and overlapping tensions. The first is that of split political loyalties, in which key characters struggle between their loyalty to the Americans and the Japanese. The lead Filipino men, Capt. Andres Gomez and Lieutenant Mariano Garcia, are soldiers fighting with the Americans. But they gradually realize that the Japanese are caring and that they fight sincerely for the Filipinos, while the Americans are only concerned for themselves. Mariano Garcia’s mother, moved by the kindnesses Japanese soldiers have shown for her younger son Tony, declares over the loudspeakers to the Filipino soldiers that she is talking to them of her own will, and that the Japanese in Manila are all very kind. The family is living a peaceful life under the Japanese. Similarly, the newly awakened Captain Andres Gomez takes to the loudspeakers to tell his fellow Filipino soldiers that the Americans have been lying. The Japanese are “every inch human” he says. And then reflecting the biopolitical metaphors and policies of the Japanese occupation, he describes Japan as like a mother. “I feel as if I am in my mother’s breast,” he says. As we shall see below, in the Hollywood films, the social relation of heterosexual lovers is the affective bond that allegorizes and completes the political bonds of nation and empire, but here it is the mother-to-child metaphor

164  Takashi Fujitani that is prominent. In other scenes, we also find male homosocial intimacies that are explicitly rejected in the Hollywood film, Bataan.19 The other drama that is linked to the theme of loyalty to Japan concerns Tony’s broken and then repaired body and is the reason why his mother develops into an ardent supporter of the Japanese soldiers. As the Americans abandon Manila in wake of the Japanese attack, one of their cars hits Tony. The soldiers do not even stop to look after the boy but instead leave him paralyzed and unable to walk. Tony and the other Filipino children are befriended by the Japanese soldier Ikejima (played by the actor who spent many years in Los Angeles). He is kind to them, even reading them stories. But most impressively, not only does he arrange for a Japanese doctor to perform an operation on Tony, but he also offers his blood for the transfusion that the little boy needs. This sharing of blood is consistent with the theme of a shared racialized Asianism that was part of the Japanese empire’s message to the other peoples of Asia, but the filmmakers used this metaphor of life to allegorize the nurturing relationship between the Japanese empire as mother and the child who grows into a self-determining subject. This allegorical relationship is not consistent with strict colonial domination, but with the other type of postcolonial empire that I have earlier described, in which newly subordinated nations will be represented as self-determining subjects of their own destinies. This imaginary relationship is symbolized in the film’s most melodramatic scene in which Tony, upon seeing Ikejima departing and thinking they may never meet again, stands up from his wheelchair and begins to walk on his own. In this all too obvious allegory of Japan’s tutelary and mothering relationship to Filipino self-determination, Ikejima stands in for the benevolent, biopolitical Japanese empire, making it possible for the young boy to represent the newly rising, independent nation. It is difficult to gauge how convincing this story and its subplots were for the Filipinos or even for the Japanese who viewed the film, but one recent commentator has surmised that its lack of universal principles did not make for an effective story. However, if the story lacked the power to move its viewers (and I am not sure this was the case), I suspect it was more because the film failed to create a feeling or sensation of freedom that fulfilled desires for pleasure in everyday life that exceeded the explicitly political and that could go beyond the formal ideology of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. This brings us back to consumerism and the topic of romance, for alongside and reinforcing the ideology of the freedom to consume, all the Hollywood films entangled the larger story of the victory of political democracy with the private or personal right to enjoy freely chosen romantic love. Liberalism as an economic and political ideology, even under total war, celebrates choice, even conflating political freedom with both the freedom to choose what to buy and eat as well as the freedom to choose one’s partner in love, sex and marriage. Freedom to Live, Freedom to Die However, before proceeding to the topic of romance, I want to comment briefly on choosing death and the representation of suicide in these films. While the kamikaze phenomena as well as the numerous cases of Japanese who took their

Feeling Freedom  165 own lives in Okinawa and the Pacific during the war are usually regarded in popular thinking as manifestations of a peculiarly Japanese death drive and even disregard for life, in my view it is only the most extreme realization of a quality inherent to all nationalisms, including U.S. nationalism. The responsibility to die for the nation, if necessary, is foundational to the logic of nationalism because modern nationalism depends upon the belief that the life and liberty of the individual can only exist through their subordination to the national community. In Japanese, this national community is called the kokutai; in Western philosophy, it is called the national body politic. Even freedom in its truest transcendental sense depends upon subordination to the Nation, much like the believer of a religion is said to find true freedom only with subordination to God or its equivalent (including Kant’s categorical imperative). That is why when in the depths of despair or endangerment to the very existence of the Nation, national subjects all too often seem ready to sacrifice themselves, even taking their own lives. This may explain why in the glorious moment of the Japanese victory over the Americans in Dawn of Freedom, no Japanese seems ready to take his own life – the national community is not threatened with extinction – while in two of the 1943 Hollywood films when final defeat on Corregidor appears inevitable, Americans kill themselves in ways that are eerily resonant with the late wartime phenomenon of Japanese suicides. This may also explain why in almost all nation-states, at one time or another, the state representing the people has had the legal right to conscript its citizens for military service. This is another way of saying that the state has been granted the right to take the lives of its citizens when necessary because there can be no genuine life without the survival of the national community. Yet we must also understand that the self-subordination of the individual to the larger political community or what Hobbes famously described as a Commonwealth is not meant to be coercive, but rather voluntary. It is a choice made to ensure survival and peace against enemies both inside and outside of the community. The invariable connection of nationalism to freedom has certainly been recognized by many theorists of nationalism, including Ernest Renan, who long ago pointed out that nationalism is founded upon a “daily plebiscite,” a repetitive election. Moreover, and perhaps most tellingly, in Japanese, the same term with the identical kanji ideographs is used to refer to suicide and ethnic or national self-determination. In other words, suggesting the inseparability of the two terms, jiketsu can signify both the glorious suicides of Japanese subjects who take their own lives in service to the nation and the self-determination of a people.20 While the theme of self-sacrifice through suicide is rarely remarked upon when discussing American participation in and Hollywood representations of the Bataan defeat, there are several scenes in which characters under duress make the free choice to take their own lives for the larger political community. In Bataan, when it becomes clear that the struggle to defend the peninsula from the invading Japanese is impossible, an American pilot loads his plane with explosives rather than fuel, and then like a kamikaze warrior intentionally crashes his warplane into a bridge

166  Takashi Fujitani to delay Japanese use of the route to Corregidor. In So Proudly We Hail when the nurses find themselves trapped during a Japanese attack, one of the women, Olivia, sticks a hand grenade underneath her shirt and then explodes it while walking into a group of Japanese attackers. This eerily prefigures the famous Japanese story of the young women nurses making up the Lily Corps or Himeyuri in Okinawa. I say eerily because this Hollywood movie was made before the tragedy of Okinawa and yet echoes for us today some of the same elements that would appear in Okinawa’s future. This includes the premonition of certain defeat, nurses hiding in the dark, fears of sexual violation, and young women taking their own lives. Finally, in Back to Bataan, it is a young Filipino boy who takes his own life for freedom and the self-determination of the Filipino people. Maximo who had earlier been fantasizing about foot long hot dogs with “relish and mustard” takes over a truck full of Japanese and drives it over a cliff, thus extinguishing not only the lives of many Japanese soldiers, but his own as well. Freedom in Romantic Love Yet far better than death, one of the most salient strategies of the Hollywood films to convince its viewers that they should fight for freedom was their linkage of freedom in the abstract, to love and romance, with allusions to the erotic. In all these movies, stories of romantic love are woven into and at times become indistinguishable from the objective of political freedom and the question of “why we fight.” At times, the drama is built upon the destruction or endangerment to romantic coupling, at others by the hope that romantic love can be consummated, and at others, especially in the 1945 film Back to Bataan, by final resolution of the enemy’s military and political threat through the trope of romantic fulfillment. For instance, when in Corregidor the Japanese launch their attack, they do so not only against the Philippines, but also literally by dropping bombs onto the wedding ceremony of two of the primary protagonists in the story, the doctors Jan Stockman and Royce Lee. In another scene, Jan says “We’re dying for something we believe in. Call it democracy. Well that’s what it is. The individual’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But rather than discuss directly what that freedom might consist of, he quickly tells Michael (who is part of a love triangle) that he must fulfill his love for Royce. So Proudly We Hail delivers a strange and incoherent plot that tells the tale of eight U.S. Army Nurses who survived the Bataan and Corregidor battles and made it back to Australia to tell of their experiences. Supposedly, it is based upon a true story. But here again, as in other Hollywood movies, one of the central motifs features the intermingling of romantic relations with larger stories about public matters such as patriotism and the ideals of the nation. In fact, it is difficult to separate the two. The pathos in this film comes as much from the inability of the numerous soldier and nurse couples to consummate their lives together because of the war against the Japanese. They fall in love and long to make families together, but the war shreds apart these dreams. In Bataan, the romantic theme is less pronounced. Nevertheless, the first casualty of the unit is the leader Capt. Lassiter. We learn in the first

Feeling Freedom  167 20 minutes or so of the film that even against regulations he and the nurse Elsie Macalister had just been married, but now the Japs have killed him. In a truly unbelievable ending to Cry Havoc, a female army nurse and one of the civilian nurse volunteers argue over a man recently killed by the Japanese, and then reconcile with each other and their loss just as they are surrendering to the Japanese. But where the 1943 films had used the endangerment to romantic love to build a feeling of what freedom might mean and to stimulate the hope for the American return to the islands, the 1945 film Back to Bataan utilizes the trope of romantic consummation to celebrate freedom and independence under American stewardship. Throughout the film, we are troubled that the lead Filipino male role Andrés Bonifacio, who is the grandson of the great revolutionary by the same name and who is played by the Mexican American Anthony Quinn, cannot consummate his romantic relationship because his lover has apparently joined the side of the Japanese. In other words, the love relationship is torn apart by divided political loyalties. Yet the storyline reveals that the female lover, Dalisay Delgado, is only pretending to work for the Japanese as a radio announcer. She is in fact a spy who is on the same side as Andrés. This enables them to reunite when the Americans return to liberate the Philippines. In one of the film’s last scenes, we see Andrés and Dalisay conjoined as lovers, while the American and Filipino flags wave proudly in the background. But even more important to the story of America as the custodian of national independence is the figure of Colonel Joseph Madden, who is played by John Wayne. The low-angle camera shot creates an artificial impression of Madden looking even larger than life as he puts his arms around Andrés and Dalisay, the couple whose reunification as lovers stands in for reunification and independence of the Philippines under American tutelage. Freedom from Racism As I have argued elsewhere, WWII was not just a racist War Without Mercy, as John Dower has argued. Instead, it was a war during which both the Japanese and Allied forces felt compelled to disavow their racism, in part because both empires competed for allies of color in Asia and elsewhere throughout the world. On the Japanese side, we have already noted the promotion of Asianism and shared Japanese and Filipino resistance to white imperialism that forms the basis of Dawn of Freedom. In So Proudly We Hail, we find relatively positive images of several men of color, even though what I have described in my earlier work as “polite racism” continues. Thus, the Filipino doctor Jose Bardia is a highly competent graduate of not only the University of the Philippines, but also Johns Hopkins. Filipino soldiers are praised several times in the film, even as they are treated as indistinguishable from each other. For instance, Lt. Summers praises the Filipino Scouts as “the bravest men I’ve ever heard of,” “they don’t give quarter and they don’t ask for any,” and “these fellas aren’t a bit afraid to die.” He wonders why they do it, and the suggestion is that they are fighting for something universal and beyond their individual lives. The disavowal of crude, or vulgar racism and its reproduction in

168  Takashi Fujitani a gentler, kinder version, is reflected in scenes such as one in which a group of Filipinos is brought in to help the Americans. They are praised as “the sweetest little fighters you’ve ever seen in action,” but they are also jokingly described as diminutive in size and so indistinguishable from one another that are all given the same name, Joe. The disavowal of racism in So Proudly We Hail is also repeated through the figure of Ling Chee, a highly intelligent Chinese man who is treated as a colleague by fellow military doctors. In his case, however, white respect for him is predicated upon the contrast between him and the absent figure of the indigenous savage. When a nurse tries to talk to this Chinese Lieutenant in a strange pidgin English, he says, “I’m a Chinese Lieutenant, not an Indian.” Bataan, as Richard Slotkin has insightfully observed, was the first multiethnic and multi-racial combat film that established a template for future war films that celebrated ethnic and racial harmony.21 Yet what escaped Slotkin’s otherwise insightful analysis is that the figure of the indigenous savage appears in literally naked force and serves to help constitute racialized and ethnicized men as almost the equal of whites. Protestant whites, white ethnics, and men of color – they are all transformed into generic American men, but the one exception is the Filipino scout who is a self-described “Moro from Mindanao.” Like the invisible savage who makes it possible to transform the Chinese man into a man of civilization, the Moro with a “murdering” lineage becomes the abjected other against whom all the other white men and minorities can realize their unity as civilized men. When the Moro volunteers to run through the jungle to secure reinforcements, he separates himself from his fellow soldiers and returns to his naturalized savagery by removing his uniform and appearing almost naked. This prompts a white sergeant to casually remark, “put your clothes on and get civilized again.”22 Final Thoughts In the above, I have juxtaposed the Dawn of Freedom and the Hollywood films on the Philippines during WWII as a method to analyze the representational strategies through which the U.S. and Japanese empires tried, respectively, to advance the notion that they did not covet colonial territories but sought only to ensure freedom and security for the Philippines and the rest of the world. Although we have seen that the strong and related themes of consumerism and romantic heterosexual love distinguished the American films from Dawn of Freedom, I hasten to add that we should not overemphasize the differences. First, in films and literature made elsewhere, such as the colonial films and literature produced in wartime Korea, a similar if more subdued version of romantic love and its entanglements with larger public issues (namely, the unity of Japan and Korea) is quite prominent.23 Second, the common theme of liberation, in which both empires built the independence of the Philippines into parts of a new and decolonizing form of empire that promised freedom, needs to be recognized in our current moment. Third, on the matters of the disavowal of racism and the question of indigeneity, these films again support

Feeling Freedom  169 an argument that I and a number of other scholars have been making in different ways (including Naoki Sakai’s pathbreaking interventions) – namely, that the ideology of Japan as a pure, Yamato race could not be sustained as Japan advanced as a multiethnic empire. Instead, the Japanese imperialists, like their American counterparts, tried to construct images of multiethnic harmony under their leadership. Finally, I hope that the mode of analysis presented above will further alert us to see beyond the superficial distinctions that are usually made between the U.S. and Japan, and to recognize that in the long twentieth century that persists into the present the U.S. and Japan have been both allies and enemies precisely because of their resemblances as capitalist empires. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Joyce C. H. Liu and Naoki Sakai for inviting me to present a version of this piece for one of their workshops on “Conflict, Justice and Decolonization” at National Chiao Tung University. Many thanks as well to my discussant and other participants in the workshop who provided constructive comments. This chapter began as a paper presented for the conference “Militarism(s), then and Now,” De La Salle University, Manila. I owe a special debt to the conference organizer Robert Diaz, as well as scholars based in the Philippines and members of the Pacific Xchange group who provided guidance and encouragement at an early stage, as well as to the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Seoul National University, for hosting and providing feedback on another version of this chapter. This work was first published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, December 21, 2018, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/ 14649373.2018.1543344. Notes 1 The pre-WWI vision of the U.S. as a power that would protect its interests across the Asia Pacific through the opening of the Panama Canal, naval and market expansion, and the peopling of the Pacific with Anglo-Saxons was forcefully articulated by the well-known naval officer and theorist Alfred Mayer Mahan. Reflecting his rejection of the idea that empires required great expanses of land – or literally territories – Mahan instead emphasized the importance of controlling the seas, like the British, and peopling strategic locations in the Pacific with capable and dependable whites. Moreover, from his writings, it is clear that the Canal had transformed the oceanic imaginary of naval planners. In his view, the Canal Zone could henceforth be considered part of America’s continuous coastline. It would link the Pacific Gulf and Atlantic coastlines and ensure that the Pacific and Atlantic naval fleets could operate as one fleet with unhindered movement across the two oceans. Turning the land-based trope of a bridge across water upside down, he thus envisioned the Canal waterway as a “bridge” that would make one ocean out of the Atlantic and Pacific. And as he explained, from “the military point of view,” the only benefit of “the land” to the navy was to provide reliable “points of support” (p. 241; Mahan 1911, 240–250). This sea power strategy – which at least significantly modified, even if it did not completely reverse the primacy of land in empire – is no doubt an early expression in the long history of what has in recent years been described as America’s “empire of bases.”

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2 Schmitt (2011, 29). The English translation parenthetically includes some of Schmitt’s original German, but I have dropped the German text here. 3 See Duara (2003, 457–478). Fujitani (2011, esp. 7–8). 4 Eiga junpō (1943, 68). 5 Philippine Independence Act, H.R. 8573, 73rd Congress (1934); Treaty of General Relations Between the United States of America and the Republic of the Philippines, July 4, 1946, U.N.T.S 88. 6 Kariya (1941, 19). 7 Terumi (1985, 294). The most up-to-date as well as comprehensive account of filmmaking in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation of the Islands is Deocampo (2016). The only format for this book available in North America seems to be the Kindle version. Therefore, all references will be in this format. Three Marias is considered lost and little information exists about it. 8 Eiga junpō (1942, 8). 9 Sakuramoto (1993, 133). 10 Sasagawa (2010, 75). 11 Suzuki (2015, 5). Japanese forces took control over the Bataan Peninsula by April 10 (or April 9, US time) and full victory came with the May 7 (or May 6, US time) fall of Corregidor, which was the fortified island off the Bataan peninsula that protected Manila Bay (the Army Post is Ft. Mills). 12 See, for instance, Satō (1996). For overviews of the film’s production see, Nornes (1994) and Deocampo, loc. 4556–4906. 13 The basic facts about Abe and the others named here can easily be found, including in the booklet inserted with the DVD version of the film, although the argument about the transnational and transimperial connections is my own. On the Japanese American diasporic contribution to Japanese imperialist projects, see, for example, Azuma (2008 and 2019). 14 For instance, High (2003, 70–76) and Shimizu (1994, 28–37). 15 Deocampo, loc. 610 of 9227, and passim. In their classic book on state and private sector control over the Hollywood film industry, Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black summarize the state’s interventionism. “Officials of the Office of War Information, the government’s propaganda agency, issued a constantly updated manual instructing the studios in how to assist the war effort, sat in on story conferences with Hollywood’s top brass, reviewed the screenplays of every major studio (except the recalcitrant Paramount), pressured the movie makers to change scripts and even scrap pictures when they found objectionable material, and sometimes wrote dialogue for key speeches. OWI gained considerable influence with the Office of Censorship, which issued export licenses for movies, and it controlled the exhibition of American films in liberated areas” (Koppes and Black 1990, vii–viii). 16 From early on in the war, Ford had headed up a new Hollywood-based naval unit. This is the institutional location from which he produced his academy award-winning documentary, December 7th. See White (2016, 129–160). 17 Although not remarked upon in the film, it may be noted in connection with this chapter that the U.S. empire’s liberation of Cuba from Spain presents a precursor to the liberation of the Philippines from Japanese occupation. As in the latter case, even as the U.S. formally liberated Cuba from Spain, the Platt Amendment allowed the U.S. to maintain its military presence in Cuba and at its own discretion intervene militarily in the newly liberated nation’s domestic affairs. Again, Carl Schmitt noted this contradiction in the Cuban context long ago. See Schmitt (2011, 36–38). 18 On consumption and the wartime economy, see Cohen, (2001, 62–109). While an important work, Cohen limits her story to “America” and not the American empire. 19 Abé Mark Nornes has highlighted a homoerotic scene in Dawn of Freedom in Nornes (1994, 239). This homoeroticism is explicitly rejected in Bataan in a scene where a

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2 1 22 23

soldier named Todd is momentarily feminized when he nurses the wound of a male sailor but then adamantly rejects the sailor’s admiring look. Renan (1990, 19). Elie Kedourie likewise foregrounds choice as a part of national existence in Nationalism, reprint edition, Kedourie (1985). My understanding of the double meaning of jiketsu has been developed in personal conversations with Naoki Sakai and Tomiyama Ichirō. Slotkin (2001, 469–498). My interpretation of the crucial position of the indigenous savage in enabling multiracialism/multi-culturalism has been inspired by Byrd (2011). I have written about this in Race for Empire. An example is the Japanese-Korean 1943 co-production, The Korea Strait, directed by Pak Ki-ch'ae (J. Chōsen kaikyō, K. Chosŏn haehyŏp).

Bibliography Abe, Yutaka 阿部豊, dir. 1944. あの旗を撃て [Dawn of Freedom]. Film. Japan: Tōhō, Tagalog Pictures. Azuma, Eiichiro. “‘Pioneers of Overseas Japanese Development’: Japanese American History and the Making of Expansionist Orthodoxy in Imperial Japan.” Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 4 (2008): 1187–226. ———. In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. Byrd, Jodi. Transit of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar American. New York: Vintage Books, 2001. Deocampo, Nick. Eiga: Cinema in the Philippines during WWII. Kindle version. Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2016. Dower, John. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Duara, Prasenjit. Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. Eiga junpō. 1942. “昭和17年文部省推薦映画並びに推薦理由” [1942 Recommended Films by Ministry of Edition and Reasons for Recommendation]. 映画旬報 [Eiga junpō] 68: 8. Eiga junpō 映画旬報. 1943. Film Listings and Descriptions. 映画旬報 [Eiga junpō] 100: 68. Fujitani, Takashi. Race for Empire: Japanese as Americans and Koreans as Japanese in WWII. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Han, Suk-jung. “The Problem of Sovereignty: Manchukuo, 1932–1937.” Positions 12, no. 2 (2004): 457–78. High, Peter B. The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931– 1945. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2003. Kariya, Tarō 狩谷太郎. 1941. “比律賓映画界見聞” [Review of Philippine Films]. 映画旬 報 [Eiga junpō] 43: 19. Katsuya, Fukushige 勝屋福茂　with Imperial Army Philippines Expeditionary Propaganda Corps, dir. 1942. 東洋の凱歌 [Asia’s Victory Song]. Film. Japan: Nihon Eigasha. Kedourie, Elie. Nationalism. Reprint ed. London: Hutchinson, 1985. Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 [1987].

172  Takashi Fujitani Mahan, Alfred Mayer. 1911. “The Panama Canal and Sea Power in the Pacific.” The Century Magazine (June) LXXXII: 240–50. NCCA. 2015. “Gerardo ‘Gerry’ de Leon.” GOVPH, 1 June. https://ncca.gov.ph/about-cultureand-arts/culture-profile/national-artists-of-the-philippines/gerardo-gerry-de-leon/ Nornes, Abé Mark. “Dawn of Freedom.” In The Japan/America Film Wars, edited by Abé Mark Nornes and Fukushima Yuko, 235–41. Chur, Switzerland; Langhorne, PA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?.” In Nation and Narration edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 8–22. London: Routledge, 1990. Sakuramoto, Tomio 桜本富雄. 1993. 大東亜戦争と日本映画 [The Great East Asian War and the Japanese Films]. Tokyo: Aoki Shoten. Sasagawa, Keiko 笹川慶子. 2010. “日比合作映画あの旗を撃ての幻影:占領下フィリ ピンにおける日米映画戦はいかにして戦われたか” [The Illusion of Dawn of Freedom: Japanese Cinema’s War Against Hollywood in Japan-occupied Philippines]. 關西大 學文學論集 [Kansai University Essay Collection] 60 (1): 57–85. Satō, Tadao 佐藤忠男. 1996. “阿部豊” [Abe Yutaka]. In日本映画の巨匠たち [Masters of Japanese Films], vol. 1, 241–54. Tokyo: Gakuyō Shobō. Schmitt, Carl. “Forms of Modern Imperialism in International Law.” In Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos, Translated by Matthew Hannah and edited by Stephen Legg, 29–45. London and New York: Routledge, 2011 [1933]. Shimizu, Akira. “War and Cinema in Japan.” In The Japan/America Film Wars, edited by Abé Mark Nornes, and Fukushima Yuko, 7–58. Chur, Switzerland; Langhorne, PA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. Slotkin, Richard. “Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality.” American Literary History 13, no. 3 (2001): 469–98. Suzuki, Nobutaka 鈴木宣孝. 2015. “‘あの旗を撃て’　苦難に満ちた現地撮影”　[Dawn of Freedom: On-site Filming Fraught with Difficulties]. In booklet あの旗を撃て　[Dawn of Freedom], edited by 中野弘太郎, 5. Included with あの旗を撃て [Dawn of Freedom] DVD edition. Tokyo: Kabushiki Kaisha Deagosutīni, 2015. Terumi, Motoe 寺見元恵. 1985. “日本占領下のフィリピン映画” [The Philippine films under the Japanese Occupation]. In 講座日本映画 [ Lectures on Japanese Films], vol. 4, edited by Imamura Shōhei 今村昌平, et al., 290–99. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. White, Geoffrey M. Memorializing Pearl Harbor: Unfinished Histories and the Work of Remembrance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

7

What Comes after “Area”? The Nomos of the Modern in Times of Crisis Gavin Walker

I want to begin this consideration with a remarkable formulation put forward by Michel Foucault, in his famous discussion of the “thought of the outside”: The movement of attraction and the withdrawal of the companion lay bare what precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming of language. A language spoken by no one: any subject it may have is no more than a grammatical fold. A language not resolved by any silence: any interruption is only a white stain on its seamless sheet. It opens a neutral space in which no existence can take root.1 To think at the limits of decolonization is to think at the limits of belonging, of national language, of the presuppositions and predicates on which supposedly stable “areas” or zones of the “civilizational” or “colonial difference” operate. Just as the transition from feudalism to capitalism furnishes certain key elements of the social field for thinking the possibility of the transition from capitalism to socialism, so too the transition to a world constituted by areas from out of the prior flux at the advent of modernity provides us certain key dimensions of a transition away from such quasi-natural and putative distinctions between human beings. What movements concatenated language into languages, transforming this “stream” “spoken by no one” into a form completely dependent on its predicates for our imagination? To really think this question requires that we understand language not only as the “house of Being” or “the social product of the speech faculty” but also as a repository of political questions and problems that can be politicized; after all, as Carl Schmitt once wrote, “it is one of the most important phenomena in the juridical and intellectual life of humanity that those who hold the real power are also able to define the content of concepts and words. Caesar dominus et supra grammaticam: Caesar also reigns over the grammar.”2 * * * If “area” was a quintessential element of the world that was constituted by modern global history and its three grand social forms – capitalism, colonialism, DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-7

174  Gavin Walker and the nation – what are we to make of a world after “area?” Can we even say that such a thing has arrived? In the late 1980s, and as part of a sequence of reflections on the category of the political, Jean-Luc Nancy speculated about who might “come after the subject,” emphasizing that this foundational category or concept might not only be overcome or bypassed, but that “this same thought, never simple, never closed upon itself without remainder” could also even come to “designate and deliver an entirely different thought.”3 What shall we do then, in our current moment, with the category of “area,” itself perhaps the ultimate building block of a world formed according to a colonial modernity? Could another signification for this word and its history arise? Decolonization, as a product of the mid-century national liberation struggles certainly aimed to remap the imperial cartography of ‘areas’, insofar as the very mapping of what constituted an “area” (something between a “target” and an “object of analysis”) was intimately and indissociably linked to the formation of empires and spheres of influence. This material and concrete decolonization cannot be said to have been achieved but rather remains a thwarted project, never completed, and perhaps destined to remain merely a rearrangement rather than a genuine transformation. The very existence of the Pax Americana is itself a kind of monument to the thwarted, abortive process of decolonization, particularly in the Pacific, where the remnants of the Japanese Empire have remained “under new management” by the Americans since August 1945. Since the turn of the century, it has been increasingly clear that a globe organized around American hegemony is in retreat. At present, it is clear that the post-1945 international world is gradually disappearing, and a new configuration is taking shape. The role of China as a major world power will become a profoundly complex issue. The Atlantic order will likely never return to the role it played in overseeing the world of empire and colonialism for 450 years. The current crisis will also become rapidly a generalized crisis of large federated states, and it is possible that the era of federalism as such, as a mode of post-empire political organization, may be over. In this context, the future of the nation-state – and its relation to “area” as a political technology – will become an important site of questions.4 Given such circumstances, can today’s decolonization as a conceptual trend and also as a political tendency push itself beyond the gestural and toward a questioning of the historically unstable character of “area” itself in preparation for the advent of another global order? What are the dynamics that lead us to even begin to propose a questioning of this most fundamental categorical and epistemological act: the act of locating, siting, and citing, a bounded and defined people on the surface of the earth? A New Nomos? It is not an obvious or self-evident thing to ask after the character of the present conjuncture. Do we live in a global order at all, in which the Pax Americana functions as a constituent part or even as the focal point, an imperialist, colonial, neocolonial order, as an Empire, or as something else entirely? Whatever the efficacy

What Comes after “Area”?  175 of these terms – and it is possible of course that they more or less all function in divergent ways to name our global moment – a series of explicatory questions remain relatively unanswered in these acts of naming: that is, what characterizes an imperial formation taken as a general order of social life, beyond the simple fact of imperialism? Is it simply a question of the inequality between “areas,” between nations? The location of a form of governing in relation to the dominant mode of production? In what or through what mechanisms, sites, or institutions are its imperial features articulated? How and by what means did such a formation emerge, develop, or succeed previous formations – and indeed, does its existence represent a break from the prior order? In the now-classical Marxian conception, there would be a concentration of production and the mobilization of capital such that monopoly would become the new required economic form. From the merging of banking capital and industrial capital would come the creation of “finance capital,” by extension the generalization of the financial sector, and on this basis, the formation of a financial manager stratum within the dominant class. Internationally, exports of capital (the financialization of underdeveloped economies) would become the rule, rather than the export of commodities. There would be a resulting formation of international monopolist organizations – the global corporation – and a political, territorial division of the world among the major world powers.5 But if we are to not solely remain at this point – and it is undeniable that imperialism persists even in its most basic, formal features – we must think about what status the present order provides at the epistemic level, at the level of concepts and even the architecture of thought and the political itself. In Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, this question is understood in a divergent manner: what are the features of the ordering mechanisms implicit to every social formation, to every organization of social life? For Schmitt, “Every new age and every new epoch in the coexistence of peoples, empires, and countries, of rulers and power formations of every sort, is founded on new spatial divisions, new enclosures, and new spatial orders of the earth,” that is, on the institution of the nomos.6 In developing the question of the nomos, in other words, by developing the question of the original appropriation, enclosure, and division, we can attempt to articulate a genealogy of power for the ordering mechanisms of the present, in particular that of “area” and its ends. To propose a schematic timeline which presumes a decisive break from pre-capitalist economic formations, and in which a unidirectional allochronic ordering of the world emerges, tends to necessarily form a retroactive necessity for the form of the nation-state (either existing or as an “ideal” in gestation) – in this allochronic ordering, development, both “early” and “late,” comes to sequentialize the world. Schmitt’s work can assist us in rethinking the nexus of questions posed by this postcolonial present, in particular on the questions of decolonization, the forms of capture in contemporary global capitalism, and the epistemic hierarchies linking questions of “area,” “culture,” and “language” to the new political forms of domination. New divisions, enclosures, and orders are themselves instantiations of the primary division, the nomos which is prior to any specific order. By attempting to treat

176  Gavin Walker the common element of all questions of social life, Schmitt argued that the nomos was that element, the sovereign constitutive process of the ordo ordinans, the order of ordering itself. For Schmitt: All subsequent regulations of a written or unwritten kind derive their power from the inner measure of an original, constitutive act of spatial ordering. This original act is nomos. All subsequent developments are either results of and expansions on this act or else redistributions – either a continuation on the same basis or a disintegration and departure from the constitutive act of the spatial order established by land-appropriation, the founding of cities, or colonization. He continues, “thus for us, nomos is a matter of the fundamental process of apportioning space that is essential to every historical epoch.”7 For Schmitt, the nomos is essentially threefold: first, the moment of taking or appropriation; second, the moment of dividing or distribution; and third, the moment of pasturage – use and production, or perhaps what we today could call “management,” understood both in its general and specific senses simultaneously. In The Nomos of the Earth, the first and founding moment of taking, appropriation retains a necessary domination over the other two moments, in that every instance in which division or use occurs is inevitably subordinate to an “earlier” (although it is not necessarily a chronological process) moment of taking. From the outset, what is politically suggestive today is this focus on the ordering of order itself, this sequentialization of the nomos. Schmitt is not simply making the point that decision trumps its results, but also attempting to return our general question about the nature of the contemporary order to the essential dimension of the event. While it is possible to read Schmitt’s argument as determinist or mechanistic – that is, it could be argued that this concept of nomos as the “order of order itself” becomes a kind of transhistorical mechanism which by its constant presence always produces endless similarly teleological historical periods – I would rather draw our attention to the unstable foundations of this decisional event. Schmitt has argued: “History is not the realization of rules or regularities or scientific, biological, or other types of norms. Its essential and specific content is the event that arrives only once and does not repeat itself.”8 What this does is return to the dimension of chance and emphasizes the capture implicit in every epistemology. To restore the evental nature of “order” in this way not only leaves the emphasis in its analysis directly on the question of the material-historical process by which the state of the situation emerged, but it also emphasizes its hazardous, aleatory, contingent dimensions. That is, the political potentiality in Schmitt’s scenario is precisely that it demonstrates the non-necessity of the given social order itself – the present nomos – by showing us the material-historical basis on which the existing order was constituted through a particular deployment and mobilization of forces, we can see precisely the potential for developing and creating different functions of social life toward a new nomos of the earth.

What Comes after “Area”?  177 One might profitably connect Schmitt’s emphasis on the evental dimensions of the nomos to what Foucault referred to as “eventalization” (événementialisation) as a method, that is, rendering open the hidden connections of a field of inquiry to the flow of the event which both founded it, and which is retroactively founded by it. This “breach of self-evidence,” the identification of the singularities that founded the possibilities of multiplicity, could be summed up simply as a method devoted to showing “that things weren’t as necessary as all that.”9 This type of procedure aims at reexamining the previously accepted and inherited causalities, and substituting for them a polymorphous chain for relations, a way of restoring to the presumed results the dimension of the event. Judith Revel has valuably articulated Foucault’s long interest in the making “evental” of history: An event is something that, rushing onto the scene of the world and its representation, at the same time interrupts and opens to the possibility of the new. It is simultaneously (contemporaneamente) both rupture and creation. That is to say, when Foucault takes up the problem again in political terms, a political event is not merely construed as a political fact: a political event is something which interrupts a political system, a system of the management of power, and which nevertheless simultaneously creates the new.10 Such an understanding of what Schmitt means by nomos, refracted through Foucault’s parallel inquiry into the event, allows us to rethink the animating question at work here: what is the general order of the contemporary moment? What is its nomos? By identifying and restoring the nomic dimensions of this order, which is through its eventalization, what can we understand about the relations and forces at play in the political field? First and foremost, it means a political break with necessity, not only with the “necessary” transition to socialism, but also historically with the “necessary” transition to capitalism. As Marx’s own work pointed out incessantly, there is a “becoming-necessary” that is essential to grasping this transition, but it is anterior to, and dependent on, the prior act of appropriation which allows for the constitution of the nomos. But this “becoming-necessary” always attempts to show itself as a “being-necessary,” upon which the logic of historical necessity and developmentalism rests. Thus, there is at work here a certain “forgetting of the nomic origins” of necessity itself, a forgetting of the fact that this apparent necessity constitutes itself only on the ground of contingency. Thus, what is actually dependent on the nomos comes to appear as if it constitutes the nomos itself. We can identify the operations of the nomos, not only through the epistemology which governs the forms and power relations of knowledge upon which we can think, but also through the direct material conditions of the real movement of sociality. That is, it is not enough to simply grasp or “name” the contemporary nomos (the problem with the contemporary theoretical understandings of “imperialism”) – the way to articulate a resistant

178  Gavin Walker standpoint capable of truly grasping this problem is to return to the “event” of the nomos, the evental site wherein we can see its aleatory foundations. Frederic Jameson has argued that for Schmitt, the concept of nomos is parallel to the concept of “mode of production,” because “it names a structure of totality that has taken various historical forms,”11 but Schmitt might well argue that multiple “modes of production” can characterize the globe simultaneously, only predicated on the prior “primary division” of the institution of the nomos. That is, “mode of production” presumes a certain ownership, a set of hierarchies, or a “combination” in which a certain type of relations obtains. In contrast, nomos as the originary appropriating act of “naming” itself indicates a relation or even a chronology, not a “modality” or “structure.” Schmitt draws our attention to this precisely in order to name something other than a structure: it attempts to name that aleatory space of decision that must precede structure. Tazaki Hideaki has effectively articulated the questions posed by Schmitt in the direction of those posed by Marx: In the nomos, that is, the appropriation of space, it is not only that the society of those whose space is taken comes to be destroyed, but also that for the appropriators themselves, in as much as they also thereby destroy their own society, the appropriation of land renders the establishment of the nomos possible (in Marx, this is what he refers to as ‘primitive accumulation’).12 Tazaki, in identifying the founding moment of the nomos with what Marx understood as “primitive accumulation,” poses the most important corollary to Schmitt’s analysis. In contrast to Jameson’s identification of the nomos with the concept of “mode of production,” it is precisely that the institution of the nomos is that which must proceed the establishment of any “modality.” Primitive accumulation is an essential question, not only in rethinking the debate on the transition to capitalism and its epistemic residues in the form of the temporality of global capitalism, but also in extending this rethinking to the possibility that this transitional space, and indeed all such transitions themselves, are not static processes, but ongoing echoes and reverberations of the original appropriation and division – that is, primitive accumulation and the enclosure of the commons.13 If primitive accumulation represents the structure of the “original sin” for the instauration of capitalist social relations, we might too see the political correlate to this moment in the form of empire – after all, as Massimo Cacciari once pointed out, empire, as a supposedly “stable representation,” is in fact “produced by the most violent contradictions. The memory of this guilt is constitutive of empire. Its ideology is presented essentially as a metabolization of that original sin.”14 With the metabolization of the original sin of primitive accumulation into its “normal” functioning, the present becomes saturated not only with the violence of the origin, but also with the possibilities of other orders, the historicity of social forms themselves and their inherent, everyday volatility.

What Comes after “Area”?  179 Money as Order The question of the nomos today, in other words, the question of how, through what mechanisms, and by what forces the contemporary period can be characterized as an order of some kind or another, can be more specifically focused on the question of money itself. Money, of course, is not a product of capitalism. Forms of money vastly pre-date the advent of capitalist production and its social relations. But nevertheless, fiscalization or monetarization has been historically, and still today, is an essential tool of control – one which always conceals itself by masquerading solely as a form through which exchange becomes for the first time possible, thereby eliding its role as a congealed figure of power. In a sense, this focus draws us toward the possibility of a return to the evental site of the nomos that is toward a genealogy which understands the space of transition, enclosure, or capture as a constantly echoing singularity which buttresses the operation of the contemporary order. Marx recalls this problem for us at an early historical moment, reminding us that the system of national debt was generated in the “forcing-house” (Treibhaus) of the colonial system: thus, “National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state (Veräusserung des Staats) – whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked with its stamp the capitalistic era.”15 In this sense, already we are acquainted with the national debt as the “mark” or “stamp” (Stempel) of the entry into capitalist society on a world-scale, as the initial moment in which the originary accumulation of capital is at one and the same time the formation of the mechanisms that will install a cartography onto the surface of the world: The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions (Gesamtbesitz) of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven. The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers (energischsten Hebel) of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury.16 The logical topology of capital’s origin and maintenance and the historical cartography of the modern world order, based on the unit of the state, are volatilely amalgamated together in the form of the national debt. But Marx also alerts us to something critically important: here the national debt is not so much a separate motion of violence, but rather one of the most “powerful” or “energetic” “levers” for the continuation or maintenance of primitive accumulation. But why would capital need yet another exteriority? Primitive accumulation itself, its raw violence, its “extra-economic coercion,” is already to an extent exterior to capital.

180  Gavin Walker Yet what capital always requires are ways and means of taking the raw violence on which it secretly rests and reinserting this violence into a new modality, in which its violence can appear in another form. This is exactly why the national debt, as a mechanism, allows capital to avoid “exposing itself to troubles and risks.” Marx goes one step further, by connecting the national debt as primitive accumulation to the nation-form itself: With the national debt arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources (Quellen) of primitive accumulation in this or that people (Volk). […] A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.17 In other words, capital’s enclosure of the earth appears both within and by means of national borders – by extension, Marx essentially reminds us here that the nation-form itself allows for the concealing within an organized and bordered system of entities, of capital’s originary-primitive violence, and yet erases this violence precisely by allowing it to vanish into the nation as an apparatus for the traversal of this gap, “vanishing in its own result, leaving no trace behind.” But this theoretical and historical problem is by no means simply an interesting episode from the past. Let us recall here a peculiar historical moment characteristic of our current conjuncture. In the German “gutter press” (Bild and the like) in 2010–2011, an entire series of discussions of the Greek national debt (and by extension the ongoing Eurozone crisis) took place. The essence of the national debt was finally blamed on the Greek “national character” (supposedly “lazy,” excessively enjoying holidays, corrupt, incapable of “rational competition,” and so forth).18 This moment of the German-Greek opposition on the question of the national debt exposes to us the recent history of this mechanism. The era of imperialism in the strict sense consisted in the formation of “debt traps” for the peripheral and underdeveloped countries: the central imperialist nations export the domestic surplus to the colonies, the periphery, and so forth, by creating and enforcing demand, maintained by the national debt. Thus, the poorer nations end up not only importing from the imperialist nations but also effectively in an endless spiral of debt, a mechanism that then forces the periphery to accept the political and economic directives of the imperialist nations for the plunder and expropriation of raw materials, cheap labor power, border controls, subordination to political regimes, and so forth. Today, this same logic persists. If the old modality of imperialism consists in the macroscopic formation of monopoly capital and super-profits in the peripheral violence, the new modality of imperialism financializes this violence into the miniature and dense concentration of capital’s interior. It is no accident that today we see a “return of the origin,” “a moment when wage constriction is violently manifested, exactly like the 16th century enclosures where access to land as a common good was repressed with the privatization of the land and the putting of wages to the proletariat.”19 This

What Comes after “Area”?  181 is why we should overlap capital’s historical threshold with the moment we are living through today: The logic of ‘governing through debt’ has its origin in the fundamental relation between capital and labor. Financial capitalism has globalized imperialism, its modus operandi that operates through the form of ‘debt traps’, both national and private indebtedness, in order to realize and sell the surplus value extracted from living labor. In the imperial schema, debt is the monetary face of surplus value, the universal exploitation of labor power, and constitutes a trap precisely because it prevents living labor from freeing itself from exploitation, from autonomizing the relations of dependency and slavery that are proper to debt.20 The national debt allows the “reckless terrorism” of primitive accumulation to be maintained as if it were absent by redirecting it to the market. The national debt is a mechanism that “conducts” or forces the situation onto a new site of the curve of capitalist development, but it is not a mechanism that “resolves,” it is a mechanism that “defers” or “displaces” the sharpening of political struggles. The national debt therefore is precisely the “dangerous supplement” of capitalism as a historical force: the national debt exposes the fact that capital itself can never resolve the situation that emerges when the relations of production come into conflict with the development of the productive forces. Capital is always trying to create mechanisms that allow it to transcend its own limitations, while simultaneously permitting it to avoid making the political leap past its own boundaries. Yet, this inevitable limit of capital’s self-deployment is paradoxically the source of capital’s own dynamism. Without this tense multiplication of its wounds, capital would never develop – that is, capital requires a certain risk or recklessness, but the more it defers this leap, the more spaces of political intervention are opened up in capital’s austere movement. This movement keeps the elements of primitive accumulation circulating on the surface, a mechanism by which to traverse the impossibility of the commencement as such, precisely by beginning the commencement over and over again. In turn, this element of the national debt returns our focus to the role played by the nation-state in allowing this “first return to origins” – the element of the national is exactly deployed in and within the movement of capture in order to guarantee labor power’s “elasticity” (Elastizität).21 Without the nation or indeed “area,” the malleable elements of labor power cannot be recirculated as if they were directly graspable, by means of the reproduction of the worker’s body on the outside. The nation – the original fictitious “substance” – conjures up its own little images of its pseudo-substantiality precisely in order to then “re-derive” itself from their existence. In this way, the elasticity of labor power is simply the microscopic or “micrological” extension of the elasticity of the nation, the form by which capital attempts incessantly to territorializes itself. Labor power’s impossibility is a microscopic image of the gap or chiasmus between the logical and the historical: the historical origin and the logical commencement,

182  Gavin Walker and this is the point on which “the insanity of the capitalist mode of conception (die Verrücktheit der kapitalistischen Vorstellungsweise) reaches its climax.”22 By returning to the space prior to this “commencement” under whose banner we must live, the space of the “feudal,” we can see an evocative image of such processes occurring today. The prolific and unorthodox Portuguese Marxist theoretician João Bernardo has produced in the last 30 years, a massive work spanning three volumes and many thousands of pages devoted to the thematic of “power” and its appearance in the form of “money.”23 Briefly, Bernardo identifies the seigneurial regime (a nomenclature he prefers to feudalism, as it specifies the seigneur or lord as the central organizing principle of the social formation) with two distinctive features of its rule: the bannum and the mundium. The bannum is the sovereign operation of power, the power to kill, to take, to destroy, to tax, to expropriate, and so forth. On the other hand, the mundium is the sovereign operation of care, the benevolent patriarchal hand of the lord, extended to protect his charges. Traditionally, many orthodox Marxist analyses of situations of imperial/colonial control have solely identified the financialization or monetarization of social relations as the nascent emergence of capitalism (eventually to result in the wage-relation) which would bring about the proletarianization of the disorganized, politically undeveloped population, thus resulting in a simultaneous birth of resistance from within the extension of control. But an analysis of the operation of the “seigneurial regime” shows that, in fact, the extension of the bannum or sovereign’s absolute power of decision was not at all destabilized by the monetarization of social relations. In fact, it had precisely the opposite effect: monetarization extended the bannum to every inch of the household and every moment of time, becoming the vehicle for what Bernardo calls the operation of “impersonal power.” Today, monetarization seems like an anachronistic site of political analysis. But if Bernardo is right, that “the principle attributes of money in the seigneurial regime were of a social and political order, as a vehicle of social relations and systems of power, and not of an immediately economic order, as would occur in capitalism,”24 it is a provocative problem to rethink today. In the tenth-century middle European seigneurial regimes, money was entirely an extension of the bannum, a mode of regulation and control which was exercised onto a population as a whole, never calling into question or planting the seeds of resistance to seigneurial power. Money in this sense did not operate solely as an agent of exchange but rather as a direct exercise of power, for instance, in the case of money tribute to the lord which merely substituted for older forms of tribute while representing itself as a more transparent “fair” tributary system. Money thus was a mechanism of ordering social relations and relations of power, and not an “economic” tool as such. Today as well, this type of reversal is operating. As Silvia Federici’s work once amply demonstrated, the new form of enclosures operating in Western Africa under the effect of the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Policy (SAP) consisted primarily in making “owners of non-owners.”25 Through the forced legislation of

What Comes after “Area”?  183 IMF-approved property law and the consequent seizure and conversion of communal lands and property, the form of money is put forward as the rational, neutral actor of equivalence, a form which will inherently allow for underdevelopment and poverty to endogenously disappear. Thus, small communal subsistence farmers are made into small property owners and immediately encouraged to “financialize” themselves by mortgaging their newly acquired property. For the IMF, it is only when such people enter a relation organized financially that they can be truly “observed,” that their politics can be “assisted,” and so forth. There is consequently a directly political, directly punitive function to such measures, designed to ensure control and the extension of observability more than it is designed for direct economic exploitation. In this sense, we can say that the “debate on the transition” is just as alive today: there is a contemporaneity and parallel between the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism, and the transition from “disciplinary society” to the “society of control.” Andrea Fumagalli has investigated the question of money today in light of its function within the circuits of power. As he argues, because the pension schemes in place for the former and (some current) generations of workers in the most “advanced” capitalist nations have been bargained for by professional union bureaucrats with ties to certain lobbies – and in Japan, by union officials who are essentially themselves management due to the structure of the internal company union (the so-called kigyo betsu kumiai) – their pensions, and therefore, wages, are dependent on new structures of financial investment, that is they are dependent on the reproduction of money by money (M-M′). He sums up this problem: “In other words, part of the deferred wages of Western and Japanese workers depends on the degree of exploitation of workers in other countries of the world.”26 Financialization in the contemporary imperial world is directly concerned today with the management of externalities, less than it is with the direct accumulation for accumulation’s sake. As Schmitt argues, “allegedly, no longer is anything taken, but only divided and developed.”27 Hence, the act of appropriation, the taking and dividing that are the new forms of enclosure and capture are represented and phenomenally appear as “development,” “aid,” “assistance,” and so forth but it is nothing other than the seizure and apportionment of the commons. Bernardo argues in his text on the earlier “transition” that “the clearing of forests and opening up of new fields were not merely operations of agrarian economics, but aspects of a colonization understood in the broad sense of the word, as submission of population to ongoing fiscalization.”28 We have here a stark and important term emerge, which is to say, colonization – coloniality. What this question of monetarization aims at, in identifying the singular events which institute the operation of the nomos today, is the conversion of the “colonial difference” into financial hierarchy. By appearing in the form of the leveling and making equivalent of the terms of sociality, monetarization and financialization can appear as tools of modern life – but the power relations that obtain therein are nothing more than the formalization and concretization of the techniques of domination and control formulated within the colonial order, forming the basic

184  Gavin Walker categories of the epistemic hierarchy of the international world, and appearing today in the schematization and logic of “area.” The nomos of the earth that has emerged is one of the management of excess, the management of externalities, understood broadly as the side effects or “third terms” generated by other acts of exchange: meetings, borders, commerce, invasions, occupations, expropriations, forced labor, etc. More than anything, this order is derived from the long and twisting history of the epistemic hierarchy called “world” and its constitutive “areas,” the question of the nation-state and its genesis in coloniality. Schmitt writes: The special territorial status of colonies thus was as clear as was the division of the earth between states territory and colonial territory. This division was characteristic of the structure of international law in this epoch and was inherent in its spatial structure. Clearly, to the extent that overseas colonial territory became indistinguishable from state territory, in the sense of European soil, the structure of international law also changed, and when they became equivalent, traditional, specifically European law came to an end. Thus, the concept of colonies contained an ideological burden that affected, above all, European colonial powers.29 Schmitt identifies here an essential fact around which resistant logics can develop, and from which new orders can emerge: the burden of the colonial system’s history. This question requires us to clarify just what the epistemology of coloniality itself is, and its relation to the logic of area. Santiago Castro-Gómez has delivered a decisive series of formulations of the contemporary problem of coloniality as an epistemic hierarchy, and as something experiencing not an eclipse in the present, but a fundamental reorganization. He poses the question – do we live in a world in which the older epistemic hierarchies put forward through colonialism have vanished, or are we not, in fact, living through a reorganization of coloniality today?30 In Rosa Luxembourg’s well-known argument from The Accumulation of Capital, colonialism is subordinated to the constitution of European industrial society and its own internal developmental necessity to conquer new exterior markets, representing new sources of revenue and materials. Thus, with the passing of the locations of sovereignty in the nation-state as a form, the logic of colonialism falls away as well – once everything is subsumed under capital, in such an optic, there ceases to be an interior and exterior to capitalist control, which is the requirement for the operation of colonialism and its expansion. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their now-seminal Empire, returned the question of empire, the operations of imperial ordering mechanisms of the globe, to the center of contemporary political analysis. In as much as they identify the problems of the increasingly socialized knowledge characterizing the globe, the new cognitive forms of labor at the base of the continuing development of the productive forces, Hardt and Negri have contributed much to a reinvigorated political understanding of our moment.31 Their analysis, which did not deny the multipolarity or unevenness

What Comes after “Area”?  185 of capital’s world development, was often presented as one in which the world is bifurcated between the inescapable empire and the multitude, constituted out of the flows of energy of the empire’s own self-creation, and that it therefore paid less attention to the analysis of the empire’s internal exterior, the outside which is the colony. I do not agree, preferring to see Hardt and Negri’s wager as a longitudinal intuition that this interiority and exteriority of Empire would be constituted as a kind of Möbius strip, mutually imbricated, and even eventually completely intertwined without clear divergence. Castro-Gómez argued that “the inward production of alterity and the outward production of alterity formed part of the same dispositif of power. The coloniality of power and the coloniality of knowledge found themselves located in the same genetic matrix.”32 Colony here would not mean any specific fantasy of “area,” “people,” and so on, but rather a sort of immaterial coloniality which functions as an essential internal outside, a coloniality of knowledge itself. In other words, if we examine solely the imperial operation of power today, it is easy to miss its “other side,” the coloniality of power as it obtains in cognition and its essential work of recoding the logic of area. As the direct governmental sovereignty of the nation-state experiences new challenges and superstate forms of organization, there is a danger in assuming that the form of “area” and its technical apparatus will “wither away” under the massive “one” of empire. But the globally resurgent nationalisms and continuing logic of area studies today show us that this is not the case.33 He continues: The existence of Empire thus implies the “end” of colonialism because the mechanisms of normalization and representation associated with the modern state are no longer necessary for the reproduction of capital. But on the contrary, if you rely on the world economy of the 16th century to trace the genealogy of Empire, you can no longer assert that coloniality is a derivation of the state; it is a constitutive phenomenon of modernity as such. And this interpretation leads to another: the existence of Empire does not imply the end of coloniality but in fact its postmodern reorganization.34 This reorganization is nothing other than a different mediation of the epistemic hierarchy of the international world, a mediation which utilizes the directly material function of knowledge today. Today, the capture and enclosure seen in the forms of control characterizing the existing nomos attempt to contain and delineate the structure of possibilities: to appropriate not the terms, but the logic according to which any relation itself is possible – that is, control always wants to limit access or mediate the realm of sovereignty, or nomos. Control thus attempts to set forward and naturalize (that is, make unsurpassable) a series of concentric circles of confinement: property relations – financialization – the nation-state. But the question of nomos leaves us with the potentiality that another form of relation could be possible. Empire today does not necessarily work to usurp the sovereignty or governance of other nation-states, rather it works (capitalism’s reterritorialization) to control the entire relationality

186  Gavin Walker according to which the world is organized, to create models for this relationality. This is why we see the coloniality of the present not in the form of colonial-ism, but in the forms similar to the original appropriation of the commons, or period of primitive accumulation: monetarization and the “primary division,” “a particular and derivative aspect of the inscription of metahistory into the field of empirical phenomena; an inscription that we know historically distinguishes capitalism.”35 “We Were Guilty of Abstraction”: The Limits to Decoloniality Writing 20 years ago, and in a conjuncture characterized by still-present fantasies of globalization as a utopian horizon of possibility, Arif Dirlik soberly pointed out the limits posed by a conception of the ‘postcolonial’ that passed too hastily into a feverish dream of the new: Global modernity appears at one level as the end of colonialism, a product of decolonization that has enabled the surge into modernity, as alternatives to colonialist modernity of the formerly colonized. On another level, it may be viewed also as the universalization and deepening of colonialism, in the internalization into societies globally of the premises of a capitalist modernity that was deeply entangled in colonialism, to which there is now no viable alternative. This ambiguity opens up the possibility that what we are witnessing presently – from the transnationalization of capital to human motions to cultural conflict – is not so much decolonization as the reconfiguration of colonialism as capital is globalized, necessitating the incorporation in its operations of new states that are crucial to global management, as well as voice for the classes of its creation who provide the personnel for that management.36 If we were to take the present rather as a “reconfiguration” of colonialism, perhaps kaleidoscoped into financialization and its “metabolization” of the violence of the origin, we might do well to recall that, in the final section of the first volume of Capital, Marx expounds on the “modern theory of colonization.” He argues here that the process of primitive accumulation is already “more or less accomplished” in Western Europe, that the process of the justification for the enclosures and capture of labor power inherent in the transition no longer appears as a contradiction, but he states, “it is otherwise in the colonies. There the capitalist régime everywhere comes into collision with the resistance of the producer.”37 This is because the colony exists as a spatiotemporal in-between: it inhabits an impossible site where the new modes of capitalist accumulation are not producing the double effect that they did in the “mother country,” that is, the “freeing” of labor power and expropriation of the land with the effect of “hurling” the affected populations onto the flux of the labor market. He states: We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary consists in this – that the bulk of the soil is still

What Comes after “Area”?  187 public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice – opposition to the establishment of capital.38 But as we have seen with the enclosures and criminalization of vagabondage in the establishment process of English capitalism, the distinction drawn here is debatable: is it a process of freeing? Or is the “secret of the prosperity of the colonies” precisely the same as that of the “mother country,” in other words, the fixing and normalization, the making-commensurable precisely by establishing an effective differential hierarchy, of the human singularities, the organic substratum of labor power? In theorizing the disjunct temporality of the “mother country” from the colony, Marx assumes that the process of primitive accumulation in its double movement of “freeing” (actually its inverse, capture) has not yet, or not completely, taken place in the colony. Yet he identifies the problem of the colony as a key to the problem of capitalism taken as a general field. Therefore, we can say that Marx knew of, or had a sense of the existence of the colonial difference, but did not adequately integrate this problematic into his discussion of primitive accumulation. Along with the analysis of the systematic ordering of the “international world” in Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth above, we can identify this problem in Marx as symptomatic of the well-known fact that he never completed his “plan” for an entire volume on the role of the State. It is precisely the problem of the formation of the nation-state in the primitive accumulation of difference, the fixing of hierarchy as commensurability, which is part and parcel of the same movement as the primitive accumulation of capital. This line of inquiry can be read in Marx with ease: “national wealth, is once again, by its very nature, identical with the misery of the people.”39 If we recall the etymological history sedimented in the term “wealth” (from wel-, “wish,” or “desire”), we can understand quite quickly that the colonial difference, as an expression of the same general movement of capture as the enclosure of common land to generate “freed” labor power, is not merely a by-product of the expansion of capitalist development on a global scale but is an effect (and result) of the primordial State desire, the drive for commensurability grounded in the natural. In thinking of the epistemic horizon implied by this nomos of the modern, we must say that we live in a peculiar time vis-à-vis the humanities, and particularly that form of knowledge called “theory” in the contemporary conditions of knowledge-production. Although today there is a generalized call to “decolonize” our curricula and university institutions, this call itself has been often assimilated to the status quo, becoming frequently an official policy of the corporate university, and a principle of the reinforcement of the status quo rather than a figure of contestation. Here in Canada, for example, there now exist such unbelievable job titles as “Vice-Provost of Decolonization,” whose mandate has nothing whatsoever to do with the transition away from the pathways formed by colonial modernity, but rather with the maintenance of the status quo by means of gestural

188  Gavin Walker inclusions solely at the level of language. Hence, in this new and Kafkaesque fashion, one often finds the presidents of Canadian universities solemnly intoning complex and winding “land acknowledgements,” making sure of course that these have been legally vetted to mean – concretely – as little as possible. They are, in this sense, not indicators of transformation, but literal supports for the status quo of Canadian liberalism, and vectors of influence for the denial of the present reality of colonial modernity, sealing off into the “hurtful” past any possibility of another mode of existence. Such “official decolonization” has often simply been a co-figurative structure of inclusion, designed to prompt as little reflection as possible by including “other” traditions, epistemologies, and so forth in the university’s regular functioning. But rarely if ever does this change in any way the dominant fields. Philosophy remains fixated on English, French, and German language texts (or if ancient and “classical,” Latin and Greek). Politics begins with the Athenian democracy and continues to circumambulate the Mediterranean for some centuries before a pilgrimage to central Europe whose ultimate destination is the Atlantic gap between Western Europe and North America. History continues to privilege Europe and North America as “normal” areas of study in which “general” questions are posed, while the rest of the world furnishes “cases” and “particularities.” English literary studies, sensing their own marginalization, have invented the category “world literature” in order to appropriate the entire world’s cultural forms, so long as they are secondarily mediated by the English language and an industry of translation that is itself largely left untheorized. In other words, the official decolonization at a pedagogical level has largely only included the “others of knowledge” as data, not as theory, thus retaining fundamentally the bifurcated structure of the world as an epistemic production, where the “West” remains in the position of “observer” and “the Rest” in the position of “observed.” If, on the other hand, a genuinely radical, emancipatory dimension of the decolonization of theory itself is to be carried out, it would require a serious reflection on the inadequacy of this co-figurative structure, and its accompanying generalized turn to empiricism – or more precisely, an impoverished and myopic empiricism concealing a more fundamental liberal-positivist orientation – that has accompanied this moment in knowledge-production. The domination of the “concrete” – in historical analysis, the naïve epistemology of “archival social history”; in literary studies, the turn to positivist data-collection of trivia that passes under the name of “surface reading” or ‘post-critique”; in media studies, the refusal of any reflection on the epistemic political economy of the domination of the image in place of a worshipful and anti-critical orientation to technical development and media-driven forms of subjectivation – has produced its own hegemonic forms and figures, but no “theory” of its own. For long, the nexus of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism constituted the particular “milieu” of “theory” in the humanities, one in which abstraction played a decisive role. Today, this nexus has been attacked from a wide variety of positions, but rather than proposing another figure that would follow in its wake has instead largely contented itself with the re-assertion

What Comes after “Area”?  189 of pre-theoretical positions, a totemic fear of abstraction, and a consequent retreat into the comfort of particularism and substantialization. But why does abstraction remain decisive for any thinking of the tasks of theory – and indeed politics after the end of the Pax Americana – today? At this point, let me quote a long passage from a letter of Maurice Blanchot that concretizes and gives us a powerful outline of the problem: Another opposition came to light, this time of a philosophical order. We were denounced as being philosophically guilty, guilty of abstraction, guilty of ignoring the ‘concrete’, of satisfying ourselves with “sublime intellectual heroism” and of turning away from the flesh. […] I must say that this refusal of abstraction and defense of the concrete seemed essentially abstract to us and of a more dangerous abstraction than the kind that we were reproached with, because it is idealizing, and in the end, ethical in nature. (To say: “one must stop being abstract, one must be concrete” without worrying whether such a slogan has the least meaning in the state of exploitation of our societies is what I call pure idealism.) […] People from the right unanimously denounce philosophy because they are afraid of contestation and of the questioning that is essentially “philosophy” for us, and because, under the pretext of praising the concrete, of praising empiricism without principles, they aim to hold onto the social status quo and sociological comfort.40 When we say that the primary discursive effect of the schema of “the West and the Rest” within the production of knowledge is the location of theory in the former and data in the latter, we must elaborate on this formulation, draw out its contours in order to think its consequences. The state of existence of the work of knowledge can be partitioned into at least two states: a practical state (content) and a theoretical state (form). Insofar as this relation of theory and data is an extrapolation of the older relation of form and content, the relations between these two states also are also co-determinant. Capital, for instance, is a work that reveals the interior motion of the form of value, not by showing us this form directly, but by showing us its content, thereby retroactively revealing its form. The opposition between theory and data can be broken down into a chain of endless regression within each of its configurational unities. Theory itself comprises a developmental unity in oscillation, and therefore is something in motion, not an object. Data itself is a theoretical concept according to which the object is constituted in an exchange or referral with the problematic within which it is grasped. In this sense, “Empirical concepts are not pure givens, not the pure and simple tracing, not the pure and simple immediate reading, of reality. They are themselves the result of a whole process of knowledge containing several levels or degrees of elaboration. […] In no case is the relation of theoretical concepts to empirical concepts a relation of exteriority, or a relation of deduction, or a relation of subsumption (empirical concepts are not the complementary particularity – the specific cases – of the generality of theoretical concepts).

190  Gavin Walker Rather, it should be said (in a sense close to Marx’s expression when talking about the ‘realization of surplus-value’) that empirical concepts ‘realize’ theoretical concepts in the concrete knowledge of concrete objects.”41 With this statement of Althusser, we can more effectively connect the question of abstraction to the problematic of area in its generality. Insofar as the order of priority is the reverse of what our common sense suggests – theoretical concepts preceding their empirical “realizations” – it becomes easier to understand why the official decolonizations frequently seem to be easily integrated into a status quo that itself should collapse were it to be “decolonized.” Where the other is simply represented as an essentialized being whose difference is absolutely ontological, rather than historically and rhetorically formed by means of technologies of subjectivation, there is no real possibility to upend the “order of being” founded on the building blocks of national subjects. The reduction of these same national subjects to their sociological or census-based conditions of existence leaves untouched the question of how and by what means a supposedly originary difference was drawn between them in the first place – a constituent effect of what we might call “cultural primitive accumulation.” To include the “other” means always a differential inclusion: the other is here allowed to become part of the dominant order but only insofar as this other either conforms to the essentialized notion of otherness (a repression of the abstract difference to which their empirical life is subjected) or renounces this otherness in favor of a majoritarian becoming. Either pathway here leaves no room for an actual encounter with difference as such. In pursuit of this question, let me quote at length a remarkable formulation from the work of Naoki Sakai, one that should shape our thinking: In spite of the fact that I encounter the others within the network of social relations that putatively represents both me and the others as oversaturated or overdetermined subjects, there is an aspect in which a singular thing encounters other singular things and which is irreducible to the relation of one subject to other subjects: unlike the encounter of subjects, which takes place in discourse and hence is measurable, the encounter of individual beings is in the final analysis without any terms of comparison, not even equality. In this specific aspect of the encounter of the singular, one meets another not only as vassal, child, wife, friend, or younger brother but also as stranger. And only when one can encounter the other partly as a stranger is ethical action possible.42 In other words, insofar as the encounter with difference takes place solely between the “oversaturated” subjects of modernity, rhetorical-historical placeholders for the national-colonial difference, no real encounter can take place. One is simply in the “‘white wall/black hole” system of the pre-arrangement of difference, as Deleuze and Guattari had it.43 What is it, then, that restrains this encounter of the singular, the stranger? What forces us into the predetermined ethical and political mode of specific difference, whereby that singularity is lost, forever covered over

What Comes after “Area”?  191 by the ordering forms of colonial modernity and its historical inheritance of the forms of difference? Returning to Schmitt is critical here, because “in its original sense, nomos is precisely the full immediacy of a legal power not mediated by laws; it is a constitutive historical event—an act of legitimacy, whereby the legality of a mere law first is made meaningful.”44 In this sense, the nomos or order of the world is not something principally institutional, territorial, or even empirical, but rather theoretical, as in Althusser’s key point about the fundamental theoreticality of supposedly empirical concepts. Nomos in this sense joins with the conception of economy: “in the word ‘economy’ the oikos is not the subject and bearer of public housekeeping and administration, but rather the object and even the material.”45 In this sense, every “word bound to nomos is measured by it, subject to it.”46 The Westphalian system of nation-states, the imago mundi of difference, was, in fact, the first real act of forgetting of the nomic origins of order because it naturalized this system of nation-states and shifted the beginning of this system forward so that what was a product of the institution of the nomos came to be seen rather as its cause or origin. For Agamben, the question of the nomos is fundamentally demarcated from that of knowledge: “What is more original and stronger than law is not (as in Schmitt) the nomos as sovereign principle but rather the mediation that grounds knowledge.”47 But we might also say that the nomos is first and foremost itself a form of knowledge, not only a sovereign principle, but quite literally that theoretical act which makes knowledge thereafter mediated by forms that themselves issue from this ordering moment, untraceable except in its echo. From the Decolonial to an Ethics of Translation If the nomos of the modern is the colonial matrix of knowledge and power, the possibilities of a decolonial order to come could only be something compositionally different. In other words, it could not be a mere repositioning or rearrangement of the same endless mediation of the originary nomos of the modern and its systematic distribution of difference, linked to the ontologically prior moment of division. In this sense, the possibility of the decolonial could only be exactly that rare, almost infinitesimal sliver of possibility, contained in the encounter, that this encounter could be also singular, between strangers. Even if the encounter in the space of the social is always formed through commensurabilities – schematized as an encounter between man and woman, colonizer and colonized, two “co-citizens” of the same nation, two “enemies” of opposed nations, two bearers of national-culture stereotypes or “burdens of particularity” – there is in it something that remains incommensurable, some trace of the possibility of the singular. That trace or minimal gap (what Althusser called the “décalage” or “discrepancy”) might as well be another name for translation as a practice. Despite the existence of a “regime of translation” – that system of pre-ordained differences predicated on their commensurability – the very act of translation itself contains an element that exceeds this capture, its capacity to tear open the smooth violence of the figurational history of itself.

192  Gavin Walker This sense of translation essentially means the creative and political potential to form new institutions of life, to overthrow and create new ways of being, to not be solely constrained by the inherited and the given. To illustrate or perhaps further complicate this point, I want to touch briefly on a remarkable and little-known text. First published in 1953, Pierre Klossowski’s peculiar erotic novel Roberte ce soir provides us with a remarkable theory – or perhaps practice – of translation and the stranger. When welcoming a guest to their home, Octave and his young wife Roberte enact a complex ritual of hospitality, in which the guest is literally welcomed completely, all the way into the bed of the hostess. From this primal scene, Klossowski derives a complete theory not only of hospitality, but also of the encounter with the stranger, the ownmost and the foreign, and for which he literally gives the name translation: At the start the two are but isolated substances between them there is none but accidental communication: you who believe yourself far from home in the home of someone you believe to be at home, you bring merely the accidents of your substance, such accidents as conspire to make a stranger of you, to him who bids you avail yourself of all that makes a merely accidental host of him. But because the master of this house herewith invites the stranger to penetrate to the source of all substances beyond the realm of all accident, this is how he inaugurates a substantial relationship between himself and the stranger, which will be not a relative relationship but an absolute one, as though, the master becoming one with the stranger, his relationship with you who have just set foot here were now but a relationship of one with oneself. To this end the host translates himself into the actual guest.48 Here is an important social consideration of what happens to the supposed “native speaker” when this process of translation takes place. Rather than one that simply allows the stranger to enter into the discourse of the native, the process by which this unfolds estranges the host as much as the guest, even if the host believes him or herself to be at home. As Antoine Berman among others has emphasized, in the classical German tradition of translation, so foundational to European modernity, one is situated in a conception of linguistic transfer between two essentialized shores of possibility: one’s “own” (le propre) and what is “foreign” (l’étranger). It is Klossowski’s device, in the Roberte texts and Les lois de l’hospitalité, to literally “personalize” this double structure in the practice of “hosting” the guest. Berman suggests on this point: “let us understand the multiplicity of configurations of the relationship of the translator subject and his language to the foreign, from devouring to losing, but above all, and this is what interests us here in the first place, the postulation of an identifiable nature and a limited essence of the proper, which is never acquired but is the object of all the quests of translation.”49 In a widely known point, Berman emphasizes that “every culture resists translation, even if it has an essential need for it. The very aim of translation – to open up in writing a certain relation with the Other, to fertilize

What Comes after “Area”?  193 what is one’s Own through the mediation of what is Foreign – is diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of every culture, that species of narcissism by which every society wants to be a pure and unadulterated Whole.”50 In a sense, however, it is exactly Klossowski who problematized this idea. If we are to say that translation is opposed to ethnocentrism, that it is all a question of pollinating le propre with the mediating force of l’étranger, we would remain solely in a sort of communicative space, forever seeing the two sides of the ownmost and the foreign as the inevitable and even ontological categories of the world. But Klossowski’s peculiar and even scandalous idea of the subjective destitution of the possession of the other reminds us of something much more fundamental: you yourself can be transformed, your whole being can become and absorb something else, what is “proper” to you is never fixed for eternity but always mutable, always capable of a development. At such a point, the boundary between what is “proper” and what is “foreign” itself shifts, reminding us that what is historically critical is not the two “sides” themselves but the nomos, the disavowed but structuring event, the act of division itself that created a space wherein two sides could compose themselves as interiorities. Let me illustrate this point very simply. As one grows and acquires – whether through migration, necessity, or interest – new languages, the gap between what is one’s “own” language and what is the “other” language becomes blurred. One does not develop a “theory” of the mutability of the ownmost and the foreign (and the line of division between them), one simply experiences that “tree” can also be orthographically represented as 木 and phonographically as ki or as “arbre.” This becomes swiftly part of the mental architecture that forms subject in relation to language. In other words, such lexical diversity – the presence of the supposedly “‘foreign” within the “proper” – is seamlessly integrated into one’s function. If someone mutters to themselves in the private admixture of languages that characterizes them, they do not don alien garb, become “foreign,” absolutely other, or even transform their practices of living in the world in accordance with those of another psychic universe, but simply express the phonetic-semantic lexicon within which they approach the world. One is born with one or more so-called mother tongues, but through the pure contingency of the social-historical world other languages can become fundamental parts of one’s discursive architecture, so much so that we could even say most people speak a language that is not national but personal, composed of phrasing, cadence, idioms that are distributed between multiple “national languages,” a mixture in which what is “proper” to one is in fact not “proper” at all. This is a completely normal, everyday aspect of the “multilingualism” of the world. The point of such an excursus is not to say that any language is also mine, but to say precisely that it is not just societies that can never be a “pure and unadulterated Whole” but also subjects. There is no person anywhere on earth who can be a Whole subject of the ethnos, the language, the nation, the territory, the civilization.51 What then do we do with the question of translation in our political climate of neoliberal austerity, resurgent fascisms, national chauvinism, and also the trends

194  Gavin Walker of the decolonial? Following the powerful formulations of Sandro Mezzadra and others, we have to link closely the relation of translation to the structure of capital as such, to the deranged social system that is both ownmost to us, in the sense that we are its component parts, and most estranged from us, at the same time. We also must leave open a danger: a return to the strangeness and mystery that underlies the practice of translation, and the even ontological character of this world of slippages that is linguistic communication, the statement, the utterance. And from this follows an ethics of translation, an ethics that can only be one aimed at what Sakai so forcefully teaches us: an ethics of the encounter of the singular, the possibility that one could meet an other, not as a rhetorical emblem of the nation or area, but at least partly as a stranger. That such a true encounter could take place should be the horizon of the decolonial and, maybe at last, the foundational gesture of a new nomos of the earth, far beyond the brief moment of the Pax Americana. Susan Buck-Morss, in an important essay that should be re-read in the contemporary moment, writes, “In the modern world order, sovereignty is the exclusive property of the nation-state, which, according to Max Weber’s classic definition, claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. In the landscape of the collective imagination, only nation-states have sovereignty and only national citizens have rights. Within this territorial system, all politics is geopolitics. The enemy is situated within a geographical landscape. The dividing line between friend and foe is the national frontier.”52 If this conception of sovereignty, belonging exclusively to the nation-state, has been the decisive one for us – “in the landscape of collective imagination” – we must consider what shall become of it, this concept that is so foundational to the political itself that “politics” are scarcely thinkable without it, in a world in which “area” functions less and less, or at least is “replaceable” as a technology of reproduction in the capitalist cycle. Could such a form of sovereignty even persist after something truly bearing the name and weight of “decolonization?” What sovereignty could there be in the wake of the Pax Americana, unless it is a new hegemonic power, a “Fourth Rome” capable of sheltering within it all the contradictory figures of the narrow self-interests of the world? Perhaps a complete transformation of this very concept beckons at the Pacific horizon, one linked not to the schematic of positions predetermined in the cauldron of the nation, but to another sovereignty “over oneself,” a “surplus” or “excess,” a “foundational act of the self’s taking possession of itself,”53 that might inaugurate precisely through such an act another relation to the other: a full decolonization of the episteme of co-figuration in favor of a courageous “true life,” the exercise of a “sovereign life” of being “useful to others” where an ethics of the encounter with the stranger as a stranger was truly possible, and this maybe for the first time since the advent of modernity. Notes 1 Michel Foucault, “La pensée du dehors”, Critique, no 229, juin 1966. Reprinted in Dits et écrits, t.1, 537. 2 Carl Schmitt, “Völkerrechtliche Formen des modernen Imperialismus” in Positionen und Begriffe. (Duncker & Humblot, 1988): 202.

What Comes after “Area”?  195 3 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Introduction” to Who Comes after the Subject?, edited by E. Cadava, P. Connor, and J-L. Nancy. (New York: Routledge, 1991): 4. 4 For a development of this point, see Gavin Walker, “Nationalism and the National Question” in SAGE Handbook of Marxism, edited by Bromberg, Farris, Skeggs, Toscano. (London: SAGE, 2022), 366–86. 5 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in Selected Works, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), v.1: 700–01. 6 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, translated by G. L. Ulmen. (Telos, 2003): 79. 7 Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 78. 8 Carl Schmitt, “L’unité du monde,” in Du politique: légitimité et légalité et autres essais (Puiseux: Pardès, 1990): 244–9, quoted in Martii Koskenniemi, “International Law as Political Theology: How to Read Nomos der Erde?” Constellations 11, no. 4 (2004): 502. 9 Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method” in Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3: Power, edited by Paul Rabinow. (New York: The New Press, 2000): 226–9. 10 Judith Revel, Michel Foucault, un’ontologia dell’attualità (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003): 33. 11 Fredric Jameson, “Notes on the Nomos” in South Atlantic Quarterly, 104 (2) (Winter 2005): 200. 12 Tazaki Hideaki, “Konnichi no sei-seiji no naka no Nīche.” Shisō, (December 2000): (164–74), 168. 13 See here Gavin Walker, “Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt.” Rethinking Marxism 23, no. 3 (2011): 384–404. (London: Taylor & Francis). 14 Massimo Cacciari, “What is Empire.” in Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016): 97. 15 K. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 in MECW, vol. 35, 742; Das Kapital, Bd. 1 in MEW, Bd. 23, 782. 16 K. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 in MECW, vol. 35, 742; Das Kapital, Bd. 1 in MEW, Bd. 23, 782. 17 K. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 in MECW, vol. 35, 743–4; Das Kapital, Bd. 1 in MEW, Bd. 23, 783–4. 18 Of course, all of these so-called explanations of the crisis are absurd and openly incorrect. The German tabloid “newspaper” (one hesitates to truly call it a newspaper) Bild placed the following headline on the front of the daily news: “Verkauft doch eure Inseln, ihr Pleite-Griechen!” (Literally, “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks!”). In response to this, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung released an excellent pamphlet, comprehensively debunking all the ideological presuppositions that characterized the attempt to place the national debt into the realm of “national character.” See http://www.rosalux. de/publication/37617//verkauft-doch-eure-inseln-ihr-pleite-griechen.html 19 Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, New Edition (New York: Semiotext(e), 2011): 118. 20 Christian Marazzi, “Un orizzonte sovranazionale per rompere la trappola del debito,” in Il manifesto, 16 December 2011, p. 11. See also Andrea Fumagalli, “Lotte di classe nel default” in the same issue, p. 10. 21 Marx, Das Kapital, Bd. 1 in MEW, 630; Capital, vol. 1 in MECW, vol. 35, 599. 22 K. Marx, Kapital, Bd. 3 in MEW, Bd. 25, 463; Capital, vol. 3 in MECW, vol. 37, 483. 23 João Bernardo, Poder e dinheiro: Do poder pessoal ao estado impessoal no regime senhorial, séculos V-XV, 3 vols. (Porto: Afrontamento, 1995–2002). 24 João Bernardo, Poder e dinheiro: Do poder pessoal ao estado impessoal no regime senhorial, séculos V-XV, vol. 3, 472. I have used Loren Goldner’s translation of this passage and relied extensively on his analysis in his lengthy critical review in Historical Materialism 12, no. 3: 333–43. 25 See in particular her “The Debt Crisis, Africa, and the New Enclosures,” originally in Midnight Notes, no. 10 (1990). Reprinted in The Commoner, vol. 2 (September 2001), at http://www.thecommoner.org.

196  Gavin Walker 26 Andrea Fumagalli, “Moneta e potere: controllo e disciplina sociale” in La moneta nell’Impero (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2002): 30–1. 27 Schmitt, “Nomos – Nahme – Name,” in The Nomos of the Earth, 346. 28 João Bernardo, Poder e dinheiro, vol. 2, 583. I have used Loren Goldner’s translation of this passage. 29 Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 199. 30 Santiago Castro-Gómez, “Le chapitre manquant d’Empire: La réorganisation postmoderne de la colonisation dans le capitalisme postfordiste.” Multitudes (September 2007): 2. 31 In the contemporary discussions of “communism” in the theoretical humanities, the crucial role of Empire, along with their masterful Labour of Dionysus, has often been overlooked, but I would like to point out that it is really Hardt & Negri who “brought back” this term in the late 1990s, well before the wave of discussions concerning the work of Zizek, Badiou, and others. 32 Santiago Castro-Gómez, “Ciencias sociales, violencia epistémica y el problema de la ‘invención del otro’” in Modernidades coloniales: otros pasados, historias presentes, ed. Saurabh Dube, Ishita Banerjee Dube and Walter Mignolo (El Colegio de México, 2004): 296. 33 See on this point Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai, “The End of Area” in The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History, edited by Walker and Sakai, a special issue of positions: asia critique, vol. 27, no. 1 (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2019). 34 Castro-Gómez, “Le chapitre manquant d’Empire,” 7–8. 35 Virno, Il ricordo del presente: saggio sul tempo storico, 126. 36 Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2001): 97–8. 37 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 751–2. 38 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 755. 39 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 758. 40 Letter of Blanchot to Uwe Johnson of 1 February 1963 in Maurice Blanchot, “Letters from the Revue internationale” in Political Writings 1953–1993, translated and edited by Kevin Hart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010): 45. 41 Althusser, “Sur le travail théorique: difficultés et resources” in La Pensée 132 (April 1967): 3–22; “On Theoretical Work: Difficulties and Resources” in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (London: Verso, 1990), here 49. 42 Sakai, Voices of the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992): 110. 43 See Gavin Walker, “The Schema of the West and the Apparatus of Capture: Variations on Deleuze and Guattari” in Deleuze Studies 12, no. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018): 210–35. 44 Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 73. 45 Schmitt, “Nomos – Nahme – Name,” in The Nomos of the Earth, 338. 46 Schmitt, “Nomos – Nahme – Name,” in The Nomos of the Earth, 338. 47 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998): 33. 48 Pierre Klossowski, Roberte ce soir, 13. 49 Berman, The Experience of the Foreign, 4. 50 Berman, The Experience of the Foreign, 4. 51 I draw here on my longer analysis in Gavin Walker, “The Relapses of the Universal: Translation and the Language of the Political” in Translation, Theory, Universality, edited by Gavin Arnall and Katie Chenoweth (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming). 52 Buck-Morss, S. 2007. “Sovereign Right and the Global Left” Rethinking Marxism 19, no. 4 (October 2007): 434. 53 Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984 (New York: Picador, 2011): 273.

What Comes after “Area”?  197 Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Althusser. “Sur le Travail théorique: Difficultés et resources.” La Pensée 132 (April 1967): 3–22.; “On Theoretical Work: Difficulties and Resources” in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. London: Verso, 1990. Antoine Berman. L'épreuve de l'étranger. Culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique: Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Berman. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. Stefan Heyvaert. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. Bernardo, João. Poder e dinheiro: Do poder pessoal ao estado impessoal no regime senhorial, séculos V–XV, 3 vols. Porto: Afrontamento, 1995–2002. Blanchot, Maurice. “Letters from the Revue internationale.” In Political Writings 1953– 1993, translated and edited by Kevin Hart. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Buck-Morss, Susan. “Sovereign Right and the Global Left.” Rethinking Marxism 19, no. 4, 432–51. (October 2007). Cacciari, Massimo. “What Is Empire.” In Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Castro-Gómez, Santiago. “Le chapitre manquant d’Empire: La réorganisation postmoderne de la colonisation dans le capitalisme postfordiste.” Multitudes. 3, vol. 26 (September 2007) 27–49. ––––––. “Ciencias sociales, violencia epistémica y el problema de la ‘invención del otro.’” In Modernidades coloniales: otros pasados, historias presentes, edited by Saurabh Dube, Ishita Banerjee Dube, and Walter Mignolo. México: El Colegio de México, 2004. Dirlik, Arif. Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2001. Federici, Silvia. “The Debt Crisis, Africa, and the New Enclosures.” originally in Midnight Notes no. 10 (1990) 10–7. Reprinted in The Commoner, vol. 2 (September 2001). at http:// www.thecommoner.org Foucault, Michel. “La pensée du dehors, ” Critique, no 229, juin 1966. Reprinted in Dits et écrits, t.1. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ––––––. “Questions of Method.” In Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3: Power, edited by Paul Rabinow, 226–9. New York: The New Press, 2000. ––––––. The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–84. New York: Picador, 2011. Fumagalli, Andrea. “Moneta e potere: controllo e disciplina sociale.” In La moneta nell’Impero. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2002. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Labor of Dionysus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. ––––––. Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Klossowski, Pierre. Roberte ce soir. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1988. Jameson, Fredric. “Notes on the Nomos.” South Atlantic Quarterly 104-2 (Winter 2005). Marazzi, Christian. The Violence of Financial Capitalism. New Edition. New York: Semiotext(e), 2011. Marx, Karl. Capital, vol. 1 in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 35. New York, London, and Moscow: International Publishers, Lawrence & Wishart, and Progress Publishers, 1996.

198  Gavin Walker ––––––. Das Kapital, Bd. 1 in Marx-Engels Werke, Bd. 23. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Introduction” to Who Comes after the Subject?, Edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Routledge, 1991. Revel, Judith, ed. Michel Foucault, un’ontologia dell’attualità. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003. Sakai, Naoki. Voices of the Past. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Schmitt, Carl. “Völkerrechtliche Formen des modernen Imperialismus.” In Positionen und Begriffe. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988. ––––––. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New Tork: Telos, 2003. ––––––. “L’unité du monde.” In Du politique: légitimité et légalité et autres essais. Puiseux: Pardès, 1990. Tazaki Hideaki, “Konnichi no sei-seiji no naka no Nīche.” Shisō no 919 (December 2000): 164–74. Walker, Gavin. “Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt.” Rethinking Marxism 23, no. 3 (2011): 384–404. ––––––. The Sublime Perversion of Capital. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016. ––––––. “The Schema of the West and the Apparatus of Capture: Variations on Deleuze and Guattari.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 12, no. 2 (2018): 210–35. ––––––. “Nationalism and the National Question.” In SAGE Handbook of Marxism, edited by Farris, Bromberg, Toscano, and Skeggs. London: SAGE, 2022. Walker, Gavin, and Naoki Sakai, eds. The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History, a special issue of Positions: Asia Critique, vol. 27, no. 1. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2019. Virno, Paolo. Il ricordo del presente: saggio sul tempo storico. Turin: Bollati Borlinghieri, 2003.

8

Theory, Institution and the North American Field of Modern Chinese Literary Studies Some Preliminary Reflections Peter Button

In the last thirty years, a number of scholars have offered historical accounts of the formation and development of the North American field of modern Chinese literary studies. Significantly, it was the arrival of theory itself onto the scene in the early 1990s that appears in retrospect to have provoked these reflections on the field’s institutional history. Indeed, some of the most well-known of these accounts were themselves the place where theory and its proper role in the field were initially debated.1 We see the same process of the appearance of theory spurring reflection upon institutional history in the work of Yingjin Zhang who in the same year in a related effort proposed “re-envisioning the institution of modern Chinese literature.”2 What all of these accounts share is that they pose the question of the North American field’s development from the internal perspective of the field itself, going back to what has generally been taken as its inaugural moment, namely the publication of C.T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction in 1961.3 The history of the field in these narratives takes on the shape of an inverted cone with Hsia’s History serving as the apex and the cone’s ever-expanding inner walls providing the disciplinary limit within which are contained the various stages of the field’s subsequent history. The chronological sequences of “paradigm shifts,” “theoretical interventions” and “rapid expansions” are sedimented, one layer atop another down to the present. Indeed, it was precisely the field’s institutional “boundaries” between the field itself and what lay beyond, that Yingjin Zhang himself in 2016 sought once more to “reenvision,” although more as a shoring-up act of reconsolidation.4 Where Zhang’s definition of the discipline of modern Chinese literary studies encompasses the study of modern Chinese literature, regardless of institutional or national location, my analysis will move in the opposite direction by confining itself to the unique features of the North American field. Occasionally in these narratives, the question is tentatively posed regarding what might have been happening elsewhere with theory in the humanities. Liu Kang, for example, writes of the “civil war rag[ing] in North American literary studies,” while Yingjin Zhang, for his part, describes the “advent of critical theory from Europe in the 1960s, [and] ideological criticism informed by Neo-Marxism DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-8

200  Peter Button [having] steadily transformed North American academia.”5 Perhaps because his own contribution to the Modern China special issue was less concerned with the field’s institutional history in North America, Zhang Longxi may have been more sensitive to the fact that approaching the problem of theory a certain way risked perpetuating the field’s “ghettoization.” To the extent that [the field] does not participate in a dialogue with studies of other literatures and does not address critical issues of interest to a wide audience beyond the boundary of local specialties, the study of Chinese literature, despite the long history of that literature and its rich content, is likely to remain a narrow and marginal field as compared with the study of English or French, something of a cultural ghetto, one might even say, closed and of little interest to outsiders in the academic environment of the American university.6 As we will see below, the concerns about the status and role of theory in the field have, with a certain regularity, provoked a combination of anxiety and perplexity regarding the field’s alleged “ghettoization” within the North American university. It is likewise characteristic of these periodic discussions about the field’s relationship to the rest of the humanities that its institutional fate is posed in purely passive terms. Looking back over the course of the past three decades, I suspect many would agree that the field remains as fully isolated from a “wide[r] audience” in other areas of the humanities as Zhang Longxi had feared.7 Nonetheless, however, one assesses such concerns, it is probably not the case that modern Chinese literary and cultural studies in North America, much less the East Asian area studies as a whole, have played only a marginal or incidental role in the rise of the globalized, neoliberal university. To the extent that the field’s scholarship largely abides by the “subject-object model of cognition and truth,” it remains well in accord with the “universalizing and homogenizing” orientation of the contemporary, global university.8 As Samuel Weber reminds us, this particular mode of knowledge production draws upon one understanding of theory as “detached contemplation, spectatorship, and appropriation through vision.”9 It is the second notion of theory, namely what Marc Redfield terms “theory as a critique of the subject by way of a reflection on language and the irreducible alterity of the other” that has been most often associated with deconstruction.10 As I will argue, this other more “ambivalent and precarious”11 notion of theory has generally received less attention in the field. My focus in what follows, therefore, will necessarily also be upon what was happening elsewhere in the North American university, particularly in literary studies, both before and after the formation of the field. But I want to begin by framing my analysis with several of Roland Végsö’s observations regarding what he terms the “anti-Communist aesthetic ideology,”12 in the United States of the 1950s.13 The brief period between the end of WWII and the Korean War was a period of intense political and cultural struggle in the United States, very much “within” the large and highly diverse “anti-Communist community.”14

The North American Field of China Studies  201 The dominant, monolithic conception of US Cold War anti-communist ideology has long obscured the remarkable “plurality” of “anticommunists of all persuasion who jostled for power: countersubversives, religious and ethnic anticommunists, liberals, and socialists.”15 What was essential to this contest for the mantle of legitimate “anti-Communism” was the need to provide it a specific, “concrete content.”16 What is of particular interest for our purposes is the way this struggle over the proper meaning of anti-Communism generated US Cold War “aesthetic ideology,”17 which, Végsö argues, needs to be understood as the conjunction of “the politics of anti-Communism and the aesthetics of high modernism.”18 Central to the task of linking anti-Communism with high modernism was the imperative to establish both the “purity of politics” alongside the “purity of art” through a process of excluding from each “field,” a “heterogeneous element.”19 In the case of politics, it is “Communist totalitarianism” which becomes, according to this reasoning, nonpolitical because it is in fact nothing more than a “criminal conspiracy.”20 On the side of aesthetics, what must be excluded are both mass culture, as well as, middlebrow literary works.21 True art, then, is at once, non-political, but at the same time, “according to its very essence,” it is also anti-Communistic.22 Végsö writes: The first statement (“art is not political”) reflects the consensual agreement of the 1950s that art cannot be reduced to a political message—that is, art is not “propaganda.” […] The second proposition, “art is anti-Communistic,” is an equivalent of the first: since art is not political (it is actually decidedly apolitical to the degree of being antipolitical)[…].23 The exigencies of US anti-Communism generated a politics of austere moral realism that was designed to completely supplant “the political ‘sentimentalism’ of the fellow-traveling left.”24 In the same moment, however, the demands of what Végsö terms US “anti-communist modernism”25 required a rigorously anti-realist aesthetic. What we confront here is not some random glitch in 1950s US antiCommunist cultural programming, with the political and the aesthetic running at cross ideological purposes. Rather, Végsö shows that the relation between the two is one of an “essential alliance.”26 What this brief foray into Végsö’s book is meant to suggest here at the outset is the multiple, complex ways the field North American Chinese literary studies at its inception was a remarkably direct and concrete expression of US Cold War aesthetic ideology.27 I will return later in this essay to a closely related but separate analysis of the problem of aesthetic ideology. For the time being, however, I only want to remark that we can discern in Végsö’s analysis many of the now well-known features of Hsiavian critical discourse: the rejection of “humanitarian” realism, the elevation of modernism,28 the thoroughly Manichean conception of the human,29 the appeal to a theological, rather than merely political, rejection of Communism,30 and finally, the embrace of a New Criticism heavily informed by a Southern Agrarian cultural ethos.31 All this is to suggest that a fuller understanding

202  Peter Button of the institutional history of the North American field would need to take fuller account of the formative role of anti-Communist aesthetic ideology in shaping the mission of the US Cold War university.32 My purpose in what follows is not to explore the as yet unrealized possibilities for dialogue with colleagues working elsewhere in the literary humanities. Rather, I think it may be more helpful, initially, at least, to focus on comparing the divergent ways theory affected different areas of literary study in North America. For what is noticeably missing from these otherwise helpful, if remarkably uniform historical perspectives on the North American field, is a clearer picture of the actual institutional location, namely the Cold War university, out of which the field itself had emerged. For reasons I will elaborate in what follows, what is necessarily also missing is a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the emergence of theory itself in the North American university. The characterization of the history of the field as a succession of theoretical and paradigmatic transformations is not in itself inaccurate. However, glossing theory as essentially a European import that was simply taken up significantly later by the field than in other areas of the North American literary academy tends to obscure our understanding of the problem that interests me here, namely the field’s own accounts of its isolation from the rest of the humanities. Most striking of all, where the emergence of theory elsewhere in the North American humanities very early on provoked a critical analysis of the formation of institutions and their conditions of possibility, the arrival of theory in the field of modern Chinese literature has largely served the cause of its ongoing institutional consolidation.33 The issue here is not whether a discipline ought to engage in such consolidation. Rather, my interest lies specifically in how theory came to catalyse that process in modern Chinese literary studies in North America in the early 1990s and since. The work of Samuel Weber is particularly helpful here in clarifying these remarkably divergent responses to theory. Weber examines the rise of academic fields and the ethos of professionalism in the American university. He writes: Limits and limitation were indispensable for the demarcation of the professional field, but once the latter had been established, the attention to borders (founding principles) became increasingly the exception rather than the rule. Attention was focused on the problems and questions emerging within the field, the coherence and even history of which was taken increasingly for granted.34 Like all modern professional fields, the field was formed by a set of constitutive exclusions whose inevitable, and indeed, necessary purpose was to establish the internal, systematic coherence of the field’s objects of study.35 My concern has to do precisely with what the field’s account of itself takes “for granted.” My goal will not be to provide an alternative account of the field’s institutional history, so much as examine the way a certain understanding of theory serves to consolidate the field in those accounts.

The North American Field of China Studies  203 Precisely because the task I have set myself requires me to provide an account of theoretical work conducted elsewhere in the literary humanities, so as to set the stage for a discussion of some of the salient differences in the way theory has impacted the field, I immediately confront two features of the field’s institutional limits, namely the implicit proscription against devoting too much coverage to issues that are not normally deemed areas relevant to the study of modern Chinese literature, above all the problem of theory itself.36 Furthermore, I will also be addressing the reception of what is known conventionally as “deconstruction.” If “deconstruction” has attracted attention in the field, the focus has more often been upon Derrida’s mention of “Chinese writing” in Of Grammatology, or more recently, the problem of Derridean spectrology. My interest is in neither of these two issues, but rather in what Samuel Weber has termed a “deconstructive pragmatics,” which, he suggests, “would work from the ‘inside’ of various disciplines, in order to demonstrate concretely, in each case, how the exclusion of limits from the field organizes the practice it makes possible […].”37 Such an inquiry would ultimately serve to render more visible and explicit the “series of ‘speech acts,’ involving injunctions and commands such as those that comprise the professional ethos” of a given field.38 Failure to attend to such “forces and factors” risks leaving unexamined: [T]he conditions of imposability; the conditions under which arguments, categories, and values impose and maintain a certain authority, even where traditional authority itself is meant to be subverted. To ignore such factors, of course, is to leave their force unchallenged and to suffer their effects without reserve.39 Within the limited scope of this essay, I cannot hope to provide anything approaching an adequate account of the many “factors” that have shaped the North American field over the course of its history. I will therefore confine myself to the preliminary task of exploring several significant lacunae in the field that derive immediately from the problem of theory, or more precisely, from a certain understanding of theory and the role it has been granted in the field. I will argue that the field’s incorporation of theory largely reflected the uniquely American institutional mode of assimilating the work French poststructuralists. Weber writes: If authors such as Derrida, Foucault, and to a lesser extent, Lacan, have been granted admission into the American Academy the price they have had to pay has generally entailed the universalization and individualization of their work, which has thereby been purged of its conflictual and strategic elements and presented instead as a self-standing methodology.40 This way of approaching theory, Weber argues, serves the needs of “containment (or delegitimization) of conflict,” that is highly characteristic of especially post-war American liberal culture and its aesthetic ideology of anti-Communism.41

204  Peter Button One consequence of this drive to preserve the “categories of universality, individualism, and consensus,” so characteristic of US Cold War liberalism, can be observed in the field’s general reluctance to engage the problem of theory on its own terms.42 Further, most of the narratives about modern Chinese literary studies have tended to focus narrowly on the field’s own uptake of theory itself, without examining the larger institutional conditions beyond the field which drove the process in the first place. The problem of theory has also tended to be posed in what are by now fairly recognizable ways. Looked at purely from the perspective of the field’s relatively late incorporation of theory into its workaday practice, the impression is created that literary studies elsewhere in the university are comprised primarily of earlier and more intensive applications of theory to their literatures (whether English, French or comparative) relative to the field’s considerably later and less intensive deployments of theory in the analysis of modern Chinese literature. I will question this way of mapping the field’s relationship to the rest of the literary humanities below. But I want to emphasize the appeal to the idea of uneven development in the “academic market place” of literary and cultural studies and the way it has consistently provoked a certain degree of anxiety about how its “products” fare in that market, as we will see in a moment.43 Furthermore, what this perspective obscures is a clearer picture of the actual practice of theory and even more importantly the set of questions that drove the development of theory in literature departments in North American universities since the early 1960s. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik has noted regarding East Asian studies in the West, that “our discipline is lacking in theoretical interest” and that “we are somewhat isolated from other disciplines with a higher demand for theoretical reasoning.”44 I suspect that few would dispute the fact that modern Chinese literary studies have since at least the early 1990s been subject to the very same kind of concerns Weigelin-Schwiedrzik describes regarding how the field’s engagement with theory compares with that of the rest of the literary academy in North America. As I noted, the most common explanation for this state of affairs is simply that theory arrived significantly later on the scene of modern Chinese literary studies. But this largely implicit explanation begs the question as to why theory took so long to take hold in the field. In order to get a better sense of what is at stake here, I would like to look at two efforts to make sense of the problem of how, why and when the field came to embrace theory as an important element of its work since I believe they characterize more broadly the way the field came to understand theory and its role in the field. What I want to focus on here is how the concept of theory itself becomes the way the field maps its relationship to other disciplines in the humanities, especially other areas of the literary academy. Ted Huters, for example, has offered an account for the field’s dilatory integration of “literary theory,” posing what remains the very important question of how to understand the field’s marginal location vis-à-vis the “mainstream” of North American literary studies. Noting that modern Chinese literary studies had tended to take its lead from its sibling field, modern Japanese literature, he looks

The North American Field of China Studies  205 to the field’s relative self-understanding in the 1980s and 1990s. I quote Huters here at some length: Students of the Chinese humanities have, however, been curiously passive, if not, until recently, largely silent on [postcolonial and subaltern studies]. I will attempt to focus on some of the possible reasons for this silence, first by suggesting historical reasons why certain key issues in Chinese literary studies have rarely been pursued or are pursued in ways that dismay many observers. […] It is probably safe to say that as of about 1980 the study of modern Chinese literature in the West was more interesting (i.e., it had more compelling things to say to non-insiders) than the study of modern Japanese literature. And I think that those of us in the field took compensatory pride in that fact; it was but one of the things that helped to demonstrate to us that our being out of the mainstream of literary theory was more a question of the West’s lack of interest in the non-West than a defect in the way we went about our work.45 Huters then goes on to suggest that the study of modern Japanese literature at the time had undergone a process of fundamentally historicizing “the nature of the discourse in that field,” a process which “forced [the field of Japanese literature] onto the broader stage of ‘world literary studies’ (not without resistance from the Europeanists who invented the field and always dominated it.”46 What interests me here is that Huters locates the hostility towards Japanese literature’s participation in “world literary studies” outside the field of Japanese literature itself. Huters does not indicate precisely which group of Europeanists actively sought to resist the incorporation of modern Japanese literature into “world literary studies” but it is very unlikely that the founder of comparative literature in the United States, namely René Wellek, would have ever endorsed such an exclusion.47 Jason McGrath has addressed a similar set of concerns, and like Huters, he does so by posing the problem in terms of the extent to which literary scholars elsewhere in the university have taken an interest in modern Chinese literature. Noting that the field is “relatively small and isolated,” McGrath asks, if scholars in the field have “long been well versed in the latest Western theoretical trends” why is it that work in the field attracts so little attention elsewhere in the literary academy?48 If McGrath here raises the problem of the field’s isolation, he does so by noting the relative rarity of a Rey Chow whom he describes as “far less discursively marginalized than most of her colleagues from East Asian language and literature departments (whether of Chinese, European, or any other descent).”49 McGrath’s passive construction indicates that the unidentified agent of that act of “discursive marginalization” must lie beyond the field itself, presumably, as with Huters, in “mainstream” literary studies in the university. For McGrath, this appears puzzling. Are not the “practitioners” in the field sufficiently conversant in theory to make their work worthy of interest among scholars in the “departments of English and Comparative Literature”? After all, scholars in the field had long since ceased to be “passive” and “silent” on the theoretical problems that had shaped postcolonial theory.50

206  Peter Button Concern for the field’s ongoing isolation from the rest of the literary humanities has not been the only continuity. It was the explanation for the field’s “marginalization” that had likewise remained unchanged. If, as of the early 1980s, according to Huters, the field was still quite distant from the “mainstream,” the fault, he claims, lay in the alleged failure of the West to take the non-West seriously. Huters in 1993 was then registering the concern that the field’s sluggish response to theory up until that point had merely exacerbated a condition the field had suffered from since its inception.51 What McGrath’s 2005 account confirms is that despite the field’s earnest efforts to engage theory very little had changed. McGrath’s explanation for what he and many others, no doubt, continued to lament as the field’s enduring isolation emphasized once again the West’s indifference to Chinese literature. In other words, if little of the work done in modern Chinese literature (for reasons that will become clearer below, I want to hold off on the question of modern Chinese cultural studies) has generated interest outside of the field, the reason, McGrath suggests, is that the West simply isn’t sufficiently interested in modern and contemporary Chinese literature to warrant the additional interest in the theoretically informed literary criticism of the latter composed by specialists in the field. What the examples of Huters and McGrath clearly indicate is that the problem of the field’s status in the academy has consistently been understood in terms of theory and the field’s relationship to it. In each case, an engagement with theory seems initially to hold out the promise of future acceptance in the “mainstream,” only to finally disappoint, leaving the field more isolated than ever. While it is probably true that the field’s initially reluctant engagement with theory was partially the result of a prolonged isolation, it is unclear which institutional forces, beyond those at work within the field itself, might be held responsible. After all, at least that portion of the mostly French intellectual figures who appear most frequently in the field’s scholarship developed their theoretical reflections within the tumultuous, post-war historical context of decolonization. Nicholas Brown’s claim that “all theory is postcolonial theory” may seem to some a bit of an exaggeration, but it is very helpful nonetheless in underscoring the constitutive role of the non-West in the formation of some of the most important theoretical inquiries in the past sixty years.52 Moreover, it is well worth recalling that the sheer quantity of invective levelled at segments of the 1960s French intellectual establishment for its erstwhile embrace of Maoism reminds us that many of those theorists themselves paid a good deal more attention to China than many in the field might have liked.53 It is probably no exaggeration to say that the field’s isolation has been coextensive with its entire history in the North American academy. I hasten to add, there is nothing inherently wrong with such isolation. There are, no doubt, countless examples of literary subfields that continue to thrive, blissfully untroubled by what the rest of the literary academy might think of them. But as the examples of Zhang Longxi, Huters, McGrath and Weigelin-Schwiedrzik all suggest, the field’s relationship to the rest of the humanities has long been and remains a cause for concern in the study of East Asia—a concern whose origin lies with the

The North American Field of China Studies  207 field’s relation to theory. Except instead of mapping out some strategy for ramping up the quality and discursive density of the field’s engagement with theory in order that it might more rapidly secure its long-sought reception in the “mainstream” of the humanities, I want to suggest that it may be more helpful initially to examine some of the significant differences between the way the field has approached the problem of theory and the way other areas of the North American literary academy have done so. As I elsewhere show, the study of modern literature in China, beginning especially in the 1920s, is much closer and indeed overlaps in many crucial respects with the way literary study developed in the North American university in the post-WWII period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But literary study in China shares also an orientation not unlike the one that emerges as theory at Yale in the 1960s. Theory in North America was not the result of a turning away from and advance beyond what comprised the fundamental elements of modern criticism as comprehensively elaborated by Wellek and Warren in The Theory of Literature, but rather the product of a much more trenchant, careful and detailed reading of the discourse of aesthetic humanism that had shaped the formation of modern literary study since the 19th century—a discourse modern China had engaged continually throughout much of the 20th century. De Man, along with J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom at Yale, did not so much as turn their backs on The Theory of Literature, as demonstrate the “deconstruction” of the institution of modern criticism, of which Wellek and Warren’s book was only the most recent example. Doing so necessitated a more comprehensive engagement with the legacy of modern philosophical aesthetics which had all along provided modern criticism with its humanistic orientation. Furthermore, especially in the case of de Man, theory emerges and develops precisely as reading of the very same philosophical sources that had powerfully shaped modern Chinese literary studies since the late 19th century.54 It is therefore not surprising that the North American field of modern Chinese literary studies’ distance from the institution of literary study in modern China would mirror its distance from “mainstream” literary study in the United States.55 This can help us better account for the considerable distance between the North American and Chinese fields of modern Chinese literary studies throughout much of its history. It is essential to keep in mind that not only did the North American field develop independently of the Chinese field, to the extent that it fell to C.T. Hsia to plot at least its initial course, it was based very much on a rejection and marginalization of Chinese literary criticism since the late-19th century as largely superseded by what Hsia, for very understandable reasons, took to be the more advanced mode of literary study, namely New Criticism.56 We should, of course, be wary of overstating Hsia’s influence upon the field as a whole, and yet Hsia’s exclusion of what Huters would later call the “intolerant hectoring” of “most 20th century” Chinese criticism remained largely in force until relatively recently.57 But where Hsia saw in New Criticism an innovative way forward for the study of individual literary works beyond what was deemed the older, moribund “extrinsic” criticism, de Man, very much like Wellek and Warren before him, turned

208  Peter Button his attention to the problem of criticism itself, initially “contemporary criticism” as in the Blindness and Insight collection of essays, but then later the Kantian and Hegelian foundations of modern literary criticism in the North American university in Aesthetic Ideology.58 The field’s near uniform sidelining of Marxist literary criticism both during and after the Cold War suggests an important reason for why the field remained relatively uninterested in the more encompassing institution of modern criticism that had long attracted so much serious interest in modern China. Prior to its installation in the university curriculum of literary study, Chinese Marxist literary criticism had emerged, in a manner not unlike the work of the “Yale critics” via a critical engagement with pre-/non-Marxist modern criticism and aesthetic theory since the late 18th century. This perhaps explains why René Wellek and Paul de Man, despite the enormous differences between them, both felt a serious compunction to grapple with Marxism in their work, a compunction that is generally absent in the field.59 Where the field’s concerns about theory have been guided to a significant degree by a prospective effort to “catching up” with the rest of the literary academy, patiently engaged in the labour of theoretically informed criticism, while awaiting the day when its scholarly production might begin to find broader acceptance in the “mainstream” of the literary humanities, my account of theory’s emergence suggests that it was oriented primarily in precisely the opposite direction, namely as a retrospective engagement with the history of modern criticism.60 Indeed, if we are using the term theory in Wellek and Warren’s sense, this would be the case since especially Wellek sought above all to shore up aesthetic humanism said to be bequeathed to modernity by Kant.61 In fact, if we want to characterize the orientation of theory’s gaze, especially beginning in the 1960s, it might better be described as a circumspective measure taking of the university as institution. By circumspection, I mean both not only the act of surveying one’s own disciplinary institutional surroundings, but also the ethos of approaching with care and patient deliberation the problem of how to understand the formation of the institution of literary study in the university. In his preface to Glyph: Textual Studies 1, Samuel Weber writes: For many years, the prevailing strategy of our established institutions of learning and of inquiry was to deny their own coercive, constitutive power. Or rather, justify it in terms of its objects, values, and a paradigm of knowledge that were held to be above and beyond question. One might argue about particular works or concepts, about the specific meaning of literary texts, but not the presumption that literature exists […].62 This early turn towards a critical focus on the problem of institutions, including not least of all what Derrida called that “strange institution of literature,” helps to explain why it was necessary to expand the focus to include the writings of Kant and Hegel, both of whom wrote about not only the problem of the aesthetics but no less importantly, the philosophical foundations of

The North American Field of China Studies  209 university study. By contrast, the field’s “theory canon” consists primarily of the writings of 20th century figures, above all “postructuralist” theorists from the 1960s and later. Both Derrida and de Man tend understandably to attract the label “high theory” but that term itself can be seriously misleading to the degree that it simply names again, in order to proscribe anything deemed an overly dense deployment of theory as apolitical and divorced from “history.”63 The invocation of “high theory,” as simply an effete and elitist practice and the exclusive preserve of the well-heeled academics at Yale, Cornell, etc., obscures deconstruction’s long-standing interest in the problems of aesthetic-pedagogical institutions and disciplinarity.64 In other words, it was not simply what Rey Chow terms the “dislocation of the sign” that enabled the “culture and pedagogical disciplinarity” of “Europe” and “Ivy League institutions” to be “dislocated.”65 In Weber’s preface noted above (whose title, incidentally is, apropos of Chow’s concerns, “Demarcating the Disciplines”), he writes of Derrida’s work in the 1970s: “Having established a certain structural instability in the most powerful attempts to provide models of structuration, it was perhaps inevitable that Derrida should then begin to explore the other side of the coin, the fact that, undecidability notwithstanding, decisions are in fact taken, power in fact exercised, traces in fact instituted.”66 And this was not just the case with Derrida, but very much with de Man as well. In a way, looked at historically from the point of view of the institution of literary studies in the post-war American university, the transition from Wellek to de Man might be viewed not as the emergence of “high theory,” but rather, theory’s “undoing” or “the universal theory of the impossibility of theory.”67 After all, for de Man theory marks the ineluctable compulsion towards a systematization that can never finally succeed, but that nonetheless must occur. One of the more salient differences, between the way the field has incorporated the theory and the set of theoretical problems addressed above all in English and comparative literature, is the prominent position of the discourse of aesthetics in the latter. If I am not only sympathetic to but also quite wary of McGrath’s blank dismissal of Hsia as the now irrelevant “emblem of how-we-don’t-do-thingsanymore,” it is because Hsia embodies in the most explicit manner the post-war institutional consolidation of the very aesthetic humanism that helped give rise to theory in the first place.68 When Redfield warns that “aesthetic humanism does not give up its dream easily,” he is suggesting that at the very least, if we really want to avoid unwittingly repeating Hsia’s practice, we must critically examine “Hsiavian criticism” as part and parcel of the “ideal of aesthetic-ethical acculturation” that in many ways continues to define, the “pedagogical discourse” of Chinese literary and cultural studies.69 In short, the theory that the field of modern Chinese literary studies took up with increasing focus beginning in the early 1990s, in fact reflected a set of concerns regarding institutions that have themselves, generated relatively little interest within the field itself.70 In some ways, this is surprising when we consider that the field has, as we have seen, experienced acutely what Redfield

210  Peter Button calls the “professional and disciplinary pressure” of theory. And by “pressure,” Redfield means also the kind of “active disinterest and hostility” that is the stuff of straight up rejection of theory. But it is well worth recalling that this pressure was by no means experienced uniformly throughout the literary academy in North America. There are many literary subfields where poststructuralist “high theory” may have had some impact, but for which theory did not become the sort of consistent preoccupation it clearly has in the field. Redfield gives the example is of J. Hillis Miller, one of Yale’s “Gang of Four” critics, whose deconstructive writings had only a relatively “minor impact” on his own field of Victorian studies, but where he is nonetheless highly regarded as the author of several classics on Victorian literature.71 Redfield argues that, “critics in other fields have generally felt a bit less haunted by the spectre of theory when it comes to discussing their field.”72 Not so, for the field of modern Chinese literature in North America. In a number of paradoxical ways, the field of modern Chinese literature more closely resembles the one literary subfield that has experienced the pressure of theory more intensely than any other, namely, romantic studies. If this is paradoxical, it is simply because like the discourse of aesthetics, romanticism has also not stimulated nearly as much interest in the field as have realism and modernism. Modernism in the Anglo-American tradition is so closely, albeit agonistically linked to romanticism, that it is scarcely possible to think the former in the absence of the latter.73 MCLC’s excellent bibliographies of scholarship on modern Chinese literature include entries for both modernism and realism but lack one for romanticism. Of course, romanticism, viewed narrowly as a literary historical period term, covering the late-18th century through the first half of the 19th century, clearly has no obvious Chinese historical counterpart. In this rigidly chronological sense, it is not surprising that the MCLC’s literature bibliographies offer no entry for romanticism.74 If we were to rely on the standard formula of artistic movements, neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, modernism, only modernism would seem to overlap with something concurrent in the West, but even here comparative literary period matching doesn’t yield much clarity. Chinese modernist literature emerges twice in the 20th century, once in Shanghai in the 1930s and again in the 1980s, each time in response to prior realisms. The problem is that romanticism signifies a good deal more beyond its status as a period term. First, it is essential to recall that as a literary historical designation, the term itself emerges along with and as a part of the institutional formation of professional literary study in the American university in the late 19th century. Drawing on the work of John Rieder, Redfield notes that the concept of romanticism is directly linked to efforts to provide institutional legitimacy for the study of vernacular literatures.75 But there are deeper conceptual connections between what we call theory, the discourse of aesthetics and romanticism itself which I want to briefly explore. Redfield advances a “triple claim”: 1) The academic field of romanticism drew particularly heavily on aesthetic discourse as it took shape as a discipline in the United States and, mutatis

The North American Field of China Studies  211 mutandis, other parts of the English-speaking world; 2) aesthetics is a selfresisting discourse that comes into being only by generating the possibility of "theory" as its dark double; 3) romanticism, therefore, in the American academy, has historically tended to be a privileged, ambivalent locus of theory and the resistance to theory, of aesthetic ideology and radical critique.76 As I noted above, what is true of the professional study of romanticism in the United States was likewise true of the development of the discipline of literary study in China, namely that both were shaped by a concerted engagement with aesthetics. While the problem of aesthetics was especially vital to the study of romanticism as a literary subfield, the professional study of literature in the North American university, meaning the modern literary academy in toto, owes much its humanist orientation to the discourse of aesthetics itself.77 The connections between romanticism and aesthetics run yet deeper. As Redfield writes, “romanticism names the historical emergence of the very idea of aesthetic-historical periodization,” in other words, modernism, postmodernism, the Avant-garde, or in the case at hand, late-Qing, May Fourth, Republican, seventeen year, Cultural Revolution, etc., to the extent, of course, that these terms are not merely buckets into which we toss a given literary text sorting them according to calendar year as they pass along field’s conveyor belt on their way to MCLC’s bibliographies.78 Such period labels also have a very pragmatic and mundane institutional function, namely to serve “as an implicit contract or horizon of expectation within an institutional setting,” enabling specialization, and generating thereby, departmental imperatives of field coverage.79 But to the extent, we suppose some fundamental ideological and political transition finds aesthetic representation in the texts we read, between, say the late-Qing and the New Culture movement, or the Cultural Revolution and New Period, we can discern the pulsating oscillations of “apostasy and renewal, of ever-renewed gestures of rejection and reclamation” that are central to romanticism. Romanticism, in a manner that Carol Jacob has termed “uncontainable,” extends to the very subject matter of much of what we write about modern Chinese literature. For, as Redfield spells out “[o]ur contemporary ideas of literature, art, criticism, imagination, nationalism, revolution, human rights, [gender], [ideology] and so on remain fundamentally romantic.”80 Likewise, our acts of critical demystification, whether directed, for example, at the “ideological” dimensions of literary realism or in the manner of cultural studies, at “representations of______” derive their form from the aesthetic, or more precisely, the volatile instability of the aesthetic as it emerged with romanticism. Redfield terms this the “difference of aesthetics” in that it marks the split of the aesthetic into theory, on the one hand, and ideology, on the other. Because of this “ironic spiral of ideology and critique,” “[r] omanticism thus becomes the home turf of aesthetic ideology, on the one hand, and high theory, on the other.”81 All of this points toward two questions that I have already alluded to above. How was it possible to have two Chinese modernisms (three, if we include Taiwan) with which we can neatly pair with two Chinese realisms, without a single

212  Peter Button romanticism to trouble the double symmetry? Of course, we have two fine studies that address the concept of romanticism, though not in the sense derived from theory in the manner I have just elaborated, namely as one term in the aestheticstheory-romanticism nexus. In Leo Lee’s classic study, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, we can begin to discern a likely reason why the subject of romanticism as part and parcel the “vexed” articulation of aesthetics and theory in modern literary study never found traction in the field. Leo Lee’s study addresses some of the familiar romantic tropes, such as the Promethean and Wertherian personalities, sentimentality, the Byronic hero, etc. But the subject of romanticism as a problematic for literary criticism and more generally, for the institution of modern literary, study is never really “discussed” so much as bracketed entirely out of consideration as a “scholastic debate,” which resulted in little more than an “interminable list” of “categories and characteristics” that Lee deemed largely irrelevant to his study.82 Haiyan Lee’s justly praised study, Revolution of the Heart, is, as the subtitle indicates above all a Foucaultian-inspired, critical “genealogy of love.”83 If her book offers us something of considerably more interest than a mere “literary history” of sentiment, it is because of her adroit deployment of Raymond William’s concept of “structure of feeling.” As such, her discussion of romanticism is broached primarily from the perspective of 20th century Anglo-American political philosophy, namely via Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Isaiah Berlin and Alasdair MacIntyre.84 Far from being in any way a limitation, this approach helps lend a great deal more nuance to her analysis of the political and cultural dimensions of the discourse of sentiment. But precisely the book’s status as a superb example of Chinese cultural studies points to the one final point of significant divergence between the field and other branches of the literary humanities that I want to explore, namely the relationship between literary studies and cultural studies. What Yingjin Zhang describes as the “rapid expansion” of the field ensured that it now encompasses multiple Sinophone literatures as well an ever proliferating number of material objects for cultural studies. Viewed purely from the supervisory perspective of the administrative structure of the contemporary university and the organization of departments, disciplines, fields and subfields, developments in modern Chinese cultural studies would appear to closely parallel the rise of cultural studies elsewhere in the humanities. But looked at from the perspective of the troubled and highly fraught advent of theory and its complex course through the university down to the present, the differences could not be more striking.85 Where the appearance of cultural studies in other fields in the university, such as English or comparative literature, became a powerful stimulus for a host of sometimes heated polemical engagements with the problem of theory itself, the transition of the journal Modern Chinese Literature to Modern Chinese Literature and Culture took place without the slightest fanfare.86 In short, it is important to recall that the integration of cultural studies into the humanities curriculum was deemed a vital problem for theory on both sides of the

The North American Field of China Studies  213 literary studies/cultural studies divide and it accordingly generated a great deal of theoretical reflection.87 One of the essential elements of theory as media event, extending well beyond the confines of the academy beginning in the 1980s, was the persistent belief among especially American conservative critics in what Redfield calls the “middlebrow” news media that “deconstruction” was the source of the multicultural dismantling of the Western canon. But for those like Rey Chow working also in “mainstream” cultural studies, the relationship to deconstruction has always been a great deal more ambivalent.88 As one can well imagine, any effort to mobilize a generalized interdisciplinarity in a manner that simply sets aside as irrelevant and inconsequential, the extensive poststructuralist labour of interrogating and unsettling the essential concepts of cultural criticism can appear to the partisans of deconstruction as at best naïve and at worst, remarkably traditional. Miller writes that in cultural studies, theory is often “superseded by a return to precritical or pretheoretical assumptions about the way literature, along with other arts, mirrors its historical and social contexts.”89 It is ironic indeed that such concerns have barely registered in a field that was so often willing to declare a theoretically more elaborate Leninist “reflection theory” bankrupt, though one suspects primarily as a way of keeping what was likewise deemed a no less moribund Marxism at bay.90 Of course, any demand to limit the proper exercise of theory to literary texts (and primarily canonical ones) will inevitably seem no less hidebound to practitioners of cultural criticism. If these often sharp divisions never became a significant preoccupation in the field, it has largely to do with the fact noted above, namely that theory has long remained insulated from the discourses of romanticism and aesthetic ideology. A “positive discipline” such as modern Chinese literature emphasizes “close readings” of individual literary texts that rely upon an “ideal of knowledge, of science, and of truth that deems these to be intrinsically conflict-free, self-identical, and hence, reproducible as such and transmissible to students.”91 What is highly characteristic of American liberalism is that such an ideal affirms “its authority precisely by denying the legitimacy of its structural conflicts, and hence of its relation to alterity.”92 One of the important strengths of Rey Chow’s work is her ability to resist this tendency and it is this singular quality that offers one possible answer to McGrath’s query above regarding the reason for the broader reception of her work beyond modern Chinese studies. Her work is both unique and exemplary in its consistent willingness to embrace a conflictual and ambivalent understanding of theory and to pursue the consequences of that ambivalence directly in relation to the problem of knowledge production in the contemporary university.93 I have called attention to the critical effort to delimit the institutional space of North American literary studies, both in terms of its unique modern history and no less so, the particularities of postwar, US Cold War aesthetic ideology at large.94 I want to suggest here by way of a preliminary conclusion that it was by no means only in France where what we customarily designate as theory was conceived in ways very much unlike what we find in the North American

214  Peter Button university. Those other locations where very few, if any, of the institutional conditions I have been describing obtained include, not only elsewhere in Europe and Asia, but no less significantly, beyond the humanities themselves in the natural sciences. If de Man has figured prominently in this account, it is because he represents very much one of the “tendencies” Weber identifies as having “begun to modify the manner in which the humanities, and in particular literary studies, are thought, taught, and practiced.”95 What is only very rarely acknowledged is what Weber also shows, namely that such “tendencies” were already manifest a half a century earlier in the philosophy of science of writers like Gaston Bachelard. Moreover, in his New Scientific Spirit, Bachelard was himself responding to and reflecting upon earlier transformations in mathematics and physics, for example, in the work of Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg.96 These developments themselves were part of a larger transformation in the sciences begun earlier in the 19th century.97 Weber shows that the transformation of the traditional “ideal of knowledge” based on the conception of “truth” as “adequation” or the correspondence between mind and thing (adaequatio intellectus et rei) led to the fundamentally different notion of “scientific reality.” Henceforth, science’s approach to reality came to be characterized as “ambivalent, agonistic, and conflictual,” precisely those dimensions of interpretation that were sometimes excluded from the North American assimilation of theory in the 1970s and 1980s.98 In short, the institutional space of the sciences from the 1890s well into the 1920s, both not only in Europe, but also in China and Japan, was already responding to a different set of imperatives than the ones Weber demonstrates were largely in force in the postwar, North American university’s “ideal of knowledge.” In an analysis that resonates significantly with Weber’s, Thomas Lamarre has shown, these changes included, among other things, “university reforms, [the] institutionalization of academic disciplines, [and] a new emphasis on science-­based technologies.”99 When Japanese during the Meiji went to Europe to study, they discovered that the sciences themselves were in a state of considerable flux. Lamarre argues that we need to rethink that standard narrative of Japan as “lagging hopelessly behind the West.” On the contrary, Lamarre insists that instead we have very good reason to think of Japan (and China, as well) as “entering the modern scene of science at roughly the same historical moment” as the West. What is especially compelling about this analysis is that it indicates the need to think the emergence of literary modernity in China, very much inclusive of modern criticism, within the context of a transnational transformation in the regime of knowledge already underway in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. I have argued that any effort to provide an historical account of the field of North American modern Chinese literary studies will need to address some of the significant differences between the way the field has taken up the task of theory in its work and the way other areas of the humanities have done so beginning in the 1960s. By reflecting critically upon both aesthetic ideology and its critique in the North American university, we may find ourselves better able to identify some of

The North American Field of China Studies  215 the formative, constitutive exclusions that shaped the field. For precisely to the degree that what we have come to designate in North America as theory shares remarkable affinities with the epochal transformation of scientific knowledge beginning in the late 19th century, we can come to appreciate the possibility, for example, that figures like Lu Xun in early 20th-century China were already grappling with a profoundly altered regime of knowledge that we are only now in the North American humanities belatedly coming to understand. Notes 1 I refer, of course, to the contributions of Liu, Link and Duke (1993). Zhang Longxi’s contribution is concerned with the debates regarding the role of theory in the study of Chinese poetry and with offering more general conclusions about the theory debates. See also Wang (2005, 51–56). 2 Zhang (1993b). 3 It is common nowadays to reference the North American field in purely linguistic terms, for example, “modern Chinese literature studies in the English-speaking world” Wang (2005), or “English scholarship on modern Chinese literature,” in Zhang (2016, 10). I preserve the term “North American” to maintain a focus on the highly unique institutional features of modern Chinese studies as it developed in both United States and Canadian universities. I address many of those features below, none of which can be properly accounted for in terms of national languages. 4 Zhang defines those boundaries in terms of the limits presumably attached to the three words, modern, Chinese and literature (Zhang 2016, 1). 5 Liu (1993, 15); Zhang (2016, 6). “Neo-Marxism,” of course, did come to play a role, but the transformation of literary studies in the North American university was the result of fundamental challenges to the pedagogy of aesthetic humanism that continued to orient literary studies in the post-war university. In other words, the issue at hand is less which varieties of neo-Marxism or poststructuralism contributed to this process, but rather precisely what was actually being challenged and transformed. It underscores the fact that theory was intimately connected to an analysis of the role of the humanities in the modern university. I discuss this process in more detail below. 6 Zhang (1993a, 71–72). Of course, to whatever extent that remains true, it is no small irony that in the decades since Zhang raised his concern, it was theory itself, especially in the form of “deconstructive criticism,” that was “abjected and ghettoized” in the contemporary humanities in the United States (Redfield 2007, 237). 7 One quite telling symptom of the field’s isolation from the rest of literary studies in North America is simply that for most of its history, its main conferences took place under the “area studies” umbrella of the Association of Asian Studies, rather than under the auspices of the MLA. Thanks very much to the stalwart efforts of Christopher Lupke and many others to have modern Chinese literature installed in the MLA, this has changed substantially. 8 Weber (2001, 15–16). For an incisive analysis of the area studies in relation to the “global university,” see Looser (2012). 9 Weber (2001, 15). 10 Redfield (2001, 4). 11 Redfield (2001, 4). 12 Végsö 34. See Charisse Burden-Stelly’s important related analysis of “Cold War state pedagogy” in Burden-Stelly (2019) as well as, her discussion of how “antiforeignness and antiradicalism reinvigorated antiblackness” during the 1950s (Burden-Stelly 2017, 345). 13 Végsö 80.

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Végsö 37. The quote is from Richard Gid Powers’ book, Not Without Honor. Végsö 37. Végsö 37. Végsö 34. Végsö 2. Végsö 86. Végsö’s book takes its title directly from W. Cleon Skousen’s 1958 bestseller, The Naked Communist, in which the former FBI agent writes that Communists rely exclusively upon “deceit, disregard of laws, violation of treaties, intimidation, subversion and open insurrection as basic tools of conquest. This makes it a criminal conspiracy” (Skousen 269). Végsö 86. Végsö 82. Végsö 82. Végsö 83. Végsö 85. Discussions of modernism in the field of modern Chinese literature tend to overlook the fact that “high modernism” of the early Cold War US represented a repudiation of the political and aesthetic values of earlier modernism. Végsö writes, “The problem with the historical avant-garde was that it combined political and aesthetic radicalism and completely rejected bourgeois standards. As many commentators of the modernist movement observed, however, one of the paradoxes of the institutionalization of modernism in the 1950s was that it came to represent both politically and culturally the exact opposite of what appears to have been its historical mission” (Végsö 92). Végsö 83. Végsö’s analysis of aesthetic ideology is premised on the initial recognition that what were originally conceived of as two separate, autonomous realms, aesthetics and ideology, reveal themselves to be mutually constitutive. Végsö writes, “The coming of age of aesthetic ideology is dependent on the perception of a certain tautology: aesthetics is ideological and ideology is essentially aesthetic” (Vegso 14). Hsia deemed modernism the necessarily “conservative” choice of a younger generation of Taiwanese writers as a consequence of their parents’ traumatic encounter with Communism on the mainland. I have elsewhere discussed Hsia’s deployment of the concept of Original Sin (see Button 2009, 31–34, passim). But the very same tendency is at work in his analyses of Zhang Ailing’s Rice-sprout Song (see Liu Zaifu 2009). For a fuller discussion of the relationship between modernist poetry, New Criticism and US Cold War Manicheanism, see Kimsey (2017). As Végsö shows in the United States, religion was recruited to carve out a space that established the “legitimate boundaries of politicization…This is why the apolitical foundation of anti-Communism must be religion” (Végsö 54). See Button (2009). Further, the question which I cannot hope to answer adequately here is the extent to which the field’s post-Hsiavian orientation remains beholden to US Cold War aesthetic ideology. An indication of this ongoing consolidation is surely the flurry of recent publications. Given its considerably smaller institutional footprint, I would hazard the claim that few literary fields in the North American academy have ever witnessed the appearance of so many compendia, companions and literary histories in so brief a period of time as the field of modern Chinese literary studies: Wang (2017); Rojas and Bachner (2016); Zhang (2015); Denton (2016). Weber (1987, 30). A paradigmatic instance of this process is the founding controversy of the North American field, namely the Prusek and Hsia polemics regarding the status of “science” in literary study. See Hsia (1963); Průšek (1962).

The North American Field of China Studies  217 36 Such proscriptions are sometimes explicit, as in Zhang Yingjin’s call to avoid “excessive theorization” or Zhang Longxi’s warning against the “scholasticism of pure theory.” In both cases, the problem is less theory itself, than theory deployed in such manner as to provoke the designations “Western,” “European” or “French.” In other words, the higher the concentration of theory, the more likely it is to attract such appellations of national or civilizational origin. One of the consequences of this reasoning is that what is deemed “high theory” is by definition Western, practiced by Westerners in relation to canonical Western literary and philosophical texts. Hence, it ought to be used sparingly, if at all. In less potent concentrations, theory can intermingle more freely with “Chinese reality” or the “aesthetic experience of a Chinese text.” Only in so doing does what Longxi calls a “properly” or “truly theoretical position” in the context of modern Chinese studies become possible (Zhang 1993a, 79). 37 Weber (1987, 32). 38 Weber (1987, 32). 39 Weber (1987, 19). Italics in original. Note that Weber is cautioning that even in those moments of transition when “traditional authority” appears to be challenged, moments very much like that of the field in the early 1990s when theory was being debated, that we be especially sensitive to the conditions that make possible the imposition of “arguments, categories, and values” in a given field’s reconsolidation. 40 Weber (1987, 41–42). 41 Weber (1987, 43). 42 Weber (1987, 44). Gloria Davies represents an important exception, but an exception that nonetheless proves the rule Davies (2000). In part because of her willingness to tackle the problem of how the field has assimilated theory, but above all because she asks the question of how even positive affirmations of the importance of “theory” in the field are often couched in terms that end up neutralizing the potentially disruptive effects of theory itself, Davies’ reflections do not appear to have gained much traction. For a careful and incisive analysis of the notion of liberal consensus in contemporary Taiwan, as well as its role in the “New Cold War,” see Jon Solomon’s Spectral Transitions: The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, forthcoming. 43 In other words, the field’s relation to the rest of literary studies is conceived in ways that look remarkably similar to the “emanation” model of modernization theory (Sakai 2005, 195). 44 Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (2015). 45 Huters (1993, 148). 46 Huters (1993, 148). 47 Wellek and Warren’s 1948 book, The Theory of Literature, argued for the establishment of what they termed, “Departments of General and International Literature, or simply Literature.” A careful reading of this early and enormously important text challenges the prevailing view that modern Chinese literary studies were prevented by “mainstream” literary studies from participating more fully in the post-war literary academy (Wellek and Warren 1977). 48 McGrath (2006). 49 McGrath (2006). 50 In a footnote, Huters writes that “scholarship on modern Chinese literature in the United States has been remarkably slow and reluctant to engage the ‘postcolonial’ discourse that has reshaped so much of contemporary criticism” (Huters 1993,169). 51 Huters (1993, 143). 52 Brown (2005, 24–25). 53 I refer, for example, to Michael Duke’s attack upon the field’s embrace of “postmodernism” and “poststructuralism.” Duke’s article is remarkable, if only because it constitutes one of the most sustained efforts in the entire field to examine the origins of “theory,” if from a decidedly contrarian point of view. His reliance upon John M. Ellis’s Literature Lost, Andrzej Walicki’s Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom, and Jose

218  Peter Button Guilherme Merquior’s Foucault helps Duke to construct what I think can legitimately be regarded as the most theoretically consistent and expressly avowed declarations of North American liberalism in the field (Duke 2000). 54 De Man makes the point that Hegel extends his influence in the American academy most of all where he is unread: “Few thinkers have so many disciples who never read a word of their master” (De Man 1996, 91). The same could very well be said in North American literary studies regarding Kant, especially where the foundations of aesthetic humanism remain unacknowledged. Where Hegelianism makes its appearance often unwittingly in North America, the same cannot be said of literary studies in China where both Hegel and Kant were quite wittingly embraced and extensively read throughout much of the 20th century as means of developing a critical analysis of aesthetic humanism. In short, given the many shared features of modern Chinese and North American criticism, it is hardly surprising that both would feel compelled to pose the problem of modern aesthetics in the post-war era. To the degree that modern Chinese literary studies began with Hsia, who spent his graduate career in the very bosom of modern criticism at Yale and in very close proximity to Wellek and Warren, two figures he very much admired, it is remarkable that the field managed to remain largely insulated from these trends in modern criticism. 55 See (Button 2009). 56 This rejection appeared all the more natural since the North American field, largely following Hsia, tended to dismiss most Chinese literary criticism as Marxist or quasiMarxist and for that reason alone, generally worthy of this rejection. Especially when one looks at the importance of Russian “democratic criticism,” in particular the trio of Belinsky, Cherneshevsky and Dubrolybov (aka. Bie-Che-Du, in Chinese), the picture of modern Chinese criticism grows considerably more complex. But it is as if for the field the mere fact the many pre- and post-Liberation Chinese Marxists were keenly interested in the three 19th-century Russians, rendered the lot of them, by default, crypto- or proto-Marxists and hence of marginal interest. 57 Huters (1990, 4). 58 De Man stated that the essays in Blindness and Insight were not meant to provide a history or survey of criticism as exemplified by Wellek’s History of Criticism (De Man 1983, 8). 59 The many strands of 19th and 20th century Marxist literary criticism are all well accounted for in Wellek’s eight volume History of Modern Criticism. As for de Man, J. Hillis Miller notes the “deep kinship between de Man and Marx’s thought in The German Ideology” (see Oventile 2001).   Several other contributors to Tom Cohen’s Material Events develop the connections between de Man’s work and Marxism. Not long before his untimely passing, de Man spoke of his long-standing interest in Kierkegaard and Marx “as the two main readers of Hegel” and his desire to write about each (De Man 1986, 121). 60 Link (1993, 5). 61 In Resistance to Theory, de Man writes, “The predominant trends in North American literary criticism, before the nineteen sixties, were certainly not averse to theory, if by theory one understands the rooting of literary exegesis and of critical evaluation in a system of some conceptual generality” (De Man 1986, 5). 62 Weber (1987, v–vi). Emphasis in original. Weber notes that Habermas, among many other skeptical observers of deconstruction, were caught off-guard by Derrida’s 1984 essay, “The Priniciple of Reason and the Pupils of the University,” for its focus on “something as evidently extratextual as the University” (Weber 1987, ix). 63 In the discourse of theory, Redfield notes, Derrida and de Man are very often, first paired and then the latter is “abjected.” He writes, “[W]hen accommodations have been made for ‘deconstruction’ over the last thirty years, de Man has repeatedly represented a negative element to be chastised and discarded. It is de Man, according to this slender but clearly defined genre of criticism, who domesticates, Americanizes, and

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6 6 67 68 69 70 7 1 72 73

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aestheticizes the revolutionary Derridean insight” (Redfield 2003, 186n). Claire Colebrook comments on the role of the term “high theory” in this process: “[De] Man’s father is (or should be) Derrida, and […] de Man’s offspring is the dead end of “high theory” that would be supplanted by a proper living theory of political engagement” (Colebrook 2012, 19). Chow remarks that deconstruction “was paradoxically practiced in the most elitist educational institutions, such as Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell, where the followers of deconstruction enjoyed the best of both spiritual and material worlds, as mental radicals and as well-paid Ivy League professors” (Chow 1998, 5). Of course, if the focus were on the “material” conditions of the contemporary neoliberal university itself, rather than on comparing the size of individual professor’s salaries at Ivy or non-Ivy schools, then the situation of cultural studies is genuinely “paradoxical,” as regards anything of a left and right political distinction. As Timothy Bahti has noted, deconstruction as “high theory” “is and remains unapologetically […] a minority position within every institution, paradigm, discourse. In this, deconstruction needs less clients than friends. Cultural studies, on the other hand, trades in the majoration of the minority, the universalization of the diverse, the globalization of the local and subaltern, and this is profitable commerce. The absorption of the university study of the humanities into an economy of sales numbers and returns on investment […] may emerge as the story of our disciplines in our time, in which case cultural studies will find itself strange (or perhaps not so strange) bedfellows with the global marketers” (Bahti 1997, 371). Chow (1998, 4–5). I suspect in her evident and very understandable frustration with Harold Bloom for his derisive scorn for “cultural criticism” as “garbage,” Chow found it difficult not to attribute to high theory-as-deconstruction itself a similar disdain for anything but the most rarified close readings of the European literary and philosophical tradition. In doing so, she obscures the fact that Derrida’s selection of texts was often motivated by a desire to pose the question of “institutionalized system[s] of interpretation” and the exclusions and closures they both require and disavow. He did so precisely in order that one might then be able to challenge what Chow quite rightly wants to call attention to, namely “pedagogical disciplinarity” in the contemporary university (Weber 1987, ix; Chow 1998, 5). As for Bloom, especially later in his career, he became much less an “avatar of [high] ‘theory’” than what Redfield describes as “the cantankerous regent of the Western Canon” (Redfield 2015, 28). Weber (1977, x). Emphasis in original. De Man (1986, 19). McGrath (2006). Redfield (2015, 40). Yingjin Zhang is an exception, though his focus is upon the history of the institution of modern Chinese literary studies. Redfield (2007, 237). Redfield (2007, 237n). Italics in original. Redfield notes that Geoffrey Hartman seconded Lovejoy’s much earlier observation that “T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, and the New Humanists appear […] to us more and more as one with Romanticism” (Redfield 2007, 241). It is well worth recalling in the current context that Hartman and Lovejoy’s insights into modernism as cut of the same cloth as the romanticism it so “violently abjure[d]” has important consequences for understanding Hsia’s “modernist” rejection of “humanitarian realism” that I noted above. What Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have identified as the “veritable romantic unconscious” might well be said both of Hsia, but of Chinese modernism more generally (LacoueLabarthe and Nancy 1988, 15). I speak here, of course, of romanticism as a specifically literary-historical designation. But as Redfield reminds us, when, or I would add, where, romanticism actually “occurred” is less of a concern than the fact that “romanticism altered our understanding of temporality” (Redfield 2003, 34).

220  Peter Button 7 5 Redfield quotes from Rieder (1997); Redfield (2007, 237). 76 Redfield (2007, 229). 77 What has been true since the late 19th century remains true today. Redfield writes, “Literature may no longer serve as the cultural capital of the bourgeoisie in the same way that it may have a century ago; but the teaching of literature remains caught up in a fundamentally aesthetic rhetoric of acculturation and the study of literary texts remains marked by a vexed, complex relationship to the aesthetic-not least when scholars imagine themselves to be rejecting ‘aesthetic ideology’” (Redfield 2007, 232). 78 Redfield (2007, 238); Redfield (2007, 241). 79 Redfield (2007, 238). 80 Redfield (2003, 29). 81 Redfield (2003, 32). 82 Lee (1973, 292, 295). It is a curious claim, since Lee’s book comprises primarily of just such a “list” of “categories and characteristics.” At the end of his book, he refers in a footnote to the important debate between Arthur O. Lovejoy and René Wellek regarding the term “romanticism.” Lee’s lack of interest in romanticism as a literary concept perhaps explains why he likewise displays little inclination to key his book towards the discipline of comparative literature. This in turn can no doubt be explained by the fact that the book is less about literature per se, than the Ericksonian “identity formation” of a group of Chinese writers and their “personality types.” As Lee frankly admits in his preface, “The source materials are literary, but the questions and answers are historical” (Lee 1973, ix). As such, I think it is fair to say that The Romantic Generation, for all its merits, is more a species of literary biography. 83 Lee (2007). 84 This particular coterie of philosophers, to the extent that they were all, if in different manners preoccupied with the problem of modernity, are no less susceptible to LacoueLabarthe and Nancy’s analysis, as the full quote suggests: “A veritable romantic unconscious is discernable today, in most of the central motifs of our ’modernity.’ Not the least result of romanticism's indefinable character is the way it has allowed this so-called modernity to use romanticism as a foil, without ever recognizing or in order not to recognize that it has done little more than rehash romanticism's discoveries” (LacoueLabarthe and Nancy, 1988), 15. Emphasis added. 85 Here I want to use Marc Redfield’s gloss for cultural studies which, “on the one hand […] summarizes a range of approaches that have in common a valorization of the local and particular; on the other hand, in its all-embracing emptiness, the adjective cultural invokes the formalization of the human that constitutes the master narrative of aesthetic ideology” (Redfield 2001, 4). As I have suggested above, theory as it emerges in the North American university is directly connected to a careful analysis of this “aesthetic ideology” whose effects are vastly more pervasive than is generally recognized in the field. 86 Li-fen Chen offers a sensitive, balanced and insightful analysis of Chow’s work (Chen 2000). But the “cultural turn” alluded to in the title, that is the transition from literary to cultural studies is posed as an established fact and is therefore never directly addressed as an event with profound implications—both theoretical and practical—for both. 87 See, for example, Redfield (2001). 88 J. Hillis Miller captures well this ambivalence: “Cultural studies have an uneasy relation to theory, particularly to the deconstructive or post-structuralist theory that preceded them and without which they would have been impossible in the form they have taken. On the one hand, cultural studies are theoretical through and through, so much so that ‘critical theory’ is almost a synonym for ‘cultural studies.’ On the other hand, they are sometimes deeply suspicious of theory, sometimes define themselves as resolutely anti-theoretical, and would stress their practical orientation as against the 'sterile' ratiocinations and elite institutional placement of ‘pure theory’” (Miller and Wolfreys 2005, 335).

The North American Field of China Studies  221 8 9 Miller and Wolfreys (2005, 362.) 90 What I want to underscore here is the fundamental difference between categorical rejections of such things as “reflection theory” or Marxist-inflected theory that closely resemble in form the standard rejection of theory and efforts to engage in a critical analysis of the limitations of such theories. Only the latter allows for the kinds of theoretical possibilities of the sort that Alain Badiou proposes in reading “reflection theory” as one of a renewed materialism’s two necessary metaphors, the other being that of the asymptote (Badiou 2009, 193). 91 Weber writes, “For the admission of the constitutive importance of [structural conflicts and alterity] would amount to a disavowal of the categories of universality, individualism, and consensus that form the foundation of American liberalism, and of the institutions that perpetuate it” (Weber 1987, 44). 92 Weber (1987, 44). 93 I am referring to her analysis in Chow (1998). Only late in the revisions of this essay, did I become aware of her more recent exploration of these problems in Chow (2021). 94 Given the dangers posed by the rapidly escalating new Cold War, a careful examination is urgently needed of the role played by the North American field of modern Chinese literature within higher education in the social reproduction of American liberalism, and more generally, liberal internationalism, during the first Cold War. 95 Weber (1987, ix). 96 Weber (1987, ix, passim). 97 Lamarre (2010, 500). 98 Weber (1987, xiii). Italics in the original. 99 Lamarre (2010, 500).

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Theory of the Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. New York: Continuum, 2009. Bahti, Timothy. “Anacoluthon: On Cultural Studies.” MLN 112, no. 3 (1997): 366–84. Brown, Nicholas. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Burden-Stelly, Charisse. “Constructing Deportable Subjectivity: Antiforeignness, Antiradicalism, and Antiblackness during the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling.” Souls 19, no. 3 (2017): 342–58. ––––––. “In Battle for Peace During ‘Scoundrel Time’: W.E.B. Du Bois and United States Repression of Radical Black Peace Activism.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 16, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 1–20. Button, Peter. Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity. Leiden: Brill Press, 2009. Chen, Li-fen. “The Cultural Turn in the Study of Modern Chinese Literature: Rey Chow and Diasporic Self-Writing.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 43–80. Chow, Rey. Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. ––––––. A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Colebrook, Claire. “Introduction,” Theory and the Disappearing Future On de Man, On Benjamin, edited by Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, with a manuscript by Paul de Man. New York: Routledge, 2012. Davies, Gloria. “Theory, Professionalism, and Chinese Studies.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–42.

222  Peter Button De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983. ––––––. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ––––––. Aesthetic Ideology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Denton, Kirk, ed. The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Duke, Michael S. “Thoughts on Politics and Critical Paradigms in Modern Chinese Literature Studies.” Modern China 19, no. 1 (1993): 41–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/189328. ––––––. “Everyday Resistance to Postmodern Theory.” Tamkang Review XXX, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 7–50. Hsia Chih-tsing. “On the “Scientific” Study of Modern Chinese Literature, a Reply to Professor Průs̆ek.” T’oung Pao 50, no. 4/5 (1963): 428–74. Huters, Theodore. Reading the Modern Chinese Short Story. New York: Routledge, 1990. ––––––. “Ideologies of Realism: The Hard Imperatives of Imported Theory.” In Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique, edited by Liu Kang, and Xiaobing Tang. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Kimsey, John. “The Ends of a State”: James Angleton, Counterintelligence and the New Criticism.” Space Between: Literature & Culture, 1914-1945 vol. 13, (2017). https://scalar. usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-and-culture-1914-1945/vol13_2017_kimsey Krimsky, Sheldon. “A Neoliberal Economics of Science.” In Review of SCIENCE-MART: Privatizing American Science Philip Mirowski. Harvard University Press, 2011. The American Scientist vol. 99, no. 4 (July-August 2011): 330–332. http://www.americanscientist. org/bookshelf/pub/a-neoliberal-economics-of-science. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988. Lamarre, Thomas. “Science, Literature, Japan.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, edited by Bruce Clarke, Paul Whitfield Horn, and Manuela Rossini. New York: Routledge, 2010. Lee, Haiyan. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Lee, Leo Ou-fan. The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973. Link, Perry. “Ideology and Theory in the Study of Modern Chinese Literature: An Introduction.” Modern China 19, no. 1 (1993): 4–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/189326. Liu Kang. “Politics, Critical Paradigms: Reflections on Modern Chinese Literature Studies.” Modern China 19, no. 1 (1993): 13–40. Liu, Zaifu. “Eileen Chang’s Fiction and C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction.” Trans. Yunzhong Shu. MCLC Resource Center. July 2009. https://u.osu.edu/mclc/ online-series/liuzaifu2/ Looser, Thomas. “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the “World.” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 1 (February 2012): 97–117. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01128.x. McGrath, Jason, “Review: Rey Chow, Ed., Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field.” Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 5, no. 2 (Winter 2006). https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/vol5/iss2/7/. Miller, Joseph Hillis, and Julian Wolfreys. The J. Hillis Miller Reader. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Mirowski, Philip. SCIENCE-MART: Privatizing American Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

The North American Field of China Studies  223 Oventile, Robert S. “Paul de Man, Now More than Ever?” Review of: Tom Cohen, et al., eds., Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001. Postmodern Culture, volume 11, no 3 (May 2001). http://pmc.iath. virginia.edu/issue.501/11.3.r_oventile.html. Průšek, Jaroslav. “Basic Problems of the History of Modern Chinese Literature and C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction.” T’oung Pao 49, no. 4/5 (1962): 357–404. Redfield, Marc. “Theory, Globalization, Cultural Studies, and the Remains of the University.” Diacritics 31, no. 3 (2001): 2–14. ––––––. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ––––––. “Aesthetics, Theory, and the Profession of Literature: Derrida and Romanticism.” Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 2 (2007): 227–46. ––––––. Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Rieder, John. “The Institutional Overdetermination of the Concept of Romanticism.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 1 (1997): 143–63. Rojas, Carlos, and Andrea Bachner, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.Sakai, Naoki. “Civilizational Difference and Criticism: On the Complicity of Globalization and Cultural Nationalism.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 188–205. Wang, David Der-wei. “A Report on Modern Chinese Literary Studies in the English Speaking World.” Harvard Asia Quarterly 9, no. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 2005). https://web.archive. org/web/20080706133055/http://www.asiaquarterly.com/content/view/154/40/ ––––––. A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Susanne. “Weigelin-Schwiedrzik on Fogel Review.” MCLC Resource Center (June 5, 2015). https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2015/06/05/weigelin-schwiedrzikon-fogel-review/. Weber, Samuel. “Preface,” and “Introduction.” In Glyph 1: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, edited by Samuel Weber, and Henry Sussman, i–xii. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1977. ––––––. Institution and Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ––––––. “The Foundering of Aesthetics: Thoughts on the Current State of Comparative Literature.” In The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, edited by Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes, 57–72. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. ______. “Globality, Organization, Class.” Diacritics 31, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 15–29. Wellek, René. “Comparative Literature Today.” Comparative Literature 17, no. 4 (Autumn 1965): 332–3. Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Zhang Longxi. “Out of the Cultural Ghetto: Theory, Politics, and the Study of Chinese Literature.” Modern China 19, no. 1 (January 1993a): 71–101. Zhang Yingjin. “Re-envisioning the Institution of Modern Chinese Literature Studies: Strategies of Positionality and Self-Reflexivity.” positions 1, no. 3 (1993b): 816–32. ––––––. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2016.

9

Between Studium and Punctum Tomatsu Shomei and Nakahira Takuma between “Japan” and “Okinawa”* Kaori Nakasone and Mayumo Inoue

In the early and mid-twentieth century, the modality of imperialism has shifted from its previous reliance upon direct colonization to a larval alignment of seemingly sovereign nation-states that locally mediate the dominant protocols of globally circulating capital as well as its terms of biopolitics. As scholars such as Naoki Sakai and Takashi Fujitani point out in the context of Asia and the Pacific after 1945, postwar “Japan” as the nation-state has been legitimated within the U.S.-led regime of a multi-state security arrangement across the Pacific, whereby the image of “Japan” as the discreet nation provides the figure— or the picture—of its national “population,” which then serves as the object to be disciplined, regulated, and militarily policed by the U.S.-led transnational regime of collective or bilateral security treaties.1 Post-1945 “Japan” as the nation-state operates as a local component of transnational biopolitical process, whereby people who live in the former’s territory are differentially “made to live” or “let die” according to the shifting demands upon “life” in the U.S.-led transnational imperial formation. The San Francisco Treaty of 1952 was one such treaty that stipulated the politically acceptable conditions of “life” for postwar “Japanese” citizens within the transnational mode of militarization and capitalist development spearheaded by the U.S. and its agencies. More problematically still, this production of postwar “Japan” in 1952 was predicated upon America’s decision to firmly retain Okinawa as its militarily occupied territory, which it designated, produced, and governed as “the Ryukyu Islands.” This is why critical practices of image-making in postwar Japan cannot simply wish to return to the form of imagined nation based on the naïve belief that it would temporarily precede or lie spatially outside the U.S.-led imperial formation of nations in East Asia. Guided by such a problematic that concerns the visual figuration of the nation within the larger field of transnational warfare and biopolitics under U.S. hegemony, this chapter analyzes photographic practices of Tomatsu Shomei

* This chapter is based upon Kaori Nakasone’s essay titled “Between Punctum and Studium: Photographs of Tomatsu Shomei, Araki Nobuyoshi, and Nakahira Takuma.” We thank Kaitlin Clifton Forcier for her critical feedback on this earlier essay.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-9

Between Studium and Punctum  225 (1930–2012) and Nakahira Takuma (1938–2015). These photographers’ oeuvres remain important as they seek to critically deviate from the received images of not only “Japan” but notably of “Okinawa” under and after its U.S. military occupation (1945–1972). To put the matter succinctly, because Tomatsu and Nakahira sought to “document” the uncanniness of reality outside the grip of subjective aestheticism and pedagogical realism in their work, we are able to gauge the extent to which their critical reformulation of “documentary” practice in art photography succeeds in interrogating the framing of the imagined nations and their populations such as “Japan” and “Okinawa” within the U.S.-led regime of multistate warfare and security. From the outset, this chapter argues that, despite Tomatsu’s and Nakahira’s efforts to “document” their encounter with uncanny traces of alterity that are irreducible to any figures of imagined nation or culture, their photographs of Okinawa tend to slide into the realm of the predictable or the stereotypical. Tomatsu and Nakahira began to shoot photographs in Okinawa in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, respectively, when many in Okinawa were already cognizant that the series of “secret agreements” between the U.S. and Japan had compromised the terms of Okinawa’s much-coveted “reversion” to Japan in 1972, effectively turning it into an opportunity for these states to retain or further reinforce the presence of U.S. military bases across Okinawa and mainland Japan.2 As Tomatsu and Nakahira continued to take photographs in or about Okinawa until the very ends of their careers, their efforts to capture the appearances of the uncanny in Okinawa often ended up producing more indexes of the exotic. Arguably, their romanticizing confirmation of the imagined culture of “Okinawa” occurs alongside their critical interrogation of the imagined culture of “mainland Japan.” Why does this disparity occur in their practices? In what ways do their deployment of exoticism in Okinawa and criticism of the same in mainland Japan further reinforce the preexisting manners of imagining nations, cultures, and populations in East Asia under U.S. hegemony? The following is an attempt to provide some answers to these questions. Figurations of “Japan” and “Okinawa” in Tomatsu and Nakahira’s Work Born in 1930, Tomatsu Shomei began photography by producing surrealist-inspired photographic images as a student at Aichi University. In 1954, he was hired by the Iwanami Shoten publisher to produce two books of reportage photography for the famous Iwanami Shashin Bunko [Iwanami Photography Library] series founded by realist photographer and critic Natori Yonosuke.3 After quitting the Iwanami Shoten in 1956, Tomatsu became quickly known as one of the promising younger photographers for his series such as Houses [Ie], Occupation [Senryo], and 11:02, Nagasaki. In these series, Tomatsu demonstrated his ability to formally isolate elements from well-known contexts of social struggle that were often the favored subjects of reportage photography [hodoshashin] and to recompose these elements into his aesthetically well-composed pictures.

226  Kaori Nakasone and Mayumo Inoue Tomatsu’s ability to heighten this tension between social space of predictable legibility and quotidian space in which materials exceed this frame of legibility made a strong impression on many critics, including Watanabe Tsutomu. In his essay titled “the New Tendency in Photographic Expression” (1960), Watanabe praises Tomatsu’s images that inscribe the very obtuseness of objects that escapes the grip of both socialist realism and subjective aestheticism which were prevalent then among many photographers in Japan. Watanabe specifically discusses how Tomatsu’s work exemplifies a new type of photography that is attuned to its own medium-specific possibility, allowing new images to emerge at a critical disjunction between exterior materiality and photographer’s interior consciousness that gives a novel form to it.4 On the other hand, Natori, who had earlier helped Tomatsu at the Iwanami publisher, began to express his doubt over the very “newness” of this “new tendency” by pointing to its resemblance to European avant-garde photography of the 1930s. Crucially, Natori’s critique hinges upon what he sees as Tomatsu’s tendency to creatively withdraw objects from the scenes of social event or activism, which leads to both aestheticization of these objects and obfuscation of their social contexts.5 Although the two critics’ valuations are diametrically opposing, their reviews, published at a key moment in Tomatsu’s career, captured the photographer’s desire to develop a method that allows him to highlight the objects’ relative autonomy in relation to their social contexts of Japan in the late 1950s. Tomatsu visited Okinawa for the first time in February 1969, as part of his attempt to produce a sequel to his Occupation [Senryo] series. Following a oneyear residency in Okinawa after its “reversion” to Japan in 1972, he moved to the Miyako Islands in 1973 and lived there for seven months. In the period from 1969 to 1975, Tomatsu produced two major photobooks that explicitly thematized Okinawa: The Bases Do not Exist in Okinawa, but Okinawa Exists in the Bases [Okinawa ni kichi ga arunodewa naku kichi no nakani Okinawa ga aru] (1969) and The Pencil of the Sun [Taiyo no empitsu] (1973).6 Nakahira was born in 1938 in Tokyo. Having studied Spanish at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, he began working as an editor for The Eyes of the Era [Gendai no me], a leading New Left magazine of the era. It was during his tenure at The Eyes of the Era that Nakahira met Tomatsu, who encouraged him to seriously pursue photography instead of poetry. After leaving the magazine’s publisher Gendai Hyoron, he began working as both a photographer and photography critic, eventually founding the small magazine Provoke with critic Taki Koji, poet Okada Takahiko, and photographer Takanashi Yutaka. Provoke, as its subtitle declared, aimed to provide “provocative documents for thought.” Provoke made explicit its desire to invent heretofore absent forms of thought that would contest the mass-mediated production and circulation of image and discourse. As Nakahira argues, the very format of Provoke—with its combination of photographs without captions and lengthy critical essays—partially resembled the occupied spaces on many university campuses where students sought to sever the link between the apparatus of the state and that of knowledge production. Correspondingly, its aesthetic of “are, bure, boke” [“rough,

Between Studium and Punctum  227 blurry, and out-of-focus”] visually registered the ways in which objects momentarily flash in urban space, opening a photographic phenomenology that could interrupt the dominant circuit of vision and cognition and indicate the possibility of new “thoughts” to come.7 For Nakahira, Provoke’s attempt to “negate photography [that serves] as an illustration of existent words that start from meaning and return to it” constitutes a part of his larger critique of mediated environment or “milieu” [miryu] that reinforces the mutual alignment of the state, capital, and mass media. He thus also implicates in his critique many left-leaning photojournalists who are caught in this “milieu.” After all, it is these journalists who shot the images of the student-­ occupied Yasuda Auditorium on the Tokyo University campus from the positions allocated to them by the police. If these photographers continue to comprehend social struggles in Japan as well as in the Third World through a web of already known causalities, Nakahira wants instead to inscribe a photographic image of the object that can “interrupt” this web of represented forms. He uses the word “freedom” to describe this power that inheres in the object itself.8 While it is tempting to imagine a clear “turn” between his Provoke-era aesthetics of “rough, blurred, and out-of-focus” appearance of things that are captured at night and his post-Provoke interest in the clarity of things that scintillate in the middle of the day and “repel” his gaze, it is more apt to note in Nakahira’s entire career an extended effort to see the profiles of vibrant matters that elude the mass-mediated circuit of image and thought. In a 1967 essay titled “The Breakdown of an Immobile Perspective,” Nakahira already shows interest in the inhuman appearance of things that falls out of human consciousness. In another essay titled “Materials of Evidence” (1969), Nakahira draws upon Walter Benjamin’s assessment of Eugène Atget’s photographs and praises the latter’s work that provides “evidence” of deserted city space and its covert indication of “historical processes.” Reflecting upon Atget’s influence on Walker Evans’s works that were shot in the U.S. South, Nakahira valorizes Evans’s ability to photograph the very ways in which “things appear as they are before the photographer’s eyes.”9 In another essay from 1969, Nakahira meditates on Henri Colpi’s film The Long Absence [Une aussi longue absence, 1961] in which an amnesiac man clips photographs from magazines for reasons he himself cannot articulate fully. In the essay, Nakahira identifies with the protagonist for the latter seems to know somehow that photographic images “appeal to the vast realm of the unconscious” and “provide a provocative document that stimulates words.”10 Crucially, Okinawa during and after the troubling process of its “reversion” to mainland Japan in May 1972 became a site where Nakahira sought to examine the degree to which his attention to “things” in photography could potentially interrupt the “milieu” of images that subtended the flow of power between the U.S. and Japan. In July 1973, a mere five months after the publication of “Why the Illustrated Botanical Dictionary,” Nakahira visited Okinawa for the first time to attend the trial of Matsunaga Yu, a young dye artisan and activist from the mainland who was wrongfully indicted by the Okinawa Prefectural

228  Kaori Nakasone and Mayumo Inoue Police after the Yomiuri Shimbun had published a photograph that showed him standing alongside the murdered local police officer at the November 10, 1971 “general strike” against the “reversion.” Although the trial ended with the acquittal of Matsunaga, Nakahira’s involvement in the Matsunaga trial crystalized various desires that were mutually overdetermined for Nakahira: his critique of mass-mediated space of images, his exploration of inhuman “gaze” of “things” beyond human mediation, and his support of “Third World” nationalisms as a viable means of decolonization in places such as Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, and Okinawa.11 Studium/Punctum in Tomatsu and Nakahira Although Tomatsu and Nakahira worked strictly in the field of “art photography” in postwar Japan, their efforts to “document” reality outside the mainstream and activist repertoires of stereotypes push them toward a mode of looking that Roland Barthes explicates under the notion of punctum in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. As Barthes defines, punctum refers to an enigmatic point in a photograph that “rises from the scene” of cultural representation, exhibiting a “speck” or “cut” that “pricks” its viewer’s vision that is otherwise trained to decode photographs through studia, a set of “figures,” “gestures,” and “actions” that compress already established historical or political meanings.12 Although Barthes’s idea of punctum is widely known, three specific aspects of this concept should prove helpful in further elucidating Tomatsu’s and Nakahira’s critical practices. First, punctum does not exist in its spatial or temporal separation from a field of socio-political legibility that consists of studia. Rather, it exerts its “pressure of the unspeakable” by “break[ing]” or “wound[ing]” such a field of cultural legibility.13 Second, punctum brings an affective shock for the viewer’s conscious imagination, deforming and transforming the schema that this viewer uses to categorize the world and its entities. As Barthes himself puts it, such a viewer experiences a photographic punctum’s “poignant” force that “bruises me.” When a punctum appears on someone’s face with an “unanalyzable” “air,” it attests to this atmospheric aspect of punctum that at once affects us and resists ideation.14 Third, punctum interrupts linear historical narratives by providing an intense “compression” of time. It leaves a “vertigo of time” in its wake, wherein the viewer feels the entanglement of the past [that it has taken place] and this past’s paradoxical future [that something that is unsaid in it may happen] that intrudes into the present moment.15 Punctum enacts a temporal disturbance in the chain of “a whole causality” by leaving traces that fall out or spill forth from the linear postulation of set causes and their equally set effects.16 Given Tomatsu’s and Nakahira’s critical desires to “document” fleeting reality outside the dominant vocabulary of stereotypes in both mainland Japan and Okinawa, we would expect that their works offer viable critique of studia that have been historically attached to both of these places. We would also expect that

Between Studium and Punctum  229 their works are capable of refraining from distributing puncta and studia to either side of the constructed binary opposition that holds between “mainland Japan” and “Okinawa.” From the outset, however, their practices often reveal the risk of reducing the taut tension between punctum and studium into a set of neatly differentiated aesthetic traits that can be mapped onto the existing schema of racialization and exoticization between “mainland Japan” and Okinawa.” That is to say, both Tomatsu and Nakahira, to different degrees, do not fully explore this irruptive spatiotemporality of puncta in their photographs that are shot in or thematize “Okinawa.” Punctum in Tomatsu

Tomatsu’s early series such as House and 11:02, Nagasaki seem generally guided by his interest in the quotidian elements of postwar “Japanese culture” that are resistant to the influence of what he calls “Americanization.” But if the House series (1960) partially aims to picture the shape of a “Japanese” house that has crumbled due to the power of a natural disaster, which then indexes an exterior force of magnitude that invades an interior space, the actual photographs that constitute House constantly slip from the grip of such a onedimensional studium.17 In fact, House tracks Tomatsu’s own long exposure to the traces and specks that have already wounded this house. In one photograph from the series published in Photo Art in March 1960, Tomatsu shoots the ceiling of the house from a lower position, allowing numerous radial molds to overflow the ceiling’s orderly grid pattern. In the next double-page photograph, its entire field is covered by the gridded roof tiles of the house, each of which is covered and gnawed by mosses. Such surfaces of vulnerability in the House series turn this house inside out, its interior space folding out as many interfaces of exposition. With his use of tripod, long exposure, and nearly closed fstop ranging from 8 to 22, Tomatsu allows two forms of temporality to overlap in these photographs: the indeterminate past of the crumbling house that now oozes forth as the molds and mosses and the duration of the present in which the photographer finds or touches these traces from the past.18 Similarly, in Tomatsu’s 11:02 NAGASAKI (1968), some of the photographs exceed this book’s chronological narration of Nagasaki’s recent history in postwar Japan that begins with the photograph showing the time of the bombing (at 11:02 in the morning of August 9, 1945) and ends with the photograph of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier anchored in Sasebo. In one photograph titled “Atomic Bomb Victim Tsuyo Kataoka, Nagasaki,” Tomatsu treats this elderly woman’s face formally in a manner that recalls many surfaces in the House series. The photograph positions Kataoka at the center by either shooting her image in close-up or cropping the surrounding landscape. Kataoka’s face is almost out-of-frame, forcing the viewer to come face to face with the veins, wrinkles, and orifices on her face. Since the impact of the bombing is palpable not simply through but more literally as the very surface of Kataoka’s face, Tomatsu’s photograph enacts a punctum’s sudden ignition within and against the linear understanding of socio-political

230  Kaori Nakasone and Mayumo Inoue events in postwar Nagasaki. Kataoka’s stern expression also resists our desire to bestow easily legible meanings on it. As we avert our gaze to her black hair above her forehead, we sense an almost imperceptible formal resonance between her face and the shape of the smoke that rose on August 9, 1945. In the photograph, Kataoka’s face “rises from the scene” of cultural codes since it is a form of what Barthes calls “vertigo of time.” The wrinkles and holes on her face re-summon the force of the bombing and, by doing so, wound the self-narration of the nation on its way toward postwar recovery. Many of Tomatsu’s photographs from the late 1950s to 1960s consciously use the format of reportage photography only in order to underscore visual forms that “deviate” [zureru] from reportage’s stereotypical portrayals of “Japanese people” [nihonjin].19 Tomatsu often achieves this end by focusing on oddly humorous appearance of people or novel appearance of objects that he has encountered at sites of political activism or significance. However, as the contemporary artist and critic Okazaki Kanjiro points out, Tomatsu’s conscious “deviation” from the mass-mediated images of the nation and its culture often relies upon and reinforces the viewer’s desire for a truer “Japan” that lurks underneath such images. As Okazaki argues, the type of humor one finds in Tomatsu’s photographs of “Japan”—especially in his series from the late 1950s on local politicians, middle-level managers, and the anti-U.S. base activists in Uchinada—deploys the rhetoric of irony, a discursive mode in which one’s desire for metaphysical truth behind an image remains tacitly present and, precisely because of such tacitness, becomes even more intensified.20 Tomatsu’s ironically indirect reportage of Japanese people’s culture that is said to exist behind the cloak of the culture of “Americanization” is thus a variant of nativism in postwar art in Japan, imbued with its desire for an “imagined return” to Japan which Miryam Sas discovers in the works of many avant-garde artists in Japan during the 1960s.21 But Tomatsu’s desire to capture such images of a culture beyond the grip of the occupier’s influence finds its rather direct and thus non-ironic correlate in the color photographs of Okinawa and South East Asia in his The Pencil of the Sun [Taiyo no empitsu] (1975). Guided by his desire to overcome the selfimposed journalistic limitation of his first photobook on Okinawa titled The Bases Do not Exist in Okinawa, but Okinawa Exists in the Bases (1969), Tomatsu shifts attention to “the vast realm of spirit that is resilient and continues to resist Americanization … in Okinawa.”22 As Tomatsu continues, “my interest quickly slid … toward the spiritual culture of Okinawa as the [photographic] negative that is opposed to what I might call the material culture represented by the U.S.” In the first section of the book, which comprises approximately threequarters of the book, Tomatsu uses 35mm format camera and monochrome film to photograph rituals, landscapes, and ways of life in the Miyako Islands where he resided then. In the last quarter of the book, Tomatsu makes a radical shift by using medium format camera and color film. Through this shift, Tomatsu builds his assemblage of explicitly colorful snapshots of life and landscape in both Okinawa and South East Asia. Tomatsu thus finds his putative antithesis

Between Studium and Punctum  231 to the culture of Americanization in the colorful world of Okinawa/South East Asia, a seemingly seamless cultural continuum that is made to appear so by his decision to begin and end this section of the book with the photographs of Okinawa.23 As sociologist Tokuda Masashi points out astutely, Tomatsu’s belief that he can directly—and therefore non-ironically—capture the images of Okinawa’s alleged “spiritual realm” outside the culture of U.S. occupation replicates the U.S. military government’s cultural policy that sought to actively produce the essentialized dichotomy between America’s technological modernity and Okinawa’s cultural premodernity and to stabilize this hierarchical division by way of both popular discourse and color photography.24 In fact, Okinawa’s military state apparatus—the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands [hereafter referred to as the USCAR]—widely distributed its two propaganda periodicals, Ryukyu Today [Konnichi no Ryukyu] (1957–1970) and The Light of the Courtesy [Shurei no hikari] (1959–1972). In these periodicals, lavishly colorful photographs of seemingly “traditional” customs and crafts in Okinawa as well as the articles on similar topics written by local intellectuals performatively marked the stark dichotomy between America’s democratic modernity and Okinawa’s rich yet atavistic traditions. These periodicals sought to codify the ways in which the former’s transnational militarism and the latter’s developmental nationalism can be mediated smoothly in a mutually beneficial relation.25 As Tokuda’s study shows, Tomatsu’s discovery of books on “traditional” culture of the Yaeyama Islands at the Ryukyuan-American Culture Center (established by the USCAR in 1952) in Ishigaki in December 1971 is not a minor episode within the cultural history of U.S. occupation in Okinawa. Rather, it emblematizes how various discourses of cultural particularism traveled upon the routes of transnational military logistics that have been institutionalized by the USCAR and its occupation politics.26 Such a facile culturalist dialectic Tomatsu posits between the photographic “positive” of the materialist culture of U.S. occupation and its “negative” counterpart of Okinawa’s local “spiritual” culture becomes particularly manifest in a photograph that Tomatsu has shot in Koza, Okinawa in 1979.27 To this day, Koza (currently Okinawa City) hosts the largest U.S. Air Force base in the Asia-Pacific from which infamous B-52 bombers had taken off to engage in carpet-bombing operations over North Vietnam. This photograph shows a woman who stands at the corner of a yellow wall while wearing a traditional kasuri kimono in purple from Okinawa, a key product which has frequently been featured in the USCAR’s periodicals for its putative symbolization of the tradition. The woman’s hair that is done in traditional style invites the viewer to surmise that she is not an ordinary person but probably a professional dancer or singer. The composition of the photograph seems deliberately staged, indicative of Tomatsu’s effort to create a dichotomy between her “traditional” attire and various shop signs in both English and Japanese that suggest the presence of American soldiers in Okinawa. These shop signs that say “Gift Shop,” “Custom Tailored Suit,” “Jewelry,” and “Accessory” also stand in stark contrast to the local police signboard in Japanese

232  Kaori Nakasone and Mayumo Inoue that warns the residents to “lock their homes” and ward off the invasive presence of the soldiers. In this photograph, Tomatsu’s distribution of shapes, texts, and colors as the indices of cultures reinforces the gendered schema of cultural particularities that the USCAR has deployed. They thus repeat the studia of U.S. military occupation: kasuri kimonos versus military uniforms on the background of purple and yellow. Punctum in Nakahira

In his review of I Am a King [1972] that assembles Tomatsu’s representative photographs from the 1960s, Nakahira critically and perceptively divides Tomatsu’s work into two divergent modalities and unequivocally favors the latter. As Nakahira distinguishes the two, the former mode inclines toward “extremely symbolic presentation” of objects while the latter demonstrates Tomatsu’s “intuitive grasp of the surfaces [danmen]” of such objects (219). Paraphrasing the playwright Terayama Shuji’s critique of Tomatsu’s aesthetics, Nakahira expresses his dissatisfaction with the role Tomatsu has chosen to play as a purveyor of easily legible political symbols: “Although I sense an almost murderous gaze in Tomatsu’s work when he photographs quotidian objects, he reduces politics to the thematic of U.S.-Japan Security Treaty when he chooses subjects that are political or social” (220).28 As we have pointed out, Nakahira’s decision to attend the Matsunaga trial in Okinawa in July 1973 stems from his sustained effort to critically overcome the mediated network of established meanings to which photographs are typically obliged to lend indexical support. “Okinawa” then names a privileged topos in Nakahira’s post-Provoke oeuvre, where the three strands of his critical practice tie a knot: his critique of the media network, his effort to photographically capture the “glittering surfaces of things” in a manner that has already been conceptualized in his essays including “Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?”, and his own investment in anticolonial nationalist struggles in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. As the photography scholar Kuraishi Shino points out, during his subsequent visits to Okinawa’s main island (1978) and to Amami Islands (1975) and Tokara Islands (1976) in Kagoshima Prefecture, Nakahira began to produce color photographs that captured the presence of “things” in horizontal shot. The works shot in these islands in the mid- to late 1970s constitute what Kuraishi calls a bulk of “transitory” work that envisaged his subsequent work during and after the 1990s.29 Following this series of works shot in Okinawa and Amami, Nakahira began to exclusively take his color photographs in horizontal shot in the early 1990s. These uncropped photographs, shot within the range of his naked vision, show the disposition of the photographer and his things within a space that they co-inhabit. Especially in recent photobooks such as Degree Zero: Yokohama (2003) and Documentary (2011), Nakahira’s camera eye closes in upon each object’s discrete formal presence. By “juxtaposing” each of his “things” that include plants, statues, cats, and homeless men on multiple pairs of two

Between Studium and Punctum  233 photographs that appear as diptychs, Nakahira seems to have discovered a passage to the realm of things beyond the environmental “milieu” of human desire and its hubristic projection that he has critiqued throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Nakahira’s late diptychs thus display a fruition of his arduous effort to “organize the gazes of things” which he had begun more than two decades ago. Such an “organization,” argues Nakahira in a 1971 essay, becomes possible when the photographer refuses to “anthropomorphize” or “sentimentalize” his objects, enabling a flash of such things’ “fantasticality” beyond the humanmade “fantasies” about them.30 More remarkably still, these late photographs demonstrate an aspect of “organization” that is not discussed in the 1971 essay. That is, Nakahira’s organization of disparate things produces a surprising sense of resemblance or resonance that transgresses the human-made taxonomical order of things. In one diptych from Degree Zero: Yokohama, we see an elderly man sleeping on the street in the right photograph and a duck swimming in a pond in the left photograph. Nakahira’s juxtaposition of their bodies side by side foregrounds how they both bear loosely similar shadows on their heads. The objects that cover their heads also show further formal resemblance: the grass for the duck and a hat for the man. As they both face toward the right side of space, the man and the duck begin to double one another through their formal resemblance and equal presence as objects. Moreover, as the surface of the pond provides a connecting line that binds the two photographs, we begin to sense an odd kinship between the duck that seems to gaze at the man and the man who sees images in his sleep. To be sure, such a connection remains tenuous and disjunctive insofar as the duck and the man are photographed as the distinct beings that stand apart across a distance. While they do not meet or touch one another, their unique signs of strangeness nonetheless find their formal and chromatic reverberations that partially echo among other beings as well. Another diptych from Degree Zero underscores again an implicit formal resonance between a rope that dangles from a ceiling of a temple on the verso side and a girl’s thin body that looks to the camera on the recto side. Given the similarly low angles from which the two photographs are taken, the viewer feels again an odd sense of similarity and equality that manifests between the rope and the girl. More strikingly, this similarity between the rope and the girl that appears in the two photographs eludes the viewer’s effort to verbally articulate the formal or chromatic terms of this resemblance. Rather, their similarity is felt at a level that logically precedes and temporally interrupts the linear temporality of cognition. The visual elements in the diptych co-produce their sense of nondiscursive resemblance that defies categorization: the girl’s blank stare and the rope’s bare presence, the former’s gray and purple striped sweater and the latter’s red and white pattern, and their somewhat similar inclinations to the left side of space. Consequently, these images fit Kaja Silverman’s definition of “analogical” relations, whereby the entities within a visual form show “authorless and untranscendable” similarities that connect them in the midst of their differences that also prevent them from “being collapsed into one.”31 Such a space of analogical

234  Kaori Nakasone and Mayumo Inoue resonance and dissonance that Nakahira organizes now envelops his own camera eye that receives the images of things. Therefore, it is more appropriate to say that Nakahira’s late diptychs are triptychs of mutually reflective surfaces that now include the photographer’s own haptic eyes. Nakahira’s eyes that reflect and receive such images of things seem comparable to Barthes’s spectatorial body that receives and metamorphoses into a spectral appearance of an object in a photograph. In Camera Lucida, Barthes recalls an experience in which his own image in a portraiture exceeds the various figurations of his persona that are expected by himself or the photographer. As he faces his ownmost punctum that foretells his own death in future, his portrait is paradoxically not his own. Rather, it is dispropriative of the subjectivity that Barthes otherwise assumes is there for him or in him. Barthes cannot be the proprietor of his own image because a fatal punctum surfaces in “that very subtle moment when … I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object” (14).32 In such a passage, Barthes wants to be affected by “specks” and “holes” in a photograph that “bruise” his imagination of who he is, his figuration of his subjectivity. In contrast, Nakahira seems already quite at home in the world of uncanny things and their reflective surfaces, one in which analogical links proliferate and engulf his subjectivity. This means that Nakahira’s diptychs conspicuously lack affective tonalities such as pain or shock that cue for Barthes a dramatic breakdown of human subjectivity. In contrast to the Barthean punctum that inflicts its painful yet blissful “ecstasy” upon one who gazes at it, Nakahira’s comparable exploration of that which wounds the viewer of a photograph proceeds through his deadpan and almost atonal quest for the analogical forms of being. And yet Nakahira’s late work, like Tomatsu’s, also succumbs to the lure of particularism especially in its relation to Okinawa. That is, Nakahira’s late photographs occasionally use fragments of texts and signs in urban space as the indices of a culture that is spatially and temporally distant from him. In one photograph from Degree Zero that is taken in Zushi, Kanagawa, Nakahira focuses on the sign for a restaurant’s name Uryukan, implicitly underscoring its second Chinese character Ryu as a found object that stands for his own partially lost memory of Okinawa as the distinct cultural area which he prefers to call “Ryukyu.” While this photograph seems to put Uryukan and Ryukyu in a relation of analogical kinship in the manner that characterizes his other diptychs, Nakahira uses the syllabic fragment of Ryu in Uryukan to signify his own fragmentary memory of Okinawa as Ryukyu. The restaurant sign in the photograph thus serves to be a partial outline of the lost culture or kingdom which Nakahira does not want to equate with the current regional demarcation of Okinawa Prefecture.33 This amounts to a rather crude view of linear history, in which textual fragments merely refer back to the allegedly lost contents of a unique culture of “Ryukyu” and of the similarly lost mnemonic contents of the young Nakahira who visited Okinawa in the early 1970s. Such a hypostatization of a cultural totality that lies in the linear past falls short of Nakahira’s more radical formulation of photographic image’s capacity

Between Studium and Punctum  235 to provoke heretofore non-existent “words” and “thoughts.” Similarly, his tendency to amass images of destitute and elderly homeless men who sleep and dream on streets in mainland Japan tends to project the capacity to dream about a utopian space outside capitalist class relation onto the figure of homeless men that is a very effect of this relation. These late photographs thus tend to index these stereotypes of cultural margins: Okinawa’s putatively “Ryukyuan” cultural substrate and homeless men’s equally putative exteriority to the space of capital. Nakahira’s mobilization of such studia compromises his effort to proliferate analogical kinships across all entities within and against the regimes of power that dominate groups and populations by fetishistically fixing their particularities. Ultimately, Nakahira’s desire to gather fragments of a lost culture of “Ryukyu” is a case of what Michelle Foucault has referred to as the problem of “repressive hypothesis.”34 In fact, Nakahira’s interest in such “repressed” grounds of cultural otherness reflects his avid reading of Herbert Marcuse’s work, which seeks to release “pleasure principle” from the dominant culture that represses play and eroticism, as well as that of Franz Fanon’s work that valorizes the “national spirits” of many “Third World” struggles against the contending national cultures of the “Europeans.”35 One early instance of Nakahira’s surprisingly naïve supposition of cultural essence in Okinawa and its archipelago is found in the “transitory” period of the mid-1970s, when he frequently visited Okinawa and Amami. In his 1976 essay titled “Amami: Waves, Graves, and Flowers, and the Sun,” Nakahira recounts his visits to both Okinawa and Amami through a predictable vocabulary of orientalist stereotypes. As he depicts the archipelago that extends from Okinawa to Kagoshima as a group of “coral-surrounded” islands, Nakahira perceives “qualitative” difference both culturally and politically between “the mainland” and “Okinawa.”36 While Nakahira attempts to qualify his desire to “discover an invisible line that divides Yamato [mainland Japan] and Okinawa” by pointing to a more “complex” process of “encounter between one culture and another,” his very notion of “encounter” reinforces the notion of culture as a relatively fixed substratum that predetermines the habitus of those who live within it. Nakahira then moves on to characterize the putative uniqueness of culture in Okinawa and Amami by suddenly pointing to this culture’s proximity to nature and light. Nakahira thinks that the range of cultural possibility for those who live in Amami is foreclosed by the natural elements of the island: “[T]he graves have generally dissolved into nature …. I could not see any trace of darkness in death there. Perhaps people’s death here means their return to nature. Death co-exists with life. And people were limitlessly kind.”37 During his previous visit to Naha, Nakahira had fantasized about a certain verbal fecundity that lay behind local farmers’ “silence” that he felt at a market, leading him to long for a time in future when “Okinawa begins to have words as Okinawa.”38 Nakahira’s avowal of cultural essentialism in relation to Okinawa is problematic not only because of its predictable mobilization of studia concerning Okinawa. It is also problematic because of its reliance on and replication of

236  Kaori Nakasone and Mayumo Inoue the notion of cultural substrate that he assumes somehow precedes modernity’s inscription of cultural particularities as the locally naturalized nodes of domination within the global space of capitalism and its biopolitics. Nakahira’s use of studia about Okinawa and its surrounding islands—their “brightness,” “kindness,” and “nature”—cannot question the historical production of cultural spectacles and culturalist spectatorship through which the very markers of the local have been rendered unquestionable within the larger filed of this global biopolitics of capital.39 Conclusive Remarks Not surprisingly then perhaps, the subtitles of Tomatsu’s Pencil of Nature and the title of Nakahira’s essay on Amami enlist similar studia about Okinawa and its surrounding islands. Moreover, the very syntaxes of their subtitles also resemble one another: “the ocean, sky, island, and people, and toward South East Asia” for Tomatsu and “waves, graves, and flowers, and the sun” for Nakahira. As literary critic and theorist Shinjo Ikuo perceptively summarizes, photographers in both mainland Japan and Okinawa often tend either to “localize that which Japan has lost” in Okinawa or to uncritically valorize “the images of ‘the South’ that [dialectically] resist the gaze of the North.” These (self-)orientalizing tendencies amount to figure this “South” as the temporal or spatial other of the “North.”40 Since the temporal “other” must always be mapped spatially and the spatial “other” must be comprehended within global modernity’s developmental timeline, the two types of orientalism are logically indistinguishable. Tomatsu’s “haptic” attention to the decaying surfaces that are full of specks and molds turns an alleged “interior” of familial or national domesticity inside out, soliciting us to re-view it as an “interface” that is always already suffused with exterior forces.41 Nakahira’s lifelong interest in the traces of “things” as the “bruising wounds” points to photography’s potential to prick, tremble, and partially undo a delimited border between the photographic subject and the photographed object.42 Such are Tomatsu’s and Nakahira’s explorations of puncta. They critically bruise the figures of imagined nations or cultures such as “Japan” and “Okinawa” within the geopolitical space of Pax Americana. These puncta could interrupt the uncritical slippage that many photographers in both mainland Japan and Okinawa have demonstrated toward the lure of culturalism. With few exceptions, there has been a shortage of studies about Tomatsu and Nakahira in Japanese that critically attend to both the promises and perils of their aesthetics and politics. There are two types of challenge to those who wish to critically countersign the rich legacies of Tomatsu’s and Nakahira’s oeuvres. First, their tendencies to delimit and exoticize certain localities within a given grid of representational codes or studia must be thoroughly critiqued. Second, and therefore, such a critique can unfold in a manner that in fact extends Tomatsu’s and Nakahira’s own efforts to produce photographs that resist and exceed the given order of discursive codification in postwar Japan. It should critically follow

Between Studium and Punctum  237 their pursuit of photographic puncta as signposts for a new mode of thought, a method or methodus for new paths of thinking and knowledge within and beyond the epistemic order of Pax Americana and its inter-national modality of politics and biopolitics. Notes 1 Sakai (2007). Fujitani (2011). On the relationship between imperial biopolitics and aesthetics especially in East Asia, see also Inoue and Choe (2019). 2 It is not possible in the space of this essay to fully elucidate the complex history of Okinawa’s “reversion” to mainland Japan and its relation to the so-called Okinawa secret deals [Okinawa mitsuyaku] brokered between the U.S. and Japan. On this history, see, for example, Inoue (2017). 3 Tomatsu produced two books for the Iwanami series, Suigai to Nihonjin [Flood damage and Japanese people] (1954) and Yakimono no machi, Seto [The city of pottery, Seto] (1956). 4 Watanabe (1960, 148–149). 5 Natori (1960, 147, 149). 6 Tomatsu’s biographical facts are based on his chronology complied by Kasagi (2013, 242–245). The volume is hereafter referred to as Gendai Shiso: special issue on Tomatsu. 7 Nakahira (2007, 234). This book is hereafter referred to as Mitsuzukeru. 8 “Chinmoku o sasaeru kotoba” [Words that subtend silence] in Nakahira (2007, 93). Originally published in September 1969. 9 Nakahira (2007, 53). 10 Nakahira (2007, 85). 11 Nakahira, (2007, 237). 12 Barthes (1981, 25–26). 13 Barthes (1981, 40). 14 Barthes (1981, 107). 15 Barthes (1981, 97). 16 Barthes (1981, 42). 17 When the Isewan Typhoon of 1959 destroyed the house in the Aichi Prefecture where Tomatsu was born, he conceived the idea to photograph images of a house that has partially crumbled due to natural disaster. He then found a house that seemed ideal for the project in Amakusa in Kumamoto and published the photos of this house as a series in the magazine Photo Art between January and September in 1960. 18 Similar images of the past’s traces in the present appear in his later series Plastics 1987– 89, a collection of Tomatsu’s photographs showing the partially disfigured shapes of bottles and other types of trash that washed upon a beach in Chiba. 19 Okazaki (2013, 218). The term zure originally appears in Ueno (1999, 15). 20 Okazaki (2013, 217). 21 Sas (2011, xv). 22 Tomatsu (1975, n.p.). 23 But Tomatsu’s (1969) book on Okinawa already assumes a binarism that manifests between the blurry images of U.S. bases and the clearly outlined images of local culture in Okinawa. 24 Tokuda (2013, 202–212). 25 Tokuda (2013, 206–208). 26 Tokuda (2013, 207–208). 27 Tomatsu (2011). 28 For Nakahira’s more openly critical remark on Tomatsu, see the dialogue between him and Moriyama Daido that is included in Moriyama (1972, 282–283). See also Nakahira’s somewhat comical complaint toward Tomatsu’s self-commodified persona in relation to Okinawa in Nakahira (2007, 275). Originally published in January 1973.

238  Kaori Nakasone and Mayumo Inoue 29 Kuraishi thus calls into question the mythologized view of Nakahira’s life, according to which a radical shift in his aesthetics took place after his experience of coma and amnesia in September 1977. See his curatorial postscript in Nakahira (2003, 169–172). 30 Nakahira (2007, 298). 31 Silverman (2015, 11). 32 As Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca argue, Barthes’s notion of “amorous” distance points to the disjunctive gap across which the photographer and the photographed are linked. In this “amorous” relation, “the encounter between the subject and the photograph he holds in his hands produces the spark that subjectivizes the image (that “animates it”) and that simultaneously illuminates his own photographic being” (Cadava and Cortés-Rocca 2009, 111). 33 Nakahira’s comment during the symposium devoted to Tomatsu’s work on Okinawa held in Urasoe, Okinawa in 2002 shows his use of the word “Ryukyu” as the signifier of “that which has disappeared” and of the word “Okinawa” as the name of the current locality. Nakahira (2002, 126). 34 Foucault (1978, 11). 35 There are many instances in which Nakahira positively refers to Marcuse and Fanon. See, for instance, his essays “Kiroku toiu genei” and “‘Daisan sekai’ to seikimatsu no eizo” [“The Third World” and visual images at the end of the century] in Nakahira (2007, 244, 276). Originally published in December 1975. 36 Nakahira, “Amami: nami to haka to hana, soshite taiyo” [Amami: Waves, Graves, and Flowers, and the Sun] in Nakahira (2007, 383). Originally published in February 1976. 37 Nakahira (2007, 384). 38 Nakahira, “Waga nikugan refu: 1975, Okinawa, summer” [My naked lens reflex: 1974, Okinawa, summer] in Nakahira (2007, 352). 39 In fact, Nakahira’s critique of the nation-forms in Europe and mainland Japan remains both consistent and astute. See his critique of France’s Popular Front and the Stalinist Soviet Union in “Rekishi e no ishi: shuru rearizumu no senzaiteki na chikara” [Will to history: potential power of surrealism] in Nakahira (2007, 369) and his more sustained critique of the logic of the “nation” (kokumin) that the state (kokka) retrospectively utilizes to obscure its reproduction of class relations in “Kiroku toiu genei” in Nakahira (2007, 225). 40 Shinjo and Shiga (2013, 189). 41 The expression of “haptic attention” is taken from Ueno Koshi’s analysis of “haptic desire” in Ueno (1999). The word “interface” is partially derived from the name of Tomatsu’s own exhibit held at the National Film Center in Tokyo in 1996. 42 Nakahira, “Shisen no tsukiru hate” [At the limit where my gaze exhausts itself] in Nakahira (2007, 420). Originally published in May and June, 1976.

Bibliography Barthes, Rolland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Cadava, Eduardo, and Paola Cortés-Rocca. “Notes on Love and Photography.” In Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, edited by Geoffrey Batchen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Fujitani, Takashi. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Inoue, Mayumo. “The Inter-State ‘Frames of War’: On ‘Japan-U.S. Friendship’ and Okinawa in the Transpacific.” American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2017): 491–9.

Between Studium and Punctum  239 Inoue, Mayumo, and Steve Choe. “Introduction: Theorizing beyond Imperial Aesthetics.” In Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia, edited by Mayumo Inoue and Steve Choe. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. Kasagi, Hinako. “Nenpu” [Chronology]. Gendai Shiso, special issue on Tomatsu Shomei. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2013. Moriyama, Daido. Shashin yo sayonara [Farewell to Photography]. Tokyo: Shashin hyoron sha, 1972. Nakahira, Takuma. “Shashin no kioku, shashin no sozo: Tomatsu Shomei to Okinawa” [Memory of Photography, Creation of Photography: Tomatsu Shomei and Okinawa], Photographers Gallery 2 (2002), 120–129. ––––––. Mitsuzukeru hateni hi ga. . . hihyo shusei 1965-1977 [Fire at the end of continuous gaze: collected essays 1965-1977]. Tokyo: Osiris, 2007. ––––––. Genten kaiki: Yokohama [Degree Zero: Yokohama]. Tokyo: Osiris, 2003. Natori, Yonosuke. “Atarashi shashin no tanjo” [The birth of new photography]. Asahi Camera. October 1960. Okazaki, Kanjiro. “Shashin ga sonzai suru basho” [The place where photography exists]. Gendai Shiso, special issue on Tomatsu Shomei. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2013. Sakai, Naoki. Nihon, Eizo, Beikoku: Kyokan no kyodotai to teikokuteki kokuminshugi. [Japan, Visual Images, and the Unites States: the Community of Sympathy and Imperial Nationalisms]. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2007. Sas, Miryam. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011. Shinjo, Ikuo, and Shiga Lieko. “Ikirareru shashin, ikirutameno shashin” [Viable photography, photography for living]. Gendai Shiso, special issue on Tomatsu Shomei. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2013. Silverman, Kaja. Miracle of Analogy, or the History of Photography, Part I. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2015. Tokuda, Masashi. “Senryo to kara shashin: Tomatsu Shomei to shimajima,” Gendai Shiso, special issue on Tomatsu Shomei. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2013. Tomatsu, Shomei. Okinawa ni kichi ga arunodewa naku kichi no nakani Okinawa ga aru [The Bases Do not Exist in Okinawa, but Okinawa Exists in the Bases]. Tokyo: Shaken, 1969. ––––––. Taiyo no empitsu: Okinawa, umi to sora to shima to hitobito soshite tonan ajia [Pencil of the sun: Okinawa, the ocean, sky, island, and people, and toward South East Asia]. Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbun Sha,1975. ––––––. Shashinka Tomatsu Shomei: Zenshigoto [Tomatsu Shomei: Photographs]. Nagoya: Nagoya Municipal Museum of Art, 2011. Ueno, Koshi. Shashinka Tomatsu Shomei [Photographer Tomatsu Shomei]. Tokyo: Seidosha, 1999. Watanabe, Tsutomu. “Atarashi shashin hyogen no keiko” [The tendency for new photographic expression]. Asahi Camera. September 1960.

10 Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies in White Settler Colonialism Jon Solomon

Politics, Personality, and Nation Building: Burma’s Search for Identity, Lucian Pye’s (1962) analysis of obstacles preventing a postcolonial nation from readily joining the ranks of a “world culture based upon modern science and technology,”1 offers a glimpse into the paradigmatic formation of US area studies around the key notions of transition and identity. As one of the leading advocates of postwar American modernization theory, Pye’s understanding of the fundamental difference between postimperial and postcolonial nations hinges on an ill-defined quality of relative stability. Previously, Seymour Martin Lipset had already articulated this difference at the end of the 1950s, correlating per capita income and literacy rates to the difference between “stable” and “unstable” democracies or authoritarianisms.2 Pye’s approach is qualitative rather than quantitative. What he terms the “more stable modern systems” of the postimperial nations are distinguished from the “transitional systems” of the postcolonial world by the qualities of transition and identity crisis.3 Pye’s work has been a favorite object of attack for critical voices in North American Asian Studies since the Committee for Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) published its first Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1969.4 Scant attention has been paid, however, to those ways in which Pye conformed to, or established, a norm for area studies scholarship shared by his critics within the areal disciplines. Seen from today’s perspective, when modernization theory has been thoroughly critiqued time and time again, the truly paradigmatic aspect of Pye’s work lies not in the methodologies he employed nor in the highly ideological positions and assumptions he espoused, nor even in the products of his research, all of which are today definitively outdated in various ways, but in terms of its aesthetic ideology. This aesthetic ideology comprises principally the following elements: (1) the positionality of the area studies specialist; (2) an interest in narratives of transition and conversion accompanied by a rich metaphorical and metonymic lexicon; (3) an emphasis on the realization of identity rather than on the exercise of sovereignty; and (4) the universalism of a typology of specific difference (a logical economy of genus, species, and individual). My interpretation of Pye is inspired by Richard Slaughter, the first to clearly see Pye’s contribution to modernization theory in terms of aesthetic ideology: Pye recasts the technical structural and infrastructural adjustments of modernization as a late industrial Bildung—as a process of acculturation through DOI: 10.4324/9781003036661-10

Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies   241 which the “becoming…modern world” and the becoming-modern human personality adequate themselves to the expansive internationalist “culture” of developmentalism, to its hegemonic vision of modernity, and to its transition narrative of modernization. Bildung, human rights, and human personality development become species in the genus of modernization…5 Following Slaughter’s brilliant insight, I will use the following discussion to flesh out the constituent elements of transpacific aesthetic ideology developed by Pye. Son of a Congregational missionary in China, Pye was part of a large, informal cohort of US area specialists, such as Edwin Reischauer and Doak Barnett, born of missionary parents or clerics. Pye’s principal contribution to US Cold War modernization theory lay in the application of political psychology to the postcolonial world. Pye first encountered political psychology through the work of Harold Lasswell (1902–1978), another minister’s son who became a professor of law at Yale University and served as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA), of the American Society of International Law, and of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS). Pye’s encounter with Lasswell’s work was furthered by another one of his teachers, Gabriel Almond (1911–2002), a fellow student of Lasswell’s. The son of Russian-Jewish and Ukranian-Jewish immigrants, Almond enjoyed an illustrious career teaching at Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, after serving, as had many early researchers in the postwar area studies establishment, in the Office of War Information in World War II. Applying Lasswell’s theories to France and Italy, Almond’s research depicted the rising wave of interest in communism among sections of the French and Italian working class as the product of a psychological deviation, a theme that found its way into Pye’s own work in a work for 1956, titled Guerrilla Communism in Malaya. At the beginning of the 1960s, Pye’s application of political psychology did not stop with Lasswell and Almond but incorporated parts of the work of a German-­ Jewish emigré, Erik Erikson (1902–1994). Taking Erikson’s emphasis on “identity crisis” as a constitutive element of individual and collective individuation, Pye focused more specifically than Lasswell or Almond on the psychological aspects, for both the individual and the society at large, of socio-political transition. Like Almond and Laswell, Pye viewed transitional difficulties as the social expression of psychological deviance. Aiming to establish a psychosocial science that saw the individual and the social as analogical entities tied together in a single struggle for identity, Pye discarded the vestiges of the dialectical approach Erikson had inherited from prewar German political anthropology. Individuals and societies each underwent parallel processes of identity formation through a period of adolescent crisis. In place of a dialectical relationship that would affect both terms, or parties, to the relationship, Pye substituted the notion of feedback. In Pye’s appropriation of Erikson, there was no possibility of a feedback mechanism between majority and minority populations, or between the stable “equilibrium systems” of

242  Jon Solomon the West6 and the volatile systems of the postcolonial world, that could potentially expose the former to unforeseen moments of crisis such as Erikson had sensed immediately upon American escalation of the Vietnam War. For Pye, growth was linear, progressive, and irreversible. The metaphor of the feedback circuit first appears in the introduction to Politics, Personality, and Nation Building where Pye begins his study with the observation of a “circuitous pattern”7 that ties individual identity to national identity. In tandem with this electromagnetic metaphor – which will serve as a template for thinking the problem of power, Pye deploys the other great metaphor of the age, the mechanisms8 or the machinery of politics and government.9 In effect, we need to take Pye seriously when he speaks of nation building. Pye straddles a delicate line between constructivism and the given. On the one hand, “the nation-state is the most appropriate and natural unit of political life,”10 “the critical unit of human social organization,”11 on the other hand, it is something that must be built. In the final analysis, the reason why the nation-state still has yet to be constructed lies in its role in the construction of a much larger, future entity – “world culture.” Hence, the machine and its electromagnetic circuits express a series of interrelationships organized according to the ascendant logic of individual, species, and genus. The addition of the human dimension12 which with Pye begins his study essentially transforms the engineering project of modernization into a project in bioengineering. Pye’s genius was to center his analysis squarely on the concept of identity, a concept elastic enough to articulate population management to knowledge production on both sides of the former divide between imperial and colonial populations. Significantly, the displacement from the exercise of sovereignty to the quest for identity was paralleled by an assimilation of the term subjectivity – a mainstay of social theory throughout the 19th and 20th centuries until the defeat of Germany at the end of the Second World War. In the midst of a sixpart bullet-point list of the component elements of political culture, a concept developed by Almond, Pye stresses the “importance of the subjective”13 and relates the “subjective dynamics”14 and the “subjective dimensions”15 of political culture to the question of order and control in the face of the aleatory and the affective: “the need of the political man to impose an element of order upon a mass of seemingly unrelated events and happenings,”16 as well as the “host of social and personal mechanisms which in most stable and integrated societies control, divert, channel, and sublimate feelings of interpersonal aggression.”17 This discussion of machinic subjectivity occurs in the context of a discussion of the final, sixth point of political culture that focuses on the identity. This semantic assimilation enables Pye to bury the questions that had motivated and troubled social theories of the modern subject, characterized by an irreducible split (beginning with that between knowledge and the a priori transcendental categories of knowledge) that introduced negativity into the heart of the modern subject. Until the introduction of the term identity, negativity had been the price required to pay for the essential freedom of the subject exalted by postEnlightenment thought. Only on condition that one would have the choice to

Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies   243 exist otherwise could the subject be said to be free. The assimilation of subjectivity to the concept of identity effectuated by American social and psychological sciences during the Cold War would not only leave a lasting impression on postcolonial discourse throughout East Asia, but it also saw an important displacement in the locus of freedom. In the thematic shift from the freedom of the subject to the quest for identity, the terms of autonomy were decisively moved toward a feedback system of mutual recognition. This conceptual displacement perfectly served the American goal of managing postwar global governance through a form of postcolonial sovereignty that would always be subordinate to the ultimate sovereignty of American exceptionalism. Perhaps because of his family and experiential connections to China, Pye was much more sensitive than Almond and Lasswell to the potential for a certain feedback loop or mutually constitutive circuit in the production of knowledge and the circulation of discourse across the divide between postimperial and postcolonial nations. I read Pye’s work as expressly designed to both amplify and interdict this sort of feedback loop by controlling its directionality. In Politics, Personality, and Nation Building, Pye offers Pax Americana with the most succinct statement of its ideology for global governance: “The clear and present dangers of the Cold War tend to obscure the fact that in addition to our political struggle with communism we also have the fundamental responsibility to help shape a satisfying new world order in which people at different levels of technology and with different systems of values can realize satisfying relationships.”18 “Different levels of technology” and “different values” refer at the most practical level to an international division of labor under the hegemony of US finance capital. Henceforth, the realization of cultural identity is the ideological key to the smooth reproduction of American hegemony on this economic basis. It is easy to forget how innovative the concept of identity was at the time. Only three decades later, in 1996, historian Eric Hobsbawm felt compelled to remind his audience at the Institute for Education in London that the term identity was a recent product of the 1960s: We have become so used to terms like ‘collective identity’, ‘identity groups’, ‘identity politics’, or, for that matter ‘ethnicity’, that it is hard to remember how recently they have surfaced as part of the current vocabulary, or jargon, of political discourse. For instance, if you look at the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which was published in 1968—that is to say written in the middle 1960s—you will find no entry under identity except one about psychosocial identity, by Erik Erikson… In short, we are dealing with terms and concepts which really come into use only in the 1960s.19 As a precocious reader of Erikson, Pye was well placed to become an early adopter of the new term. Significantly, the identity emerges as a keyword of US global governance during a decade when the management of transitions established immediately after the end of World War II itself begins to undergo

244  Jon Solomon a period of transitional crisis emblematized by the progressive US entry into the Vietnam War starting as early as the decision to send US military advisers and trainers to South Vietnam in 1961. The introduction of the term identity into the lexicon of North American political discourse parallels the consolidation of aesthetic ideology that had begun in earnest in 1958 with Title VI of the National Defense Education Act that established a basis for the reorganization of Area Studies motivated by partnerships between US finance capital, government, military, and intelligence needs. Identity is part of the conceptual apparatus of colonial governmentality under erasure that defines US global control. In contradistinction to the European and Japanese imperialist powers supplanted by the United States, the United States remained as it had always been an antiimperialist power (with certain exceptions, notably The Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Wake) against the impediments to penetration by US finance capital posed by colonial tariffs and regulations. It goes without saying that anti-imperialism does not preclude other forms of control – a point that will make an uncanny, transferential return decades later in debates about the antiimperialist rhetoric of the biopolitical engineering state in contemporary China. Under Pax Americana, postcolonial sovereignty was not to be viewed as a challenge but as a constituent element of its hegemony. The particularism of cultural nationalism in the postcolonial nation could go hand in hand with the universalism of imperial nationalism in the United States. The key to this transformation lays in reconfiguring sovereignty from a question of the exercise of power to the quest for identity. Power is a central theme for Pye in Politics, Personality, and Nation Building. He is deeply aware that its essentially dynamic, volatile character poses enormous difficulties for social analysis, precluding a strictly structuralist interpretation.20 Somewhat like Michel Foucault, who was beginning at virtually the same time to embark on an intellectual trajectory that would subject the analysis of power to a revolutionary concern with its role in subjective formation, Pye’s analysis of power relations focuses on the affective quality of power. Like Foucault, Pye, too, is interested in describing a microphysics of power, except that Pye takes the word power literally, seeing it through the metaphor of electricity: it has its circuits, its feedback mechanisms, and its dangers, to which would correspond the need for proper insulating protection. Significantly, the displacement from sovereignty to identity occurs precisely at the level of power relations. The international division of labor and finance would be disguised by its alienated reflection in the fetish of technology “levels,” “value systems,” and “identities.” Pye’s strategy hinges on displacing the conversation from the structural advantages of US financial imperialism backed up by military superiority to a discussion about “identity”: “We could then make it unmistakably clear to the people involved in the nation-building process that we at least do not confuse ‘modernization’ with ‘Americanization.’”21 The best way for the rest of the world to become more “American” would be to subsume the “American” species into a larger genus of “world culture” that would allow for the subsumption of other similar national “species.” Modernization would

Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies   245 be the pursuit of the technological rationalization of social and political circuits of power, consolidating these elements in highly stabilized, normalized identities joined together by a one-way feedback model of dependency. In a remarkable illustration of the tensions and contradictions of postimperial liberal subjectivity, Pye summarizes the results of his research: A fundamental conclusion arising from our examination of the Burmese political class is that the dynamics of social change generate profound anxieties over precisely this issue of being controlled and manipulated. Our need in the West to reassure ourselves that our motives are altruistic seems to deaden our sensitivity to the fact that people we are helping to become more modernized can be intensely uneasy about being subtly controlled by outside forces, and that until the new sense of freedom and the new social controls of modern life have been psychologically internalized, they may be peculiarly sensitive to the ‘dangers’ of ‘foreign control.’22 Pye’s anachronistic methodological commitments should not distract attention from a more enduring problem particular to the disciplinary rationality of which Pye is a perfect avatar. By conflating representation with what is represented, the area studies discipline hides social relations (of exploitation and domination) under the pretense of autonomous objects and the recognition of affective agency. This displacement is crucial to the ethic of sympathetic concern for the plight of the postcolonial other – reflected most directly in the desire to provide recognition for successful Bildung or “acculturation” to the “world culture based upon modern science and technology”23 – that defines the subjectivity of the postimperial area studies specialist. One of the first lines of attack for the CCAS critique of modernization theory will be to offer evidence of – and assert the political relevance of – the subjective agency of the other. In the historical progression from the objectivization of the other to a recognition of the other’s subjective agency, the emphasis on identity remains, however, a constant feature of area studies’ disciplinary rationality. The advantage of the identity as a concept lies in the differential yet mutually complementary places it accords to the specialist and the native, both of whom become part of a recursive feedback circuit. Pye’s theory echoes cybernetics’ interest in feedback mechanisms and communication systems, developing a microphysics of electromagnetic circuits to manage the volatile power relations between the postimperial and the postcolonial societies. The specialist becomes part of a recursive circuit that mediates between the “transitional societies” of the postcolonial world and the “stable societies” of the technologically advanced, postimperial world. The mediation of the specialist was necessary above all to initiate the machine of mimetic rationality that was to govern the democratic transition following a narrative paradigm of the Bildungsroman – a struggle for identity and autonomy. Some of our politician respondents, employing in essence a continuum extending from the traditional to the modern cosmopolitan man, pictured the

246  Jon Solomon Burmese peasant’s relationship to themselves as being the same as their own relationship to Westerners. They were now seeking to influence the peasants, to change their ways, just as they had once been influenced.24 Within the continuum of mimetic rationality, public opinion, including expert assessment, of events in the postcolonial society by observers in the postimperial one played an extremely active role in shaping the affective political desires of the postcolonial population. Pye singles out for discussion the foreign reaction to the Saya San rebellion of 1930 and the student strike at Rangoon University in 1936. In both instances, foreign commentary – of which Pye’s Burmese informants were highly aware – privileged the development of “nationalism” as a positive sign of political progress against other indicators. This a priori narrative prejudice led foreign observers to endorse each of these political rebellions as positive demonstrations of a new progressive force – Burmese nationalism. As narrated by Pye, the effect of the foreign discourse upon local actors – “modernizers” and “nation-builders” – was direct and devastating. Significantly, Pye, always attentive to the affective dimension of power, describes it in terms of victimization: “the aspiring politicians were uniformly victimized by the assumption [on the part of foreign observers] that the sentiments of nationalism are more truly reflected in atavistic feelings and destructive emotions than in reasoned efforts at improving oneself and one’s country… The individual politician was thus caught in a conflict between the attraction of the world culture with its stress on rationality and the demand of a brand of nationalism which became under the circumstances peculiarly antirationalistic.”25 Once again, the methodological deficiencies of Pye’s approach (the naïve belief that rationality was opposed to political violence of the most destructive or systematic sort) should not distract us from the genius of the methodological core: Pye’s discovery of a recursive feedback circuit, a nascent transpacific discourse of power and affect. Having recognized this recursive circuit, Pye undertook to fashion an ideology that could effectively manage it for the benefit of transpacific governance and capitalist accumulation under US hegemony. The key element here hinges on the differential positionality contrasting the postcolonial elite with that of the postimperial expert. While both occupy a position “in between,” the former is exposed to all the dangers of feedback; the latter intervenes in the circuit but is protected from its effects. One of the salient points of the feedback mechanism dialed in around the question of identities lies in its capacity for the individualization of social and political problems. Although Pye never applies the term “transitional” to individuals, only nation-states, the parallel is clear. Implicitly, there is a “transitional” process in the psychology of the individual that is analogous to the transition of an entire society. In the language of non-Marxist sociology, the outcome of the individual transitional process could be objectively measured by the category of social mobility. Despite an exclusive focus on the elite and elite forms of power, Pye is attentive to the changes in relative status among the subjects of his case studies. The movements of individuals, families, and clans up and down

Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies   247 the rungs of social status and power are part of the larger metaphor of dynamic transition that characterizes modern societies. Conceptually speaking, the idea of tracking transitions through reference to the individual (person or society) removes from consideration those institutional elements that structure the transitional dynamic, allowing structural benefits to accrue in highly uneven fashion. Just as US hegemony could be hidden behind global or international institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the dollar, capitalist hegemony could be hidden behind the organization of markets. Pye’s genius lay in his understanding that mimetic rationality necessarily instantiated unequal power relations between the societies laying claim to the model and those relegated to the imitation. A number of Pye’s anthropological case studies are devoted to dissecting the sources of postcolonial resentment the better to arrest its circulation. Needless to say, the asymmetrical quality of the postimperial positionality itself was a prophylactic against the possibility of contamination by resentment. In a world marked by decolonization, nothing could guarantee that yesterday’s colonizers would not become today’s or tomorrow’s servants. Postimperial populations, with the ethnocentrism, racism, and prejudice accumulated through centuries of colonialism, were extremely exposed to the potential for explosive political resentment during the process of decolonization. Pye recognized that the specialist would have to be proficient at “countering tendencies of ethnocentrism and helping Westerners to avoid the sin of pride.”26 Protections against these “sins” – which would obviously jeopardize the penetration of new markets in the decolonized nations and the conversion of labor to surplus value – could not have worked had there not been in place a certain regime to govern the flow of information and communication between the postcolonial social formation and the postimperial one. Even while the “contact zone” was actually a proliferating mess of mutually constitutive and highly volatile feedback mechanisms, it was necessary to fashion a discourse that would make it look as if the “contact zone” were actually something that preceded the messy reality of mutually constituted identities while providing leverage, or insulation, for managing that circuit to the benefit of postimperial capital accumulation. Like his mentors, Lasswell and Almond, Pye adopted a postimperial positionality of distance. The social scientist working from a postimperial, albeit sympathetic, positionality thus implicitly became, according to the logic of Pye’s research methodology, an analyst, precisely in a psychological sense, of the postcolonial, transitional society. Needless to say, the postimperial positionality advocated by Pye was imperceptibly close to the theories of psychological warfare and manipulation that formed the basis of covert “psy-ops” operations to influence public opinion and individual behavior, as well as more elaborate government efforts such as Project Camelot to influence the social sciences, arts, and humanities both at home and abroad during the Cold War. As documented by Gilman, the “very creation of the CIS [Center for International Studies at MIT],” where Pye worked, “was the result of a top-secret anti-Communist propaganda project conducted at the Massachusetts Institute

248  Jon Solomon of Technology in the fall of 1950.”27 While the existence of such intellectual proximities certainly explains a great deal about the establishment of area studies in the United States, it will not help us understand the aesthetic ideology behind Pye’s work and consider its transpacific dimensions. The best name for the asymmetrical relationship envisaged by Pye is the modern regime of translation, the analysis of which has been pioneered since the 1980s by the US-based Japanologist and cultural theorist Naoki Sakai. It goes without saying that at the time when modernization theory was being elaborated by Pye, Almond, Lasswell, and others, translational flows between the postcolonial and the postimperial world were essentially governed by a colonial logic that cross-mapped asymmetrical translational flows, reading, and writing practices with divisions between the universal and the particular in the order of the production of knowledge, and thence to geopolitical divisions in the emerging world order. Postcolonial societies were at best a source of empirical data, which could be exported to centers of knowledge production in the postimperial center to be rendered into general theory. In retrospect, it is not surprising that the electromagnetic metaphor of modernization led to an emphasis on the introduction of a highly simplified cybernetic model into Area Studies. The pioneer for this work was a colleague of Lasswell’s, David Lerner. Lerner had spent the Second World War in the army’s Psychological Warfare Division. “His career,” summarizes Gilman, “typified the trajectory of many postwar scholars from wartime propaganda work into cold war ‘communications’ scholarship.”28 The crude cybernetic model employed by Lerner emphasized only the transfer of information, eliminating the presence of “noise” and the problem of the medium that had been an essential aspect of cybernetic theory from the beginning. Lerner saw mass communication technologies as the vehicle of modernization and even devised a quantitative methodology for its measurement. Pye shared in this project, as would attest his article, “Communication Patterns and the Problems of Representative Government in NonWestern Societies” published in 1956 – two years before Lerners’s classic work of 1958, The Passing of Traditional Society, one of the first explicit theorizations by an American social scientist of a process called “modernization.”29 Focusing on “the communication system common to non-Western societies, where the mass media generally reach only elements of the urban population,” Pye lamented precisely the absence of a domestic “feedback” system analogous to the one that existed between the postcolonial and the postimperial societies30: “Indeed, the Westerner often has less difficulty than the majority of the indigenous population in understanding the intellectual and moral standards reflected in the media of mass communication, for the media are controlled by the more Westernized elements who may be consciously seeking to relate them to the standards of the international systems of communication rather than to the local scene.”31 Through the work of Lerner and Pye, Area Studies developed on the basis of a logistical rationality concerned with the efficiency – and moral economy – of transfer. It would be no exaggeration to state that under the modern regime of translation, logistics replaces translation as a social practice.

Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies   249 The logistical reduction of social relations carried out under the regime of translation had profound effects. Because postimperial area studies intellectuals would never be expected to subject their knowledge production to the protocols of production and circulation in a postcolonial language and postcolonial institutions regulated by a postcolonial state, the postimperial area studies intellectual was sheltered from the subjective effects of the recursive feedback circuit that he nonetheless managed. Hence, Pye could plausibly assert the possibility of distinguishing between the hegemony of interstate rivalry and the hegemony of representation and recognition through instruments like international law, monetary standards, and logistical infrastructure. “In our concern with ‘winning the game’ we often forget that we must also help establish the agreed ‘rules of the game.’”32 Although Pye writing in 1962 did not have access to Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance,33 Michael Hudson’s 1972 critique of US global domination exercised precisely through “agreed ‘rules of the game’” such as Bretton Woods, the World Bank, the IMF, GATT, and dollar hegemony, Pye certainly would have already had the benefit of a decade-and-a-half of US covert regime change operations to reflect on American exceptionalism. Here, it is a question of seeing how certain standards institute double standards before the fact, part of a phenomenon that we call the biopolitical infrastructure of comparison essentially baked into a world system composed of nation-states vying for the capture of value. Reading Pye today, one cannot help but come away impressed with the degree to which the scholarly persona of his writing figures the paradigmatic subjectivity of the area studies scholar. Far from the arrogance that the position of collective analyst might suggest, the area studies specialist in the mold of Lucian Pye would be an enormously modest figure. His was a modesty born of unquestioned faith. To call it anticommunism does not do justice to the application of faith beyond a strictly political domain. Unlike the faith of his father, however, Pye’s was a secular faith particular to Pax Americana. The irreproachable authenticity, good intentions, and bonhomie of the specialist validate the intrinsic connections among democratic transition, division of labor, and secularized theological conversion that is the hallmark of postwar American ideology. It is precisely this form of faith that is at work in Pye’s inability to see how the constituent power at work in establishing “the rules of the game” could be a potent resource for domination. Blindness to the power inherent in norm-defining institutions, or again, confusion between the instituting power of area studies and its representations, continues to this day as a salient characteristic of institutional area studies. The extent to which Pye’s faith remains a cornerstone of institutional area studies can be measured by the obituary written some four-and-half decades after Politics, Personality, and Nation Building by Ezra Vogel, one of Pye’s peers and a founder of East Asian studies in the United States: “Just as officials in Washington DC were helping build institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to make the world a better place, so the sons of China missionaries were building scholarly institutions to improve the understanding of Asia and make the

250  Jon Solomon U.S. government and international institutions function more effectively.”34 As innocuous and salubrious as it might sound, to “improve the understanding of Asia” is merely to emphasize indirectly the necessity both of a distinction between “us” and “Asia” and the possibility for infinite regression afforded by a project of cumulative understanding. Vogel’s formula betrays the marks of the “regime of separation”35 on which transpacific aesthetic ideology is constructed. Distance, unsurprisingly, is a central theme in Pye’s work on Burma. Omnipresent, distance distinguishes social relations in “transitional societies” as well as relations between those societies and the “stabilized” postimperial ones. Among the forms of distance, there are those that are part of premodern, traditional Burmese society, such as the distance between ruler and ruled, superior and inferior, different ethnicities, etc.; there are those that are a legacy of British colonialism, such as the distance between colonizer and colonized, that between “Westernized” and “traditional” indigenous Burmese, and that between servitude and mastery; there are those that are due to the exponential acceleration of technological development, a distance that threatens to multiply the distance between “transitional” postcolonial populations and “stable” postimperial ones; there is the distance between the researcher and his objects of study; and, finally, there is the distance between the individual’s identity crisis – particularly acute for transitional peoples – and the individual’s stabilized identity. Within the electromagnetic circuit of postcolonial global governance, the postimperial self is always insulated from the “shock in choosing a national identity”36 by occupying the seat of the one who provides recognition rather than the seat of the one who receives it.37 To do otherwise would have undoubtedly made it impossible for the non-minority white American male scholar to avoid confronting an analogous problem of political composition and population management across a succession of anomalous territorial arrangements characterizing the short history of settler colonialism in the United States. In other words, it would have forced Pye to recognize that the process of “Americanization” that he so adamantly wished to differentiate from “modernization” was a problem for domestic populations as well as foreign ones – not least of all because of the dangerously shifting and ultimately undefinable boundaries of whiteness. It is only on the basis of this repression that the social scientist is able to claim, “What is needed in most non-Western countries in order to have stable representative institutions are people who can perform the role that local party leaders performed in introducing the various immigrant communities into American public life.”38 Formulated at the beginning of the 1960s, ideas similar to Pye’s would readily be put into practice a few years later in the suburban planning and architecture transplanted from US urban centers to Saigon. For the social scientist, the minority neighborhoods of immigrants in North American cities were a microcosm of the postcolonial world, the physical migrations of the former presaging the immaterial migration of the latter into a global techno-industrial culture. In effect, the problem of nation building under Pax Americana is, for Pye, strictly analogous to the problem of minority population management at the crux between labor migration and colonial governmentality under erasure.

Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies   251 From a literary point of view, to assert that modernization is not Americanization as Pye does is to deny a simile while upholding a metaphor. Modernization is an engineering project requiring the operation of heavy machinery and electromagnetic power circuits. The postimperial operator is an analyst who benefits from insulation. The postcolonial one is a patient subject to shock treatment. If postimperial analyst and postcolonial analysand do not properly align their polarities, the result could be like Frankenstein’s Creature. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a literary precedent for Pye’s modernization theory. The century-and-a-half intervening between the two does not alter the fundamental metaphor of modern biopower: electricity. As Stuart Curran observes, “the remarkable fact of Frankenstein is that this aim [that of joining the separate fields of specialization of the novel’s two scientific protagonists, Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton, in a single field] remains today the great desideratum of the material sciences, what is called in English the Grand Unified Field Theorem.”39 Life, a story of Bildung-style transitions that transform the organic into a synthetic new construction, is power and power is electromagnetic. Just as Frankenstein’s Creature relies, at an early stage of life, on electromagnetic energy as a kind of therapeutic cure for the shock of socialization, the postcolonial transitional society has to rely on feedback from the postimperial analyst. Stuart Curran’s observation that “the stress on electrochemistry in the novel turns scientific principle into a universal field of metaphor”40 extends to Pye’s work as well. The primary metaphor would be that of polarization – the universal aspect of social relations constructed by the divide between the colonial and the imperial, the West and the non-West. Opposing polarities establish the electrical current and provide a basis for the proliferation of disciplinary rationalities hiding in the metaphor. Pye’s sense of the analogous relation between migrant minorities in the postimperial nations and the position of the postcolonial nation within global cartography was common to his era. The amount of disavowal and denial involved in that analogy is on display in Pye’s contentious assertion that “religion and race tend to be the dominant considerations”41 in transitional societies. For the white American son of Christian missionaries, it must have seemed natural to project American religious racism onto “transitional societies.” To get a sense of the repression involved, it is instructive to refer to Erik Erikson’s roughly contemporaneous essay, The Concept of Identity in Race Relations: Notes and Queries, published in a special issue of Dædalus devoted to theme of “The Negro American” at the end of 1966 – only a few years after Politics, Personality, and Nation Building. From the outset of the article, Erikson draws an explicit parallel between “literature on the Negro revolution” and “the psychological core of the revolution of the colored races and nations who seek inner as well as outer emancipation from colonial rule and from the remnants of colonial patterns of thought.”42 As it had been for Pye several years earlier, the central issue for Erikson in both cases concerns the question of identity. Unlike Pye, who never exposes his own position to the risk of uncontrolled feedback or electric discharge, i.e., to dialectical interaction, in the course of his writings, Erikson

252  Jon Solomon embraces self-exposure in this essay, entering into a long detour around the question of Jewish identity and identity confusion – issues that touched the core of his own biographical experience. In order to do justice to the difference between Pye and Erikson and to tease out the ramifications for our understanding of area studies’ role in the formation of US hegemony and transpacific aesthetic ideology, it would be necessary to chart out the division of labor between white Jewish men and white Christian men within the US academy and in the new area studies disciplines, in particular, in the aftermath of the Shoah and arrested decolonization. In a sense, the institutional relation between these two social identities, one minority and the other majority, contributed in a significant way to a strategy of mobilizing postcolonial and minority identity that was central to the aesthetic ideology of postwar US hegemony. Whereas Pye’s personal biography emphasized those elements in the US hegemony tied to the trauma of colonialism, Erikson’s personal biography was focused specifically on the trauma of the Shoah. Together, these two events, the Shoah and colonialism, define the problematic of Bildung in colonial—imperial modernity. As Peter Button has shown, missionary discourse was at the root of the notion, dear to the first wave of Yellow Peril narratives, that what Chinese of the Qing Dynasty lacked was a clearly defined national character or anthropological type.43 This lack, of course, was exactly how Nazi ideology depicted European Jews. This structural link between European Jews and Qing Dynasty Chinese became a touchstone for the development of a postwar US aesthetic ideology designed to manage the problems of population management in a world characterized, externally, by postcolonial sovereignty and, internally, by minority populations within each nation-state. Although it is impossible to know if Pye and Erikson were personally aware of the respective histories of the discourse of national character and the anthropological type in relation to European Jews on the one hand and Chinese on the other, each was a direct inheritor of that historical experience: Erikson through his experience as the son of a Jewish-Gentile mixed couple that fled Europe, and Pye as the son of a missionary stationed in China. Given Erikson’s personal biography, deeply marked by the experience of migration, multiple identities, and the Shoah, it is impossible not to read Erikson’s emphasis on the negative value of “identity confusion” as the personal plea of a successful member of what would be called the model minority. By the same token, given Pye’s personal history, marked by the journey back to China as an intelligence officer in the US Marine Corps (a role that would lead him to a career in the Ivy League) after an abortive childhood as the son of Congregational missionaries in rural China, it is impossible not to read Pye’s emphasis on postcolonial “identity crisis” as a form of self-confirmation through the trope of return. One might also see in it a kernel of the refusal of historical shame associated with the legacy of colonialism that was to become a hallmark of postimperial populations in Japan, Western Europe, and the United States. Politics, Personality, and Nation Building is unequivocal about the overwhelmingly positive role of colonialism (see footnote 3, Chapter 1, which cites “thoughtful evaluations of the profound nature of colonialism and its capacity to spread the concepts of the modern

Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies   253 nation and modern government”44). Based on the refusal to expose his position to any sense of historical responsibility and shame for the colonial past or any sense of implication in the predicament of the postcolonial present, Pye advanced an aesthetics of postcolonial acculturation to the US (white, protestant)-led “world culture” in which “leadership” would correspond with the logical economy of species difference applied to social organization. For Erikson, the solution to the traumas of the past lay in combatting ethnocentric exclusionism, of which he saw Nazism as an extreme example. Unlike Pye, Erikson was deeply aware of the dangers of introducing the logical economy of genus and species into the aesthetic ideology of transitions, conversions, and growth. Erikson understood the logic of specific or species difference as an effect of “psychosocial evolution…rooted in tribal psychology” culminating in a simulacrum of biological evolution at a social level that produces the dangerous phenomena of “pseudo-species” dividing human populations.45 Where Erikson rejoins Pye – revealing in the process his unwillingness to see biopower as a generalized problematic beyond Nazism – is in the panacea of techno-politics, “the creation of a new and shared technological universe” that would ultimately enable “man to realize his specieshood and to exchange a wide identity for his [destructive] pseudo-species.”46 In the covenant around technological fetishism joined to an aesthetic ideology of global transition that joins the male Jewish minority scholar to the Gentile white protestant one in a discussion about “post-colonial and colored identities,” 47 one detects the model of an unwritten social contract concerning global population management. This social contract is joined around the founding exclusions of race and class with which the fields, now transnationalized, of East Asian, and particularly China, studies have never reckoned to this day. In other words, the intelligibility of East Asian area studies becomes politically legible only as the palimpsest of white settler colonialism’s transformation into creedal nationalism without going through a process of decolonization.48 Postwar US creedal nationalism can only be fully understood from the perspective of the Area Studies Social Pact emblematized by Pye and Erikson. Under cover of being devoted to the production of knowledge, Area Studies is, in truth, an apparatus for imperial population management. According to the Area Studies Social Pact, the key to social harmony in the face of profound differences with roots in capitalist exploitation and colonial domination lies in developing an effective aesthetic ideology that presents history as a process of Bildung, or the construction of identity. A measure of the importance of the identity can be gauged from the concept’s preservation in Dankwart Rustow’s classic essay from 1970, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” which rejects the idea of “personal identity in the psychoanalyst’s sense” so dear to Pye (and obviously Erikson) while preserving the notion of identity as a form of belonging that ties the individual to the unity of a national community.49 History is inherently progressive, moving, however imperceptibly, toward a “more inclusive identity”50 that leads eventually to an exit from the liminal state of crisis that marked the species’ early immaturity. Reading Erikson today, the contradiction is as glaring as it is implacable: how could technology,

254  Jon Solomon which was in the final instance associated with a division of labor at the source of the geographies of inequality that proliferated in his time, be seen as a solution for the very inequalities that it exacerbated, if not created? Blindness to this contradiction leads Erikson to a position that amounts to a startling endorsement of the techno-politics of modern colonization: [T]he crisis of youth is also the crisis of a generation and of the ideological soundness of its society… The crisis is least marked and least “noisy” in that segment of youth which in a given era is able to invest its fidelity in an ideological trend associated with a new technical and economic expansion (such as mercantilism, colonialism, industrialization).51 Technology and the identity converge on the future. The redemptive promise of the future is key. Ironically, this implicit faith in the redemptive power of the future was being articulated at precisely the moment when the United States was entering a protracted period of economic crisis that would result in a fundamental shift in the basis of US hegemony. The United States had maintained its ascendant position in world affairs due to its status as a creditor nation from the First World War, when it had bankrolled England and France in their fight against Germany, onward. Within several years after the end of World War II, the United States had cornered 75% of global gold reserves. Yet its global military deployment and military adventurism in fighting communism around the globe was leading, by the 1960s, to a severe depletion of US gold reserves. Eventually, this monetary crisis would lead the United States, under Richard Nixon, to declare an end to the gold standard in 1971, setting the stage for a historic transformation in the basis of US hegemony from credit to debt – that form of money most closely associated with the promise of the future. From the 1970s onward, the United States maintained its financial hegemony through the instrument of monetary imperialism. Foreign creditors of the United States literally paid for the US military’s global garrison that could threaten creditors who tried to buck the system at any moment with total infrastructural war. By displacing the conversation about postcolonial global governance from the exercise of sovereignty to the quest for identity, the Area Studies Social Pact effectively underwrote the ideological basis for continued US domination during the transition to monetary imperialism based on debt capitalism that began in the 1970s. With the above analysis of Erik Erikson and Lucian Pye, we are much closer to understanding East Asian area, and particularly China, studies’ roots in white settler colonialism. These roots are expressed in the founding, disciplinary exclusions condensed by the terms, anticommunism and antiblackness. While a full intellectual history of area studies in relation to the formation of US creedal nationalism and settler empire remains to be written, recent work by Roderick Ferguson52 and Charisse Burden-Stelly on the bipolar genesis of American studies and area studies (including Black studies) provides an essential point of departure for understanding how knowledge production contributes

Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies   255 to prolonging colonial relationships while seeming to promote a discourse of “freedom.” The management of the international via a discourse of identity and self-determination that replaced popular sovereignty independent of US military and financial controls was deemed, as we have seen in the work of Erikson and Pye, coextensive with the management of domestic minority populations. Burden-Stelly summarizes: In this way, area studies became an arm of neocolonialism that influenced key foreign policy considerations, including which countries would receive aid and which would be invaded; the level of democracy or authoritarianism that would be accepted; and how Third World populations would be disciplined, managed, and/or accommodated.53 To tease out the implications for both knowledge and sovereignty, the epistemic and the political, we could do no better than to turn to writers from the black radical tradition such as the contemporary philosopher Nahum Chandler, who offers an irreplaceable point of reference for a critique of the anthropological presuppositions that underlie the parallel relation between geopolitical organization and epistemic organization that is managed by the apparatus of area (studies).54 In the case of East Asian and particularly China-focused area studies under Pax Americana, we seem to have forgotten, as Chandler persuasively argues, that sovereignty needs to be understood fundamentally in relation to slavery, not freedom (aka “democratic transition”), much less identity. From this perspective, slavery names not the symmetrical opposite of freedom but the asymmetry of a double bind from which the only possible escape is not the normativity of “freedom” realized in postcolonial identity (shorn of concerns for political economy, as Burden-Stelly does not cease to emphasize) but the rejection altogether of the type of normative political subjectivity called “identity” that is configured through a gradient between ostensibly opposed, yet mutually reinforcing, poles. Just as epistemic decolonization in the era after Pax Americana cannot afford to ignore how the areal organization of the humanities and social sciences is fundamentally complicit with the founding exclusions of anticommunism and antiblackness, geopolitical decolonization cannot afford to ignore the ways in which bordering practice creates area. To understand bordering practice is to understand how the act of drawing, or reproducing, a border creates, or reproduces, the things apparently separated by it. In other words, to study the act of bordering is to perceive the gradient of differentiation polarized by “things” or “identities.” To study, furthermore, the act of bordering in light of not the identity of freedom but the double bind of slavery is to remember that the relational gradient between these intrinsically related polarities only appears symmetrical when we forget how the “freedom” of “unity in diversity” (E pluribus unum, the Latin motto appearing on the Great Seal of the United States of America) was first created by settler colonialism in relation to its “outside.”

256  Jon Solomon Notes 1 Lucian Pye, Politics, Personality, and Nation-Building: Burma’s Search for Identity (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1962): 10. 2 Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 69–105. 3 Pye (1962, vxii). 4 Fabio Lanza, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017): 52. 5 Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007): 210. 6 Pye (1962, 43). 7 Pye (1962, 4). 8 Pye (1962, 5). 9 Pye (1962, 116). 10 Pye (1962, 13). 11 Pye (1962, 11). 12 Pye (1962, 3). 13 Pye (1962, 125). 14 Pye (1962, 124). 15 Pye (1962, 125). 16 Pye (1962, 124). 17 Pye (1962, 125). 18 Pye (1962, 298). 19 Eric Hobsbawm,. “Identity Politics and the Left,” New Left Review 1, no. 217 (1996): 38. 20 Pye (1962, 145). 21 Pye (1962, 298). 22 Pye (1962, 294). 23 Pye (1962, 10). 24 Pye (1962, 262). 25 Pye (1962, 260). 26 Pye (1962, 42). 27 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003): 156. 28 Gilman (2003, 171). 29 Gilman (2003, 171). 30 Pye (1962, 20). 31 Pye (1962, 21). 32 Pye (1962, 298). 33 Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (London & Sterling: Pluto Press, 2003). 34 Ezra Vogel, “In Memoriam: Lucian Pye, 1921–2008,” The China Quarterly 196 (December 2008): 913. 35 Naoki Sakai, “From Area Studies Toward Transnational Studies,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 272. 36 Pye (1962, 258). 37 Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 154–5. 38 Pye (1962, 30). 39 Stuart Curran. “The Scientific Grounding of Frankenstein”. In Mary vs. Mary, edited by Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2001): 289. 40 Curran (2001, 90). 41 Pye (1962, 189).

Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies   257 42 Erik, Erikson, “The Concept of Identity in Race Relations: Notes and Queries,” Dædalus 96, no. 1 (1966): 145. 43 Peter Button. “(Para-)humanity, Yellow Peril and the Postcolonial (arche-)type,” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 4 (2006): 431. 44 Pye (1962, 11). 45 Erikson (1966, 153). 46 Erikson (1966, 154). 47 Erikson (1966, 169); emphasis in the original. 48 Aziz Rana, “Colonialism and Constitutional Memory,” U.C. Irvine Law Review 5, no. 2 (2015): 269. Available at: https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/ucilr/vol5/iss2/4. 49 Dankwart Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics 2, no. 3 (1970): 350. 50 Erikson (1966, 165); emphasis in the original. 51 Erikson (1966, 161). 52 Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 53 Charisse Burden-Stelly, Black Studies in the Westernized University: The Interdisciplines and the Elision of Political Economy (New York and Milton Park: Routledge, 2019), 80. 54 Nahum Chandler, X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

Bibliography Button, Peter. “(Para-)Humanity, Yellow Peril and the Postcolonial (arche-)type.” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 4 (2006): 421–47. Burden-Stelly, Charisse. Black Studies in the Westernized University: The Interdisciplines and the Elision of Political Economy, 73–86. New York and Milton Park: Routledge, 2019. Curran, Stuart. “The Scientific Grounding of Frankenstein”. In Mary vs. Mary, edited by Lilla Maria Crisafulli, 283–92. Naples: Liguori Editore, 2001. Erikson, Erik. “The Concept of Identity in Race Relations: Notes and Queries.” Dædalus 96, no. 1 (1966): 145–71. Ferguson, Roderick. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Gilman, Nils. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Identity Politics and the Left.” New Left Review 1, no. 217 (1996): 38–47. Hudson, Michael. Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance. London & Sterling: Pluto Press, 2003. Lanza, Fabio. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017. Lipset, Seymour Martin. “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.” American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 69–105. Pye, Lucian. Politics, Personality, and Nation-Building: Burma’s Search for Identity. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1962. Rana, Aziz. “Colonialism and Constitutional Memory.” U.C. Irvine Law Review 5, no. 2 (2015): 263–88. Available at: https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/ucilr/vol5/iss2/4 Rustow, Dankwart. “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model”. Comparative Politics 2, no. 3 (1970): 337–63.

258  Jon Solomon Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ––––––. “From Area Studies Toward Transnational Studies.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 265–74. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc. The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Vogel, Ezra. “In Memoriam: Lucian Pye, 1921–2008.” The China Quarterly 196 (December 2008): 912–8.

Index

Notes: n refers to notes in the text. Abe, Yutaka 157–159, 170n13 aesthetic ideology 200, 201, 203, 208, 211, 213, 214, 216, 220, 240–241, 244, 248, 250, 252–253 Africa 7, 50, 61–63, 84–85, 90–91, 93, 95, 97, 102–104, 106, 108–111, 116, 126–127, 129, 131, 135–136, 151, 182, 232 aidagara (mutual relationship/ betweenness) 67–68, 72–74 Almond, Gabriel 241–243 Althusser, Louis 13, 191–192 American Studies 7–8, 36, 83 anthropological 3, 6, 33, 54, 59, 87, 88, 247, 252, 255 anthropological difference 4, 16, 18, 20–21, 28–29, 31, 43–47, 53, 57–60, 84, 150 anthropos 3, 31, 54 antiblackness 6, 215, 254, 255 anti-communism (anticommunism) 8, 12, 36, 201–203, 249, 254–255 area passim area studies passim Arnold, Thurman 8 Arrighi, Giovanni 113 Asia’s Victory Song (Tōyō no gaika) 156–157 Austria 142–145, 150 Azuma, Eiichirō 158, 170n13 Bachelard, Gaston 214 Back to Bataan 158, 159, 162–162, 166–167 balkanization 150 Barlow, Tani 24 Barnett, Doak 241 Barthes, Roland 228, 230, 234

Bataan 158, 161, 162, 164, 165–167, 168, 170n19 Bell, Daniel 23–24 Bellah, Robert 43, 58–64, 71, 78–82 Benedict, Ruth 59–61, 81 Benveniste, Émile 77 Berman, Antoine 192 Bernardo, João 182–183 Bhabha, Homi 47 biopolitical 3, 163–164, 224, 236, 237, 244 bipolarity of modernity 43, 60, 83 Bitburg Affair 139 Black Panthers 8–10, 14 Blanchot, Maurice 189 Bolivia 116–119 border 6, 15–28, 32–34, 58, 114, 126, 180, 184, 202, 251 Borges, Jorge Louis 91–93, 106 Braudel, Fernand 90 Britain (British, United Kingdom) 2, 4, 8, 11, 13, 69–72, 94, 100, 107, 113, 128, 169, 250 Brown, Nicholas 204 Buck-Morss, Susan 194 Buden, Boris 149 Burden-Stelly, Charisse 7, 36, 215, 254–255 Burma 156, 157, 241, 246, 250 Button, Peter 21, 37, 83, 252 Calichman, Richard 14 Canut, Cécile 84 capitalism passim Caribbean 7, 116 Castro-Gómez, Santiago 184–185 Césaire, Aimé 128 Chandler, Nahum 14, 255 China passim

260 Index Chomsky, Noam 147 Chow, Rey 21, 47, 205, 209, 213, 229 Christian 79, 91–96, 102, 162, 251–252 Civilization passim civilizational transference 44, 62, 71–78, 82–83 Climate and Culture 62–70, 72–78 Clinton, William (Bill) 23, 147 Cold War passim Cold War Culturalism 7 colonial-imperial: divide 4–6, 15, 19; modernity 1, 6, 12, 24, 30, 34, 252; order 2–3, 43–46, 56; power 44 colonialism 1–11, 18, 44–46, 68–70, 80, 84, 96, 100, 105, 115–116, 124–129, 136, 155, 163, 173–174, 184–187, 247, 250–255 coloniality 5, 11, 16, 92 passim, 126, 184–186; see also colonialimperial; decoloniality Committee for Concerned Asian Scholars 240, 245 communism passim; criminalization of 135, 137, 138 Conrad, Joseph 127, 143 constitutionalism 5, 7 consumerism 162–164 conversion 183, 240, 247, 249, 253 Corregidor 158, 161, 162, 166 Courtois, Stephane 139 creedal nationalism 5–10, 35, 253–254 Croatia 136 passim Cry ‘Havoc’ 158, 167 Cumings, Bruce 22–28 cybernetics 4, 24, 31–32, 245, 248 Dawn of Freedom (Ano hata o ute) 156–160, 163–164, 165, 167, 168–169 De Leon, Gerardo 157 De Man, Paul 207, 209, 214, 218, 219 De Ocampo, Nick 159, 170n7, 170n8, 170n15 death 55, 61, 127, 134, 164–166 Debord, Guy 30 debt 2, 18, 26–33, 123–125, 136, 178–181, 195n18, 254 decoloniality 102, 105–106, 125–126, 186 decolonization 1–35, 100, 103, 112–114, 125–130, 155, 173–175, 186–190, 194, 206, 228, 247, 253–255

Deleuze, Gilles (and Félix Guattari) 32, 190 denial of coevalness 60, 67–68, 87 Derrida, Jacques 203, 208–209, 218n62–63, 219n65 Dirlik, Arif 186 division of labor 19, 21, 61, 85, 243–244, 249, 252, 254 Du Bois, W.E.B. 7–9, 14, 115, 128 Duke, Michael 217n53 Dulles 11; Allen 12; Dullesism 21–27; John-Foster 21 Dussel, Enrique 92 East Asian Community 56; see also Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere Ecuador 119 Egypt 89, 99 Eight Corners under One Roof, the 79 Emperor System, the 58, 63, 80–81 engineering 51–52, 242, 244, 251 enlightenment 71, 94–95, 143, 146, 242 epistemological (epistemic) 1–22, 28, 30–32, 44, 60–69, 92–106, 112, 126, 150, 174–178, 184–188, 194, 237, 255 Erikson, Erik 241–243, 251–255 ethics 28–29, 35, 50, 58, 62–67, 71–75, 79, 80–82, 98, 101, 141, 194 Europe 2, 11–13, 30, 45–58, 69–76, 91–97, 104, 114, 126, 128, 135–154, 163, 188, 199, 209, 214, 238n39, 252; Central Europe 136, 141, 143–144, 151; East/ern Europe/an 45, 135–154; European 4, 20, 43, 46–58, 71–75, 80, 83, 89–102, 112–114, 126–129, 135–154, 182–184, 192, 202, 206, 217, 229, 226, 244, 252; European humanity 4, 43, 46, 55–58, 84, 144; European identity 58, 139, 142; non-Europe/an 2, 45, 54–55, 58, 61, 85, 93, 95, 99; Western Europe/an 3, 12, 39, 44–50, 67, 71, 85–86, 90, 94, 144, 186, 188, 217, 252; see also Mitteleuropa Extraction 27–28, 34, 112–134 Fabian, Johannes 60, 67, 87n52 Fanon, Franz 235, 238 federalism 174 feedback 13, 189, 241–245 Ferguson, Roderick 254

Index  261 finance, 11, 18, 26, 30, 34–35, 115, 118, 120–127, 175, 243–244 Ford, John 158, 159, 170n16 Foucault, Michel 173, 177, 203, 218, 235, 244 France 2, 4, 11, 51, 72, 84, 93, 107, 145, 213, 233, 254 freedom 5, 8, 11, 13–14, 23, 33, 81, 126, 136, 135, 142, 146, 149, 155–156, 160–168, 227, 242–244, 255 frontier (extractive frontier) 115–116, 120, 125, 194 Fukuzawa, Yokichi 71 Fumagalli, Andrea 183 Gago, Verónica 117–121 Galeano, Eduardo 118 Germany 9, 12, 49, 51, 55–56, 64–66, 72–75, 85, 91, 139–141, 146, 159, 242, 254 Gilman, Nils 247–248 globalization 2–3, 17, 48, 113–114, 186, 119 Graeber, David 123 Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere 56, 71–80 Guatemala 11 Haiven, Max 18, 26 Hall, Stuart 43, 46, 125 Hardt, Michael 114, 120, 184–185, 196n31 Havel, Vaclav 146–152 Haywood, “Big Bill” 129 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 89, 95–96, 103, 208, 218 hegemony 1–4, 15, 20, 22, 31–33, 43, 45, 89, 91–107, 112–114, 118, 127, 155, 158, 174, 224, 243, 244 passim Heidegger, Martin 55–56, 64–65, 96 historical revisionism 136–137 Hobsbawm, Eric 243 Hong Kong 4, 10, 64–69, 157 Hsia, C.T (Chih-Tsing) 199, 207–209, 216n28, 216n29, 216n35 Hudson, Michael 249 humanitarianism 149 humanitas 3–4, 14–16, 32, 54, 84, 112, 149 humanities 1–42, 43–88, 112, 147, 187–188, 196, 188–223, 247, 255 Huntington, Samuel P. 35n8, 89–92 Husserl, Edmund 43–88, 144 Huters, Ted 204–207, 217n50

ICTY 148 Identity 5, 30, 35, 45, 57–68, 78, 83–88, 136–139, 142–144, 220, 240–258 ideology 5, 16, 24–25, 28, 137–138, 155, 164, 169, 178, 200–203, 211–214, 216n27, 216n32, 220n77; see also aesthetic ideology imperialism (imperial, postimperial) 1–42, 43–88, 99, 102, 142, 146, 149, 158, 160, 174–175, 177–178, 180, 184–185, 224, 237, 240, 242, 244, 251, 252–253 India 47, 64–70, 90, 96, 99, 116, 135 Indonesia 11, 116, 135–136 international law, system of 2–3, 20, 45, 52, 83, 83–94, 147–148, 184, 249 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 182–183, 247, 249 International Research Center for Japanese Studies 48 international world, modern 2–3, 8, 12, 44–52, 83–84, 185, 187 internationalism, 4, 8, 127–129, 221 Iran 11, 89, 96, 99, 103, 114 Iraq 89–91, 96, 146 Islam 91, 96, 151 Jameson, Fredric 178 Japan 2–6, 9–12, 35, 43–88, 89–90, 102, 150, 155–158, 163–164, 168–172, 183, 214, 224, 224–239, 252 Jewish 55, 80, 85, 144, 241, 252–253 Jus Publicum Europaeum; 45, 83 Kang, Liu 199 Kant, Immanuel (Kantianism) 95–96, 103, 108, 110, 165, 208, 218 Keynesianism 19, 23–25 Kierkegaard, Søren 64, 218 Klossowski, Pierre 192–193 Korea 4, 9–10, 22, 48, 81, 90, 158, 168 Kôsaka, Masaaki 79 Kosik, Karel 141–153 Kosovo 136, 147, 152–153 Kundera, Milan 143–145 labor (labor power) 18–31, 33, 38, 61, 85, 91, 93, 94, 96, 114–129, 180–181, 184, 186–189, 243–254 Lamarre (LaMarre), Thomas 214 language: 16–19, 22, 26–29, 32–35, 48–52, 84–85, 116, 125–129, 143–144, 173–175, 188, 192–193, 200, 205,

262 Index 246, 249; national language 16, 22, 49–51, 78, 84, 173 Lasswell, Harold 241, 243, 247–248 Latin America 11, 47, 62–63, 92, 96, 98, 101, 103, 112, 115–119, 136 law 7, 21, 23, 52, 70, 98, 148–149, 163, 183–184, 191, 241; see also international law Lazzarato, Maurizio 123, 130, 132 Lee, Haiyan 212, 222 Lenin, Vladimir Nikolai 127, 139, 195, 213 Lerner, David 248 liberalism 13, 28, 72, 94–95, 188, 204, 218, 221 Libricide, Croatia 139 Lily Corps (Himeyuri) 166 Lipset, Seymour Martin 5, 35, 240 Lithuania 137 Liu, Lydia 32, 40 logistics 120–121 Lorenz, Christian 25, 37, 40 Lu Xun 215 Luxemburg, Rosa 124–125, 130, 132 Lyotard, Jean-François 17, 37, 40 MacArthur, Douglas 157, 161 machine 100, 128, 242, 245, 251 Macron, Emmanuel 107, 109 Mahan, Alfred Maher 155, 169n1 Mahbubani, Kishore 104, 109, 110 Manchukuo 156 Marazzi, Christian 22, 24–25, 27, 37–38, 40, 195, 197 market 20, 22–27, 69, 94–95, 100, 112–113, 117–119, 134–135, 149, 169, 181, 186, 204 Marshall Plan 12, 35 Martin, Randy 18, 28, 42, 123 Maruyama, Masao 63 Marx (Marxist, Marxism) 175, 177–182, 186–190 Mason, Paul 100, 104, 108 Massumi, Brian 20, 21, 29, 37–38, 40 Mbembe, Achille 116, 130, 132 McGrath, Jason 205 Meister, Robert 26–27, 34, 38, 40 memory 6, 11, 41, 137–139, 147, 178, 234, 239, 257 Mezzadra, Sandro 5, 7, 37, 40, 112, 128–133, 194 Mignolo, Walter 5, 7, 89, 109–110, 126, 130–131, 133, 196–197 Miki, Kiyoshi 56 militarization 32, 33, 34, 224

Miller, J. Hillis 207, 210, 218, 220–222 Mirowski, Philip 19–20, 22, 37, 40, 222 Mitteleuropa 141, 142 mobility 120, 246 modernism 201, 210–211, 216 modernization 10, 24, 49, 52, 59, 62–63, 70–71, 75, 81, 84, 90, 240–251 modernization theory 4–8, 24, 217, 240–241, 245, 248, 251 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 115, 130, 133 money 179, 182–183 Montgomery, Robert 158, 159 Moro 168 multicultural 149, 213 multiplication of labor 122, 125 Munich Syndrome 145 Nakahira, Takuma 226–228, 232–236 Nancy, Jean-Luc 40, 85, 88, 124, 174, 195, 198, 219–220, 222 national character 66–69, 76, 81 national character study 59, 61, 78, 81 National Socialism 55–56, 79–80; see also Nazi nationalism 165, 171n20 nation-state 3, 10, 14, 16–17, 21, 34, 49, 51, 69, 78, 95, 112, 115, 126, 149, 153, 156, 165, 174–175, 181, 184–185, 187, 191, 194, 224 NATO Humanitarian Bombing, Yugoslavia 141, 145, 146, 147 Nazi 5–6, 80; see also National Socialism negativity 242 Negri, Toni 114, 120, 132, 184, 196–197 Neilson, Brett 37, 40, 112, 114, 120, 122–123, 130–133 neocolonialism 125–126 Neo-extractivism 115 passim Neoliberal (neo-liberal, neo-liberalism, neoliberalism) 4, 6, 11, 13, 16–20, 22–25, 31–32, 34, 39–40, 95–96, 99, 101, 106, 113, 118, 120, 132, 136, 138, 193, 200, 219, 222 Netherlands 2, 93, 106, 113 New Criticism 201, 207, 216 New Public Management 24–25, 40 Nida, Eugene 32 Nietzsche, Friedrich 64, 108, 110, 139 Nihonjinron (Discourse on Japanese uniqueness) 59, 70, 83 Nishida, Kitarô 63 Nomos 89–111, 174–179, 183–187, 191, 193–194 Non-Aligned Movement 135, 136

Index  263 non-European philosophy (Indian and Chinese) 50–51, 54 Nornes, Abé Mark 170, 170n12, 170n19 Ogyû, Sorai 63 Ōkawa, Heihachirō (aka Henry Ōkawa) 158 Okinawa “reversion” to mainland Japan, 225; U.S. military occupation, 224, 231 Orientalism 4, 60, 84, 102, 236 origin 176–181, 186, 190–191 Ôtsuka, Hisao 63, 70 outside 13–18, 22, 31, 45, 53, 51, 58, 60, 83, 92, 115, 120–126, 165, 173, 181, 185, 228, 231, 235, 245, 255 Parsons, Talcott 63 Pax Americana 1–42, 43–88, 174, 189, 194, 217, 236–237, 243–244, 249–250, 255 Philippines 5, 10, 86, 155–158, 160–163, 166–172, 244 philosophy 21, 24, 47–54, 57–60, 72, 75, 82, 84, 94, 96, 98, 106, 165, 189, 212, 214 Poland 12, 137, 151 postcolonial 1–42, 115, 117–128, 136, 164, 175, 186, 205–206, 217, 240–255 postcolonialism 100, 125; power passim Prague Declaration 137 Prashad, Vijay 136, 154 Prebisch, Raúl 118, 130, 133 primitive accumulation 178–181, 186–187, 190 Pye, Lucian 240–255 Quijano, Aníbal 92, 98, 99, 101, 108, 109, 111, 126, 130, 131, 133 Quinn, Anthony 158, 167 racism 7, 33, 44, 55, 58, 72, 85, 87, 149, 160, 167–169, 247, 251 Rafael, Vicente 83 Rana, Aziz 5–6, 13, 34–35, 257 recognition, politics 137 Redfield, Marc 209–213, 215, 218–220 Reischauer, Edwin 241 Revel, Judith 177, 195, 198 Robinson, Cedric 114, 130, 133 Rodney, Walter 116, 130, 131, 133 romantic love 166–167, 168 Romanticism 7, 210, 211, 213, 219, 220 Rubber 127–129

Russia 49, 52, 90, 96–99, 102–103, 106, 109, 114, 141–143, 147, 218, 241 Rustow, Dankwart 253, 257 Said, Edward 47, 60 Sakai, Naoki 169, 171n20 Sas, Miryam, 230 Sasagawa, Keiko 157, 170n10 Sassen, Saskia 120, 130, 134 Saudi Arabia 89–99 Segato, Rita 125, 130, 134 Serbia 136, 139–140, 147–148, 150–151 schema 16–17, 21, 27, 29, 32–33, 42, 181, 189, 196, 198, 228–229, 232 Schmitt, Carl 155, 170n2, 170n17, 173, 175–178, 183–184, 187, 191 self-determination 155, 160–161, 164, 165–166 settler colonialism 250–255 shame, politics 6, 10, 136, 252–253 Shelley, Mary 251 Shinjo, Ikuo 236 Shinmei, Masamichi 56, 79, 80 Shinran 63 Silverman, Kaja, 233 Slaughter, Richard 240–241 slavery 28, 108, 111, 116, 181, 225, 255 Slotkin, Richard 168, 171, 172 Smith, Adam 94–95, 97, 113, 131 So Proudly we Hail! 159, 160–161, 162, 166, 167–168 Social Science Research Council (SSRC) 45–46 Solomon, Jon viii, 1, 37, 41, 83–85, 88, 138, 155, 154, 217 South Africa 106, 109, 110, 112, 126 sovereignty 182, 184–185, 191, 194 spatiality of human existence 73–77 species (speciation, specific difference) 3, 33, 34, 68, 76–77, 86, 95, 193, 240–242, 244, 253 Spengler, Oswald 89, 91–92, 96, 98–99, 107, 111 spiritual shape of Europe 55–57 Spivak, Gayatri 47 Srnicek, Nick 121, 134, 159, 171 Stoler, Ann Laura 127, 131, 134 stranger 190–192, 194 Strauss, Leo 21–22 subject (subjectivity, subjective) 3, 8, 11, 15, 34, 36, 41, 43, 46, 59–61, 83, 112, 164, 173–174, 190–193, 195,

264 Index 198, 200, 204, 211, 221, 234, 236, 242–245, 249, 255, 256, 258 suicide 164–165 Taiwan viii, 4, 9, 10, 37, 41, 48, 78, 83, 88, 211, 216, 217 Takada, Yasuma 79, 80 Takeuchi, Yoshimi 49 Takigawa, Yukitoki 56 Taussig, Michael 127, 131, 143 Tazaki, Hideaki 178, 195, 198 technology 16, 21, 26–29, 38–38, 71, 99–101, 174, 194, 240, 243–245, 248, 253–254 Terayama, Shuji, 232 Tetsurô, Watsuji 43, 50, 51, 53, 56–59, 61–65, 71–72, 78–79, 81, 83, 85–88 theory 47, 53–54 They Were Expendable 158, 159 Third Nomos of the earth 92 passim Third World 135 Tokuda, Masashi 231 Tomatsu, Shomei 225–227, 229–232, 236–237 totalitarian regimes 138, 139 transition 1, 4–5, 9, 11, 13, 16–17, 19–20, 22–24, 29, 31, 48, 80, 100–101, 112–113, 120, 124, 149, 173, 177–179, 183, 186–187, 209, 211–212, 217, 220, 240–241, 243–247, 249–251, 253–255 translation 188, 191–194 transnational 6, 14, 16–18, 25, 27, 30, 36, 37, 41, 139, 158, 241, 246, 248, 250, 252 transpacific 7, 15, 85, 88, 150, 154, 238, 241, 246, 248, 250, 252 Tsing, Anna 121, 130, 134 Turkey 85, 96, 99, 103 Uchimura, Kanzô 63 Ukraine 85, 89, 102 ultranationalism 137 United Nations 2

universal (universalism) 3, 4, 15, 18, 24, 32, 41, 48, 49, 50, 58, 71, 78, 80, 82, 86, 90, 97, 99, 106, 114, 147, 160, 162, 164, 167, 181, 196, 209, 248, 251 Valéry, Paul 54 Végsö, Roland 200, 201, 215, 216 victimization 6, 246 Vietnam 12, 22, 38, 86, 90, 149, 228, 231, 242, 244, 258 Vogel, Ezra 249, 256, 248 Walker, Gavin vii, 5, 13, 27, 30, 32, 37, 38, 41–42, 131, 134, 173 passim Wallerstein, Immanuel 92, 99, 100–101, 108, 110–111, 113, 129 passim Wark, McKenzie 28, 38, 42 Watsuji, Tetsurô 43, 50, 51–82 Wayne, John 158, 167 Weber, Max 62, 63, 70, 86, 88, 114, 130, 134, 194 Weber, Samuel 200, 202, 208, 209, 215 passim Wellek, René 205, 207–209, 217, 218, 220, 223 Werfel, Franz 144–145, 152 West and the Rest, the 43–47, 51, 54, 57–58, 60, 70–78, 83 Western imperialism 115, 149 Western theory 4, 15, 47 White (whiteness) 7, 15, 35, 56, 69, 72, 76, 83, 86, 96, 103, 115, 136, 146, 167 passim, 173, 190, 240, 250, 254 Wilson, Woodrow 7, 155 World Bank 257, 249 world marker, 112 Yanagita, Kunio 59 Yugoslavia 135 passim Yutaka, Abe 157–159, 171 Zhang, Longxi 200, 206, 217, 223 Zhang, Yingin 200, 206, 217, 223