The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work 9780822387589

Citation preview

the age of the world target

next wave provoc ations

A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman

the age of the world target Self-Referentiality in War, Theory,

and Comparative Work

rey chow

Duke University Press durham and london 2006

∫ 2006 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Katy Clove Typeset in Scala by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For Harry Harootunian

contents

Preface ix Introduction. European Theory in America 1 I

The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies 25

II

The Interruption of Referentiality; or, Poststructuralism’s Outside 45

III

The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective 71 Notes 93 Index 117

preface

I am indebted to the coeditors of Duke University Press’s new series Next Wave Provocations—Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman— for the opportunity to produce this book. I also want to take this opportunity to thank all the readers and audiences in the field of Women’s Studies who, over the years, have given my work consistently warm, intelligent, and open-minded reception. Their magnanimity makes me believe that it would be possible to explore my topics in the critical spirit of feminist inquiry even as the discussions involved do not immediately coincide with the objectification of women and genders. In that non-coincidence, then, lies the provocation of the following pages: what power relations of knowledge production can be articulated by a feminist cultural critic juxtaposing war, theory, and comparative work, without necessarily folding these events back into feminism’s self-referential frame? Indeed, as the chapters collectively ask, how might a critique of self-referentiality as such be part of an exercise to restore contemporary Western academic and intellectual phenomena to their constitutive exteriority, their relations with things that are repeatedly expelled and excluded (even in moments of radical Western self-deconstruction)? Di√erent parts of the book have benefited from the attention of colleagues and friends—Iain Chambers, Jonathan Goldberg, Elizabeth Harries, Michael Moon, Naoki Sakai, Kenneth Surin, and Dorothea von Mücke —who at various stages o√ered my arguments space, time, comments,

suggestions, and constructive criticisms. The manuscript was completed during 2004–05, when I was the Chesler-Mallow Senior Research Faculty Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University, and directed the Center’s postdoctoral seminar ‘‘The Orders of Time’’; I thank the seminar participants and guests for two semesters of stimulating conversations on an inexhaustible topic. The extraordinary graciousness of Dore Levy and Michael Silverman, my two department chairs, as well as the good will of many colleagues and students, made working at Brown a uniquely rewarding experience. To Bill Brown, I am grateful for the gift of a generously engaged reading, which challenged my biases, pointed me to additional sources, and energized my revisions. Ken Wissoker has been the ideal editor: I cannot thank him enough for the enthusiasm and e≈ciency with which he has overseen this project since its inception. Austin Meredith, as always, provided the goodhumored, indulgent environment that freed me to focus on writing, often in gleeful oblivion of most if not all of my domestic obligations. Finally, although they were not directly involved with this project, I would like to express my thanks to Chris Cullens and Livia Monnet for their long-standing a√ection and camaraderie; to Natalie Zemon Davis, Fredric Jameson, Dorothy Ko, Masao Miyoshi, William Mills Todd III, Kathleen Woodward, Michelle Yeh, and Anthony C. Yu for their extremely kind endorsements of my work. I dedicate this book to Harry Harootunian, in respectful acknowledgment of his decades-long scholarly and pedagogical e√orts to create possibilities in the U.S. academy for the theoretically as well as historically informed study of Asia—as an order of things that needs to be handled in coevalness with, rather than as an exception to, the rest of the modern world. Earlier, shorter versions of the three main chapters appeared respectively in America’s Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory, edited by Philip West, Steven I. Levine, and Jackie Hiltz (Armonk, N. Y. : M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 205–20; The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.1 (winter 2002): 171–86; and elh (English Literary History) 71 (2004): 289–311. These materials have been expanded and substantially revised for the purposes of this book.

introduction European Theory in America

The chapters of this book comprise a series of attempts to contemplate three related sets of issues. How have we come to write in the manner we do in the Anglo-American world of humanistic studies today? How might this condition of writing be assessed against the larger forces of crosscultural encounters and entanglements—specifically, since the end of the Second World War? What might we learn by juxtaposing area studies, poststructuralism, and comparative literature—academic spheres which seem to lead separate existences but whose developments are all closely tied to postwar North America, in particular the United States? By the ‘‘manner’’ in which we have come to write, I mean a tendency, since the arrival of poststructuralist theory, toward a kind of critical language—primarily in the study of literature but also in other humanistic disciplines such as history, philosophy, film, gender studies, and cultural studies—that distinguishes itself from the commonsensical, ‘‘readable’’ prose that continues to appear, for instance, in journalistic and other kinds of mass publications. Scholars in the humanities who have been influenced by theory tend to write with vocabularies, syntaxes, and argumentative turns that are regularly ridiculed and disdained by those outside the humanities (as well as by unsympathetic humanists) as dense, obscure, and inaccessible. How did we arrive at this tortuous linguistic relation, in which the ideal of transparent, comfortable communication between parties seems to have been forsaken to make way for ever more impenetrable writing, a

writing that, to some of us at least (and I definitely include myself here), is oftentimes less a mere fashionable style than a necessary barrier—a line of self-defense—between ourselves and the rest of the world? This question necessitates a reconsideration of the implications of poststructuralist theory, even as the term ‘‘theory’’ itself may, for younger generations of graduate students these days, designate a di√erent set of authors— Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Kittler, Niklas Luhmann, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Carl Schmitt, for instance—from the names of an older currency such as Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and so forth. For, despite the latest trends, it is equally evident that the presence of a generalized poststructuralist way of thinking continues to inform some of our most influential critics (Étienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and ˇ zek, to name just a few), whose writings testify to the ongoing Slavoj Ziˇ potency and salience of what seems a dated theoretical paradigm—often referred to as ‘‘the linguistic turn’’—in newer subfields such as gender, queer, cultural, ethnic, and postcolonial studies. As I see it, the transformations in question are a sign less of the decline of poststructuralist theory tout court than of its mutation, selection, and adaptation, processes that make a retrospective examination of some of its crucial moments of intervention all the more pertinent, arguably, at this historical juncture.

The Emergence of ‘‘Self-Referentiality’’ in Modernity: The Story of a Fall In one of his early works, The Order of Things, Michel Foucault undertook a historical analysis of the transformations that had taken place, since the Renaissance, in the relationship between the codes and conventions of representation, and the world being represented.∞ Foucault’s rich, detailed, and imaginative argument is well known to many readers, and no attempt to recapitulate it would do justice to the eloquence or complexity of his observations. Nevertheless, because his work is deeply relevant to the issues I raised above, I will attempt a feeble paraphrase. Once upon a time, Foucault tells us, there was a great kinship between words and things. As the two were linked to each other by resemblance and proximity, to know language—that is, to master the rules of representation —was simultaneously to know the world in its inexhaustible plenitude. 2 introduction

Over time, however, that natural kinship began to disintegrate, and words and things increasingly drifted apart. What was once a continuum mutated into disparate entities, and ways had to be devised to mend this progressively complicated (because increasingly di√erentiated) state of a√airs. In the classical age (the period from the mid–seventeenth century to the early nineteenth), representation took the form of signification, whereby signs— not just words but numbers, tables, and various grids of classification— would be imposed on the world to generate meanings. In the modern age (from the early nineteenth century to the present), even these grids have become unable to hold together the thorough rift between language and the universe, and knowledge of the world can no longer be assumed to result logically from representations that seem to refer to it. Instead, it has become increasingly inadequate merely to ‘‘know’’ something in its empirical form or even through the artificial signs that ‘‘order’’ them. More and more pressing is the need to explore the conditions of possibility, the terms on which knowledge itself is produced. As claims to boundary-free knowing become untenable, modern knowledge in turn becomes self-reflexive; cut o√ from its previous kinship to the world, knowing is, ever more so, an attempt to know how knowledge itself comes into being. As Foucault demonstrates with his inimitable reading of Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, which he believes encapsulates the argument of The Order of Things, the world in which the place of knowledge was once securely occupied by the sovereign has now given way to a world in which man himself has entered the picture. Moreover, man has entered both as object and as subject, whose truth and visibility are henceforth inextricable from a web of intertwining thresholds, boundaries, and limits. The emergence of man is also the emergence of knowledge as finitude.≤ Of the specific realms of knowledge (what Foucault names as the human sciences and what we nowadays tend to call disciplines) he highlights— money/economics, natural history/life sciences, and grammar/language —that have replaced the generality of universal knowledge, Foucault seems most intimately concerned with the changing conditions of the last. As George Canguilhem comments, ‘‘The idea that language is a grid for experience is not new. But the idea that the grid itself calls for decoding still had to be formulated.’’ In other words, for Foucault the enigma arises at the point when language, the ‘‘grid of grids,’’ calls for a grid—because it signals a decisive ‘‘break with the period in which language itself was the grid for introduction

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things, after having been, even earlier, their signature.’’≥ The transformations in the status of language—from being the equivalent to the (plenitude of the) universe as such to being the primary ‘‘order’’ or arrangement of things, and finally to being a practice having recognizably eccentric, indeed solipsistic, rules of its own—thus constitute perhaps the most palpable manifestations of what Foucault means, in his early work in general, by epistemic shifts.∂ As Simon During writes, the project in The Order of Things, as in The Archaeology of Knowledge, is ‘‘one of defamiliarization: a turning of the Same into the Other.’’∑ In an age (what some would call the post-Wittgenstein age) when to know language—to be able to speak, read, and write—is no longer to know the universe or even to arrange it according to some infinitely expandable, rational order (such as a table), what exactly has language become? As in some of his other work, modernity (the period beginning in the early nineteenth century) is described by Foucault as a kind of fall, whereby the world moves from an originary condition in which things share a relationship of similarity, continuity, and propinquity to one in which things become divided, dispersed, and alienated from one another.∏ The choice of words Foucault uses to describe the arrival of modernity suggests an admixture of a√ects—an apparent lamentation and nostalgia (for the good old days when things were simpler because undi√erentiated and undivided); a sense of trepidation about but also a fascination with the more recent happenings. He writes, for example: ‘‘The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss’’; ‘‘The space of Western knowledge is now about to topple’’ (The Order of Things, 251; my emphases). As knowledge based on resemblance and rationality comes to an end, the world takes on an ‘‘obscure verticality,’’ which Foucault further defines as follows: a depth in which what matters is no longer identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables with all their possible paths and routes, but great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus, origin, causality, and history. From now on things will be represented only from the depths of this density withdrawn into itself, perhaps blurred and darkened by its obscurity, but bound tightly to themselves, assembled or divided, inescapably grouped by the vigour that is hidden down below, in those depths. (The Order of Things, 251)

4 introduction

Having thus portrayed the fate of language in modernity as that of a fall (into ‘‘an abyss’’), in which it loses its previous capacity as the grid that coincides with or names (and organizes) the world, Foucault adds an analysis of several compensatory functions: ‘‘This demotion of language to the mere status of an object is compensated for, however, in three ways’’ (The Order of Things, 296). The first compensation takes the form of scientific language, invented in accordance with ‘‘the positivist dream of a language keeping strictly to the level of what is known’’ (The Order of Things, 296), of a language that remains an accurate replica of the world. In correlation with this positivist dream is the search for a logic that is altogether independent of language, ‘‘a logic that could clarify and utilize the universal implications of thought while protecting them from the singularities of a constituted language in which they might be obscured’’ (The Order of Things, 297). Where even the simplest sentence would be prey to impurities—the excess, unintended meanings that interfere with accuracy—the invention of symbolic logic, based on abstract formulas, would be transparent to thought in ways that bypass the annoying baggage of language. As Roland Barthes, one of Foucault’s contemporaries, describes it, a mathematical formula such as E=mc≤ was designed with a brevity and abstractness that would, ideally, block out the distorting mythologies (or ideologies) that saturate modern life.π The second compensation for the demotion of language appears in the form of exegetic writing, namely, all the discourses that specialize in recovering the critical value embedded in language: ‘‘Having become a dense and consistent historical reality, language forms the locus of tradition, of the unspoken habits of thought, of what lies hidden in a people’s mind; it accumulates an ineluctable memory which does not even know itself as memory’’ (The Order of Things, 297). Foucault would insert Marx and Nietzsche as well as Russell and Freud in this ‘‘critical elevation of language,’’ which in the nineteenth century moves both toward formalism in thought and toward the discovery and interpretation of the unconscious (The Order of Things, 299). The last of the compensations for the demotion of language is the ‘‘appearance of literature, of literature as such.’’ Foucault considers this compensation to be ‘‘the most important’’ (The Order of Things, 299; my emphasis). The notion of literature as a compensatory anchor in a world that has become over-technologized and over-bureaucratized is, of course, not exactly new—in Victorian England, Matthew Arnold’s investment in literaintroduction

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ture as a kind of custodian of morality in the advent of secularism is a good case in point. But Foucault approaches the uniqueness of literature quite di√erently. By ‘‘the appearance of literature,’’ Foucault is referring to a kind of writing that, in revolt against language’s loss of agency, takes on a permanently oppositional stance against the world—in the form of an impenetrable self-referentiality. Whereas Barthes, in a similar vein, would allude to (the cryptic expressions of ) modern poetry as his primary literary example of such a linguistic resistance,∫ Foucault dwells with considerable detail on the appearance of this new form of writing. His impassioned descriptions are worth quoting at length: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when language was burying itself within its own density as an object and allowing itself to be traversed, through and through, by knowledge, it was also reconstituting itself elsewhere, in an independent form, di≈cult of access, folded back upon the enigma of its own origin and existing wholly in reference to the pure act of writing. Literature is the contestation of philology . . . it leads language back from grammar to the naked power of speech, and there it encounters the untamed, imperious being of words. From the Romantic revolt against a discourse frozen in its own ritual pomp, to the Mallarméan discovery of the word in its impotent power, it becomes clear what the function of literature was, in the nineteenth century, in relation to the modern mode of being of language . . . Literature becomes progressively more di√erentiated from the discourse of ideas, and encloses itself within a radical intransitivity; it becomes detached from all the values that were able to keep it in general circulation during the Classical age (taste, pleasure, naturalness, truth), and creates within its own space everything that will ensure a ludic denial of them (the scandalous, the ugly, the impossible); it breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of a≈rming—in opposition to all other forms of discourse—its own precipitous existence; and so there is nothing for it to do but to curve back in a perpetual return upon itself, as if its discourse could have no other content than the expression of its own form; it addresses itself to itself as a writing subjectivity . . . At the moment when language, as spoken and scattered words, becomes an object of knowledge, we see it appearing in a strictly opposite modality: a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can

6 introduction

possess neither sound nor interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being. (The Order of Things, 300; my emphases)

This intense and beautiful passage raises two major questions. First, the qualities of literature: we repeatedly come upon claims of revolt, denial, and contestation, on the one hand, and assertions of literature’s detachment from—indeed, severance of all ties with—the rest of the world, on the other. Clearly, for Foucault, literature is what escapes the world—what, as he writes, is ‘‘reconstituted elsewhere’’ and has an independent existence all its own. Whether or not we agree with this definition of literature, it is in accordance with the logic of his argument in the entire book: if the terms for grasping the classical order of things are resemblance, analogy, continuity, and propinquity, those for grasping the modern world have to do with estrangement, di√erence, discontinuity, and distance—literature, in other words, ‘‘recoils from the aims and assumptions upon which the human sciences are based’’ and ‘‘remains unavailable to commentary, interpretation, explanation.’’Ω Preoccupied with no one but itself, literature is language turned defiantly—and narcissistically—inward. But Foucault is too conscientious a historian not to remember inserting relevant specifics—‘‘the beginning of the nineteenth century,’’ ‘‘the Romantic revolt,’’ ‘‘Mallarméan discovery,’’ and so forth. Once he does that, however—and this is the second question raised by his passage—we need to ponder the fact that he has, at the same time, referred to this ‘‘most important’’ compensation for the demotion of language in terms of ‘‘literature as such.’’ In the midst of a compellingly erudite historical portrayal of the transformations of language over the past few centuries, hence, he has introduced something of a dilemma: is the ‘‘appearance of literature’’ about the emergence of a unique, local phenomenon, or is it about a timeless generality—‘‘literature as such’’? The notion of literature as resistant and transgressive—qualities that are mapped onto the non-communicability, the hysteria as it were, of language in certain modern literary examples (examples that would include Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud, Maurice Blanchot, and Georges Bataille at other moments in Foucault’s writings), only then to be declared as the definition of literary writing itself—is, to say the very least, problematic. Whereas Foucault would go on, in his subsequent work, to criticize the ‘‘repressive hypothesis’’ in modern practices of

introduction

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sexuality such as psychoanalysis, at this point in his career he seemed invested in none other than a repressive hypothesis of literature, whereby literature, rather than being the vehicle and e√ect of power (as he would teach us about sexuality), is conceived of, romantically, as power’s victim and opposition. For scholars of premodern literature and scholars of nonWestern literature, in particular, Foucault’s literary and historical bias is glaring, even though this bias is, admittedly, shared by many contemporary academics and has provided the impetus for prevalent modalities of reading literary texts, including the literary texts of the ‘‘third world’’ and the ‘‘global South’’ today.∞≠ In retrospect, what remains instructive about Foucault’s account is not so much his (witting or unwitting) romanticist-modernist understanding of literature (as resistance or transgression) as the unmistakable emphasis he places on the historicity of forms of writing even as the latter may appear, at certain moments, to be timeless or universal. Foucault shows us that ‘‘literature’’—or what appear as noticeably ‘‘literary’’ qualities in language— is the outcome of a shifting relationship, one that assumes its objective ‘‘being’’ only in relation to other historical forces, other types of writing.∞∞ This said, the one feature he accentuates as the definitively literary quality in modern writing—self-referentiality—demands further discussion. In Foucault’s analysis, self-referentiality has emerged as a key problematic in language not in the sense of the personal or autobiographical genres that have been proliferating in the academy and beyond—his critique of confession as a major form of subjection would eventually appear in the first volume of The History of Sexuality∞≤ —but more strictly in the sense of a destabilization of epistemic ground, a destabilization that he associates with representation’s historical trajectory toward modernity in the West. To put it in a di√erent way, the tendency on the part of language to appear ‘‘folded back upon the enigma of its own origin and existing wholly in reference to the pure act of writing’’ is, we might say, symptomatic of the fundamental dissolution of the power language used to have as the ‘‘grid of grids,’’ as the very basis for knowing the world. Having lost its age-old agency, language can now derive its strength only, and paradoxically, from its own powerlessness. In what Foucault calls ‘‘the Mallarméan discovery of the word in its impotent power,’’ literature perpetuates itself by referencing itself, ad infinitum, and in that manner takes on the import of a deep interior.

8 introduction

To this extent, the phenomenon known as poststructuralist theory since the 1960s may be seen as literature’s brief contemporary continuance. Consider once again the diatribes that are often made against theory by its detractors—that it is elitist and inaccessible; that it obfuscates reality and disregards the masses; that it is amoral and nihilistic, and so forth. Recast in the historical perspective Foucault provides in The Order of Things, poststructuralist theory’s methodically painstaking, self-reflexive turns— undertaken to bring to light the conscious and unconscious assumptions behind each and every utterance—can now be understood as similarly symptomatic of an ongoing historical response to language in modernity. Perhaps even more than the avant-garde writings named by Foucault, poststructuralist theory specializes in foregrounding language’s work as one of self-reference, so much so that language, we are told, always already embodies the clues to its own undoing (see my more detailed discussions in the chapter ‘‘The Interruption of Referentiality’’). Should this epochal fascination with self-referentiality be read in terms of confinement, in terms of what many consider to be Foucault’s signature concern with incarceration in the modern age? Should Foucault’s reading of the appearance of ‘‘literature’’—as the language that is always folded back on its own rules of intelligibility, so to speak—be read in light of his other (what many consider to be pessimistic) studies, such as those of the institutionalization of madness and various practices of discipline and punishment in modern society? The answer can, with good reason, be ‘‘yes’’— Fredric Jameson’s classic The Prison-House of Language was perhaps the first study in English to call attention to this Nietzschean motif of confinement in (post)structuralism’s recursive ‘‘linguistic turn’’∞≥ —though an important intervention made by Gilles Deleuze must be invoked at the same juncture to complicate the discussion. Referring primarily to Foucault’s works such as Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish, Deleuze o√ers the startling—and remarkable—argument that to treat Foucault as a thinker of confinement as such is a misreading of the global implications of Foucault’s project. Rather, Deleuze writes, ‘‘Foucault has always considered confinement a secondary element.’’ That is to say, Foucault’s conceptualization of confinement (of lepers, madmen, and delinquents, for instance, who were exiled and partitioned from society) is, one might argue, based ultimately on a relation of exteriority:

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Exiling and partitioning are first of all precisely functions of exteriority which are only afterwards executed, formalized and organized by the mechanisms of confinement. Prison, as a hard (cellular) segmentarity refers back to a flexible and mobile function, a controlled circulation, a whole network that also crosses free areas and can learn to dispense with prison. . . . As Maurice Blanchot says of Foucault, confinement refers to an outside, and what is confined is precisely the outside . . . It is by excluding or placing outside that the assemblages confine something, and this holds as much for physical interiority as physical confinement. . . . It is in general a question of method: instead of moving from an apparent exteriority to an essential ‘‘nucleus of interiority’’ we must conjure up the illusory interiority in order to restore words and things to their constitutive exteriority.∞∂

As the outcome of language’s ‘‘demotion’’ in modern times (as Foucault repeatedly puts it), literature’s self-referentiality (or self-incarceration), too, may thus be seen as a manifestation of a certain function of exteriority— one that leads only secondarily to the confinement, indeed ghettoization, of certain kinds of writing (critical as well as creative) in the form of a closed space inhabited only by madmen, poets, and, we may add, poststructuralist theorists. Following Deleuze’s logic that ‘‘nothing in Foucault is really closed o√,’’∞∑ the question becomes that of reopening—or dis-closing—the literary linguistic turn that, as Foucault puts it, ‘‘encloses itself within a radical intransitivity.’’ How, then, to ‘‘restore words and things to their constitutive exteriority,’’ as Deleuze argues? How to make visible those interconnections that have given rise to what (only secondarily) appears as an ‘‘illusory interiority,’’ mysteriously cordoned o√, stubbornly inaccessible to the rest of the world? Foucault responds to these questions by pointing to, in the closing chapters of The Order of Things, the limit of Western thought. (We need to remember that much of poststructuralist theory, including Foucault’s, originated during the postwar era when France, like Britain, was crumbling as an empire. Hence, as During writes, ‘‘The Order of Things is written as if poised on the brink of a new era.’’∞∏) What Foucault repeatedly refers to as the finitude, the other, or the unthought lurking around the modern invention known as ‘‘man’’ are thus figures by which he suggests how some of the elusive functions of exteriority constituting the human sciences—and with them, the emergence of self-referentiality in writing—may be restored.

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In the following sections, I will supplement Foucault’s suggestive gesture by considering this modern drama of language and theory—however critically definitive it may seem in certain circles with a logic and interiority all its own—as part of a global discursive politics, in which what begins sympathetically as resistance and revolt in the West and the Western academy can take on entirely di√erent connotations elsewhere.

The Drama of Language, Take Two: This Time with Area Studies in the Picture The developments of poststructuralist theory in the Anglo-American academy in the past few decades have led to a situation of considerable irony, in which theoretically sophisticated studies of the wretched of the earth tend to be undertaken by those in the most wealthy and prestigious institutions of learning.∞π As some of the pages to follow (specifically, in the chapter ‘‘The Interruption of Referentiality’’) will argue, this aporia between the mode of address (well-informed and often self-conscious academic language) and the harsh, downtrodden worlds it purports to be concerned about is, to be sure, by no means attributable purely to poststructuralist theory, but the latter’s focus on the self-referential capacity of language and signification, as well as its radical suspension and deferral of referentiality as such, does make certain questions ineluctable. For instance, are we to consider such an aporia a kind of revelation that has been made all the more acute by the theoretical understanding of the temporally belated or displaced nature of linguistic signification, or are we to think of it as characteristic of the social divide between the economically comfortable and the disenfranchised? Or both? Are not the two seemingly disparate phenomena—one having to do with the technical nuance of academic language, the other having to do with ‘‘vulgar’’ economics—mutually inscribed in each other, in the sense that the more glaring the economic divide is, the more it tends to become a motor for the kind of truth that language unveils by being profoundly, painfully aware of itself, of its own rules of intelligibility? Conversely, if the ineluctability of linguistic self-referentiality has stemmed from a historical awareness of language-as-fundamental-dislocation—as Foucault and other poststructuralist theorists have argued—can such self-referentiality, however patient and vigilant, in any way help ameliorate the problems of social inequity and injustice, or does it simply become—and continue to derive its introduction

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legitimacy as—such inequity and injustice’s symptom? Where does the incessant bracketing of referentiality leave those cultures and identities that remain peripheralized? Can poststructuralist theory deal with exclusion— and how? What happens when poststructuralist theory confronts the demands of critical multiculturalism? This is the point at which self-referentiality, as a problematic emerging from a particular epistemic rupture, needs to be understood in terms that go beyond the drama of avant-garde language and theory in modernity. As I will argue in the chapter ‘‘The Age of the World Target,’’ some of Martin Heidegger’s work, insofar as it challenges the dominance of the modern technological attitude—namely, an exploitative, ordering attitude that sees human beings as the center of the universe for whose use everything else exists—serves as a good point of departure for a broader critique. Heidegger’s analysis in the essay ‘‘The Age of the World Picture’’ o√ers valuable insights into the philosophical underpinnings of the United States’ hegemony as a military superpower and its will to world domination in the twentieth century. In 1945, toward the end of the Second World War, the United States dropped its entire inventory of two atomic bombs on Japan. What politics of vision—of viewing the world—accompanied the strategic decision to drop the bombs? The technologies of atomic warfare, inseparable from those of seeing, have far-reaching ramifications. Following Heidegger’s suggestion that in modernity the world has come to be grasped and conceived as ‘‘a picture,’’ we may say that in the wake of the atomic bombs the world has come to be grasped and conceived as a target— to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.∞∫ If the rise of modern selfreferential writing has functioned as a ‘‘mad’’ and ‘‘poetic’’ resistance to the steady instrumentalization of the world, one that is dominated by the manifestation or unveiling of techne in the form of destructive technological forces, what does this madness, this poetry, have to say about catastrophes such as that caused by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the context of Anglo America, this question embeds another, one that concerns the place of America in contemporary cross-cultural transactions: how, in the wake of the institutionalization of poststructuralist theory, which arrived from Europe (and is derived from the undoing of European thought from within itself ), have we dealt with historical events on the Pacific side of the United States? Does the literary-theoretical consciousness/writing that 12 introduction

rebels against the demotion of language ever see these events other than casting them as signs of the decline and sunset of the West? From Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault, Western philosophy and theory’s pronouncements of the West’s demise and loss of meaning have continued with relative indi√erence to and ignorance of the histories and languages elsewhere. As Shu-mei Shih writes: ‘‘Poststructuralist theory exercised and strengthened the muscles of Western thought, rendering that thought even more able to reproduce itself through discursive self-criticism’’; at the same time it ‘‘has not attempted to seriously confront the non-West’’ except through negligence and silence.∞Ω As a scholar from Asia working closely with European theory in America, I find myself habitually returning to the implications of this disjuncture: between the self-reflexive and (fashionably) mournful/melancholy postures of contemporary theory, on the one hand, and the strange complacency of its provincial contents (its habit to tell the story only about certain languages, cultures, and histories), on the other, is there not . . . a persistent epistemic scandal? One may perhaps counter: life is short; you can’t expect specialists of ancient Greek tragedy, the Italian Renaissance, German semiotics of the eighteenth century, the English novel, or the French nouveau roman to know about happenings in the Pacific region. But that alibi—of not having enough time or not being available to know everything—is precisely the heart of the matter here because it is, shall we say, a one-way privilege. Such an alibi is simply not acceptable or thinkable for those specializing in non-Western cultures. They, by contrast, must know quite a bit more than their own specialties—in the form of languages, histories, and texts—in order to pass as credible academic professionals. Few scholars of Asian languages and literatures, for instance, have not read or studied something by Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Austen, Dickens, Freud, and Woolf; fewer still have not heard of Sartre, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas in recent decades. On these scholars, the pressure is that of an imperative to acquire global breadth—to be cosmopolitan in their knowledge—even if they choose to specialize in esoteric languages and subject matters. (Time and again, the contrast between those who specialize in the West and those who specialize in the Rest comes to the fore at international conferences held in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and elsewhere. In my own experience with such conferences, local participants often have read the latest introduction

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theory published in North America or Europe, whereas those specializing in North America or Europe, unless they happen to be ethnically or culturally related to the Rest, often can only speak of their own specialties with little knowledge of the local languages or cultural traditions. If language is used as a metaphor, the locals in this instance tend by and large to be multilingual—in the sense that they [are obligated to] know more than their own specialty/language, whereas specialists of the West tend by and large to be monolingual—in the sense that they often speak only from within their own specialty/language.) Read against issues raised in the present discussion, the atomic bombs that were dropped in August 1945 on two Japanese cities suggest much more than the malice that is an inevitable product of warfare. Above all, the unleashing of the bombs was perhaps the crowning event of the ascendance of the United States to the position of supreme world power. Designed with the help of European scientists as part of the war for control of Europe, the bombs were, nonetheless, deployed to annihilate population centers in Asia. If the self-referential turn of modern literature and theory is inherent to the tortuous but necessary process in which the supremacy of the Western logos (and, by extension, Western imperialism and colonialism) is deconstructed, then the consequences of the United States’ ascendancy as superpower by the mid–twentieth century, certainly, would need to be part of such deconstruction, whether or not it is consciously intended by the individual writer. In other words, would not the concerted e√orts at disconnecting the signifier and signified—at interrupting, bracketing, and dismantling so-called referentiality—need to be rethought from this supplemental perspective, one that understands America not as just the land of Disney and McDonald’s but also as the successor to and advancer of Europe and European imperialist intentions and tendencies over the course of modern history? In terms of knowledge production, the shift of the center of geopolitical power to America and an increasingly English-language-dominant world means that the unleashing of the bombs must be historicized in conjunction with the post–Second World War development of area studies, the peacetime information-retrieval machinery that complements the United States’ self-aggrandizing foreign policy. Area studies capitalize on the intertwined logics of the world-as-picture and the world-as-target, always returning the results of knowing other cultures to the point of origin, the ‘‘eye’’/ 14 introduction

‘‘I’’ that is the American state and society. As H. D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi write: ‘‘More than fifty years after the war’s end, American scholars are still organizing knowledge as if confronted by an implacable enemy . . . Area studies as it was implanted in colleges and universities and their adherents still ceaselessly seek to maintain the received structure of operations with new infusions of cash in a world more global and culturally borderless than the one that existed at the inception of the Cold War.’’≤≠ In this instance, in which a binary of self and other is reinforced as government policy, the epistemic ground that poststructuralist theory methodically takes apart—reveals to be unstable—is reestablished both with brute force (military conquests, followed by the stationing of U.S. troops in various bases throughout the Pacific) and with flourishing civil apparatuses (funding agencies, educational programs, culture and information bureaus, religious missions, publishing houses, and so forth). Knowledge of the other—often coded as native or indigenous knowledge—is now part of the enforcement of self-referentiality in a direct sense. Rather than being a problematic emerging from the ashes of the demise of language, to be selfreferential is, from the perspective of U.S. foreign policy, a straightforward practice of aggression and attack.≤∞ As was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the more recent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq this selfreferentiality means bombing—and eradicating—those others who are not like ‘‘us.’’ Language and literature, in this post-atomic-bomb world order, do not exactly constitute the site of avant-garde resistance and experimentation as they do in the account of modern Europe that Foucault o√ers. In the establishment of area studies, language and literature are rather tools with which to hypostatize the targeted culture areas—Asia, Africa, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East—and make them more legible, more accessible, and more available for ‘‘our’’ use. Similarly, since September 11, 2001, we have witnessed the rapid rise of interest in and demand for Arabic (speakers) across the United States, but it is hardly a question of studying Arabic as language as such with an eye to the destabilization of epistemic ground. Recruited as service providers in area studies, teachers of language and literature (who, contrary to some misconceptions, are an inherent part of some area studies programs) thus tend, oftentimes, to be the least respected among those engaged in this thoroughly instrumentalist enterprise.≤≤ introduction

15

If the deconstruction of language has in recent decades received some of its most productive elaborations in the English-speaking academy of North America—as a dwelling of Being (Heidegger), as di√érance (Derrida), as temporality and belatedness (Paul de Man), as the revolution of the unconscious (Julia Kristeva), as the production of an alternative cognitive space from within ideology (Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey), or as a history in which it was gradually demoted to its current functions, with literature being the most ardent case of a dissident self-referentiality (Foucault)— such elaborations have somehow, consistently, left out of their purviews the instrumentalist status of language that continues to be imposed, in area studies, on various ‘‘other’’ cultures (the very targets of post–Second World War American knowledge production). In the latter situation, as Harootunian and Miyoshi point out, ‘‘there is the presumption of the transparency of language as an unmediated conveyor of native truths and knowledge, that filter through once the words of another language are understood.’’≤≥ How do we begin to compare the two kinds of destinies—and with them two kinds of symbolic powers, to borrow a notion from Pierre Bourdieu— inhabited by languages in the Anglo-American academy, one carved out by high theory and the other by area studies?≤∂ At this juncture, the question of language seems incompatibly split. On the one side is a (viable and sophisticated) philosophical and theoretical consciousness about language both as an aesthetic and political issue (with an active engagement against the mandate of instrumentalization and bureaucratization, of ‘‘transparent communication’’). On the other side is a systemic reinforcement of language acquisition (when it comes specifically to languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Tagalog, Lao, Arabic, Swahili . . . ) as precisely instrument, bureaucracy, and means of transparent communication. The rationale of the latter approach to language is that the more we ‘‘know’’ about these cultures by acquiring their languages, the more we would be able to avert misunderstanding and future conflict. Such a rationale seems to make perfect sense until we notice that it is seldom invoked in relation to European languages such as French and German, even when France and Germany oppose U.S. policies, as for instance in the case of the war against Iraq beginning in 2003. To be sure, during this period, we heard patriotic clamors to change the name ‘‘French fries’’ to ‘‘freedom fries,’’ but seldom did we hear that we needed to learn the French language in order to understand why the natives of the 16 introduction

Hexagon in continental Europe seemed to behave so di√erently from ‘‘us’’: was this because the French are, unlike the Arabs, Asians, and Africans, already part of ‘‘us’’? The liberalist mission of learning more about another culture and its language in order to improve understanding and avoid conflict, in other words, already contains within it an implicit politics of comparativism and an often hierarchical judgment about di√erent cultures and languages. As Harootunian reminds us, the study of western European languages and cultures, unlike the study of languages and cultures in area studies, is hardly ever referred to as ‘‘fieldwork.’’≤∑ (See the chapter ‘‘The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies’’ for a more detailed discussion of the assumptions of linguistic and literary comparativism.)

‘‘In America’’ With these concerns about language, theory, and the postwar United States, my attention was captured by the title of an anthology published not too long ago, French Theory in America. What made me curious, I must admit, was not so much French theory per se but what the contributors thought about the connection ‘‘in America.’’≤∏ The scholarship, intelligence, and historical knowledge that have gone into the book are deeply admirable, though as I read its chapters I also keep feeling uneasy about the notion of America generally implied on a great many of its pages. This notion strikes me as—how should I put it?—out of focus. My point, let me quickly add, is not that a book with the word ‘‘America’’ in its title has to reflect, among its contents, something of America’s demographics, including academic demographics (‘‘Where are the Blacks? The Asians, Latinos, Native Americans?’’)—though this would be, to many readers, a legitimate concern. Rather, I am more disturbed by the relation intimated between America and Europe, as we read in the interesting, because rhetorically ambivalent, first sentence of the editors’ introduction: ‘‘ ‘French theory’ is an American invention . . . and no doubt belongs to the continuity of American reception to all sorts of European imports, an ongoing process.’’≤π First, America is recognized as some kind of originator, responsible for the invention of a phantasm called ‘‘French theory’’ that does not exist in France itself. As we come upon the word ‘‘reception,’’ however, we understand better what kind of invention this is. Europe and European theory, as is often the case, are regarded as the genuine source of introduction

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the intellectual action involved, whereas America is treated as a place to which French theory has, shall we say, brought the bounty. The agency for any significant radicalization of thought, in other words, belongs to French theory. If America does have a certain inventive role to play, it is simply that of the (parochial, reductive) commercial dealer, one that turns intellectual action, as it does everything else, into a commodity, a package for circulation.≤∫ To that extent, it would be worth our while to attempt to reconceptualize what the phrase ‘‘in America’’ can mean. What if America is not simply regarded as the passive receiving end, busy with the task of absorbing the wisdom of Europe, but rather as an active intellectual nexus at which French theory—indeed, French philosophy—gets disseminated—in the aftermath of the Second World War and during the era of area studies—to the rest of the post–British Empire, English-speaking world? (We should remember that what is often called ‘‘French theory’’ is really philosophical writing that departments of philosophy, under the sway of Analytic Philosophy, tend to reject as philosophy proper.) On its own, existing only in the French language, would French theory have had the same impact it now has in humanistic studies from Canada to Taiwan and Japan, from India to the Caribbean, from Korea to Nigeria, Eastern Europe, and Australia? If such theory has had a considerable impact, is it because of its Frenchness or is it because of the fact of such theory’s translation into English—in America (as well as in Britain)—a translation that enables it to have a considerably extended afterlife in various parts of the higher-education world? In what must come across as blasphemy to chauvinistic French thinking, French cultural influence in this instance seems in large measure a consequence of the globalization of English. Once the conceptual emphasis is shifted in this manner, questions that may first seem irrelevant under the rubric of ‘‘French Theory in America’’ will begin to take on germane connotations. It would be possible to ask, for instance: How does French theory coincide with the intellectual issues informing the civil rights movement and the postwar liberalized attitudes toward cultural di√erence? To what extent does French theory radicalize and further struggles in contemporary U.S. identity politics, especially the identity politics that are embedded in the teaching of national languages and literatures? In what ways does French theory challenge but also supplement the legacy of New Criticism and its aesthetically formalist ‘‘close read18 introduction

ing’’ practices, which were pedagogically promulgated in all the former British colonies, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Hong Kong, and which, according to some, were collusive with cold war military strategies?≤Ω How does the suspension of referentiality become popularized, and migrate into various non-French disciplines, fields, and subfields? What are the epistemological and political stakes involved in such suspension of referentiality (including the risks that are worth taking) when the United States asserts its global hegemony during the postwar period through a powerful knowledge apparatus such as area studies? It would be disingenuous to insist that all such questions simply prove the incomparable essence of French theory as the originating or legitimating event. (As Françoise Lionnet points out, French theory’s own role is, historically speaking, already that of a mediator: ‘‘French philosophy since the war can be viewed as a series of very acute commentaries on German philosophy.’’≥≠) It would be more precise to say that French theory—displaced from ‘‘French,’’ articulated with di√erent accents, and perhaps (to some degree) misread, defaced, and disfigured—has become (if I may be allowed the coinage of two verbs) thoroughly miscegenated and fusioned in America, and in that way metamorphosed into new forms of thought and new practices. By the same logic, if we think of some of the better-known scholars working in today’s Anglo-American academy who in one way or another have drawn on aspects of French and European theory in their investigations of cultures of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America—Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gauri Viswanathan, Masao Miyoshi, Naoki Sakai, Harry Harootunian, H. Richard Okada, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Xiaomei Chen, Ann Laura Stoler, Jenny Sharpe, Simon Gikandi, Gaurav Desai, Olakunle George, Doris Sommer, Mary Louise Pratt, Carlos Alonso, and numerous others—or for that matter those who have mobilized versions of such theory in their arguments about ethnic cultures within the United States and Canada—Saidiya V. Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, Smaro Kamboureli, to name just a few—we would have to come to the conclusion that French and European theory is an intellectual phenomenon whose influence, legacy, and continuing relevance have become cosmopolitan, to a great degree, because of its multifaceted trans-formations ‘‘in America.’’≥∞ (Similar lists can be drawn up of scholars who work in disciplines and introduction

19

subfields such as film studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.) As Lionnet comments, ‘‘ ‘theory’ has now been thoroughly Americanized, domesticated, cut loose from its ‘origins’ in the pedagogical practices of French departments, and widely disseminated by specialists in other fields, who, like Deleuze and Guattari’s nomads, have thoroughly deterritorialized it, multiplying its ramifications and rhizomic structures across a curriculum that now bears its imprints.’’≥≤ In this spirit we can begin to imagine a project called ‘‘European Theory in America’’ that would make full historical acknowledgment as well as creative use of the complexity—for those of us working in America—of the self-referential phrase ‘‘in America.’’ This complexity has to do with a persistent paradox, comprising both the recognition of the imperialist status of the United States in postwar world politics (of which the institution of area studies remains a dominant manifestation) and the continual dismissal, if not erasure, of the United States as an agent of intellectual change whenever it is pitted against ‘‘elite’’ phantom indexes such as ‘‘French theory’’ and ‘‘comparative literature.’’ Between these two polarized and, hitherto, mutually unengaged positions of America, innumerable possibilities of rethinking await notice.

Foucauldian Inspirations By the problematic of self-referentiality, then, I do not intend a discussion of the popular thematic of the self, nor do I mean to o√er a moralization of what we call selfishness. In the terms provided by poststructuralist theory, in which language and signification have become, in modernity, irrevocably self-referential, self-referentiality would seem at once an inevitability and a predicament in the historical trajectory of Western thought. An inevitability, insofar as certain modalities of language and signification must resist the onslaught and complete cooptation by modern instrumentalism and bureaucratization; a predicament, because such resistance seems rather ine√ectual in the face of tendencies toward blatant self-aggrandizement and promotions of self-interest—such as when cultures encounter one another, as they do as a routine, on fundamentally inequitable premises. Given this conundrum, what are the elements of poststructuralist theory that continue to be useful and useable? Can we hold onto the possibility of a self-consciousness that does not, simply because it must be critical of op20 introduction

pressive forces, repeatedly fold in upon itself, becoming self-referential— and self-incarcerating—in the form of that non-communicative language that Foucault (mis)recognizes as ‘‘literature as such’’? These questions are taken up in the chapter ‘‘The Interruption of Referentiality,’’ in which I briefly revisit key moments of the emergence of poststructuralism as an intellectual event—how it enabled (without completing) an analysis of petty bourgeois mass culture, how it transformed and complicated the way we approach a perennial problem such as literariness, and how it laid down productive, yet also self-contradictory, directions for scholars interested in minority culture and identity issues. In particular, I consider the implications of poststructuralist theory’s most influential and controversial contribution, its gesture of bracketing what is called referentiality. My thinking in this book is, quite obviously, indebted to the work of Foucault, though readers will see that I use that work somewhat eccentrically, dwelling on aspects that have not always been considered to be Foucault’s key contributions. As I have indicated elsewhere, Foucault’s work, even though it undoubtedly shares many of the poststructuralist perspectives on language and subjectivity that specialize in a particular kind of negativity—namely, the suspension and/or undoing of the ground of signification—nonetheless also provides examples of analysis and argumentation that amount to a detour and a deviation from—and a purposeful evasion of—such negativity.≥≥ Such informed negotiations with negativity are, for me, the strongest forms of inspiration o√ered by this work. On the question of self-referentiality, for instance, it is noteworthy that a thinker whose early work partakes of the structuralist fascination with language, systems of representation, and archaeologies of knowledge, and whose best-known books focus attention on the relentless subjection of modern individuals by institutions of surveillance, punishment, and incarceration, returned in his last works to what seems to be a deceptively simple notion of the self. The direction in which Foucault seemed to be moving in his last two books—The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self—is highly suggestive in this regard.≥∂ In his detailed references to the prescriptive texts on (ideal) sexual conduct for free men in Greek and Graeco-Roman antiquity, Foucault was obviously drawn to an ethics of self-orientation that, considered from the perspective of the late twentieth century (the time of his writing), marked a decisive break from the modern (and modernist) modes of self-referentiality that he has dissected so well in all his works. introduction

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Be it in the form of the deconstruction of ground or of the recurrent recoiling of the self toward itself, such modes of self-referentiality tend to invest in a compulsive ontological move to interiorize (in the form of language or of subjectivity) as the only barrier against external aggression. (In other words, incomprehensible self-deconstructing writing and neurosis/ psychosis have become the only weapons—aesthetic as much as libidinal— against oppression.) By contrast, the qualities of self-restraint—and with them the goals of self-governance and self-mastery—that Foucault delineates in the ancients stem from a refusal of this ideologically loaded gesture of interiorization as the only feasible intellectual solution. It is beyond both my expertise and the purpose of this introduction to debate the scholarly merits of Foucault’s last works. But what I trace in them is a thoughtprovoking supplement to his ongoing approaches to the problematic of self-referentiality—the collective frenzy of our age—and the possibility of a critical self-consciousness that can be imagined in ways other than the delirium of self-abnegation or self-aggrandizement.≥∑ In the final chapter, turning once again to Foucault’s The Order of Things, I raise the question of comparison. Can the problematic of selfreferentiality—be it in the form of linguistic resistance, poststructuralist reference bracketing, or strategic area knowledge production—be raised to a di√erent conceptual plane by a turn to comparative work? Interestingly, much like area studies (itself arguably ‘‘a kind of weak comparativism’’),≥∏ comparative literature as a field of learning arose in an era in which the world was at war—when European states were, as usual, engaged in various struggles with one another during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With its goal of bringing together di√erent national traditions of fiction through the democratic notion of a world literature, comparitivism was advanced as a possible peaceful remedy to intercultural conflict. Once again, post–Second World War North America plays a crucial role as mediator and transition point: the discipline of comparative literature as we know it today is very much a legacy of the work of European literary scholars, many of whom were exiled from their homelands because of racial and political persecution, who found institutional support for their utopian vision of literature in the United States. How is the problematic of self-referentiality configured in a field that emphasizes linguistic pluralism as its very disciplinary (and epistemic) ground? Beyond the con-

22 introduction

tinental European focus of its original context, what are the possibilities of reading—if any—held open by comparative literary and cultural studies today? Taking my hint from Deleuze’s imaginative reading of Foucault, I o√er responses to these questions in the following pages as part of an e√ort—replete with risks, to be sure, but hopefully also with potentialities— to ‘‘restore words and things to their constitutive exteriority.’’

introduction

23

s

s

I

the age of the world target Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies

They did not want to risk wasting the precious weapon, and decided that it must be dropped visually and not by radar . . . —Barton J. Bernstein, ‘‘The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,’’ Foreign A√airs (January/February 1995): 140 There has not yet developed a discourse in the American public space that does anything more than identify with power, despite the dangers of that power in a world which has shrunk so small and has become so impressively interconnected. —Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1994), 300

For most people who know something about the United States’ intervention in the Second World War, one image seems to predominate and preempt the rest: the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pictorialized in the now familiar image of the mushroom cloud, with e√ects of radiation and devastation of human life on a scale never before imaginable.∞ Alternatively, we can also say that our knowledge about what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is inseparable from the image of the mushroom cloud. As knowledge, ‘‘Hiroshima’’ and ‘‘Nagasaki’’ come to us inevitably as representation and, specifically, as a picture. Moreover, it is not a picture in the older sense of a mimetic replication of reality; rather, it has become in itself a sign of terror, a kind of gigantic demonstration with us, the spectators, as the potential target. For someone such as myself, who grew up among survivors of Japan’s invasion of China in the period 1937–45—banian kangzhan or the ‘‘Eight-

Year War of Resistance’’ as it is still called among the Chinese—the image of the atomic bomb has always stood as a signifier of another kind of violence, another type of erasure. As a child, I was far more accustomed to hearing about Japanese atrocities against Chinese men and women during the war than I was to hearing about U.S. atrocities against Japan. Among the stories of the war was how the arrival of the Americans brought relief, peace, and victory for China; however hard the times were, it was said to be a moment of ‘‘liberation.’’ As I grow older, this kind of knowledge gathered from oral narratives persists in my mind not as proof of historical accuracy but rather as a kind of emotional dissonance, a sense of something out-of-joint that becomes noticeable because it falls outside the articulations generated by the overpowering image of the mushroom cloud. It is as if the sheer magnitude of destruction unleashed by the bombs demolished not only entire populations but also the memories and histories of tragedies that had led up to that apocalyptic moment, the memories and histories of those who had been brutalized, kidnapped, raped, and slaughtered in the same war by other forces. As John W. Dower writes: Hiroshima and Nagasaki became icons of Japanese su√ering—perverse national treasures, of a sort, capable of fixating Japanese memory of the war on what had happened to Japan and simultaneously blotting out recollection of the Japanese victimization of others. Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is, easily became a way of forgetting Nanjing, Bataan, the BurmaSiam railway, Manila, and the countless Japanese atrocities these and other place names signified to non-Japanese.≤

Lisa Yoneyama sums up this situation succinctly: ‘‘Hiroshima memories have been predicated on the grave obfuscation of the prewar Japanese Empire, its colonial practices, and their consequences.’’≥ To this day many people in Japan still passionately deny the war crimes committed by the Japanese military in East and Southeast Asia, and the label ‘‘Japanese’’ is hardly ever as culturally stigmatized as, say, the label ‘‘German,’’ which for many is still a straightforward synonym for ‘‘Nazi’’ and ‘‘fascist.’’∂ But my aim in this chapter is not exactly that of reinstating historical, literary, or personal accounts of the innumerable instances of victimization during and after the war.∑ Rather, I’d like to explore the significance of the atomic bomb as an epistemic event in a global culture in which everything

26 the age of the world target

has become (or is mediated by) visual representation and virtual reality. What are some of the consequences in knowledge production that were unleashed with the blasts in the summer of 1945? To respond to this question, I turn briefly to the civil, pedagogical apparatus known as area studies: whereas it is common knowledge that area studies programs in the United States are a postwar, cold war, government-funded phenomenon, I want to ask how rethinking the most notorious U.S. action in the Second World War—the dropping of two atomic bombs—can complicate and change our conventional understanding of such programs.

Seeing Is Destroying As an anonymous journalist commented in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the catastrophes, the bombs that fell on the two Japanese cities in August 1945 ended any pretense of equality between the United States and Japan. It was, he writes, ‘‘as if a steel battleship had appeared at Trafalgar, e√ortlessly and ruthlessly destroying the wooden enemy fleet. There was absolutely no contest.’’∏ Passages such as this rightly point to the fundamental shift of the technological scale and definition of the war, but what remains to be articulated is the political and ideological significance of this shift. From a purely scientific perspective, the atomic bomb was, of course, the most advanced invention of the time. Like all scientific inventions, it had to be tested in order to have its e√ectiveness verified. It was probably no accident that the United States chose as its laboratory, its site of experimentation, a civilian rather than military space, since the former, with a much higher population density, was far more susceptible to demonstrating the upper ranges of the bomb’s spectacular potential.π The mundane civilian space in the early hours of the morning, with ordinary people beginning their daily routines, o√ered the promise of numerical satisfaction, of a destruction whose portent defied the imagination. Such civilian spaces had to have been previously untouched by U.S. weaponry so as to o√er the highest possible accuracy for the postwar evaluations of the bombing experiments.∫ And, destroying one city was not enough: since the United States had two bombs, one uranium (which was simple and gunlike, and nicknamed Little Boy) and the other plutonium (which worked with the complex and uncertain means of assembly known as the implosion design, and

the age of the world target

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was nicknamed Fat Man),Ω both had to be tested to see which one should continue to be produced in the future.∞≠ After the more ‘‘primitive’’ uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the more elaborate plutonium one was dropped on Nagasaki a few days later. The fact that there were Christians and U.S. prisoners-of-war in such spaces, which were therefore not purely Japanese or ‘‘enemy’’ territories, did not seem to matter. As Evan Thomas writes: If there was little debate over the moral rights and wrongs of atomizing Hiroshima, there was even less over Nagasaki; indeed, no debate at all. The operation was left to [General Leslie R.] Groves, who was eager to show that an implosion bomb, which cost $400 million to develop, could work as well as the trigger-type bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima. Exploding over the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in the Far East, the Nagasaki bomb killed an additional 70,000 people. The victims included as many Allied prisoners of war as Japanese soldiers—about 250.∞∞

There are many ways in which the development of modern science, with its ever-more refined criteria for conceptualization, calculation, objectification, and experimentation, led up to these moments of explosion in what Michael S. Sherry calls ‘‘technological fanaticism.’’∞≤ Yet what was remarkable in the incident of the nuclear blast was not merely the complexity of scientific understanding but the manner in which science—in this case, the sophisticated speculations about the relationships among energy, mass, speed, and light—was itself put at the service of a kind of representation whose power resides not in its di≈culty but in its brevity and ready visibility. In a flash, the formula E=mc≤, which summarizes Einstein’s theory of relativity and from which the bomb was derived, captured the magnitude of the bomb’s destructive potential: one plane plus one bomb = minus one Japanese city. Was the formula a metaphor for the blinding flash of the atomic explosion itself, or vice versa? Precisely because the various units of measurement must be carefully selected for such a formula to be even approximately correct, and precisely because, at the same time, such exactitude is incomprehensible and irrelevant to the lay person, E=mc≤ exists far more as an image and a slogan than as substance, and far more as a political than as a scientific act. If the scientific accuracy and verifiability of this formula remain uncertain to this

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day, it was nonetheless a supremely e√ective weapon of persuasion and propaganda. The speed of light is supposed to be a maximum, the fastest anything could possibly travel. The speed of light squared is thus clearly and easily perceived as a very large multiplier. Because of its simplicity and visual representability, the formula successfully conveyed the important messages that one bomb could create great terror and that one airplane was enough to destroy an entire nation’s willingness to resist. It seized the imagination, most crucially, of the non-scientist, such as the U.S. president who consented to dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.∞≥ With the gigantic impact of the explosion thus elegantly encapsulated— as if without e√ort—in a neat little formula that anyone could recall and invoke, an epochal destruction became, for the ordinary person, an instantly perceivable and graspable thing, like a control button at his or her command. In this manner, the most rarefied knowledge of science became conceptually democratized—that is, readily accessible, reproducible, and transmissible—as a weapon of attack. I should make clear that what I am suggesting is not simply that hard science was replaced by a visual gimmick, that the ‘‘real thing’’ was replaced by a mere representation. Instead, it is that the dropping of the bombs marked the pivot of the progress of science, a pivot which was to continue its impact on all aspects of human life long after the Second World War was over. Science has, in modernity, reached the paradoxical point whereby it is simultaneously advanced and reduced. Having progressed far beyond the comprehension of nonspecialists and with complexities that challenge even the imagination of specialists, science is meanwhile experienced daily as the practically useful, in the form of miniscule, convenient, matter-of-fact operations that the lay person can manipulate at his or her fingertips. This is the situation to which Martin Heidegger refers in a passage such as this one from his well-known essay ‘‘The Age of the World Picture’’: Everywhere and in the most varied forms and disguises the gigantic is making its appearance. In so doing, it evidences itself simultaneously in the tendency toward the increasingly small. We have only to think of numbers in atomic physics. The gigantic presses forward in a form that actually seems to make it disappear—in the annihilation of great distances by the airplane, in the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness, which is produced at random through radio by a flick of the hand.∞∂

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Our daily uses of the light switch, the television, the computer, the cell phone, and other types of devices are all examples of this paradoxical situation of scientific advancement, in which the portentous—what Heidegger calls ‘‘the gigantic’’—disappears into the mundane, the e√ortless, and the intangible. We perform these daily operations with ease, in forgetfulness of the theories and experiments that made them possible. Seldom do we need to think of the a≈nity between these daily operations and a disaster such as the atomic holocaust. To confront that a≈nity is to confront the terror that is the basis of our everyday life. For Heidegger, hence, the explosion of the atomic bomb is ‘‘the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened’’∞∑ —a process of annihilation that began with the very arrival of modern science itself. From a military perspective, the mushroom cloud of smoke and dust signals the summation of a history of military invention that has gone hand in hand with the development of representational technologies, in particular the technologies of seeing. As Paul Virilio asserts, ‘‘For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye.’’∞∏ Virilio argues time and again in his work that close a≈nities exist between war and vision. Because military fields were increasingly reconfigured as fields of visual perception, preparations for war were increasingly indistinguishable from preparations for making a film: ‘‘The Americans prepared future operations in the Pacific,’’ Virilio writes, ‘‘by sending in film-makers who were supposed to look as though they were on a location-finding mission, taking aerial views for future film production.’’∞π In the essay cited above, Heidegger argues that in the age of modern technology, the world has become a ‘‘world picture.’’ By this, he means that the process of (visual) objectification has become so indispensable in the age of modern scientific research that understanding—‘‘conceiving’’ and ‘‘grasping’’ the world—is now an act inseparable from the act of seeing— from a certain form of ‘‘picturing.’’ However, he adds, ‘‘picture’’ in this case does not mean an imitation. As he explains: World picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place re-

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garding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.∞∫

For Heidegger, the world becoming a picture is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age, and he emphasizes the point ‘‘that the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man’s becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is.’’∞Ω By the word subiectum, he is referring to ‘‘that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself.’’≤≠ As such ‘‘ground,’’ men struggle to conquer the world as their own particular pictures, bringing into play an ‘‘unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things.’’ As is clearly demonstrated by the case of the United States, science and research have thus become ‘‘an absolutely necessary form of this establishing of self in the world.’’≤∞ Supplementing Heidegger, we may say that in the age of bombing, the world has also been transformed into—is essentially conceived and grasped as—a target. To conceive of the world as a target is to conceive of it as an object to be destroyed. As W. J. Perry, a former United States Under Secretary of State for Defense, said: ‘‘If I had to sum up current thinking on precision missiles and saturation weaponry in a single sentence, I’d put it like this: once you can see the target, you can expect to destroy it.’’≤≤ Increasingly, war would mean the production of maximal visibility and illumination for the purpose of maximal destruction. It follows that the superior method of guaranteeing e≈cient destruction by visibility during the Second World War was aerial bombing, which the United States continued even after Japan had made a conditional surrender.≤≥ If the dropping of the atomic bomb created ‘‘deterrence,’’ as many continue to believe to this day, what is the nature of deterrence? (We can ask the same question about ‘‘defense,’’ ‘‘protection,’’ ‘‘security,’’ and other similar concepts.) The atomic bomb did not simply stop the war; it also stopped the war by escalating and intensifying violence to a hitherto unheard of scale. What succeeded in ‘‘deterring’’ the war was an ultimate (am)munition; destruction was now outdone by destruction itself. The elimination of the actual physical warring activities had the e√ect not of bringing war to an end but instead of promoting and accelerating terrorism, and importantly, the terrorism of so-called ‘‘deterrent’’ weaponry. The mushroom cloud, therefore, is also the image of this semiotic transfer, this blurring of the

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boundary between war and peace. The transfer ushered in the new age of relativity and virtuality, an age in which powers of terror are indistinguishable from powers of ‘‘deterrence,’’ and technologies of war indissociable from practices of peace. These new forces of relativity and virtuality are summarized in the following passages from Virilio: There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception—that is to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, a√ecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and di√erentiation of object . . . . . . By demonstrating that they would not recoil from a civilian holocaust, the Americans triggered in the minds of the enemy that information explosion which Einstein, towards the end of his life, thought to be as formidable as the atomic blast itself. . . . Even when weapons are not employed, they are active elements of ideological conquest.≤∂

This fuzzing of the line between war and representation, between war technology and peacetime technology, has brought about a number of consequences. First, the visual rules and boundaries of war altered. While battles formerly tended to be fought with a clear demarcation of battlefronts versus civilian spaces, the aerial bomb, by its positionings in the skies, its intrusion into spaces that used to be o√-limits to soldiers, and its distance from the enemies (a distance which made it impossible for the enemies to fight back), destroyed once and for all those classic visual boundaries that used to define battle. Second, with the transformation of the skies into war zones from which to attack, war was no longer a matter simply of armament or of competing projectile weaponry; rather, it became redefined as a matter of the logistics of perception, with seeing as its foremost function, its foremost means of preemptive combat. Third, in yet a di√erent way, the preemptiveness of seeing as a means of destruction continues to operate as such even after the war. Insofar as the image of the atomic blast serves as a peacetime weapon to mobilize against war, it tends to preclude other types of representation. For a long time nuclear danger remained the predominant target against which peace coali32 the age of the world target

tions aimed their e√orts, while the equally disastrous e√ects caused by chemical and biological weapons (nerve gases such as sarin and bacteria such as anthrax) seldom received the same kind of extended public consideration until the Gulf War of 1991. The overwhelming e√ect of the continual imaging of the mushroom cloud means that the world has been responding to the nuclear blast as if by mimicry, by making the nuclear horror its point of identification and attack, and by being oblivious (until fairly recently) to other forms of damage to the ecosphere that have not attained the same level of visibility.

The World Becomes Virtual The dropping of the atomic bombs e√ected what Michel Foucault would call a major shift in epistemes, a fundamental change in the organization, production, and circulation of knowledge.≤∑ War after the atomic bomb would no longer be the physical, mechanical struggles between combative oppositional groups, but would increasingly come to resemble collaborations in the logistics of perception between partners who occupy relative, but always mutually implicated, positions.≤∏ As in the case of the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for several decades, war was more and more to be fought in virtuality, as an exchange of defensive positionings, a tacitly coordinated routine of upping the potential for war, a race for the deterrent. Warring in virtuality meant competing with the enemy for the stockpiling, rather than actual use, of preclusively horrifying weaponry. To terrorize the other, one specializes in representation, in the means of display and exhibition. As Virilio writes, ‘‘A war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects (projectiles and missiles).’’≤π In the name of arms reduction and limitation, the salt and start agreements served to promote, improve, and multiply armament between the United States and the Soviet Union, which were, strictly speaking, allies rather than adversaries in the so-called ‘‘Star Wars’’ or sdi (Strategic Defense Initiative).≤∫ Moreover, war would exist from now on as an agenda that is infinitely self-referential: war represents not other types of struggles and conflicts— what in history classes are studied as ‘‘causes’’—but war itself. From its previous conventional, negative signification as a blockade, an inevitable but regretted interruption of the continuity that is ‘‘normal life,’’ war shifts the age of the world target

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to a new level of force. It has become not the cessation of normality, but rather, the very definition of normality itself. The space and time of war are no longer segregated in the form of an other; instead, they operate from within the here and now, as the internal logic of the here and now. From being negative blockade to being normal routine, war becomes the positive mechanism, momentum, and condition of possibility of society, creating a hegemonic space of global communication through powers of visibility and control. It is important to note that the normativization of war and war technology takes place as well among—perhaps especially among—the defeated. As Dower writes, in Japan, deficiency in science and technology was singled out as the chief reason for defeat, and the atomic bomb was seen simultaneously as ‘‘a symbol of the terror of nuclear war and the promise of science.’’≤Ω Because it was forbidden to advance in militarism, postwar Japan specialized in the promotion of science and technology for ‘‘peace’’ and for the consolidation of a ‘‘democratic’’ society. Instead of bombs and missiles, Japan became one of the world’s leading producers of cars, cameras, computers, and other kinds of ‘‘high tech’’ equipment.≥≠ With Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sony, Sanyo, Nikon, Mitsubishi, and their like becoming household names throughout the world, the defeated ‘‘victim’’ of the war rises again and rejoins the ‘‘victor’’ in a new competition, the competition in bombarding the world with a di√erent type of implosion—information.≥∞ With the preemptiveness of seeing-as-destruction and the normativization of technology-as-information, thus, comes the great epistemic shift, which has been gradually occurring with the onset of speed technologies and which finally virtualizes the world. As a condition that is no longer separable from civilian life, war is thoroughly absorbed into the fabric of our daily communications—our information channels, our entertainment media, our machinery for speech and expression. We participate in war’s virtualization of the world as we use—without thinking—television monitors, remote controls, mobile phones, digital cameras, PalmPilots, and other electronic devices that fill the spaces of everyday life. We do not usually notice the strangeness of, say, listening to news on the radio about di√erent calamities while preparing lunch or dinner, nor are we shocked by the juxtaposition on television of commercials with reports of rapes, tor-

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tures, or genocides. Our consumption of war, bloodshed, and violence through our communication technologies is on a par with our consumption of various forms of merchandise. There is, furthermore, another side to the virtualization of the world which most of us do not experience but which is even more alarming: when a war does occur, such as the Gulf Wars that began in 1991 and 2003, the ubiquitous virtualization of everyday life means that war can no longer be fought without the skills of playing video games. In the aerial bombings of Iraq, the world was divided into an above and a below in accordance with the privilege of access to the virtual world. Up above in the sky, war was a matter of maneuvers across the video screen by U.S. soldiers who had been accustomed as teenagers to playing video games at home; down below, war remained tied to the body, to manual labor, to the random disasters falling from the heavens. For the U.S. men and women of combat, the elitism and aggressiveness of panoramic vision went hand in hand with distant control and the instant destruction of others; for the ordinary men, women, and children of Iraq (as for the ordinary people of Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s), life became more and more precarious—immaterial in the sense of a readiness for total demolition at any moment.≥≤ Even as we speak, the Pentagon is reported to be building its own Internet for the wars of the future, with the goal ‘‘to give all American commanders and troops [including those on the ground] a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats—‘a God’s-eye view’ of battle.’’≥≥

The Orbit of Self and Other Among the most important elements in war, writes Karl von Clausewitz, are the ‘‘moral elements.’’≥∂ From the United States’ point of view, this phrase does not seem at all ironic. Just as the bombings of Afghanistan and Iraq in the first few years of the twenty-first century were justified as benevolent acts to preserve the United States and the rest of the world against ‘‘the axis of evil,’’ ‘‘weapons of mass destruction,’’ and the like, so were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered pacific acts, acts that were meant to save lives and save civilization in a world threatened by German Nazism. (Though, by the time the bombs were dropped in Japan, Germany had already surrendered.) Even today, some of the most educated,

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scientifically knowledgeable members of U.S. society continue to believe that the atomic bomb was the best way to terminate the hostilities.≥∑ And, while the media in the United States are quick to join the media elsewhere in reporting the controversies over Japan’s refusal to apologize for its war crimes in Asia or over France’s belatedness in apologizing for the Vichy Government’s persecution of the Jews, no U.S. head of state has ever visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or expressed regret for the nuclear holocaust.≥∏ In this—its absolute conviction of its own moral superiority and legitimacy— lies perhaps the most deeply ingrained connection between the foundation myth of the United States as an exceptional nation and the dropping of the atomic bombs (as well as all the military and economic interventions the United States has made in nationalist struggles in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East since the Second World War).≥π Even on occasions such as Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and September 11, 2001, when the United States had to recognize that it was just part of the world (and hence could be attacked like any other country), its response was typically that of reasserting U.S. exceptionalism—This cannot happen to us! We are unique, we cannot be attacked!—by ferociously attacking others. In the decades since 1945, whether in dealing with the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, Vietnam, and countries in Central America, or during the Gulf Wars, the United States has been conducting war on the basis of a certain kind of knowledge production, and producing knowledge on the basis of war. War and knowledge enable and foster each other primarily through the collective fantasizing of some foreign or alien body that poses danger to the ‘‘self ’’ and the ‘‘eye’’ that is the nation. Once the monstrosity of this foreign body is firmly established in the national consciousness, the decision makers of the U.S. government often talk and behave as though they had no choice but war.≥∫ War, then, is acted out as a moral obligation to expel an imagined dangerous alienness from the United States’ self-concept as the global custodian of freedom and democracy. Put in a di√erent way, the ‘‘moral element,’’ insofar as it produces knowledge about the ‘‘self ’’ and ‘‘other’’—and hence the ‘‘eye’’ and its ‘‘target’’—as such, justifies war by its very dichotomizing logic. Conversely, the violence of war, once begun, fixes the other in its attributed monstrosity and a≈rms the idealized image of the self. In this regard, the pernicious stereotyping of the Japanese during the Second World War—not only by U.S. military personnel but also by social 36 the age of the world target

and behavioral scientists—was simply a flagrant example of an ongoing ideological mechanism that had accompanied Western treatments of nonWestern ‘‘others’’ for centuries. In the hands of academics such as Geoffrey Gorer, writes Dower, the notion that was collectively and ‘‘objectively’’ formed about the Japanese was that they were ‘‘a clinically compulsive and probably collectively neurotic people, whose lives were governed by ritual and ‘situational ethics,’ wracked with insecurity, and swollen with deep, dark currents of repressed resentment and aggression.’’≥Ω As Dower points out, such stereotyping was by no means accidental or unprecedented: The Japanese, so ‘‘unique’’ in the rhetoric of World War Two, were actually saddled with racial stereotypes that Europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites for centuries: during the conquest of the New World, the slave trade, the Indian wars in the United States, the agitation against Chinese immigrants in America, the colonization of Asia and Africa, the U.S. conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. These were stereotypes, moreover, which had been strongly reinforced by nineteenth-century Western science. In the final analysis, in fact, these favored idioms denoting superiority and inferiority transcended race and represented formulaic expressions of Self and Other in general.∂≠

The moralistic divide between ‘‘self ’’ and ‘‘other’’ constitutes the production of knowledge during the U.S. Occupation of Japan after the Second World War as well. As Monica Braw writes, in the years immediately after 1945, the risk that the United States would be regarded as barbaric and inhumane was carefully monitored, in the main by cutting o√ Japan from the rest of the world through the ban on travel, control of private mail, and censorship of research, mass media information, and other kinds of communication. The entire Occupation policy was permeated by the view that ‘‘the United States was not to be accused; guilt was only for Japan’’:∂∞ As the Occupation of Japan started, the atmosphere was military. Japan was a defeated enemy that must be subdued. The Japanese should be taught their place in the world: as a defeated nation, Japan had no status and was entitled to no respect. People should be made to realize that any catastrophe that had befallen them was of their own making. Until they had repented, they were suspect. If they wanted to release information about the atomic

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bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it could only be for the wrong reasons, such as accusing the United States of inhumanity. Thus this information was suppressed.∂≤

As in the scenario of aerial bombing, the elitist and aggressive panoramic ‘‘vision’’ in which the other is beheld means that the su√erings of the other matter much less than the transcendent aspirations of the self. And, despite being the products of a particular culture’s technological fanaticism, such transcendent aspirations are typically expressed in the form of selfless universalisms. As Sherry puts it, ‘‘The reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed less important than the bomb’s e√ect on ‘mankind’s destiny,’ on ‘humanity’s choice,’ on ‘what is happening to men’s minds,’ and on hopes (now often extravagantly revived) to achieve world government.’’∂≥ On Japan’s side, as Yoneyama writes, such a ‘‘global narrative of the universal history of humanity’’ has helped sustain ‘‘a national victimology and phantasm of innocence throughout most of the postwar years.’’ Going one step further, she remarks: ‘‘The idea that Hiroshima’s disaster ought to be remembered from the transcendent and anonymous position of humanity . . . might best be described as ‘nuclear universalism.’ ’’∂∂ Once the relations among war, racism, and knowledge production are underlined in these terms, it is no longer possible to assume, as some still do, that the recognizable features of modern war—its impersonality, coerciveness, and deliberate cruelty—are ‘‘divergences’’ from the ‘‘antipathy’’ to violence and to conflict that characterize the modern world.∂∑ Instead, it would be incumbent on us to realize that the pursuit of war—with its use of violence—and the pursuit of peace—with its cultivation of knowledge—are the obverse and reverse of the same coin, the coin that I have been calling ‘‘the age of the world target.’’ Rather than being irreconcilable opposites, war and peace are coexisting, collaborative functions in the continuum of a virtualized world. More crucially still, only the privileged nations of the world can a√ord to wage war and preach peace at one and the same time. As Sherry writes, ‘‘The United States had di√erent resources with which to be fanatical: resources allowing it to take the lives of others more than its own, ones whose accompanying rhetoric of technique disguised the will to destroy.’’∂∏ From this it follows that, if indeed political and military acts of cruelty are not unique to the United States—a point which is easy enough to substantiate—what is nonetheless remarkable is the manner in which such

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acts are, in the United States, usually cloaked in the form of enlightenment and altruism, in the form of an aspiration simultaneously toward technological perfection and the pursuit of peace. In a country in which political leaders are held accountable for their decisions by an electorate, violence simply cannot—as it can in totalitarian countries—exist in the raw. Even the most violent acts must be adorned with a benign, rational story. It is in the light of such interlocking relations among war, racism, and knowledge production that I would make the following comments about area studies, the academic establishment that crystallizes the connection between the epistemic targeting of the world and the ‘‘humane’’ practices of peacetime learning.

From Atomic Bombs to Area Studies As its name suggests, area studies as a mode of knowledge production is, strictly speaking, military in its origins. Even though the study of the history, languages, and literatures of, for instance, ‘‘Far Eastern’’ cultures existed well before the Second World War (in what Edward W. Said would term the old Orientalist tradition predicated on philology), the systematization of such study under the rubric of special geopolitical areas was largely a postwar and U.S. phenomenon. In H. D. Harootunian’s words, ‘‘The systematic formation of area studies, principally in major universities, was . . . a massive attempt to relocate the enemy in the new configuration of the Cold War.’’∂π As Bruce Cumings puts it: ‘‘It is now fair to say, based on the declassified evidence, that the American state and especially the intelligence elements in it shaped the entire field of postwar area studies, with the clearest and most direct impact on those regions of the world where communism was strongest: Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and East Asia.’’∂∫ In the decades after 1945, when the United States competed with the Soviet Union for the power to rule and/or destroy the world, these regions were the ones that required continued, specialized super-vision; to this list we may also add Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. As areas to be studied, these regions took on the significance of target fields—fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary for the perpetuation of the United States’ political and ideological hegemony. In the final part of his classic Orientalism, Said describes area studies as the age of the world target

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a continuation of the old European Orientalism with a di√erent pedagogical emphasis: No longer does an Orientalist try first to master the esoteric languages of the Orient; he begins instead as a trained social scientist and ‘‘applies’’ his science to the Orient, or anywhere else. This is the specifically American contribution to the history of Orientalism, and it can be dated roughly from the period immediately following World War II, when the United States found itself in the position recently vacated by Britain and France.∂Ω

Whereas Said draws his examples mainly from Islamic and Middle Eastern area studies, Cumings provides this portrait of the East Asian target field: The Association for Asian Studies (aas) was the first ‘‘area’’ organization in the U.S., founded in 1943 as the Far Eastern Association and reorganized as the aas in 1956. Before 1945 there had been little attention to and not much funding for such things; but now the idea was to bring contemporary social science theory to bear on the non-Western world, rather than continue to pursue the classic themes of Oriental studies, often examined through philology. . . . In return for their su√erance, the Orientalists would get vastly enhanced academic resources (positions, libraries, language studies)—and soon, a certain degree of separation which came from the social scientists inhabiting institutes of East Asian studies, whereas the Orientalists occupied departments of East Asian languages and cultures. This implicit Faustian bargain sealed the postwar academic deal.∑≠

A largely administrative enterprise, closely tied to policy, the new American Orientalism took over from the old Orientalism attitudes of cultural hostility, among which is, as Said writes, the dogma that ‘‘the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).’’∑∞ Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the ‘‘scientific’’ and ‘‘objective’’ production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special ‘‘areas’’ became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target.∑≤ In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits of higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, 40 the age of the world target

historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war—if, for instance, the ability to translate a di≈cult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes∑≥ —is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to ‘‘know’’ the other cultures? Can ‘‘knowledge’’ that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare’s accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign ‘‘self ’’/‘‘eye’’—the ‘‘I’’—that is the United States, the other will have no choice but remain just that— a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber—such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter—will never receive the attention that is due to them. ‘‘Knowledge,’’ however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences.∑∂ This is one reason why, as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by ‘‘the absence of a definable object’’—and by ‘‘the problem of the vanishing object.’’∑∑ As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investment in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said’s criticism of Orientalism, to become the site where a the age of the world target

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genuinely alternative form of knowledge production might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, ‘‘Said’s book represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted, would have reshaped area studies and freed it from its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,’’∑∏ the challenge was too fundamentally disruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas so firmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said’s attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed, and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to area studies’ future orientation, simply ‘‘migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a full-scale preoccupation with identity and its construction.’’∑π A long-term outcome of all this, Harootunian suggests, has been the consolidation of a type of postcolonial studies that, instead of fully developing the comparative, interdisciplinary, and multicultural potential that is embedded theoretically in area studies, tends to specialize in the deconstruction of the nature of language, in the amalgamation of poststructuralist theory largely with Anglo-American literary studies, and in the investigation mostly of former British colonial cultures rather than a substantial range of colonial and semicolonial histories from di√erent parts of the world.∑∫ On its part, having voluntarily failed to heed Said’s call, area studies can only remain ‘‘locked in its own enclaves of knowledge’’∑Ω based on the reproduction of institutional and organizational structures with claims to normativity, while being defensively guarded against the innovations of poststructuralist theory that have radicalized North American humanistic and social scientific learning since the 1970s. As I have already suggested, the truth of the continual targeting of the world as the fundamental form of knowledge production is xenophobia, the inability to handle the otherness of the other beyond the orbit that is the bomber’s own visual path. For the xenophobe, every e√ort needs to be made to sustain and secure this orbit—that is, by keeping the place of the other-as-target always filled. With the end of the cold war and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the United States must hence seek other substitutes for war. As has often been pointed out, drugs, poverty, and illegal immigrants have since become the new targets, which occupy— together with Moslems, Arabs, and communists (that is, Cuba, North 42 the age of the world target

Korea, and mainland China)—the status of that ultimate danger to be ‘‘deterred’’ at all costs. Even so, xenophobia can backfire. When anxiety about the United States’ loss of control over its target fields—and by implication its own boundaries —becomes overwhelming, bombing takes as its target the United States itself. This is so because, we remember, bombing the other has, as a rule, been held as the most e√ective means to end the war, the violence to stop violence, and, most important, the method to a≈rm moral righteousness. Why, then, when the United States is perceived to be threatened and weakened by incompetent leadership, should bombing not be the technique of choice for correcting the United States itself ? And so, in spite of all the suspicions of racist conspiracy quickly raised about ‘‘foreigners’’ in the bombing of the federal o≈ce building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, U.S. militiamen were arrested in the case. Spurred by a supremacist determination to set things right, the targeting of ‘‘others’’ turned into the targeting of innocent American men, women, and children, with a violence that erupted from within the heart of the country. The worst domestic terrorist incident in U.S. history,∏≠ the bombing in Oklahoma City took place with the force of an emblem: the vicious circle of the-world-as-target had returned to its point of origin.∏∞

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s

s

II

the interruption of referentiality; or, poststructuralism’s outside

In the increasingly globalized realm of theoretical discourse, a habitual move may be readily discerned in critical discussions regarding marginalized groups and non-Western cultures: the critic makes a gesture toward Western theory, but only in such a way as to advance the point that such theory is inadequate, negligent, and Eurocentric. As a consequence, what legitimates concern for the particular group, identity, or ethnic culture under discussion (which, for the purposes of this chapter, I will simply refer to as X) is its historical, cultural, or gendered di√erence, which becomes, in terms of the theoretical strategies involved, the basis for the claim of opposition and resistance. Epistemically, what is specific to X—that is, what is local, history-bound, and culturally unique—is imagined to pose a certain challenge to Western theory; hence the frequent adoption of the vocabulary of contestation, disruption, critique, and so forth. I refrain from references to particular authors whose works fall into such critical patterns because the point is not to show individuals up for their theoretical shortcomings. Rather, it would be more productive to delineate a general picture of the predicament we face collectively, as scholars whose intellectual lives have been deeply a√ected by both the presence of theory and the multifaceted reactions to theory in the past few decades. As is the case throughout this book, I use the term ‘‘theory’’ to mark the paradigm shift introduced by poststructuralism, whereby the study of language, literature, and cultural forms becomes irrevocably obligated to attend

to the semiotic operations involved in the production of meanings, meanings which can no longer be assumed to be innocent or natural. Obviously, there are other types of theories that have had great impact on large numbers of academic intellectuals—one thinks of the cultural writings of the Frankfurt School critics; various forms of historicisms and psychoanalyses; sociological, anthropological, and gender theories; the work of towering figures such as Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, and Fredric Jameson, for instance— but it is arguably poststructuralism, with its tenacious attention to the materiality of human signification, that has generated some of the most farreaching ramifications for the manners in which we continue to approach questions of objectivity and questions of subjectivity alike. The one indisputable accomplishment of poststructuralist theory in the past several decades has been its systematic unsettling of the stability of meaning, its interruption of referentiality. If such meaning had never been entirely stable even in pre-theory days, what poststructuralist theory provides is a metalanguage in which it (meaning) can now be defined anew as a repetitive e√ect produced in the chain of signification, in the form of an exact but illusory correspondence between the signifier and signified. While referentiality as such may continue to exist, for the new metalanguage it is the movements in the realm of signification that matter, that command critical interest as the (shifting) basis for meaning. Henceforth, ‘‘meaning’’ is a term that occurs within scare quotes. With the emphasis on material signifiers comes the determining function of di√erence—to be further di√erentiated as both di√ering and deferring—which would from now on take the place of sameness and identity as the condition for signification. Ferdinand de Saussure’s summary statements may be conveniently recalled here: ‘‘In language there are only di√erences. Even more important: a di√erence generally implies positive terms between which the di√erence is set up; but in language there are only di√erences without positive terms.’’ ‘‘Language is a form and not a substance.’’∞ The foregrounding of di√erencing means that it is no longer possible to speak casually about any anchorage for meaning. If intelligibility itself is now understood as the e√ect of a movement of di√erencing, a movement that always involves delays and deferrals, then no longer can the old-fashioned belief in epistemic ground (and groundedness) hold. In its stead, the conception of (linguistic) identity becomes structurally defined, with (linguistic) signifiers mutually dependent on one another for the generation and regenera46 the interruption of referentiality

tion of what makes sense. Rather than being that which follows identity, di√erence now precedes and defines identity. It is necessary, in any consideration of the vicissitudes of theory, to acknowledge the substantial impact made by poststructuralism’s landmark desacralization of referentiality. The exercise of bracketing referentiality is crucial because adherence to referentiality has often led to a conservative clinging to a ‘‘reality’’ which is presumed to exist, in some unchanging manner, independently of language and signification. This a priori ‘‘real world’’ is, moreover, often given the authority of what authenticates, of what bestows the value of transcendental truth upon language and signification. The dismantling of such a metaphysics of presence is hence most e√ective in disciplines in which the presumption of a factographic form of knowing has traditionally gone uncontested (as in some practices of history, for instance), but it is groundbreaking also in areas in which the naturalness of an object of knowledge is seldom put into question. By intensifying our awareness of (linguistic) signification as first and foremost selfreferential, poststructuralist theory has opened up ways for the ingrained ideological presuppositions behind such practices of knowledge production to be rethought. Insofar as it challenges the premises of the Western logos, we may say that poststructuralist theory emerged on the contemporary Western epistemic horizon as the writing of a special kind of alterity, an irreducible metaphoricity that insists on having its own autonomous status—from within Western thinking itself. As Paul de Man writes regarding the realm of literature: Literary theory can be said to come into being when the approach to literary texts is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic, considerations . . . when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning or the value but the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their establishment—the implication being that this establishment is problematic enough to require an autonomous discipline of critical investigation to consider its possibility and its status.≤

Although some would insist that there is great dissonance between de Man’s writing and leftist political thinking, his act of calling attention to the materiality of language amounted, in today’s terms, to nothing short of a politics of recognition whereby language, through critics such as himself, the interruption of referentiality

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implores us: ‘‘Look at me! Look at me and give me acknowledgment for what I am!’’ By pointing out that language embodies a concrete kind of labor, poststructuralism in fact shares important a≈nities with Marxism: the oppressed who is called upon to rebel from within Western society, to problematize the stability of the cognitive field (that ranges from logic and grammar to rhetoric), and thus to reclaim the products of her labor, is none other than language itself. In the hands of poststructuralist theorists, language flexes its muscles and breaks the chains of its hitherto subordination to thought, throwing into question all old illusions of symbolic plenitude and epistemic self-su≈ciency, and refusing the customary erasure of language-as-mere-language. What is restored by this theoretical revolution, accordingly, is what might be called an originary di√erence intrinsic to the Western logos. To complete the comparison with Marxism, the status of language is not unlike that of a guest worker, an exploited, colonized ‘‘alien’’ who has been indispensable in helping to hold together the host society with her hard work, but whose existence continues to be disavowed. Instead of staying in the shadows, this alien now demands its own visibility. In order to honor their commitment to linguistic materialism as understood in these terms, those who pursue poststructuralist theory in their critical writings find themselves permanently at war with those who expect, and insist on, the transparency—that is, the invisibility—of language as a tool of communication. To counter this kind of ‘‘common sense,’’ poststructuralists charge that it is precisely such an expectation that perpetuates the denial of the materiality (that is, the work) of language. In order that such materiality no longer be denied, it is essential for them to adhere to certain principles: 1. any assumption of language’s transparency must be systematically demystified as an unexamined ideological manner of thinking; 2. any attempt to deny the work of language and to co-opt us into believing in the likes of ‘‘nature,’’ ‘‘essence,’’ ‘‘identity,’’ ‘‘origins,’’ and so forth, must be vigilantly deconstructed; 3. the work of language is never finished and cannot be separated from the slow but certain movement of temporality (and, by implication, di√erence); 4. any resistance to (poststructuralist) theory as such is symptomatic of a certain blindness to one’s own theoretical assumptions (‘‘The attack [on theory] reflects the anxiety of the aggressors rather than the guilt of the accused’’).≥

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In retrospect, it is important to acknowledge the specific nature of the force carried by poststructuralist critical thinking. This force is most detectable at the points at which such thinking exerts its greatest energies, and it tends to be preponderantly negative in its charge: a profound distrust of literal or naturalized meanings; a persistent refusal or deferral of reference; a determined unmasking of any use of language that seems devoid of semiotic self-consciousness; a ready dismissal or debunking of those who challenge any of the above as themselves being the victims of their own mystifications.∂ In poststructuralist theory’s Sisyphean e√orts to obstruct the path of a sweeping global instrumentalism (one that has led to the demotion of language), we see the compelling legacy of a romanticist high modernism with its avant-garde political-aesthetic programmatic intentions. (Consider, in this regard, the importance of the English and German, as well as French, romantics for de Man, and the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, LéviStrauss, Artaud, and others for the early Jacques Derrida.) Linguistic opacity, obscurity, impenetrability—these qualities that are characteristic of high modernist works of art and literature, with their aversion to realist and mimetic representation—are also characteristic of much deconstructive critical writing. In the case of poststructuralist theory, such qualities serve less as mere markers of an alternative poetics and aesthetics than as signs of a dissident politics based—as were many social movements of the 1960s (anti-colonialism, feminism, civil rights, and so forth) on both sides of the Atlantic—on consciousness raising. At the same time, precisely because it can indeed be seen in this regard as the late twentieth century’s version of high modernism, the practice of poststructuralist theory is likewise shot through with high modernism’s self-contradictions. Like high modernism, we might say, poststructuralist theory yearns to be of the masses—if only in order to warn them they have always already been unmasked and undone by the ‘‘alien’’ that is language—yet of necessity speaks and writes in such ways that few of the masses will ever be able to understand. The radical events of reading and writing that began as acts of subversions of an unbearable regime (Western logocentrism and its many ‘‘ideological aberrations,’’ to use a phrase from de Man),∑ that strove toward a democratic order that would truly reflect the actual ways in which language (the proletariat) works, fail precisely on the very issue (language) on which poststructuralism has waged its most intimate battles, turning poststructuralism, in the interruption of referentiality

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a manner quite opposite its philosophical premises, into the perceived enemy of the people. The predicament of poststructuralist theory consists, finally, in this unresolvable contradiction, this rift between the radicalism of its aspirations and the ‘‘elitism’’ of its execution. These fundamental revelations of poststructuralism notwithstanding, many critics have gone on pragmatically to explore di√erencing and its liberating potential in various social and historical contexts. They do so, for instance, by translating the open-endedness of linguistic signification into the fluidity of the human subject: when transplanted into the tradition of individualism, significatory di√erencing quite logically means the multiplication of selves. Nowadays, what is commonly referred to as identity politics typically takes as its point of departure the problematizing and critiquing of essentialist notions that are attached to personhood, subjectivity, and identity formation.∏ Such branching o√ from high theory into egalitarian investigations of selfhood (through a thematization of di√erencing) is in many cases justifiable, but it has also left certain problems intact. In this regard, I think it is important not simply to practice antiessentialist di√erencing ad infinitum but also to reconsider such a practice in conjunction with the rejection of referentiality that lies at the origins of poststructuralism. Exactly what happens when referentiality is rejected? What are some of the more troubling consequences?

(Post)structuralist Incarceration?—The Invincibility of Myth Our task of responding to these questions can be facilitated, first, by some reminders of Roland Barthes’s memorable little book of the 1950s, Mythologies,π a study of the postwar (and post-empire) modernization of French everyday life and its implicit ideologies.∫ In the theoretical part of his book, Barthes o√ers a systematic analysis of what he terms myth—which in today’s language might be called the interfacing of multiple domains of signification, whereby meanings, instead of properly stabilizing in one domain, have the capability to shift and slide among di√erent ones, thus o√ering multiple opportunities for duplicity, ambiguity, disguise, and manipulation. This protean capacity of signifiers for transforming themselves is the reason why, for Barthes, any fixed notion of referentiality as such no longer works. For the purposes of our present argument, however, it is not so much the semiotic analysis Barthes provides (to capture this protean capac50 the interruption of referentiality

ity) as two conflicting moments subsequent to such an analysis that are highly suggestive of the complexities informing the issues at hand. The first moment is to be found in the section entitled ‘‘Myth as Stolen Language,’’ in which Barthes clarifies myth’s power to absorb and recontain everything, including acts of resistance against it. ‘‘When the meaning is too full for myth to be able to invade it,’’ he writes, ‘‘myth goes around it, and carries it away bodily’’ (132). Of special significance here are the examples Barthes provides. In this case, resonating with the question of technology and with the emergence of literature (as I discussed them in the introduction and Chapter I), Barthes invokes the languages of modern mathematics and avant-garde poetry: In itself, [mathematical language] cannot be distorted, it has taken all possible precautions against interpretation: no parasitical signification can worm itself into it. And this is why, precisely, myth takes it away en bloc; it takes a certain mathematical formula (E=mc≤), and makes of this unalterable meaning the pure signifier of mathematicity. (132) Contemporary poetry . . . tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves . . . This is why it clouds the language, increases as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified . . . Poetry occupies a position which is the reverse of that of myth: myth is a semiological system which has the pretension of transcending itself into a factual system; poetry is a semiological system which has the pretension of contracting into an essential system. But here again, as in the case of mathematical language, the very resistance o√ered by poetry makes it an ideal prey for myth: the apparent lack of order of signs, which is the poetic facet of an essential order, is captured by myth, and transformed into an empty signifier, which will serve to signify poetry . . . by fiercely refusing myth, poetry surrenders to it bound hand and foot. (133–34)

As these examples suggest, the process of mythification is so inherent to the experience and politics of language in modernity that even modern mathematics (which can resort to abstract symbols), let alone modern poetry (which must rely on verbal language), finds itself at risk and has atthe interruption of referentiality

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tempted to mount acts of resistance. In both cases, moreover, resistance is issued in the form of a deliberate obscurity, exclusiveness, and impenetrability, so as to guard the contents in advance by restricting access to them only to initiates. And yet, as Barthes points out, such resistance, however sophisticatedly vigilant and anticipatory, can hardly deter myth, for myth has a way of capturing even—and especially—that which resists it the hardest: ‘‘Myth can reach everything, corrupt everything, and even the very act of refusing oneself to it. So that the more the language-object resists at first, the greater its final prostitution; whoever here resists completely yields completely’’ (132–33). The second moment I’d like to highlight is diametrically opposed in spirit to the first. In this second moment, we find Barthes attaching a certain romanticism to nature and the countryside, which are, in a manner of speaking, antitheses of the urban, artificial objects that he analyzes with considerable enthusiasm in the first part of his book. We encounter this moment in the section called ‘‘Myth on the Left.’’ Here, despite having demonstrated the all-pervasive workings of myth, Barthes goes on to assert that there is a kind of language which is, surprisingly, not mythical—the language of ‘‘man as a producer,’’ who seeks to transform reality rather than preserve it as an image (146). Who is it who usually speaks this political, unmythical language? Again, Barthes’s example is revealing: ‘‘If I am a woodcutter and I am led to name the tree which I am felling, whatever the form of my sentence, I ‘speak the tree’, I do not speak about it . . . between the tree and myself, there is nothing but my labour, that is to say, an action’’ (145). Barthes calls this ‘‘the real language of the woodcutter,’’ a real language he also attributes to ‘‘the oppressed’’ (148–49). This assertion of a language that can remain free of myth because of its own material deprivation and barrenness is ba∆ing because it is, in contradistinction to Barthes’s own semiological method of reading, a remnant of a structure of feeling that is invested in a stable, as-yet uncorrupted origin of meaning—that is, in the certitude of referentiality. As is characteristic of such structures of feelings, this gesture tends to project itself onto certain kinds of people—children, peasants, proletarians, aborigines, refugees, the poor, the downtrodden, the colonized, the subaltern, and so forth. It is hence no accident that Barthes refers to the rustic figure of the woodcutter and his tree. His own analytical insights notwithstanding, Barthes astonish-

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ingly reads in the woodcutter and the oppressed an unmediated relation to language—theirs is, he writes, ‘‘a transitive type of speech’’ (148)—a relation that in turn becomes recoded by him as political resistance (to processes of bourgeois mythification) and as truth per se. In an ambience in which referentiality has been so drastically called into question, Barthes’s handling of myth is illuminating for reasons that remain germane to this day. The two moments just mentioned portray the two ends of an argument that, in the final analysis, fails to adhere to its own argumentative logic. On the one hand, as he explicates the threat posed by myth to specialized languages, Barthes a≈rms the insuppressible nature of the semiotic movement that puts referentiality o√ indefinitely and that, by implication, constitutes the invincibility of myth itself. On the other hand, despite his shrewd grasp of the semiotic dissolution, once and for all, of the fixity of ‘‘meaning,’’ Barthes reintroduces the latter by evoking the presence of a truth that can be ‘‘spoken’’ directly, without language, by the woodcutter. If mythic signification functions like an inescapable prison-house, Barthes seems to suggest, its spell may nonetheless, miraculously, be broken by the speech of a non-metropolitan laborer, for whom referentiality— and thus resistance—is still possible. In the midst of an argument about what might be called (post)structuralist (significatory) incarceration, then, the figure of the woodcutter stands as an index of a basic conundrum. Against the ubiquity and universality of myth, the woodcutter, we are told, possesses a certain freedom—an access to the outside, so to speak—yet this freedom, this access to the outside, is already discredited in advance precisely because of the ubiquity and universality of myth. Is not ‘‘the woodcutter’’ therefore really a symptom of his own immateriality, a sign of his own foreclosure from a system that will simply go on ‘‘imagining’’ him—that is, keeping him afloat utopically, as it were, in a nonplace?

Poststructuralist Deferment: The Work of Literature-as-Temporality Before exploring the full implications of this basic conundrum, I’d like to remark on a consequence that follows more immediately from the bracketing of referentiality as such, namely, the radicalization of the notion of an object of study. Whereas Barthes’s Mythologies demonstrates how the

the interruption of referentiality

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bracketing of referentiality works socially—in tandem with (French) petty bourgeois mass culture and its mercurial ways of generating insatiable desire—in the realm of literary study the bracketing of referentiality bears rather on the academic question of how an object of study can be defined. Consider the familiar issue of literariness—of what is specific to literature. For Foucault, as I indicated in the introduction, the emergence of literature in modernity is the story of a fall, which follows from the divisions and fragmentations internal to language’s historically evolving functions. Putting aside for the time being Foucault’s repressive hypothesis of literature, we may restate this general question of what literature ‘‘is’’ as, precisely, a question about referentiality: what is literature all about? To what does it refer? What ‘‘reality’’ does it represent? As I will argue, this familiar preoccupation with literariness actually has surprising a≈nities with the contemporary cultural politics that clusters around identity. Let me retrace some of the well-known attempts at approaching the question. Marx’s and Engels’s discussion of literary writing and aesthetic representation provides a good instance of such an attempt because it is contextualized in their more general concern for social revolution and radical political practice. In their responses to authors seeking advice on writing fiction, Marx and Engels, we remember, made some rather startling statements.Ω Albeit theoretically forward-looking, they were careful to warn these writers against turning literature into socialist propaganda in which fictional characters simply function as mouthpieces for revolutionary doctrines. ‘‘The solution of the problem,’’ writes Engels, ‘‘must become manifest from the situation and the action themselves without being expressly pointed out and . . . the author is not obliged to serve the reader on a platter the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he describes.’’∞≠ Embedded in these brief remarks is an intuitive sense that theoretical and literary discourses are distinguished from each other by an essential articulatory di√erence, and that literary discourse, which specializes in indirection, can only become dull and mediocre should one turn it into a platform for direct proletarian pronouncements. Even where the subject matter cries out for justice to be done on some victim’s behalf, literary writing, they suggest, tends to accomplish its task more e√ectively when it does not explicitly solicit the reader’s sympathy as such. In literature, the modus operandi is not to speak about something expressly even when one

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feels one must—in a manner quite opposite the clarity and forthrightness of rational argumentation. ‘‘The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art’’:∞∞ in other words, a very di√erent kind of power for producing change is in play. David Craig summarizes this point succinctly: Surely, if literature a√ects action or changes someone’s life, it is not by handing out a recipe for the applying but rather by disturbing us emotionally, mentally, because it finds us . . . , so that, after a series of such experiences and along with others that work with it, we feel an urge to ‘‘do something’’ or at least to ask ourselves the question (the great question put by Chernyshevsky, Lenin, and Silone): ‘‘What is to be done?’’∞≤

What remains noteworthy in these discussions is a perception of the work of indirection that seemed, to Marx and Engels at least, to be the unique characteristic of literary discourse; this is remarkable especially in light of their political belief in asserting the necessity for social reform and revolution, a belief that, in discursive terms, would be more in line with direct, straightforward, clear-cut expression—the very antithesis of their observations about literary writing. As political theorists, Marx and Engels nonetheless recognized that literary production could not be reduced to a mechanical mirroring of some reality out there, and that, whatever literature is ‘‘about,’’ such referentiality occurs, by definition, in a refracted manner rather than by straightforward declaration.∞≥ In subsequent debates, it was often the critics who were explicitly concerned with form (rather than with politics) who would continue the elaboration of this observation of literature-as-indirection, even though indirection was now theorized in di√erent terms. For instance, the Russian Formalists’ e√ort in defining the defamiliarizing capacity of art and literature—of art’s capacity for presenting something familiar in such a manner as to call attention to its ‘‘artfulness,’’ or its capacity for taking readers by surprise through the process of de-formation—can in retrospect be understood as an attempt to identify, perhaps to construct, a kind of rupture and distance from within a conventional discourse, so that the shock and alienating e√ect produced can be described as what is specific to art and literary expression. Such shock and alienation, again, is not a matter of direct expression but rather that of a sensitively perceived di√erential—the more

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implicitly the di√erential is grasped, the greater the e√ect of artfulness and literariness—so much so that the art object itself takes on only secondary importance. In the Anglo-American world the literary-theoretical avant-garde of the twentieth century was represented by New Criticism, which specializes in the discernment of a literary work’s specificity through close reading. The contradiction between the aim and practice of New Criticism has been well noted. Between the nostalgic desire to produce a complete, intrinsic kind of reading that would isolate and exemplify the literary work as a self-su≈cient world with rules that apply only to itself,∞∂ on the one hand, and the ambiguous, open abyss of meaning that results ironically when such desire in put into practice, on the other, lies the aporia that becomes, for a deconstructive critic such as Paul de Man, New Criticism’s unwitting self-undoing. De Man demonstrates this by reintroducing the dimension of temporality—hence of postponement, deferral, belatedness—in the process of coming to terms with literary discourse: ‘‘the temporal factor, so persistently forgotten, should remind us that the form is never anything but a process on its way to completion.’’∞∑ Whereas New Criticism is still invested in a kind of time-less reading of the work of literature, a reading which forgets and circumvents temporality by the ideological projection of the work’s organic wholeness, deconstruction would distinguish its comparable interest in literary specificity by underscoring the e√ects of time as manifested through the negative momentum of language. In de Man’s hands, the previous attempts to get at literature’s indirectness culminate in a thought-provoking reformulation by way of the originary constitutive role of temporal di√erence, a role that consistently undermines textual presence and plenitude. If literature is indirect, defamiliarizing, ambiguous, ironic, allegorical, etc.—if, in other words, it is never straightforwardly referential—it is because human linguistic signification itself is always already mediated by the slow but indismissible labor of temporality. But the perception of time alone cannot and does not necessarily account for the derailing of reference. One is reminded of the great humanist literary critic Erich Auerbach, for instance, for whom the noticeable temporal shifts in modernist literary representation, shifts he describes with animation and verve, nonetheless do not challenge the basic idea that there exists something common to all of our lives even in the midst of diversities.∞∏ From a poststructuralist, di√erence-oriented perspective, this statement 56 the interruption of referentiality

from the end of Auerbach’s Mimesis is quite astonishing, particularly in view of the sensitive close readings he has performed: The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light. The more numerous, varied, and simple the people are who appear as subjects of such random moments, the more e√ectively must what they have in common shine forth. In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but see to what an extent—below the surface conflicts—the di√erences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. The strata of societies and their di√erent ways of life have become inextricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples. A century ago (in Mérimée for example), Corsicans or Spaniards were still exotic; today the term would be quite unsuitable for Pearl Buck’s Chinese peasants.∞π

In spite of his grasp of the changes in literary, representational time, referentiality itself is not a problem for Auerbach because he remains convinced of a universal something called human reality. Mimesis is simply a way of accessing it; accessibility itself is not an issue. The contribution made by poststructuralist theory therefore lies not merely in its articulation of temporality but also in its insistence that time does not coincide with itself. This recurrent slippage and intrinsic irreconcilability—between speaking and writing, between sign and meaning, between fiction and reality—are what allow some poststructuralist critics to assert that deconstruction is a rigorously historical process. As Geo√ Bennington writes: ‘‘deconstruction, insofar as it insists on the necessary noncoincidence of the present with itself, is in fact in some senses the most historical of discourses imaginable.’’∞∫ For Marian Hobson, the point of deconstruction-as-history is precisely that identity is never possible, and that such impossibility is itself plural: ‘‘It is trace, track, which makes identity impossible. But this impossibility is itself plural, not simple. It is not a straight negative—not simple, identical, non-identity. Trace, lack of selfcoincidence, is on the contrary a plurality of impossibilities, a disjunction of negatives.’’∞Ω If conventional practices of history may be criticized on the basis of a premature projection of the referent, deconstruction’s response is that history resides rather in the permanently self-undermining process of di√erentiation, a process that, by the sheer force of its temporal movement, need not have an end (and destination) in sight. the interruption of referentiality

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Poststructuralist Identity Politics This potential alliance between the lack of (temporal and ontological) selfpresence and di√erentiation-as-historicity is one major reason poststructuralism has left such indelible imprints on those areas of knowledge production that do not at first seem to have much to do with semiotics or, for that matter, with the revamping of metalanguages, but that are intimately linked to empirical issues such as culture and group identity. It is not di≈cult to see that the basic tenets of structuralist linguistics and semiotics— di√erence, identity, value, arbitrariness, convention, systematicity—carry within them connotations that resonate well beyond the terrain of a narrow sense of language. With the bracketing of the object of knowledge and the foregrounding of the process of signification-as-temporality, as introduced by poststructuralism, it is inevitable that the certitude of the identities involved—epistemic, subjective, or collective—can no longer be safely taken for granted. Not surprisingly, therefore, one of the most prevalent uses of the poststructuralist metalanguage of di√erencing is to be found in areas of inquiry in which existential identity is most at stake— multiculturalism, postcoloniality, and ethnicity. In these intersecting terrains of inquiry, most often conducted in the U.S. academy, the leftist intellectual response to the postwar era of decolonization—the response that began as ‘‘French theory’’ in the 1960s—has finally come full circle. If this is the case, how is it that in these areas of inquiry, there is also such a regular refrain that non-Western subjects and subject matters are ‘‘resistant to’’ and beyond Western (often poststructuralist) theory—that is, that they fundamentally (and often antagonistically) exceed such theory’s rationale of comprehension, however nuanced the latter might be? Three or four decades ago, even though the same ambivalent gesture toward the West might be made, theory itself was not a problem. Nowadays, as can be surmised from journals, conferences, anthologies, and single-author publications, not only do scholars of more fashionable topics such as transgender politics, third-world media, postcolonial urban geography, or cultural translation feel obligated to gesture toward one type of Western theory or another, but even specialists of ancient ethnic poems and narratives must also, in order to argue the case of the latter’s uniqueness and beyondcomparison status, demonstrate an awareness of the background of Western theoretical issues. Yet, if all this is testimony to the hegemony enjoyed 58 the interruption of referentiality

by Western theory, why are the claims of resistance—in so many versions of ‘‘We are di√erent!’’—so adamant? Are such claims at all e√ectual? If the exploration of literary di√erence was in order to ground literary specificity—that is, to define literature as an object with its essential attributes, attributes that make literature definitively unlike anything else— then one of the outcomes of such exploration is, ironically, the dissipation of this ‘‘object’’ altogether. From the nineteenth-century perception of its essence (in Marx and Engels) as indirection to the late-twentieth-century assertion (by deconstructionist critics) of its non-coincidence with itself, the object of literariness seems to have become theoretically unsustainable exactly at the moment of its concrete definition: it ‘‘is’’ what it always is not. This capacity for becoming-other-than-itself, here associated with literariness through the course of temporality, returns us uncannily to the prisonhouse logic of myth as Barthes analyzes it, a logic that captures and entraps as much as it shifts and defers. Indeed, the two sides of the logic are not so distinguishable from each other: what captures and entraps—what seems inescapable—is none other than an ever changing tendency to shift and defer, ad infinitum. Conversely, what incessantly shifts and defers with an open ending may, by the same token, become a predictable, because endlessly perpetuated and extendable, condition. That is to say, much as the ongoing e√orts to define the literary object as such have shown that temporality/di√erence will always fragment and dismantle whatever specificity that may be established through it, this (metacritical point of the) impossibility of stable objectification, once grasped and reiterated, can turn into nothing less than a metaphysics (of presence)—with language or signification as the primary origin, as the source of divinity or evil from which there is, as it were, no possibility of an exit. Consider now the study of X—those areas which, as I mentioned at the beginning, often attain visibility by beckoning toward and resisting Western theory at the same time. As in the case of literariness, we may set out to define X as an object with certain attributes. But we already know from the example of literariness that such an attempt at discovering the specificity of X will lead first to the process of di√erencing and eventually to the dissipation of X itself as a stable referent. With the advantage of this theoretical hindsight/foresight, should we therefore conclude that, ultimately, X as such does not exist, that X, like literariness, is a permanently shifting, nonself-identical relationship? What might be the implications of proclaiming, the interruption of referentiality

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let us say, that African American, Asian American, and gay, lesbian, and transgender specificities do not exist? Such proclamations would be faithful to the logic of poststructuralist deferment, yet they would be intolerable to many who are conscious of the hierarchical politics of race, class, gender, and ethnicity that structure Western and non-Western societies alike. In the face of the practical struggles for existential self-determination that go on daily against various forms of social injustice, it is, for many, unthinkable to declare, as in the case of the referent of literariness, that these versions of X do not exist. Yet the alternative—the insistence that they are real, out there, their empirical existence absolutely incontestable, and that they are an authentic core from which to mount resistance to the virtual claims of high theory—is equally untenable because it is theoretically naive. The conundrum we face today in the wake of theory may thus be described as follows. In their attempts to argue the specificity of their objects of study, critics of marginalized areas of inquiry often must, as a gesture of independence and pride, rhetorically assert their resistance to or distrust of Western theory. But what exactly is the nature of that which they are resisting and distrusting? As these critics try to defend the viability of their proposed objects, they are compelled, against their own proclaimed critical stance, to set into motion precisely the poststructuralist operation of differencing, of making essentialist categories of identity disintegrate. Indeed, di√erencing—and deferment—is often the very strategic weapon with which they stage their attacks on Western theory. Although they criticize Western theory, then, these critics are meanwhile implementing the bracketing of anchored, referential meanings, a bracketing that, arguably, constitutes contemporary Western theory’s most profound and influential contribution. To argue in a truly e√ective way, these critics would in all likelihood have to go against or abandon the very theoretical premises (of poststructuralist di√erencing) on which they make their criticisms in the first place.≤≠ Put in a di√erent way, the attempt to advance the specificity of X as such, even as it discredits poststructuralist theory, tends to reproduce the very terms—and the very problems—that once used to surround the theoretical investigation of literariness. Like literature—Foucault’s problematic pronouncements about the emergence of literature in modernity again come to mind—X is often constructed negatively as what defamiliarizes, what departs from conventional expectations, what disrupts the norm, etc.— 60 the interruption of referentiality

terms that are invested in inscribing specificity by way of di√erentiation, deferment, and resistance. Like the attempt to define literariness also, the attempt to define X seems doomed to destroy its own object in the process of objectification. More disturbingly still, if representation of X as such is recognizable in these similar theoretical terms, doesn’t it mean that there is no essential di√erence between X and high theory—that the articulation of X, however historically specific it may be, is somehow already within the trajectory mapped out by high theory? To this extent, critics who attempt to use X as a site of resistance are not unlike Barthes, who invokes the speech of the woodcutter in the midst of his own semiotic analysis of myth. Judged according to the terms of Barthes’s own method, the woodcutter is an enigmatic figure because he has, to all appearances, emerged from an outside that has already been rejected in anteriority. Similarly, for all the commonsensical justifications for X’s existence, X seems theoretically out of place, its ‘‘being’’ at once anticipated and erased by the logic in which it strives to appear. This lifeand-death entanglement between X and poststructuralist theory is exactly the juncture (and dead end) at which a rethinking of poststructuralist theory is in order—not once again by way of semiotic or temporal di√erencing but, as I would contend, by way of reexamining theory’s interruption of referentiality.

Paradoxes of the Outside Because the drastic rooting out of (the belief in) any extra-systemic determinant in the production of meaning (be that determinant in the form of subject, object, consciousness, or perception) remains to this day poststructuralism’s most controversial, because most radical, intervention, it is important, even at the risk of repeating the obvious, to underscore its fundamental mechanism—a methodical process of redefining the di√erence hitherto thought to exist between (two) entities as one that is already within entities. For instance, the di√erence between ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘woman’’ may be shown as a split (di√erence) within man or masculinity, a split that is then projected outward and given a body as ‘‘woman’’; alternatively, the di√erence between ‘‘non-Jew’’ and ‘‘Jew’’ may be shown as a repressed, unwanted part (di√erence) within the anti-Semitic non-Jew, who then externalizes it by labeling it ‘‘Jew.’’ In both cases, ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘Jew’’ seem to be the interruption of referentiality

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di√erences or identities existing external to ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘non-Jew,’’ but, for poststructuralists, it would be more accurate to argue that they are in fact markers of an internal dislocation or alienness, that the names ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘Jew’’ simply objectify and externalize an earlier rupture that is immanent to ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘non-Jew’’ themselves. This move to relodge di√erence and otherness repeatedly in the interior of an ongoing state of a√airs—a move that is parasitic by definition since its key operation is a matter of reversing and re-placing what has been established and accepted as the norm—suggests that poststructuralism does not and cannot have any positive agenda of its own to speak of. The point of poststructuralism, of course, is precisely that all agendas need to be deconstructed in this manner as unconscious bearers of some residual ideology. To this, we must pose the necessary questions: Whose agendas? At what point in time and place? Under what circumstances are such agendas pursued, and under what circumstances should they be sabotaged—and with what consequences? Where the subject involved is a socially marginalized group fighting for the legitimacy of its own existence, a group which may have the political need to adhere to certain goals or beliefs (such as religion, nationalism, di√erent kinds of human rights, etc.), poststructuralism’s tendency to reject externally observable di√erence (say, in the form of longstanding practices of discrimination) can easily turn into an impediment, making it virtually impossible to advance the more urgent and practical agendas of improving the social conditions of the underprivileged or disenfranchised concerned. Meanwhile, although the most frequent criticisms of poststructuralism, as the preceding paragraph indicates, tend to portray it as an apolitical, indeed nihilistic, enterprise, indi√erent to the ‘‘real’’ problems of the world, a more simple but basic issue that accompanies the bracketing of referentiality has remained elided. By bracketing referentiality, separating it from the signified, and redefining the signified as part of an ongoing chain of signification, poststructuralism has established an epistemic framework in which what appears to lie ‘‘outside’’ can, indeed must, be continually recoded as what is inside. There is hence no outside to the text. Because of this, we can also argue, with due respect to the work of Derrida, that the poststructuralism that specializes in textual vigilance, in particular, really does not o√er a way of thinking other than by turning (what is thought) inward. This is not exactly the same as 62 the interruption of referentiality

saying that poststructuralism is a closed system of permutations (that was the problem with structuralism); rather, it is simply that its fundamental motivity (that is, capacity for change or othering), which consists in rewriting referentiality as an illusory e√ect produced by the play of temporal di√erences, is the motivity of a compulsive interiorization—so much so that even what is excluded, as well as the act of exclusion, has to be cast by way of (or mediated through) interiorization, as a trace, an inscription, and so forth. As I already suggested, should we not recognize in this compulsive interiorization a kind of metaphysics, attached fatalistically to a preexisting condition, a presence, called language and signification? The resurgence in this instance of what, for lack of a better term, is a kind of nature—a naturalized interiority—in a reading method that otherwise astutely cautions against illusions of nature, origin, primordialness, authenticity, and so forth: this appears to be an intricate philosophical issue that merits much further discussion than has hitherto been forthcoming. If textually vigilant poststructuralism specializes in foregrounding the alterity that is inherent to, that is an inalienable part of, any act of signification, has it not, by the same token of its insistence on linguistic self-referentiality (or inwardturning), essentialized such alterity (or its process of reinscription) in the form of a final determinant—a lurking reference, no less? As Barthes’s analysis of myth reveals, this implicit reference (to an unsurpassable nature or horizon known as language and signification) remains haunted by a particular outside that the theorist has, by definition, precluded from the time and space of his own rationalization. As in the case of Barthes’s woodcutter, this outside typically returns in the shape of rustic, socially oppressed, and/or culturally other figures, but even when names, places, and activities are supplied, these figures typically loom as specters— that is, as mere generic (or stereotyped) bearers of the limits of an entire system of thinking. Accordingly, the most important attribute of the woodcutter is that he does not and cannot speak in the same manner as the metropolitan producers and consumers of myths—that is, he does not and cannot inhabit the interior of their chain of signification. But what if, counter to Barthes’s proposal, we were to imagine a woodcutter who is living in Paris, amid the allure of images, technologies, commodities, and fantasies that are the stu√ of contemporary petty-bourgeois consumer culture? This tendency—or rather need—to at once reduce and promote to an the interruption of referentiality

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otherworldly existence some social identities in a critical discourse that is otherwise so focused on this world and so determinedly humanistic (in its investment in human language and signification) strikes me as poststructuralist theory’s major unresolved paradox. These ghostly identities are perhaps less the figures of the (passive) condition of exteriority as such than they are the abject leftovers of a theoretical act of exclusion: barred from entering signification (the realm of human contact and interaction), they are nonetheless retained, (re)named, and elevated, in a benevolent, secondorder gesture, as signification’s spectral other or its so-called condition of possibility, commanding respect like an irreproachable moral lesson. And, as long as they are consigned to this doubly outside position, foreclosed from the hermetic terrain of signification and prevented from speaking there, yet meanwhile endowed with a strange subversive power (such as the power to ‘‘speak the tree’’), these figures will remain ‘‘mythologies’’ par excellence. Furthermore, like high modernism, the poststructuralist radicalization of language and signification also needs to be considered in the larger context of the demands placed by modernity on languages and cultures worldwide. If a politically self-conscious, but to many impenetrable, languageplay can be seen in the West as a historical rebellion against the increasing trend toward instrumentalism since the Enlightenment, then elsewhere in the world, in cultures that have had to cast o√ the burden of the ethnic tradition in order to modernize, the problem of language is, rather, always defined in terms of how it must become more clear, more accessible, and more useable—in short, how it must become more of a viable instrument to assist the developing nation in its progress toward the future. It was in the latter kind of cultural furor about cleansing the native/ethnic language of its past—especially of its obsolete, opaque literary qualities—that a country such as modern China, for instance, found itself in the early twentieth century.≤∞ Globally, hence, it is as though modernity had, by the twentieth century, compartmentalized the world into two apparently disjointed but in fact mutually implicated halves: in the industrialized West, an avant-garde linguistic drama, staged first through (romanticism and) high modernism and then through poststructuralist theory, driven by a fervently puritan resistance against progressive instrumentalism; in the developing Rest, a characteristically desperate e√ort to bring the native culture up-to-date by 64 the interruption of referentiality

reinforcing (rather than resisting) such progressive instrumentalism, so as to survive the trauma that is the obligatory and demeaning encounter with Westerners. On the one side, the fate of aesthetic or critical language was to become ever more specialized, unreadable, and thus superfluous (so that, or so the fantasy goes, it cannot be easily appropriated); on the other side, the practical task faced by politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and culture workers alike was rather that of creating a language that can be properly functional, communicative, and useful—a tool, precisely, for purposes of national and cultural self-strengthening. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in ways that could not have been foreseen, the forces of globalization have brought these two sides of modernity face to face. For instance, as Asian countries such as China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Korea become economically prosperous, with su≈cient financial resources to be spared for ‘‘cultural exchanges’’ or ‘‘border-crossing dialogues,’’ even the most arcane and linguistically formidable Western theory has found unprecedented channels for burgeoning. Like modern poetry and E=mc≤, theoretical critical language has begun to assume a mythical life of its own—as a trendy global commodity whose market appeal lies precisely in its near inaccessibility. As the operational logic of myth would have it, the more impenetrable the critical prose, the stronger the suggestion that there is some mysterious value therein; and the more audiences feel the frustration and intimidation of not ‘‘getting it,’’ the more they desire and pursue ‘‘it.’’ Witness the innumerable mentions and applications of theory at international conferences across the Pacific as well as across the Atlantic, and from the Northern to the Southern Hemispheres. Is theory still the event of political dissidence that it was in its origins? Has it not become, instead, a thriving entrepreneurship, whose powers for expansion and circulation often have little to do with the rebellion against instrumentalism that once inspired its refusal to be intelligible?

Rethinking the Rhetoric of Temporality Although it constitutes what is arguably poststructuralism’s most fundamental intervention in European thought, therefore, the theorization of time’s non-coincidence with itself—and thus of the perpetuity of signification’s postponement of referentiality—tends to a) lose its persuasiveness at those points where the seemingly open-ended time of signification is juxtathe interruption of referentiality

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posed with the invocation of specific ‘‘outside’’ figures, and b) take on a substantially contrary set of connotations once we go beyond the parameters of contemporary Western Europe and North America. Where otherness appears as an empirical and cultural issue, the assertion of temporal disjunction as such (as an absolute force that structures all signification) may coincide, or become complicit, with the anthropological problematic that Johannes Fabian has called, in his well-known phrase, the denial of coevalness—‘‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.’’≤≤ (By ‘‘coevalness,’’ Fabian means a sharing of time that is ‘‘not given but must be accomplished [and can be denied]’’; coevalness, he writes more recently, is ‘‘a kind of contemporaneity [Zeitgenossenschaft ] that is not a mere implication of coexistence in time.’’)≤≥ In other words, whereas the insistence on the non-coincidence of the present with itself may indeed be a revolutionary charge within the philosophical and epistemological terrains from which poststructuralism stems, such an insistence, when seen in light of Europe’s history with its colonized others, may turn out to be nothing more than another instance of what Fabian calls allochronic discourse, in which other peoples who are our contemporaries are discursively confined each to their culture gardens or ethnic ghettos in the name of di√erence. Be it temporal, ontological, linguistic, or identitarian, ‘‘non-coincidence’’ can hardly be considered groundbreaking in the global circuits of colonialism and neocolonialism because the non-Western others are already classified—as is typically the case, for instance, in postwar area studies and its instrumentalist programs of non-Western language and culture learning—as non-coincident, anachronistic, and fundamentally discontinuous (from populations in the West, from the times and languages of Western ethnographers) to begin with. These non-Western others, in other words, have long occupied a place in Western anthropological discourse that is homologous to the place given to the woodcutter in Barthes’s analysis. To emphasize, indeed to belabor, non-coincidence as such is thus merely to reify and raise to the level of metalanguage a rather conventional anthropological attitude toward the other’s temporal otherness—which is often unproblematically upheld as a fact—without actually confronting the conditions that enable such assumptions of non-coincidence to stand in the first place. Referring to the relevance of Fabian’s work for the study of colonial 66 the interruption of referentiality

America, for instance, Carlos J. Alonso comments on one such manifestation of the (principle of ) non-coincidence inherent to the rhetoric of temporality—the expression of amazement: Europe’s rhetoric of amazement vis-à-vis America . . . necessitates the ceaseless deferral of total cognitive mastery. But rather than being deployed in order to maintain an irreducible alterity, the European figuration of the New World as new posited a continuity between itself and the new territories that made possible European appropriation of the recently discovered lands while simultaneously a≈rming their exoticism.≤∂

In the terms of our ongoing discussion, ‘‘amazement’’ (at the other’s novelty) is precisely the a√ective symptom of a politics of temporality through which the encounter with what is irreducibly foreign can be appropriated into an existing interior (‘‘a continuity’’) in such a manner as to become part of this interior’s infinite series of di√erentiations over time. To be sure, this infinite series is always ready for further di√erentiation, yet never again will it be directed at the primary, originary moment involving the as-yet unresolved outside (the New World in its ‘‘irreducible alterity’’). In the place of the latter, there is now, simply, ‘‘exoticism.’’ The flip side of amazement (as understood in these terms) is the displacement and postponement of the other to an exceptional, indeed utopian, realm whose epistemic function lies in the idea that it cannot speak or materialize in the present, that it is currently absent. Again, Alonso’s observations about the discursive place occupied by America in the European imagination during the colonial epoch are pointedly provocative. From being perceived as novel, he writes, America gradually shifted into the position of the future: Almost imperceptibly, the coevalness that the narrative of newness required was replaced by a narrative paradigm in which America occupied a position of futurity vis-à-vis the Old World. This transformation from novelty to futurity was significant because, among other things, it created the conditions for a permanent exoticization of the New World—the sort that cannot be undermined or dissolved by actual experience or objective analysis: safely ensconced in an always postponed future, America could become the object of a ceaselessly regenerating discourse of mystification and perpetual promise.≤∑

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This refusal to deal with the other except by reconfiguring it safely as otherworldly ‘‘exoticism’’ or ‘‘perpetual promise’’ returns us, once again, to the scenario with which I began this chapter. When scholars of marginalized groups and non-Western subjects rely on notions of resistance (to Western theory) in their attempts to argue the specificity of X, they are unwittingly replicating the conundrum whereby the specificity of an object of study is conceived of in terms of a di√erential—a di√erential, moreover, that has to be incorporated in the chain of signification in order to attain recognition. Since, as noted by Alonso, the chain of signification (and recognition) is often underwritten by a politics of temporality that operates with the alternating e√ects of mystification and futurization, such a process can only lead to an unending series of appropriations—and eliminations—of X. In other words, the more resistive (that is, on the outside) X is imagined to be, the more unavoidably it is to lose its specificity (that is, become appropriated) in the larger framework of the systematic production of differences, while the circumstances that make this framework possible (that is, that enable it to unfold and progress as a permanently self-regulating interiority) remain unchallenged. This is, I believe, one reason why so many new projects of articulating alternative identities, cultures, and group formations often seem so similar in the end. Whether what is in question is a particular ethnic work or the identity of an ethnic person, what has become predictable—literally, already spoken—is precisely the compulsive invocation of di√erence with interchangeable terms such as ‘‘ambivalence,’’ ‘‘multiplicity,’’ ‘‘hybridity,’’ ‘‘heterogeneity,’’ ‘‘disruptiveness,’’ ‘‘resistance,’’ and the like; and, no matter how new an object of study may appear to be, it is bound to lose its novelty once the process of temporal di√erencing is set into motion in the aforementioned manner. With the act of originary exclusion—the di√erence that makes the di√erence, as it were—being foreclosed, a priori, from signification, critics dealing with X can only repeatedly run up against the incommensurability between the experience of temporality as self-deconstruction (with its ever-more-nuanced theoretical distinctions) and the experience of temporality as allochronism (with its crude racialist ramifications). In sum, contemporary uses of poststructuralist theory have tended to adopt poststructuralism’s solution—di√erencing—without su≈ciently reflecting on its problem—its (programmatic need for the) preemptive cir68 the interruption of referentiality

cumvention of (the act of ) exclusion. Yet contemporary issues of identity, social recognition, and cultural conflict almost invariably necessitate a questioning of the politics of exclusion. Can these seemingly incompatible states of a√airs ever be reconciled with each other? Can specificity be imagined in terms other than a naturalized di√erential, an automatized discontinuity that in the end may be just part of a continuous (semiotic) series? Are there perhaps forms of closure and reference that should not be too quickly disavowed, because the act of disavowing them inevitably leads to a theoretical impasse? At the level of metalanguage, these are precisely the questions pertaining to the problematic of referentiality, that as-yet unresolved outside of poststructuralism that, exorcized and banished dutifully by many of us, has hitherto been living the life of the exiled. When reformulated in this manner, referentiality may in the end require us to accept it more precisely as a limit—as the imperfect yet irreducible condition that is not pure di√erence but a hierarchized di√erential, one that is thoroughly immersed in and corrupted by the errors and delusions of history. Getting at this hierarchized di√erential is often the intention behind the many attempts to objectify X. But rather than using the banalized and bankrupt language of resistance, it would be much more productive to let the problematic of referentiality interrupt—to reopen the poststructuralist foreclosure of this issue, to acknowledge the inevitability of reference even in the most avant-garde of theoretical undertakings, and to make way for a thorough reassessment of an originary act of repudiation and expulsion (of referentiality) in terms that can begin to address, as Fabian writes, the ‘‘scandal of domination and exploitation of one part of mankind by another.’’≤∏

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s

s

III

the old/new question of comparison in literary studies

A Post-European Perspective

There would be no raison d’être for the comparative method if it was not the classification of entities or traits which first have to be separate and distinct before their similarities can be used to establish taxonomies and developmental sequences. —Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), 26–27

The universalist concept of all the literatures of the world being held together as a totality, one that transcends restrictive national and linguistic boundaries, remains an enormously appealing one to many people nearly two centuries after Goethe proclaimed the notion of Weltliteratur in the 1820s. As Edward Said writes, ‘‘For many modern scholars—including myself—Goethe’s grandly utopian vision is considered to be the foundation of what was to become the field of comparative literature, whose underlying and perhaps unrealizable rationale was this vast synthesis of the world’s literary production transcending borders and languages but not in any way e√acing their individuality and historical concreteness.’’∞ Arising in the historical context of nascent nationalisms in Europe, the notion of world literature partook of the aspirations toward global peace, cosmopolitical right, and intercultural hospitality that were among the most important intellectual legacies of that period.≤ As Susan Bassnett notes: ‘‘With the advantages of retrospection, we can see that ‘comparative’ was set against

‘national’, and that whilst the study of ‘national’ literatures risked accusations of partisanship, the study of ‘comparative’ literature carried with it a sense of transcendence of the narrowly nationalistic.’’≥ It was such transcendence toward a general, cosmopolitan humanity that Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, author of the first book-length study of comparative literature in the English language, proposed as the rationale for the discipline: ‘‘the gradual expansion of social life, from clan to city, from city to nation, from both of these to cosmopolitan humanity, [should be adopted] as the proper order of our studies in comparative literature.’’∂ Comparative literature as it is pursued in North America still retains many of these historically specific but arguably universally valid aspirations.∑ However, despite the explicit use of the term ‘‘comparative,’’ these aspirations are not always accompanied by a sustained critical engagement with comparison as a historically overdetermined problematic.∏ More often than not, it is assumed that comparison occurs as a matter of course whenever we juxtapose two (or more) national languages and literatures, geographical regions, authors, or themes, and rarely do critics stop and ponder what the gesture of comparing consists in, amounts to, indeed realizes and reinforces.π These days, the term ‘‘comparative’’ is often used in tandem or interchangeably with words such as ‘‘diverse,’’ ‘‘global,’’ ‘‘international,’’ ‘‘transnational,’’ ‘‘cross-cultural,’’ ‘‘planetary,’’ and the like, in ways that once again conjure the signature aspiration of ‘‘more than one,’’ of going beyond restrictive national boundaries, that has been used to define ‘‘world literature,’’∫ yet the nebulousness of the term, as well, seems to persist in direct proportions to its popular usage. In a field that defines itself so consciously as plural and interdisciplinary to begin with, such nebulousness is, one suspects, unlikely to go away simply with renewed assertions of the openness of comparative literature’s terrain or the permeability of its borders. The more critical question, rather, is as Francesco Loriggio poses it: if ‘‘the debate about flows, traveling cultures, migrancy, diaspora has culminated in pleas for curricular change that foreground the actuality of cultural realms . . . why is it then that today complit is experiencing its most serious institutional crisis, instead of its final institutional consecration?’’Ω As part of a cluster of concepts that sees linguistic cosmopolitanism and the peaceful coexistence of national and cultural traditions as its telos, comparison in comparative literature is understandably grounded, as the etymology of the word suggests, in the notion of parity—in the possibility of 72 comparison in literary studies

peer-like equality and mutuality among those being compared. As Bassnett puts it, ‘‘Communication, commingling, sharing were key words in this view of comparative literature, which depoliticized writing and aspired towards universal concord.’’∞≠ Hence, whereas a single national literary tradition needs to be investigated in accordance with its historical specifics, comparative literature often proceeds with investigating multiple literary traditions on the assumption that there ought to be a degree of commonality and equivalence—and thus comparability—among them; that they are, somehow, on a par with one another despite their obvious di√erences. Interestingly, the assumption of parity and sameness is premised on a requirement of linguistic disparity and di√erence: if not at least two or three languages are involved, the work is often described (as it is by some of my friends and colleagues in the profession) as ‘‘not comparativist.’’ What are the implications of this prerequisite multilingualism? Although, having always worked in di√erentiated linguistic traditions, I deeply appreciate the intellectual and personal benefits of knowing multiple languages, it appears problematic (to me at least) to equate comparison with multilingualism per se. In that equation, so often voiced in the decisionmaking processes of hiring committees and other professional situations, language has come to be viewed as a stand-in for method, and the ability to use a particular language, more or less as the equivalent of having knowledge itself—indeed, as a privileged—because nativist—way into a culture, a key that opens all doors. As Susan Sniader Lanser writes, as a discipline, comparative literature has relied on an ‘‘insistence on language as the primary site of di√erence and hence not only the discipline’s central basis for ‘comparison’ but the very ground of its disciplinary legitimacy.’’∞∞ Such a belief in the absolute merit of being multilingual is, of course, debatable: the multilingualism essential for political surveillance and intelligence networks such as the fbi or the cia, and the multilingualism needed for purposes of religious indoctrination, as in the case of Jesuit and Protestant missionaries throughout the centuries, are but two obvious questionable examples. Moreover, as Roland Greene asks: What does it mean to ‘‘know’’ a language? When can one be said to know English or Spanish, if these languages are so multifarious in themselves? How does a comparatist, with his or her paradisciplinary investments, need to know French di√erently than a scholar of the nineteenth-century French

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novel? How does knowing languages in the academic sense dispose us toward reproducing the conventional studies of the national literatures?∞≤

And, as Waïl Hassan and Rebecca Saunders write: ‘‘If language is the house of being, as Heidegger suggests, it a√ords some very diverse kinds of accommodations. Who, after all, is supposed to accommodate whom?’’∞≥ It also goes without saying that a prerequisite multilingualism usually ends up, in practice, in the form of a highly selective multilingualism, one that is only ‘‘narrowly comparative.’’∞∂ Despite all such legitimate concerns, however, the habits of according supremacy to multilingualism and of conflating multilingualism categorically with comparative work per se continue unabated in some circles. Because di√erentiation or plurality (multilingualism) as such is presumed, paradoxically, to be the basis for the commonality or parity (comparison) among languages, it follows that the kind of comparative literature that adopts this presumption tends not to concern itself with challenging the presumption at all but instead with defining and defending what literature is and does. The belief is that once we have identified literature’s specificity, ‘‘comparison’’ will take care of itself.∞∑ René Wellek and Austin Warren’s classic Theory of Literature remains an exemplary case of an erudite and sophisticated account of what the literary is under the rubric of comparative literature. First published in the late 1940s, Wellek and Warren’s was a project that sought ambitiously to demarcate the specifics of literature in such ways as to distinguish it from science (that is, the physical or natural sciences), on the one hand, and from everyday language, on the other. The authors clarify from the outset that their interest in literature is to be distinguished from mere enjoyment and appreciation; rather, they write, it is an interest in a systematic way of studying literature, in the theory of literature: Like every human being, each work of literature has its individual characteristics; but it also shares common properties with other works of art, just as every man shares traits with humanity, with all members of his sex, nation, class, profession, etc. We can thus generalize concerning works of art, Elizabethan drama, all drama, all literature, all art. Literary criticism and literary history both attempt to characterize the individuality of a work, of an author, of a period, or of a national literature. But this characterization can be accomplished only in universal terms, on the basis of a literary theory. 74 comparison in literary studies

Literary theory, an organon of methods, is the great need of literary scholarship today.∞∏

Historically speaking, Wellek and Warren’s endeavor to formalize literary study and turn literature into an autonomous field of specialization follows two well-recognized paths: first, that of di√erentiating literature externally from other fields; second, that of analyzing the internal dynamics of literary genres, forms, styles, and so forth. Such an e√ort at elaboration continues the logic of the invention of disciplinary knowledge in the human sciences that Foucault discusses in The Order of Things. As I pointed out in my introduction, for Foucault, modern literature’s increasing impenetrability—and need for theorization—is symptomatic of the epistemic shifts, since early modern times, in the relations of representation, shifts that result in the ultimate separation (in modern times) between words and things. ‘‘From the nineteenth century,’’ Foucault writes, ‘‘language began to fold in upon itself, to acquire its own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of its own. It became one object of knowledge among others, on the same level as living beings, wealth and value, and the history of events and men.’’∞π To compensate for the demise of its status as a transparent, universal means of communication, Foucault argues, language develops into roughly three major forms of writing or discourses— the scientific (or positivistic), the exegetic (or interpretive), and the literary (or self-referential). Foucault’s argument, as I noted, was an attempt to account for the appearance of literature as a distinct field and object of study, an appearance that is traceable to the historical trajectory of knowledge production in the West. Comparative literature’s disciplinary emphasis on multilingualism, it would seem, is simply a furthering of this ongoing objectification of literature in multiple languages. But Foucault’s work o√ers another important insight—not so much on the appearance of literature as on the practice of comparison rooted in the co-presence of dissimilar kinds of phenomena. The Order of Things is, after all, a study of the history of the classification or organization of knowledge in the West, in which the propinquity or common ground that once existed among things has purportedly become lost. According to Foucault, the study was inspired by his encounter with one of Borges’s inventions, the fantastic ‘‘Chinese encyclopedia’’ (entitled the ‘‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’’ in Borges’s text) in which all the familiar landmarks

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and connections of Western thought are disturbed and threatened with collapse.∞∫ Foucault writes: The monstrous quality that runs through Borges’s enumeration consists . . . in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. . . . Borges . . . simply dispenses with the least obvious, but most compelling, of necessities; he does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed. . . . What has been removed, in short, is the famous ‘‘operating table’’ . . . in two superimposed senses: the nickel-plated, rubbery table swathed in white, glittering beneath a glass sun devouring all shadow—the table where, for an instant, perhaps forever, the umbrella encounters the sewing-machine; and also a table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences—the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.∞Ω

The idea that di√erent languages can have among them a certain parity, similitude, or equivalence is, arguably, a type of comparative thinking derived from the ‘‘operating table,’’ what Foucault also refers to as the taxonomic method of knowledge production. Foucault’s point is that when this method used to work in premodern times, with its ever-expandable classificatory interstices and descending order of proximities (such as species, genus, family, and so forth in natural history, for instance), it served at once as the conceptual horizon and the technical means of charting and naming the world’s phenomena. As a spatially organized rationale, taxonomy provides a grid of intelligibility in the midst of infinite material variations. Because, whether or not it is literally visible, the grid remains stable, transformations are a matter of addition and accumulation: supplementary knowledges would a≈rm and perpetuate the function of inclusiveness that is an inalienable property of the table. Something of this supposedly defunct operating table seems to be still alive in the realm of comparative literature. The grid of intelligibility here is that of literature as understood in Europe, and historical variations are often conceived of in terms of other cultures’ welcome entries into or becoming synthesized with the European tradition. Wellek and Warren put

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it in this manner: ‘‘it is important to think of literature as a totality and to trace the growth and development of literature without regard to linguistic distinctions. . . . Western literature, at least, forms a unity, a whole . . . and, without minimizing the importance of Oriental influences, especially that of the Bible, one must recognize a close unity which includes all Europe, Russia, the United States, and the Latin American literatures.’’≤≠ As Edward Said comments, ‘‘To speak of comparative literature therefore was to speak of the interaction of world literatures with one another, but the field was epistemologically organized as a sort of hierarchy, with Europe and its Latin Christian literatures at its center and top.’’≤∞ This hierarchical formulation of comparison, which may be named ‘‘Europe and Its Others,’’ remains a common norm of comparative literary studies in North America today. In this formulation, the rationale for comparing hinges on the conjunction and; the and, moreover, signals a form of supplementation that authorizes the first term, Europe, as the grid of reference, to which may be added others in a subsequent and subordinate fashion. An outcome of this kind of comparison is an often asymmetrical distribution of cultural capital and intellectual labor, so that cultures of Europe (the grid), such as French and German, tend to be studied with meticulousness while cultures on the margins of Europe, such as those in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, even when they are di√erentiated by unique, mutually unintelligible linguistic traditions, may simply be considered examples of the same geographical areas (and hence not warranting a similar degree of comparative finesse). (To this classic division by geography we may also add the hierarchical divide between ‘‘French’’ and ‘‘Francophone’’ writings.)≤≤ The and thus instigates not only comparison but also a politics of comparison: on the one side, the infinite opening of histories, cultures, languages in their internal vicissitudes in such a manner as to enable their studies to become ever more nuanced and refined; on the other side, a crude lumping together of other histories, cultures, and languages with scant regard to exactly the same kinds of details and internal dynamics of thought that, theoretically speaking, should be part of the study of any tradition. These other histories, cultures, and languages remain, by default, undi√erentiated—and thus never genuinely on a par with Europe—within an ostensibly comparative framework.≤≥ It is in this light that even an otherwise defensible pedagogical method such as close reading becomes suspect

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because, for close reading to be practiced properly, the majority of global literary texts outside the small Western canon have to remain peripheralized—or not read at all.≤∂ Close reading must remain self-referentially restricted to this canon in order to do its work well. As a form of comparative practice, therefore, ‘‘Europe and Its Others’’ has methodologically predetermined the outcome of comparison: European thinking and writing will continue as more thoroughly examined and carefully dissected than non-European ones, and thus—to follow the logic of the vicious circle—as the more credible criterion for future projects of comparison. As Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto puts it, those who study Europe will always appear to be more bona fide comparativists: Like ‘‘literature,’’ ‘‘comparative’’ is not an ideologically neutral term. ‘‘Comparatists’’ refer to those who specialize in certain European literatures, whereas those who study Chinese and Japanese are called ‘‘Asian comparatists.’’ . . . At the disciplinary core of comparative literature has always been the idea of Europe. I would even venture to argue that comparative literature is less a discipline of literature than a type of area studies, a counterpart to East Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies, Latin American studies, etc.≤∑

Consider, for instance, the study of what is called the novel. The heightened theoretical consciousness about the historicity of literary genres notwithstanding, the generic term ‘‘the novel’’ continues to be in use, almost always with the definite article. When one looks closely at what is meant by the novel, one usually finds English (and sometimes French) materials. Once outside the arena of Western Europe, the term is almost always invoked with a national or ethnic qualifier, as is evident in the studies of the modern Japanese novel, the American novel, the Russian novel, the Argentine novel, and so on. Although many of such studies explore the historical lack of fit between the novel as a genre and the particular literary traditions of various geopolitical locations, and although some of them tend also to emphasize the novel as a ‘‘nexus of transnational exchange,’’≤∏ the fact that so many local varieties now accompany this genre called the novel indicates that the paradigm of ‘‘Europe and Its Others’’ remains fully in play. Even as the politically savvy specialists of English and French novels now take pains to research and argue the influences of non-European cultures in the makings of the baggy monster, it is simply inconceivable for students of, say, modern Japanese, Chinese, Cuban, or Algerian fiction to call their novels 78 comparison in literary studies

the novel without the national or ethnic label, while their counterparts in English departments continue to be able to get away with doing exactly that. The apparent lack of the need to make English visible in the same manner and the accepted convention of presenting the English novel as a kind of general equivalent—ever self-evident, self-su≈cient, and self-referential— are good instances of how the idealistic project of provincializing Europe, to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase,≤π is no more than a glimmer at this point. The politics of comparison at stake here is that those who can talk about the novel in a particular set of monolingual terms (English) are comparativists in the sense of Foucault’s taxonomists. Their notion of the novel works with the assumption of a kind of di√erentiation that is ultimately additive or cumulative in method, requiring others to name themselves as other while they retain the generic term as the grid of general intelligence, the morphology that has the power to account for additional, including divergent or deviant, information. Because language as such tends to be viewed as a neutral fact, seldom do discussants of comparative literature emphasize that languages and cultures almost never enter the world stage and encounter one another on an equal footing, that ‘‘languages embed relations of dominance,’’≤∫ and that the notion of parity inscribed in comparison (as it currently stands) would need to be recognized perhaps as a form of utopianism that tends to run aground in practice. Even in its inception, we should remember, the notion of a world literature, one that transcends national boundaries, emerged in a historical context in which thinkers were attempting to address and mediate the conflictual, warring political situation within Europe. Yet, as Lanser reminds us, the consequences are somewhat ironic: Comparative literature grew up in an era of imperialist nationalism which some comparatists hoped to combat by a≈rming a transnational spirit in the human sciences. This agenda must have seemed especially pressing in the years when comparative literature was developing in Europe and the United States, since these were years in which the very countries collaborating most fully in the comparative project, France and Germany, were bitter enemies. ‘‘Rising above’’ national boundaries and partisan identities was surely a crucial strategy of resistance, a way to preserve not simply personal and collegial relations, or even the project of comparative literary scholar-

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ship, but ‘‘culture’’ itself. It is sadly ironic that this resistance to nationalism ended up constructing an androcentric Continentalism that became its own exclusivity.≤Ω

In the twenty-first century, we need to ask what it really means for any practice of writing to be considered to transcend national boundaries. Why is it such a good thing to transcend national boundaries? Is not such a transcending, which signifies a certain privilege of mobility, always part of a power dynamic, with those who can apparently transcend the boundaries (the ones who can talk about the novel, for instance) setting the criteria for evaluation? And, as is evident in the case of those who must talk not about the novel as such but about the Brazilian novel, the Egyptian novel, and so forth, the possibility of moving beyond national boundaries is not exactly at everyone’s disposal. As Réda Bensmaïa, commenting on the reductionist tendencies in the Western reception of Maghrebi literature, writes: What has long struck me was the nonchalance with which the work of these writers was analyzed. Whenever these novels were studied, they were almost invariably reduced to anthropological or cultural case studies. Their literariness was rarely taken seriously. And once they were finally integrated into the deconstructed canon of world literature, they were made to serve as tools for political or ideological agendas. This kind of reading resulted more often than not in their being reduced to mere signifiers of other signifiers, with a total disregard for what makes them literary works in and of themselves.≥≠

In this predominant, hierarchizing frame of comparison, not only is the literariness of non-Western literatures readily overlooked, as Bensmaïa rightly notes, but those who continue to be immobilized according to national and ethnic boundaries are rarely able to transcend those boundaries even when what they write is clearly not confinable to single nations or ethnicities. This incommensurability between what scholars might want to uphold as the ethical as well as theoretical ideal of an inclusive world literature, on the one hand, and the actual events that take place in the name of comparison, on the other, requires us to conceive of a fundamentally different set of terms for comparative literary studies.

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Europe’s modernity was always already there.—H. D. Harootunian, ‘‘Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem,’’ boundary 2 (summer 2005): 31

For our purposes, then, Foucault’s The Order of Things is helpful insofar as it provides an account of how the methods of organizing knowledge are historical and thus, perhaps, changeable. As the premodern ways of knowledge production, with their key mechanism of cumulative (and inexhaustible) inclusion, came to an end in modern times, the spatial logic of the grid gives way to an archaeological network wherein the once assumed clear continuities (and unities) among di√erentiated knowledge items are displaced onto fissures, mutations, and subterranean genealogies, the totality of which can never again be mapped out in taxonomic certitude and coherence. Knowledge production would henceforth be a matter of tracking the broken lines, shapes, and patterns that may have become occluded, gone underground, or taken flight. In his imaginative portrayals of the seismic shifts in the human sciences—in the ways man comes to know the world and himself—Foucault is also, quite obviously, theorizing a new possibility of comparison. In the absence of taxonomic assurance and no longer resting securely on a presumption of similarity, equivalence, and likeness, comparison, Foucault’s observations imply, must rather be reconceptualized as an act of judging the value of di√erent things horizontally, in sheer approximation to one another—an act that, because it is inseparable from history, would have to remain speculative rather than conclusive, and ready to subject itself periodically to revamped semiotic relations. As much as it is inevitable (since the violent yoking together of disparate things has become inevitable in modern and postmodern times), comparison would also be an unfinalizable event because its meanings have to be repeatedly negotiated—not merely on the basis of the constantly increasing quantity of materials involved but more importantly on the basis of the partialities, anachronisms, and disappearances that have been inscribed over time on such materials’ seemingly positivistic existences. Not surprisingly, the scholars who have been working on more marginalized cultures are somewhat ahead of the game here, for reasons that are inherent to the politics of comparison, even though the latter may not always be explicitly stated. With a focus on modernity as a post-European cultural problematic in the Indian Subcontinent, Anglo Africa, Spanish

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America, the Mediterranean, and East Asia, a number of critics have advanced the discussion of comparison by foregrounding, in their studies of the literary and other writings of those areas, the conflicts and incongruities resulting from the encounter with Europe that are manifest in the articulations of the native or indigenous traditions and identities. The aftermath of this encounter—a historically given condition that is regularly reinforced not simply as a meeting, a contact, or a conversation but specifically as an encounter with that which is deemed culturally superior—this aftermath is what I am designating by the term ‘‘post-European.’’ In his work on post-British India, for instance, Partha Chatterjee o√ers at once in-depth analyses of the multifaceted social and cultural problems of India as a ‘‘developing nation,’’ and a trenchant critique of the dominance of European conceptual models. He does so by highlighting the stigma of derivation that accompanies any kind of progress made by third-world nations.≥∞ At the heart of nationalism in Asia and Africa is, according to Chatterjee, a fundamental contradiction: intended to bring about freedom from European domination, the pursuit of nationhood as such remains trapped within European post-Enlightenment rationalist discourse. (I will return to Chatterjee’s work toward the end of the chapter.) A similar understanding of the di≈culty inherent in postcolonial cultures’ assertion of freedom is provided by Olakunle George, who in his work on postcolonial Nigerian literature and literary criticism argues how the notion of agency, so indispensable to modern and contemporary cultural work, cannot be reduced to a simple matter of opposition or resistance. To the contrary, he writes, agency requires us precisely to take into account the blind spots, self-contradictions, and ambiguities that inform modern African literary and critical practices. While it would have been inconceivable for African writers and critics not to have responded to the preemptive presence of the West and devised ways of coming to terms with that presence, it is equally untenable, George suggests, to imagine them as single-mindedly and consistently opposing that presence with an agential power that has remained pure and untouched by the traumatic e√ects of history.≥≤ Likewise, in the context of Spanish America, Carlos J. Alonso writes that modernity, as both an aesthetic and socioeconomic phenomenon, is by necessity constituted as an ambivalent cultural discourse. According to Alonso, the peculiar ethnic and racial makeup of Spanish American history means that the critique of European imperialism that is part of this moder82 comparison in literary studies

nity is, rhetorically, much less invested in a nostalgic look back to a preexisting native or indigenous past (as is possible in the case of postcolonial Indian historiography’s investment in precolonial India, for instance) than in a progressive movement toward the new and thus, ironically, toward Europe. This love-hate relationship with Europe becomes the source of selfimagining for various Spanish American cultures, and it is the contradictions embedded in that relationship that, for Alonso, define the specificity of these cultures’ modernity.≥≥ Gregory Jusdanis explores the role played by literature in the construction of a modern Greek national culture on the margins of a powerful western Europe and its secularist institutions and beliefs. Citing Wellek’s definition of comparative literature as the study of ‘‘all literature from an international perspective, with a consciousness of the unity of all literary creation and experience,’’ Jusdanis comments: ‘‘This ideology demands that others be like us.’’ Comparativists, Jusdanis says, ‘‘have presumed from the beginning the existence of a universal literature, the founding paradigm of all literary production. Yet an examination of contemporary literatures from the Mediterranean would have demonstrated that this notion hardly corresponds to the reality of Europe, let alone the rest of the world.’’≥∂ Like George, Jusdanis argues that coming to terms with the institutional practices of theorization and monumentalization (such as canon formation) is crucial for understanding the emergence of modern Greek literature as such. The specificity of Greekness as both a national and a literary identity, accordingly, is part of a belated modernity, sustained by an aesthetics that is compensatory in function. Naoki Sakai approaches a comparable set of historical dynamics in the context of Japan by focusing on the apparent preoccupation with Japanese ‘‘particularity’’ on the part of modern Japanese philosophers and intellectuals. Interestingly, what may appear to be an obsessive self-referentiality in this case is, Sakai argues, always already a mimetic desire, responsive and oriented toward the West’s imposition of itself on the Rest: The history of Japanese thought was created as a symmetrical equivalent to the history of Western thought or of Western philosophy, so that this field has been dominated from the outset by demands for symmetry and equality. The entire discipline has been built on the premise that, if there is thought in the West, there ought to be its equivalent in Japan. But these demands

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necessarily gave rise to a sense of lack, as is best testified to by the often professed bitter realization that there was nothing worth calling philosophy in Japan, although there should be an equivalent to it. Because of this mimetic desire, intellectuals since Nishi Amane (1829–97) have repeatedly deplored the absence of a systematic reasoning or of philosophical thinking in Japan . . . The self-referential character was inscribed on the history of Japanese thought by way of this mimetic desire.≥∑

He goes on to propose the term ‘‘schema of cofiguration’’ as a way of marking this complex state of a√airs: The self-referential relationship to one’s own language always assumes the schema of cofiguration . . . The self-referentiality to one’s own language necessarily comprises the desire to be seen from the viewpoint of a foreign language. The reason for which self-referentiality in fact can never free itself from the transferential desire to see from another position is, thus, already outlined in the schema of cofiguration. Our desire to know what we have supposedly known in our own language thus arrives by way of our desire for the figure of a foreign language.≥∏

Of relevance to the present discussion in these scholarly studies, which I have only presented in the most schematic manner, is a suggestive alternative paradigm of comparison. No longer simply a spontaneous act occasioned by, say, the taxonomic arrangement of multiple linguistic spheres, comparison is understood by these critics as a type of discursive situation, involuntarily brought into play by and inextricable from the conditions of modern world politics—a discursive situation that in the end does not quite conform to classical comparativist aspirations. Unlike the old-fashioned comparative literature based on Europe, none of the studies in question vociferously declares its own agenda as international or cosmopolitan; to the contrary, each is firmly located within a specific cultural framework. Yet, in their very cultural specificities, these studies nonetheless come across as transcultural, with implications that resonate well beyond their individual locations. Be they articulated by way of discursive derivation and entrapment (Chatterjee), agency-in-motion (George), ambivalence (Alonso), belatedness and compensation (Jusdanis), or mimetic desire and cofiguration (Sakai), the literary, cultural, and identitarian formations of non-Western modernity are, according to these critics, thoroughly immersed in, indeed

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predicated on, comparison. But this is not the kind of comparison that can be tabulated rationally or cumulatively so that di√erences are simply chronologically more recent variations to be incorporated into a familiar grid of reference. Instead, comparison now resembles the archaeological tracking of historical remnants that Foucault identifies as the modern order of things. To do its job properly, this kind of comparative practice must be willing to abandon inclusionary taxonomizing habits and ready to interpret cultural narratives symptomatically, as fragments that bear clues—often indirect, perverse, and prejudiced—to a history of ideological coercions and exclusions. An important conceptual link among these post-European comparative studies is that a post-European culture needs to be recognized as always operating biculturally or multiculturally even when it appears predominantly preoccupied with itself. If we substitute the names of other postcolonial cultures for ‘‘Greek’’ and ‘‘Japanese,’’ these passages from Jusdanis and Sakai may be taken as transcripts of the general post-European predicament, one that is by necessity inscribed in comparativism and must be grasped through comparativism: Greekness was an attempt to determine an authentically Greek nature in the overwhelming presence of European modernity, experienced by Greeks in terms of insu≈ciency and inferiority. . . . Greekness embodied the foreign and the local, the traditional and the new.≥π ‘‘Japanese thought’’ was, from the outset, posited as the subject for comparative investigation. The history of Japanese thought has been a field of selfreferential knowledge for Japanese students precisely because, in this field, they enunciate in comparative modalities . . . The students have not had any other choices but to enunciate in a comparative setting . . . They might be free in their choice of subject matter, but in the modern world they could never freely select enunciative modalities other than those of comparison.≥∫

The apparently monolingual, monocultural, or mononational investigations of India, Nigeria, Spanish America, modern Greece, or Japan, in other words, should be understood as full-fledged comparative projects, their precarious and enigmatic enunciations bearing testimony to an interlingual, intercultural, and international historicity that exposes the positivistic limits of the (Western) human sciences—that exposes, indeed, the finitude of

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(Western) man as a domain of the known and knowable that Foucault so memorably elucidates.≥Ω For similar reasons, the pursuit of comparative literature in non-Western countries is often not entirely distinguishable from national literature studies. As Bassnett reminds us, by the 1970s, when comparative literature in the West was being radicalized by various kinds of theory, comparative literature began to gain ground in the rest of the world. New programmes in comparative literature began to emerge in China, in Taiwan, in Japan and other Asian countries, based, however, not on any ideal of universalism but on the very aspect of literary study that many western comparatists had sought to deny: the specificity of national literatures.

Bassnett’s conclusion is instructive: ‘‘Implicit to comparative literature outside Europe and the United States is the need to start with the home culture and to look outwards, rather than with the European model of literary excellence and to look inwards.’’∂≠ Rather than seeing language and linguistic di√erentiation as the exclusive way to demarcate the notion of comparison, specialists of national literatures (which often involve, in the postcolonial as well as in premodern contexts, multiple languages) may, under certain circumstances, be helping to bring about a revamping of the definition and practice of comparative literary studies. Comparison would in this case include a critique of the uneven distribution of cultural capital among languages themselves, a critique that in turn would necessitate a questioning of any unqualified insistence on multilingualism as the determining factor in comparative literary work. For, even though knowledge of multiple languages is undoubtedly an advantage (which we should always encourage our students to acquire), it is something else altogether to turn linguistic ability into a means of intellectual exclusion. Doing so would only result in the suppression of a viable kind of comparative literary studies, which, for compelling historical reasons, participates in comparison di√erently and which, in fact, may offer persuasive ways of challenging and broadening the hitherto prevalent conventions. To this extent, Samuel Weber’s notion that comparative literature may be part of a foundering (rather than founding) of aesthetics is pertinently on the mark. In his deconstructive reading of Kant’s writings, Weber o√ers the view that the aesthetic, as Kant argues it, is much less about the founding or 86 comparison in literary studies

systematizing of a field of knowledge (as Wellek, for instance, would have it) than about an oscillating process of judgment. This is the process in which, because there are no a priori universal rules for representing and evaluating what is unique, heterogeneous, and particular, judgment must include, in its undertaking, a reflection on the ability to represent and evaluate per se (as what is at stake). Such reflection consists in a movement to reach the universal and an e√ort to lay bare the very terms on which we arrive at a particular phenomenon’s value. According to Weber, It is only in its reflective form that judgment can be studied as such, since only here does it attempt to ‘think’ its way, as it were, from the particular to the universal. . . . Should judgment actually arrive at its goal, should it produce valid knowledge, the particular would henceforth be contained within the universal, and judgment would have become determinative, cognitive, and part of theoretical thinking. It is only where this movement toward the universal is, in a certain sense, perpetuated and held in suspense that judgment reflects its own operation.∂∞

Ultimately, therefore, aesthetic judgment involves a reflection of the terms on which the reflecting activity is performed rather than only a reflection of the (external) object being judged, and brings with it a potential for dismantling those terms precisely as the reflecting activity tries to reach for the universal. Defined along these lines—that is, as a process of suspending and possibly of de-legitimizing its own premises for enunciation—aesthetic or reflective judgment seems poignantly germane to those areas of knowledge production in which problems of radical otherness are the most acute. Advancing Weber’s reading one step further, we may argue that the stakes of aesthetic or reflective judgment are also constitutive of the politics of comparison in the postcolonial global context. In the place traditionally occupied by literature or art (in such judgment), let us now put cultural di√erence. In the various studies of post-European cultures mentioned above, is not cultural di√erence exactly that ‘‘object’’ which confronts us repeatedly with the limits of the terms of its representation and evaluation, demanding thus a reflective judgment of those terms themselves? To the (more narrowly defined aesthetic) question as to how we can represent and evaluate this object, cultural di√erence, in all its particularity (without simply falling back on a previously determined aesthetic system), we must thus add another (historical and political) level of interrogation, to be directed comparison in literary studies

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precisely at the hierarchical frames of comparison—and judgment—that have long been present, that stand in the way, as it were, as universals subsuming otherness rather than letting such otherness challenge and disassemble their self-perpetuating modus operandi. Chatterjee expounds on this predicament of judgment in relation to the concept of nationalism in the third world. Like some historians of postcoloniality, he poses the implicitly Kantian question: how to read or do justice to the ‘‘work’’ that is the postcolonial nation and its culture, without compromising and erasing the particularity of its alterity? He finds himself immediately faced, as I mentioned above, with the politics of comparison in the troubling guise of derivation: a third-world nation cannot be or become itself without being derivative of that epistemic frame against which it is struggling; and yet, try as it may, it cannot free itself of that frame. Nationalist thought in the third world, Chatterjee writes, ‘‘reasons within a framework of knowledge whose representational structure corresponds to the very structure of power nationalist thought seeks to repudiate.’’ Given this powerful prescript-ion of non-Western cultural di√erence (as lack, inferiority, or imitation), how might the particularity of such di√erence (let’s say, in the form of a national literature) be approached at all? What would an aesthetic or reflective judgment of such di√erence look like?—what are the terms that would have to be subjected to critique, that would come to ‘‘founder’’ as it were? Can this judgment ever become autonomous from the politics of comparison in which the frame of reference has been decidedly Western, against which the non-Western ‘‘work’’ or cultural di√erence can only be seen as a derivation? Or, as Chatterjee puts it: ‘‘Can nationalist thought produce a discourse of order while daring to negate the very foundations of a system of knowledge that has conquered the world?’’∂≤ It is with these questions in the foreground that he responds to the much popularized notion of ‘‘imagined communities’’—Benedict Anderson’s shorthand for nationhood in the era of print capitalism—with the rhetorical question, ‘‘Whose imagined community?’’∂≥ At this point, the comparative paradigm that I have abbreviated as ‘‘Europe and Its Others’’ may be supplemented (and compared) with a paradigm that, as we see in the works of Chatterjee, George, Alonso, Jusdanis, and Sakai, may be abbreviated as ‘‘Post-European Culture and the West.’’ Whereas, as I mentioned, the first paradigm indicates a semiotic relation-

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ship that stabilizes Europe as the grid of intelligibility to which may be added more and more others, the second paradigm would signify that, even in the seemingly narcissistic or obsessive preoccupation with itself, a culture such as postcolonial India, postcolonial Africa, Spanish America, modern Greece, or modern Japan already contains, in its many forms of self-writing, imprints of a fraught and prevalent relation of comparison and judgment in which Europe haunts it as the referent of supremacy. In this latter paradigm, the conjunction and is not a matter of taxonomic addition or inclusion. Rather, it designates a relation of temporality, with Europe being experienced not exactly spatially (as a chartable geographical location) but much more as a memory, a cluster of lingering ideological and emotional e√ects whose force takes the form of a lived historical violation, a violation that preconditions linguistic and cultural consciousness. The schism between this involuntary, neurotic and and the complacent and of ‘‘Europe and Its Others’’ constitutes the extent of the rupturing—and deterritorialization—of comparative literature as a field and a practice at the present time.∂∂ To be precise, the post-European culture is caught between this ‘‘always already’’ present that is Europe, on the one hand, and the histories and traditions it must now live as its pasts, on the other—pasts that nonetheless continue to erupt as so many suppressed indices of time with forgotten and/or unfinished potentialities. It is in the light of such consistently occluded relations of temporalities that H. D. Harootunian writes about what he calls the strategies of comparability.∂∑ Resonating with Foucault’s critique of classical tabular epistemology and with Johannes Fabian’s critique of Western anthropology’s habit of reifying non-Western cultures,∂∏ Harootunian suggests that much of the contemporary work undertaken in the humanities and social sciences, from area studies to postcolonial and cultural studies, has tended to privilege space rather than a time-space correlation as a way to think comparatively. His words, intended to address issues in historiography, are equally applicable to the comparative literature of ‘‘Europe and Its Others’’: The inevitable impulse to compare fused with a strategy to classify and categorize according to criteria based upon geopolitical privilege. As a result of this principle of classification, societies were invariably ranked according to spatial distance from an empowering model that radiated the achieve-

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ment of industrial and technological supremacy—namely, the countries of Euro-America—and expected life identification with it. In a sense, this was simply a replication of the hierarchization of political power that froze positions and history during the cold war. This classification strategy, itself signifying the static synchronicity of the spatial, was mapped onto an evolutionary trajectory that succeeded in apotheosizing the model of natural history and thus defining the task of a comparative agenda, which, according to Johannes Fabian, constituted a vast, ‘‘omnivorous intellectual machine permitting the ‘equal’ treatment of human culture at all times and [in all] places.’’∂π

As di√erences are imagined as spatial distinctions, Harootunian writes, the unequal and uneven material conditions that have left their marks on post-European cultures at an everyday level, in the crisscrossings of nonsynchronous temporalities, tend to be eschewed—and so are the possibilities of comparability (and, we may add, the possibilities of aesthetic or reflective judgment, as argued above) inscribed therein. For this reason, Harootunian is skeptical of the ‘‘spectre of comparisons’’ spoken of by Benedict Anderson in the latter’s more recent work. That ‘‘spectre,’’ Harootunian argues in his review of Anderson’s book, remains definitively that of Europe, which Anderson seems to continue to prioritize as a space, a location, and thus an incomparable point of origin.∂∫ For Harootunian, what should inform a new kind of comparative practice is, rather, the ‘‘larger spectrality of societies deeply involved in fashioning a modernity coeval with Euro-America yet whose di√erence is dramatized by the revenant, the past and the premodern culture of reference, which appear as ghosts that have not yet died but have become repressed excess . . . ready to return . . . to haunt and disturb the historical present.’’∂Ω Although he is clearly critical of the politics of comparison in the form of ‘‘Europe and Its Others,’’ Harootunian’s argument implies that neither should comparison in the form of ‘‘Post-European Culture and the West’’ remain an albatross around our necks. Therein lies his unique contribution to the present topic. In Harootunian’s vision for a future comparative practice, the and in ‘‘Post-European Culture and the West’’ needs to disconnect as well, so that its hitherto compulsory presence and its historically specific predominance can become, finally, a temporally delimited phenomenon. In its stead, other possibilities of supplementarity, other semiotic conjunctions

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mediated by di√erent temporal dynamics, can come to the fore. The conventions of ‘‘Europe and Its Others’’ and ‘‘Post-European Culture and the West’’ would then, hopefully, give way to other, as-yet-unrealized comparative perspectives, the potential range and contents of which we have only just begun to imagine.∑≠

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notes

Introduction 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970). Hereafter, page references to this work will be provided parenthetically in the text. 2 Barry Smart has o√ered a succinct explanation of what Foucault intends by the notion of finitude: ‘‘Foucault has argued that the general experience of individuality in modern Western culture is itself inextricably associated with finitude, with the idea of death which derives from positive medicine and that the latter has been of considerable importance and influence, methodologically and ontologically, in the formation and development of the human sciences.’’ Smart, Michel Foucault (1985; rev. ed., London: Routledge, 2002), 31. 3 George Canguilhem, ‘‘The Death of Man, or Exhaustion of the Cogito,’’ translated by Catherine Porter, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 82–83. 4 See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 5 Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 92. 6 This conceptual frame is most evident in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), but a similar one can already be detected in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard (abridged ed., New York: Pantheon, 1965).

7 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers (Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1973), 132–33. A more extensive discussion of Barthes’s point will be o√ered in the chapter ‘‘The Interruption of Referentiality.’’ 8 See Barthes, Mythologies, 133–35. 9 During, Foucault and Literature, 116. 10 In her argument for a new comparative literature in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reissues a similarly romanticist and modernist call for understanding literature as what ‘‘escapes the system’’ (52) and ‘‘contains the element of surprising the historical’’ (55), as ‘‘transgressive’’ (56), and as the ‘‘Unheimlich’’ (74). Such definitions of literature seem strictly in keeping with the trajectory of the emergence of ‘‘literary’’ language in the West as Foucault describes it, though Spivak is describing writings of what she calls the ‘‘global South’’ as well as those of the European canon. 11 For comparison, see Raymond Williams’s brief account of the recent historical emergence of the concept of literature in the West—of how ‘‘literature’’ gradually lost its earlier meaning of reading ability and reading experience and became an apparently objective category of printed works of a specialized, imaginative quality—in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 45–54. 12 See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), in particular 58–73. 13 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 14 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, translated by Seán Hand, foreword by Paul Bové (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 42–43; my emphases. Deleuze’s reference to Blanchot is from the latter’s L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 292. For related interest, see also Foucault/Blanchot, translated by Je√rey Mehlman and Brian Massumi (New York: Zone Books, 1987). 15 Deleuze, Foucault, 43. 16 During, Foucault and Literature, 93. 17 For a thoughtful discussion, see Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), in particular the chapter ‘‘Can the Postcolonial Critic Speak? Orientalism and the Rushdie A√air’’ (22–49). 18 For a recent discussion of the word ‘‘target,’’ see the preface to Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Although I share many of Weber’s observations, my own use of the word, since I first presented the lecture ‘‘The Age of the World Target: War, Vision, and Cultural Politics’’ at the neh Summer Institute ‘‘Amer-

94 notes to introduction

19 20

21

22

23 24

25

26

ican Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach’’ (University of Montana, Missoula, June 29, 1995), has been intentionally literal so as not to downplay the significance of planned, precise military aiming. For more extended discussions, see the following chapter. Shu-mei Shih, ‘‘Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition,’’ pmla 119.1 (2004): 18. H. D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, ‘‘Introduction: The ‘Afterlife’ of Area Studies,’’ in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 5–6. Describing the situation somewhat di√erently, Susan Hegeman writes: ‘‘The Cold War social-scientific ‘three worlds’ paradigm, which parsed the globe into a schema of self (the rational, developed, ‘free,’ first world); other (the ideological, communist, second world); and those over whom self and other struggle (the developing, prerational, preideological, third world), was predicated on the hierarchical understanding of American society as coextensive both with the ‘first world,’ and with the ‘real,’ unideological, aspirations of the ‘third world.’ ’’ Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 168. I have already discussed this phenomenon in the chapter ‘‘The Politics and Pedagogy of Asian Literatures in American Universities,’’ in my Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 120–43. The chapter was a revised version of an essay originally published in di√erences 2.3 (fall 1990): 29– 51. Harootunian and Miyoshi, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 11. See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, edited and introduced by John B. Thompson, translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Harootunian is referring to his former experience of puzzlement as a graduate student doing research in Asia: ‘‘France, Italy, and England were countries where people went for study and research; Japan—Asia—and Africa were simply fields that required first-hand observation, recording, and, in some instances, intervention. Perhaps this sense of the field revealed the deeper relationship of these areas to a colonial unconscious, where they were still seen as spaces occupied by ‘natives’ that needed to be observed and thus represented.’’ H. D. Harootunian, ‘‘Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, eds., Learning Places, 161. See also Harootunian and Miyoshi, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 7. French Theory in America, edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2001).

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27 Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen, ‘‘Introduction: A Few Theses on French Theory in America,’’ French Theory in America, 1; my emphases. 28 While my reading of the individual essays may have simplified the authors’ intentions, the ideological tendency (of valorizing Europe and debasing America) I am foregrounding is, I believe, pertinent. As far as I can tell, there are few exceptions in French Theory in America to this general way of thinking: Donald F. Theall, ‘‘Marshall McLuhan, Canadian Schizo-Jansenist and Pseudo-Joycean Precursor of and Preparer for the Dissemination of French Theory in North America’’ (111–23); Andrea Loselle, ‘‘How French Is It?’’ (217–35); Kriss Ravetto, ‘‘Frenchifying Film Studies: Projecting Lacan onto the Feminist Scene’’ (237–57); Chris Kraus, ‘‘Supplement B: Ecceity, Smash and Grab, the Expanded I and Moment’’ (303–308). 29 For an argument about the vital connections between the methods of New Criticism and U.S. military and intelligence strategies both during and after the Second World War, see William H. Epstein, ‘‘Counter-Intelligence: ColdWar Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies,’’ English Literary History 57.1 (Spring 1990): 63–99. See also Richard H. Okada, ‘‘Areas, Disciplines, and Ethnicity,’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, eds., Learning Places, 190–205, for a discussion of Epstein’s argument in relation to area studies and Japanese literary studies. 30 Françoise Lionnet, ‘‘Performative Universalism and Cultural Diversity: French Thought and American Contexts,’’ in Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought, edited by Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 123. 31 The following list of these scholars’ representative works is by no means comprehensive, nor does it represent a detailed survey of all relevant works of related interest. It is simply meant as a reminder of the extensive role that has been played by the English-speaking academy in North America in the dissemination and popularization of French and European theory: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics: (New York: Methuen, 1987); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003); Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Masao Miyoshi, O√ Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘‘Japan’’ and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan

96 notes to introduction

32 33

34

35

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); H. Richard Okada, Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry and Narrating in The Tale of Genji and Other MidHeian Texts (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991); Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000); Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995); Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Gaurav Desai, Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001); Olakunle George, Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Discourses of Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Carlos J. Alonso, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996); David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Smaro Kamboureli, Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2000). Lionnet, ‘‘Performative Universalism and Cultural Diversity,’’ 124. See my ‘‘Poststructuralism: Theory as Critical Self-Consciousness,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, edited by Ellen Rooney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2006). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985); The History of Sexuality, Volume III: The Care of the Self, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1986). For a compelling discussion of Foucault’s last works and final days, see Paul Veyne, ‘‘The Final Foucault and His Ethics,’’ translated by Catherine Porter and Arnold I. Davidson, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, edited and introduction

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by Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 225–33. See, as well, Smart, Michel Foucault, 108–17, for helpful comments on Foucault’s uses of the Greek and Latin texts. 36 ‘‘In the Area Studies model, the study of other countries served as a kind of weak comparativism, in which the Soviet Union, for example, served . . . as a player in a larger narrative that ultimately was about the United States, its peculiarly moral democratic structure, its special role in world politics and history.’’ Hegeman, Patterns for America, 191–92.

I

The Age of the World Target 1 For an account of the immediate consequences of the dropping of the bombs in Hiroshima, see John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946). Hersey’s account was first published in The New Yorker, August 31, 1946. An excerpt from the account was reprinted on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in The New Yorker (July 31, 1995): 65–67. For a study of historical events and personal accounts in relation to the dropping of the second bomb, see Frank W. Chinnock, Nagasaki: The Forgotten Bomb (New York and Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1969). For related interest, see the short account of the sparing of Kyoto in Otis Cary, Mr. Stimson’s ‘‘Pet City’’—The Sparing of Kyoto, 1945 (Moonlight Series No. 3; Kyoto: Amherst House, Doshisha University, 1975). 2 John W. Dower, ‘‘The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory,’’ Diplomatic History 19.2 (Spring 1995): 275–95; the quotation is on 281. See also Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994): ‘‘To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War. All the su√ering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima.’’ Buruma criticizes the manner in which Hiroshima has become the exclusive sacred icon of martyred innocence and visions of apocalypse in Japan, often in total isolation from the rest of the history of the war. In this process of sanctifying Hiroshima, he writes, what has been forgotten is the city’s status as a center of military operations during Japan’s period of active aggression against other countries such as China. ‘‘At the time of the bombing, Hiroshima was the base of the Second General Headquarters of the Imperial Army (the First was in Tokyo)’’ (106). Buruma o√ers accounts of the Rape of Nanjing and the varied postwar Japanese reactions to Japanese war crimes; see Parts Two and Three of his book. 3 Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3.

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4 See Buruma, The Wages of Guilt, for comparative accounts of the significance of Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Kentaro Awaya has argued that the stigmatizing of Japan, though di√erent from that of Germany, is widely felt within Japanese circles, including the Diet itself. See Awaya, ‘‘Controversies Surrounding the Asia-Pacific War: The Tokyo War Crimes Trials,’’ translated by Barak Kushner, in America’s Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory, edited by Philip West, Steven I. Levine, and Jackie Hiltz (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 221–32. 5 For scholarly investigations of the literature, historiography, political debates, and other types of cultural discourses in postwar Japan, see, for instance, John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces; Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also the rich and informative discussions in Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, edited by Laura Hein and Mark Selden (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997). For the early stages of postwar engagement with nuclear culture within the United States, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985); reprinted with a new preface by the author (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 6 ‘‘The Mushroom Cloud Over Art,’’ The Economist (February 25, 1995): 87–88. 7 The testing of the plutonium bomb on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity site in New Mexico was in the main a concept test: what was tested was the nuclear device but not the precise delivering mechanisms or the blast e√ects on a real target. ‘‘Between Trinity and Hiroshima, the bomb remained [to the scientists] a kind of awesome abstraction, now tested to be sure, but not yet imaginable as a weapon of war.’’ Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 343. In his notes, Sherry appends information on calculations that were made at Trinity about possible hazards to occupying personnel (nn. 112, 113, on 417). 8 For an account of the shift, among U.S. military decision makers, from the older morality of not killing noncombatants to the emerging morality of total war, see Barton J. Bernstein, ‘‘The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,’’ Foreign A√airs 74:1 (January/February 1995): 135–52. Murray Sayle writes that the moral line of not bombing civilians was in fact already crossed with the bombing of Dresden in February 1944; see his essay ‘‘Letter from Hiroshima: Did the Bomb End the War?,’’ The New Yorker (July 31, 1995): 40–64. For a long and detailed history of the events leading up to the use of the atomic bomb, including the major scientific and political figures involved, see Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).

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9 The gender politics of the naming of the bombs is noted by Sherry as follows: ‘‘Dominated by men, Western science has aspired to unlock the secrets of the natural world. Often its practitioners have also sought immortality through escape from that world, a world so often associated with women and femininity. By their colloquial language, the men at Los Alamos hinted at such aspirations. . . . Femininity was weakness, masculinity was the power to transcend nature and its mortal reality. If these men entertained a male fantasy of ultimate potency, it was perhaps not coincidence that they gave their bombs masculine names (Fat Man, Little Boy)’’ (The Rise of American Air Power, 202–3). By contrast, crews often gave their own bombers feminine names, since such bombers were regarded as ‘‘the symbolic repository of feminine forces of unpredictable nature which men could not control’’ (The Rise of American Air Power, 215). 10 For a personal account of these events, see Philip Morrison, ‘‘Recollections of a Nuclear War,’’ Scientific American 273.2 (August 1995): 42–46. A neutron engineer, Morrison was one of the many physicists enlisted to work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago and Los Alamos. 11 Evan Thomas, ‘‘Why We Did It,’’ Newsweek (July 24, 1995): 28. See also Hersey, Hiroshima, 107–8, and Buruma: ‘‘There was . . . something . . . which is not often mentioned: the Nagasaki bomb exploded right over the area where outcasts and Christians lived’’ (The Wages of Guilt, 100). 12 See Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, especially chapters 8 and 9 (219– 300). 13 ‘‘According to President Truman, on his part the decision to use the atomic bomb was taken without any second thoughts.’’ Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 138. Braw’s source is Harry S Truman, Year of Decisions, Vol. 1 of Memoirs (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 302. Sayle writes that ‘‘No one ever made a positive decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, only a negative one: not to interfere with a process that had begun years before, in very different circumstances. Truman later described it as ‘not any decision that you had to worry about,’ but a decision implies a choice, and Truman never contemplated, or even heard suggested, any delay, or any alternative to the bomb’s use on a Japanese city’’ (‘‘Letter from Hiroshima,’’ 54). See also Osborn Elliott, ‘‘Eyewitness,’’ Newsweek (July 24, 1995): ‘‘Harry Truman . . . buried any qualms he might have had. At a press conference in 1947 he told reporters, ‘I didn’t have any doubts at the time.’ He said the decision had saved 250,000 American lives. In later years Truman would raise the number of lives saved to half a million or a million. ‘I’d do it again,’ Truman said in 1956. In 1965, seven years before he died, he repeated that he ‘would not hesitate’ to drop the A-bomb’’ (30). For a detailed account of the decision-making process (by top military

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15

16

17 18 19 20 21

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personnel and scientists as well as Truman) that led up to the dropping of the bombs, see Bernstein, ‘‘The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered.’’ Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977), 135. Elsewhere, I have discussed in greater detail the manner in which modern technology, which is aimed at facilitating global ‘‘communication’’ in the broadest sense of the word, has paradoxically led to the increasing intangibility of, and, for some, the disappearance of, the material world. See Chapter VIII, ‘‘Media, Matter, Migrants,’’ in my Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). Heidegger, ‘‘The Thing,’’ Poetry, Language, Thought, translated and with an introduction by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), 166. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1984), translated by Patrick Camiller (New York and London: Verso, 1989), 20. Virilio’s other works, in particular Pure War (with Sylvère Lotringer), translated by Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), are also germane to this topic. Virilio, The Vision Machine (1988), translated by Julie Rose (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 49. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 129–30. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 135. It should be noted, however, that in the interest of making a philosophical argument about ‘‘man’’ in the singular, Heidegger himself is unwilling to equate the developments of modern science and technology he is describing with the term ‘‘Americanism’’ (see 135). Instead, he defines ‘‘Americanism’’ as that which is ‘‘an as-yet-uncomprehended species of the gigantic, the gigantic that is itself still inchoate and does not as yet originate at all out of the complete and gathered metaphysical essence of the modern age’’ (Appendix 12, 153). Quoted in Virilio, War and Cinema, 4. ‘‘On August 10, the day after the Nagasaki bombing, when Truman realized the magnitude of the mass killing and the Japanese o√ered a conditional surrender requiring continuation of the emperor, the president told his cabinet that he did not want to kill any more women and children. . . . After two atomic bombings, the horror of mass death had forcefully hit the president, and he was willing to return partway to the older morality—civilians might be protected from the A-bombs. But he continued to sanction the heavy conventional bombing of Japan’s cities, with the deadly toll that napalm, incendiaries, and other bombs produced. Between August 10 and August 14—the war’s last day, on which

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27 28

about 1,000 American planes bombed Japanese cities, some delivering their deadly cargo after Japan announced its surrender—the United States probably killed more than 15,000 Japanese.’’ Bernstein, ‘‘The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,’’ 147–48. In The Rise of American Air Power, Sherry argues that the United States’ aerial attacks on Japan stemmed from strategic and emotional reasons: ‘‘The ultimate fury of American aerial devastation came against Japan not because it was more fanatical, but because it was relatively weaker. Germany’s strength and tenacity gave the Allies little choice but to resort to invasion because Germany would not surrender without it. It was the relative ease of attacking Japan by air that tempted Americans into the fullest use of air power. As an image, Japan’s fanaticism was real enough in the minds of many Americans. But it served mainly to justify a course of bombing rooted in strategic circumstances and the emotional need for vengeance’’ (246). For records of how ordinary Americans were overwhelmingly in favor of using the bombs against Japan, see Sadao Asada, ‘‘The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches: Japanese and American Perceptions of the Atomic-Bomb Decision, 1945–1995,’’ in Hein and Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb, 173–201. According to Asada, a Gallup poll on August 16, 1945 showed 85 percent of respondents in approval; a later, Roper poll showed that 53.5 percent endorsed the bombing of both cities and that an additional 22.7 percent regretted that the United States had not quickly used more atomic bombs before Japan had a chance to surrender (177). See also Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, for reactions in the United States to the scientific and cultural implications of the arrival of the atomic age. Virilio, War and Cinema, 6. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970). Foucault means by ‘‘episteme’’ not simply a concept or an idea but a particular relation between ‘‘reality’’ and representation, a relation which produces knowledge (i.e., which exists as a condition for the possibility of knowledge) and which shifts with di√erent historical periods. Ironically, this partnership attests to what Freud, in the famous exchange with Einstein, discusses as the ambivalence of war, which for him advanced as much as threatened civilization. See the section ‘‘Why War?’’ (1932/33) in James Strachey et al., eds., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), Vol. 22, 197–215. Virilio, War and Cinema, 4. For a series of informative discussions about the United States’ cold war military ideology, in particular nuclear ideology, see Hugh Gusterson, People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

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29 Dower, ‘‘The Bombed,’’ 279. 30 Dower points out that Japan’s conversion to nonmilitary manufacturing activities in the postwar years was greatly facilitated by its previously diverse and sophisticated wartime technology. See the chapter ‘‘The Useful War’’ in his Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: The New Press, 1993), in particular 14–16. 31 Notably, Japan’s rise to supreme economic power in the 1970s and 1980s triggered in the United States a new rhetoric of anxiety and hostility—a rhetoric that is, Dower argues, in fact rooted in the racist attitudes toward Japan in the Second World War. See his discussion of this point in War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 311–17. 32 See Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 204–18, for an account of the distance from the enemy that occurs both because of the nature of air combat and because of the demands of aviation that arise outside of combat. In the history of air war, airmen were conditioned to ‘‘see themselves as an elite for whom performance of professional skills—a mastery of technique—was more important than engaging an enemy. Before they went into combat and again when they came out of it, powerful factors of class, education, and policy strengthened their status and their elite image’’ (213). 33 Tim Weiner, ‘‘Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War,’’ The New York Times, November 13, 2004, A1. The phrase ‘‘God’s-eye view’’ is reported to be used by Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the United States’ biggest military contractor. 34 Karl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 184. See also Book One, Chapter Three, ‘‘On Military Genius’’ (100–112) for more extended discussions. 35 Buruma reports that at a United Nations Conference on Disarmament Issues in Hiroshima in July 1992, ‘‘an American Harvard professor argued that the Hiroshima bombing ‘ended World War II and saved a million Japanese lives.’ He also added that the horror of this event had helped to prevent nuclear wars ever since, and thus in e√ect Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions more lives’’ (The Wages of Guilt, 105). See also the account by Mary Palevsky Granados, ‘‘The Bomb 50 Years Later: The Tough Question Will Always Remain,’’ Los Angeles Times Magazine (June 25, 1995): 10–11, 28–30. Granados was shocked to hear Hans Bethe, the man who was the head of the Los Alamos Lab’s Theoretical Physics Division during the time of the war and ‘‘who has been called America’s most influential advocate of nuclear disarmament,’’ emphatically confirm that ‘‘the first use of nuclear armaments was necessary and correct’’ (28). 36 Richard Nixon visited Hiroshima in 1964, four years before he became presi-

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37

38

39

40 41

42

dent, and Jimmy Carter visited Hiroshima during the late 1980s, on one of his many trips to Japan after he had left o≈ce. Neither expressed regret for what was done by the United States during the war. In April 1995, Bill Clinton (consistent with the positions taken by Ronald Reagan in August 1985 and by George Bush in a televised interview in December 1991) declared that the United States did not owe Japan an apology for using the atomic bombs and that Truman had made the right decision ‘‘based on the facts he had before him.’’ See Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1995), 211–22; Asada, ‘‘The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches,’’ 182. It should be pointed out, however, that despite the massive destructions over the decades, attitudes toward the United States in some of these areas remain ambivalent rather than straightforwardly hostile. For instance, in a country that was devastated by U.S. military forces and weapons such as Vietnam, there is, ironically, widespread welcome of the return of American businesses today. See Jacqueline Rose’s persuasive discussion of this point in ‘‘ ‘Why War?,’ ’’ the first chapter of Why War?—Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), 15–40. Dower, War without Mercy, 127. Besides Gorer, the notable academics who studied the Japanese national character listed by Dower include Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Alexander Leighton (119). Of course, these academics did not come to the same conclusions. Dower, War without Mercy, 10. Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed, 142. For details of the censoring of information about the atomic bomb in the aftermath of the Second World War, see in particular chapters 1, 2, 8, 9, 10 of Braw’s book. Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed, 151. Notably, such suppression of information took place even as Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur publicly emphasized the virtues of the freedom of the press and freedom of speech. (MacArthur issued a Directive for the Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press in Tokyo on September 10, 1945, and reimposed censorship on the Japanese press on September 18.) From being simply a routine military undertaking that was negative in its function, censorship was transformed into a positive, essential tool, a tool which would assist in the virtuous task of helping Japan emerge from defeat as a democratic, peace-loving nation; see pages 143–56 of Braw’s book for an extended discussion. For an account of how the censorship of reports on the human e√ects of the bombs took place at the same time that U.S. scientists went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to study the remains of Japanese victims’ bodies for the purpose of documenting scientific information, see Gusterson, People of the Bomb, 63–72. For an account of the voluntary censorship exercised by Japanese people, in particular the hibakusha, the victims of

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43 44 45 46 47

48

49

50 51 52 53

54

the bombs, after the war, see Braw, ‘‘Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Voluntary Silence,’’ in Hein and Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb, 155–72. See also Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, Chapter 1 (19–46), for a revaluation of the myths, historical events, and social discourses that helped produce, in Japan as well as in the United States, the foundational narrative of U.S.-Japan postwar relations. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 351. Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 13, 15. See for instance, the discussion of the ‘‘inhuman face of war’’ in John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 319–34. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 253. H. D. Harootunian, ‘‘Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,’’ in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 155. Bruce Cumings, ‘‘Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and Area Studies during and after the Cold War,’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, eds., Learning Places, 261. This essay o√ers an eye-opening account, chock full of details and personalities, of the history of area studies from before the postwar years to the present. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 290. As I indicated in the introduction, the teaching of language and literature, too, is (contrary to Said’s generalization) a vital part of some area studies programs, though there are, obviously, di√erent practices among the various ‘‘areas’’ being targeted. Cumings, ‘‘Boundary Displacement,’’ 264–65. Said, Orientalism, 301. See my discussions about the pedagogy and politics of Asian studies in American universities in chapters I and VI of Writing Diaspora. I am indebted to Richard H. Okada for this suggestion, which he o√ers in a discussion of the status of Japanese literature in area studies. Following the work of William Epstein, Okada argues that there is a close parallel between the reading habits advocated by New Criticism and cold war strategies—a parallel which finds itself reproduced in postwar Japanologists’ tendency to essentialize and aestheticize Japan as an iconic, exclusionary object of study. See Okada, ‘‘Areas, Disciplines, and Ethnicity,’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, eds., Learning Places 190–205; the mention of translation and breaking military codes is on page 197. For a collection of essays that focuses on the predicament of accepted historical representations of the Asia-Pacific War(s) in the mid–twentieth century, see Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), edited Takashi Fujitani, Geo√rey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001).

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55 Harootunian, ‘‘Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,’’ 151. Using the study of Japan as his example, Bernard S. Silberman explains it in this manner: ‘‘Area studies begins with notions of fixed substance and cannot provide us with a real understanding of what goes on in the lives of the Japanese. Japan is not a fixed entity of any sort. There is no essential personality nor is there an essential Japaneseness. What is incontrovertibly Japanese is the axis along which the ‘bargaining’ takes place. The axis doesn’t require a genealogy, it is there and understood to be the product of a historical but not a substantive process.’’ ‘‘The Disappearance of Modern Japan: Japan and Social Science,’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, eds., Learning Places, 317. 56 Harootunian, ‘‘Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,’’ 152. 57 Ibid., 152–53. 58 For an informed discussion of the implications of Anglocentrism in postcolonial studies, see the contributions to the issue on postcolonial studies and comparative literature, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23: 1&2 (2003); in particular Waïl S. Hassan and Rebecca Saunders, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 18–31. 59 Harootunian, ‘‘Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,’’ 167. 60 See the exclusive prison interview with the prime suspect, Timothy McVeigh, in David H. Hackworth and Peter Annin, ‘‘The Suspect Speaks Out,’’ Newsweek (July 3, 1995): 23–26. Eventually found guilty, McVeigh was executed in 2001 for his crime; he remained defiant to the end. His accomplice, Terry Nichols, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. 61 Although this chapter has been substantially revised and lengthened since its first publication, I remain grateful to Beth Bailey, David Farber, James A. Fujii, Peter Gibian, Jackie Hiltz, Austin Meredith, and Susan Neel for their valuable contributions to the initial version.

II

The Interruption of Referentiality

1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, introduction by Jonathan Culler, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, translated by Wade Baskin (Glasgow: Collins, 1974), 120, 122. 2 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, foreword by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 7. For another well-known, thoughtprovoking account, in early poststructuralism, of the status of language in modern literature, one that is predicated on language’s self-referential agency, see Roland Barthes, ‘‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb?,’’ in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, edited by Rich-

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5 6 7

8

9

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ard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 134–56. De Man, The Resistance to Theory, 10. This passage from de Man o√ers a characteristic summation of these points: ‘‘What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence. Those who reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical (that is to say ideological) reality are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit’’ (The Resistance to Theory, 11). The phrase is found in the preceding quotation from de Man, in note no. 4. The greatly influential work of Judith Butler is exemplary in this regard. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers (Frogmore, St. Albans: Paladin, 1973). Hereafter page references are included in parentheses in the text. For an illuminating historical critique of the social and intellectual forces informing France’s postwar transition, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass., and London: mit Press, 1995). Ross discusses Barthes’s book on 180–84. For discussions of Barthes’s work in relation to the theoretically avant-garde Parisian journal Tel Quel, see Lisa Lowe’s discussions in Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). For useful discussions of the problematic of (aesthetic) reflection in Marxist theory, see, for instance, Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, translated by Geo√rey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); and Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1978). For related discussions, see Henri Arvon, Marxist Esthetics, translated by Helen R. Lane with an introduction by Fredric Jameson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1973); Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary, selected and with historical and critical commentary by Maynard Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1973); and Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics, afterword by Fredric Jameson, translation edited by Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980), as well as the essays collected in Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, edited by David Craig (Penguin, 1975). Friedrich Engels, ‘‘Letter to Minna Kautsky,’’ in Craig, ed., Marxists on Litera-

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11 12 13

14

15

16

17 18

19 20

21

ture, 268. See also chapters 8, 9 (Marx’s and Engels’s letters to Lasalle), and 13 (Engels’s letter to Margaret Harkness), all reprinted from Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow, n.d.). Engels, ‘‘Letter to Margaret Harkness,’’ in Craig, ed., Marxists on Literature, 270. David Craig, ‘‘Introduction,’’ Craig, ed., Marxists on Literature, 22. Pierre Macherey’s discussion of Lenin’s reading of Tolstoy (and the question of reflection in Tolstoy’s works) remains one of the most illuminating accounts in this regard. See Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, 105–35; 299–323. See John Bender and David E. Wellbery, ‘‘Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,’’ in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, edited by John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3–39. The authors see modernist rhetoricality, with its emphasis on the groundlessness of truth, as a legacy of Nietzsche. See Paul de Man, ‘‘Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,’’ ‘‘The Rhetoric of Temporality,’’ and ‘‘The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism,’’ in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd. rev. ed., introduction by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 20–35, 187–228, 229–45. The quotation is on 31. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953; 50th-anniversary edition with introduction by Edward W. Said, 2003, with identical pagination). See especially Auerbach’s perceptive discussion of Virginia Woolf, in which, as he notes, external events often have only the vaguest of contours, while the rich and sensitively registered internal time of the characters has led to the abdication of authorial objectivity and hegemony. Auerbach, Mimesis, 552. Geo√ Bennington, ‘‘Demanding History,’’ in Post-structuralism and the Question of History, edited by Derek Attridge, Geo√ Bennington, and Robert Young (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17. Marian Hobson, ‘‘History Traces,’’ in Attridge, Bennington, and Young, eds., Post-structuralism and the Question of History, 102–3. For a succinct critique of the contradictions inherent in poststructuralist theory and the profound impact poststructuralist theory has had on the multiculturalist trends in the humanities, see Masao Miyoshi, ‘‘Ivory Tower in Escrow,’’ boundary 2 27.1 (spring 2000), in particular 39–50. (This essay also appears in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002], 19– 60.) Miyoshi’s critique is part of a long discussion about the steady corporatization of the university and the mind in post–Second World War America. I have o√ered extended discussions elsewhere of the historical specificities per-

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24 25 26

taining to modern Chinese language and literature, and will not repeat these arguments here. Interested readers are asked to see Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), chapters 2 and 3; and the chapter ‘‘Media, Matter, Migrants’’ in Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 31. Fabian, ‘‘If It Is Time, Can It Be Mapped?,’’ review essay on Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), History and Theory 44 (February 2005), 119 n. 13. Carlos J. Alonso, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. Ibid., 8. Fabian, Time and the Other, x. In Miyoshi’s terms, this would mean restoring the hitherto discredited function of so-called metanarratives: ‘‘The academics’ work in this marketized world . . . is to learn and watch problems in as many sites as they can keep track of, not in any specific areas, nations, races, ages, genders, or cultures, but in all areas, nations, races, ages, genders, and cultures. In other words, far from abandoning the master narratives, the critics and scholars in the humanities must restore the public rigor of the metanarratives’’ (‘‘Ivory Tower in Escrow,’’ boundary 2 27.1 [spring 2000]: 49).

III The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies 1 Edward W. Said, ‘‘Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition,’’ in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), xvi. 2 For an example of an influential and controversial philosophical essay on these ideas, see Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, preface by Nicholas Murray Butler (Los Angeles: U.S. Library Association, Inc., 1932). The text of this edition follows the first edition of Kant’s essay, translated from the German and published in London in 1796. 3 Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 21. Bassnett o√ers an informative discussion of the origins of comparative literature as a discipline; see especially 12–30. 4 Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, Comparative Literature (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), 86. Posnett’s work was published in ‘‘The International Scientific Series,’’ with a preface dated January 14, 1886. 5 ‘‘The ‘origin’ of U.S. Comparative Literature had something of a relationship

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with the events that secured it: the flights of European intellectuals, including such distinguished men as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, René Wellek, Renato Poggioli, and Claudio Guillén, from ‘totalitarian’ regimes in Europe. One might say that U.S. Comparative Literature was founded on inter-European hospitality.’’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 8. For an erudite and informative account of the life-inexile of one of these figures, Leo Spitzer, and an argument of how, in his work, a paradigm of comparative literature emerged that emphasizes the crucial role of multilingualism within transnational humanism, see Emily Apter, ‘‘Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933,’’ Critical Inquiry 29 (winter 2003): 253–81. 6 For an admirable attempt to engage with the problems posed by comparison in the age of multiculturalism, see Charles Bernheimer, ‘‘Introduction: the Anxieties of Comparison,’’ in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, edited by Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1– 17. However, Bernheimer’s definition of comparison is rather too open-ended to be able to address some of the more thorny issues involved: ‘‘Comparison is indeed the . . . what is it?—activity, function, practice? all of these?—that assures that our field will always be unstable, shifting, insecure, and self-critical’’ (2). These days, such a definition would tend to be adopted by sensible practitioners of almost any field of knowledge. For an account that emphasizes the more familiar humanistic dimensions of comparison as an act of liberation, defamiliarization, and creativity, see Ed Ahearn and Arnold Weinstein, ‘‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: the Promise of Comparative Literature,’’ in Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 77–85. By contrast, some scholars see comparison as a matter of ‘‘defining general and constant rules’’ (see Michael Ri√aterre, ‘‘On the Complementarity of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies,’’ ibid., 67). This notion of comparison, which has stemmed from comparative literature’s close relationship to poststructuralist theory since the 1970s, is also unsatisfactory for reasons that will become clear in the rest of this chapter. 7 See Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 27 and following, for a discussion of the French origins of this binarist (études binaires) approach, which has influenced generations of comparative literature scholars. 8 For a recent account of world literature, see, for instance, David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Damrosch defines world literature in terms of circulation: ‘‘I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’’; ‘‘world literature is . . . a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new discov-

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12 13 14 15

16

eries alike’’ (4, 5). For a persuasive earlier study of the histories and politics involved in examples of such circulation, see Michael Hanne, The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change (Providence, R.I.: Berghan Press, 1994). See also the essays in the collection Debating World Literature, edited by Christopher Prendergast (New York and London: Verso, 2004). Francesco Loriggio, ‘‘Disciplinary Memory as Cultural History: Comparative Literature, Globalization, and the Categories of Criticism,’’ Comparative Literature Studies 41.1 (2004): 71. Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 21. Susan Sniader Lanser, ‘‘Compared to What? Global Feminism, Comparatism, and the Master’s Tools,’’ in Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 287. Lanser’s essay o√ers a shrewd and constructive argument for dismantling comparative literature’s linguistic hierarchies. Roland Greene, ‘‘Their Generation,’’ in Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 146. Waïl S. Hassan and Rebecca Saunders, ‘‘Introduction,’’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23: 1&2 (2003): 23. Lanser, ‘‘Compared to What?’’ 288. In hindsight, this is, of course, highly problematic. As Loriggio writes: ‘‘To believe that once we have identified and a≈rmed literature’s specificity and its critical/theoretical purveyors, we really don’t have to fret over comparison, is to misconstrue both comparativism and its role within criticism or theory.’’ Loriggio, ‘‘Disciplinary Memory as Cultural History,’’ 52. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1984), 19. Wellek and Warren’s project is parallel in aim to what is called Literaturwissenschaft or poetics (Dichtung). See also Wellek, ‘‘The Crisis of Comparative Literature,’’ in which he defines the problem of comparative literary study in a similar manner: ‘‘The most serious sign of the precarious state of our study is the fact that it has not been able to establish a distinct subject matter and a specific methodology’’ (in Concepts of Criticism, edited and introduction by Stephen G. Nichols Jr. [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963], 282). For an earlier attempt to systematize the study of literature (as a ‘‘science of literature’’), albeit on rather di√erent assumptions, see Posnett, Comparative Literature: ‘‘by the use of the term [science] we mean to imply that limited truths discoverable in the various phases of literature may, nay, in order to be understood even as limited truths, must be grouped round certain central facts of comparatively permanent influence. Such facts are the climate, soil, animal and plant life of di√erent countries; such also is the principle of evolution from communal to individual life which we shall hereafter explain at length’’ (20).

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17 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970), 296. 18 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,’’ in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, introduction by James E. Irby (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 101–103. 19 Foucault, The Order of Things, xvi–xvii. 20 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 49. 21 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 45. For a fairly recent study that continues to argue for Europe, in particular France, as the center of literary modernism and internationalism, a center which authors from di√erent world cultures strive and compete to enter in order to be in the literary present, see Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2004). For a substantive critique of Casanova’s argument, including its Eurocentrism, see Christopher Prendergast, ‘‘The World Republic of Letters,’’ in Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature, 1–25. 22 For a succinct discussion of the problems with ‘‘Francophonie,’’ see Réda Bensmaïa, ‘‘La langue de l’étranger ou la Francophonie barrée,’’ Rue Descartes 37 (2002): 65–73. 23 For a di√erent conceptualization of the same phrase, a conceptualization that emphasizes Europe’s internal heterogeneity and declining global relevance (in comparison with North America), see Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Europe and Its Others,’’ in Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, edited by Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam and NAi Publishers, 2001), 294–303. 24 ‘‘The trouble with close reading (in all of its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon . . . And if you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature will do so: it would be absurd if it didn’t!), close reading will not do it. It’s not designed to do it, it’s designed to do the opposite. At bottom, it’s a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously . . .’’ Franco Moretti, ‘‘Conjectures on World Literature,’’ New Left Review 1 (2000): 57. 25 Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, ‘‘Questions of Japanese Cinema: Disciplinary Boundaries and the Invention of the Scholarly Object,’’ in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 393; my emphasis. For some constructive proposals for how comparative literature might revise its parameters and practices in light of the issues raised by multiculturalism and cultural studies, see ‘‘The Bernheimer Report, 1993: Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century’’ (the third Report on Standards written for the American

112 notes to chapter iii

26

27

28

29 30

31

32 33 34

Comparative Literature Association and distributed in accordance with its bylaws), in Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 39–48. Note, however, that some of the contributors to the volume disagree strongly with the proposals put forth in the report. See, for instance, some of the essays in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.) The quoted phrase is from the editors’ ‘‘Introduction: The Transport of the Novel,’’ 4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Di√erence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For an account of how the historical case of the western European novel is actually the exception rather than the rule to the typical rise of the novel around the world, see Moretti, ‘‘Conjectures on World Literature,’’ 58–61. Lanser, ‘‘Compared to What?,’’ 295. To this extent, even as some scholars see translation as a way out of the conundrums of Eurocentrism and out of the elitism of those who favor using only original languages, I find the currently popular debates about translation rather unhelpful because they tend, by and large, to remain bound to an unhistoricized notion of language and language users as such. Ibid.‘‘ 290. Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations or, the Invention of the Maghreb, translated by Alyson Waters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 6. Shu-mei Shih makes a similar point: ‘‘On the margins of this centripetal production of knowledge and on the lower rungs of the hierarchy, a scholar working in nonWestern and minority literatures often has to contend with scholars whose engagements—despite ‘good’ intentions—fall short of the level they would exercise with their ‘own’ areas of expertise. Their generosity is circumscribed by an uneven attention, a compulsion to apply less rigorous critical judgment to non-Western and minority materials than to canonical materials.’’ ‘‘Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition,’’ pmla 119.1 (2004): 17. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Tokyo: Zed Books, 1986); The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Olakunle George, Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). Carlos J. Alonso, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Gregory Judanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 4. The quote from Wellek is taken from Wellek’s Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 19.

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35 Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘‘Japan’’ and Cultural Nationalism, foreword by Meaghan Morris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 48. 36 Ibid., 59. 37 Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture, 80. 38 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 51. 39 See Foucault, The Order of Things, in particular chapters 9 and 10 (303–87). 40 Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 5, 38. 41 Samuel Weber, ‘‘The Foundering of Aesthetics: Thoughts on the Current State of Comparative Literature,’’ in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, edited and introduction by Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 65. Weber’s essay o√ers a thought-provoking reading of Kant’s work (in particular The Critique of Judgment ) and a critique of Wellek’s (mis)use of it for the founding of something like a discipline of general literature. Above all, the essay makes possible a linkage, with rich ramifications, between the issues of comparative literature and the wider problematic of aesthetic or reflective judgment. Among contemporary critics, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work is exemplary of an engagement with Kant along these lines in relation to post-European cultures. See, for instance, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 42 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 38, 42. 43 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, chapter 1, 3–13. 44 For a set of timely arguments about the complex linguistic and cultural ramifications of comparative literary studies in various postcolonial contexts, see Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23: 1&2 (2003); in particular, Waïl S. Hassan and Rebecca Saunders, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 18–31. 45 H. D. Harootunian, ‘‘Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem,’’ boundary 2 32.2 (summer 2005): 23–52. 46 Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 47 Harootunian, ‘‘Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem,’’30; Harootunian is quoting from Fabian, Time and the Other, 16–17. In that work, Fabian argues that even taxonomy, a seemingly spatial arrangement, contains temporal implications: ‘‘setting up a semiotic relation, especially if it is part of a taxonomy of relations, is itself a temporal act. While pretending to move in the flat space of classification, the taxonomist in fact takes a position on a temporal slope—uphill, or upstream, from the object of his scientific desire’’ (Time and the Other, 151).

114 notes to chapter iii

48 See Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998); Harootunian, ‘‘Ghostly Comparisons: Anderson’s Telescope,’’ diacritics 29.4 (winter 1999): 135–49. Harootunian’s critique of Anderson is intimately tied to his sustained critique of the establishment of area studies and its lost calling for comparability; see, for instance, Harootunian, ‘‘Tracking the Dinosaur: Area Studies in a Time of ‘Globalism,’ ’’ in his History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 25–58. See also his ‘‘Introduction: The ‘Afterlives’ of Area Studies’’ (coauthored with Masao Miyoshi), and ‘‘Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desires,’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, eds., Learning Places, 1–18, 150–74. For related discussions of comparability regarding the nation as found in Anderson’s work, see the other essays in the same special issue of diacritics, in particular Pheng Cheah, ‘‘Grounds of Comparison,’’ 3–18. 49 Harootunian, ‘‘Ghostly Comparisons,’’ 148–49. 50 The initial version of this chapter was published with four responses. I remain grateful to the respondents for their comments and questions. See Simon During, ‘‘Comparative Literature’’; Frances Ferguson, ‘‘Comparing the Literatures: Textualism and Globalism’’; Jonathan Goldberg, ‘‘English’’; Michael Moon, ‘‘Comparative Literatures, American Languages,’’ elh (English Literary History) 71.2 (2004): 313–22; 323–27; 329–34; 335–44.

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index

aerial bombing: in Second World War, 31, 101–2n.23; by United States, 15, 35; visual boundaries destroyed by, 32, 103n.32. See also atomic bombings of Japan aesthetics: comparative literature as foundering of, 86–87; reflective judgment and, 87, 114n.41 Afghanistan, 15, 16, 35 Africa: area studies and, 15, 95n.25; colonization of, 37; critics of, 82; cultures of, 77; nationalism in, 82; postEuropean modernity in, 81–82, 89; writers of, 82 agency: French theory and, 18; of intellectual change, 20; in modern African literary and critical practices, 82, 84 ‘‘Age of the World Picture, The’’ (Heidegger), 12, 29–31 ‘‘Age of the World Target, The,’’ 25–43, 94–95n.18 allochronic discourse (Fabian), 66, 68 Alonso, Carlos J., 19; on ambivalence,

84; on chains of signification, 68; on modernity, 82, 83; on noncoincidence in rhetoric of temporality, 67 alterity: New World and, 67; particularity of, 88; poststructuralist theory and, 47, 63 Althusser, Louis, 2; on language, 16 Amane, Nishi, 84 amazement: New World and, 67; rhetoric of, 67–68 Anderson, Benedict: on comparison, 90; on ‘‘imagined communities,’’ 88 Anglo-American academy, 58; area studies in, 15; deconstruction in, 16; multilingualism in, 73; poststructuralist theory in, 11, 19, 96–97n.31 aporias, 11, 56 Arabic speakers, 15 Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault), 4 area studies, 1, 11, 65; atomic bombings of Japan and, 14–15, 27; failings of, 42; high theory and, 16–17; literary

area studies (continued) studies and, 78, 96n.29, 106n.55; model of, 98n.36; in postwar America, 14–17, 19, 39–43; privileging of space by, 89; Said’s neocolonial discourse and, 42; targeted cultural areas of, 15, 16, 22, 39, 95n.25 Arnold, Matthew, 5–6 Asia-Pacific region, 65; area studies and, 15, 39, 40, 95n.25; atomic destruction of cities in, 12, 13, 14; colonization of, 37; comparative literature in, 86; cultures and languages of, 39–41, 77; nationalism in, 82; scholarly associations and, 13, 40; U.S. interventions in, 15, 36 Association for Asian Studies (aas), 40 atomic bombings of Japan, 12, 13, 14, 25–29, 30, 37–38, 99n.7, 100n.9; area studies and, 14–15, 41; as atrocities and terror acts, 26, 29; Christians and Americans killed in, 28; deterrence of, 31–32, 103n.35; as epistemic event, 27; hibakusha and, 104–5n.42; morality of, 28, 35–36; mushroom clouds caused by, 25, 26, 30, 31–32, 33; science and, 27–30, 104–5n.42; significance of, 99n.4; U.S. exceptionalism and, 36 atrocities: atomic bombings as, 26; by Japan, 26, 36, 98n.2 Auerbach, Erich, 56–57, 108n.16, 110n.5 avant-garde, 15, 49; language and theory, 12, 56, 64, 69; poetry, 51; writers, 7, 9 Barthes, Roland, 2, 61; on mathematical formulas, 5; on myth, 50–53, 59, 61, 63; Mythologies, 50–54; on poetry, 6, 51; woodcutter of, 52–53, 61, 63, 66

118 index

Bassnett, Susan, 71–72, 73, 86 Bensmaïa, Réda: on ‘‘Francophonie,’’ 112n.22; on Maghrebi literature, 80 Bernheimer, Charles, 110n.6 Blanchot, Maurice: on confinement in Foucault, 10; language in, 7; Borges, Jorge Luis: ‘‘Chinese encyclopedia’’ of, 75–76 Bourdieu, Pierre, 16 bourgeoisie, the: mass culture of, 21, 54, 63; mythification of, 53, 63 bracketing: of object of knowledge, 58; of referentiality, 21, 53–54, 60, 62 British Empire: close reading in former colonies of, 18–19; postcolonial studies and, 42; postwar crumbling of, 10, 40 Canguilhem, George, 3 canon, Western: 13, 77, 78, 80, 94n.10, 112n.24 Care of the Self, The (Foucault), 21–22 Chakrabaty, Dipesh, 79 Chatterjee, Partha, 82, 84, 88 China, 36, 64, 65; anti-Japanese reaction of, 41; comparative literature in, 86; invasion of, 26; United States and, 26, 37, 42–43 civil rights movement, 18 Clausewitz, Karl von, 35 close reading, 18–19; Western canon and, 78, 112n.24 coevalness, 66–67 cold war, 90; area studies and, 15, 27, 39–43; close reading practices and, 18–19; New Criticism and, 105n.53; new enemy needed after, 42–43; superpower relations during, 33; three worlds paradigm of, 95n.21 comparative literature, 1, 17, 20, 22, 71–91, 111n.15; as area studies, 78;

in Asia, 86; Bassnett on, 71–72, 73; comparison in, 72–73, 110n.6; defined, 83; in Europe, 79–80, 86; as foundering of aesthetics, 86–87; grid of intelligibility and, 76–77; institutional crisis of, 72; Lanser on, 73, 79– 80; multilingualism and, 73, 74, 75– 76; new post-European, 84–91; in non-Western countries, 85–86; oldfashioned, 84; parity in, 72–73; Posnett and origins of, 72, 111n.16; Said on, 71; in United States, 77, 79, 86, 89, 110n.5 comparison, comparativism, 22, 90; alternative paradigm of, 84–91; Bernheimer’s definition of, 110n.6; in comparative literature, 72–73, 86; future perspectives of, 91; mechanics of, 72–73; politics of, 79, 88, 90; practice of, 75; speculative, 81, 85 complit. See comparative literature confinement and incarceration: Foucault and, 9–10, 21; mechanisms of, 10; in poststructuralism, 10, 53, 59 consciousness raising, 49 Craig, David, 55 critical language, 65: poststructuralist theory and, 1, 49 Cumings, Bruce, 39, 40 Damrosch, David, 110–11n.8 deconstruction, 14, 22, 49, 62, 68, 80; ascendancy of United States and, 14; close reading and, 112n.24; as historical process, 57; of language and literature, 16, 42, 46, 56, 59 deferment: poststructuralist, 53–57, 60; specificity and, 59–61 Deleuze, Gilles, 2; on exteriority in Foucault’s work, 9–10, 23; Lionnet on, 20 de Man, Paul: on ideology, 107n.4; on

language and literature, 16, 47–48; on temporality, 56; on Western logocentrism, 49 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 13, 49, 62; on language, 16 De Saussure, Ferdinand, 46–47 deterrence, nuclear, 31–32, 103n.35 di√érance, 16 di√erence, di√erencing: cultural, 87, 88; determining function of, 46–47; high theory and, 61; identity and, 47, 66; language of, 58; liberating potential of, 50; originary, 48, 68; particularity of, 88; poststructuralist operation of, 60, 61, 68; pure, 69; redefining of, 61–62; as spatial distinctions, 90; systematic production of, 68; temporal, 61, 63, 65, 68; of theoretical and literary discourses, 54–55, 59; types of, 66 di√erentiation: deconstruction and, 57; as historicity, 58; linguistic, 86; of the novel, 79; specificity and, 61 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 9, 93n.6 disciplines: area studies, 40–41; comparative literature, 22–23, 71, 73; literature, 75; as specific realms of knowledge, 3 Dower, John W.: on atomic bombings and memory, 26; on postwar Japan, 34; on stereotypes, 37 During, Simon, 4, 10 East Asia: area studies and, 39–40; post-European modernity and, 81–82 Engels, Friedrich, 54–55, 59 English language, 73: comparative literature in, 72; dominance of, 14, 18; novels in, 78–79 English studies, 42

index

119

episteme: atomic bomb as epistemic event, 27; epistemic identity, 58; epistemic scandal, 13; framework of poststructuralism, 62 epistemes, 33, 102n.25 epistemic ground: belief in, 46; Foucault and, 4, 8; Heidegger and, 31; reestablishment of, 15; selfreferentiality and, 12; shifting of, 4, 8, 12, 15, 31, 34 ethnicity: existential identity and, 58; ethnic identity and, 68; hierarchies of, 60; in Spanish America, 82; traditions of, 64 Europe: androcentric Continentalism and, 80; canon of, 94n.10; comparative literature and, 22–23, 86; conceptual models of, 82; as grid of intelligibility, 88–89; as grid of reference in comparative literature, 77; imperialism of, 66: languages of, 16–17; literature of, 76–77; modernity of, 80; nationalism in, 71; New World and, 67; United States and, 14, 67, 96n.28; western, 66, 78, 83. See also post-European ‘‘Europe and Its Others’’: comparative paradigm of, 88–91; hierarchical formulation of literary comparison, 77, 78, 88; novel and, 78–79, 80 European theory: on demise of the West, 13; disdain for, 1–2; in United States, 1–23, 96–97n.31. See also French theory exegetic writing, 5 exoticism, 67–68; Auerbach on, 56–57 exteriority: constitutive, 10; in Deleuze, 10; in Foucault, 9–10 Fabian, Johannes: on comparative method, 71, 90; on denial of coeval-

120 index

ness, 66–67; on non-Western cultures, 89; on scandal of domination, 69; on taxonomy, 114n.47 Far Eastern Association, 40 finitude: Foucault on, 10, 93n.2; knowledge as, 3; of Western man, 85 formalism: aesthetic, 18; Russian, 55; in thought, 5 Foucault, Michel, 2, 13, 15; The Archaeology of Knowledge, 4; bias of, 8; The Care of the Self, 21–22; classical tabular epistemology criticized by, 89; on confinement, 9–10; Discipline and Punish, 9, 93n.6; on epistemes, 33; epistemic shifts and, 4; on grammar and language, 2–7, 21; as historian, 7–8; The History of Sexuality, 8; on literature, 5–8, 21, 60, 94n.10; Madness and Civilization, 9, 93n.6; on modernity, 4; on modern order of things, 85; The Order of Things, 2–7, 9, 22, 75–76, 81; psychoanalysis criticized by, 7–8; on representation, 4; repressive hypothesis of literature and, 8; on self-referentiality, 6, 8, 9, 11, 16; on signification, 21; taxonomists and, 79; The Use of Pleasure, 21–22; on Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 3 France: empire of, 10, 40; French language and culture, 16–17, 73–74, 77; Germany and, 79; modernization in, 50; novels of, 78; U.S. policy in Iraq opposed by, 16; Vichy persecution of Jews and, 36 French theory, 1–22, 58; in AngloAmerican academy, 96n.31; as mediator, 19; translation into English of, 18 French Theory in America (Lotringer and Cohen), 17, 96n.28 futurity, 67, 68

gender: atomic bombs and, 100n.9; hierarchies of, 60 George, Olakunle, 19; on agency in motion, 84; on postcolonial Nigerian literature, 82 Germany: cultural stigmatization of, 26, 99n.4; France and, 79; German language and, 16–17, 77; in Second World War, 102n.23; U.S. policy in Iraq opposed by, 16 gigantic, the, 29–30, 101n.21 globalization: area studies and, 15; poststructuralism and, 65 global South, 8, 94n.10 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 71 Gorer, Geo√rey, 37 Greece: modern, 89; national culture of, 83, 85 Greene, Roland, 73–74 ‘‘grid of grids,’’ 3–4, 5, 8 grid of intelligibility: Europe stabilized as, 88–89; comparative literature and, 76–77 Guattari, Félix, 20 Gulf Wars, 33, 35, 36 Harootunian, Harry D., 19; on Anderson, 90; on area studies in America, 15, 39, 41–42; on modernity, 80; on new strategy of comparability, 89– 90; on notion of field, 95n.25; on Said’s Orientalism, 42; on transparency of language, 16; on western European languages, 17 Hassan Waïl, 74 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 49; ‘‘The Age of the World Picture,’’ 12, 29–31; on atomic bomb, 30; on language, 16, 74; on man, 101n.21; on science, 29; on subiectum, 31 Hiroshima, 36; atomic bombing of, 12,

15, 25, 28, 29, 35, 38, 100–101n.13, 103n.35; hibakusha and, 104–5n.42; as icon of Japanese su√ering, 26, 98n.2; U.S. presidents’ disregard of, 36, 103–4n.36 historicism, historicity: of comparative literature, 72; di√erentiation as, 58; of Foucault’s works, 8, 9; of literary genres, 78; of national literatures, 73 history: of classification of knowledge, 75–76; Foucault as scholar of, 7–8; hierarchized di√erential and, 69 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 8 humanistic studies, 1 identity and identities: collective, 58; cultural politics and, 54, 58; di√erence and, 47; epistemic, 58; existential, 58; formation of, 50; impossibility of, 57; issues of, 69; linguistic, 46–47; national, 83; politics of, 18, 49, 58–61; social, 64; subjective, 58 ‘‘imagined communities’’ (Anderson), 88 imperialism: American, 20; European, 82; Western, 14. See also British empire; France: empire of inclusiveness, 76 India: post-European modernity in, 81– 82, 82–83, 89; precolonial, 83 indirection, 55 information: area studies and, 39; explosion of, 32; in postwar Japan, 34 instrumentalism: poststructuralism and, 49, 64, 65; the ‘‘Rest’’ and, 64– 65, 66 interiority, interiorization: di√erence and, 62, 63, 67–68; illusory, 10; of modern language and theory, 11; natural, 63; nucleus of, 10; selfreferentiality and, 22

index

121

Iraq, 15, 16, 35 Islam, 40 Jameson, Fredric, 46; The Prison-House of Language, 9 Japan, 41, 65, 89, 95n.25, 105n.53; area studies and, 106n.55; atomic bombs used against, 12, 14, 25–29, 35, 98n.2, 99n.7, 101–2n.23; comparative literature in, 86, 96n.29; cultural stigmatization of, 26; hibakusha in, 104–5n.42; historical memory in, 26, 98n.2; science and technology in, 34, 103n.30; stereotyping and stigmatizing of, 36–37, 99n.4; surrender of, 31, 101–2n.23; thought of, 83–84, 85; U.S. occupation of, 37–38, 104– 5n.42; war atrocities by, 26, 36 Jusdanis, Gregory, 83, 84, 85 Kant, Immanuel: Chatterjee and, 88; Weber on, 86–87, 114n.41 knowledge, knowing: archaeologies of, 21, 81; of atomic bombings, 25; classification of, 75, 81; as emotional dissonance, 26; epistemes and, 33; as finitude, 3; language as object of, 4, 6; of languages, 73–74; man as subject and object of, 3; modern, 3; ‘‘obscure verticality’’ of, 4; of the other, 15, 41; scientific, 29; self-referentiality and self-reflexiveness of, 3, 41; shifts in meaning of, 2–3, 4; specific realms of, 3; war and violence and, 41 knowledge production, 14, 16, 22, 27, 113n.30; area studies as, 36–39, 40–43; reflective judgment and, 87; self-referential, 41–43, 47; taxonomic method of, 76, 81; in the West, 75 Kristeva, Julia, 2; on language, 16

122 index

language, languages, 4, 5, 6, 9, 59; area studies and, 15–17, 40–41; in atomic era, 15; Barthes on, 50–54; Canguilhem on, 3; comparative literature and, 73–74; critical, 1; deconstruction of, 16, 56; demotion of, 13, 16, 49; developing nations and, 65; dominance and, 79; European, 16; Foucault on, 2–7, 11, 16, 75–76; as fundamental dislocation, 11; Greene on, 73–74; as ‘‘grid of grids,’’ 3–4, 5, 8; Hassan and Saunders on, 74; evolving functions of, 54; hysteria of, 7; instrumentalist status of, 16; interiorization and, 63; knowledge of, 73–74; Marxism vs., 47, 48, 49; materiality of, 47–48; myth and, 51–53; national, 72, 78; as object of knowledge, 6; as oppressed and powerless, 8, 48; Oriental, 16, 39–41; parity of, 76; poststructuralism and, 9; production of meanings and, 45–46; of resistance, 69; as rules of representation, 2–3; self-referentiality of, 20; transformations in status of, 4–5, 10; transparency of, 48. See also multilingualism Lanser, Susan Sniader, 73, 79–80 Latin America, 13; area studies and, 15, 39; cultures and literature of, 77, 82– 83; post-European modernity in, 81– 82, 89; U.S. interventions in, 15, 36 linguistic materialism, 48 linguistic pluralism, 22–23 linguistic signification: displaced nature of, 11; open-endedness of, 50; selfreferentiality of, 47, 63; temporality and, 56 Lionnet, Françoise, 19, 20 literariness, 54; perennial problem of, 21, 61

literary criticism, 74–75 literary studies, 71–91 literature, 1, 15, 55; Arnold and, 5–6; in atomic era, 15; de Man on 47–48, 56; European, 76–77; Foucault on, 5– 10, 21, 54, 60, 75–76; genres of, 78; interiority of, 8; Maghrebi, 80; Marx and Engels on, 54–55; modern, 7; national, 71–72, 73, 74, 75, 80, 86; objectification of, 75; production of meanings and, 45–46; qualities of, 7; reality and, 54–55; repressive hypothesis of, 8; Said’s neocolonial discourse and, 42; science of, 111n.16; self-referentiality of, 6–7, 9, 10, 21; specificity of, 74; temporality and, 7, 53–57; as universal phenomenon, 71; as victim of and opposition to power, 8; Wellek and Warren on, 74–75, 76– 77; Western, 77–78; world, 71–72, 110–11n.8. See also comparative literature logic, symbolic, 5 Loriggio, Francesco, 72, 111n.15 Macherey, Pierre: on language, 16; on Lenin’s reading of Tolstoy, 108n.13 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 9, 93n.6 ‘‘Mallarméan discovery of the word,’’ 6, 7, 8 man: finitude of Western, 85; Heidegger on, 101n.21; modern invention of, 10; as producer, 52; as subject and object of knowledge, 3; woman and, 61–62 Marx, Karl: Foucault on, 5; on literature, 54–55, 59 Marxism, 48, 49 masses, 49 materiality: global communication and,

101n.14; of human signification, 46; of language, 47–48 mathematics: Barthes on, 51–53; formulas of, 5 meanings: instability of, 46–47; semiotic operations and, 45–46, 61 memory, historical, 26 Meninas, Las (Velázquez), 3 metalanguage, 66, 69; poststructuralist, 58; realm of signification and, 46–47 metaphysics of presence, 59 Middle East: area studies and, 15, 39, 40; U.S. interventions in, 15, 36 Mimesis (Auerbach), 56–57 mimetic desire, 83–84 Miyoshi, Masao, 19; on area studies in America, 15; metanarratives and, 109n.26; on transparency of language, 16 modern age, modernity: bifurcation of, 64–65; emergence of selfreferentiality and, 2–11, 20, 21–22; estrangement in, 7; of Europe, 50, 80; European imperialism in, 14, 82–83; Foucault on, 4, 21–22; knowledge in, 3; language and literature in, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 54, 60, 64; modernist rhetoricality and, 108n.14; mythologies and, 5, 51–53; in non-West, 83– 85; periodization of, 3, 4; poetry of, 6, 65; as post-European cultural problematic, 81–82; postructuralism and, 9; science and technology in, 12, 29; self-referentiality in, 8, 9; world becoming a picture in, 30 modernism, 49, 64 monolingualism, 14 morality, 35–39 Moretti, Franco, 112n.24 multiculturalism, 12, 58

index

123

multilingualism: comparative literature and, 73, 74–75, 76, 86; Heidegger and, 74; of non-Western scholars, 14 mushroom cloud, 33; image of, 26; semiotic transfer between war and peace and, 31–32; as sign of terror, 25; as summation of history of military invention, 30 myth: bourgeois mythification and, 53; invincibility of, 50–53; language and, 51–53, 63, 64; logic of, 59, 65; ubiquity of, 53 mythologies, 5, 64 Mythologies (Barthes), 50–54 Nagasaki: American pows in, 28; atomic bombing of, 12, 15, 25, 28, 29, 35, 38, 100n.11, 101–2n.23, 103n.35; Catholic cathedral in, 28; hibakusha and, 104–5n.42; as icon of Japanese su√ering, 26; U.S. presidents’ disregard of, 36, 100–101n.13 nationalism: in Africa, 82; in Asia, 82; in Europe, 71–72, 79–80; imperialistic, 79; national literatures and, 71– 72, 73, 74, 75, 86; third world, 88; transcendence of national boundaries and, 71–72, 79, 80 New Criticism: in Anglo-American world, 56; close reading and, 112n.24; cold war and, 105n.53; French theory and, 18; U.S. intelligence agencies and, 96n.29 New World, 67 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13, 49; confinement in, 9; Foucault on, 5; modernist rhetoricality and, 108n.14 Nigeria, 82 non-coincidence, 57, 66–67 non-West: classification of, 66; cultures of, 45, 88, 89; languages and litera-

124 index

tures of, 66, 80, 113n.30; modernity in, 83–85; scholars of, 13–14; social science theory and, 40; subjects of, 58, 68; treatment by West of, 13–14, 16–18, 37, 64–65 novel, 78–79 object, 87; of literariness, 59; of study, 53–54, 68 objectification of literature, 75 object of knowledge, 47; bracketing of, 58; language as, 6, 75; vanishing, 41 Oklahoma City bombing, 43, 106n.60 oppressed, 63; language of, 52, 53 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 2–7; comparison and, 22; During on, 4; historical perspective in, 8–9; limit of Western thought in, 10–11; organization of Western thought and, 75– 76, 81 Orientalism: American, 40; European, 39, 40; influences on Western literature and, 77 Orientalism (Said), 39–42 ‘‘other,’’ otherness: alienness and, 62; amazement and, 67; as cultural issue, 66; non-Western, 66; novel and, 79; temporal 66 outside, 61–65, 67, 68; of poststructuralism, 69; specific figures of, 66 parity: in comparative literature, 72–73; of languages, 76 Perry, W. J., 31 philology: literature as contestation of, 6; Orientalism and, 39, 40 poetry: Barthes on, 51; of modern age, 6, 65 politics: of comparison, 79, 87, 88, 90; discursive, 11; dissident, 49; of exclu-

sion, 69; gender, 100n.9; of identity, 50; modern world, 84; of recognition, 47–48; of temporality, 68 Posnett, Hutcheson Macaulay, 72, 111n.16 possibility, 3 postcoloniality, 82, 88; existential identity and, 58; global context of, 87; missed opportunities of, 42; privileging of space by, 89 post-European: comparative literature, 84–91; cultures, 85, 87, 90, 114n.41; cultural problematic, 81–82; defined, 82 ‘‘Post-European Culture and the West,’’ 88–91 Poststructuralism: alterity and, 63; confinement in recursive linguistic turn of, 9; criticisms of, 62; desacrilization of referentiality and, 47, 50; emergence of, 21, 66; epistemic framework of, 62; group identity and, 58; in humanistic study, 1; intervention in European thought of, 65; Marxism and, 48; materiality of human signification of, 46; ‘‘outside’’ of, 45–69; paradigm shift and, 45– 46; signification as temporality and, 58 poststructuralist theory, 2, 20, 61: Anglo-American academy and, 11, 12, 42; anti-instrumentalism of, 49, 64, 65; authors of, 2, 9, 10, 11, 13, 46; comparative literature and, 110n.6; critical language and, 1; critical multiculturalism and, 12, 56–57; criticisms of, 9; deferment and, 53–57, 60; deconstruction of agendas and, 62; di√erencing and, 60, 62, 68–69; entrepreneurship of, 65; epistemic ground and, 15; exclusion and, 12;

historicity of, 10; identity politics and, 58–61; institutionalization of, 12; linguistic materialism and, 48; negative force of, 49; non-West neglected by, 13; problem of, 50, 64, 69; reference bracketing of, 22; resistance to, 48, 58, 61; self-contradictions of, 49–50; self-referentiality of language and, 9, 11, 20, 47; self-reflexive turns of, 9; significatory incarceration of, 53; specificity and, 59–60; stability of meaning unsettled by, 46–47; suspension of the ground of signification and, 21; temporality and, 56–57 Prison-House of Language, The (Jameson), 9 psychoanalysis, 7–8 race: hierarchies of, 60; in Spanish America, 82; stereotypes based on, 37; war and knowledge production and, 38–39 referentiality, 53, 55: as limit, 69; bracketing of, 21, 22, 47, 53–54, 62; certitude of, 52, 53, 62; desacrilization by poststructuralism of, 47; human reality and, 57; inevitability of reference and, 69; interruption of, 45, 46–47, 61, 69; of literature, 56; postponement of, 65; problem of, 69; rejection of, 50–51, 53; rewriting of, 63 reflection, 87, 114n.41 relativity, 28–29, 51, 65 representation: E=mc2 as, 28–29; Foucault on, 4, 8; language as rules of, 2–3; mushroom cloud as, 25, 26; signification and, 3; technologies of, 30; that being represented vs., 2; visual, 27; war and, 32

index

125

resistance, 53; acts of, 52; agency and, 82; bankrupt language of, 69; to nationalism, 79–80; political, 53; to poststructuralist theory, 58–61, 68; specificity and, 61 ‘‘Rest, the.’’ See non-West romanticism: in Barthes, 52; of high modernism, 49, 64 Romantics: importance for de Man of, 49; revolt of, 6, 7 Roussel, Raymond, 7 Russia: area studies and, 15, 39, 98n.36; United States vs., 33, 36, 39, 42 Said, Edward W., 19, 46; on comparative literature, 71, 77; Orientalism, 39–40, 41–42; on power, 25 Sakai, Naoki, 19; on Japanese thought, 83–84, 85; on ‘‘schema of cofiguration,’’ 84 Saunders, Rebecca, 74 ‘‘schema of cofiguration,’’ 84 science, 5; development of atomic weapons and, 14, 27–30; global communication and, 101n.14; literature and, 74–75; male domination of, 100n.9; paradox of scientific advancement and, 29–30; racial stereotypes confirmed by, 37; visual objectification and, 30 Second World War: aerial bombing in, 31, 101–2n.23; atomic weapons in, 12, 14, 25–29, 31, 99nn.7–8, 101–2n.23; China in, 26; European science in, 14; Japan in, 36–37, 98n.2 self-consciousness: critical, 22; poststructuralist theory and, 20–21 self-referentiality: as aggression, 15; ‘‘in America’’ as phrase of, 20; of area studies, 41–43; bombing and, 12, 14, 15; canon and, 78; deconstruction

126 index

and, 14, 22; as destabilization of epistemic ground, 8, 12; enforcement of, 15; of English novels, 79; of history of Japanese thought, 84; of language, 9, 16, 75; linguistic, 11, 47, 63; literature as impenetrable form of, 6; in modernity, 2–11, 20; problematic of, 20–21, 22–23; recoiling of self toward itself and, 22; of war, 33–34 September 11, 2001, 15, 36 sexuality, 7–8, 21–22 Sherry, Michael S., 28, 38 Shih, Shu-mei: on poststructuralist theory, 13; on scholars of non-Western literatures, 113n.30 signs, signification, 64; chain of, 62, 63, 68; deconstruction of, 14; incarceration of, 53; interiorization and, 63; linguistic, 11, 46–47; mathematics and, 51; mythic, 53; originary exclusion and, 68; poetry and, 51; postponement of referentiality of, 65; poststructuralism and, 46–47; as primary origin, 59; representation and, 3; sameness as condition for, 46–47; self-referentiality of, 20; shifting of, 21, 50–51; as temporality, 58 Silberman, Bernard S., 106n.55 slave trade, 37 Smart, Barry, 93n.2 social movements: consciousness raising of, 49; poststructural theory and, 62; social injustice and, 60 ‘‘Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem’’ (Harootunian), 80 South, global, 8, 94n.10 Soviet Union: area studies and, 15, 39, 98n.36; United States vs., 33, 36, 39, 42

specificity, 59–61, 68, 69; of comparative literature, 72; of cultural frameworks, 84; of Greekness, 83; of literature, 74, 111n.15; of modernity, in postcolonial cultures, 83; of national literatures, 86 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2, 19; Death of a Discipline, 94n.10; on Kant, 114n.41 stereotyping, 36–37 structuralist linguistics, 58, 63 subiectum (Heidegger), 31 subjectivity, 8, 50 symbolic logic, 5 taxonomy: Fabian on, 114n.47; Foucault on 76–77, 79 techne, 12 technological attitude, 12: ‘‘technological fanaticism’’ and, 28 technologies: of atomic warfare, 12, 27, 32; of seeing and representation, 12, 30; of war, 34 temporality: as allochronism, 68; de Man on, 56; fragmentation of specificity and, 59; language and, 48; linguistic signification and, 56, 58; politics of, 68; poststructuralist theory and, 57; postcolonial nations and, 89; rethinking rhetoric of, 65–69; as self-deconstruction, 68; synchronous, 90; temporal di√erence and di√erencing and, 63, 68, 90 terrorism, 15, 36, 43 theory: literary, 74–75; types of, 46. See also European theory; French theory; poststructuralist theory; Western theory Theory of Literature (Wellek and Warren): 74–75, 76–77, 83 third world: first and second worlds

and, 95n.21; literary texts of, 8; progress in, 82 Thomas, Evan, 28 time. See temporality Truman, Harry S, 29, 100–101n.13, 101–2n.23, 104n.36 unconscious, (the): assumptions by, 9; discovery and interpretation of, 5; revolution of, 16 United States: apologies avoided by, 36, 103–4n.36; area studies in, 39–43; atomic bombs dropped by, 12, 14, 25– 29, 36, 41, 99n.7, n.8, 101–2n.23; China liberated by, 26; close reading practices in, 18–19; commoditization in, 18; comparative literature and, 22– 23, 72, 77, 86, 110n.5; early history of, 66–67; enemies of, 15; ethnic cultures in, 19; Europe and, 17–18; European theory in, 1–23; exceptionalism of, 36, 98n.36; foreign policy of, 14–15, 16; French theory in, 17–20, 96n.28; humanistic studies in, 1; identity politics in, 8; intellectual change and, 20; Iraq and, 15, 16, 35; Japan occupied by, 37–38, 104–5n.42; literature of, 77; military hegemony of, 12, 14, 15, 19; scholars of, 15; science and research in, 31; self-referential view of, 41; Soviet Union vs., 33, 39; stereotyping of Japanese by, 36–37; as successor to European imperialism, 14; as target of itself, 43; terrorism in, 15, 36, 43; Vietnam and, 104n.37 universalisms: transcendent aspirations of the self and, 38; of world literature, 71–72 Use of Pleasure, The (Foucault), 21–22 Vietnam, 104n.37 Virilio, Paul, 30, 32, 33

index

127

virtuality: military Internet and, 35; virtualization of the world, 34–35, 41; war in, 33 visual objectification, 30, 31, 32 war: air combat in, 103n.32; a≈nities with vision of, 30; in age of atomic weapons, 33–34; comparative literature and, 79; knowledge production and, 36–38, 40–41; morality of, 35– 39, 99n.8, 101–2n.23; normativization of, 34; peace likened to, 32, 34– 35, 38–39; racism and knowledge production and, 38–39; representation and, 32; self-referentiality of, 33– 34; substitutions for, 42–43; in virtuality, 33. See also Second World War Warren, Austin, 74–75, 76–77 Weber, Samuel: on comparative literature, 86–87; on Kant, 114n.41; on reflective judgment, 87, 114n.41; on Wellek, 114n.41 Wellek, René, 110n.5; ‘‘The Crisis of Comparative Literature,’’ 111n.16; Theory of Literature, 74–75, 76–77, 83, 86–87; Weber on, 114n.41 Weltliteratur (Goethe), 71 West: canon of, 13, 78, 80, 94n.10; demise of, 13; human sciences of, 85; imperialism of, 14; individualism in,

128 index

93n.2; knowledge production in, 75; literature of, 77–78, 94nn.10–11; philosophy of, 13; ‘‘the Rest’’ and, 13–14, 16–17, 37, 64–65, 83 Western logos, 49: deconstruction of, 14; originary di√erence and, 48; poststructuralist challenges to, 47 Western theory: bracketing move of, 60; challenges to, 45; Eurocentrism of, 45; hegemony of, 58–59; resistance to, 58–61, 68 Western thought: Borges’s ‘‘Chinese encyclopedia’’ and, 75–76; Japanese thought and, 83–84; selfreferentiality in, 20 woodcutter (Barthes), 52–53, 63, 66 word: discovery of, 6, 8 world: literature of, 71–72, 79, 80, 110– 11n.8; as picture (Heidegger), 12, 14– 15, 30–31; politics, 98n.36; as target, 14–15, 31, 38, 40, 42, 43; virtuality of, 33–35 World War Two. See Second World War xenophobia, 42–43 Yoneyama, Lisa, 26, 38 Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, 19; on comparative literature, 78

rey chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University and the author of numerous works on literature, film, and cultural politics. Her recent publications include a collection of her essays translated into Italian, Il sogno di Butterfly: costellazioni postcoloniali (Rome, 2004), the Japanese-language edition of her book Woman and Chinese Modernity (Tokyo, 2003), and the Korean-language editions of her books Primitive Passions and Writing Diaspora (Seoul, 2004, 2005). She is coeditor of the book series ‘‘Asia Pacific,’’ also published by Duke University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chow, Rey. The age of the world target : self-referentiality in war, theory, and comparative work / Rey Chow. p. cm.—(Next wave provocations) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3732-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 0-8223-3744-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Poststructuralism. 2. Foucault, Michel. I. Title. II. Series. b841.4.c46 2006

149%.9—dc22

2005029786