The impossible subject position

I was hesitant about what to put in my title to indicate the position where one can claim to be a subject. I don't feel that I am talking about Althusser, but maybe eventually I am. So please bear with me and let me leave the title indeterminate for a while.

Parsing through the suspicious categories of universalism, particularism, authenticity, collectivity and the mother tongue, Sakai seems ultimately to land in a place of indeterminacy, at least when he arrived at Lu Xun at the end of Chapter 5.

Tentatively I accept this position as perhaps the only one with enough integrity for us. But only for now. I find it important, however, to respect the various (failed) attempts at a collective, a universal and a translation of language.

Sakai's first chapter on translation inevitably reminds me of Deleuze, whose reverence for difference and inequality somehow does not integrate into cultural relativism or scattered radical indeterminacy. Deleuze's Kafka is still able to talk, although in a voice of challenge, irony and resistance. I believe it is important to recognize that the indeterminate position we have arrived at does not mean we are to stop hope, action, or speech.

I am still not sure what is the practice of this position, other than being cautious and vigilant when we attempt to form our world and speech. Maybe that is why I cannot yet think of it other than that it is an impossible position to occupy.

Techne and universalism

I just wanted to highlight a moment of continuity in Sakai's text with other texts that we have read this term. Towards the end of Chapter 5 he writes, "As is amply shown by the fact that the Orient had to modernize and adopt things from the West in order to resist it, the modernization of the Orient attests to an advance or success for the West, and, therefore, it is always Westernization or Europeanization" (172). What I think is interesting about this quote is that this adoption of things could be read as what both Kant and later Cheah term "techne."

Whether it is the techne of something like the radio or television, or more broadly, the embracing of a free, self-regulating market, there seems to be an inevitability of imagining subjectivity in relation to Western universalism at least in terms of technology when a country tries to "resist" as a particularized or essentialized nation.

Furthermore, and to follow the line of the spread of the free market and democracy as part and parcel to Western universalism, any sort of particularism must define itself, and thereby also its subjectivity in terms of the multinational capitalist system. Because it doesn't seem to me for it to be enough just to possess some abstract notion of ideological supremacy or universalism--this must be backed up by the very real presence of superior techne. And how can you resist this techne except by meeting it on its own terms?

week 10

There are many binaries in Naoki Sakai's Translation and Subjectivity: foreign language and national language; individuality and totality; particularism (or nationalism) and universalism; the East and the West. The components of each binary are not merely two extreme ends of a spectrum, but in their relation to one another there is something more fundamental, in the sense that one gives rise to the other. Sakai tells us that desire to know a foreign language is the desire for one's own national language; according to Watsuji, individuality is created only when a person fails to identify himself/herself with his/her subjective position in a totality (for Watsuji, individuality is not only the negation of totality but also the negation of the ethical because, he believes that the totality (community, state) is necessarily ethical and thus occupying of one's proper position in the totality is also what it means for a person to be ethical); it is only through nationalism that universalism, or internationalism, become possible; and the strange and different--namely, the East--is needed to establish the West's identity.

Sakai discusses particularism and universalism' relation to modernity. With monistic history giving rise to pluralistic world history and all states encouraged to become modern industrial society, it might seem that the world is increasingly become universalistic. However, Sakai argues that modernization process, as exemplified by the U.S.'s modernization theory, is not universalistic, but "universalism is a particualrism thinking itself as universalism; it is doubtful whether universalism could ever exist otherwise" (157).

Week 10 Reading Response

Hypervisibility and hypererasure have historically functioned as regulative mechanisms of identification and oppression in different countries around the world. In Chapter 3 of Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism, Naoki Sakai illustrates how the visibility and simultaneous invisibility of the body of the emperor contributed to “the formation of postwar Japanese cultural nationalism.” The everywhere and nowhere of the emperor's body and the overwhelming abundance of descriptions of his body constructed particular and universalist frame for identification. Is it then possible to read Sakai’s discussion of the premodern and the modern (154) is situated in relation to the universal and the particular (157), where the modern operates as a kind of hegemonic yardstick of what universal notions of teleological progress would look?

On Heterogeneity and Spatiality

Naoki Sakai is an adamant proponent of heterogeneity, seeking in his work to disrupt national and regional constructs that obscure the signs of difference contained within them.  Constant throughout Translation and Subjectivity is a fervent desire to transcend such binaries as West and East, universal and particular, modern and premodern.

One of the difficulties of area studies is that the dimensions of the field are delineated by the very boundaries that easily reify cultural difference and discourage a more direct engagement with, for example, "Japan."  We have already seen how Harootunian posits the uneven encounters with modernity in everyday life as one possible site of critical analysis, and Sakai emphasizes the decentering effects of language and translation as another.

I wonder of we might draw upon spatiality--both physical and textual--as a way of linking the work of these two scholars.  In the first case, space defines the physical relationships between human beings in society, enabling a social encounter that goes beyond the rigid capitalist model of existence (the human as homo economicus).  In the latter, space exists within the text itself, enabling a linguistic encounter that alters the reader's understanding of the world.  These spatial relationships are by no means bound to a culturally specific context, yet they resist the homogenizing tendencies of ethnocentric discourse by remaining forever open to interpretation.

Naoki Sakai Reading

The assignment for this week is chapters 1, 3, and 5 of the Sakai book. Also, read Chapter 4 if you have time. Sorry I forgot to let you know last Thursday. See you Thurs.

Travis

The Role of the Human Sciences in Neo-liberalism

Following Foucault's analysis, we can see where the discourses of neo-liberalism tend to situate the human sciences. In Foucault's reading of Gary Becker's theory of human capital, we see that neo-liberalism was concerned with developing a theory of labor in which labor would not be reduced to either "labor-power" (Marx) or to time (Ricardo then Marx). In neo-liberal economic discourse, labor is no longer solely a quantative measurement (e.g. congealed labor time), but something that has to be studied qualitatively (i.e. sociologically). As with modernization theory, a theory of social action is to be developed.

Neo-liberalism is marked not only by the expansion of economic rationality into spheres previously thought distinct from economic relations, but by the attempt to redefine and regulate behavior by instigating the active application of economic principles on the part of individual subjects. This is one aspect of what Foucault calls the "shift in point of view" (252). Neo-liberalism (particularly of the American variety) will try to discover the psychological and behavioral foundations for the search for work, and to actively produce economic subjects. The only poverty to be addressed is absolute poverty--the conditions under which a portion of the population sinks below the capacity to consume. Relative poverty (between different social classes for example) is dealt with by phrases like "Inequality is the same for all" (Roepke, 143). The effect of the penetration of such economic discourse into daily life through both knowledge and "social policy" is not only to naturalize or mystify existing class relations (which would be the usual Marxist interpretation), but to introduce a framework through which disparities of material well-being can be interpreted according to economic principles which rely on an idea of the individual human subject as homo economicus. Poverty is systemic, perhaps, but nonetheless the freedom of competition between individual enterprises must be defended in the last instance. The human being is almost genetically defined by its economic character.

Like all universal humanisms before it, neo-liberalism relies on a particular notion of the species-essence (Gattungswesen; translated "species-being" in Marx). Surprisingly, perhaps, the rudiments of neo-liberalism's species-essence are not too far off from Marx's own definition of man as fundamentally a laboring subject. To what degree does it matter whether this labor is defined as individual enterprise or as collective labor?