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?

Foucault and the non critique of neoliberalism...

I can’t help but wonder if it might be beneficial to read the emergence of neo-liberalism from a more oppositional standpoint—what I mean is some sort of acknowledgment and opposition to the fact that the human agent through his or her labor has become a particular commodity—indeed, according to Marx, one of the most important in the capitalist system. Foucault seems to want to avoid going down the Marxist road, which he deems as inadequate due to its primary critique of classical economics and is thus insufficient for a critique of neo-liberalism.

He believes that it is insufficient to the critique of liberalism in that there has been a reversal in the logic of alienation and abstraction that Marx uses in Capital. For example, he eschews the notion that labor has been abstracted by capitalism—that is, turned into a commodity. Instead, he focuses on the neoliberal argument that has stipulated that it is actually the classical economic discourse that has abstracted it—that has viewed it as only a product of the capitalist machine. Furthermore, and I think this is one of the most revolutionary claims that Foucault is making, neoliberals have actually given agency to the worker within their framework: “the worker is not present in the economic analysis as an object—the object of supply and demand in the form of labor power—but as an active economic subject” (223). That is, an entrepreneur. The worker does not work for a wage, but an income that allows him to invest in various forms of satisfaction. Foucault somewhat leaves the analysis here and does not seem to want to engage with how this homo economicus, the entrepreneur, actually manifests itself on a daily basis.

Basically, I think what I’m saying with all of this is that I think Foucault misses something with this kind of tacit acceptance of homo economicus in that even though in the neoliberal discourse the worker as changed from the commodified object to active economic subject, one thing has not changed: those who control the means of production. The neo-liberal discourse seems to say that because the worker has been transformed into an active economic subject he is now in the position of creating new relations of production through his income (the means of production). However, I think that, and this would require some further research, one could simply say that this just isn’t the case. Just because the worker is now conceived of as an entrepreneur does not mean that the income/wages will endow the worker with the means of production to control a whole new array of relations of production. There are still differences of class, uneven distributions of capital, social or otherwise, and the very persistent reality (think of outsourcing and sweatshops) of the commodification of human labor. In this sense I think the Marxian critique is still valid, even in the age of neo-liberal economics. Although, perhaps the rhetoric needs to be updated to counter the current mode of discourse.

Week 9

In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault expounds German and American neo-liberalisms. First of all, After the German experience with Nazism, many came to mistrust the the state. German neo-liberalism after the fall of Nazis was concerned about legitimizing the newly emergent German state through the principles of a market economy. The state were to be placed under the supervision of the market and the state, in turn, were to function to guarantee the smooth workings of economy. "Ordoliberals" drew parallels between what they called statism or anti-liberalism of capitalistic society and Nazism and argued that statism would inevitably lead to Nazism. The state had to allow competition because competition is the organizing form of the market; therefore, the state should not intervene on the level of market economy. Instead, the state was to intervene on the level of "framework" or the social environment--such as education and the legal system--to guarantee that the smooth workings of the market economy would be possible.

As for American neo-liberalism, what is closely related to it, I think, is the concept of homo economicus. Homo economicus , Foucault says, is "the man of consumption, insofar as he consumes" and he is also a producer in that "he produces his own satisfaction" (226). With men being producers, it is now possible to use homo economicus as the analytical grid of economic activity. Therefore, with American neo-liberalism, social relationships and individual behavior can be analyzed, studied and deciphered, and, as the objects of economic analysis, people become govermentalizable.

Moreover, as producer of his own satisfaction, homo economicus is also a subject of interest. But while homo economicus are rational and predictable in that they contantly act to further their interests, the overall society is by no means predictable and it can never be controlled according to the people's will. Instead, the American neo-liberalists argue that "the efforts each makes for himself serve [serving in original] the good of all" (277). The government, therefore, should not and cannot obstruct the interests of individuals because no one, including the sovereign, has a firm grasp on the economic mechanism. The sovereign cannot interfere with the individuals' pursuit of their interest, and it is only when the individuals are free to pursue their interest that the totality will also reap benefits and somehow gain a balance. This, Foucault argues, is what is meant by the invisible hand of Adam Smith.

Week 9 Reading Response: Liberalism, Liberalization & The Social

The readings for this week discuss neonationalist, neoliberal and statist responses to economic and social crises and issues in Japan and South Korea resulting from the liberalization of economic markets. Yoda outlines the dangers of market mentality in the social that neonationalists and neoliberals appropriate for their own projects and the failure of the adoption of liberal democratic principles to reconcile the contradictions of an accelerated and overloaded capitalist economy. Although, there is an acceptance of capitalist liberalization of financial markets in Japan and South Korea, both Yoda and Hart-Landsberg and Burkett articulate the reluctance of the state to completely relinquish its authority and let global capitalism run itself. According to the authors, the South Korean chaebol has become an enemy of neolibeals who want the state to deregulate, stop protecting national conglomerates, and open its markets to international competition. As labor management in Japan merges what Yoda articulates as the traditional and enterprise societies to capitalize on and more thoroughly discipline the labor force, labor in South Korea has become increasingly more unruly to discipline. Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett discuss the work of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in fighting capitalist restructuring efforts that attempt to exploit labor for surplus value. The authors suggest KCTU build solidarity internationally with other workers movement.

According to Foucault, in the lectures from The Birth of Biopolitics, liberal government functions to supervise (to surveil) and to intervene only when economics is not able to carry itself and the country. He talks about a crisis of governmentality alongside state-phobic apprehensions that are a kin to the mistrust of the state and global capitalism for labor unions in the Hart-Landsberg and Burkett reading. Perhaps liberalism’s performance of a separation between public and private, church and state, function to produce dissonance and anxiety, that makes capitalism thrive on fissures and difference while alluding to homogeneity and sameness. Foucault articulates a new programming of liberal governmentality by which state and economy shift roles and the liberal governmentality apparatus “asks the economy how its freedom can have a sate-creating function and role” (95). How do we see this new programming functioning in our readings on Japan and South Korea as they attempt to negotiate liberal democratic principles and the liberalization markets?

Alternatives to Neoliberalism

While I agree with many of the attacks on neoliberalism made by Foucault, Yoda, and the Hart-Landsberg/Burkett duo, I remain uncertain as to what alternatives we might posit in refutation of the current system of global capital.  With my skepticism, I do not mean to diminish the critical efforts of these thinkers, nor do I wish to signal a subdued acceptance of the controls and limitations that affect our lives.  I do, however, want to start think more constructively--and less destructively--about these issues, especially in light of the fact that this course is nearing its conclusion.

In her article on Japanese neoliberalism and neonationalism, Yoda criticizes both schools of thought for their tendency to reify Japan as a national entity and posit that entity against the rest of the world.  For, as she argues, "the issue is not the changing relation of Japan versus global capitalism but the permutation of the global order of capital into an increasingly direct and pervasive force organizing our world" (50).  Yoda seems hesitant, however, to postulate a theory that will address this pernicious, invasive force.  She recommends a return to modernity "not in the sense of grafting old frameworks onto the new conditions but as a means for understanding the present by imagining the alterity to the dominant ideological horizon of our time" (50).  This statement suggests temporal (and epistemological?) alternatives that might undermine the universalist claims of the capitalist present.  I am reminded of the literary scholar Kamei Hideo's work, "Transformations of Sensibility," where he identifies in the experimental linguistic qualities of Meiji literature imaginative possibilities now precluded by the homogenizing tendencies of modern literary development.

Hart-Landsberg and Burkett are more explicit in their political views, advocating a "movement toward a new economic system centered on human needs instead of profitability and mutually destructive competition" (426).  While I sympathize with their aspirations, I fear that such a movement will prove unsatisfactory insofar as it seeks only to answer the needs of human beings without investigating their underlying causes.  I would not deny the validity of basic requirements for life, but I would suggest that the human proclivity for acquisition and power will continue to perpetuate itself unless more fundamental changes occur.  The inequalities of modernity demand far more than a socioeconomic transformation; they necessitate nothing less than a revolution of the mind and heart.

I contend that we can only find peace if we reject the prerogatives of the self that dictate our unending consumption, and seek instead an absolute release from suffering.  Such a position may well invite skepticism and derision from those who are more firmly anchored in materialist society.  For example, Gandhi is an eminently respected figure, but there are few who truly take his ideas seriously.  Yet I would venture to say that such principled idealism represents a refreshing alternative to the self-righteous indignation that so often characterizes the political stance of leftist academics.

Week 8

Harry Harootunian focuses his article on criticizing the field of Asian Studies in the West (particularly the U.S.) and Naoki Sakai examines Tanabe Hajime's lecture entitled 'Death and Life' in terms of the meaning of being Japanese subjects in the Imperial Japan. T. Fujitani's article brings Harootunian's and Sakai's respective arguments together in his discussion of the Reischauer memo.

Harootunian criticizes the field of Asian Studies in the U.S. on several grounds, which include his observation that the area specialists have not been able to completely detach themselves from the area studies' original purpose of providing intelligence regarding the enemy during the Cold War. Due specifically to the problem of receiving funding, what many of these specialists are doing is reinforcing the entrenched ideas of what the East is supposed to be. Therefore, the area specialists have not been able to lead the field of Asian Studies into novel directions. T. Fujitani also writes about how elite academicians, with or without their knowing, have contributed in framing Japan and the Japanese people in a certain way as to meet the needs of the U.S. interests. Therefore, according to Fujitani and Harootunian, there is a close relationship between area studies and policymaking.

Fujitani also writes that the American government, eager to demonstrate that the U.S. did not practice racism, recruited Japanese-American soldiers and sought for new ways to embrace minorities into the American society for purposes of propaganda. President Roosevelt's declaration that "Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry" (390) is of course contradicted by the ongoing practice of racial discrimination in the U.S., but it is also reminiscent of Tanabe Hajime's conceptualization of the imperial state. Tanabe argued that it was necessary that a state be ethnically diverse because he believed that only when people are granted the possiblity to negate their social grouping, they could become parts of the grouping in more proactive ways. Tanabe's argument was that in order to become a Japanese subject in the Imperial Japan, what is necessary is not the Japanese ancestry, but the devotion to the Japanese state to the point of death. In the cases of both Japanese-American soldiers and volunteer soldiers of the Imperial Japan, even though the reality of ethnic discrimination belied the rhetorics of universalism and equality, these rhetorics were continued to be implemented to solicit devotion to the state order.

Week 8

I really appreciate one particular insight from the dinosaur piece, where Harootunian urges the distinction between homogeneity and universalism (page 49). It may be a minor point in the argument, but it answers some of my long-standing problems concerning how one should position oneself in relation to cultural differences and global exchanges. When we talk about the homogenizing tendency of global capital, we laud cultural differences; but then again we can easily fall into the trap of cultural relativism and essentialism. The point I take from Harootunian's comment (quoting Pierre Vilar) is that capitalism does not homogenize culture but universalize history - that all societies exist in the same "world time." Turning all cultures into the same global culture is not exactly on the agenda of capitalism, and asserting cultural differences as the site of resistance would just miss the target. Global capital totalizes in politico-economic terms, and infiltrates our daily life, actually creating unevenness while demanding a flattening synchronization in the web of production and trade.

What is in danger is thus not, horizontally, the widest possible spectrum of cultural differences, but rather the disregard for, vertically, historical depth and complexity in every particular point of convergence. Here I concur with Tug and Freda that the minuteness implied in the close inspection of everydayness seems difficult to manage in academic practices.

How to become a Japanese imperial nationalist:

I would like to try to tackle a little bit of what Sakai calls modern subjectivity, which he has taken from Kant. He writes: “Most of Japanese philosophical discourse on the subject, the self and the ego in the 1920s and 1930s assumed the basic understanding of modern subjectivity, the Kantian formula of the split between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego: only as long as the ‘I’, the knowing subject, cannot be determined can the ‘me’ as the an empirical ego be known as an object of experience” (484). So, as we have already discussed in previously weeks, Sakai is also talking about what Foucault calls the “empirico-transcendental doublet.” The empirical subject—that is, taking yourself as a possible field of study, or the birth of anthropology—can only be said to exist when the transcendent subject remains in obscurity.

I’m not quite sure I understand what this obscurity brings to the table other than if it was not obscure, it would necessarily fall into the realm of the empirical ego, and there would be no “outside” or “knowing” subjectivity that could categorize and theorize concrete, or empirical existence. It’s as if, in order to get out of the contradiction that one cannot conceive of oneself as both subject and object, Kant has invented an ego split. That is to say, there is one part of you that can be the object of empirical study while another part of you that stays outside of the realm of scientific observation. In short, your transcendent ego.

So, modern subjectivity is then necessarily schizophrenic in that there are two egos in any one person. From what I gather from the rest of the argument, this split in egos allows a self-reflexivity on the part of the subject (it can conceive of itself as a knowing ‘I’ as well as an object of observation that can be fit into Foucault’s modern episteme). Indeed, one could posit schizophrenia as the extreme form of self-reflexivity—one self always questioning the other self etc.

But how does this relate to Sakai’s argument about Japanese imperial nationalism? I think that this self-reflexivity, or self-awareness allows for Tanabe to say that in order to be a part of a species—which is biological referent for nationality—you must be capable of choosing NOT to disassociate yourself with the given community. Here is where the logic gets all inverted when he talks about the role of negativity.

This is what I think he’s saying: In order to observe your empirical ‘I’ as a part of a particular nationality, you have to be able to “freely choose” not to disassociate with a particular nationality (or just freely choose to associate with a particular nationality, but somehow the positive formulation of it misses the importance of some dialectical process). In other words, you appeal to your transcendental ‘I’, which for Kant (I think) meant the realm in which free will existed, in order to get the justification for choosing to participate in a given nationality. This is the negation of the species/nationality by appealing to a higher source of validation. By freely choosing, with your transcendental ‘I’—which is just another way to describe Tanabe’s notion of appealing to God to “prevent the state form deviating from truth and justice”— you can conceive of your empirical ‘I’ as part of a particular nationality. In short, submitting the state to “God” means submitting the state to your transcendental ‘I’, which means being able to have the self-awareness/reflexivity of modern subjectivity. This also means that anyone can be a true Japanese nationalist, regardless of your ethnicity, geographic origin etc.

This gets us out of ethnic and geographic determinism of who can and cannot be a Japanese imperial nationalist. Although, my one question--and this might be related to anti-imperial movements across the board--is, what happens when the transcendental 'I' says, "Hell no, I don't want to be a Japanese imperial nationalist!"? Who says that by negating the species/nationality by self-reflexively questioning it will automatically lead to your active participation in it?

Week 8 Reading Response

In “Tracking the Dinosaur” Harootunian discusses the vanished object of Asia and the role that Asian area studies has played in that disappearance. He castigates scholars in Asian Studies for their refusal to include interdisciplinary theories and methodologies that implicate culture and systems of power, in their allegiance to nation-states and reliance on statistical data as the substantive requirement of field study in Asian countries. He says that Asian Studies professional journals and associations are complicit with Asian area studies departments in a perpetual state of fundraising while not making intellectual changes in the field in order to allow it to be able to put issues in Japan studies in conversation with other area studies, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies.

I agree with him that “any critique must now be positioned not inside or outside the ‘West,’ since the ‘West’ can no longer be thought of as a dominant geographical concept structuring the non-West” (41). I also agree with him that it is important to instead view conflicts between nation-states from within the framework of a “dialectical encounter.” However, I still think there are important power relationships that are denied if the role that the “West” and specifically European states and the United States have played in colonization of mass amounts of people of color around the world. In his effort to not do what post-colonial studies does in relation to the binary of the colonizer and the colonized and leveling out differences in order to present a united monolithic experience of abjection and oppression, he does not leave a place for broad structures of racism and processes of racialization through colonialism that share commonalities in their differences around the world. It makes it difficult to account for the hundreds of years of white European and U.S. specific brutality and ideological trauma and categories that largely organize local and global social and political life today. How do we manage to not get stuck in monolithic particulars and instead have an ethical reading of histories and present oppressive frameworks? Connected to this is Tugg's concern, which I also share, with the gap between the everyday local knowledge and broad theoretical conversations-- I hope we might be able to talk about this too.

At the same time, I understand and think that he is making an important move in trying to bring critique to bare on Japan Studies as well as critiquing the Japanese nation-state as a colonialist state (which is sometimes left out of post-colonial narratives of white colonialists). This critique also surfaces in the Fujitani piece for today too, in his tracing of the ethnocentrism and racism of Edwin O. Reischauer through his memo to military officials in 1942. He also reads the racism at the heart of Japanese studies in its penchant for utility and functional characterizations of Japan and Japanese culture. He argues that Japanese studies provided the data that constituted Japan as a model capitalist nation even as Japanese Americans were constituted as the model-minority in an effort to counter movements in the 1960s and 70s for racial justice. Fujitani attributes the failure of Japanese studies to acknowledge the diasporic experiences of Asian immigrants in the U.S. because it would implicate the Japanese nation-state’s role in wars in the Asian Pacific region as well as the U.S.’s military presence and dominance in Japan and in other Asian countries. In an effort to filter how Japan is viewed as a nation-state, the prominent voices in Japanese studies do not critically account for social and political issues that implicate the Japanese nation-state as a global superpower as well as the U.S. government.

Week 6 Reading Response

Towards the last pages of the Spectral Nationality, Cheah alludes to the state of the disintegration of the political body and contrasts it with Aristotle’s earlier organismic conception of the body, previously discussed in chapter 1 (p.52). I’m assuming he’s referring to the transnational flexible accumulation of capital and the invasive structure of the corporation as a global powerful force in local and global politics as the main causes of this disintegration. Even though he disagrees with Hardt and Negri’s conceptualization of the multitude as a body of globally oppressed underclass of neocolonial forces of globalization and capitalism, he seems to be drawing from Deleuze’s conception the body without organs (382) as he discusses nonorganic vitalism. Although he moves away from Hardt, Negri, and Deleuze, as he makes a case for freedom’s relation to finitude and the ghost of the postcolonial state, there are some traces of their ideas in his characterization of the ghost of the postcolonial nation that haunts global capital even as it eviscerates the power of the poco-state. Cheah suggests that this haunting is a new organizing mechanism of libratory politics “the most apposite figure for freedom today” (395). In class we mostly dispelled his arguments, but I don’t remember us talking about the postcolonial ghost that haunts capital’s new world order as an articulation of freedom in it’s “reincarnation.” Is this a contraction to his critiques of finitude and libratory politics as a road toward nationalism?

Dinosaur Hunting with Harry

In his scathing critique of Asian studies, Harry Harootunian argues for a methodology that addresses the uneven temporalities engendered by modernity and capitalism.  Harootunian emphasizes everyday life as the site of encounter, by which he means "the experience of the lived reality that marks the appearance and expansion of industrial capitalism and its propensity to install similar conditions everywhere it is established" (54).

One of Harootunian's central objectives is to dismantle Asian studies as an isolated specialization defined by nation and discipline, impenetrable to outsiders.  While I am in complete agreement with this aim, I would like to reflect a bit more on how to close the gap between local knowledge (most notably, language) and broader theoretical discourse.  Also, since much of Harootunian's discussion centers on modern history, I would also like to ask how his ideas might extend to a premodern context.

What intrigues me about Harootunian's perspective is his desire not only to overcome the obvious shortcomings of Asian studies as it developed in the post-WWII era, but also to transcend the epistemological limitations of postcolonial studies and cultural studies as they are currently practiced.  I echo his concern that "the search for the excluded voice often leads to the futile pursuit for authenticity and restores the Eurocentric claims of the sovereign subject it wishes to eliminate" (48).  Although he vehemently rejects the foundations of Asian studies (even the idea of Asia itself), Harootunian is astute enough to note that this rejection itself will not be enough to satisfy his ambitious objectives.

How does Modernization theory presage neo-liberalism?

This has already been touched on to a certain extent in Prof. Workman's post, but I just wanted to elucidate a particular aspect of the text that I think shows distinctly the emergence of the military-industrial-finance complex that turns into the mid-wife of full blown pro-market interventionist neo-liberalism. If we accept the Marxist interpretation of class struggle as the prime motivator of history, then the formulation of the CIS and the CCP depend upon an outside donor of research funding in order to get their project of paradigm shifting of the social sciences off the ground. If you noticed, almost every organization that was working on modernization theory was funded by either the Rockefeller, Carnegie, or most often, the Ford foundation. Although Nils Gilman does not explicitly remark upon that fact that these research groups were the philanthropic project of huge and increasingly multinational corporations, it is not to difficult to discern the beginnings of the collusion of bourgeois class interests with national ones, especially as Rostow was active in both circles--and particular in the turn towards heralding the modernizing powers of the military of which Rostow was an active supporter.

What I want to bring out of the text is how modernization theory, as funded by Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller provided the theoretical apparatus that justified the expanse of surplus capital into development and infrastructural projects in the Third World. In capitalist production, there comes a moment of over-accumulation or over-capacity which produces surplus capital. Instead of reinvesting this surplus capital back into the national infrastructure (it actually can't because the national market has reached what economists call a high-equilibrium trap wherein a high level of competition has driven down the rate of profit for all companies on a national scale) , it seeks an outlet for investment projects that let it continue the expansion of finance. What I'm proposing is that modernization theory, as it took economic development as its major indicator for growth in postcolonial countries, was in fact just the theoretical justification for the expansion of US business interests overseas, which would allow capital to find new markets and in so doing preserve American business (and also national) hegemony.

What is even more interesting to me is how the military (either American, or just American support for compliant military dictatorships) becomes one of the primary apparatuses used to ensure that these new markets stay open to free trade. Again, I think that this would just be the Marxist/pseudo-conspiracy theory concerning American Cold War ideology and foreign policy...

I also think we should talk about the psychological aspects of postcolonial development that people like Lucien Pye use---I would love to read him against Fanon...

Week 7

(Ever since I woke up this morning, I have been feeling vertigo, so it has been a bit difficult for me to keep focus and gather my thoughts. I apologize in advance for any muddled sentences or unclear terms.)

Nils Gilman's insight into the rise of modernization theory in the U.S. shares two of the themes that we have dealt with in our revious readings, namely, universalism and social sciences. The rise of modernization theory meant "the end of ideology" because, as reflected in Truman's Point Four, Merriam's behavioralism and etc. modernization theory was a departure from pure ideology in that it was founded upon social theories. It also functioned as a struggle against the dominance of the field of economics in postcolonial development studies as modernization theoriests brought various disciplines of social studies into the discussion of postcolonial studies; for example, Lerner, Lasswell and Pye focused on psychological factors and Almond on structural-functional approach to politics, while Rostow modified and elaborated on the role of economics.

What these scholars sought to discover through the social theories was "the total political process" (129) that will prove to be relevant to almost all countries in the world. They argued that all postcolonial states, regardless of their history, tradition, language, and etc., were all destined to leave behind their "traditional" society toward "modern" society because the countries (meaning the elites) desired such outcome. The two political systems that enabled attainment of modernization were democracy and communism, but they reasoned that communism was doomed to destruction. As a result, in order to become a healthy and thriving modern society, all postcolonial states were to emulate the U.S. model of development. According to them, the ideal world was where all states were culturally, socially and politically universalized under the American rubric.

One another thing I found interesting was that Gilman emphasized that modernization theory was as much about America's own identity as it was about modernization/Westernization of postcolonial states--that it not only looked at the normative modernization process of the postcolonial states but it also was an "obsessive search for 'the' national identity by American scholars" (17). Moreover, he also wrote "In creating modernization theory...the modernization theorists had to enact and embody modernity themselves" (146). Both of these points reminded me of Foucault's "empirico-transcendental doublet."

Week 7 Reading Response

Gilman provides a provocative discussion of the roots of modernization theory as being based in liberal universalism. He asserts that he sees modernism as not only an aesthetic movement, but one that also pertains to social, political, and economics and for that reason he refuses to disaggregate modernization theory from modernisms as many historians have done before. His argument that intellectual modernizers were just as concerned about what modernity and being constituted as a modern subject mean in the U.S. than the applicability of their ideas abroad and that this was a part of a project to promote a “high concept version of Americanism” through modernization narratives of liberal ideas of progress, democracy, market economics. Gilman goes on in a later chapter to discuss, the inclination of Europeans to define themselves in relation to non-European others, he further develops this idea by adding that there was also a process of abstracting modernity into the idea of the universal at work at the same time. I was trying to make a connection between this idea of European preoccupation with the other and Bellah’s characterization of Japanese particularism in group identification and continuity in terms of deference to the rule of the ruler and later the state. In both there is a desire to make the local the primary focus of political concern while at the same time attention to what is outside of the group is important whether through universalism or hierarchical relations of rule.

Bellah’s conceptualization of group or political community (kokutai) social organization formations suggests that Japanese modernization patterns take cues from tradition, rather than acting to eradicate and act completely in contrast to it and that Japanese cultural values are at once particularistic and universalistic which has allowed for the survival of different ideological frameworks. Bellah also states that a merging of the sacred with the state through Confucianism allowed for a stronger allegiance to the both state and religious rule but maintains that the group is the primary concern and a source of allegiance for people.

I’m wondering how issues of gender and race complicate both Bellah and Gilman’s conceptualizations of modernity and modernization, in particular regimes? Feminist and postcolonial critiques and uses of modernization theory have been incredibly important and contested in scholarship and economic and public policy; I’m trying to think about how these conversations might add to and diverge from both Bellah and Gilman.

Foucault and Modernization Theory

As we move into Part 2 of the course, I hope that everyone is beginning to formulate some thoughts about what they would like to write on for their final papers. I am meeting with one student today during my office hours, and I hope that others will also take the opportunity to meet with me about their papers. Since we have been reading so much theory in the course, it may be helpful to go over the ideas you have about how to connect the coursework to your ongoing dissertation or master's thesis projects.

There are a few important questions to consider as we begin our analysis of modernization theory, with some specific attention to the postwar situations in Japan and South Korea:

1) What correlations can we see between the intellectual discourse of modernization theory and Michel Foucault's analysis of security, territory, and population? Although we ended with Foucault at the end of the 18th century, and will continue with his analysis of the 20th century in week 9, I think we can already begin to make connections. One important issue to consider is the status of "liberalism." In the political discourse of the United States, "liberalism" tends to refer to a public policy which advocates the redistribution of wealth, federal funding of egalitarian public programs, and, finally, tolerance of difference in the realm of cultural values. However, we have to consider the "polysemy" of the term liberalism; that is, "liberalism" is made to signify a wide variety of positions on politics, economy, and culture.

When Foucault discusses the perceived "naturalness" of economic adjustments which emerged in the late 18th century with the Physiocrats, we have to recognize there the roots of classical liberalism. Adam Smith's discussion of the "invisible hand" of the market claimed that there was a realm of the economy that should be free from government interference. In the "Birth of Biopolitics," Foucault will show how this argument of classical liberalism gradually changed into that of neo-liberalism, which insists that the state and other public institutions should intervene to ensure the freedom of the market. It is not enough to set off a realm of freedom for the economic individual, but rather the absolute freedom of the market's movement, control, and governance must be guaranteed. In neo-liberalism, market relations and market concerns begin to govern the state.

Now, without getting too far ahead of ourselves, we have to ask what Nils Gilman means by "American liberalism" in Mandarins of the Future. It seems to me that the liberalism of modernization theory is not precisely akin to either classical liberalism or neo-liberalism. In order to differentiate its discourses from communism, modernization theorists had to argue for the historical necessity of capitalist development (even when they were loathe to actually use the term "capitalism"). At the same time, however, they also proposed that modernization should lead to a welfare state and to an egalitarian civil society in which all nation-state subjects were politically and legally equal. However, because they were so concerned that political participation would lead to political conflict and produce the potential for the rise of leftist or communist governments, they sought to create environments of political quietism in which consumer society and the entrenchment of cultural values allowed for the smooth functioning of state bureaucracies and an uninterrupted national-historical development. Therefore, the "liberalism" of modernization theory was "liberal" in the sense of supporting government intervention in the distribution of wealth and economic development, but it also prefigured "neo-liberalism" in that state intervention was to guarantee the free functioning of the market, and a smooth transition to a capitalist economy with a national-cultural basis. In this regard, both articles on neo-liberal economic reforms in Japan and South Korea will point out continuities between proponents of a national economy and proponents of neo-liberal reform.

Therefore, in comparing the various versions of "liberalism" we are confronted with here, it is necessary to look more closely at the apparatuses of security proper to each, and the versions of humanism that each of these apparatuses relies on. For example, as Gilman shows, Talcott Parson's theory of "social action" was the epistemological foundation of much modernization theory. Social science made claims about the fundamental qualities of the human being, particularly the human individual acting within society. Following Foucault, we could say that the political effects of modernization theory lie as much in these articulations of a human subject as they do in the policies this knowledge led to. Is it possible to consider the theory of "social action" to be an apparatus of security? What does it attempt to secure or protect society against? Did modernization theory apply a cost/benefit analysis to historical action and political intervention? What norms did it attempt to institute? How did statistical information contribute to its conclusions concerning society and governance?

Modern Reflections

By revealing the social, political, and economic forces involved in the development of modernization theory, Nils Gilman accomplishes two major objectives.  First, he demonstrates that the way in which these American scholars viewed other peoples and cultures was prefigured on their own historical assumptions.  Because these men sought to impose their ostensibly universal ideas of modernization rather than respond to local conditions, their failures are hardly inexplicable.  Second, Gilman enjoins that we reflect on our present circumstances.  While we may lay claim to a more enlightened viewpoint than the proponents of modernization theory, we are still subject to many of the same apparatuses of power that structured the world in the 1950s.  Where do we stand in relation to this power?  How might we position ourselves more constructively when looking at other cultures?  And what ideals (if any) continue to motivate us in our work?

Modernity remains a defining boundary in area studies, with scholars grouped into modern and premodern factions.  Is this merely an artificial division, or does it indicate an epistemological rupture to which academics have been obliged to respond?  In terms of influence on departmental structure, the only boundaries comparable to this line of modernity are those between nation-states.  I suspect that we will address this issue more thoroughly next week with our reading of Harry Harootunian, but I would like to raise it now in the hopes that we can begin to think productively about how we approach, structure, and articulate our research.

So what exactly is this contaminating techne?

One of the reoccurring concepts in Cheah's book is "techne." While we did not read the chapter on Kant and his definition of techne (mechanical), we do get a sense of what it is when he discusses it in juxtaposition with physis (natural) in his section on Aristotle and Descartes. What I got from that discussion is that the organicist nation (Fichte) or state (Hegel) is necessary undercut by a mechanist techne ridden contamination that takes the form of the state (Fichte) or civil society (Hegel). The techne, as best as I understand it, is this recourse to the technological, the automaton, the mechanistic consumption of industrial capital--the recourse to some outside creator that sets up causal mechanisms to animate existence that ultimately produce alienation in the subject.

However, I'm not sure that I understand the exact reason why the organicist nation or state must necessarily be read through techne. To the best of my understanding, the fatal moment where the organicist concept that promotes freedom for the citizen is contimated by the techne is linked to the inability to distinguish between physis and techne. That is to say, between the natural world as created by an outside technical force, i.e., God, and the fact that art (or society if we take that as a product of human technical skill) is an imitation of this same technical expertise. Since the natural world/human beings are "mechanical" in that they were created from some divine blueprint, so are also the objects (either artistic or societal) that we as humans create using tools--a kind of imitation of the first instance of divine "techne." This nullifies the auto-causality, or the spontaneous self perpetuating organicism because then it is reliant upon some outside design and is thus no longer free.

Why is this contamination? Does the existence of a God necessarily imply that we no longer have an autonomous will? Is this the contamination of the techne? That we should fall into some sort of indoctrinal mode of thinking shoved down our throats by the mechanical God/state/civil society? Is this just a manifesto for critical thinking, instead of indoctrination? And ultimately a critical thinking that leaves us with anarchism as the only viable political option?

I know I'm taking this to an extreme...and I'm sure that Cheah is not prescribing anarchism--he is, rather, prescribing a method of survival in this system (since you can't in reality actualize the idea of freedom due to the contamination by the techne)...the process will always be haunted by the spector of the techne so long as the objective is individual freedom within the collectivity--he calls this an aporetic freedom I think...

Organic Nation and Population in Security Society

I would like to do a little exercise and compare the concept of organic nation in German idealism, as described by Cheah, and Foucault's analysis of the rise of population as the key concept in the security society. Frist of all, a very obvious difference - the organic nation goes on to involve mostly cultural institution or development of Bildung, while the security society, at least in Foucault's examples, engages in economic and medical /reproductive technologies. Put in a crude way, the organic nation employs life as a metaphor for the collective, while the security society manages individual lives as the foremost task.

Despite the totally different domains of inquiry, some similarities may be observed. If we remember the examples Foucault gives about the technocrats and the economic picture of scarcity, we notice the tendency to treat the whole of population and the economic system as an organic whole which plays out by itself, over time. The state or government, on the other hand, is only to ensure that the population will realize its natural cycle which would sustain its own existence and, subsequently, the governing power's subsistence. It stikes me as smiliar to the formulation of the nation as the organic actualization of the ideal of the people. Through a process of cultivation (Bildung) over time, the people will realize themselves in the ideal of freedom and an organic collective.

What is interesting is the place of the state in relation to the nation - since Cheah argues that there are different formulations among the German thinkers. It seems that the goal of the security society Foucault describes is closer to Hegel's formulation, where the state functions as the institution ensuring the development of the organic body of nation. However, as the ultimate goal of the security society is its own substenance - to stay in power, in other words - there seems to be a gap between the self-development of the organic population (or nation) and the functions of the state.

I am not really sure what I am trying to get at with this comparison after all. Maybe I am trying to argue that the later development of the nation-state simplifies the gap between the self-development of the nation and the goal-driven operations of the state - and thus comes closer to the governmental technology of security. But is it one of the reason why nationalism has gone awry in its later developments?

Week 6

What I found most interesting in chapter three of Spectral Nationality is that Fichte believed cultural nation to be prior to the political nation while Hegel gave precedence to organic state. For Fichte, even in the face of foreign occupation, as long as the culture remained, the possibility of resistance was preserved. But for Hegel, individuals need to be bound by an ideal state, which is a state where reason and freedom are already actualized. This difference between Fichte's nationalism and Hegel's statism led me to think of the Korean peninsula during the colonialization. Korea during that time lacked its own state institutions, but there were independence-minded organizations that sought to educate people and facilitate resistance movements. Hegel's ideal state was a monarchy, but I came to think that these organization might have assumed the role of an invisible state. Also, some of those spearheading the independence movements were "nationalists", as seen by the development of nationalistic history, but some of them were educated overseas and wrote in Japanese and English as well as in Korean. So, what was the role of language and the role of Korean culture during the colonialization? I wish I was more knowledgeable in both German philosophy and in history of Japan's colonialization of Korea so that I could think more clearly about these issues.

What I thought to be interesting in chapter six was Pramoedya Ananta Toer's discussion of negative notion of freedom manifested in colonial capitalism and the positive notion of freedom where freedom entails reciprocal responsibilities. The modern capitalism that suppressed the natives needed to be replaced by the higher morality of native intelligentsia, who truly cherished the Indies people's living needs and true interests.

Chapter 4

Hello all,

Sorry I have been absent on the blog this week. I presented my work at a Mellon seminar two weeks ago, and beginning tomorrow there is a conference on Transnationalism (I am presenting tomorrow morning at 9:30 am if anyone cares to rise so early). I am presenting on the Korean poet Yi Sang and the colonial architecture journal Korea and Architecture. Anyway, once the weekend is over I want to make a few posts to the blog, particularly because we will be moving into our discussions of modernization theory, area studies, etc.

The Pheng Cheah book is quite ambitious and is full of good insights and connections. I don't necessarily agree with many of his claims, though I find myself moving toward them. In any case, this book can serve as an invaluable reference for those interested in questions of colonialism and the politics of culture in the process of de-colonization. Also, it sets the material we have read thus far in a more global and less provincially European context. We can see that problems of finitude / infinitude, life and death, transcendental philosophy and anthropology, Bildung as organic formation, etc. are better considered issues of modernity, and more specifically colonial modernity, rather than questions confined to Foucault or Berman's putative "West." But this should already be obvious...

I want to point out that I did not assign Chapter 4 only because the reading load was already quite substantial. Nonetheless, this is a vital chapter for anyone interested in connections between national liberation movements and Marxism. His presentation is somewhat brief, but nonetheless he touches the main points and it is definitely a good entryway into the "national question" in Marxism. It would be great if you get a chance to at least look over that chapter.

Pheng Cheah's Spectrality

As we conclude Part I of the course and move into issues of area studies, social science, and translation, Pheng Cheah's work demonstrates one possible avenue of theoretical engagement. Like our course, Spectral Nationality comprises two parts, roughly divided between (German) philosophy and (Kenyan and Indonesian) literature. Cheah's exposition of the organismic metaphor of the social and political body extends to his discussion of the writings of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Underlying Cheah's approach is his contention that "all work should ultimately be comparative and collaborative, open to the disruption of the other" (13).

Cheah seems to be seeking some middle ground between the universal and the particular. Neither does he blindly apply European theoretical models to African and Asian sociopolitical realities, nor does he privilege the latter in such a way as to exclude their cultural productions from broader consideration. Instead, he engages the two, revealing the productive disruptions to which he alludes in his introduction.

One of the more striking developments to emerge from this engagement is Cheah's analysis of Pramoedya Ananta Toer: "for Pramoedya, the decolonizing or postcolonial nation is not congenitally infected by a colonialist will to domination because he does not regard modernity and enlightenment as Europe's exclusive property" (280). For me, this position is rich in possibility, for it offers an alternative to the limitations of postcolonial discourse. By negating the cultural specificity of modernity and enlightenment, it enables new formations of subjectivity and nationalism that are closer to the elusive ideal of freedom.

Bildung

The idea of the Bildung is very interesting, especially Berman's exposition that the German Romantists considered the encounter with the foreign as the dialectic mediation which enables a higher fulfillment of oneself. In this mode, the foreign is embraced only because it facilitates progression towards one's higher self. This may ties into Duncan's question about the not-so-radical foreignness of the German Romantic project. Berman explains that for F. Schlegel, limitation is inherent in the experience of Bildung: "Limitation is what distinguishes the eperience of Bildung from the purely erratic and chaotic adventure where one loses oneself" (48). No matter how humble, self-critical one starts on the journey of Bildung, ultimately all the foreignness seems to matter only in relation to the ideal self. The vision of perfecting oneself thus seems to prescribe standards of the inclusion of certain foreign materal (e.g. the Greeks), and the mode of encounter which may be beneficial to the formation of the self.

In this context, Berman's casual invocation of the Umheimlich seems interesting (page 46, in parenthesis). For all we know, the Umheimlich is anything but a simple term designating the unfamiliar. It means the weird feeling of familiarity amongst the most estranged context. Ultimately, therefore, the experience with the forieng is a search for the self. But where does that leave the foreign? Does it retain its integrity when it is subsumed in the process of Bildung?

Lastly, it is interesting that Berman didn't discuss the meaning of "experience" in its original German meaning. Hegel also employs "experience" as the major mediating element in the development of the consciousness. In German, it is Erfalrung. Falrung, meaning travel or journey, defines experience as always a forey into the foreign.

Week 5

I would like focus my post on Goethe's notions of translation and Weltliteratur , which I found to be perplexing albeit also interesting. First of all, I appreciated Goethe's insights into translated texts' ability to reveal to the readers things that are foreign, and thereby reveal things that are inherently of their own but theretofore were left hidden from their view. I found such dynamic between the original and translated texts interesting, and thought translation certainly can perform such function to a certain degree. I also like the idea of Weltliteratur where there will be an "active coexistence of all contemporary literatures."

But the details of Goethe's depiction of Weltliteratur and the role of translation ultimately, at least for me, undermined his ideas to the point where I was left doubtful than being convinced. If the development of world literature reserved an honorable role for Germans and if--as he wrote in a letter (Berman claims that Goethe might have not wholeheartedly believed in what he was writing in the letter)--that "when someone understands German well, he may do without many other languages (57)," with his being a German, how convincing his advocation of world literature can be? Moreover, if translations should be considered belonging to the national literature, isn't he, on a certain level, rejecting the "otherness" that makes translations so enlightening? He might have had better intentions but I can only view that as involving an usurpation of other cultures' accomplishments.

Lastly, this might just belong to the realm of personal differences, but although I greatly appreciate, admire and respect the process of translation, I do not think translations can always "attain the untranslatable." Goethe does not seem to take into consideration that a translation might not always be able to completely convey the content of the original text. Translating is something that I would like to pursue and I always wrestle with the inability to come up with the perfect translation, so Goethe's complete faith in translation was something that draw my attention.

Translation as Épreuve

Insofar as it introduces a distinction between l'étranger and le propre, translation serves to define linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries.  But translation can also function as a mediating force between these boundaries, and in this sense it holds promise as a transformative act.  This, I believe, is the sense of the word épreuve as used by Berman.

The linguistic changes wrought by translation can extend beyond the immediate confines of the translated text.  Berman cites Luther's translation of the Bible as a pivotal moment in the history of translation and literature in Germany.  This Verdeutschung served not only to render the text into German, but also to define the linguistic parameters for future translations.

If we turn our consideration to a discussion of world literature (including, but not limited to, the topics that Goethe raises in his essay), how might we envision a practice of translation that engages productively with 'foreign' texts?  What is the difference between translation as épreuve and translation as homogenization?  Although English, not German, is the dominant mode of linguistic discourse in the contemporary world, issues of history and economics (to which others have already alluded in their posts) remain pertinent.

How foreign is this "experience of the foreign"?

While I overall enjoyed the theoretical claims that Berman makes as he summarizes German Romantic thoughts on translation, I was kind of annoyed by the repeated reference to the Greeks as the "foreign" culture with which the German's must primarily interact with in their translations. It is this kind of encounter with a "foreign" that doesn't cause one to fall into the nasty aporetic trap of strangeness and in turn allows for the move of double fidelity to both the original text and the native language in translations.

What I find problematic in this claim is that it seeks to posit the experience of the Greeks as the primary beneficial experience of the foreign. The foreign here is not an experience with the "exotic orientalism" of say China or India that would instantly produce a dizzying vertigo in the German sensibility. Heavens no. Instead, the encounter with the foreign through translations is primarily viewed as an experience with the pinnacle of Western civilization (and thereby implicitly makes the claim that the Germans are heirs via translation of this tradition), which was for the German Romantics, the Greeks. In fact Berman even includes a quote from Eckermann stating as much: " 'But while we thus value what is foreign, we must not bind ourselves to some particular thing, and regard it as a model. We must not give this value to the Chinese, or the Serbian, or Calderon, or the Nibelungen; but if we really want a model, we must always return to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of human kind is always represented. All the rest we must look at only historically, appropriating to ourselves what is good, so far as it goes' " (63).

What the hell? The German Romantics (or at least Eckermann--although Berman makes no real attempt to engage with this) thus seem to have only wanted an experience a "comfortable" foreign as a model, one that will buttress their belief in the preminence of Western civilization, and thereby allow them to construct the German national language and culture as its necessary apotheosis. I know it sounds like I'm hating on the Germans...but it just seem highly contradictory that all of a sudden there are "acceptable" and "non-acceptable" cultures with which to construct the experience of the foreign. This seems to demarcate a geographical limit to the German Romantic theory of translation to the Northwestern hemisphere... My question is then how can we use the elements of the German Romantic theory of translation to talk about East Asia? I think that we can definitely extropolate elements, but I'm wondering what exactly we would have to tweak and modify to make it work. What, in our current moment of globalization, actually constitutes an experience of the foreign?

Interesting points for discussion

I have only read the posts of Freda and Lita (DO YOU PREFER LITA OR LOLA?) so far, but I think both make important points. I think that Freda's question concerning the Eurocentrism of Goethe's theory of world literature is an important one. We have to keep in mind the historical limitations to the project of World Literature at that time (we can look, for example, at Goethe's distinctions between the "West" and the "East"), and to consider whether or not the "expansion" of its model to a more inclusive global society is possible or desirable. In other words, are ideas of cosmopolitanism themselves colonial? Does the idea of the "multitude" posited by Hardt and Negri get out of the "bad universalism" of Goethe's Enlightenment project? In the Japanese empire, for example, ideas of cosmopolitanism became effective as colonial discourse, and as a means for national assimilation. As Freda suggests, we have to address the problem of "universality" in Goethe's work, and in the various theories of translation in German Classicism and Romanticism.

Lita's comment brings up many important points. I also think that Goethe's discussion of the relationship between translation and economic exchange is significant. If translation occurs in a cultural marketplace, it is not solely a process of actualizing the spirit, but has close material connections with the modern (capitalist) economy. How do economic relations dictate what gets translated and what dies away, confined to its own language? If translation is a way to re-vivify texts, then which texts are lost to history and translation because of the economics of translation? These are important questions, I think, and are not unrelated to the colonial dimension of "World Literature." For example, why is there a whole canon of Japanese literature available in English, but most of the classics of modern Korean literature have not been translated? This problem is certainly related, but not limited, to the economics of translation.

Both Lita and Freda point out the position of German in Goethe's discussion. This is very problematic, and I don't think Berman really gives it enough attention. For example, Goethe's assertion that one need only learn German in order to read Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian literature (because of the quality of German translations) seems directly at odds with Berman's own claim, mentioned in my post below, that the translating drive posits the foreign language as superior to one's own language. I agree that Berman could have better addressed the problem of the universality of German in these theories of translation, although Berman's text is an explication, so we cannot necessarily impute the problems in German Classicism and Romanticism directly to him. I am curious to read his other texts on translation, to see if his own theories of translation repeat some of the problems of Eurocentrism, universality, and cosmopolitanism found here. For example, he mentions in the introduction that he came to the problem of translation through a project of translating Latin American literature into French.

Week 5 Reading Response

Goethe alludes to the nation-state conflicts that are hindering the building and consolidation of a unified world literature (277). Is this turn toward world literature a way to shore up a universal cosmopolitan humanism that we talked about in our discussion of Kant or is this just another colonizing move by a Western intellectual to elevate European epistemologies and categorize them as representative of the world, while silencing other forms of meaning-making that occur alternatively occur within the Western as marginalized knowledges and in other parts of the world as subjugated knowledges by white Western male scholars? Who is this secret silent congregation of like-minded intellectuals that Goethe speaks of (227)?

I was trying to make loose connections between Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's conceptualization of the multitude of transnational “networked citizens” that possess the potential to shore up global democracy and the society of control in their book Empire and the multitude that for Goethe seems to be consolidated around universal world literature and humanism. I still have to think through the connections and contentions though.

The Drive to Translate

In hindsight, last week seemed rushed. There is a lot of material in Security, Territory, Population, and perhaps the lectures warrant more than one class discussion. However, for better or worse, we are moving on to The Experience of the Foreign, which is another exciting but difficult text. The good news is that we will certainly have a chance to revisit Foucault's lectures because we will be reading his course from the subsequent year (The Birth of Biopolitics) in which he extends the analysis of the apparatuses of security into the 20th century through a reading of German ordo-liberalism and American neo-liberalism. At that point, it will be useful to remind ourselves of the main points from last week, which should contribute to a more thorough review of the text than was possible in one class period. In any case, after three weeks of Foucault, it may be good to move outside of his material for a while.

Before writing a post on the "apparatuses of security," with some more reflections on the position of Foucault in relation to Marxism, I want to mention some things to think about in trying to connect Antoine Berman's text to what we have read so far. At first glance, it may not be quite apparent how it fits into the course. I know that I said in the first week that I would be writing up reading guides for you. Predictably, perhaps, that plan fell by the wayside. However, I think that it is actually much more useful for both you and I if I just post to this blog once or twice a week. So, here are a few comments about the Berman reading.

There is one claim in Berman's text, stated very early, on pg. 8, which is useful to start with:
"In reality, however, the translating drive leaves any humanist project far behind. Polytranslation becomes an end in itself, the essence of which is to radically denaturalize the mother tongue. The translating drive always starts off with a refusal of what Schleiermacher has called das heimische Wohlbefinden der Sprache--the indigenous well-being of language. The translating drive always posits an other language as ontologically superior to the translator's own language."

This passage is quite interesting in its implications. Here Berman relates what he calls the "translating drive" to humanism, claiming that the translating drive "leaves behind" any humanist project. The first striking thing about this statement is that German Classicism and Romanticism are in many ways two of the first models for the contemporary humanities. The study and translation of literature prominent in early 19th century Germany was foundational for establishing the position of the humanities in the university. Many aspects of their models (the organic formation of the text, the spontaneous poesis of the subject, the purposiveness of cultivation etc.) eventually made their way to the United States--in New Criticism, for example--by way of the study of English Romanticism (which had itself borrowed liberally from the German case). Humboldt was responsible in many ways for defining the methodologies and the historical purpose for modern university education, and he gave particular attention to the study of languages and to comparative methods in the study of literature.

In this sense, it is somewhat counter-intuitive that Berman would locate a drive to translate in the intellectual work of this period and would claim that this drive actually moves beyond the confines of the humanist project for which it was also foundational. In chapter 3, which discusses Bildung (culture or cultivation), Berman discusses this question in terms of an intimate relation between the drive for Bildung and the drive to translate. In other words, university education, which in modernity was connected to the project of "forming" national subjects, was also a project of translation in which the process of national formation entered into intractable relations with the foreign. By the way, I think it is these relations that confront the translator with what he calls an "ethics of translation."

Taken at the level of the drive, Berman suggests that translation studies, and perhaps comparative literature as an entire field of inquiry, has the potential to work entirely against the grain of the humanist project to which it seems so bound. This point is debateable, but nonetheless interesting for our moment. For example, why are there so many students studying literature and comparative literature who are critical of the humanist project? How do the polytranslations involved in the "experience of the foreign" occur within the confines of the humanist project while also pointing well beyond them? What "models" or "practices" of translation facilitate a sublimation of the translating drive into the humanist project and which ones potentially subvert it?

Berman relies on an overly simplistic determination of "drive" in terms of sexual desire. Nonetheless, there is a question of desire involved in the relation between Bildung and translation, and psychoanalysis may provide us with a vocabulary for translation studies. It is possible to differentiate "drive" from both "desire" and "wish," but for now I won't get into these differences. In his early articulations of the relationship between the unconscious and dreams (e.g. The Interpretation of Dreams), Freud used terms such as "condensation" and "displacement" to refer to how the dreamwork created the manifest content of dreams. Interpreting the "latent content" of dreams remained an ongoing process which required the analyst to consider the dream-thoughts and associations of the analysand, what s/he knew about the analysand's past, and general principles concerning the structuring and development of the psyche (e.g., Oedipus, etc.). According to Freud, the psyche in its most rudimentary "formation" is, at least to some degree, an effect of repression. Repressed content emerges from the unconscious in the form of dreams, and, furthermore, dream content is never a direct translation of the "wish." Rather, the dreamwork patches together images through condensation, displacement, and other mediating narrative devices. The simple point here is that if the practice of translation is the effect of a drive, it is misguided to expect that any translation will somehow produce an adequate "copy" of the original. Maintaining "fidelity" to the original, while not sacrificing the coherency, conventions, and style of one's "own language," is a consistent problem whose final overcoming can only be imagined through a kind of repression. Structural models of languages that require a total consciousness of meaning are an example of this sort of repression, which forecloses many of the ethical, historical, and analytic problems that Berman is concerned with. This is one of my hypotheses.

Therefore, one question tomorrow will be how, precisely, Berman can claim that the "drive to translate" leaves behind the humanist project. Clearly, this problem is bound up with the "denaturalization" of the mother-tongue. In many ways, Freud also assumed such a "de-naturalization" of the mother-tongue, and equally connected it to the problem of the drive. Does the insight that there is nothing natural to the "mother-tongue" allow the practice of translation to move beyond humanism? Is there more to it?

In the style of this blog, this is by no means a cohesive argument, just some initial thoughts on tomorrow's text. Before entering into this sort of speculation tomorrow, it will be useful to discuss in detail the various modes of translation that were conceived during this seminal period in the creation of the humanities. Berman's text has the benefit of providing an overview of this period in German intellectual history while at the same time drawing out some of the most important theoretical problems.

Week Four: So is Foucault a Marxist or what?

One of the things that struck me the most in the lectures was Foucault's juxtaposition of the mercantilist state against the more modern conception of the state promoted by the economistes, which dictated that the state should only intervene in order ensure the good circulation of natural phenomena--whether that be the laissez-faire regulation of grain scarcity or the relations of human beings with each other and their production--either of goods or commodities.

I think that he perhaps explicitly refrains from positing whether this transition is a good thing or a bad thing--that is, the transition from a police-state mercantilist system to the laissez-faire roots of free trade, but you definitely can understand why Sartre would lambast him as being the last defense of the bourgeoisie...although that would seem to be a misinterpretation.

And yet, you could say that Foucault's analysis, whether he says that it is more an analysis of the emergence of the art of governmentality, is really a Marxist, or class analysis of society. I just want to highlight one particular moment in the 13th lecture: "Apparently the development of the market economy, the multiplication and intensification of exchanges in the sixteenth century, and the activation of monetary circulation, all introduced human existence into the abstract and purely representative world of the commodity and exchange value. Maybe, and maybe it should be deplored, in which case let's deplore it" (338).

He then goes on to say that what is more interesting for him is the analysis of the art of government and how to control the state forces through manipulation of the population etc. Yet all of this is based on a fundamental shift in the transition of economies: from mercantalist to free market. Perhaps even though we can't say that he is bona fide, card carrying Marxist, he is still intimately wedded to the Marxian critique of history.

Week 4

When reading The Order of Things last week, it seemed to me that Foucault was focused more on explaining the break between, or the distinctions between, the Classical period of wealth, natural history and general grammar and the modern period of economics, biology and philology. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault talks about three different periods, namely, those of sovereignty, discipline and security. While his aim is to explain their differences, he does so by also drawing attention on their commonalities, and I think that is one of the reasons that I found this week's reading to be more intriguing.

The problem of scarcity is one of the common factors that govern the structure of the three kinds of society. During the time of sovereignty, scarcity was seen either as a manifestation of bad fortune or a punishment for person's evil nature. In a juridical and disciplinary society, the the authorities sought to prevent scarcity by keeping the price of grain at the minimum level. On the other hand, in the apparatus of security, the overarching stance is that of laisser-faire, which is letting the natural courses of things have their way so that they can nullify the reality that they themselves are parts of.

Moreover, there are also continuities. The art of government, for example, has persisted in exerting influence on the development of administrative apparatus ever since the sixteenth century. It is only that the art of government was still trapped within the structures of the administrative monarchy until its 'unblocking' was enabled by the emergence of the perspective of population during the eighteenth century.

Week Four Reading Response

I'm still reading and absolutely love the letures; i'll stick to just one small point of clarification... In the third lecture Foucault discusses processes of normation and normalization (57). He argues that disciplinary techniques of the state and government rely on a norm as a model for constructing the normal and the abnormal. So the norm is the milieu, drawing from his secon lecture, within which the normal and abnormal are judged. Foucault tries to differentiate between normation, which I read as the process by which the norm comes into being as regulative and normalization the process by which what's normal is constructed. I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive, as Foucault is suggesting- he seems to be distancing himself from processes of normalization in talking about the norm, but I think that in order for norms to become regulative they rely on processes of normalization whether or not normalization is related to law, social interactions, ideological apparatuses etc. What do you all think?

Economy and People

So far two issues concerning security intrigue me the most.

First of all is the model of security as a system that aims at allowing fluctuation and compensation play out by itself. Of course this is very much an economic model as Foucault's example demonstrates. But there are two sense where we can view it as an economic model - firstly, and more specifically, as the capitalist economy, and secondly economy in a more general sense, namely the mechanics of any circulation and equilibrium. Concerning the capitalist economy, one wonders whether we can say, in the voice of a vulgar Marxist, that a higher development of capitalist economy gave primacy to the technologies of securty in the 19th century. For example, in the discussion of scarcity, the liberalist argument works with the important aspect of an expanded market - one that includes other country in the region, but also, at this time, an emerging global market in sight. Concerning the general model of circulation, on the other, it ties in well with Foucault's argument that the object of the power mechanism (population here) is viewed for the first time as something natural. The idea that energy and material eventually balance out seem to cohere with our knowledge about biological and physical realities. It thus seems a response to a more mechanical view of the world which in turn somehow dehumanizes the human subject into yet another natural phenomena.

The question about the human as natural phenomena leads me to my second interest, which concerns Foucaults statement that the population is different from the people. Of course we can surmise different meanings to the formulation, but what is really interesting to me is that the people seem to be those who are resistent or disruptive to the systematic calculation of the population. It reminds me how revolts or revolutions so frequently have to assume the name of the people, and to reassert that the people should be the real actors in the political scenes. At the same time, however, the revolutionary ideas are very frequently coded in rational calculations for the greater good (I am thinking of William Godwin here), and for example the public policy after the French Revolution seems to carry out exactly the abstract management of the population. Can I try to explain this by just saying that the French Revolution (and William Godwin for that matter) are after all a middle-class movement, in which the values are inevitably bound up with the capitalist economy that I discussed earlier?

Reflections on Kant; Freedom from the World, Freedom in the World

I want to address some of the topics that have been brought up on the blog so far. Since communicating in written media is different from conversation, it is possible that some different directions can be explored here.

One issue that is of interest to me was brought up by Jonelle in the second week. In her discussion of Kant and Foucault she asked something like [I'm paraphrasing], "as humans can we ever escape from our world through Enlightenment? Is it possible to ever see the objects of the world as they really are and therefore somehow free ourselves from the world through knowledge?" She used a complete consciousness of the political system and political situation as her example, I believe.

This is a central problem that Kant was concerned with. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he began by asking how synthetic a priori judgments are possible. That is, whether we can bring together various objects under categories and concepts prior to any experience of those objects. In order to understand the conditions of knowledge "prior to experience," the Kantian subject set itself off from objects, and established a relation with them that opened up the possibility of knowledge. This setting off of the subject from the object is referred to as "the subject/object split" in philosophy.

The problem, as Jonelle suggested, is that once we set ourselves off from objects in an attempt to see things as they truly are, we presume ourselves free from the very conditions we are trying to understand. If we are completely free from those conditions in this manner, however, there is nothing to guarantee that our ideas about them can have any sort of objective validity. In other words, once a person says, "I am completely free from the various objects that I understand," it is unclear what constitutes the connection between ourselves and what we supposedly understand. Although I am being a bit crude and a bit brief here, this is more or less why Kant introduced "regulative ideas" in the Critique. Regulative ideas [or "transcendental ideas"]surpassed any possible experience. They were completely hypothetical, not constitutive (to use his distinction). Nothing related to an object is necessary for a regulative idea, as in those ideas that have a constitutive use. The purpose of regulative ideas is to expand the understanding to its greatest unity and extension. This does not mean that they free the mind from any consideration of truth. Rather, the understanding can only be extended and unified by a careful consideration of the various illusions that can emerge in our reasoning.

The regulative idea is a focal point (focus imaginarus) where the conditions of knowledge and the objects of knowledge would be adequate; therefore, it allows us to organize our knowledge and thoughts reasonably, by way of the ultimate purpose for producing our knowledge. In this sense, the antinomic question of whether the subject is completely free from the world or is completely determined by it (which appears in the Critique of Pure Reason) can only be "solved" through the free hypothesizing of ideas that are not random ruses, but will rather lead the subject to the greatest possible truth about the world to which s/he belongs. Ideally for Kant, it seems, we would belong, in an entirely free manner, to a world which we adequately understand as a totality. (BTW, in Kant's idiom, only such a totality could properly be called a "world"; that is why he states that transcendental philosophy is concerned with cosmological ideas). But, Kant suggests that this is not so easy because reason continually foists illusions onto us that we have to grapple with and clear up.

In Foucault's reading of Kant as I understand it, the empirical study of man is haunted by the same possibility of infinite transgressions on the part of reason. In others' behaviors, temperaments, feelings, and ideas we confront a dispersed time in which no two people seem to cognize the world in the same way at any given moment. If this is the case, what is the regulative principle that can guide a variety of subjects to a use of their freedom that is also truthful? In other words, the reasoning subject can regulative himself or herself according to the ultimate goals of knowledge, but how can the thoughts and feelings of others arrive freely at the same truths? Pragmatic anthropology, with its ultimate goal of defining "man" empirically, steps in to describe man in his actions as a free being, and to also establish what the most truthful of those free actions are. This is accomplished through communication and speaking, a kind of deliberation.

The question of whether we can ever be both Enlightened and free in the world, therefore, is taken up in two ways by Kant, in a fashion that was not recognized until Foucault's penetrating analysis. The first is through transcendental philosophy and the hypothesizing of regulative ideas, and the other is through an infinite empirical analysis of man as the locus of this possibility for self-regulation. By the way, the most prevalent modern concept dealing with the relationship between the free human being and the world which determines him/her is the concept of "culture." Culture suggests both a passage to freedom and those determinations of ourselves that seem the most intractable. Interesing problem...

This is how I have come to understand Kant and Foucault. In order to come to a better definition of freedom, I agree with Foucault that freedom has to be de-linked from the question, "What is man?" or "What does it mean to be human?"

From Security to Population

In his first lecture, Foucault defines three types of security: the legal code (code légal), the disciplinary mechanism (mécanisme disciplinaire), and the devices of security (dispositifs de sécurité).  The first two types are quite straightforward; it is the last that poses the most difficulty and that occupies Foucault's attention.  The devices of security hold within them a more totalizing power because they transcend the binary oppositions to which the other types of security so rigidly adhere.  Ostensibly, the devices grant greater autonomy to a population, allowing a wider scope of acceptable action.  But because they operate more subtly to enforce the regulative norm, their influence permeates the territory in which they are enacted.

Foucault describes the sociopolitical function of these devices as bio-power (bio-pouvoir), a term that links security and population.  Security is immanent in population, and the population is at once subject and object of its controls.  Moreover, insofar as the human being exists as part of the population, the human sciences cannot be separated from the dynamics of power.