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?