The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana: Spectral Transitions 9789819933211, 9789819933228

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The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana Spectral Transitions jon d ougl a s sol omon

FOREWORD BY NAOKI SAKAI

The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana

Jon Douglas Solomon

The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana Spectral Transitions

Jon Douglas Solomon Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires et Multilingues Université Paris Nanterre Paris, France

ISBN 978-981-99-3321-1 ISBN 978-981-99-3322-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Foreword

The monograph entitled “The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana: Spectral Transitions ” is an exceptional piece of intellectual work. This much can be avowed, even though I cannot profess at this stage to have grasped its full significance after preliminary reading(s) of the manuscript shared with me by the author, Jon Douglas Solomon. Before I had access to the current and longest manuscript, the author gave me two shorter versions of the work in progress; what I have been witnessing is a painstaking process, familiar to anyone who has gone through the task of book writing. It has been marked by many hesitations, alterations, and modifications. I am sure that the author will continue to revise it until the very last moment before he eventually submits this manuscript to the publishers. Although I am convinced that the book is an actualisation of an extraordinarily ambitious project, I regret that I am not capable of illuminating its exceptional potentiality with sufficient persuasion. I am afraid that it will take time for its full impact to be fully appreciated. In that respect, this book will have to wait for future generations of readers. Despite these inadequacies, however, I would like to offer this short preface to this book, in preparation of that future. Let me begin my reading of The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana: Spectral Transitions by listing five major topoi which drive Solomon’s extremely challenging inquiry: Taiwan, modernity, area studies, discontinuity and bordering, and transition/ translation. v

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1. On Taiwan The book is devoted to an inquiry into the area of Taiwan. In the first place, it may appear to take up Taiwan as a subject-matter for the investigation to which the entire monograph is devoted, as a target of inquisitive gaze institutionally framed in the disciplines of area studies. In a conventional academic publication of this kind, neither the author nor the reader is expected to pay too much attention to the manner or conventional procedure in which the proper name Taiwan is assumed to signify, be referred to, or connote. In reading a book on Taiwan, one is not expected to pose such questions as, “What is meant by Taiwan?” “What procedures and presumptions allow one to take Taiwan for granted in this or that sense?” or “How am I solicited or seduced to seek to know about Taiwan?”. In the first place, it may appear that the author wants to discuss Taiwan and illustrate its multiple aspects in many different contexts by demonstrating his expertise as a specialist on Taiwan—and China, since Taiwan is often subsumed as a province or region under the larger area of China studies—that he has acquired over many years. Conventionally, it is expected that readers are to engage in the narrative offered by the specialist by accepting his claimed expertise or entrusting the disciplinary formation upon which his knowledge is built. Thereby, they are to join the author’s search for knowledge and engage in his endeavour to discover some truth, in this case, about Taiwan. For readers to accept the author’s expertise is not only to accept his authority as a specialist but also to accede to the disciplinary institution and its epistemology under which his specialised knowledge has been nurtured, with decades of training, apprenticeship, fieldwork, research, academic publication, and so forth. The author’s expertise, thanks to which we are enticed to read his book, is a product of the disciplinary as well as social institutions in which he was supposedly trained as an expert of knowledge production on an area. Without doubt, Taiwan is one such area. Both the author and the reader are supposed to engage in a certain regime of truth that is generally marked as “an area studies,” a particular naming that, as I discuss below, has become prominent globally since the late twentieth century. And it is important to keep in mind that the regime of truth in question is also a disciplinary one in the sense that, in this disciplinary discourse, both the reader and the author are trained and disciplined to operate in that regime. In other words, the regime of truth also serves as a discourse of

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subjective transformation or subjectivation. Accordingly and customarily, this book is classified into the genre of area studies on Taiwan—or China. As soon as you open Spectral Transitions (allow me to abbreviate the title of the book hereinafter), you are made aware that the conventional desire to hear the voice of an area expert is betrayed every step of the way. No doubt, this is a book about Taiwan in the first place. But subsequent to that, it is not on Taiwan, or, to put it succinctly, it is discernible that Jon Douglas Solomon is rather concerned with how the proper noun Taiwan serves as a referent in the diversity of registers, geographic, political, cultural, military, economic, epistemological, and so on; he draws your attention to the conditions and norms by which so-called Taiwan could be constituted in its multiple contexts; he is interested in the multiple histories in which not merely the residents in the territory governed by the sovereign state of the Republic of China since the days of the Allied occupation immediately after Japanese colonial rule, but also all those who participated in one way or another in the global hegemonic arrangement called Pax Americana were involved. Solomon wants to study not only the area of Taiwan but also the constitution of the area itself. For, the very plausibility of thematically addressing Taiwan as an area can never be dissociated from the historical prearrangement upon which the global hegemony of the United States was built. To challenge the enclosure of Taiwan as an area is to open it up to histories, or what the author alternatively calls “transitions.” Although the government of the United States flatly denies the colonial status of Taiwan, the sovereignty of the Republic of China (= Taiwan since 1949) has been subjugated to that of the United States of America on many occasions. Subsequently it is important to recognise in what register—there are many of them, as a matter of fact—Taiwan is problematised. There are potentially multiple registers in which knowledge about it can be reflected on. In due course, Taiwan proliferates, and the author encourages us not to evade the heterogeneous historicity surrounding this proper name. Hence, the registers at which the area of Taiwan is questioned in this book are many: the area of Taiwan as sovereign state, the area as a spatial enclosure in knowledge production, the area as a national community, the area as a domain for capitalist investment, or the area for neoliberal domination, just to mention a few. It shows that the designation in many registers of an area serves many different functions, and this multiplicity of function necessitates many perspectives such as the general history of

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area studies—closely affiliated with the history of Pax Americana—the identity politics undertaken in the area (extensively discussed in the first part of the book in the analysis of the commercially successful film Detention), and the critical examination of the relationship between knowledge production and global hegemony. As I will discuss later in this preface, historicity does not connote the continual narrative of storytelling in which things about Taiwan, its people, state, culture, and so on evolve or develop along continual curves. On the contrary, the historicity at issue should be construed as a series of events, and each one marks a singular point that cannot be smoothed out along a continual line. An event cannot be reduced to a gradient, a continual evolution of development; rather, it is a disruption or “transition” which can be apprehended only as a “non-sense,” as a singular point of “discontinuity” that interrupts continuity. According to Solomon, historicity cannot be confined to the domain of continuity. History cannot exclusively be subsumed under the genres of narrativity where events of the past, the present, and the future are represented within the modality of coherent comprehensibility; for him, history does not consist exclusively of narrative accounts of the events of the past, the present, and the future, the accounts all of which make sense; historical time as the author advocates in his historical analysis is not devoid of nonsense or events with which one is at a loss; historical analysis must include those moments in which our sense-making attempts fail. For, history must include the past that cannot be understood, just as it must also include the aleatory moments whose future cannot be predicted or predetermined. This is a drastic re-conceptualisation of the term “transition”: transition no longer connotes change, movement, transformation, or conversion along a continual and smooth line of passage. Rather, history includes transitions of discontinuity. An analysis of historical transitions, therefore, cannot overlook moments of traumatic disruptions, unpredictable leaps, or transitions of discontinuity. History necessarily denotes these transitions in which we try to make sense out of non-sense, in which we make aleatory decisions without figuring out what is to come. Of course, this is why the author deliberately places “translation” and “transition” next to one another, since both translation and transition designate the performativity of events at singular points of discontinuity. In the first place, Taiwan could designate, as a geographic area, an archipelago of small islands located off the east coast of the Eurasian landmass on the western shore of the Pacific Ocean. But, in the context of

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international politics, it may as well refer to the territorial nation-state of either the Republic of China or the People’s Republic of China. In the narrative of national identification, it could designate a historical continuity of a nation/ethnos, but because of its heterogeneity, the Taiwanese/ Chinese nation cannot be rendered identifiable without appealing to the processes of national imagination and the transformation of its members’ subjectivity. Just as with any other nation, the imaginary of the Taiwanese nation requires elaborate procedures, strategies, and aesthetics by which the national community is projected as an historically enduring entity, a certain version of national community legitimated by the state, with each member subjected/disciplined/transformed in such a way as to convince him or herself to inherently belong to it, and to be ordained to share a national destiny with his or her compatriots, and so on. Detention, a commercially successful film released in 2019 based on an eponymous video game, provides a platform for the author of Spectral Transitions to engage in a series of theoretical and historical forays that illustrate how historically disruptive transitions of the past have been smoothed over and reformatted in the mode of continuity, such that the Taiwanese nation could be presented as if it had always been there, rather than invented each time in moments of discontinuous transitions/ translations. What has to be questioned, above all else, is the apparatus of subjectivation that includes such presumptions as the continual presence of the nation in Taiwan. Of course, the very plausibility of questioning the presence of the nation as well as the identity of Taiwan as a nation is deliberately repressed, dispersed, or denied in the continual narrative of Detention. The nationality of Taiwan’s nation may well either include or exclude, for instance, the indigenous tribes or post-1949 immigrants from the Chinese continent who came to Taiwan with Chang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party. The identification of the nation may well give rise to disputes of many kinds. Just as in any nation, membership of the Taiwanese nation has never been free of divisive clashes between social classes, or of ethnic disputes over social discrimination. In Taiwan’s relatively short history since 1945, the story of the presumably independent nationstate is marked by a number of disruptions, divisions, and struggles over who or what portion of the supposed totality of the nation could possibly claim authentic membership. Ever since the seventeenth century the indigenous population of Taiwan was subjected to a series of colonial governments, Dutch, Spanish, Qing, and Japanese suzerain states,

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but finally the Japanese colonial government was removed at the end of World War II. Hence, during the period of the first Cold War under the so-called collective security system administered by the United States, Taiwan somewhat evaded the public recognition of its status as a colony, or a so-called non-self-governing territory. Somewhat, 1945 was supposed to mark the end of the colonial government there. But can we seriously call Taiwan an “independent” nation? Is it any more than an endorsement of “postcolonial” grandiloquence propagated under Pax Americana? In the rhetoric of developmental modernisation in the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan served as a key strategic factor in the international configuration of the global hegemony of the United States of America; thanks to this Taiwan was permitted to exist as a sort of “independent” nationstate of “the West.” We must say “a sort of independent nation-state,” firstly because of the particular situation American imperial nationalists described by “the loss of China,” and secondly because none of the satellite states of the United States in East Asia—Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and South Vietnam—could qualify as fully constituted territorial sovereign states as long as one adheres to the classical pre-World War II notion of state sovereignty. Taiwan was a Japanese colony until August 1945 and then was occupied by the Allied Powers after the Japanese Empire was defeated. Formally, the territory of Taiwan was registered under the jurisdiction of the Republic of China. In 1949, the Nationalist Party of China was expelled from the Chinese mainland and escaped to Taiwan, where, under the auspices of the United States, the Nationalist Party of China consolidated the administrative apparatuses necessary to govern a territorial state. For the United States, Taiwan was primarily a frontier for the Policy of Containment that the Truman administration pursued from 1947, for the purpose of creating a global and/or international system of military, political, and economic domination in the name of preventing the spread of communism in the world. From the loss of China in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the Policy of Containment was put forth as the principal justification for the United States international policy in both the Trans-Atlantic sphere and the East Asia region; it paved the way for Pax Americana, an international arrangement of semi-colonial domination under the global leadership of the United States of America. Taiwan under these auspices was a symbol of Pax Americana, and its post-World War II history or histories are utterly misrepresented when American global hegemony is overlooked.

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It is, therefore, simply impossible to comprehend what the proper noun Taiwan could and can mean without regard for Pax Americana. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the first Cold War years (from the late 1940s through to the era of détente between the Soviet Union and the United States) and in the second Cold War years (marked by increasing rivalry between China and the United States) as well, Taiwan could hardly be recognised as a sovereign state unless in terms of what Solomon calls “the schema of internationality,” an imaginary mapping device advocated to legitimate the global order of Pax Americana. But, instantaneously, a question arises: could the Republic of China be a sovereign state even in the 1950s and 1960s? Moreover, is it possible to evade a second question: does Taiwan possess the status of a sovereign state today? Should we frankly admit that the Republic of China was and still is an American colony? Of course, one has to redefine the concept of coloniality. If Taiwan is a colony, in what respect is this so? If it is not, how did the discipline of area studies deal with the actuality of Pax Americana with regard to the colonial governmentality most evidently found in the case of Taiwan? In order to respond to these questions, the author would have to confront two sets of issues. The first is about the system of international law by which, it is generally agreed, the idea of state sovereignty—it was defined in terms of territorial state sovereignty—was first conceptually determined by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Moreover, he would also have to inquire into the second set of problems about the definition of state sovereignty as designed and promoted by the United States under Pax Americana. In Spectral Transitions, Solomon frequently refers to the adjectival “colonial–imperial” in his discussion of the formation of the international world in modernity. “Colonial–imperial” modernity is closely associated with the order established in Europe first and then in the rest of the world, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The Eurocentricity of the modern international world was not established overnight; people became aware of the dominant presence of Europeans across non-European regions step by step with different chronologies. If we limit our scope to East Asia, the symptomatic manifestations of colonial–imperial modernity became discernible in the eighteenth century and thereafter, much later than in other regions such as the Americas and Middle and South Asia, even though the Spanish and the Portuguese had begun colonising a number of places in East Asia already in the sixteenth

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century. In order to deal with the peculiar situation in which Taiwan has been placed for the last seventy-eight years, however, it is necessary to take into account the second set of issues about the idea of state sovereignty under Pax Americana, because it was widely advertised that the postWorld War II world was a “postcolonial” one and that colonialism was a thing of the past under the global hegemony of the United States. What is decisively important for the perspective that Spectral Transitions tries to pursue is the fact that, whereas the basic structure of the international world was resurrected after the liberation of colonised territories—Hong Kong and Macao remained under colonial administration until much later—in East Asia, under Pax Americana the pomposity of postcoloniality was fostered according to which old colonial governmentality was overcome with the demise of the old colonial powers of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, and so on. The United States promoted the prevailing vision that colonialism was finished and that we lived in “the world after colonialism.” Yet, as many have noted, Pax Americana of the post-World War II period is known for its extraordinary violence. The government of the United States has employed many and persistent tactics to prevent the topic of colonial violence from attracting the attention of people outside the Euro-American world. The global prerogative of Pax Americana has been described in terms of postcoloniality, precisely because the very topic of modern colonial legacies, as well as attention to popular sovereignty against colonialism, could be evaded by focusing on postcoloniality. How could the policy-makers of the United States manage to claim that the problems of modern colonialism had been miraculously solved at the end of World War II when the legacies of settler colonialism were manifest almost everywhere in the American society itself? Do the various forms of racial discrimination, for which the United States is globally infamous, not indicate the presence of colonial power? Is it not oxymoronic to use the term postcoloniality for areas outside the West when everyday life in the United States itself was saturated with signs of coloniality? Of course, the crucial question addressed in Spectral Transitions is: how has area studies as a historically specific knowledge formation participated in the strategies of postcoloniality under Pax Americana? How did and do area experts involve themselves in the tactics utilised in American global hegemony? Immediately, one can see the ambiguous status Taiwan occupies in these questions. How should one apprehend the postcoloniality

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worshipped in peculiar ways in area studies? Does it mean that Taiwan was freed from colonial subjugation ever since the Retrocession Day of 25 October 1945?1 Or has Taiwan discarded the position of a non-self-governing territory? When area studies is in question, the term postcoloniality must be first “decolonised,” not only because it is a device for the repression of certain colonial reality, but also because it encourages a new arrangement of biopower by which what Solomon calls “the anthropological difference,” an illocutionary device differentiating the West (also called Europe until the twentieth century) from the Rest, continues to be reproduced. It is brazenly insisted upon that, thanks to American ingenuity, the postWorld War II world has been finally liberated from the vices of colonialism despite the common-sensical truism that the United States was and still is the most typical state built on the remnants of settler colonialism. It is by means of the idiom “colonial–imperial modernity” that the author wants to draw attention to possible links between the first set of the issues concerning the classical system of international law, which distinguished the prestigious area called “Europe” (later the West) from the Rest of the World, and the second set of issues concerning Pax Americana. What is typically overlooked in area studies are the possible links between the social, political, economic, and cultural features of Taiwanese society and the self-formation on the part of those who know or work to know, following the protocols of this regime of truth, generally designated by “area studies.” Yet, it is normally disavowed that the procedure of knowing in the disciplinary formation of area studies has a subjective side to it, or that it serves as a sort of subjective technology. It is denied that the regime of truth not only produces objective knowledge but also functions as a sort of procedure for subject formation, whereby to transform the agent of knowing and produce a subject conforming to the regime. Specialists engaged in area studies may well compete among themselves for the objectal validity of their truth, but they rarely question their own participation in the performative delivering of truth. They usually fail to notice the disciplinary nature of area studies and remain mostly uninformed on how they are committed, affected, and transformed in their pursuit of truth. Only by anticipating a process of becoming that which the knower is expected to be can an area expert assert his or her status as a specialist of an area, as one who is supposed to know about the area in question. And in area studies, no matter whether or not the specialist has in fact

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grown up as a Taiwanese, Chinese, Asian at large or as a foreigner or special kind of foreigner called Westerner, he or she is bound to take the positionality of the West in contrast to the Rest. It is significant that taking up the positionality of the West in knowledge production is not the same as identifying with the West in ethnicity or nationality. Even if one’s ethnic or national identity does not coincide with one’s identification in knowledge production, the contradiction is normally overlooked or reformatted in what I have elsewhere called “civilisational transference.”2 For, being born or raised in the area may qualify the person as an authentic “native informant,” but it does not necessarily indicate he or she is an area expert. Neither is it a matter of taking one side against the other. In the regime of truth as area studies, the very configuration of epistemic positionalities is set up in such way that the problem of the “anthropological difference” cannot be reduced to the question of taking sides. It is not a matter of whether the specialist takes a condescending attitude towards the Rest or makes an unfavourable judgement on behalf of the West; rather, it is a question concerning the epistemic positionality one has to assume when one engages in the regime of truth in area studies. Yet, just as Johannes Fabian analysed in reference to “the denial of coevalness” in anthropology3 in the 1980s, to assume a determinate epistemic positionality in area studies can easily lead to the prejudicial determination of the positionality of the specialist in relation to the object—the indigenous, the native population of the Rest—of inquiry. Thus, it is neither simply a problem of the geographic division of the world—the West and the Rest—nor the stages of historical evolution—the developed versus the under-developed societies—but of a subjective positioning, of how the self is postulated in contrast to the other. Hence, the disciplinary formation of area studies segregates and divides the world. It is in reference to “the anthropological difference” that the sociopolitical issues of Taiwan, as an area, are associated with the disciplinary and subjective strategies inherent in area studies. Thus, by discussing the issues of knowledge production about Taiwan, Solomon cannot help but open up the scope of his inquiry to the problematic of the bipolarity of modernity. 2. On Modernity Assumed in Jon Douglas Solomon’s frequent use of the adjectival “colonial–imperial” is an apprehension of modernity which guides his critical

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analysis of knowledge production in area studies. How does he understand modernity at large? It is globally accepted that today all of us live in the modern world, regardless of location on the geographic map of the earth, the nationality one belongs to, or the cultural tradition one is bound by. Some may insist that modernity is a periodic term indicating a span of time in the chronological order of historical time. It is purportedly preceded by a premodern era, and, it is presumed that the whole world must have gone through this evolutionary process from the premodern period to the modern one, although there is no unanimity as to how the boundary of the premodern and the modern periods can be inserted. A few decades ago, a relatively small number of intellectuals began to use the term “postmodern”; they argued that new historical signs indicating a transition from the era of modernity to that of postmodernity had emerged. It is far from certain, however, that postmodern or postmodernity can be comprehensible within the vocabulary of chronological periodisation, even though the prefix “post” usually connotes a position of posteriority in the order of succession. We are far from certain that it is possible to locate ourselves chronologically or geographically outside modernity; it is not plausible to assume that we have finally left modernity behind or moved beyond the stage of the modern era. Perhaps, postmodernity was instead a sign of a certain anxiety indicating an internal dislocation of what has been assumed to be modernity’s prerequisite, rather than a historical stage following the modern one. It seems that we are still situated in the modern world, and Spectral Transitions takes upon itself to investigate what could possibly be meant by “being situated in the modern world.” In due course, Solomon’s inquisition of modernity is one of the driving forces in this book. Understandably, the term “modernity” gives rise to complexity and multi-dimensionality in his investigation into the problems of modern conditions, which include the topics we have intimated above: the bipolar constitution of the West and the Rest in the modern world, the schema of internationality under the system of international law, the anthropological difference, the dynamics of speciation, the modern regime of translation, and so on. Despite the global acceptance of the word “modernity,” it invokes amazingly diverse uses; by “modernity,” we insinuate many different positionings in the modern world. As a matter of course, “being situated in the modern world” cannot be singularly reduced to spatial or geographic

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location; neither does the statement “we are in modernity” merely signify that we are chronologically assigned to the general era of modernity, or in the geographic region that is modernised. It is decisively important that the so-called developed societies and the under-developed or “still developing” ones are both located or situated in modernity. We have been modernised in diverse and different ways as a result of which modernity is a sort of destiny nobody can evade, no matter where each of us is located on the geopolitical map of the world. In the modern world, basic units of human sociality such as individuals, nations, civilisations, and races are related to one another hierarchically, differentiated from one another according to degrees of progress or retardation, motivated by subjective investment towards progress or hindered by the lack of such investment, and are in competition in the dynamics of capitalist commodification. In short, these units are constituted through the bordering practices that differentiate, classify, and discriminate one from another. There are many registers or contexts of modernity in which one feature is not only paradigmatically differentiated but also articulated to other features. Prominent among them is the bipolarity of the modern world, the West and the Rest, a bipolar division that is not solely in the register of geographic space. For example, this bipolarity is readily associated with the binary opposition in the human classification of the non-colour (or white) and the coloured.4 Perhaps, for the first time, the category of whiteness emerged together with the contrasting categories of “the people of colour.” There are many other binary oppositions, such as the developed versus the underdeveloped, that can be readily cross-referenced to human racial classification and vice versa. Yet, even though modernity cannot be reduced to any single binary opposition, many of the binary oppositions on which the modern world rests are finally related in one way or another to the bipolarity of the colonisers and the colonised. This much can be said: the features of modern colonialism cannot be overlooked when the modernity of the modern world is at issue. As Solomon repeatedly draw our attention to the two repressive orientations, antiblackness and anticommunism, in Pax Americana, the presence of colonial relationship can never be neglected in our investigation of the modern world. Around the eighteenth century, a new apparatus of human classification, which was later called “racism,” emerged mainly across the Atlantic, in conjunction with the gradual acceptance of the system of European Public Law (Jus Publicum Europaeum). Perhaps, for the first

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time, “Europe” was identified as distinct from “non-Europe,” as a region where a group of territorial sovereign states among whom European Public Law—renamed “international law” in the nineteenth century—was promulgated. The “Peace of Westphalia” inaugurated the system of diplomatic agreements whereby “Europe” gained the prerogative by which the bipolarity of the modern world would be further consolidated. “Europe” was then constituted as an international world whereas “non-Europe” was constituted as its outside, excluded from the realm where inhabitants were safeguarded by the system of international law. Thus, the world was divided into two portions, the international world where the European Public Law was adhered to and the non-international world, where the local polities and indigenous populations were neither expected to be protected by nor adhere to the system of European Public Law. Through this arrangement, the state was defined as a nation-state, as a territorial sovereign state equipped with a definite territory circumscribed by a national border, as well as a determinate population subjugated to the sovereignty of the modern state. Thanks to the European Public Law or the system of international law, the international world was shaped as a comity of nation-states each constituted as a territorial state sovereignty. Let us take the geographic index of Asia as an example. From antiquity, Asia was used to indicate land, inhabitants, and the vast space in the direction of east; it was an indexing device that objectally posited some domain or group of people in the direction of the east (literally “oriental”), outside the positionality of the onlooker. In this way, Asia signified an outside or some far place in the east, in contradistinction to “here” or what would be self-referenced in modern times as Europe (or later the West). From classical antiquity, the Romans called some people located in today’s Middle East “Orientals.” And the word “Asian” is said to have evolved from the Latin word “oriens.” People living along the Euphrates were called Asians. Then, as time passed, those along the Indus and the Ganges were included among the Asians, and Asia was further extended eastward to include Siam, Vietnam, the Middle State (China), the Korean peninsula, and eventually, the archipelago of Japan. The people located in the east of Europe were called “Asian,” for instance, by those onlookers situating themselves in the west of the Bosporus strait. But those living in Siam, the Qing dynasty, or the Tokugawa Shogunate never acknowledged they were “Asians” until the late nineteenth century because there was no need for the viewpoint of the

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onlookers in their self-recognition. But, in this process in which the Eurocentric bipolarity gained hegemonic dominance, those living in “Asia” began to accept the European perspective that they were “Asians.” In other words, the structure of what I called “civilisational transference” elsewhere was internalised by those who were classified into the Rest— Americas, Asia, Africa, and the other regions that are excluded from Europe—it was not only Europeans who looked at the world from a prestigious positionality, but also Asians, Africans, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and all the others in the Rest who referred to themselves from the viewpoint of the Europeans. Modernity can never be dissociated from this epistemic structure of Europe’s hegemony. In this binary constitution of the modern international world, European states were entitled to appropriate the land outside Europe which they managed to colonise. Unlike local polities and indigenous populations, the sovereign states of Europe believed they were entitled to engage in the various manoeuvres of colonial conquest and land appropriation. Sanctioned by European Public Law (initially the Treaty of Westphalia until the end of the eighteenth century) and, later, the system of international law (from the nineteenth century through the present), the modern international world was increasingly organised by a variety of socio-political and economic bipolar oppositions giving undue privileges to those associated with Europe while disadvantaging those not allied with it. This one-sidedness incorporated in these bipolarities served to incorporate a binary structure in the modern international world. This dynamism promoting the division of the world, generally called “modern colonialism,” has served to characterise the modern international world as an essentially Eurocentric one. This is one reason why modernity cannot be discussed without reference to modern colonialism. Of course, Solomon’s exploration begins from the recognition of the devastating role colonialism has played in the constitution of the modern international world and asks how the “colonial–imperial” legacies have been powerfully preserved in Pax Americana today. Consequently, modernity cannot be dissociated from this bipolar formation of the West and the Rest (or historically Europe and nonEurope), from a vision of the world based upon the colonial one-sided distribution of state sovereignty. This is why peoples and polities in nonEurope, except for a few special cases such as the kingdom of Siam and the Japanese Empire, could not constitute themselves as “nation-states,” as fully fledged members in the community of international sovereign states,

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until the end of World War II. And the vast majorities of territories outside Europe or in the non-West were registered as colonies subjugated to the suzerain sovereignties of the European, American, or Japanese states. As I hinted above, the binary division of the modern world was often associated with a new formula of human classification, a formula generally called “racism,” that emerged around the eighteenth century. The bipolarity was apprehended in selective, and most often arbitrary, references to a physiological, biological, economic, cultural, or social potentialities: one group of human individuals was allegedly capable of organising the sovereign states, nurturing progressive culture, and pursuing rational knowledge called “science,” whereas the rest of humanity was estimated to lack such potentialities. As the potentialities are best expressed by Edmund Husserl’s idiom, the “spiritual shape of Europe,”5 this bipolarity is most succinctly expressed by the contrast between humanitas and anthropos, between the form of “theoretical” rationality purportedly particular to European humanity and the general form of rationality to be found in humanity at large that is incapable of “theorising” itself in pursuit of knowledge. It is imperative to remember, however, that this polarity is never certified by experiential verification, and it can scarcely be accredited upon any factual observation. On the contrary, this binary design is a teleological requirement, never more than a kind of anticipatory pre-judgement or prejudice, by which a person is expected to aspire to the mission of European tradition, to fulfil norms for the European identity, so as to distinguish him or herself from such non-Europeans as the Indians and the Chinese. As soon as the essentialist norms of European or Western exceptionalism are discredited, we can see how the polarity of the West and the Rest has served as a significant part of the subjective technology of modernity, as an incentive for the subjective transformation of an agent in knowledge production. What underlies subjectivation in the discourse of the West and the Rest is that neither the West nor the Rest is empirically determinable, so that the very bipolarity must be asserted and reasserted repeatedly. Ultimately, it is a matter of faith; it is concerned with the norms that dictate one’s conviction. One can never be certain that one is European as a matter of fact. For those who somewhat wish to associate themselves with the West, it can never be manifest in its entirety; they are not able wholly and exhaustively to obtain their Western identity because it is impossible to eliminate the element of indecision, uncertainty, or insecurity in the identification with the West. In short, for individuals

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who wish to regard themselves as Westerners, the West exists only in the modality of anxiety. This is to say that the West is a symbolic expression of the existential anxiety that propels an individual to assert and reassert his or her European identity. Accordingly, identification with the West necessitates two types of prerequisites: the first, on the part of an individual, is a desire to perform according to certain norms so as to belong manifestly to the West, an investment in membership of the West. The second is a certain perlocutionary performance to show how different one is against some other who is distinctly not Western. For, it is only by one’s difference from nonEuropean humanity that one’s belonging to European humanity can be asserted, by the effect such performance brings to an interlocutor. Thus, identification with the West demands a transformative procedure whereby to distinguish oneself from the non-West. Only by subjugation to the regimen of bipolar discrimination, can an individual anticipate his or her Western identity, not in the present but in the mode of future anterior. It is quite possible to approach the bipolarity of modernity not merely from the side of the West but also from that of the Rest. I have so far discussed how the bipolarity of modernity dictates the processes of subjective transformation in knowledge production, only from the viewpoint of the West/Europe. Since that perspective would require an analysis of the “the civilisational transference,” I regret that I am not able to give a fuller picture of how this bipolarity of modernity affects us all, regardless of whether we identify with the West or the Rest, and how the biopolitics of subjectivation is not at all independent of the formation of the modern international world. Since readers will surely detect a detailed explication of the effects of this bipolarity on the Rest in Jon Douglas Solomon’s analyses in Spectral Transitions, I feel comfortable with limiting my presentation of the bipolarity of the West and the Rest as a subjective technology to the perspective of the West. Instead, I would prefer to use this space to ask, in what contexts or registers is the whole problematic of subjective technology addressed and analysed by the author? On the one hand, it is imperative not to forget that the bipolarity of the West and the Rest is ascertained only through a certain performance, one characterised by “schematism” (the practice of schema, image or figure). Here, schematism is used in its classical sense in modern transcendental philosophy; it means an application of a schema or schemata in conjunction with a normalised practice. I will elaborate on the issues

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of schematism later in reference to Solomon’s explication of translation, but let me tentatively assert this much: neither the West nor the Rest is given as a determinate being in the present. Since each of the bipolar terms is imagined or anticipated to be actualised in “the future anterior,” they both can only exist in the modality of potentiality when postulated in the present. They are no more than images, figures, or schemata in the progressive present; they are not yet actual in the performance of the progressive present. Only through a normalised practice under the guidance of certain schemata can they transit from the phase of image to that of reality, or pass from the stage of the figurative into that of the socially validated realitas. As an imaginary anticipation, both the West and the Rest lack what is conventionally referred to as “reality,” namely the sense of social actuality or of the state of things that is intersubjectively corroborated. But, such an imaginary anticipation can be ascertained and rendered “real” by an institutionalised performance of fulfilling certain norms. Whereas the West is no more than a figment of imagination when figuratively anticipated, it is rendered real or actual in “the future anterior” when its schema is put in practice and performed in a perlocutionary act so as to obtain others’ endorsement. In this sense, the identity of either the West or the Rest is brought about through perlocution, and its actualisation is feasible only in the future anterior (the future perfect tense). On the other hand, this bipolarity of modernity invites a speaking person, or more generally a performing agent, to position him or herself according to a set of norms. To be recognised as an authentic European, one must respond to certain demands, behave according to certain norms, and follow an expected pattern of behaviour. What Husserl covertly suggested by the idiom “spiritual shape of Europe”6 is nothing other than this set of norms, an assemblance of these demands, directions, and norms by virtue of which a person is not just a human being but a European personality who commits to the missions of European civilisation. What is indicated by Husserl’s obsessive stress on the European tradition is an urge to institute and re-institute the teleological dynamics of European civilisation, in terms of which the authentic identity of the European person becomes meaningful. He claims that a European is not merely somebody born, raised, and living in Europe. The European identity does not derive merely from the identification of an object; one does not recognise some object “over there” under a given category, thereby

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being identified in those classificatory terms in contradistinction to nonEuropean kinds. It is above all else a subjective anticipation, commitment, and action without which a person cannot be a European. For Europeans themselves, it is to transform themselves into a European person repeatedly. In this respect, it is a subjective transformation or subjectivation that must be instituted and re-instituted towards the future. A European must be different from the rest of humanity, and this very difference thanks to which the European identity is ascertained must be repeatedly instituted, so that this European identity cannot be actualised without teleological investment in “the anthropological difference.” Here, we cannot afford to overlook an important presumption: a successful actualisation is not always guaranteed in the process of the transition from anticipatory pre-judgement or prejudice to actualisation in the future anterior. Indeed, this transitional shift may well fail: one can wish to be European, but one can equally fail to actualise European humanity as potentiality. Precisely because this transition is a “transition,” it is an event from which the aleatory element cannot be entirely eliminated. This analysis of the bipolarity of modernity probably cannot serve as an adequate explication on how Solomon relates the concept of the transition to the modern regime of translation, but hopefully it is sufficient to outline the general direction of the author’s argument on issues concerning the modern regime of translation and what he calls the “schema of internationality.” 3. On Area Studies One of the links between the set of issues concerning the anthropological difference and another set of issues pertinent to postcoloniality can be found in the detailed analysis conducted by Jon Douglas Solomon on debates concerning what constitutes “the Taiwan Consensus.” Corresponding to the idiom “the Washington Consensus,” “the Taiwan Consensus” was coined in 2011 by Tsai Ing-wen, the chair of the Democratic Progressive Party in order to replace “the 1992 Consensus” and declare the absence of such a consensus over the issue of “One China” as the basis of negotiation between the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China. What characterises the Taiwan Consensus is, first of all, the denial of the existence of the consensus; secondly, the absence of the communal body—neither the nation who expresses their will in election,

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the parliamentary assembly where the collective will is voted for, nor even the vague notion of a people whose will is the ground for a consensus; finally, the need for consensus comes from the world market and concerns itself with the international industrial policy within the terms imposed by the Washington Consensus. Indeed, the Taiwan Consensus appears enigmatic. It is rather a transnational arrangement and one does not know why it has to take a modifier “Taiwan.” It has little to do with the ethnic or national community of Taiwan. Yet, as fil conducteur, it is an excellent metaphor for the area studies on Taiwan. Above all, it opens up our scope to the transnational constitution of the area of Taiwan. Of particular importance is that the study of Taiwan as an “area” has generally followed the epistemological format that is symptomatic of colonial–imperial modernity. In other words, Taiwan could be postulated as an object of academic inquiry, predominantly in the discourse of the West and the Rest, a discourse in which the subject and the object of knowing are assigned to a bipolar pair of positionalities, the West and the Rest, respectively. One feature that can hardly be disregarded whenever colonial–imperial modernity is at stake is found in the orientation of the epistemic gaze, a sense or direction of inquiry—generally characterised as “Orientalist”—from the scholar of the West towards whatever object to be found in the Rest. The presumption or precondition underlying this treatment of knowledge production is that, as long as a scholar wants to produce “universal” knowledge—universality implies “theory” also in Husserl’s formulation—that is claimed to be independent of, or not limited by, some particularity interests embedded in the context of the life world, he or she is supposed to occupy the positionality of the West/ Europe. It is presumed that the non-European population at large are not capable of producing knowledge that claims its truthfulness in the general ground. Astonishingly enough, something like Husserlian teleology was repeated in the disciplinary formation of area studies more than a decade after his death. In no way, however, could such a claim be ascertained on a factual basis, yet one must keep in mind that the presumption concerning the prescription of knowledge production is a pre-emptive presumption, an investment for prejudicial authentication that precedes the factual validation by experimental examination. This is why Husserl did not hesitate to argue, entirely on the basis of orientalist stereotyping or civilisational prejudice, that Indian or Chinese philosophers were not endowed

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with genuinely theoretical rationality.7 He somewhat insinuated that European humanity was endowed with more “universalistic” tendencies, whereas non-European societies lacked the “theoretical” capacity to produce knowledge beyond “particularistic” contexts in their mythical and practical world-views and world-knowledges. Thus, one might find the most elaborate version of modern bipolarity in knowledge production in Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.8 The bipolar constitution in knowledge production of the world was appealed to so as to justify preemptively the idea that only among European humanity is the genuinely “theoretical” attitude feasible; hence, it is totally misleading to call knowledge produced by the so-called philosophers of India or China “philosophy.” For Husserl, Indian or Chinese philosophy is nothing more than a typical misnomer. In a similar but much less conceptually sophisticated vein, the historical changes of societies can be dictated under the auspices of the bipolarity of modernity, in the so-called modernisation theory: the modernised societies of the West are bound to modernise much faster in comparison with some traditional societies of the Rest. Of course, modernisation theory could never present a conceptually rigorous and methodologically elaborate argument equal to that in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology; nevertheless, both were totally under the dictates of the bipolarity of modernity. Probably, this was the gist of the emotive and racist investment in “modernisation theory” propagated widely in the 1950s and 1960s. The popularity of “modernisation theory” and the idea of “development” newly introduced by the Truman administration were contemporaneous with the inauguration of area studies as a disciplinary formation at universities in the United States of America. It is worthwhile to bear in mind that the disciplinary formation of area studies is so named because its vocation is to study the Rest, the Rest being what remains after the West has been extracted from the world. From the outset, area studies is designed to take the Rest of the world as its object of study, as the objectal target of inquiry to be found outside the West, as an “area” that marks the circumscribed area in which exotic objects to be studied—population, culture, history, various institutions, and so forth—are to be located while those who study these objects are most often assumed to be Westerners, and assigned to its outside onto the side of the West. Even though it was proposed that Western Europe too would be treated as an area in

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the original plan of the program for area studies proposed by the Social Science Research Council, at no university in the United States did such area programs actually develop to include any study of West European societies or population in the late twentieth century.9 Today, one can recognise a fatal misapprehension in the term “universal” among the proponents of modernisation theory—the term “general” would be preferable—but “universality” was insisted upon in the place of “generality” in the early phases of area studies. This seems to reflect one aspect of the bipolarity of modernity, as can be seen in Husserl’s insistence upon the universalistic orientation in the European “theoretical” attitude, in contrast to the particularistic adherence to the mythical and practical world-view/world-knowledge of non-Europe.10 Once again, we must acknowledge that the very differentiation between the “universalist” orientation of the West and the particularistic tradition of the Rest is not based on factual observation. To reiterate, we must acknowledge that this differentiation derives from a conventional form of prejudicial presumption, a customary formula of desire, or an effect of perspectival distortion which Solomon summarily calls the “anthropological difference.”11 It is a form of epistemic investment or anticipation that is repeatedly asserted in the attempt to prove that the bipolar opposition of the West and the Rest is not only geopolitical, but also that this binary is based on the fundamental difference between the humankind of the West and that of the Rest. Furthermore, whereas the anthropological difference establishes a species difference between one kind of humanity and another, it articulates the West to the Rest hierarchically, with the West as a superior term—“universal”—in contrast to the Rest as an inferior term—“particular.” Even though the West and the Rest are expected to designate two contrasting poles, two subsistent entities external to one another, or two unambiguously marked spheres, they can be imagined to follow this bipolar configuration only as long as they are first differentiated. As a matter of fact, neither the West nor the Rest is given as an entity or substance that continues to exist by or in itself. It is only by virtue of an essentialising perlocutionary performance that either the West or the Rest can be regarded as a substance. Only in the eighteenth century, as Martin Bernal argued on the basis of extensive philological and hermeneutic research,12 was the very idea of European (classical) civilisation invented by the Romantics. And the classical civilisation of antiquity was further reified to constitute what is called “European civilisation” that was supposed to have endured for

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more than twenty-five centuries. As we mentioned earlier, the essentialisation of Europe was accompanied by the inauguration of racism as well as the invention of the historical linguistics of Indo-European languages. Of course, Husserl’s remarks about the European tradition wholeheartedly inherited the legacy of this eighteenth-century Romantic convention. Only in the eighteenth century, therefore, was the idea of Europe—or later the West—first attributed to the long tradition reaching back to Greco-Roman antiquity, as if Europe had continued to exist for more than two millennia. The geopolitical index of Europe thus mystified; it began to be treated as an independent substance. Yet, even today in the twenty-first century, some three hundred years later, Europe or the West serves as a typical case of polysemy, as a geopolitical, political, civilisational, military, or racial marker whose intelligibility is largely dependent upon how the difference between the West and the Rest, or between Europe and the rest of the world, is prescribed in each context. In view of the diversity and equivocalness of its polysemy and internal contradictions, I would like to use the West in the sense encompassing both Europe and the West, although admittedly Europe designates the western peninsula of the Euro-Asian continent while the West is much more elastic in its reference. Furthermore, as I have already discussed with regard to the anticipatory investment of the bipolarity of modernity, what must be repeatedly underlined is the overdetermined or excessively equivocal nature of either the West or Europe. Of course, the very distinction of the people of non-colour against the people of colour, a sort of corollary of the bipolarity of modernity, is no exception in this regard. It is one of the reasons why the bipolarity of the West and the Rest is quite often read as a somewhat racialised binary of the white (non-coloured) versus the coloured. As a result, nowadays, nobody in serious intellectual pursuit would try to determine conclusively what whiteness is, just as the attempt to determine a race in terms of an individual’s biological or physiological constitution, previously called “scientific racism,” is absurd. A number of corollaries follow from the differential, or discriminatory but unstable nature of the index Europe or the West. (1) The West is never identified without reference to its bipolar opposite, non-Europe, the rest of the world, or simply the Rest. The concrete presence of the West cannot be determined unless what is postulated as the polar opposite to the West, namely the Rest, is diacritically identified. (2) The identity of the West is necessarily ambiguous or equivocal as I have illustrated above. In this respect, so-called Orientalism is not merely an expression of the

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Westerner’s curiosity about exotic things about the Orient or an attempt to speak on behalf of the Orient, thereby silencing it. It is rather first and foremost intimately associated with the Westerner’s desire for the identity of the West. It is rendered identifiable, endowed with any quality or any common feature only when the Orient is determined in some contra-distinctive manner. Simply put, the Occident cannot exist unless the Orient is positively there. (3) The West is supposedly endowed with some feature, capacity or prerogative that makes it superior to the Rest. Accordingly, this differentiation or bordering practice is never performed on a horizontal plane; it is anticipated as a slope moving from the West down to the Rest. Accordingly, civilisational developmentalism or evolutionism is one inevitable consequence of anticipatory investment in the difference between the West and the Rest. (4) We can now see why this bipolar structuration of the modern world time and time again evokes “the anthropological difference,” some foundational distinction between European humanity and the rest of humankind. One form or another of the anthropological difference ought to exist between the human race of the West and those of the Rest. Yet, it cannot be found in factual knowledge; it cannot be proclaimed in the constative assertion. It must be invoked repeatedly and projected into the future. In short, one is urged to produce a perlocutionary effect of “the anthropological difference” on those interlocutors in imagination, those who are imagined to be in the Rest.13 From this brief observation, one can appreciate why “colonial–imperial modernity” cannot be neglected in the production of knowledge. The disciplinary formation of area studies was proposed in the late 1940s when it became evident that it would be extremely difficult to continue to legitimate colonial governance by the old colonial powers, and that some of those subjugated populations in colonies would no longer tolerate it. At the same time, it was not hard to foresee that the United States of America would be by far the most dominant power economically, politically, and militarily in the postwar world to come. In Spectral Transitions, Solomon does not focus on the history of Taiwan prior to the end of Japanese colonisation in 1945, mainly because his inquiry does not dissociate itself from the issues of knowledge production, or of area studies as a disciplinary formation in particular. Of course, academic knowledge on Taiwan was produced before the end of World War II, but what is of importance in the design of this book is the formation of postwar Taiwanese society which roughly coincided with the

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formation of area studies at American universities. In other words, the author’s inquisitive gaze refuses to be confined to the narrow target of an area or to be obligated to follow the conventions of disciplinary protocols in area studies. The author does not agree that his discussion on Taiwan must proceed within the domain defined by an area. For, the area of Taiwan is just like “the Taiwan consensus.” It is not organised around the core of some identifiable substance. He states unambiguously that, in a double sense of the word “area”—geographic enclosure on the one hand and institutionalised domain of specialised knowledge on the other—he keeps the “outside” of an area in view. Immediately what is rendered evident by such an approach is that the area of Taiwan sustains itself by deliberately overlooking the “outside” of an area, as well as of area studies as a disciplinary specialisation in academic knowledge production. Thereupon, the historical vicissitudes of the area studies on Taiwan are explored with a number of historical transitions, out of which there emerges a much more complex picture of Pax Americana during the first Cold War through to the second Cold war. The “outside” is overdetermined: it is impossible to postulate the single dimension of meta-language from which transcendental reflection can be undertaken. Relying upon Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx,14 the author explores the relationship between what is targeted as an object of knowledge and the spectral dynamism of the positionality of one or ones who know. By appealing to the notion of “visor effects,” Solomon seeks to avoid substantialising the “outside”: he does not postulate the platform of transcendental reflection from which the organisation of area in area studies can be critically inspected. What the logic of specters or the ghostly spirit advocated by Derrida allows is that the privileged postulation of transcendental subjectivity need not be called on for the sake of critical inspection; unlike modern critical philosophy, it is unnecessary to adhere to modern humanism in which the presumption of the transcendental ego serves to guarantee the very possibility of transcendental reflection. Hence, whereas he positions himself at the level of meta-language in the critical inspection of the “outside” of area studies, the outside never stays stable; as the critical focus shifts, the level of meta-language also shifts. As the specter turns, the visor effect changes. Yet, it is important to note that this reflective shift in the level of meta-language is not destined to follow the passage of dialectics. Although it traces the movement of specter or spirit, it does not adhere to the teleological history of the Hegelian spirit. Here, the distinction between the spectral spirit and the dialectic spirit is

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of decisive significance. By approaching the “outside” this way, Solomon tries to open up both an area and area studies to a variety of critical inspection. What concerns him is not merely the validity of empirical knowledge about Taiwan but also the epistemic and political conditions for historical knowledge. Thereupon, let me trace the trajectory of Spectral Transitions one more time. In some cases, Taiwan could be regarded as a part of the area of China, as a specialised genre within so-called Sinology. An area is an international unit, a geographic, political, and sociological unit with characteristics similar to those of a nation-state, but neither the settler colonial states of North America nor the former colonial suzerain states in Western Europe are included among areas. In short, an area is an equivalent to a nation-state in the Rest. Nevertheless, unlike the nation-state, it is much more amenable. As an area, the areas of China, Japan, and Russia exist, but the areas of Southeast Asia, Latin America, or Western Africa can also exist. Its territory can almost arbitrarily be defined independent to the will of the inhabitants of the area, since the unit of the area is determined for the sake of onlookers who want to know about its territory, population, and history from its “outside.” From the outset, the unit of the area is invented as a target of remote control. Whereas the area is in the disciplinary formation of area studies that adopts conventional protocols through which the nation-state constitutes its territory and population (= the national community), the institution of the national language has been taken as a proof of the presence of the nation in the modern international world. One of essential apparatuses by which the population inhabiting the territory of the sovereign state is identified as an integrated community is the national language. The national language is supposedly a powerful instrument by means of which the inhabitants of the national territory are gathered together to form a new and imaginary community called “the nation.” It is important to remember, however, that the idea of the national language is a recent invention—in the last few centuries even in Europe where the idea of the national language was probably first coined—and, in Africa and Asia, it is a new invention instituted in the process of modernisation/colonisation. Accordingly, in some regions in Africa, the idea of native and national language is no more than an artificial imposition by the colonial fantasy of the Europeans.15

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In the Rest, including Asia, the national language was deliberately invented as a measure of modernisation in order to urge the local population to fashion themselves in accordance with the protocols of the nation-state. For instance, in the late nineteenth century, the Japanese state rushed to create the Japanese language together with its universal system of national education to qualify as a modern nation-state. The universal language of the Chinese nation was an even more recent invention: indeed, the Chinese language as a national language did not exist until the twentieth century. The area studies inherits this protocol of the nation-state in the presumption that there must be a native language corresponding to the unit of an area, and an area is imagined after the model of the modern nation that co-exists with other nations according to the schema of internationality in the international world. As a result, included in the expertise of an area expert today is the knowledge of the language of an area. Unless a scholar is endowed with a near-native proficiency in the national/ethnic language of an area, he or she is not entitled to claim the status of an area expert.16 It may appear that Taiwan and China share so-called Mandarin, but it cannot be argued that they should be included in one single area. Thanks to other variables, Taiwan could be taken as a name for the national community of Taiwanese people, somewhat distinct from the national community of the People’s Republic of China. At the same time, as in the 1992 Consensus which the Taiwan Consensus attempted to deny, it can also be argued that there should eventually be one unified China. Interestingly enough, Spectral Transitions starts with the premise that there can be many registers of Taiwan; there can be many ways to identify Taiwan and narrate its vicissitudes since the end of World War II, a series of transitions that cannot be apprehended without reference to outside factors. In acknowledging the heterogeneous possibilities of Taiwan, Solomon analyses which identity of Taiwan was chosen by what party and how the determination of such an identity requires an elaborate strategy. This is to say that what guides him in this book is a project of critical inspection of Taiwan and its relations to its “outside.” What is immediately evident is that the identity of Taiwan was neither chosen by the old inhabitants of territorial Taiwan nor by those who were subjected to the state sovereignty of the Republic of China. National and popular sovereignty claims that the future of the nation must be decided by the “people.” While the American rhetoric of postcoloniality endorses such

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claims at least at a formal level, such rhetoric obviously must not be taken literally if one is to apprehend the role played by Pax Americana in the history of Taiwan. First of all, as soon as Japanese colonial rule ended, the agents who worked to create the various identities of Taiwan involved the Allied Powers under the leadership of the United States, the Nationalist Party of China, the Chinese Communist Party, Taiwanese intellectuals and activists, and many other groups. Clearly, the transitions in which Taiwan’s identity was at stake continued to happen after the early years of liberation. After the Nationalist Party of China was expelled from mainland China in 1949, many political and social changes took place in Taiwan with regard to its identities and the identification processes of the nation(s) of Taiwan. In other words, the different figures of Taiwan were constituted in historical and political processes. Undoubtedly, the most significant point in the history of Taiwan’s national history is the overwhelming presence of the United States; it is neither the Nationalist Party of China nor the Chinese Communist Party, but rather the global hegemony of the United States that continued to play the leading role in Taiwan’s transitions from the late 1940s through to the era of the second Cold War (from the middle of the 2010s up to the present). In order to give some comprehensible narrative about the transitions people in Taiwan have undergone in the last seventy-eight years, it is imperative to pay attention to multiple historical actors to avoid succumbing to the epistemological framework offered by area studies, a framework in which the unpredictable and aleatory nature of each transition is overlooked. Thus, the readers of this book are expected to encounter many different turns, shifts, and transitions from one topic to another, from one semantic register to another, and from one reflective moment to another: Spectral Transitions presents itself as an elaborate analysis comprising a composite of discontinuous transitions from one social context to another, or meta-linguistic reflections from one epistemic dimension to another, rather than a continuous story line. From the outset, Solomon insists that the history of Taiwan is an amalgam of histories, the different versions of which cannot be harmoniously accommodated in a single national history even though a certain orientation towards some totalising synthesis—although this orientation does not duplicate the movement of dialectic logic—is discerned. In due course, the narrative format of national history is under scrutiny throughout this work.

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Then, the author poses an overarching question about the history of Taiwan: is it appropriate to summarise the series of transitions that have taken place in Taiwan by means of a national history in which the nation progressively constitutes itself? Is it justifiable that, as a history of the nation, Taiwan’s nationalist history must be a story of liberation and democratisation? Jon Douglas Solomon’s answer is a definitive no. He demands his readers to be aware of the manifold and multi-dimensional diversity in the manner of identifying such areas as Taiwan with a variety of its referents, indices, communities, cultures, populations, and, above all, sovereignties. But, perhaps most urgently, he commends the readers to reflect upon how the area of Taiwan is postulated, how an expertise on Taiwan is expected, what positionality an area expert on Taiwan is to occupy, and what disciplinary arrangement is required as a general framework against which knowledge on Taiwan has been created. Despite his critical stance towards area studies by the conventional standard, however, he is professionally qualified as an area expert on Taiwan and/or China. As a matter of fact, Solomon is an exceptionally well-qualified specialist on China who routinely publishes in the standard Chinese and translates English and French publications into Chinese in both mainland China and Taiwan.17 As an autobiographical episode in one of his classes at university demonstrates, he urges readers and students not to accept the status quo of an area expert and area studies at large. It is in this context that his historical analysis of knowledge production proves itself indispensable in this book. 4. On Discontinuity and Bordering By now, it is evident that the problematic that guides Solomon’s argument in this book is entirely different from the conventional concern for nationalist narrative. Let us note that the narrative form of nationalist history is given with a sense of authenticity for the members of the national community, only within the framework of the modern international world; it can only claim its legitimacy there. A territorial nation-state cannot exist alone; its existence as a state sovereignty can be authenticated only in the comity of nations; it is, therefore, only in the co-presence of other nations—the co-presence of nations is represented or mapped by

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what Solomon calls “the schema of internationality”—that a nation-state constitutes itself co-figuratively together with other nation-states. Rather, what the author is committed to is the problematic of how to emancipate our imagination from the internationality of the modern world—not through a negation of the institutional presence of the nationstate itself but instead by problematising the “feeling of nationality” that permeates knowledge production in the humanities in national studies as well as in area studies, and thereby projecting an alternative image of the transnational community. What is strategically of decisive importance is the presumption of the nation as an enclosure. Unless one calls into question the schema of internationality in which plural nations are co-figured, as co-present but external to one another, the enclosure of the nation is never seriously undermined. The putative exclusivity of the nation and its essentialisation in terms of ethnicity and race do not arise in the internal formation of nationality; the decisive factor in the constitution of nationality is a bordering practice of expelling strangers/aliens from the inside of the nation; the identity of the national community would be impossible should the discrimination and exclusion of those coming from the outside be delegitimated; the society of sympathy, that is the essential feature of the community called “the nation” according to John Stuart Mill, would be totally inconceivable if its members are not allowed to cast their antipathy towards foreigners, those coming from outside the national territory. By suspending the nationalist conviction that requires all foreigners to be located beyond the national border, Solomon covertly refuses to essentialise nationality as something unavoidable; instead, he reverses the order of priority while never rejecting our struggle with colonial modernity.18 In other words, the nationalist narrative must first be recognised as a strategy by which to displace different practices of bordering; most often national history is appealed to so as to repress traumas caused by capitalist transitions. His reading of Detention illustrates how the displacement of neoliberal capitalist trauma is carried out in the nationalist narration of the historical change, from the anti-liberal dictatorship of the Nationalist Party of China to multi-party democracy. Simply put, nationality is a restricted derivative of internationality. And the guiding question in this book is how the foundational modality of sociality is delimited, regulated, and restricted by the rules of the international world. It is in this context that the author has to confront the issue of bordering in an implicit reference to translation.

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To problematise nationality is to discern how the nation is imagined— represented in terms of image, figure, or schema—against the backdrop of internationality. The priority of nationality is supported by the cofigurative representation of internationality. And this would be impossible unless some division or distinction is drawn between one nation and another, as a result of which one nation is represented spatially external to another. To call into question nationality in the international world, therefore, we must first problematise the figure of the border. It is in this context that the problematic of internationality is articulated to that of the modern regime of translation. Translation may take many different forms and follow a variety of protocols. But, just as the modern international world has been organised since the seventeenth century following the schema of internationality, the performance of translation is assumed to follow the communication model of messages transferred between one language and another. It is in the modern world of internationality that the national language began to be formed as an independent and unified entity juxtaposed to other national languages. Thus, the modern regime of translation which restricts and guides its performance according to the co-figurative image of languages became prominent as the modern international world emerged as the dominant vision of the globe. The very notion of the national or ethnic language—or la langue in French—is a specifically modern construct that used to be particular to Europe where the international world was formed perhaps for the first time in history.19 The schema or figure of a language—strictly speaking, it is not certain that language can be treated as a countable nominal, as either a language or languages—is substituted for the imagined totality of a language in the absence of any possibility to know or experience it in perception. The language in the sense of la langue is an imaginary construct just as the nation is, but the imagination operating in the schema or schemata of languages operates quite differently from that of a nation. Now, we can see that the distinction between le langage and la langue introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure was a sort of leap or fantastic solution to the problem concerning the individuality of language.20 According to the modern regime of translation, the source language and the target language—the language being translated from and the language being translated into—are clearly separated from one another, located external to one another. Crucial in this regard is the presupposition that two languages between which translation is carried out are

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distinguishable from one another. Each is presumed to be an independent unity. Accordingly, even though the world is composed of units of languages rather than those of peoples or nations, the world is imagined to be an international space in which national or ethnic languages co-exist external to each other. The entirely different image of the world projected by the modern regime of translation is somewhat assumed to be homologous to the world imagined by the schema of internationality, and these images of the world are supposed to mirror each other. In this regime of translation, a border is preliminarily postulated between one language and another. Primarily, the border is a matter of tropics as far as translation is concerned because the unity of a national or ethnic language as a schema is already accompanied by another one for the unity of a different language. Let us take note of an inherent disjunction here. While more than two languages are present at the same time according to the schema of internationality, languages in the modern regime of translation are always posited co-figuratively, that is, in a pair, two at a time. The schema of internationality postulates the synchronic copresence of plural languages, whereas the modern regime of translation posits the distinction or border practice that separates one language from another. Co-figurative schematism operates in the mode of the progressive present in time since it is a bordering practice. On the contrary, internationality is above all else a matter of synchrony, which means a presence of plurality that cannot be reduced to any present in the temporal transition of the past, the present, and the future. As Peter Osborne reminded us, the simultaneity indicated by synchrony is not in time.21 The modern regime of translation highlights the transitory and temporal performativity of translation, but there is no time or transition in internationality. This is why translation is represented co-figuratively in the modern regime of translation; the use of schemata, images, or figures in this regime must be characterised by “co-figurative schematism,” by a practice in terms of images, figures, or schemata. It follows that the individual unity of a language is possible only in the element of two in one; it is not other languages but another language in contrast to which the individual unity of this or that specific language is asserted. Only in the pairing of two, can a language be ascertained as an individual unity. In order for there to be many, one unity must first be distinguishable from another in the pairing. In the representation of translation, therefore, one language has to be clearly and visibly distinguished from another. The individual unity of language thus presupposes the postulation of a

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border in the tropics of translation. In contrast, the practical and temporal aspect of the co-presence of languages is entirely erased in the schema of internationality. Of course, the border cannot exist naturally in the socio-political world of internationality; physical markers such as a river, a mountain range, a wall, and even a line on the ground become a border only when made to dictate a certain pattern of social action. In this respect, a border is always human-made and assumes human sociality. Only when people react to one another does a border come into being. Even if a border separates, discriminates, or distances one group from another, people must be in some social relation for a border to serve as a marker or representation of separation, discrimination, or distance. For, separation or discrimination is nothing but a symptom of sociality. A border is posterior to social relations, which may well be comprised of an act of exclusion, discrimination, or rejection. At the beginning, there is an act of “bordering.” Only where people agree to “border” can we talk about a border as an institution. In this sense, an act of “bordering” always precedes the actuality of the border. Prior to bordering, it is impossible to conceptualise the national border. Thus, the national territory is indeterminate prior to “bordering.” Similarly in the world of linguistic internationality, it is impossible to determine a national language prior to “bordering,” even though the temporality of border practice is totally absent in the schematism or representation of internationality. What must be stressed here is that, viewed in terms of schematism or the practice of schemata, translation comes prior to the determination of language unities, although the act of translation is assumed to bridge the two languages presupposed beforehand. A radical reversal is under way: translation comes before the determination of the identity of the language unity. Conceptually, the relationship of languages must come before the unity of a language becomes comprehensible in isolation. Before the postulation of a national or ethnic language, there is translation, just as there is transnationality before nationality, as I have already suggested above. So far, I have deliberately avoided an explanation of what translation is as an event or as a procedure. I have evaded explaining translation in itself. Instead of attempting to answer the question “what is translation?”, I have only discussed how translation has been represented. This is indeed somewhat related to the truism that translation is recognised as necessary

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when we are at a loss, unable to comprehend what the interlocutor says or means to say, or do not know how to make ourselves understood. Almost without exception, the fables of translation, the most famous of which is indeed the Tower of Babel, retrace an incident or disaster of dis-communication and non-sense. What I pursue in my preliminary investigation of translation beyond the conventional domain of the linguistic is an appreciation for this elementary event or experience of non-sense, of what goes on beyond my comprehension, even though the concept of event or experience may well be inadequate to describe this happening of non-sense. Instead of a direct discussion of translation, I purposely begin my inquiry into translation by exploring how translation is represented. Non-sense is unrepresentable because it can hardly be experienced; non-sense cannot be registered as an incident of empirical datum. It cannot be represented since I, we, or one does not know what it is. Yet, it always designates a primordial locale of sociality, a starting point from which social relations are to be articulated. Let me tentatively define this locale of primordial sociality beyond representation in terms of “discontinuity.” Solomon offers an extraordinary attempt to integrate those insights concerning non-sense and discontinuity into his analyses of social changes. This is why our attempt to apprehend the dynamism of translation is closely affiliated with the new conception of historical time. Now, his conception of “transition” is synthesised with the modern regime of translation, a historically particular procedure by which translation is represented through the co-figurative schematism. At this stage, we must acknowledge that, in a critical examination of the modern regime of translation, the representability of translation has yet to be critically examined. Accordingly, the first moment to confront in our inquiry is how the very cause of translation, a happening of non-sense to which translation is supposedly a remedy, is represented, and how the incident of noncommunication is figured in the representation of translation. In the vast majority of cases, noncommunication is described as the presence of a gap or separation between one medium and another, one language and another, between two interlocutors. This is why the trope of bridging or filtration is so often appealed to in order to comprehend the workings of translation. Of course, two distinct media or two unities of languages are already presupposed in this mobilisation of the tropes of gap or filter.

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The second moment in this inquiry is concerned with the topic of comparison. It may be summarised as an occasion where we are obliged to compare. Generally speaking, comparison takes place because the determination of species difference is needed. But to discern certain political complexity in the notion of the determination of species difference, let me instead ponder what is often referred to as language difference, and indeed two distinct approaches to language difference. In the presence of a person who appears to be speaking, if I can understand neither what she wants nor what she is meaning to do, I am at a loss. At such a point, some explanation as to why I or we are at a loss is demanded: reasoning may well provide a schematic explanation about some generalised experience of incommensurability, and the most popular explanation for such an occasion is that of language difference. Allegedly she and I are different. Supposedly what she speaks is the Chinese language whereas what I speak is English. Both belong to the general class of languages, but we cannot make ourselves understood to one another because the Chinese language is different from English. Let me pause here momentarily since I do not think at all that the difference at stake in this instance can in due course be subsumed under the concept of species difference. What is at stake here is some difference, but it is not reducible to the conception of difference between Chinese as a particular language and English as another one, of difference that conforms to the conceptual economy of species and genus in the classical logic. The determination of the species difference is sometimes offered as a solution to the initial problem of our being at a loss, in response to the perplexity we come across in such a locale. Thus, language difference is supposed to give rise to a situation where we are forced to know why we are at a loss with one another. To perform translation is to respond to the demand of “being of community,” to acknowledge our fundamental sociality, that we are exposed to one another in our “being in common.” This is why language difference, if already preliminarily determined as species difference within the genus of languages, is a serious matter. Such an apprehension of what prompts the act of translation delimits the scope of understanding of such an event, prejudges the significance of the occurrence of non-sense, and pre-emptively confines the range of its social implications. Translation is above all else an event which is always characterised as a reaction to, a response to, or a repetition of, what precedes its enunciation; it always affirms that one is never alone, that one is

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primordially connected to others, one’s interlocutor(s); non-sense, misapprehension, or noncomprehension would never take place without “being in common” with others. It is one’s answer to what is beyond one’s apprehension, when not understanding another. Against the conventional assumption that our sociality is grounded in some primordial commonality, on our capacity to be immediately and instantaneously in a common sharing, translation reveals the fundamental inadequacy of such an apprehension of community. It is not by virtue of the communal sharing of the same language or culture that we are in common or are in the community. On the contrary, we are together in common precisely because we are capable of coming across non-sense, of acknowledging that we do not understand each other all the time. The fundamental mistake, manifest in how the individual unity of language is apprehended in the modern regime of translation, derives from the misapprehension that language difference causes our inability to share, to result in the absence of this communality. It leads to a misguided and essentialist image of community; it is because we share such commonality as national language, racial/ethnic heritage, or cultural tradition that we belong to the community. We presume, usually or normally, that normalcy consists of this unwarranted assumption, asserted repeatedly in the “homolingual address,” that people do understand each other unless disrupted by some abnormal obstacle or “language difference.” Implicitly assumed in the modern regime of translation is the thesis that the need for comparison occurs only when we are forced to become aware of different people, different beings that we are in the presence of. The encounter with cultural difference or discontinuity is thus immediately interpreted as an encounter with one type or another of species difference, that is, difference in continuity. The term “difference” becomes codified in this manner—“difference” in the classification formula of the Aristotelian logic of individual-species-genus —precisely because of this experience of “non-sense,” “being at a loss,” or “being unable to make sense of the occasion,” in short, of “being deprived of the world.” But the refusal to conceive of difference outside the logical comprehensibility of continuity persists. Because we are in the presence of others in discontinuity, the determination of it in terms of species difference becomes all the more urgent and even desperately important. Most often, we talk of this encounter with discontinuity in terms of the foreign, but it is significant that, initially, the foreign did not connote the outside or the external in a strictly spatial sense associated with national territory. Instead, it is

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used to indicate the presence of aliens or strangers; it was an outside for a given and familiar comprehensibility, an outside indicative of the nonsensical that evades the spatial alternative of either inside or outside. It was an outside, but it was not accommodated in the spatial register of the schema of internationality.22 The foreign acquires the status of the external or the outsider, mainly through the modus operandi of homolingual address, through an assumption that we are inside the common element—language, culture, or nationality—represented as an “inside,” spatially delimited by borders. Only when the being-in-common is represented by a spatial figure of enclosure does the foreign gain the trope of the external to, or, the outside of the domain or domesticity or familiarity.23 Yet, it is important to note that discontinuity is something incommensurate with the logic of location in a spatial economy; the encounter of non-sense has to be said to be discontinuous precisely because its location cannot be identified in the continuous expanse of space. For, at this stage, discontinuity is what cannot be represented as a relationship between one point and another within a smooth continuous space. It is not because some person or people are different —in the sense of species difference—from me or us, that we are at a loss. On the contrary, it is because we are at a loss or unable to make sense in the first place that we attempt to determine this encounter with difference, of a different kind to what is representable in the logical economy of species and genus. Are we to overlook the very difference between the one in the sense of “non-sense” or “being at a loss” and the species difference already codified by the logical economy of species and genus ? In the context of our discussion of language difference, I would like to introduce this conceptual ambiguity of the individual into my understanding of the locale of comparison, of a place where we are articulated to one another in ways that I have called “heterolingual,”24 in contrast to the homolingual address. It is with regard to these problematics concerning cultural difference that we must task ourselves with a reversal of the conventional comprehension of translation that depends on the trope of translation as a bridging between two separate languages or a transferring of a meaning between them. In this regard, I fully agree with Solomon; his inquiry here takes the form of a discursive analysis beyond the domain of the linguistic. Even though he appeals to the way translation is represented, his discussion is not confined to the realm of linguistics at all.

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Accordingly, his analysis of knowledge production on Taiwan involves the questions of figuration, schematism, mapping, cartographic representation, and the institution of strategic positions. In the conventional understanding of translation—dictated by the schematism of cofiguration—the separation of two languages or the border between them is already presupposed. The economy of the international world thus excludes the potentiality of “heterolingual address” from the outset. 5. On Transition/Translation When we are to engage in a critical and reflective attitude towards the disciplinary formation of area studies, initially we cannot avoid taking a negative approach. First, we must disclose what is displaced and overlooked in the production of knowledge in area studies. Rather than accepting the institutionally imposed conditions of its epistemology, we must be concerned with the historicity of knowledge production. What Solomon puts forth is historicity as transition; it is an aleatory action to respond to a traumatic change, which most often presents itself as non-sense in history. What is at stake is how this transition should be conceptualised when the discontinuity inherent in transition and change is repressed, overlooked, and neutralised. He tries to disclose indeterminate or uncertain moments in history. Above all else, Taiwan is a political collectivity that exists as a social imaginary. In assuming Taiwan to be a referent independent of the complexity that arises from the fact that it is involved in a number of contexts or registers, we would be totally blind to a certain “visor” effect into the description/appreciation of Taiwan. Ironically enough, one would be subjugated to its “visor” effects by being blind to the dynamics of spectrality. The knowledge formation in area studies cannot evade this particular epistemic economy, and the author of Spectral Transitions appeals to the notion of this “visor” effect as a conducting thread to appreciate the positionality, that is made visible, of one who sees, observes, and objectifies the object(s) in the disciplinary formation generally designated as “area studies.” As long as the disciplinary arrangement of area studies is not problematised, we are not obliged to pay particular attention to the problematic of multi-contextuality or multi-dimensionality. Instead, Solomon tries to trace the specter of Marx.

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What he endeavours to do in this book is to thematically draw readers’ attention to the effects of this epistemic “visor.” Thus, the strategy the author adopts is to make visible the multiple registers which the West operates in. But, we cannot be completely free from visor effects. What is made obvious is that this reflective process of critical examination of the conditions of possibility for knowledge does not follow the design of transcendental criticism or the teleology of dialectics. Obviously, Solomon is not content with the reflective critique of conventional knowledge on Taiwan. Yet, neither does he abandon a reflection on the discipline of area studies or a critical analysis of the apparatus of area. What he seeks is a more synthetic approach to the post-World War II formation of what is conventionally referred to as “area studies” on Taiwan—on China, Japan, and other areas as such—and as area studies in general. In order to reflect critically upon the institutionalised operation of academic knowledge production—Taiwan in this case—one must introduce the positionality of an epistemic subject who postulates such an operation. Yet, no guarantee exists that such an object can be determined in just one context or dimension. What is discussed in terms of “the visor effect” concerns the very epistemic arrangement by which the positionality of the area expert is postulated as if independent of the putative object. Thanks to this “visor effect,” the area expert is allowed to locate him or herself aerially, or somewhat above or away from the object. So-called aerial “area studies” belongs to a historically specific discourse of knowledge production in which the expert is assigned to the positionality of an area expert, a positionality outside, above or “aerially” over the putative object of an area. Even if the area expert is not able to locate him or herself geographically outside the area, he or she is allowed to locate herself or himself epistemologically outside, above, or over it. And the very apparatus of an area allows for this postulation of epistemic positionalities in the discourse of area studies. In order to break away from such an institution of “aerial knowledge,” Solomon turns to the topic of “transition.” Above all else, what is symbolised by “transition” is the absence of an institutionalised stability of the positions or states to be occupied by people. Transition indicates a sudden disruption rather than a gradual change. And, it is best exemplified by the practice of translation. But, it is appropriated in the modern regime of translation which interprets the event of translation according to the model of communication and

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denies the discontinuous nature of the event of translation. The conventional notion of translation thus apprehends the act of translation as a transfer of an already determined message from one language to another, as though both the language translating from and the language translating into were already determined as individual entities just as the message to be transferred was also predetermined prior to the action of translation. In his ingenuity, Jon Douglas Solomon sees that an analysis of translation revolutionises our basic apprehension of history and historical time. What is totally overlooked in the conventional conception of “transition” is the moment of historicity: the event is represented as a process of recovery, as a gradual change whose before and after are securely linked by the common element of the sameness of the message to be transferred. The concept of “transition,” as the author emphasises throughout Spectral Transitions, differs from the conventional notion attributed to the term by appealing to a different sense of temporality that cannot be accommodated in the modality of “continuity.” Solomon pays meticulous attention to the intricate articulation of the transition to the other aspect of social transformation. In due course, Spectral Transitions is filled with striking descriptions and explications of historical changes related to the disciplinary formation of area studies under Pax Americana. The transition is closely affiliated with his comprehension of capitalism and chiefly signifies the social mobility in the service of the capacity of capital to erase the first kind of transitions given rise to by people’s “being in common” and to reconstitute them according to the logic of speciation. What is suggested by “speciation” is very broad in its scope; it addresses the general topic of “identity,” but is not limited to the sphere of an individual’s self-identification. It is the logical procedure of classification in terms of the general scheme of individual-species-genus, the hierarchical classifying formula by which things in the world are individuated and systematically grouped in species and then genera. Thanks to this, it used to be believed that each creature in the world had an identity within the total order of the creationist universe. Perhaps the best example of the systematic categorisation of things in the world can be found in Systema Naturae invented by Carl Linnaeus. Of course, the bipolarity of modernity is closely associated with the classificatory operation of speciation. Neither is the dynamics of speciation a transhistorical providence that humanity cannot evade. It is not even a remnant of the past like the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of

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China, or cathedrals in Europe, that still exist today simply because they have not been destroyed. Certain features of the bipolarity of modernity are still existent, because they have been revived and resurrected. They were actively rescued at the moments of “translations” and have culminated into a modern “worlding,” the facticity of our being-in-the-world, the most recent manifestations of which are observable in Pax Americana. As we have seen above, the bipolarity of modernity can be detected in so many contexts—political, racial, cultural, epistemic, economic, and so on—in the modern international world, yet, without reference to capitalism, we cannot fully appreciate how the world has been penetrated by this colonial–imperial modernity of Eurocentricity. Solomon believes that there have been moments of “transitions” at which the workings of capitalism could have been disrupted or challenged. He refuses to stay passive towards this and never hides his Marxian conviction. In order to appreciate the continuing presence of Pax Americana and the “imperial–colonial” remnants of modernity, Solomon insists, we must first understand those moments of “transitions” when capitalism was reformed for the sake of its survival, or the bipolarity of modernity was reformulated so as to sustain the Eurocentric structure of the international world. It is fairly well known that, in 1950, five years after the demise of the National Socialist Government in Germany, Carl Schmitt, one of the most brilliant Nazi ideologues who sought the legitimacy of the Hitlerian regime in the survival of European civilisation, argued for the global hegemony of the United States. After many transformations of the Western Hemisphere, he came to realise that the American impulse was directed at a representative of European civilisation and European international law.25 In short, Schmitt held that the torch of Eurocentricity was handed over from German National Socialism to the emerging Pax Americana. The continuous legacy of European civilisation was an antidote to a transitional disruption of World War II by which the classical supremacy of European humanity was seriously discredited. For him too, the end of World War II marked another transition at which the bipolarity of modernity could have been undermined. According to Solomon, this trans-Atlantic transition can be further supported by the historical description of Dullesism—a reference to the brothers, John Foster Dulles (1888–1959) and Allen Dulles (1893–1969). Eurocentric bipolarity was coordinated with antiblack/ anticommunist endeavours in the early twentieth century. Starting with

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a behind-the-scene efforts to prevent the Racial Equality Proposal by the Japanese Government at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference from being signed into the Treaty of Versailles—both John Dulles and Allen Dulles were involved in the Paris Peace Conference, John as the U. S. legal counsel and Allen as one of the delegates—the Dulles brothers actively worked for the sustenance of the white prerogative in the international politics. As is described in Spectral Transitions, they supported Hitler’s efforts for German rearmament throughout the 1930s in a sustained attempt to prevent the racial distinction of the West and the Rest from collapsing. In this respect, their long-term vision was not much different from Carl Schmitt’s. After World War II, John Dulles held the position of the Secretary of State (1953–59) under Eisenhower, and Allen Dulles was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1953–61). The Dulles brothers contributed much to the creation of the institutional conditions for the global hegemony of the United States of America during the period of the first Cold War. While John Dulles organised the systems of collective security by reformatting international law in Western Europe and East Asia—we have already touched upon the redefinition of the concept of state sovereignty—Allen Dulles was involved in the Central Intelligence Agency which was often in charge of regime change in countries such as Iran, Japan, and Guatemala. As the author describes extensively, the role played by the Dulles brothers was instrumental in the shaping of Pax Americana in the first Cold War period as well as the formation of area studies: they rehabilitated Nazi and fascist war criminals, not only in the domestic institutions of the United States, but also in such countries as Japan and South Korea in East Asia. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party which was established in 1955 is a good example. Already during the war, United States policymakers, some of whom were regarded as the founding fathers of area studies on Northeast Asia, advocated not charging Emperor Hirohito of Japan with war crimes; the CIA deliberately pardoned other war criminals such as Nobusuke Kishi, Ryôichi Sasakawa, and Yoshio Kodama, all of whom were imprisoned in the Sugamo War Criminal Prison in Tokyo at the time, and it of course intimidated those war criminal conservatives to collaborate with the US occupation of East Asia, to work in anticommunist campaigns and for American interests. Kishi worked as the minister of Great East Asia in the Hideki Tôjô administration during the war, but in the late 1950s, he became prime minister. Sasagawa and Kodama became a sort of eminence grise figures in Japanese national politics after

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World War II. The recent Prime Minister Shinzô Abe, who was assassinated for his connections to the Unification Church, was a grandson of Nobusuke Kishi. The lasting legacies of the Dulles brothers are still visible in the conservative and pro-American politics of Japan even today. Similar regime change manoeuvers had been carried out in other countries in East Asia. This is part and parcel of the regime of “postcoloniality” promoted by the Dulles brothers. No doubt, Pax Americana was shaped to a great extent by them. So far, I have offered a very rough sketch of the main points of Solomon’s argument in Spectral Transitions. The overwhelming impression a reader would probably have after reading this book, however, is that his argument is backed up by detailed descriptions of historical links that articulate the global strategies exercised in Pax Americana. In addition to the already mentioned topics, I would like to add the following: (a) the emergence of area studies as a disciplinary formation in American universities. (b) The various operations of worldwide institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the US Department of Treasury, operating under the covert reign of the United States, which will later be summarised in global mass media by “the Washington Consensus.” (c) The post-World War II system of international politics of “postcoloniality” that was in fact closely coordinated with the politics of anticommunism and antiblackness inherent in Pax Americana. The historical analysis presented in this book will persuade most readers that all these contexts referred to are, as a matter of fact, relevant to the topic of Taiwan. Taiwan was a nodal point through which the American global policy of anticommunist repression has been consistently pursued since the end of World War II. At the same time, given the bipolarity of modernity, this anticommunist incentive could never be divorced from the pervasive reality of antiblackness in the domestic spheres of the United States of America as well as third world countries. This is why Solomon started his critical examination of how the series of transitions had been represented, narrated in history, and responded to so as to highlight the posture of anticolonialism—in the gesture of postcoloniality—promoted by the human rights discourse put forward by the United States foreign policies, while downplaying the antiblack or white-supremacist implications in the international as well as domestic policies promoted in Pax Americana.

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In the historical narration highlighted in Detention, one observed that certain variables were stressed. The variable most frequently emphasised is the drastic change that must have occurred in the transition from the political system under infamous martial law (1949 through 1987), initiated by the Nationalist Party of China, to the parliamentary democracy. Thus, another variable that is persistently stressed is the continuous existence of the national community of Taiwan that is supposed to have undergone the historical transformations to the multi-party democracy from the dictatorship of the Nationalist Party of China under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo. It is the main variable in terms of which the historical transition of Taiwanese society is defined, at the expense of many other variables, such as the colonial governmentality exercised by the United States not only over Taiwan, but also over other countries in Northeast Asia such as South Korea, Japan, South Vietnam, and the Philippines. Very often in places like Taiwan and South Korea, these transitions affiliated with neoliberal capitalism were described as joyful developments—the East Asian economic miracle—as if it were unanimously welcomed by all members of the society. For instance, however, one of the most important markers of social and political change that took place in Taiwan has been deliberately neglected: many people were forced to give up their old ways of living due to drastic transitions in many sites in the society; they were forced to adjust themselves to the new arrangement of social hierarchy and forms of discrimination. Did neoliberal capitalism destroy or transform some institutions upon which much of the population used to rely? Were those transitions accompanying the penetration of neoliberal capitalism perceived as traumatic by many? Was it not simply a phenomenon limited to Northeast Asia, but instead closely affiliated with some fundamental transformations happening in global capitalism? By re-conceptualising the term “transition,” Jon Douglas Solomon introduces a novel approach to history. After all, however, the writing of history is always a historical performance, itself a response to a “transition.”’ In this respect, he attempts to return to the originary significance of ‘transition,’ to invoke a repetition of the enunciation of historical translation. Undoubtedly, it is in this sense that Spectral Transitions: the Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana constitutes an opening to a new type of history writing.

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I am, indeed, honoured to have been given the opportunity to write a preface to the emergence of a new genre of writing history. Naoki Sakai Professor Emeritus Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA

Notes 1. Under Chiang Kai-shek’s rule, October 25 was celebrated every year on the grounds that Taiwan was officially returned to the Republic of China on that day. Today, however, that date’s historical significance is in dispute. The Taiwan Independence Party, for example, does not accept such an interpretation of Taiwan’s sovereignty. 2. For a more detailed discussion on “civilizational transference,” see my article, “Area Studies and Civilizational Transference” in Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization, eds. Peter Button, Jon Douglas Solomon and Naoki Sakai, Routledge, forthcoming. Or in Chinese, 酒 井直樹著, ,《日語学習与研究》 第5期, 222号 (‘Area Studies and Civilizational Transference,’ Junliang Huang trans., in Japanese Language Learning and Study, no. 5, vol. 222, 2022). 3. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other—How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. 4. In the English language, the duality or internal dislocation of racial recognition is expressed very well. Humanity is divided into two major types, those marked as coloured people and those of whom colour is not predicated. On the one hand, humanity is classified according to their physical appearance (symbolically summarised in terms of colour), along the spectrum of colours, in the logical formula of individual-species-genus. This is what Solomon calls “speciation,” which is one of the fundamental features of the modern world. On the other hand, racism operates in a register different from that of “speciation,” which operates in the dichotomy of invisibility (non-colored) and visibility (colored) and in which those who recognise others’ racial identity are somewhat transcendent beyond colour recognition. Are they invisible or transparent, so that they do not belong to the coloured people group? Space is limited here, so I do not explore the implications of this second dimension in the epistemology of racism. 5. See my reading of Husserl’s Eurocentrism in The End of Pax Americana— the Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2022: 91–128.

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6. Edmund Husserl, in the Vienna Lecture entitled ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity’ p. 274, among appendixes to The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 7. After asserting that European civilisation has continued to inherit a worldview and world-knowledge peculiar to the European humanity from the Greeks in antiquity, Edmund Husserl argues, “ … only in the Greeks do we have a universal (“cosmological”) life-interest in the essentially new form of a purely “theoretical” attitude, and this as a communal form in which this interest works itself out for internal reasons, being the corresponding, essentially new [community] of philosophers, of scientists (mathematicians, astronomers, etc.)” (p. 280). He also insists, “ … it is a mistake, a falsification of their sense [concerning the mythical and practical world-view and world-knowledge], for those raised in the scientific ways of thinking created in Greece and developed in the modern period to speak of Indian and Chinese philosophy, and science (astronomy. mathematics), i.e., to interpret India, Babylonia, China, in a European way” (pp. 284–285). In the Vienna Lecture, op cit. 8. See my reading of Husserl’s Eurocentrism in The End of Pax Americana— the Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism, op cit. 9. Vicente L. Rafael, ‘The Culture of Area Studies in the United States,’ in Social Text, no. 41 (Winter, 1994), pp. 91–111. 10. The use of the term “universal” by Husserl cannot be simply dismissed as a miscomprehension of universality. Unlike the followers of modernisation theory, Husserl was very much concerned with the status of philosophy as a universal orientation in theoretical rationality. At the same time, in adhering to the Romantic essentialisation of European civilisation and its tradition, he committed the same mistake as modernisation theorists. 11. We used the term “anthropological difference” for the first time in our introduction to Traces vol. 4. See Jon Douglas Solomon and Naoki Sakai, “Addressing the Multitude of Foreigners, Echoing Foucault”, Translation, Biopolitics and Colonial Difference, Traces vol. 4 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University, 2005), 1–35, republished in a revised version in Naoki Sakai, The End of Pax Americana (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 159–182. Solomon has elaborated on the concept extensively throughout his writings since the first decade of the new millennium. In “Another European Crisis? Myth, translation and the apparatus of area” (https://transversal.at/transversal/0613/solomon/en?hl= SOLOMON), he explains, for instance, both the original meaning of the term as used by Étienne Balibar and the conceptual modifications he, Solomon, would choose to make. 12. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

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13. The role assigned to the imaginary philosophers from India and China in Husserl’s The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology (op cit) is interesting. It is highly unlikely that he actually knew cases of Indian or Chinese philosophers who could not carry out rigorous and theoretical examination of what is conducted in one’s transcendental reflection. On the other hand, it is known that he taught many Japanese students who attended his courses at Freiburg from the late 1920s until his retirement. But did he not notice that the Japanese were incapable of the sort of transcendental critique required in “the spiritual shape of Europe”? What his reference to Indian and Chinese philosophers indicates is the stereotypical prejudice (in the sense of preliminary judgement) inherent in the very structure of the bipolarity of modernity to which Husserl wholeheartedly subjugated himself. 14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge, 1994. 15. I rely upon a brilliant work to which I was introduced by Jon Douglas Solomon: Cécile Canut, Provincialiser la langue, Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2021. 16. As a matter of fact, there are many area experts who are not at all fluent in the so-called national languages of their areas. What has to be problematised in this regard is not how many of area experts are actually fluent in the native national language but whether not the so-called native speakers of the area are in fact fluent in the language of the area. What is at stake is the very existence of what is called the national language. 17. It is worth noting in this context that Jon Douglas Solomon publishes regularly in Chinese under the name 蘇哲安 (Su Zhean), without the aid of second-party translation. Some of his more notable original publications in Chinese include the monograph,《香港反送中運動左翼敗北 的系譜: 翻譯、轉型與邊界》[A Genealogy of the Defeat of the Left: Translation, Transition, and Bordering in the Hong Kong anti-ELAB Movement]. Taipei: Tonsan Publications, 2022; a lengthy article on the Sunflower Movement of 2014, (An Analogical Translation of the Sunflower Movement: Between the Logistical Coup in the Global State and the Creation of the Commons),《文化研究》 第23期, 2016年, 台北, 頁79–117; a critical response to Alain Brossat’s account of Foucault’s relation to China,《錯開的翻譯: 評布洛薩的認同倫理及其現象學式的「地緣 哲學」》(“The Missed Translation: A critique of Alain Brossat’s ethics of identity and phenomenological ‘geophilosophy’”), 劉紀蕙編,《錯開的交 會: 傅柯與中國》 , 新竹: 國立交通大學出版社, 2019年, 頁117–136; and a Chinese translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, “La communauté désœuvrée” (Aléa 4 [1983] included in the collection of essays translated into

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18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

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English under the title, The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, 1991),《解構共同體》 ,臺 北: 桂冠, 2003年. In addition to these original works written directly in Chinese (the above is not an exhaustive list), Solomon’s publications also include numerous other articles translated by second-party translators into Chinese. One of the drawbacks in anticolonial nationalism lies in the presumption that colonised people cannot reject colonial subjugation unless they form an exclusive community of a nation themselves. Many blindly accepting the premises of anticolonial nationalism are convinced that, without internalising the schematic representation of the territorial national community offered by the system of international law, one cannot be independent or free of colonial subjectivation. This is one of the reasons why Japan, for example, became an imperialist colonising nation by internalising what was demanded to become a fully-fledged national state, so as to evade being colonised by the Euro-American colonial powers in the late nineteenth century. See Cécile Canut, Provincialiser la langue, op cit. Since Ferdinand de Saussure did not keep his lecture notes on his Course in General Linguistics, I have to rely upon notebooks taken by students attending his lectures. There are at least two versions available today. I chose Troisième cours de linguistique générale (1910–1911): d’après les cahiers d’Emile Constantin, ed. Eisuke Komatsu, trans. Roy Harris into English, Oxford: Pergon Press, 1992, rather than Cours de Linguistique Générale, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, Paris: Éditions Payot, 1972, translated into English by Roy Harris, Chicago: Open Court, 1983. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time, London: Verso, 1995, 27–29. We must attribute the thought of an “outside” neither inside nor outside in the space of commensurability or conceptual determination to Maurice Blanchot’s monumental work The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock, Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Indeed, I owe much to Michel Foucault’s essay on Blanchot. La pensée du dehors, Paris: Fata morgana, 1986. In regard to the concepts of being-in-common, communication and communion, I owe much to Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “La communauté désœuvrée” in Aléa 4 (1983): 11–49. Translated into English in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 1–42. Incidentally, Jon Douglas Solomon has translated this essay into Chinese; see note 11 above. Also important is Nancy’s essay “De l’être-en-commun” in La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 2004), 199–234.

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24. For the term “heterolingual,” see my Translation and Subjectivity—On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism, op cit. 25. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth—In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulman, New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006: 281–294.

Acknowledgements

I would have never started writing this book without the help and encouragement of Briankle Chang. Briankle’s generous invitation to join him in co-editing a special issue of Open Cultural Studies about Taiwan is what provided me with the inspiration to begin writing. Along the way, I received much needed criticism and helpful counsel from Peter Button, Naoki Sakai, Boris Buden, Sarah Mekdjian, Myriam Suchet, Lucia Quaquarelli, Joyce Liu, Shu-fen Lin, Ned Rossiter, Brett Neilson, Amie Parry, Flair Donglai Shi, Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado, Saša Hrnjez, Gavin Walker, Boris Voyer, and many others in Taiwan whose names will have to remain anonymous. A generous invitation to spend a semester guest lecturing at the Institute of Social Research and Culture Studies, National Chiao Tung University, in the fall of 2018 helped me to catch up with trends in Taiwan. An invitation to present ideas on the Taiwanese underground from my former colleague at the National Taipei University of the Arts, Kuo Chao-lan, gave me a precious chance to receive feedback. Alain Brossat published an earlier version of the section on anti-centrism studies on his blog about Taiwan, Invisible Armada. The section titled “The outside” is taken from a long article, titled “Wynter is Coming: Black Communism, Translation, and Technics,” commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin for the 2022 exhibition Ceremony curated by Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Denise Ryner, Claire Tancons, and Zairong Xiang. The section is reprinted here with permission. The final three sections in Chapter Six were originally published

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as part of my contribution to the long Introduction to Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana (Routledge 2023), co-authored by Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, and Peter Button. This material has been republished here with permission from the publisher. When I began writing, I never planned for it to be a book. Originally conceived as an article for publication in Open Cultural Studies (De Gruyter), the work kept growing while bearing the mark of its original destination in the form of British spelling and the strict avoidance of footnotes. Personally, I love footnotes—both the reading and the writing of them. The peculiar discipline of avoiding footnotes in a book-length scholarly work has, I hope, resulted in a narrative that is perhaps more readable than might have otherwise been the case, at the expense of parenthetical distractions and inevitable superficiality. To accommodate the publisher’s request, the title of the final book-length manuscript has been modified, with Spectral Transitions being consigned to the position of subtitle. The manuscript version on which Naoki Sakai based his foreword was composed with the original title in mind, hence Sakai’s reference to the work as Spectral Transitions. Written largely on the weekends on stolen time in between other duties, the text mushroomed until it became apparent that the material would need to be reorganised into a book format. Despite the veneer of completion lent by the format, the work is incomplete and flawed. The seriousness of the geopolitical situation, a sense of duty to the friends and family living in Taiwan, and the gratitude to the many people in Taiwan who welcomed me and helped me during the two decades of total accumulated time during which I lived in Taiwan from 1982 to 2011 (a period during which I never doubted that Taiwan was my permanent home, a place where I chose to live not as an “expat” but rather as an immigrant member of Taiwanese society), all served as motivations pushing me to devote every bit of precious time available to present an argument that would be as well researched and thoughtful as possible within the constraints imposed on me: no sabbatical, no time off, no access to a research library, etc … It might be helpful to readers if I were to briefly describe my intellectual and personal itinerary. I spent a huge amount of my own resources early in my career to learn to exit the West without entering another parallel area that would prolong in a negative fashion the fantasy of the West. I forced myself, even at the cost of going downwards in the

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ranking tables and pay scales, to work professionally with and in Chinese language, actively, not just passively, writing, teaching, applying for grants, socialising in Chinese, yet without ever ethnicising Taiwanese/Chinese or creating Taiwan/China as an isolated refuge, refusing to engage in ideas and events nominally unrelated to Taiwan or China. I consciously chose to leave a tenure track position in a top 30 global ranked university to pursue my career in an admittedly insouciant yet intensely engaged way that would marry an intervention into what are still today the extremely asymmetric social relations around translational and linguistic labour that characterise international knowledge production about China (not to mention the glaringly obvious class and racial exclusions that mark the field) to an elaborate intellectual critique of bordering processes in the composition of knowledge. Working in Taiwan, I did not position myself either linguistically as an expatriate (teaching/writing/working/ socialising in English) nor start wearing traditional clothes to adopt a “native” identity. From the outset, I worked to incorporate a critique of area studies and the modern regime of translation into the heart of my intellectual project and my personal practice. Despite the precociousness of my decolonial exit from the West and a refusal to pursue the typical bourgeois academic career path, however, it still took me a great deal of time and effort before I could even begin to have an inkling of how anticommunism and antiblackness had been inscribed in my own intellectual formation. Even though some of my friends in Taiwan will not understand why I would have arrived at the positions elaborated in this book, I believe that none of them would ever doubt my claims to Taiwan and Taiwan’s claims upon me. They are the people who, by virtue of their own myriad forms of marginality, inventiveness, and errancy, made those claims possible in the first place, giving me a chance during the accumulated twenty-plus years I lived in Taiwan from 1982 to 2011 to define my own sense of a culturally errant Taiwaneseness beyond the limits permitted by the modern regime of translation. Sadly, amidst the rear-guard actions to preserve Pax Americana, Taiwanese identities have been weaponised today even more—and in more extreme ways—than they had been by the previous experience of European, Japanese, and Chinese colonialisms. Many of the ideas that went into this book were first developed in the critique of the Hong Kong Protest Movement that I published in Chinese in 2022, titled Genealogy of the Defeat of the Left: Translation, Transition, and Bordering in Hong Kong (Fansongzhong zuoyi baibei de xipu: fanyi,

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zhuanxing yu huajie). That book was supported by a publication grant from the Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires et Multilingues at the Université Paris Nanterre, for which I am enduringly grateful. A note on Romanisation: throughout this book, I use the spellings given in the “Cast” section of the Wikipedia entry for characters in Detention; observe spelling conventions preferred by historical persons (e.g. Chiang Kai-shek), groups (e.g. KMT for the Chinese Nationalist Party or zhongguo guomindang ), authors, or persons of renown (e.g. John Hsu and Chen Chieh-jen); and use Hanyu Pinyin for the rest.

Contents

1

Introduction

1

Part I The Taiwan Consensus 2

3

Detention and the Rousseauian Consensus Two Images of Authoritarianism Plot Summary of the Film, Detention Autoimmunity and Compulsion Copying Rousseau Copying, or, the Aporias of Political Anthropology Anthropological Coding Authoritarian Freedom The Wounded Interiority of Victimhood Nationalism Back to School Gamification The Erasure of Communism Spectatorship The Purity of Absolute Consensus Spectres, Monsters, and Trauma (The Ethos of Area Studies I) Cannibalism, Monsters, and the Visor Effect Gendered Zhuti Doctor Father Spectres and Historical Trauma

19 19 20 21 24 28 32 40 44 51 56 60 63 63 78 86 88

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4

CONTENTS

The Trauma of Capitalism Carl Schmitt Everywhere

97 104

The Taiwan Consensus and Transitional Justice The Taiwan Consensus Neoliberal Civil War and Consensus Civilian Militias The Epistemology of the Secret: Hegemony and Conspiracy in the Era of the Privatised Digital Platform Human Rights Discourse and Transitional Justice A Consensus of the Bystanders and Beneficiaries US Hegemony and Transitional Justice War and Consensus Transnational Justice and Translation

119 119 124 130 145 187 193 205 213 220

Part II The Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana 5

6

Transition, or Area as a Tool to Manage the Capitalist Outside A Tight Little Island Transpacific Spectral Transitions Civil Society in Transition The Language of Defeat The Outside Transition or What Good Is an Area? From Dullesism to Financialisation (The Ethos of Area Studies II) Dullesism and the Spirit of Area Studies Conspiracy, Complicity, and Disavowal: The Loss of China Area Studies as Alibi The Logistics of Honesty The Labour of Translation: Assigning Referentiality, Globalisation, and the Derivative Area Studies as an Appendage of the Neoliberal Thought Collective The Financialisation of Knowledge and the Area Studies as Spread Arbitrage When Anthropos Becomes a Robot

233 233 240 244 249 253 263 271 271 281 294 302 305 312 317 331

CONTENTS

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Cofiguration Hegemonic Global Whiteness and the Construction of Ethnicity in Taiwan The Pax Americana Cofiguration Program Cofiguration and the Ideology of Cultural Difference An Anticommunist Ethos Postcolonial Immunity

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From Anti-Centrism Studies to Translation Anti-Centrism Studies and Decolonisation Lessons from the Taiwanese Underground The Other Struggle

373 373 393 402

337 346 352 361 368

Works Cited

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Index

449

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book confronts a problem: how to write about a certain place without giving in to the ideology of the “self-contained version” (Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 291)? Hence, this is a book about Taiwan that engages in sustained analysis of objects that ostensibly have little to do with Taiwan. Not only does it show that Taiwan cannot be understood without a discussion of Pax Americana (and, conversely, that Pax Americana, or simply the United States, cannot be understood without a discussion of Taiwan and other nations), it also shows that political ideologies in other nations cannot be properly understood without reference to the multifaceted population management apparatus of a global empire that is not opposed to but rather incorporates postcolonial sovereignty, migration, and minority recognition into its mode of governance. Chief among the institutions and practices that constitute the apparatus of population management in Pax Americana’s transnational empire, those that are tasked with knowledge production—particularly universitybased area studies—play a role that is still poorly understood. Once we begin to evaluate area studies in terms of its role in population management, alongside the intelligence agencies, media, and other institutions, rather than exclusively in terms of its role in knowledge production, it becomes abundantly clear that postwar Taiwan has been and continues to be deeply inscribed in the epistemic presuppositions reproduced by area studies. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. D. Solomon, The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8_1

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J. D. SOLOMON

In the climate of today’s cancel culture, it is often asserted that any discussion of peripheral nations or minority populations that ascribe a causal role to imperial control is invariably proof of an imperialist or perhaps even racist mindset that acquires purchase by denying the agency and the voice of the local inhabitants. While the decolonising motivation behind such assertions is unassailable, a more subtle form of the colonial relation is reproduced and transmitted by many of the assumptions that sustain such objections. Chief among them is an uncritical acceptance of the anthropological categories concretised in the notion of autonomous areas and communities to which “agency” is ascribed. A full response to this assertion would have to begin with an account of the conceptual displacement indicated by the historical shift from subjectivity to agency. It is symptomatic of this displacement that many of those who write about Taiwan today simply do not conceptually distinguish between the two terms, ignoring all of those elements within subjectivity (such as negativity and temporality) that escape the purview of agency. Parallel to this critical conceptual genealogy, it would also be necessary to interrogate the historical and material dynamics that have led one to identify agency with the national form. Against that tendency, this book aims to develop a discussion of “area” as an essential operation for the governing capacity of the state in parallel to the question of “population,” a form of the investment of state power within life, what can be called after Foucault, “biopower.” These parallel operations of articulation called “area” and “population” are required by the state in order to give to itself an image of community called “nation,” an image that folds back into itself in order to naturalise the modern form of belonging to the nation-state (which is essentially a form of racism), and to create heuristic measuring devices for “normal” and “exceptional” positionalities within it. The agency ascribed to normative populations associated with the national form generally hides histories of defeat and class decomposition. Against this sort of erasure, an examination of the biopolitics of translation occupies a privileged place for understanding the relations among anthropological difference, geocultural area, and primitive accumulation. In the absence of this approach, it would be impossible to understand the material and historical dynamics that first constitute “agency” according to disciplinary translational norms (the politics of translation and recognition that go into “agency”) and then funnel those translational relationships into the forms of historical transition that favour capital accumulation.

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A personal anecdote may help to illustrate the stakes involved. Shortly after I first arrived in France in 2011, following two decades in Taiwan, to teach in a Chinese department at the university level, I was confronted by a group of graduate students who were so deeply upset by this approach that they submitted a formal letter of complaint about my “incompetence” to the Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages. The title of the course in which those students were enrolled was “Modern Sovereignty.” In the Faculty of Foreign Languages at my university, as in all public French universities, the course titles are decided collectively by the departments within a given school or faculty. It is assumed that each foreign language department will approach the topic contained in the title of the course in relation to the specificities of the geocultural area to which the department corresponds. Hence, it is expected that a course titled “Modern Sovereignty” dispensed in a Chinese department would focus on the Chinese experience of modern sovereignty. It hardly requires special acumen to see that the disciplinary presuppositions about the nature of a such a course are themselves part of the history of modern sovereignty. Conferred with the task of teaching such a course, I thus designed it around the need for historicisation. Lacking such historicisation, it would be impossible to understand the context within which the transformations in sovereignty in “China” occurred. In practical terms, this meant that nearly half of the course material was devoted to discussions of histories, places, events, and concepts that ostensibly had nothing to do with “China” or “Chinese,” however loosely defined. Evidently, the cause of the students’ chagrin and the basis of their attempt to have me censured lay in what they considered to be a transgression of the social contract or convention convened around China studies. To spend “too much” time discussing things “non-Chinese” was taken as evidence of the instructor’s lack of the “competence” required by a university course on “China.” Undoubtedly, my substandard level of French language skills contributed to the sense of incompetence in a nation where the romantic ideology of language and people remains a cornerstone of sovereignty (note: here and throughout this work, the term “romantic” is used as a period concept rather than in the colloquial sense of “unrealistic”). This anecdote exemplifies the phenomenon of “civilisational transference,” according to which knowledge about an area inevitably instantiates the demand for its outside. What the students really objected to was the pedagogic process by which their own investment in the fantasy of the West was made visible.

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Social relations in area studies are deeply invested in the fantasy of a geographical border that corresponds with scholars’ self-identity and relation to linguistic and translational labour. The social relations around international knowledge production about China remain defined by asymmetrical bordering practices seen in the translational and linguistic labour that sustains the field and its founding exclusions. While the modern regime of translation is hardly an innovation of neoliberalism, neoliberal organisational practices, such as performance evaluation, conspire to reinforce that regime. Every academic discipline is constructed on the basis of methods, objects, and theses defined by founding exclusions. In the case of China studies, some of these exclusions have become increasingly well-known thanks to several decades of critique; others, however, continue to remain unexcavated, hence still active. In certain cases, we might even observe instances in which critique has ironically contributed not to the gradual deactivation of such exclusions but to their prolongation and metastasis. While the decolonisation of knowledge has gained certain traction in recent years, the more subtle and profound forms of colonisation at the epistemic level continue to persist and, in some senses, have been consolidated and strengthened. A paradigmatic case can be seen in the debates about Eurocentrism, in which the constitution of “Europe” or “the West” is reified for the benefit of defending or rejecting it. Contrary to that approach, this book argues that assertions of inversion and exteriority, attested to by various proposals based on the autonomy and sovereignty of the non-West, the “provinciality” or particularism of Western culture, and/or the presupposed unity of language/culture/people that underwrites such notions, are themselves part and parcel of the epistemic legacy of the colonial–imperial modernity. They are, in short, part of the fantasy of the West, internal to its composition, hence unable to dislodge it. The reason why the term “fantasy” can serve a useful purpose to describe this social formation is due to the intrinsically articulated nature of area. “Area” refers simultaneously to an epistemic field, a global order of geolocation, and a continuum of social differences. Unlike territory, with which it might be confused, “area” cannot be simply equated to geolocation alone. Despite the appearance of quotidian naturalness and concreteness, it is hard to think of anything more theoretical than area. Although it does contain an element of geolocation, geolocation is hardly the only element, nor even the determining instance, of area. Precisely because of such constitutive multiplicity, an element of imagination is necessary

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5

to synthesise the various elements together into the imaginary unity of area. While borders are an essential part of area just as they are for territory, they are secondary to the primary, synthetic function of bordering upon which area is premised. These bordering practices, which call forth the retrospective representation of an imaginary, aerial perspective from which borders can be surveyed and drawn, are the foundation of what Michel Foucault and others have called an apparatus. Like any other apparatus, this amphibological apparatus, articulating the aerial to the areal, is designed to produce social subjects—the “natural” or “normal” inhabitants of any given area. Due to the central role of translation in the production of these normative social subjects, the name that Naoki Sakai has used to refer to this apparatus is the modern regime of translation. I have found it helpful also to call it the apparatus of area and anthropological difference. Our emphasis on the systemic complicity between universalism and particularism in such apparatuses reveals an attachment to social criticism focused on the social totality—the type of social criticism that has gone out of style since the defeats suffered by communism in the twentieth century. Faced with both the Cold War history of area studies’ involvement in the national security state’s regime change operations and the contemporary proliferation of post-truth regimes in the new Cold War, an understanding of the continuities between the previous era and the present one is an unavoidable task. Beginning with the premise that these phenomena are symptomatically related to the suppression of critiques of the social totality, this book focuses on constructions of bourgeois hegemony and their relation to epistemology as a necessary supplement to—and sometimes corrective of—the view that a critical account of area studies’ former relationship to the national security state is sufficient. Were one to stop there, it would be impossible to understand how area studies are deeply related both to settler colonialism and to neoliberalism. As a form of institutionalised forensics, area studies are the negative precursor of a host of digital knowledge practices that have mushroomed in the age of postsocialist globalisation. Tied together by epistemological stances held in common—or, what I call “the epistemology of the secret,” both area studies and neoliberalism bear a relationship to the innovative form of colonial governmentality under erasure developed in Pax Americana. An essay that I wrote several years ago about the origins of area studies in white settler colonialism (“Lucian Pye and the Origins of Area Studies in White Settler Colonialism”), helped me to understand

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how anticommunism and antiblackness are two of the founding exclusions of the humanities and Human Sciences as they have developed under Pax Americana. In a more recent essay, I finally had a chance to express this realisation in a positive form in terms of the figure of “black communism.” Organised around “areas” that are supposed to correspond to anthropological types (such as “Chinese”), the humanities as they have developed under Pax Americana are essentially an apparatus for population management in which anticommunism and antiblackness are privileged. The ideology that organises and reproduces these founding exclusions is that of “conversion,” both economic and religious, and “transition,” both historical and metaphysical (for a discussion of conversion in Pax Americana, please see my essay “Beyond a Taste for the Dark Side: the apparatus of area and the modern regime of translation under Pax Americana”). Conversion and transition are encoded in the practices of the modern regime of translation that governs the schema of internationality in the (post)colonial–(post)imperial world. As disciplines overtly devoted to the regime of translation, those parts of the humanities known as area studies are especially sensitive to the political labour of conversion and transition, i.e., “translation,” essential to the formation of subjectivity. That, in brief, accounts for why area studies should be understood, first and foremost, as part of the apparatus of global imperial population management. The Left has historically overlooked the importance of the labour of translation for capitalist reproduction. Thanks to the work of a group of Marxists inspired by the Japanese Marxist historian Uno K¯oz¯o, it is possible to theorise this deficiency in a way that reveals just how important the ostensibly “marginal” fields of knowledge production known as area studies really are. In truth, such fields offer an elaborate means for managing the capitalist outside. This statement does not mean that area studies are capitalist by nature or that they are commanded by a capitalist ideology; rather, what it means is that a certain construction of the outside is essential to the formation and abstraction of the capital relation. The usefulness of area studies for the capital relation lies in naturalising this form of exteriority. The most enduring form of naturalisation in the modern world is that ponderous entity designated by the term, “the West,” that anchors the modern schema of internationality. It is something of a truism to state that Taiwan cannot be understood without understanding its place in the world. Usually, this statement is taken to refer to Taiwan’s status

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under international law and its precarious position as a largely unrecognised nation excluded from the United Nations and most international organisations. This book approaches the problem in a different way, not just by refusing the normativity of sovereignty on historical and methodological grounds, but also by relating the abstraction of relationality that sovereignty hides to other forms of abstraction such as national language, the national community, the capital relation, and international law. Under the aegis of international law, the modern international world is characterised by a colonial order to which the plurality of formally equal nation-states has not, and arguably cannot, put an end. For this reason, we will not bother to enter into the details of debates over the status of Taiwan’s sovereignty since Japan relinquished control over this territory annexed in 1895, nor the historical claims of the Qing (1644– 1912) dynasty. Out of respect for the imposing amount of intellectual and affective labour invested in the question, however, it may be useful to cite several examples to illustrate our point. The first example concerns the Ryukyu Shipwreck Incident of 1871, when a group of sailors from Miyako Island in the Ryukyus (1429–1879, annexed as Okinawa by Japan in 1879) were massacred by indigenous peoples on the eastern side of Taiwan. After the Satsuma Domain had invaded the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1609, the island kingdom had continued to pay tribute to both dynastic imperial power on the continent (first the Ming and then the Qing dynasty after 1644), as had been customary for Ryukyu Kingdom since 1372, and also henceforth to Satsuma (which was absorbed into a unified “Japan” after the Meiji Restoration). Needless to say, the practice of paying tribute to the suzerainty of two sovereigns is incomprehensible within the modern international law, based on the principle of the indivisibility of sovereignty. When the Japanese government sent a delegation, the Soejima Mission, to Beijing in 1873 to discuss the Shipwreck Incident, the issues of territorial sovereignty and administrative control over Taiwan naturally were a focus. Responding to a question about the issue posed by Yanagihara Sakimitsu, Mao Changxi of the Zongli Yamen (the Office for the General Management of Affairs concerning the Various Countries, established in 1861 as a sort of foreign ministry in the Qing imperial administration) responded by stating that both islands (Miyako and Taiwan) were territories of the Qing and hence the problems associated with the massacre, including reparations, were an internal matter for the Qing administration to handle. Yanagihara responded by

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asserting that the Ryukyu Islands were part of Japanese sovereign territory. Historians agree that the Qing negotiators were unaware that the Meiji government had unilaterally declared its annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom a year earlier, in 1872, in part because the Meiji government had tried prior to 1873 to maintain the façade of Ryukyu independence in its dealings with the Qing (the official annexation of the islands by Japan was not consummated until 1879). To counter this assertion, Mao Changxi retorted, “sharenzhe shengfan, guqie zhi huawai...jie bufu wanghua.” I will translate these phrases as follows, pending further explanation below: “the murderers were raw [as opposed to “cooked”] fan/ tribes, hence external relative to [aesthetic] transformation...and unwilling to submit to rexification.” The translation of these phrases is complicated by the history of translation internal to modern imperialism, particularly the fraught history of translations of the Chinese imperial lexicon used to refer to internal and external border peoples (notably the archaic terms yi, di, rong, hu, and fan). As Lydia Liu explains in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, the translation of those terms as “barbarian” imposed by the British during negotiations with the Qing around British gunboat diplomacy in the first half of the nineteenth century instituted a regime of colonial knowledge that persists to the present day, as evidenced by many commentators who choose to translate the first two clauses in the phrase cited above as, “the assailants are barbarians that the Qing government has not brought under effective rule,” or phrases similar to that effect. In a 2022 special issue devoted to Taiwan edited by Stéphane Corcuff for the popular French historical magazine Historia, “barbarian” is precisely the term that Corcuff, one of the preeminent French specialists of Taiwan, uses in his introduction to the issue to comment on edicts issued by the Kangxi Emperor in 1683 following the fall of the Dongning Kingdom (1661–1683) established by anti-Qing Ming loyalists on the island of Taiwan. “In 1683,” Corcuff writes, “upon the fall of the Kingdom [of Dongning], the Manchurian Emperor Kangxi (1662–1722) has no intention of incorporating Taiwan. He sees in the island a ‘mass of mud in the middle of oceans,’ concurring with the idea that, ‘to obtain it would not present any advantage and not to obtain it would not incur any inconvenience.’ He merely wants to dislodge the Ming loyalists, repatriate the Chinese, and get out of there. To the contempt that the Chinese have for this savage island peopled by barbarians, the Manchu court thus adds offence, suspicion, and fear. These feelings endure to the present day” (Corcuff “La guerre

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des deux Chines 1661–2022”). It is dubious that Kangxi’s focus centred on a population designated by an anachronistic national quality (“Chinese”) rather than on a group determined by their status as rebellious imperial subjects. That the emperor of a continental empire expressing no intention to appropriate an island territory off the coastal regions of the empire could be perceived by a contemporary researcher as a form of “contempt” is an interpretation that would oblige us to accept the delirious notion that the appropriation of the island by conquest would have been a sign of respect. No doubt many colonised peoples would have preferred such “contempt” to conquest and colonisation. Furthermore, Corcuff’s use of the term “barbarian” to translate the imperial Chinese lexicon aligns itself with the long, colonial tradition imposed by force by the British in the nineteenth century. Certainly, one of the crucial insights established by Lydia Liu is that the main result of the British-imposed translation is to assign the idea of “foreignness” or “strangeness” to something that comes from the spatial outside of the sovereign nation-state (Liu Tokens of Exchange, 35). For the Qing Imperium, by contrast, foreignness or strangeness was something that could co-exist within the interiority of the spatial bounds of the empire (and even here, it would be necessary to add the caveat that the configuration of interiority was not premised on contiguity). This assignation of strangeness to spatialised exteriority demanded by the British, and later used by the Japanese to justify colonial appropriation of the Ryukyu Kingdom and, they hoped, Taiwan, is one of the hallmarks of the modern regime of translation, which represents exteriority via the schema of cofiguration as equivalent to a spatial border between two national communities. With regard to Mao Changxi’s retort, the problem of translational (in)commensurability is further complicated for us today, within the horizon of the modern regime of translation, by the two phrases that follow, “guqie zhi huawai” and “jie bufu wanghua,” which many contemporary advocates of Taiwanese self-determination and adherents of the normativity of international law conventionally choose to translate as “hence, not under our jurisdiction” and “none of whom submit to imperial rule.” The key point of contention concerns the translation of hua in the two compounds “huawai” and “wanghua.” Glossed as transformation, hua refers to a cosmology of Chinese imperial population management that cannot be directly mapped onto sovereignty (much in the same way that the multiplicity of tributary relations cannot be directly mapped onto the modern principle of sovereignty’s indivisibility). Even

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the standard convention of mapping hua/transformation onto a civilisational discourse of “sinification” hardly avoids the pitfalls of colonial epistemology, given the central role that the category of “civilisation” has played in that discourse. Rather, wanghua, literally “transformation via kingship” or rexification, as I have chosen to clumsily translate it, is shorthand for a cosmology in which the Imperium plays a role, akin to Bildung or aesthetic formation, that is pedagogic, aesthetic, and ethical before political. Hence, it would have been equally common at the time to speak of the imperial distinction between “raw” (sheng ) and “cooked” (shu) peoples in terms of jiaohua (literally transformation, hua, by teaching, jiao), a pedagogical or aesthetic transformation, as well as wanghua/rexification. The choice of the defunct term wang / king, associated with Chinese “feudal” antiquity prior to the succession of imperial dynasties initiated by the Qin (221–207 BCE), instead of the term huang /emperor used by the post-Qin dynasties, merely underlines the extent to which hua/transformation was a cosmological and aesthetic concept, not a strictly political one. If modern commentators regularly succumb to the temptation to translate the aesthetic transition signified by wanghua into the exercise of territorial sovereignty, it is an indication of the extent to which the modern regime of translation plays an ideological function in relation to modern sovereignty. Writing about the problems of translation related to the negotiations over the Ryukyu Shipwreck Incident, Mizuno Norihito notes: “The Japanese understood the Yamen’s statement to be evidence that the aboriginal territories [in Taiwan] were terra nullius ” (Norihito “Qing China’s Reaction to the 1874 Japanese Expedition to the Taiwanese Aboriginal Territories,”104). Norihito further observes that the Japanese had received advice from US American advisors concerning the status of terra nullius in international law used to justify colonial territorial appropriation. As Norihito dryly comments, “the Chinese were unaware of the Japanese [and American] logic” (ibid., 105). The assertion, advanced by some contemporary advocates of Taiwanese self-determination, that this diplomatic exchange from 1873 provides evidence that the Qing administration never exercised sovereign control over the totality of the island of Taiwan and hence effectively refutes the historical basis of the People’s Republic of China’s current claims to sovereignty over Taiwan is tantamount to ignoring the complexities of historical and translational discontinuity (between modern European international law and the East Asian tributary system), or again, simply to ignoring modern colonialism and imperialism, for the

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purpose of political expediency. To cite another example from the twentieth century, contemporary advocates of Taiwanese self-determination cite the fact that Japan never stipulated the recipient nation of sovereign control over Taiwan temporarily assumed by the United States Army upon cessation of hostilities in 1945, nor again in the Treaty of San Francisco of 1952 that formalised the end of Japanese rule. Such arguments selectively ignore or trivialise the role of imperial prerogative in the first case and imperial manipulation (of international law) in the second (the United States excluded “China,” both the PRC and the ROC on Taiwan, from participating in negotiations that led up to the signing of the Treaty, while the Soviet Union withdrew from negotiations after concerns surrounding the US occupation of Japan, the restoration of Taiwan and other territories to China as mentioned in the Potsdam Declaration (July 26, 1945), and the rehabilitation of Japanese class A war criminals in 1948 were summarily dismissed). Finally, the fact that the United States merely “acknowledged,” rather than recognised, China’s claims to sovereignty over Taiwan in the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué that inaugurates the US One-China Policy is a more recent example often cited by advocates of Taiwanese self-determination (and of supposed US “neutrality” on the issue) that fails to “acknowledge” in turn the arbitrary manipulation of international law according to imperial prerogative. In short, each of these examples demonstrates the dangers of arguments that accept the normativity of national sovereignty and modern international law while ignoring the colonial aspects of such institutions and the long tradition of manipulation and exceptions established by European, Japanese, and latterly, US American imperialisms (see Benton A Search for Sovereignty and Anghie Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law for further details on this aspect of international law). My goal here is not to defease the social contract of self-determination but rather to point to the hope that self-determination could be conceptually re-articulated to a decolonisation of the system of internationality and the modern regime of translation without which the self-determination of small nations such as Taiwan (and Okinawa/the Ryukyus, etc.) invariably proves to be chimerical. As a specifically modern concept, internationality hides the enduringly colonial aspect of the world system, preventing deep decolonisation. The innovative feature of US Empire lies precisely in developing a form of colonial governmentality that fully recognises internationality, incorporating rather than resisting postcolonial sovereignty into its model of global governance and imperial control. In the current conjuncture,

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as the agenda of area studies turns away from epistemic decolonisation towards the “decentring” of certain regional states with imperial legacies, the presuppositions of an older philological nationalism remain intact, strengthening the modern system of internationality bequeathed by the colonial–imperial modernity. Hence, this book never loses sight of Taiwan’s relationship to that fantastic or imaginary relationship known as “the West.” To the extent that the “West” names an imaginary configuration with potent effects in the real, it can hardly be identified with an inventory of particularistic traits, values, beliefs, or geographical locations, but must be seen, like capital, as the abstraction of a social relation. Precisely because of its abstract quality, the “West” is endowed with a certain mobility borne out by modern history that affords it the flexibility to be associated with the leading area of the world despite shifting vagaries in the location. As such, the “West” is the cornerstone of the world schema of areas and anthropological difference inherited from the colonial–imperial modernity. Yet, because of its inherently relational nature, the “West,” wherever it happens to be located, will always have a need for some theoretical and practical “Taiwan,” just as every “Taiwan” will always need a certain “West” to achieve “independence.” In lieu of satellite dependency, this book proposes a politics of transition and translation instead. Many of the arguments discussed revolve around wresting these two key concepts away from their hegemonic usage, renewing their meaning in relation to the social totality. Transitions call for translation just as translation always presents an opportunity for transition. An indication of their importance can be glimpsed from the fact that the ideological operation par excellence of the capital relation consists in appropriations of transition and translation, often crystallised in the form of borders. Borders make transitions and translation look natural, even progressive. Unless we follow the sage advice of Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra to distinguish rigorously between territorial borders and the frontiers of capital, we might easily fall prey at a methodological level to this naturalising operation. Some of the crucial aspects of the defeat of the Left during the twentieth century can be traced to problematic presuppositions about transitions and translation borrowed from the ideological toolkit of capitalism. On the one hand, transition was identified with linear historical “progress,” the role of the vanguard, and the spatial exception—precisely those elements that in a different context constitute the figure of the West. On the other hand,

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translation was identified with exchange, (non)equivalence, and the relation between autonomous cultural individuals—precisely those elements that constitute the figure of the “Rest” in relation to the West. Bolstered by a conception of translation as a social practice, might we not conceive of transitions in a new way that affords justice? Such is the hope of this work. While this book does provide a preliminary outline of how the defeat of the Left has been inscribed at an epistemic and social level into the disciplines of knowledge known as area studies, it is still far from being able to provide a global account of that history. One day, the history of the twentieth century will be rewritten to account for the enduring cultivation and complicity with fascist anticommunism that lies behind liberalism’s ideological struggle against the authoritarianism that it is largely responsible for cultivating. The truth is that liberalism was not only instrumental in the rise of historical fascism before World War II, it also played a key role in giving the remnants of historical fascism a second, and then a third, life after the military defeats suffered by fascism in that terribly destructive war. If fascism could be said to have lost the hot war, it could also be equally said to have successfully won the “Cold” War (which was mortally “hot” in most of the non-West) in important ways that we still cannot account for fully even today. The story of the United States as an anticolonial, antifascist power is at odds with the actual history of US complicity with Nazism before and after the war as well as the development of an innovative new form of empire that eschewed direct colonisation in favour of colonial governmentality under erasure, the weaponisation of immigrant communities with their own complex histories of fascist nationalism, and global “rules” serving American exceptionalism. These disavowed historical defeats, inscribed at the epistemic level, constitute the horizon of a form of decolonisation still to come. The existence of area studies, or more precisely, the continuing centrality of area as an organisational principle for both knowledge and population, is a mute testimony to the failure of anticapitalist and anticolonial struggles to successfully converge and usher in a general transition, via the practice of permanent translation, to a non-capitalist, non-colonial world. Due to the differential way those defeats have been inscribed in knowledge, this work naturally accords a central place to the problem of temporality, highlighted in discussions of, variously, the politics of historical memory, transitional justice, anthropological difference, the modern

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regime of translation, national history, neoliberalism, financialisation, militarisation, and post-authoritarian transition. Temporality is one of the key places from which to interrogate the hegemony of the present. It is telling that the politics of historical memory and transitional justice grounded in human rights discourse has become dominant precisely during an era characterised by an unprecedented attempt to control the future, both collective and individual, through debt. This work shows that while the connection between financialisation and the discourse of transitional justice is hardly accidental, the internal logic of their relation cannot be fully grasped without relating each to the problem of area studies. Decades of ideological defeat at the hands of liberalism and neoliberalism have led to a situation where the decomposition of the transnational working class over the last decades is the material precondition for populations such as those in Taiwan to assert “agency” and to mobilise for the militarisation of everything in defence of “freedom.” Attention to the double standards instituted through disciplinary temporalities might well be the only way to begin to extricate ourselves from the straitjacket of presentism and the hijacking of the future. In effect, the central issue for the decolonisation of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences today is not that of devising a nonhegemonic approach, but rather that of radically transforming the areal and anthropological basis of the disciplinary fields into which knowledge production is organised. It would be apposite to call that basis “antiblack” and “anticommunist,” but these terms are unfortunately susceptible of being appropriated in ways that extend and even reinforce the apparatus of area and anthropological difference. For that reason, a denaturalising critique is indispensable. In that vein, this book shows that today’s Taiwan is inseparable from an apparatus of knowledge production that retains distinctly colonial aspects—what I call the apparatus of area and anthropological difference, or again, the modern regime of translation—even as it privileges Taiwanese identities. The kind of causality at stake in the relation between Taiwan and area studies is not linear but rather immanent and co-dependent. Area studies should always be seen primarily in terms of its subjective effects. It is above all an apparatus for the production of subjects. If it is not accidental that this apparatus also happens to produce knowledge, that does not mean that we must accept the institutional claims to the primacy of knowledge production over and

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above subjective production. On the contrary, the integral importance of knowledge production merely highlights two essential points: not only is subjectivity constituted through knowledge, but also humanistic knowledge is always already implicated in social practice, and, as such, is a form of translation.

PART I

The Taiwan Consensus

CHAPTER 2

Detention and the Rousseauian Consensus

Two Images of Authoritarianism Our genealogy of transition in contemporary Taiwan begins with the juxtaposition of two images. The first is a still taken from the video recording made in 1983 at the time of Chen Chieh-Jen’s guerrilla street performance in Ximending in the waning years of martial law, Dysfunction No. 3. In this still, we can see a group of performers both hooded and blindfolded surrounded by a thronging crowd of on-lookers in Ximending, a bustling movie-theatre district in Taipei. The short video documenting the event ends with the arrival of secret police on the scene. Fast-forward 37 years and a similar image of a group of hooded people appears at the climax of the popular Taiwanese film Detention (2019), a fictive horror story supposedly based, albeit very loosely, on fact, about state repression and terror in a Taiwanese high school. The two images appear to be joined by a common concern with the politics of state terror, witness, victimisation, truth, and memory related to the suspension of constitutional law during a 38-year period of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987—the longest instance of a “permanent state of exception” (Agamben Homo Sacer, 20) in modern global history.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. D. Solomon, The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8_2

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Plot Summary of the Film, Detention My discussion of Detention will be limited to the film version, not the eponymous game from 2017 nor the eponymous Netflix TV series from 2020, neither of which were available to me at the time of writing. A fictional story supposedly based on historical events, Detention (Fanxiao in Mandarin) is a 2019 horror film directed by John Hsu (Xu Hanqiang ) set in Taiwan in 1962 at the height of the White Terror during martial law. The film recounts the story of the members of a secret reading group devoted to banned books organised by two teachers, Chang Ming-hui and Yin Tsui-han, at Greenwood High School (cuihua gaozhong ). For readers unfamiliar with the film, the English version of Wikipedia provides a brief plot summary that I reproduce here in full, without any changes: In 1960’s Taiwan, during the White Terror, high school student Wei Chung Ting is a member of a secret book club, headed by teacher Miss Yin Tsui Han, that reads and studies books banned by the government; the possession of which is heavily penalized. Sometime later, the book club’s activities are discovered and Wei is among those arrested and is tortured for information. After hours of interrogation, Wei, barely alive, enters a nightmarish version of the school that is seemingly abandoned with most of the rooms boarded up with placards of mourning. Wei encounters Fang Ray Shin, a fellow student who does not recall how she got there. They discover they are trapped in the school when they find that the bridge has apparently fallen into the flooded river. They decide to find Mr. Chang Ming Hui, another teacher whom Ray saw wandering the building; and nearly encounter a monstrous ghost resembling a militaryofficer carrying a lantern that stalks the grounds. While searching the school, Wei encounters another book club member who is burning notes and copies of the banned books. He explains to Wei that someone ratted them out before he is attacked by the Lantern Ghost. Finding the book club at a bomb shelter on school grounds, the other members and Miss Yin turn on Ray and accuse her of being the rat. When Wei asks what they mean by this, Ray flees. In the auditorium, Wei sees the other book club members have been strung up and executed; and is captured by the school’s military inspector Bai. Ray appears and slits Wei’s throat before shooting Yin with Bai’s gun. The story is intercut with flash-backs and reveals that Ray, though a bright student, had a difficult home life. She subsequently found comfort in and

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entered a romantic relationship with Mr. Chang, who was also deeply involved with the book club. Miss Yin confronted Mr. Chang about the relationship and urged him to break it off, considering that it would harm the book club. However, Ray overheard their conversation and mistakenly concluded that Yin and Chang were themselves in a relationship. Inspired by how her mother framed her abusive and philandering father and got him arrested, Ray planned to get rid of Miss Yin. She exploited Wei’s crush on her and convinced him to let her borrow a copy of one of the club’s books. Ray then handed the contraband over to Inspector Bai, hoping that Yin would be dismissed. However, Chang and the book club members were arrested along with Yin. Much to her horror and sorrow, Ray witnesses Chang’s execution, and is then accosted by the school’s students who call her a murderer. Ray then recalls that she killed herself out of guilt after the book club’s arrest; and that she has been trapped in a hellish, cyclic purgatory, repressing her memories and refusing to acknowledge her wrongdoings. Chang’s spirit appears to Ray and tells her to save Wei so that one of them can live on and remember. Ray rescues Wei (now unharmed); but is caught by the Lantern Ghost. Bai tempts Ray to repress her memories again and continue denying her guilt. Ray refuses to do so any longer, defeating the Lantern Ghost. Ray and Wei run to the school’s gate as shadows overtake the building. Ray helps him climb over and urges him to live on while she remains behind. Wei escapes and awakens back in prison. He confesses to his crimes and opens himself to any punishment, provided that he be allowed to live. Years later, a middle-aged Wei visits now-closed and soon to be demolished school. Following Chang’s last wish, he locates a hidden copy of one of the banned books. In one of the empty classrooms, he presents the book to Ray’s ghost. In it, she finds a jade deer pendant Chang had given her, as well as a last, loving letter wherein Chang promises to meet her in the next life. (Wikipedia “Detention”)

Autoimmunity and Compulsion The four decades intervening between Dysfunction No. 3 and Detention span the history of Taiwan’s democratic transition since the end of martial law in 1987. As a self-conscious attempt to narrate that transition, Detention accords central emphasis to a process of identification intrinsically linked to historical memory. In a crucial scene near the end of the film, female protagonist Fang Ray-shin hangs suspended in mid-air, caught in the death grip of a faceless monster, known as the Lantern Spectre, that symbolises the horror of the authoritarian, terrorist state.

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Before a crowd of classmates bedecked with execution hoods and whose applause signals complicity with authoritarian power, Fang finally succeeds in freeing herself from the monster’s grasp and certain death. The key to winning her freedom consists in looking directly into the face of the authoritarian monster—confronting power, as it were—to repeat with staunch willpower the words, “I will not forget any longer!” Crucially, as Fang gazes into the Lantern Spectre’s face, a mirror-like surface devoid of humanoid features, the moment of resolution initiates the monster’s selfdestruction. This is resolution in both senses of the word, as the image of her own face comes clearly into focus in the mirror’s reflection just as her own will to identify via remembrance takes shape. Introduced from the outset of the film via shallow focus technique resulting in blurred frame edges, the metaphorical dimensions of resolution and focus are thematically established not only by liberal use of shallow focus technique but also by images such as Fang’s ghost with a melted face or Fang’s blurry reflection in a mirror. As the Lantern Spectre’s face shatters under the impact of high/unwavering resolution, Fang Ray-shin is thrown to the ground, where she scrambles to escape the self-destructing monster’s impotent wrath. This scene, enacting a popularised version of the mirror-stage that psychoanalytic theory since Freud has determined to be a crucial step in the construction of the ego, links identification to memory. Contrary to psychoanalytic theory, for which memory is always characterised by processes of condensation and repression, hence beyond the domain of the conscious mind, Detention’s identificatory version of memory is based on volition. The will to resist is generated by the will to remember, which can only be realised in turn by the will to identity. As something at risk of oblivion, identity in the film is constructed through a two-step process of confirmation and return. The will to remembrance is what enables the self to posit identity as seen from a position that is imagined by the self to be that of the other. Identification via remembrance and fantasy enables the self to return to that which it had ostensibly always been yet had risked losing. In this structure of return, we can detect an element of heteronomy that stubbornly inheres in the pretence of autonomy. The positing of otherness is essential and prior to the positing of self-same identity. This structure conforms to the logic of “autoimmunity” described by Jacques Derrida across a number of works, beginning with his pathbreaking examination of spectrality in Specters of Marx (1993) that is often attributed with having initiated “the spectral turn” in contemporary

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scholarship since the turn of the century (Blanco and Pereen The Spectralities Reader, 2). The idea of autoimmunity, in brief, centres around a contradiction. Aiming to protect something (often the individuality of a community), it unleashes effects that escape the volitional intent to protect, rebounding against the individual in unpredictable and violent ways, threatening itself with destruction. Laden with biopolitical overtones (Derrida himself does not use the term biopolitical), autoimmunity is associated with forms of political paroxysms that concern the generic conditions of life. Derrida is careful, however, to emphasise that there is a second aspect to the logic of autoimmunity, one that opens the way to self-transformation. The key to this transformation ultimately lies in negotiating a new relationship to the other within (to stay within the terms of self and other, a pair whose problematic nature hinges on the very definition of what a self means and the thorny problem of ontological genesis). To protect against the fallout from powerful securitarian impulse to protect oneself is, in the final analysis, the crux of the contradiction posed by autoimmunity. Detention exhibits no such awareness of the political and ethical trap of autoimmunity, embracing instead hope in the fantasy of immunity conferred by “democratic transition.” We say fantasy instead of promise because the promise is always open to the indefinite future, whereas fantasy closes in on itself. The key to the success of democratic transition lies, Detention would have us believe, in the moral imperative to resolve to remember (oneself) correctly, without divergence or deviance. Bearing the weight of a typically pedagogical project in aesthetic formation, or Bildung, the will to remember oneself takes on a quality of compulsive repetition that unleashes unintended effects from which the film’s identity claims will not emerge unscathed. Repetition compulsion, it will be recalled, is one of the elements along with the death drive the discovery of which led Sigmund Freud to abandon the concept of the pleasure principle—an idea that had formerly provided an explanation of identity formation in terms of the processes of condensation and repression in the organisation of memory. On the face of it, Fang’s eventual remembrance of her own pivotal role in ratting out the members of a subversive reading group that she joined almost by accident ostensibly conforms to the logic of what Freud had previously called the “return of the repressed.” The memory that had been consigned to oblivion returns, producing a transformation in the subject. Yet, the compulsively repetitive quality ascribed to the imperative to

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remember inadvertently recalls the notion of compulsive repetition that Freud subsequently developed to replace and rework the previous system of the return of the repressed based on the pleasure principle. Despite an investment in volition that should ostensibly obviate compulsion, Detention ends up unwittingly retracing a problematic point in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory. Described by Samuel Weber, the crux of this problematic concerns the status of the self and its tendency to cast otherness as “demonic.” It concerns, in Weber’s words, “the unity of a consciousness that seeks to repeat itself as one and the same, despite the irreducible alteration involved in all repetition. Hence, the ‘demonic’ quality of the ‘repetition compulsion’ that Freud acknowledges [in his earlier work that becomes the basis for rethinking later in his career the entire system of psychoanalysis]” (Weber Return to Freud, 119). The “demonic quality” at stake here is associated with the eruption of “a repetition that produces the ‘same’ as the ‘nonidentical,’ to recall the formulation of Derrida”. It entails “sameness without self if by self is understood self-identity” (ibid., 120). Although Detention portrays the demonic as an emanation originating in a historically identifiable source, the investment in compulsive repetition as a means to combat, or exorcise, the demon raises questions about its own identity politics.

Copying Rousseau Copying, or, the Aporias of Political Anthropology Detention’s relation to classical liberalism takes the form of citational repetition. Questions are posed not to open discussion but rather to create a normative consensus that stifles dissensus. In the first scene where the secret reading group is introduced at the start of the film, Wei Chong-ting (one of the principal protagonists and a junior classmate of Fang Ray-shin) exemplifies this stifling of dissensus by posing the rhetorical question: “shouldn’t it be the case that humans are born free?” Freedom is posited as a static concept, something given. In the film, the question is rhetorically phrased as a self-evident truth; no discussion ensues. In fact, the only activities in which the members of the ostensibly subversive “reading” group engage are recitation and copying, not reading, discussion and questioning. The viewer is thus compelled to accept truths that are worthy of repetition, not thought. As the object of compulsive repetition, these truths mimic a consensus based on copying. Structurally speaking, the representation of political subversion in the film is hitched to acts of

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duplication that threaten identity with duplicity. A moral economy that manages oppositional pairs bifurcates into the “good” acts of copying, or duplication, contrasted with the “bad/evil” acts of betrayal, or duplicity. Inscribing innate freedom into the act of copying, the film adheres with profound fidelity to the problematic contradictions of “Rousseau”— both the historical personage of the man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who made a living out of copying (mostly musical) texts (particularly important after censorship and exile) and the texts of political anthropology gathered under that proper name. The rhetorical question posed by Wei is thus an allusion to the first sentence with which Rousseau begins The Social Contract (1762), a work that was banned by Parisian authorities: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (156). In a study of Rousseau’s career as a copyist, Angelica Goodden summarises, “Writing spelled danger for Rousseau, copying, safety: authorship, the forbidden (by the authorities, and hence by Rousseau himself), copying, the licit” (Goodden Rousseau’s Hand, 21). Danger and safety are related not simply to the vicissitudes of friendship and enmity that critics of liberalism such as Carl Schmitt, Mao Zedong, and Vladimir Lenin would assert lie at the foundation of the political, but also to the passage from the “state of nature” to the “state of [civil] society” that informs Rousseau’s understanding of politics. In that sense, Rousseau’s very real, lived experience of friendship and enmity (emblematised by the bitter feuds in which he engaged with his erstwhile friends David Hume and Voltaire) repeats the unacknowledged contradiction between description and declaration, or the constative and the performative, that Derrida, writing in Of Grammatology, detects in Rousseau’s philosophical and political texts (217). Taking account of Rousseau’s career as a copyist, Goodden concludes that there was, “nothing strange in Rousseau’s having been, as Derrida describes him, a writer who mistrusted writing” (Goodden Rousseau’s Hand, 2). Against Rousseau-the-writer, there was, thus, Rousseau-thecopyist. The question of trust in relation to language evokes problems of referentiality and the tropic nature of language to which we will return in Part II. What is interesting and, I think quite successful, about Derrida’s reading of Rousseau is that he manages to demonstrate the intrinsic link between metalinguistic theories of language and the political anthropology that underwrites virtually the entirety of liberal humanism inspired by Rousseau. When Derrida takes aim, in Of Grammatology, at the “linguistic and metaphysical phonologism that raises speech above writing” (103), constituting a “system of defense against the threat of

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writing” (101) that underwrites Rousseau’s thinking about everything from language and anthropology to politics and art, Derrida is also taking aim at the way in which anthropology, taken in the broadest sense possible as a theory encompassing both biological and social forms of speciation, is the foundation of modern political thought. This foundation in anthropological difference reveals something problematic that is shared between both liberalism and its critics, well beyond and before the possibility of the friend-enemy distinction. Much more than a “mistrust of writing,” what Derrida uncovers in Rousseau is the problematic inscription of anthropological difference that threatens equally the possibility of an orderly passage from the state of nature to the state of civil society as well as the possibility of a transition from the state of civil society to the non-state of proletarian communism. The crux of that problematic lies in the paradoxical figure of the copyist as a foreigner—the latter being a theme sustained throughout Derrida’s reading of Rousseau. To clarify this point, it will be necessary to amend Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s English translation to reflect the ambivalent meaning of the French word étranger, which covers both the foreign and the strange in English: Accents are, like punctuation, an evil of writing: not only an invention of copyists but of copyists who are foreigners [étrangers ] to the language which they transcribe; the copyist or his reader is by definition a stranger [étranger] to the living use of language. … For obvious reasons, Rousseau was of necessity fascinated by the person of the copyist. Especially but not only within the musical order, the moment of transcription is the dangerous moment, as is the moment of writing, which in a way is already a transcription, the imitation of other signs; reproducing the signs, producing the signs of signs, the copyist is always tempted to add supplementary signs to improve the restitution of the original. The good copyist must resist the temptation of the supplementary sign. (Derrida Of Grammatology, 227; translation modified)

Goodden’s characterisation of Derrida’s analysis of Rousseau, while not inaccurate, may still be misleading. What Derrida shows, against Goodden, is that even the ostensibly “safe” activity of copying is permeated by a level of danger no less central to Rousseau’s political anthropology than that associated with the activity of writing. It is the nature of language itself that bears this danger. Essentially iterative, never original, the linguistic sign implicates us in a form of copying even before

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we have begun to articulate meaning. This element of repetition, or copying, inherent in the linguistic sign is what introduces, according to Derrida, the element of writing into oral language. The relation between this danger, of an epistemic nature, and the danger of being imprisoned instead of exiled, which Rousseau also faced, should not be confused. Precisely for that reason, an account of their articulation or relationship cannot be omitted. What is at stake, ultimately, is the discourse of anthropological difference and social speciation that underwrites the emergence of civil society from a state of nature. As he attempts to construct an argument for a social contract among members of the same community, Rousseau is always confronted with the spectral arrival of the foreigner. The contradiction at work here is ultimately no less surprising than that contained in Rousseau’s startling solution to the aporetic origin of the law in violence: So that the social pact not become a futile blank form [un vain formulaire], it tacitly includes this engagement, which can alone give force to the others—that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free …. (Rousseau The Social Contract, 166; emphasis added and translation modified)

Rousseau’s first concern is to prevent the social contract from becoming little more than a bureaucratic form to be filled out in the mode of rote copying that would render it senseless and futile. To avert this latent tendency of the contract to slip out of the realm of consensual agreement into that of bureaucratic mimicry, Rousseau proposes a chilling solution. The idea of a freedom that can only be instantiated by the constraint of force recalls the paradoxical formulation of engineered selfdetermination that US policymakers and academics contemplated for Taiwan in the 1950s (see Part II). Conceived as a defence against unbridled authority, Rousseau’s notion of relying on force to establish the basis of communal law in freedom is achieved, much like that of engineered self-determination, only at the cost of drawing a border that could be as much internal as external. (No doubt that is one of the reasons why Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist about whom we will have more to say, was deeply attracted to Rousseau.) Continuing the passage cited above, Rousseau concludes:

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… for such is the condition which, uniting every citizen to the fatherland, protects him from all personal dependency, a condition that ensures the control and working of the political machine, and alone renders legitimate civil engagements, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and subject to the most enormous abuses. (166)

In light of these contradictory considerations, my interpretation of Detention emphasises the various ways that the “supplementary sign” is channelled by the film into a consensus.

Anthropological Coding The content of the duplicated consensus in Detention is a certain historical understanding of liberal democracy. According to the liberal tradition of political philosophy, citizenship confers freedom, conceived as the right to exercise ownership of private property, by birth (or “naturalisation,” which essentially mimics birth). The discourse of citizenship thus partakes of the problematic appropriation of birth, or natio in Latin, by the nation. In a modern context, this appropriation leads to a series of contradictions between the nation and the state that classical liberal theory attempts to solve via the institution of the border. Contemporary critiques of liberalism have thus focused on showing how the link between wage labour and citizenship dissimulates forms of domination and exploitation exercised through multiple border regimes that proliferate throughout the history of capitalism’s incessant transitions (Mezzadra “How Many Histories of Labor?”). In the Derridean vocabulary of autoimmunity discussed above, these border regimes introduce violence and instability into the societies they aim to protect precisely via the institution of the border. Repressing dissensus and transforming the outside into a physical space, the film ventriloquises the classical notion of freedom based in the rights of citizenship as it expresses a de facto rejection of the classic, modern concept of freedom grounded in autonomy and negativity— the ability to choose not to be this way as opposed to that. The film never invites viewers to ask why, if humans are born free, as Wei Chongting holds, would identification via remembrance, of all social practices, ever become a normative requirement for political sovereignty? If people were, in de jure fashion, truly free, would not identity, like one’s position in the social division of labour, be something that could be changed at will without risk? These questions are manifestly not the same as

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that golden question motivating increasingly large amounts of intellectual labour commanded by policy-oriented social science since the 1980s: does the population in Taiwan consider itself “Chinese” or “Taiwanese,” and, what does the answer to this question tell us about the organisation of sovereignty along the border figured by the Taiwan Strait? They point instead to the necessity of asking why the category of identity, shorn of the negativity formerly associated with the philosophy of the subject that had dominated European social theory before that time, has become the sole, de facto source of political legitimacy for East Asian societies transitioning to the new model of Pax Americana that began to take shape in the 1970s around industrial outsourcing, military garrisons, neoliberal civil society, and monetary imperialism. To rephrase the question, why has identity transition become a focus of enormous amounts of intellectual labour when capitalist transition as an ongoing process is ignored and socialist transition as a project of liberation has fallen into disrepute? Why is Taiwan studied as a “laboratory of identities” and a model of “democratic transition” rather than a laboratory of “engineered selfdetermination,” “colonial governmentality under erasure,” “neoliberal transition,” “exclusionary nationalism,” and now the “New Cold War”? Asking such questions is, more generally, to inquire about the connections among identity, sovereignty, and that latter-day capitalist transition known as neoliberalism. While identity can plausibly be shown to have existed as a concern throughout history, its appearance as an object of knowledge at the centre of social science research about both domestic minority issues and postcolonial governance in the 1960s roughly coincides with a major historical transition in the mechanisms of US Empire (see Solomon “Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies in White Settler Colonialism” and Moran Identity and Capitalism). Surely this co-evolution of neoliberal transition and identity transition provides a challenge for thought. In many of the following sections, we will come back to the question of the relation between identity and capitalism, and the significance of that question for writing about Taiwan, notably by exposing the anticommunist, antiblack ethos that subtly informs the field and our understanding of transition. For the moment, it is essential to observe that the juridical order based on supposedly “free” wage labour guaranteed by citizenship not only contributes to the proliferation of de facto forms of voluntary transnational slavery (Stierl “Of Migrant Slaves,” 4), it is also inscribed, at the level of a world system based on sovereign nation-states, in an essentially

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colonial discourse of species or specific difference. Just as the nation-state “represents” citizens in both senses of the term (both as proxy and as image), the national citizen is not only the proprietor of his or her own labour, supposedly “free” to sell it on the market to the capitalist whose own relation to property is not mediated by the body but by capital, he or she is also related to others via an ontological order of specific difference that begins with the presupposition of the individual and ascends vertically to the national level and onwards to humanity as a unified whole. This ontological order of specific difference is referenced in a key scene at the conclusion of the film when an aged Wei Chong-ting returns to the high school where the horrific events of sixty years ago occurred. Poking around, he implausibly finds a notebook with a personal letter to Fang Ray-shin inside hidden by his teacher Chang Ming-hui some six decades earlier. The moment leads Wei to wax poetic about the vertical moral continuum of animality, evil, and divinity that authoritarian state terror reveals in the constitution of individual choice. It goes without saying that this continuum echoes the cultural imaginary of modernity defined in terms of what Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit infamously called the “master–slave dialectic.” Throughout the modern period, i.e., the period of a colonial–imperial bipolarity, the binary choice between enslavement and mastery (“animality” and “divinity”) has exercised a determining effect on the various ways to imagine relations between humanity, now understood as a species among other species, and its others—principally the animal, the machine, and the omnipotent divinity. The dialectic of anthropological difference at the heart of modernity is thus hardly limited to interspecies difference but extends to—or, more precisely, originates in—the understanding and experience of intraspecies difference, an experience for which nationality and race are primordial. Situating “evil” (emoxing ) between “animality” (shouxing ) and “divinity” (shenxing ), Detention would have us understand this quintessentially modern dialectic between master and slave in terms of a morality tale about good and evil invariably ascribed to collective human populations formed as nation-states. If Detention never explicitly identifies this “evil” other ethno-nation as “Chinese,” the simulacrum of identity leaves no question otherwise. Allow me to list the elements that compose this simulacrum with parenthetical references to specific details in the film: accents (the janitor at the school who lends a storage room key to the “reading” group speaks Mandarin with an accent identifiable according to today’s standards as

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continental—noticeably different, it should be observed, from what an actual continental Mandarin accent might have sounded like in the first half of the twentieth century when most speakers, including Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife Soong Mei-Ling, deviated widely from practically non-existent national norms), dialects (in the very first scene when the “reading” group is introduced, the scene begins with one of its members, Ah-Sheng, speaking in Taiwanese Hokkienese—one of the rare occasions in the film when Hokkienese dialect is heard—and playing with a puppet figurine from the pantheon of gods familiar to Taiwanese popular religion), and settings (such as the dialogue between Fang and Chang that occurs on the steps of a generic Shinto shrine that we will discuss below). Together, these elements add up to implicitly brand everything “good” as “Taiwanese,” everything “evil” as “Chinese.” Needless to say, there are no Americans, First Peoples, or others in the film to complicate this moral reductivism. More poignantly, the film evacuates the nuance of historical detail related to the infamous February 28th Incident at the heart of the historical trauma that initiated the period of authoritarian rule in the Republic of China on Taiwan. Popularised accounts, of which Detention would be one example, regularly portray the 228 Incident as a case of ethnic enmity. The animated short film, “A Massacre Before Democracy: the history of the 228 incident in Taiwan,” by Taiwan Bar, whose Youtube channel specialising in animated explanations of historical events has over a million subscribers, exemplifies this trend towards unnuanced ethnicisation of that historical event. (It is worth noting that Taiwan Bar also released a non-animated short video explaining the historical background of the video game version of Detention.) Yet, as recalled by the oral historian Lan Bozhou, a specialist of the Incident, ethnicity is not a reliable index to understanding the conflictual nature of the event (which was eminently political and to which waishengren, the post-49 migrants from the continent, and benshengren, the pre-49 Han settlers on the island, responded in multiple ways, as much in concert together as in opposition to each other) but rather a result of posterior projection (see Huang Jie’s interview with Lan for a synopsis of Lan’s extensive work in oral and narrative history of the Incident: Huang “228 lishi zhenxiang ”). Dissimulating neoliberal subjective formation behind the citational repetition of Rousseauian truisms constituting the “free world” and neoliberal identity politics that redefine sovereignty explains a lot of what happens in Detention. Detention’s citational practices, drawing

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from the simplified image of liberal nationalism, are not just a cinematic invention, but have a basis in history. They are an instance of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has identified, in his powerful critique of the colonial assumptions behind European Enlightenment, as “an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms ” (Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe, 4) that exercises a powerful influence on the postcolonial imagination. In Detention, that imaginary figure, based on clichés, is not only that of the “free world,” the history of which is as problematic as it is troubling, but also that of “ethnic identity” (zuqun rentong ) within Taiwan. The citational aspect of the film undoubtedly contributes to the “clichéd” (Lee “Detention”) or “overplayed” (Hioe “Review: Detention”) aspect widely noted by critics. These same critics nevertheless miss the way that citational repetition functions as an ideological device, leading one to surmise that the oversight is an inevitable result of the critic’s own ideological investment in the political representation of Taiwan for a (North American) anglophone audience as a bastion of freedom against authoritarianism bearing an ethno-national identity distinct from Chineseness.

Authoritarian Freedom More alarmingly, the association of freedom with birth opens the way, beyond nationalism, to the seemingly contradictory formula of fascist freedom. Recently analysed by Alberto Toscano, the previously overlooked role accorded to freedom in historical fascism provides crucial clues to understanding the counter-intuitive links between neoliberalism and neofascism today. The very possibility of a fascist freedom—and the unsettling need to reflect on the abiding potentialities of white, settler-colonial, propertied, masculine figurations of freedom—is excised by the discourse on ‘totalitarianism’, even in the latter’s most philosophically and historically rich variant, namely Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism— whose recognition of the ‘boomerang effect’ of colonialism should have sensitised her to freedom’s racial over-determinations (8). Toscano’s work is a call to take seriously the prominent role accorded to freedom in the discourse of historical fascism. We cannot simply dismiss the appeal to freedom within fascist discourse as false promise or ideological ploy. Beyond the specificities of the various “figurations of freedom,” such as race, property, and gender, mentioned by Toscano, our attention

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is at a more general level drawn to the articulation between freedom and bordering, understood in the broadest sense possible as a fundamental operation of social speciation. Turning our attention to a discussion about China and Taiwan, there is probably no better place to start than with the writings and speeches of Chiang Kai-shek himself. If we divide Chiang’s middle to late career into two periods, the first encompassing the two long and chaotic decades of conflict with Imperial Japan and the Communist Party of China on the Asian continent prior to 1949, the other encompassing the period after fleeing the continent in 1949 to the “First Island Chain” established by Pax Americana’s inheritance of the Japanese Empire, it is not difficult to perceive a major shift in the way that Chiang articulates the cause of freedom. Beginning in the late 1920s, as the conflict with the Communists intensified, Chiang adopted an increasingly authoritarian model of governance, justified by the theory of national tutelage originally advanced by Sun Yat-sen. This view held that Chinese populations were not ready for democracy and needed to be trained, disciplined, and tutored before achieving political maturity. Prior to that maturation, freedom would have to be deferred in order for the members of the nation to collectively go to school. Based on the idea of civilisational “uplift” closely connected to racisms and the subjective technology of anthropological difference, the discourse of national schooling follows a typically colonial logic inscribed in postcolonial nationalism. In Chiang’s wartime work, China’s Destiny (1943), freedom is articulated to a biopolitical racial struggle at the global level. As the conflict with the Japanese Imperial Army brewing since the beginning of the 1930s exploded into full-fledged war, the period of collective tutelage of the 1920s and 1930s was usurped by the Japanese plan, as Chiang understood it, to turn the entirety of China into a “slave colony” (73). As the inherently class project of anthropological upgrade gave way to a struggle for collective survival, China embarked on a “total war” (142) of resistance to national enslavement. In Chiang’s choice of the term “total war,” we can hear the echoes of a totalisation that is anthropological in nature. At this point, freedom is not opposed to authoritarian modes of government, but to racially based systems of collective enslavement. To be sure, the freedom that Chiang wants to fight for in this era is based on national independence and autonomy, yet our understanding of what this freedom means would be distorted if it were restricted to national sovereignty. Indeed, the very concept of “destiny” that serves as the title

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of Chiang’s wartime appeal evokes a teleological notion of becoming that is determined, or prefigured, by the notion of social speciation along a biological model. Beginning with a chapter on political anthropology, China’s Destiny advances the thesis that the differences among the various populations that constitute China are not of a racial order, such as that between different family trees, but rather of a familial order within the same arborescent configuration. Without going into the details of the text’s composition—partially ghost-written by the social anthropologist Tao Xisheng or at least based on Tao’s ideas and then significantly modified by Chiang in a second edition (see Lou Gui-pin for a fascinating discussion of the details)—the point to retain here is that the text is selfconsciously inscribed in a biopolitical discourse of racial origins, historical lineage, and latter-day “survival” and “freedom” from “enslavement.” If the discourse capitalises on the amorphous morphology of modern Chinese terms distinguishing people, nation, and race, we should be careful not to attribute the conceptual confusion to the filter effect of cultural translation (i.e., “the Chinese just got it wrong because of presuppositions inherent to their own culture”) instead of recognising first the extent to which the concepts of nation, ethnicity, people, and even citizenship are inherently overdetermined, in the modern period, seemingly always bound to the “destiny” of figuring anthropological difference in general. While the inclusion of other nationalities (such as Tibetans, Mongols, and Uyghurs) in the Chinese nation as proposed by Chiang (following to a certain extent Tao) looks like Han chauvinism when seen from the perspective of “people” in a national determination, it is equally anti-imperialist when seen from the perspective of “people” determined as race. Whether in the first edition’s preference for Tao’s “theory of the historical convergence of national peoples” (minzu ronghe lun) or in the second edition’s preference for what was essentially Chiang’s “theory of the coeval origin of national peoples” (guozu tongyuan lun), the different editions of China’s Destiny share the common task of establishing China as a non-racialised space within the larger reality of a global system of racial hierarchy defined by collective slavery and mastery. In light of this aspect of China’s Destiny, I do not think that we can subscribe without modification to Evan Dawley’s assertion that the “Guomindang (GMD [or KMT]) rigidly held to this notion of minzu-as-nation” (Dawley Becoming Taiwanese, 13). If Chiang does not say as much, the implications of his biopolitical logic placing the nation under the sign of racial difference are unmistakable for Sino-Japanese relations. To the extent that Imperial

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Japan aimed for nothing less than turning Republican China into a “slave colony” and the enslavement of racial others is the hallmark of Western imperialism, the difference between China and Japan was deemed to be essentially racial. The biopolitical struggle against racial enslavement would have had to be fought, according to Chiang, at an epistemic level. To avoid racial enslavement, it would be necessary for the Chinese nation-race to undertake a project of self-tutelage: “In other words, it was our unwillingness to become slaves that first caused us to study Western civilization” (Chiang China’s Destiny, 97). What Chiang laments is that this resistance to slavery carried out at an epistemic level led to its opposite: “Thus, although the Chinese people originally studied Western civilization because of their unwillingness to become slaves, the result was that they unconsciously became the slaves of foreign theories because of their studies of Western civilization” (ibid., 98). Despite a volitional commitment to combat colonial slavery, knowledge still commands the power to enslave the colonised without their even being aware of it. Chiang’s explanation of how knowledge wields such wily powers is based on a notion of determination that superficially looks like what contemporary theorists would call “situated knowledge,” but would more aptly be called “anthropologically overdetermined knowledge.” Rather than pointing to the way knowledge is involved in the construction of positionality, Chiang’s idea is that knowledge is an object of geo-localised possession, always the property of a national-racial group. Relying on an incredibly simplistic mode of identification, Chiang’s concept of knowledge is also for that reason easily communicable and apt to moralisation. Significantly, Chiang attributes the root source of epistemic colonisation to the dangerous act of copying. After bemoaning the role of foreign models in several republican constitutional proposals, Chiang characterises the conflict between proponents of liberalism and communism in China as, “nothing more than the copying of irrelevant ideas from the AngloAmericans and the Soviets” (ibid., 100; translation modified). Chiang continues: “These academic theories and political discourses based on copying irrelevant ideas not only do not hew to China’s national plan and the people’s livelihood—thereby transgressing the spirit of China’s innate culture—they also show that the speaker himself has fundamentally forgotten that he is a Chinese…” (ibid., 100; translation modified, emphasis added). Much like the film Detention, Chiang Kai-shek, too,

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subscribes to the idea that the mnemonic structure of identity is sufficient defence against epistemic colonisation. According to this idea, identification is a matter of remembering who you really are. While Chiang’s understanding of epistemic decolonisation is simplistically wishful, ascribing to identity an inherently anti-racist, decolonial aura without further inquiry into the historicity of identity as a bio/ political discourse of anthropological difference, it remains the fact that his understanding of the mnemonic structure of identity is fundamentally not a stranger to the idea of postcolonial sovereignty sustained by postwar Pax Americana’s idea of “engineered self-determination,” substituting cultural nationalism (co-figured against and with American imperial nationalism) for popular sovereignty. Significantly, it would take the Americans and their allies among elites on the other side of the Pacific several years to figure out how to put that idea of cultural cofiguration into practice for the new form of colonial governmentality under erasure that has characterised America’s informal empire in the Pacific for the past 70 years. In the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War, the US Department of State, which had commissioned during the war an English translation of Chiang’s text, refused to make it public until 1947, effectively banning the book from publication by classifying it as top secret. Needless to say, as millions of copies had already been published in Chinese, the top-secret classification attributed to the work as late as 1946 was, like the “banned” books in Detention (see below), focused on translation, not the original work itself. As far as US publics were concerned, the image of Chiang’s government as “Free China” (as opposed to Occupied China) was deemed sufficient; Chiang’s biopolitical anti-imperialism, by contrast, was considered too toxic to publicise. With the end of the Pacific War, followed closely by the “loss” of the continent to the Communists and Chiang’s US-assisted flight to the former Japanese territory, however, the meaning of “Free China” for Chiang Kai-shek (and, with the advent of the Korean War, for his fickle American backers, too) changed dramatically. Gone was the biopolitical discourse of racialised slavery. While the opposition to “slavery” (nu) still defines the meaning of freedom in Chiang’s discourse, the racial content is completely replaced by the politics of anticommunism. In that respect, Chiang’s ancillary position in the Cold War period compelled him to reproduce the hypocrisy of the former imperialist nations that had once sought to enslave China. The anticommunism of the former imperialist nations was inherently imbued with an unmistakable element of colonial

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racism, emblematised by the image of Mao Zedong at the head of a horde of locusts that adorned the cover of the December 11, 1950, issue of TIME magazine, accompanied by the perverse caption: “new war, old warlord.” Such obvious capitulation to something against which he had fought—or had at least pretended to fight—so passionately must have been only one of a number of cruel ironies originating in crueller attachments that Chiang experienced in exile in the First Island Chain of Pax Americana. The transition to the Cold War led Chiang’s concept of freedom to be defined not against racial slavery but in relation to a Manichean division between the Communist International and the Free World. In a New Year’s address to members of the R.O.C. military from 1961 (nominally one year before the fictional “events” depicted in the film Detention), Chiang Kai-shek emphasises the connections among freedom, the frontier, and the monstrous evil seeping in from the other side: Brethren! Against the plans of the Communist International to invade [other countries] one by one and turn the world red, our Republic of China, chosen to be its first important target, has been bearing the brunt of that assault continuously since 1921. Confronting this evil, monstrous force that constantly invades and besieges us on two fronts, via both internal traitors and foreign enemies, we have never given in to fear or sought avoidance. We are more resolved than ever, as we overcome the obstacles and hardships of communist invasion, to realize the full program of recovering our country, guaranteeing world peace and human freedom.

Whereas freedom in the pre-1949 era was defined in terms of a biopolitical “race war” (or zhongzhan, to use the phrase coined by Liang Qichao at the end of the nineteenth century), freedom in the post-1949 era is defined in terms of a defence of borders against monstrosity and evil. That the borders are at once internal and external is a logical consequence of the nature of the monstrosity that is communism—a form of transnationalism that sweeps across borders, eliminating them in the process, turning human populations that had once been divided into different “colours” of masters and slaves into a monochrome, red unity of global enslavement. The border, in other words, is the source of freedom in Chiang’s post-1949 discourse. If we focus exclusively on the political repression of freedom during the period of martial law in Taiwan, we will undoubtedly fail to see how

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the border was an essential element in the articulation of fascist freedom under Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. More investigation would be required to test the hypothesis that I have advanced here, which consists in seeing the border of the post-49 discourse in terms of the racial anthropology of the pre-49 discourse. Nevertheless, I feel confident that this preliminary analysis of the KMT version of “fascist freedom” provides a basis from which to investigate continuities with the transnational discourse of Taiwan’s contemporary position on the frontlines—internal and external—of a global war against authoritarianism. The parallels with Detention are indeed striking. Depicting authoritarianism in the colours of ethnic difference that follows the contours of a border at once internal and external, the ethicised view of White Terror advanced by Detention touches the place of “freedom’s racial overdeterminations.” Similarly, Chiang’s notion of “recovering our country” finds a parallel in the mnemonic structure of Taiwanese identity at the heart of the film’s politics. In a figurative sense, today’s Taiwan Consensus is constructed around a narrative of “taking back” one’s own country from the “foreign regime” (wailai zhengquan) of the KMT. This is precisely one of the central themes articulated during Tsai Ing-wen’s 2011 presidential campaign, when the notion of replacing the “foreign regime” with a “Taiwanese government” (Lin Shenxu) played an important role in the expression of the Taiwan Consensus. Crucially, this idea of the foreignness of the KMT state is invariably accompanied by a discourse of geo-localised inscription, emblematically seen in the deictic phrase, Taiwan zhe kuai tudi, or “this piece of land that is Taiwan,” that has been a ubiquitous element of nativist political discourse in Taiwan for several decades. The point is not to evaluate which ethno-national collectivities or political factions exercise legitimate claim to the state but rather to refuse to uncritically accept the normative idea that the state is an organic representation or possession of the nation that can be won, lost, and regained. From this perspective, there is little to be gleaned from distinguishing between states that are “accidental,” as Hsiao-ting Lin has innovatively described Taiwan in The Accidental State, and states that are “deliberate” or “intentional”—an attribute that inevitably refers to the Rousseauian idea of a general will shared by the national community. In Taiwan’s case, as Lin’s work clearly shows, the creation of a separate state in Taiwan was accidental only in the sense that it was unforeseen and unplanned. What was intentional and could have been foreseen beyond doubt was

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the imperial prerogative of the United States, for which discretional population engineering and the privatisation of interstate relations to achieve the aims of American geostrategic interests were standard operating procedure. The fact that there was no preconceived, deliberate plan to create a “Republic of China on Taiwan” was simply a corollary of the SOP of (imperialist) international law in the Western Pacific inherited by the United States, which treated law essentially as a tool, often negotiated in secret, for population engineering serving liberal imperialist ends. In many cases, the ad hoc exception was the plan. Beyond the machinations of international law, a far deeper sense of “policy” informed those who thought of themselves as naturally sutured to the positionality of the West, for the West is nothing but the plan to “fix others” that guides all imperial policy. If US American policy planners could afford to be ad hoc, it was not only because the US at the end of World War II commanded the military, logistical, and economic power to do so, but also because of their faith in the temporal pretentions of the West. Being a spatial abstraction of the assumed chronology of modernity’s metonymic transitions, the West would have seemed like a bedrock of direction (both orientation and command) that afforded the liberty for ad hoc exceptions. In short, the term “accidental” conveys a series of normative imperial notions that do not stand up to scrutiny: the idea that some transitions are the organic unfolding of the present into the future while others are continually hobbled by the return of the past in the present; or again, that while states may be accidental, national community is not. We will have more to say about the accidental quality, in both senses of the term (as damage and as contingency), of nation-states specifically in relation to borders in our discussion of the trauma of capitalist transitions in Chapter 3. As far as Taiwan is concerned, a more appropriate word choice to describe the KMT satellite state that unexpectedly developed under US hegemony would be arbitrary rather than accidental. To clarify this issue, it is useful to consult Gavin Walker’s work in “Citizen-Subject and the National Question,” which resolves the relation between the nation and the state at a general level: [T]he form of the nation-state is often understood in a common-sense manner by means of a simple sequence: the nation must precede the state, because it legitimates and justifies the state, giving it a certain solidity that would otherwise be lost in attempting to link the state’s boundaries to a given community. But this sequence cannot be logically sustained for

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a number of reasons. First and foremost, if the nation were to precede the state, it would imply that a concept of boundary or border could be rigorously drawn between one nation and another prior to the advent of the modern political community. It would imply, for instance, that national language or custom could be strictly delimited or demarcated within boundaries that correspond to concrete differences on the level of the concept. This in turn would imply that prior to such nations, there exists a natural stratum of difference in which difference could be understood as already organised. In this sense, it would imply that each national community is simply a historical concretisation of a set of differences that not only existed in antiquity, but exists eternally, in an infinite regress, though always corresponding to some natural hierarchy inscribed in the earth itself. Needless to say, we know, and have known for centuries, that such a conception of an inherent systematic ordering of difference inscribed in the earth never existed. … This leads us, therefore, to assert the precise opposite of the commonly held wisdom. In other words, the state—a social form always associated with an intensive concentration of systems and institutions that in turn are made to correspond to an extensive territoriality and formation of borders—must always precede the nation. (3–4)

What is brilliant about Walker’s explanation of the relation between the state and the nation is that it permits him to explain how the presupposition of the nation by the state is intrinsically linked to capitalist regimes of accumulation via the conceptual apparatus of the transition. Despite its appearance as a temporal concept, the notion of capitalist transition is always tied into a social geography of uneven relations that belies the idyllic image of natural correspondence between producers and consumers, supply and demand, capital and labour.

The Wounded Interiority of Victimhood Nationalism As Jie-hyun Lim, a Korean historian and specialist of mnemonic politics has observed, claims to nationalised forms of victimhood have become central to the human rights regime inherent to the global memory space today (Lim Global Easts, 45). If a “sacralization of memories” that “block[s]…[the] gaze of outsiders” (ibid., 48) is essential to what Lim memorably calls “victimhood nationalism,” it follows that one of the ways to excavate such nationalism is to look for the construction of wounded

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interiority. Invariably, the sense of wounded interiority beyond the gaze of others is refracted by the image of an inner self that is lovable and unique yet equally misunderstood. This sense of wounded interiority at the basis of personal identity leads almost inexorably to the search for a sympathetic soul who would provide validation for the self-image of one’s own uniqueness. A familiar motif, it is as much a classic theme of Rousseauian liberalism, expressed in the Confessions, as that of the theme of freedom given at birth, expressed in The Social Contract. As Ellie Kennedy has shown, Rousseau’s Confessions is structurally similar to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werther, providing a literary template for political romanticism. Just to be clear, political romanticism does not refer to voluntaristic, wishful thinking, but rather to the idea that the identity between language and people is the natural basis of political community. The Rousseauian thematics at the basis of romanticism suggest that the latter is not just a literary phenomenon linked to a specific period in early modernity focused on the birth of subjective interiority but rather constitutes a horizon, or an ethos, of political and cultural modernity as a whole. If romanticism in this latter sense is a discursive ethics about the figuration of the human being that continually reconfigures the singularity of the human according to the logic of individual-species-genre (thus inadvertently destroying singularity itself), then the politics to which it gives rise is always invested in realising human uniqueness via the identification of a collective that mediates between the individual and humanity as whole. Hence, the way the film presents the sphere of intimacy provides a privileged site for understanding Detention’s romantic investment in the problematic of anthropological difference at the heart of the fantasy of the nation-state. In Rousseauian fashion, the intimate relation between Fang Ray-shin and the male teacher/counsellor, Chang Ming-hui, with whom she falls in love is a central subplot of the movie. At a narrative level, Fang’s fantasised, unrequited romantic interest in Chang sets the stage for her jealous betrayal of the underground “reading” group. As pressure mounts on the “reading” group due to increasing political repression both at school and in society at large, a crucial scene occurs when Fang inadvertently overhears part of a dialogue between the two teachers who lead the “reading” group, Chang and Yin Tsui-han—the teacher who originally referred Fang to Chang for counselling after Fang experienced emotional issues in the wake of seeing her mother betray her father to the authorities in revenge for his marital infidelity and domestic violence. Concerned about

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the possible ramifications for the “reading” group participants should Fang’s budding love for Chang be discovered by others, Yin counsels Chang to make a choice. The eavesdropping Fang only hears the first clause of a sentence in which Yin offers Chang a choice between either Fang or the “reading” group; Fang mistakenly assumes that the second option would have been Yin herself. Critics universally conclude that there was no romantic involvement between the two teachers, but, despite the consensus, I do not find the conclusion persuasive. Prude, proper, beautiful, professionally committed, and the daughter of the former school principal, Yin does not strike one as a female character who would approach her romantic passions in anything but a cautiously reserved way. Comradeship provides the perfect pretext for a character like Yin to shrewdly dissimulate her own romantic interest in Chang as would befit a woman of her social status, physical attractiveness, emotional maturity (relative to the adolescent Fang), and steadfast morality, while letting Chang assume the social risks of making the first move. Although a relatively minor issue in relation to plot development, the question of the relation between the two teachers who lead the “reading” group could be seen as a litmus test for the audience’s investment in the theme of authenticity and honesty that underwrites the film’s ideological commitments. At an ideological level, the stakes are much higher. Fang’s relationship to Chang is the principal vehicle used to establish the image of subjective interiority and autonomy essential to the clichéd image of the social contract and the idea of bourgeois civil society as a realm of mediation between the individual and the state considered necessary to stave off authoritarianism. Just as the classical legal contract includes a reference to the place where the contract was concluded in addition to the date, the place where the search for the “sympathetic soul,” whose function is to provide affirmation of my own self-image via fusional communion, is a crucial detail. What amounts to the social contract of the private individual is enjoined in front of a temple identified as “Japanese Shinto” by a tablet above the front gate, the backdrop for two heart-to-heart scenes between Chang and Fang, that bears the inscription, kunitama (pronounced guohun in Mandarin and meaning “national spirit”). Shinto shrines related to kunitama were part of a colonial network of temples based in Hokkaido (which had been a Japanese frontier territory in the nineteenth century) and of which one was present in Taiwan during the 50 years of Japanese annexation. By avoiding a precise date for the events of the film (an

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intertitle approximately six minutes into the movie announces 1962 as a reference, but the date is never specified), Detention is free to mobilise the image of a generic Shinto shrine as a background for the heartfelt dialogue between Fang, who plays the role of the misunderstood, wounded heroine, and Chang, who becomes in effect the “sympathetic soul” that provides Fang with self-validation. The generic aspect of the shrine complements the quality “outside of time” in which the two scenes between Fang and Chang occur. Yet even in this atemporal, generic space, the passage of historical time is alluded to by the erasure of a third sinogram following kunitama. The missing sinogram, an erasure presumably imposed by the KMT regime, was undoubtedly supposed to be sha, she in Mandarin, or “[Shinto] shrine” in English, forming a neologism composed of three sinograms that was never used for any recorded shrine in Taiwan during the colonial era. Although Shinto shrines in Taiwan were not destroyed after the end of Japanese annexation, the KMT government embarked on a vigorous de-Japanisation campaign. Shinto shrines were regularly converted to local Earth God temples (tudigong ), while others became national monuments to fallen KMT soldiers (zhonglieci). At a historical level external to the film, this representation of subjective interiority enacted in a zone “outside of time” located in front of a generic Shinto shrine imbues the film with a sense of historical ambiance even as it introduces contradictory elements of an ahistorical fiction. Perhaps more importantly, this repression of historical difference via a discourse of subjective interiority encourages viewers to look at themselves in a way that furthers the operation of neoliberal ideology, as if intimate desires were not the product of the myriad socio-political forces packed into a smartphone, such as predictive algorithmic technologies, real-time feedback, videogames, social media, and the monetisation of affect. Indeed, the version of ideology promoted by the film is akin to what Marxists before Louis Althusser might have described as “false consciousness.” According to this view, (authoritarian) ideology is something that is imposed from the outside and whose causes and effects are primarily psychological. Due to its external nature, those people subject to its machinations can remain, as is the case for the members of the underground copying (“reading”) group in Detention, completely aware of its imposed character, always able clearly to distinguish “private” ideas, desires, and inner life from those imposed by the “public,” state ideological discourse. Fang Ray-shin’s culpability ultimately comes down to a

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confusion of the line between the public and the private, taking advantage of state terror to pursue the ends of personal jealousy. When Chang consoles her in the timeless world on the steps of the Shinto shrine, declaring that Fang herself should not be held responsible for the group’s annihilation as she had been used as a tool by the terrorist authoritarian state with which responsibility ultimately lies, he emphasises the primacy of the private over the public. By reinforcing the externalist account of ideology as false consciousness transposed over authentic subjective interiority, the film effectively mystifies the border between the public and the private, leaving viewers unable to confront the contemporary discourse of neoliberal individualisation other than through strategies of disavowal and complicity for which the national border, or again a proliferation of borders, becomes both the pretext and the justification.

Back to School Gamification Detention presents the public secondary school as a symbolic space for a Bildungsroman about authoritarianism. A study of public schools in Taiwan would no doubt reveal an aesthetic function that goes far beyond the political ideology and military discipline of public schools during the period of Martial Law. The continuities at the level of aesthetic ideology amidst the changes accompanying democratic transition would make an interesting study. In lieu of such in-depth treatment, a few ultimately superficial remarks about the significance of the school as a site of social reproduction and aesthetic ideology will help to underline the importance of the drama that unfolds in Detention. The Chinese-language title of the film, fanxiao, does not refer as in the English version to the overtly political connotations of the word detention, but to a compulsory return to school often during a period that might otherwise have been allotted to vacation. The practice of fanxiao, or being sent back to school (in the middle of summer, for example), is thus a ritual of socialisation in Taiwan in preparation for the discipline of a job market ranked fourth globally in both 2019 and 2020 for longest working hours (Everington “Taiwan Has the 4th Longest Working Hours In the World”; Taiwan News “Taiwan records 4th longest hours worldwide in 2019”). Due to the imposing stature of work in Taiwanese society—a discipline instilled during the Martial Law era, school plays a central role in the popular Taiwanese social imaginary, where different generations are named by decade as if they were students in the same

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school class. Shu-mei Shih’s description of Taiwan’s position within US Empire via the figure of the “model minority student” (Shih “Theory,” 735) provides a further point of reference for the school as metaphor in a postcolonial world of continuing inequality and colonial imaginaries. As a metaphor for social relations in general, the Taiwanese school is thus a place where neocolonial satellite dependency and capitalist hierarchies come together in a myth of engineered autonomy. It is also, one might add in a gesture towards themes to be discussed in subsequent sections, a place where the legacy of the linguistic ideology of modernity is fastened to subjective formation. Although schools no longer mete out corporeal punishment for speaking non-standard languages, the assumption remains that language is a predominantly corporeal discipline linking the individual to a community via the presupposition of identity. The public school is hardly an anodyne space for the modern nationstate. As Jacques Ellul noted in a monograph about propaganda, coincidentally written in 1962, the same year in which the fictional events of Detention are set, “the development of primary education is a fundamental condition for the organization of propaganda” (Ellul Propaganda, 110). Inasmuch as school aims to establish the disciplinary patterns of control and organisation amidst the explosion of information necessary to the vast enterprise of a technological society, the school is the social institution par excellence in which propaganda dominates. Ellul’s unorthodox definition of propaganda as a symptom and result of technical societies will be an object for discussion in a subsequent chapter. For the moment, what is important to retain is that school is not just a place for the transmission of knowledge, information, and values but also the place where the technical organisation of society is first imposed on individuals in the form of disciplines that are frequently more corporeal than cerebral. To put it another way, the school is the place where individuals become “individualised” according to the demands of technical reason. Technical reason does not necessarily demand “technological” commitments. Rather, it demands a recognition of patterns, one name for which would be algorithms, another simply wen (the sinogram that is usually translated as “literary,” but which etymologically referred first to patterns). Patterns structure action towards predetermined and hierarchically valued ends. Although Ellul tends to see the people-language-culture nexus at the heart of modern nation-states as a fully formed and essentially autonomous collective individual, there is no doubt that the nation-state itself is for him an expression of technical reason. When speaking of the

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“four great collective sociological presuppositions in the modern world” that universally structure propaganda regardless of political ideology or social institutions, Ellul reminds his readers that he is speaking of “the world that shares a modern technology and is structured into nations” (Ellul Propaganda, 39). As we will explore more fully further on in this book, the “pattern” of the national form in the modern era is defined by a relationship that is disavowed or repressed. The Two of the relationship is effaced in favour of the One of national sovereignty, posited as existing prior to and independent of the relationship. In the context of Taiwan, this pattern converges around the figure of Taiwan cofigured in relation to the fantasy of the West. (Cofiguration is a technical term that will be the object of further discussion, notably in Part II.) Reading with Ellul yet beyond Ellul, we would like to be attentive to the exercise of technical reason within the realm of the imaginary, the place where figuration, usually understood in a literary aesthetic sense, becomes a basic modern technology—if not the model of modern technology in general. Following this logic, we might offer the following formula: Precisely because Taiwanese public schools in both the Martial Law era and the era of democratic transition have been instrumentalised in favour of national identity (“Chinese” or “Taiwanese,” respectively), the school is also the place where the fantasy of the West is most successfully instilled through the procedures of aesthetic ideology. If the national form, more than nationalism per se, has been a continuous theme of Taiwanese public schooling from the “Chinese” content of the Martial Law era to the “Taiwanese” content of the current one, the national quality of this theme in no way points to the absence of a relation to the extra-national. Indeed, that relationship is precisely what lies behind the reification enacted by sovereignty. While the West often serves as the end point or culmination of the “successful” educational trajectory, potentially to be finalised in the Ph.D. obtained overseas, the West is even more closely identified in Taiwan, as in all postcolonial nations, with the source of standards, judgement, recognition, and specialised technical knowledge that enable pursuit of Ellul’s “four great collective sociological presuppositions in the modern world,” namely, that “man’s aim in life is happiness, that man is naturally good, that history develops in endless progress, and that everything is matter” (Ellul Propaganda, 39). In order to be properly happy, good, progressive, and material, one has to go through a process of aesthetic education that forms one into an individual part of a species (the nation) that is part of a genus (humanity), each endowed with a

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recognisable and unique figure. Not just a source of recognition for the political existence of such figures, the West is also charged, by virtue of its role as arbiter, with the force of punishment or retribution for deviation from these presuppositions. Punitive measures range from a refusal of recognition to outright invasion. As such, the West, or more precisely, a reified image of the colonial relationship that suppresses its relational quality in the figure of an autonomous geocultural unit—“the West,” is profoundly incorporated into the institution of social reproduction (the school) as social speciation (the national form). To the extent that the school governs social access to technical knowledge and technical organisation is equated with the West, the West is implicitly inscribed into the school system. It hardly matters whether there is any thematic connection between the knowledge taught in schools and the specificity of the West. In most cases, professional knowledge, such as materials engineering, is identified precisely by the absence of areal or cultural markers. What is essential, however, is that the West, as a site of supposed universalism, occupies a position of judgement, a source of recognition. Behind this colonial structure of recognition lies a subtle form of technology that is thoroughly subjective and aesthetic in nature. This kind of technology operates simultaneously on bodies, tongues, and minds at the level of the imaginary, creating figures of the human (or, more precisely, cofigurations of the human) as its primary practical effect. More than a ground for socialisation, the public schools in Taiwan, as in other nations, are a colonial institution of aesthetic ideology, or figuration, adapted to the age when colonial governmentality persists in the innovative form developed under Pax Americana of “colonial governmentality under erasure.” The kind of “propaganda” instantiated by the elementary and secondary schools in Taiwan is precisely that which concerns the aesthetic ideology of the modern system of internationality. Needless to say, none of this is experienced as such by the individual student; instead, it takes the form of the vague anxiety that hounds the postcolonial student with the shame and insecurity of colonial inferiority. As a result of colonial trauma, the postcolonial student invariably has to prove her worth; citizenship on its own is not sufficient grounds to be granted a reprieve from the inferiority imputed by colonisation. If the national form and the national figure seem like both the cause and the solution to this inferiority complex, that is because aesthetic ideology itself contains an element of circularity, as one becomes what one should have already been. Acquiring the status

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of a norm, technical reason in the guise of aesthetic figuration engenders a circular relation of autonomously normalising norms. To conform is reasonable, to correct deviation for conformity is technical, and the technical is the key to a simulacrum of “independence” called “identity.” Figuration elevates both the individual and the collective to the level of technical reason, or the autonomously normalising norm. As the threat of exclusion from the norm is so acute, and the consequences of exclusion potentially so grave, all patterns and disciplines, including those related to figuration and subjectivity, are inherently associated with the acquisition of technical reason per se. All the traces of this form of “propaganda” disseminated by the public school in Taiwan, or again, all the traces of the aesthetic ideology concerning social speciation and the human individual’s place in a postcolonial, capitalist, technological world organised into nation-states, have been delicately preserved in the subtext of Detention’s political pedagogy (“to remember that one is Taiwanese”), yet erased from the conscious “memory” of the film. This contradiction reinforces our suspicions about the constitutive role of historical repression in the film’s ethics of identity and remembrance. In terms of the plot, the “back to school” theme could refer either to the nightmare world in which Wei and Fang find themselves trapped after normal school hours or to the film’s denouement. Released from prison in the post-martial law period and pardoned for his participation in the underground “reading” group, Wei Chong-ting returns to an abandoned Tsuihua High School now facing demolition in preparation for a new, eponymous apartment complex (a gesture to the financialisation of real estate in neoliberal Taiwan), where a bittersweet encounter with Fang’s penitent ghost awaits him. Enacting the “back to school” theme for which the movie is named, the final scene succeeds in blending nostalgia based on disavowal with the cataclysmic “loss of loss” (Bown Playstation, 44 and 101) instantiated by neoliberal gamification. By turning ghosts of the past both into remnants of a false consciousness that formerly prevented us from realising an ultimately alienated version of freedom based in the nation-state’s appropriation of birth and into prodding reminders of just how authentically simple (danchun), lovable (ke’ai), and wronged (yuanwang ) “Taiwanese” really were/are, the movie recycles the forms of social affect that were essential to decades of vaunted “stability” under martial law that supposedly enabled, according to classic postwar American social science, “miraculous” economic growth while paving the way for future “democratic

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transition” within the “spokes and hub” arrangement of Pax Americana’s unique form of colonial governmentality under erasure. Despite a trenchant rejection of the authoritarian past, the movie is imbued with a sense of nostalgia for the values of authoritarian developmentalism founded on the discipline of work. What is decisively different from the previous period, however, is that the discipline of work is now married to the pursuit of enjoyment. At a time when gamification, understood broadly as the reorganisation of social action around the principle of enjoyment in the service of commodification, is “rapidly gaining traction in education discourses, policies, and practices” (Tulloch and Randell-Moon “The politics of gamification,” 204), not to mention in economic activity in general, the nostalgia for a “simpler” time in the past plays an ideological role, preventing viewers from understanding Taiwan’s contemporary transitional experience in terms of neoliberal capitalist transition as opposed to the story of generic “democratic transition” favoured by the Washington Consensus. The ideological subtraction of capitalism from the experience of both authoritarianism and democracy prevents one from grasping the continuities between the two, as well as from imagining alternative forms of freedom that are not based on the birth rights of citizenship or the mimesis of representation, i.e., identity, as well as alternative forms of pleasure that are not based on capitalist gamification. As a form of pedagogy, the combination of nostalgia with the denial of loss provides the formula for a model of identification based on a triple movement of return. The first form of return is towards the disavowal of complicity that is a necessary component of neoliberalism’s penchant to manage social contradictions via the multiplication of borders and an accompanying proliferation of moral panic that sees a risk of “infiltration” behind every social relation. The second form of return is set in motion by the necessarily fictive image of the national community as a form of destiny, encapsulated in the idea of becoming that which one was supposedly born to be. The final form of return consists in a revalorisation of the motif of escape inherited from authoritarianism, now repurposed to neoliberal ends. In that sense, Detention fully conforms to the political valence of the video game world and cyberspace described by Bown, one that is, “structured in favor of what is currently referred to as the ‘alt-right,’ … [and] dominated by conformist trends which tend toward conservatism, protectivism, fear of ‘crisis,’ and support for the core values of the current capitalist climate or endorsement of a return to the values of

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the imaginary past (a yearning which serves nationalism and populism)” (Bown Playstation, 5–6). While Bown’s attribution of these characteristics to the American “alt-right” certainly holds true, the same might be said of other positions across the political spectrum as well. In the postTrump period, the same affectively charged themes of crisis, fear, and return dominate the discourse of American liberals. Nothing is more emblematic of the film’s obsessive compulsion to morally enforce selective, fantasised remembrance than the gamification of historical transition. The film’s roots in an eponymous horror adventure video game from 2017 leave an indelible mark on the filmic presentation of democratic transition, now gamified into a do-or-die struggle to survive the bloodthirsty Lantern Spectre and escape outside the walled compound of the school in which the protagonists are trapped. Two obstacles prevent them from accomplishing this mission. The first is force majeure in the form of a torrential flood outside the gates of the school compound that effectively interdicts communication with and passage to the outside. The second is the role of memory and oblivion. As long as one is unable to remember the truth of the historical past, or, in the case of Fang Ray-shin, unable to recall complicity with state terror for personal vanity (Fang’s presumed innocence is ultimately revealed to be a form of psychological repression that erases the memory of her betrayal, motivated by romantic jealousy and spite, of Wei and the other members of a secret “reading” group), one is compelled to remain trapped within a nightmare simulacrum of the school compound, constantly gaming with death. Crucial to the gamification of subjectivity is the accompanying representation of temporality as a spatial passage. The image of the “outside” to which one must escape plays a central role in subjective formation. It is this image that plays, in the final analysis, a paramount role in suturing the various contradictions unwittingly unleashed by the film to create a unified narrative whose intent is explicitly pedagogical (to teach the younger generation about the moral value of historical events of which they have had no direct experience) and implicitly economic (to gain a return on investment at the box office). In truth, Detention invites its viewers to submit voluntarily to a dysfunctional education consisting of clichéd aesthetics for which the audience literally foots the bill. This is a discipline of highly normalised “identity” that instructs people, especially young people, how to feel—and makes them pay for the lesson while “enjoying” it. Following the huge commercial success

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of the game version, which sold over half a million copies in two years, Detention the movie grossed NT$260 million (approx. USD$10 million), reportedly becoming the third highest grossing local production since 2011. Critics lavished praise on the metonymic ensemble of a Taiwaneseproduced game morphing into a Taiwanese-produced film presenting true Taiwanese history from an authentically Taiwanese-perspective and the film was nominated for twelve Golden Horse awards, winning five.

The Erasure of Communism What is probably most surprising about the film Detention is that the repression of historical difference that constitutes its ideological commitments takes blatantly direct forms. While director John Han-chiang Hsu and his team of scriptwriters have emphasised their “responsibility to history” (Wu “Spectralizing,” 80), the historical events on which the film is supposedly based are treated as allusions used to construct a mythology, not a history. The number embroidered onto Wei’s student uniform, 501014, coincides with the date when Zhong Haodong, a high school principal in Keelung, was executed by firing squad in 1950 in Taiwan for using the school as a base from which to organise the Working Committee of the Taiwan Province Keelung Municipal Chinese Communist Party and publishing a communist newspaper, the Guangmingbao. Yet despite the allusion, the film studiously avoids situating the events depicted at any specific time or place. This poetic licence not only authorises an additional allusion to the Li Zisong Case (in which a member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Taiwan was executed in 1951 for having organised a Socialist Youth Alliance at the Hsinchu County High School), it also enables the inclusion of a generic Shinto shrine mythically sequestered away from the passage of time. Clearly, considerations of historical accuracy took a backseat to fictive monumentalisation in Detention. Further investigation reveals that the most salient example of historical distortion occurs with the film’s central prop—banned books. Crucial to the plotline, these books are not only the bearers of subversively “free” thought to be fetishistically recited and copied, they are also the pretext that leads to the executions of Chang, Yin, and the other members of the group. In a pathetic attempt to remove Yin, whom Fang (mistakenly?) assumes to be a competitor for Chang’s affection, Fang vengefully delivers one of the banned books to the school’s military instructor, Bai

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Guo-feng, who promptly delivers the group’s members to their death. The banned books present in the film include Rabindranath Tagore’s Stray Birds (translated by Zheng Zhenduo), Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (translated by Ba Jin), and Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Symbols of Anguish (translated by Lu Xun). Sharon Tzu-yun Lai, a professor in the Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation, Taiwan Normal University, has publicly commented in the Taiwan edition of Marie Claire that none of the works in question were banned in Taiwan during the period of martial law (Editor Lu “‘Fanxiao’ jinshu you bug?”). What was banned were specific translations of those works effected by Chinese literary figures associated with the Left (starting in 1950, Zheng Zhenduo, the translator of Stray Birds, and Ba Jin, the translator of Fathers and Sons, each held numerous positions in the cultural establishment of the PRC; Lu Xun, the translator of Symbols of Anguish, although not a member of the CPC, was lionised by the CPC cultural establishment after his death in 1936 as a pioneer of the Left). According to Lai, Ba Jin’s translation of Fathers and Sons circulated freely in martial law Taiwan under a pseudonym; Kurigayama’s Symbols of Anguish circulated freely after the release of a Taiwan translation in 1957; similarly, a new translation not done by Lu Xun of Rabindranath’s Stray Birds was published in Taiwan in 1956 (I follow Indian convention in using the author’s given name). Of the three unevenly “banned” translations (not books) present in the film, Rabindranath’s Stray Birds is accorded a central place, appearing at several points in the movie, notably approximately five minutes into the film when the “reading” group is first pictured (the same scene in which Wei asserts that the members of the “reading” group unanimously shared the conviction, “shouldn’t all humans be born free?”) and approximately thirty minutes later in the film when Wei, confronted by a maimed classmate burning books for which the latter was tortured and executed, recalls a meeting with Chang in which the teacher recites stanzas 133 and 134 from Rabindranath’s book-length poem: 133. The leaf becomes flower when it loves. The flower becomes fruit when it worships. 134. The roots below the earth claim no rewards for making the branches fruitful.

In order to serve as a symbol of “free thought,” the passage above from Rabindranath is decontextualised, both from the rest of Stray Birds and the corpus of Rabindranath’s writings as a whole. The decontextualisation

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extends from the textual to the historical, eliding the fraught history of Rabindranath’s reception in China during and after World War I which culminated in an unhappy visit to Shanghai and Beijing in April 1924 that incited acrimonious and highly politicised controversy pitting a slew of progressive writers (Chen Duxiu, Guo Moruo, Lin Yutang, Mao Dun, Qu Qiubai, et. al.) against conservatives (Cai Yuanpei, Liang Qichao, Xu Zhimo, and Carson Chang/Zhang Junmai, who subsequently became an important ideologue for the KMT regime during the New Life Movement of the 1930s and who felt compelled in 1924 to issue a declaration asserting that he was not the one who had arranged Rabindranath’s visit). A cursory investigation of Rabindranath’s visit to China in the 1920s would have revealed a complex constellation of questions that surpasses some of the facile ideological framings and Left/Right distinctions that even participants at the time made use of. At a minimum, might we not take seriously the objections of those progressive Chinese intellectuals who rejected the idea of pan-Asian unity proposed by Rabindranath, as they understood it, based on the simultaneous erasure of both cultural multiplicity (the differences between India and China, and, why not, the differences within each) and economic dispossession? The point is not to pass judgement and choose a side, Left or Right, but rather to re-open for us today the thorny problem of collectively striving for transcultural, postcolonial epistemic agency. One is reminded of Peter Button’s warning, at the conclusion of a section tracing the complex intellectual genealogy of nineteenth-century Russian criticism in relation to Nietzsche, Marx, and their literary reception in China, that, “when it comes to the formation of the institution of modern Chinese literature and especially the theory of realism against and through which it develops, a glib and unreflective deployment of the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ easily obscures far more than it clarifies” (Button Configurations of the Real, 98). It would be hard to think of anything that attracts the “glib and unreflective deployment” of ideological labels more than Chinese socialist realism, yet Button handily demonstrates that by taking the aesthetic, philosophical, and political claims of socialist realism seriously, refreshing new perspectives about modernity’s ethos of anthropological difference can be articulated in general. Much more than a poorly understood attempt to discern and portray “reality,” socialist realism began with a recognition that (capitalist) exploitation and (colonial) domination inscribed in subjective formation was something that would inherently prevent social “reality” from being an object that could be simply remembered, reflected, represented, or

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immediately known. Hence, the abiding emphasis on the figure and the type that dominated Chinese socialist realism was not an attempt, as many have assumed, to portray according to the ideological dictates of Marxism a tableau of representative social identities in China but rather an attempt to intervene in the modern, i.e., colonial and capitalist, figuration of the human—to intervene, in other words, in the order of anthropological difference. Further problematisation of Rabindranath’s work and its complex translation/reception in China will, unfortunately, have to wait for another day as we focus our attention on what is undoubtedly the most egregious form of erasure in the film: the screaming absence of communism. The Li Zisong Case and the execution of Zhong Haodong may serve, as many have claimed, as inspiration for Detention, but these claims to historical authenticity rely on privileging relatively insignificant details while obliterating the main thing that relates the two events. Detention’s director, screenwriters, audience, and critics seem united in wanting (us) to believe that the “where,” i.e., a high school, is more important than the “what,” i.e., ideas, of an event. The history of communist activity, communist thought, and communist insurgency in Taiwan in which both events played an integral part is effaced, leaving a historical pastiche of ambient staging to take its place. Conspicuously eliminated from the film’s representation of history, the world-historical event of communism has been replaced by … monsters in a high school. (A sympathetic reviewer suggested that I pay attention to suggestions that the school janitor, Gao, who was executed on account of providing access to the room where the subversive “reading” group met, had had a history of communist association. In the film version of Detention, however, such suggestions are nowhere to be found. Gao is depicted simply as a member of the KMT party faithful and continental diaspora who haplessly wound up being collateral damage for just trying to be a good guy and score a few cigarettes on the side. In that sense, the filmic representation of Gao is a rather unsympathetic and historically inaccurate depiction of the subaltern men from the continent who arrived in personal and collective disarray following the defeat of the KMT. By framing Gao as a faithful believer unfairly wronged by the Party-State security apparatus, the film creates the image of a duped, passive victim, eliminating the agency of that group of men. (See Dominic Yang The Great Exodus from China and our discussion of Yang’s work in a following section for details.) The fact that the two events happened in relation to secondary schools is deemed

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more significant than the ideas at stake in the events themselves. The result is a theatrical pastiche that substitutes the stage for the plot. In that sense, Detention’s approach to history is neatly symbolised by the fictive Shinto shrine discussed above. The film provides, in effect, an analogy of the community enjoined between producers and consumers, director/ screenwriters and audience, consecrated by the film. Just as a fictive Shinto shrine serves as background for key meetings between Fang and Chang, a fictive high school becomes the scene for the nationalist “community of sympathy” between viewers and creators. With the erasure of communism, viewers are discouraged, to put it mildly, from thinking about the historical relation between communism and struggles for freedom. It is impossible, within the terms of the film, to understand the historical articulation between communism and freedom, or again, to ask why communism—and not the autoimmunitarian national identity pedalled by the film—necessarily had come to be widely understood in the first half of the twentieth century as an incontrovertible locus for the popular struggle to wrest freedom from colonialism and capitalism. This impossibility is dramatically highlighted by the glaring difference between the Chinese text of the intertitles flashed on the screen approximately six minutes into the movie and the English subtitles offered as translation. Where the Chinese intertitles read: “In the fifty-first year of the Republic [1962], at the very moment when Taiwan was under martial law, any expression of anti-government ideas or books that advocated freedom were strictly banned,” the English subtitles offer the following translation: “In 1962, during the Cold War, Taiwan was under martial law, all books contained Communist or left-wing thoughts [sic.] were strictly banned.” Just as the Chinese language text makes no mention of “communism” or “left-wing thought,” the English subtitles make no mention of “freedom” and “anti-government ideas.” This “translation” establishes clear—and clearly linguistico-nationalised—borders between different target audiences. Rather than working to hint at a conceptual equivalence between “freedom” and “communism,” the difference between Chinese and English functions like a return of the repressed, inadvertently indicating a truth that cannot be comprehended within the film’s ideological manipulation. Evidently, the selective choice of banned books that were not really banned becomes a pretext taken by the team of director/scriptwriters as an authorial licence to rewrite history and airbrush communist thought out of the picture, leaving an impoverished, dehistoricised, and static

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concept of “freedom” vaguely tied to decontextualised “expression” in its place—as though communism in both its historical and intellectual dimensions could simply be understood as another variant of “authoritarianism,” excluded by definition from any meaningful articulation with freedom (which, as we have seen, is patently not the case in relation to Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarian discourse).

Spectatorship Among the self-contradictions unwittingly set in motion by the film, the question of complicity is paramount. The film stages complicity in the form of spectatorship. Some of the most politically chilling scenes of state violence occur in public before an assembled audience of students. The most salient of these would be the image with which we began, that of a crowd of students donning execution hoods and standing in regimented order in the school auditorium while clapping wild approval of bloodcurdling authoritarian punishment. Numerically speaking, complicity is the default position of the majority. The fact that the film frames the complicity of the majority in terms of authoritarian compulsion risks posing questions about the possibility of complicity and the political nature of the majority in general. The film implausibly conveys the widely circulated notion that Taiwanese identity is an essentially minoritarian construction—even in a national declination. In the process, it unwittingly raises questions about the mode of spectatorship to which the film audience should conform. As Wei tries to escape the auditorium while Fang approaches her identificatory epiphany, a multitude of disfigured hands pierce through the floorboards attempting to grab him and pull him down. Nothing is known about these demonic hands save for their active, numerically multiple character. If they are responding to authoritarian command, what does that say about the political problem of complicity and the constitution of the majority-identity? It is as if the function of the spectator in the film is to create and confirm a space of reassuring self-deception among the spectators of the film “in the real world.” The content of this self-deception lies in the basic axiom of individual freedom, which effectively immunises members of the audience from having to pose for themselves the question of whether their own spectatorship (of the political injunction to remember identity) is not itself a new form of consensual complicity?

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In Dysfunction No. 3, Chen Chieh-Jen’s guerrilla street performance from 1983 captured in video, spectatorship is handled in a way diametrically opposed to that of Detention. In Dysfunction No. 3, the hoods are worn by the performers, who also don T-shirts with the word “neutral” (zhongli) embroidered on them. Unhooded and open to the possibility of taking a non-neutral stance, the audience in the video becomes an active parade of followers who march along with the “neutral” hooded performers whom the former protect via their presence at the conclusion of the performance when secret police arrive on the scene. The performance itself is quite simple. A line of five hooded and blindfolded persons with bandages around their feet instead of shoes files down the street silently until the line collapses in unison and the performers inexplicably start screaming and writhing on the ground. The reversal of the power relation between spectators and performers in Dysfunction compared to Detention is reinforced by the symbolism of the respective venues in which each is staged. In a prescient nod to the “society of the spectacle” that will serve later as a bridge linking authoritarian developmental capitalism and militarised neoliberal capitalism, Chen Chieh-Jen’s performance takes place in the Ximending district of Taipei, or what was called a sakariba, the Japanese-derived term for bustling entertainment and pleasure districts. Alongside the performers stands one of several movie theatres for which the district was known, this one showing Cannibal Holocaust (titled ren shi ren shilu), a controversial depiction of the society of the spectacle whose unadulterated violence and vicious cruelty is matched by its ironic critique of media sensationalism and complicity with the spectacularisation of anthropological difference. While the appearance of Cannibal Holocaust in the background is undoubtedly coincidental, its accidental presence in the scene reinforces the situationist-style critique of the way authentically aleatory social encounters have become impossible in the pre-programmed urban space of modern capitalism. The various levels of dysfunction revealed by the performance range, thus, from the function of the constitution suspended by martial law, the function of the voice reduced to screaming, and the function of the body blindfolded, hooded, and bandaged, to the function of representative democracy increasingly usurped by technologically assisted media and the function of authentic social encounters suspended by the nascent consumer society. Above all, Dysfunction No. 3 reveals that the power of authoritarianism lies not so much in the gagging of free speech as in the normalisation of functions—or, to rephrase it in Deleuzean terms,

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the power of authoritarianism lies in the ability to compel the machinic agency of the body and the collective agency of speech to coincide in the same function. Dysfunction occurs when the two no longer coincide, when the play of speech and the play of the body take priority over the instrumentalisation of each via disciplines of communication and work/ war. The authoritarian consensus is nothing but this principle of functionality, which has been taken to an extreme and punitively enforced. Adopting a critique of the normativity of authoritarianism, Dysfunction No. 3 implicitly suggests that the non-authoritarian society would be one in which dysfunction plays a central role. Elevated to the level of a principle, dysfunction would signify a complete break with the ideology of communication—the idea that language is a tool for communication and the body is merely an instrument. Dysfunction No. 3 thus points to multiple forms of authoritarianism that go beyond pyramidal decisional structures concentrated in an individual or a party to include horizontal, populist structures that disperse consensus into a logic of necessity and naturalisation, such as species war, which is always really a form of civil war. After viewing Chen’s work, we might imagine what a world governed by the principle of dysfunctionality would look like. My understanding of this principle is inspired by Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s early attempt to define a Marxist philosophy of language by turning what he calls the six principles of bourgeois linguistic sciences on their head. Among those six, the principle of dysfunctionality reverses the principle of functionality, emphasising that: “Language is not an instrument at the speaker’s disposal … [but] an experience and an activity” (Lecercle A Marxist Philosophy of Language, 70). Imagined in accordance with this principle, freedom of speech would no longer be a property to be possessed that endows the bearer with a right of disposal, such as the freedom to communicate alternative content. It would consist rather in the liberation of speech from an instrumentalised communicational function and the liberation of the body from a disciplined work function. This principle would recognise “play” above “freedom,” or rather would see the latter as one of the manifestations of the former. This could be the play at the heart of language that the linguist Marina Yaguello identifies in Alice au pays du langage (31), or it could be the play associated with labour’s liberation from capital that Marx and Engels identify in a famous passage in The German Ideology, the play which “thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon,

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rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (53). If the measure of a society that promotes such a principle of dysfunction, allowing a maximum of play, is difficult to assess, that is precisely because it would no longer have accumulation as its goal. Hence, posing the principle of dysfunction means ultimately posing the question of a civil society that is not based on capitalist relations. With these considerations in view, we can begin to see that the depiction of authoritarianism in Detention could not be more estranged from the vision of martial law provided by the video footage of Chen Chieh-Jen’s street performance. Whereas Detention sees the roots of authoritarianism in mnemonic dysfunction, Dysfunction No. 3 sees the roots of authoritarianism in normative function; the answer to authoritarianism proffered by the former consists in a mnemonic politics of identity, the answer suggested by the latter consists in a principle of dysfunction. The difference points to an ambivalence in post-Rousseauian theories of the general will, which implicitly require a notion of the people as an indivisible body as a precondition. Situated within a political anthropology of species difference, this presupposition of indivisible unity constitutes a functional consensus prior to discourse, what might be called in Saussurean structuralist terms, the consensus of langue prior to parole. Critics of Rousseau have long noted, and argued over, the ambivalence of Rousseau’s theorisation of the general will, which oscillates between democracy and dictatorship (hence Carl Schmitt’s interest in Rousseau). Just as Saussurean linguistics proceeds on the basis of initial exclusion (Lecercle A Marxist Philosophy of Language, 10), the Rousseauian political anthropology proceeds on the basis of excluding non-aggregate forms of community. The image of “Taiwan” as a selfcontained island unit (as opposed to the actual geography of the state known as the Republic of China on Taiwan, which comprehends one hundred and sixty-five different islands dispersed over a wide area) lends itself, as an imaginary object, to a naturalised representation of such founding exclusions. Despite Taiwan’s large footprint by certain global metrics such as purchasing power parity or arms purchases, the image of smallness visually attributed to the self-contained island makes, as Rousseau himself would have hoped, the imaginary projection of a preconsensual consensus that is much easier to achieve. While some will certainly point to the themes of “plurality” and “diversity” that have become basic elements of the discourse of civic nationalism under the

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Taiwan Consensus, the truth is that plurality has always been a necessary condition for the presupposition of unity regarding modern social objects such as language, culture, and people (see Sakai, “How do we count a language?”).

The Purity of Absolute Consensus The idea of ideology as a game of escape into (instead of exile from) identity and consensus is not simply an invention of neoliberal Taiwanese popular culture but was also an important element in the popular culture of Taiwanese developmental authoritarianism. No work of popular culture from that period with which I am familiar exemplifies this ideological staging of escape more clearly than the romance fiction novella Loving Purely (Chunchundi ai) by Yan Qin from 1979. Author of over one hundred and eighty novels and short stories many of which enjoyed the sort of popularity (primarily in Taiwan and Hong Kong) that today could only be achieved by the film and music industries, Yan Qin was born in Hangzhou to a father who was one of the first generation of Chinese air force pilots and who later become a member of the R.O.C. Air Force general staff in Taiwan. Following her family to Taiwan after the KMT’s defeat in the civil war, she grew up in Taipei and graduated from the foreign language faculty at National Taiwan University before moving after marriage to Hong Kong where the bulk of her immensely popular romance fiction was written, eventually settling finally in New Jersey. As if Yan Qin’s family background were not enough to give her unassailable credentials to represent the cultural ideology of authoritarian developmentalism during the period of martial law, she reportedly aspired when she was young to become a KMT spy (Douban “Yan Qin”). Set in a tourist hotel in downtown Taipei, Loving Purely depicts the trials of a young woman named Betty freshly graduated from a foreign language program in a second-tier university (Tunghai University, Taichung) whose first experience with the job market reveals the moral hazards of money in an export economy organised around domestic scarcity. Stuck in a den of corruption and moral degeneracy, Betty becomes a sexualised object coveted by various men with power, money, and/or desire, from the American industrialist to the hotel management. Similarities with Detention abound. First, school plays a similarly central role, with the polarity reversed. Compared to the hotel, the school (Tunghai University) is akin to a paradise lost, a protected world of

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simple integrity and honour from which the degenerate, corrupt world of the tourist hotel could hardly be contemplated. Second, following the reversal compared to Detention, it is not the school that is a dark, tenebrous hotbed of evil but the hotel. Like the school in Detention, the hotel in Loving Purely is a trap. Although able to return home in the evenings, Betty remains effectively stuck inside because of a need to support her family. Third, the inner purity of the central protagonist occupies a central position. Near the end of the novella, as Betty takes stock of the world of the hotel, she rhetorically asks herself, “How could I have possibly ever imagined the dirtiness, ugliness, sinfulness, and baseness of humanity?” (Yan Qin Chunchundi ai, 83). The implication, elaborated continuously throughout the novel, is that Betty herself is a pure and innocent victim. Fourth, in contrast to the bonds of complicity, a proper community is based, in Betty’s eyes, on relationships of sympathy: “There should be sympathy between people, they should help each other out. There was nothing wrong about that idea. Where I went wrong was in my mistaken understanding of others. I assumed that everybody in the world was good, just like in my school…” (ibid., 82). Ever since John Stuart Mill identified sympathy as the foundation of liberalism’s national community, sympathy has served as the nationalist affect par excellence. Fifth, the will and the resolution to remember plays a crucial role in the protagonist’s effort to save herself. In the depoliticised world of Loving Purely, memory is directed towards Betty’s absent boyfriend, Xin, doing an advanced degree in the United States. “I mustn’t forget about Xin,” Betty exhorts herself during a key transitional scene, “There’s a letter from him waiting for me to read downstairs. The wonderful future that Xin and I have planned together mustn’t be destroyed by those inhuman creatures” (ibid., 94). Here again we find the same quasi-theological ontology of humanity, animality, and divinity that frames the nationalist community of sympathy in Detention, set in motion by the protagonist Betty’s identity as a Christian. Sixth, ideology appears in Loving Purely in the guise of false consciousness. As Betty finally summons the resolve to remember her true self and walks out the door of the hotel, she realises that all the degenerate people inside that tenebrous world were not behaving authentically but were putting on a façade: “With each step, my heart became that much lighter. I knew that in this life I could never return to this place, to this dark place haunted by that group of people in the dark. [At that moment] Everybody was looking at us, but what were they watching us do? We weren’t acting. The ones acting were them. So pitiful! They

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weren’t even aware of it themselves” (ibid., 96). Here, ideology means doing something inauthentic without self-knowledge, the textbook definition of false consciousness. Like Detention, Loving Purely ends with a moment of identification: “That foreign guy living in Tokyo was right, I don’t belong to that place where the sun doesn’t shine, but what he didn’t know was where I do belong. If I had the chance, I would tell him about that place. I know now. I’ve found it!” (ibid., 99). Escaping from the dark trap of the hotel world, Betty realises that her authentic identity, the place where she really belongs, lies in the world of metaphorical “sunshine” outside the tenebrous, haunted hotel. The most appropriate phrase to describe this affective state would be the school motto qin’ai jingcheng (“familial love and intense honesty”) that Chiang Kai-shek introduced during his tenure as a principal of the Whampoa Academy and that was posted on schoolyard walls throughout Taiwan during the Martial Law era. Despite the veneer of anti-KMT authoritarianism, Detention is hardly distinguishable from Loving Purely at the level of affective politics and ideological representation. Ultimately, the common theme shared between Detention and Loving Purely boils down to the status of the outside. Associated with freedom, identity, and true community, the outside is not a space of liberation but a space of security. The outside depicted in the novella from 1979 is a place still under martial law. Of course, the removal of any trace of martial law from the novel will be seen today as a sign of its ideological inauthenticity but such was not the case for Yan Qin’s large readership in 1979. As we consider the depiction of the outside in a film from forty years later, how can we be so sure that the situation has fundamentally changed? Or, as Alain Brossat implicitly asks, who are the true “heirs to the Generalissimo?” (Brossat “The Schmittian Turn”). What, we might ask, has been removed from the depiction of the outside today, just as it was fifty years ago? Our analysis shows that the simplest answer to this question is dissensus. Dissensus is not a place but a social practice. The “outside” constructed through dissensus cannot be understood via a de jure spatial figure but must be understood as a de facto relational practice that occurs in time.

CHAPTER 3

Spectres, Monsters, and Trauma (The Ethos of Area Studies I)

Cannibalism, Monsters, and the Visor Effect The fortuitous presence of cannibalism in the background of Chen ChiehJen’s performance video reminds us to review the intellectual genealogy of the identification of Chinese authoritarianism with cannibalism, atrocity, and monstrosity. In Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond, Chiarong Wu credits David Der-wei Wang with providing a seminal analysis charting the “connection between history and spectrality in the field of Chinese history and literature” (26). A close examination of these claims, based primarily on Wang’s seminal work around the themes of cannibalism, monstrosity, atrocity, and spectres in The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China, provides the focus for our discussion in this section. In The Monster That Is History, David Wang takes up the task of reading Chinese literature while “bearing witness to the horror of recent Chinese history” (1). “One can hardly read modern Chinese history,” Wang asserts, “without noticing a seemingly endless brutality totted up in dishearteningly large figures” (2). The list of numerical figures of each successive major atrocity in twentieth-century Chinese history provided by Wang adds up to a staggering total of sixty-seven million victims. Dishearteningly large, these statistics add to, or confirm, the self-evident quality of a judgement on the nature of modern Chinese history.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. D. Solomon, The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8_3

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As Wang holds this judgement to be self-evident, he does not waste time discussing its potentially problematic nature. Hence, before we can examine thematically the idea of that which is taken to be self-evident, it is necessary to have a look at the sources for the statistics themselves. Symptomatically, a footnote to the paragraph on page two of the Introduction that presents statistics backing up the self-evident nature of modern Chinese atrocities begins with an important caveat not problematised in the main body of the text. Wang warns his readers, “These figures vary, to be sure, thanks to an insufficiency of data” (302). The problem, Wang would have us believe, is quantitative, not qualitative, yet even at the quantitative level, statistical “variation” is apparently not enough to warrant discussion. To support statistical assertions that are barely problematised quantitatively much less qualitatively, Wang cites a total of six works, of which the scholarly quality is uneven and, in some cases, debatable. The one that is closest to simply being an anticommunist rant is written by Lin Baohua, a Chinese dissident writing under the pseudonym Ling Feng and resident in the United States whose work was published by the Epoch Times, the publishing arm of the international right-wing organisation founded by members of Falun Gong. A second work is a chapter by Jean-Louis Margolin from The Black Book of Communism, a collection edited by Stéphane Courtois that has incited a great deal of criticism and controversy—including from Margolin himself, who protested publicly along with several other authors published in the collection against editor Courtois’ assimilation of communism to Nazism. The extensive scholarly and public debate raised by the book, focused on questions of methodology, source material, interpretation, and presuppositions, presents a nexus of issues that ought to invite the attention of any scholar and, in any case, could only be overlooked at the cost of reducing scholarly work to propagandistic formulas such as “communism equals Nazism” (for a detailed description of problems with the work and Courtois’s own activist role as an “entrepreneur of memory,” see Neumayer The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space After the Cold War). A third work is misattributed to a “Jasper Baker” instead of Jasper Becker, a minor spelling error in the surname of a strategic consultant and journalist who authored the first book in English on the famines associated with the Great Leap Forward in 1957— an error that would hardly be cause for criticism of David Wang’s work which displays an impressive command of primary and secondary sources. A fourth work is concerned with fiction and reportage literature. Of the

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two, remaining works, one was written by the historian Ping-ti Ho (He Bingdi) and the other by the sociologist Rudolph Rummel. Titled China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, Rummel’s work merits detailed attention not just because Wang lists it first, nor because the tally of atrocity victims (sixty million) given by Rummel largely coincides with that given by Wang in the Introduction, but also because of the interesting status of the work itself and its illustrious author. Delving into the bibliography of China’s Bloody Century (available on Rummel’s website), one “can hardly read without noticing,” to paraphrase David Wang, problems with that work’s sources. Of the one hundred and eighty-five entries listed (not counting Rummel’s own works), nine, or approximately 5%, were published by the World AntiCommunist League (WACL) based in Taipei. We will have more to say about the WACL and its afterlives in Part II. A number of other works, whose exact number is not worth determining, were published by other similar Cold War propaganda outlets. To cite one example, Rummel references an article titled, “40 million Reported Killed by Mao’s Regime,” from 1971 that appeared in Volume 7 of The East-West Digest. According to information provided (eighteen years after the publication of China’s Bloody Century) by the website Powerbase, a Wiki-style project launched by Public Interest Investigations in the UK, “The East-West Digest was produced by the anticommunist Dudley Geoffrey StewartSmith as the journal of his Foreign Affairs Circle. It was distributed free to [UK] MPs. According to Lobster magazine, the Digest was published by Stewart-Smith’s Foreign Affairs Publishing Company, which also acted as a distributor for material for much of the British Right. Lobster reports that the Digest ‘mostly consisted of large chunks of blind (authorless), extremely detailed, apparently pretty accurate material on the British Left: reports on meetings and conferences; documents and journals analysed.’” Anecdotally, this example reveals a typical Cold War conflation between the domestic and international agendas of the national security state and its political allies on the Right, indicating in the process the extent to which the Left was subjected to extensive surveillance before its collapse later in the same decade, symbolised by the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Besides the element of Cold War propaganda that clearly informs Rummel’s work on China, it is also pertinent to note that Rummel’s bibliography contains only one Chinese language source, an obscure publication probably published in the United States by dissidents and exiles called the Press Freedom Herald (xinwen ziyou daobao), that

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announces the same tally of sixty million victims endorsed by Rummel (and Wang). Credited with introducing the neologism democide into scholarly research, Rummel’s work and biography reveal a concatenation of ideological positions that cannot be veiled by the apparent neutrality of statistics. A veteran of the Korean War, Rummel’s scholarly activities received long-term funding from the US Department of Defense, funnelled principally via ARPA and DARPA, until his DARPA funds were cut off in 1976 following the publication of a work critiquing arms control and advocating a policy of definitive nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union—a policy that recalls the self-deceptive idea of a “winnable” nuclear war advanced by Hermann Kahn in 1960 for the RAND Corporation. A strident libertarian, Rummel’s positions in the aftermath of the Cold War increasingly overlapped with the imperial aims of America’s neoconservatives, including active support for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. As one of his sympathetic admirers, Bruce Russett commenting in the foreword to a collected volume of essays on Rummel’s legacy, has observed, Rummel “did not consider all the real policy implications of following his controversial policy, notably the effect of sustained confrontation in producing what Harold Lasswell back in 1941 called ‘The Garrison State’” (Russett “Foreword,” vi). Lasswell’s description of the “garrison state” not only applies, as Russett wryly notes, to contemporary America, it also might partially describe the current ideological configuration in Taiwan. Chief among those elements of Lasswell’s analysis that would seem pertinent today are the role of the professional managerial class, both to secure consent and to provide crucial management skills for the garrison state. Focused on what essentially amounts to authoritarianism, however, Lasswell’s framework would prove to be useless for understanding the way that managerialism and oligarchic rule could be maintained in tandem with the institutions of representative democracy and progressive inclusion of minority populations, or again, for understanding how postcolonial sovereignty could be engineered to sustain US global empire. Nevertheless, the lineage from Lasswell to postwar social science research in the service of a new form of colonial governmentality under erasure, via scholars such as Gabriel Almond, Daniel Lerner, and Lucian Pye (see Solomon, “Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies in White Settler Colonialism,” for further discussion of relations among Lasswell, Almond, Lerner, and Pye), is suggestive of a genealogical link between the garrison state and Cold War liberal democracy. Indeed,

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the contrast—and integral relation—between Rummel’s political positions and his hopes for a “democratic peace” was, in effect, predicted by Lasswell, who wrote: “as modern states are militarized, specialists on violence are more preoccupied with the skills and attitudes judged characteristic of nonviolence” (Laswell “The Garrison State,” 458). In the light of Lasswell’s remarks, we might adjust our understanding of R.J. Rummel from that of an advocate of peace to that of a “memory entrepreneur” who built his career on a totalising view of violence to justify the hegemony of Pax Americana. The final element for consideration in Rummel’s career concerns his literary activities. Rummel wrote a series of six novels collectively titled Never Again, available like many of his historical works for download on his personal website. In the novels, a Rummelesque figure who works for the “Time Police” of the United Democracies in the year 2357 hops back in time and across parallel universes to stop major human catastrophes of the modern era from happening—not African slavery, colonial extermination, or modern sweatshop factories, but events like Nazism, communism, and the Armenian genocide. Despite the addition of many examples of democide in the (post)colonial world, the decidedly Eurocentric focus of Rummel’s interest is unmistakable. He never attempts, as David Michael Smith does in Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire (2023), to tally the death toll of US settler colonial empire, which Smith places at a staggering figure of 300 million. War & Democide Never Again, the first novel in the series, starts off with the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. This event functions like the traumatic event described by Jeanne Morefield, whose analysis of Rawlsian liberalism reveals a naïve and ahistorical conscience always “just waking up” to crises and threats while disavowing its own role in creating them via border regimes that conveniently place the source of deviation from liberal ideals squarely on the other side (Morefield “Challenging Liberal Belief,” 191). The next catastrophic event in the same novel is the Cultural Revolution. Red Terror Never Again, the third novel in the series, starts with an unattributed epigraph: “Tell me, what do you think of Marxism?” To which the response is, simply, “It’s evil!” In Genocide Never Again, the fifth volume of the series, the Rummelesque character waxes confident about democracy: To her surprise, John went off on a clever tangent. “Also, we should keep in mind that no famines have ever happened in a democracy. A plus

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for democracy in itself. Moreover, democracy is an engine of economic, technological, and medical development. So the effects of epidemics are reduced for democracies as a result, if they occur. … As a new convert to the power of democracy, and now with the realization that fostering democracy could be a way of lessening the toll of major disasters, or even avoiding some altogether, Jy-ying nodded vigorously. (72)

Read in the light of the wholesale adoption in 2021–2022 of ineffective “herd immunity” policies leading to de facto population culling (and as-yet poorly understood effects from post-acute sequelae) in response to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Rummel’s risible faith in the capacity of democracies to avoid or mitigate the ravages of epidemics is tragically ironic. By the time Genocide Never Again was written, Western liberal democracies had already definitively turned to neoliberal policies of upward redistribution that gutted healthcare systems prior to the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. The story of how the contemporary neoliberal democide, to use Rummel’s term, is related to the “criminalisation of communism in the European political space after the Cold War” (Neumayer) and the defeat of socialism more generally across North America and Europe is a thought-provoking question for future discussion and research. In an essay titled, “The ambiguous status of Eastern Europe and the criminalization of communism in Europe,” Maja Vodopivec addresses the historical experience of Eastern Europe to show how the cartographic inscription of anticommunism is a fundamental principle in the constitution of area in the postcolonial neoliberal world. As the ground zero of European colonialism prior even to Africa, Eastern Europe has played a seminal role in the genealogy of the West. It is no surprise, thus, that Eastern Europe has historically been the site of the most intense forms of philological nationalism, failed transitions, and border struggles, culminating in today’s situation whereby the borders of antiblackness and anticommunism converge. Given David Wang’s conviction that “literature perhaps does more [than historical research] … in re-enacting the affective tendencies of private and inadmissible truth” (2–3), it is regrettable that Wang published The Monster That Is History before being able to account for the literary aspects of Rummel’s career when consulting the latter’s work to support sweeping moral judgements on modern Chinese history (both Wang’s work and Rummel’s first volume of fiction were published in the same year, 2004). Ironically, Rummel’s fictional writing displays some of

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the characteristics of what Wang calls, “the two dominant sensory faculties underlying [the] realist paradigm,” namely the quasi-religious forms of the incantatory (akin to conjuration) and the scopic, in which “seeing is believing ” (282), to which left-wing Chinese writers supposedly adhered with, Wang claims, disastrous results. It must be noted that Wang’s own work dallies with the incantatory in the guise of exorcism—hoping to banish the “monster that is Chinese history” by repeating the litany of crimes and errors that have been committed in the name of revolution. Placing responsibility for a century of revolutionary violence at the feet of politically motivated literary authors (notably Lu Xun), Wang pens an exposé of writers who were, he claims, blinded to the “violence of representation” by their commitment to change the future via “representations of violence.” As Peter Button concludes at the end of a thorough critique of the profound confusion that reigns over Wang’s understanding of realism in general and of Lu Xun’s realist fiction in particular: What is most remarkable about David Wang’s conclusion about Lu Xun and his responsibility for revolutionary violence in modern Chinese history is that it repeats in radically inverted form the Romantic aspiration, par excellence, namely the ascription of genuinely – though in Wang’s case, monstrously – poetic powers to a literary text. (Button Configurations, 80)

In Rummel’s case, what we find is an inversion that preserves this romantic aspiration, without any of the profound attention to the aesthetic and philosophical challenges taken up by Chinese realist authors (and missed, according to Button, by David Wang). Above all, Rummel’s fiction reveals the essentially evangelical character of his work. Proffering redemption through faith, Rummel delves into the horror of the past to announce the evangelical “good news” of the future. It must be stressed, however, that as technologically fantastic as it may be, the vision of futurity fictionally glimpsed by Rummel is one that is strictly programmatic and voluntarist. In Rummel’s fictional world, the way to change the future lies in changing the past. Crucially, Rummel does not ask the question of whether the people of the future would adhere to the same program despite an inevitably different sense of the past. Behind Rummel’s fictional musings lies the presupposition that,

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“I/We will be the same in the future as I/we are now.” Such is the essential premise of the ideology of identity. This ideology can be read as a symptom of the way Rummel’s Eurocentrism is intimately tied to his espousal of a libertarian capitalist ethos. As avowed Eurocentrists such as Paul Valéry once showed, one of the ways to define the nexus joining capitalism to an incoherent directional orientation masquerading as a geocultural region consists in seeing “the West” as an historical subject continually reaching into the future, always striving to surpass itself. In this mode, Western society is governed by an expansive drive: economic growth, accumulation, capitalism, universal values… It is precisely this obsession with the future (understood as an eternal present) that orients capitalism on the one hand towards a quest for the freedom to accumulate and on the other hand directs accumulation towards the relational and differential category of the geocultural area. The ideology of identity is precisely what dissimulates or naturalises the link between the two. That is why Gavin Walker concludes: “Hence, we must theorize the question of area, not only in terms of the operations of biopower pointed out by Foucault but also in terms of the process of the primitive accumulation of capital. It is, in fact, one and the same process, the process of enclosing the flux of bodies, words, statements, histories, and other purely heterogeneous sequences of meaning into the units of difference” (Walker, “The Accumulation of Difference and the Logic of Area” 75). Rummel simply presents this “process of enclosing” as a neo-evangelical form of “good news.” David Wang’s romanticist aspirations share more with Rummel’s literary neo-evangelism than the former might acknowledge. The example of an historian who writes fiction in which the principal plotline revolves around attempts to selectively change the past according to the ideological vision of Eurocentric modernity casts a long shadow on Rummel’s work as a scholar of history. Similarly, the example of a literary critic who writes history in which the principal plotline revolves around self-evident truths about evil according to the ideological vision of American Cold War modernity casts an equally long shadow on Wang’s work as a scholar of literature. Rather than conceiving, as Walter Benjamin once suggested, of historical writing as a chance to uncover repressed historical difference as a way of creating alternatives for the future, Rummel’s fictive enterprise, like Wang’s historical enterprise, reveals a desire to rewrite history much like that of the Taiwanese film Detention.

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In the end, what is most compelling about Rummel’s fiction is an implicit critique of Rummel’s own historicist understanding of temporality. While the very idea of the “Time Police” in some sense captures the historicist desire to normalise time, the fictional imagination reveals an anomaly of an entirely different order. To imagine accessing the past in order to rewrite it, it is necessary first to project oneself into the future. Hence, the crude fictional plot of the Never Again series of novels starts with the fantasy of a future world where time travel into the past is possible. The structure of access to the past via the opening of the future is precisely the disruption of the temporality of the present detected by Derrida in his reading of spectres, ghosts, and monsters. Contrary to authorial intention, Rummel’s fictional writing performatively enacts this disjointed temporality. As for David Wang’s claims about the singular violence of modern Chinese history that draw in large part on the work of Rummel, perhaps the best that one could say is that they are flimsy. My interest, however, is not drawn so much to, variously, the flimsiness of the paltry sources cited to justify sweeping moral claims about modern Chinese history, nor the often blatantly ideological motivations behind those sources, nor to what Wang qualifies as “insufficient data,” but rather to the generic quality of self-evidence with which Wang presents his claims: “One can hardly read modern Chinese history without noticing…” Wang’s judgement rests on a comparative procedure that is never thematised much less problematised in his work. The source for this disavowed comparison ultimately lies in the inherently comparative and relational nature of the nationstate. Any attempt to characterise modern Chinese history as singularly “traumatic,” “violent,” and filled with “atrocity” requires either an explanation of historical norms that vary according to time and place or a general theory of violence in modernity. While Wang does acknowledge more than once in various ways that “all modernities bear the imprint of primitive savagery” and that “A monster haunts the human struggle for self-betterment” (8), the acknowledgement of such generalities functions like a staging effect designed to buttress the critic’s ability to discern between the primitive and modern. Such generalities, which amount to little more than a modern prejudice—the faith that linear temporality coincides, or should coincide, with moral “betterment”—do not become a cause for theorisation and problematisation that would lead the critic to challenge the self-evidence of national history as the vehicle for modern progress. As a result, one never gets, with David Wang’s presentation, to

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inquire into the costs of the epistemic transition imposed by nineteenthcentury imperialism on the Qing Empire, forcing not just the adoption of the nation-state form and the commodity form, but also imposing as normative the disciplines of national language, national history, national literature, national market, national affect, national aesthetics, etc. In other words, if modern history, as national history, is violent, as David Wang suggests, what might this tell us about the categories, such as China or Chinese, that we use both to classify hierarchies of violence in the modern period and to produce knowledge about them? How are area studies implicated in the understanding of modernity as a moral project in collective “betterment”? Obviously, one could not plausibly argue that Wang’s position amounts to saying that modern Chinese history is violent because it is Chinese. What I am saying, however, is that the position of judgement undeniably assumed by Wang corresponds to the type of positionality typical of modern racism. This point demands explanation. In preparation for an excavation of this positionality, I would like first to call attention to the theological motifs running parallel to the assumption of self-evident truths throughout The Monster That Is History. The word “soul” occurs fiftythree times in the text alongside one hundred and ninety-two instances of the word “evil.” Interestingly, one of the ways that Wang inserts these keywords of secular political theology into his narrative occurs via translation. In a symptomatic moment, Wang deliberately paraphrases a key passage from the preface to the collection of short stories by Lu Xun, titled Nahan in Chinese, that introduces a theological element into English that was not present in Lu Xun’s Chinese text: “Lu Xun realized that before saving Chinese people’s bodies, he had first to save their souls” (16). Consulting the original Chinese language text of that widely discussed preface, those familiar with modern Chinese literature would likely recall that the exact phrasing used by Lu Xun contains neither the words “to save” nor “the soul.” Instead, Lu Xun writes, with regard to his compatriots, about “changing their spirit [gaibian tamen de jingshen].” The subtle substitution via paraphrasing enables Wang to position Lu Xun within a secularised theological discourse in order to essentially hide behind this sleight of hand a theological framing that is Wang’s own. No doubt some readers will point to the correct translation, given in a direct citation of the relevant passage in Nahan some four pages later, as proof that Wang is not mistranslating anything but that is precisely the point of ideological intervention, the place where vacillation provides

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room for interpellation. This vacillation is particularly ironic in the light of Lu Xun’s own relation to the nineteenth-century missionary discourse about China’s “soul” (and what it held to be the crippling absence of a relation to God) variously analysed by both Lydia Liu and Peter Button in their discussions of Lu Xun’s fictional masterpiece, The True Story of Ah Q . Writing after the publication of Liu’s work, Button summarises: Liu is really the first to examine the ways Lu Xun both feels compelled to address [Christian missionary Arthur H.] Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, yet do so in a manner that fundamentally distances Ah Q from the fate of being a mere composite of Smith’s “characteristics” [as is regularly assumed by Lu Xun criticism]. What I think Liu tends to overlook is just how firmly and completely grounded Smith’s observations on the Chinese character are in the Christian faith as theology. (Button Configurations, 114)

Button thus detects in Lu Xun’s fiction a carefully considered “literary retort to Smith” (ibid., 115), especially the latter’s quasi-theological framing of modern China. Such considerations prevent us from taking the sort of liberties with paraphrasing exercised by David Wang. As Button notes, the true heir to the legacy of Smith’s quasi-theological condemnation of China would not be Lu Xun, but Chiang Kai-shek. What is striking is that Chiang’s own rhetoric not only parallels Smith’s, but as I have elsewhere shown, it also displays features of Hegel’s own description of China. Begun in 1934, Chiang’s ostensibly new Confucian New Life Movement was very soon handed over to “more American, more Christian” elements of the KMT leadership until the movement was finally placed under the leadership of the American missionary George Shepherd. … Where, as Lydia Liu has shown, Lu Xun accomplishes a far more complex and contestatory rewriting of national character discourse in Ah Q, Chiang’s dimensionless and inert Chinese living dead effectively installs a direct American missionary descendent of Smith’s doctrine of the Chinese character as the basis of the Republican State’s domestic reform agenda. (ibid., 116)

As our analysis of Detention has shown, the Taiwanese film finds its place in a lineage that extends back to the authoritarian “Chinese” ideology it decries—and, beyond that, to the quasi-theological discourse of American missionaryism.

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These considerations form an essential preamble to unpacking David Wang’s influential characterisation of modern Chinese history as “monstrous”—a characterisation implicitly embraced by Detention—and the elements that constitute the positionality from which Wang delivers this judgement. Contextualised in relation to the quasi-theological aspects of Wang’s argument, the quality of self-evidence that obviates justification for Wang’s sweeping claims about modern Chinese history is intrinsically related to the theme of the monster in ways elaborated by Jacques Derrida that escape Wang’s notice—despite the occasional references to Derrida in The Monster That Is History. As Derrida’s thoughts about the monster are scattered across several sources, it will be necessary to economise in order to save time. As explained in the essay “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)” that was part of a series of seminars about nationalism and philosophy, the term monster, or le monstre in French, opens up a “polysemic gamut … concerning norms and forms, species and genus” (Derrida “Heidegger’s Hand,” 166). It is worth pointing out that the question of “norms and forms, species and genus,” bears a direct connection to the modern conception of nationality and race, each of which imports, at least partially, the classical Aristotelian logic of individual-species-genus as the basis for understanding and classifying the relations among individual, community, and humanity. Connected etymologically to monstration, or showing (a meaning preserved in the English word demonstration), the monster-aspolysemic-concept is related to the deictic function of language, showing instead of telling, associated most closely with demonstrative pronouns. In Derrida’s analysis, the metaphysical opposition between indication and signification at the origin of modern linguistics provides a metaphysical support, or quality of self-evidence if you like, for misconstruing socially constructed “things” as non-discursive facts. (An even more pointed analysis and historical genealogy of this opposition can be found in Giorgio Agamben’s Language and Death.) One example of this error pursued to political and social ends would be the notion that humanity can be manifestly divided, following a classical logic, into types, such as race, nation, and gender, akin to those of species and genus in the natural world. According to what might be termed a racist metaphysics, the monster is that which shows us, via the “monstrosities” of transgression and perversion, the self-evident quality of different colour cast(e)s, conceived of in the manner of separate species. Derrida intervenes in this metaphysics in a way that disrupts its claims to self-evidence. While the term monster

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had always been associated with hybridity and graft, Derrida relates it to an event or manifestation that exceeds the normalised schemes of specific difference, such as race, based on the ostensibly self-evident quality of visibility and indication: The monster is also that which appears for the first time and, consequently, is not yet recognized. A monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name, which does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely, the composition or hybridization of already known species. Simply, it shows itself [elle se montre] – that is what the word monster means – it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure. (Derrida Points, 386)

Rather than referring to either miscegenation, i.e., the racial monstrosity feared by white supremacists, or hybridity, i.e., the colonial desire secretly lurking inside the hearts of many of those same avowed supremacists, Derrida’s account of the monster would take us into the realm where difference can no longer be figured according to the logic of species or specific difference—a radical difference, in other words, that calls into question the system that organises difference into identity along the axis of individual-species-genus. Hence, for Derrida, monstrosity is invariably connected to the unanticipated—and un-anticipatable—aspects of the future when it is not determined in a programmatic way. It is precisely this aspect of radical futurity that is missing both from Rummel’s fiction and from Wang’s understanding of Chinese realism. Radical futurity cannot be comprehended within a discourse that either domesticates monsters or places them behind bars as in a spectacle. In yet another essay, Derrida concludes, “Monsters cannot be announced. On cannot say ‘here are our monsters,’ without immediately turning the monsters into pets” (Derrida “Some Statements,” 81). Even closer to the mark would be the image of the monster explained by Michel Foucault, in Madness and Civilization: “Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and to the indignation of Royer-Collard, madmen remained monsters – that is, etymologically, beings or things to be shown … but on the other side of bars” (70). As a treatise about “the monster that is modern Chinese history,” David Wang’s work instantiates an economy of visibility and invisibility held in place by a strict discipline of separation akin to the bars of a prison. The parade of Chinese criminal

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monsters exhibited by the text is unidirectional. While Chinese “monsters” can be seen with piercing transparency and guilt can be assigned with exacting precision (as Wang attributes to Lu Xun), they are never allowed to look back at the critic. Lu Xun’s alleged attempt to “indict foreign aggression” is said to turn catastrophically into an appropriation of “cannablistic” violence that unleashes “a new, more powerful form of cannibalism – revolutionism” (Wang The Monster, 35). While there is no time to explain my fundamental disagreement with this interpretation of Lu Xun and the status of cannibalism in both Lu Xun’s fiction and Taiwanese author Wuhe’s fictional reportage novel about the aftermath of the Wushe Massacre (each of which is discussed by Wang), it will suffice to observe that Wang nowhere accepts the premises of the need, allegedly registered by Lu Xun, to engage in the sort of epistemic decolonisation inevitably required of the critic by an “indictment” of imperialism. The ledger of criminal acts registered according to the specificity of Chineseness attesting to the unique violence of Chinese history includes not only an explicit assignation of guilt but also an implicit announcement, in evangelical fashion, of the “good news.” Because they are Chinese, their atrocities must be inventoried, displayed, and judged. The “good news” is that they are behind the metaphorical bars of their own self-evident incapacity for salvation, safely separated from us. It is not just the scattered references to “the Communist regime” and “Communist hunger politics” that register this logic but more profoundly the arrogation of a position of judgement from which the other is seen yet cannot see (has no right to see) back. It is precisely this economy of visibility and invisibility, the unilateral relation between the two, that has recently been analysed by Naoki Sakai as one of the two mutually contradictory regimes at the heart of modern racism. While the first of these two regimes emphasises a quasi-biological system of classification based on the Aristotelian logic of individual-species-genus, the second involves an economy of visibility that enables one: to distinguish two positionalities according to which the subject of cognition is distinguished from the object of cognition, the agent of perception and knowing is separated from the objectal object of knowing and racial perception. The agent of knowing is allocated to the positionality of invisibility whereas the object of knowing is fully displayed and allocated to the positionality of visibility. Hence, in this regime, the white is deprived of

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color, of any feature of an object that must be gazed at since the subject of knowing is not allowed to be gazed at. In this second regime, whiteness means invisibility or colorlessness. (Sakai “The Economy of Invisibility and Visibility.”)

I must stress again that while I see no plausible basis on which to conclude that Wang views Chinese history as particularly violent because it is Chinese, the rather flimsily constructed position of judgement assumed by Wang matches in its structural aspects the type of positionality typical of modern racism. To be clear, this assertion does not mean or imply that Wang is racist. It means rather that Wang’s claims about the criminal nature of Chinese history problematically amount to an alibi—a claim that one is or was elsewhere when criminal acts allegedly occurred. Or, in this case, were recounted. Where David Wang sees in this distinction a double bind that preserves and genetically transmits violence via narrative, I would see a problematic moment of subjective formation not on the side of “the Chinese” but on the side of the subject of knowledge. The subtle shift from objects to subjects implied by my difference with Wang is probably one of the most enduring tasks for a decolonisation of area studies. Choosing the word alibi to describe Wang’s claims, I should make clear that my intention is not to cast doubt on Wang’s personal honesty, which I consider to be beyond reproach. On the contrary, honesty itself is an integral part of the alibi in its subjective—hence, imaginary—aspects. As we will analyse in Part II, the alibi—both the honest alibi and the alibi of honesty—forms an essential part of the positionality of the area studies scholar. (Terminological note: while I use the term “area studies” in a generic sense, my understanding of this term is heavily informed by area studies covering East Asian nations and their global diasporas. If I stick with the generic form of “area studies” rather than, say, “China studies,” it is precisely to avoid methodological nationalism and/or civilisationism.) Significantly, this type of positionality structurally resembles what Derrida has analysed, based on a reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Specters of Marx, as the “visor effect” of the spectre. Those at whom the ghost or spectre donning a visor looks cannot look back. Establishing authority and lineage, the “visor effect” instantiates a patriarchal logic. This patriarchal lineage in relation to postcolonial spectrality provides us an additional context in which to understand Yi-hung Liu’s assertion that Cold War modernist literature in Taiwan—often associated with the fragile beginnings of civil society in authoritarian Taiwan during the

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1960s—amounted to a substitution of an imaginary American “father,” thought to be “new and free” (Liu Cold War in the Heartland, 98) for the paternal power of the KMT. This substitution was arguably inscribed in the KMT even before it had been forced to abandon the Chinese mainland to the Communists. Detention arguably prolongs this structure, extending the association of “freedom” with hierarchically nested patriarchies.

Gendered Zhuti From this perspective, several observations about the role of gender politics in the film are warranted. The two instances of political betrayal portrayed in the film are the result of actions taken by female protagonists (Fang and her mother) faced with what they construe to be male sexual duplicity and infidelity (in Fang’s case, this judgement is, most would argue, patently in error, while in her mother’s case, it was unquestionably correct). For the female characters, sexual infidelity trumps political fidelity; the personal is political and the men who ignore that truth do so at great peril. To that extent, Detention gestures towards a (single-issue) feminist politics in which women are neither victims nor perpetrators but active agents establishing their own value system in a reversal of societal patriarchal norms. Despite the gesture towards agency, it is important to note that in each case, heterosexual female agency is established on the basis of a mutual appropriation conjoined between women and the patriarchal state security apparatus. In that sense, the feminist politics depicted by the film comes at the price of an investment in the national security state. This state feminism repeats a prominent aspect of Cold War US liberalism seen in the admiration shown by liberal intellectuals for CIA Director Allen Dulles’s mobilisation of the national security state to oppose Senator Joseph McCarthy, an issue the ramifications of which we will discuss more fully in Part II. It will suffice at this juncture to note that in the Cold War US experience, appeals to the national security state in the defence of rights were concomitant with the suppression of popular sovereignty and the ethos of antiblackness that defines US settler colonial empire. In Detention, feminist politics are thus used as a pretext, a tool of appropriation for the film’s essentially nationalistic ends. To that extent, the distinction between Authoritarian Taiwan and Democratic Taiwan is

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not as clear as the film’s community would like us to believe. The constellation of issues at stake here is crucial to the ideological representation of contemporary Taiwan on a global stage as progressive and minoritarian on the one hand while being a militarised satellite outpost of Pax Americana engaged in the unrelenting theological battle against absolute evil on the other. To do justice to an analysis of this constellation of concerns, it would be necessary to undertake a genealogy of gender studies in Taiwan since the end of martial law—their unique and, I think, unquestionable status as the most progressive wing of institutional cultural studies since the establishment of cultural studies at the end of the 1980s by successive waves predominantly composed of young intellectuals returning from anglophone PhD programs. A useful control point would include reference to migration studies in Taiwan, which shared with gender and sexuality studies for a brief moment in the 1990s and early 2000s a similar position at the forefront of Taiwanese cultural studies. If migration studies today play a less prominent role than queer studies in the construction of what many young scholars fancy to be a leftist version of Taiwanese independence, this tendency in itself reflects the ever-deepening imbrication of sovereignty with enclosure. Moreover, while debates have raged for over a decade around the politics of state feminism in a transnational frame in relation to Taiwan, participants on both sides of the debate have not, to my knowledge, explicitly traced the genealogy of gender and sexuality studies’ relationship to cultural studies’ emergence in the aftermath of Cold War anticommunism—becoming, in an intellectual sense, a conduit for transmitting the presuppositions derived from the historic defeat of the Left. (There is a persuasive argument to be made that the critics of state feminism in Taiwan have taken much greater precautions than their state feminist adversaries to include the legacy of the Cold War in their research and institutional projects, but even while recognising the importance and validity of this argument, we would insist that it still does not address the inscription of the defeat of the Left in the horizon of post-Cold War thought.) This juxtaposition of feminism, nationalism, and the genealogies of contemporary knowledge production is sure to bring to mind the recent intervention by Adam Chen-Dedman calling attention to the limits of homonationalist critique and advocating “tongzhi sovereignty,” or the “inseparability of legal rights and sexual citizenship for tongzhi from the preservation of Taiwan’s political sovereignty” (Dedman “Tongzhi

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Sovereignty,” 12). [Note to non-specialist readers: the term tongzhi, which was originally invented in the twentieth century to translate the lexical term “comrade,” has been appropriated by minority gender and sexual communities since the 1980s.] In a gesture that recalls the history of anticolonial struggles, Chen-Dedman places readers on guard against the dangers of export theory. Claiming that critiques of queer theory’s appropriation by homonationalism are “rooted in US-centric” concerns, Chen-Dedman decries “decontextualised framings” (ibid., 8) that in the real world spell the danger of “authoritarian encroachment” (ibid., 12). Expressions of alarm over the encroachment of misplaced theory upon her empirical object of study is a practice with a long history for the area studies scholar. It is probably also pertinent to point out that North American area studies scholars traditionally have been blind to US imperial nationalism while decrying or defending postcolonial cultural nationalism. For my part, I do not see what the suffix “homo-” adds to a critique of the cofiguration between imperial and cultural nationalisms, while it possibly creates confusion about the constitutive role that plurality and exteriority play in modern nationalism even of the most ethnically exclusionary kind. In any case, Chen-Dedman’s emphasis on the necessity of correct contextualisation aligned with disciplinary/geopolitical boundaries is consistent with his insistence on setting proper limits to “queer theory’s deconstructive critique of the ‘normalised nation,’” which while useful “within particular contexts,” Chen-Dedman admits, “should not be flattened and superimposed on Taiwan” (ibid., 19). The topography of context that Chen-Dedman would like to preserve is described, in a revealing turn of phrase, as a “human condition underpinning Taiwanese sovereignty” (ibid., 11)—an idea that is echoed again several pages later by the notion of rights as a reflection of the “innate desire [for freedom]” (ibid., 18). The question of how one can come to freely desire one’s own servitude—a central question for the “resistant” current of modern political philosophy from Spinoza to Foucault—does not enter into ChenDedman’s considerations. Instead, we encounter one of the salient issues with the human rights discourse that has become dominant since 1989. In the reduction or the essentialisation of human rights to an innate property or possession, the practical aspect of rights has been completely dissociated from the transitional situations in which appeals to rights that have been denied are made. We will have more to say about this in our discussion of transitional justice below.

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The essentialisation of rights and sovereignty that we see here was something that Jacques Derrida tried to deal with under the rubric of “national humanism,” which the philosopher defined as a type of “essentialist universalism” (Derrida “Onto-Theology of National-Humanism,” 17). Normally, essentialism is identified with particularism, not universalism. Before getting to an explanation of what Derrida’s apparently paradoxical formulation means, we would like to stay closer to ChenDedman’s text, to tease out some of the implications that will help us understand what Derrida was getting at. For a definition of the concrete content of his national humanist commitments, Chen-Dedman turns to the right-wing Taiwanese nationalist thinker Rwei-ren Wu, who predictably appeals to the master-slave relationship in a fight for survival or extinction that haunts the classical political philosophy of colonial– imperial modernity. In Wu’s words, this is the stark, Manichean choice between “life and death, master [zhuti] and slave, Man and beast” (Wu cited on page 12 of “Tongzhi Sovereignty,” translation modified). In recognition of Chen-Dedman’s emphasis on contextualisation, it would be worth dwelling for a moment on a translational niggle in this passage, which Chen-Dedman translates as, “life and death, subjectivity or slavery, and being our own masters or ruled over like animals” (Chen-Dedman “Tongzhi Sovereignty,” 11–12; the original Chinese text, provided by Chen-Dedman in a footnote, reads in Hanyu Pinyin Romanisation as sheng yu si, zhuti yu nuli, hai you ren yu shou zhijian). Chen-Dedman chooses to use the term “subjectivity” to translate Wu’s zhuti—a standard lexical choice, to be sure, but since the term is opposed by Wu to the slave [nuli] and is not used in reference to the philosophy of negativity that was the hallmark of theories of subjectivity since the nineteenth century, I insist on translating it as “master.” Chen-Dedman reserves this English term to translate the oppositional pair formed by ren yu shou, conventionally translated as human and beast, translated here as “being our own masters or ruled over like animals.” The curious substitution of “master” for “human” (ren) shows that Chen-Dedman is aware in a certain sense of the political stakes that inform Rwei-ren Wu’s use of the term zhuti/subject. Almost like a Freudian slip, the displacement that occurs in the position of the word “master” in Chen-Dedman’s translation calls attention to the reduction of the term zhuti’s original semantic range as used by Wu to a rump or stub of the full conceptual breadth covered in English by the philosophical notion of subjectivity.

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In historical perspective, we might observe that a broad spectrum of meanings accreted around the term subject/sujet/Subjekt in Western European languages had been distributed into several different sinogram compound terms in the Japanese lexicon of modernity imported into China at the end of the nineteenth century, including zhuti for the subject that stands in opposition to an object (the term being used here by Rweiren Wu), zhuguan for the idea of the subjective viewpoint, zhuci for the idea of the grammatical subject, zhuti for the idea of the subject as theme (using a different sinogram with a different tone than the ti in zhuti above), and chenmin for the idea of a population subject to royal authority. Thanks to Naoki Sakai’s analysis of the problem in an analysis of Watsuji Testur¯o’s culturalism (in the former’s Translation and Subjectivity), we can now recognise that the semantic unity of the single term used in English to cover all of these different meanings hides a conceptual problem internal to the modern philosophy of the subject since Descartes and Kant—namely, the idea that, somehow or another, the subject is always internally split. Sakai’s analysis of the Japanese sinogram translations that were later imported wholesale into modern Chinese mandarin reverses the Eurocentric presupposition of the primacy of the source language, revealing how the supposedly secondary translation interpellates the original term and sheds light on a conceptual problem inherent to the modern philosophy of the subject. Strictly speaking, both Chen-Dedham’s translation of Wu’s zhuti and my counter translation are incorrect. Mine is incorrect in the sense that zhuti is conventionally not equated to the term “master.” Chen-Dedman’s translation is incorrect because the standard cognate for subjectivity, as opposed to subject, in modern Chinese would be zhutixing not zhuti (the former is a compound that adds the suffix -xing to the latter, zhuti). The lack of accuracy here is mirrored in Chen-Dedman’s translation of the term nuli/slave against which zhuti is opposed by Wu. Chen-Dedman’s choice of “subjectivity” imposes the grammatical choice of “slavery” (which would be nulizhi) instead of “slave,” the correct term. These rather pedantic considerations are of trifling concern, however, next to the conceptual issues at stake in the peculiar usage the term zhuti has acquired in Taiwan and Hong Kong since the 1990s. This usage is not peculiar to Wu but is typical of the term zhuti’s reappearance in the Taiwanese (and then Hong Kongese) political lexicon since the 1990s, in a context in which the philosophical negativity typical of the modern subject has been eclipsed by the positivity

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of identity associated with the hegemonic US social sciences that largely replaced the philosophy of the subject in social theory after World War II. Hsing-wen Chang’s brilliant observation that the variable translational relationship formed by the pair zhutixing /subjectivity in contemporary Taiwanese usage is primarily a self-referential concept deployed in a political context (Chang “Hewei Taiwan de ‘zhutingxing /subjectivity?’ ”, 17) provides a crucial point of entry for understanding how it is intrinsically connected to Pax Americana via the modern regime of translation and the schema of cofiguration, as we will explain in Part II. (I have serious reservations, however, concerning Chang’s claims of Naoki Sakai’s alleged Lacanism, which Chang then criticises for being insufficiently attuned to the role of the Other. I can see why one might think at first that Sakai’s notion of the position of the translator is indebted to Lacan because some of the vocabulary Sakai uses includes familiar Lacanian terms such as the “subject of enunciation” and the “subject of the enunciated.” The split in the subject was not an idea that originated for the first time with Lacan but is something that goes back to the early development of modern theories of subjectivity in both Descartes and then in Kant. Later in his career, Sakai is somewhat more careful to refer to the Kantian split (between the transcendental I and the empirical I) to avoid the kind of confusion that might lead one to surmise, as Chang does, that he is using a Lacanian conceptual vocabulary. Despite the terminological similarity, however, the conceptual logic is quite different and anti-Lacanian. If as Lacan says, the unconscious is structured like a language, Sakai’s project is to show that this “structure of a language” is completely contaminated by translation, such that translation precedes structure. In seeing translation opposed to structure, that is, in seeing translation as a practice or operation, Sakai is developing a way of understanding sociality that places practical relationships before the identities of the things related. That is what distinguishes Sakai’s approach from a theory of articulation. In addition to Chang’s article cited above, I might also refer readers to the long footnote #4 beginning on page 10 in my Chinese language book on bordering practices in the Hong Kong Protest Movement of 2019, Xianggang fansongzhong zuoyi baibei de xipu [The Genealogy of Defeat of the Left], for further discussion about the contemporary meaning of zhuti in Chinese; and to my article “Logistical Species and Translational Process” for a discussion of the relation between structure and operation in translation.)

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Chen-Dedman’s claim that tongzhi sovereignty “destabilis[es] hegemonic notions of sovereignty as the purview of the state” (ChenDedman “Tongzhi Sovereignty,” 9) is contradicted by his other intellectual commitments, beginning with his call at the essay’s conclusion for a “scholarly commitment” to fight against ideas that “erode the sovereignty of…subjectivity” (Chen-Dedman “Tongzhi Sovereignty,” 23). An ellipsis eliding the adjective Taiwanese helps us get to the bottom of the very traditional philosophy of the subject—and its realisation in the nation-state—that lies behind these proclamations. It goes without saying that once one has admitted at a methodological level the sovereignty of subjectivity—any subjectivity—then one has also committed oneself equally to a theory of the subject for which the only politically viable transition is the one that leads to mastery. In the lexicon of modernity, mastery is a concept that does not broke limitations; it necessarily extends in every direction. What Derrida calls “essentialist universalism” consists in the idea that what is at stake in national community is something like political evolution or, more precisely, a politicised version of Aristotle’s “Great Chain of Being” updated by the concept of modern biological evolution and then transposed to the socio-cultural sphere. Nothing less than the survival of a species vying against other species for mastery over speciation itself is encapsulated in the implicit idea that Man (with all of the baggage of species and gender difference that this term connotes) has an innate nationality—not the idea that individual men (and women) carry national passports, but the idea that the concept of humanity as a species, the “human condition” as it were, is inseparable from the experience of nationality and that nationality, in turn, is a question of survival. Depicting nationality as a veritable species concept is the hallmark of national humanism’s “essentialist universalism.” It is precisely the implicit notion of species or specific difference that lends this kind of essentialism a universal rather than particularistic quality. (This essentialism is the same logic, it bears mentioning, that sees human rights as innate rather than contingently linked to the transitional contexts in which the demand for rights are aired.) The stakes of the massive naturalisation at work here go well beyond homonationalism and point to the imbrication between the common roots of gender and nationality in the murky region where the human is, for much of modern thought, a vector or analogon between biological speciation and an analogous process in the social that might be dubbed social speciation. This analogy was the same at work in the German term

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Geschlecht (“race, family, genealogy, filiation, almost sex?” Derrida “OntoTheology of National Humanism,” 13) that we saw above in relation to Derrida’s discussion of the monster. In effect, Chen-Dedman’s argument that national identity and sexual identity in Taiwan have become inextricably intertwined due to the geopolitical situation is one that ends up reifying the aporetic relationships among gender, sexuality, race, and nationality in the modern thinking of social speciation. One of the results of this reification is an inability on Chen-Dedman’s part to take stock of, much less refute, the theoretical and historical implications of the very different relation between state and people in modern China analysed by Yin-Bin Ning, one of the main targets of Chen-Dedman’s criticisms. Instead, Chen-Dedman simply reiterates the normative distinction between state and nation (Chen-Dedman “Tongzhi Sovereignty,” 21) as attested to by his field research subjects, as if the distinction between the two was empirically given rather than the product of a specific history. This reiteration enables Chen-Dedman to criticise Ning while avoiding addressing Ning’s historical and theoretical claims (for those interested in these claims, see Ning “Zhongguo zuowei lilun”; Ning summarises his principal ideas in a separate article discussed at length by Chen-Dedham, see Ning “Fenshi yu tongxinglian”). Not just an inconsistent application of Chen-Dedman’s “radical contextualism” (Chen-Dedman “Tongzhi Sovereignty,” 23), this avoidance by reification reveals much about a methodological stance that translates into a politics of enclosure. Close encounters with this aporetic vector result in the ponderous rhetoric of honesty to which Chen-Dedman’s national humanist sensitivities turn when confronted by the inescapable violence of sovereignty. Ultimately, the critique of homonationalism “evades an honest reckoning,” writes Chen-Dedham, “with the very real imbalance of military power in the contemporary cross-Strait dynamic between Taiwan and China” (Chen-Dedman “Tongzhi Sovereignty,” 20; emphasis added). Clearly, Chen-Dedman means to say that the critique of homonationalism leads to dishonesty when taken too far. In response, we might be tempted to begin to enumerate the exclusions that have gone into the calculus of “military power” in the Taiwan Strait. Would it include the order of battle of third nations such as the US and Japan? If a balance of military power was manifestly never a concern during US preparations to unilaterally use nuclear weapons in the Taiwan Strait in 1958 (Savage “Risk of Nuclear War Over Taiwan”), what does the introduction of the concept of balance tell us now about the new Cold War? How do definitions of “reality” that

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appeal to military power tie into the reproduction of capitalist production via the devalourised labour of women, migrants (invariably opposed to the concept of citizenship to which Chen-Dedman appeals), and minorities in Taiwan? Before spending too much time to enumerate the various exclusions that have gone into Chen-Dedman’s calculus of the real, we realise in no short order that the relation between evasiveness, honesty, and positionality is neither incidental nor something that can be unilaterally attributed to those useful idiots who take critique “too far,” aiding and abetting the enemy, but is rather a perfect expression of the alibi that structurally informs the positionality of the area studies scholar and to which we shall, as promised above, return again in Part II.

Doctor Father As Derrida is quick to point out in Specters of Marx, the patriarchal logic at work in the visor effect does not have to be substantialised in a fleshly body but could easily manifest in a “technical body or an institutional body”: “Like the one who says, from the safety of his visor, ‘I am thy Fathers Spirit,’ it is … always under the tough institutional or cultural protection of some artifact: the helmet of the ideologeme or the fetish under armor” (Derrida Specters, 158). Chief among these institutions would be those that house the “scholar.” Let us remember that Derrida comes to this conclusion only by staying with a close reading of the character of Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. After observing the difficulty of speaking not so much about as to and with spectres (an idea that will blossom into Derrida’s ethics of spectrality that distinguish it fundamentally from exorcism, spectacle, and criminology), Derrida writes: [The task of dialoguing with a specter] seems even more difficult for a reader, an expert, a professor, an interpreter, in short, for what Marcellus calls a “scholar.” Perhaps for a spectator in general. Finally, the last one to whom a specter can appear, address itself, or pay attention is a spectator as such. At the theater or at school. The reasons for this are essential. As theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe that looking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not always in the most competent position to do what is necessary: speak to the specter. (Derrida Specters, 11)

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Somewhere in the link between the treatment of monsters accorded by David Wang and the treatment of spectatorship in the film Detention, one senses the enduring historical failure on the part of modern institutions of knowledge production and popular representation alike to learn to “speak to the spectre.” Not the failure of this or that individual, but the failure of an institutional configuration joining academia, think tanks, media, intelligence agencies, and states that repeats, in its own way, the economy of visibility and invisibility that defines both patriarchy and modern racism— and in effect seals the bond between the two around the interrelated categories of the national and the international. Ultimately, what is at stake in spectrality is a question of knowledge. Not just historical knowledge, but knowledge production as a general feature of subjective formation. As Blanco and Pereen observe, we should always be attentive to the ways that metaphors, such as the metaphorical use of ghosts, spectres, and monsters, are not just a “word or idea and its associations, but a discourse, a system of producing knowledge” (Blanco and Pereen The Spectralities Reader, 1; emphasis added). In a witty formulation, they call attention to the process by which “the ghost … does theory” (ibid.). It is not only legitimate but necessary for our discussion of a popular film like Detention to devote energy to teasing out the implications the film, its reception, and related scholarly discourse bear for the decolonisation of knowledge production today. What I have shown is that we cannot be content with David Wang’s assertion that modern Chinese history is characterised by monstrosity in the absence of an attempt to question the formation of disciplinary knowledge and that which is institutionally excluded by its judgement(s). One such missed attempt occurs in Wang’s erudite explanation of the mythical monster, the Taowu, that first appeared in ancient Chinese texts and was revived by Cold War diasporic Chinese authors whose work is of interest to the literary critic. As Wang explains in the Introduction, “The title of this book, The Monster That Is History, draws on the ancient Chinese concept of the monster taowu, known for both its ferocious nature and divinatory power” (6). While charting the historical genesis of the taowu monster, Wang notes that, “somewhere along the way, the taowu acquired cognitive identity with history itself; hence, the taowu is an animal that can foresee the future, so it can always run away before the hunters arrive. Since history reveals both past and future, it is referred to as the taowu” (7). Wang appears to overlook the significance of the taowu monster’s contradictory identification with both the past and the

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divinatory future. The question that he poses in relation to the taowu is a criminological and forensic one, not a temporal or subjective one: Ambiguity abounds when one looks into the way by which Taowu the monster is translated into Taowu the diviner, and when taowu as history is folded into taowu as divination. In view of the incessant outbursts of violence and brutality from one generation to another, one has to ponder: could history be regarded as both an embodiment and an indictment of monstrosity? If so, to what extent has the contemplation of history entailed insight as well as indifference? This paradox becomes all the more poignant in modern times, when monstrosity has taken on an unprecedented multitude of forms. Particularly in view of the massive scale of violence and pain that the Chinese administered to China in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude, one senses that the line between understanding and complicity had never been so difficult to discern. (7)

The element that Wang misses in the Taowu is what the monster, like all true monsters in the Derridean sense, says about temporality. According to the logic of the taowu, the origin of the past is located in the return of the future. The past literally comes from the future. The direction of history is not from past to present to future but is rather from future to past to present. At the very least, this is a very different sense of temporality than the sense of homogenous, linear time that characterises the temporality of the modern nation-state. Wang’s lexicon, framed by indictment, stops at what I have termed the criminological and the forensic. The aesthetics that motivate this approach lie in a biopolitical regime of identification that turns the future into a simple modality of the present. An alternate reading, one that is ethico-political, is however possible. This reading would begin with the recognition of the taowu monster’s disruptive potential for modern temporality and would proceed to account for the cost of alternating attempts to domesticate it (the taowu) or throw it behind bars.

Spectres and Historical Trauma Given the flattening of history under Detention’s ponderous ideological baggage, it is not surprising that the director/screenwriter team avoided stanza 139 in Rabindranath’s Stray Birds (as mentioned above, stanzas 133 and 134 are cited twice in the film): “Time is the wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.” It may

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be useful to refer to Derrida’s reminder that the demonstrative aspect of the monster is related to the analogue clock via the semantic confusion inherent in the French word, montre, formerly spelled monstre (just like the contemporary French word for monster), i.e., for the portable timepiece known in English as a watch. What the monster shows, the timepiece reveals … both are the object of a specular gaze. A spatial representation of time, the “watch” or analogue clock is a monstrous parody, as Rabindranath astutely observes, in the sense that it confuses genres—a typical gesture in the repertoire of parody. Relying on spatial movement to indicate temporal passage, the analogue clock is a parody of time. The parodic substitution of space for time removes the panoply of difference that constitutes temporality as such, eliminating the distinction between the temporal and the spatial. A consideration of temporality is essential not just to understanding what is at stake in spectrality but also to appreciating how Detention stumbles around the presentation of time. As Derrida explains in Specters of Marx, the spectral is not simply the opposite of the substantial but a constituent part of that singular reality known as the present. The spectral points invariably to the irreparable split that sunders the temporality of the present. This “dis-located time of the present” (20), the “noncontemporaneity of present time with itself” (29 and in modified form xviii), inserts an element of difference into the present that produces a fracture in time and identity. To use Shakespeare’s poetic formula, “time is out of joint.” An inventory of the elements in Detention that conspire to unleash this unintended deconstructive effect is in order. (Given the frequency with which the term deconstruction circulates in contemporary scholarly discourse, especially in the transitive verbal form to deconstruct X, such as to deconstruct Han chauvinism, or to deconstruct Chinese nationalism, it may be necessary to repeat a truism about the operation denoted by the term. Strictly speaking, one cannot apply deconstruction in the manner of a transitive verb. In the sense elaborated by Derrida, deconstruction occurs only in terms of a relation. Hence, we are precluded from talking about deconstruction as if it were a volitional act to be executed by a subject upon an object. To phrase it otherwise, it is never a question of the pure intention of an individual subject or agent but concerns the intentionality to, where the preposition itself indicates the relational difference that inhabits every putative individual.) A quick inventory of deconstructive effects in Detention would thus include: the cinematic

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fiction of temporality and the essentially spectral nature of cinematic, technologically-reproduced moving images (Gilles Deleuze has written extensively about the former, see Marrati Gilles Deleuze; Jacques Derrida, the latter, see Stewart Cinema Derrida); the irrepressibly disseminative, corrosive effect that results both from nesting a film within a film to represent memory (a movie date with Chang leads Fang to watch a “film” that abruptly shifts from the frolicking pleasures of a pair of anonymous lovers to the scene of Chang’s detention by military police) and from the multiple forms of organised spectatorship within the film (in addition to the episode discussed above, Fang herself is also depicted as a spectator for Chang’s capture within the film she watches together with Chang); the irresolvable contradiction between the filmic presentation of the contingent, aleatory nature of the event, and the film’s identity claims; the confused timeline of events in the movie and their ambiguous location between the “real world” (the world of linear time, with past, present, and future, constructed out of the modalities of the present) and the “nightmare world” (a world haunted by memories, monsters, and ghosts from which the culpable dead cannot escape); the teleological representation of history as fiction “based on a real-life event” (Lee “Detention”) that is not only not precisely specified in time but also introduces elements key to the plotline that are the result of pastiche, distortion, or outright repression of historical fact; the presence of multiple selves and the spectral nature of identity in general; the evangelical and theological undercurrents of the film combined with a repression of the most elemental aspects of traditional Chinese ghost culture; the fantasy of autoimmunity that guides the film’s exorcistic approach to historical trauma; and, finally, the film’s investment in neoliberal gamification. As this inventory suggests, examples abound. To save time, I would like to focus on one key instance, the scene in which protagonists Fang Ray-shin and Wei Chong-ting first meet because of an accidental collision around a blind corner in the hallway at school. Bumping into each other, the protagonists collapse on the floor, books scattered around them. While collecting their belongings off the floor, a startled and embarrassed Fang inadvertently picks up a notebook belonging to Wei, which she discovers has been used to copy a forbidden book. In the absence of this event, the plotline could not proceed. Fang would have never been admitted to the reading group she later betrays; Chang Ming-hui and the rest of the group’s members (apart from Wei) would have never been executed. Crucially, the fateful accident is repeated

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twice in the film, neither instance utilising the high-grain black and white images generally—though not uniformly—used to indicate flashbacks. Although the film would probably like to portray this event in terms of discovery, often confused with the event, it fails. In the repetition of this aleatory event, Detention gestures—inadvertently, no doubt compulsively—to the quality of singularity, not discovery, that defines an event in the philosophical sense. Singularity, as Samuel Weber explains in Singularity: Politics and Poetics, stands at odds with individuality and identity. Weber writes: Singularity, then, which seems simple enough if we think of it only as the “unique,” much less as the “individual,” is in this account [developed by Walter Benjamin] intrinsically split – split off from itself by being accessible not directly but only through a certain repetition that at the same times changes it while reproducing it. Thus, what is absolutely unique and singular is precisely never “absolute” in the literal sense at least of being detached or freed from connections and interdependencies. Rather, it is always tied to a network of repetitions, both past and to come, actual and virtual. (16)

The temporality introduced by singularity, the singularity of the event, is intrinsically connected to the temporal disruption that Derrida calls spectral; it is also connected, we might observe, to the linguistic eruption that Derrida names “iterability,” or the repetition of the same that introduces difference into every linguistic utterance. The spectral, for Derrida, is not simply about the return of things from the past that “haunt” us today, it is also about the way that the future impinges on the present, moving into the latter via a prior return to the past. Not only does this movement disrupt the modal flow of time conceived of as a succession of presents, it also radically changes the notion of the present. There are so many ideas to be unpacked and so many implications to be drawn; I simply do not have the time to pursue these questions here. What I would like to point out is that the discourse of spectrality as it is understood by critics writing about spectrality in Taiwan, like Chiarong Wu and David Wang, is fundamentally different from that elaborated by Jacques Derrida. This point is worth mentioning not for pedantic reasons but because Wu’s claim that Wang, “[f]ollow[s] Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology” (Wu Sinophone, 25–26), compels us to evaluate that claim. As elaborated by Derrida, “hauntology” is an ontological

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concept. Indeed, in French, the two terms, hauntology and ontology, are virtually homophonous. What Derrida intends to signal with the homophonous neologism is another way of repeating and prolonging the critique of the phenomenological “metaphysics of presence” with which the philosopher began his career. Aware of the ontological implications of the word, Wang nevertheless seems to miss their significance: “Using the controversy over the ‘Death of Marxism’ as a case in point, Jacques Derrida imagines a ‘hauntology’ to replace conventional ontological thought: when the dead do not rest peacefully and threaten repeatedly to return to life, Derrida suggests, history reveals its ties with the spectral other” (Wang The Monster, 5). In Wang’s account, otherness would be the result of a return that violates the smooth procession of present moments represented as linear time. This is manifestly not what Derrida intends in Specters of Marx. “To haunt does not mean to be present,” writes Derrida, “and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology” (202). It is not because the dead writ large, “do not rest peacefully and threaten repeatedly to return to life,” that difference is introduced into the present but rather that the concept of the present as the unity of that which is immediately given is untenable on its own terms. That is why Derrida concludes, “Ontology opposes it [hauntology] only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration” (202). What Wang has erroneously termed “hauntology” is, in the vocabulary developed by Derrida, rather the definition of ontology. Conventional ontology—a conceptual strawman if there ever were one—would have us see the past as simply a modality of the present. Hauntology, by contrast, begins with the anticipation of return, but as anticipation it is always connected first to the future, not to the past. Hauntology shows, against conventional ontology, that the future returns to the present via the past bringing with it an irreducible difference that inhabits the present. Hence, every unique origin begins not with the original but with repetition. In the light of the above discussion, we will have to reconsider the meaning of Chia-rong Wu’s assertion that, “Detention points to the interconnectedness of spectral haunting and identity politics” (Wu “Spectralizing,” 76). Wu intends this to mean that, “Detention calls into question the identity construction orchestrated by the hegemonic political regime” (81). Certainly, both assertions are true, yet I do not think that we can subscribe to them without additional modifications crucially

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missing from Wu’s account. The “interconnectedness of spectral haunting and identity politics” is characterised by the irreparable disruption that the former exercises upon the latter. Hence, while Detention certainly does call into question the construction of Chinese identity under the KMT authoritarian regime, it equally calls into question the construction of Taiwanese identity—unwittingly, as it were. Ultimately, the two identities are genetically—and patrilinearly—related; they are spectralisations of each other. Derrida’s account of spectrality is not the only one and it certainly does not have to be held up as correct or normative. In their introduction to The Spectralities Reader, Blanco and Pereen call attention to previous work arguing that the “spectral turn” in contemporary scholarship is bifurcated into two models, a deconstructive one and a psychoanalytic one (33–34). Whereas the former emphasises companionship with the spectre, the latter advocates expelling the spectre. Despite the references to Derrida, both Wang’s and Wu’s positions would align more closely with the psychoanalytic camp. Even so, a considerable distance separates them from the psychotherapeutic understanding of trauma. For both Wang and Wu, the “spectre” (ghost or monster) refers to traumatic historical events of great violence that remain unresolved and continue to impinge upon the present. The purpose of criticism, they implicitly hold, is to contribute to historical closure. This type of haunting is taken as a point of origin, a punctual moment in the past that constitutes the identity and unity of the present. My response to their work has been not to show that they are misguided so much as to complicate the picture of what historical closure entails. The crux of the matter amounts to what to make of historical trauma. In terms of trauma studies today, the psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches mentioned above have been further joined by a sociological approach that shares with the deconstructive one a sceptical attitude towards identities derived from or claimed on the basis of traumatic experience. Significantly, trauma is a word that is used extensively in both Wu’s works under discussion here (fifty instances in the article on Detention and one hundred and thirty-five times in Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan) and David Wang’s work, though to a far lesser extent (twenty-nine times in lengthy manuscript). It is fair to say that both scholars conceive of their work within the context of finding a resolution to trauma. For Wu, obtaining “recognition and understanding” (Wu “Spectralizing,” 75) is key to “liberat[ion] from loss and shame” (77). Even as Wang avoids

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overtly endorsing a single position (vacillation plays an important ideological role in Wang’s text), he claims inspiration from theoretical “models of violence” (Wang The Monster, 5). Reading between the lines, the reader understands that Wang essentially endorses the psychoanalytic approach when he writes: “From a psychoanalytic perspective, theorists of trauma have taken up where Adorno left off. What should have never happened had happened. These critics ask whether it is possible to find any literary or clinical analysis to properly explain this unlikely historical wound” (4). David Wang’s work is devoted to this task of literary analysis that could serve as a proper explanation. An alternative approach to Wang’s, yet one still in dialogue with literary psychoanalysis, begins with a definition of trauma not as unanticipated, shocking occurrence but as an event that challenges the social construction of meaning. As David Lloyd explains in a fascinating analysis of historical trauma in Ireland resulting from brutal English colonisation, “The trauma is defined in the psychotherapeutic literature not so much as the undergoing of intense, inflicted pain, but as a state of what is strictly terror” (Lloyd “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?” 213). One of the key characteristics of this terror is the insufficiency of socially sanctioned systems of meaning to digest the traumatic event. What is traumatic about trauma is not the surpassing of some quantifiable threshold of violence, such as Rummel’s death counts, but the failure of discursive meaning to capture what happened. This element of excess to meaning, crucial to the psychotherapeutic account of trauma, is overlooked by Wang and, especially, Wu. In Wu’s estimation, “Detention provides a direct exposition of the incurred historical trauma. … As the KMT is fashioned as the nearly omnipresent and omnipotent political monster in Detention, the once unspeakable trauma of the individual and the society can find its outlet through a combined narrative of ghost haunting and survival” (Wu “Spectralizing,” 82; emphasis added). As Wu sees it, trauma can be the object of “direct exposition”; the filmic medium provides a way for the “unspeakable” to be narrativised. Despite the divergence from the classic notion of trauma in psychotherapeutic theory, it should be noted in fairness that Wu’s understanding of trauma is based on ideas that are widely circulated in contemporary scholarly film criticism—as Wu makes clear from the citations used to buttress his argument. In the light of these scholarly precedents in cultural criticism about Taiwan, it is worth summarily describing the different approach advocated by Lloyd. Where both Wang and Wu emphasise the confluence between

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personal and collective experiences of trauma, Lloyd warns against the pitfalls of equating the two. A crucial passage merits full citation despite the length: The individual survivor in therapy comes into a relation to her own past through an immemorial history of abuse that has deprived her of the very conditions of subjective security. In the case of colonialism, the relation to the past is strictly not a relation to one’s own past but to a social history and its material and institutional effects and in no simple way a matter of internal psychic dynamics. The problem emerges as to how the transition from the level of the individual to that of the social can be theorized, since it is not self-evident that there is any necessary relation between the psychological and the social that is not already ideological. At one level of analysis this problematic holds for any theory of ideology and interpellation, bringing us to confront once more the theoretical difficulty that Fredric Jameson framed some twenty years ago as the problem of ‘the insertion of the subject in the socius’ (Jameson 1977: 338). Facing this problem, analogy – the fatal Cleopatra of theorization – is of little help, precisely because it shores up the ruse of a liberal individualism that reverses the relation between the formation of the subject and the social institutions that interpellate it, making the correspondence between the psychic and the social seem ‘natural’ or intuitive. The possibility of the analogy becomes the problem to be resolved rather than the means to critical analysis. (Lloyd “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?” 216)

My analysis of Detention has attempted to highlight the ideological proliferation arising out of the film’s many analogies (between, variously, the individual and the collective, history and fiction, cinema and life, monsters and Chineseness). As we saw with the theme of resolution, the analogy between the collective and the individual in Detention is diverted away from critical analysis towards the consensus of weaponised identity. That consensus is what inscribes the film within what Samuel Weber has called “the mono-theological identity paradigm” (Weber Singularity, 6) that characterises militarised neoliberal globalisation. More precisely, the film adopts an essentially neo-evangelical posture. The “good news” that every evangelism holds central is expressed primarily via Chang Minghui’s assertion, during the second scene on the steps of the generic Shinto shrine that, “as long as one is alive, there is still hope.” Speaking from a moment posterior to his and Fang’s deaths (yet outside of the nightmare

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world of the haunted school), Chang intones with the certainty of teleological faith: “Although we were unable to await the arrival of freedom, the living still can.” The evangelical “good news” announced by Chang, “the arrival of freedom,” amounts to an unshakeable faith in the future past, a future that no longer has the quality of openness and indeterminacy but is predictably locked in. As Samuel Weber has written in a different context, “This is tantamount to subordinating the perspective and experience of singular, living beings to a concept of Life written with a capital L” (Weber Singularity, 30). For Weber, this appropriation of Life into a discourse of identity, “defending a self that is inherently indefensible” (ibid.), is inextricably linked to the “militarization of feeling” that occurs under late neoliberal Pax Americana. Among the characteristics that define this structure of feeling, the one that draws our attention here is “the compulsion to view the world in terms of mutually exclusive adversaries” (Weber Singularity, 43). It is this compulsive quality, associated with a repetition that instantiates difference in the heart of identity, that ultimately reveals the true monstrosity at the heart of Detention. With each attempt at exorcism, Detention slips deeper into conjuring a new nightmare. Rather than initiating a therapeutic resolution of the traumatic contradictions of colonial subjectivity, Wu’s analysis of Detention proposes its sublation into recognition. The compensatory catharsis conferred by recognition thus becomes the basis for an ideology of identity. Tempered by scholarly conventions, this ideological sublation finds a correlate in the enthusiastic response the film garnered among (post)millennials and scholars alike. In Specters of Marx, Derrida not only reminds readers that mourning follows trauma but also warns readers that jubilatory proclamations announcing the death of the past constitute the so-called triumphant phase of unsuccessful mourning work (64). In an ethico-political vein, Derrida concludes, “trauma is endlessly denied by the very movement through which one tries to cushion it, to assimilate it, to interiorize and incorporate it” (122). Such endless denial of trauma and the unsuccessful work of mourning characterise both Detention and its popular and scholarly reception to date. In response to the dilemma of trauma and in recognition of the kernel of intolerable meaninglessness that defines it as an experience rather than an object of knowledge, Lloyd proposes an interesting solution: “a nontherapeutic relation to the past, structured around the notion of survival or living on rather than recovery, is what should guide our critique of

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modernity and ground a different mode of historicization” (Lloyd “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?” 219–220). Modernity itself, notes Lloyd, is cunningly crafted as a therapeutic discourse. It proposes to offer recourse for the ailments of immaturity and irrationality—in short, for authoritarianism—that supposedly marred premodernity. Elements seen as an impediment to full-fledged modernity, defined in a teleological way as the correct path of human development, are symptomatic of backwardness, one might even say monstrous backwardness. Resistance to imposed development would be seen in turn as, “symptomatic of a refusal to be cured” (ibid., 219). The therapeutic discourse of modernity would thus explain both its others and resistance to its hegemony in terms of symptoms in need of cure. From this perspective, the therapeutic effects of modernity are seen primarily in the accession to the institutions of liberal democracy and its version of civil society, in which the “pedagogical relations of the school … find their rationale in the hierarchies of civil society” (ibid., 217). Yet as Lloyd points out, “If the function of therapeutic modernity is to have us lose our loss in order to become good subjects, the very process of mourning the dead is at once their condemnation, their devaluation” (ibid., 222). The loss of loss that we noted in our analysis of Detention is mistakenly supposed, under the influence of neoliberal gamification, to be a resolution of trauma. In truth, it is more like a sublation that hides the continuity of the present with the past and the instantiation of a new form of ideological domination structurally similar, and patrilinearly related, to that of the past.

The Trauma of Capitalism The Great Exodus from China, Dominic Yang’s important study of the dispossessed, disenfranchised men and women who migrated to Taiwan following the KMT’s debacle on the continent in 1949, exemplifies a curious problem common to trauma studies and especially common to writing about Taiwanese modern history in general. Extremely attentive to the way that trauma affects different populations in different ways, Yang ends his monograph with a moving account of his own personal journey as a Taiwanese immigrant to North America returning to conduct research in Taiwan upon groups of people his ethnic identity formation had taught him to view unsympathetically. Espousing a methodology of “multidirectional empathic unsettlement” (11), Yang’s work conscientiously applies that standard to critical self-reflection. In the process,

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Yang demonstrates how identities fluctuate and change as trauma works its way through successive phases compounded by the incessant projection of human events into the future. There is a niggle, however, to the humanist perspective: the historical narrative of identity transition that Yang painstakingly, and in a sense lovingly, constructs on the basis of archival research, oral interviews, and theoretical reflection implicitly communicates the nebulous idea that there exists a certain baseline of normality that is not traumatic, even if only as an unstated ideal type. This implicit baseline is all the more salient given Yang’s explicit methodological commitments away from an exclusively evental conception of trauma towards other forms of trauma not tied to punctual moments. Given our concern here with transition as a general phenomenon of capitalist modernity, the implicit admission of such baseline normativity in the non-evental concept, or perhaps longue durée concept, of trauma risks conferring upon capitalism’s incessant transitions a normative status, as if they were entirely natural and the suffering attendant upon them entirely ephemeral. In his concern for the impact of migration upon both incoming and host populations, Yang’s historical narrative comes very close to touching one of the best indirect indices we have for measuring the violence of capitalist transition. As Yann Moulier Boutang has persuasively argued in a theoretical reflection on his extensive historical research into the link between migration and historical capitalism, the history of migration is often something that can only be reconstructed indirectly on the basis of absences in official historical documents. Moulier Boutang thus calls into question the “protocols of rationality that preside over the construction of memory” (Moulier Boutang “Between the Hatred of All Walls and the Walls of Hate,” 106), leading him to advance the following hypothesis: “the traces of these obstacles to the diagonal [of mobility], this coded information, have been packed away like dead memory, like cartons of archives or records whose classification and means of access have been lost to us. Something in the preparation of memory systematically effaces them” (ibid., 107). The series of books and articles undertaken subsequently by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have further established in conclusive fashion the intrinsic links among bordering practices, border regimes, migration, translation, labour history, and capitalist transitions. Viewed in the light of these works, Dominic Yang’s study of the national identity transition among Taiwan’s waishengren population (the name for those migrants from the continent), or again, Evan Dawley’s study of the early formation of Taiwanese identity among Han populations under

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Japanese rule, provide further evidence for concluding that the correlate of capitalist trauma in the cultural sphere, its manifestation, if you will, is the imperative to have an identity articulated to the apparatus of area and anthropological difference—itself the very product of capitalist modernity. From this perspective, the distinction that Dawley draws between national and ethnic identity is one of degree, not one of kind; what he terms “nonnational” ethnic identity would be more accurately phrased as “proto-national” in a situation where “national” occupies a normative position mediating between the individual and the species. Such considerations lead necessarily to a re-evaluation of Dawley’s assertion that, “Taiwanese forged their ethnic consciousness in contradistinction to two nationalisms, Japanese and Chinese, both of which were imposed on Taiwan” (Dawley Becoming Taiwanese, 21). While this statement is certainly not untrue, and Dawley’s ethnographic history of the port city of Keelung is a fascinating, erudite study of the cofiguration between Taiwanese proto-national identity and Chinese/Japanese national ones, it could be extremely misleading if it were taken to mean that it was not the apparatus of area—and with it the logic of specific difference placing the nation as a mediating instance between the individual and the species—that was “imposed” on Taiwan. The elision of this imposition, its naturalisation, is one of the enduring features common to contemporary Taiwan studies, if not area studies in general. The apparatus of area is conceptually designed to manage a series of related or analogous operations recurring across borders or frontiers between spaces normally thought to be of completely different orders, such as sovereign nation-states or separate disciplines in the humanities. The initial challenge to which this apparatus was to respond was the curious distribution of post/colonial knowledge production about a given area across different languages, usually understood through the modern figures of the native and the foreign. How to understand knowledge production about a specific area undertaken within the United States in relation to the knowledge produced about that area by the natives of that area themselves, for example, was a problem that quickly gave rise to an interest in the problems associated with translation, location, and the production and circulation of knowledge, as forms of social relation, as well as those problems associated with the modern project of anthropological knowledge in general. Rather than emphasising a particular set of answers to these questions that become hegemonic, it might be more helpful to think of how

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the questions themselves organise subjectivity. In a landmark essay titled, “The Problem of ‘Japanese Thought’: The Formation of Japan and the Schema of Cofiguration,” Naoki Sakai explains how the notion of the nation-state as a species concept is articulated to knowledge at the level of desire: Granted that “a nation is something that wants to be a nation,” one cannot evade the problems concerning political (or subjective) techné as to how to manufacture and effectively institute the desire to “want to be a nation” in pursuing the issue of how to manufacture “the nation.” And, the nation cannot be unless the populace is endowed with a rather irrational mentality which bears with it “the active spontaneity of the ego.” (Sakai Translation, 67)

What matters is not so much the answer to the question, “What is X nation/people/culture/language?” as the posing of the question itself. Even better, the question as opposed to the answer is liable to be shared internationally. The apparatus of area is thus an international production that simultaneously spans the organisation of both knowledge and population. What better way to initiate that production—the “sentiment of nationality” (John Stuart Mill)—than through the “active spontaneity of the ego,” i.e., through the manifestation of authentic honesty that grounds the nation-state as a species concept? Those whose relation to the nation is “spontaneous” are distinguished from those whose relation to the nation is “extraneous.” The lesson to retain here is that this ostensibly spontaneous love on the one hand combined with ostensibly extraneous honesty on the other is deeply architectonic and highly orchestrated within the institutional norms that reproduce the founding exclusions of area. Hence, in speaking about how nationalism has been imposed on Taiwanese, we would do well to remember that it is not simply Chinese or Japanese nationalisms that have been imposed. Rather, what has also been imposed is the question, what type of humanity are the populations in Taiwan? What matters is not so much the answer, which can and has been historically variable, as the traumatic impact the imposition of the question bears for the formation of subjective desire. Once we admit that capitalism’s incessant transitions are traumatic— and not just traumatic but the paradigmatic form of normalised trauma in the modern era—then the identity begins to look differently. Is it not that

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case that what is truly traumatic about modernity are not just the dislocations caused by capitalist transitions, colonial population engineering, and bordering practices that result in endless mutations to antagonistic social identities, but rather the becoming-political of identity, concretised through the modern schema of internationality, as an expression of anthropological difference in general? Baked in to the “everyday” quality of capitalism is a form of traumatic disruption that can only be perceived negatively via a denaturalising critique of the relation between capitalist transitions and the modern apparatus of area and anthropological difference. Seen from this perspective, the ethical appeal to reclaim one’s true national, ethnic, or racial identity via the remembrance of past trauma appears to be essential to the ideological work of maintaining the capital relation. This is the work that consists in projecting labour, i.e., humans in the form of a marketable commodity, as a natural community of people pre-existing the capital relation. A popularised trauma theory, such as that seen in the film Detention, that seeks a resolution of trauma in the remembrance of one’s true identity manifestly parallels the operation by which the capital relation dissimulates its essentially future-oriented outlook (anticipating a return on investment via the cycle transforming money into commodities back into more money). As Gavin Walker explains, the dissimulation consists in representing labour as something that exists naturally prior to the encounter with capital. As the primary commodity without which accumulation would not be possible, labour is treated as an autonomous social entity, or “thing,” that exists naturally in a form ready to be utilised by capital to promote the circulation between supply and demand. Yet since capital itself is nothing but a social relationship, it is logically impossible for one part of the relationship, i.e., labour, to pre-exist the relationship, i.e., capital, that contains it. The “solution” to this problem lies in setting into motion the complex gyration needed to make something that is essentially projected in advance look like something that was always there just waiting to be used properly. This gyration results in a temporal (un)folding that turns the future back into the past, creating the image of labour that precedes capital, individuals that precede social contracts, and nations that precede states. The popularised version of trauma theory at work in a film like Detention is the very mechanism by which such temporal folding unfolds, so to speak. Making himself responsible not just to ethnic others but also to other scholars in the field, Dominic Yang begins his monograph by laying out

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for readers his position in relation to intellectual debates within trauma studies and the different schools that have taken shape. My interest is not to review these debates but rather to revisit the work of Cathy Caruth, whose writing is often credited by advocates and detractors alike as a seminal point in the establishment of modern trauma studies. One of the principal conclusions drawn by Caruth’s work, according to Yang, is that if trauma is characterised by the inaccessibility of memory—what theorists since Freud call the “latency of trauma”—resolution can be sought in the direction of reclaiming those experiences in the form of shared memories. In effect, Yang’s summary of Caruth’s position makes it sound very much like an academic theory that would lend support to the kind of popularised account of trauma seen in the film Detention. Recognising the importance such theory could potentially have for my critique of the film, I felt compelled to engage directly with Caruth’s work, with surprising results. Reading Caruth’s initial formulation of the problematic in a seminal article from 1991, titled “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History,” that gave birth to an eponymous book in 1996, I was deeply struck by the insufficiency of the way her theories have been represented (and, quite possibly, elaborated by Caruth herself in subsequent work that I have not had the time to consult). In Caruth’s analysis, the essential element of trauma is that it is shared, tied to our relation to others and especially to other communities. As she develops this idea of the essential otherness that inhabits the personal experience of trauma via a reading of Freud’s text Moses and Monotheism written in stages between Freud’s last days in an Austria in the throes of Nazification and his subsequent exile in London, Caruth places special emphasis on the passage between nation-states and national languages in the confluence between the final version of Freud’s text and the final years of Freud’s life. Caruth does not say so directly, yet the implication is unmistakable: trauma is inextricably related to an experience of the border. Even more, trauma itself is an act of bordering that asymmetrically creates “peoples” on each side of the border. This asymmetrical aspect means that what may from one side of the border look like two separate peoples (such as “Taiwanese” and “Chinese”) could look from the other side of the border as one people divided by an intrusive and artificial line. In that sense, trauma is intrinsically linked to the psychoanalytic experience of anxiety in general, the experience of borders par excellence. In writing about the specific circumstances of Freudian trauma,

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Caruth calls the reader’s attention to a complex signifying chain semantically held together in German by the root fall: “Between the Unfall, the accident, and the ‘striking’ of the insight, its auffallen, is the force of a fall [ fallen], a falling which is transmitted precisely in the unconscious act of leaving [verfallen]. It is this unconsciousness of leaving which bears the impact of history” (Caruth “Unclaimed Experience,” 191). The temporal movement described by Caruth is quite self-consciously modelled on the Freudian notion of nachträglichkeit, the blow from the present that retrospectively stamps the past with meaning. Extrapolating from Hsiao-ting Lin’s characterisation of the KMT satellite regime installed by Pax Americana’s population engineers as an accidental state, I would like to risk the following formula inspired by Caruth: what is revealed in Freud’s account of trauma, as read by Caruth, is that the act of bordering is an “accident” that befalls (a) population(s), re-creating it/them as (a) nation-state(s), with an overwhelming force that can only be understood in the unconscious act of exile. The ultimately arbitrary nature of borders means that every border always has the quality of an accident. If bordering is the quintessential social act necessary to capitalist reproduction, then the traumatic accident of bordering is the capitalist trauma par excellence. In the modern era, there is no population that does not suffer the effects of this trauma, unrecognised as such. From this perspective, “Taiwan” would thus be the name for a singular experience of this global accident. Yet, if the border is essentially a traumatic accident, it is necessary to distinguish the accidental nature of the border from its role in the injustice of capitalist accumulation. That is why we arrive, finally, at formula: The trauma of capitalism is the trauma of the accident of the border and the necessary role played by that aleatory accident in the injustice known as the commodification of labour. In Freud’s account, it seems that the only way to recognise the traumatic accident as such lies not in remembrance but in the experience of exile. As Caruth describes it, this act of exile, in its genuinely accidental unconsciousness, is the source of true freedom: “Freud’s freedom to leave [Austria for England] is paradoxically the freedom, not to live, but to die” (191). The threat posed by that exilic form of freedom accounts for the reason why every modern state reserves for itself the right to claim the sacrifice of its citizens in defence of the nation. In Chang Ming-hui’s insistence on the importance of living on in order to testify to the remembrance of one’s true, collective identity, it is not hard to detect a similar appropriation of death for the community of the nation-state. Eschewing

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remembrance in favour of exile, Caruth’s analysis of trauma—at least in her article from 1991—cannot be contained within a mnemonic politics. The clue that Caruth has left us for the resolution of trauma consists in the experience of exile, not memory per se. From there, it would only take us a few steps more to recognise that other, properly political forms of exilic experience, besides the freedom to die, are not only possible but urgently required. Among these, perhaps the most fundamental would be that of the experience of being a translator liberated from the constraints of the modern regime of translation.

Carl Schmitt Everywhere The philosopher Alain Brossat has dealt with a theme similar to what we have been calling Rousseauian absolute consensus under the guise of what he wryly dubs “democratic Schmittism.” Lying at the heart of this short essay that situates Taiwan within a global political context, titled “The Schmittian turn of Global Democracy,” lies a pointed reference to the political theory advanced by Carl Schmitt. An erudite legal scholar and critic of liberalism associated with the demise of Weimar democracy and the rise of the Nazi Party, Schmitt developed the idea that the foundation of the political lies in the distinction between friends and enemies. In Brossat’s reading, it is this Manichean outlook that motivates the new Cold War and the desperate, reactionary attempt to save the presumed equivalence and unity of the terms “Western,” “white,” “free,” and “superior” at the end of American Empire. For Brossat, the new form of absolute consensus that has taken hold since the end of the Cold War is the result of a series of transitions that the philosopher charts out from World War II to the present. Chief among these is the transition from a Machiavellian paradigm, based on the grey area of coexistence and competition with one’s ideological enemy, to a Schmittian paradigm, based on the Manichean conflict, an us-orthem fight to the death, ending in the quasi-religious conversion of one’s enemies at gunpoint. “[T]he new world order which emerged with the fall of the Soviet Empire was not at all the advent of the age of global democracy but a form of Restoration and permanent counter-revolution whose specificity, in theoretical terms, is to be based on the substitution of the Machiavellian-Vic[oesque] paradigm for a Schmittian-type paradigm.” Brossat defines the latter as, “the advent of the One-only as an exclusive

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figure of political civilization – the One-only of democracy … an exemplary Schmittian figure because it ipso facto entails the criminalization of the [domestic and foreign] enemy … and has for inevitable correlation the essentialization of the enemy who becomes a hypostasis of infamy and a new embodiment of absolute Evil.” What Brossat calls the “One-only” is a discursive form of consensus that does not recognise, as a matter of ontological principle, the legitimacy and right to existence of opponents. From this perspective, dissensus could only be conceived of as the sign of a divergence so fundamental that it could only be described in existentially inimical terms. Because it is fundamentally a different species of existence, the enemy is an inhuman monster that needs to be either eradicated or converted. The only forms of existence admissible are those that can be incorporated into an exclusive monopolar vision. This is the vision that was behind the recruitment slogan, “an Army of One,” used by the United States Armed Forces directly after the 911 Incident. Presaging our discussion of transitional justice below, it would be apposite to mention that Robert Meister has observed a similarly Schmittian motif in the construction of contemporary human rights discourse. We can thus see that the aspect of Human Rights Discourse that Schmitt called “warlike” is at once a basis for community and for hatred — community based on hatred of the purveyors of hate. As an emergent ideology of the “world community,” Human Rights Discourse does not move beyond the paranoid stance of demonizing all demonizers to a state in which we realize that our aggression toward the split-off bad victim might destroy the good victim. (Meister After Evil, 36)

Brossat’s analysis of the militarised “One” constructed on the basis of a reductive and characteristically Schmittian political pair, or “Two,” ends with a sobering assessment of the potential for future domestic political violence in Taiwan that echoes Meister: [I]t is also a question of the violence that this Schmittian turning point in contemporary democracy promises and heralds: it is not difficult to imagine what could be, in this country [Taiwan] where public opinion is heated by anti-Chinese propaganda and warmongering conditions, the effects of the slightest “incident” (on land, in the air or at sea) bringing the protagonists of this regional conflict into direct confrontation: the continued stigmatization of Beijing’s supposed Fifth Column on the island (including the

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main opposition party) and other “infiltrators”, “Chinese agents”, “collaborators” of the enemy in this country would find (even if Taiwan would not be directly involved in the clash), its immediate extension in a violent repression hitting indiscriminately all who are likely to appear as an agent of the enemy, accompanied, inevitably, by abuses perpetrated by more or less improvised gangs of vigilantes and rabid pro-independence activists in a climate of civil war prepared for a long time. The loop would then come full circle where those who have established their legitimacy on the denunciation of the crimes committed under the era of Chiang, at the time of martial law (1949-1987) and more particularly during the White terror which followed the events of February 1947, and who are now firmly established at the helm of the State to prove, in terms of the criminalization of the designated internal enemy, the worthy heirs of the Generalissimo… all this, naturally, in the name of defense and the promotion of both local and global democracy – but, in all cases, booted and helmeted… (Brossat “The Schmittian Turn”)

Of course, Brossat’s comments are mere speculation. Yet as we have seen, Detention provides ample grist for the mill of speculation (adding to a pile of flagrant examples drawn from Taiwan’s English language press cited by Brossat), unwittingly demonstrating via its own clichéd imagination the extent to which the aesthetic community of viewers and producers formed around the film might well be, in some very important respects, “the worthy heirs of the Generalissimo,” as Brossat acerbically puts it. From this perspective, what is essential in Brossat’s comments is not the prospective aspect but the retrospective one. Rather than predicting what may happen in the future, Brossat draws a conclusion about what has already happened. The current conjuncture in Taiwan is defined by the fulfilment of the discursive conditions for future political paroxysms that could easily align with those of the past. That Brossat should detect within the self-proclaimed democratic camp discursive practices that he, a philosopher by training and profession, deems to be decidedly Schmittian in nature contrasts with the spate of articles dissecting the “Schmittian turn” in contemporary Chinese intellectual and political life (see Mitchell “Schmitt in Beijing”; Chang “The Nazi Inspiring China’s Communists”; Lilla “Reading Strauss in Beijing”; Goldman “Why Carl Schmitt Matters to China”; Reinhardt “Totalitarian Friendship: Carl Schmitt in Contemporary China”; and Veg “The Rise of China’s Statist Intellectuals”). Lurking behind these

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claims and counterclaims would be an intellectual politics of criminalisation of the enemy. Besides the ignominy associated with the figure of Schmitt himself, the contentious assertion of an equivalence between Nazi Germany and Communist China heightens the sense of crisis associated with the new Cold War and increases the stakes for intellectual debate. Whether seen in the “Chinazi” (chi nacui) meme that gained wide circulation on social media in Taiwan and Hong Kong following popularisation by the born-again dissident Yu Jie, author of a 2018 book titled “Nazi China” (nacui zhongguo), or a front-page report by Yuan Li in the January 12, 2022, edition of The New York Times likening the implementation of China’s zero-COVID policy to the “banality of evil” that underwrote the Holocaust, the popular, mediatised comparison between Nazi Germany and Communist China (to cite but two examples of a widespread trend) weighs heavily today on every mention of the thought of Carl Schmitt in a Taiwanese or Chinese context. Hardly limited to the popular sphere, assertions about China’s “national socialist” ideology have entered the scholarly realm, with one UK researcher anxiously asking, “how Western government [sic.] ought to approach a national socialist China[?]” (Dessein “National Socialism in China,” 87). Given recent critiques of ubiquitous Schmittianism in Chinese intellectual circles, it may be useful to highlight the somewhat overlooked centrality of transition theory in such debates. One important example would be Sebastian Veg’s article from 2019 titled, “The Rise of China’s Statist Intellectuals,” which attempts to demonstrate Schmittian continuities between the Chinese New Left of the 1990s and the Chinese New Right of the current decade. Noting that the New Left had “target[ed] democratic transition theory and the notion of a single path to modernization” (Veg “The Rise of China’s Statist Intellectuals,” 31; emphasis added), Veg leaves aside crucial questions about the relation between transition theory and areal division in which his own position as a university-based areal researcher is reflexively implicated. Hopes that a seasoned scholar of Veg’s calibre might be able to shed some light on the validity of transition theory are dashed as the reader discovers another China studies scholar who takes advantage of the visor effect to obviate the obligation to engage herself in a critical reading of democratic transition theory on its own merits. In other words, the disciplinary rationality of the area condensed in the identity of the object enables the area specialist to occupy a position that is asymmetrical to that

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occupied by intellectuals in the area object of study—precisely those intellectuals who cannot avoid posing for themselves the necessity of a critique or acceptance of “democratic transition theory.” In addition to the disciplinary rationality focused on the identity of the object, Veg’s article also deploys a second form of disciplinary rationality, one that is essentially taxonomic and related to the biopolitical power of the modern state. “To sum up,” Veg concludes, “this essay argues that the new statist and sovereigntist thought that has become popular among Chinese legal scholars and critics of liberalism can be divided into three main strands” (ibid., 45). The typological impetus of area studies is designed to render transparent a population that is opaque for the subject of knowledge whose knowledge credentials or knowledgeability relies on translation instead of direct access. This mediation instantiates a power relation into the subject of knowledge while rendering the targeted population into an object-medium available for governmental technologies such as conversion and transition. The typological impetus itself is an integral part of state rationality in the wake of colonial–imperial modernity. Yet if the humanities and social sciences cannot legitimately deploy typological rationality, how, one must ask, could they ever hope to intervene in the social hierarchies created by domination and exploitation inherited from the past and reproduced in the present? The answer to this question lies not in the constitution of the identity of the object but rather in the formation of the subject. Veg’s taxonomy of contemporary Chinese “statist” thought, which focuses on the pernicious influence of Carl Schmitt, is sustained by a comparison with parallel intellectual trends outside of China that is itself a product of the visor effect essential to the subjective formation of the area studies position. The operation of this subjectivity becomes visible in the moment when Veg reminds his readers, “It was not the first time that Schmitt’s critique of liberal depoliticization and endorsement of sovereignty against universal norms proved attractive to the left” (ibid., 33). Considering that Veg’s is an article devoted to delineating a typology of a specifically national, i.e., Chinese, school of thought, the spatial vagueness of “the left” to which Veg refers in this sentence is remarkable. A quick look at the appended footnote reveals a source that is focused exclusively on thinkers who would conventionally be defined as “Western.” By bracketing the problematic relation between transitions and the accident of the border, crystallised in area, the area

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studies specialist is able to reduce Chinese thought to a mimetic repetition of debates in the West. It comes as no surprise that the first casualty of the disciplinary visor effect is the grounds for the contextualisation and “typology” or “matrix” (ibid., 24) of intellectual production in other fields putatively external to the one from inside which the area studies scholar operates. The great care that Veg brings to his task of classifying different schools of contemporary Chinese intellectual thought and their respective adherents contrasts with the pell-mell assimilation and condensation found in the author’s conflation of intellectual schools of thought in the West. Without fanfare, Veg lumps contemporary political philosophers Étienne Balibar and Chantal Mouffe together in a hodgepodge amalgamation as “critics of liberalism who situate themselves on the left” (Veg “The Rise of China’s Statist Intellectuals,” 27). As a classificatory scheme, this is imprecise; as intellectual history, it is grossly misleading. One does not have to speculate, moreover, about what either Mr. Balibar or Ms. Mouffe would have to say about this lack of precision since their difference has already been publicised in the pages of Le Monde, one of France’s largest legacy media platforms. In an interview with Jean Birnbaum in 2016, translated into English a year later, Balibar was quite explicit on this point: “[P]eople like my friend Chantal Mouffe descend upon and ask me ‘But what planet are you living on? National identity is the only framework that allows for the defence of the popular classes against an untamed capitalism!’ I think that they are wrong, but of course, we need to prove that. That is my point of honour: I do not want to renounce either social critique or internationalism” (Birnbaum “Translation and Conflict”). If the distance between the two figures can be measured in terms of the metaphor of interplanetary space travel, as Ms. Mouffe thinks, it would be inaccurate and misleading to hastily place them together without justification—unless dealing with things “on the left” relieves the China studies scholar from any further typological responsibility whatsoever. Significantly, the disciplinarily sanctioned amalgam of Balibar and Mouffe effaces irreducible disputes between the two figures—and the schools they represent—about the political meaning of sovereignty and universalism. These are the disputes that led Balibar to reject Mouffe’s attempt at a “‘tempered’ use for Schmitt” (Étienne Balibar Citizenship, 97). Since these are the same issues at stake in the Chinese intellectual production analysed by Veg, the potential for cross-disciplinary contamination is great. In an essay that has as its stated goal the production of a typology relative to

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“statist and sovereigntist thought” in China, the lack of parallel attention to the differences between Mouffe and Balibar is highly symptomatic. It goes without saying that the disciplinary rationality in evidence here can easily sustain a reversal of the ideological polarities at work and remain intact. Getting at the heart of this thing that remains intact despite ideological reversals is of utmost importance. To paraphrase Veg, “critics of the left who situate themselves within liberalism” would be an equally dissatisfying formula—even applied to Veg and company—when accompanied by pell-mell assimilation and condensation. Hence, mine is not a critique of either ideological position or intellectual erudition—Dr. Veg’s claim to the latter in any case is beyond reproach—but is rather a critique of disciplinary protocols and rationalities that coalesce in a transnational aesthetic ideology. On the way to exposing that aesthetic ideology, it will serve us well to pay greater attention to the mutually reinforcing rationalities—bourgeois, disciplinary, and geopolitical—that conspire to create identities at the expense of relations, objects at the expense of subjects. Crucially, Veg’s taxonomy of “statist and sovereigntist thought” in China overlooks those elements that would complicate the historical narrative. Cui Zhiyuan’s critique of what Veg translates as the “fetishism of transition” is an instructive example. (In Cui’s original 1994 text referenced by Veg, the term used multiple times by Cui is “institutional fetishism” (zhidu baiwujiao), not the “fetishism of transition.”) Cui’s critique explicitly takes as its goal the creation of innovative possibilities beyond a series of ossified binary oppositions: “All the traditional binary oppositions,” wrote Cui in 1994, “‘private vs. state-owned,’ ‘market vs. planned,’ ‘Western Applied Tech within a Chinese Frame’ vs. ‘Total Westernization,’ ‘reformism vs. conservatism,’ have all lost their ability to inscribe reality and imagine the future. We need a second Movement for the Emancipation of Thought, the emphasis of which would no longer be on a simple negation of the ‘conservative faction’ but would instead emphasize expanding the space for imagining institutional innovation: it would no longer be attached to an either/or binary approach…” (Cui “Zhidu chuangxin yu dierci sixiang jiefang,” 12). The retrospective dismissal of the significance of such attempts to devise alternative frameworks authorises Veg’s assimilation of the Chinese “new left” to the Chinese “new right” around a vague emphasis on the role of the state. Among the Chinese “new right,” however, one does not find any analogous attempts in any domain to defeat binary oppositions in the construction of future alternatives. On the contrary, representatives of

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the Chinese “new right” such as Jiang Shigong—whose work constitutes the main focus of Veg’s article—strive wholeheartedly to consolidate and multiply the oppositions that close down alternatives. The straitjacket of binary oppositions dovetails perfectly with the effects of contemporary neoliberal theories and economies based on rent extraction. For this reason, Veg’s assimilation of the Chinese “new left” to the Chinese “new right” as its temporal and intellectual precursor is, on this point, singularly unconvincing. Even without going into the details of Veg’s argument, the very least that one could say is this: institutionally sanctioned studies about the society, politics, and culture of a second state conducted in stateaccredited or state-recognised institutions—even private ones—in a first state are indelibly marked by a constellation of disciplinary rationalities that is already contaminated by “statist” commitments. This point gets to the heart of Brossat’s critique of the Schmittianism behind contemporary militarised liberalism. It has nothing to do with the individual researcher’s avowed methodological commitments, ideological stance, political engagement, and/or consultative role for intelligence agencies. To be clear, the author of this text has no pretensions to stand outside or claim exemption of any sort relative to this irreducibly statist aspect of area studies. In a world characterised by an appropriation of the nation by the state, area studies are statist by their very nature. To avoid confusion, however, it would be best to rephrase this characterisation in terms of the hyphenated form of the modern nation-state. Area studies are by their very nature implicated in the problematic construction of the nation-state and the modern system of internationality. Evidence of this problematic can be seen in the implicit claims to a post-state, post-national, post-ideological position frequently adopted by many contemporary area studies scholars based in the West. In thinking about the relation between area studies and the state, it is useful to refer to the gesture engaged by Michel Foucault in his celebrated 1978 address at the Sorbonne published under the title, “What Is Critique?” (Note: this paragraph and the following three paragraphs were originally published as part of an article titled, “Foucault 1978”). Foucault’s address reads like a programmatic synthesis of one of the most intriguing, yet subterranean, aspects of the French intellectual itinerary emerging in the 1960s. I am not talking about post-structuralism’s flirtation with signifying chains, but rather about a constellation of ideas that join causality (Althusser, Simondon), individuation (Deleuze,

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Derrida, and Simondon), and figuration (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy) to Foucault’s own emerging interests in biopolitics, racism, and the state, and that lead in the direction of a radical departure from the presuppositions of what C.B. MacPherson, author of The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), confidently—and somewhat misleadingly—termed the “Western democratic ontology” (MacPherson Democratic Theory, 24). In Foucault’s 1978 address, this radical break has its beginning in the attempt to rescue critique from “an inquiry into the legitimacy of the historical modes of knowing” (Foucault “What Is Critique?” 393). This style of inquiry, typical of the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century conflation of critique with Enlightenment, is “historicophilosophical” (391). Foucault is careful to explain that this amalgam of history and philosophy must not be understood in a cumulative way (i.e., not as a philosophy of history or as a history of philosophy), but rather as a process of creating a story (390), “fabricating as through fiction” (391). How could one not hear, in 1978, an echo of the path-breaking analysis of romanticism, in which the philosophical project of Kantian subjective freedom is realised precisely through literature, that was accomplished by the deconstructive philosophers Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in The Literary Absolute published in French that same year? Their analysis, which complements that of Foucault, essentially defines fiction as the creative power of a subject. They call it “fictioning” in order to highlight its ontogenetic aspect. Fictioning is nothing but the attempt to isolate, identify, and ultimately harness anthropologically creative power, turning it into the power of identification. The modern fantasy, or philosophical project, is that such creative power supports the notion of an autonomous subject that is self-creative, who is its own origin and destination—“man creating man.” For Foucault, however, this story leads directly to the methodological horror of “Man,” a figure composed by an amphibological blurring of the transcendental and the empirical (as well as an erasure of sexual and gender difference), as he had described 15 years earlier in The Order of Things (and just several years before his definitive turn to the techniques of self that bear a difficult proximity to the object of critique in 1978). Although Foucault cannot miss, in the 1978 Sorbonne address with which we started, the opportunity to recall his earlier “archaeological” work, his focus in 1978 is rather on developing an innovative series of methodological moves, moves that lead we might say definitively away

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from the “Western democratic ontology” and its fictions that so many intellectuals, such as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, began to identify, at the end of the 1970s, with the horrors of Nazism (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy “The Nazi Myth”). The foundation of the specifically modern story, writes Foucault in a gesture to the Frankfurt School, is that “our [premodern] social and economic organization lacked rationality” (Foucault “What Is Critique?” 390). Ironically, this story about the intentional insertion of rationality into social organisation through a critique of irrational forms, such as absolute kingship, dialectically produced a situation in which power, which had been one of its principal targets, essentially mutates and multiplies, invading the social field. This results in the proliferation of identities against which Foucault has a long and storied history of critique. Foucault is very careful to distinguish a mechanistic model of power, in which subjects operate upon objects, thus mimicking production, from one that is concerned with what Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) would have called “subjectity”—the comprehensive relation between subject and object that forms each of the two poles (Heidegger Hegel’s Concept of Experience, 110). This distinction becomes essential to Foucault’s argument as he prepares to define power in a nonobjective way. Critique in the sense that Foucault wants us to understand it is a “different procedure” that begins not with the Kantian epistemological problem of critically delimiting the possibility of positive knowledge, but rather with what he calls, somewhat enigmatically, “power” and “eventialisation” (Foucault “What Is Critique?” 393). What is really at stake in the Foucaultian concept is the singularity of relations, which is always a relation of relations in a metastable environment that is mobile and, those with a Buddhist sensitivity will not fail to remark, “impermanent” (398). While we might today wonder whether power is a term adequate to the task assigned to it by Foucault, the salient point to retain is that in the Foucaultian vocabulary, the term “power” really means the singularity of relations. Along with this redefinition of power according to the notion of “subjectity,” Foucault adds another curious term, “eventialisation,” which is also very much informed by the Heideggerian air of his day. Yet unlike Heidegger, Foucault strictly refuses the search for origins of any kind. In the context of this address, “eventialisation” refers neither to the historical point of departure and progressive accumulation of positive knowledge acquired by a subject of reason, nor to the historicophilosophical “forgetting of being” aimed at by Heidegger, but rather to the constant reticulative feedback among cause and effect such

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that effects are also causes and causes also effects. Foucault reminds his audience that the deployment “of another type” of theory of causality, one that is in “opposition to a genesis” or theory of origins, “has to do with pure singularities related not to a species or an essence” (396). This is in fact the second time in this short address that Foucault highlights the notion that “pure singularities” are “not the individualization of a species” (395). It is, in other words, a displacement of taxonomy based on causal relations. I think that it would not be much of a risk to suggest that the alternative form of critique proposed by Foucault is covering some of the same ground that was charted by Gilbert Simondon (1924– 1989) in the latter’s critique of hylomorphism begun nearly twenty years earlier (but not widely circulated until Deleuze’s interest brought greater attention to Simondon’s work). Informed by this perspective, we can begin to connect the dots in Foucault’s address leading from ontology and fictioning back to the problem of the state, which is where the problem of critique as a historicophilosophical gesture is really localised. While postmodernism acquired notoriety for revealing the problems of modern historicophilosophical narratives, biological evolution remains curiously absent from the postmodern critique of metanarrative. It was only in Foucault’s work, especially that part conducted between 1976 and 1978, that the connection between biology and the state becomes prominent. In the 1978 address at the Sorbonne, the state is the nexus, or the apex, of the modern historicophilosophical fiction. It encapsulates the demand for rational organisation, and in the process of doing so, becomes a form that is representative, in a dual sense, of speciation as individualisation. The state not only represents that quality (knowledge of and as individualisation) that supposedly distinguishes homo sapiens from other species, it also represents a site at which “decisions” relative to evolutionary progress—decisive moments of individualisation that create and maintain homo sapiens as an exceptional species—are made as the exercise of a selfaware subject, the subject of freedom. In that sense, the state is precisely the place where “our story” is told. What is at stake, however, is not simply national history or civilisational history, but rather the history of (Aristotelian) specific difference, or again, specific difference as history. What we have been calling the “visor effect” is only the most obvious type of disciplinary rationality regularly deployed by the area studies. By design, this effect or structural relationship conceals the essentially

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comparative, dialogical nature of areal fields of inquiry. Under the influence of the visor effect, we would simply have no sense of the way in which feedback mechanisms between the area and its outside might amplify, distort, or otherwise transform the social practice of knowledge production. A second form of disciplinary rationality deployed by the area studies would be the one that is essentially taxonomic and related to the biopolitical power of the modern nation-state. As Michel Foucault showed, the modern state relies, through the disciplines of statistics and sociological knowledge, on the rationality of taxonomic classification and statistical tracking of governed populations. This type of rationality is what enables the identification of population as an object corresponding to the exercise of state power. It is to this form of rationality that the American social scientist and China specialist Lucian Pye appealed when he asserted that, “all specific political cultures can be classified along a continuum and according to a typology” (Pye Politics, Personality, and Nation-Building, 123). The task of the political analyst in the mould of Pye (and with him, Gabriel Almond, Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and a slew of others) is to provide typologies essential for neocolonial population management. The typological impetus of area studies is designed to render transparent a relatively opaque population, turning it into an object-medium available for governmental technologies such as conversion, transition, and profitable communication. The typological procedure itself is an integral part of state rationality in the wake of colonial–imperial modernity. A third form of disciplinary rationality takes as it object the language-peopleculture nexus. A critique of this rationality and the unities of national language, national community, and national culture sustained by it has been pioneered by Naoki Sakai since the 1990s under the heading of the modern regime of translation. Significantly, Sakai’s critique of the modern regime of translation has included in turn relevant critiques of the first two types of disciplinary rationality mentioned above. This perfunctory list of disciplinary rationalities is not intended to be exhaustive but illustrative. In that vein, we might add a few additional comments about the asymmetrical relationship or stance towards knowledge, known as the “visor effect,” that separates the area studies specialist from intellectuals in the area under study. The intellectual whose position is sutured to the “outside” of any given area can take an intellectual interest in transition, but this is one in which positionality is not put into question. By contrast, for intellectuals whose position is

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thought to be sutured naturally to the areal object of study, the necessity of a direct confrontation with and response to transition theory is unavoidable, regardless of acceptance or rejection. The example of neoliberal transition and the global circulation of “statist” discourses “outside” China during the period beginning in the 1990s (the same period roughly covered by Veg’s taxonomy of Chinese Schmittianism) is too important to overlook or simply to hand off to a different discipline. Neoliberalism’s claims over that part of the liberal tradition that calls for a diminished role of the state contrast with neoliberalism’s active promotion of a political strategy that relies on state capture to restructure markets and politics. Far from being simply a theory of the minimal state, neoliberalism is also a series of practices that conspire to commandeer the national state to achieve the ends of corporate sovereignty, pushing sovereignty into the realm of private right. Any Chinese intellectual writing about politics from the 1990s onward—even more so after the financial crisis of 2008 imposed serious constraints on Chinese labour—could not possibly have avoided confronting the rise and dominance of neoliberal theory, institutions, and knowledge, much less the juggernaut of their penetration into the institutions and disciplines where he or she worked. Steven Cohn’s Competing Economic Paradigms in China: The Co-Evolution of Economic Events, Economic Theory and Economics Education, 1976–2016 offers a riveting account of the wholesale transformation of the discipline of economics that paralleled the global neoliberal transition, radically altering both the conditions of knowledge production in China and the apprehension of China as a transitional economy. How China Escaped Shock Therapy, Isabella Weber’s study of the debates within the CPC about the perils of financialisation during that transition underscores this point. At the limit, a sinological effort to identify typologies of “statist” thought “in” China that does not account for its own role in the international feedback mechanisms of statist rationality runs the risk of becoming merely a variation on the conventional visor effect. In an age when neoliberal discourses ubiquitously disavow their statist commitments and anti-state statism has been identified by Alberto Toscano as one of the salient characteristics of today’s rising neofascism, a study of contemporaneous Chinese statist discourses that neglects problematising the meaning of statist theory in the light of the experience of both neoliberal transitions and the disciplinary rationality of area studies only serves to consolidate

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the “Schmittian paradigm”—explicit or implicit, avowed or disavowed— that drives today’s new Cold War in Beijing, Washington, and Taipei alike. If something might make a difference within this hard and fast institutional constraint that speaks before any researcher has lifted a pen, surely it would have to begin with posing the question: What would be the form of area studies devoted to breaking the areal configuration of knowledge production? This is a vexing question that would be the disciplinary equivalent of asking the Marxist question, What would be a state devoted to the end of the state? Just as the answer to that latter question would need to begin with a definition of the proletariat that is not defined by the sociological givens of class and nation but rather draws inspiration from that which exceeds and precedes those representational categories (such as the migrant), the answer to the former question would necessitate a lengthy consideration of the element of the transnational that comes before the elements of the national and the transcendentally conceived cosmopolitan or international. In the vocabulary developed by Naoki Sakai, this horizon of the transnational must be radically distinguished from both the frontiers of area and the bordering practices of the transcendental aerial view. For this reason, area studies are perhaps the only place today where it makes the most sense, politically speaking, to do as Alberto Toscano urges: to disentangle, that is, “the horizon that was once termed, in communist circles, that of the non-state state” from “the fascist potentials within the anti-state state” (Toscano “Fascists, Freedom, and the Anti-State State,” 18). Hampered by the concept of authoritarianism, today’s area studies are, like the Taiwanese movie Detention, metaphorically stuck in a temporal loop back at school, ill-equipped to deal with the contemporary articulation of neofascism and freedom. That is where the task of revisiting the notion of the transnational, rescuing it from both the national and the transcendental/universal, is an issue of burning importance for a simultaneous reorganisation of both the disciplinary divisions of the humanities/social sciences and the geopolitical divisions of the postcolonial world.

CHAPTER 4

The Taiwan Consensus and Transitional Justice

The Taiwan Consensus The importance of the notion of consensus (gongshi) in Taiwanese political discourse over the past several decades cannot be overestimated. Closely allied with the notions of “mainstream society” (zhuliu shehui), “mainstream popular opinion” (zhuliu minyi), and the “rectification of names” (zhengming ) that have played a central role in the construction of nativist discourse, the notion of consensus formally entered the vocabulary of electoral politics in 2011, when Tsai Ing-wen adopted the term, “Taiwan Consensus” (Taiwan gongshi), as part of her electoral platform in an unsuccessful bid to win the presidency in 2012. As originally used by Tsai, the term was a deliberate rebuttal to the so-called “1992 Consensus” that had supposedly been reached in negotiations held in November 1992 in Hong Kong between Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council represented by the Straits Economic Foundation (SEF) and the PRC’s Association for Relations Across the Strait (ARATS). Not actually used in the course of those negotiations, the term “1992 consensus” has been attributed to Su Chi, a KMT legislator who admitted in 2006 that he made up the term in 2000 to describe the mutual understanding that had been reached by the parties to those early negotiations (Shih “Su Chi admits”). Tsai’s faction in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) rejected the notion that a consensus had been reached with China concerning the One

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. D. Solomon, The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8_4

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China Policy which held that Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan was indivisible from that of the mainland. As a rebuttal to the positions of both parties to the 1992 negotiations, i.e., the CPC (which asserted the principle of indivisible sovereignty) and the KMT (which subscribed to the notion of indivisible sovereignty but qualified that by the idea of “divergent interpretations”), the DPP under Tsai asserted that sovereignty over Taiwan was a political decision to be made exclusively by the inhabitants of Taiwan, expressing their popular will through the means of representative democracy. Against the CPC’s assertion that the stakeholders involved in political decisions over the sovereignty of Taiwan concerned not just the inhabitants of Taiwan but also all the citizens of the PRC represented by the Party State, Tsai insisted on the exclusivity of stakeholder status, limited to the still somewhat amorphous proper name Taiwan (amorphous because it included diasporic populations as well as the inhabitants of the other 165 islands that comprise the effective jurisdiction of the Republic of China since 1949). Tsai’s notion of the Taiwan Consensus was thus designed to evince liberal democratic proceduralism, which advances via the mechanisms of representation and majority rule to achieve a national political consensus. Nevertheless, the means for determining the basis of the consensus were never spelled out. Despite widespread calls for a referendum on Taiwanese Independence and for the promulgation of a new Constitution, such measures were never adopted as policy. The decisive yet unstated rationale behind such refusals, which characterised both the DPP administrations of Tsai (2016 to the present) and her predecessor Chen Shui-bian (2000– 2008), lay not only in the unwillingness of the United States to pay the diplomatic and inevitably military price of a Taiwanese declaration of independence, but also in the certainty that the ensuing political and military volatility would result in massive capital flight from the island nation’s economy. From the very outset when Tsai Ing-wen first introduced the concept of the Taiwan Consensus into a presidential electoral campaign in 2011, it was intrinsically articulated to future-oriented industrial policy. Speaking in Kaohsiung on October 8, 2011, about the Taiwan Consensus, Tsai reminded her audience, “If society isn’t harmonious and there’s no solidarity,” i.e., no Consensus with a capital C, “then it won’t be possible to work together to develop next-generation industries” (Lin Shenxu “Cai Yingwen”). It is doubtful that the articulation of the Taiwan Consensus

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to industrial policy—which is also, by implication, foreign policy and military policy—is an original idea attributable to a single political figure. Rather, the articulation between the two responds to a neoliberal, biopolitical constraint exercised upon political discourse in Taiwan that situates the source of political legitimacy in an economy that serves capital before social needs. The consensus, in other words, is not based on an authoritarianism that consists in decisional command, nor is it based exclusively on a representation of popular will; it is based rather on a complex calculation of access and position to the world market within the terms guaranteed by the Washington Consensus. Should Taiwan try to change its relation to world market, the prospect of capital flight or even capital strike would be very real. Hence, any attempt to treat hegemonic consensus in contemporary Taiwan as a purely national affair has in a sense already fallen prey to an ideology of state sovereignty that masks the transnational basis of the Taiwan Consensus. The ever-present possibility of devastating capital flight should Taiwan deviate from parameters acceptable to the United States reminds us that the Taiwan Consensus in the narrow sense of the term (as the expression of popular will to remain a sovereign state independent of the jurisdiction of the government in Beijing) has always been conditioned by a number of other types of “consensus.” Elements of this transnational basis rooted in the Washington Consensus at the foundation of Pax Americana’s global governance after the end of the Cold War can be seen with startling clarity in an analysis published in 2004 by the London-based Taiwanese diasporic scholar Bi-yu Chang, titled, “From Taiwanisation to De-Sinification: Cultural Construction in Taiwan Since the 1990s.” Emphasising the role of state intervention into politics, economy, education, and culture, Chang explains that, “The process of ‘Taiwanisation’, which began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s, altered the previously dominant Chinacentric identity, and created a new national-popular consensus” (Chang “Taiwanisation,” paragraph 19). Both the timeline and the conceptual framework are important elements here, the former because it coincides with the consolidation of the neoliberal Washington Consensus at a global level, the latter because it subsumes consensus under the category of the identity. Taken together, those two elements express the political centrality of the concept of the identity to societies organised around a neoliberal “consensus,” imposed not just through global institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, private commercial courts, and the imposing professional industries and arcane bureaucracies required to

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negotiate them, but also through dollar hegemony and the US global military garrison. In a fascinating study that attempts to bridge the gap between the older “social left” that views political antagonism through the lens of the capital-labour relation and proffers revolution vertically led by a vanguard party as the answer to capitalism and the newer “cultural left” that rejects the primacy of the capital-labour relation in favour of a horizontal politics of recognition in which different subjects exercise equal priority, Marie Moran has convincingly shown both that the concept of identity as we understand it today is a relatively recent invention that dates back to no earlier than the 1950s and 1960s, and that it was also intrinsically tied to the gradual rollback of the military Keynesianism that characterised most of the Cold War in favour of the rise of consumerist neoliberalism. [T]his book makes the perhaps surprising and controversial claim that identity never ‘mattered’ prior to the 1960s because it did not in fact exist or operate as a shared political and cultural idea until the 1960s. … [T]he idea of identity, as we now know it, cannot be separated from the cultural political economy of the capitalist societies in which it came to prominence…The claim is not that people’s ‘identities’ came to matter more in late capitalism, but that identity itself came to operate as a new and key mechanism for construing and experiencing a sense of self. (Moran Identity and Capitalism, 3–4)

Moran’s analysis provides an alternative perspective on the importance of identity to the transitions that began in the 1980s in Taiwan, both in the sense of historicising the increasing intellectual labour commanded by questions of identity that has defined the emergence of Taiwan studies as a new institutional field of research and in the sense of drawing attention to the relation between the neoliberal consensus and the Taiwan Consensus. The absence of critical perspective in Bi-yu Chang’s account of the early roots of the Taiwan Consensus can only be partly explained by her manifest sympathies with the Consensus itself. The author’s understanding of “Gramscian hegemony” that grounds the notion of consensus confusedly eliminates any reference to class and the Marxist idea of the state as a state of class, reducing the concept of hegemony into an interaction between the nation and the state in which the nation is given prior to the action of the state. Even at this level, the assumption of givenness

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is contradicted by a process of self-awareness leading to political recognition among the members of the nation regarding their “true” identity. To become what they really are, it is necessary to remember who they have been. This act of remembrance, however, is described as immediate, i.e., without mediation. Where we would have expected to find a discourse of subjective formation attentive to the problems of mediation, the conceptual vocabulary of modern subjectivity has been stunted by the assumptions of US social science and neoliberal ideology meticulously catalogued and critiqued by Marie Moran. Chang adopts the contemporary Chinese (Taiwan/HK) definition of subjectivity as “mastery” over a “home” (dangjiazuozhu). This definition restricts subjectivity to the appropriation of the state by the nation, excluding the epistemological issues (the problem of the limits to what one knows) that had been central to theories of modern subjectivity since Kant. Yet the problem of knowledge remains residually intact because of the necessity of the cognitive acts of “recognition” and “awakening” that authorise the implausible appropriation of the state by the nation—implausible because, unlike the classical discourse of modern subjectivity in which the subject of knowledge is split, there is no split in the subject of Taiwanese national “home mastery.” These problems culminate in a celebratory account of an activist state role in the educational system to produce ideological outcomes (the socalled task of “de-sinification” deemed necessary to “Taiwanisation”) and the role of the neoliberal economy. We can only imagine the opprobrium that a scholar based in the West would face were she to attempt to pass off as research uncritical accolades of the social engineering projects launched by an activist Chinese state in the PRC and its funding for state-friendly China studies in other nations. Of course, even as Bi-yu Chang ticks all of these politically sensitive boxes, the difference lies in the assumption that democratic proceduralism and native identity lend a positive character to the social engineering projects of the DPP-controlled Taiwanese state and their representation in area studies scholarship. This is the point at which the concept of identity does some heavy lifting both to naturalise state intervention, clothing it in the guise of a restitution rather than an invention, and to divert attention from the active transformation in the nature of the concept of identity—including the identity of the researcher—by the political economy of neoliberalism and the assumptions that constitute its unspoken consensus. We will have more to say about this in Part II. It will suffice in the present context to note that

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when liberalisation is discussed exclusively as a cultural issue rather than also as an economic and political one, it is much easier to preserve unchallenged the putative unity and givenness of identity. In the absence of an attempt to develop a comprehensive understanding of the way the Taiwan Consensus was related to Taiwan’s full-fledged insertion into the neoliberal Washington Consensus emblematised by admission to the WTO in 2002, readers would have to do their own research to connect the DPP policies of the mid-2000s promoting the “Green Silicon Island” and the service industries celebrated by Chang to dollar hegemony, financialisation, global military garrisons, and logistical supply chain dominance. This is the same curated vision—call it state propaganda adjacent academic knowledge production if you like—that has enabled Tsai Ing-wen to dub semiconductors “democracy chips” in 2022 (Asia Financial “Taiwan Calls Semiconductors ‘Democracy Chips’ in US Meeting”) without any justification for the choice of the word democracy other than national security (otherwise, Tsai would have had to explain how the aggressive actions taken in recent years by the US government to divert massive public funds to private US manufacturers to monopolise the development, financing, production, and supply chains for advanced semiconductors is connected to the exercise of popular sovereignty connoted by the term democracy).

Neoliberal Civil War and Consensus While reflecting on the neoliberal gamification of ideology in Detention, we are reminded of Frédéric Neyrat’s observation that, “we could call ideology not that which masks human alienation but that which seeks to fill the abyss of distance [écart ] with images and slogans” (Neyrat Le communisme existentiel de Jean-Luc Nancy, 41). Or, we might add, with games. Detention seeks to accomplish this ideological work by turning politics into a game of escape. This is not an escape from so much as an escape into: an escape into a world where exploitation, domination, and dispossession are legitimised through the apparent absence of ideology on this side of the border (in contrast with what appears to be the savage proliferation of ideology on the other side of the border); or again, an escape into a world organised for the benefit of capital accumulation according to the schema of specific difference and national citizenship. This is the “apparatus of capture” that operates via the “enclosure into difference” brilliantly analysed by Gavin Walker (“The Schema

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of the West,” 67). Walker’s choice of the words “capture” and “enclosure” evokes the operations of capital, which aims to capture value, i.e., capture labour, via the enclosure of spaces, practices, and temporalities that had previously been external to it. This form of capture and enclosure is essential to the ideological creation of majoritarian identities that are the original form of racism and nationalism, what Paola Marrati has memorably called, “the ‘producing of a model of identity and normality in relation to which deviations can subsequently be detected’” (qtd in Walker “Schema,” 72). The obsessive compulsion to remember, albeit selectively and “correctly,” at the core of Detention’s pedagogy is but a symptom of the practices of capture and enclosure that characterise neoliberal capitalism. The type of ideology at work here is one that aims to construct what Neyrat calls the “absolute community,” which he defines thus: “‘totalitarianism’ not only in its Nazi or Stalinist guise, but as the abolition of separation within the political sphere” (Neyrat Le communisme existential, 50). The separation to which Neyrat refers is not the liberal concept of autonomy, which is ultimately based on the sanctity of private property and the discourse of possessive individualism but refers rather to divergences among social actors that cannot be reduced to interests and identities. Neyrat is fighting against the moment when politics is founded in a desire for homogeneity that is ontological. Detention reveals this desire in the form of an absolute consensus. While the term consensus denotes a voluntary agreement reached among autonomous parties, modification by the adjective absolute carries the connotation of a form of essentially sovereign power, based on the infinite extension of conformity and homogeneity, from which any divergence can only be construed as an anomaly, i.e., something that requires exceptional measures to combat and reinstitute the norm. In modern societies characterised by exploitation and domination hidden behind institutions of formal equality and negative freedom, the politics of absolute consensus depends on the erasure of the critique of political economy to assist in its strategies of civil war. In contemporary Taiwan, the issue of cross-straits relations and Chinese authoritarianism becomes a flashpoint for the mobilisation in a new Cold War that straddles the line between civil war and interstate conflict. As Alain Brossat notes:

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the fabrication of anti-Chinese hysteria is a formidable device for neutralizing class struggle in one of the countries in the world where working hours are the longest and where the incomes of the vast majority of employees are kept at their lowest, where migrant workers face shocking discrimination, where working conditions in certain sectors (fishing, construction, domestic work, etc.) are often close to slavery, where the religion of growth and the omnipotence of large-scale industry perpetuate the most brutal sacking of the environment, etc. (Brossat “The Schmittian Turn of Global Democracy”)

Significantly, the erasure of political economy in Detention is heightened by a carefully curated version of Taiwanese folk religion and superstition that depicts the burning of ghost money (mingzhi)—one of the most ubiquitous practices associated with ancestor worship and the dead in Taiwan—in a rather implausible way. While scenes of mantra recitation, incense offering, and altar arrangements dot the film with quotidian practices of folk religion in the normal places where such acts would occur (i.e., before a family altar), the only instance in which the act of burning ghost money as an offering to the dead occurs happens in a location removed from the normal places in which ghost money would be burned (such as a temple, a family gravesite, or a family residence). In order to hide the burning of banned books designed to destroy inculpatory evidence, Wei’s classmate and fellow member of the reading group, Huang Wen-hsiung, mixes ghost money into the pile of burning book paper while standing in the midst of an open field at the edge of the school grounds, bordered by a forest. The burning of ghost money under such unusual circumstances could hardly be expected to dissimulate illicit political activity. Typically, one would never make an offering of ghost money in such an open location, as it would inevitably attract the attention of ghosts—possibly malevolent—with whom one has had no familial connection, leading them to abscond with the funds or, worse yet, pilfer them and stick around for a while creating havoc for the living. Sure enough, Lantern Spectre appears promptly on the scene, killing Huang Wen-hsiung in the process. While Wen-hsiung’s use of ghost money was surely careless, the film’s treatment of the political economy of ghost money is simply negligent. As the Hong Kong film critic and independent scholar writing under the pseudonym Madanni (his legal name has been omitted at the author’s request) has brilliantly noted in an essay evocatively titled “Detention,

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Exorcism/Conjuration, and the Spectral Economy,” the traditional practice of offering ghost money establishes a relation to the dead that is at once immanent (i.e., the dead exists in the same realm as the living, not, as Detention would have it, in separate worlds of haunting nightmares and generic monuments) and economic (the money burned as an offering essentially amounts to a contractual form of payment to appease their wishes in exchange for security). Detention’s aim to “exorcise” the traumatic “ghost” of the past turns, in Madanni’s estimation, into its opposite, a form of conjuration that does not put ghosts to rest but rather stimulates their proliferation: Hence, we come to truly understand the motivation behind the production of Detention. Superficially, the film is an attempt to exorcise spectres, but it is in fact a ritual of conjuration. “Freedom, Democracy” and Tagore’s poetry are the incantations used to conjure spirits. The screenwriting and directorship are like sacrifices made during the Double Ninth and the Ching Ming Festivals, undertaken in the hopes of domesticating these ghosts and ghouls; yet precisely because it aims to rewrite history, Detention veritably ends up becoming a filmic “adaptation” in the most rigorous sense. As the production team (including the intended audience) does not have the courage to faithfully confront this part of history, everything is dealt with in the most perfunctory manner. The shadows of that era—the “memory” that has not yet been grasped as history—cannot be successfully manipulated, hence doomed to continue to ensnare the present. (Madanni “‘Fanxiao’”)

I am tempted to take a bit of liberty with the translation of a key phrase above, “wei bei lijie wei lishi de ‘jiyi’ [the ‘memory’ that has not yet been grasped as history],” to render it in the future anterior—the memory that will not have yet been grasped as history. The choice would be partially justified by Madanni’s emphasis earlier in the review on the dialectic of presence and absence at the heart of temporality via a discussion of Nishitani Keiji and Jacques Derrida. This description of the film’s relation to memory, in the mode of something that will have occurred in the past depending on how we re-imagine ourselves in the present, succinctly grasps the film’s investment in a form of the past that returns only via an imagination of the future. Against what the film would have us believe, spectres do not come from the traumatic past so much as from the future that we project out of our fraught conjuncture onto the past.

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To grasp the type of absolutism at stake in the term, “consensus,” it would be necessary to dispense with the notion that authoritarianism is a procedural affair that manifests exclusively in political regimes with a pyramidal decisional structure. In a chapter titled “neoliberalism and authoritarianism” at the conclusion of their book, The Choice of Civil War: An Alternate History of Neoliberalism, Pierre Dardot and his co-authors insist, after having distinguished several different models of authoritarianism, upon the identification between neoliberalism and authoritarianism. The key concepts in their argument are those of the privatisation of sovereignty and the civil war that ensues. Rather than a specific set of policies that concentrate decisional authority, neoliberalism is a set of strategies that push sovereignty into the realm of private right. That which is “absolute” and “authoritarian” about neoliberal consensus begins with the disciplinary power of financialised markets such that everything from environmental protection and educational policy to “sanctioned” conspiracy theories and privatised cyberwar industries has to be justified in financial terms. From there, social relations enter, according to Dardot and company, into a vicious spiral of civil war. These strategies collectively enable neoliberalism to capture progressive aspirations for freedom while fostering a proliferation of borders, both internal and external, that thwart social solidarity, hospitality, and mobility for certain (usually racially, ethnically, or gender identified) populations. Against this neoliberal authoritarianism, the authors remind us that democracy is not consensual but conflictual (Dardot, Pierre et al. Le choix de la guerre civile, 318). Dardot’s approach to neoliberalism contrasts with that elaborated by Gary Gerstle in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. One of the things that leaps off the page from just a cursory scan of this work is the way it carefully positions the terms “neoliberal” and “authoritarian” so that they never converge but are rather implacably opposed. The political motivation for this manipulation consists in the author’s anti-Trumpist commitments. The price for this otherwise admirable political engagement is high. One of the reasons that allows Gerstle to avoid examining the articulation between neoliberalism and authoritarianism is his manifestly ideological claim that the former term stands for “open borders”—“open” not just for capital but for “people” (Gerstle notably avoids using the term labour; Gerstle The Rise and Fall, 5). This error, reaching the level of an ideological obfuscation, has been so thoroughly debunked by migration studies

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and border studies that there is hardly any need for citation to refute it. A further symptom of the effort required to keep neoliberalism and authoritarianism apart can be seen in Gerstle’s understanding of the postrevolutionary “New Left” that arose in the aftermath of the defeat of traditional revolutionary politics in the 1970s. Gerstle’s characterisation of the New Left as a “revolt against excessive regulation” (Gerstle The Rise and Fall, 8) effaces the political appropriation (of the core demands of the civil rights movements of the 1960s), detected separately by Brian Holmes in “The Flexible Personality” and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism, that was part of a strategy of capitalist transition from Cold War military Keynesianism to full-fledged (and equally if not more militaristic) neoliberalism. Dardot and company’s articulation of neoliberalism to war, and specifically to civil war, is an approach that is replete with significance for our understanding of Taiwan, especially given the importance of China’s unresolved civil war for modern Taiwanese history. At the outset, it is imperative to observe that critical discussions of neoliberalism in institutional Taiwan studies have been effectively cordoned off from the discussions about identity and so-called “identity transition” that dominate the bulk of intellectual labour undertaken by researchers in the field. Hence, the importance of understanding how neoliberalism has penetrated area studies knowledge production is as great as that of understanding the role of consensus within both neoliberal ideology and financialised markets. Due to a long-term engagement in developing a philosophy of dissensus, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière was sensitised early on to the connection between war and consensus under conditions of neoliberal accumulation. In response to the massive disinformation campaign waged by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, aided and abetted by their respective news media, that enabled the Second Gulf War and the disastrous occupation of Iraq, Rancière observed: It is not some felt insecurity which made the war necessary. Rather, the war was necessary to impose insecurity. Indeed, the management of insecurity is the functional mode that corresponds to our consensual society-States. (Rancière “On War as the Ultimate Form,” 254)

Read nearly twenty years later in the context of the United States’ adamant denial of the concept of mutual security in Eastern Europe and consistent dismissal of Russian security concerns since the end of the Cold War, Rancière’s counter-intuitive understanding of the relation between

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war, insecurity, and consensus is deeply instructive. Based on Rancière’s analysis, we would want to devote attention to the role played by the “management of insecurity” in the construction of the reigning social consensus in Taiwan implicitly crystallised in cultural manifestations such as the film Detention.

Civilian Militias The Rousseauian consensus in contemporary Taiwan repeats a quandary that Rousseau himself had foreseen concerning the necessity of militarisation for the small state. Just as the solution proposed by Rousseau lay in a total mobilisation system of popular militias, the same tendency has been progressively gaining steam in Taiwan over the past two decades. A crucial discursive element in the Taiwan Consensus, the genealogy of these budding militias cannot be fully analysed here yet is worth a brief mention. The precursor to the idea of civilian militias currently gaining traction in Taiwan can be traced back to the concept of “total citizen defence” (quanmin guofang ) introduced in the National Defense Review published in February 1992 under Chen Li-an, Minister of Defence in Lee Teng-hui’s post-martial law KMT government. A cornerstone of what became in 2017 the Overall Defence Concept (ODC; zhengti fangwei gouxiang ) behind national defence plans for the Republic of China on Taiwan, “total citizen defence” was itself a composite of various programs combining education, mobilisation (both of human and material resources), and, ideally, civilian-military integration. During Chen Shui-bian’s term in office, the idea was expanded by the Deputy Minister of Defence, Lin Chong-pin, to include the idea of establishing a civilian militia in preparation for guerrilla warfare against a hypothetical invasion from the continent. During Admiral Lee Hsi-ming’s tenure as Chief of the General Staff (2017–2019), ODC was vigorously promoted. In a presentation at The Hoover Institution in 2021 after retirement, the former Admiral suggested, “Taiwan should transform the current reserve system into a homeland defense force to comprise volunteers, conscripts, policemen, fire fighters, and coast guards... The homeland defense forces would be small and mobile guerrilla forces.” (Lee “Taiwan’s Overall Defense Concept: Theory and Practice,” 3.) (Former Admiral Lee is currently a Visiting Fellow at The Project 2049 Institute, a hawkish think tank founded by Randall Shriver, former

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Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the Trump administration recommended to the post by Stephen Bannon, a noted strategist for the far-right, and which draws links and funding not just from the foreign policy agencies in the governments of the US, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Taiwan, but also from the US defence industry and private equity, as well as regime change agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy. See Cartalucci “The National Endowment for Democracy,” Blumenthal “Inside America’s Meddling Machine,” and Cassano and Kotch “Pentagon’s Top Official for East Asia Funded by Defense Contractors and Foreign Governments”.) With the inauguration of the All-Out Defence Mobilization Agency (AODMA; quanmin fangwei dongyuan shu) at the end of 2021, a new government agency devoted to developing means for waging asymmetric warfare was officially put into operation—even as ODC was removed from the 2021 Quadrennial Defense Review and National Defense Review, reportedly due to personal animosity and factional disputes in the R.O.C. military (Hunzeker “Taiwan’s Defense Plans Are Going Off the Rails”). In current defence planning parlance, “asymmetric warfare” extends to production, logistics, tactics, and organisation, to be realised in Taiwan via measures such as nationwide education, cyberwar, autonomous weapons, civilian militia, provisions to expand private security forces and include them in wartime planning, and civilian–military integration (including the commandeering of civilian drones and communications). Conceptually speaking, asymmetric warfare implies an underlying structural logic linking industrial policy to defence policy, as well as forms of social mobilisation destined to affect social organisation and social relations even during peacetime. Presumably, the Agency will partner with nominally civilian groups such as The Taiwan Military and Police Tactical Research and Development Association (TTRDA), an NGO established in 2015 “made up of a mix of former, reserve and active-duty special operations soldiers, current members of Taiwan’s SWAT police units, and those with special skills” (Minnick “Taiwanese Civilians Have an Answer to Chinese Threats: Paramilitary Groups”). At the beginning of September 2022, Robert Tsao, founder of Taiwan microchip maker United Microelectronics Corporation, announced that he would contribute NT$600 million (approx. US$20 million) for training 3 million “civilian warriors” and NT$400 million (approx. US$13.5 million) for training “common folk snipers” at the Kuma Academy (heixiong xueyuan), one of the two main organisations, alongside Enoch Wu’s Forward Alliance (zhuangkuo

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Taiwan), involved in civilian military and/or disaster training. Founded in 2021 by Puma Shen and associates, the exact nature of the training to be offered by the Kuma Academy remains to be seen but in a Facebook post, Military blogger Matt Wang, who co-authored a popular book on Chinese cognitive warfare with Shen, explains: So-called civilian defence doesn’t refer exclusively to civilian militia but is rather an element in the national defence reserve; the Kuma Academy just aims to establish basic awareness…This training cannot be divided into “green” and “blue” types. During war that’s just what happens; ideological entanglements are the most frightening side of information warfare and cognitive warfare. No matter how you talk about total civilian defence and enhancing Friend or Foe ID capabilities, does that mean in today’s Taiwan that you’re just a pan-green hack?! Imperceptibly, amid the opposition between the blue and the green parties, discussions about national defence have unbelievably turned into a debate about whether or not to surrender. As if that weren’t frightening enough. So-called infowar refers to the machinations of the “enemy nation,” who takes advantage of divisions to launch internal political attacks against our country. That’s what it means to be hit by cognitive warfare. If the average people are confused, it all starts from the lack of clarity in Friend or Foe identification. To put it plainly, “the Kuma Academy project is no big deal, it just aims to rebuild our Friend or Foe ID capabilities and establish the most basic corps d’esprit among the people….” (Wang 09/02/2022 Facebook Post)

The private financial support from a top executive in the semiconductor industry, whose personal net worth was once reportedly NT$81 billion (US$2.5 billion; Gillespie “Taiwanese businessman Robert Tsao offers $1bn to train up ‘civilian warriors’ and ‘common folk’ marksmen”), suggests the extent to which privatisation and corporate sovereignty are aligned with the rhetoric of national defence. In response to public criticism about private funding for what amounts to a massive national mobilisation project, Matt Wang’s dismissive attitude reveals contempt for the public typical of neoliberal ideology: “It’s not a government agency using taxpayer money for which oversight by the people is a given. If you haven’t contributed, then don’t go pointing fingers at the funds raised by a civilian organisation” (ibid.). We will have a closer look at the discourse of “Chinese infiltration” and cognitive warfare in the digital age in the following section. For the time being it will suffice to recognise that the kind of training being organised with private money from

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windfall profits in the semiconductor industry is of the sort that produces social effects even during peacetime. In short, the plan amounts to a weaponisation of identity via an extremely reductive—and quintessentially Schmittian—distinction between “Friend and Foe,” and the construction of a peacetime total mobilisation system. Collateral damage from the weaponisation of identity produced by a privatised total mobilisation system fashioned around either militias or emergency civil preparedness would probably initially affect gender relations the most. Earlier in 2021, Newsweek reported that Defence Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng had informed lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan of the Ministry’s plans to recruit members of local temple organisations into the civilian militias to be organised under the AODMA (Feng “Taiwan to Raise ‘Temple Militia’ of Holy Villagers to Fight off China Invasion”). Military analyst, proponent of asymmetric warfare, and former Canadian intelligence agent J. Michael Cole’s exposé of Chinese infiltration of domestic Taiwanese politics via pro-China mafia associated with regional temple organisations, published by the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau in 2021, is likely only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the full story of politicised mafia involvement in Taiwanese local religion, including those organisations such as the Heavenly Way Alliance and the Four Seas Gang traditionally associated with anti-KMT nativist factions (Cole’s exposé notoriously ignores the question of proindependence mafia political activity). At a popular level, it is an article of faith among Taiwanese internauts that, “the development of Taiwanese temple culture in the modern era has gone seriously awry, to the point of simply becoming ‘Mafia Festivals’” (Lin Junying “Guangfu hou nan guanzhi de taiwan gongmiao huodong ”). Even if one were to wishfully dismiss the connections between local temple organisations and Taiwanese mafia gangs as little more than rumour, it still stands to reason that the implication of local temple organisations in civilian militias would likely exacerbate the longstanding problems of gender inequality and patriarchy in Taiwanese society with which these organisations have perennially been associated. Even in the regular army itself, the “problems of abuse under the patriarchal system” (Ping “Zhengfu”) are no less serious. “Even active-duty servicewomen today are regularly attacked with epithets such as ‘cunt’ (qiabeibei), ‘butch’ (nanrenpo), and ‘B team grunt,’ while there is no shortage of stories about servicewomen being sexually assaulted by their male colleagues or superiors” (ibid.).

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Considerations for the effect of civilian militias and civil defence organisations on domestic society and politics are further complicated by the active role of the United States. The Taiwan Peace and Stability Act, or Section 30210 of the 2022 America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act (America COMPETES Act), passed by the US House of Representatives on February 4, 2022, ends with a provision for “strengthening the community of civilian defense professionals in Taiwan.” Containing appropriations for new funding that amount to a staggering total of US$318 billion, the America COMPETES Act will have to be amended in negotiations with the US Senate, which previously passed its own, similarly funded version of the bill under the title of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which included provisions of US$300 million a year for at least five years to fund negative narratives about China and other activities via the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). At the end of 2021, the United Daily News reported that the Ministry of Defence of the ROC had agreed in principle to establish and expand institutional exchanges with state militias in the United States (Hong “Guofangbu”). At this point, it is impossible to say how much money will be funnelled from the United States into Taiwan expressly for the purpose of supporting the “asymmetric” capability of civilian militias, but the very existence of such funding, the potentially massive amounts of money involved, and the institutional arrangements being put in place to oversee it all raises great concern for the potentially negative effects on Taiwanese society at large. The fact that third-country popular insurgency has become a standard part of US global military planning that dovetails with ever-increasing, astronomically high military budgets and permanent war raises a slew of questions about the true extent of US commitment to de-escalation and the demilitarisation of technology and society. As a recent report prepared by the RAND on the “will to fight” suggests, the “cohesiveness” of “national identity” should be considered a key factor in military conflict simulation (Connable et al. Will to Fight ). In effect, the RAND report emblematises the weaponisation of identity that has become a central part of US global military strategy. Civilian militias are an extension of the militarisation of identity. At a meeting in April 2022, General Mark Milley, US Joint Chiefs of Staff, directly proposed civilianisation as a preferred military strategy for Taiwan: “If your opponent tries to invade you, and every military age man [and] woman is armed, and they have a little bit of training, that can be a very effective use” (Seligman

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“‘Deadly Serious’”). General Milley neglected to point out the potential cost in human lives and suffering of the status of the civilian he proposes. Similarly, Former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien remarks in Taipei in 2023 that, “a Taiwan with 1 million AK47-armed citizens on ‘every corner and in every apartment block’ would be a fearful deterrent to a Chinese invasion” (Thomson “Trump advisor says that 1 million Taiwanese with AK47s would be strong deterrent”), demonstrates the same sort of disregard as General Milley. Quoted in the Taiwan News as further stating, “Those legitimate concerns around gun ownership concerns or gun safety pale in comparison when we look at the war crimes that have taken place” (ibid.), O’Brien’s justification is problematic. As a former official representing a nation with the developed world’s highest gun-related death rate and a military that not only has refused international jurisdiction over war crimes allegedly committed by its own armed forces but has even threatened to attack judges in the International Criminal Court potentially handling such cases, O’Brien’s reassurances are hypocritical. Lamentably, such hypocrisy is not limited to one political party in the United States but is a structural part of the “humanitarian” approach to war that paradoxically generates increased violence at home and abroad, or “permawar,” while striving to make the conduct of war more “humane.” As Atsushi Tago writes in a review of Samuel Moyn’s Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, “Samuel Moyn argues that the humanitarian war tradition is a hypocrisy. As war becomes a humane one, the fight will continue for a long time and may never end” (Tago “Book Notes”). Seemingly inured to the human costs for Taiwanese, US officials have publicly declared that they have been exerting pressure on the Taiwanese government to incorporate asymmetric warfare concepts into the heart of Taiwan’s defence plans. According to a report in Politico, “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Mira Resnick and her colleagues briefed the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council in March that the administration would no longer support arms sales for Taiwan ‘outside their definition of “asymmetric” defense’” (Seligman “‘Deadly Serious’”). Resnick’s remarks indicate that comments by Milley and O’Brien, among many other similar public pronouncements too numerous to catalogue, constitute industrial policy as well as military and foreign policy. The imbrication of financial, military, industrial, foreign, and domestic security policies in the United States of America is a defining feature of Pax Americana militaristic neoliberalism.

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Long before US officials had adopted this idea as policy, it was condensed in the notion of Israel as a model for Taiwan’s defence posture. Virtually a meme, the “Israeli model” has been a regular feature of online discussions, media commentary, and think tank analysis for well over a decade. Despite the enduring interest in the Israeli model, the social, political, gender, and economic issues of Israeli settler colonialism and their potential bearing on Taiwanese settler colonialism, patriarchy, and ethnonationalism have rarely been discussed. As we have emphasised, this is not just a model of defence posture but inevitably becomes a model for social organisation. If nothing is said about the model’s underlying investment in militarised apartheid ethnocracy, the chances those commitments will be unconsciously adopted as standards increase proportionally. Within the general motif of the Israeli model, several different strands can be detected. Besides the total mobilisation system and civilian militias/ defence organisations, discussion in and about Taiwan has also focused on the cybersecurity industry and the domestic arms industry, areas in which Israel enjoys the dubious distinction of being a global leader. The absence in Taiwan of public discussion about the social effects of asymmetric warfare preparations has been highlighted by early Taiwanese responses to events in Ukraine. Barely one week into the Russian invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022, Taiwanese security experts began to prematurely claim that the Ukrainian conflict had effectively validated Taiwanese government plans for asymmetric warfare (Yang and Chin “Ukraine resistance validates Taiwan’s decisions”). In light of the fact that both the CIA and right-wing extremist militias in the United States have been involved with Ukrainian civilian militias since 2015 (see Marcetic “The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine”; Vagner “The Far Right is Using the Ukraine Crisis to Cement Its Power”; and Lister “The Nexus Between Right-Wing Extremists in the United States and Ukraine”), one would have expected that comparisons with Ukraine would have given pause for thought rather than hasty validation. Whatever one thinks about the bitterly contested political sequence of the past decade in Ukraine prior to the illegal and catastrophic invasion launched by Putin’s Russia in 2022, it is widely recognised that a resurgence of ethnonationalism against plurinationalism has led to the increase in visibility of far-right elements with a history of Nazi collaboration and ethnic cleansing in Ukrainian society and in the Ukrainian diaspora abroad (especially in North America). One of the results of this heightened visibility has been the striking normalisation of these elements in national life, specifically via

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the role of civilian militia (exemplified by the notorious Azov battalion/ regiment/brigade still in 2023 under the command of Andriy Biletsky, whose white supremacist views have been well-documented) supported, and quite probably armed, by the United States of America (Marcetic; Vagner). While critics may claim that the extent of the political resurgence on the far right is quite marginal given that openly far-right candidates have polled at less than 2% in recent national elections, such comments confuse force and influence with number. As Yurchenko writes: “In a separate study of the right wing at Maidan and beyond, Ishchenko warns against discarding the significance of the right and suggests that it is not only the proportion but the role the right has been playing that sh[ould] be taken into account” (Yurchenko Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, 168). In an interview podcast recorded directly after the publication of The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution (December 2022), Nicolai Petro has offered a definitive interpretation of the apparent contradiction seen in a political force whose vast influence extends far beyond its polling numbers. Queried by Aaron Maté about how the far-right parties could exercise a decisive influence on Ukrainian politics while still polling at marginal levels, Petro explains, “because they [the far-right parties] define the tone of politics. They are the predominant intellectual elite. Now, I don’t mean that in the sense of having the dominant thinking, but rather the dominant ideological framework and language of politics” (Maté and Petro “ How Ukraine’s Far-Right”, 09:52). Despite the proportional weakness of the far right, their ideology of ethnonational homogeneity has become hegemonic, effectively framing political discourse in the beleaguered nation in much the same way that far-right discourse about immigration has come to define political debate in many Western liberal democracies. Petro’s focus on the tensions and struggles within transnational Ukrainian, i.e., a Ukraine that, like all modern nation-states, cannot be understood in terms of a bounded interiority but must be seen rather in terms of a complex distribution across borders via institutionalised bordering practices, has earned him praise from Volodymyr Ishchenko, himself an emerging young authority on Ukraine, for being “unique in amplifying the voices of the ‘other Ukraine’ that fit neither Putin’s ‘single people’ nor the dominant Ukrainian nation-building projects” (Ishchenko cited on De Gruyter webpage for The Tragedy of Ukraine). Hence, it is no surprise that Petro calls attention, in his interview with Maté, to the series of laws enacted by

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the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) starting in 2017, i.e., several years prior to the 2022 (re)invasion, that institutionalised the ethnonationalist presuppositions of the Ukrainian far right. Key among these would be the Donbas Reintegration Law (Law 7163) and the Education Act, both of which were adopted in 2017 and signed into law in 2018. These laws were, as Petro explains, “The first in a series of laws which over time would become harsher and harsher with respect to the inhabitants of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, pointing out that they needed to go through processes of re-education and filtration before they could be recognized— once the territories were reintegrated into Ukraine—before they could be allowed full citizenship rights” (Maté and Petro “How Ukraine’s FarRight”, 30:06–37). Via this series of laws, the Russian language, native to 29.6% of Ukraine’spopulation (Wikipedia), was excluded from the nation’s official languages, while punitive measures were put in place to sanction its use (effectively mirroring or prolonging an historical series of repressive linguistic interventions by the state, including the Tsarist suppression of Ukrainian language for several centuries, the suppression of Ukrainian and Russian language by Polish authorities who gained control of parts of Western Ukraine following the Treaty of Versailles, and the genocidal elimination of Polish, Hungarian, and Jewish populations in Western Ukraine by Ukrainian nationalist partisans during World War II). These laws represented the culmination of a process of delegitimation of Russian language that accelerated after the 2014 Maidan revolution—a process that Boris Buden has characterised as one of linguistic bordering achieved through othering translation (Buden “The Janus Face of Translation: In the Time of War and Dissolution”). Undoubtedly, political discourse in the Malaross Donbas “republics” in eastern Ukraine outside of Kyiv’s control—where the concentration of Russophone populations was highest and in which the results of a referendum in the 1990s to support the official status of Russian language had been ignored by the authorities in Kyiv—became dominated by a similar ethnonational ideology during the same period. The fact that there is a power differential between the two forms of emerging exclusionary nationalisms does not prevent their “cofiguration,” which conspires to render impossible the choice of a plurinational Ukraine that is neither “Russian” nor “Western,” nor modelled on the exclusionary nationalism of the Galician diaspora. Most germane to our concern with Taiwan would be the effects of over seven decades of intervention by the US and other Western powers that deliberately sought to weaponise Galician forms

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of Ukrainian nationalism, articulated to fascist ideas of ethnolinguistic purity, dating from the end of World War II to the present. While North America became a haven for a Ukrainian diaspora composed largely of communities that had participated in fascist organisations during the war (such as the Waffen SS “Galicia” division and the OUN, Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists), the diaspora was deliberately mobilised by US policy planners first to support covert activities against the USSR (Ukrainian nationalist partisan remnants of the OUN were active in the Ukrainian SSR until 1956) and later to bring the virulent form of Galician nationalism back to Ukrainian politics after 1991, when the diaspora began to re-establish connections in a newly-independent Ukraine. As Petro summarises: “Ukraine’s failure to obtain its independence in the aftermath of both World Wars led to nationalism becoming the driving political motif of Ukraine’s exiled political elites. Ukrainian nationalists managed to survive their wartime alliance with Nazi Germany by positioning themselves as allies of the West in the new Cold War against the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the USSR, they re-established themselves as regional actors in western Ukraine, and from this Galician base sought to commandeer the direction of Ukrainian politics. Despite being a political minority within Ukraine, Galician-inspired Ukrainian nationalists have been encouraged by the West, because they can always be relied on to oppose closer ties with Russia. This, however, has deepened the split along the country’s linguistic, religious, and cultural fault lines” (Petro The Tragedy of Ukraine, 247). Petro’s intimate familiarity with Ukrainian history allows him to establish a focus on Ukrainian agency in its many forms while not losing sight of the way that Ukrainian agency has been instrumentalised and weaponised by external powers with their own geopolitical agenda. The results of such instrumentalisation have exacerbated internal conflicts within Ukraine itself that constitute an ongoing civil war with a history dating back at least to the nineteenth century. The picture that emerges from this historical account is that the West, led by the United States, acts unscrupulously to advance its own interests with little regard for the populations living and circulating through the areas concerned. It is for this reason that Petro brings the focus back to internal Ukrainian divisions (and the stifling Galician consensus progressively imposed on Ukrainian institutions, law, and public discourse since independence), advocating the path of reconciliation and transitional justice that will remain to be undertaken no matter the outcome of

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the tragic war underway. Despite many differences related to the specificities of national history, Petro’s analysis serves both as a sobering reminder of the work of reconciliation that needs to be done within and without Taiwanese society and as a warning about the potentially unscrupulous role played by external powers, such as the United States, claiming to protect Taiwan. The combination of nationalist purity and borders is a potent means for escalation that ends up restructuring societies around the sanctioned conspiracy theories of foreign infiltration and weaponised identities that constitute a philologically divided world in the age of computational media. In a blog post for The Atlantic Council (a NATO organisation), journalist Josh Cohen described some of the negative impacts of civilian militias on Ukrainian society during an era of relative peace: Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators. International human rights groups have sounded the alarm. After the March 8 attacks, Amnesty International warned that “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and Front Line Defenders warned in a letter that radical groups acting under “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values” were allowed to operate under an “atmosphere of near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to commit more attacks.” To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of a “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity. Whether this is due to a continuing sense of indebtedness to some of these groups for fighting the Russians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real problem and we do no service to Ukraine by sweeping it under the rug. (Cohen “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem”)

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While the value of a comparison with Taiwan may be limited due to the different histories involved (including notably the weakness of the Ukrainian state), the example of far-right Ukrainian militia illustrates the potentially far-reaching effect that civilian militias and defence organisations can have upon societies in the throes of border disputes and geopolitical/plurinational conflict. This is a sobering precedent for Taiwan. The comparison is further complicated by the role of interstate relations, demographic hybridity, and contested national sovereignty. Unguarded references to Ukraine by security specialists in Taiwan inevitably invite comparisons of US government support for civilian militias in “separatist” Taiwan with Russian state support for civilian militias in the “separatist” Donbas region of eastern Ukraine (Casado “Taiwan does not resemble Ukraine as much as it does the Donbass”). From there, the slippery slope of the ethics of proxy war is virtually unavoidable. Needless to say, proxy war can coexist perfectly well with indigenous national defence against an external state power. In critical reflection about the war in Ukraine by East European intellectuals, one of the most striking themes pertinent to a discussion of Taiwan concerns the cultural imaginary of whiteness. Situating “the war in Ukraine within the broader context of Ukraine’s position in global patterns of production and social reproduction, focusing in particular on its racialized and gendered dynamics,” Olena Lyubchenko writes: the emerging idea of ‘Ukrainianness’ and its equation with ‘Europeanness’ is mediated through a conceptualization of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Ukraine’s sovereignty and self-determination are increasingly understood by local elites to be bound up with incorporation into ‘fortress Europe’ and the making of the ‘Ukrainian nation’ as ‘white’ and ‘European.’ The concept of ‘self-determination,’ borne by the internationalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperial revolutionary left is instrumentalized today. In the use of Western and Ukrainian elites, the history of local internationalism, communism, and anti-fascism is separated from ‘selfdetermination’ through Eurocentric maneuvers. (Lyubchencko “On the Frontier of Whiteness?”)

In Part II, we will consider more fully Taiwan’s historical investment in hegemonic global whiteness and the way in which that quality is essential to the construction of postcolonial sovereignty within Pax Americana. As Lyubchenko points out, one of the functions of “hegemonic global whiteness” is the erasure of antiblackness as fundamentally constitutive

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of anticommunism. The result is a version of self-determination that uses “decolonisation” as a justification for the violence deemed necessary to protect the sacrificial proxies defending hegemonic global whiteness. Ironically, such versions of self-determination never put decolonisation of the modern regime of translation and the apparatus of area and anthropological difference on their agenda. To imagine that the unpredictable effects of civilian militias upon domestic politics, culture, economy, religion, and society in Taiwan during peacetime would be minimal or non-existent seems like potentially dangerous wishful thinking, just as the social effects of sustained civilian insurgency during wartime are highly unpredictable, too. In a Chineselanguage post from spring 2023 on Guava Anthropology, a respected academic blog, titled, “Civil Defence as a Citizens Movement: Mental Defence at the Crux of Preparations for War,” Taiwanese gender theorist Wen Liu combines Cold War psychology (psy-ops, essentially) with neoliberal disaster capitalism population management to build a case for grassroots defence mobilisation. Excluding civil war, specifically the Chinese civil war between the KMT and the CPC, from a consideration of how war figures into the development of a “nation that has never faced war as a ‘Taiwanese community’” (Liu “Minfang zuowei yizhong gongming yundong ”), Liu sets the stage for a new kind of community distinguished by the libidinal economy of enmity and disavowal. While this exclusion would seem justified in terms of the historical and generational distance involved, it clears the way via disavowal for the possibility of a new phase of conflict that will have the special quality of violence reserved for the civil or religious war. The bulk of Liu’s article describes how a grassroots model of social mobilisation and disaster training creates a certain kind of community, one that is ready for war, physically, mentally, semiotically, and affectively. It is not difficult to piece together the type of community implicitly envisaged by the author. Notions of normative transparency, referential determinacy, contractual trustworthiness, and disaster management-style team spirit add up to the familiar figure of the communication model of society promoted by the Cold War social sciences and ego psychology in North America (recalling the work of the founder of communication studies, Wilbur Schramm, who worked extensively for the CIA for many years). A rhetoric of “trust” combined with the elimination of “indeterminacy” in the face of potentially catastrophic events describes a fully biopolitical regime of what we would call securidentity. Implicitly working with the communication model, Liu

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aims to create what she names, in an activist vein, a “citizens defence subjectivity.” Purged of negativity and the various splits and fractures that characterised theories of the modern subject, the concept of subjectivity employed here has no relation to the classic usage of the term in modern philosophy. Behind the aura of grassroots activism lies the familiar figure of an anti-state rhetoric employed in the service of state aims. While anti-state statism has deep roots in pre-computational modern societies, the advent of computational media and algorithmic governance on privatised platforms behind today’s grassroots mobilisation society has generated a radical metastasis, enabling anti-state statism to penetrate much more deeply than before. The discourse of civil defence in Taiwan advocated by Liu is an excellent example. Powered by a potent combination of the activist vocabulary of grassroots anti-state statism, Cold War academic psy-ops, and disaster capitalism, Liu is of the persuasion that the “enemy” can be contained by a grassroots total mobilisation society that vigilantly polices internal as well as external borders. While Liu celebrates the fact that, “in terms of gender, these [civil defence organisations] are different from the stereotypical hetero male space and the number of women participating is rather high” (ibid.), she grants no attention to the other kinds of homogenisation, division, and desubjectivation at work. It is here, in the figure of the enemy, that civil war returns to Taiwan from its historical slumber. As Liu’s article inadvertently attests, the measures needed to preserve Taiwanese “independence” as a satellite of the US require increasingly extreme forms of social mobilisation, communicational normalisation, political paranoia, and libidinal investment bringing Taiwanese civilian society (back) into the fold of a civil war. Today, the pieces for such a terrible event are being laid, one by one, in methodical fashion. A chilling reminder of the reality of this tendency can be glimpsed from a US Army Special Forces training exercise scenario in 2023 held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, that began with “anti-Chinese riots erupt[ing] in Taipei, followed by a Chinese military exercise that turned into a full-blown invasion of Taiwan” (Skove “With Lessons from Ukraine, US Special Forces Reinvents Itself for a Fight With China”). Clearly, US Special Forces are already training in scenarios of US military intervention into a domestic civil war in Taiwan, hidden behind a rhetoric of Chinese infiltration. In an opinion piece published at the beginning of 2023 on Storm Media online, Kuo Hungchih, a veteran journalist, reminded readers that, “it would be impossible to guarantee that militia organisations with different positions would

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not defend their dignity with arms (yongwu zizhong ) and attack each other, plunging Taiwan into civil war” (Kuo “Minbing keyi kangzhong baotai, ye keyi zhizao neizhan”). From a social point of view, developing asymmetric warfare and civil defence in Taiwan means not only the militarisation and total mobilisation of society as a whole, laying the ground for what security experts call the “civilianisation of conflict,” but also a deepening inter-nationalisation, i.e., both a nationalisation and an internationalisation, of antagonistic identities. These are trends that cannot but have a profound influence on society, even in peacetime. Yet despite the risks, there has been insufficient public discussion in Taiwan about how preparations for asymmetric warfare, especially civilian militias, private security contractors, and civil defence organisations, flush with cash and training (possibly from the US or from Taiwanese entrepreneurs), might affect Taiwanese society, nor how to mitigate the potentially deleterious social effects of such measures. When even savvy gender theorists ignore such questions, it suggests that the process leading to the disappearance of a clear distinction between civil society and the state—a lack of distinction that is the hallmark of the civilianisation of conflict (Wenger and Mason “The civilianization of armed conflict,” 846)—has in a very real sense already begun. Fortunately, this danger has been raised publicly (yet without inciting to the best of our knowledge response from proponents of militias and civilian defence) by a couple of Taiwanese commentators, notably Hsu He-ch’ien of the “New Republic” (xingonghe) collective in 2020 and Wu Yong Yi, a professor at the Tainan National University of the Arts who is part of the “Parallel Government” (pinxing zhengfu) collective, in 2023, both of whom have called attention to the potential for civilianisation to lead to atrocities in the heat of battle (Hsu “Wu Yinong de ‘quanmin jiebing’ ti’an, hui dui canyu zhanzheng de pingmin dailai shenme fengxian?” and Wu “Oubulaien hei’an de ‘Taiwan xiangding’ ”). Aside from these important interventions, which focus on the effects during wartime, Taiwanese critics have not yet tackled the thorny issues related to the social effects of these measures during peacetime. Under the weight of a consensus about civil defence, the vaunted autonomy of civil society in Taiwan is already in danger.

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The Epistemology of the Secret: Hegemony and Conspiracy in the Era of the Privatised Digital Platform As we noted at the start of this chapter, London-based researcher Biyu Chang suggested already a couple of decades ago that the Taiwan Consensus is a form of political hegemony. Yet even as she invokes Gramsci, Chang’s analysis of hegemony in Taiwan eliminates from the discussion the focus on class. Ignoring the fundamental Marxist insight that the state is always a state of class, Chang focuses instead on the nation. Treating the nation as a presupposition rather than as a dialectical doppelgänger of the state (as seen, for instance, in Gavin Walker’s nuanced treatment cited earlier), Chang’s account locates the nation both at the source of political legitimacy and at the basis of capitalist hegemony. Implicitly, she argues that once the nation and the state have been properly aligned along the axis of the nation’s essential givenness reflected in authentic “identity,” hegemony opens the door to a successful national branding strategy, international recognition, and bountiful capitalist development. Something of this sort of alignment is intimated by the discursive construction of “Chinese infiltration.” The phenomenon of “infiltration” covers a spectrum of different activities including fake news, disinformation, propaganda, hacking, spying, and data collection, all of which is bundled into the blanket term, “cognitive warfare.” According to Taiwanese government officials, in 2021 government agencies faced approximately five million attacks and probes a day from sources attributed to the PRC (France24 “Taiwan government faces 5 million cyber attacks daily”). If the full scale of cognitive warfare allegedly conducted by the PRC against Taiwanese targets is difficult to quantify, that is in part because of the vast range of activities it covers as well as the flexible, some would say amorphous, definition of information warfare. It was nominally in response to the threat of “Chinese infiltration” that the Tsai-led DPP passed into law the Anti-Infiltration Act on December 31, 2019, after a truncated debate of only 34 days in the national legislature. To the extent that “Chinese infiltration” calls forth a multiscalar response that is widely distributed across the public and private sectors, it is not so much an indication of the extent of Chinese penetration as an indication of the scale of the Taiwanese hegemony that creates it as an object of governmental techniques. Situated at a crossroads among

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government, industry, academia, national security agencies, private security corporations, civil society networks, legacy media, and social media, the discourse of “Chinese infiltration” traverses the entirety of Taiwanese society in exhaustive fashion. It would be no exaggeration to say that the Taiwanese discourse of “Chinese infiltration” has “infiltrated” Taiwanese society to an extent that Chinese intelligence agencies and troll farms could only dream of. For this reason, it is crucial to note that “Chinese infiltration” is never simply a “Chinese” affair but always concerns citizens of the ROC in Taiwan, as well. What the Information Operations Research Group (IORG), a Taiwanese organisation comprised of journalists, social scientists, civil rights organisations, and public associations mobilised to defend against “Chinese infiltration,” calls “local enablers” (zaidi xielizhe) is just a synonym for the “internal enemy” and “fifth columnist” of the Cold War; it is a term that recalls the ubiquitous slogan, “Careful! Commie spooks could be right next to you!” (xiaoxin feidie jiu zai ni shenbian) plastered across public space in Taiwan during the Martial Law era. The criteria for identifying “local enablers,” like that used for offshore troll farms, is extremely subjective, often relying on stereotyped assessments of national identity, including linguistic usage and imputed point of view (Internet Operations Research Group Zhongguo dui Tai Zixun Zhan Caonong ji Renji Shentou Yanxi). It is for this reason that Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado refers to Taiwan as a “field for disinformation” (Casado “Taiwan as a field for disinformation”). Challenging the notion typically promoted by think tanks and research institutes with state funding that the sources of disinformation principally arise from foreign governments and internal collusion (e.g., the Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, Project, holds that Taiwan has been the world’s top target for foreign instigated disinformation campaigns since 2013; see Brandt et al. “Disinformation” 33, and Rauschfleisch et al., “Taiwan’s Public Discourse About Disinformation,” 1), Casado counters with an analysis of the hegemony spanning the state and civil society. An account of the politically motivated manipulation of information, including outright suppression of media outlets, exercised by “the DPP and anti-Chinese media” in Taiwan (Casado “Taiwan as a field for disinformation,” 202) reveals a situation in which disinformation proliferates. In truth, what this more balanced approach ultimately shows is that hegemony relies on bordering practices, among which translation and the control of truth via double standards play a prominent role. As Casado explains:

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The discursive operation of constructing an internal enemy—Gramscian, relying on a war of position linking political society and civil society, seeking for cultural hegemony to dominate the state, expressing a nationalcollective will united vis-à-vis the “enemy”—is based on national identities and elite interests. It is becoming so exclusionary and entangled with Sinophobia that it enters into the terrain of racism and totalitarianism. The antagonism to the opposition party and its related media and organisations as foreign agents of the evil Chinese enemy is the classic operation of despotic regimes, the undemocratic operation par excellence that leads Taiwanese society towards a conjuncture of civil war… (Casado “Taiwan as a field for disinformation,” 200)

Factors such as these lead one to conclude that the presupposition of national identity is what creates “foreign infiltration” as a discursive object. Otherwise, one would be obliged to begin by considering the way infiltration stands for a more general process that Marx called subsumption. Subsumption describes that movement by which increasingly larger swaths of social relations come to be commandeered by the capital relation, leading eventually to the capture of the totality of social relations—and finally subjectivity—by the capital-relation in a movement that progresses from what Marx called “formal” to “real subsumption.” Even this description of state infiltration is problematic, of course, to the extent that it implicitly presumes, much like Bi-yu Chang, that society is external to the state and that identities are given in advance. Yet if the state is always a state of class, state infiltration is precisely that act by which society against the state is created. The fact that “Chinese infiltration” refers to a state that is considered foreign—a characterisation that the Chinese state of course rejects—does not negate the basic issue but rather highlights the way the systemic competition between states is a necessary condition for the structural domination of class. In other words, something approaching the Marxian notion of real subsumption is necessary to confront the kind of hegemony that sustains the discourse of “Chinese infiltration” in Taiwan. If, beyond real and imagined threats to national security and the presence of internal enemies, the discourse traverses so many different domains yet always manages to imply not just a national security strategy but also a form of industrial policy and market investment strategy for emergent technologies (conveniently summed up by keywords such as innovation and civic tech), that fact in itself suggests a level of alignment among ostensibly autonomous social actors that can only be grasped by the concept of hegemony.

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In Taiwan as elsewhere, the distinction between “sanctioned” and “unsanctioned” forms of conspiracy theory plays a decisive role in the construction of hegemony. The unsanctioned forms of conspiracy theory are those that threaten the hegemonic consensus; sanctioned forms are those that justify it. The discourse of “Chinese infiltration” is one such example of a sanctioned conspiracy theory. That it is, in an important yet impossible to quantify sense, “true” hardly negates its status as a conspiracy theory, which is ultimately related to affective charge and libidinal investment rather than truth claims. As the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupanˇciˇc explains, every conspiracy theory—including the most outlandish ones such as the “flat Earth” thesis—contains elements of the real. Yet, even if the conspiracy theory is predominantly “true,” as in the case of Chinese hacking and trolling activities in Taiwan, it is always accompanied by an affective element that is pathological—not in an individual sense but in a social one. This pathological aspect is analogous, Zupanˇciˇc holds, to that described by Jacques Lacan in relation to jealousy: even if the partner of a jealous lover in a monogamous relationship is truly engaged in an affair with a third party, the lover’s jealousy still has a pathological element to it. It is not that we think that the threat from China’s security agencies and troll farms is negligible or fictitious but rather that the digital mediation of the response to this threat, which takes the form of a “true” conspiracy theory, is deeply problematic. In conspiracy theories (even “true” ones), the source of this social pathology is a fantasy about the “agency of the big Other” (Zupanˇciˇc “A Short Essay on Conspiracy Theories,” 239). This fantasy is invested with a libidinal energy that shifts the emphasis from the existence of the Other to the deceptiveness and evilness that are thought to be “constitutive of His existence” (ibid., 240). References in Taiwanese society to the “evil nature” of the “Heavenly Empire” (tianchao, i.e., China) are so ubiquitous as to hardly require citation. One representative example could be seen in If China Attacks (Agong dalai zenmeban), a popularised account of Chinese full spectrum “cognitive warfare” against Taiwan coauthored by Puma Shen, a professor in criminology at Taipei University who specialises in Chinese fake news and disinformation, and Matt Wang, a popular military affairs blogger. The epigraph from Francis Bacon, referring to the “nature of evil,” that begins the preface to the book by Yu Tsung-chi, a retired major general and former head of the Cultural and Psychological Operations Division of the Ministry of National Defense’s Political Warfare Bureau, is a perfect instantiation of Zupanˇciˇc’s point. It

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matters little that, in the words of one expert, “Bacon’s ideas on evil can only be reconstructed with difficulty, and tentatively. It seems fair to say, therefore, that Bacon’s ideas about the nature of evil had no influence on subsequent debates” (Henry “Francis Bacon,” last page chapter 10). The purpose of the epigraph is affective not intellectual. It confirms what readers already know: Communist China is the seat of evil, a real-life version of Mordor, the fictional realm of evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (just for the record, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King from 2003 is the 34th highest grossing film of all time in Taiwan as of 2022; see Wikipedia “List of highest-grossing films in Taiwan”). While the direct cause for this libidinal investment is the fear of annexation, many other forms of fear lurk in the background. “Communist China” thus performs the work of semantic condensation, gathering all of the social anxieties into a single, evil other. Crucially, the other is not strictly external but internal, as well. This distribution of otherness serves not only to justify the libidinal investment in enmity, it also serves to erase from view the massive production of disinformation, or simply propaganda, by state agencies, media, think tanks, and academia that constitute the Imperial Spectacle Corporation in both Taiwan and the United States apropos of China. Such erasure is, in fact, necessary to the maintenance of the libidinal economy of enmity and explains why, each and every time the premises of conspiracy theories about Chinese infiltration are challenged on social media, a veritable shitstorm of ensues. As if by command, a swarm of internaut trolls spontaneously intervenes to enforce the libidinal consensus via a combination of ad personam insults and the repetition of sanctioned “truths” massively disseminated by the Imperial Spectacle Corporation that are the informal equivalent of denial-of-service attacks whose aim is to silence the other. The “tone” of these attacks constitutes an integral part of the Consensus and in that sense is neither spontaneous nor extraneous but structurally linked to the libidinal economy that sustains the Consensus. The “true” conspiracy theories of “foreign infiltration” that erase subsumption (or simply domestic state infiltration and misinformation) and motivate neoliberal consensual politics not just in Taiwan but in liberal democracies across the globe today are a symptom of the compromised state of social critique today. Part of Zupanˇciˇc’s project in conspiracy theory lies in rescuing critical theory from doubts about its pretension to reveal social truths hidden by hegemonic forms of consensus. While her analysis is limited to Bruno Latour’s attack on

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ideology critique, the implications of her argument are broadly applicable. In agreement with an idea first raised by Fredric Jameson, Zupanˇciˇc writes: “As Frederic Jameson beautifully argued in his seminal study of conspiracy films of the 1970s and 1980s, conspiratorial thinking functions as an important means of cognitive mapping in late capitalism—it could be seen as almost the only way left to think about the social as totality and about the collective (as opposed to the individual)” (Zupanˇciˇc “A Short Essay on Conspiracy Theories,” 233). Elaborating on this idea in an oral interview in September 2022, Zupanˇciˇc further historicises the meaning of the absence of critical perspectives on social totality today, relating this phenomenon specifically to the effects of neoliberal atomisation (Lain and Zupanˇciˇc “Be Nice to the Conspiracists”). Precisely because critique of the social totality no longer seems valid in a neoliberal situation emblematised by Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration that, “there is no such thing as society,” a renewal of interest in conspiracy theories arrives to fill in the gap. Not just a symptom of the Thatcheresque destruction of society, conspiracy theories might be seen as a side effect of the salient role of information in financialised economies in which information is crucial to liquidity and markets seek profit from volatility and catastrophe. Financialised markets do not attempt to redress the problem of information—either its overwhelming, excessive abundance or its secretive insufficiency—so much as to devise strategies for turning the vagaries of informational flows into sources of liquidity. The concept of social totality in Marx is precisely designed to respond to a situation in which transparency has been rendered epistemologically meaningless by financial capital. In that context, Neilson and Mezzadra’s renovation of the concept of “world market” as a “dimension internal to any and each scale of capitalist development” (Mezzadra and Neilson The Politics of Operations, 76) must be read as a historic attempt to rescue the concept of social totality from the identification with the nation-state that characterised much of previous usage. Above all, the totality is not a quantitative entity that could be measured as the sum total of its parts, but a series of frames for the relation between capital and its outside in which the framing operation itself is the only measure of totality available. Thanks in large part to the previous work Nielson and Mezzadra have done on borders and bordering practices, it is possible for us to see that bordering practices are the quintessential form of “framing operation” today—and the reason why the social totality must never be equated simply with the nation-state. A glimpse of this regressive form of measure

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can be seen in the Grundrisse, where Marx writes: “Their own exchange and their own production confront individuals as an objective relation which is independent of them. In the case of the world market, the connection of the individual with all, but at the same time also the independence of this connection from the individual, have developed to such a high level that the formation of the world market already at the same time contains the conditions for going beyond it” (Mark Grundrisse, 161). In effect, what Marx calls the “world market,” the connection of the individual with a holistic “all” that paradoxically contains within itself the very form of the outside that the notion of unlimited connectivity logically seems to deny, presages the situation of network culture in the twenty-first century. If “every limit [in the world market] appears as a barrier to be overcome” (Marx Grundrisse, 408, cited in Mezzadra and Neilson The Politics of Operations, 89) yet the very process of “overcoming” seemingly confirms the a priori lack of outside, the paradoxical nature of limits in general obviates the problem of transparency altogether without cancelling the urgent need for a critique of the social totality. If the social totality no longer seems to make any sense as a point of purchase for alternative political transitions, the reasons for that decline have as much to do with the ubiquitous adoption of networked media as with the hidden hierarchies and vested interests masquerading as universal figures that cut across the formerly unified revolutionary subject. Seen at one point as a promise of grassroots freedom and resistance, the internet from the outset was defined by hidden inequalities of access that informed early utopian demands for open source, free access, and horizontal connectivity. Moreover, within a short space of time it had become the infrastructure for corporate private platforms that amplify— and in effect create—social antagonisms, monetising them in the process by harvesting the enormous quantities of data produced by users for free. A profound and politically counter-revolutionary synergy has thus developed between the techno-feudalism of the corporate private platforms and the secular theology of the dominant human rights discourse (which will be the focus of our discussions below about transitional justice) in which the calculus of victims and perpetrators has effectively replaced the analytic of production and reproduction that used to drive the desire for a unified revolutionary subject. Networked forms of digital media have not only played a key role in the demise of critiques of the social totality, those same networks have also vastly enabled the symptomatic replacement of such critiques by viral conspiracy theories that reinforce the status quo.

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As a symptom of the collapse of critical perspectives on the social totality condensed in the notion of the “world market,” conspiracy theory in the neoliberal age is always haunted by its double. The duality of the distinction between sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of conspiracy theory is reflected in the proliferation of double standards and blinkered perspectives. While “Chinese infiltration” is a cause for moral panic in Taiwan, the role of US private corporations that are essentially transnational surveillance platform monopolies such as Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), and Apple, etc., hardly elicits a response. Taiwan reportedly had the highest per capita level of Facebook penetration back in 2014 (The China Post “More Taiwanese use Facebook per capita than anywhere in the world”), while the level of active social media penetration in Taiwan ranked 8th globally in 2022 (Statista); Microsoft has a monopoly on cloud computing for the corporate, government, and educational sectors; and Google has a monopoly on the mining of big data through search-related access. On the 40th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act, President Tsai Ing-wen’s Facebook account symbolically announced large new expansion projects in Taiwan by the rent-yielding monopolies of US surveillance capitalism, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook (Tsai 2019). A hypothetical inventory of “US infiltration” in Taiwan would hardly stop at the overwhelming presence of US surveillance/platform capitalism in Taiwan but would necessarily have to extend to consider the tight direction exercised by a panoply of intelligence agencies over US-based globally dominant social media companies revealed by the Twitter Files at the end of 2022 (Taibbi “Twitter Files Thread: The Spies Who Loved Twitter”), the revolving door between the CIA and social media platforms and search engines (Lowkey and Macleod “How the CIA Has Infiltrated Social Media Companies, With Alan Macleod”; Macleod “National Security Search Engine: Google’s Ranks Are Filled With CIA Agents”) and the civil society organisation networks linked to and often funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (see the section on “Postcolonial immunity” in Chapter Six below). Such considerations are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the myriad forms of overt and covert US involvement and influence in Taiwan. Yet, despite the alignment everywhere in evidence among private corporations, media, academia, think tanks, and US intelligence agencies, “US infiltration” is, as we have noted, a non-issue in Taiwan. Typically, the topic would be considered a priori a form of unsanctioned conspiracy theory, discredited and unworthy of any serious discussion.

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To untangle these double standards, a concept of hegemony is needed. Like the state, hegemony, too, is a class concept. The corporate private platform complex that dominates technologically mediated digital “publics” today is characterised by an apparent sense of transparency that is barely the tip of the iceberg in a technologically mediated covert sphere. The proliferation of conspiracy theories across privatised social networks is symptomatic of the explosive growth in the amount of information and algorithmic processes that are hidden by the corporate state ecology. As a substitute for social solidarity, sanctioned conspiracy theory nourishes a compensatory affective element. In place of popular sovereignty, there is the simulacrum of democracy as consensus on monetised private platforms. Actions that had been traditionally the object of covert operations during the heyday of the Cold War rely today on the rhetoric of popular mobilisation, rechristened “civic tech,” to crowdsource surveillance in ways that dovetail with the aims of state intelligence agencies and the business plans of private corporations. Meanwhile, the “black box”-style operation of the private platform itself essentially extends the sphere of covert action into the totality of social communication. As Timon Beyes summarises, “In platform society, the behaviour of users and providers is enrolled in, and monitored and modulated through, opaque and illegible processes of algorithmic management” (Beyes “Staying with the Secret,” 119). While we are not aware of any critical studies of grassroots information warfare on privatised platforms in the service of state and corporate aims in Taiwan, something of the magnitude of the problem can be glimpsed from the analysis of guerrilla marketing by Ngai Keung Chan and Chi Kwok, who call attention to how Uber “mobilized the fictitious voice of the democratic people to fight against a democratically elected government” in Taiwan (Chan and Kwok “Guerrilla Capitalism,” 791). Even though Uber’s efforts to influence Taiwanese government policy have been ineffective to date, the example demonstrates the extent to which popular mobilisation is intrinsically part of the business plan adopted by platform capitalism. As state security has become the focus of crowdsourcing-style grassroots tactics, the teleology of conspiracy is compressed into strategies for accumulation that weaponise identity. Conspiracy is thus a symptom of corporate sovereignty whose ideological condition of possibility lies in a kind of philological populism. Conspiracy theory emphasises a deterministic teleology, as if it were the very nature of the future that were at stake. Hence, if left unchecked, “Chinese infiltration” ultimately leads from “dried mangoes” (mangguo

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gan), a popular anagram meme for the feelings of anxiety over the impending loss of one’s country (wangguo gan), to the capitalist “end of the world” (shijie mori) scenario evoked by Stan Shih, CEO of the Taiwanese IT conglomerate Acer, to describe what would happen in the event a Chinese blockade were to bring to a standstill the Taiwanese semiconductor industry (Xie “Taiwan zao fengsuo you duo yanzhong?”). To be sure, the anxiety felt over “Chinese infiltration” is indeed related to earth-shattering change analogous to the end of the world inasmuch as it serves as a mystification or proxy for the massive digital transitions currently underway and the ultimate goal of saving capitalism so that capitalism can save us. In this context, one must ask whether the claims of “digital democracy” raised by Taiwanese government officials and echoed with admiration by academics, media, industry associations, and think tanks in the West do not amount to a form of plausible deniability? The combination of cybersecurity policy, industrial policy, data policy, domestic political strategy, and participative democracy initiatives in a single administrative unit—the new Ministry for Digital Affairs created in August 2022—suggests more than considerations of budgetary convenience. Is it not the case that the alignment among such a wide panoply of different domains indicates the operative presence of hegemony? What we are dealing with is essentially the same phenomenon observed nearly six decades ago by Jacques Ellul in an analysis of propaganda undertaken in 1962, at the height of the Cold War. For Ellul, propaganda is not the property of an ideology or a political system but is rather the inevitable result of the technical totalisation of society. As part of a totalising system, technology cannot be understood by focusing on specific technologies or objects created by technology but must be understood temporally as an evolving lineage constituting both an environment and a developing system within that environment each of which are increasingly guided in their development by technical reason. Propaganda arises not because of this or that modern political creed but because the force of technical totalisation progressively extends to every domain of life on every part of the planet. Tending towards totalisation, the force of technical progress described by Ellul resembles Marx’s notion of subsumption in that it essentially colonises or subsumes everything existent, yet against Marx, Ellul claims that capitalism can only be understood as a component of technical totalisation and not the other way around. To untangle Ellul’s deep-seated

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anticommunism, a crucial component of the melancholic Eurocentrism that drives Ellul’s The Betrayal of the West (published in 1975, 13 years after Propaganda), is an enterprise that would take us too far afield from the discussion at hand; suffice it to say that the relation between anticommunism and Eurocentrism is hardly accidental. Convinced of Western exceptionalism, Ellul’s attachment to the putative unity of the West would have prevented him from seeing the West as the abstraction of a colonial relation that precedes the individuality of the geocultural “thing in itself.” Similarly, his attachment to the philosophical underpinnings of the autonomous individual would have prevented him from seeing capital as the abstraction of a social relation. For an avowed anarchist who identified nationalism as one of the main scourges of the modern era, Ellul’s approach is, at a methodological level, deeply nationalist in the sense that he assumes the givenness of national individuality. Reading against the grain, however, we might find it possible to do what Ellul would have abhorred, articulating a theory of the technical society to a critique of global capitalism and the fantasy of the West by redefining individuation so that the relationship is given priority over the individualised abstraction (such as “capital” and “the West”). This is, in a sense, the methodology developed by Gilbert Simondon, who exercised a great influence on some of Ellul’s later work, such as The Technological System from 1977. One avenue for re-reading Propaganda in light of a radical redefinition of individuation would begin with the concept of communication. Ellul’s approach to technical totalisation in Propaganda takes communication as a paradigmatic case for life in general. The appropriation of “communication” by technical reason, manifest in the myriad, ever-changing technologies that facilitate and transform communication, is, in the final analysis, the root cause of propaganda. In Ellul’s estimation, the choice of political system is orthogonal to the predominance of propaganda in modern society. Inasmuch as communication occurs along a specific material channel regardless of the informational content or ideological messaging, it is increasingly susceptible to the demands and development of technical reason. The appropriation of communication by technical reason occurs precisely around the mediation of the channel. To the best of my knowledge, while Ellul did not try to argue that communication might be seen as a form of individuation in the particular sense given to this term by Simondon (who developed the idea

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in contradistinction to the presuppositions concerning autonomous individuality that have guided the mainstream of modern philosophy since Descartes), it is hard not to see how communication extends beyond the strictly linguistic or even informational sphere, encompassing the processes whereby things become “things,” i.e., individualised, as such (for a description of such methodology, see my article “Logistical Species and Translational Process”). As a humanist, Ellul’s ultimate concern lay with the changes wrought by technical reason not simply on the environment and the various systems of life on earth but above all with the changes produced in human beings themselves. Hence, a concern with communication as individuation is a concern for changes in subjectivity. Paramount among these changes is the increasing atomisation of society and the resulting alienation of the human. Propaganda is thus not just a lamentable symptom of the juggernaut of technical totalisation that transforms human beings into repetitive patterns, it also constitutes a perverse yet seemingly inescapable response to the problems unleashed by that very same totalisation: Again I want to emphasize that the study of propaganda must be conducted within the context of the technological society. Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world. Propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of a regime (it is that also) than the effect of a technological society that embraces the entire man and tends to be a completely integrated society. At the present time, propaganda is the innermost, and most elusive, manifestation of this trend…People keep saying: “Everything depends on what kind of a State makes use of propaganda.” But if we really have understood the technological State, such a statement becomes meaningless. In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. (Ellul Propaganda, xviii)

The “problems created by technology” ultimately amount to the subordination of the human and indeed all life to the imperatives of technical reason. In terms of human society, this subordination creates a contradictory situation summed up by the concomitant forces of massification and atomisation. Writing several decades before the widespread advent of the internet, yet only seven years before the establishment of Arpanet, the

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modern internet’s first precursor, Ellul seemed to accurately and precociously intuit the predicament of fully digitalised, networked societies, characterised by extreme—and extremely polarised—forms of integration and alienation, individualisation and collectivisation. Yet, as Ellul explains, these polar extremes are not so much opposed to each other in the technological society as complementary. The result of their synergy is to create a human individual, lonely yet fully enmeshed in an automated swarm, who is not simply ripe for propaganda but who rather actively needs and seeks it: Propaganda fills a need of modern man, a need that creates in him an unconscious desire for propaganda. He is in the position of needing outside help to be able to face his condition. And that aid is propaganda. Naturally, he does not say: “I want propaganda.” On the contrary, in line with preconceived notions, he abhors propaganda and considers himself a “free and mature” person. But in reality he calls for and desires propaganda that will permit him to ward off certain attacks and reduce certain tensions. (Ellul Propaganda, 138).

The “attacks” to which the modern human individual is subjected begin, according to Ellul, with the sacrifices demanded by work, followed by those of war, taxes, and other impositions of the modern state and society. But the main attack, and the source of the main “tension” experienced by humans living in modern technical societies, comes from information. It is not a dearth of information that spurs the need, or creates a breach, for propaganda but rather the superabundance of information that instils such need. Somewhat like conspiracy theory, then, propaganda responds to a certain incessant disruption that occurs between knowledge and sociality. Whereas conspiracy theory is a substitute that occupies the space left by the withdrawal of critical perspectives on the imaginary institution of social totality, propaganda offers an ersatz form of totality—hegemony— that functions as a reassuring bromide in the face of the crushing weight of the information/data explosion. In both cases, we are dealing with the symptoms of repressed totality. Whereas for Marxists that totality might be the capital relation, for Ellul it is the technical one. In either case, these are the truths that are never discussed in the media, “for news can never deal with the whole” (Ellul Propaganda, 144). It is precisely the

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lack of purchase or perspective on the totality that turns propaganda into the main form of communication in mediatised societies. While criticism of the effects of this hegemony is no substitute for a thorough analysis of its operations (a task that unfortunately lies beyond my means at the moment), it is of pressing importance at least to recognise how the hegemony forecloses the development of solutions other than those of a military-security nature in which growth in the covert sphere of society is directly proportional to the loudly proclaimed defence of the “epistemological a priori” of “accountability, publicity, and transparency” (Beyes “Staying with the Secret,” 123). Even the notion of shared identity becomes a thoroughly securitarian concept that leads to “shareveillance”—a spontaneous kind of peer-pressure mutual surveillance of identity (Beyes “Staying with the Secret,” 120). Those sectors of society that might have been able to provide alternative solutions to the discourse of infiltration via critique of the social totality tend, as Zupanˇciˇc fears, to atrophy in reverse proportion to the growth of a mass mobilisation system of cognitive warfare based on weaponised identity. Even as the viral dissemination of insecurity and anxiety leads to high levels of spontaneous participation and social mobilisation, or self-motivated shareveillance, among Taiwanese, the discourse of “civic tech” for which Taiwan has recently been lauded consistently masks the sort of hegemony that can be obliquely glimpsed by the extraordinary level of alignment occurring today. The real challenges for democratic politics in relation to digital culture come not from foreign infiltration but from the growing synergy among monopoly platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, computational media, data harvesting, the privatisation of war, conspiratorial social contagion, and the security operations of the corporate state (the censorship-misinformation-industrial complex). To ignore these trends while making claims about innovations in digital democracy vastly reduces the potential value of such experiments by turning them into forms of deflection and disavowal that contribute to the atrophy of social critique. In this context, a trend in digital media studies to disqualify the importance of a critical research project aimed at a critique of the social totality would be a source of concern. “The Media Arcane,” an influential article published in Grey Room in 2019 co-authored by media theoretician Timon Beyes and media historian Claus Pias, might be seen as representative of this trend—if, indeed, it is a trend. Summarising work by media studies specialists over the past two decades, Beyes and Pias begin

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with a critique of the notion of transparency that motivates much of the popular discussion about the challenges brought to democratic politics by computational media. One such example of this discussion could be seen in the notion of “radical transparency” invoked by Audrey Tang, the inaugural minister of the new Ministry of Digital Affairs in Taiwan, established in 2022 as part of the “digital democracy” and “civic tech” put into practice under Tsai Ing-wen’s administration. Despite Tang’s rhetoric, the criteria of transparency are irrelevant in the face of the many forms of power that can be both transparent and deeply unequal at the same time. As Blendi Kajsiu, a Colombian specialist of neoliberal anti-corruption discourse, explains, “[anti-]corruption has been used to institute neoliberalism, the market, competition. Such anti-corruption policies have resulted in further capture of the state and the public sector by powerful private actors…Another important use has been the reproduction of asymmetrical relations between the First and Third Worlds” (Lynch “The Summit for Democracy Day 2: Anticorruption and its Discontents (Interview w/Blendi Kajsiu)”). As Beyes and Pias argue, the concern with transparency and its avatars such as privacy amounts to little more than what media theorist Wendy Chun has called a “compensatory gesture” (Beyes and Pias “The Media Arcane,” 87) that diverts attention away from the revolutionary transformations wrought by computational media. Certainly, the example of Audrey Tang’s ideological claims about “radical transparency,” which leave monopoly platforms and their relation to state intelligence agencies, private algorithmic surveillance, and popular shareveillance out of the picture, confirms this part of Beyes and Pias’s (and Chun’s) analysis. Among the changes unleashed by computational media, those in the temporal dimension are salient. By instantiating feedback loops at the heart of social institutions, cybernetics creates a new form of temporality distinguished by the “absolutism of the present” (Beyes and Pias “The Media Arcane,” 93). It is not the consequences of action that matter so much as the temporal interval between an action and its consequences that becomes the focus of cybernetic control. This “faith in gaining control over the future” (ibid.) leads to a closure of radical futurity, the upshot of which completely subverts, according to the authors, some of the basic presuppositions of political modernity grounded in the notions of participation, representation, and reason-based action.

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The hegemony of the present is a fascinating and important topic, one that echoes many of our discussions of temporality elsewhere in this book, yet we find ourselves sceptical about Beyes and Pias’s assertion that this regime of temporality can be pinpointed to a transitional moment in the rise of cybernetics during World War II. As Alessandro Aresu argues in the first chapter to Le potenze del capitalismo politico: Stati Uniti e Cina (The power of political capitalism: The United States and China), the rise of accounting presages a sense of temporality and the absolutisation of the present that is the flip side of the obsession with the calculability of the future. Since the days of classical economy, capitalist operations have clearly always been based on a calculation of the future. As a result of the temporal shift instantiated by the new technology of accounting, it became impossible to think the future except as a modality of the present, inserted in a linear succession of homogeneous nows. Hence, much like the cybernetics of the twentieth century, the nascent science of accounting at the dawn of the mercantile age produced a similar effect on the meaning of the future as that attributed to cybernetics by Beyes and Pias. Perhaps what cybernetics adds to the equation is rather a means of control for this absolutisation of the present. Questions of intellectual history and periodisation aside, the point at which Beyes and Pias’s argument is most unconvincing occurs at the political level, where their intervention is explicitly formulated in response to the Snowden revelations. In 2013, a trove of some 1.7 million documents was transmitted to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poltras by Edward Snowden, a former consultant for the US National Security Agency (NSA). The parts of this archive rendered public showed that the NSA had been involved in mass surveillance not just in the United States but all across the globe, primarily by taking advantage of an imperial communications infrastructure that routes much of global data flows through servers in the United States. To illustrate the stakes, it is useful to contrast Beyes and Pias’ approach with that of contemporary Cold War studies. As is well-known, contemporary Cold War studies has made every effort to exhaustively chart out the ways in which almost every aspect of post-World War II life was infiltrated and programmed to align with the political aims and ideologies of Pax Americana. Without this body of work, most of which is no more than a decade old, we would be unable to understand how entire disciplines of knowledge were founded either directly as covert CIA operations, as in the case of Communications studies, or indirectly

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in the adjacent “safe spaces” left open by such activities (such as area studies, black studies, etc.), nor how the Genocide of the Left that consumed the postcolonial world for several decades under the misnomer of a “Cold” War was connected to minority repression in the imperial centre. The word “adjacent” calls to mind many different spatial images. Some of these could be concrete, like university campuses housing various programs with different relations to industry, government, security, think tanks, finance, and civil society. Some of them could be immaterial, in the sense of alignment with hegemony. The term “adjacent” suggests, in short, a certain type of organisation that allows for a unity of ends without a unity of means. Knowledge production could be said to be “adjacent” when it bears some relation to the covert sphere—a sphere that in the age of computational media is now much more expansive than that of the fabled world of James Bond during the first Cold War. To cite one example: Calls emanating in area studies for the “decolonisation” of nation-states with imperial histories, invariably accompanied by calls for the “decentring” of the fields of study devoted to them and the “subjugated nations” within or along their borders, could be said to be “adjacent” in the sense that they complement, or even pursue by different means, the imperial aims of certain US state agencies against US enemies—including regime change, neoliberal democratic transition, and finance-friendly Balkanisation. As a blueprint for disciplinary knowledge production, the direction Beyes and Pias chart out for contemporary media studies in the wake of the death of transparency is rather different. Their deflection of attention away from a potential connection to Cold War studies is symptomatic. Beyes and Pias’s reference at a crucial moment in their article to Nigel Thrift’s idea of the “security-entertainment complex” (Beyes and Pias “The Media Arcane,” 99) suggests a certain continuity with the Cold War via an implicit relation to the “previous era of military—industrial complex” of the Cold War that Thrift says it replaced (Thrift “Lifeworld Inc,” 11). Unfortunately, Thrift himself, in the article from 2011 cited by Beyes and Pias, does not dwell on the problem of dis/continuities with the Cold War. Given Thrift’s own avowed interests elsewhere in his writing in Eurocentrism and placeness, his otherwise inexplicable silence on these dis/continuities amounts to a typical form of deflection in which one evokes the Cold War (and all that means for the postcolonial world in which that war was decisively hot for several decades) only to consign it to the past and thus turn away from exploring it any further—as if

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the historical reckoning with that period were simply an issue for historians, not an unresolved problem in the present. The problem is not just Thrift, either. A phalanx of brilliant minds, from Howard Caygill, Wendy Chun, and Nigel Thrift to Timon Beyes and Claus Pias, all seem to head off in the direction of deflection rather than take up a project analogous to that embraced by contemporary Cold War studies’ critique of the social totality reflected in the hegemonic consensus of the day. Ultimately, Beyes and Pias’s proposal to respond to the absolutism of the present by going beyond an excavation of secreta and arcana is tantamount to a virtual declaration of voluntary, proactive compliance with a hypothetical cease-and-desist order emanating from the transnational “security-entertainment complex.” Arriving at the end of Beyes and Pias’s article, one starts to wonder why they were not interested in the problem of continuity amidst transition in relation to the Cold War. It is as if the “absolutism of the present” adds an element of excess, calling forth a supplement of deflection at the very moment when presence is invoked or encountered. Unlike the object of Cold War studies, this conspiratorial hegemony is taking place in the hereand-now manifestly connected to issues resurfacing from the first Cold War. One of the first questions to be asked is whether today’s university is not still as deeply inscribed in the “security-entertainment complex” of the present as yesterday’s university was inscribed in the “militaryindustrial complex” of the Cold War. For a scholarly discussion of a video game turned movie about a key historical trauma of the early Cold War that happened in Taiwan, this question is hardly irrelevant. Yet, whereas Cold War studies benefits from a temporal distance within the “absolutism of the present” to apprehend its object of study, media studies, finding itself without a ready-made form of distance, recreates such distance at the level of theory, providing a theoretical justification for abandoning critique of the social totality. That this abandonment takes the form of a capitulation to the present only reinforces the sense of symptomatic critique that pervades their article. The only clue that we could find to help us better understand this deflection lies in the appeal to melancholy (derived from Friedrich Kittler’s work) evoked in the conclusion. This is the same sort of affect that we can find in the deconstructionist philosophers who give an excellent map of Eurocentrism but fail to go beyond it themselves because of their own Eurocentric formation. Finally, we are led to reflect on the meaning this deflection has for social critique at the end of Pax Americana. Explicitly articulating their

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position in the wake of the Snowden leaks, Beyes and Pias implicitly fall on the side of those for whom the affair was all about executive power, corporate complicity, and the limits of civil liberties. The fact that Beyes and Pias then disqualify the validity of this perspective via the critique of transparency merely underlines the fact that they do not see anything more in the Snowden affair to begin with. Against this view, we hold that the primary issue at stake in the Snowden affair is not the anachronism of transparency, but the changing nature of transnationality induced by computational media in a global empire in the throes of decline that will resort to any form of hybrid warfare possible to maintain crumbling hegemony. Revealing a form of cross-border surveillance that involves many different intelligence agencies in many different nations while apparently obviating the need for translation, the Snowden leaks are all about transnational empire in the digital age. The absence of translation is only apparent, moreover, as the role of the global English that binds most of the core partner countries together—the so-called Five Eyes— is precisely that of a universal translation machine in the age of neoliberal globalisation. In talking about the changing nature of imperial transnationality, continuities with the Cold War, and English language dominance in the informational sphere, it is indeed impossible to avoid mentioning the Five Eyes. Dating back to World War II, this informal security alliance which gathers together the major, white-majority settler colonial nations of the former British Empire (the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, along with the UK, of course), has taken on, as the Snowden leaks show, new tasks in the age of computational media. Despite the public outrage, the Snowden leaks did nothing to limit the capabilities of the Five Eyes. On the contrary, key satellite client states and military allies of the United States such as Japan have more recently demanded its expansion, while Taiwanese government officials have publicly admitted that Taiwan shares military and intelligence information in real time with the Five Eyes. At a historical juncture when the Five Eyes are synonymous with a rearguard action to preserve the hegemonic global whiteness associated with the continuity between the British Empire and the American one from one Cold War to the next, the stakes of computational media in the construction of the present hegemony go well beyond the anachronism of transparency. Public debate over the role of the Five Eyes has difficulty leaving conspiracy theory behind. “Five Eyes today’s axis of white supremacy”

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barks the garish title of an editorial in the English-language version of the Global Times, a Chinese media site often described as “ultranationalist” in the Western press. Thoroughly caricatural in its truncated depiction, the Global Times ’s editorial nevertheless hits the mark with its own version of a “true” conspiracy theory: the Five Eyes is an attempt by the United States to create a “center of the West” on the basis of a bloc of nations joined together by the legacy of white settler colonialism who share the same language, a “strong sense of civilization superiority,” and similar extremist, right-wing movements in defence of fading white supremacy. In response to the editorial’s call for global politics to correspond more closely to the wants and needs of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants rather than “a tiny fraction” composed of white settler colonial nations, John Coyne, a program director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) resorts to postcolonial shaming in a blog post titled, “Criticism of Five Eyes points to flaws in China’s strategic thinking.” As if it were impossible for the researcher who sutures himself to whiteness and the West not to arrogate to herself the role of civilisational instructor, Coyne faults the Chinese for misunderstanding the benevolent grandeur of (Western) hegemony. “That kind of thinking conflates dominance and leadership,” Coyne fulminates, culminating in a “fundamental confusion over hegemony” (Coyne “Criticism of Five Eyes”). Not offering even a feigned denial of the centre-periphery dynamic, Coyne suggests instead that such typically neocolonial dynamics are justified by leadership. By the time he arrives at the blustery assertion that, “The global powerhouses in international relations are reliant not on coercion, threats or control but on leadership and influence” (ibid.), it becomes patently obvious that his blog post is not even addressed to the postcolonial world where American-sponsored regime change is a living, ongoing history. Coyne’s article is nothing more than an exercise in self-exoneration for white hegemony and its satellite clients. The fact that ASPI receives the lion’s share of its funding from the US defence industry—an industry valued larger than the size of that in the next ten nations combined—speaks more eloquently than anything Coyne writes about the true nature of “influence.” Claims by researchers such as Coyne concerning the alleged absence of “coercion, threats or control” on the part of global “powerhouses” whose military industrial financial complex funds their research reach a transparent level of propaganda that easily equals that of the “true” conspiracy theories pedalled by the state-run Global Times. As if the alignment between multifaceted power and whatever-centrism were the very basis of geopolitical

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legitimacy, Coyne’s homolingual address amounts to a caricatural return to transparency, in which the assumed congruence between power and legitimacy, English and truth, reaches pompous proportions. In a series of articles, John Price, a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria, examines the rise of the coalition of the white settler colonial states of Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand, and how they are, together with the UK, fomenting conflict in the Asia-Pacific today. Price’s description merits extensive citation: The Five Eyes spy network, representing the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, was established in 1948. Conventional histories portray its formation as the natural culmination of years of wartime collaboration in the fight against fascism. What that story conceals, however, is the common lineage of these countries as settler colonial states formed through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Ancient empires, including the Greek and Roman variants, often adopted forms of settler colonialism, but European expansion from Columbus onward shaped its modern guise. From the 1800s, the British empire and its settler offspring would come to the fore in the scramble for global power. Espousing liberalism and free trade while practicing white supremacy, this Anglo alliance was grounded in histories of dispossession of Indigenous peoples, global slavery, white domination, and racial capitalism that met resistance at every turn from the forces of decolonization and worker uprisings. The Second World War saw the British government increasingly dependent on US support. By the end of the war, the US displaced the UK as the most powerful force in the Anglo alliance. But it also faced the forces of decolonization at home, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, not to mention the challenge presented by the Soviet Union, particularly in Europe. With Great Britain in decline, Winston Churchill called for a united front of the Anglo alliance in his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946. With US President Harry Truman on the stage, Churchill declared that Soviet tyranny (an iron curtain) was descending over eastern Europe. What he conveniently omitted was that independence movements in India and elsewhere were laying siege to British colonialism and the Soviet Union refused to accept the liberal-capitalist paradigm of growth. To counter these challenges, Churchill proposed: Now, while still pursing the method of realizing our overall strategic concept, I come to the crux of what I have traveled here to say. Neither

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the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States… If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealth be added to that of the United States, with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe, and in science and industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure. On the contrary there will be an overwhelming assurance of security. This was a colonial call for unity, for the English-speaking AngloAmerican empires to band together in an alliance that would have the power to counter the effects of global decolonization as well as the perceived Soviet menace. The UK and its settler colonial offspring—the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—were to use their economic and cultural power, derived from Indigenous dispossession, global slavery, white supremacy, and racial capital, to establish Pax Americana with the ability to leverage support from non-Anglo allies including European nations and Japan. This was the alliance that spawned the Five Eyes spy network in 1948. It would play a decisive role in the post-war politics of race and empire in the Pacific as well as globally. (Price “The settler colonial origins of the Five Eyes alliance”)

While it is doubtful that a single discipline could fundamentally change the ideological alignment between ASPI’s imperial transparency and Audrey Tang’s postcolonial “radical transparency,” the absence of critical voices from media studies that are engaged in a critique of the present social totality—if indeed an absence there is—would tend to leave knowledge production in the same situation that it was in for much of the first Cold War, restricted to the “safe spaces” adjacent to hybrid war. The gravity of this situation has been noted by young researchers in Science and Technology Studies (STS) concerned with the “blackboxing” of China in the New Cold War. Reflecting on an alarming tendency in anglophone studies of China, Yuchen Chen, Alex Jiahong Lu, and Angela Xiao Wu call attention to, “a striking case where blackboxing a political and racial Other, and blackboxing nefarious new technologies, converge” (Chen et al. “China as a ‘Black Box?’” 7). The result is the formation of an “extraordinary academic ecology” (ibid., 6) that ends up “making China-related accounts extra-conducive to the imperatives of the Cold War mentality” (ibid.) that is currently undergoing, in their view, a widespread renaissance today. As a new Cold War takes

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hold and flows of all sorts from information and data to supply chains and migration have been heavily impacted, many voices in area studies have called for the kind of epistemological response exemplified by The Center for Strategic Translation (CST) established in 2022 by The American Governance Foundation to provide translations that would allow insight into the Chinese “black box.” A description of its activities on the CST’s website highlights the relation between the black box metaphor and open-source forensic analysis: China darkens as it climbs in power. Tools once used to interpret the People’s Republic of China avail no longer. Studying the Chinese system once meant conducting field surveys, interviewing Party officials, or traveling to archives in China. That era has ended. Archives are closing. Officials no longer grant interviews. Even traveling to China grows difficult. As the need to understand the PRC presses ever more urgent, accessing the ideas, intentions, and plans of China’s leadership has become more challenging. The future of Western-China relations now rests on “open source” analysis. This type of analysis is still possible—provided that sources are found and Westerners are taught how to read them. (The Center for Strategic Translation “Our Impact”)

Despite the vaguely theological rhetoric, CST’s position is hardly an outlier. “China Watching in the ‘New Era’: A Guide,” written by Charles Parton for the UK’s Council on Geostrategy, repeats the same ideas, albeit in less dramatic fashion. Both are representative of the tendency to respond to the contraction of cross-border information flows in China via blackboxing. For Chen et al., the phenomenon of “blackboxing” refers to an “epistemic act of othering that leads to ontological reification” (Chen et al. “China as a ‘Black Box?’” 3). In view of our discussions above about the “visor effect,” it is pertinent to note that blackboxing extends this effect to the informational and computational spheres, “wherein China is presumed as a veiled singular truth ‘out there’ and data [is seen] as resources for extracting this truth” (ibid.). In a curious inversion, the veiling effect of the “visor” is projected onto the other in a move that naturalises and hides the viewing subject’s own investment in practices that produce that “effect.” Of course, it would never occur to those concerned about China’s “darkening”—the implicitly racial and theological overtones are hard to miss—to contextualise those trends in terms of a relationship rather than in terms of a specifically Chinese problem.

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Yet, as Chen and her co-authors are quick to point out, the metaphor of the black box relies on an implicit bordering practice that presumes, “an ‘outside’ that is open, self-evident, accessible to all,” and, finally, “works to uphold a specific, self-contained ontology of this thing and specifies an external viewing position” (ibid.). It would be worth it, in this context, to call attention to the dearth of information publicly available about The American Governance Foundation that funds The Center for Strategic Translation. Seen in this context, Audrey Tang’s calls for a kind of “radical transparency” that excludes the conditions of platform capitalism and monopoly surveillance/data extraction are nothing more than expressions of the same ideological blackboxing of China as those advanced by Tanner Greer, director of The Center for Strategic Translation. As an outsider to the field, I feel somewhat caught between admiration for Beyes and Pias’s commitment to a critique of disciplinary knowledge in their field of specialisation and a creeping feeling of déjà vu concerning the political implications of that critique outside of their field. The tipping point in this tug-of-war occurs, for me, in the way they conceive of the transformations unleashed by cybernetics in terms of a return to premodern forms of ritual-based consensus: Consequently, the thesis that premodern concepts allow for a different and perhaps more adequate reflection of social organization in digital cultures could also be advanced in light of additional concepts and phenomena. For example, the “like” culture of so-called social media has less to do with modern participation than it does with premodern rituals. “Likes” seem to resemble more the états, cortes, or parliaments that were common from the late Middle Ages up into the eighteenth century. As rituals, they have a standardized and almost algorithmic form that guarantees their “correct” performance. They require a particular public sphere that confirms their social order without demanding any consensus regarding their significance. Rituals are performative—that is, productive instead of representational— and their performance is based on a purely external execution through which they reinforce the ongoing existence of institutions. Such forms of “participation,” to which modernity had put an end, were rituals of consensus and not negotiations of dissent. In fact, modernity disavowed just such rituals as the opposite of the political. They operated according to a sort of logic that has nothing to do with a participatory public sphere based on arguments and transparency. They were necessary and performative forms of participation within a non-future-oriented temporal order

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because they lacked the concept of decision-making itself. (Beyes and Pias “The Media Arcane,” 95–98)

Probably Beyes and Pias were not thinking of the non-West when they referred to the contemporary rituals of consensus that resemble a (European?) premodern era. Even though I share with Beyes and Pias a concern for dissensus over consensus, it is difficult, however, for me not to see in their analysis a typically Orientalist gesture that refuses co-temporality to the postcolonial other, projecting it instead onto the imperial centre’s past. Rather than seeking to understand how imperial information dominance translates into stultifying “rituals of consensus and not negotiations of dissent ” in postcolonial satellite nations such as Taiwan or in Five Eyes’ target nations such as China, Beyes and Pias seemingly abandon the field to a form of knowledge production that is reminiscent of that seen during the first Cold War. The fact that the “rituals of consensus ” are also becoming dominant in the former imperial centres as well as the postcolonial world is perhaps less a product of the anachronism of transparency and a return to the premodern than a testimony to the reactionary defence of class and racial privilege occurring in a crumbling settler colonial empire, where strategies for labour control formerly reserved for colonised populations are now being redeployed at home with increasing frequency. In American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, Aaron Good develops an argument about the relation between empire and hegemony in Pax Americana, which he sums up as follows: In sum, the stronger case is not that hegemony and empire are opposing ends on a continuum, but that the concepts are characterized more by overlap. This point is crucial to understanding the US-dominated world order established after World War II. To recap, Ikenberry claims that prior to 2001, the US was “liberal hegemonic” and after 2001, it took on imperial characteristics. Similarly, Doyle asserts that hegemonies do not control the internal politics of sovereign states. Any assertion that the postwar US was hegemonic fails to conform to Doyle’s definition, given the numerous cases in which the US did intervene to dramatically impact the internal politics of sovereign states. Similarly, Ikenberry’s assertion of America’s liberal hegemony ignores the repeated US violations of state sovereignty during this era. These US interventions served to forge an international order characterized by hierarchical relationships maintained to a considerable degree by elite networks in the hegemonic and subordinate states.

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Even so, no dominant power can rule wholly, or even mostly, by coercion. The consensual aspects of hegemony are essential. Therefore, it can be said that any empire must constantly endeavor to maintain its hegemony. In the case of the US-led world order, several points emerge. The US was in a historically unprecedented position of power after World War II. Capitalizing on its structural power, the US dominated the material, ideological, and institutional arenas of the world order which emerged. The US-led world order has been preserved and extended with varying degrees of consent along with covert or overt coercion, but always with the strategic goal of maintaining American hegemony. That the US has striven for imperial hegemony—i.e., hegemony in the pursuit of empire—is a foundational assumption of this work. The forces that compel the US to pursue empire are of key significance. (Good American Exception, 31)

Even though I only became aware of Good’s work in the late stages of revision of this manuscript, too late to engage with it more fully, I recognise its value in situating my own work here in this book, which ought to be seen as an exploration of the ways in which a hegemonic consensus has arisen in Taiwan within the framework of US imperial hegemony. Despite my criticisms of Beyes and Pias’s earlier work, I have been much more positively impressed by the direction Beyes has taken in his most recent work about the dialectic of transparency and secrecy in the platform society. In “Staying with the Secret: The Public Sphere in Platform Society,” Beyes refines the argument about the end of transparency previously developed in concert with Claus Pias, this time with more promising results. Beginning from the sober presupposition that the explosive dilation of the covert sphere into all aspects of social life is an axiomatic byproduct of the ubiquity of computational media, Beyes militates for us to abandon the residual modern fantasy of naïve transparency that he detects in Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, Surveillance Capitalism. In the machinic covert sphere, calls to make algorithmic ordering accountable—to open the black box, disclose the codes—come across like pretty fictions, perhaps returning us to a supposedly benign state of reciprocal capitalism such as the one envisioned and projected back by Zuboff. (Beyes “Staying with the Secret,” 122)

It is highly significant that Beyes returns, in the context of his appreciative criticism of Zuboff, to Nigel Thrift’s idea of the “security-entertainment

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complex” that motivated his reflections in the previous work with Pias. As I have argued above, the relation to Thrift’s work is symptomatically critical of a repressed relation to Cold War knowledge production. Significantly, Beyes sees Zuboff’s work, and that of Thrift as well, as forms of a “more paranoid mode of speculating about a new organizational complex” coalescing in the wake of computational media (ibid., 120). A dismissive intention is unmistakable. To characterise critique as “paranoid” is the last step before condemning it as conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, Beyes brings an undeniably important nuance to his project of abandoning the desire “to normatively resolve the dialectic of secrecy and public sphere toward one side or the other or to reject it altogether” (ibid.). Whether one sees Beyes’s position as cynical or innovative may depend in the final analysis on the bordering practices to which one is sensitised. Now that we have seen how the social totality might be fruitfully associated with the world market in the sense described above (i.e., not as an aggregation but as a process of bordering), we dispose of an intriguing way to avoid, as Beyes would urge, normative resolutions of the dialectic of secrecy while still bringing totality back into social critique even after the demise of the unified revolutionary subject. In that vein, Beyes’ advocacy of “the radicality of thinking secrecy as constitutive for publicness” (ibid.) resonates with previous critiques of the instrumental and communicational view of language, such as the Marxist-inspired critique of the “ideology of communication” launched by Jean-Jacques Lecercle (see A Marxist Philosophy of Language, page 66 passim) and the theory of heterolingual address elaborated by Naoki Sakai (see “Introduction: Writing for Multiple Audiences and the Heterolingual Address” in Translation and Subjectivity). In A Marxist Philosophy of Language, Lecercle rejects the idea that language can be thought of in terms of the principles of “transparency” (68) and “functionality” (ibid.) and instead proposes placing “opacity” (71) and “dysfunctionality” (70) at the heart of our understanding of language. Refusing the notion that language can be thought of as a tool, i.e., as something that is exterior to the user and which can thus be objectivised, Lecercle begins with the conundrum of metalinguistic recursivity (the fact that we can only talk about language with the assistance of language, or again, the everyday, unconscious choices that lead individual speakers to choose one locution over another) as a point of departure rather than an exception for understanding subjective formation. In parallel fashion, Sakai advocates beginning with the presupposition that communication is not defined

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by transparency but by failure and that failure cannot be ascribed to the supposed exteriority of one language to another or to the exteriority of a referent to its sign. Just as Beyes might suggest, translation in the sense proposed by Sakai could no longer be conceived as an act of “decoding” undertaken by a competent translator versed in two different code systems. In lieu of assuming the transparency of communication among native speakers as an epistemological a priori, one might instead contemplate how a politics of post-secrecy could be articulated to a universal translational practice against the ideology of communication. Clearly, the parallels between “radical secrecy,” the heterolingual address, and a Marxist critique of the ideology of communication are perfectly plausible. Indeed, the penultimate sentence that ends Beyes’s article, in which he asks, “whether a civic mechanism of arcane socialization will develop that might give rise to a greater public[?]” (ibid., 123), poses precisely the question of a “nonaggregate community” (Sakai Translation and Subjectivity, 4) such as that which might be formed via the heterolingual address. It is somewhat disappointing, however, that Beyes ends his reflections with the hermeneutical notion of horizon, expressed in what he takes to be the truism that, “the politics of radical secrecy… [is] unthinkable without the horizon of the public sphere” (ibid.). A generous reading might see in this inexplicable tautology the anodyne need to find a quick and tidy way to end the article within the journal’s word limit, but this is hardly an explanation. To understand what is at stake, I take as a point of reference the work that Naoki Sakai has been doing to clarify the conceptual distinction between internationality and transnationality— work in which the notion of horizon is key. Basically, Sakai holds that internationality assumes a kind of transcendental or “aerial” position from which terrestrial space can be partitioned into areas, as vividly illustrated by the Mercator projection. Transnationality, on the other hand, constitutes a rejection of the areal/aerial viewpoint, revealing instead the singularity of bordering practices that occur within a certain horizon. Among the leading figures of the hermeneutical school, however, there is a marked tendency to conflate the phenomenological horizon with an areal border—specifically the borders of “Europe” and the “European tradition.” This confusion leads to an identification of the horizon of the public sphere with the schema of internationality that issues from the modern regime of translation—precisely the schema that “radical secrecy”

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would abandon if it were analogous to the practice of (radical) translation. For that reason, let us keep in mind that it is not because we can anticipate an entirely different social formation or world schema on the horizon of the immediate future that we criticise plurilingualism in favour of the heterolingual address, but rather because the examination of singular bordering practices such as translation within a certain horizon calls for a different understanding of sociality. I understand this critique to be oriented towards an opening up of social practice that would help institute new disciplines of knowledge production, while new disciplines of knowledge production would conversely help institute social practices in a different light. On the way to the creation of those new disciplines of knowledge production, it is essential to recognise the extent to which many of those disciplines that gestated during the Cold War period and beyond under Pax Americana hegemony are fundamentally invested in the epistemology of the secret. Conceptually speaking, area studies are founded on this premise, not simply because the exotic area that serves as an object for specialised knowledge is indecipherable to the majority of inhabitants in the postimperial nations but primarily because the creation of specialists to whom the work of translation can be conferred serves to normalise and legitimate the status of all those working in ostensibly “external” fields, as well as the public at large, who are not required to acquire “specialist” competence such as the mastery of postcolonial languages. The existence of area studies inaugurates a subjective stance sustained by an epistemology of the secret anchored in the apparatus of area and anthropological difference—what US Japanologist Patricia Steinhoff once memorably called “cracking the kanji code” (cited in Tansman “Japanese Studies,”3). Area studies are related to intelligence agencies of the (post)imperial state not just by virtue of a constitutive investment in the ideological appropriation of transition, epitomised by ideas such as “democratic transition” and practices of “regime change,” but also by an investment in the subjective stance harnessed to the epistemology of the secret. Understanding the epistemological roots of the subjective stance of the area studies under Pax Americana helps us to further understand the structural reasons why area studies born out of the Cold War outlived the end of that period and grafted themselves successfully onto the presuppositions of the neoliberal Washington Consensus that succeeded the Cold War. The key to that continuity lies precisely in the role of

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epistemology. As the economist Philip Mirowski—one of the most original and penetrating critics of neoliberalism—maintains, neoliberalism is above all an epistemological project: “neoliberalism masquerades as a radically populist philosophy, which begins with a set of philosophical theses about knowledge and its relation to society” (Mirowski “Postface: Defining Neoliberalism,” 425). Writing about the intellectuals in the Mont Pèlerin Society at the core of the neoliberal ideology, Mirowski astutely observes that “their primary tool was redefining the place of knowledge in society, which also became the central theme in their theoretical tradition” (431). From this perspective, the market was “posited to be an information processor more powerful than any human brain, but essentially patterned on brain/computation metaphors ” (435; emphasis in the original). In other words, neoliberalism is not simply an economic theory, it is also—and primarily—a theory of cybernetic control for the totalised technical society. Despite the populist rhetoric of freedom and transparency, neoliberalism’s epistemological stance favours a hierarchy of truths and leadership shrouded in the secrecy of totalisation: “The Russian Doll of neoliberal organization was never intended to be transparent; the central core was not supposed to be visible from the think tank perimeter” (432). If, as Mirowski contends, neoliberalism is based in an epistemological project with a populist appearance wedded to hierarchies of accumulation, the social institution that epitomises that project more than any other is Wikipedia. As Mirowski points out, “Wikipedia owes its very conception to explicit neoliberal doctrine” (Mirowski “Defining Neoliberalism,” 417); its founder, Jimmy Wales, “claims that he got the idea for the site from his reading of Friedrich Hayek’s famous article on ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society,’ the ur-text of the [neoliberal] Mont Pèlerin thought collective” (423). As Mirowski explains: Wales subscribes to the precept that objective knowledge is a state rarely attained by any individual because his or her experience is subjective and idiosyncratic; that no individual is capable of understanding social processes as a whole; and that individual beliefs are frequently wonky beyond repair, but given appropriate (market-like) aggregation mechanisms for information, the system ends up arriving at the truth through ‘free’ entry and exit. Furthermore, these aggregation systems themselves emerge willy-nilly through something resembling evolution, and not from the visions of some rational planner. Knowledge in this schema is frequently treated as though

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it were a disembodied “thing,” and consequently human progress comes from the accumulation of information at various technological sites, which then serve to convey the relevant stuff to its decentralized user base. (423)

A rejection of the possibility of creating critical knowledge about the social totality is thus the starting point for Wikipedia’s quintessentially neoliberal project. Ironically, the symptoms of the demise of revolutionary perspectives on the social totality are not limited to conspiracy theories but include the stalwarts of neoliberal civil society like Wikipedia, as well. In place of the revolutionary apprehension of the social totality with an eye to subjective transformation, neoliberalism assumes that an epistemology of the secret is the only viable way to meet the challenge of handling the information explosion unleashed by the technical society. The mechanisms governing the handling of this secret are themselves black box-like, wholly untransparent and impossible to represent rationally, yet possessed of an autonomous technical rationality that makes them “just work” for the end user—who is, one surmises, herself radically transformed by the process of technological totalisation in which she is involved. As Mirowski demonstrates, the hierarchy of access that forms the core of neoliberalism’s graded levels of knowledge is a crucial part of what I am calling the epistemology of the secret that motivates neoliberal theory. It should be clear from this cursory description of Mirowski’s critique of neoliberalism that area studies not only occupy a positionality that is epistemologically adjacent to the imperial national security state, they are also constitutionally implicated in the epistemological stance proposed by neoliberalism as a “solution” to the challenges of a globalised world tendentially heading towards technological totalisation. In short, area studies are bound, in different ways, to both the national security state and the neoliberal economic and political project via an epistemology of the secret. No doubt these epistemological commitments are what accounts for the relative ease with which area studies survived the transition from the end of the Cold War to the era of full-fledged neoliberalism. Considerations such as these make it difficult to subscribe without reservation to the notion of “forensic aesthetics” elaborated by Eyal Weizman, via the open-source intelligence (OSINT) group he founded with a grant from the European Research Council at Goldsmith’s College

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in 2010, Forensic Architecture. The fruit of nearly two decades of practical work and theoretical reflection, Weizman’s Investigative Aesthetics, co-authored with University of London colleague Matthew Fuller, promises to respond to the epistemology of the secret in a revolutionary way. Weizman, Fuller, and Forensic Architecture’s accomplishments in developing the innovative techniques of open-source intelligence and professional technical expertise to reconstruct war crimes (such as those committed by the Israeli state), and state/right-wing violence (such as that committed against migrants in Europe), are not just impressive demonstrations of creativity and cooperation (often soliciting active participation from the communities of the victims), they also potentially shed light on the way technological totalisation proceeds via surreptitious bordering practices crucial to the spectral transitions and global cartography of capitalist reproduction. Investigative Aesthetics is marred, however, by an odd mixture of sophistry and gullibility—or perhaps, less generously, complicity—that is most evident in descriptions related to the OSINT group Bellingcat, a major partner for many years of Forensic Architecture’s investigative activities. Curiously, in their discussion of what they consider to be Bellingcat’s success in assigning responsibility for the alleged chemical attacks in Douma, Syria, and the Novichok poisoning in Salisbury, UK, Weizman and Fuller neglect to discuss the extreme politicisation of these events by the very type of state agencies that Forensic Architecture specifically, and “forensic aesthetics” theory more generally, aspires to avoid. Not a word is said about the elaborately presented objections to the claims made by Bellingcat, not even to dismiss them as the work of “useful idiots” purveying conspiracy theories and/or propaganda useful to authoritarian or even genocidal states in Syria and Russia. (A series of highly detailed, in-depth exposés debunking claims about the Douma chemical attacks, largely authored by Aaron Maté and some of which was presented in remarks before the UN Security Council, can be accessed on The Grayzone, a controversial website that Wikipedia has banned on the grounds of it being a “deprecated source”; see The Grayzone “OPCW Douma” for details. Concerning the Novichok poisoning, the Russia-based Australian journalist, or Russian state propagandist, John Helmer has published a book and a series of blogposts debunking such claims. Former UK diplomat Craig Murray, who is also an outspoken supporter of Julian Assange and a proponent of Scottish Independence, has also published a series of blogposts questioning the UK government’s account of the

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case; see “Novichok related blogposts” on Craig Murray for details.) To deny that such controversies exist, or again, to dismiss them a priori on account of a political assessment concerning their reliability is an inexplicable choice given the book’s subject matter. In the context of a critical discussion of the conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation that together constitute the “anti-epistemology” flooding society today, such omissions reproduce rather than displace the “othering” and “bordering” presuppositions that make propaganda into something that happens elsewhere, not here. Citing Bellingcat, not to mention repeatedly partnering with that organisation, without addressing Bellingcat’s alleged connections with British intelligence (see Klarenberg, “Bellingcat funded by US and UK intelligence”; Macleod “How Bellingcat Launders National Security State Talking Points Into the Press”; and Kennard and Curtis “‘CIA Sidekick’ Gives £2.6M to UK Media Groups”; James “The Bellingcat research collective: War propaganda masquerading as ‘citizen journalism’”; Wikispooks “Bellingcat”) is like talking about Wikipedia without noting, as Philip Mirowski does, that Jimmy Wales’s inspiration was Hayek—an essential point of departure for understanding in turn how Wikipedia works, occasionally in tandem with intelligence agencies, to produce an image of horizontal plurality that is nevertheless organised vertically and, when deemed necessary, stifles dissensus (Norton “Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing”; Norton and Blumenthal “Meet Wikipedia’s Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundation’s regime-change operative CEO”). That, in turn, would suggest a failure to grasp neoliberalism’s epistemological investments, i.e., Mirowski’s claim that, “What holds neoliberals together first and foremost is a set of epistemic commitments’” (Mirowski “Defining Neoliberalism,” 417). It might explain why Weizman and Fuller speak of a “liberal epistemic order” rather than a neoliberal one: If the attack on mainstream, established, institutional expertise by antiepistemology is a quest for the destruction of the old order and the seizure of authoritarian affective power, a tempting response to it might be to buttress the familiar custodians of factual authority, the academy, journalism, public administration, the judiciary, the police, perhaps even the FBI or other intelligence services that seem to be holding together the ‘liberal epistemic order’. To start championing the power of institutional expertise as such, rather than requiring its passage through critical evaluation,

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would leave us to simply believe in the now quaint institutions of state. This would swap one mechanics of falsehood for another, recursing into a political-cultural battle of attrition. (Weizman and Fuller Investigative Aesthetics, 22; emphasis added)

Writing over a year prior to the revelations of the Twitter Files, Weizman and Fuller could not have been aware of the extent to which the FBI and the Pentagon, among many other US government agencies, were directly involved in the regulation and control of social media, not just in terms of algorithms and access but also in terms of deliberately spreading partial truths or misinformation that conformed to the ideological or policy aims of those agencies (for information relative to the Pentagon, see Greene “Under Musk, Twitter Continues to Promote US Propaganda Networks”) while deleting or curbing the spread of information that even the agencies themselves knew to be truthful but which controverted the agencies’ political agenda or ideology (such as the FBI in relation to disclosures about Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 presidential election, which the FBI knew to be authentic yet publicly claimed was a product of Russian disinformation). Yet Weizman and Fuller certainly would have been aware at the time of writing of the elevated status enjoyed by the FBI among Americans who approved of the activist role played by US intelligence agencies and officials, such as James Comey (under whose direction the FBI had been involved in the spurious Steele dossier compiled at the request of the Clinton campaign to incriminate Donald Trump) and James Clapper (who committed blatant perjury as Director of National Intelligence when he denied the existence of the surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden before the US Congress in 2013), in controversies surrounding Donald Trump and the bitterly contested claims of Russian electoral interference that allegedly gave Trump the election in 2016 (see Sakwa Deception: Russiagate and the New Cold War; Zollman “Manufacturing a New Cold War: The National Security State, ‘Psychological Warfare,’ and the ‘Russiagate’ Deception”; Taibbi “It’s Official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD”; O’Brien “No, Russiagate Isn’t This Generation’s WMD”; and, finally, the comprehensive account in Columbia Journalism Review of calculated collusion among US media corporations in the dissemination of disinformation by Jeff Gerth, a respected investigative journalist who spent 29 years at The New York Times, Gerth, “The press versus the president”).

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Rather than inquire into how the “epistemic order” guarded by the intelligence services might be implicated or related—however directly or indirectly—to the production of knowledge about global areas and populations under conditions of neoliberal global capitalism, Weizman and Fuller offer instead a palliative rejection of the state, as if the protocols of open source constitute in and of themselves a mechanism for the processing of information that will be truthful precisely to the extent that any vestige of ideological claims to represent the social totality or indeed provide any perspective on it all will have been disqualified. Delegitimation of critiques of the social totality is a heavy price to pay for uncovering punctual instances of political violence, a price, moreover, that is the entry ticket common to conspiracy theories in general. Furthermore, one cannot help but notice that the institutional life of Forensic Architecture within the British university and EU funding structures could be the perfect avatar for the post-1990s entrepreneurial academic scene. Some commentators will want to pose the question of influence directly, as Angela Ambrose has done in a discussion of Bellingcat and others: “One may question whether an organizations’ projects are motivated, perhaps at least in part, by their partners and financial supporters” (Ambrose “What happens when open source data and citizen evidence becomes a resource for human rights investigators?” 7). Ambrose does not offer any further information, leaving readers with the dissatisfying option of conjecture. Often, the questions we should be asking are not those of “influence” but rather those that concern a subtle formation in the desire to know. A combination of grants from state-based funding agencies and opportunities for professional advancement can, for instance, form an incentive structure that favours the consolidation of a consensus around rights discourse durable enough to incorporate opposition while leaving intact the structures of neoliberal economy and neoconservative global primacy. This constellation of incentive structures and discourse gets very close to that adopted by Wikipedia, albeit with a much greater display of technical prowess—to the point of becoming spectacle. Weizman and Fuller’s laudable rejection of the FBI’s “liberal epistemic order” overlooks that which is proper to the neoliberal epistemic order. Compared to some of the effects that the group Forensic Architecture has produced in the real world—challenging the powerful, incriminating security agents, and rendering justice to disempowered migrants,

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minority, and stateless populations against political violence—my evaluation of Weizman and Fuller’s work borders on the meaningless. Indeed, the only meaning it could have would be if it were understood not as a criticism but as a call for a program to bring perspectives on the social totality back into view. A project in rendering justice to the victims of political violence without a theory and practice of non-capitalist, decolonial transition is a symptom of the historical defeat of the Left, as if the only viable choice today were to fulfil Jacques Ellul’s Eurocentric, anticommunist vision, pronounced on the eve of the French Communist Party’s historic abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat: “If the Left were playing its proper role, it would be promoting life, freedom, and the individual” (Ellul The Betrayal of the West, 143). Ellul’s vision of the vanguard political force that he expects the Left to be is invariably tied to an explicit geo-localisation of the vanguard region of history. Premised on the fantasy of the West and the cartography of the West-andthe-Rest that results from such fantasy, Ellul’s vision of techno-politics not only reifies but in fact actively valorises what STS researchers call the standpoint, “foregrounding the role of material infrastructures, research positionality, and power relations” (Chen et al. “China as ‘Black Box?’” 2) that conspire to produce a “social and technical location” (ibid., 4). To conclude: The collaboration with and admiration for Bellingcat without any consideration of the potential complexities in Bellingcat’s relation to intelligence, security, and military agencies ultimately reveals neither a lapse of investigative prowess on the part of Forensic Architecture and the authors of Investigative Aesthetics nor an active endorsement of “adjacent” knowledge production. After all, Weizman and Fuller have expressed unequivocal opposition to the “persecution” of Julian Assange (Weizman and Fuller Investigative Aesthetics, 138). Rather, it signals a naturalised or normalised acceptance of the accumulated historical defeats experienced by the anticapitalist, anticolonial Lefts in the long twentieth century. (The term “defeat” is not meant to convey passivity; indeed, some of these defeats have been self-inflicted). Something of this kind of acceptance is what lies behind Jacques Ellul’s judgement that the “future of man and mankind” will not only be “determined in the accursed West” (144), but that the West as an avatar of universal progress must be led by the “authentic leftists” (145) to achieve this task. This belief in the geolocation of authenticity—seen in the stubborn belief that the West is the source of progressive politics—is a condition for the sort of acceptance that is necessary to assent to, consciously or not, the substitute for

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a political program proposed by Ellul: “For the movement of history to continue, there must be a radical challenging of the state … and of technique” (Ellul The Betrayal of the West, 143–144). Today’s OSINT groups are the heirs of Ellul’s post-leftist, occidentalist standpoint. If this tacit acceptance—unstated because “political violence” is understood to be the most eloquent testimony of its necessity—is invisible within Weizman and Fuller’s book, the reason for that invisibility lies with the neoliberal epistemology of the secret that pervades the silence around Bellingcat. The neoliberal epistemology in turn has to be related to the epistemology of area studies, namely, the persistence of the West as an organising trope for global relations and knowledge production about areas in general—even those ostensibly organised around the trope of decolonisation. In order to excavate this blindspot and, in the process, tie together many of the themes that have concerned us in this section, it would be helpful to recall that forensic or investigative aesthetics is essentially a response to the fundamental challenge posed by globalisation, “the reality that there is no longer any immediately universal standard or norm that we can turn to and make absolute measurements with” (Weizman and Fuller Investigative Aesthetics, 22). What is being euphemistically called “measure” here essentially amounts to the standards of imperial nationalism that acquire “universal” significance. If particularism proliferates to the extent that even universals appear particularistic, it may seem as if a “loss” of measure has occurred. In truth, what is at stake is a readjustment in the hegemonic complicity between universalism and particularism, rather than their opposition. “Globalisation” could thus be seen as a historic response to the collapse of modern imperialism and an attempt to reconstitute imperial control on an entirely different basis. In the geopolitical sphere, such reconstitution takes the shape of the innovations brought by Pax Americana, which promotes the recognition, rather than the repression, of the multitude of postcolonial sovereignties and minority identities as part of its mechanism of control. In the economic sphere, the postfordist response to this readjustment has been to promote outsourcing while imposing measures external to production via the mechanisms of intellectual property rights (IPR). This formula applies equally to immaterial as well as material production. In relation to the modern university, IPR is the lever at the core of the neoliberal reorganisation of the university. In the sphere of knowledge production in the university-based humanities, the measure imposed by IPR has been crucial to the establishment of quantitative metrics of evaluation responsible for

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transforming the humanities from an institution of national translation into an institution of logistical transfer and accumulation (for more on this process, see Solomon “The Performativity of Indexing”). Weizman and Fuller propose something very different and potentially quite radical: [T]he investigative mode is also a challenge to systems such as the university’s arrangement of forms of knowledge. Pursuing investigation as an intellectual form of engagement requires different forms of pedagogy. The university is, of course, not only an authority-giving framework, but also based on the disciplinary logic of the division of knowledge and the budgetary silos, citation wells and rivalries that go with it. Such a structure is itself a legacy of modernisation with its entanglement with empire and colonisation. As new kinds of enquiry are pursued, adequate forms of pedagogy will become necessary. (Weizman and Fuller Investigative Aesthetics, 27)

The advantage of transforming the disciplinary logic of the university via a pedagogical approach is that it potentially places the subjective formation of the researcher at the heart of knowledge production rather than objective-oriented metrics and object-oriented fields. Unfortunately, it leaves intact that other legacy of colonisation and empire, the areal/aerial principle that links disciplinary divisions to anthropological difference codified into language-culture areas. The way this configuration remains intact is not obvious but can be helpfully illuminated by a close reading of Jeff Barda’s intriguing commentary on Investigative Aesthetics in a short article for a special issue of the French journal Multitudes on OSINT published in 2022: In the absence of the “outside” in which only the logic of the “inside” prevails—the logic, in other words, of saturated immanence, closure, and hierarchy—these practices [of forensic or investigative aesthetics] reintroduce heterogeneity, the residual, and alterity. Following the Heraclitean logic of flows, “linear, or forming circles closed upon themselves,” and which very often give us the impression of being disoriented, led astray, or lost, these practices propose to reorganise, to redispose, thus creating different, or again, the distance (écart ) … via the slowing down, the enlargement, exemplification, expansion or reconfiguration of data. How thus to orient oneself geographically and logically in the midst of these flows? (Barda “Les pratiques poétiques à l’ère de l’OSINT,” 131)

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Barda’s comments confirm our analysis of the conjunctural nature of forensic or investigative aesthetics as a political response to the normalisation of the defeat of the Left via the trope of “globalisation.” Citing the concept of immanence from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire to explain the meaning of the outside, Barda leaves unchallenged the hegemonic narrative that proclaims the end of the outside. Certainly, nothing appears more justified than the acceptance of this end game, which appears virtually irrefutable: Today there is no outside to capitalism. What this truism excludes from view, however, is that capitalism, or more precisely the capital relation, is entirely dependent on retrospectively recreating the image of the outside—especially one that has been “lost”—to hide its own spectral exteriority. A complete explanation of this ruse will have to await Part II. For the time being, it is enough to notice that this principle can be applied to subjective formation with the same ease with which it is applied to cultural objects, turning subjectivity into objects of study. The new, radical pedagogy of forensic aesthetics thus remains bound to a distribution of the capitalist outside—yet another form of “measure”—codified into a new form of empire defined by the universalism of particularity (or again, by the complicity between the two): a more general sense that it is necessary to mark a further shift in the way in which human understanding ceases to be locked in geostationary orbit onto a particularly gilded fraction of the human population. The West, and the global North, are provincial; their epistemic cultures can learn a little reticence. (Weizman and Fuller Investigative Aesthetics, 28)

Calling for the “provincialisation” of the West is ultimately an indirect way of preserving the global cartography, or world schema, inherited from the colonial–imperial modernity. While it does diminish to a certain extent the stature of the historical West, it does not transform the relationship of the West—a type of relationship reified into the format of areas. Provincialisation in this sense simply turns a reified colonial relationship into a template for the naturalisation of the capitalist outside disguised as a particularistic geocultural location. When Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe appeared at the beginning of the new millennium, the novelty of the idea made up for its inherent deficiencies (I discuss some of these shortcomings in relation to the modern regime of translation in the appendix to Zuoyi baibei de xipu “The Genealogy of the Defeat of

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the Left” in Chinese). Today, nothing is more common—at least on the progressive side of cultural institutions—than to naturalise the template of area and the aerial positionality on which it relies behind the façade of geocultural particularism. For a sense of the possibility of bringing concern with the social totality back into forensic or investigative aesthetics, Anselm Franke’s intervention in “The Forensic Scenography” is highly suggestive. Harkening to the etymology of the term in the Latin word forensis, Franke envisions the “forum” instantiated by the forensic act as a “paradigmatic site of translation, mediation, and figuration” (Franke “The Forensic Scenography,” 483). Against this promising background, Franke’s reinterpretation of the famous “Earthrise” photograph from 1968 as “a monstrous forensic object in the form of a global public and global visibility regime” (484; emphasis added) heightens the sense of anticipation. Perhaps the only way to reintroduce social totality back into the vision of the Left is via the concepts of the monster and the spectre as Derrida would define them. Yet, there is an undeniable danger to this approach. Probably because of his role as curator, rather than “investigator,” Franke grasps with alacrity the ambivalence of the forensic approach: “[F]orensics is based on technologies of identification and fixation, and … these very same technologies are the basis of mass entertainment, as exemplified by the development of games both for military and consumer purposes” (493). The validity of Franke’s assessment of the “security-entertainment complex” can be inferred by its high level of applicability to Detention, both as video game and as cinema of traumatic and potentially weaponised identity. Against this application, Franke optimistically detects an alternative possibility for forensics. Beautiful and problematic, Franke’s description merits full citation: On the other hand, there is a forensic momentum that refers to a restless modern past that is currently being exhumed, unburied, and investigated, at a time when not just the nature of violence, but also the means of holding perpetrators accountable, are dramatically changing. The forensic here can serve the identitarian agenda of states or certain minorities, but it can also be essentially turned against state and symbolic power. The countless restitution claims concerning not only artifacts, but also human remains, which museums and other institutions are currently facing from victims of violence and formerly colonized people, further testify to the

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scope of forensic aesthetics as a mode not only of restoration of histories/continuities otherwise lost, but of their active construction. Forensic identification serves to establish “truth” as a means of the reconstruction of social bonds that have been destroyed, of different possible societies, a task which is most often related in this context to the identification of human remains. A map of exhumations of sites of political violence would show that we can truly speak of a global momentum, which points to a universal dimension of political violence in modernity and in the name of the state—a “negative” universality, to be sure, but one whose explication provides a possible “common ground,” a basis on which we can imagine what is missing from actual universality. (494)

If Franke’s approach is both beautiful and problematic, it is precisely on account of the clarity with which he perceives the risk of forensics in terms of identitarian agendas while conceding barely a faint hope to universalism. As the preceding discussion of David Wang’s forensic approach to the alleged violence of Chinese history has revealed, forensics can easily sustain the areal/aerial structure of modern internationality even when opposing political violence. In effect, there are two versions of forensic aesthetics: one that is positive and another that is negative. While Weizman and Fuller probably never encountered forensics in this context, the organisation of the modern humanities under Pax Americana has long made space for entire fields and disciplines to be organised around the negative version of forensic aesthetics. The official institutional name for those fields is area studies. Combining anti-state statism with concern for identities and involvement with the “victim communities themselves,” negative forensic aesthetics is nothing but the operational mode of institutional area studies. In principle, this mode consists of several steps, including naturalised bordering practices, forensic identification, subjective formation via cofiguration, accusation or criminalisation of the other, and, finally, the elaboration of an alibi for the self. The difference with Weizman and Fuller’s positive type of forensic aesthetics lies in the overtly ideological aspect of the version practised by area studies—never more so than when it claims the transparency of “essentialist universalism”— precisely to the extent that area studies always presupposes ideology as something that happens over there, on the other side of the border. If the link to area studies never occurred to them, it was almost certainly because Weizman and Fuller never felt it necessary to engage that context. We would rather phrase it as an issue of disciplinary subjective formation, an

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institutional structure of feeling, rather than an individual disposition. As Yuchen Chen and her co-authors remind us, this structural, rather than individual, disposition, “is particularly salient in Media and Communication Studies and Information Sciences, which, compared to other social science disciplines, lack the tradition of localized area-specific research” (Chen et al. “China as ‘Black Box?’” 6). Within that institutional locus, it was not necessary or possible to historicise the negative institutional precursors to the positive version of forensics. Hence, there was no need to clarify the historical conditions for the “investigative” or “forensic” aspect of the aesthetics Weizman and Fuller advocate beyond some superficial remarks in the preface about globalisation. The oft-mentioned idea taken up by Weizman and Fuller of globalisation as a period distinguished by the loss of standard or common measure should not only be reinterpreted as a moment internal to the reproduction of the capitalist outside after the loss of formal colonial empire, it should also serve as a trace of the unacknowledged historical defeats of the anticolonial socialist left that inform the book’s aesthetics. In effect, the positive version of forensic aesthetics achieves its positive aspect via a certain normalising acceptance of prior political defeats, the memory of which are suppressed via condensation into the category of political violence. As a crucial targeting mechanism for the delivery of political violence, identity is not just a problem of “states and [their] minorities,” it is also a problem of the epistemologies that articulate identities to secrets. The most banal meaning of this articulation is given expression in the oftheard idea that others cannot understand our victimisation because they have not personally undergone such experience. While the problem of socially constructed privilege and immunity is a pressing issue for the decolonisation of knowledge, the reification of the link between knowledge and experience prevents the development of solidarity via critiques of the social totality. In this case, it utterly fails to acknowledge that the naturalisation of the assignation of identities is itself a form of political violence—one that quite possibly stems from the primary political violence associated with the management of the outside under capitalist regimes of accumulation. For Marxist theory, political violence has always referred first and foremost to the quotidian violence inscribed in the commodification of labour. When the concept of political violence is restricted to a positivistic meaning that excludes the violence of abstraction, the possibilities for non-capitalist, decolonial transition are stunted if not eliminated. In the final analysis, a cartography of political violence

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narrowly understood, however much necessary and useful, hardly opens a vista onto the social totality. It does not produce a new, non-colonial, non-capitalist world schema nor an alternative to areas. Even if identities could be turned against the state and symbolic power, as we all would hope along with Anselm Franke, how could one expect that they would not be recuperated by the neoliberal “solution” of using identity to “resolve” the problems of the capitalist outside—the problem of globalisation with which Investigative Aesthetics begins? Why is this approach any better than toiling instead, or as well, to radically update anticolonial socialist projects discredited in the eyes of many by past events of political violence and the betrayal of revolutionary ideals? It seems that the answers to such questions will always return us back to the neoliberal configuration of “life, freedom, and the individual” implicitly tied to the fantasy of the West (Ellul) unless we can take new inspiration from the initial brilliance of “translation, mediation, and figuration” (Franke) and radicalise our understanding of those terms for the purpose of creating an authentic planetary “monstrosity” in the Derridean sense (something like the figure of “black communism” that we discuss in Part II, perhaps).

Human Rights Discourse and Transitional Justice Based on our analysis of different aspects of the Taiwan Consensus detailed above, we can now turn to a sustained discussion of the true core of that consensus which lies in an understanding of Taiwanese history as reflected in the narratives of transitional justice. Finally, at the end of this chapter which concludes our discussion in Part I, we will offer an idea for how to reconceptualise transitional justice in a way that relies on translation rather than on hegemonic consensus. In an English-language article on the subject of transitional justice in Taiwan penned by Ernest Caldwell that has become a ubiquitous point of reference for studies in English, Caldwell identifies three distinct periods of human rights abuses in modern Taiwanese history. The first of these occurred after Japan annexed Taiwan in 1895 following a war with the Qing Dynasty. The main victims of this abuse were members of Taiwan’s indigenous populations. The abuses and expropriation suffered by these victims have remained under-recognised to the present day; no process of transitional justice or restoration of lands ensued after the end of Japanese annexation and Taiwan’s indigenous population remains the

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island’s largest subaltern community. The second event of historical injustice was the February 28 Incident that occurred in 1947, leading to a bloody repression of the local population. Caldwell claims the victims of this repression were local Taiwanese and did not include diasporic populations from the Chinese mainland, the so-called waishengren (extraprovincial persons) that had started flocking to the island after the end of hostilities with Japan. This view of the identity of the victims has been contested in Taiwan notably by the oral historian Lan Bozhou. The third period of historical injustice in Taiwan concerns the period from 1949 to 1989, known as the White Terror, when the KMT ruled Taiwan through a suspension of the Constitution by martial law. The victims of this period included many waishengren. The concept of transitional justice arrived belatedly in Taiwan during the early 2000s (see Wang Horng-luen “Women neng hejie gongsheng ma?” for a brief history of the concept’s translation into the Taiwanese public sphere), eventually becoming government policy under the administration of Tsai Ing-wen with the creation of the Transitional Justice Commission (TJC) in 2018, culminating in the Commission’s Final Task Report in 2022. As the TJC’s final report makes clear, the main precedents and guidelines that informed the work of the Commission were those drawn from the United States Institute of Peace, the International Center for Transitional Justice, the United Nations, and the German Federal Republic—all of which generally agree on the conceptual framework of human rights discourse promoted by US foreign policy. We will address some of the transnational aspects of transitional justice in the following section. The process of addressing transitional justice after democratisation in 1987 was incessantly deferred in a process that Yen-tu Su has called, with qualified admiration for its salubrious restraining effects, “majoritarian muddling through” (Su “Transitional Justice and Political Compromise in Taiwan,” 3). The end of Martial Law on July 15, 1987 roughly coincided with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Fearful of demands for retribution from those parts of the population that were not satisfied with the narrative of beneficiaries, the KMT government promulgated the National Security Act During the Period of National Mobilisation for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion (the National Security Act) on June 23, 1987, a few weeks before Martial Law was lifted. Article 9 of the National Security Act restricted the rights of political victims to appeal

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in civilian courts those cases that had been previously handled under Martial Law by court martial. In addition, Article 2 of the Act prohibited assemblies and parades advocating communism or secession. Referred to as the three principles of the National Security Act, these provisions and the struggle against them channelled Taiwan’s democratic transition throughout the 1990s into a partisan contest between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the KMT. The deeply partisan and polarised nature of the contest gave birth to a political culture in which victory means more than justice—a serious obstacle to the dominant way that transitional justice has been conceived in the post-Cold War period. (The prohibition against communism was lifted only in 2011 during Ma Yingjeou’s first term of two as president, largely because the prohibition presented legal obstacles to his administration’s policy of rapprochement with the PRC known as the 1992 Consensus. This anticommunist provision was effectively reinstated by the Anti-Infiltration Act passed at the end of 2019 by the Tsai administration; while that Act denies that any specific political party or ideology is targeted, press release No. 101 by the Mainland Affairs Council accompanying passage of the bill in the Legislative Yuan explicitly identifies the CPC as the “hostile foreign power” at which the Act is aimed. See Mainland Affairs Council “Press Release No. 101.”) Following Tsai Ing-wen’s election to the presidency in 2016 and the DPP’s unprecedented victory in the national parliament, known as the Legislative Yuan, the “Act on Promoting Transitional Justice” (TJA) was enacted in December 2017. The TJA aimed to “provide for public access to political archives;” “remove authoritarian symbols and preserving sites where injustices were committed;” “redress judicial wrongs;” “settle and utilize ill-gotten [KMT] party assets;” and “handle other matters pertaining to transitional justice.” Following established precedent in the globally dominant human rights discourse of transitional justice, the TJC added psychotherapy and consultation to their official mission the following year (2018). While the quantity of writing about transitional justice in Taiwan is too voluminous to engage with exhaustively here, a recent work popularising the subject by Wan-yao Chou, a specialist of Taiwanese history in the Department of History, National Taiwan University, attracts our attention first for its pedagogical mode of address self-consciously targeting the younger generation. This is a mode of address that has gained considerable traction in recent years and forms an important part of the pedagogical/propaganda component of the Taiwan Consensus.

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Much like the film Detention, which was designed with a similar goal in mind to present history to a post-Martial Law generation without any personal experience of the Party-State era, Chou’s The Road to Transitional Justice: The Past and Future of an Island (published in 2019 by the National Human Rights Museum and updated in 2022) explicitly aims to introduce the concept of transitional justice to young readers. Works like these express what Jacques Rancière calls the “pedagogical presupposition” (Rancière “Communists Without Communism?” 168). This presupposition is one of the fundamental motifs that works against social and political emancipation, authorising everything from the mission civilisatrice of colonialism to the pyramidal decisional structure of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Crucially, the “pedagogical presupposition” effectively ties those who oppose the Martial Law system with the justification for Martial Law given post-facto in the notion of democratisation and victory in the Cold War. The result in Chou’s case is similar to Detention in the sense that myth trumps history. In Chou’s Transitional Justice, however, it is much more of a legend than a myth. As in every good legend, the storyteller begins with an ideal type. We should note that the element of ideal types is an important component of the hegemonic approach to transitional justice promoted by the United States, which displays a marked preference for “getting the bad guy” in a “dualistic narrative about ‘good versus evil’ that is a core element of American identity” (Bird US Foreign Policy, 2–3). In Chou’s case, this is the idea of transition as a transformation between two ideal types, the first of which is authoritarian dictatorship (type A) and the second of which is liberal democracy (type B) (Chou “Diyizhang ”). While Chou superficially nods to the limits of using ideal types, the precaution is extraneous to her argument and hence thoroughly irrelevant. All could agree, no doubt, that the demand for simplification imposed by addressing a young readership is fundamentally different from the decision to represent history in terms of a universal teleology moving from point A to point B. The fact that this teleological representation bearing the weight of a moral lesson enjoys the symbolic capital conferred by the storyteller’s day job as a specialist of history at the nation’s highest-ranked university compounds the legendary quality of the story. As a historian who replaces history with teleology, the stories Chou tells her young audience acquire the character of legend. Unless we understand this predilection for legend, it would be impossible to comprehend how a senior scholar in a history department at the nation’s

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flagship university could possibly succumb to the idea that informational control and political manipulation are phenomena that are strictly limited to type A societies and could not possibly occur in type B ones. Chou writes: “Today, Taiwan is rife with fake news, yet many people ‘naturally’ fall for it without suspecting as much. It would be necessary to return to the style of media reportage of the Party State era and the tastes and habits of the readership ‘nourished’ by it. Those remnants of the Party State that remain to be tidied up by transitional justice are truly numerous, are they not?” (Chou “Diqizhang ”). “Fake news” is a code word for officially sanctioned conspiracy theories of “Chinese infiltration” that lumps together various phenomenon ranging from unfounded rumour to conflicting perspectives. The implicit assumption behind Chou’s rhetorical question is that education plays a decisive role in subjective formation. The consumers of “fake news” are predominantly composed of members of an older generation educated under an older authoritarian model that predisposes them to manipulative fakery. As one wonders how the generational difference that allegedly makes one more gullible to authoritarian mind control maps onto intergenerational wealth discrepancy in Taiwan (Huang “Generational Wealth Gap”), it becomes clear that Chou’s narrative diverts attention from distributive justice to possibly retributive forms. One shudders to think of what the process of “tidying up” that Chou invites her young readership to assent to would entail. This moment is also the same one in which we realise that the teller of legends has no interest in assisting young minds to develop habits and methodologies for critically apprehending what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have memorably called “the manufacture of consent” in liberal democracies (Chomsky and Herman Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media), nor for helping them to recognise more generally how power, money, and social hierarchies of all sorts can be inscribed in the ostensibly free expression of apparently neutral elements like information, images, language, and facts. While we feel sincere admiration for Chou’s sense of civic responsibility, her civic pedagogy lamentably shares more in common with the “education by imposition” (guanshu shi jiaoyu) said to characterise type A societies as opposed to the “education by eliciting” (qifaxing jiaoyu) that is ideally supposed to distinguish type B ones (Chou “Diyizhang ”). The question of types of domination that operate not through coercion but precisely through subjective formation and individual atomisation (as seen in the appropriation of the “eliciting” model to impose neoliberal subjectivation

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and the privatisation of education) simply does not exist in the legendary world of type B societies. The problem with such legends is that they leave the populations steeped in them more vulnerable to the appeal of political silofication already deeply exacerbated by social media and the discourse of infiltration. The self-evidence of that which is legendary creates a consensus that tends to express itself via the investment in sanctioned conspiracy theories. It hardly matters whether the conspiracy theories are “true,” what matters rather is the affective investment in othering that lies behind the conspiracy theories. This tendency seems to confirm conclusions reached by sociologist Wang Horng-luen in his recent study of the paradoxes of transitional justice in Taiwan. Wang advances the novel idea that the differences separating Taiwanese into distinctly separate historical structures of feeling and understandings of the meaning of transitional justice are ultimately of a political, not ethnic or ethno-national, nature as many, including Chou, would like to believe. For Wang, whose political sympathies lie squarely with advancing a pro-independence agenda beyond the interests of an electoral party, the danger is that transitional justice could easily distract, or worse yet, compromise the more immediate and pressing political project of creating a national consensus: Does the present approach to transitional justice make Taiwan more divided or more unified? At a time when the political transformation [full-fledged political independence under the name Taiwan] has yet to be achieved, before the crucial moment in the construction of a national people has arrived, will the promotion of transitional justice according to the methods currently being used [by the Tsai administration] help or hinder the gelling of a domestic consensus and solidarity in Taiwan? These are the urgent questions that are extremely necessary to consider. (Wang “Women neng hejie gongsheng ma?”)

It is significant that a scholar with that rare combination of political commitment and relative autonomy such as one finds in Wang would privilege the political task of consensus above that of transitional justice. While Wang manifestly shares the same goals as the proponents of transitional justice who see in it a means to secure the transition to a new form of Taiwanese nationhood designed to replace the old forms ostensibly imposed by China, he strenuously argues that transitional justice

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threatens the main political task of the moment. Given Tsai Ing-wen’s successful re-election bid in 2020 (one year before the publication of Wang’s article), there is grounds to believe that the consensus she represents has not been weakened by the process of transitional justice as it has proceeded so far. Nevertheless, Wang’s assessment is entirely reasonable given the unpredictable nature of the target, the “they,” that consensus, as a cross between sanctioned conspiracy theory and a particular kind of transitional justice, unleashes. At the very least, Wang’s argument indirectly indicates the extent to which political consensus is not only the central issue in Taiwanese politics today but has in fact already been established—albeit in a potentially fragile fashion. Whereas Wang clearly imagines that consensus-building is a necessary stage leading to the ultimate goal of political transformation (Taiwanese independence), we are not convinced by the teleology. As we argue, consensus has its own political logic, one that may constitute a political transformation in its own right. Where Wang would see in consensus a means to an end, we have set out to show how the consensus can become an end in itself, as symbolised by conspiracy theories, or, can become a means that displaces Wang’s preferred end leading to a wholly different political sequence.

A Consensus of the Bystanders and Beneficiaries The dilemma faced by advocates of the Taiwan Consensus is precisely that plumbed by Tsai Ing-wen and others who, either explicitly or implicitly, validate the Chiang regime’s anticommunist state terror as historically correct or at least indirectly beneficial on the basis of their contemporary enmity for the PRC. Speaking at the inauguration of the Chiang Ching-kuo Memorial Library on January 22, 2022, Tsai Ing-wen declared that Chiang Ching-kuo’s firm stance to protect Taiwan against Communist China is the “greatest consensus shared by the Taiwanese people” today (Xu Weizhen, “Jiang Jingguo Tushuguan Kaimu”). Reacting to similar statements made prior to Tsai’s speech by Wu Nai-teh, one of the earliest activist scholar proponents of transitional justice in Taiwan, Wang Horng-luen is quick to point out the self-contradiction inherent in such a position—a point that Wang uses to provide further ammunition for his fears about the fragility of the Taiwan Consensus (See Huang “Tsai undercuts transitional justice” for an additional example in English of negative response to Tsai’s intervention). The implications for transitional justice

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are profound. If Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo (who headed up the security services during his father’s reign), were right about “China” in an important sense that many of their erstwhile political opponents in Taiwan feel compelled to recognise today, one cannot avoid the conclusion originally advanced by the KMT directly after Martial Law that all Taiwanese should be considered beneficiaries of the injustice of the White Terror regardless of their relation to the actual victims and perpetrators. Indeed, Caldwell says as much: due to the significant reduction of state violence during the waning years of martial law and the tremendous economic growth of Taiwan under KMT stewardship, when the island transitioned to democracy there was an initial ambivalence within major portions of the population towards “punishing” the KMT through transitional justice mechanisms. (Caldwell “Transitional Justice Legislation in Taiwan,” 451)

The Martial Law system that sustained waishengren privilege was ambivalently credited by many—not just the perpetrators and direct beneficiaries of the Martial Law system, but also the bystanders and indirect beneficiaries—as having ushered in a period of rapid economic growth (the so-called “Taiwan Miracle”) and democratisation of which all Taiwanese were the beneficiaries. This narrative repeated that which had developed among the majority Taiwanese population after the end of Japanese colonialism. While there was no similar process of transitional justice following the end of colonial annexation, many Taiwanese credited the colonial administration with bringing Taiwan to a higher level of intellectual, cultural, and economic development than that of the Chinese mainland (which had been wracked by civil wars and foreign invasions unlike the relative stability and calm under which Taiwanese had lived for half a century). Although many Taiwanese would have rejected the KMT idea that democratisation and the end of the Cold War were essentially a “graduation gift” dispensed by President Chiang Ching-kuo before his death on January 13, 1988, the fact remains that the identity of the beneficiaries of the Martial Law system arguably extends to the majority of the population in much the same way that a Taiwanese majority sees itself as the beneficiaries of Japanese colonialism. That this is so can be inferred from the extremely limited number of Taiwanese, regardless of ethnicity or political affiliation, who would support a counter-factual unification with the PRC during the 1950s—with the sole exception of

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avowed communists, a case with which we shall deal momentarily in greater detail. That counter-factual account of the past becomes the basis for framing contemporary China within an essentially colonial temporality that sees China as the recidivistic incarnation of Taiwan’s past evils. Taiwan is more advanced than China precisely in the sense that China serves as a spatialised depository housing the authoritarian injustices of the Taiwanese past. The implicit beneficiary of the White Terror—and the developmental capitalism that it enabled—is precisely the point at which a consensus has coalesced in Taiwan despite the vociferously polarised political debates accompanying the details and extent of the process. It is hardly coincidental that the official spokesperson of this consensus, Tsai Ing-wen herself, comes from a family well-known to have benefitted greatly from conformist compliance and cooperation with the KMT Martial Law regime. As the senior journalist Xia Zhen observed, “Of course, Tsai Ing-wen is a vested interest beneficiary of the authoritarian system of the Chiang family” (Xia Zhen, “Cai Yingwen dangran shi liang Jiang weiquan tongzhi de jide liyizhe”). While many pro-KMT commentators have complained about the ethnic and partisan implications of the process’s political instrumentalisation (which they see as serving the partisan interests of the DPP) and some pro-DPP commentators have even explicitly celebrated it (a whistle-blower revealed in 2018 a secret recording of Tien-chin Chang, a Tsai ally named earlier that year as vice chairperson of the TJC, in which Chang declared that that TJC should operate as a “secret police”—the term he used was dongchang, the “Eastern Depot,” the name of an infamous imperial agency during the Ming Dynasty used to stifle internal dissent—in the service of partisan goals), the greatest form of instrumentalisation to which transitional justice has been subject undoubtedly concerns the normalisation of ROC citizens as the implicit beneficiaries of the injustices that occurred during the era of Martial Law. The target of this instrumental reason would be the overwhelming majority of Taiwanese who were conformist bystanders during the Martial Law era (much like Tsai Ing-wen’s family). Tsai Ing-wen herself admitted as much on July 21, 2016. Hsieh Wen-ting, nominated by Tsai for the post of vice president of the Judicial Yuan, participated in many important national security cases during the last decade of Martial Law yet excluded mention of his role during that era on the CV that he submitted for the post; confronted by public scrutiny about the nomination, Tsai replied with the rhetorical question, “during

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the authoritarian era, didn’t everybody choose to obey?” (Shi Xiujuan, “‘Weiquan shiqi bushi dajia dou xuanze fucong ma?’”) By designating today’s populations in Taiwan as the implicit beneficiaries of the past violence because of their current independence from Beijing’s rule while casting contemporary China as the physical site of a recidivistic return to the (Taiwanese) past, the political discourse around the TJC has effectively inscribed transitional justice in the tradition of therapeutic solutions promoted by the US since the end of the Cold War that encourage the decollectivisation of responsibility. The fact that a few individual perpetrators have not yet been symbolically brought to justice—a key part of the US approach to transitional justice that has not yet been applied in Taiwan—is irrelevant to this process of social decollectivisation. The “success” of the process lies not with personification so much as with relieving the bystanders of any guilt. Following the removal of guilt, the bystanders are thus free to imagine that they would have resisted had they known what they presumably know today, namely, that the victims were worthy of protection (because, as victims, they did not seek revenge). The recent rise of a virtual cultural and academic industry around depictions of Taiwanese “resistance” to Japanese colonialism, with very little if any attention to Taiwanese complicity, indirectly attests to the success of this aspect of the larger agenda of transitional justice in Taiwan. Decollectivisation thus becomes a complement to the neoliberal aim of social atomisation, in which the category of the identity plays a key role, one that destroys notions of collective solidarity outside of a narrowly defined security context akin to that of civil war. The idea that a process as antagonistic as that surrounding transitional justice in Taiwan could be the source of any kind of consensus is counterintuitive, to say the least. Certainly, Wang Horng-luen has considered it a threat to consensus, if anything. Unburdened by Wang’s interest in national reconstruction, we are free to discern another kind of consensus that transcends the wrenching political divisions that wrack contemporary Taiwanese society along the lines of a festering civil war. The best place to see where the discourse of transitional justice in Taiwan constructs this kind of consensus lies in the controversies surrounding the treatment of the communist victims of the White Terror during the martial law period. Somewhat counterintuitively, our focus lies not with the communist victims themselves nor the perpetrators of their misery but with the status of the beneficiaries from that violence. Beginning in October 2018, the TJC announced on three separate occasions

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amnesty lists for some of the victims of the 228 Massacre and the White Terror. With the final amnesty announced on February 27, 2019, a total of 3,831 individuals formerly found guilty by court martial were officially proclaimed innocent. Among those granted amnesty was Chien Chi, a Taiwanese peasant leader who had joined the CPC to overthrow the ROC government. Chien organised the Taiwan Autonomous Allied Army (Taiwan zizhi lianjun) in Chiayi in 1947, serving as a political commissar who directed guerrilla operations. In October 1949, he became the secretary of the Mountain Working Committee of the Taiwan Provincial Working Committee of the Communist Party of China. Arrested and sentenced to death by court martial in 1950, Chien was executed by firing squad on March 7, 1951. Chien was not the only communist among those granted amnesty, nor were all of them Taiwanese provincials like Chien. The CPC has publicly admitted that it sent more than 1,500 special agents into Taiwan sometime around 1949 to conduct various underground operations that were progressively uncovered by the KMT government; of these, it is thought that over 1,100 were executed by the KMT. In 2013, the People’s Liberation Army established the Unsung Heroes Square in Xishan, Beijing, where the names of 846 victims verifiably executed by the KMT were carved onto the walls of the monument in the Square. A total of 409 people in the first two waves of amnesty announced by the TJC were listed as martyrs in the Unsung Heroes Square in Beijing. The reaction in Taiwan to the first announcement, in which at least 208 persons granted amnesty were also listed in the Unsung Heroes Square, was extremely negative. Significantly, both the pro-KMT “blue” camp and the pro-DPP “green” camp voiced a sense of outrage over the idea that “communist spies” had been granted amnesty. Despite the extremely polarised and acrimonious nature of political debate around the TJC, a certain consensus spontaneously emerged on both sides of the political divide around the inappropriateness of granting amnesty to communists who had been actively engaged in an armed struggle to overthrow the government of the ROC. For the pro-independence factions, amnesty for this group was tantamount to a repetition of historical injustice by according undeserved amnesty to national traitors. For the pro-KMT factions, the amnesty was tantamount to denying the benefits that KMT rule under martial law had brought to Taiwan. In essence, what the objections of both sides reveal, each in their separate way, is the status of Taiwanese populations as the beneficiaries of past injustice.

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In an indirect recognition of the hidden consensus inadvertently revealed by the controversial amnesties, the Final Task Report of the TJC deals with what it gingerly calls the “communist party factor” (gonchandang yinsu) under the heading of “The Face of Authoritarian Rule” that constitutes the second of three sections that together form the introduction. Citing the work of the Taiwanese nationalist philosopher Rwei-ren Wu, the report suggests treating the context in which communists became victims as a “structural” factor in which the “global situation” impinged on state actions. This displacement onto global structural factors leads the authors of the Final Task Report to grant a certain credence to the objections to amnesty voiced by many: Among those [state actions undertaken in the global context of structural impingements], those which present a significant challenge to the discourse and practice of transitional justice would be the large-scale elimination of leftists that occurred in the 1950s. During the period of authoritarian rule, the official explanation was that these people were potential enemies sent by the CPC as sleeper cells awaiting a chance to assist the Chinese Communist Party to “liberate” Taiwan. As of today, when archives have been progressively made public and research has progressed, doubts have arisen as to whether these types of cases merit compensation/reparation at all, including questions such as: Were these people fellow travellers of the Communist Party? If so, why should the government grant them amnesty? If they were to have succeeded in helping the CPC liberate Taiwan, Taiwan’s development would have necessarily taken a vastly different course from today. Is the category of “political victims” appropriate to this group of people? Or even: If the arrest, repression, and trials of these people are now considered problematic, how should we confront the problem of “communist spies” infiltrating Taiwan today? What place would there be for national security? (TJC Renwu zongjie baogao: diyibu zonglun, 19)

The Final Task Report’s inclusion of counter-factual questions is an indirect confirmation of the Commission’s general understanding that the majority of people living in Taiwan today are the implicit beneficiaries of injustice in the past. To that extent, the Commission repeats one of the talking points traditionally used by the KMT throughout the 1990s which held that democratisation in Taiwan could be understood as a “silent revolution,” i.e., a change that had fundamentally reneged on the violence that bourgeois theories typically ascribe to the innate character of proletarian revolution—instead of, for instance, the innate character of

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the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”—and hence represented a definitive exit from the vicious circle of political modernity prior to 1989. In other words, in framing Taiwanese in general as the beneficiaries of past injustice while characterising the transition as a “silent” exit from revolution, the Commission staked its name on a wholehearted acceptance of the human rights discourse that had become globally dominant after the victory of the US in the Cold War and the establishment of the Washington Consensus. To that extent, the Commission’s main strategy for achieving transitional justice is to protect this consensus and its beneficiaries from being challenged. One of the ways the Commission attempts to achieve this goal is by pointing to the transprovincial nature of the victims, who came from both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Another way is to describe how even the communist victims themselves were united in the goal of “protecting productive institutions” in Taiwan from being destroyed by potential scorched-earth actions that could have been taken by the KMT in the event of a CPC invasion. Clearly, the upshot of these two factors suggests that the one thing that all communities in Taiwan can agree about (except of course the community of communists, if they could be called that) would be the shared legacy of capitalist development under first the colonial Japanese administration followed second by the authoritarian KMT regime. Of course, the Final Task Report camouflages this consensus behind a legal rhetoric of “two principles” against which any amnesty or justice must be measured, namely the “implementation of the liberal democratic constitutional order” and “correcting the illegal use of state power.” Yet, the consensus is still visible, nonetheless. In the process of developing my own understanding of the process of transitional justice in Taiwan, I have been deeply inspired by the work of Robert Meister. Meister’s After Evil, a hefty tome extending over six hundred pages, starts with a narrative about a major historical transition that precedes and, in a sense, underwrites the notion of transitional justice. This narrative begins with a periodisation that divides the modern discourse of human rights into two eras, the first of which extends from the French Revolution in 1789 to the end of the Cold War in 1989, the second of which roughly begins at the end of the Cold War but whose antecedents stretch back to the end of World War II and the Nuremberg Trials. The difference between the two periods hinges on the collapse of revolutionary bourgeois and leftist politics. From 1789 to 1989, human rights discourse was essentially an arm of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and the political Left wielded against counter-revolutionary state terror.

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Yet even when the Left managed to appropriate state power for itself, the struggle with the counter-revolutionary Right (and their liberal bourgeois allies) proved itself to be interminable. Faced with the incessant challenges posed by the reactionary Right, the revolution turned out not to usher in a new, communist system but rather a period of more-orless permanent socialist transition, always at risk of being overturned. In that context, the counter-revolutionary Right could easily appropriate the discourse of rights for its own ends to counter state repression of the counter-revolutionary forces in much the same way as that historically pioneered by the Left. The end of the Cold War and the repudiation of a revolutionary alternative—typified by the anti-revolutionary reformism of “Eurocommunism”—gave rise to a new use for the discourse of human rights. Rather than being a tool in the arsenal against counterrevolutionary restoration, human rights discourse at the end of the Cold War came to be seen as a way to transcend the vicious cycle of victor and vanquished between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary factions. While few would disagree with the obvious advantages, transcendence ushered in a series of new problems. In Meister’s estimation, the key issues concern the temporality of justice on the one hand and the identity of the beneficiaries distinct from victims and perpetrators on the other. Meister’s conclusions are summed up by the phrase, “now is never the time for justice.” In the temporality of transitional justice conceived as transcendence, both retributive and distributive forms of justice are reneged by the victims in favour of a form of justice that is therapeutic and moral rather than political and material. The temporal displacement at the heart of therapeutic justice is expressed by the transactional nature of the justice offered. The key transaction occurs not between victims and perpetrators but between victims and bystanders/beneficiaries of the injustice. Transitional justice enables the beneficiaries to imagine that they would have intervened on the side of the victims given what they know today about the victim’s moral innocence in the past—a moral innocence defined by the lack of interest in revolutionary redistribution and revenge. That this form of transitional justice has become well-entrenched in Taiwan has been revealed, perhaps inadvertently, by Fan-ting Cheng’s account of transitional justice theatre. Using electrocution in Too Many Dreams in One Night [a series of performances held in the Jing Mei White Terror Memorial Park in Taipei in late

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2018 by Dark Eyes Performance Lab] as a way to achieve transitional justice was highly controversial. The scene made torture into a public spectacle, an ostensibly long-abandoned practice in democratic societies. Responding to the explicit ethical dilemma of the scene, most participants refused to press the button [that would “electrocute” a perpetrator of state terror in the performance]. They stared at the covered face of the perpetrator, listened to the confession, and stepped away. However, if refusing to press the button was a politically correct ethical decision, it does not follow that those few who chose to press the button advocated torture. During the postshow discussion, one of the participants stated that his decision to press the button was based on curiosity: “Exactly because using an electric chair to achieve transitional justice is problematic, I was curious to know what would happen if I pressed the button.” Yet, when the theatre artists explained that the electric chair used in the production was not a prop, but an actual electrically charged chair that uses a minimum level of electricity that does no serious harm on the performer’s body, the participant was enraged: “If I had known that was a real electric chair, I would never have pressed the button. My life is now scarred by the memory of electrocuting a person. What you claimed about transitional justice was a total scam!” This participant accused the performers of setting up participants to make an unethical choice. (Cheng, “The Paradox of Transitional Justice Theatre in Taiwan,” 171)

The expression, “had I known, I would have never,” is precisely the role accorded to bystanders and beneficiaries of past injustice in the transitional justice script that has become dominant in today’s human rights discourse analysed by Meister. This discourse has deep roots in the recent Taiwanese past. Long before the end of Martial Law, the cultural organs of the KMT authoritarian developmental state had already patronised the development of a narrative about the indirect beneficiaries of the system. Beautiful Duckling (yangya renjia), a feature length film released in 1965—the year when US aid to Chiang’s regime formally ended and US ground troops entered Vietnam in force, exemplifies this narrative. The film’s director Lee Hsing, a Shanghai-born son of a former aide to the financial magnate T.V. Soong, garnered crucial material support and recognition from Henry Kung, the head of Central Studios, in 1963 for Lee’s film Our Neighbour ( jietouxiangwei) which inaugurated his style of “healthy realism” ( jiankang xieshi zhuyi) designed to counter socialist realism. Beautiful Duckling recounts the story of an orphaned girl, Hsiaoyueh, raised by a neighbour and friend of her father who was inducted

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into the Japanese Imperial Army and died on Hainan Island before the end of the war. Unaware that her stepfather, Lin Tsai-tien, was not her biological father, Hsiao-yueh grows up in the Taiwanese countryside helping her father manage a duck farm. The men with whom the attractive Hsiao-yueh comes into contact all vie for her affection, beginning with the indolent yet well-meaning son of the competitive, scheming neighbour, also a duck farmer. The idyllic life shared by father and daughter is disrupted by the appearance of Chao-fu, Hsiao-yueh’s biological brother. Armed with a letter sent by Hsiao-yueh’s biological father from Hainan before his demise, Chao-fu uses the letter to demand hush money payments from Lin to keep the secret from Hsiao-yueh. As Chaofu’s financial situation deteriorates with the declining fortunes of his wife, a fading star of Taiwanese opera (ke-tsai-hsi, or gezaixi in pinyin), he is prodded by his wife into hatching a plan to retake custody of Hsiao-yueh, separating her from her stepfamily and inducting her into the world of Taiwanese opera where she could make money for the couple. As a parable about patriarchy, the film stages the question of filiation, inheritance, loss, and intergenerational benefit. The orphaned victims of Japanese colonialism, Hsiao-yueh and her biological brother Chao-fu are distinguished, as victims, by the status of moral damage. Unlike Hsiaoyueh, who remains, despite the loss she has suffered, morally undamaged by the experience, Chao-fu’s depiction as a hooligan who wears sandals and spits betelnut juice while demanding blackmail payments from Lin nails his status as a victim who has been morally damaged by the experience of victimisation. True to the logic of the post-1989 human rights discourse identified by Meister, Chao-fu’s status as a morally damaged victim disqualifies him from receiving the audience’s sympathy, reserved exclusively for those victims like Hsiao-yueh who can prove themselves to be morally undamaged and who thus seek neither revenge nor reparation. Significantly, Chao-fu is overtly coded as “Taiwanese.” Of course, almost all of the characters in the film, predominantly rural farmers, are generically coded as “Taiwanese,” yet in accordance with the cultural policy of the era, this Taiwanese quality is muted by the linguistic subordination of Hokkienese to Mandarin Chinese. Taiwanese Hokkienese is heard only once in the film, late in the film when Hsiao-yueh first visits the lodging of Chao-fu. Chao-fu’s association with “Taiwaneseness” is overdetermined by the waishengren racism that conflates class difference with ethnic difference. The image of the betelnut-chewing, sandal-wearing hooligan projected onto Chao-fu is a typical product of

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this racist stereotyping—one that continued into the post-Martial Law era in the form of the pro-unification New Party that was particularly active in the first decade after the end of Martial Law. While waishengren are not visibly present in the film, the patriarchal Party-State that confers privileged status on a portion of the waishengren community is represented both by the agent of the Council of Agriculture, who gifts Lin with ducks bred to favour productive output, and the voiceover at the start of the movie that introduces the movie’s bucolic setting by reference to the eponymous oil painting by the Taiwanese artist Ran In-ting (Lan Yinding ). The voiceover, completely external to the filmic narrative, establishes the implicit waishengren gaze that anchors the story. Hence, the freeze frame image of Ran’s painting that begins the film is a metonym for the problem of mediation that guides the director’s approach to realism. Just as the “real” of “realism” is mediated by paint, the filiation of patriarchal lineage is equally mediated by the legal status of the stepfamily. Although Lin himself is undoubtedly not a waishengren, his status as stepfather to Hsiao-yueh becomes a proxy for the legitimacy of the multiethnic KMT state. Lin’s relation to Hsiao-yueh becomes a metaphor for the beneficent image of patriarchy promoted by the extra-territorial, diasporic waishengren Party-State, which distributes “gifts” of economic and moral value to those meritorious members of the benshengren population. The fact that Lin himself lost his wife to illness, making him, too, a victim of familial loss somewhat like Hsiao-yueh, further deepens the image of a community of beneficiaries bound by a fictitious common experience of victimisation increasingly promoted by the authoritarian state. When Hsiao-yueh finally learns the truth of her family situation and duly decides to re-unite with her biological family, represented by Chao-fu and his wife, the extent of the moral damage to which the couple has succumbed leaves her in a state of shock. After a sleepless night at Chao-fu’s lodging, a bleary-eyed Hsiao-yueh watches as her stepfather, Lin, arrives on the scene with a pile of cash earned from the sale of the entirety of his farm’s ducks. Assuming that Lin intends to use the cash to buy back Hsiaoyueh’s freedom, Chao-fu reminds Lin, and Hsiao-yueh, of the pecuniary benefit Lin received over many years from Hsiao-yueh’s essentially unpaid labour on Lin’s duck farm. Shocked by the cold-heartedness of Chao-fu’s transactional approach, Hsiao-yueh counters with the idea that the care given to her by her stepfather when she was just a baby exceeds simple monetary value. The contrast between Chao-fu’s transactional calculations and Hsiao-yueh’s gratitude heightens the moral difference between

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the two. Contrary to Hsiao-yueh’s expectations, Lin has not come with the intent of purchasing Hsiao-yueh’s freedom but has rather come to offer the cash to Chao-fu as seed money to start a legitimate business that will allow him to leave behind his hooligan ways and fully integrate into society. Smitten by the stepfather’s unconditional love and generosity, Chao-fu suddenly realises the extent of his own moral damage. As Hsiaoyueh leaves to chase down her stepfather, Chao-fu turns on his wife, who had been greedily counting the money received from Lin. In terms of the patriarchal parable, Beautiful Ducklings dramatises the relation between waishengren and benshengren “ethnicities” in the form of an intergenerational story of loss, victimisation, and patrilineal inheritance. Countering the narrative of benshengren blood and soil identity symbolised by Hsiao-yueh’s relation to Chao-fu, the movie proposes instead a patriarchal community of beneficiaries bound by their quality as morally undamaged victims. Studiously averting any depiction of the perpetrators, the film portrays the waishengren as a surrogate father for the benshengren Taiwanese who are like the former’s stepchildren, both apprentice and beneficiary at the same time. Despite Hsiao-yueh’s status as a beneficiary of the surrogate father’s generosity, her allegiance to her stepfather is ultimately not transactional but moral. She only implores him with repeated affirmations of his role as her true father after witnessing Lin’s readiness to sacrifice everything for her own and Chao-fu’s happiness. Conversely, the stepfather’s claim to be the head of a household not defined by blood relations relies on his willingness to sacrifice transactional advantage in favour of the common good defined within the boundaries of state legality. Structurally speaking, this narrative, shorn of the waishengren racism that characterises Lee Hsing’s 1965 film (such racism is the device by means of which his film distinguishes between morally good and morally damaged benshengren), is structurally the same one that will be mobilised six decades later by Tsai Ing-wen’s discourse of “consensus” and, more generally, the process of transitional justice executed during her administration. In the updated version, the roles ascribed to the different “ethnicities” have been reversed, such that the waishengren are now the hapless orphans (cut off from their natal families on the mainland) while the benshengren represent the beneficent state distributing gifts of forgiveness, economic development, and anticommunist, faith. To prove that they are morally undamaged, the waishengren must adhere to a virulently anti-China position, while the benshengren must forego the demand for

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revenge against previous waishengren injustice, fictitiously reduced to a question of identity. The pact between the two, sealed around opposition to China, is based on a narrative of shared victimisation. To the extent that the majority of both waishengren and benshengren populations were bystander victims and passive beneficiaries of the Martial Law system who together now forego vengeance and agree to a common enemy, they become the morally undamaged victims worthy of protection by “the world community.” Those among the “greens” and the “blues” who reject this consensus (the “deep greens” because it allegedly amounts to selling out Taiwanese; the “deep blues” because it amounts to a transactional sell out of China) can all be depicted as morally damaged victims, unworthy of protection.

US Hegemony and Transitional Justice Following the end of the Cold War, the United States of America emerged into a period known as the unipolar moment when US hegemony came to define global institutional standards. Critics of this hegemony, such as the economist Joseph Stiglitz, appropriated the term “Washington Consensus” originally used by John Williamson in 1989 to delineate the accepted wisdom of orthodoxy in the field of Economics (Marangos “The Evolution of the term ‘Washington Consensus’”). Critics of this hegemony such as Stiglitz held that all political, economic, and social development eventually converged upon a single, “neoliberal” model supposedly represented, if not actually realised, by the US, which centred around aggressive state intervention to make financialised markets into the political decision centres of nations. Even as state intervention was crucial to this transitional process, the process itself was depicted as one of “deregulation” and “privatisation,” i.e., getting the state out of the economy so that markets could function “freely” to rationally distribute wealth where it would naturally be most productive. In line with US foreign policy goals in the unipolar world imaginary of the Washington Consensus, the idea of democratic transition assumed central importance. Applied equally to postsocialist, postcolonial, and postfascist states emerging from authoritarian developmental modes favoured by the Cold War (a Eurocentric misnomer for the period of very hot wars and genocidal campaigns launched against communism and non-aligned movements in the postcolonial world), the notion of democratic transition was accompanied by the active promotion of the

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concept of transitional justice. As Robert Meister observes, “Political transitions are not just new beginnings; they are also what I call ‘survivor stories’ that reflect a non-neutral judgment on the history that preceded them” (Meister After Evil, vii). In this section, we examine how the hegemonic discourse of transitional justice in Taiwan is not simply a “Taiwanese” issue, despite appearances to the contrary, but attests rather to the globalisation of memory observed and analysed by Jie-Hyun Lim. Our first task consists in a historicisation of the concept itself. Although transitional justice as both practice and theory began developing in the 1990s, it was not until a couple of decades later that researchers began to explore transitional justice as an integral component of Pax Americana’s post-Cold War global hegemony denoted by the term Washington Consensus. As Annie Bird notes in US Foreign Policy on Transitional Justice, the US played a “pivotal role” at the global level in the promotion of the concept, “providing crucial political backing, as well as key technical and financial assistance” (Bird US Foreign Policy, 1). More recently, Dustin Sharp has drawn a connection between support for narrowly legalistic versions of transitional justice and the implementation/imposition of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” on societies deemed to be in the throes of “transition”: Transitional justice was born out of the euphoria, triumphalism, and, perhaps, arrogance of the “end of history,” a time in the 1980s and 1990s when some believed, in a sort of democratic domino theory, that the world was inevitably converging, or at least normatively should be converging, upon Western liberal market democracy as the only plausible form of governance. It was in the forge of the ideology and intellectual ebullience of this era that the “dominant script” of transitional justice was created, a script premised on a core liberal-legalist narrative. … it [transitional justice] has been particularly shaped by a narrower form of neoliberalism—a turbocharged liberal capitalist ideology—which has in turn fostered and cemented rather reductive and minimalist understandings of violence, justice, and human rights at the core of the field. These limited and pinched understandings have been tightly woven into the dominant script, not only helping to shape initial thinking about what it meant to “do justice” in times of transition but also casting a long shadow over transitional justice thinking, policy, and practice up though the present day. In other words, debates about some of the field’s most vexing questions— justice for what, for whom, and to what ends—cannot be understood

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without reference to that (dominant, neoliberal) script. It has effectively come to shape the field’s core and periphery, what is emphasized and what is marginalized. (Sharp Rethinking Transitional Justice, viii–ix).

Significantly, Sharp draws a connection between the neo-evangelism of the “end of history” discourse (the same discourse that served as a point of departure for many of Derrida’s reflections on spectrality in Specters of Marx) and the rise of models of transitional justice that favour a resolution via criminal jurisprudence. The political upshot of this connection serves to reinforce neoliberal solutions to governance in general, emphasising the individualisation of social risk and the decollectivisation of responsibility. Little attention has been paid among the proponents of transitional justice in Taiwan to the strategic aspect of US support for the concept identified by Bird and its integral role in the legitimation and promotion of the neoliberal Washington Consensus analysed by Sharp. To the best of my knowledge, Chih-yu Shih, a professor of political science, is the only academic voice in Taiwan who has publicly identified the issue of transitional justice in Taiwan with US geostrategic policy before and after the Cold War up to the present day. In a brief article from 2017 titled, “How Has the US Betrayed Transitional Justice in Taiwan?”, Shih insists that the problem of transitional justice surpasses the narrow framework of the KMT’s authoritarian legacy within which partisans of the concept have pursued it: “Transitional justice in Taiwan is no exception. While it appears to be aimed at the civil war system of the KMT, it is in fact, just like that civil war system itself, utterly subject to the mercy of America’s national and global security policies” (Shih “Meiguo ruhe beili”). This analysis leads Shih to the startling conclusion that transitional justice in Taiwan represents nothing less than a “return to colonial modernity” that executes, at a macro level, the “global security mission of the United States” (ibid.). Shih’s analysis is confirmed in a sense by Ian and Jamie Rowen, whose sympathy with the defence of what they consider to be a country that adheres to “international norms of human rights, democracy, and selfdetermination” (Rowen and Rowen “Taiwan’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee,” 105), leads them to conclude that Taiwan is “worthy of protection and recognition” (ibid., 110). Rowen and Rowen do not specify what kind of power nor what kind of violence would be permissible in the mission to “protect” Taiwan, but the idea of protection

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itself is one of the mainstays of contemporary human rights discourse, condensed in the UN recognised principle of the “Responsibility to Protect.” Implicit recognition of this principle leads the authors to a guarded appreciation of transitional justice in Taiwan as a “geopolitical strategy with potentially radiating effects” (ibid., 112). In effect, the difference between Shih on the one hand and Rowen and Rowen on the other amounts to a value judgement about the relationship between “global norms” and US Empire. In this confrontation, Shih’s emphasis on decolonisation contrasts with Rowen and Rowen’s emphasis on postcolonial norms. To their credit, Rowen and Rowen are probably the first in the anglophone world to have grasped the potentially transnational implications of transitional justice in Taiwan in their discussion of the “communist party factor.” While noting at the conclusion of their article, written before the TJC had become a reality, that “China could be implicated in this new TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Committee],” this prescient observation leads them simply to suggest that communist victims of the White Terror in Taiwan “should perhaps be compensated by the CPC instead of the KMT” (Rowen and Rowen “Taiwan’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee,” 112). In the face of the potentially transnational aspects of transitional justice, this emphasis on policy friendly prescriptions that return justice to the borders of the nation-state is indicative of larger problems in the conceptualisation of today’s human rights discourse. Significantly, Rowen and Rowen’s gesture turns the relation between communism and Taiwan into an exogenous one, parallel to the difference between states. While upholding Taiwan’s self-determination, Rowen and Rowen’s contention that the communist victims of the White Terror should be compensated by Beijing (because the communist party of which those victims were members is seated in Beijing) inscribes transitional justice within the schema of internationality governed by international law. It is important to notice that even within the schema of internationality, important asymmetries exist. We cannot fail to notice that even as Rowen and Rowen associate communism with the PRC, they refuse a parallel gesture with regard to genocidal US anticommunist militarism. Leaving the US and Japan entirely out of the picture of the White Terror, Rowen and Rowen inadvertently confirm our suspicions that when transitional justice is conceptualised as a geopolitical strategy rather than a

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collaborative project for transnational justice it develops a political bias that dovetails with American exceptionalism to “international norms.” While the TJC’s Final Task Report implicitly recognises that different Taiwanese communities could all be counted among the beneficiaries of previous injustice, one of the major beneficiaries that it does not recognise is the United States. Given the staggering total of $1.4 billion given to “Taiwan” by the United States from 1945 to 1965—a contribution that by all accounts was vital to the stabilisation of the Taiwanese economy and the transition to light industry that became the basis for the subsequent “Taiwan Miracle,” the Final Task Report’s silence on this count is telling. If the process of transitional justice in Taiwan conforms to Meister’s critical account of the role of beneficiaries that essentially prolongs the counter-revolutionary tradition by other means, it is clear that the silence surrounding one of the greatest beneficiaries—the United States of America—is precisely the means by which the potential guilt of this beneficiary in particular can be assuaged. One needs to only consult the web page devoted to US-Taiwan relations on the official site of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States to see this transactional relation in action: “As Taiwan’s security gradually strengthened, its economy also began to flourish and grow with American economic aid” (TECRO, “Taiwan-U.S. Relations”). What is left unmentioned are the host of benefits that Taiwan’s anticommunist global leadership and military posture brought to US Cold War containment policies—benefits that induced successive Cold War US administrations to provide massive aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s regime despite the deep ideological conflicts between the two states and the numerous debates this divergence from US economic and political ideology occasioned among US political leaders, academics, and governmental agencies. As Wayne Robert Hugar has shown in a dissertation titled Cold War Economic Ideology and US Aid to Taiwan, 1950–1965, US policymakers were fully informed at the time of both the nature of Chiang’s authoritarian rule and his nepotistic economic policies favouring state above private enterprise yet chose to ignore such considerations for geostrategic reasons. As Hugar summarises: These and other contradictions show that Washington deliberately, albeit logically consistent from a pragmatic cold war economic ideological perspective within the US containment strategy, tried to dampen criticism from the US Congress and others while publicly touting Taiwan’s

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economic “success” of its private sector due to US economic aid. This despite it going primarily to the ROC government’s owned public sector and state enterprises. (Hugar Cold War Economic Ideology, 299)

In effect, even before US aid to Taiwan had ended in 1965, US governmental agencies were preoccupied with developing a narrative that justified US support for a regime that did not conform to American economic and political ideology but which nonetheless offered the US irreplaceable benefits in a global war against communism. Not long after the end of US aid, these geostrategic benefits were increasingly accompanied by tangible economic ones. Again, Hugar’s summary is helpful on this point: “From the late 1960’s to the present, the American private business sector benefitted significantly with Taiwan being the United States’ top 15 ranked trading nation partners for imports and exports during the last 40 years—a staggering statistic given Taiwan’s small size and population” (Hugar Cold War Economic Ideology, 301). By passing this aspect of the White Terror under silence (presumably because it does not fall under the purview of the “two principles” of legality and liberal democratic order espoused by the TJC), transitional justice in Taiwan effectively relieves the Americans of any fear that they, too, might be held accountable in some way for their terror-enabling complicity. This relief allows the US political and managerial class to fantasise counterfactually that US aid was designed as a form of material aid for spiritual uplift—uplift that would, in the eyes of the highly influential academic and policy analyst Walter Rostow, “create a Taiwanese middle class with a vested interest in further economic expansion and eventually transform Taiwan into a liberal democratic, capitalist-leaning government with a more favorable economic ideology supporting free enterprise” (Hugar ibid., 294). Perhaps the main geostrategic benefit that accrued from US support for Taiwan was the stability of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty. The so-called “Taiwan clause” in the Sat¯ o-Nixon Joint Communiqué of November 1969, which stipulated that “the maintenance of peace and security in the Taiwan area was also [after Korea] a most important factor for the security of Japan” (Cited in Yoshihide “Taiwan in Japan’s Security Considerations,” 140), was a direct recognition by both governments of the tangible security benefits that accrued from the continued existence of the ROC. Had Taiwan fallen under the control of Beijing, thus enabling the PLA to interdict crucial shipping lanes that supplied most

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of the energy and raw materials for Japanese industry, the resulting pressure could well have given pro-PRC elements in Japan a sufficient pretext to attempt to renegotiate the balance of security arrangements in the Western Pacific to the disadvantage of Pax Americana. State recognition of the US as a beneficiary of the US-enabled White Terror Cold War period is announced at the beginning of the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 (Bill S. 4428 of the 117th Congress, 2021–2022). Section 2 of the Bill, which has already been passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as of this writing, begins with the statement: “Since 1949, the close relationship between the United States and Taiwan has been of enormous benefit to both parties and to the Indo-Pacific region as a whole” (United States Congress “S.4428”). Given that the US began providing aid to Taiwan immediately after retrocession in 1945, the choice of 1949 as a start date must be considered deliberate and meaningful. While the date of 1949 obviates the need to discuss events and issues related to the sovereignty of Taiwan, it also signals unreserved (if not unwitting) acceptance of the beginning of Martial Law as the start date for US-Taiwan relations. Moreover, the bill unequivocally states that both Taiwan and the United States have derived “enormous benefit” from their mutual relationship stretching back to and including the entirety of the world’s longest period of martial law. Hence, we arrive at a fundamental contradiction between two parallel geopolitical discourses deployed by Washington, one of which holds that democratic transition is the basis for Taiwan’s claims to independence from the PRC, the other of which holds that both the United States and Taiwan are the direct beneficiaries of the authoritarianism that democratic transition is supposed to have rejected and replaced. The irreducible contradiction between these two discourses is the source not just of a proliferation of double standards but also a creeping violence in the mission to “protect” Taiwan. Before turning to a discussion of that violence, it is important to briefly mention that other international beneficiaries of Taiwan’s role in the Cold War system would include the many authoritarian states in Latin and Central America that benefitted from ROC security assistance, including notably Guatemala, where Taiwanese aid to security forces was implicated in the genocide of indigenous populations. In short, the Final Task Report makes no effort to document the crucial support role of US political backing, economic aid, military training, and arms supply to the execution of the White Terror nor the ROC’s client state role in exporting White Terror techniques and assistance with US blessing to

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support state-sponsored genocide in Guatemala or other nations, nor any gesture towards the publication of ROC archival materials on the subject. (The Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatemala does not mention Taiwan. Similarly, articles and posts that discuss the process of transitional justice in Guatemala written by Taiwanese proponents of transitional justice only discuss Guatemala as a potential reference point for Taiwan’s own efforts, not as a potential victim or beneficiary of White Terror exported from Taiwan.) In the conspicuous silence of the TJC’s 2022 report on these transnational aspects of Taiwan’s authoritarian past, one detects an indirect confirmation of Chih-yu Shih’s brutal assessment despite his lack of engagement with the fundamental problems of human rights discourse. This suppression of the transnational aspects of transitional justice in Taiwan is hardly a Taiwanese invention but is an established practice of transitional justice since 1990. Even among those who argue for incorporating certain transnational aspects into the process, the element of transnationality is viewed as an addition or an extension rather than a fundamental reframing of the discourse. The problem common to both Shih and Rowen & Rowen is that they both tend to look at the transnational aspects of transitional justice in terms of power relations that are external to the discourse itself. In the case of Rowen and Rowen, this tendency is not surprising given their embrace of the universal normativity of human rights discourse. Yet even Shih Chih-yu’s more critical assessment of the political valence of transitional justice in Taiwan is directed at the political application of the discourse, not the discourse itself. Referring to Meister’s After Evil, we find an explanation for why Shih’s anti-imperialist argument would be essentially disqualified in the eyes of the proponents of contemporary human rights discourse such as Rowen and Rowen: Like Lévinasian ethics, today’s discourse of human rights confronts the charge that its motives are political, not ethical. The point of this charge is that occupying violent places to provide security is always political— that, even in Hobbes, the intervention of a third-party sovereign is needed to end the “war of all against all.” From that point on, security means support for the sovereign—his enemies become our enemies, both foreign and domestic. An ethics that makes security its prime directive is also a political justification for third parties to use exceptional violence to stop violence and, potentially, to invade, occupy, and rule an otherwise violent

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place. Those who oppose such intervention as “imperialist” typically do so by stressing the continuing political role of the third-party intervener (such as the U.S.) in creating and perpetuating enmity between the original Two. The ethical counterargument is that politicizing rescue in this way has always been an excuse for third parties to turn away from those who suffer. After Auschwitz, this argument concludes, we must never again let ethical indifference masquerade as realpolitik. Instead of reducing ethics to security, Human Rights Discourse (and Lévinas) regard themselves as elevating ethics to its highest imperative—the “Responsibility to Protect” human life. (Meister After Evil, 46–47)

The implications of this “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) are the focus of the following section, in which we consider how transitional justice can potentially be related to the new kind of “human rights wars” and police actions that dominate the global scene since the end of the Cold War. (Samantha Power, who served as a member of the National Security Council and was US ambassador to the UN under Obama, is the best-known advocate in the United States policy circles for R2P foreign military intervention; see Power “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide.)

War and Consensus The real problem with Chih-yu Shih’s anti-imperialist critique is that it overlooks the way transitional justice is mediated by the essentialist universalism of human rights discourse. Unfortunately, the “Responsibility to Protect” easily becomes a pretext for new forms of injustice under the cover of rescue. Hence, it is imperative for critique to excavate the theme of war that parallels or inhabits the discourse of transitional justice. Elements for tracing the contours of this discursive connection could be found in Wang Horng-luen’s argument. The political, not ethnonational, difference that fractures Taiwanese society today, fragilising the consensus that Wang considers to be of primary importance in the march towards independence, is ultimately based, according to Wang’s own analysis, on incompatible and incommensurable experiences of war among the Taiwanese population. Those parts of today’s populations in Taiwan that experienced the Pacific War through the Japanese Imperial Army, or intergenerationally inherited that experience from elders who experienced it that way, and those that experienced it through the Chinese Republican Army constitute two distinct populations implacably opposed at a

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political level by diametrically opposed experiences of war that have left an indelible mark on each. If, as Wang holds, today’s mnemonic politics are thus to be understood as the legacy of war, the implications for the future potential of transitional justice are truly ominous. Although it is manifestly not Wang’s intention to build such an argument, an analysis placing the logic of war, not peace as regularly claimed, at the core of the properly political claims of transitional justice in Taiwan—and, quite probably, those of the Taiwan Consensus, as well—has far-reaching implications for the prospects for peace in the Taiwan Strait. This realisation makes the problem of a transnational form of transitional justice all the more urgent and, if the recent slide towards the inevitability of war in the Western Pacific is any indication, all the more tragic. War would thus seem to be the inflection point where the nexus of US imperial strategy and transitional justice, noted by Dustin Sharp, meets the claims of transitional justice in Taiwan. Might we not say, in light of Wang Horng-luen’s doubts about the threat to the Taiwan Consensus posed by the issue of transitional justice, that war is indeed the common denominator between the Washington Consensus and the Taiwan Consensus that it has nourished? Pursued to a conclusion, we would inescapably arrive at the following hypothesis: war might well be the only model for transition actually put into practice by Pax Americana. For those who have grown accustomed to projecting the impetus for war in the Western Pacific onto the othered, criminalised enemy, i.e., China, to the detriment of recognising the United States’s ongoing historical investment in “permawar” to contain the Asian mainland and control the Eurasian heartland or geostrategic Pivot Area, this line of thinking will undoubtedly appear inadmissible. Yet, to sustain this objection requires suppressing knowledge of the way war is intrinsically related to transitional justice. The human rights discourse, the “responsibility to protect,” that the United States is certain to use as a justification for military intervention in the Taiwan Strait—whether of a reactive or proactive nature—is the source of the problem. Meister’s perspicacious explanation of this dynamic is important: At the level of collective history, Human Rights Discourse functions in similar ways to construct the innocence of victims. That discourse begins with the commonsense premise that there is a significant difference between suffering an atrocity and committing it. It exhorts us, always, to identify with victims whose suffering it graphically depicts by inviting us

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to imagine ourselves as victims of desires that we no longer condone. But this humanitarian act of identification is also the ideological basis for using military force against those whom we believe have forfeited their claims to a common humanity by avowing and/or acting upon such now forbidden desires. The tragic irony is that our own atrocities become (indirectly) thinkable by projecting onto our enemy the desire to commit atrocity. (Meister After Evil, 34)

As of 2022, a human rights discourse attesting to the atrocities supposedly committed by the perfidious Communist Party of China, including genocide, forced labour, sterilisation, digital dictatorship, political repression, settler colonialism, debt trap diplomacy, and military aggression, has been relentlessly constructed by a concatenation of actors in US academia, legacy media, social media, government, and intelligence agencies. There can be no doubt at this point that an ideological foundation to criminalise “Communist China” has been laid to the extent that even claims to common humanity could be put in doubt (as the heightened wave of Sinophobic attacks on “Asians” metonymically associated with “Chinese” during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could attest). Undoubtedly, while many will feel that Sinophobia is unjustified under any circumstances even as condemnation of the atrocities, abuses, and injustice committed by the Communist Party-State is wholly warranted, a disturbing trend is taking shape in Taiwan and Hong Kong—one that is shared by certain offshore area studies scholars who specialise in such regions—whereby Sinophobia and anti-Chinese racism are seen to be justified on the grounds of a perceived threat from the PRC, leading to a de-pathologisation and even legitimation of Sinophobia. (An example of this trend was on display in the presentation made by Kevin Carrico, titled “Sinophobia-phobia: How a Readymade Critique of the Risks of Hong Kong Nationalism Overlooks its Insights into the Risks of Chinese Nationalism,” and echoed by other participants at the conference, “Sinophobia in the Rise of China,” convened online at the International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, October 10, 2022.) It is important to recognise that many scholars in offshore China studies already consider themselves to be inoculated against a critique of the Schmittian logic of absolute othering to which persons of real or apparent Chinese ethnicity may be subjected in the West and many of its satellite states such as Taiwan and Japan. To get a rough idea of how the inoculation works, one needs to only refer to the following paragraph

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in the “Statement of Principles” on the website of the Critical China Scholars (CCS), an organisation that represents progressive scholars based in the West: We oppose the dangerous rhetoric that demonizes the PRC and its citizens, and subjects those of Asian appearance to racist prejudice. At the same time, we recognize the justice of movements that resist oppression by the Chinese state, and we stand in solidarity with political activists fighting for labor, gender, ethnic, religious, and environmental justice. We refuse to allow one priority to outweigh the other. (Critical China Scholars “Statement of Principles”)

As may be inferred from a reading of this passage in the context of the utopic, post-national, post-state positionality that CCS arrogate for themselves, critiques of Sinophobia function precisely as an alibi to hide positions adjacent to the covert sphere of the neoliberal corporate security state. (For further discussion of CCS, see the section about the alibi in Part II of this work). As for the political implications, Meister does not hesitate to raise a warning about: a time in which Human Rights Discourse allows the U.S. to fight wars of aggression only on the condition that they are not described as such, and to threaten even the use of nuclear weapons if this is what it takes to rescue the victims of crimes against humanity. (Meister After Evil, 33)

Before we reject Meister’s assessment as pure speculation, it would be apposite to recall the historical precedent. As whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg has recently disclosed, the US military had seriously considered using nuclear weapons in the Taiwan Strait in 1958, while a US study conducted in 1966 about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan concluded that the United States would quickly turn to a nuclear option in that scenario. While that moment during the Cold War precedes the era of “Human Rights Discourse” analysed by Meister (which he dates starting from the end of the Cold War in 1989), the existence of such a precedent attests to the realistic nature of the threat, the likelihood of which would have now been multiplied considerably by the dominant human rights discourse described by Meister. In a recent interview, Lyle Goldstein, a researcher on Chinese and Russian strategic military development who taught at the

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US Naval War College for twenty years, warns about the very real possibility of the United States resorting to the use of nuclear weapons, tactical or strategic, against China in the Taiwan Strait: “the United States in this scenario can’t possibly bring enough firepower to win unless it resorts to nuclear weapons. That was understood in the 1950s, and nothing really has changed” (Marcetic and Goldstein “We Shouldn’t Underestimate”). Additional support for this frightening hypothesis comes from the logic of transitional justice. In a sense, the goal of transitional justice, like the goal of liberal democracy itself, is to avoid revolutionary demands for justice in the present—demands that would necessarily extend to the sphere of the economy and private property. As Meister argues in After Evil, within the human rights discourse that has become the dominant mode of narrating historical transition since the end of the Cold War, transitional justice shifts the focus of attention from injustice to trauma, locking in a preference for therapeutic solutions over those that seek redistributive or re-organisational ones. Translated into an older political lexicon, this means that therapeutic solutions to trauma are in effect designed to subvert and prevent “socialist transition.” As Meister explained in a talk at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory in June 2022: I criticized the idea that what comes after a history of injustice is not a revolutionary reversal of that bad history but rather a cultural shift to a discourse of human rights and of human development in which the beneficiaries of past injustice are able to join in a moral consensus that the past was evil but only in return for the willingness of surviving victims of that injustice to accept a political consensus that the evil has past, a consensus that defers indefinitely a project of reversing or harvesting its cumulative effects but also sets aside the question of whether those cumulative effects are seen to be a perpetuation of the injustice or even whether they need to be justified at all. (Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, 05:42–06:42)

Meister is concerned with the way that past injustice feeds into widening inequality in the time since the injustice leading up to the present, seeing his own work as a critique of what he calls the “capabilities approach” to justice that sees trauma as a disability to be therapeutically treated and overcome. In Meister’s estimation, the “disability” consists in not being able to attach a story to one’s body, a situation that he describes through the metaphor of writer’s block.

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To better understand what is at stake here, it would be useful to refer to a couple of concepts used by Jacque Rancière, the first of which would be the notion of the “communism of intelligence” (Rancière “Communists Without Communism?” 168) that is the direct corollary—and negation—of the “pedagogical presupposition” that motivates works like Detention and Chou’s Transitional Justice for minors. In effect, the capabilities approach is anticommunist or counter-revolutionary in the sense that it presupposes a pedagogical trajectory in which the therapeutic cure expresses an unequal relation of power. The second notion that would be pertinent here is Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “police order” that structures society along the model of consensus. This is a “more general order that arranges that tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in community” (Rancière Disagreement, 28). A police order is not just an order of capabilities or powers, it is “an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable” (Rancière Disagreement, 29). The key point to retain here is that a “police order” names, for Rancière, an order of intelligible bodies coordinated by an identitarian discourse that equates name with place and the pairing of the two with function. Inasmuch as neoliberalism is a subjective technology of somatic and subjective atomisation that is invariably implicated in the quest for identity recognition (usually via commodity consumption and personal branding), the “disability” to which Meister refers is the fiction that points to the therapeutic solution of identity, or “identity transition,” rather than social solidarity and popular sovereignty against increasing privatisation of collective wealth. The contemporary interest in the recognition of Taiwanese identity and the valorisation of Taiwanese voices seeks, in effect, to resolve the problem of metaphorical collective “writer’s block” by creating a narrative of self-determination. As a narrative about and by the “unblocked” author of her own destiny, self-determination performs various functions: It effaces both those elements of hetero-determination such as US imperial power that constitute it and the antiblackness at the heart of anticommunism; it diverts attention away from the ongoing capitalist injustice in the present that has its roots in the past of the authoritarian, stateterror of the capitalist developmental state, insisting that now is not the right time for that kind of justice (because, for instance, the capital flight

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that it would unleash would lead to the kind of political destabilisation that could provide a pretext for annexation by China); it legitimises the notion that today’s beneficiaries of the injustices wrought by the authoritarian capitalist developmental state can be identified with the victims, not the perpetrators, by virtue of bearing witness to the innocence of past victims and thus becoming a would-have-been rescuer; and it makes “Taiwan” into a pretext for endorsing exceptional imperial violence—the global sovereign police’s “duty” to protect and defend potential victims so that past violence is never again repeated—on the basis of repudiating past violence (the above points are based on Meister’s bullet list of conclusions given in the preface to After Evil, pp vii–x). A transition based in human rights rather than in redistribution and/or reorganisation of both the productive market and the financial market is a transition that is directed towards the aesthetic ideology of “remembering oneself” à la Detention in lieu of re-membering oneself into a properly political moment of shared community beyond the inevitable “police order” that structures quotidian norms grafted onto bodies, such as gender, race, sexuality, and class. In the context of contemporary Taiwan, this path of critique would suggest opening up transitional justice to a consideration of the trajectory leading from authoritarian developmental capitalism to neoliberal capitalism, or what Meister terms an “injustice compounding machine.” Yet this is precisely what the trajectory of transitional justice both actively pursued by its partisan advocates in Taiwan and passively confirmed by the Taiwanese beneficiaries of the past conjoined in neoliberal consensus, despite their viciously petty enmity for each other, has deliberately excluded. In the final analysis, the social consensus sealed by transitional justice beyond the partisan feuds between the DPP and the KMT is precisely that which concerns the exclusive political legitimacy enjoyed by neoliberal transition. At the heart of this consensus lies a fundamental tension between transitional justice as an attempt to freeze civil war and neoliberalism as an attempt to stimulate civil war as a profitable solution to globalisation. In response, the Taiwan Consensus proposes a new form of identification in which all Taiwanese are survivors now threatened with annihilation by Communist China. The problem with this form of identification, as we will see in our continued analysis of Detention below, is that it relies on a form of temporality that precludes the radical futurity of the future.

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Transnational Justice and Translation Recast as a therapeutic rather than political process, transitional justice effectively legitimates the inherent injustice of economic inequality in the present. Paradoxically, this temporal displacement (of the possibility of justice in the present) is accompanied by a discursive element that absolutises the present at the same time that the present itself is deferred. One way to grasp this paradox lies in the status of physical pain taken by the human rights discourse as the basis for its therapeutic model. Physical pain is precisely the sort of pain that exists only in the present, so much so that it provides the illusion of self-identity with the most convincing “proof” of existence imaginable, thereby enabling the identity politics of victimhood nationalism. As a non-physical form of pain, trauma is nevertheless redefined according to the structure of physical pain, which enjoys unassailable ethical priority over political demands. From this perspective, trauma is continually “present” until it can be resolved via therapeutic methods of transitional justice—primarily in the form of narrative. If this narrative generally takes the form of melodrama, that is not because the claims of victims have been overblown but rather because of the compensatory catharsis it affords to the beneficiaries/ bystanders of previous injustice who can now imagine their compassion for the victims without fear of retribution. Reflecting on the historical implications of the ascendancy of human rights discourse, Meister expresses his own commitments with admirable frankness and critical self-awareness: My ideological critique of Human Rights Discourse is that it continues, rather than transcends, the counterrevolutionary project to the extent that victims of the old regime let its beneficiaries keep their gains in the new. This is, I believe, a moral advance over the uglier forms of counterrevolution—it allows reconciled victims a moral victory—but it remains a political compromise that gives beneficiaries more long-term security than they might have gotten through counterrevolutionary means. (Meister After Evil, 69)

Seen from Meister’s perspective, it is not difficult to understand how the subterranean consensus surrounding the politically polarised contestation of transitional justice in Taiwan is an extension of counter-revolutionary politics after the end of the political modernity defined by the circular

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struggle between revolution and counter-revolution. It is “counterrevolutionary” in the sense that it takes off the table the possibility of distributive justice in the present. Yet unlike traditional counterrevolutionary politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the human rights version is based on a displacement of the political analysis of class by an ethico-therapeutical analysis of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. What interests me about both Chih-yu Shih’s anti-imperialist position and Rowen and Rowen’s normative legal universalism is, in the final analysis, the seminal idea that transitional justice is not something that can be conceived within the framework of a community that coincides with the given borders of a nation-state or an imagined national community. This insight opens on to a radically different, transnational conception of transitional justice, one that begins—as we might imagine it beyond both Shih and Rowen & Rowen—with the experience of the trauma of capitalism that we analysed in a previous section, leading to the following conclusion: The trauma of capitalism is the trauma of the accident of the border and the necessary role played by that aleatory accident in the injustice known as the commodification of labour. In effect, the transnational aspect of transitional justice reveals important truths about the nature of the world system born out of colonial encounter. In the first place, we are compelled to recognise that so-called universal values invariably imply transitions. Universalism is nothing but a disavowed theory of transitions. The basis for these transitions is a cartography of borders, or again, a cartography of populations managed by the governmental technologies of borders and translations. This quiver of governmental technologies, crystallised in the apparatus of area, further provides a mechanism for managing the essential conundrum of the capital relation, namely its exteriority to the social. The process by which this exteriority is made to appear internal, and hence natural, to social relations, is the primordial form of traumatic violence that is incessantly repeated throughout the cycle of capitalist accumulation and that becomes especially visible during periods of capitalist transition. It is in light of the “trauma of capitalism” that transitional justice must be apprehended with a view to translation. Only through the realisation of transition as an event akin to that of translation, at the singular point where the translator creates continuity from discontinuity, can human rights be actualised. This is why the event of translation and the event of transition can both be illuminated by attention to the positionality

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of the translator and the bordering practices that she facilitates. This point became clear to me during a presentation by Naoki Sakai at a conference in September 2022 organised by Rada Ivekovi´c on the politics of translation. Asked to comment on Sakai’s presentation, I dwelled at length on the implications for transitional justice. Sakai responded in kind the following day with a short, written text, also presented orally, in which he summarised the main points while adding conceptual clarity. The following paragraphs which conclude this section are thus the result of this intellectual dialogue, for which I am deeply grateful. The trouble with the human rights discourse that has become dominant since the demise of the political modernity that oscillated between revolution and counter-revolution lies in the reduction or the essentialisation of human rights whereby the practical aspect of human rights has been completely dissociated from transitions. Illan rua Wall, one of the leading proponents of critical legal theory, describes this difference in terms of the temporality of constituent power: Radical notions of rights—that is, demands for a different being-together— constantly emerge in constituent moments. In this instance it is through the shared and mixed experience of radical resistance to the plantation economy that the demand for radical politico-economic change is enunciated. What I have tried to do in this section is draw attention not to the content of the rights demanded by the slaves, but to the use of rights as rupture and demand. The danger with the eternal focus on the content of rights is that their purpose is missed. They become a matter for standard setting and policing. This focus has the tendency to look for rights being effectively implemented by a government. The point with Haiti, however, is that rights are used for many purposes, not least as a tool of radical change. Rights are picked up by the slaves and mixed with their own political traditions in order to rupture the political constitution of the time. We can see a version of rights which is born from and tightly bound to the constituent. This is an association that our modern historians of human rights tend to overlook. (Wall Human Rights and Constitent Power, 20–21)

What I find fascinating about Wall’s approach is that it implicitly links the demand for rights to a transitional situation. In effect, the temporality of transition is what defines rights, which should not be seen in terms of standards against which performance can be measured. In Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts suggests a similar idea when he asserts that

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the relation between slavery and freedom should not be conceived as a smooth space of progress but as a striated or interrupted space of rupture in which freedom can only be realised as a process of transition that all members of a society must undergo. In today’s human rights discourse, however, transitional justice has been reified, essentialised, and turned into a confirmation of some pre-existing, innate condition that becomes the basis for a paradoxical temporality that privileges the absolute priority of the present on the one hand while condemning justice to a future that is endlessly deferred on the other. This differed temporality is what Meister describes as, “the refusal of today’s discourse on human rights to fall forward into justice out of fear of falling backward into the evils of the past” (Meister Justice Is an Option, 77). What is at stake is not to prove that the so-called universality of human rights is already inherent in every human being individually. The universality attested to in the conception of human rights must not be confused with the generality of human rights. Universality does not exist in the register of a classificatory schema running from genus to species to individual (or, humanity, nation, individual). Rather, it exists in the register in which universality is contrasted to singularity. The universality at issue is thus not some incontestable truth, valid anywhere at every moment, which holds that each human individual already possesses human rights that need to be protected; it is not in the mode of generality that every human being is endowed with rights. On the contrary, it is in the singular moments of practice, such as transition, that human beings actualise the rights with which they are endowed. What we need in place of a form of universalism that is an unacknowledged theory of transition is rather a form of universalism that confronts the hegemony of capitalist transitions head-on. This type of universalism sheds its connection to essentialism (Derrida) and particularism, becoming instead a generic event. If we can speak of transition as a generic event, it is only because each transition is always already a translation in the sense of being a bordering practice or rupture that creates anew communities and histories. The translator translates, engaging in bordering practice by intervening in difference, antagonism, incommensurability, and discontinuity; by translation, she or he invents, announces, and actualises the original meaning of the text, thereby initiating a transition. Of course, what the translator actualises is not prevented from further translation; it is always exposed to another translation. Thus, every translation is exposed to the

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possibility of re-translation in the future. Yet, since the origin of the text to be translated is only given in its iterability, translation is from the outset always already a form of repetition. One always begins to translate by repeating translation. To the extent that the instance of translation is relative to the sovereignty of the translator, the act of translation consists in inscribing a border thereby instituting the two separate spheres. As long as it is subjected to the modern regime of translation, however, translation serves to organise the economy of specific differences according to the classification of nationality, ethnicity, and race. Beyond that regime, however, we can perceive a different alternative. The sovereignty of the translator, if one may put it that way, consists in the act of encountering already established borders with the possibility of creating a different economy of differences that dismantles the existing distribution of identities to initiate a transition. One of the most innovative aspects of Naoki Sakai’s theory of translation consists in his theorisation of the translator as a “subject-in-transit” (Sakai Translation and Subjectivity, 11 passim) who intervenes at the singular point of discontinuity and incommensurability. This subjectivity endows the translator, and translation as a social practice, with the power to instantiate borders that are themselves ineluctably associated with transition. To the extent that bordering practices such as translation are essential to the imaginary institution of areas, areas are sites of contestation and hegemony over the politics of transition, becoming in effect governmental technologies for the management of populations within transitional processes, beginning with colonial-imperial modernity. The perspective that we have outlined provides a potential avenue for revising the unique project in indigenous transitional justice undertaken by the Taiwanese legal scholar Wu Hao-jen in the collection of his essays published in 2019 titled, Restoring the Rights of the Savage: Transitional Justice for Taiwan’s Indigenous Nations and the Self Redemption of the Modern Legal Order (Yeman de fuquan). Beginning with a historical critique of the disciplines of anthropology and law that relates the two to colonialism and capitalism and describes a synergistic complementarity between the two dialled in around the status of private and state property, Wu advances the thesis that restorative justice for Taiwan’s indigenous populations based on the negation of private property is the only possible avenue for true transitional justice in Taiwan. In the historical trajectory of modernity in Taiwan, which only began with the annexation by Japan in 1895, indigenous populations were

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originally denied citizenship altogether. Basing their argument on documents from the Qing Dynasty which held that Taiwan’s indigenous tribes were outside of Qing administrative control (see my introduction for details of this judgement), the Japanese colonial administration concluded that the indigenous populations of Taiwan were not included within the cessation of sovereignty to Japan by the Qing Empire. In effect, the Japanese decided to treat the indigenous populations of Taiwan as stateless persons—a category that did not exist in international law prior to the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons adopted by the UN in 1954. In the absence of such a category and to avoid being compelled to grant the rights of the citizen to indigenous peoples, the Japanese colonial administration mobilised colonial anthropology to classify indigenous peoples among the category of “winged birds and ambulatory animals” ( feiqin zoushou). After the KMT arrived in Taiwan, the citizenship of indigenous peoples was nominally recognised, yet this seemingly positive change in status only exposed the tribes, according to Wu, to even more direct forms of assimilationist violence and expropriation under a discourse of national identity—which held that indigenous peoples were, like all Han Chinese, “grandchildren of the Fiery Emperor and Yellow Emperor” (yanhuang zisun)—a discourse that permitted, according to Wu, accelerated destruction of tribal customs and national identity (Wu Yeman de fuquan, 33). To remedy this injustice, Wu suggests that the first step consists in recognising the historical violence of dispossession and expropriation to which indigenous peoples in Taiwan have been subjected. On this count, Wu adopts an uncompromising position: Even as the differences between the “advantages” inherent to the two colonial discourses imposed by “imperial force” upon Taiwanese aborigines—the discourse of the “winged birds and ambulatory animals” and that of the “grandchildren of the Fiery and Yellow Emperors”—are difficult to calculate, there was hardly any difference in the exploitation and expropriation of indigenous people that occurred under each. It was not until after the indigenous-led Restore Ancestral Lands Movement of the 1980s that society finally began to understand and reject the violence [of the past], entering a path towards communication as equals. The answer to the question of whether society has already arrived at a consensus or a sense of tolerance about how to begin to restore the participatory rights of such marginalised others may depend on one’s perspective. Perhaps the government believes that great progress has already been made, however,

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this author, at least, holds the view that the answer to this question is unequivocally negative. (ibid., 36)

Wu’s uncompromising clarity leads him to understand that what is at stake is nothing less than a transformation of the legal institutions that sustain the modern nation-state as the organisational form or expression of global capitalism. Even though Wu does not explicitly call for rewriting the Constitution, his argument unmistakably leads in that direction. Yet unlike the contemporary advocates of constitutional change who see in it a means to legitimate Taiwanese identity and independence without addressing the history of settler colonialism on the island, Wu’s position amounts to a decidedly radical approach that aims to change the ontological categories of personhood, individuality, and possession. Summarising the notion of indigenous sovereignty, Wu explains that “the land does not belong to people, people belong to the land” (ibid., 24). Beyond the challenge to private property and the critique of disciplinary knowledge, what I find truly fascinating about Wu’s approach is the potential element of transnationality. To get that to point, however, it would be necessary to undertake in turn a critique of the modern regime of internationality that underwrites Wu’s political anthropology. To rephrase it in the terms preferred by Wu, it would be necessary to transform the notion of belonging (whether to land or to people) such that “belonging” no longer occurs in the modality of a taxonomic scheme, as in belonging to a specific class of being in the order of genusspecies-individual. In that sense, the “restoration of the rights of savage” can only take place when the scheme of biological speciation no longer determines the way we think about social speciation. To be sure, the history of injustices sustained by Taiwan’s indigenous tribes at the hands of different extra-territorial regimes over the past 130 years begins, in Wu’s account, with a presupposition of internationality that is typical of the modern understanding of national individuation. It is precisely this perspective that enables Wu clearly to perceive the national limits of transitional justice and to call for a radical project beyond them: “[S]o-called ‘reconciliation,’ so-called ‘never again,’ are strictly limited to reconciliation within a single state” (ibid., 218). In response, Wu points to the New Partnership Between the Indigenous Peoples and the Government of Taiwan signed by Chen Shui-bian in 1999 and reaffirmed in 2002 after Chen had been elected President of the ROC, as a tacit admission of the fact that transitional justice for all peoples

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in Taiwan would have to begin from the premise of international relations internal to Taiwan, rather than the presumption of intra-nationality among the citizens of a single nation. Quite radical in many respects, Wu Hao-jen’s analysis adheres to a typically modern understanding of anthropological difference that takes the nation as the normative form of the relation between people, language, and culture. The cultural nationalism that sustains Wu’s eloquent arguments for a restoration of indigenous sovereignty based on collective rather than private property paradoxically displaces the notion of possession from the individual to the relationship between language and people, each of which “belong” to the other in a schema of belonging defined by the biological categories of genus-species-individual transcribed into the social categories of humanity-nation-individual. Hobbled by this typically modern approach to social speciation, Wu’s understanding of transitional justice ultimately falls back on the human rights discourse described and critiqued by Meister. What makes today’s indigenous populations supremely qualified to mediate transitional justice for all communities in Taiwan is, in Wu’s eyes, precisely their status as what Meister calls, “undamaged victims.” Wu admiringly states: “In Taiwan’s multi-ethnic society, we almost never see any of the indigenous nations use hate speech against the dominant society…This tolerance of the minority for the majority, a tolerance of the victim for the perpetrator…is precisely the best interpretation of both restorative justice and transitional justice” (ibid., 190). The emphasis on the moral status of the undamaged victim displaces demands for justice in the present to an endlessly deferred future that never arrives yet is continually projected onto the past, much the same as the modern regime of translation projects a representational image of translational practice—which is always inherently future-oriented—onto the past as though translation were determined by the pre-existing identities of linguistic unity (source and target language). The result in both cases is varying degrees of essentialist universalism. It is precisely in adopting the perspective of the translator as a singular point in the midst of social discontinuity, as a “subject-in-transit,” where the temporal violence of representation can be resolved. In terms of Wu’s theory of restorative justice for indigenous nations in Taiwan, this means beginning with a redefinition of the concepts of “dialogue” (duihua), “communication” (goutong ), “consensus” (gongshi), and “community” (gongtongti) that lie at the core of his understanding of the framework within which international, instead of strictly national, justice can be

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achieved. Such redefinition would displace the sort of syllogisms expressed by Wu in the following statement that emblematises the inter/national limits of his radical project: “Only if there is dialogue and communication can there be consensus and tolerance, while consensus and tolerance are the irreplaceable elements for the internal cohesion of the community” (ibid., 36). Wu’s statement of principle amounts to a repetition of the classic tautology between language and people that defines the modern philological ideology of the identity between the two. The internal cohesion of the community is already presupposed at a linguistic level by the notions of dialogue and communication to the extent that such acts are imagined in terms of a passage across a spatial border between two national communities mediated by the translator. This is precisely the moment when the transnational/non-national sovereignty of the translator, a “subject in transit” as Naoki Sakai calls it, is denied. The political stakes might be further illustrated by reference to Rweiren Wu’s criticisms of the “ethnic entrepreneur” with which Wu Hao-jen finds himself in agreement. For Rwei-ren Wu, “the monopolisation of the ethnic subject’s right to enunciation” (ibid., 212), preventing a diversity of internal viewpoints from being communicated “outside the community,” is the essence of a character that Wu disparagingly dubs “the ethnic entrepreneur.” Despite the emphasis on a diversity of voices, what this critique really amounts to is an ethics of communalism and moral economy that begins with the presupposition that exteriority is always ethno-linguistic in nature. Clearly, it is only within the limits of the modern regime of translation that the problem of the “monopolisation” of “communal speech” directed at the “outside” can occur. While Wu Hao-jen introduces an extra-national element to the idea of transitional justice in Taiwan in the form of demands emanating from the dispossessed indigenous nations that are internal yet foreign, his approach to nationality leaves intact the presupposition of internationality essential to the construction of cultural nationalism. The identification of the national always assumes the element of the international within which it becomes possible to distinguish between nations in the manner of mutually exclusive communities. Contrary to this regime of internationality, which is based on the cofiguration of different nation-languages, the element of transnationality is that which logically and historically precedes the inter/ national. Transnationality names precisely the condition that occurs when the land does not belong to people and people belong to the land in terms of the singularity of sharing rather than the generality of taxonomy.

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In this respect, we can begin to imagine a more conclusive answer—one that is more “savage”—than that offered by Wu Hao-jen to the question, “what comes after the unjust spatial structure originally created on the basis of the synergy between colonial anthropology and the Eurocentric system of international law?” It is around the problematics of transition as translation that the current classification of national, ethnic, gender, and racial identities should be called into question and new figures of humanity imagined. Of course, the internationality of the modern world appears predetermined and irreparable by virtue of the very repression of the translator’s sovereignty, of the deliberate erasure of her or his prestige to cause transitions in this world. Thus, the originary ambiguity and ambivalence of the translator’s positionality is denied by the internationality of the modern world, while the singularity of translation is denied by the representation of a fictitious linguistic unity and autonomy that supposedly precedes translation. No wonder “the invisibility of the translator” is an inevitable feature of the modern regime of translation and the presupposition of internationality is a constituent component of today’s human rights discourse behind transitional justice. Now is the time to open a broader perspective under which the transitions to which the movement of capital constantly gives rise are counteracted by the revolutionary transitions of justice and the revolutionary translations of politics without alibi. In reference to Taiwan, we would like to stress that the transnational nature of historical injustice in the past demands transnational approaches to transitional justice in the present. Transitional justice that does not include populations ascribed to the proper nouns, China, Indigenous, the US, Japan, Guatemala, etc., or again to gender (such as “Comfort Women,” J. ianfu, Ch. weianfu), re-instantiates the traumas associated with the accident of the border and capitalist transitions. In truth, transitional justice in Taiwan needs to be articulated to the demands for transitional justice and indivisible security across East Asia, the Western Pacific, and beyond, lest the inscription of border trauma into the normalisation of memory continues to generate conflict and even war. As the abstract for Lea David’s The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights summarises: “the human rights memorialisation agenda does not lead to a better appreciation of human rights; instead, contrary to what would be expected, it serves to strengthen national sentiments, divisions and animosities along ethnic lines, and lead to the new forms of societal inequalities that are closely connected to different forms

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of corruptions” (David The Past Can’t Heal Us, frontmatter). Unfortunately, the transitional justice process brought to a conclusion by the DPP provides new evidence to sustain David’s thesis. Beyond David, our discussions in this book have led us to propose rethinking transitional justice via the insights provided by a critique of the modern regime of translation and the schema of internationality it sustains. Ultimately, translation as we conceive it is itself a practice of dissensus more fundamental than disagreement or even dissent.

PART II

The Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana

CHAPTER 5

Transition, or Area as a Tool to Manage the Capitalist Outside

A Tight Little Island Throughout the period of martial law stretching from 1949 to 1987, Taiwan was known to US Americans as the “Tight Little Island.” Beginning with an article, titled “Chiang’s Tight Little Island,” in The New Republic in 1952 at the start of the Cold War, the moniker stuck with Taiwan, still known as Formosa, up through the 1980s, when the Hong Kong-based English periodical The Far Eastern Economic Review published a critical cover story on the island under the title Tight Little Island, circa 1982–1983. Eminently political, the term was also notably used by Alfred Jenkins, a National Security Council staff member who was one of Henry Kissinger’s key China advisers. In a memorandum issued in 1968 to Walt Whitman Rostow, National Security Adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Jenkins opined, “We need not indicate overtly that the U.S. foresees the possibility of an eventually independent Taiwan” (Foreign Relations, 674). Jenkin’s idea of foresight craftily removes the expression of volitional agency expressed a decade earlier in 1957 by John K. Fairbank, considered by many the founder of university-based China studies in the US, who asked with earnest approval, “How do we engineer an independent Republic of Taiwan…?” Fairbank’s understanding of self-determination must be placed in the context of the “two long-term principles” said to have guided US policy towards China “since 1785,” namely “national © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. D. Solomon, The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8_5

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self-determination” and “freedom of access…as part of an international order of trade, travel, and enterprise.” In other words, US support for self-determination is conditional on reciprocal support for whatever policies are deemed beneficial to a regime of capitalist accumulation whose centre of decision resides not in a local sovereign power but offshore. Fairbank’s formula for managing the inherent contradiction of an externally engineered form of “self-determination” that defines freedom in terms of telecommanded regimes of accumulation relies on what he calls “de facto” rather than de jure arrangements, deriving legitimacy from armies, elections, and dollars rather than laws and history. We cannot discount the strong likelihood that Jenkins’ advocacy of “support” for Taiwanese independence, as opposed to calling for directly “engineering” it, was itself an evolution of de facto colonial engineering technology. Jenkins predicted that “Taiwan’s fate” would be decided not necessarily by either Beijing or Washington but by whether Chiang Kai-shek’s successor, Chiang Chingkuo, “opts for a relatively popular base for government or looks to military support for a ‘tight little island’” (Foreign Relations of the United States, 374). In essence, Jenkins would be the first avatar of an idea that would gradually become elevated into a doctrine of American exceptionalism usurping the principle of national sovereignty. This would allow the United States and its satellite “allies” to sit in a position of judgement on the nature of the political regime in power as the final arbiter of sovereignty—a radical departure from the norms established and practised since the origins of the interstate system in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. In effect, sovereignty would no longer be seen as the source of political legitimacy but rather the other way around: political legitimacy would be the source of sovereignty while the United States would be the sole arbiter of legitimacy. In the eyes of the political engineers of Pax Americana, to sever Taiwan’s ties to China and to secure the perimeter of the “first island chain,” a “popular base” was essential to confer legitimacy. By the time Fairbank’s proposal was published, a similar kind of colonial governmentality under erasure had been developing for nearly a dozen years to stabilise the relation between Japan and the United States. As Naoki Sakai argues in a persuasive analysis of postwar Japan, “this situation should be called a new type of colonial system,” the main characteristic of which would be “a relation of complicity” as opposed to a relation of domination predicated by a transitive verb, typically expressed by the phrase, “the United States colonised Japan” (Sakai Kib¯ o, 22–23).

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Sakai’s work effectively shows how the postcolonial agency of the subordinate nation, i.e., complicity, is crucial to the operation of this innovative “new type of colonial system.” As we dwell on the implications of an updated version of the contradictory formula of “engineered self-determination,” in which colonisation and self-determination go hand-in-hand, it is important to note that the tension between de facto and de jure interpretations permeates the discourse of sovereignty in general. The aspect of external power that lends a contradictory quality to the idea of engineered selfdetermination is merely an exacerbated sign of a relational quality on which sovereignty invariably relies but suppresses behind its claims to self-generated autonomy. While it is easy to detect the spectral quality of self-determination engineered by an external power, it is not as simple for us to discern how self-determination in the form of state sovereignty is always essentially spectral. Somewhat like a form of ideology, sovereignty transforms de facto practices that are intrinsically relational into a de jure form of self-sufficient, self-generating autonomy. The essentially Eurocentric history of international law (Anghie), punctuated by de facto transgressions and semi-permanent exceptions legitimated by force (Benton), calls into question the very legitimacy of a world system based on sovereign nation-states, revealing in the process the essentially unstable premises of the postcolonial world order. Today, by all accounts, Taiwan has shed its former image, successfully rebranding itself via the theme, “small island, big heart,” endowed with political legitimacy derived not from the continuity of sovereignty but from a narrative about historical transition. When Jacques Derrida writes in Specters of Marx of the “death and expropriation at the heart of the living” (164), we hear a reminder of the fact that transitions always produce a remainder. As with any transition, Taiwan’s recent historical transition begs the question, to what extent have things really changed? In posing this question through the lens of transition, we avoid adjudicating on the competing claims of sovereignty over Taiwan. Developments over the past several decades attest to the transformation of Westphalian sovereignty, not just in terms of a proliferation of ever more exceptions, but also in terms of the basis, meaning, and practices of sovereignty as more and more forms of power—primarily algorithmic and financial—emerge that do not conform to the model of state sovereignty. As Robert Meister notes, just as “sovereignty was the abstract form of

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power specific to the national development of capitalist modes of production,” “liquidity is the abstract form of power specific to globalized financial capital” (Meister Justice Is an Option, 3). This book does not attempt to test those claims but rather to add them to the list of working assumptions that call for attention to their effects. The most salient of those effects in the realm of the humanities has been the central importance accorded to the identity. In the case of Taiwan studies, the concept has virtually become the dominant motif commanding an entire field and the phalanxes of intellectual labour socially organised by it. Yet, as Marie Moran points out, this concept of the identity is relatively new and dates back no further than the 1950s and 1960s. Contrary to the traditional idea of identity used throughout most of the history of modern Western philosophy, which saw identity in terms of a quality or characteristic that endures over time, the new idea of identity is intrinsically related to changes in processes of subjectivation brought about by the transformations of neoliberal financialised economy. To speak of Taiwan’s recent history as a history of “identity transition” (Corcuff “Introduction: Taiwan, A Laboratory of Identities,” xi) is a formula that attests to this transformation in the meaning of the concept, which otherwise would have been unintelligible in the context of the classic understanding of identity in modernity—according to which “identity” is precisely that which resists temporal change, not measures it. What this evolution in the meaning of the term points to is a radically different sense of temporality behind the notion of identity. These changes, in turn, can only be properly understood, as Moran persuasively argues, in relation to the transition in political economy that culminates in neoliberal globalisation. While Moran’s focus is on the rise of personal identity in a neoliberal culture that emphasises personal branding and the entrepreneurship of the self, we might also connect it to the financialisation of everyday life and the changes in temporality wrought by financialisation (we will discuss this further below). Contrary to the tenets of state sovereignty laid down by the Eurocentric juridical order initiated with the Treaty of Westphalia, the source of legitimacy for postcolonial sovereignty today is increasingly no longer to be found in the historical past of a people-nation—a volatile fiction at the heart of the Romantic Ideology that has dominated modernity and one in which proponents of both Taiwanese Independence and Chinese sovereignty are equally invested in different ways—but is now being relocated to a hypothetical seat of judgement about the human

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rights performance of political regimes in any given postcolonial state at any given moment, even as techno-feudal corporate sovereignty becomes more and more of a reality (Varoufakis Technofeudalism; for a critique of conceptual problems with the idea of technofeudalism, see Morozov “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason”). As the “responsibility to protect” trumps even the right to self-determination, it has become less important to derive legitimating precedents from history—precedents that invariably normalise colonialism, imperialism, juridical exceptionalism, and the modern nation-state to varying degrees (as seen in the historical arguments presented by advocates of Taiwanese sovereignty)—than to pass judgement in the present. This judgement, of a transactional nature, is what lies behind the oft-repeated rejection of Chinese claims to sovereignty over Taiwan because the Communist Party of China—whose rule is deemed illegitimate—has never exercised effective administrative control over Taiwan. Hence, the call we so often hear nowadays, to include Taiwanese voices and to respect Taiwanese agency. When claims to national sovereignty become subordinate to extraterritorial judgements about the nature of a ruling regime, sovereignty itself becomes differentiated hierarchically. Indeed, inclusion is not a prophylactic against hierarchical differentiation. The presentism that insists on the absolute priority of present voices, if not the voice as presence and the present as a temporal unity, reminds us of sociologist Didier Eribon’s warning, which serves an extended motto for this work: [A]ny sociology or any philosophy that begins by placing at the center of its project the “point of view of the actors” and the “meaning they give to their actions” runs the risk of simply reproducing a shorthand version of the mystified relation that social agents maintain with their own practices and desires, and consequently does nothing more than serve to perpetuate the world as it currently stands — an ideology of justification (for the established order). Only an epistemological break with the way in which individuals spontaneously think about themselves renders possible the description of the mechanisms by which the social order reproduces itself. The entire system needs to be apprehended, including the manner in which dominated people ratify their domination through the choice they make to drop out of school, thereby making the choice they had been intended to make. A theory’s power and interest lie precisely in the fact that it doesn’t consider it as sufficient simply to record the words that “actors” say about their “actions,” but that rather, it sets as a goal to allow both individuals and groups to see and to think differently about what

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they are and what they do, and then, perhaps, to change what they do and what they are. It is a matter of breaking with incorporated categories of perception and established frameworks of meaning, and thereby with the social inertia of which these categories and frameworks are the vectors; after such a break, the goal is to produce a new way of looking at the world and thereby to open up new political perspectives. (Eribon Returning to Reims, 52–53)

Eribon’s emphasis on the importance of the “epistemological break” crucial to critique is precisely the same attitude that Alenka Zupanˇciˇc defends in her critique of conspiracy theory that we discussed in Part I. What Detention shows is not that a “Taiwan Consensus” internal to Pax Americana is constituted by metaphorically dropping out of school, as Eribon puts it, but rather the reverse, by dropping back into it. Despite appearances, it is not democracy that provides legitimacy for Taiwanese sovereignty, but a judgement made in the absolute present about the international community’s (i.e., the United States’s) “responsibility to protect” the “advanced students” of modernity in Taiwan. The process of human rights judgement results in a ranking table of those populations worthy of “rescue” by the “world community”—those model students whom the “world community,” a euphemism for the exclusions that constitute imperial hegemony, has a responsibility to protect even by resorting to extreme violence. Self-determination becomes on this account not so much national liberation as “school security,” not the ability to assume a history but rather the ability to selectively exclude history from the curriculum, to assert that today’s consensus, authentically voiced by Taiwanese, determines the only temporality that matters and that “hetero-determination” in all its aspects can be ignored. In the same gesture that mimics the capitalist obsession with the future as the eternality of the present, self-determination motivated by the search for security denies an openness to the future and to the other. Just as capitalism reduces the future to a return on investment that can become a market option in the present, the school security version of self-determination reduces the future to a return to self, determined as that which one will have been in the past based on what one thinks one is likely to do when/if the past were to repeat itself in the future. This notion of the present is one that is, as Meister argues, denuded of the possibility of justice. In the aporetic void left by the evacuation

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of any temporality other than a present that is paradoxically never the appropriate moment for social justice, redemption takes the form of a deferred promise whose claims could never for that reason be betrayed or falsified. Instead, the absolute consensus of the present offers itself the panacea of an infinite succession of nows in which the demands for justice always have more time to realise the pompous promises of creedal faith. This version of self-determination reneges on both the healing of the past and the promise of the future—not this or that future but the radical futurity without which temporality is nothing but a modal succession of presents. As a tenacious faith in absolute presentism that excludes the other, the “school security” version of self-determination, or securidentity, channels demands for present, distributive justice and relief from past historical trauma into identitarian politics. “Everything will be better once our identity as a human rights practitioner and model leader of democracy has been recognised and accorded corresponding protection,” is the chimerical promise of this kind of self-determination. Even as identitarian politics is, in Taiwan’s case, regularly associated with democracy and freedom, no attempt is made to specify exactly how identification aids democracy beyond certain types of formal recognition that are confused with interest—inseparable from marketing and branding strategies to accumulate both capital and recognition. The role of identity in those forms of ongoing injustice that are not identity-based remains conspicuously unexplained. The reason for the absence of such explanation, of course, is because it falls outside the boundaries of those forms of moral panic permitted, when not actively cultivated, by the Consensus, expressed most fully in the insecurity of civil war. If the purest expression of national sovereignty has always been war, the neoliberal “school security” version of self-determination is invariably tied to civil war. This permanent civil war reduces war into that part of it that is a logistical operation rather than a sovereign decision. Once war has been reduced to logistics, popular sovereignty can be restricted to the forensic politics of identity recognition. Within that narrow view, logistics—and war, since the two are coterminous—becomes the only possible justice, the only possible transition, imaginable. Logistical claims to self-determination that reinforce the power of transactional judgement and the fantasy of the model region where judgement takes place—the fantasy of the West as a coherent unity— do a grave disservice to the cause of decolonisation. The fact that the United States has spent a great deal of the past seven decades since the

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end of World War II doing everything it could to crush any form of popular sovereignty—even those won by democratic election (such as in Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, Chile, and Brazil)—makes any form of self-determination that relies on US military protection today inherently compromised. It is, furthermore, precisely this illegitimate appropriation of postcolonial sovereignty that makes discussions of money flows and covert action just as necessary as theoretical critiques of the normativity of sovereignty to our understanding of the intrinsic links between areal knowledge production and the geopolitics of settler empire. Such discussions testify to the history of the annihilation of popular sovereignty by the very powers that claim to defend the right to self-determination, revealing in the process the egregious double standards that proliferate behind the rhetoric of universalism that covers up colonial governmentality and white settler empire today. Nothing emblematises this duplicity more than the calls by state actors, media influencers, and intellectuals to “decolonise” nations that happen to be US geostrategic foes. Due to the illegitimate, transactional appropriation of postcolonial sovereignty practised by the West, such calls can never amount to anything more than cover for the strategies of Balkanisation that open the doors to privatisation, offshore resource extraction, and financialisation, if not perpetual instability, ethnic hatred, militarised border regimes, and permanent war. While the US has spawned a global industry of transitology devoted to imagining political transition, it has nevertheless proved itself incapable of undertaking transitions that are not accomplished by war. Transitology is simply the ideology of bellicose transition. The challenge for Taiwanese intellectuals and their accomplices/allies today is for us to think transition against the logic of war. Unfortunately, the window of opportunity to develop such ideas and put them into practice is closing fast and may well have already been definitively closed by the escalating bellicosity in the Taiwan Straits. Having said that, I can only hope that the analyses conducted in this work may be of some use to those who come after the war(s), trying to pick up the pieces.

Transpacific Spectral Transitions Considering the themes of history, politics, and the outside discussed in Part I, it is necessary to leave behind the cultural sphere for a moment to review the historical relationship between the economic development known as the “East Asian Miracle,” profound changes in the US

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military-industrial complex, and the discourse of historical transition, or transitology. As analysed by Seymour Melman, a fundamental transition in the institutional arrangement of the US government occurred starting with the Kennedy administration. From the end of World War II up through the beginning of the 1960s, the US was dominated by what Dwight D. Eisenhower had described as a “military-industrial complex.” This “complex,” which Eisenhower himself had helped to construct, was characterised by a “loose collaboration of senior military officers, industrial managers, and legislators, operating mainly through market relations” (Melman War, 16). The new system that replaced this “complex” was defined by managerialism more than by the market. Melman coined the term “state-management” (Melman Pentagon, 1) to define the new institutional arrangement, in which “a formal central-management office to administer the military-industrial empire” (Melman Pentagon, 2) operated behind the appearance of the “free market.” By the early 2000s, it was clear to Melman that one of the keys to the operation of this system of managerial capitalism resided in the existence of a professional managerial class (PMC) working for the benefit of oligarchic interests that promoted deindustrialisation, inequality, and social dislocation. Preceding the consummation of the neoliberal transition in the 1980s by two decades, the transition to managerial capitalism in the 1960s effectively prepared the ground for the emergence of neoliberal financialisation, with profound implications for the production of specialised knowledge about areas outside the United States over which the military-industrial empire exercised new forms of indirect colonial control. In between these two transitions was another important transition that concerned military supply chains. For much of the Cold War up until the 1970s, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) relied on a system of military standards and “military specification,” dubbed Mil-Std and Mil-Spec, respectively, that rigorously distinguished between civilian and military-industrial supply chains and products. Unique defence requirements like electromagnetic pulse (EMP) resistance effectively precluded the use of most civilian microelectronics. Until the 1970s, the DoD Mil-Spec procurement supply chain represented a sizable portion of the overall market and, in parallel, was the major source of funding for the cutting-edge research and development in microelectronics. Between supply chains and R&D, the DoD could effectively assure not only that key military technologies were in the hands of US firms but also that the

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supply chains for weapons procurement were mostly kept “in country.” From the mid-1970s onwards, however, advances in semiconductor fabrication changed the economics of the supply chain. New technologies such as metal oxide semiconductor technology (MOS) and complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology (CMOS) offered a way to produce integrated circuits (ICs) at considerably lower cost for the civilian sector than Mil-Spec ICs. As production exploded, costs decreased dramatically. Although the DoD initially regarded these technologies as unsuitable for defence applications because of EMP vulnerabilities, by the early 1980s the civilian microelectronics industry had progressed exponentially (Moore’s Law), leaving Mil-Spec generations behind. The “East Asian Miracle” is thus intimately connected to the story of military supply chains, dual use technologies, and the rise of transnational managerial capitalism. East Asia began playing a role in the US microelectronics supply chain (the largest consumer market in the world) with the US occupation of Japan and the Korean War, as Japanese factories were mobilised to produce equipment for US forces. The “East Asian Economic Miracle” was based in part on the progressive relocation of the US IT industrial base to facilities in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, followed later by Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and China. By the late 2010s, the global electronics supply chain became dominated by players in East Asia, with the US maintaining a substantial lead only in high value-added activities like design and manufacture of parts with high margins. Echoing the operational name Desert Shield of the First Gulf War (1991), Craig Addison coined the memorable term “silicon shield” ten years later to describe the strategic implications of Taiwan’s simultaneous integration within global IT supply chains and the US global military garrison of over 800 bases dotting the globe (Addison Silicon Shield, 17). Parallel to the military-industrial supply chain transition, a new form of monetary imperialism catapulted the United States into the role of hegemon in a system of accumulation by debt, alternately known as debt capitalism or monetary imperialism. Beginning in the first half of the twentieth century, the US had maintained its ascendant position in world affairs due to its status as a creditor nation dating from World War I, when it had bankrolled England and France in their fight against Germany. Within several years after the end of World War II, the United States had cornered 75% of global inter-governmental gold reserves. Yet

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its global military deployment and military adventurism fighting communism around the globe were heading, by the end of the 1960s, to a severe depletion of US gold reserves. This monetary crisis would lead the United States, under Richard Nixon, to declare an end to the gold standard in 1971, setting the stage for a historic transformation in the economic basis of US hegemony from credit to debt. Following the end of the gold standard in 1971 and the institutionalisation of the dollar as the exclusive currency for oil purchases in 1973, the United States was able to create and sustain unique conditions for global dollar hegemony. The operation of this hegemony was based on using sovereign debt as an instrument for capital accumulation without fear of the consequences. The nations that had hosted production outsourced from the United States had no other choice but to use the dollars acquired through the sale of those products on the US market for the purchase of US government issued bonds in the form of Treasury Bills. Historically, the East Asian states (Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and, much later, the People’s Republic of China) have been the largest purchasers of these T-Bills, as they are known. T-Bills effectively became the instrument of a new monetary imperialism that enabled the United States to occupy a singular position as the principal beneficiary. Nations, such as Taiwan, with large reserves of T-Bills were, in effect, subsidising the massive and ever-increasing levels of sovereign debt in the United States. Given the extent to which up to half of that debt can be attributed to military and security spending, it is logical to conclude that the nations buying T-Bills were effectively bankrolling US global militarism, in which they invariably had a certain stake. As of March 2020, six of the top ten foreign state holders of T-Bills were banking centres (i.e., tax havens, including Hong Kong, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Ireland, Cayman Islands, etc.), with top consumers of US military hardware located predominantly in East Asia and the Middle East (Japan, China, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia) coming in next (Statista). This form of monetary imperialism and managerial capitalism, backed up by the punitive potential of the economic sanctions lever and a global military garrison, has for decades formed an incredibly effective feedback loop that permitted financial interests to exercise global hegemony via managerial control exercised across the public and the private sectors. Like every other form of hegemony, this one also required a discourse to garner legitimacy and support, especially from those who were asked to play a subordinate role, such as that attributed to the ostensibly sovereign

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nations in East Asia playing the role of “spokes” to the central “hub” of the super-sovereign United States. The new geography of global supply chains, monetary imperialism, and managerialism that had started to crystallise in the 1970s combined to create, with the collapse of protections around dual use technologies at the end of the Cold War, a situation whose volatility was hidden behind a new discursive apparatus: the narrative of democratic transition.

Civil Society in Transition What is really at stake here is the idea first promoted by American social science in the 1950s and 1960s that sees civil society as the key to “democratic transition.” In the Taiwanese film Detention that motivated our discussion in Part I, civil society is represented internally through the public school (as the place where the private individual and the state meet) and externally through the film’s success at the box office—behind which stands, of course, the commercial success of the eponymous videogame. This link between the economic and the educative recalls Michael Hardt’s discussion of the Hegelian concept of civil society that, “persists in various forms throughout modern and contemporary social and political theory” (Hardt “The Withering,” 30). At once economic and pedagogical, the Hegelian account of civil society is embedded in a discourse of anthropological difference and evolution equated with the development of capitalist productive forces (ibid., 28). Civil society is, in other words, the realm in which citizens learn to become productively “civilised”—particularly the “great unwashed” classes latterly enfranchised by the modern political transition from absolutism to representative democracy. The ideas condensed in this pedagogical project, or Bildung, typical of aesthetic romanticism brings facets of capitalist development and class hierarchy together with the continuum of race-nation-social speciation that characterises a modern world defined by imperialism and capitalism with an aesthetic interest in formation and figuration. Becoming civilised, as Hardt is quick to point out, amounts to a discipline of the organisation of abstract labour. The concept of abstraction to which Hardt refers is the Marxist one that questions how capitalist regimes of accumulation establish quotidian standards of equivalence in which one thing becomes exchangeable for another and all things can be represented in terms of a common denominator of exchange. Among these objects of equivalence, the most salient would be that of human

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labour—the force at the source of the mysterious conversion that turns relations based on ostensibly equal and free exchange into circuits that enable the extraction of surplus value for one, not both, of the parties. This is the process that Fredric Jameson calls “the riddle” of capitalism (Jameson Representing Capital, 14). How can ostensibly equal exchange between two parties lead to the accumulation of surplus value for only one? Commenting on Jameson’s work with an eye to its implications for identity theory, Grant Farred reminds us that identity politics in a capitalist society leads not to liberation but to alienation via the constraints imposed by representation that both mimics and is increasingly entwined with the mysterious operation of exchange (exacerbated by the technological transformation of public space). As Farred ironically quips, “why would any mode of struggle [for liberation] propose as its intention the diversification and broader dissemination of alienation?” (Farred “The Riddle,” 34). As a pair, diversification and dissemination implicitly describe a marketing strategy rather than a project for social and political liberation. This confusion points to one of the weaknesses of civil society theories in general, which ostensibly distinguish civil society from both the state and the market. While this is not the place to review the history of the concept, it will suffice to note the difficulty. Even as corruption has been advanced as a means to index threats to the autonomy of civil society from both the market and the state, the index of corruption is powerless to explain forms of control that are ideological, beginning with the law. Hence, from an epistemic perspective, the concept of civil society partakes of post-Enlightenment political philosophy’s complex relation to the ways in which law has been used to enable imperialism and capitalism. How does one escape from the nihilistically future-oriented paradigm in which civil society is the name of a subjective effect unleashed either by the ideology of political economy or by the ideology of political anthropology? To the extent that “civilisation” is determined by the level of capitalist abstraction in everyday life, it is inescapably bound to increasing alienation. Unfortunately, I do not have the time here to chart all the transitions in the practice and meaning of civil society from the colonial to the postcolonial era. It is crucial to take note, however, of the preponderant role of neoliberal globalisation and transitional justice in fashioning the norms that govern our understanding of what civil society in postcolonial East Asian nations like Taiwan means. In many East Asian societies, such as Taiwan and South Korea, the end of authoritarianism that opened the door to a flourishing of civil society as it is

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normally understood today coincided with the end of the Cold War and the rise of the neoliberal form of globalisation known under the rubric of “the Washington Consensus.” During the first Cold War, the United States conducted vigorous, yet covertly organised, intelligence operations around the world to infiltrate and guide the development of the cultural, artistic, and intellectual spheres through cultural movements such as literary modernism and abstract expressionism and through disciplinary configurations such as communications studies and area studies. (The list of related publications is too long for an essay format without footnotes. For a discussion of such covert operations in general, see Stonor Saunders Who Paid the Piper?; for discussion in relation to Taiwan, see Wang Mei Hsiang Yinbi Quanli, Chen Chien-chung Meixinchu, and Yi-hung Liu Cold War in the Heartland). With the end of the Cold War, under the Reagan administration, the emphasis shifted from covert to overt operations explicitly designed to support civil society organisations aligned with the precisely defined and limited understanding of freedom as promoted by the neoliberal Washington Consensus. The tension between the Washington Consensus and the human rights discourse that became dominant after 1989 ironically served in the post-authoritarian East Asian nations to cover up the extent to which authoritarian dictatorship enjoyed a popular base—what Jie-Hyun Lim has eloquently captured with the paradoxical formulation of “mass dictatorship.” The blossoming of a robust civil society in post-authoritarian Taiwan, like in other East Asian nations, is premised on a series of historical defeats that are rarely acknowledged and regularly disavowed or repressed. Reflecting on the rise of civil society in the context of post-authoritarian neoliberal globalism, we should note, with historian Alex Gourevitch, how defeat has insinuated itself into the political premises accepted today as normative: Thus, when Isaiah Berlin famously said there are only two coherent ways of speaking about liberty, one negative and one positive, he reproduced at the conceptual level a political defeat. This defeat has been naturalized. According to Skinner, we have become “bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about [concepts like freedom] bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them,” which then constrains our political imagination. The task of historical scholarship is to denaturalize this way of thinking about freedom by making us aware that the present constellation of values

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and conceptual possibilities is neither necessary nor self-evidently the best. (Gourevitch From Slavery, 19)

Principal among these historical defeats in a Taiwanese/East Asian context would be: (1) the virtual annihilation of communist movements (outside of the handful in China, Vietnam, and Korea, etc., that were able to successfully appropriate the state); (2) the arrested progress of decolonisation—seen notably in the peculiar type of colonial governmentality under erasure established by the United States in postwar Japan upon the remnants of prewar fascist militarism that organised to form the Liberal Democratic Party that has been in power for nearly all of the past seven decades; and (3) the erasure of popular support for authoritarianism amidst a narrative of resistance. Expanding on patterns established during the Cold War, a considerable amount of intellectual labour has been organised on both sides of the Pacific to assure an historical and epistemological framework in which the emerging newly industrialised economies (NIEs) of East Asia and Japan would fit into a larger narrative about historical transitions— an enduring thematic cornerstone of the ideology of colonial–imperial modernity—that fit the aims of postcolonial global governance on the basis of unrivalled US financial and military hegemony. The bulk of this labour was taken up by intellectuals based in universities and think tanks whose interests and values increasingly aligned with that of the PMC, producing a narrative about “freedom (of access),” “self-determination,” “free markets,” and “development” that cleverly diverted attention from a, “capitalist logic of extraction … and an epistemic logic of … ‘extraaction’ – the domination of ‘inferior’ humans and nonliving extractables from outside and above” (Driscoll The Whites, IX). This was the story about frontline states—not postcolonial nation-states but either citystates (Hong Kong, Singapore) or anticommunist enclaves in a civil war (Taiwan, South Korea)—that had once been staunch anticommunist allies buttressed by authoritarian developmentalism but which had subsequently transitioned or were transitioning towards “democracy” and, crucially, “open” markets accessible to foreign capital. This narrative about transition as one from “authoritarianism to democracy,” sustained over decades, has proven particularly effective at diverting attention away from the transition from authoritarian developmental capitalism to neoliberal managerial capitalism at the heart of the Washington Consensus.

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Within this deflection, the discourse of identity functions like a substitute for the practice of true popular sovereignty against privatisation, providing a plausible story about why the “spokes” should accept their ancillary status paying tribute or deriving legitimacy from the military/ financial super-sovereign “hub.” As a result, populations on both sides of the Pacific have been insulated from questions about the role of East Asian frontline states in the maintenance of US monetary imperialism backed up by a global garrison and the evolution of anticommunist policies and networks in the wake of the global extermination of the Left. They/we have been insulated, in other words, from the spectrality inherent in transition. On the eastern side of the Pacific: this transition mainly concerns that from settler colonialism to civic nationalism in the United States that left the “creedalism” of the former intact. The term “creedal nationalism” is derived from the Swedish researcher Gunnar Myrdal’s analysis of the “American Creed” in the 1940s. It was taken up subsequently by Samuel Huntington, Seymour Lipset, and others to simultaneously describe both American exceptionalism and a redemptive narrative of civic inclusion (See Aziz Rana “Decolonizing Obama”). Aziz Rana redeploys the concept in a critical register, emphasising the psychic costs for subordinated groups of being forced “as a condition of any reform, to accept and repeat self-validating majority narratives” (Rana “Colonialism,” 269). In his analysis of Standing Rock Sioux theorist Vine Deloria Jr.’s work, David Myer Temin argues that according to the redemptive narrative of creedal nationalism, past “oppression” is generally understood as an historical prior condition of “exclusion from the dominant modes of civic identity,” and therefore, not in terms of the ongoing “domination of colonized and racialized subjects” (Myer Temin “Custer’s Sins,” 365). On the western side of the Pacific: this transition concerns the shift from imperialism and fascism to neoliberal democracy that left colonial governmentality intact while substituting identitarian models of community for popular sovereignty. The disavowed continuities that mark each of these parallel transitions and the complicitous relation between them lend to both a decisively spectral quality. It is not so much the past that returns to haunt the present but the future that does so, while the present is fundamentally spectral due to the temporal fissure and discontinuities that characterise it.

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The Language of Defeat There is a third element of defeat that is not specific to East Asia yet which has its own specific history in the region. Unlike the defeats described above, this third kind of defeat is much more difficult to describe because it is inscribed in the very tool—language—that we would use to describe it. It seems the only way to describe the “defeat” that has occurred both in language and to language would be in negative terms. The first aspect of that defeat consists in the reduction of language to a tool of communication. The second aspect consists in the identification of languages with the borders of anthropological difference writ large. Conquered by philology, anthropology, ethnography, and biology, the indeterminacy of language has been replaced by a schema of internationality, crystallised in the idea of the unity of language. The result is a normative conception of language that functions in metonymical fashion to define how we think about peoples and cultures. Representations of this defeat have the quality of self-evidence. The map of the world on a Mercator projection with the surface of the globe divided into nation-states, each with its unique colour, is a powerful example; the inverted tree model that charts linguistic and cultural evolution in terms of arborescent filiation is another; while the cybernetic representation of language as a transfer of information between two idealised positions, receiver and sender, joined by a medium or channel, is a third familiar representation attesting to the inscription of this defeat in common sense. The concept of civil society with which we are familiar today presupposes the unities of language, culture, and people that constitute the modern system of internationality. Even when theorists attempt to expand or revise the concept to account for plurality and multiplicity, civil society itself remains a unit for measuring transition. Both the product of transition and the means for recognising transition, civil society is intrinsically related via the concept of transition to translation and language. It would be useful in this context to return to the essay titled, “Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar,” mentioned earlier in which Gavin Walker explains how this trinity of interrelated presuppositions retrospectively provides a crucial point of leverage to rationalise the future-oriented social relations that are crystallised in the form of capital. As a form of relationality that is inherently unstable and irrational, capital orients human action towards the deferred realisation of future profit via the circulation of commodities and the extraction

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of value from labour. We could perhaps say, reformulating a little the foundations of the Marxian analysis of value, that exchange value is precisely an accumulation of the present in abstract forms, such as money, that can be exchanged tomorrow. In order to assure the conditions of labour’s commodification, capital, which is itself nothing but a social relation, has to make it look like the commodification of labour—labour power’s exchangeability against the wage—is based on “naturally occurring” properties inherent to the body of the labourer that precede his or her insertion into the capital relation. This is where the discourse of identity plays a crucial role for capitalist accumulation, using “things” to hide “relations,” using the past to hide an obsession with the future that diverts attention from an unbearable present. To assure the conditions of its reproduction, the capital relation has to hide the form of relationality—essentially exploitative—seen most clearly in the commodification of labour (but also, crucially, in the typically gendered, unpaid domestic care labour necessary for the social reproduction of commodified labour). This task is accomplished by projecting into the past what are essentially nothing more than presuppositions about the unity of language, culture, and people. As the unity of these essentially indeterminate, unbordered cultural entities can only be figured in projective fashion, as something to be realised in the future, the projection of this presupposed (yet actually non-existent) unity into the past performs a crucial dissimulating function for the capital relation. In effect, it makes humans who are the bearers of labour power appear to be endowed with anthropological qualities— Korean or Japanese, male or female, migrant or citizen—that have been established by an historical process of sedimentation long before those individuals enter the marketplace and are subjected to commodification. This projection of suppositions about the future into presuppositions ostensibly established by the past parallels the temporal inversion of capitalist production itself, which makes it look as if the self-sufficient circulation between supply and demand precedes the relation between two types of humanity—the one that possesses “labour power” to be sold on the market and the one that possesses “capital” to unilaterally accumulate value out of exchange—that actually initiated circulation in the first place. In truth, the circuit of circulation is anything but a self-sustaining, self-sufficient relation between people who need things and people who supply things. Behind the façade of equality lies the inherent inequality of the relationship itself. The inequality of this relationship is not only the source of the “surplus value” that accrues to one of the parties to

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the circuit of exchange, it is also a source of instability inasmuch as the labour power from which surplus value is extracted cannot be produced ex nihilo by capital alone. Hence, “capitalism” must be understood as a social relation of permanent transition; the “capitalist transition” naming not simply a punctual event in history but a process that is incessantly repeated and re-performed in the reproduction of the social relations necessary to the commodification of labour. The perverse, frenetic circularity that characterises this aspect of capitalist regimes of accumulation noted by Walker is reflected in a mnemonic structure that makes it seem as if the identities resulting from the commodification of labour are simply the crystallisation of collective social memory from the past. As the capital relation hides its essential relationality behind the image of social things, or identities, that precede its arrival, it fashions those identities according to a logic of remembrance. In the act of remembering one’s “true” social identity from the past to the present, one is thus performing the work that is necessary to the nihilistically future-oriented reproduction of the capital relation. The past several decades have given rise to many important attempts to measure this historical defeat. Significantly, the extent of the defeat and the way it looks varies depending on the perspective one adopts. Basing himself on Western European sources, Giorgio Agamben calls it the Romantic ideology, which “tried to clarify something that was already obscure (the concept of people) with the help of something even more obscure (the concept of language). Thanks to the symbiotic correspondence thus instituted,” Agamben concludes, “two contingent and indefinite cultural entities transform themselves into almost natural organisms endowed with their own necessary laws and characteristics” (Agamben Means Without End, 65). Beginning from a study of Japanese history, Naoki Sakai engages us in a critique of the “modern regime of translation” (Sakai “The modern regime of translation and its politics”) that produces a “schema of internationality” governing our commonsense vision of the postcolonial world. As a representational regime that ideologically inverts our view of language (Sakai Translation, 52), the modern regime of translation begins by casting translation as derivative and secondary compared to the supposedly normal use of language between speakers of the same national language when it, translation, should rather be seen as a primordial social practice characteristic of language in general and the implicit, yet effaced, operation without which the notion of linguistic unity behind national language could not be

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established to begin with. Engaging with the history of northwest Africa, Cécile Canut, launches a critique of the “metadiscursive regime” (Canut Provincialiser la langue, 146), a veritable “linguistic ideology” (ibid., 41), that imposes and naturalises the “order of language” (l’ordre-dela-langue; ibid., 17) accumulated via practices of “bordering” (mise en frontières; ibid., 141), “equivalencing” (mise en equivalence; ibid., 221), and “mapping” (mise-en-cartes; ibid., 289) of both language onto people and people onto language, perpetuating epistemic colonisation despite postcolonial independence. In the aftermath of this defeat, we have come to look at language and people in a way that is perpetually open to appropriation by conflicting identities without examining the basis for our presuppositions about identity. Even in our efforts to recognise pluralistic and hybrid identities, a certain presupposition of residual unity stubbornly remains. Under the influence of this defeat, we habitually take it as self-evident that, variously: language is a tool for communication; languages are individual unities each denoted by a proper noun associated with a community (Sakai “How do we count a language?”); peoples and communities are a logical category that occupy a place in the taxonomy between the individual and humanity as a species; and the social world is constructed on the basis of a schematic relation between the many and the one, plurality and individuality. As the unity of language has always been the common denominator assumed by modern political theories of civil society and latter-day theories of civic nationalism, the intrinsic connection between this linguistic defeat and the rise of modern civil society could not be clearer. At a general level, civil society becomes, as Michael Hardt puts it, “the paradigmatic terrain for the disciplinary deployments of power in modern society, producing normalised subjects and thus exerting hegemony through consent in a way that is perhaps more subtle but no less authoritarian than the exertion of dictatorship through coercion” (Hardt “The Withering,” 31). Among the normalising disciplines of modern society, none is as far-reaching as the normalisation of language achieved via the discipline of compulsory national education. As we saw in Part I, one of the best places to see the operation of such “normalised subjects” lies in the construction of autoimmunitarian identity as an intrinsically pedagogical and economic project in the Taiwanese film Detention. Here in Part II, we will want to focus our attention on the way in which the normalisation of language is accomplished through the modern regime of translation and

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then on that basis turn our attention to understanding how the modern regime of translation fits into the transition to full-fledged neoliberal global governance—financialisation and cybernetics—while maintaining the ethos of antiblackness and anticommunism that has pervaded Pax Americana since its inception to the present day.

The Outside When looked at as a figure rather than an identity, the spectre of “black communism” that lurks outside Pax Americana refers through its impossibility—within the political imaginary of Pax Americana—to nothing less than the political importance of the ir/rational “outside” at the heart of the capital relation. If “blackness” is an essentialist attribute applied within hegemonic global whiteness exclusively to a particular fraction of humanity, while “communism” is a politics of universal property, the combination of the two terms signals the impossibility of a particularistic universalism—precisely the negative image of the universal particularism that sustains Pax Americana. In speaking of the “ir/rational outside,” a theme that we came across repeatedly in Part I, I am deliberately drawing upon the pioneering research and intertextual conversations pursued across the past decadeand-a-half among Marxist theoreticians inspired by the work of the Japanese Marxist Uno K¯ oz¯o (1897–1977), such as Nagahara Yutaka, Ken Kawashima, and Gavin Walker. This diverse body of historically grounded theoretical work takes a cue from Uno’s unique theorisation of the commodification of labour condensed in the Japanese term, muri, composed of two sinograms, mu, meaning nothing or negation, and ri, meaning principle or reason (wuli in Mandarin). In colloquial Japanese, muri can also mean something that is impossibly troublesome. While the semantic polyvalence of the term makes it difficult to translate (Uno’s translator, Kawashima, proposes the elegant phrase, “nihil of reason”), it essentially describes a mechanism that is paradoxically rational and irrational, both forced and natural: “Uno’s term muri, which is one of his original and unique concepts, connotes several meanings: a fundamental difficulty, a contradiction, an ir/rationality, antagonism and enforcement” (Uno Theory of Crisis, 72 translator’s note). As Kawashima had already explained in work published a decade before his momentous translation of Uno’s Theory of Crisis:

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These everyday nuances of opposition and negation are implicit in Uno K¯ oz¯ o’s use of the word muri. More specifically, however, as contemporary theoretician and historian Nagahara Yutaka has emphasized, Uno primarily used the word muri to describe two interrelated problems. First, muri describes capital’s fundamental angst, its Achilles heel, its most vulnerable weakness and impotence. For what the process of commodifying labor power inescapably discloses is that, fundamentally, capital can never produce labor power as a commodity, and must therefore rely on state power to expropriate, by the force of violence, direct producers in the process of socalled primitive accumulation. This process of expropriation then creates a mass of surplus populations compelled to encounter the process of commodifying labor power at capital’s most exteriorized extremities. Here at this extremity, in the pores of capitalist society, and often at the furthest strata of the surplus populations, the boundaries of the inside and outside of the capitalist commodity economy are suspended, however briefly, in the commodifying process of labor power. Second, these boundaries are suspended because of an inescapable contingency disclosed in the process of exchange. As Nagahara has argued, the word muri in Uno’s text thus discloses, on the one hand, the fundamentally social tensions immanent to the force of expropriation, carried out by the capitalist state at the furthest extremities of the commodity economy, and, on the other, the sudden appearance of contingency in the sale and purchase of labor power as a commodity. (Kawashima The Proletarian Gamble, 208)

Kawashima and Walker, like Nagahara before them, all begin from Uno’s pioneering insight that the sole thing that capitalism cannot produce is precisely the single commodity necessary to all the fictions that supposedly set in motion and continually sustain the capital relation—fictions collectively summed up by the fanciful story of capitalism as a happy relation of free and equal exchange among autonomous individuals contractually linked by the perfect social complementarity of production and consumption. In effect, this is the myth of the rational, circular self-organisation of the market. The reality, however, is that capital relies entirely on the processual contingency of the commodification of labour to assure a supply of the one commodity that it cannot produce—living labour. Uno’s theoretical breakthrough consists in seeing this contingency in terms of a structural crisis internal to the recursive circuit presupposed by the capital relation, one that occurs first and foremost at an ontological level where social “individuals” become individuals via a process that

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“stamps” them, as workers, with various hierarchically organised differential figures of the human, such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Significantly, the “place” where this crisis is most in/visible, as Nagahara explains, inevitably lands on the limits or borders—internal as well as external—of the nation-state community that regulates labour markets, “at the non-territorial sphere or the boundary/limit of communities” (Nagahara “A Sketch on the Hauntology of Capital,” 155). Kawashima has persuasively shown how this critical interstice operated historically in the ethnicisation and commodification of Korean migrant labour in Japan. At a more general level, borders instantiate the limits of capital itself, the fact that while labour is indispensable to capital (as the source of value accumulation), capital’s productivity relies on the creation and maintenance of a surplus population, such as “Korean migrant labour,” ready to be disposed at any time conditions warrant. The trick, as Nagahara points out, is to make it look like the attributes that define a surplus population as surplus exist prior to the intrusion of the capital relation into the social. To make it look like, in other words, something that was utterly exterior to the social is in fact innately anterior to capital and hence intrinsic to the social. It is precisely in that sense that the “boundary” of communities is temporal, rather than spatial, despite our habitual tendency to assume the contrary. What the work of this group of unorthodox Marxist theoreticians collectively shows is that the figuration of the human is taken up by capital as the solution to an irresolvable internal contradiction. On the one hand, the results of figuration, what Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter calls the “genres of the human,” enable capital to portray labour as a natural given that pre-exists the capital-labour relation and is simply waiting to be “employed”; on the other hand, figuration also helps explain why specific forms of commodified labour contingently ascribed to this or that population or group can become superfluous or even detrimental to the functioning of “healthy” capitalist recursivity between consumption and production. In that sense, the work inspired by Uno K¯ oz¯o tends to show precisely what Sara-Maria Sorentino has identified as a major goal of Sylvia Wynter, namely “to make available the terms appropriate to an analysis of capitalism as a component of slavery” (Sorentino “Expecting Blows,” 25 emphasis in the original).

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In effect, I am arguing for a rapprochement between Marx and Wynter, or again, between those who privilege wage, i.e., commodified, yet ostensibly “free,” labour as the key to a critique of capitalist political economy and those who privilege slavery, i.e., objectified, possessed, racialised “unfree” labour as the key. In both cases, the contingency of anthropological figuration—what is popularly known as “identity”—plays a key role in relation to the normalisation of the constitutive violence that establishes these ostensibly opposed forms of labour. The juridical order based on supposedly “free” wage labour guaranteed by citizenship not only contributes to the proliferation of de facto forms of voluntary transnational slavery (Stierl “Of Migrant Slaves,” 4), it is also inscribed, at the level of a world system based on sovereign nation-states, in an essentially colonial discourse of species or specific difference. Just as the nationstate “represents” citizens in both senses of the term (both as proxy and as image), the national citizen is not only the proprietor of his or her own labour, supposedly “free” to sell it on the market to the capitalist whose own relation to property is not mediated by the body but by capital, he or she is also related to others via an ontological order of specific difference that begins with the presupposition of the individual and ascends vertically to the national level and onwards to humanity as a unified whole. Such a form of rapprochement has already been described by Ken Kawashima as, “two, ongoing historical processes – expropriation through primitive accumulation and exploitation within capitalist production processes” (Kawashima The Proletarian Gamble, 211). Thinking the commonality between the two has the advantage of deconstructing the putative opposition between “free” and “unfree” forms of labour thought to distinguish the modern from the premodern by drawing attention to the foundational role of contingent violence and violent contingency in the constitution of each. A further contribution to this rapprochement has been recently elaborated by the Italian theorist Maurizio Lazzarato in a new work published in French in 2022 under the title L’Intolérable du present, l’urgence de la revolution: minorités et classes (The intolerability of the present, the urgency of revolution: minorities and classes). This work represents an important epistemological break in the thinker’s intellectual itinerary, fundamentally parting ways with scions of the Italian Autonomist tradition that he himself had come to represent, such as the Hardt and Negri of Empire, the Deleuze and Guattari of A Thousand Plateaus, the Foucault of biopolitics, the Marx of the “Fragment on Machines,” the

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theoreticians of “cognitive capitalism,” etc. Placing unpaid work, women, minorities, and slaves at the centre of understanding capitalism, just as feminists and decolonial thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter have been urging, Lazzarato takes a remarkable turn for a thinker who had been closely associated with Autonomist Marxism and Foucaultian biopolitics throughout his career: From the point of view of actual function, which means the point of view of the global machine of capitalism, these assertions [rejecting the idea that the accumulation of surplus value by the capitalist is a form of theft] by Marx, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault are assuredly false. For they only take into account one part of the apparatus of “capture,” that of the production of abstract labour, while completely neglecting the work of human and extra-human natures (land, women, slaves, serfs, the colonized, and the indigenous), always and necessarily “stolen.” (Lazzarato L’Intolérable du present, 144)

Rather than advocating a renovation of Marxism via an “extension” of the theory of abstract labour to ostensibly irregular and exceptional forms of labour such as domestic care and slavery, Lazzarato proposes returning to the fact of expropriation by extra-economic means, such as war and conquest. The upshot of this turn is that capitalist commodification of labour can never be understood in linear fashion as a form of historical progress, for it is always sundered by contingency. Capitalism is not a more or less linear evolution from servile labour to abstract labour. At each phase of its development, it has to invent a new relationship between the valorisation of abstract labour and the devalorisation of unpaid work, a new articulation between productivity and pillage, the organization of work and war. (Lazzarato L’Intolérable, 146)

Lazzarato’s critical project proceeds not by relativising or multiplying the origins of abstract labour but rather by restoring to view the repressed historical memory of the contingency (conquest, violence, and expropriation) at the site of the origin. This approach brings him very close to Sylvia Wynter, especially when he affirms that, “women, like slaves, grasp what capitalism hides, precisely because they do not entirely participate in that [capitalist] mode of production” (Lazzarato L’Intolérable, 150). It also, incidentally, brings Lazzarato in line with Kawashima’s assertion a decade and a half earlier that, “Foucault’s notion of biopolitical power

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must be criticized for its inability to account for the profound relationship between the process of transforming labor power into a commodity and the dissemination of microphysical forms of modern power and their attendant forms of knowledge” (Kawashima The Proletarian Gamble, 210). If, by contrast, Kawashima and Walker have insisted more recently on the “specifically capitalist nature of labour” that is “[u]nlike a slave economy” (Kawashima and Walker “Supplementary Essay,” 182), it is, I surmise, not because they privilege abstract labour as a normative form (an assumption that Wynter never ceased to criticise) but rather because the specifically “free” aspect of wage labour brings into view the absolutely contingent nature of the anthropological qualifications intrinsic to the labourer that are commonly assumed to precede the process of commodification. And unlike various pre-capitalist forms of ‘extra-economic coercion’…the formation of labour power is only possible when what is commodified – that is, circulated as a commodity – is not labour in general but the specific capacity to work ‘piecemeal’ or ‘for a determinate period’. This difference furnishes us with the essential problem of the labour power commodity, a commodity that is bought and sold in the labour market, but that can never be located in a stable presence. (Kawashima and Walker “Supplementary Essay,” 182–183)

The question then amounts to this: can the chains of slavery assure a “stable presence” of location attributable to an essential quality of blackness? Would emancipation achieve (or negate) this de/stabilising effect instead? The answer from Afropessimist thinkers would be a resounding “no.” Calvin Warren explains: The terms free and black do not just present political problems of citizenship, rights, and inclusion, but also present serious ontological problems, since the boundaries of ontology – between human and property and freedom and unfreedom – are thrown into crisis with the presence of the free black. Ultimately, I propose that the Negro Question is a proper metaphysical question, since the Negro is black and black(ness) has always been a terror for metaphysics. (Warren Ontological Terror, 27–28) Following [Frank B.] Wilderson [III], I would argue that the tendency to reduce freedom to a contingent experience is a strategy of romantic

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humanism…If one proceeds from the assumption that freedom can be achieved from political action, then humanism can distort antiblackness, such that it is no longer a question of being, but of action/hard work…But when the question of black being is foregrounded, contingent freedom becomes irrelevant because freedom is not predicated on any contingent experience but on the Law of Being…The legal distinctions between slave and free only matter with a romantic narrative in which emancipation is synonymous with freedom and freedom is reduced to the acquisition of rights. What the free black, as paradigm, reveals is that no right will restore black being – such restoration is a ruse. (Warren Ontological Terror, 89–90)

In an age when a desire for restoration characterises the strategies of “infinite decolonisation” analysed and critiqued a couple of decades ago by Alberto Moreiras (Moreiras “On Infinite Decolonization”), Warren’s political refusal of restoration on ontological grounds may sound shocking to some. While Warren’s approach is assuredly different from that adopted by Nagahara, Kawashima, and Walker, what ties them together is the theme of ontology—not ontology as a quasi-theological problem of abiogenesis but as a properly political problem of ontogenesis: how is it that one thinks of humanity as one species among other species within which all manner of internal species or specific difference, such as race, can be apprehended? Looking at this problem in relation to labour reveals its eminently political nature. Despite the fundamental differences between slave labour and commodified wage labour, each one reveals in its own way the fact that living labour “can never be located in a stable presence.” Rather than opposing the two as essentially incompatible, antinomic figures that lead to diametrically opposed methodological and ontological commitments, would it not be possible to recognise the relation between the two as an unmediated non-relation, or what Antonio Negri once described as a “savage anomaly” that short-circuits dialectical recuperation and synthesis? Is it not precisely the anthropology cum cartography of difference between labour that is possessed-as-property (the slave) and labour that is commodified-as-time (the salaried worker) that simultaneously mobilises ontology in the service of capitalist recursivity and also manages the irrational contingency of the social relations born out of a circular capitalist relation (M-C-M’) unrecognised as such? That is why the figure of recursivity looms so large over both Nagahara’s work and Kawashima and Walker’s Uno (and Nagahara)-inspired

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critique. Crucially, in the work of all these thinkers, recursivity is invariably linked not just to an anthropological image but also to the figure of the border. Uno therefore identified precisely how the ‘narrowness’ (Bornitheit ) of capital’s own ‘boundaries’ or ‘barriers’ (Schranken) stems from ‘limits’ (Grenzen) thrown up by capital itself, a reflexive relation back upon its own foundations that always returns to the ‘ontological defect’ of the labour power commodity. (Kawashima and Walker “Supplementary Essay,” 185 emphasis added)

In Nagahara’s writing, this reflexive relation of return to borders initiated by the fact that labour power is neither ontologically given nor simply something that capital can produce on its own acquires the form of a logical conundrum and a political crisis. The core of this conundrum begins with the curious moment in Marx, identified by Nagahara, when the explanation of the process by which capitalist commodities are formed can only proceed by implicitly positing the existence of a capitalist commodity, in the form of labour power, prior to the process. In effect, Marx explains the commodification of products by presupposing the commodification of labour. This niggle acquires interest of a political, rather than simply theoretical, nature, as Nagahara then goes to show that Marx’s implicit gesture positing labour as always already commodified inevitably relies on an essentially political assumption about the borders of community. [I]n these formulations, it must always already be assumed that there exist at least two closed communities that are expected to be the very moment at and by which the “other” can be recognized as the “other.” For Marx, in order for products to be recognized as commodities, it is logically necessary at once to recognize and to fabricate the “other” as the “other,” only through this process of which can the encounter/exchange of products be achieved…As a result, logically, this discovery of the “other” is, at the same time, a re-discovery of “we.” This “we” must be fragile unless something substantial is given. The mutual recognition which accompanies the transmutation of products into commodities first and foremost creates the collectivities of “we” on the two sides that are othering each other… If this is so, then, although the community is premised as the point of departure of Marx’s logical procedures, this community comes at the

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very last as the originary (beginning). It is a belatedness. (Nagahara “Hauntology,” 155–156)

In Walker’s own work, he has theorised the temporality of this reflexive return of the border as a form of “torsion” (Walker “Primitive Accumulation”) and “perversion” (Walker The Sublime Perversion of Capital ), terms that highlight the irrational aspect of recursivity necessary to sustain capital. Two points are essential to retain: first, despite the claims made since Max Weber about the “disenchantment” of the world in capitalist modernity, capitalism represents a very specific form of reenchantment, one that coalesces precisely around the promise of returns—both economic returns on investment and figurative returns to borders that constitute the political geography of extraction and value capture (MaCarraher The Enchantments of Mammon). Second, much like in the modern regime of translation, the presupposition of borders between communities plays a crucial role in capitalist accumulation, justifying both the anthropologisation of the division of labour and the differential transitions of uneven development ascribed to different anthropological groups (Mezzadra and Neilson Border as Method). That is why the movement of capital constantly calls forth a dialectical need for translation and transition. The border is precisely the non-place at the site of which surplus populations such as the unemployed, but also including by extension the colonised, the feminised, or the enslaved, etc., are subjected to domination, while the employed parts of “surplus population” are subjected to exploitation (because any population, even “heterosexual white males,” are potentially surplus as far as the capital relation is concerned). These reflections bear important ramifications for how we draw lessons for thinking about the nation-state. Certainly, the “nihil of reason” at the core of capitalist reenchantment tends to relativise the universalism of capitalist modernity, suggesting that capitalism is yet another cosmology, with its origin myths, fables of transition, promises of redemption, and mystifications of reason beyond the order of strictly disenchanted knowledge that theorists since Max Weber have claimed it to be. On this point, Wynter’s “paradigm of an ‘ecumenism’ of humanity” that lays claims to a counter-universalism capable of both dislodging the Figure of Man from a position of hegemonic dominance and opening the way to new relations of human autospeciation is warranted and necessary. Yet it is precisely in

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relation to the second aspect of the recursive torsion or perversion essential to the capital relation that Wynter’s ecumenism risks surreptitiously prolonging the Figure of Man precisely by claiming that capitalist modernity can be understood as an expression of what she calls the Western cosmogony. Such identification of the West as a culturally specific entity, a particularism with universal pretentions, plays into the naturalising recursive movement of boundaries and borders that is part of the “nihil of reason” thrown up by capital itself. It is, in Wynter’s terms, part of the Figure of Man. As an alternative to this approach, I follow Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai, who begin not with the West as a particular civilisational region, but rather with the idea of the West as an abstraction of social relations of (self)bordering comparable to capital. As the template of area in the colonial–imperial modernity, the West establishes the Figure of Man precisely through a relational mechanism that Sakai calls cofiguration. A concrete instance of cofiguration seen in relation to Chinese/Taiwanese literature will occupy us in a section below, where the concept is described more fully. For now, it is important to note that Sakai’s description of the schema of cofiguration is very similar to the temporality described by Nagahara in his analysis of the role of the community in the commodification of labour. In both cases, it is the relation itself that precedes and in effect gives rise to the two things being related to one another. The supposition of relative autonomy prior to the encounter with the other is a projection onto the past leaving the identities thus produced indelibly marked by belatedness. Hence, the West is nothing but the schema of cofiguration expressed through the grammar of translation as exchange, conjugated into discrete, relationally defined “areas” that are supposed to constitute the natural homeland for the different sub-species of “Man,” Western and otherwise. Areal “homelands” produce “Man” while “Man” produces “homelands.” The Man-Homeland diptych that characterises the patriarchal, specieist thought behind the naturalisation of the nation-state is linked precisely by a jointure that creates the two parts to be joined; the more it is successfully sutured, the more it looks necessary, organic, and natural, as if a certain type of “Man” belongs to a specific “Homeland” and a specific “Homeland” is the natural habitat of a specific figure of “Man.” The tendency towards spatialisation of entities that are essentially social serves to associate the “Man-Homeland” diptych with a physically contiguous border, which then becomes a naturalised figure of difference. Despite the appearance of naturality and necessity, the jointure itself is not a structure but an operation—which means, in

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effect, that it is always contingent. In Sakai’s case, this operation is that of translation, which he understands not in a narrowly linguistic fashion but rather as a characteristic of language as a whole and social relations in general. The only way out of this situation is to begin with the operation of jointure rather than the structure of the diptych, whose elements are the effects of the bordering practices, such as translation, that create the image of separate, autonomous civilisational species-homelands and their corresponding cosmogonies—to begin, in other words, in the middle, without preparation; to “start cold,” as it were. To start, as we now must, in and with Winter/Wynter. What I am suggesting, in other words, is that rather than assigning the choice between production and figuration, or again, between slave labour and wage labour, to the property of the West, it is going to be necessary instead to examine how figuration (of the human, of the West and the Rest, etc.) is accomplished by a schema of cofiguration that produces the Figure of the Human as a diptych, typically divided by the colour line.

Transition or What Good Is an Area? Inevitably, I must in turn make myself response-able to the discourse of transition on its own terms. A vast topic at the heart of many key intellectual, political, and historical debates both on the Right and on the Left, transition deserves far more nuanced attention than I can possibly hope to give it here. To save time, I will begin with a basic orientation: transition is a concept that broaches change via the leverage of some objectal “thing” deemed to be continuous or enduring enough to justify speaking of transition rather than genesis, destruction, or entropy. Understood this way, transition is intrinsically linked to the original meaning ascribed to identity in the discourse of philosophical modernity—that which does not change over time. Hence, transition names not just change but also a way of organising epistemological and ontological categories related to the social objects that undergo change. The changes in meaning and usage that the term “identity” has undergone in the age of neoliberalism suggest the extent to which the field or ground of transition has been transformed. This abstract idea “hits the ground,” so to speak, in the modern construction of “area.” As Gavin Walker reminds us, “the transition to capitalism has always been tightly linked to the history of the formation and global ordering of putatively national communities, areas or regions that serve as consistent frames for differentiation. In this sense,

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the historical background of the transition to world capitalism, situated just behind the formation of the global and systematic arrangement of the world on the basis of the form of the nation-state, is always linked to the production of national subjectivity” (Walker “Citizen-Subject,” 6). Beginning with the template of area—that taxonomically incoherent yet socially powerful relationship known as “the West”—transition is integral to the very definition of what an area is. The West becomes the West by virtue not just of its transition (to modernity) in the past but by virtue of an inherent association with a virtually unlimited metonymical series of future transitions still to come. For this reason, area serves as a convenient point of leverage to measure progress and evaluate transitional goals. In a sense, the relation between area and transition is inherently circular, if not tautological. Recognition of this dual or circular aspect of transition is precisely the point of departure for the fascinating approach taken by Atila Luki´c and Gordan Maslov, a pair of Polish researchers who apply the discursive theory of Ernesto Laclau to the experience of postsocialist transition in Poland and Eastern Europe. Dialogue with their thought-provoking theorisation of that experience provides us a fruitful avenue to save time and to gain focus. The most promising aspect of their approach concerns the relation between the construction of objects of study and the manipulation of social experience into individual units. In other words, they are interested in how transition organises social things and the way we know them. Although Luki´c and Maslov are focused on the East European experience, their approach constitutes a radical critique of many of the major presuppositions that continue to remain part of the framework of knowledge production today in area studies fields outside of those concentrated on Eastern Europe, such as China studies and Taiwan studies. The key concepts of circularity, distance, metaphor, and metonymy—closely related to the tropic operations, such as translation, that construct the apparatus of area—are turned on their head by Luki´c and Maslov’s critical intervention. Although I do not have the time here fully to unpack the relation between the concepts deployed by Luki´c and Maslov and the trope of area, I think it may be possible to provisionally obviate this task by pointing out that the concept of transition, like that of the nation-state, is integral to the construction of area studies as an institution of social practice based on the modern regime of translation. By design, area studies assume not just an ineradicable yet equally repressed comparative aspect, they also assume, both conceptually and historically,

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that the object of study, the “area” as it were, is always confronted with the unfinished task of transition that must be continually taken up by the area studies researcher as a task of translation. The paradigmatic form of transition for area studies is of course modernisation but the metonymic series of analogous transitions is potentially unlimited. The basis for this assumption is grounded in that peculiar “area” that serves as the template of area in the modern, i.e., colonial–imperial, era, namely “the West.” Taxonomically incoherent, the West is a term that dissimulates a relationship under the guise of a nominal appellation whose geographical pretence cannot sustain more than the slightest scrutiny. As a form of relationship reified into an autonomous areal “thing,” the West is distinguished precisely by its incomparable capacity for self-renewal, self-transition, and self-translation that keeps it ahead of others while assigning to them spatial locations that serve to contain the West’s own past injustice. As a prelude to dialoguing with Luki´c and Maslov’s theory of transition, we should bear in mind that the concept of transition touches the very heart of what is most problematic about colonial–imperial modernity: the apparatus of area. Parallel to my interest in the way the disciplinary rationalities of area studies have survived the demise of Cold War American social science, Luki´c and Maslov conclude, after a brief review of the history of transitology studies beginning from the 1970s social scientist Dankwart Rustow onward: “Although transitology as a knowledge apparatus has been strongly criticised from its inception, its central concept of ‘transition’ was usually taken for granted … Therefore, regardless of the criteria in question – economic, cultural or political – which differ from author to author or from one school of thought to another, the rules for creating the definition of the concept are more or less the same” (Luki´c and Maslov “Did Somebody Say ‘Transition’?” 208). Sharing a concern for the “rules creating the definition of the concept,” I would like to explore how those rules are integrally linked to the apparatus of area and the types of subjectivity it produces. The question of subjectivity is crucial, not just because that is the best way to access and understand the operation of apparatuses that straddle disparate social domains but also because of the essentially self-referential bias built into the concept of transition. If the discourse of transition is especially effective at channelling subjective formation into areal units such as the nation-state, that is because the logic of transition is itself integral to the conceptual formation of area. Luki´c and Maslov observe:

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The transitional framework represents a key step towards political signification, an attempt at defining social unity as a meaningful system by excluding that wh[ich] is heterogeneous to its structure. But herein lies the “trap” of transitional ontology. Its universality – i.e.[,] the framework within whose boundaries individual identities are formed – does not represent only a particular logic which erases differences among individual identities, but rather a logic which becomes a ground that permanently “absorbs” differences into itself, becoming a resource for transitional teleology itself. (ibid., 216)

As a mechanism that controls the distribution of the heterogeneous, transition helps to create the imaginary unity of the society to which a transitional task has been assigned. It goes without saying that the invention of the imaginary unity of one society could never be contained in a single unit as such, but rather establishes the framework within which boundaries in general are formed. Transition, in other words, is a bordering practice. As a bordering practice, transition mobilises difference, packing it away into the areas that are the units, or subjects, of transition. Area is thus like a raw material for transition; the end product of the transitional process is the area itself, or, more precisely speaking, the subjects that identify with the area. Luki´c and Maslov emphasise the circular nature of this subjective formation, which I believe is intrinsically connected to the construction of area as a stop gap solution for capitalist transitions. As time passes relative to the punctual point in time at which the social scientist or transitologist intervenes and the “transitional societies” under study inevitably begin to change (again), this unquestioned institutional framework turns into a “circular narrative structure” (ibid., 209) that oscillates between being an ontological explanation for a series of infinitely metonymic processes (one thinks of the metonymic relations among the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the popular democratic revolution, etc.) and being a conceptual or epistemological category that identifies those processes as objects of knowledge and action. This oscillation instantiates a feedback loop in which one creates the very things about which one seeks knowledge. This loop is hardly confined to the construction of objects but also extends to the formation of subjects. While transition is represented as a “neutral discourse,” it “cancels the distance between representation and the object that is represented” (ibid., 209; emphasis in the original), implicating the researcher in the constitution of the object under study. In

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effect, transitional discourse is always an exercise in self-referentiality, “a logical circuit,” as Gavin Walker writes, “that always refers back to itself, short-circuiting the dilemma of the articulation between the nation-form and state-form with the rhetoric of the given and identity” (Walker “The Accumulation of Difference,” 81). More than a concept or a model, transition is an epistemic practice that reproduces both the areal category upon which it depends for logical consistency and the subjectivity of transitional knowers. As Luki´c and Maslov are quick to point out, an ideological critique of this self-referential disciplinary rationality is incapable of capturing it. “In this sense, we are not simply dealing with [the] modern duality of ideology as error and reality as truth: as a signifier transition produces the reality it aims to represent ” (ibid., 209; emphasis in original). This conclusion is not due to the conceit of some methodological presupposition on the part of the researchers but is rather a consequence of the concept of transition. Despite the overwhelming pressure of disciplinary rationality to normalise social experience into stable typologies permitting the construction of scientific objects of knowledge, the concept of transition has to admit of a radical contingency without which the very possibility of change would simply not make sense. Transition is by nature a concept that makes visible something about the formation of area, the elements that conceptually distinguish area from territory and the state, that should always be hidden, namely a certain feedback mechanism between knowledge production and subjectivity. “This (in)finitivity of transitional societies’ foundations is,” Luki´c and Maslov point out, “at the very core of transitional promise and the crucial aspect of the concept itself” (ibid., 211). The application of the category of transition to “objects” that are actually social subjects in temporal movement produces an implacable contradiction constantly denied by transitology’s implicit basis in the concept of identity as that which endures across time. One solution to this conundrum appears to lie in the positionality that we have described, following Derrida, as the “visor effect.” In practice, the visor effect represents an attempt to intervene and control the feedback mechanism inherent in the concept of transition upon which area studies are based. If the area studies scholar relies on the visor effect to establish her positionality, that is because the concept of transition plus its temporal movement as an institutional, i.e., social practice, exerts a corrosive effect both on the distance required to assume an objective stance that dissimulates relations of power and on the category of the

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identity that underwrites the concept of transition. The circular temporality of transition makes visible the spectral aspects of the temporality of the present—the way in which past and future cannot be seen simply as modalities of the present and the present cannot be seen as an undivided unity or plenitudinous identity. Intended to master this recursive feedback circuit, the visor effect inevitably induces problems of its own, as we have seen. Derrida summarises these problems under the heading of spectrality. Spectral effects are those elements of difference that contaminate the purity of the “present identity” sought after in the object of study by the one adopting such positionality, or “donning the visor,” so to speak. As the Hong Kong critic of Detention writing under the pseudonym Madanni might say, rather than exorcising spectres, the visor-wearing areal specialist conjures their proliferation. It is hardly coincidence that one chapter in Derrida’s Specters of Marx is entirely devoted to an analysis of the neo-evangelical discourse of one of post-Cold War transitional theory’s most dedicated ideologues, Francis Fukuyama. The object of Derrida’s analysis, Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, was composed between 1989 and 1992, roughly the same period in which the neoliberal dogma of shock therapy transition was being elaborated by Jeffrey Sachs (see Yurchenko Ukraine, 11 passim). Confronted with this situation, what Luki´c and Maslov propose instead is to liberate the asymmetrical feedback circuit instantiated by the concept of transition rather than seeking to master it through the positionality of the visor effect. While they do not conceive of this effort in relation to the construction of areas and areal knowledge, the implications for this sort of recontextualisation of their analysis are unmistakable. The production of knowledge about transitions must always reckon with its implication for social practice. To write about a democratic transition is not simply to observe nor to make it transparent for others, nor even to make visible the agency and subjectivity of the transition’s “proper actors,” but to define norms about what constitutes the areal identity of the transition. In other words, to write about democratic transition is to endorse the apparatus of area—and with it the template of “the West”—that defines knowledge production in the colonial–imperial modernity. That is why Luki´c and Maslov conclude that transition, “is rather a politically articulated unity in which power and representation are mutually contaminated from the very beginning. As a theoretical and political concept its effects are written in the social reality itself ” (Luki´c and Maslov “Did Somebody

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Say ‘Transition’?” 214). One might say, following Derrida, that transition is an anti-monster concept in the sense that transition pretends to separate things that are integrally related into distinct genres or species of experience. (The monster, for Derrida we will remember, is that which is new and cannot be contained within the conventional categories of received concepts and specific difference.) The order of representation at stake in transitional theory is precisely the system of internationality as the avatar of specific difference. It is nothing but the normative organisation of global populations into logical categories, such as the nation-station, that represent social difference in terms of arborescent taxonomy. Mediating between the individual and the species, the nation-state offers an explanation of transition that takes an effect of transition—differential development—and turns it into a cause. Significantly, the political ramifications for the populations taken as the object of transitional processes are unequivocally associated by Luki´c and Maslov with the depoliticising tendencies of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism in their account reduces social questions to a “simple management ‘cost-benefit’ issue.” Managerialism, or the “idea of transition as a subjectless process of managing social ‘costs’” (ibid., 215), conceals the actual subjective operation of neoliberal politics. Hardly subjectless, the latter are rather characterised by the equation of sovereignty with private right, including such well-known phenomena as the privatisation of risk, the development of an entrepreneurial attitude towards the self, and a conquest of the state and public institutions such as universities by private capital. In effect, what Luki´c and Maslov are describing is the operation by which the discourse of neoliberal democratic transition becomes the source for a consensus that is desubjectivising even as it promotes an image of subjective agency. This is precisely the discourse of “engineered self-determination” that American geostrategic planners had conceived for Taiwan during the first Cold War. In terms of the economy, the analogy to engineered self-determination would be the implacable contradiction noted by World Bank economist William Easterly, who ruefully observed that the very idea of planning a free-market economy is inherently contradictory. In Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, Yuliya Yurchenko goes one step further, observing: “Easterly, however, like many other critics of the prescriptive nature of ‘market planning’ fails to mention that the very assumption that there must be a free market is planning in itself; that ‘free market’ is a teleological fixation that in reality is as unattainable as it is undesirable due to its socio-economically

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destabilising nature” (50). Of course, transition would not be a transition if it were not a potentially destabilising affair. Yet what I think commentators like Yurchenko and then Luki´c and Maslov are getting at is something different. If the presuppositions of transition function in teleological fashion, it is equally the case that the teleology of transition surreptitiously constitutes its own presuppositions. What is really at stake here is the way that capitalism manages its outside by appealing to a discourse of transition that naturalises area. This naturalisation makes it look like area is the support—and in some cases, the cause—for capitalist transition, rather than a spectral effect of the transition. The result of this naturalisation is reflected in the presupposition of internationality behind the modern regime of translation. Whereas the schema of internationality is an effect of translational practice, the modern regime of translation represents internationality as the condition given in advance of translation that calls for it. Yet without appeal to an implicit notion of translation, it would be impossible to conceive of linguistic difference in terms of that between two unities separated by a border.

CHAPTER 6

From Dullesism to Financialisation (The Ethos of Area Studies II)

Dullesism and the Spirit of Area Studies Although neither of the Dulles brothers (John Foster Dulles, 1888–1959, and Allen Dulles, 1893–1969) could lay any claim to areal expertise, there are good reasons to take the pair together as a composite figure of the ideological grid within which US area studies, institutionalised in the aftermath of World War II, operates. The good-cop/bad-cop duo, with one brother (John Foster) manning overt foreign policy executed at the State Department while the other brother (Allen) piloted covert foreign policy, a.k.a. regime change engineering, attracts attention not just for the considerable influence they exercised upon US foreign policy particularly during the 1950s, but also for the social, economic, and political networks they frequented before and after World War II. Involved through their Wall Street corporate law firm both with funding the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party and with helping fund his regime in rearmament during the 1930s, the Dulles brothers were equally involved at the end of and after World War II with the incorporation of former elements of the Nazi intelligence and scientific agencies into US intelligence agencies and linked university programs in a battle against global communism. A playbook of governmental technologies could be extrapolated from the personal biographies of the Dulles brothers. Chief among these would be: recognition of subordinate postcolonial national sovereignty coupled with covert and overt action that transgressed such sovereignty; regime © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. D. Solomon, The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8_6

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change operations against any domestic and foreign forms of national sovereignty that veered off into popular sovereignty; interest in mind, thought, and/or behavioural control; financial engineering; cartographical engineering; collusion for profit with repressive right-wing regimes; money laundering for right-wing figures; rehabilitation of Nazi and Fascist war criminals; anti-labour policies; cooperation with death squads; implacable anticommunism; revolving door conflicts of interest; and an essentialist sociality typified by informal networks of racially, sexually, and gender-coded privilege. Dullesism is the name that I would like to give to this constellation of forces, practices, and modes of subjectification characteristic of the emergence of the Pax Americana at the end of World War II. The choice of a proper name to designate this peculiar historical assemblage is inspired by the role that social networks among US elites played in the transformation of the US state into a global hegemonic power and their role in the establishment of the postwar “deep state” (alternately called “parapolitics,” “invisible state,” “dual state,” etc.). The public part of the family history, from John W. Foster (1836–1917) to Allen and John Foster Dulles, maps onto the time stretching from incubation to full-fledged Dullesism, spanning a period that stretches from the late nineteenth-century scramble for colonies—emblematised by John W. Foster’s less-than-neutral involvement in the Treaty of Shimonoseki negotiations that granted Japan sovereignty over the islands of Taiwan—through the involvement of his grandchildren, John Foster and Allen Dulles, in the US delegation to the Treaty of Versailles during which period the United States joined with the UK notoriously to refuse the Japanese delegation’s proposal for the inclusion of an anti-racist clause in the treaty (the “Proposal to abolish racial discrimination”), up to the frenzied attempts by industrial and financial capital to intervene in the increasingly violent confrontation between Fascism and Socialism preceding the outbreak of hostilities in World War II—emblematised by John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles’s active involvement in the investment/industrial side of Germany’s rearmament and the development of Hitler’s war machine. Were a mission statement for Dullesism formulated, it would be focused ideologically on promoting anticommunism and antiblackness while creating an optimal international operating environment for the interface among finance capital, the state, and the war machine. Under Dullesism, the war machine and the state-capital alliance shared a common target, the revolutionary forces of popular sovereignty mobilised

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against capitalism, with both parties hoping to capture, not necessarily kill, their target for different ends. For the state-capital nexus, the capture of labour and the liberation of markets were essential to the regime of accumulation; for the war machine, it was necessary to care for workers well enough that they would accept induction, deployment, and possible death on the battlefield. Historically speaking, Dullesism was the political ideology that corresponded to the peculiar historical conjuncture coming after the wars of total mobilisation (World War I and World War II) and before a definitive conclusion to the wars of colonial liberation, a time when everything pointed to the evanescent convergence between anticolonial struggles and anticapitalist ones. The antiblack, anticommunist ethos of Dullesism was present at the very start of the brothers’ career in public life, emblematised by the dual exclusions of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that kept the Soviet delegation out of the process altogether and hubristically rejected the Japanese “Proposal to abolish racial discrimination.” From that seminal moment onwards, the ideology of Dullesism gradually took shape as a response to the possibility of this political convergence, hiding the metastasis of US white settler colonialism into imperial nationalism behind a façade of Wilsonian anticolonial rhetoric (“self-determination”) in foreign policy and the gradual expansion of political enfranchisement at home. In short, Dullesism names the truth that lay behind US claims in the second half of the twentieth century to be an anticolonial, antifascist power. This peculiar conjuncture was reflected in the institutional forms adopted by Dullesism between overt diplomacy based on postcolonial state recognition and covert action projected across borders. Directly or indirectly, government agencies from the CIA to USAID funnelled funds to support discursive production, literary translations, art exchange, political parties, cultural associations, political groups, etc., throughout both the postimperial and the postcolonial areas of the postwar world. The covert aspect of Dullesism was not just a device to hide the collusion with anti-democratic Fascist elements that characterised the Dulles brothers’ (and particularly Allen’s) career both before and after World War II, it was also necessary to orchestrate support among different classes. Hence, for the cultural elites, there were covert programs to influence cultural and intellectual production while distracting attention from US oligarchs; for the working class, there were covert programs designed to infiltrate working-class political organisations and, when necessary, stage violent acts to thwart popular socialist revolutionary movements. Ultimately, the

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main goal of the various covert operations was to keep markets open to capital penetration and provide political legitimacy for the foreign and domestic regime change ops burgeoning since the end of World War II. The relative success or failure of covert ops should not be measured, as some commentators would like us to think, simply in terms of influence. Theories emphasising the influence of external factors upon individual psychology always fail in the end to understand the role of desire—particularly the role of desire in relation to imaginary social projects, such as national community, global cartography, and the division of labour. Since the formation of subjectivity is prior to the establishment of subjective interior and objective exterior, it follows that quantitative measures of external influence are not a reliable indicator of processes of subjection. Geopolitically speaking, Dullesism could be described as a series of practices designed to manage the historical transition from a world organised around imperialism and colonialism to a world organised around the creation of markets open to US capital penetration and command under the guise of postcolonial national sovereignty. Its aim in managing the transition was not to conduct a process of thorough decolonisation leading finally to a non-colonial world order, but rather to appropriate the historical wave of decolonisation that began to swell after the Great War by incorporating it into a new kind of alliance between the state, capital, and the war machine that formed the basis of Pax Americana. In ideological terms, the greatest achievement of Dullesism has been to depict the United States as an anticolonial, antifascist power when it is, in fact, neither. Although the United States has traditionally been described since the nineteenth century as an anticolonial power (barring the so-called anomaly of the Philippines) on account of its opposition to the system of closed markets practised by European and Japanese imperialisms, its relationship to what today might be called decolonisation is much more ambiguous. Odd Arne Westad concludes The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, a convincing study of the central role played by non-European, postcolonial areas and regions in the Cold War, with a simple verdict: “In a historical sense – and especially as seen from the South – the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means” (Westad Global, 396). Summed up in a few words, the “slightly different” means used by Pax Americana centred on the role of formal national independence and postcolonial sovereignty in a decolonising world now dominated by the global networks of US

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military deployment and finance capital—with little or no respect for borders or frontiers of any kind, we should add, except in the explicit decision, for political reasons, to prevent US capital from gaining market access to postwar Japan. If support for postcolonial sovereignty distinguishes Pax Americana from the previous Japanese and European imperialisms, it is equally important to keep in mind, as Ruth Oldenziel forcefully argues, that the scalar remapping of global space undertaken after World War II was enabled by a pervasive, global network of islands, peninsulas, and littoral spaces, made for the most part invisible to domestic US populations precisely by the island territories’ lack of sovereignty. These spaces, thousands of barely registered “dots on the map,” writes Oldenziel, “allowed America to continually renounce territorial ambitions while expanding to become the sole global power after the Cold War” (Oldenziel “Islands,” 31). The continuity between Pax Americana and earlier forms of European and Japanese imperialism lies not in the denial or recognition of postcolonial sovereignty, but rather in the continuation and prolongation of a series of anomalous, irregular spatial “zones” that would support the transoceanic logistical infrastructure necessary for global domination, while maintaining an optics of low visibility. The accumulated inconsistencies and vagaries might easily be identified today, in the light of Lauren Benton’s profoundly important work on the “imperfect geographies and the production in empire of variegated spaces with an uncertain relation to imperial power” (Benton A Search for Sovereignty, 2), as a continuing chapter in the long history of those “anomalous legal zones” that constitute for Benton the sorely unrecognised yet fundamental characteristic of a modern global legal order constructed in contingent fashion through the experience of colonial conquest, interimperial competition, and the rise of the nation-state market. At pains to show that such anomalies cannot simply be understood as the result of “persisting, older irregularities” (Benton Search, 4) in the narrative chronology of a triumphant “rationalization of space,” Benton insists that the creation of anomalous variegated forms of spatial jurisdiction and possession was “a function of the routine operations of empire” (ibid.). Among these functions, Benton’s study privileges the role played by the “modes of gathering geographical knowledge” (Benton Search, 9) in order to develop a persuasive understanding of the homological relation between the production of geographical knowledge and the development of international law. In place of a narrative favoured by the institution of international law about

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the progressive rationalisation of space, Benton’s account advances a story of international law as the temporal, rather than simply spatial, trajectory of multiple institutions and disciplines, constituting the field of international law. The temporality of development, leading from the establishment of colonies, protectorates, extraterritorial zones, mandates, and other tutelary or administrative forms of colonial control to the assimilation of all populations under the sovereignty of independent nation-states, was the common denominator behind the various imperial discourses that contributed to the modernisation theory developed in tandem with, and as justification for, the Pax Americana hegemony. This is what Westad calls the “teleological” side of Cold War ideology (Westad Global, 9), or again, what Perry Anderson calls the paradoxical combination of exceptionalism and universalism that characterises the United States as it moves into a global deployment (Anderson America’s Foreign Policy, 2015). Applied to areas, this universalist teleology sees development in terms of a rational progression exercised upon terrestrial space and is the externalised parallel to the ontology of possessive individualism that sees freedom in terms of a rational choice based on the calculus of interests. Just as the practice of “colonial governmentality under erasure” reveals that the United States has never been fundamentally opposed to colonialism, the same must be said about the US’s relation, emblematised by Dullesism, to fascism and Nazism. Prior to the war, the Dulles brothers were responsible for funding Hitler’s rearmament. On the eve of war, the US, following Britain and France, hoped until as late as the winter of 1939–1940—even after the invasion of Poland—that Hitler could be used to fight Soviet communism. The story of “appeasement” that commonly circulates in the US popular imaginary is a revisionist history that effaces the complicity with Nazism and the repeated refusals (particularly in 1938–1939) to entertain a multilateral international front with Stalin against Nazi Germany (Jones, “Stalin, appeasement, and World War II”). After the war, Allen Dulles used Reinhard Gehlen’s Nazi SS spy ring and numerous East European fascist remnants to fight the Soviets. Ukrainian Nazi partisans funded and armed by the CIA were active until 1956. The Marshall Plan is commonly depicted as a sign of US generosity, yet it was designed to suppress communists in Western Europe—a mission that defined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) more than deterrence (Genser NATO’s Secret Armies ). A curious historical anecdote

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emblematises these continuities and complicity, illustrating the significance for the postcolonial world: according to reports by East German filmmakers, the West German military adviser to the US based in Saigon during the Vietnam war, who had previously been a decorated officer in the Nazi Wehrmacht, still wore his Nazi Iron Cross when the East German filmmakers visited him in 1977, and had earlier counselled US military planners to find a “final solution” to the “Vietnam problem” (Alter “Excessive Pre/Requisites: Vietnam Through the East German Lens,” 69). As the only political movement in most European countries that had opposed the Nazis prior to the war, communists enjoyed a certain political legitimacy in the immediate postwar period that none of the other political forces in Europe and Japan could claim. The criminalisation of communism in Europe (and Japan) after the war was a policy actively pursued by the US. Operation Gladio is the classic example of how the US used fascist remnants after the war to reshape the political landscape of Europe. In truth, across the globe and particularly in the postcolonial nations, the US instigated a veritable genocide of the Left, conniving to use fascist remnants to achieve its goals. The point is not to argue that a secret core of Nazi sympathisers directed US policy or that behind the façade of democracy lay the reality of a fascist state (an argument sometimes put forth during the 1960s and 1970s), but to understand why the US, as an anticommunist power, found Nazism and then postwar Nazi/fascist remnants to be extremely useful, both covertly and overtly (albeit for very different purposes). This understanding is essential if we are to recognise how the area studies, up until today, are still beholden to a narrative that elides the actual nature and history of US anticommunism by presenting the rejection of communism as a generous and broadminded response to political forces that are simply incompatible with American values and hence, the human condition as such. In economic terms, the covert part of Dullesism was a rejection of the Keynesian aspect of the Cold War system. It shared with the neoliberalism that eventually supplanted Keynesianism the assumption that free markets do not simply materialise in an ineluctable historical progression, but must be actively created, by regime change if necessary. Dullesism could thus be seen as a torchbearer for the neoliberalism that would eventually replace the military-industrial Keynesianism (Alliez and Lazzarato Wars and Capital, 220) that dominated US domestic politics and foreign policy from 1945 up to 1973.

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In social terms, the racist component of Dullesism places it firmly within the mainstream of US domestic and foreign policy since the nineteenth century. The sense of racial hierarchy and anti-revolutionary politics identified by Michael Hunt in his analysis of the major ideological themes that have dominated US foreign policy since the nineteenth century (Hunt Ideology, 17–18) apply equally well to Dullesism. As Naoki Sakai argues, the postwar Pax Americana was constituted on the basis of a delicate ideological balancing act that maintained strictly racialised hierarchies of power even while promoting the façade of anti-racism. This approach parallels the overall policy towards postcolonial national sovereignty, which promoted self-determination within a hierarchy of transgressive sovereign power. While comprehensive, the racist component of Dullesism was not programmatic. It was not designed to be the political execution of a certain scientific truth about the medical and biological origins of anthropological difference, as was the racist ideology of the Nazi party that the Dulles brothers’ investment and policy activities indirectly helped to promote. Instead, it was designed to be an appendage of Dullesism’s core interest in harnessing social divisions to capital accumulation, beginning, of course, with the division of labour upon which capitalist regimes of accumulation depend. The normative, white, male financial subject was balanced by labour coded through various social differences. Hence, the ethos of antiblackness that pervades Dullesism was intrinsically connected to anticommunism, while anticommunism could be said to have been a crystallisation of the fear behind antiblackness. The fulcrum in this grossly unequal balancing act is the border between an international system based on postcolonial sovereignty within the framework of US military and financial superiority and a national system based on racialised, ethnicised, sexualised, and gendered minorities. The racist component of Dullesism might, therefore, best be understood as what Eric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato have described, in their book Wars and Capital, as an index to “the war of subjectivity” that accompanies the capital-state-war nexus and includes virtually every sort of social difference imaginable. Racism, within Dullesism, was one of the techniques for the formation and capture of subjects according to the alliance among capital, the state, and war. One possible approach to this institutional constellation might be to take inspiration from C. Wright Mills’s Cold War critique of institutional power relations, which he dubs “command posts,” in The Power

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Elite (1956). As a critique of networks spanning big corporations, the state, and the war machine responsible for, “the great structural shift of modern American capitalism toward a permanent war economy” (Mills Power Elite, 215), Mills’s book takes aim at the practices of Dullesism. The advantage of Mills’s approach lies in the flexibility with which it apprehends analogous operations of power across the separate domains of economy, politics, and security. Although Mills is focused on the operational power of decision, he avoids adopting a Schmittian tack. Rather than being founded on the sovereign exception, power in Mills’s account arises from the power to make borders precisely in the act of their transgression that Mills calls, “interchangeability” (ibid., 296). Limited by the individualist assumptions of behavioural psychology, Mills tends to view interchangeability in terms of the ability of individual bodies—invariably heterosexual, white male ones, though Mills does not tarry over the implications—to appear in several domains at once. Interchangeability (of bodies) is thus also logistical interoperability (of platforms). What makes interchangeability possible, in the end, are the means of communication, the relays, across institutional boundaries (ibid., 23). One might have expected that a critique of national or imperial community based on logistical interoperability would have begun either with the fundamental role of knowledge, as Jean-Luc Nancy does in his philosophical meditation on the aporias of modern community in The Inoperative Community, or with the fundamental role of capital becoming a direct political actor, as Neilson and Mezzadra do in The Politics of Operations. While Mills argues that the United States is unique among modern nations in that it lacks a civil service that would provide politically neutral expertise (ibid., 297), a blind spot arises in his argument due to the methodological nationalism that Mills employs. For it is precisely in the embryonic establishment under the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA) of an institutional archipelago of knowledge production about outlying regions of Pax Americana motivated by the needs of the national security state in gestation that the outlines of that kind of civil service system, whose credentials would derive from stateaccredited examinations or institutions and whose purpose was wholly to serve the state beyond politics, could be seen. In the end, Mills’s useful idea of “command posts” would be greatly assisted by expanding it beyond such individualistic assumptions to include social abstractions that nevertheless play a commanding role in concrete situations of everyday

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life. An example of this kind of strategy could be seen in “Nationality and the Politics of the ‘Mother Tongue,’” an article in which Naoki Sakai theorises the relation between universalism and particularism in a Eurocentric postcolonial order. While noting the internalised system of “commands” emanating from the West that characterises postcolonial sociality, Sakai is careful to call attention to those moments prior to the “command” when the parties issuing and receiving commands are fashioned. Although these regimes of domination were established neither simultaneously nor in one stroke, and involved entirely different historical processes and groups, the “West” has come to refer uniformly to the dominating force. This overlaps with the process through which the vague category of “the white race” is conceived as that which sustains the identity of the “West.” The problem with this view of modernity as the era in which the “West” dominates the world, however, is that it leaves unanswered the question of whether there was a “West” prior to this as well. (Such a view is, of course, closely connected to the view that modernity established the “white man’s superiority.”) Such a manner of speaking is, however, mistaken. We should rather understand modernity as the process through which the unitary category of the “West” and the racial category of “white’” were established. These categories of “West” and “the white race,” moreover, not only concealed discrete histories of domination through violence, but appeared as their displacements. (Sakai “Nationality and the Politics of the ‘Mother Tongue,’” 14)

This approach would help us grasp the nature of a hegemony that was largely consensual and “relied,” in spite of the dark side of Dullesism and the ultimately coercive instance of US military and financial power, “more than its predecessors on co-option of dependent elites rather than outright subjugation” (Anderson Foreign Policy, 258). What we need, in other words, is a theory of how Pax Americana organises “command posts” that cannot be thought of as “centres,” but must be apprehended via the notions of nodal distribution and networks, or international complicity, using the asymmetrical nature of borders as an integral component of command.

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Conspiracy, Complicity, and Disavowal: The Loss of China Characterised by the duplicity of covert operations for which the border between the foreign and the domestic served as a point of articulation rather than a guarantee of protection, Dullesism was founded on a complex relation to conspiracy. Conspiracy had played a major role in the construction of modern European nation-states, culminating in the antisemitic, racist ideology of Nazism. After the war, conspiracy continued to play a salient role in the internal politics of Pax Americana during the Cold War, particularly through McCarthyism (c. 1950 – 1954). McCarthyism’s first point of entry into the university occurred precisely in the locus of institutional area studies, leading to a de facto purge of American China studies. On the one hand, the United States government and corporations actively conspired to defeat the Left globally; on the other hand, any attempt by opponents of Dullesism and advocates of popular sovereignty to develop a systematic critique of Dullesism, such as that mounted by C. Wright Mills, was stigmatised and dismissed as “conspiracy theory.” The hysteria generated around conspiracy theories typified by McCarthyism was a central affective component of the Manicheanism instituted by the Cold War. Conspiracy theory was part of the Dullesist ideology of double standards, double truths, and apocalyptic, zero-sum games. While the communist enemy was assumed to be conspiratorial, “our side” used the charges of conspiracy theory to discredit the communist opposition while conspiring at the same time to covertly organise anticommunist regime change. Hence, the key distinction with regard to conspiracy theory is not that between truth and deception but rather that between sanctioned and unsanctioned theories; this difference in turn is the basis for a liberal disciplinary society obsessed with controlling the boundary between the normal and the abnormal. The historical context of McCarthyism helps elucidate the political stakes of this mode of liberal subjection. In a 1999 article titled “The Archaeology of Populism,” French historian Yves Viltard takes apart the crux of complicity and disavowal that emblematises postwar US liberalism up to the current day. In Viltard’s view, underlying the US liberals’ collective depiction of McCarthyism as a form of “populism” was an attempt to whitewash their complicity in the utter collapse of the Left following the 1948 presidential election and the massive wholesale self-appropriation

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by liberal intellectuals all-too-eager to identify with the capital-state-war machine nexus. The electoral politics were dramatised by the spectre of the emerging “Deep State” or “Dual State” that would come to characterise the structure of Pax Americana rule in the imperial “homeland.” On October 11, 1948, in the midst of a heated electoral campaign, in which the Democratic Party would warn, only two weeks later, of a “dictatorship” in the event of a Republican victory, incumbent Harry S. Truman was forced to abandon plans entertained by his electoral campaign for a rapprochement with the Soviet Union—plans that he had conducted completely without the knowledge of the State Department (nor the existing intelligence agencies of the day). Truman’s astonishing and unforeseen victory a month later marked the beginning of “triangulation” before Bill Clinton gave that policy its name, leading Truman’s aide Clark Clifford to remark that “the Democratic party is an unhappy alliance of Southern conservatives, Western progressives and Big City labor” (Clifford 1947). Faced by insurrection from white Southern constituencies eager to maintain institutional and informal racism, as well as a challenge from the Left in the form of FDR’s heir, Henry Wallace, who attracted the communist vote, Truman gained prestige by triangulating off of foreign policy. Whereas Wallace had correctly pointed out that the Czech coup of 1948 was precipitated by US containment policies, Truman caved in to the Republican establishment that sought confrontation. Truman’s unexpected electoral upset, which came at the price of triangulating off the deep state’s foreign policy goals, was viewed by many as the single most important factor in the subsequent rise of McCarthyism. When Allen Dulles used the CIA against McCarthy to come to Truman’s rescue, the irony was multiplied. Wallace’s defeat was a crushing blow from which the US Left has not recovered to this day. It could not have been accomplished without the complicity of US liberals. Viltard’s thesis is that in order to cover up that political sell-out, the liberal intellectuals created a straw man, or in the words of the day, an “ideal type” (the concept having been borrowed from Theodor Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality), of the populist deplorable mobilised by McCarthy, painting themselves, not communists, as the real targets of McCarthyism. One of the principal authors of this mythology was Daniel Bell (1919– 2011), whose The End of Ideology (1960) was the programmatic manifesto of a Cold War liberal ethos. A Harvard sociologist considered one of

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the leading intellectuals of his day, Bell was highly active in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organisation covertly supported by the CIA to absorb and appropriate liberal left cultural workers into an anticommunist political front (see Barnhisel Cold War Modernists; Iber Neither Peace Nor Freedom; Stonor Saunders Who Paid the Pied Piper?; Whitney “The Paris Review”; and Wilford The Mighty Wurlitzer). Stridently anticommunist, Bell was equally opposed to Joseph McCarthy, blaming him for “populism”: “McCarthy’s targets were intellectuals, especially Harvard men, Anglophiles, internationalists, the Army” (Bell End, 111). Advancing a liberal genealogy of “populism” derived from the end of the nineteenth century—the last time that a third party mounted an effective challenge to the two party duopoly of US domestic politics—in which material interests and practices were superseded by the psychology of “ideal types” and their perceived social status, Bell regarded anyone who did not agree with the reigning consensus (essentially composed of an alliance between the non-Left remnants of the New Deal, Wall Street, and the MilitaryIndustrial Complex) as a nut job or a deplorable. The answer proposed by Bell to “populism” consisted of an ethics of objective, apolitical science, conducted in institutions, like Ivy League schools, that would legitimate meritorious patriarchal hierarchies and cement the public–private partnerships essential to Pax Americana hegemony. Bell’s solution was thus part of the transition to managerial war capitalism described by Seymour Melman. Inevitably, the PMC that emerged in the 1960s transition to managerial capitalism was heir to the tireless efforts of Allen Dulles to seamlessly integrate the former medical and scientific researchers who had been involved in the Nazi armament industry and the frightening human and biological experiments conducted by both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (e.g., MKNAOMI, the joint CIA/Defense Dept. work on bioweapons that began with the Operation Paperclip-style recruitment of Japanese Unit 731 war criminals who were brought to Fort Detrick to give lectures in the early 1950s and some of whom were redeployed to run experiments on North Korean POWS during the Korean war just as institutional area studies were being set up in US universities; see Ghost Stories podcast for details), as well as entire rings of Nazi spies and intelligence officers, into the US “operational research” establishment. Bell’s silence on this count emblematises liberal disavowal. In a classic relation of transference that made the paranoia that had been a hallmark of McCarthyism their own, the liberal intellectuals in the mould

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of Daniel Bell directed their paranoia at the multitude, subsumed into a monolithic history of authoritarianism. As David Talbot explains in a biography of Allen Dulles, “Dulles’s defiance of McCarthy won the widespread devotion of liberals, but it established a dangerous precedent. In his very first year as director, Dulles began molding an image of the CIA as a super agency operating high above mere senators. The CIA would grow more powerful and less accountable with each passing year of Dulles’s reign” (Talbot Devil, 344). Targeting the amorphous multitude, the crux of liberal subjectivity centred precisely around their complicity with the status of the imaginary division between the West and the Rest that was becoming a key component of bordering practices such as the modern regime of translation at the heart of global governance under Pax Americana. In order to make this complicity operational and attractive for white male liberal US intellectuals such as Bell, a certain affective lure was needed. That lure was the possibility to disavow the shame associated with the ethos of arrested decoloniality and anti-popular sovereignty. The way Bell looks at it, shame is to be understood precisely in relation to institutional normativity. Shame and other emotions such as anxiety and guilt (Bell End, 51) are social guardrails against the violation of norms. These norms are the basis of institutions, and “[i]nstitutions,” Bell explains, “derive from particular, established codes of conduct” (ibid.). These presuppositions lead Bell to a normative, procedural view of politics. “Democratic politics means,” he declares, “bargaining between legitimate groups and the search for consensus” (Bell End, 121). The emphasis on legitimacy excludes claims that contest institutional norms. Redeploying the double standards of Dullesism behind a discourse of legitimacy, Bell dismisses Mills’s argument in The Power Elite as conspiracy theory, or something, “suspiciously close to it” (Bell End, 55). While viewing Mills himself as legitimately anti-Marxist in both his methods and conclusions (Bell End, 47), Bell regards the “Communist movement” that allegedly had appropriated Mills’s work as a “conspiracy, rather than a legitimate dissenting group” (Bell End, 123). Accusations of conspiracy thus serve to discredit political opponents and to legitimate their exclusion from the liberal consensus. The myth of US liberalism as a consensus that wisely avoids the “ideological extremes” (Bell End, 309) of European history is a by-product of this delegitimising procedure. The consensus thus obtained would be defined by its own surreptitious complicity with the conspiratorial forces of the US national security state and the disavowal of white

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settler colonialism’s exclusionary view of community. If Bell holds that shame could be averted by identifying with institutional normativity, his expressions of liberal deflection invite us to inquire into the institutions of colonialism, including language and knowledge, that disseminated the shame of inferiority among colonised populations, robbing them of their dignity, while insulating the colonising population from experiencing the shame of their actions. Among the dozen-and-a-half essays collected together in The End of Ideology, the issue of colonialism is rarely mentioned. The term “post-colonial” is reserved exclusively to describe the United States of America after independence from Great Britain. References to “the breakup of the old colonial empires” (Bell End, 119) are extremely sparse, while the characterisation of those other postcolonial societies—“where the masses are apathetic and easily manipulated” (ibid., 403)—reproduces the anthropological presuppositions of the modernisation theory advanced by Walt Whitman Rostow and Max Millikan (Westad Global, 33 passim). One quickly realises that the condition of possibility for The End of Ideology, both as a book and as an historical conjuncture, is a denial of shame legitimated by the inherent antiblackness and anticommunism of normative institutions—not least of which would be the university. While the American University is not quite the same overwhelmingly white male patriarchal institution that it was in Bell’s day, the democratisation of the university has not necessarily put an end to the ethos of anticommunism and antiblackness. Much like a therapeutic form of transitional justice that proposes a pact among beneficiaries and bystanders as a substitute for radical justice in the present, the democratisation of the Western University via the inclusion of formerly excluded others has largely avoided posing the question of a reorganisation of the disciplinary formation of humanistic knowledge beyond the areal basis inherited from the colonial–imperial modernity. The exclusion of postimperial shame and the transferential projection of conspiracy onto political opponents is emblematic of the Dullesist ideology of postwar Pax Americana. Hence, it comes as no surprise that The End of Ideology reiterates a theme central to the nexus between anticommunist progressivism and antiblack US imperial nationalism, situating the US at the teleological end of history. Bell uses the example of the “loss of China” to illustrate what he sees as a dangerous flaw of populism in American political culture that extended beyond McCarthyism. “The cry of betrayal and the charge of conspiracy is an old one in American

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politics” (Bell End, 116). Against these incessant accusations of an ultimately false and manipulative nature, Bell asserts that the real conspiracy in American political life is to be found in a bad populist analogy: “so long as one translated all problems into the smalltown setting, the dichotomy of politics and moralism could prevail. Business was business, and church was church; and politics was a business” (Bell End, 115). In an era of global reach, however, the fictional microcosm called “Mainstreet USA” conspires to prevent Americans from realising their pragmatically progressive destiny, pushing the US into dangerous moralism. The roots of this moralism stretch back nearly a century before the global commitments of Pax Americana to the decades just after the end of the US Civil War. Bell’s historical critique of conspiratorial populism thus implicitly reproduces a white settler colonial narrative about Reconstruction, effectively erasing the appropriation of radical demands for popular sovereignty and racial justice. Parallel with this erasure of popular sovereignty from post-Civil War US history, Bell does not hesitate to ascribe to twentiethcentury Marxism an inability to formulate an effective response. Leftism’s fatal flaw, according to Bell, is to misunderstand the nature of political promise. The communists promise utopia, a gesture that guarantees disappointment, betrayal, and violent reaction. The non-ideological liberal, by contrast, promises rational progress and normative perfectibility. Inheriting the views of the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, Bell was what Aziz Rana would call a creedal nationalist, someone who believes in the essential perfection of the founding document of the American polity and sees history as the story of progress on the way to the realisation of that perfection. Although Bell’s reference to translation is obviously intended to be metaphorical, the “smalltown setting” is nothing but a figure of the self-referential system that had become the basis for Pax Americana representations of the difference between postcolonial and postimperial sovereignty. Within this international system, the “loss of China” is emblematic of much more than a political reconfiguration in the contest between postimperial and postcolonial sovereignties. The “loss of China” defines the ultimate figure that haunts the political ontology of Pax Americana. The fear associated with this figure was concentrated in those normative institutions that deal specifically with the distant areas of America’s far-flung global empire—nowhere being more “distant” than China. Nothing epitomises this normative distance more than area studies, the disciplines of knowledge created to study the societies

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that arose in the wake of the collapse of the old empires and kingdoms located outside of the Eurocentric international order. These are precisely the disciplines that experienced McCarthyism politically, undergoing a veritable purge that established an anticommunist ethos at the heart of university based intellectual life in the US. Permanently plagued by the spectrality or hauntology that threatens to disrupt the manipulation of objectivity—plagued, in other words, by the eruption of subjectivity that could lead to popular sovereignty and class solidarity across divisions of gender, race, class, and nation, the area studies are essentially invested in a mode of subjection characterised by complicity and disavowal. The depth of disavowal is inversely proportionate to the virulent accusations of conspiracy theory launched against comprehensive critiques of the Dullesist system and the silence of institutional exclusion. While much of the discussion about the rise of area studies has rightly focused on their importance for the national security state, it is equally important to trace the genealogy of area studies to the intellectual division of labour that maintained the trope of separation essential to liberal subjectivity. As I have demonstrated in an analysis of Lucian Pye, the roots of area studies lie in the founding, disciplinary exclusions condensed by the terms, anticommunism and antiblackness. It is important to recognise the importance that the articulation of these two terms held for white liberal imperial nationalism and the reasons this ideology had to be secured in those fields and disciplines such as area studies that were relatively marginal to the Humanities. Significantly, in Daniel Bell’s disparaging account of the populist outrage experienced over the “loss of China,” he turns immediately to the example of Tom Watson, a politician from Georgia who ran for Vice-President on the ticket of the People’s Party in 1896. Focused on the exclusion of groups he considers illegitimate prior to the procedures of consensus, Bell is not prepared to recognise the importance of third-party politics in the United States and its significance for popular sovereignty against the emerging political duopoly between Republicans and Democrats. Crucially, Bell remains silent about Watson’s attempt to articulate class solidarity against racial divisions. We would have to turn to Thomas Frank’s recent critique of the class basis behind US liberals’ anti-populism to recall that Watson had, “declared in a national magazine that ‘the People’s Party will settle the race question’ by addressing the common economic interests of black and white farmers” (Frank The People, 38). Bell’s silence on these issues was emblematic

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of the founding exclusions of the liberal consensus—precisely the same exclusions that founded area studies. These exclusions necessitated disciplines of knowledge production specifically targeted at the social objects prone to reveal problems in the institutional norms that justify exclusion prior to the consensual procedures of democracy. While a full intellectual history of area studies in relation to the formation of US creedal nationalism and settler empire remains to be written, recent work by Roderick Ferguson and Charisse Burden-Stelly on the bipolar genesis of American studies and area studies (including Black studies) provides an essential point of departure for understanding how knowledge production contributes to prolonging colonial relationships while seeming to promote a discourse of freedom, equality, and the recognition of identity. The management of postcolonial sovereign nations via a discourse of identity and self-determination that replaced popular sovereignty independent of US military and financial controls was coextensive with the management of domestic minority populations. As Burden-Stelly summarises: As Black studies became absorbed into the pedagogy of the state by way of the westernized university, it aided in the reconstitution of capital based on new forms of governmentality and exclusion through cultural specifications. The logics of modernization and development that circulated in area studies became transferred to Black studies through their investment in historicism and the privileging of history; through civilization narratives and the privileging of literary and cultural studies; and through cultural explanations of deviance and pathology and the privileging of structural-functionalist sociology. The result was the production of Black studies specialists whose expertise and production of knowledge served the interests of the state and its engagement with notions of difference that became reduced to specifications of cultural condition…which, like American studies and area studies, demanded little attention to class…Area studies provided the basis for a new form of governmentality that inhered in liberal inclusion instead of racist foreclosure and conscious and unconscious ‘ignorance.’ It set the precedent for racially specific studies to become sites for the management of difference. Area studies specialists became essential to the formulation of policies and practices adopted by the U.S. state in strategic areas of governance. Black studies scholars, on the other hand, were largely irrelevant to efforts aimed at the implementation of policies that impacted the material realities of Black people…Black studies did, however, provide an understanding of how Black people should be managed by the state – namely, through discourses of multicultural

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rights that asserted equality in terms of cultural recognition. (Burden-Stelly “Black studies,” 80–82)

As Burden-Stelly concludes, the triangulation among American studies, area studies, and Black studies was central to imperial population management abroad and at home. Emphasising identity and recognition rather than material conditions of existence, this configuration (and cofiguration in the sense used by Sakai) separated the culturally specific from political and economic realities. As a result, “the possibilities of international alliances against capitalist oppression were marginalized” (Burden-Stelly “Black studies,” 84). In effect, the division of labour between American studies and area studies was decisive, establishing a formula of disciplinary and linguistic cofiguration that provided a model for knowledge production in support of informal empire on both sides of the border between the domestic and the foreign. Once we recognise the extent to which the disciplinary, racial, and linguistic cofiguration in the Humanities is linked to imperial population management, we can no longer be content to stop at a critique of the area studies’ relation to the Cold War national security state. In truth, the role of area studies is central to understanding how Pax Americana operates and underlines the necessity of pursuing anew the moribund project of epistemic decolonisation in the area studies today. Peter Button’s explanation is bound to become an incontrovertible point of reference for the future: The “creedal myth” of American exceptionalism has left the US public’s memory of its historical past profoundly “fractured” (Rana “Race”). US political elites recognized in the early 20th century that the US ascension to global authority required the erasure of what had always been affirmatively embraced, namely the role of settler colonization in preserving “white imperial authority” (Rana, “Colonialism,” 265; Rana quotes Stephen Douglas from 1858, ”I hold that this government was made on the white basis, by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men and none others.” Ibid., 270.) This deliberate occlusion of that settler past by no means marked the emergence of a new “legal-political” order in the US of the sort that might well have occurred had the project of Radical Reconstruction with its aspirations to create an interracial democracy oriented towards meaningful popular sovereignty not been crushed by the violent reassertion of

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white supremacy along with a property rights supremacism in the American South. (Maclean Democracy, 10) Where Reconstruction might have facilitated a potentially decolonizing rupture with settler imperial legal and political practices, Rana argues the legal decisions regarding the “Insular Cases” in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War successfully advanced those practices onto a global stage. The anti-annexationists with their attendant, anti-imperialist rejection of colonial dependencies were motivated above all by a desire to preserve, rather than in any manner dismantle, the “ethno-racial hierarchy” that had always been the defining feature of white settler conquest in North America (Rana “How We Study,” 319). The “creedal constitutionalism” (Rana and Bâli “Constitutionalism,” 268) that emerged over the course of the American Century underwrote the ultimate consensus between the pro- and anti-annexationists who came to share the conviction that the US must “impose order on a disordered globe.” (Rana “Insular Cases,” 328) One of those sites of disorder that was of paramount concern was necessarily, of course, the US itself, where from the early 1900s on, Black radical thinkers and political activists like W.E.B. Du Bois had clearly identified the material conjunctures between Jim Crow racism at home and colonialism abroad. Black radical thought would later be countered with “Cold War Culturalism” defined as an epistemology according to which “Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material […] conditions of dispossession.” (Burden-Stelly “Cold War Culturalism,” 216). What is essential here is the identification of the emergence of American studies as an “interdiscipline” that would provide the “grammar, form and function” for both the area studies and Black studies (Burden-Stelly “Black studies,” 74). Immediately prior to the deployment of American studies in the service of US Cold War ideological needs, an “American Studies Group” had been proposed by the “History, Art, and Literature committee.” Tellingly, in its original conception the American Studies Group was designed to provide an opportunity for “foreign students to study, in close contact with American life, the institutions and principles of American democracy, a subject of worldwide interest.” (Italics added.) It was initially launched in 1946 as a summer school program called the “Yale School of American Studies for Foreign Students.” From its inception, American Studies at Yale drew upon a strategy of cofiguration (Holzman “The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale,” 78-79). The “epistemic effect(s)” of Cold War Culturalism have been profound throughout the North American university, in large part because it drew upon the early 20th- century anticommunist

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reaction to the Black radical critique of the racialized legal-political order that sustained systemic dispossession at home and abroad (Burden-Stelly “Cold War Culturalism,” 221). American studies thus served U.S. creedal nationalist demand for the ongoing obliteration of the settler imperial past. No less decisively, it helped to efface what Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism nearly half a century earlier had already “rendered legible” – namely the “structural imperatives of decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean and the quest for Black self-determination and liberation in the United States.” (Burden-Stelly “Black studies,” 73) If the Cold War “weaponization of culture start[ed] at Yale” (Whitney “CIA”; Holzman “Ideological Origins,” 83) in earnest in the late 1940s, it is precisely in Burden-Stelly’s sense as the “elision of political economy” through the interdisciplinary, methodological construction of the many rapidly proliferating postcolonial nations around the globe, as modular, self-identical, ethno-cultural units (Burden-Stelly “Black studies,” 73). They were further defined by their own unique internal narrative of selfrealization, unfolding towards the mature capacity for a plebiscitary politics that over the course of the first few decades of the 20th century increasingly confined the exercise of popular will to periodic participation in “free and fair elections” (Rana Two Faces, 288.). As Woodrow Wilson ensured beginning with the Dominican Republic in the early 20th century, the final determination of the democratic legitimacy of elections abroad would remain the sole imperial prerogative of U.S. executive power. (ibid.) U.S. constitutionalism came to play a decisive role in the shaping of “racial and economic policies pursued by American elites” (Rana and Bâli “Constitutionalism,” 264). By 1935, what New Deal federal judge and Yale law professor Thurman Arnold called the “ideals of humanitarian imperialism” was understood to be the “general basis for social policy, both domestic and foreign” (Rana Two Faces, 310; italics added). In other words, Arnold endorsed what he saw as the necessity of a “fully realized imperial prerogative power, operating both at home and abroad” (ibid., 310). As such, “anticommunism/antiradicalism” would inevitably require the categorical rejection and stigmatization of every impulse toward overturning a legal-political order, both at home and abroad, of “stratified subjecthood,” according to which different racial and ethnic groups occupied different points on a “continuum” that had always run from “free citizens (who enjoyed republican freedom) and [racialized] stratified subjects (under discretionary prerogative powers)” (ibid., 159). It is hardly surprising, then, that it would fall to radicals like the Black Panthers and their allies to register with clarity that the greatest “hindrance” to a

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comprehensive project of decolonization, both in the U.S. and around the world, was the U.S. Federal Constitution itself, hence their collective call for the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in 1970. (Rana “Colonialism,” 285) If the area studies took up the epistemological gaze fashioned in part by American studies at Yale, it did so in the service of installing anticommunism as its foundational ethos (Burden-Stelly “Cold War Culturalism,” 226; Holzman “Ideological Origins,” 87-89). It is essential to emphasize the epistemic thrust of 20th century U.S. anticommunism which from the early 20th century on was continuously engaged in neutralizing the decolonizing charge contained in Du Bois’s analysis of the international hierarchy of racial subordination and systemic dispossession that spanned the continents. During the Cold War, Du Bois’s color line was subjected to a violent epistemic displacement by modernization theory’s linear continuum of cultural and racial progress that disaggregated the collectively dispossessed darker races/peoples/nations of the world, redistributing each individually along that continuum in the form of discrete, ethno-cultural units. (Sakai, Solomon, and Button, “Introduction: Epistemic Decolonization During the New Cold War”)

Button’s synopsis of the genealogy of area studies within the configuration of white settler colonialism is essential for understanding why a critique of the links between area studies and the Cold War national security state is ultimately insufficient to achieve the task of full epistemic decolonisation. Just as the Black Panthers recognised that the only solution to the synergy between domestic minority population management and imperial postcolonial population management lay in rewriting the US Constitution, the same is true for the social and human sciences, which require a similar project of radical reconstruction. The premise for this reconstruction starts with the abandonment of the areal basis of humanistic knowledge production, a move that can only be realised by putting an end to the modern regime of translation and the co-figured forms of colonial–imperial sovereignty it sustains. To tease out the implications for both knowledge and sovereignty, the epistemic and the political, we could do no better than to turn to writers from the black radical tradition such as the contemporary philosopher Nahum Chandler, who offers an irreplaceable point of reference for a critique of the anthropological presuppositions that underlie the parallel relation between geopolitical organisation and epistemic organisation that

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is managed by the apparatus of area (studies). Black studies begins, in Chandler’s estimation, with a “hidden question about a European American or ‘White’ identity or identification” (Chandler X, 22). Disciplines such as Black studies or area studies whose objects of study are anthropologically coded operate in a dual mode. In addition to the overt object of study that is racially or anthropologically defined, the field or discipline is always surreptitiously directed by a covert object of study that contributes to the presumed equivalence between whiteness and the West. In response, Chandler argues that Black studies must begin instead with questioning the legitimacy of anthropological difference in general by asking, “On what basis and in what manner can one decide a being and its character of existence, as one kind or another” (Chandler X, 22). Reading Chandler, we realise that the East Asian section of area studies, which have collectively never confronted the inherent racism in the determination of “character,” are based on a disavowed relation to the constitution of the West/whiteness. In truth, these marginal disciplines are precisely the place where the West and whiteness are constructed and reproduced as such—often even in the strategies that seem to resist, exclude, counter, or differentiate the postcolonial area from the West. Richard Calichman summarises what this means for Japan studies: Despite appearances, the emergence of racism in the field cannot be restricted to its explicit thematization in the form of individual essays or monographs. More broadly, the very framework in which an entity called the “Japanese people” comes to serve as the object of knowledge for a subject that determines itself as “Western” must be recognized as already racist. The problem, in other words, is a structural or institutional one, and involves the way in which the production of knowledge has come to be organized in the modern era. (Calichman Before Identity, 185)

What prevents the recognition of the fundamentally racialised nature of area studies from blossoming into demands for radical transformation of the apparatus of area and anthropological difference is precisely the quest for recognition within the framework of the promise of sovereignty. Chandler’s critique of knowledge production conducted in the mode of anthropological difference invites us to rethink the relation between sovereignty and freedom that is at the core of postcolonial demands for recognition within Pax Americana. While it is usually assumed that postcolonial sovereignty is the guarantee of freedom, Chandler instead

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proposes that sovereignty needs to be understood fundamentally in relation to slavery, not freedom, much less identity. This displacement takes us out of the continuum of cultural and racial progress, the logic of “democratic transition,” which is based on a series of assumptions that take the unity of whiteness and the West and their equivalence as a normative standard. From this perspective, slavery names not the symmetrical opposite of freedom but the asymmetry of a double bind from which the only possible escape is not the normativity of “freedom” realised in postcolonial identity shorn of concerns for political economy, as Burden-Stelly never ceases to emphasise, but the rejection altogether of the type of normative political subjectivity called “identity” that is configured through a gradient between ostensibly opposed, yet mutually-reinforcing, poles. Just as epistemic decolonisation in the era after Pax Americana cannot afford to ignore how the areal organisation of the humanities and social sciences is fundamentally complicit with the founding exclusions of anticommunism and antiblackness, geopolitical decolonisation cannot afford to ignore the ways in which bordering practice creates area. To understand bordering practice is to understand how the act of drawing, or reproducing, a border creates, or reproduces, the things apparently separated by it. In other words, to study the act of bordering is to perceive the gradient of differentiation polarised by “things” or “identities.” To study, furthermore, the act of bordering in light of not the identity of freedom but the double bind of slavery is to remember that the relational gradient between these intrinsically related polarities only appears symmetrical when we forget how the “freedom” of “unity in diversity” (E pluribus unum, the Latin motto appearing on the Great Seal of the United States of America) was first created by settler colonialism in relation to its “outside.”

Area Studies as Alibi If Dullesism’s anti-populism created the conditions for liberal subjectivity, liberal subjectivity in turn required a plausible alibi in relation to the double standards of Dullesist covert action: one did not want to be blamed for the “loss of China” any more than one wanted to be seen as complicit with the McCarthyite reaction. The notion of having been elsewhere when a crime was committed dovetails perfectly with the trope of separation and telescopic distance upon which the founding exclusions and ethno-national/racial divisions of the area studies were laid. During

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the first Cold War, the alibi allowed area studies scholars a form of plausible deniability vis-à-vis the machinations of covert actions undertaken by the US national security state. After the first Cold War, during the period of neoliberal globalisation, the alibi enabled area studies scholars to focus on issues of identity and recognition, becoming advocates for the postcolonial populations that serve as the object of study. In short, the alibi is the affective and epistemic structure that enables area studies scholars to deny their complicity with transnational colonial governmentality under erasure, allowing them to fantasise that their relation to the area of study could be simply understood in terms of advocacy of progressive causes such as human rights and identity recognition—to imagine, in short, that they occupy a position in a field of knowledge production that has already undertaken epistemic decolonisation. To critique the alibi of area is not to question the integrity and honesty of individual researchers but rather to question the cartography of anthropological difference and the cofiguration of US imperial nationalism with postcolonial cultural nationalism. In practice, the area studies scholars have been extremely sensitive to questions of integrity and honesty. Reviewing the field of U.S. Japanese Studies in 2003, Alan Tansman, a specialist of Japan, appealed precisely to what he called “intellectual honesty” when he suggested that “Area Studies work would be conceived as acts of translation, in which scholars would grapple with foreign materials in their own terms and strive to render clearer what seemed opaque” (Tansman “Japanese Studies,” 19). Our interest is not in the interior, subjective world of the researcher, but rather with the institutionalisation of protocols socially recognised as honest. In that context, the theme of honesty within area studies cannot be dissociated from the theme of conspiracy. The need for an alibi arises precisely in proportion to the transferential relation to conspiracy as the return of the repressed. What attracts our attention to Tansman’s appeal to honesty is the way in which he articulates it to the problem of translation as a conceptual apparatus of making sense in an international, i.e., postcolonial, world. Tansman’s description of the knowledge producer who deploys translation in order to negotiate passage across national borders manifests honesty precisely in relation to borders. The border is a gage of honesty, providing both postcolonial and postimperial scholars with a plausible alibi. For the former, this is the narcissistic alibi of postcolonial immunity (see our discussion below); for the latter, this is the narcissistic alibi of postimperial decoloniality. Yet, within the context of silence about

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Dullesism’s incessant transgression of borders depending on the needs of the national security state, Tansman’s honesty is sustained by disavowal. The results of this disavowal linked to the border are made evident by Richard Calichman’s devastating critique of Tansman’s symptomatically critical relation to Japanese fascism: In Tansman’s examination of Japanese fascism, the object of criticism is not other works of Japanese literary scholarship but rather the writers and thinkers of fascism itself. Japanese fascism sought to protect the unity and identity of traditional cultural forms from what was regarded as the corruptive effects of a decadent modernity. By formulating an attack on fascist thought from a position that privileges the safeguarding of interiority, [Tansman’s] The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism ends up repeating the desire for border protection that was so central to the figures Tansman critically discusses. (Calichman Before Identity, 177)

To phrase it in more theoretical language: when honesty consists in affirming translation as the work of eliminating discontinuity in the social, i.e., when the protocols of translation are conducted according to a symmetrical cofiguration derived from the identity of linguistic unities posited prior to the translational exchange, it is indeed difficult to distinguish it from narcissism that heads off in the direction of extreme political immanentism. Naoki Sakai’s discussion of narcissism in relation to translational practice and the establishment of disciplinary area studies remains vital for our understanding of the politics of honesty (see the section titled, “The modern world and the narcissism of the West,” in Sakai Translation, p. 68 passim). Readers looking for honesty beyond self-referentiality would strive in vain to find any genuine, comprehensive consideration of the intrinsic links between spectral transitions on both sides of the Pacific. The problem is essentially the same one that we saw earlier with Daniel Bell, who excluded parties that challenge institutional norms (such as communists for whom democracy begins with the relations to property, production, and reproduction) from legitimately participating in the consensual procedures of democracy. The political exclusion is matched by a complementary anthropological one. As Sakai observes in reference to the narcissism of the West, “hybridity, excess, or the otherness of the other at large, which is unrepresentable and incommensurate in the given regimes of representation and translation, must first be excluded” (Sakai

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Translation, 71). What this exclusion of otherness really means is an exclusion of the future. It is only logical that the affective structure of the alibi that governs the positionality of the area studies scholar finds its realisation in a certain truncated form of temporality. If the alibi points in an etymological sense to the fact of being elsewhere, this means that the alibi contains within it the element of temporal deferral and difference that Jacques Derrida theorised under concepts such as the trace and hauntology. The essential proximity of area studies with deconstruction consists precisely in the structure of the alibi—the difference between the two consisting in the affective charge of honesty that area studies bring to the table. Deconstruction, for its part, has always been confronted with suspicions of being dishonest, precisely on account of its theoretical destruction of the unity of the present. The enduring resistance to deconstruction perennially expressed by area studies scholars attests not to the allegedly conservative or progressive character of those attracted to area studies, much less their integrity and faithfulness, but rather indirectly to the essential need to contain temporality and location within the strict coordinates of selfreferentiality. “Honesty” thus names the disposition to insist on the unity of the present. The honesty prized by area studies scholars such as Alan Tansman and Adam Chen-Dedman (to recall our discussion from Part I) has little to do with personal integrity but is rather a form of virtue signalling that covers up the double truths of bordering practices in the modern regime of translation. In short, “honesty” as deployed by the area studies consists in conformity with the consensual aspect of what Rancière calls the “police order.” Perhaps we could modify that last expression to the idea of the “police (b)order.” Precisely because the expression of “honesty” takes the form of an alibi, it is also intrinsically related not just to deconstruction but also to communism, or to what Rancière has described as the “core of emancipation” (Rancière “Communists Without Communism?” 171) that consists in the “affirmation of the communism of intelligence or the capacity of anybody to be where she can’t be and do what she cannot do” (ibid.). As an institutionalised discipline of the capacity to be-whereone-cannot-be, the area studies share a common habitus with the idea of communism; as an institutionalised discipline of affective alibi, the area studies also share a common habitus with deconstruction. What prevents the area studies from materialising deconstructive communism, despite (or because of) the overwhelming desire of area studies practitioners in

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general to be historically “progressive,” are precisely the social conditions under which areal knowledge production is conducted, conditions that are codified by the modern regime of translation and the bordering practices of area. It is straightforward enough to see that the kind of expertise on which the area studies are built is fundamentally opposed to cognitive equality, becoming the principal reason why translation, which always exceeds knowledge, must be both fetishised and suppressed at the same time in the area studies. By placing the alibi of honesty and the honest alibi at the core of the disciplinary subjectivity produced by the apparatus of area and anthropological difference institutionalised under the name “area studies,” this mode of subjection does much more (and sadly much less) than partake of or share in the “core of emancipation,” it rather actively appropriates it as property—both in the sense of the private property of the researcher and in the sense of a property ascribed to a national community that privatises the power of anyone. The former meaning of private property is what enables the alibi in the age of financialisation to become a kind of hedge against depreciation of the value of the researcher’s personal brand. Taking a position that is always somewhere else, the area studies researcher hedges against the devalorisation of her brand. The latter meaning is what enables the alibi to become a form of “engineered self-determination.” Somewhat counterintuitively, the idea of always being somewhere else points precisely to the place where the area studies scholar is supposed to be, according to the disciplinary rationality of the field. This place is the place where bordering practice is represented through the schema of cofiguration in the modern regime of translation as a specific or species difference between cultural communities that are external to one another. As a form of border logistics, area studies is the place where communism is both touched and denied in the same gesture. One might even say that this is the whole point of the area studies as a mode of subjection. The double bind of the alibi means that the only justification for being where one is not supposed to be, which according to the logic of the area studies means not being somewhere else, consists in the ethical demand to be a rescuer. For the subject of area studies, the only time that it’s okay to be where one is supposed to be is when adopting the role of the rescuer. A rescuer could be a foreigner, a native, or even a migrant, the only condition is for her to think that the area studies are primarily an institution of knowledge production, not a social apparatus for the production of subjectivity via bordering practices. Having fulfilled

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this basic condition, she is then free to imagine that the main objective of the subject-under-erasure given as a result of bordering practice is to intervene “ethically” in any given, specific segment of social speciation— such as that defined as “Taiwanese.” By virtue of being committed to this type of ethical intervention, the area studies scholar is always already typed within a nascent depoliticised human rights discourse as a rescue worker ready to save the other from whatever atrocity. In this circuitous fashion, the position of someone-who-is-always-somewhere-else-except-to-rescuethe-other is a position that never “falls forward” into the radical futurity of emancipation but always “falls backward” into the nation as a species concept and the temporality of “never again/not now.” That is why the area studies is always a business of saving the “nationality of the human.” The “Statement on Taiwan and the US-PRC Conflict” posted on September 22, 2022, by the Critical China Scholars (CCS) collective provides a concrete example of how the alibi defines the positionality of area (including both the area as a disciplinary field of knowledge production and the area as a national community). In a form of symmetry replete with symbolic meaning, the first and last paragraphs of the Statement combine to establish a pair of mutually constitutive positions, each of which are endowed with an alibi. The Statement’s first paragraph refers to the “people of Taiwan,” who are described as being “caught in the middle of a growing conflict between the PRC and the US” (Critical China Scholars “Statement on Taiwan”; emphasis added). The Statement then ends with a performative declaration that establishes the group’s own position: “In the face of very daunting forces, speaking not for the interests of any government but as critical China scholars and members of global movements for justice, we support the right of the people of Taiwan to cease being pawns of the PRC, US, or any other empire–and to determine their own identities and their own future.” The performative aspect of the Statement lies in the declarative intent to speak from a position of disinterest—a position from which the equivalence of competing imperialisms ostensibly becomes visible. The expression of disinterested equidistance is somewhat surprising, however, as it contradicts the admission, expressed in the middle of the Statement, that the “first responsibility” of the CCS, whose members are “mostly based in the West,” is “to recognize the damaging effects of US imperialism.” The contradiction is, however, purely superficial. The Statement clearly establishes two symmetrically interdependent positions: that of those innocently caught in the middle and that of those

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who are disinterestedly equidistant. Interdependent and symmetrical, the two positions constitute an ensemble of positionality imbued with a character akin to that of being innocent bystanders collectively threatened by the perpetrators of imperialist violence. The alibi provides cover for the dynamic of recognition between the two figures of the bystander. On the one hand, there is a philological people (the “people of Taiwan”) in search of recognition for their innocent victimhood and national identity decision; on the other hand, there is a group of scholars whose credentials as the authentic providers of recognition are cemented by their progressively “equidistant” stance. In this context, any mention of the CCS’s “first responsibility” is little more than virtue signalling designed to bolster the group’s collective alibi in the face of their own positionally passive complicity with US imperialism. It is hard not to see in these two mutually constitutive alibis a familiar form of the politics of recognition typical of postcolonial modernity. Nothing is more deeply identified with the legacy of Western epistemic hegemony than the belief that no matter what egregious acts the West has engaged in over the past, the West remains the unique global wellspring of historical progress towards political enlightenment, making intellectuals based in the West uniquely qualified to recognise “progressive” movements elsewhere. Ever since the 1950s, it has always been the task of the offshore area studies scholars to identify, and thus accord recognition to, the progressive forces, movements, and leaders in the postcolonial nation. Calling upon “both the PRC and the US to de-escalate and fully reject the use of military force to resolve the conflict,” the CCS Statement provides ideological cover for a narrative figuration of the bystander that hides the consensual complicity between the US and Taiwan as the implicit beneficiaries of the long period of violence during the White Terror and the Cold War that assured the survival of Taiwan as an independent, anticommunist political entity. By normalising the beneficiaries of previous injustice and violence while depicting Taiwanese as innocent bystanders “caught in the middle” and “Western-based” scholars as “disinterested,” the Statement has almost certainly subverted the admirable call for de-escalation and demilitarisation, providing instead a pretext for US imperial intervention in the form of the “Responsibility to Protect” Taiwanese populations against a demonised enemy. Given the recidivistic view of history that motivates this discourse about transitional justice in Taiwan, it is no surprise that the section of the Statement dealing with the “legacy of neoliberalism” is similarly

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phrased in the past tense, in terms of what the CCS calls “the death of neoliberalism.” The premature declaration of neoliberalism’s demise is but another alibi based on the temporality of “not now/never again,” albeit one that is widely shared by the US liberal establishment (see my criticisms of Gary Gerstle’s 2022 work on the end of neoliberalism in this regard). This alibi relieves area studies scholars from addressing Taiwan’s relation to the corporate platform economy and Taiwan’s complicity with the neoliberal elites in Europe and North America who are now doubling and tripling down on the militarised rentier economy, no matter what the cost. Amidst a series of alibis, the political significance of the second form of intellectual responsibility affirmed by the Statement becomes much clearer: “As China scholars, we also have a responsibility to correct the inaccuracies of much rhetoric of the international left, which too often portrays the US government’s ‘One China Policy’ (which acknowledges without recognizing the PRC’s claim that Taiwan is a part of China) as reflecting sacred truth rather than necessary fiction, and which fails to recognize the legitimacy of the anti-imperialist struggles of the people of Taiwan.” Speaking from an anti-imperialist position, one would expect an account of the “One China Policy” to begin with a critique of the imperialist history of “geo-law” that went into the diplomatic machinations behind the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 to which the Statement refers. The passage in question from that Communiqué issued on February 27, 1972, is as follows: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position” (Joint Communiqué Between the United States and China). In diplomatic usage, the term “acknowledge” signals unofficial observance rather than official state recognition, which would have been indicated in this context by the term “recognises.” The US position expressed in the Communiqué is hardly a “necessary fiction,” as the CCS Statement claims, it is rather the expression of the vastly unequal power relations that existed between the US and the PRC in 1972 when the Communiqué was issued. The CCS implicitly locate themselves nowhere, suggesting that while “Chinese people” are located in “China” and “Taiwanese people” are located in “Taiwan,” they (the CCS) are completely unique post-national human beings who are not located somewhere at all, hence their ability to call for everyone to disavow everything to do with concrete relations of power at the state level. This

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fantasy of being nowhere (and therefore anywhere) is the perfect example of the voice of the putative unity of the West speaking through these brave, post-state, post-national “critics.” In fact, it is a type of argument that is standard in the NATO lexicon: we are not aggressors because in our vision of the world, to be an aggressor is to refuse integration into the dominant order, and since we represent the dominant order (in relation to which NATO reserves an imperial prerogative of exception, as evidenced by the illegal bombing campaign waged in Yugoslavia in 1999), any deviation from that order or attempt to exist outside the hegemonic bloc is an act of rupture and aggression. Given the colonial politics of recognition noted above, it is telling that the CCS affirms a responsibility to “correct inaccuracies” attributed specifically to the “international left” but sees no need to subject the imperialist state manipulation of international law to a decolonial analysis. As for the composition of the “international left” on which they heap scorn, that term is shorthand allowing them to maintain the fiction that the only other “left” of any relevance besides the CCS are (predominantly) white Western “tankies” such as The Grayzone, Friends of Socialist China, Code Pink, Monthly Review and other such organisations. As such, the CCS can adopt the standard US liberal posture of erasing from consideration the views of the rest of black and brown humanity. (In that sense, even US diplomats like David Rundell and Micheal Gfoeller have a better sense than the CCS of global political realities; see Rundell and Gfoeller “Nearly 90 Percent of the World Isn’t Following Us on Ukraine.”) No mention is made in the CCS Statement of correcting or critiquing positions on the right. Indeed, the notion of conducting public debate by way of correcting inaccuracies itself suggests a neutral administrative procedure performed by the agents of truth— precisely the figure of neoliberal ideology that consists in the reduction of governance to logistics and administration.

The Logistics of Honesty The discourse of “intellectual honesty” applied to the translational encounter obscures the fact that, for the Cold War area studies, translation was a cybernetic black box monitored by the area studies’ quality-control (QC) apparatus, targeting the convergence between anticapitalist and anticolonial struggles as a metaphorical form of flawed production. This “QC operation” in humanistic knowledge production was intrinsically connected to the market-based regimes of accumulation that were the

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essential geostrategic goal of Pax Americana’s support for postcolonial sovereignty. I am thus expanding on the idea developed by Rey Chow, for whom, “the post-Second World War development of area studies” was based on its status as a “peacetime information-retrieval machinery” (Chow The Age of the World Target, 14). While the operation of that machinery was principally seen in translation and bordering, those operations could ultimately only be known by their effects. Since the market is an information processor that exceeds the ability of any single actor or collective actor (such as a state) to know, the market essentially functions in the role of a black box. As black box, the market functions as an implicit model of translation in the sense that it correlates social input with output, yet its operation cannot be exhaustively codified by a transparent set of use rules. An analogous situation occurs in the translational encounter described by Sakai. In the “schema of cofiguration” elucidated by Sakai, the schema, or figure, of a language is substituted for the totality of a language in the absence of any possibility to exhaustively know, or experience, that totality as much by any individual user as by groups of experts. The totality of a language is something that can never be known. It is foreclosed to knowledge. Schematisation works in an algorithmic fashion. The equivalence between languages produced by the schematisation is itself strictly unknowable on account of the lack of knowledge concerning the totality of any given language in general, yet a schematic representation intercedes in order to make sense of translational practice. The problem, as Sakai points out, occurs when the representational schema is projected upon the radical indeterminacy of the translational encounter, as though it were constitutive of the conditions that produce the encounter, rather than result from it. The element of indeterminacy essential to translational practice, but repressed or codified by translational representation, reveals the extent to which the relation between input and output is unpredictable, and finally unknowable. In their mobilisation of translation, the area studies replicate the neoliberal presumption that “capital has a natural right to flow freely across national boundaries. (The free flow of labor enjoys no similar right.)” (Mirowski “Postface: Defining Neoliberalism,” 438): in the area studies version, where the labour of translation is invariably effaced by the discourse of “honest,” i.e., securitised, identity, the only thing that flows freely across national boundaries is the schema of cofiguration, i.e., the self-referential form of social totality identified with the tautological equivalence between language and people.

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The role of translation in the area studies is fundamentally cybernetic (in a sense now long discarded by media studies) and essentially logistical. Patricia Steinhoff, author of a massive 1993 Japan Foundation-funded study of Japanese studies cited by Tansman, describes the cybernetic aspect of knowledge production in personalised terms—i.e., in terms of the rhetoric of honesty: “I think the majority of my generation who entered Japanese Studies in the 1960s and early 1970s were, like me, attracted by the intriguing puzzles of Japan’s difference and the sheer intellectual challenge of cracking the kanji code” (cited in Tansman “Japanese Studies,” 3). What could be more “honest” than making strange code transparent? Code-cracking was at the heart of the birth of cybernetic theories of communication since Claude Shannon’s work during World War II at Bell Laboratories on cryptography commissioned by the National Defense Research Committee. Shannon’s target was initially “enemies,” which was subsequently incorporated into the more generalised notion of “noise” in early cybernetic theory. Here again we can catch a glimpse of the dialectical relation between conventionalised, institutionally sustained honesty and conspiracy theory that lurks within the Dullesist area studies. When code-cracking becomes a model for social relations during peacetime, the theatre of war shifts towards the constitution of subjectivity. If area studies is the site, occasionally, of a “war against theory” (Murthy & Schneider “Rethinking the Zombie”), it is equally important to recognise that the generalisation of war as epistemological infrastructure was ambivalently implanted on the side of “theory”’s proponents as well as among its detractors. Rey Chow’s even-handed observation on this account deserves greater circulation: “[T]hose 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” (Chow Age, 48). As I have suggested in an essay about Ernst Cassirer’s emblematic role in the establishment of global English, the notion of transparency, as it was constituted at the end of World War II with the rise of Pax Americana, was based on the emerging construction of global English as a translational machine based on the model of exchange value (Solomon “The Proactive Echo”). Parallel to the role of the English language as universal translation machine, the dollar acquired a role as nascent global currency with the Bretton Woods accord in 1944—a role that was solidified by the end of the gold standard in 1971. Those postimperial intellectuals fighting

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a war against the hegemony of the appropriation of social value by exchange value through the regime of translation committed, we can now see, a strategic error when they chose to fight for and against transparency only on the side of theory, in English, rather than also simultaneously engage in contestatory practices of translation and linguistic production and circulation in postcolonial languages. Pax Americana is not a system that concerns solely the United States of America or the anglosphere. The fact that many nations, such as those in East and Southeast Asia, acceded to postcolonial national sovereignty in the transition period from European and Japanese Imperialisms to Pax Americana suggests the extent to which the operations and ideology of Pax Americana are equally inscribed in the practices of postcolonial sovereignty—including, of course, the practices of resistance to the hegemony of transparent global English by the cultural and linguistic impenetrability of a co-figured national language (what is called in today’s parlance “local language”). The assimilation of labour, particularly the labour of translation, to noise in early cybernetic theory is an integral aspect of the logistical hegemony in area studies (Solomon “The Freedom of the Translator”). Like the logistical archipelago of island territories and leased, or ceded, lands that connected the postwar network of bases enabling the United States to pair unrivalled financial superiority with global military dominance, but which have remained largely invisible to the carefully polished image of the United States as a postimperial global power without territorial ambitions, the operations of the area studies rely, too, on the infrastructural invisibility intrinsic to translational labour. This is not just the vaunted “invisibility of the translator” brought to the fore in the wake of Lawrence Venuti’s pioneering work in the 1990s (Venuti The Translator’s Invisibility), but also the invisibility that accrues to the forms of sociality and labour that cannot be subsumed under the category of either exchange value or specific difference.

The Labour of Translation: Assigning Referentiality, Globalisation, and the Derivative While we are on the subject of the way in which certain modes of address are institutionally hardwired into the disciplinary divisions of the Humanities, it is worth pondering the implications of Rey Chow’s fecund observation that a lack of time (Chow Age, 13) is often anecdotally cited

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as one of the main reasons for a widespread and institutionally legitimised ignorance of postcolonial languages among postimperial scholars working in theoretical and/or Western-related fields of knowledge. The role of time as a measure of value under capitalist regimes of accumulation is always related to the division of labour. While the relation between multilingualism and disciplinary specialisation is distributed asymmetrically between postimperial and postcolonial scholars, our concern here is not with linguistic pluralism. As Naoki Sakai has persuasively argued, linguistic plurality is the condition of possibility for the modern regime of translation based on homolingual address (Sakai Translation, 3 passim). Plurality is not an index of heterolingual social relations. The homogeneity of address to which Sakai calls attention concerns not so much the number of languages involved as the way of understanding language as a unity, linked, transcendentally, to the faculty of reason that makes homo sapiens a supposedly unique species, and, empirically, to anthropologically coded communities. Linguistic pluralism within a homolingual mode of address characterises the empirico-transcendental form that anthropological difference takes in colonial–imperial modernity. At both levels, the homogeneity of address functions in relation to specific difference. Hence, instead of privileging linguistic pluralism, we would prefer to highlight the connection, in the measure of labour time, between the regime of translation based on homolingual address and an international division of labour that extends to the production of knowledge. From the perspective of capital, the area studies can become useful precisely because of their seemingly anachronistic nature. Hence, it would be as ineffectual to combat the capitalisation of social relations in the area studies through a discourse of historically successive paradigms that leave intact the essential operations of the area studies as it would be to attempt a critical analysis on the basis of theory as culturally or geopolitically specific to a “Western” site of origin. Under the modern regime of translation, the translational situation is represented as an encounter between discrete, separate languages, and linguistic communities. This view of translation privileges an encounter between abstract totalities of a systemic nature that are apprehended as cultural unities. Tansman’s honesty is the realm of fidelity to the Saussurean systematicity of langue, with no space for parole (speech). The ramifications for social analysis are profound: the representation of translation (as opposed to the practice of translation) within the modern regime

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of translation inevitably equates community with norms and equates the capacity for systematicity with a species-specific faculty of reason. When we look, however, at translation, as Sakai urges, not as a process of comparison between objects (linguistic totalities) that pre-exist the translational encounter, but rather as the very process by which those social objects appear to representation in the first place, we discover that translation is not a thing, or a product, but rather a series of relations (or again, relations of relations). An interesting parallel might be made with the way in which we understand capital. Capital is not a thing, but under the force of an everyday representational regime, capital appears to be nothing more than money, or the commodity form. What is missing from this view of capital is the role of labour and slavery that constitutes capital as a social relation. The nexus joining the commodification of labour to a system of knowledge production whose main task is, surprisingly, not really knowledge but the reproduction of social relations according to a model of closed totalities and self-referential cultural spheres, inevitably poses a conundrum for critique in the face of an enduring divide, in the modern regime of translation, between postimperial and postcolonial spheres. That aspect of the knowledge production in the area studies that is intrinsically related to the mode of address and translational practice means, in other words, that knowledge production in the area studies is always bound to the socialisation of non-knowledge. Rey Chow devotes considerable attention to this conundrum in a chapter titled “The Interruption of Referentiality” in a short book that deals with some of the themes, such as the Cold War roots of area studies, that concern us here. Even as Chow credits poststructuralist theory with an “interruption of referentiality” (Chow Age, 46) that signals a refusal or contestation of the instrumental reason coming to dominate the subsumption of society under imperial and postimperial capitalist regimes of accumulation, she is far too attuned to the way in which such resistance operates differentially within postcolonial social and linguistic formations to ignore the way in which the “interruption of referentiality” incarcerates areal knowledge in a prison-house of difference that unwittingly reinforces the colonial–imperial binary. (I should note that I do not fully subscribe to the thesis that the challenge to referentiality was a product of postmodernism. Other events such as space travel and the atomic bomb played a role in this regard, too. See Solomon “Beyond a Taste for the Dark Side.”).

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Unfortunately, Chow’s penetrating discussion of the systematic nature of a “globally compartmentalized world” divided into “two apparently disjointed but in fact mutually implicated halves,” i.e., an “industrialized West” and a “developing Rest” (Chow Age, 64), heads off in the direction of plumbing the depths of poststructuralism’s limits and constitutive outsides while reifying the amphibological link between area and knowledge production in the figure of Western theory (the paradigm of the apparatus of area caught between its material and cognitive aspects), rather than examining, as we would urge here, the way in which labour is integral to the modern regime of translation, or again, the way in which both the West and theory are effects of translational labour. A missed opportunity to initiate this kind of analysis occurs in Chow’s discussion of referentiality when, turning to Roland Barthes’ work on the subject, she discovers two internally contradictory moments in Barthes’ approach that will dilate to become a figure of the “mutually implicated halves” that interdict the translation of resistance across the colonial–imperial divide. The first moment is an acidic reduction that destroys “any fixed notion of referentiality” (Chow Age, 50) per se, while the second moment is the recuperation of referentiality in the “speech of a non-metropolitan laborer, for whom referentiality—and thus resistance—is still possible” (Chow Age, 53). Chow deftly shows that the resistance suggested by the second moment is fatally implicated in the appropriative, colonising power of the first moment. But what happens when the labour in question is none other than the labour of reassigning referentiality—or what we today normally call translation? Language is not only an instrument to describe the world, it also bears a performative function that creates worlds. Translation mobilises the difference within linguistic referentiality in a performative way. Precisely because the translator never says, “I speak,” the translational situation brings to light the essential iterability of language in general. For that reason, translational practice can never be reduced simply to a question of correspondence and equivalence between the closed totalities of discrete referential systems, or code-switching. The reassignation of referentiality seen in translation affects not just the object of reference, but above all the subject, yet in a way that is decidedly more objective, i.e., shared and divided, than subjective. For this reason, translation bears a special importance for financial markets, which depend on controlling referentiality—a point to which we will return below.

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Even without repeating the argument that translation extends to the entirety of linguistic practice, we should still be able to agree on the truism that translation minimally implies linguistic multiplicity. Yet where are the postimperial intellectuals not in area studies who make that kind of practice integral to their strategies of resistance? The reason why it is extremely important for postimperial intellectuals in disciplines outside of area studies (as well as those inside) to write, speak, read, and work in postcolonial languages at a professional level is not in order to acquire linguistic competence to negotiate cultural difference, but rather in order to engage with the gender/class/race/ethnicity/linguistic barriers encoded in the material conditions of knowledge production, particularly the publishing-academic-state complex, in postcolonial nations. If discontinuity exists in the social field with regard to practices and norms of referentiality, it is certainly not because of some theoretical intervention staged by postimperial intellectual and artistic avant-gardes, but rather because of the way in which the inescapably indeterminate nature of the common is mobilised and organised into taxonomies of social, cultural, political, and economic difference. The historical synergy between capitalism and colonialism is nothing but the capitalisation of that indeterminate potentiality, harnessing translation to a regime of exchange value and specific difference. In that sense, translation is a name for the general problem of social relations in modernity. The problem with Chow’s postimperial intellectuals is that they did not take the revolution far enough, beyond the limits of the apparatus of area that creates “Western theory.” We are reminded of the work of Randy Martin, for whom the derivative is an historically specific attempt to arrest and control the decolonial moment (Martin Knowledge, 77). What Martin calls decolonisation is the problematisation of boundary-making processes that lead to the rejection of those forms of sociality that look like autonomy but are really forms of authority in disguise. One cannot help read Martin’s understanding as an expansion and multiplication of the sense of what Partha Chatterjee famously described as the “derivative discourse” of postcolonial nationalism (Chatterjee Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse). Except that in the postmodern moment described by Martin, the “logic of the derivative” infects nationalisms on both sides of the colonial–imperial divide, including both imperial nationalism and postcolonial cultural nationalism. This infection produces a situation in which decolonisation, for Martin, is undeniably associated with the

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proliferation of non-knowledge (precisely the field in which the financial derivative intervenes, aiming to control and harness it). This conclusion would centre on what Martin terms the “generative excess here being called nonknowledge” typical of the “decolonizing condition” (Martin Knowledge, 77). Unlike the forms of identity politics to which this has given rise, I am proposing instead to relocate the form of non-knowledge into a social relation called translation. When Martin speaks of the derivative as a method for controlling decolonisation, he is referring both to the way in which emergent postcolonial autonomy was largely “sabotaged by the politics of debt” (Haiven “The corollary of the derivative is the border”) that benefited postimperial states, corporations, and institutions and to the liberation of subaltern bodies and communities from all forms of capture by authority. The first take away from this is that Martin’s notion of decolonisation operates on both sides of the colonial–imperial divide, but unfortunately has no theory of how to make that differential commonality communicable. We could even say that what Martin’s idea of decolonisation lacks is an element of communism, provided that we understand the “co- “ of communism in the existential way suggested by Jean-Luc Nancy when he writes: “The co- of communism is of another kind. It is, in the terms used by Heidegger about the mit of the Mitsein, not a categorical but an existential with (mit, co-). A categorical with means, in a more or less Kantian way, that it is merely formal and does no more than distinguish between with and without (you are here with me, but you could be here without me; it disturbs neither the fact you are here, nor the fact that you are you as I am me). An existential with implies that neither you nor me are the same when together or when separate. It implies that the with belongs to the very constitution or disposition or, as you may wish to say, to the being of us. There is more to it. Only in such a case can we speak of a ’we’ or better, only in this case is it possible that a we comes to be spoken. Better still: if the we can only and each time be a speech act, then only a we existentially spoken may perform its significance (what exactly this significance is, is another matter. For now, I only note that it implies a relationship, not a mere side-by-side). (Nancy “Communism, the Word,” 149)

Deeply involved in both the performance and theorisation of dance, Randy Martin undoubtedly would have been sympathetic to JeanLuc Nancy’s notion of the performativity of pronominal invocation.

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The importance of this performative “communism” has been explained nowhere better than in Naoki Sakai’s brilliant introduction to Translation and Subjectivity: to put it more rigorously, “we” as a case of the vocative designation cannot be confused with a group of those who are capable of communicating the same information with each other, for such a group can be posited only imaginarily and in representation. Furthermore, translation is required in order to determine the sameness of the information: what remains the same in information cannot be identified unless it is translated. What is translated and transferred can be recognized as such only after translation. The translatable and the untranslatable are both posterior to translation as repetition. Untranslatability does not exist before translation: translation is the a priori of the untranslatable. (Sakai Translation and Subjectivity, 5)

For that reason, it would be extremely useful to relate the two meanings of decolonisation used by Martin back to the movement of translation. Following Naoki Sakai’s logic, the practice of translation always offers a point of intervention against the regime of translation. Translational practice places a demand for sociality that exceeds knowledge. The area studies have been constructed upon the premise of harnessing that excess to knowledge in the forms of sociality advantageous to capitalist accumulation—that is what we call the modern regime of translation. Against this regime, a translational practice of non-knowledge becomes a way to socialise the surplus that the regime of translation otherwise diverts into sustaining the reproduction of social relations necessary for capitalist accumulation. The upshot of this diversion is the crystallisation of areas under the modern regime of translation. Areas are thus organised hierarchically in a continuum of metonymical transitions (industrial revolution, democratic revolution, scientific revolution, secularisation, etc.), running from “undeveloped” to “developed,” typical of the world schema inaugurated by the colonial-imperial modernity. Translation is, as we have seen, precisely the form of social labour that is reified by the area studies—both fetishised and repressed. What binds these various discourses together is affective alibi attached to selfreferentiality—as if to say, “We may be narcissistic, but don’t blame us because we weren’t there when it happened; the only thing we hope to do is to rescue those who have been made victims.” There are, minimally, two ways in which the problem of self-referentiality defines area

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studies. The first would be in terms of a logistical infrastructure of translation always linked to the production of anthropologically coded objects. This infrastructure, codified in disciplinary divisions of the Humanities, is what affords postimperial intellectuals working in fields that have nothing to do with postcolonial areas the form of “alibi” specific to their positionality—that of “insufficient time” ridiculed by Chow, or again, that of acting as if the task of decolonisation had already been completed. The second would consist in the relation between the area studies and neoliberal globalisation, particularly as the former developed in the transitions first from Japanese and European Imperialisms to the Cold War version of arrested decolonial transition, and then from the Cold War to the neoliberal Washington Consensus. In a sense, the area studies prefigure neoliberal financialisation, both in terms of the self-referentiality of its world model and in terms of the logistical operations that constitute the field. That there should be this kind of parallel between the area studies and financialisation, understood as temporal trajectories rather than as object-specific disciplines, makes sense when one considers the strategic role of the apparatus of area within Pax Americana specifically, and capitalist geopolitical organisation more generally.

Area Studies as an Appendage of the Neoliberal Thought Collective Language provides an unlikely passageway for tracing the link between area studies and neoliberal financialisation. Despite a parade of consecutive critiques of area studies since the end of the Cold War culminating in various calls for universalising both area and the practice of theoretical knowledge production, the constitution of area via the modern regime of translation remains intact. This limit can easily be perceived in the distribution of linguistic competence expected in the fields of East Asian area studies according to anthropological difference. A carte d’entrée to the field, linguistic competency is disciplined at the level of production. To acquire accreditation and expertise in the field does not require one to be able to write and to publish professionally in the so-called local language that nevertheless serves, in ad hoc fashion, to define the objects considered legitimate by the field. Despite the rhetoric of a theoretical engagement in the medium of the universal accomplished “together with Asia,” area studies today, even in its critical versions, plays a crucial role in maintaining and legitimating the complicitous desire for the naturalisation

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of anthropological difference via differential inclusion of linguistic competence. That which is effaced is the political economy that sustains the field. The academic publishing industry is not simply a question of individual prestige and personal branding nor is it simply one of the power relations between universal and particular. Rather, it is also a key node articulating knowledge production to big finance and the state. The point is not just that differential inclusion rears its head via the distribution of linguistic competency according to anthropological difference but that the effect of naturalisation curated by the area studies via differential inclusion of linguistic competency sustains a political economy linked to the financialisation of knowledge and the transformation of the university into a knowledge corporation. At a time when area studies language training programs increasingly rely for their continued survival, like many humanities programs, on absorption into business-oriented degree programs, the debates over cultural essentialism vs. individual agency that mobilise passions and mediate the service provided to management programs effectively hide the fact that both positions (essentialist and agential) are complicitous with policies promoting financialisation. Hence, it is necessary to trace the relation between the area studies and what economist Philip Mirowski has dubbed the “neoliberal thought collective” (NTC). Although generally associated with the period after 1973, when Keynesianism gave way to the deregulation of financial markets, neoliberalism’s roots go much further back. In the genealogy developed by Mirowski et. al. in the collective work, The Road From Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, the precursors to neoliberalism are clearly evident before World War II, but only coalesce into an international, interdisciplinary, and inter-institutional “thought collective” during the postwar period at the start of the “Cold War system.” In effect, the genesis of the NTC is concomitant with the formation of area studies in the transition to Pax Americana. The connection is genealogical and conceptual as much as periodic. Between area studies and the NTC, there exists not only a number of important similarities, but also, above all, a series of integral, complementary links that make it difficult to imagine thinking one without the other. The interdisciplinary, transacademic nature of NTC, like area studies, spanned a network of partisan think tanks, new media, universities, and intelligence agencies, that combined private and public funding. Yet the most interesting point of convergence concerns the ability to “organize the power

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of knowledge and ideas across borders” (Mirowski and Plehwe Mont Pélérin, 7). In other words, the hegemonic dimensions of the NTC as described by Mirowski et. al. include an implicit element of translation and bordering. Given the fact that Mirowski and his associates do not focus on the areal aspects of the neoliberal hegemony, however, it is not surprising to discover that the actual responsibility for developing and managing the translational and bordering template of the NTC ideological production has been parcelled out to a realm intrinsically designed to develop an apparatus of translation, such as area studies, which takes bordering practices as its primary concern. Conversely, the distribution of the more overtly ideological features of the NTC, such as its understanding of the market as a transcendental “black box” that would process knowledge in a way superior to any possible state, corporate, or other “command post” imaginable, could also be effectively cordoned off from area studies, leaving the latter free to focus on those parts of the ideological production directly related to social ontology that would be mirrored by its culturalist practices of anthropological difference and translation. Henceforth, ontology, politics, and history could be combined within an idealised template of the modern area—for which the putative unity of “the West” would provide a figure, despite the impossible definition and historical errancy of the actual entity designated by the term. This template would combine the notion of modern history as the progressive rationalisation of terrestrial space advanced by legal positivism’s view of international law with an ontology of possessive individualism, an epistemology of the market black box, and a politics of “autonomous self-governed individuals, all coming naturally equipped with a neoclassical version of rationality and motives of ineffable self-interest, striving to improve their lot in life by engaging in market exchange” (Mirowski and Plehwe Mont Pélérin, 437). As hegemonic institutions that developed in the transition first from Japanese and European Imperialisms to the Cold War version of arrested decolonial transition and thence from the Cold War to Neoliberalism, the co-evolution of area studies and the NTC requires greater attention. Logically speaking, the area studies prefigure the NTC, both in terms of the self-referentiality of its world model and in terms of the logistical operations that constitute the field. That there should be this kind of parallel between the area studies and the NTC—each understood as temporal trajectories rather than as object-specific disciplines—makes sense when one considers the strategic role of the apparatus of area within

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Pax Americana specifically, and capitalist geopolitical organisation more generally. Deterrence, the quintessential concept of Cold War relationality, is one of the keys to understanding this symbiotic relationship. The selfreferential narcissism that Brian Massumi detects at the heart of Cold War deterrence policy (Massumi Ontopower, 15) applies not just to relations between the First and Second, capitalist and socialist, Worlds, but also to those between the First and Third World, as well. During the arrested decolonial transition known as the Cold War, the self-referentiality of deterrence could be extrapolated to postcolonial global governance. As a useful way to manage the complicity between postcolonial national elites and US imperial nationalism, a form of deterrence operated analogously in the cultural sphere. Based on the mutual destruction of desire for recognition in the event that the self-referential schema of cofiguration, the template of postcolonial governance, should be attacked, “cultural deterrence” under Pax Americana has worked above all to preserve the system of internationality composed through the modern regime of translation. If, as Massumi asserts, deterrence combines “a proprietary epistemology with a unique ontology” (Massumi Ontopower, 14), then nothing exemplifies that combination more than the schema of the world constructed upon the presuppositions of the modern regime of translation and the apparatus of area (for more on this idea, see Naoki Sakai’s reading of the “world schema” developed by the Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime, in the section titled, “The World Schema (sekai zushiki): space of the past and time of the future,” in Sakai, “Subject and Substratum,” p. 498 passim). If the Cold War strategy of deterrence turned self-referentiality into both a business plan and a technology of global governance, it bears repeating that the problem of referentiality and the challenges to its symbolic and social order go well beyond the challenge to referentiality posed by poststructuralism—a challenge generally rejected by area studies during several decades prior to poststructuralism’s ultimate cooptation into the fields of area studies once the general implications for bordering practices (notably between disciplines) had been contained and domesticated. The proportions of the problem can be grasped, obliquely, by referencing the fundamental connection between Leo Strauss and Dullesist ideology implicitly described by Lance DeHaven-Smith in Conspiracy Theory in America: “For his part, Strauss did not use the term ‘conspiracy theory,’ but he advocated state political propaganda and covert

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actions to protect a society’s traditional beliefs and ongoing illusions about its origins and virtues from unrestrained inquiries or, in other words, conspiratorial theorizing” (DeHaven-Smith Conspiracy, 78). The covert side of Dullesism, besides working primarily in the service of capital to open new markets, was also useful to preserve the capitalist state’s role as the guarantor—and enforcing instance—of the referential order of a society grounded in private property. This order would explain why an international division of labour paired with a division of disciplinary knowledge orchestrated through the nation-state was historically “progressive” instead of being straightforwardly anticommunist and antiblack. Covert action was not just a security operation in the narrow sense, nor was it directed simply at foreign governments; it was also related, within a domestic imperial space, to a certain historicity necessary to the maintenance of the commodification of labour in a postcolonial world. Strauss’ thinking differed from much of Popper’s analysis but saw scientific criticism of official accounts of important historical events as a precursor to totalitarianism because it undermines respect for the nation’s laws and traditional beliefs; it ushers in, with philosophy and science, the view that nothing is true; and it unleashes tyrannical impulses in the political class as top leaders compete for popular support. Although Popper and Strauss arrived by different routes, they agreed that conspiracy theories can fuel totalitarian political movements that threaten respect for human dignity, popular sovereignty, and the rule of law. (DeHaven-Smith Conspiracy, 78)

In effect, long before poststructuralism had reached US shores, the epistemic challenge to referentiality (à la Rey Chow) had already been posed by attempts in the hard sciences to come to terms with it (Solomon “Beyond a Taste for the Dark Side”). Yet none of this might have mattered outside of lab rooms, ivory towers, and debating societies had it not been for the fact that the problem of referentiality extends, crucially, to the operation of markets as a mechanism that institutes collective opinion as the reference norm. As autonomist-inspired economist Christian Marazzi explains: On the financial markets speculative behavior is rational because the markets are self-referential. Prices are the expression of the action of collective opinion, the individual investor does not react to information but to what he believes will be the reaction of the other investors in the face of that information. It follows that the values of securities listed on the stock

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exchange make reference to themselves and to their underlying economic value. This is the self-referential nature of the markets, in which the dissociation between economic value and exchange value is symmetrical to the disassociation between individual belief and collective belief. (Marazzi Capital and Language, 26)

By casting the principal social antagonism of late colonial–imperial modernity in terms of an opposition between normativity and totalitarianism instead of seeing it in terms of the historical task of articulating the decolonisation of language to the liberation of labour, Strauss’ work emblematises the political suppression of a fundamental link between knowledge production and population management that passes through the labour of translation. It is precisely in that sense that the area studies operate within a Straussian space—the same one that was staked out by Daniel Bell’s Dullesist liberalism. It is no wonder that Mirowski concludes that, “Leo Strauss had a detectable profound influence on the Neoliberal movement, mainly through getting them to confront more directly their endemic problem of needing to espouse a set of double truths” (Mirowski Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 28). The espousal of a set of double truths is an apt way to describe the role that the area studies have had to negotiate since the democratisation of the field due to new migratory flows: through the regime of translation, a differential system of complementary referential systems, known as national language and national culture, is maintained and correlated, providing an effective alibi for all participants. In the final analysis, the system of referentiality defended by the area studies’ attachments to their object-of-desire is intrinsically connected to the forms of sociality that occur under the growing epistemological hegemony of the market. Just as Naoki Sakai has developed a theory of “colonial governmentality under erasure” in Pax Americana, Philip Mirowski speaks of the “Neoliberal Thought Collective under erasure.”

The Financialisation of Knowledge and the Area Studies as Spread Arbitrage In the late 1990s, a moment of historical transition in Pax Americana and the area studies alike, Bruce Cumings, a specialist of Korea, presented a penetrating analysis of the way in which, “the American state and especially the intelligence elements in it shaped the entire field of postwar

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area studies” (Cumings 2002, 261). Cumings’ well-researched exposé (Cumings 1997, 2002) of the institutional, financial, and personal links among US universities, foundations, think tanks, intelligence agencies and former Nazis, and of the profound role that such collusion played in the formation of area studies was summarily dismissed, by no less a figure than one of the “founding fathers” of the area studies establishment, John K. Fairbank, as a “left-McCarthyite…conspiracy [theory]” (Cumings 1997, 22). It is worth noting in passing that Philip Mirowski’s critique of the NTC was met with similar charges of conspiracy theory (Mirowski & Plehwe Mont Pélérin, 36) by those particularly in the discipline of Economics. Tani Barlow, commenting on the tense relation that divides-yet-binds Cumings and his senior male critics like Fairbank, draws attention to the gendered aspect of these networks: “Cumings’s disclosures reinforce the truism that emotional ties among men are a significant part of the social history of dissenting generations in U.S. intellectual life” (Barlow “The Virtue of Clarity,” 43). In doing so, Barlow lends weight to her critique of the essentially normative and nationalist aspects of Cumings’ area studies paradigm. Highlighting Cumings’ inability to think of boundary as a process, Barlow offers a tantalising reference to the “work of drawing boundaries” (Barlow “Clarity,” 46; emphasis added) that cries out for greater theorisation of the role of borders and bordering practices in the encounter between capital and labour. Drawing an implicit link between the changing definition of interdisciplinary boundaries and the international frontiers and networks of modern political organisation, Barlow’s phrase might as well be the title in a call for research projects that examine bordering and translation as general operations in the global encounter between labour and capital, both within the production of knowledge and within the production of social relations. A member of the group that had coalesced during the Vietnam War around the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Cumings lobbed a grenade at the cohort forming around Positions, a new journal, for which Barlow was the chief editor, that represented a new form of critical position vis-à-vis both the Cold War configuration of area studies and the anti-imperialist critique of the 1960s and 1970s with which Cumings actively identified. Cumings noted that the Positions group, unlike the BCAS group, did nothing in the 1990s to problematise the crossinstitutional reconfiguration initiated by the National Security Education Act (NSEA) under which Title VI, born of Cold War politics, was

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subsumed. According to Cumings, the main “innovation” produced by the NSEA was that massive, deep government involvement in the area studies would no longer have to be covert as it had been throughout the Cold War period. The becoming-visible of the state-knowledge-securitymarket nexus, of course, represents a significant transition in the operation of Pax Americana, suggesting the demise of a Dullesist ideology that relied on the Manichean opposition between overt recognition of postcolonial national sovereignty and covert transgression of all terrestrial borders according to the prerogatives of US imperial exceptionalism. In practice, however, the changes of which the NSEA was symptomatic represent an intensification, rather than a demise, of Dullesism. Cumings’ account attracts our interest to the extent that it shows how the procedural was mobilised by an interventionist state to create substantive change—the retooling of area studies in the transition out of the Cold War. Cumings’ narrative homes in on the restructuring of the Social Science and Research Council (SSRC) in support of the Clinton Doctrine, “of promoting U.S.-based global corporations and U.S. exports through the most activist foreign economic policy of any president in history” (Cumings 1997, 24). The era of the Clinton Doctrine is precisely the era in which theory begins to earn limited acceptance within the area studies that had previously put-up stiff resistance while bemoaning “ghettoisation.” (“Ghettoisation” is a recurring theme among area studies scholars, signifying both an object of critique (Miyoshi and Harootunian Japan in the World, 5) and a lamentable situation of marginalisation within the Humanities (see Drake and Hilbink “Latin American Studies”; Shohat “Area Studies,” 1269; and Kuei-fen Chiu’s remarks about the “ghettoisation” of Taiwan studies in Shih et. al “Forum 2,” 219). Cumings highlights the role played by SSRC Vice-President Stanley J. Heginbotham, who lauded the new NSEA-led re-purposing of area studies. Noting a certain tacit agreement between Heginbotham and Peter Gosling, secretary-treasurer of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS), Cumings points out that the first major point that the two shared in common (out of a total of three) was that their “analysis and recommendations [we]re almost entirely procedural” (Cumings 1997, 21). Unpacking the notion of the procedural, we discover that it is being used in a deliberately substantive way. In effect, we are confronted with the operation of the “McUniversity”: “a fast-food outlet that sells only those ideas its managers believe will sell, that treats its employees as if they were too devious or stupid to be trusted, and that values the formal rationality

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of the process over the substantive rationality of the end” (Parker and Jary 1995, 329, cited in Lorenz “Surveillance,” 608). It is useful at this juncture to recall that Daniel Bell, one of the leading American ideologues of the Cold War, insisted that a Kantian distinction between procedural law and substantive issues lies at the heart of American democracy. For the Neoliberal Thought Collective, this tenet is reworked into the presupposition of the formal freedom of the worker to choose his or her occupation—a presupposition that neatly mystifies the moment when labour is codified by anthropological and other forms of social difference that restrict actual choice. The NTC’s main point of conflict with the Keynesian policies that characterised the Cold War system was thus focused on the actively constructive role that the state ought to play in developing the social conditions for the market to assume its proper function as a transcendental black box. Markets free of state intervention do not just happen; they paradoxically need state intervention to be put in place and maintained. Several decades after Daniel Bell had expressed faith in the “formal rationality of the process,” proponents of New Public Management theory had made it an institutional reality in the neoliberal university. Cumings begins to outline a sketch for combating this configuration in his critique of the “formal theory” and “rational choice theory” that forms the backbone of a general critique of neoliberal economics and its progressive invasion and occupation of the American University. Barlow was certainly correct to point out that Cumings’ critique missed the mark by taking aim at the discipline of Economics, which by the early 1990s was already in the process of being eclipsed by Business School management programs at the popular level. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the discipline of Economics continues to be highly involved in the formulation of policy, hence hardly irrelevant. In either case, Barlow unfortunately did not spell out for her readers the difference between the two disciplinary configurations, a difference that hinges on the distinction between mathematical models of the constrained optimisation of utility and a general philosophy of market society (Mirowski “The Neoliberal Thought Collective Under Erasure”). Essentially, the difference between the two amounts to the reduction of economics to cybernetic and logistical models of communication and control. As implausible as it may sound, we can now see in hindsight that the restructuring of area studies was hitched to this transition precisely via the type of self-referential

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ideology shared equally by both the modern regime of translation and the optimisation models at the heart of the new business schools. While Barlow and Cumings were trading jabs, Christian Marazzi, an economist steeped in Italian autonomist thought, had already embarked on a series of works beginning in the mid-1990s analysing the role of linguistic phenomena in financialisation. Many aspects central to the reproduction of social relations managed by the area studies were put into play during the process of financialisation. Since “financialization depends on mimetic rationality” (Marazzi Language and Capital, 21) that occurs in the context of “structural information deficits” of all parties concerned, financialisation is integrally connected to the essential problem of social relations in the colonial–imperial modernity: communication in the midst of a proliferation of opaque discontinuities and antagonisms in the social. This is to say that, just as translation is neither regulated by nor grounded in the model of communication tacitly espoused by the modern regime of translation, the process of financialisation can never be rationalised by referentiality to the financial markets. Cold War modernisation theory, of course, was an attempt to collate mimetic rationality with structural information deficits inherent to global modernity in order to provide the legitimacy for a new global order not based on overt colonial control but rather based on postcolonial national sovereignty in the context of grossly unequal hierarchies of state-capitalmilitary force. At the heart of this configuration lay the role of expert knowledge. Expert knowledge would be both a template for guided modernisation in the postcolonial nations and a model for universal democratic participation among citizens of postimperial nations. Yet as the Cold War came to an end and the financialisation of ever-larger spheres of life started to accelerate, the former role played by expertise in the reproduction of the social conditions of capital accumulation experienced a crisis. My concern is to dial in our understanding of this crisis around the apparatus of area. If the ideological suppression of the labour of translation—the fundamental link between knowledge production and population management—was based on a logic of self-referential spheres bound to each other in a complicitous logic of mutual constitution (akin to deterrence), financialisation signalled a profound disruption. While the self-referentiality in question pertains initially to markets, we have already seen the extent to which the construction of markets within Dullesism was a quintessentially political, or parapolitical, affair of postcolonial international governance. In certain cases, such as Taiwan, the

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US was even prepared to accept conditions that violated the ideology of free markets and private enterprise in exchange for geostrategic military advantage in the fight against communism. Within this paradigm, the role of the area studies was to assure the global conditions of social reproduction minimally necessary for unimpeded accumulation. Yet in a globalised economy, where the Keynesian barriers have fallen and markets have been recalibrated to encourage rapid capital transfer and transnational supply chains, the task of social reproduction is complicated by the logistical demands of overproduction. As Marazzi points out, “the crisis of the financial markets [w]as a crisis of the overproduction of selfreferentiality” (Marazzi Capital and Language, 35). This state of affairs, which is quite different from the interruption of referentiality discussed by Rey Chow, could not help but have profound implications for the area studies, throwing them into the frenzied state of simultaneous technological upgrade—the limited acceptance of theory—and doubling down on the modern regime of translation and the apparatus of area. Financialisation, in other words, has not destroyed the closed totalities and self-referential spheres of the area studies any more than it has done away with the self-referentiality of speculative markets. On the contrary, financialisation has stimulated an excess or surplus of referentiality, both in the market, and, as we now argue, in the reproductive normativity of the area studies. Within universities, this can be seen in the discourse of New Public Management (NPM) that has essentially occupied and taken control of the institutions of higher education. In a piercing analysis of the ideology of NPM and its function within the neoliberal university, Chris Lorenz resoundingly calls our attention to the “hermetic, self-referential nature of the NPM discourse and the fact that NPM ideology has proved to be completely resistant to all criticism for over thirty years” (Lorenz “Surveillance,” 601). In Lorenz’s account, the ideological function of NPM operates around a metonymical association between self-financing and autonomy that turns the latter into the self-exploitation of intellectual labour. The name for this operation within the neoliberal university is Quality Assurance (QA). We are looking at QA in terms of its ramifications for subjective formation. As Lorenz pertinently reminds us, “Audits are checks on the validity and reliability of information. Audits are, therefore, also performed to evaluate the internal control of systems” (Lorenz “Surveillance,” 618 note 52). “Information” is the link between financialisation and the regime of translation based on self-referentiality. This referentiality could be either linguistic or financial, simply because the

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financial includes a communicational, hence ultimately linguistic, element. What we have, thus, is an attempt to control the excess of referentiality in a postcolonial, globalised world. The target for this control is the figure of labour, co-figured here through (representation of) the labour of translation. This excess of referentiality is seen most clearly in the crises related to a particular form of financial instrument most representative of the era of financialisation—the derivative. Basically, the derivative is an instrument of public wager on a future price. But the derivatives in circulation today are far more complex than a contract between a potential buyer and a seller based on information related to the future. Their complexity concerns volume (“the volume of annually circulating derivatives represent somewhere between 70–700 times the earth’s productive activity”—Haiven “The Corollary of the Derivative”); speed (most of the circulation is managed by algorithmic computing); distribution (derivatives are incommensurable forms of risk bundled together in complex ways); abstraction (of all possible future states); and infrastructure (the circulation of marketised risk requires new forms of border control). Added together, these elements spell a form of complexity shrouded behind specialist expertise. Derivatives are not simply a modern form of barter, and the untrained will find the “language” of derivatives as impenetrable as non-specialists would find the languages of specific areas. For Max Haiven, the derivative above all is a technology of bordering, a technology for managing movement (which is risky) and deriving profit from that movement. Derivatives thus represent a de-socialisation of risk, based upon their integration of risk into a market logic. But in a dialectical fashion, the effects of this initial de-socialisation are borne by society. In the face of increasing volatility, derivatives become the final arbiter or value. Credit and debt flows, bond ratings, sovereign debt ratings, the health of a nation’s financial institutions, even corporate debt…all of these are measured and mediated by derivatives contracts that target and hence divide and affect populations in different ways. The transfer of risk, or again the hedging against risk, differentially ascribed to specific populations, is an idea that implicates the area studies both at the level of the object of knowledge as well as at the level of the reproduction of the social. Robert Meister summarises the basis of this hedging mechanism and its implications for higher education’s role in social reproduction:

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Today, higher education claims credit for widening economic disparity, and is thus, implicitly, selling something like a financial product, a hedge against falling into the bottom twenty percent of the population, a segment that had not experienced any income growth since the 1970s. In other words, a university now presents higher education as kind of proxy for what might amount to a financial derivative that would protect you against the possibility that technology is generating growth in the economy and leaving people without education behind. (Imagine, instead, that the financial markets allowed you to buy a parametric option that hedges against a growing spread between GDP growth and the Gini coefficient of economic inequality, allowing you to bypass education altogether. The fact that you can’t do this gives universities an effective monopoly right to sell a proxy for that hedge). (Meister “Confronting the Corporate University”)

It is probably necessary to backtrack a bit here and explain that Meister, somewhat like Cumings but without the latter’s attention to area studies, sees the financialisation of the university in the context of a crisis in the old Cold War-related federal funding model. Changes beginning in the 1970s culminate in the increasing reliance of US universities upon globalised bond markets. We will have to skip this fascinating and complex history, which Meister narrates in relation to the specific experience of the University of California, in order to stick with our primary question: How did all of this affect those areas of research like the area studies that had initially expanded essentially under the mission statement of Dullesist Cold War imperatives? The effect of financialisation was arguably to lend new importance to the traditional role of area studies. Minimally, this means that the sociality instantiated by the modern regime of translation, institutionally curated by the area studies, would henceforth be implicated in, and exposed to, the problem of risk and its financialisation. If language and communication pervade the phenomenon of financialisation, then it makes sense that we would need to re-evaluate the political position of institutional sites like the area studies devoted to the mobilisation of linguistico-cultural difference. Finance relies on the expectation of price increases/decreases and market expansion/contraction, and these expectations immediately call into question the status of communication. Arbitrage is the operation whereby financialised markets manage price differentials, or spreads, ascribed to different markets. As Carolyn Hardin explains in Capturing Finance: Arbitrage and Social Domination, “Arbitrage consists of a trader identifying securities or commodities that are the same or sufficiently similar that they can be substituted for one

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another, buying the cheap one, and selling the more expensive one... in actuality, arbitrage is a process of creating novel comparison that leads to monopolistic appropriation” (15). It is precisely this comparative aspect, which institutes the terms of comparison as a precondition to appropriation, that suggests a relation between arbitrage and translation. Seen in this light, arbitrage is not simply a financial technology; in its conditions of possibility, it is also a bordering technology between different regimes of value that is eminently (geo)political. Beyond the geopolitical aspect, arbitrage is also a preeminent technology for subjective formation—what may be called a “subjective technology.” Hardin’s account of the central role that arbitrage occupies in the disciplines of Economics and Business Administration, “never questioned, never critiqued” (ibid., 2), echoes some of the key subjective elements that constitute area studies. The “benevolent-efficiency narrative of arbitrage,” where “arbitrage is framed as a kind of public service” (ibid., 43), parallels the attribute of honesty typically associated with knowledge production in the area studies. Similarly, the notion that “arbitrage is present only in its absence” (because the theoretical models hold that arbitrage, if it occurs, necessarily leads to market price corrections that cancel altogether the possibility of arbitrage) recalls the alibi that structures area studies positionality. As Hardin points out, Friedrich von Hayek, one of the seminal theorists of neoliberal epistemology, “specifically holds up arbitrage as an example of the kind of activity that contributes to the coordinating function of the market” (ibid., 42). Hardin concludes, “Read through the doctrines of the neoliberal thought collective, arbitrage is the linchpin not just of financial economics, but of the larger neoliberal project” (ibid., 43), or again, “the system of financial economics that produces the discourse within which arbitrage is both central and present in its theoretical absence, can be read as a successful system of apologism for financial capture” (ibid., 47). As an institution that benefits from the structural advantages of the asymmetric flows of the modern regime of translation (and the flows of student migrant labour associated with it), area studies parlay linguistic difference into political differentials, exploiting what are essentially proprietary advantages in the global industry of higher education and research. In today’s globalised context, the linguistic difference associated with the schema of the world that emerges out of the modern regime of translation becomes a new form of spread—both a source of crisis and a way of extracting additional value. The institutions of knowledge production, now financialised in the same way as the automobile

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industry, for example, are implicated in a new way. It is useful to refer here to Meister’s comments about the extraction of value from the financialisation of higher education: “the current revenue model for tuition growth in higher education is really pricing in an embedded financial asset that can be separately traded on what is in effect a global options market” (Meister “Confronting”). Enrolment growth is inextricably tied to the role of transnational flows of students, who are themselves essentially forms of migrant labour. Such growth produces absolute surplus value for the university in the form of tuition, which can be increased without limit, allowing the university a viable means for leveraging. In the meantime, distance-learning and MOOCs create a deterritorialised global market for debt-creating products that can also be leveraged into the liquidity of immediate wealth. Liquidity, as Marazzi explains, “requires the production of a reference value” (Marazzi Capital and Language, 24) organised by a market. Taking all of that into account, the “untethered” quality of the area studies in the post-Cold War period astutely observed by Gavin Walker (Walker “The Accumulation of Difference,” 80) turns out to be, in fact, another source of absolute surplus value for the “knowledge corporation” that universities have become, while at the same time acquiring a new function in the surveillance or securitisation of various areal populations increasingly targeted for extraction through financialised flows as much as through traditional labour-intensive extractive industries. In the same way that tuition increase is no longer justified by any economic exigency—it is, in fact, “untethered”—so, too, the power of the area studies to institutionalise the excess of referentiality unleashed by financialisation and to overcode that excess via anthropological difference appears just as equally unlimited. While the area studies has always stood guard over the arealisation of different regimes of referentiality— providing legitimation beyond any specific ideology on the left or the right—those regimes today connect directly to financialisation. Inasmuch as financialisation itself is a bordering technology, the effect is multiplicative. Together with the bordering technology of reified translation at the heart of the area studies, financialisation creates a new form of colonisation that is once again epistemic and subjective, as well as economic and political. If the logic of the derivative signals an irrevocable erosion in the status of knowledge within the paradigmatic realm of modern autonomy at which classical liberalism had always aimed, this situation has profound ramifications for the mission of area studies. “Poised between noise and

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information, between non-knowledge and knowledge, derivatives emerge from the space between the measurable and the immeasurable – not simply making a quanta actionable but changing the medium in which they move with certain qualities” (Martin Knowledge LTD, 116). Part of the complexity of the derivative concerns the way in which it constitutes an abstraction of the future, which is not limited just to the forms of known unknowns (i.e., “risk”), but also to the forms of the unknowable unknown (“uncertainty”). While derivatives require specialist knowledge to operate, their operation includes a combination of “risk” and “uncertainty” that makes the distinction between knowledge and non-knowledge problematic. Drawing important conclusions from Randy Martin’s work, McKenzie Wark writes: “Expertise can no longer prevent volatility. There’s a link between the financialisation of non-knowledge and the state attacks on expertise that accelerated under Reagan and Thatcher. They attacked the credibility of their own governing class. Knowledge no longer has an autonomous value. It has to show a return. The mass of knowledge on which finance rested became its impediment. There’s a loss of trust in the particular expertise that managed particular risks, in education, health or security, for example. Finance became the manager of generalised risk in the form of non-knowledge” (Wark “For Randy Martin”). Wark’s comments are particularly pertinent in the context of the area studies, which were the site of intense political battles in the 1990s concerning the withdrawal of federal funding and the constitution of their object. The kind of areal expertise and the ethics of integrity defended by those who openly identify with area studies in the manner of a public confession of faith must be measured against the increasing devalorisation of expertise motivated by financialisation. A fruitful parallel can be drawn between risk and uncertainty relative to financialisation, on the one hand, and continuity and discontinuity relative to translation, on the other. When seen in terms of being a singular act that must be performed each time anew, translation operates in the medium of discontinuity shared by uncertainty. When seen in terms of bridging a gap between two or more unities of language, translation operates in the medium of continuity shared by risk. Intervening at the singular point where discontinuity is transformed into continuity, translation can only be understood as a bridging technology when viewed retrospectively. The projection of this retrospective view into a schema that guides social praxis, such as translation, is what Sakai has termed the “schema of cofiguration.” At a

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conceptual level, the unity ascribed to a language relies on an implicit operation of comparison in the mode of translation that is subsequently effaced by the representation of the unity of the language concerned. The challenge for theorising this act (of transforming discontinuity into continuity) lies in devising a theory sensitive to the microphysics of comparison that accounts for discontinuity (“unknowable known”) without appealing to the “schema of cofiguration.” From this perspective, the various defences mounted today of the area studies are to be distinguished from the general disavowal of the modern regime of translation that has always proliferated within area studies. Whereas the deterrence characteristic of the first Cold War found an analogue in the cultural sphere via the schema of cofiguration, the preemption that is characteristic of the Global War on Terror (which has now morphed into the new Cold War) finds its own, new analogue in the cultural sphere via pre-emptive self-colonisation. Such pre-emption works by claiming a position as if the area studies and the humanities writ large had already been decolonised. In order for this modification to the schema of cofiguration to work, it is necessary to pre-emptively domesticate the social element of non-knowledge, especially the practice of translation, always implicated in knowledge production. This aspect of the contemporary position of area studies reminds us of the workings of financialisation. For Brian Massumi, the appropriation of non-knowledge by the financialised regime of capital accumulation is intimately connected to the ontology of pre-emption. Pre-emption is, according to Massumi, invariably invested in a logic of becoming other (Massumi Ontopower, 24). In order to fight terrorism, you have to become like the terrorists, indeed, you have to actively produce terrorism. Massumi’s observations not only remind us that the Global War on Terror (GWOT) could be seen as an outgrowth of the logic of financialisation, they also call attention to the way “becoming other” can be appropriated by self-referentiality. Becoming other, area studies in an ethically woke mode no longer claim to speak for the other but rather with the other. Yet this “other” is little but a figure that has been posited in advance by the self-referential schema of cofiguration now sustained by financialisation. What is particularly preemptive about this newfound ethics of companionship is that it focuses exclusively on positions to the detriment of an inquiry about positionality. As a result, it denies the possibility of alternative futures not invested in area.

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The struggle inevitably has been displaced to the future. If debt is designed primarily as a pre-emptive means of controlling the future, then it finds a companion in the area studies, for which the future has always remained constitutionally unthinkable except in the mode of a Bildungsroman about “democratic transition.” Tied to the image of anthropological difference fabricated from traces of the past collected and organised by the archive of colonial–imperial modernity and mobilised in the present to capture labour, the area studies are constitutionally incapable of imagining a world in which the future has no model and both the past and the present are equally transnational. Instead, area studies trade in prolonging the fantasy of “the West” as the price to be paid for the question/desire that motivates the social reproduction of the areal object X. The fantasy of “the West” is a response to the latter’s essential incoherence and instability. Ironically, this response is characterised by a repression of historicity in virtually the same move that establishes the unity of “the West” as something supposedly derived from the past. In other words, the distinction of the West from the Rest is reactive to vicissitude; it is an attempt to repress historical changes. No wonder that those who obstinately insist on their Western identity are more often than not those who feel most uncertain about their own qualifications to be Western. For what is preserved in the distinction are the historical conditions of the encounter of unequal powers which gave rise to bourgeois Europe, and in which colonial forces progressively dominated what would summarily be lumped together as the Rest. There is no doubt that the West is a historical construct and, as such, is constantly exposed to historical change, but the putative unity of the West which is also at work in that countervailing tendency is not historical in the sense of continually registering historical mutation. Rather it represses the historical. In short, the putative unity of the West is not in time. (Sakai “The West,” 191)

We cannot afford not to acknowledge a fundamental temporal discord at the heart of the fantasy of “the West.” As the unity of “the West” exists only at the level of the relational imaginary, its nature is essentially putative. Yet the futurity inherent in that putative, i.e., not-yet-realised, unity is contradicted by the repression of temporality necessary to sustain the inversion that makes it look as if the unity of the West had been given in advance by history. This paradoxical temporal structure of the West makes it a perfect subject for the kind of transitional justice that

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has become dominant since 1989. In each case, now is not the time, yet society is organised as if justice (or decolonisation) had been achieved. It is easy to see how management of the “as if” quality observed here could become a project motivating large amounts of intellectual labour across a panoply of domains (academia, media, think tanks, etc.) that together form what may well be referred to as the Imperial Spectacle Complex (ISC). What makes the ISC “spectacular” is not showmanship, but its investment in the curation of the curious temporality signified by the “as if.” This retroactive form of temporality is, as Gavin Walker has argued, essential to the parallel abstractions of social relations that constitute both “the West” and the commodification of labour (See Walker “The Schema of the West”). If, as Guy Debord indicated in his pathbreaking study of the “society of the spectacle,” the accumulation of capital reaches its zenith in the formation of an image, much the same can be said for the accumulation of difference curated by the area studies. As both a discursive construction that aids capital accumulation and a result of that very same process of accumulation, the epistemic image curated in different ways by area studies and big finance stands at the intersection between the mode of subjection and the mode of production. Analogous to the physical body said by Marx to be the “bearer” of labour power sought out by the capitalist, the epistemic image at the heart of the ISC is the vehicle for “the general shift from having to appearing ” (Debord Society of the Spectacle, 5) that links area studies to neoliberal financial speculation. On the side of the area studies, this is the labour of translation crystallised in the epistemic image of anthropological difference used to manage the “outside” and then financialised through levers such as evaluations, rankings, intellectual property regimes, and knowledge transfer. The epistemic image is thus not just the expression of a hegemonic consensus such as the West and the Rest, it is also a bearer of traces of the repressed history of labour’s repeated defeats in the encounter with capital. The vast amount of intellectual labour commanded by the wellfunded, well-established, well-staffed globalised networks, institutions, and conceptual frameworks of the Imperial Spectacle Complex (ISC) dwarfs any comparable alternative. Underfunded and working at a huge numerical disadvantage in relation to capital, even critical theorists often end up inadvertently relying on such epistemic images mediated by ISC knowledge production without being aware of it or simply discounting their importance. The true significance of such compromises, which every humanist inevitably makes at one time or another simply by virtue of his

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or her implication in the areal organisation of the human sciences, lies in the normalisation of the tropic of area. Hence, just as it is easy to see how the management of the “as if” quality of area can sustain a proliferation of disciplinary knowledge production defined by area, it is equally possible to see how a vocation curating the “as if” quality of area is intrinsically related to financialisation. In the end, both the first Cold War system and today’s financialisation are methods of arresting decolonial transition. Area studies historically played a key role in grounding this arrested decolonial moment in an apparatus of area that would capture labour and proliferate divisions of knowledge. Since the end of the first Cold War, it is not just the area studies that have become untethered, but the autonomy of every domain, including finally the economic. Financialisation is the desperate response to this untethering, an attempt to appropriate the sociality revealed by untethering. Turning it into a source of fear (for labour) and moving from deterrence to pre-emption, financialisation interdicts the passage that leads from the social to the common. Like financialisation, the area studies today thus function, despite or really on account of their intrinsic connection to deconstruction (via the alibi) and communism (via the power of anyone), as an institution of arbitrage that manages the spread between the excess of referentiality and the loss of referentiality. It manages the risk that objects (of knowledge, of governmentality) could be permanently lost or permanently expand, rather than the risk of any particular political position or particular (postcolonial or postimperial) sovereignty. Against this regime, a translational practice of non-knowledge could become an alternative way to socialise the surplus that the regime of translation otherwise diverts into sustaining the reproduction of social relations necessary for capitalist accumulation.

When Anthropos Becomes a Robot Before bringing this chapter to a conclusion, I would like to note the existence of a third key element, cybernetics and information science, accompanying area studies and neoliberal economics in the epistemic hegemony of Pax Americana. Born in the heat of World War II, cybernetics took shape in roughly the same gestational period as area studies and neoliberal theories. Just as many of the early practitioners of area studies in the United States received their language training in the US Army or were called upon by the US government to support various

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agencies in their wartime effort, the key progenitors of cybernetics, such as Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon, initially developed their ideas in the context of war. To each of these three intertwined elements that compose the epistemic hegemony of Pax Americana correspond different figures of humanity. For the area studies, it is anthropos and humanitas; for neoliberalism it is homo economicus; and for information science it is the robot or technical object. Regrettably, the military origin of each of these different figures or faces of Pax Americana epistemic hegemony is being renewed today by a new wave of militarisation of knowledge. Such militarisation represents a reactivation of what Lydia Liu, in her study of the cybernetic presuppositions, or “cybernetic unconscious,” that structure knowledge production throughout the period since World War II, calls the “military-industrial-academic complex of the United States” (Liu Freudian Robot, 71). The difference is that today it is less “industrial” than informational. We take seriously Liu’s claim that cybernetics “set the course to conquer all fields of knowledge on behalf of imperial technoscience.” (ibid., 33). As a result, Liu claims, “all coding systems…have been subsumed under a single unified and universal system unprecedented in the history of world civilization” (ibid., 12) such that, “we no longer have at our disposal a pure linguistic theory or semiotic theory across the humanistic disciplines that remains untouched by information theory or long-distance communication technologies” (ibid., 22). When Gavin Walker elucidates the schemata of the West and the Rest in terms of a binary system of coding and ciphering discussed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Walker “The Scheme of the West,” 216), we should recognise a meaning that is as much literal as metaphorical. Due to limitations of space and time, I am unable to chart here fully the historical trajectory of cybernetics and to unpack the consequences of its “universal system.” For our purposes, it will suffice to observe the following points: (1) information science began, notably in the work of Claude Shannon, as a theory based on a model of communication; (2) the theory of translation first developed by Eugene Nida, considered to be the inauguration of translation studies, drew its inspiration directly from the cybernetic model of communication; (3) the critique of the modern regime of translation and the theoretical innovations brought to translation theory by Naoki Sakai effectively started with a critique of the model of communication in the realm of language and culture; (4) ergo, our critique of the modern regime of translation is also simultaneously an implicit critique of the “imperial technoscience” that “conquered all fields

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of knowledge,” creating a military-industrial-academic complex. What I have tried to stress in my discussion of Taiwan and area studies is that this disparate and somewhat amorphous “complex” is fully international in nature and that an analysis focused solely on either the United States or Taiwan would be structurally inadequate. In reflecting about the reasons why the modern regime of translation is so durable and politically persuasive across national borders, we cannot afford to discount the role played by the specific way the digital revolution has evolved in tandem with neoliberal financialisation. Finance as we know it today would be impossible without information technologies and the two together are deeply enmeshed in the militarisation of knowledge renewed by the Global War on Terror and now accelerated ten-fold by the GWOT’s prolongation and metamorphosis into Cold War 2.0. A concrete manifestation of the dialectic between militarisation and knowledge is probably best seen in the type of liberal biopower being deployed today, and projected into the future, against China. The dystopian scenario everywhere in evidence today, as a teleological inevitability, is that robots not only will supplant Chinese labour in “the world’s factory,” but, when armed and quite likely operating semiautonomously, will also constitute the most fearsome type of army the world has ever seen. Swarms of drones powered by AI and biomimicry technologies will stand ready to suppress the inevitable insurrections and national resistance from the “yellow hordes” abandoned by the bioinformatics economy. The final irony of liberal biopower is not just that this plan will be executed in the name of freedom, but that none of it would be possible without the massive purchase of US debt by China and other Eurasian countries, who are at once the primary support for US monetary imperialism and the principal targets of its global garrison military. Today, as the United States has embarked on its most ambitious restructuring of industrial/foreign policy since the era of Ronald Reagan, a form of “Yellow Peril” discourse is being mobilised anew to lend ethical and political legitimacy to such frightening militarisation. (A thorough account of the transformation initiated under Ronald Reagan in the economic, scientific, monetary, and discursive basis of US imperialism can be found in Cooper Life as Surplus; see also, Cowen The Deadly Life of Logistics, 1; and Hartung and TomDispatch “The Pentagon’s Cunning Plot”). Historically speaking, the older form of Yellow Peril discourse, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was primarily concerned, beyond an affective investment in racism, with normalising

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the logic of species difference though the aesthetic exemplarity of the anthropological type. The thing about “Chinese” that was most frightening to those who sutured their positionality to the world schema of the West and the Rest was not this or that specific characteristic, but rather their supposed lack of a fixed, identifiable national character. In this sense, what was most frightening about the “Chinese” is a certain refusal to become areal. Hence, Yellow Peril used to function primarily to legitimate taxonomies of specific difference in terms of the universality of human essence as represented by an anthropological type associated with a supposedly superior area, i.e., “the West.” Today, the fear of “Chinese” is shifting discreetly from the realm of referentiality to that of self-referentiality. Attachment to this taxonomy of speciation has not waned, even as it increasingly reveals itself to be untenable. As Peter Button has argued, “the logic of the type has historically manifested itself in the West precisely in relation to what it [the West] conceived of (and viscerally feared) as an unassimilable exterior” (Button “Yellow Peril,” 443). The crux of this fear—associated with essentially unstable borders (of the West, of the human, etc.)—lies in the “fear of the dissolution of history as the realisation of the genre of the human itself” (ibid.). From Ronald Reagan’s call in 1987 to “tear down this wall” to Donald Trump’s call in 2016 to “build the wall and have them pay for it,” the putative unity of the West remains unquestioned—sometimes even by those most intent on reversing Western hegemony—as if, in remaining unquestioned, the West could possibly monopolise the status of the areal positionality of self-referentiality. Poised as we are on the cusp of an unprecedented transformation in warfare, a panoply of signs points to the contemporary reactivation of the context in which Yellow Peril discourse thrives: anxiety over the logical inconsistency of “the West” and the fate of the “genres of the human” (Wynter “The Map for the Territory,” 117). It is axiomatic that the “peril,” if there is one, stems not from a population improbably specified as “yellow,” but rather from the possibility, if not inevitability, that the appropriation of advances in biotech, information tech, and nanotech by finance capital, following a logic of militarisation and securitisation, is exercising profound effects on the generic living conditions on our planet. (For a discussion of the central role of the colour yellow in representing the violent ambiguity of modern visual culture, see Doran The Culture of Yellow.) Neoliberalism colonises time through the “cruel optimism” (Berlant Cruel Optimism) of a speculative future hedged against ever-deepening

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indemnity. Colonial–imperial romanticism colonises time through the tautological relationship between people and language. Combined, as they are, in the deployment of computational media to translational practice, the new, neoliberal romanticism spells the beginning of a long war of attrition to realise capitalist modernity’s oldest dream: the hope that humanity’s self-production—enhanced by biotech, AI, and nanotech— will immediately and fully coincide with the accumulation of surplus value. It is important to remember that this is not the only version of a translation-enabled futurity to have been imagined within the horizon of the colonial–imperial modernity that we still inhabit today. L. L. Zamenhof’s Esperanto and Qu Qiubai’s “common language” (putonghua) are two examples that were both conceived, albeit in different ways, to combat the dialectic of universalism and particularism, which became codified in the modern regime of translation associated with the birth of modern nation-state languages. This was a combat directly tied to the revolutionary creation of a “people-to-come” that could not be contained in the logical economy of species and genus. In other words, this would be a type of community whose foundational theory and praxis would not be based on the apparatus of species difference, the template of which would be that exceptional, yet ultimately incoherent, area known as “the West.” It should be apparent by now that we hold that the decolonisation of knowledge can only occur with the disappearance not only of area studies but also of the area as a principle for disciplinary organisation across the human sciences. In our struggle within and against area studies, we must seek alliances with those intellectuals, postimperial, and postcolonial, who might consider themselves to work (about fields or areas) outside area studies. In pursuing those kinds of alliances necessary to simultaneously engage the international areal, financial, communicational, and military complex of Pax Americana, we would also be well-advised to take heed of what Meister calls “the process by which financial assets are being created by the ability to manipulate and arbitrage spreads, both among universities themselves and also within universities, between and among departments, internally and externally – because this is how universities are now being managed” (Meister “Confronting”). Today’s disciplinary divisions are subject to a logic of financialisation—the same logic that makes border conflicts of all types into a site of wealth extraction via risk management. How can cross-disciplinary alliances possibly avoid this

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logic? Perhaps our greatest hope lies in the type of analogous convergence that proliferates under financialisation: as in the world of finance, so in the world of knowledge. There are deep infrastructural, affective reasons why language in the period after methodological nationalisation is the worst thing on which to pin our hopes for change, but we might have precious little choice. We might as well try to benefit from that convergence in order to socialise the surplus that the modern regime of translation otherwise diverts into sustaining the reproduction of area. Via a reconceptualisation of language as translation, that is to say, as a social practice of non-knowledge (where the prefix “non-”signifies a non-exclusive relationship much the same as that conveyed by the term “non-Euclidean geometry”), might we not move away from the internationality curated by area studies, aiming for nothing less than a concomitant decolonisation of both the institutions of knowledge production and the geopolitical divisions of the world?

CHAPTER 7

Cofiguration

Hegemonic Global Whiteness and the Construction of Ethnicity in Taiwan It should be clear by now why the detour through Pax Americana area studies is necessary to trace the genealogy of today’s Taiwan Consensus. Our discussions have amply demonstrated that “area studies” is not simply located “offshore” but is thoroughly international in nature, constructing a continuum of reified difference or positions through the binomial pairs, areal/aerial and position/positionality. In the following sections, we return to Taiwan to get a better sense of how the Dullesist ideology and the modern regime of translation have played out on the Western side of the Pacific. The early modernist fiction of Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung, a diasporic author who came to the United States from a family of high-ranking Chinese exiles in Taiwan, offers an incontrovertible point of reference for grasping the role both whiteness and the modern regime of translation have played in identity construction in postcolonial Taiwan since the second decade of the Cold War. This discussion will prolong the argument advanced in Part I that holds that much of what is happening in Taiwan today can be understood in terms of continuity with the first Cold War. While it might be expected that the best way to pursue an argument demonstrating historical continuities between different eras would

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. D. Solomon, The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8_7

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proceed by pointing to the similarity between Detention’s spatial imaginary and the claustrophobic construction of social space and cultural nostalgia in the short stories, such as “The Eternal Snow Beauty” (yongyuan de Yin Xueyan, 1965) and “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” (youyuan jingmeng, 1966), gathered in Pai’s classic collection titled Taipei People (Taipeiren, 1971), I will proceed in a somewhat counter-intuitive fashion by interrogating the construction of whiteness in what Joseph Lau has described as Pai’s “exile” fiction (Lau “Celestials,” 409) from the period just after Pai’s arrival in the United States in 1963. Characterised by absence, whiteness nevertheless appears obliquely in both of Pai’s short stories, “Death in Chicago” (zhijiage zhi si, 1964) and “Li T’ung: A Chinese Girl in New York” (zhexianji, 1965), dealing with the life of Chinese/Taiwanese students and émigrés in the United States. Observations gleaned from this analysis will then be brought into a dialogue with, consecutively, a discussion of the much-celebrated literary aesthetic developed in Taipei People, followed by a discussion of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, which Pai attended beginning in 1963. Tracing this itinerary, I intend to show that Pai’s aesthetics, rooted in the schema of cofiguration described by Naoki Sakai, participate actively in the essential foundation for the ethos of identity that dominates the world of arrested decoloniality under Pax Americana. The first question that presents itself in relation to Pai’s work concerns the identity of the writer. Born in Guilin, China, in 1937, Pai was a junior member of the first generation of waishengren migrants arriving in Taiwan from the continent in 1952 via Hong Kong. Similar to Yan Qin (author of the short story Loving Purely discussed in Part I), Pai’s father, Bai Chongxi, was a high-ranking military officer assigned to the post of Minister of Defence in the KMT government before the KMT’s collapse in the civil war against the Communist Party of China. Before Pai left Taiwan for the United States in 1963, in what turned out to be a permanent emigration, he had already published twelve short stories in Taiwan. By all accounts, however, his greatest works of fiction were written in Chinese in the United States and published in Taiwan after having left Taiwan definitively to enrol in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW) at the University of Iowa. Early critical reception by C.T. Hsia, generally considered the pioneer of university-based studies of modern Chinese literature in North America, as well as that by Joseph Lau, a Hong Kong-born scholar and creative writer of Pai’s generation who completed a Ph.D. in the United States after graduating from National

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Taiwan University in 1960, made no distinction about Pai’s identity as a Chinese or a Taiwanese author. In fact, the length of Pai’s sojourn in Taiwan was no longer than eleven years. Yet, despite the fact that the bulk of Pai’s creative output was produced after relocating to the United States, he was not considered a Chinese-American author until quite a bit later in his career. Since all of Pai’s major works were written in Chinese, the “American” aspect of the hyphenated identity generally took a back seat to the “Chinese” side, unlike those authors of Chinese ethnicity who published in English. That categorisation changed when Sheng-mei Ma, a Taiwanese-American scholar, began in 1988 to advocate placing discussions of overseas student literature in the wider context of Asian-American literature (Andy Wang “Yamei,” 23), followed in the next decade by Asian-American studies’ inquiry into the limits of disciplinary boundaries. Regardless of the subtle changes in the critical reception of Pai’s identity as a writer, it was not until the advent of new methodologies associated with the concept of the Sinophone elaborated by Shu-mei Shih that critics began to emphasise strictly “American” meanings independent of “Chinese” (or “Taiwanese” or “Taiwanese waishengren”) ones (such as the trope of “cultural nostalgia” on the part of Taiwan’s waishengren) in relation to Pai’s fiction. Brian Bernards explains: Shih’s framework compels readers to ponder how their understanding of a given text changes when they approach it not as a diasporic or overseas text, which emphasizes its sense of distance and separation from the ancestral homeland, but as a Sinophone text that is rooted in the experience of the time and place in which it is produced. For example, a “Sinophone American” reading of the short story “A Day in Pleasantville” (anlexiang de yiri, 1964) by Bai Xianyong/Pai Hsien-yung, included in the authors’ New Yorkers (Niuyueke, 1974) volume, might attribute the protagonists’s inability to integrate in a largely white, bourgeois suburban New York neighborhood not to her lamentable “exile” from a Chinese cultural milieu and homeland, but to the racist and exclusionary practices of an Anglodominant American society that paradoxically orientalizes her in the role of a “stereotyped Chinese” while demanding her conformity and assimilation (Pai 1981: 187). As an American text, Pai’s work issues a challenge to the assimilationist standards and racist biases of white normativity in the United States while contributing to a more broadly conceived, multilingual canon of American literature a compelling account not of what it means to be Chinese, but of what it means to be American, though not of the dominant culture. (Bernards “Sinophone Literature,” 77)

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Bernards persuasively demonstrates how a change in perspective can lead to a change in meaning. His assessment of Pai’s fiction and the critique of white settler colonialism is important. However, I do not think that our reading of Pai Hsien-yung’s fiction can afford to stop there. If “A Day in Pleasantville” can be read as a condemnation of racially motivated exclusionary practices, it is equally important to recognise that “Death in Chicago,” the first story written by Pai after arrival in the United States (published the same year as “A Day in Pleasantville”), undeniably reproduces the racist gaze of white settler colonialism. The central protagonist, a Chinese PhD student named Wu Hanhun, lives in a dank basement studio where he not only pores over texts in preparation for his thesis defence but also unexpectedly gains initiation into the racialised visual regime of urban North America: Silhouettes of people in the window churned like a slideshow. Milky white calves, straw-coloured calves, chocolate-coloured calves, stood out in the window frame like a row of multicoloured jade pillars. For the first time, Wu Hanhun noticed that so many women’s legs could appear in the dust caked window. It had never occurred to him, moreover, that these plump calves could come in so many different hues…. (3)

While the act of “taking notice” of racialised difference seems relatively innocent and is surely presented that way in “Death in Chicago,” the postcolonial critic cannot afford to subscribe to such naturalisation but must instead withhold judgement to see how the narrative develops. Indeed, it does not take long for the narrative voice, in the mode of third person omniscience, to turn this initial “taking notice” of race into a fullfledged racialised—and racist—gaze as seen in the following description of a black female jazz singer at a Chicago night club: The front of the bar was mobbed by a throng of patrons looking to get drunk while an incomparably stout black woman towering over the small stage opposite the bar, her giant arms outstretched, her mouth unfurled onto a black hole, spurted out a song infused with primitive savagery and grandly rich perfume from between two rows of gleaming white teeth, the rose-coloured stage lights reflecting off her greasy skin, wet and glowing. (4)

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The descriptions of primitive savagery, black holes, greasy skin, etc., conspire to form a composite image of blackness that evokes colonial fantasies of primitivity and fetishisation—the nadir of white settler colonial racism. The fact that this image is described via third person omniscient narrative objectivises the path leading forward from the “taking notice” of race attributed to the protagonist. The blending of perspectives between protagonist and narrator disingenuously dissimulates racism behind the façade of objective description. Juxtaposed against the critique of racism in “A Day in Pleasantville,” “Death in Chicago” shows how the minority immigrant assumes a position congruent with white settler colonialism in regard to other minority populations, reproducing the racist gaze of the dominant white society. About the best thing that one can say about the narrative is that the author kills off his protagonist at the end of the story to make a point about the persecution to which racialisation leads. After an encounter at the bar with an ageing prostitute named Laura eager to “do it” with “an oriental” whom she nicknames “Tokyo” because she cannot be bothered to pronounce his name, Wu Hanhun finally ends up drowning himself in Lake Michigan. Contemporary readers motivated by a wish for racial justice might have preferred that it be the narrator who was subjected to figurative death, instead. Ironically, the author gets close to that point, only to turn away. In the closing lines of the story, the narrator disappears, first ceding way to a quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, then to the text of Wu Hanhun’s job advertisement (with which the story began), in which the newly minted Ph.D. lists “Chinese” as his first qualification, thereby internalising the racist gaze. Despite the gesture towards an elimination of the narrator in favour of the protagonist, the narrative voice reappears one last time to describe Wu’s inner turmoil before leaving Wu to turn the job ad into an obituary, dashing hopes that the disappearance of the narrator was anything but fortuitous. While the racist gaze of fantasised whiteness is not as overt in the short story, “Li T’ung: A Chinese Girl in New York,” race and racism play a conspicuous ambient role there, too. The black doorman at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, like the Latin American musicians inside or the Chinese émigré who runs a high-brow Chinese antique shop up on Fifth Avenue, are all props that remind readers of the highly racialised social environment of the United States during the mid-1960s. A small detail related to the protagonist’s final appearance in front of her friends conveys the implicit acceptance and reproduction of white American racism in Chinese discourse: “The driver sitting next to her

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with a lanky build looked like an American. That was the last time we saw Li T’ung” (15). Expressed in the voice of first-person narrative, the identification of “American” here surely means white. Undoubtedly, the black man working as a doorman outside the Tavern on the Green was as “American” as that lanky stranger in the car, but only the latter is named as such. This kind of reproduction of the racist presuppositions of white settler colonialism that equates authentic American identity with whiteness comes as no surprise. Even today, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is still a widespread habit among Chinese speakers living in communities like Taiwan to use the term “American” to refer to what Andy Chihming Wang calls “the white America constructed by Western cultural hegemony” (Wang “Yamei yanjiu,” 21). More importantly, it confirms what scholars of white settler colonialism agree is a transferential relationship to racism among minority immigrant populations such as Chinese (Lawrence and Dua “Decolonizing Antiracism”). My point is that Pai Hsien-yung’s work cannot be read simply as a form of testimony or criticism of white settler colonial racism and the gaze with which it is associated but must also be seen as adopting the same positionality, distributed into a continuum of positions that constitute the cultural imaginary of a minority immigrant. This minority identification with whiteness (and yellowness) is of course only ornamental but as ornament it is, I will argue, closely related to Pai Hsien-yung’s literary aesthetics of cultural difference and hybridity. Furthermore, I will also argue that even as the “‘place-based’ practice of reading and interpreting literary and other cultural texts” (Bernards “Sinophone Literature,” 77; emphasis in the original) opens up new and important vistas of meaning, the change in perspective would become a new kind of identitarian dogma if it were used to prevent practices of reading that are based on dislocation as much as location. In more direct terms, what this means for my interpretation of Pai Hsien-yung is that, just as his work can and must be read as entirely situated within the United States, his work in exile can and must be read as intimately situated within Taiwan in light of the “American” experience in Taiwan. This imperative requires a reconsideration of Christopher Lupke’s close reading of the trope of whiteness in Taipei People as an example of what he calls “the intratextual web of recurring imagery”: The connotation of the term for “white” (pai) may be laden with the cultural notions of death, but the moribund or elegiac tone that pervades

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the novella could only be engendered by repeated use of the image. … As pai continues to collect contextual significance, its appearance in this passage encourages the reader to make an association between the white teeth of Ch’eng (and, by implication, Chiang’s) and Cheng Yen-ch’ing’s teeth. Cheng, whose name sounds similar to Ch’eng’s, is described as having the exact same kind of teeth … In the latter portion of Madame Ch’ien’s second interior monologue, “white” becomes an obsessive image repeated over ten times (Pai 244/166-167). The prominence of the image of “white” in the novella indicates not only Madame Ch’ien’s obsession with death, but associates her with Madame Tou as well. … Given the cultural resonance of the term “white,” the only possible option is that the repetition of this imagery evokes a strongly moribund feeling. (Lupke “(En)gendering the Nation,” 168–169)

Employing a method that he refers to as “decoding” (Lupke “(En)gendering the Nation,” 162, 170, 172), Lupke astutely uncovers the connotations of whiteness specific to Chinese culture. The construction of this cultural identity bears, it is worth noting, structural similarities with the motif of return that thematically unifies the fourteen novellas collected in Taipei People. Rather than calling Lupke’s approach essentialist, it would be more accurate to characterise it as a form of codification implicitly based on the untenable notion of language as a system of code. Within the fictional limits of the code, Lupke’s characterisation remains perfectly valid. It is worth recalling, however, the Saussurean truism that for language as langue, or system, to be construed as a code, it is necessary to posit the generality of language as langage, a generic set composed of individual subsets each of which is assumed to constitute a unity, or langue, endowed with a systematic character. The presuppositions of generality at the level of langage and of plurality at the level of langue provide a clue to the essentially dialogical or co-figured aspect of the “cultural resonance of the term ‘white.’” Reading intertextually, instead of intratextually, one indeed discovers a subterranean link between the “white teeth” of Ch’eng/Cheng in “Walking in the Garden” from 1966 and the “white teeth” of the anonymous black female jazz singer in “Death in Chicago” from 1964. Suddenly, whiteness is much more than a culturally specific trope into which the area studies expert could metaphorically sink her teeth as things that “require an erudite knowledge of the literary tradition” to recognise and decipher (Lupke “(En)gendering the Nation,” 170). In this moment, the limits of a cultural hermeneutics of decoding could not be clearer; they are

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intrinsically linked to the way the hermeneutic horizon is identified with an imaginary linguistic unity. It is important to note in passing that the perspectival change advocated by proponents of Sinophone studies would be insufficient to transform this reductive and erroneous identification of the hermeneutic horizon with a “tradition” whose boundaries can only be constituted in the mode of presupposition. In truth, the philological investments of Sinophone studies—the object of discussion in a following section below—virtually assure that a change in perspective would merely serve to reinforce the ethos of area and anthropological difference that legitimises such readings in the first place. In any case, it is precisely this circuitous route, what Chinese cultural criticism has long called by the name of chukou zhuan neixiao, or an export strategy aimed predominantly at domestic consumption, that provides a literary expression for the ideological basis of waishengren identity and indeed the entire discursive apparatus of identities in Taiwan in general. The name for this ideological basis is whiteness . The essential operation of this identitarian ideology consists in imagining oneself in the position of whiteness from which one creates the self by “gazing back,” simultaneously imagining symmetrical relations between “compatriots” and “others.” It is thus intrinsically related to the positing of the “idealized Western reader” described by Naoki Sakai in Translation and Subjectivity (48–50)—an embodiment of the presuppositions and ethos of anthropological difference dissimulated behind the formal symmetry of specific identities. Yet, in view of the relative absence of white populations living in Taiwan during this period (the period after the Sino-American Joint Communiqué of 1958, when migrants from the continent were forced to recognise that return to the continent would be impossible), it is logical to refer to this form of universal whiteness as a blank. Those familiar with the etymological origins of the English word “blank” in Old French “blanc” (which in modern French means “white”) will recognise immediately the connection between whiteness and blankness in the historical itinerary traced by the word. It is this whiteness that takes the form of a blank waiting to be “filled in,” so to speak, by whatever population is dominant in Taiwan at the moment within a world organised by Pax Americana. It is what I would call, in Mandarin, the kongbai at the heart of the discourse of ethnic identity in Taiwan since 1950. Composed of two sinograms, one meaning “empty” (kong ) the other meaning “white” (bai), the compound kongbai means “blank” in English. This kongbai, or white blank, establishes the element

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of generality—the contingency of whiteness—necessary to specific identity construction. In the past, it was the waishengren construction and their authoritarian consensus that successfully appropriated the kongbai of the contingency of whiteness. Today, it is the “New Taiwanese” identity around which has coalesced the Taiwan Consensus of beneficiaries to anticommunist violence that now occupies this place. In each case, the majoritarian identity associated with consensus bears a metonymical relation to whiteness, laying claim, in effect, to be the true “whites” of Taiwan, i.e., those people who are members of a population whose identity, in its very difference (including the difference from “actual whites”), appropriates aspects of hegemonic global whiteness more and better than others. I should hasten to add, however, that even those populations that seem most naturally entitled to suture their position to whiteness essentially have to engage in the same imaginary act of filling in a blank as Taiwan’s waishengren, for it is of the imaginary and contingent nature of whiteness itself to be inherently relational and unstable. Ou-yang Tzu’s observations about the role of emptiness in Pai Hsien-yung’s fiction are highly suggestive when read in the context of a gloss on whiteness. One of Pai’s fellow students at National Taiwan University, Ou-yang helped create, along with Pai and several others, the literary magazine Modern Literature that is generally credited with being the first break with state-condoned anticommunist literature of the 1950s in Taiwan. Cited and translated by Lupke (I do not have access to the original Chinese text here in France), Ou-yang writes: Pai Hsien-yung posits “past” as noumenal reality and “present” as illusory nothingness. However, isn’t “past” clearly gone without a trace? And isn’t “present” clearly before our eyes? Thus, Pai Hsien-yung hints that emptiness is real and reality is empty; what is false is true and what is true is false. This contradictory theory corresponds exactly to the teachings of the Taoist philosophers. (Lupke “(En)gendering the Nation,” 166)

Rather than confining the meaning of “emptiness” to a Chinese cultural trope, I would like to suggest that it can and must also be read as a commentary on the metonymical site of whiteness that constitutes the “blank” upon which Taiwanese “ethnic” identities are palimpsestically filled in. In that sense, whiteness is both a position within the continuum

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of “race” difference and a positionality from which the continuum can be apprehended and aerially surveyed.

The Pax Americana Cofiguration Program The ideological construction of identity secured by the presupposition of whiteness is crucially articulated to an implicit theory of translation. To understand this link, we must dwell for a moment on the training that a young Pai Hsien-yung received upon his arrival in the United States in 1963. Pai Hsien-yung’s participation in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (IWW), a key institutional piece in the CIA’s plans for a cultural front to the Cold War, suggests a need to extend the interpretation of Pai’s transferential relation to whiteness to the culturalist strategies of the first Cold War. Translation enters the picture in the form of the new International Writing Program (IWP) that Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh established two years after Pai arrived in the IWW. The personal and professional relationship between Engle, director of the IWW from 1941 to 1965, and Hualing Nieh, another waishengren author who arrived in Iowa one year after Pai, provides rich material for an analysis of translation in relation to ideology at an institutional level. The first point to note, following Yi-hung Liu’s study of Taiwanese participants in the Iowa Literary Programs (including both the IWW and the IWP that grew out of it), is that “modernist literature in 1960s Taiwan was a literary form of the U.S. politico-cultural network in Asia” (Liu Cold War, 93). What I would like to draw attention to, calling upon but also going beyond recent accounts of the writers’ programs in Iowa by Yi-hung Liu, Mark McGurl, Eric Bennett, and others, is that the anticommunist politics behind the covert operations of Pax Americana cultural policy were sustained by a culturalist ethos of area and anthropological difference. Pai’s role in this configuration—and cofiguration in the technical sense of the term used by Naoki Sakai—is emblematic. As Yi-hung Liu points out in her dissertation, Cold War in the Heartland: Transpacific Exchange and the Iowa Literary Programs, Pai Hsien-yung himself was fully aware of the political nature of the US support for the magazine Modern Literature that he had helped to found: Whereas Pai believed in the separation between literature and politics, his compliment to the USIS-conducted publication indicated how the Cold War modernist project was instituted through cultural exchange and

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literary translation. Pai was fully aware that “the USIS was an intelligence agency from the outset,” and that “the United States established [posts of] the Information Service all over the world, mainly for the purpose of collecting information and practicing ‘cultural aggression.’” (Liu Cold War, 95–96)

The story of how the technologies of global population management under Pax Americana were based on the parallel between a set of presuppositions about cultural identity and a series of institutional practices blurring the lines between knowledge production and ideology is a fascinating and important one, the ramifications of which we are still only just coming to terms with. A forthcoming work by Peter Button on the ideological construction of area studies promises to radically alter our understanding of the unfinished task of epistemic decolonisation in the humanities. Given the time constraints under which I work and the fact that Button’s work is not yet available, I will not have the time here to fully elaborate the place of creative writing, New Criticism, and area studies in the genealogy of humanistic knowledge production at the confluence between the ethos of anticommunism and the ethos of antiblack anthropological difference. As a tentative contribution to that itinerary (which will undoubtedly have to be revised after the publication of Button’s work), what I would like to point to here is the inscription of the Iowa writing programs, one of which Pai Hsien-yung attended, in the modern regime of translation and the schema of cofiguration theorised by Naoki Sakai. It is only now, in light of the work that has been recently conducted and the future work that is currently in progress on the Iowa writing programs and the ideological construction of area studies in relation to the national security state of the United States, that I feel like have achieved a rudimentary understanding of what Sakai was getting at when he characterised the regime of translation as an ideology. This ideology is precisely what was at stake and put into play in the intimate and professional relationship between Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh. The core duo behind the IWP, Engle, and Nieh teamed up for a number of translations from Chinese into English, notably including an edition of Mao Zedong’s poems in 1972. Despite the temptation to immediately jump into an analysis of ideology in the sense of a political appropriation of culture, it would be misleading to ignore the deeper structural role played by culturalist translation. Yi-hung Liu describes how translation, a cornerstone of US Cold War cultural policy, was an idea

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that had preoccupied Engle during the 1960s prior to the establishment of the IWP. Framed in this way, Liu’s analysis amounts to showing the extent to which translation was an integral component of the IWP’s disciplinary training. In effect, translation, as much as New Criticism, was not just a vehicle for the delivery of an ideological message clothed in apolitical terms but much more a practice that in itself would be ideologically overcoded, regardless of the messaging content. It is not surprising, thus, that Smith Palmer Bovie, a professor of classics and a translator of classical literature, argued in 1959 that, “translation has a right to pose as a form of ‘new criticism’” (Bovie “On Translation,” 79). In that sense, the concept of translation deployed in the IWP’s institutional arrangement of international exchange expressed the ideology of communication that had come to occupy a central role in the social sciences in the United States since the 1950s. At the theoretical level, this ideology was based on a cybernetic notion of communication as the exchange of information between two points via a channel or medium that precedes and to a certain extent dictates the transmission of meaningful content. Control of the channel thus acquired ideological significance equal to or surpassing the informational content passing through the channel. In terms of translation, this conceptual assumption about the cybernetic nature of communication essentially meant that ideology intervenes in translation at the level at which the “channel” is formatted. In relation to translation, the channel would refer to the relationships involved in the translation. Among the elements to be formatted, the position of the translator was crucial. Seen as a mediator between symmetrical linguistic unities associated with postcolonial sovereign nation-states, the translator would be the figure where the symmetry could be personified. I use the word personify deliberately in reference to the theory of enunciative personality introduced by Émile Benveniste that serves as a source for Sakai’s radical redefinition of the position of the translator as a “subject in transit ” (Sakai 1997, 13; emphasis in the original). By virtue of occupying multiple positions at once, the translator is shown to be not a mediator between linguistic unities that pre-exist the translational exchange but rather a singular point at which the indeterminacy of both language and positionality in general is revealed. Attentive to the “oscillation or indeterminacy of personality in translation” (Sakai Translation and Subjectivity, 13; emphasis in the original), our understanding of cultural difference is radically transformed beyond the ideology of translation.

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To understand the ideological ramifications of translation, it may be helpful to backtrack a bit and consider how Communication studies in the United States were consciously established as a tool of Cold War ideology. In a review of Christopher Simpson’s The Sciences of Coercion (1994) that examines the ideological foundations of communication studies, Howard Frederick summarises: Using 75 pages of detailed appendixes, references, and newly declassified Freedom of Information Act releases, Simpson persuasively argues that government and foundation-sponsored funding of “psychological warfare” research from 1945-1960 determined the very nature of modern U.S. communication research. In the pressure cooker of the cold war and McCarthyism, communication researchers had to make choices: support federal government campaigns, be labeled a “neutralist,” or worse. Academics who challenged the “communication as domination” paradigm were shunned, fired, lost tenure or promotion, and suffered FBI and congressional inquiries. (183)

Given the extent to which the model of communication, inspired by cybernetics and communication studies, was implicated in the foundation of postwar area studies, the ominous idea of “communication as domination”—backed up by the disciplinary mechanisms of exclusion—alerts us to the inherently ideological nature of cultural knowledge production conducted on this basis. In that context, it is hardly irrelevant to recall that the IWW was initially set up in 1936 by Wilbur Schramm. Recognised as the founder of Communications studies in the United States, Schramm moved later in his career directly into area studies, becoming the Director of the East–West Center’s Communication Institute at the University of Hawai’i. Schramm’s connection to the CIA and the implications for the human and social sciences are summarised, again with penetrating succinctness, by Frederick: Schramm’s landmark, The Process of Effects and Mass Communication (1941), was prepared under government contract as training materials for U.S. propaganda programs. Public Opinion Quarterly maintained especially close ties to the CIA, State Department, and the Pentagon. … But beyond Simpson’s startling findings, there is a much deeper lesson. Government psychological warfare research helped shape mass communication research into a distinct field of scholarship. Lasswell, Pool, Lerner, Schramm, and many others “scientized” the paradigm of domination during the Cold

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War, legitimated the science of coercion and thereby increased social misery and violence against the Third World and the Soviet Union. The founders of our field not only supported efforts to dominate and manipulate other peoples, they took a strong stand against any variety of critical thinking, thus delegitimizing the field of critical communication studies for decades. (184)

Unfortunately, there is no time here to take full measure of the extent to which the “science of coercion” became an organising principle beyond communication studies for the human and social sciences in general. In Part I, we already saw how taxonomy and classification are one of the legacies of this “science of coercion” that continues to direct the research program of the area studies. At the very least, we should recognise that the extent of this influence goes far beyond the single discipline of communication studies, extending to the founding exclusions of new interdisciplines like area studies which drew heavily from the cybernetic model of communication for their understanding of cultural difference and were as subject to CIA infiltration as communication studies. It would be naïve, however, to limit the areal basis of the humanities to culturalised interdisciplines when the principle of areal division—itself legitimated by the cybernetic model—sustains the disciplinary divisions of the humanities as a whole. In the absence of Freedom of Information Act inquiries into the founders of area studies in the United States, one might reasonably suspect that there is still a lot that we do not know about the role of the national security state in the founding of these disciplines. Having cursorily traced the dots linking translation and ideology, we are better prepared to take stock of the Iowa writing programs. Given the cybernetic emphasis on the channel of communication above the content of communication, it makes sense that translation would acquire an inherently ideological role among Pax Americana’s quiver of governmental technologies for population management. Elaborated in the context of institutional knowledge production informed by Cold War priorities, Engle and Nieh’s approach to translation, which they termed “co-translation,” provides a privileged site from which to apprehend the critical ideological role of translation. As one of the clearest examples of the formatting of the personality of the translator according to the schema of cofiguration, “co-translation” is thoroughly steeped in the ideology of translation. As Liu Yi-hung describes their approach:

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It became “a lesson in and an example of communication” that compelled the IWP co-translators to “learn not only to respect the other, but also to inhabit the worldview of each,” as noted by scholar in U.S. culture and literature, Richard Jean So. When Nieh and Engle translated, they simultaneously practiced their pedagogical design of co-translation. Through their design, both Americans and non-Americans learn to communicate and fundamentally, as So argues, to be “empathetic.” … Therefore, the ‘co’ effort of the IWP co-translation was more than a literary collaboration and a textual output; instead, it demanded co-translators to be imaginatively — and affectively — engaged with one another. As the Engles laid bare the affect in the co-translation process, ‘we feel that “co-imagination” is crucial”. (Liu Cold War, 134–135)

Strictly speaking, the personality of the translator within the modern regime of translation critiqued by Sakai is fundamentally based, at an imaginary level, on the type of co-translation put into practice by Engle and Nieh. The modern regime of translation assumes that the translator mediates between two discrete, discursive persons, whether they are actually present or not, each of which belong to a separate language community excluding the hybridity of the translator. The culturalist presuppositions of symmetrical equivalence and the autonomous unity of separate language = people = culture constellations are unmistakably revealed in a dialogue between the couple recorded in an unpublished, typewritten manuscript they wrote together in the early 1970s titled, “CO-TRANSLATION: The Writer’s View.” In response to Engle’s questions, Nieh exclaims, “But that is precisely our problem – you must try to understand our Chinese mind, not look at our poetry only as an American” (Engle and Nieh “Co-translation,” 15). What Engle and Nieh called “co-translation” is an act that puts into practice the culturalist assumptions of the modern regime of translation. The fact that the practice of “co-translation” was explicitly conceived as a pedagogy simply confirms the inscription of subjective formation in aesthetic ideology. Due to the stark clarity with which the connection between translation and ideology at the heart of the IWP’s aesthetics can be perceived, the IWP provides a privileged window into the mechanisms of Pax Americana’s governmental technologies of population management in a postcolonial—yet hardly decolonised—world.

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Cofiguration and the Ideology of Cultural Difference Pai Hsien-yung’s fiction is useful not only for understanding how the contingency of whiteness stands at the centre of “ethnicity” in Taiwan, but also for understanding how an ideology of cultural difference links the domestic construction of ethnicity to the external construction of cultural difference as complementary tools for transnational population management in Pax Americana. Inheriting the legacy of New Criticism’s concern with style, Christopher Lupke’s reading of Pai’s literary aesthetics is remarkable for the way it calls attention to a concern that would have been anathema to the New Critics—the question of ideology. Undoubtedly the first scholar familiar with the critical idiom of New Criticism to bring to the fore the ideological dimensions of Pai’s work, Lupke opened up new terrain that would have been considered off limits by New Critics like C.T. Hsia and Joseph S.M. Lau: The most complicated aspect of Pai Hsien-yung’ s story, and its most powerful ideological message, is rooted in the way the structure of the work “reads back” into the classical tradition of Chinese literature, assigning new significations as it insinuates itself into that legacy. A powerful strategy, Pai Hsien-yung employs it in order to strengthen his position as a literary nationalist even as the structure is informed in profound ways by the tropes of Western Modernism. (Lupke “(En)gendering,” 166)

Innovation is often achieved in dialogue with tradition. Even as Lupke brings ideology into the discussion, his judgement of Pai’s aesthetics adheres to the interpretative framework previously established by C.T. Hsia and confirmed by Joseph Lau in the latter’s essay from 1975 on Taipei People, titled, “‘Crowded Hours’ Revisited: The Evocation of the Past in Taipei jen”: Pai Hsien-yung – instead of assuming the voice of Cassandra – has given us a convincing example of successful literary acculturation. Pai Hsien-yung is indeed one of the few Western-trained Chinese writers who has sufficiently benefited from the great writings of the West without giving up his Chinese identity on the one hand, and without doing undue violence to the basic structure of the Chinese language on the other. In view of his formal

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literary training in English and American literature (BA, National Taiwan University and MFA, University of Iowa), this is no small accomplishment. (Lau “Celestials,” 10)

In effect, what Lupke seizes on as the moment of ideological interpellation in Pai Hsien-yung’s fiction—an adroit blending of Chinese tradition with Western modernity—equally underpins the critical reception of Pai’s work by previous critics such as Lau and Hsia. Despite the innovative aspects of Lupke’s reading, it still does not provide us with a comprehensive account of the moment of ideological interpellation. Precisely because the ideology interpellates not just “China” but also the “West,” it would be impossible to limit our discussion to one side of the pair. The situation is further complicated by the addition of a second relational pair. In addition to the pair combining the opposition between China and the West, tradition and modernity, there is the second pair that had already been previously described by both Lau and Hsia. Lau’s analysis of Pai’s style, “laden with symbolism, imagery, and allusiveness,” (Lau “Celestials,” 16) focuses on the way it is tied together by an “admixture of wen-yen (classical) and pai-hua (vernacular) in the narrative, the combination of which Yen Yüan-shu has regarded as Pai Hsien-yung’s innovative contribution to the Chinese language” (ibid., 15). The oppositional pairing of classical literary and modern vernacular linguistic forms thus describes a second pole of ideological interpellation in Pai Hsienyung’s fiction (equally shared, as we see with Lau and Hsia, with his critical reception in the university). Before delving further into the ideological importance of this second pairing identified by Joseph Lau, I would like to summon into our discussion Eric Bennett’s work on the role of style championed by New Criticism at the core of the ideological task it assigned to literature and criticism during the Cold War. [I]t was very much the case that starting in the 1940s intellectuals obsessed, with new intensity, over style. This obsessiveness went beyond the limits of the New Criticism to an outlook widely shared — one in which style offered deliverance from many of the propagandistic dangers discussed above. The conception of literary style as something painstaking, metaphysical, and singular, which was promoted by the reigning critics and professors, served four related agendas: (1) it overthrew the domination of totalitarian manipulation (if Soviet) or commercial manipulation (if American) by being irreducibly individualistic; (2) it facilitated the creation of

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an ideologically informed canon on ostensibly apolitical grounds; (3) it provided a modernist means to make literature feel transcendent for the ages; and (4) it gave reading and writing a new semblance of difficulty, a pitch of rigor appropriate for the college or graduate school classroom. (Bennett Workshops of Empire, 48)

Bennett’s remarks draw attention to the way that style functioned as the cornerstone of an aesthetic ideology central to the Cold War. As an inherently pedagogical project, style as understood by New Criticism was also fundamentally type-cast as representative of bourgeois possessive individualism. An author possessing style was both an expression and a confirmation of a social ontology built on the supposed givenness of the individual—the building block or raw material out of which national bastions of anticommunism could be constructed. A young author learning to develop his or her style was learning, in effect, how to become a representative individual, a party to the social contract that would appear apolitical even as it surreptitiously invited anticommunist ideological presuppositions into the basic conception of society. Very much informed by the literary standards established by New Criticism, Pai Hsien-yung’s fiction first gained recognition from New Critics such as C.T. Hsia precisely for what Hsia called his consummate technique. In Hsia’s estimation, Pai had managed at a particularly turbulent time in history to avoid the temptations of utopian rebellion by which Western youth were being swept away—disparagingly epitomised, according to Hsia, by the “wild amalgamation of Marx and Freud” and Herbert Marcuse’s “new[fangled] system of thought” (Hsia “Bai Xianyong,” 181)—thus enabling Pai and Chinese writers of his generational cohort to “respect [Chinese] tradition” while incorporating the “experimental techniques of early twentieth century [Western] masters” (Hsia “Bai Xianyong,” 181). For Lau, this style was summed up by the notion of “acculturation”—a term that evokes the pedagogical content of the aesthetic ideology of Bildung. Since the particular form of “acculturation” at stake, according to Lau, concerns the relation not just between the Chinese literary tradition and Western literary modernity but also the relation between classical Chinese literary language and modern vernacular Chinese, it would be useful to call upon the recent work done by Jeffrey Weng on the invention of a modern Chinese national language to highlight the stakes involved. Citing the work of literary scholar Shang Wei, Weng makes the point that

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wenyan classical “Chinese” and baihua vernacular “Chinese” were never strictly separate—much less conceived as linguistic unities corresponding to temporal national identities—until the invention ex nihilo of national language in the twentieth century (Weng “What Is Mandarin?,” 7). The separation of these amorphous entities into two distinct languages associated with different temporalities is the hallmark of linguistic modernity defined by a project of nation-building. The successful “literary acculturation” detected by Lau in Pai’s work operates on two levels, one within a nascent Chinese linguistic sphere, in the invention of vernacular via its difference with literary forms, the other on the external borders of the Chinese linguistic sphere, where the anaphoric difference with foreign language enables the recognition (and invention) of Chinese. The work needed to explain the role of translation in the construction of national language in China is a task for which we do not have the time, but which can be achieved in allusive fashion by referring to the example of Chao Yuan Ren (1892–1982; Zhao Yuanren). A gifted polymath/ polyglot and one of the founders of Chinese linguistics, Chao translated Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1922—roughly the same historical moment in which he was directly involved in the invention and institutionalisation of modern Mandarin. Referring to a key passage in the introduction to his translation, Chao explains that Carroll’s novel is part of a literary genre devoted to nonsense and linguistic play: The jokes in this book are of a special kind, whose meaning seems to consist in having no meaning. What is meant by this phrase? There are two levels of meaning. First, the author does not use it as a means to advocate some ism or fable but employs it rather for the creation of a work of fine art; Second, so-called “having no meaning” is the English word Nonsense [in English in the original], what is called “butong ” in Chinese. (4)

I have left butong untranslated in order to dwell for a moment on what is conveyed by a compound meaning “no passage.” The sinogram pronounced tong in standard modern Mandarin covers a semantic range that includes, but is not limited to, verbal ideas such as to open, to pass through, to link up, to understand, to comprehend, to exchange, etc. Conceptually speaking, the meaning of the term should be read in the context of Chao’s assumptions about linguistico-cultural unity, which he identifies with the figure of the border. A multiplicity of borders is at work in the translator’s preface, as well as in the various practical

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activities in which Chao himself was engaged. Not just a translator and a linguist, Chao had also received early training as a mathematician at Cornell University in 1914 before enrolling in a doctoral program in philosophy at Harvard University in 1915. Following completion of the Ph.D. and a postdoc at Harvard, Chao returned in 1919 to Cornell where he taught Physics before finally heading back to China in 1920, where he worked for several years promoting the creation of a national language— before returning to Harvard in 1924. Besides his academic pursuits, Chao was also an accomplished musician and composer who wrote a number of popular songs. Travelling the world as a polyglot and a polymath, Chao’s activities spanned many different domains, languages, nations, and disciplinary fields. Despite the multiplicity of his engagements, his activities across separate domains, traversing the academic and the artistic, were kept strictly separate, suggesting a personal investment in the notion of the frontier or border—conceived in the mode of a line between two separate, autonomous domains—as a general element of subjective formation. The choice of the term “butong ” to translate the concept of “nonsense” evokes this idea of the border. As such, it conveys a decision concerning the role of exteriority in relation to language. A literal translation back into English of Chao’s butong would be “aporia.” Derived from ancient Greek, the word aporia is composed of the prefix ¢- (“not,” “without”) and the word póros (“passage”), meaning a non-passage or an absence of passage. Chao’s translation suggests that he was aware of the aporetic nature of language and the deconstruction of linguistic unity at the heart of Lewis Carroll’s work. In effect, reading Lewis Carroll’s work via the bias of translation, we quickly realise that the looking glass is a metaphor for the inversion of perspective instantiated by the birth of national language via the modern regime of translation. This is the question of, “how to comprehend language from the viewpoint of translation,” as Naoki Sakai puts it, “that is, how to reverse the conventional comprehension of translation that always presumes the unity of a language” (Sakai “How do we count a language?” 71). This inversion is what is responsible for the idea that translation is a secondary, derivative form of linguistic act compared to the normative, primary form that is communication within a single, unified national language shared by two or more speakers. Chao’s brilliant translation of Carroll’s “dormouse” into duo’ershu is an excellent indication of this nascent awareness on the part of the former. Used to name a rodent who continually drifts off to sleep during the Mad Tea Party

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in Chapter 7 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the term dormouse is composed of a French root for “sleep” (dormir) and the English word “mouse.” The neologism calls attention to the inadequacy of our modern conceptualisation of language as something individuated into discrete national unities. The character’s soporific indolence subverts the notion of ersatz hybridity constructed on the basis of pure identities. Chao’s homophonic translation, duo’ershu, conserves an approximation of the French sound “dor” while transmitting at the same time the notion of laziness (duo) that leads the fictional character, in a nod to linguistic errancy, incessantly to nod off to sleep. When the Dormouse does intermittently awake in the midst of the Mad Tea Party, it is invariably to articulate a phrase that reveals the performativity of linguistic signification beyond a referential model, or again, to confuse significations shared differentially among two languages, such as English and French, whose distinction as separate unities can only be upheld on the basis of state-sponsored, retroactive codification. As a translator, Chao must have been acutely aware of the way that Carroll’s text challenges the notion of linguistic unity and referential meaning, yet rather than problematising exteriority within the metaphysical distinction between signification and indication, Chao opts, when leaving behind the role of the translator for that of the scholar writing a preface, for a choice that assigns exteriority not to language in general but to two strictly defined instances. The first of these concerns the border between politics and art; the second concerns the border between national peoples that serves as a figure for the ineffable unity that cannot be discovered within language itself. In other words, Chao seeks a resolution of the aporetic or undecidable nature of language via an appeal to borders, thereby covering up the role of bordering— what Naoki Sakai calls translation—in the social construction of discrete languages. It must be observed that the role of translation in the constitution of national language is not merely a matter of textual rendering, it is also, as Sakai’s theorisation of translation and national language has shown, an inescapable conceptual operation implicitly posited in the presupposition of linguistic unity that underwrites the modern concept of language deployed in both the creation of national language and in the inevitable work of translation between languages conceived as discrete communal unities as such. In the Introduction to Translation and Subjectivity, Sakai theorises this understanding of exteriority in terms of the representation of translation, “understood to be a transfer of a message from one clearly

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circumscribed language community into another distinctively enclosed language community” (Sakai Translation, 6). This representation is based on a prior exclusion of other experiences of exteriority and leads to an essentially normative conception of language. “What is kept out of this regime of homolingual address is the mingling and cohabitation of plural language heritage in the audience, and subsequent to this address, speech addressed by or to a foreign language speaker is put aside as secondary to the authentic form of delivery or as an exceptional case outside normalcy” (Sakai Translation, 6). What Sakai calls the “homolingual address” is not distinguished by the number of languages involved but rather by the presupposition of unity that can only be conceptualised via a preliminary division of language into discrete unities. This conceptualisation, Sakai points out, can only be achieved by appeal to an implicit operation of translation prior to the identification of linguistic unity, without which unity as such would be impossible to grasp. “Translation” in this case names the moment when the unity of the other language is posited as a correlate and source of validation for the unity of my own. This simultaneous positing of individual linguistic unity is what Sakai calls the schema of cofiguration. The notion of the schema is derived from Kantian philosophy. As a philosophy that begins with the question of the limits of positive knowledge (what can potentially be known vs what can never be verified by knowledge), Kantian philosophy introduces the concept of the schema to describe the synthetic process by which knowledge about objects of which I can have no direct experience can nevertheless be organised and correlated. In Sakai’s view, the unity of language is one such object, something that by nature can never be present as an object of positive experience. The schema is thus a fictional device useful for the correlation of disparate experience into knowledge about a single object. As a fictional device, it calls forth a certain image or figure. In the case of language, this would be the figure of the individuality of language, one language as distinct from another on the model of a countable noun. The relation between the two, or more precisely, the individuation of the two out of an indeterminate relationship is achieved via the schema of cofiguration. “The schema of cofiguration is,” according to Sakai, “a means by which a national community represents itself to itself, thereby constituting itself as a subject” (Sakai Translation, 15). Paradoxically, this self-referential concern for one’s own national community can only be realised by positing the unity of another national community different from my own.

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In Sakai’s estimation, language provides the quintessential blueprint for national community: “the figure of one’s own language as a systematic unity is a correlate in this schema of cofiguration to its twin partner, the figure of a foreign language. One’s own language neither precedes nor succeeds a foreign language – both come into being at the same time – that is, one’s own language is always a foreign language for a foreign language, and the self-referential relationship to one’s own language always assumes the schema of cofiguration” (Sakai Translation, 59). Crucial to this symmetrical representation of the unity of the foreign language that validates the unity of my own is a certain localisation of the experience of non-sense or noncomprehension. Based on an aesthetics of symmetry, the schema of cofiguration assigns linguistic exteriority to the other language-unity rather than to language in general. This aesthetics of symmetry hides the essential role of failure and dysfunction in language, essentially prolonging the linguistic ideology of communication that views language as a tool. The role of “non-sense” in this distribution of exteriority is key. Sakai’s masterful explanation is expressed with such simplicity and clarity, I feel compelled to cite at length the following passage: This is to say that, in the homolingual address, the experience of not comprehending an other’s enunciation or of the other miscomprehending your verbal delivery is grasped immediately as an experience of understanding the experience of not comprehending. For instance, when you were spoken to by an unknown man and could not figure out what he tried to convey, you describe this incident in the following manner: “A man spoke to me in Russian, so I could not understand him” (provided, of course, that you do not speak Russian). In the first place, it is very dubious as to whether an experience of noncomprehension can be called an experience at all. Furthermore, this manner of conceptualizing the failure of communication by the representation of an experience that contains the explanation of its own putative cause should necessarily entail an implicit tautology that merges its description and the putative explanation of it indistinguishably. Consequently, it is assumed that the experience of noncomprehension comes simultaneously equipped with an explanation as to why you fail to comprehend. It is assumed, in other words, that you necessarily experience an incident of discommunication while knowing why you happen to fail in communication. Here, we may as well draw attention to the mundane insight that communication fails all the time, not necessarily because of the gap between linguistic communities, but also because of the fact that

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communication takes place only as “exscription”: to try to communicate is to expose oneself to exteriority, to a certain exteriority that cannot be reduced to the externality of a referent to a signification. When we fail to communicate, we cannot attribute the failure to its possible cause — whether it is excessive noise in the medium or the addressee’s refusal to respond — precisely because we fail to communicate. In our case, failure in communication means that each of us stands exposed to, but distant from, the other without grasping the cause for “our” separation. It is only retrospectively, and, in the final analysis, subsequent to the representation of translation, that we begin to figure out an experience of noncomprehension of an other’s utterance according to the international schematism. (Sakai Translation, 6–7)

As that which calls for translation in the first place, noncomprehension is a practical experience that resists representation. As soon as we try to explain it, we begin to leave behind the aporetic experience of noncomprehension, heading into a representational register that substitutes comprehension for aporetic noncomprehension, representation for practice. The representation of the aporia of noncomprehension serves as a blueprint for funneling indeterminacy into the schema of internationality, erasing the experience of noncomprehension via tautology. A great deal of Sakai’s theorisation of language as translational practice thus consists of attempting to describe this passage from discontinuity into continuity in a way that preserves fidelity to the experience of noncomprehension that called for translation in the first place. This detour into Sakai’s critique of the modern regime of translation and the schema of internationality has been necessary to help us understand the stakes of the linguistic bordering practices at work across the various texts and periods that have concerned us, including Chao Yuan Ren’s translational invention of Mandarin, Pai Hsien-yung’s literary style of “acculturation,” Engle and Nieh’s idea of “co-translation,” and New Criticism’s ideological concept of individual style. Extending Christopher Lupke’s analysis of ideological interpellation in Pai Hsien-yung’s juxtaposition of China and the West, we can bear witness to two parallel operations of ideological interpellation in Pai’s fiction both of which fall equally under the purview of the schema of cofiguration. The opposition between East and West, on the one hand, and that between classical, imperial, wenyan Chinese and nationalised, modern, baihua Chinese, on the other, work in tandem, in the fashion of cofiguration. As an aesthetic of cofiguration, Pai Hsien-yung’s literary style is an appropriation of

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what Sakai calls “ex-scription,” turning exteriority inside out into the inscription of personal identity that is, in its very individuality, paradoxically representative of a national community. From this perspective, the metonymical construction of identity via the blank of whiteness is integrally related to the linguistic ideology of cofiguration at the heart of Pai Hsien-yung’s literary aesthetics. Lupke’s attentiveness to ideology in Pai Hsien-yung’s style, which is demonstrably linked to an implicit representation of translation and white settler colonialism, presages Andy Wang Ming-chih’s compelling analysis of the ideology at the heart of Asian-American Transpacific complicity in an essay from 2004 that accords a central place to Pai’s “Death in Chicago.” Titled Ya Mei yanjiu zai Taiwan, Wang’s essay would be best translated, I suggest, as “Asia(n) America(n) Research in Taiwan”; the parentheses being a somewhat clumsy but effective reminder that Wang’s concern is with Asia and America in Taiwan as much as with AsianAmerican experience. As Wang summarises at the end of this long essay, “the decisive force in distinguishing between ‘East’ and ‘West’ is the imperial structure that tightly binds capital, military affairs, and politics together” (Andy Wang “Yamei,” 37). This reminder of the ideological stakes for criticism follows a reading of “Death in Chicago” that calls attention to the story’s inscription in a division of labour that is simultaneously material and immaterial, economic and epistemic. “As a metaphor of mobility and exchange, the market (consumption and human labour) strengthens the desirability and extendibility of the transnational imaginary, constituting a material and imagined basis for linking Asian America into Taiwan” (Andy Wang “Yamei,” 21). Extending the pathbreaking analyses of ideology separately undertaken by Lupke and Wang, we can clearly see that Transpacific ideology cannot be properly understood without interrogating the modern regime of translation.

An Anticommunist Ethos Among Taiwanese with a political orientation towards independence, it has become common practice on social media over the past decade to refer to the United States by the epithet of choice formerly preferred by Chinese communists during the Maoist era, meidi, or “US imperialists.” Despite the apparent recognition of the imperial aspects of the “hub and spokes” system of regional governance in which Taiwan is lodged, the

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currency ascribed to this epithet in Taiwan is not accompanied by, variously, a general analysis of US imperialism and class domination, as it was under Maoism, a general analysis of domestic racism and US management of postcolonial sovereignty, as it was for W.E.B DuBois and thinkers in the black radical tradition, nor, finally, a general analysis of Taiwanese complicity with US imperialism across or despite the transitions of the past four decades since the end of martial law. Shu-mei Shih’s innovative idea of inscribing Taiwan within, “relational arcs…[organized] around significant world-historical events” (Shih et al. “Forum 2,” 212), potentially offers a means to reveal Taiwan’s role not as “satellite” or “periphery” but as an active, leading agent within US empire. Indeed, Shih’s choice, expressed during a roundtable discussion on Taiwan Studies in 2018, of settler colonialism and “decolonial narratives in the global sixties” (ibid.) as two representative arcs in which to highlight Taiwan’s role, promises to achieve just that. To evaluate the efficacy of that promise, however, it would be necessary to compare Shih’s remarks from 2018 with similar analysis from an article she published in 2016 (also cited by her and other participants in the 2018 roundtable), in which Shih refers to the latter arc specifically as “Americanism” (Shih “Theory in a Relational World,” 730). Although the nuance and details are somewhat different in each case, the central concern for both is Taiwan’s status in the Cold War and the relation between that event and larger processes of imperialism and decolonisation. Shih’s admirable goal of restoring the visibility of Taiwanese agency in the production of knowledge and world-historical events stumbles against latent anticommunism. “Taiwan’s participation in the Cold War,” Shih wrote in 2016, “may be not so much as an agent, but perhaps more as an extension of the United States” (Shih “Theory in a Relational World,” 730; emphasis added). While it is undoubtedly true that the “tight little island” of the Cold War was so tightly bound to the United States that it might justifiably have been seen as an “extension” or “protectorate” of the US—or even, as Chinese premier Zhou Enlai put it, a US-occupied territory (qtd in Shih, “Theory” 734), satellite dependency does not eliminate the possibility of agency. Indeed, lack of agency is hardly the picture that emerges when we account for Taiwan’s role as the founder and leader of the World AntiCommunist League (WACL) in 1966. Joining together networks of former Nazis, fascists, death squad leaders, and other opponents of popular sovereignty in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin

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America, the WACL was not only active throughout the Cold War, it also played a crucial role in the violent repression of the Left executed under the auspices of Operation Condor in Latin America (Abramovici “The World Anti-Communist League,” 114–115). Any attempt to restore historical agency to Taiwan that does not take into account this history inevitably falls prey to charges of ideologically motivated rewriting. Taiwan’s active agency in anticommunist repression is part of a larger global story the belated telling of which signals the return of “master narrative” formerly dismissed by a vulgarised version of postmodernism, albeit in a very different context. One of the places where we can observe the return of grand narrative concerns precisely the status of that event known as the Cold War. As Paul Thomas Chamberlin has painstakingly shown, the global war that occurred from 1945 to 1990 was only “cold” when seen from a Eurocentric perspective. Viewed from the postcolonial world, where over twenty million deaths, predominantly civilians, were registered, the war was durably and lethally “hot.” Not just a hot war designed to dissimulate arrested decolonisation, this period was a sustained effort, self-consciously organised by the burgeoning national security state in the US, to annihilate the communist left at a global level. In Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, the United States worked tirelessly, via covert channels such as Operation Condor in Latin America and Operation Gladio in Western Europe, to instigate, support, and legitimise the suppression and, when necessary, violent annihilation of a global political community. As Vincent Bevins explains in a landmark work about the organised extermination of the Indonesian Left, during the four decades of the Cold War, a “loose network of US-backed anticommunist extermination programs emerged around the world, and they carried out mass murder in at least twentytwo countries” (Bevins The Jakarta Method, Chapter 11, paragraph 26). In view of this history, a more appropriate name for the arc of the “global sixties” of which Taiwan was an active agent and sometimes leader would be that of global anticommunism or simply the global genocide of the Left. A comprehensive account of Shu-mei Shih’s consistently anti-Marxist and anticommunist positions is beyond the purview of this book, but we should at least note, after having mentioned the central importance of Indonesia in the global extermination of the Left, the emblematic role of Bandung in Shih’s rewriting of history around contemporary antiChina themes. While describing the “Cold War” as the “relational Other”

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of the “global sixties,” Shih emphasises in 2018, citing her article from 2016 as a reference, the importance of “deconstruct[ing] the unthinking celebration of the Bandung moment and China’s claim to global revolutionary leadership role” (Shih et al. “Forum 2,” 212–213). Maoist China’s foreign policy attempts to use the Bandung Conference of 1955, held in Bandung, Indonesia, to fashion for itself a leading role in the non-aligned movement are at best of secondary importance compared to the significance of the Communist Party of Indonesia itself. (For an account of Taiwan’s relation to Bandung, see Chen “Resisting Bandung?” Accepting at face value the decolonisation claims of the ROC Martial Law regime, Chen is unable to explain how decolonisation could work for the benefit of a new form of coloniality under erasure characteristic of Pax Americana; avoiding any discussion of the ROC’s historic role in destroying the evanescent convergence between anticolonialism and anticapitalism, Chen does a disservice to contemporary movements for decolonisation and justice.) As Vincent Bevins notes near the conclusion of his study about the genocide of the Left in Indonesia, “Bandung” symbolises an alternate world that might have taken shape in the absence of the bloody coup of 1965. According to Bevins, the extermination of the world’s third largest organised communist movement in Indonesia established a global model of governance and an infrastructure of governmentality within which we still live today. Uncovering the traces of the annihilated Indonesian alternative is a crucial part of any genealogy of the present. It is not hard to imagine from today’s perspective how a communist transition in a predominantly Muslim country could have radically altered the global geopolitical reality. Were we to follow Shih’s lead, however, it would not be possible to grasp fully the importance of the confluence between anticommunism and antiblackness seen in both the violent suppression of an alternate world that occurred in the Postcolonial Hot War and in the development of North American area studies (Solomon “Lucian Pye”). Shih’s comments about the “wide cross section of Western intelligentsia” attracted to Marxism as part of the “ideological polarizations” of the Cold War (Shih “Theory,” 726) is symptomatic of two very different types of historical repression, the first being the erasure of the black radical tradition in the United States, the second being the denial of the political legitimacy that accrued to communists and communisms as the sole organised opposition to Nazis and fascists prior to the war when the US and the UK were secretly aiding Hitler and Mussolini’s rise to counter communism. If Western intellectuals were attracted to

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communism after the war, it was not, in the first place, because of a kneejerk reaction to “polarization” but rather because of the sordid history of liberal complicity with fascism. Despite the extraordinary pressures of the McCarthyite anticommunist consensus, “Western leftists,” a category that included especially black communists in the US, viewed Bandung as an epochal event. As Peter Button has reminded me, it was none other than Richard Wright, author of Native Son, who attended Bandung (with funding from the CIA-front organisation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom) and communicated to the white world Sukarno’s speech, which began with the momentous observation: “This is the first international conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind” (Wright The Color Curtain, 136). One of the functions of “hegemonic global whiteness” is the erasure of antiblackness as fundamentally constitutive of anticommunism, both in the US, but also globally. Shih’s hegemonic rewriting of history is confirmed in the following paragraph, as “Western Marxism” becomes a bridge example leading to a discussion of the “sanctioned ignorance” (Shih “Theory,” 727) about the postcolonial world that constitutes the self-sufficient account of Eurocentric theory at which Shih’s proposal for “relational theory” takes aim. Having written extensively about some of the problems of Eurocentrism in contemporary theory (using, in the fashion of immanent critique, those same theories to critique their own presuppositions), I have no intention of defending the undeniably Eurocentric presuppositions of Western Marxists from this period. However, when critiques of Eurocentrism become a pretext for a repression of history that discursively repeats the extermination of the Left, that is another matter. To speak of Marxism in the global sixties and limit the conversation to “Western Marxists” without any mention of Marxist theorists and practice on the peripheries of empire (among black thinkers in the United States or among activist thinkers in the postcolonial world)— and the grave challenge of extermination they faced—is to indulge in an omission that is as serious as the erasure of liberalism’s complicity in the rise of fascism. Of course, this is not exactly what Shih does, since she does reference, albeit quite vaguely, “Taiwan’s radical history” and “Marxist politics” (Shih “Theory,” 729), only to summarily dismiss the “radical impulse among Taiwan’s Marxists” (ibid., emphasis added). The vague allusion to psychology is diminutive. An “impulse” does not rise to the level of reason, much less “theory”—a term that Shih otherwise

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admirably hopes to wrest away from its erstwhile Eurocentric presuppositions. Yet coming after the historical annihilation of the communist Left in Taiwan, the burden of theorisation, or simple reason, lies squarely with the postcolonial critic. Demoted to the status of an “impulse” by Shih, the political engagements of “Taiwan’s Marxists” are said to have introduced a “confused, anachronistic, romantic internationalism” that eventually led them (a vague plurality, as the only individual named is Chen Yingzhen) blindly to embrace “neoliberal China” (Shih “Theory,” 730). Shih’s opposition to the “unthinking celebration of the Bandung moment” is premised on a political agenda that erases historical reflection about the genocide of the Left, Taiwan’s active role within it, and the alternate world that still might be. The subject position interpellated by Shih’s ideologically motivated erasure of Taiwanese agency metonymically conflates Marxism with China in a vicious circle of culpability designed to discredit both without exposing the agency of the subject of knowledge. To claim that China is not “socialist” but really “neoliberal” while simultaneously repressing the possibility of narrating Taiwan’s recent historical experience in terms of continuities with the past, or again, in terms of a neoliberal transition rather than a “democratic” one institutes a double standard, to say the least. Given the conditions of a new, not-so-Cold War under which I write, it is probably necessary to spell out clearly that my position does not amount to posing anew the question of whether China is “really socialist,” much less to offering a defence of China’s supposedly socialist credentials. Given that no modern polity lives up to the model set forth by its own constitution, there is little to be gained by asking that question beyond the institution of a double standard. The presence of that double standard exemplifies the spectral transition, in which freedom and democracy are ghosted by neoliberal marketisation, militarism, and the absolute community, or again, in which the past is continually disturbed by expropriations of the future. Having said that, it is important to note that the socialist state that does not live up to its socialist constitution occupies a different discursive position than the liberal state that does not live up to its liberal one. While there are many ways to look at the difference between the two, the difference in terms of discursive potential becomes clearest when looked at in relation to the concepts of the promise and transition. The main pitfalls on either side are messianism, i.e., the fulfilment of a promise in a transcendental future, and neo-evangelical redemption, i.e., the promise of rebirth after repentance that defers justice in the present. Socialism

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tends to the former while neoliberalism tends to the latter. Probably for this reason, socialism is hounded by betrayal while liberalism is hobbled by deflection. Derrida’s reflections on the meaning of the promise in “Advances,” a long preface originally written in 1995 to Serge Margel’s Le Tombeau du Dieu Artisan (The Tomb of the Artisan God), helpfully elucidate the meaning of the promise. Associating the promise with the word “advance,” Derrida provides three glosses: (1) the advance as a form of chronological order; (2) the advance as a form of credit; and (3) the advance as a libidinal strategy equally applicable to love, war, and other forms of conquest. Liberalism’s version of the advance consists in asserting that liberalism is the most advanced, hence universal, form of governance, that its advantages can be calculated in advance, hence offering to those it would conquer a promise of love. What the liberal state does not promise, strictly speaking, is a future. Rather, it attempts to suppress or relieve the promise of the future via a creedal faith in the perfection of the Constitution, reducing the promise to the realm of the economic, as in a calculated advance. For the liberal creedalist (see Rana and Bâli), racism is not a problem of the liberal constitution per se but rather a problem of its execution. Socialism, by contrast, is the modern political ideology of the promise par excellence. It promises nothing less than a conception of time prior to that conceived as a series of successive present nows, offering a vision of the “already-not-yet” that exceeds calculability and seduces by its openness. Many socialists unable to shake off the bourgeois concept of the promise as a contract have fallen prey to messianism instead. Yet, to the extent that the promise is an authentic promise, it is characterised not by a contractual aspect but by an excessive otherness that opens on to an indeterminate future. It is this indeterminacy of the future and radical division of the present that so-called actually existing socialism has never been able to live up to, yet the very fact that socialism exists at all, against all odds in the face of regime change covert ops, means that an alternative future, i.e., an authentic future that cannot be known in advance, is always part of the secret of the present. In that sense, socialism promises a transition that is dialectic, i.e., is a form of becoming other or that which one is not supposed to be, while liberalism, by contrast, promises instead a process that would be better termed development, i.e., a form of becoming that which one is supposed to be via a succession or series of steps in a process of Bildung-like aesthetic formation. To discredit socialism is an integral expression of liberalism’s reduction of the advance to a pecuniary relationship that locks subjects

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into the linearity of bourgeois time while promising the pedagogy of development. To oppose liberalism is an intrinsic expression of socialism’s virtual capacity to open the indeterminacy of the future and to decolonise historical time, restoring the unlimited right to learn and the obligation to freely share knowledge.

Postcolonial Immunity Whether we call it the “arc of the genocide of the Left,” or somewhat more euphemistically, the “arc of global anticommunism,” a name change of this order would afford us a perspective from which to reevaluate the continuities in Taiwan’s global role today, despite the end of the KMT’s authoritarian rule and the transition to identity-based neoliberal parliamentarianism. Sometimes the continuities are direct, as in the case of funding for international anticommunist organisations, including classified operations (Lu and Chin “MOFA”). More often, the continuities consist of funding for civil society organisations (CSOs), including think tanks and NGOs, that fall within Washington-backed regime change networks funded by a combination of Taiwanese and US government sources, private equity, and the defence industry (see “Tanks”; “Alliance”; Barrows-Friedman and Blumenthal “Max Blumenthal on Investigating the Islamophobia’s industry’s financial network”; Cartalucci “The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), An Instrument of ‘Regime Change’ Financed by Wall Street”; Blumenthal “Inside America’s Meddling Machine”; Cassano and Kotch “Pentagon’s Top Official for East Asia Led Think Funded by Defense Contractors and Foreign Governments”; Porter “How a key Pentagon official turned China policy over to arms industry and Taiwan supporters”). The details of the role of Taiwan’s government, tech companies, and representative private organisations in contemporary global networks are difficult to ascertain (many of them, such as the Global Taiwan Institute, do not publicly disclose their funding sources, while public records of funding for the government agencies such as the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy or the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Representative Office are incomplete). Under conditions of financialised capitalism, the asymmetrical relation between investor advantage (capital/information) and popular sovereignty is a given. Despite the asymmetry, we do have enough clues without access to classified private information to delineate a network of links and cash flows among US domestic politics, lobbying (Zhang

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and Freeman The Taiwan Lobby), the defence industry ($17.9 billion in notified arms sales transfers from 2000 to 2019); think tanks (Taiwanese money supports a number of major Washington policy institutions that advance a neoliberal/neoconservative agenda, including Brookings Institute, Hudson Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Center for a New American Security, as well as partner institutions such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute that receive funding from the US defence industry), academia (particularly Taiwan studies events and scholars), and global civil society organisations that promote the neoliberal Washington Consensus or advance regime change agendas (such as the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the World Uyghur Congress, the Alliance of Democracies, etc.). If the recent Routledge Handbook of Civil Society in Asia edited by Akihira Ogawa is any indication, critical questions like these about the nature and role of civil society in relation to US government-sourced funding for networks promoting US policy goals are not ubiquitously recognised as an essential part of the discussion in relation to Asia. Symptomatically, this hefty volume from Routledge, whose compilation was probably as contingent rather than deliberate as any collective publishing project, contains only one reference to the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-funded organisation associated with an agenda for neoliberal privatisation and regime change policies that have been a major source of funding for civil society organisations in Asia since the end of widespread covert operations at the conclusion of the Cold War. Just as the National Endowment for Democracy was established by the Reagan-era CIA and represents a certain continuity in change with covert operations during the Cold War to infiltrate and direct news media, academia, and cultural organisations across the globe, the support given by the Taiwan government and private funding sources today represents a potential form of continuity with the authoritarian past. One of the difficulties we face consists in the lack of knowledge about networks that previously existed during the Cold War, as well as those new ones being established today. As Araujo and Bohoslavsky have explained in 2020, “What have been less frequently examined are the processes of circulation of actors, money, arms, propaganda, and idea ideas among extreme Right organisations and governments in Asia and South America during the second Cold War” (Araujo and Bohoslavsky “Circuits,” 107). Despite significant changes in both the international and domestic political situation, Taiwan maintained

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throughout the Cold War important links with anticommunist regimes in Latin and Central America, helping to train security forces, sometimes linked to genocidal right-wing death squads (Alexander “Past With Guatamela”; Sanford Buried Secrets, 170), in numerous countries. The circulation of money, ideas, actors, arms, techniques, and propaganda did not stop with the end of the Cold War but has survived into a new era characterised by a new international and domestic political situation. As Ben Lian Deng has written in 2019: Taipei, supported by Washington, provided political and financial support to several right-wing dictatorships during the Cold War period, especially in Latin America, such as Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, etc., supporting the formation of several anti-communist death squads, financing several human rights violations in Central America. After the end of the Cold War period, Taipei has changed the strategy, and began to engage in illegal activities in Latin America, including payment of bribery to right-wing politicians and political parties, election frauds, and even supporting coup d’état, in order to maintain his own diplomatic allies, contributing for the political instability in Latin America. The article concludes that Taiwan, along with the United States, historically supported right-wing regimes in Latin America, through illegal operations and corruption, contributing for the political instability in several Latin American countries. (Deng “Dirty Diplomacy”)

Given the sordid history of Taiwan’s involvement in Latin America symbolised by the friendship between Chiang Kai-Shek and Alfred Stroessner, one might have expected that the green camp now in power would have taken particular care to avoid involvement with the Venezuelan right-wing money and organisations funding Washingtonbacked right-wing coups across Latin America (Barrows-Friedman and Blumenthal; Blumenthal), but faith in postcolonial immunity should not be underestimated. Ironically, the imperative to remember expressed by Detention does not apply to Taiwan’s involvement in Latin American genocide, as the archives of Taiwan’s historical support for Guatemalan death squads have never been made public and there is no popular demand for them to be so. Consideration of Taiwan’s role within the militarised neoliberal networks of the Washington Consensus provides an opportune moment to reflect on the contradictory way volition, i.e., freedom of choice, is presented in the political discourse of Taiwanese identity. In contrast to

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the key role played by volition in the construction of identity in Detention, volition is often evacuated from discussions about the island territory’s relation to US militarism, “Pentagon Capitalism” (Melman), and rightwing networks. According to my own unscientific, anecdotal observation, one of the themes that comes up constantly in discussions within Taiwan about its position vis-à-vis the US and the P.R.C., is the lack of choice. Taiwan has no other choice, it is often said, but to align itself according to a logic of the lesser of two evils with the “US Imperialists” against the Chinese dystopia thought to be of greater imminent danger. Rather than assess this calculation on its own merits, a proper response would begin by taking seriously the idea of a lack of agency, an idea that recalls the classic formula, TINA (there is no alternative), used to describe neoliberal policies since Margaret Thatcher. The distribution of volition into contradictory moments of choicelessness and identity, each of which are equally well-noted characteristics of neoliberal politics since the Thatcher era, is complemented by a phenomenon that I call the postulate of postcolonial immunity. It forms an interesting corollary to the presumption of imperial immunity arrogated by the United States as it flouts international law, international treaties, the laws of other sovereign nations, and so on. The type of immunity assumed by the postcolonial nation, which must be distinguished from the type of immunity claimed by the neoimperial nation, is an outgrowth of the sense of victimisation that accompanies postcolonial nationalism. In the face of an enduring power imbalance between postcolonial and neo- or postimperial states, the logic of victimhood nationalism encourages political actors and intellectuals in the postcolonial state to imagine a relation to domestic politics in the neoimperial one that is exempt from responsibility. Since the postcolonial actor occupies a marginalised position relative to the neoimperial one, the postcolonial actor feels a sense of entitlement to cooperate with neoimperial actors and to appropriate neoimperial discourses, free of responsibility to neoimperial hegemony. To the extent that cooperation or strategic alliance may be deemed beneficial to the immediate objectives of victim nationalism, the postcolonial actor espousing them believes that he or she is not responsible for the ramifications such alliances—and the effects of the well-funded lobbying efforts to forge them (Zhang and Freeman The Taiwan Lobby)—bring to bear upon domestic politics in the neoimperial state, which are treated as an external given. Postcolonial immunity is intrinsically related to a corollary postulate, that of the fantasy of (the unity of) the West, without which the postcolonial immunity would be

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impossible. Following a movement analysed by Naoki Sakai, the West is in practice constructed only via operations such as claims to postcolonial immunity that call forth an imaginary cartography of civilisational difference: “The unity of the West, therefore, is always its putative unity; it is something to be called for, and yet, in the presumptive and essentialist investment, it is naturalised and presumed to be a given” (Sakai “Dislocation,” 89). The presumed givenness of the West relies on a fundamentally relational dynamic to acquire the aspect of naturalness. As was the case with the agency of Taiwanese anticommunism, Taiwan’s agency in calling forth the putative unity of the West should also not be overlooked. It should be apparent by now why a discussion of historical continuities and agency in relation to US Empire is a necessary, albeit often overlooked, part of the discussion about the spectral transition of recent Taiwanese history. As a satellite dependency of the United States, Taiwanese partake of the epistemological limitations imposed by imperialism memorably described by the fictional character Whisky Sisodia in Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses: “The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means” (343). Undeniably, a politically significant portion of Taiwan’s modern history has similarly occurred—and is still occurring—overseas. Yet because it is understood to occur “outside” Taiwan in the context of a TINA-type situation, its significance has been largely overlooked. Clearly, the unequal power relation of satellite dependency is not a pretext for ignorance any more than for denial of agency. Culturally speaking, the continuity with the past is nowhere more evident than in the ideological construction of “Fortress Taiwan” (the name of a massive Pentagon arms sale to Taiwan approved in 2020) as a community of absolute consensus. It is not so much a question of producing a common identity as a question of eliminating deviation. The theme of escape around which Detention, in the tradition of Loving Purely, deploys an aesthetic project is, in the final analysis, an escape from dissensus into consensus.

CHAPTER 8

From Anti-Centrism Studies to Translation

Anti-Centrism Studies and Decolonisation To prepare for the work of epistemic decolonisation, it will be necessary to dissect the improbable, paradoxical formulation of decolonisation in the service of empire. While it is well known that the United States has fashioned itself as a global pillar of decolonisation that hides innovative new forms of colonial governmentality under erasure, the participation of peripheral and satellite populations—often in places that would have formerly been recognised as part of the Third World—in the construction of a decolonial coloniality is insufficiently recognised. The case of contemporary Taiwanese intellectuals who vigorously pursue independence while claiming staunch opposition to US imperialism is a textbook example of this dynamic. The image of anti-US imperialism promoted by the “Collective Statement on Taiwan Independence: Building Global Solidarity and Rejecting US Military Empire” (Funie Hsu et al.) is a complement to the decolonial posture adopted by area studies scholars despite the persistence of colonial governmentality under erasure in the Western Pacific. For postcolonial and postimperial scholars alike, this form of cofiguration functions along the model of the honest alibi, allowing one to claim exteriority to whatever crimes are being committed by the permawar state in the name of the responsibility to protect. The alibi has the effect of unilateralising the forensic gaze, so

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. D. Solomon, The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8_8

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that the alleged perpetrator of the crimes is sufficiently othered such that one’s own complicity is erased. It takes a patient reading of Wen Liu’s essay, “From Independence to Interdependence: Taiwan Independence as Critique, Strategy, and Method toward Decoloniality,” to discover the vestigial traces of such complicity. As one winds through the thrilling critiques of normative sovereignty and condemnation of the “conservative alliance with the US military and economic power” (Liu “From Independence to Interdependence,” 371), a certain vigilance on the part of the reader is required to realise that Liu’s call for a “leftist Taiwan Independence movement,” that is, “both anti-imperial and anti-colonial ” (372), and rejects “choosing sides from the pretence of a Cold War ideological rivalry” (ibid., 374), begins with the axiom of “building a united front against the PRC” (ibid., 376). Readers could forgive themselves for not having grasped the salience of this axiomatic point of departure, against which a slew of other statements about equidistance and the rejection of Cold War binarism must be measured, because this key point is not divulged until the penultimate line in the essay’s concluding paragraph—and then only in a modifying clause that prefaces the triumphalist main clause of the sentence in which it is embedded: “Taiwan Independence necessitates a politics of decoloniality that builds alliances across the dispossessed, impoverished, queer, and migrant communities—those whose participation in the nation-state form has been conditional and limited” (ibid.). Perhaps, but Taiwan Independence apparently also necessitates a united front against the PRC. Despite the triumphalist tone (which we think is definitely cool), this modifying clause is like the proverbial asterisk clause in a contractual agreement that limits the liability of one of the contracting parties to the detriment of the others, just when you thought that we were all in it together. Should we not assume that a “united front against the PRC” does not include the friendly folks in the US military and regime change agencies? It goes without saying that there is not the slightest mention of “building a united front against the US,” much less any mention of Japan (Okinawa is mentioned but not the state of Japan) or the Republic of Korea. It certainly does not help, either, that Liu conceives of sovereignty in a recidivistic way as something lost to be recovered or restored (ibid., 373). At that point, there is no longer any valid reason to investigate the essay’s intriguing claims to combine leftist, anticolonial, and indigenous perspectives in a “method of multiple sovereignties” (ibid., 375). With that single asterisk, Liu’s essay turns

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from being a serious political program, albeit more anarchist than socialist, into a United Front checklist designed to provide Front members with an alibi when the violence of regime change and the redrawing of borders engulfs continental populations in unspeakable carnage. The notion that people who would claim as home an island situated not more than 180 km from the continental mainland would invest themselves in a United Front inevitably aligned, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, with US military and financial strategy designed to accelerate “the churn” on the continent—and moreover convince themselves in the process that such unpredictable destabilisation on their front doorstep could be the basis for a progressive, even “leftist,” politics that would not serve the interests of disaster capitalism (Loewenstein Disaster Capitalism)—is little more than a sophisticated version of the fairy tale fables about political transition to which more and more Taiwanese intellectuals of various political positions are turning. It is worth asking whether the hypothetical addition of “a united front against the US” would be sufficient to politically redeem Liu’s project. One of the main takeaways we glean from the pioneering work of Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra on borders and bordering practices is that borders are never symmetrical (Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method and The Politics of Operations ). The duality of the border is intrinsically asymmetrical and spectral. The word spectral, used in the Derridean sense, indicates a critique of the kind of ontology that sees the things separated by the border as autonomous and prior to the bordering practices that instantiate the border and the things on each side. Against that ontology, Derrida has proposed an alternative ontology of relationship devoid of substantialism that he wittily calls “hauntology.” Taiwanese Independence is not, as Wen Liu holds, an “ontological impossibility” that is “either doomed to be a failure due to China’s military threats or perpetually trapped between the two imperial powers” (Liu “Interdependence,” 374). While those are reasons why even nominal independence (but real satellite dependency) might be practically impossible, they do not explain the impossibility at an ontological level. As Derrida writes, “Sovereignty is undivided, unshared, or it is not. The division of the indivisible, the sharing of what cannot be shared: that is the possibility of the impossible” (Derrida Without Alibi, xx; italics in the original). Only an investigation into the nature of modern areas can reveal the full extent of that impossibility and suggest the

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possibility of new forms of political community that live up to Liu’s erstwhile aspiration for non-normative sovereignty. On that account alone, the pretence of equidistance prized by the proponents-of-the-UnitedFront-who-create-alibi-checklists-and-asterisk-clauses merely exacerbates the imperial–colonial bordering practices like the modern regime of translation already in place. Borders are asymmetrical, spectral, accidental, and, hence, traumatic, and that trauma is the trauma continually experienced by living labour as it gets commodified into the capital relation. Faced with the historical legacy of Pax Americana, many contemporary theorists have turned towards a reconceptualisation of area, epitomised by the rise of Transpacific studies, that aspires to achieve a radical change of perspective. In this rest of this section, I would like to tease out some of the limitations of this approach. Despite its areal attachments, the Transpacific is not simply a geographical region that one could point to on a map nor a population of specific bodies. As a figure rather than a toponym, the Transpacific is tied to the anxiety born from a sense of indeterminate boundaries combined with the undeniable presence of a transcontinental behemoth—China. To recognise that the Pacific was originally part of the Atlanticist projection of global cartography and that the belated formation of a new field of Transpacific studies could signal opportunities for salubrious reversal is certainly a cause for celebration, yet hardly addresses the source of anxiety. Concerns such as this multiply when one tries to account for the fact that the history of trafficking and slavery and their ongoing practice in the Pacific has yet to disrupt, conceptually speaking, the seamless continuity between freedom and sovereignty, ostensibly consummated by the rights of the citizen, that still defines the desire for political recognition throughout the Pacific. (For an idea of how to understand the discontinuity between freedom and sovereignty, see Chandler X—The problem of the negro and Robert Freedom as Marronage. For a history of the dialectical and at times causal relationship between US slavery and US imperial population engineering, or again, the relation between the network of islands that sustains Pax Americana and the Black Pacific, see Mount). Anxiety, which overdetermines the figure of the Transpacific, has an undeniably dual character. “Is anxiety a constitutive process by which the psyche maintains its coherence and identity, or does it ultimately entail their dissolution?” In Samuel Weber’s estimation, Sigmund Freud never found the answer (Weber Return to Freud, 154). This undecidable quality makes anxiety not just a symptomatic part of psychoanalysis but places it,

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as Ruth Ronen argues, at the very core of aesthetic experience (Ronen The Aesthetics of Anxiety). Aesthetically speaking, the ocean was regularly taken by philosophers of the romantic era, from Baumgarten and Kant to Burke, as a representative example of the sublime. While for Burke the ocean is sublime because its vastness incites a subjective fear of death, for Kant it would be sublime because its vastness exceeds empirical understanding. If, in the romantic vision, an ocean is a source of anxiety that is emblematic of either the finitude of life or the finitude of knowledge, then what would be a vast ocean like the Pacific, emblematic of the global itself, if not a vast source of anxiety related to finitude? Not by coincidence, the height of the age of colonial exploration by sea in the eighteenth century CE coincides with intense exploration of a new category of human experience, named aesthetics by Alexander Baumgarten, that by the end of the century was being widely used to refer to judgements about the beautiful. If aesthetics is, as Marc Redfield reminds us, “a discourse of framing that violates its own frame” (Redfield The Politics of Aesthetics, 10), and the most important volume of collected essays on Transpacific studies to date is subtitled framing an emerging field (Hoskins and Nguyen), then we cannot avoid the realisation that a decisive confrontation with the aesthetic ideology of romanticism inevitably awaits Transpacific studies. Undoubtedly, a certain anxiety related to the proliferation of borders and bordering practices under the impetus of capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, and ethnocentrism characterises the inauguration of Transpacific studies (Hoskins and Nguyen Transpacific Studies , 4). Significantly, Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s response to this dilemma in their pathbreaking collection, Transpacific Studies , is to cast it in moral terms (ibid., 10). If place-based “centring” is a moral question, the reason is, I will argue, because the aesthetic ideology of romanticism hangs over Transpacific studies in the form of a return of the repressed, one of the classic forms ascribed to anxiety in the early phases of Freud’s writings about psychoanalysis prior to World War I (Weber “Anxiety”). The politics of anti-centrism that seem to motivate not only Transpacific studies but also cultural studies in general is essentially no different from the intellectual program that was described nearly two decades ago by Alberto Moreiras as “infinite decolonization” (Moreiras “Infinite Decolonization,” 586). In the face of the historical injustice of colonialism and capitalism, it is widely believed that the only progressive choice today, ethically and politically, is to aim for a fundamental restitution of rights,

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identities, proper names, lands, labour, and profits, away from unethical “centres.” This has given rise to what I would call anti-centrism studies. Methodologically speaking, anti-centrism studies promote a comparative and relational method that aims to restore or reconstitute the multiplicity, regularly hidden by centrism, that constitutes all objects in the postcolonial social world. From this perspective, what we call the West, to take the most imposing example in modernity of a social object formed on the basis of centrism, is really but a multiplicity of constituent elements drawn from global interactions that cannot be neatly placed into categories that adhere to formal boundaries between inside and outside. In The Global Origins of the Modern Self , Avram Alpert sums it up as an “historical methodology that I, following Said, call ‘reconstitution’” (12). The pluralist description of objects, or their “reconstitution” from a new, anti-centrist perspective respectful of their constitutive multiplicity, operates in fact like a necessary precondition for political and ethical restitution. Transpacific studies inherit some of this historical baggage from postcolonial studies via the mediation of Sinophone studies. Amidst the methodological commitments, variously described by Sinophone studies’ foremost advocate, Shu-mei Shih (sometimes in tandem with Françoise Lionnet), as minor transnationalism, creolised theory, and relational comparison, that Transpacific studies carries forth, it is crucial not to overlook the problematisation of China, and Sinocentrism, from which Sinophone studies derives its name. The essential point to retain here is that Sinophone studies begins with a gesture that is essentially philological, using an interrogation of “the conflation of the word Chinese with everything from China” (Shih Visuality and Identity, 24) or of the “reductive equivalence of China = Chinese = ethnicity” (Wong “From the Transnational to the Sinophone,” 316) as the jumping off point for a general political mobilisation. With its romanticist passion for redefining taxonomies of language and people against centrisms and its inevitable entanglement in the politics of minor nationalism, separatism, and satellite autonomy, Sinophone studies partakes, in political terms, of the transferential relation to twentiethcentury Eastern European history, as if the Balkan Mountains were to jut directly into the Western Pacific (see Buden What to do with the question “What will the Balkans look like in 2020?” for a similar image). Just as philology played a crucial role in the historic claims of Eastern European nationalities to national sovereignty from the Austro-Hungarian and

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Russian empires (Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism, 271), a philological moment lies at the core of today’s claims for self-determination on the borderlands of the People’s Republic of China. Symptomatically, while Eastern Europe rarely appears even in the conscientiously global purview of minor transnationalism, the term “balkanization” (Shih Visuality and Identity, 20; Shih and Lionnet The Creolization of Theory, 13), invariably used in a generic sense, is associated with politically erroneous critiques of identity politics. According to Maria Todorova, the term “Balkanisation,” which emerged during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, “not only had come to denote the parcelisation of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian” (Todorova, 3; qtd in Buden What Will the Balkans Look Like). “Balkanisation,” in other words, is originally part of the terminology of romanticism, both as a symptom-concept of modernity and as a period-concept. It organises bodies and populations into anthropological types based on a logic of specific difference that implicitly justifies the survival rankings attached to each. Emblematically, Shih’s early work on Chinese literary modernity, The Lure of the Modern, implicitly adheres to the ideological notion that sees romanticism as an historical or developmental stage superseded by realism, rather than as a horizon of assumptions that bind language, people, and knowledge production about them, into “area.” The containment of romanticism within a discourse of periodisation prevents recognition of the way the romantic horizon pushes knowledge production about “areas” into the realm of the aesthetic. Under romanticism, the realm of the aesthetic is that in which the representation of linguistic difference via the figure of a spatialised border that separates two peoples, groups, or communities becomes a figure for areal and anthropological difference in general. The representative image, a nation-state, both “speaks for” a people and “stands in” as that people’s collective reflection or construction. While the nation-state may not be the ultimate form of area, it is paradigmatic within the romantic horizon in the sense that it takes the supposed unity of language (which can only be represented through an implicit operation of translation) as a figure for the tropic of area. As David Golumbia writes in “The Deconstruction of Philology,” this philological approach turns national language into a “species-like object” (26) that lends itself to the idea that social difference can be understood in purely logical terms as specific difference. From

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there, whether one actively advocates a racist view of the relative inferiority of certain national types or supports instead an internationalist view of the equality of types, the structure of colonial reason and the organisation of populations under the regime of the typological image of specific difference remains intact. This is the context within which the political geography of the ethno-national proper area took shape during the age of imperialism under formulas such as China proper, Russia proper, Bulgaria proper, etc. The contemporary rehabilitation of the term “China proper” by some historians working under the rubric of the New Qing History is an excellent example of the sort of restitution aimed at by infinite decolonisation. The crucial political question of our time, however, is not, “what is China proper?” or “who are the real Chinese?” much less “What is Europe?” and “Who are the real Europeans?”—questions which, in the context of modern European history, have always been tied to the most unthinkable violence—but rather why are questions like these not simply one among many but constitutive of the political as such, simultaneously of and in modernity? As the world enters into a new, not-so-cold Cold War, the question of “what are you?” is increasingly articulated to “which side are you on?” The consequences of the conflation of these two questions are a recipe for permanent civil war on a global scale. Unless the nexus of philological presuppositions that frame such questions is addressed in a fundamental way, permanent global civil war seems increasingly unavoidable. A discourse about contemporary China, such as that seen in Sinophone studies, that combines a regionalised “fracturing” (Shih Visuality and Identity, 39) of phono-nationalism with a reinvestment in the notion of the ethno-national homeland or proper area (Shih Visuality and Identity, 4), is little more than a justification for the balkanisation of one side or continental extremity of the Transpacific. To put it bluntly, it is, deliberately or not, a pretext for the “balkanisation” of the People’s Republic of China. It may be worth recalling that the preference for the dismemberment of the People’s Republic of China among US elites is not a recent idea floated in response to current events in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and elsewhere, but dates to the end of the Cold War in Europe and the beginning of a decades-long, nation-busting war in the Greater Middle East. An op-ed piece from 1991 titled, “Another ‘Prison of Nations’: China: As in the Soviet Union, a regional decoupling could

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end communism,” by Jack Miles, a member of the LA Times editorial board, serves as a poignant reminder. It would also be apposite to take note of even more disturbing historical antecedents. The Cold War idea of “liberating” so-called captive nations in the enemy camp, in Eastern Europe, was preceded, if not directly inspired, by similar plans in Nazi Germany’s foreign policy towards the East. Even George Kennan, the quintessential Cold Warrior, expressed dismay about the continuities with Nazi policy. As Moss Robeson, author of a blog tracing the activities of the far-right Ukrainian nationalist diaspora in North America, writes, “George Kennan, the architect of Washington’s Cold War ‘containment strategy’ against the Soviet Union, bemoaned later in life that Public Law 86–90, which established Captive Nations Week and paved the way for the private, far-right National Captive Nations Committee, symbolically committed the U.S. to the liberation of countries ‘invented in the Nazi propaganda ministry.’ [Kennan was probably referring to Idel-Ural and Cossackia]. The ABN [Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a Western Ukrainian nationalist organization with fascist ideology] played a prominent role in the so-called ‘captive nations movement,’ and had a relationship with the two principal authors of the joint congressional resolution (one of them perhaps only years later)” (Robeson “Death to Captive Nations Week”). The transferential relation to Nazi plans for Eastern Europe goes farther than Kennan’s alarm about Public Law 86–90. There was plenty of active participation from British and US intelligence: many former Nazi collaborators and former soldiers in the Wehrmacht and SS, as well as nationalist partisan groups that participated in ethnic cleansing against Poles, Hungarians, and Jews, from East Europe were admitted to North America after the war. Some were recycled by the intelligence agencies back into Europe as a weapon to fight against communism. An account of the way fascist anticommunist migrant communities from East Europe were weaponised in the service of US and Canadian foreign policy and/ or covert operations in Eastern Europe is a story that disrupts some of the fault lines central to today’s narrative about the resistance to neofascism in the US. For starters, it shows that the US neoconservatives, who were not themselves fascists, were perfectly fine with cultivating the support of those fascist clients and communities originally recruited by the CIA and MI6 during the Cold War, thus aiding, by design or inadvertently, an intergenerational transition without historical justice within North American diaspora communities of East European nationalisms with a history

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of fascist ideology and Nazi collaboration (Bellant Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and U.S. Cold War Politics ). Second, it shows that since Ukrainian statehood was formalised in the Constitution of 1996, neoliberal institutions and persons have played an extremely important role in tandem or in concert with neoconservative aims, pursuing the relationship with diaspora communities that were never called upon to come to terms with the historical injustices perpetrated by the marriage of nationalism and fascism in their own communities and in their countries of origin (Rosenberg “Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret”). Taken together, this allows one to reconstitute the continuity of fascist elements in domestic American society and US foreign policy well before the rise of contemporary neofascism emblematised by Donald Trump and propagated by the likes of Tucker Carlson. While confirming the truism that US foreign policy cannot be understood without reference to domestic politics, it points more importantly to a form of imperial population management that spans the line between the domestic and the foreign—often precisely through the mobilisation of aspirations for postcolonial national sovereignty, minority recognition, and migration. In other words, the story of US support for and weaponisation of the fascist nationalist Ukrainian diaspora for more than seven decades is a perfect example not only of the central role that fascist anticommunism has played in the “American century,” but also of the cofiguration between US imperial nationalism and postcolonial cultural nationalism that is the cornerstone of Pax Americana global hegemony. It goes without saying that the effects of the Galician nationalism prevalent among the Ukrainian diaspora in North America have had profound effects on the development of imperial nationalist politics in Canada and the United States, emblematised by the importance of politicians and policy makers of Ukrainian heritage, such as Chrystia Freeland, Anthony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland. The implications for area studies are enormous. Regular calls by area studies scholars based in the (post)imperial nations for “finding and making common cause with progressives” within any given global population (for one recent example, see Falcone “The Left Can Support Protesters in China Without Shilling for US Imperialism”) have to be measured against the legacy of Cold War CIA recruitment policies that targeted, among many others, Ukrainians with a history of fascist anticommunist struggle. Aimed at both natives of, or migrants from, a given

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area as well as the scholars, journalists, artists, writers, and researchers, both native and foreign, who studied or worked in/on/with those areas, Cold War foreign asset recruitment began precisely with the protocols of identification. This ultimately forensic operation was, furthermore, merely a prelude to area studies’ larger role as an apparatus of subjective formation and population management according to the dual aerial/areal logic. Rather than looking at area studies as a collection of fields of knowledge production that happen to accommodate scholars from immigrant, native, and foreign backgrounds, it would be more apposite to see area studies the other way around as disciplines of transnational population management that happen to produce knowledge. While Cold War recruitment policies may no longer be in practice today, the apparatus of subjective formation established during that era plays an even more important role in the contemporary era of heightened global flows. At a more abstract level, the fantasy of the West (which includes, it bears repeating, a certain version of the Rest) plays the ultimate role in the “recruitment” of minority populations to the imperial cause under the guise of the complicity between universalism and particularism. “This means, practically, [to draw] from among diaspora populations across the globe” (Falcone “The Left”). In effect, diasporic minorities emigrating to the US from enemy nations targeted for regime change operations are particularly invested in the complicity between universalism and particularism, often simultaneously espousing philological nationalism and universal values at the same time. The transcendental positionality of the aerial view solicited by the idea of “finding and making common cause with progressives” is what enables the different and superficially opposed areal positions within imperial space—such as universal and particular—to be plotted as a single continuum. If those who operate within that space today derive their progressive credentials from forensic practices and interventions that reproduce borders and divide populations along the “progressive” continuum, without seriously challenging the transnational bordering practices and epistemology of the secret that sustains the continuum itself, the results are sure to align or coincide with imperial aims—regardless of whether or not the CIA or any of its post-Cold War cutouts, such as the National Endowment for Democracy or the National Democratic Institute, are directly involved. Posing as progressive efforts to “decolonise” US enemies, the pursuit of such plans during the Cold War inevitably fed imperial aims for regime

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change and “balkanisation,” aka imperial population management operations, in enemy nations. An interesting contrast to the standard policy of “balkanisation” of enemies could be seen in the covert negotiations that allegedly took place in February 1943 between Allen Dulles and a Nazi counterpart, during which Dulles allegedly offered to preserve the borders of post-Anschluss Germany in order to secure the Nazi regime’s surrender to the West in exchange for constituting a bulwark against Soviet communism (Committee for Promotion of Peace Falsifiers of History, 60–61). These allegations generally conform to the alternative history of appeasement described by Mark Jones, in which the British Marxist traces the anticommunism at the heart of both UK and US foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century culminating in the persistent hope, as late as the winter of 1939–40 (i.e., after the invasion of Poland) that Hitler might still be persuaded to make peace with the West to fight Soviet communism (Jones “Stalin, appeasement, and the Second World War”). They are also generally consonant with the shocking revelations about Operation Unthinkable, which envisioned using Nazi German military formations to counter the Red Army directly after Germany’s defeat. As Kerstin von Lingen writes in Allen Dulles, the OSS, and Nazi War Criminals, “With the help of German sources, it is now possible to confirm that Operation Unthinkable was not just a British military war-game scenario, but that the defeated German commanders had indeed kept their troops under arms with the expressed permission of the Western allies” (von Lingen Allen Dulles, 6). While von Lingen does not find evidence of Allen Dulles’s involvement, it is hard to believe that he would have been unaware and/or uninvolved. The fact that allegations about Dulles’s involvement in secret negotiations to orchestrate the preservation of the borders of the Third Reich are available exclusively in archival material presented in Soviet propaganda from 1948, making them essentially “radioactive” and untouchable for serious scholarship, highlights the issues associated with the epistemology of the secret that tie area studies not just to the national security state but to neoliberalism and beyond. Given the extent to which “balkanisation” under the cover of decolonisation is a renewed theme of interest today, at a moment of heightened geostrategic conflict between the United States and those nations increasingly identified by US government agencies and think tanks as enemies or “peer competitors,” the genealogy of the politics of postcolonial sovereignty, domestic minorities, and migrant populations in relation to area studies is of continued contemporary relevance. My

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criticism of such perennial calls to decolonise China is, thus, not motivated by an a priori commitment to defend the borders of the People’s Republic of China but rather by the conviction that durable, de-escalatory change can only come about by transforming the totality of a colonial world system, beginning with the fantasy of the West, that is collectively heading towards the conflation of “whose side are you on?” with “what people do you belong to?” Contemporary debates over unipolarity vs. multipolarity conspire to preserve the colonial nature of the international interstate system. In practical terms, this would mean transforming the basis of the international system composed of nation-states plus the supplement of a panoply of irregular or exceptional spatial arrangements, e.g., zones, corridors, protectorates, colonies, mandates, garrisons, etc., that together serve the regimes of capitalist accumulation. From this perspective, multipolarity arguably has much more potential to lead to decolonisation than unipolarity under the guise of a “rules-based order” that is itself a codeword designed to hide American exceptionalism, yet only on the condition that the theorisation of multipolarity pass through the decolonisation of enduring bipolarity first. An approach that takes aim at capitalism at the same time as colonialism necessarily approaches the national form in a way that cannot be reduced to good/bad binaries or the normativity of national sovereignty any more than to the rhetoric of anti-state statism. As long as we fail to see how postcolonial sovereignty can become the basis for innovative new forms of empire such as Pax Americana, or again, how the United States can portray itself as an anticolonial power even while pursuing unprecedented innovations in the technology of colonial governmentality, decolonisation (and true multipolarity) will remain an elusive goal. Hence, that other form of decolonisation—an ersatz or half-hearted pretext for what amounts to the great power politics of “balkanisation”— is certainly not part of an effort to liberate global populations from the political geography cum aesthetic ideology of the proper area. Yet this compromise is what takes place when self-determination is seen not as an historically conditioned horizon but as a moral imperative within that horizon, “the imperative to live as a political subject within a particular geopolitical place,” as Shu-mei Shih puts it (Shih “Against Diaspora,” 46). As an “imperative,” this version of self-determination exemplifies the way that the restitutive movement of infinite decolonisation invariably presents itself as a law (Moreiras “Infinite Decolonization,” 591) that imposes the search for an infinite restitution of the identity between subjectivity and

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the proper name to which it should correspond. It is hard to think of any “law” that could be more opposed in spirit to the reality of migration than this one. Hence, it may be helpful to tease out the presuppositions behind a concept like the Transpacific. One of many possible starting points for a diffuse notion of the Transpacific begins with that which lies between the Asian continent and the American one. Dialled in a bit further, it begins to focalise around the space between the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America. Despite the appearance of symmetry given by an oceanic space bounded by two large continents, the Transpacific is marked by the asymmetries that are the legacy of highly unequal flows throughout this diffuse space. Ruth Oldenziel reminds us that the thousands of islands, many of which are located in the Pacific, over which the United States has dominion serve a multitude of ideological, political, economic, military, and epistemological functions. Most germane to our discussion here is the idea that, “islands have helped nurture America’s self-image as a post-colonial, post-imperial power in the era of decolonization and globalization” (Oldenziel “Islands,” 14). Oldenziel draws attention especially to the political disenfranchisement and economic exploitation to which the indigenous populations of these island possessions are subject, reminding us of the essential violence of the modern system of nationstates. The list of considerations that one might add to Oldenziel’s argument is long, beginning with the asymmetries of migration and capital flows around the Pacific. To Oldenziel’s reflections on the role of “invisible” islands in the constitution of US empire, we might add, for instance, further reflections on the incorporation of colonised indigenous nations. In Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries, Jodi Kim brilliantly summarises how the naturalisation of the peoples and territories thus incorporated by settler colonialism becomes an alibi: [W]hat we call the United States is composed of hundred of colonized Indigenous nations, so invoking the United States as a “nation” in this context functions to provide an alibi for imperialism. This process, as I have observed, is US metapolitical authority’s ultimate assertion as well as its disappearance. The alibi obscures not only continental and extracontinental imperialism (or the process through which successive territories extending from the Atlantic and into the Pacific were incorporated as US

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states) but also the ongoing US domination of the territories that it has not incorporated as states, namely Guam, American S¯amoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Yet still, the alibi also obscures the existence of a US military empire, the tentacular reach of US power on military bases throughout the globe numbering about eight hundred, close to 40 percent of which are disproportionately concentrated in Asia and the Pacific. (Kim Settler Garrison, 24)

In effect, what Kim is describing are some of the processes of decomposition that serve as the precondition for US imperial nationalism. Although not obvious in the passage cited above, Kim’s abiding concern in Settler Garrison is on how the processes of decomposition that serve transpacific complicity in Pax Americana are not exclusively focused on nation and ethnicity but touch also, and sometimes even more directly, on class and gender issues. One of the conclusions that we might draw from Kim’s work relative to Taiwan concerns the construction of Taiwanese agency. As we have emphasised throughout this work, agency is an overdetermined concept that often hides as much as it reveals. The processes of decomposition internal to Pax Americana constitute a salient example of such overdetermination, sustaining forms of agency that are compromised by invisibilised desubjectivation. Faced with the inadequacy of the schema of internationality to understand this and other asymmetries, we might ask if it would not be safe to assume that if all states are equally objects of anti-centrist critique, the centre could not possibly reconstitute itself in any form? The answer, quite simply, is no. Neither the “multidirectional critique” (Shih “Against Diaspora,” 47; Shih Visuality and Identity, 190) nor the “inherently comparative and transnational” (Shih “Against Diaspora,” 29) aspect of anti-centrism studies in their Sinophone declination have fundamentally altered the philological investment in area. Needless to say, the nationstate, the paradigm of a modern area, is nothing if not a comparative unit, so anti-centrism studies do not bring anything fundamentally new to the table in that respect—except for an element of representation. As for multidirectional critique, it does nothing to help us understand either how the acts of bordering that instantiate the grounds of comparison precede the act of comparing or how the entities distributed across various directions performatively co-produce each other in the present. Hence, despite the post-national orientation, today’s anti-centrist methodologies

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leave intact the comparative infrastructure and representational orientation of modernity, displacing it to a biopolitical and aesthetic level. Simply to assert that, “‘the West’ is a real entity with historical power that has emerged through global constitutions,” (Alpert Global, 11) leaves us unable to account for that element of the West that “represses the historical” (Sakai “The West,” 191). It is also fundamentally different from pointing out that the West is, “a topos in the chronological register … by which to generate an apparent taxonomic coherence where real coherence is impossible” (ibid., 183), or a “social relation rather than an object” (Walker “The Schema of the West,” 228), an “abstraction that organises real social relations ” (Walker “The Schema of the West,” 212; emphasis in the original). Motivated by a disavowed constellation of romantic concerns from philology, aesthetics, and biopolitics, contemporary anticentrism studies bypass the chance to interrogate the performativity of area in the present and to ask why capitalism needs a certain global cartography based on essentially volatile, performative areas in the first place (Walker “The Accumulation of Difference”; Mezzadra and Neilson Border as Method)? Balkanisation, for Shih and Lionnet, is not simply a disparaging way to refer to populations incapable of constituting themselves through the moral imperative of self-determination, but also paradoxically a way of trivialising the challenge posed notably (but not exclusively) by the philosophy of difference colloquially known as deconstruction to representationalist views of language that are essential to theories of subjectivity complicit with sovereignty (Shih Visuality and Identity, 21). There is, regrettably, no chance at this time for me to reckon fully with Sinophone studies’ relation to theory, emblematised by deconstruction (as is typical for the North American-centred intellectual world), in its problematic relation to area. In Shu-mei Shih’s work, “Derridean deconstruction” appears only as a caricatural version of texts whose significance is exclusively figural. Whereas Jacques Derrida made repeated efforts to distinguish deconstruction from linguisticism by emphasising the machinic aspect of the sign (as well as visual and phonic elements), Shih characterises his work as linguistico-centric (Shih Visuality and Identity, 9); whereas Derrida was the first to alert us to the pitfalls of anti-centrist critiques that reinforce the centre (Derrida Writing and Difference, 353), Shih, with Lionnet, characterises Derrida’s work as serving only to muscularly enhance the centre (Lionnet and Shih “Introduction,” 3); whereas Derrida spent considerable time across multiple

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works critiquing the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Shih resorts to the trope of personification (Redfield Theory at Yale, 10) to discredit Derrida’s work in toto by virtue of the author’s supposed intellectual association with Heidegger (Shih Visuality and Identity, 175). All of the above is accomplished without ever actually getting into even a single line of the Derridean text to address the specificities of Derrida’s ideas. The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of Derrida’s earliest English translators, is treated in a similar way, albeit with an even stronger emphasis on the trope of personification (Shih “Is Feminism Translatable?”). No better illustration of these paradoxical commitments and repressions can be found than the passing reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay from 1988, Can the Subaltern Speak?, that occurs in Lionnet and Shih’s preface to the 2011 collection of essays titled, The Creolization of Theory. Even as Lionnet and Shih acknowledge that Spivak’s political concept of the subaltern is articulated around the “constraints of representation,” they assimilate Spivak’s work into a representational category of ethnicised intellectual labour conducted by specifically “Indian intellectuals” that “has tended to generate a selfperpetuating and politically unproductive anxiety that could be said to be self-absorbed” (Shih and Lionnet “The Creolization of Theory,” 20). Placing Spivak alongside Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, all of whom had, like Spivak, already emigrated to the United States by the time The Creolization of Theory was published, Lionnet and Shih curiously elide the diasporic, dislocated quality of these aforementioned scholars, in what can only be construed as a resounding embrace of essentialist representation. But are constraints or limits the matter of representation? In an enigmatic essay titled, “The Return to Philology,” Paul de Man writes that “literature, instead of only being taught as a historical and humanistic subject, should be taught as a rhetoric and a poetics prior to being taught as a hermeneutics and a history” (De Man The Resistance to Theory, 25–26). Rhetoric and poetics are the keywords that refer, in de Man’s vocabulary, to the tropic nature of language. “The paradigmatic structure of language is rhetorical rather than representational or expressive of a referential, proper meaning” (de Man Allegories of Reading, 106). Irreducibly split between two senses of the word, “related but irreducibly discontinuous” (Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 275), representation emblematises or, tautologically represents, the split that is characteristic of modern subjectivity—and with it the terrible possibility that subjects

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can become objects, “the other side of the democratic and parliamentary ethics of representation, that is to say, the horror of calculable subjectivities” (Derrida Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 113). Bringing de Man’s Nietzscheanism into conversation with Marxism, Spivak’s critique of the subaltern is not about the constraints of representation per se but about the possibility of a non-representational politics within, or given, the rhetorical structure of language. Constrained by a view of representation as a question of limits, Lionnet and Shih’s minor transnationalism is wishfully focused solely on one of the “two codes, the political and the aesthetic” (Derrida ibid., 98), or one side of the “double body” (Derrida ibid., 95), that dislocates representation from within—as if the split of representation could be either naturalised or eliminated. This would be the side of representation covered by the German term Vertretung —a proxy that is performative and for which a potentially infinite series of metonymic substitutions, or mobile subalterns, can be enacted. In de Man’s rhetorical view of language, this form of representation concerns rhetoric as persuasion. If minor transnationalism’s refusal of anxiety is based on the lack of results-oriented productivity in the realm of politics, this lack is taken as a self-evident, unassailably persuasive truth of representation. In an age when the measure of productivity, or metrics, constitutes the basis of neoliberal debt capitalism’s usurpation of representative democracy, it goes without saying that “unproductive” refusal, such as the refusal of work, the refusal to repay debt, the refusal to stay in one place (or to be forced to move), the refusal to consume, the refusal to vote, etc., are hardly apolitical. From this perspective, Hoskins and Nguyen’s recognition of the fundamental ambivalence at the heart of transpacific studies’ institutional position, which “both critiques and is part of institutional, academic power and knowledge production” (Hoskins and Nguyen Transpacific Studies, 23), takes us at least halfway towards a reinscription of knowledge production beyond the politics of representation. The other side of representation, the one ignored by minor transnationalism, would be, in de Manian terms, linked to the rhetoric of tropology. This would be that part of representation covered by the German term Darstellung —representation in the sense of a portrait, but also in the sense of the ideological representation of labour power by value or the equally ideological representation of language by translation, typified by the notion of cultural transfer or cultural translation. This side of representation calls, in the context of area studies after the social turn,

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for a critique of the tropic nature of areas and anthropological difference in general (Sakai “The West and the Tropics of Area Studies”). What this means for us is that the problem of representation in the sense of both Darstellung and Vertretung can be fruitfully displaced by the problem of translation. In this vein, the critique of the subaltern both with and against Spivak can be fruitfully reworked as a critique of the position of the translator (Solomon “The Postimperial Etiquette and the Affective Structure of Areas,” 187 passim). In posing the question, Can the translator speak?, we ask how to take into account the idea that “the so-called relation of translation or of substitution already escapes[s] the orbit of representation” (Derrida Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 97)? The discontinuity revealed to us in the work of translation beyond or before representation is hardly a constraint but rather an opening. It is the sort of opening that is useful to understand the non-representational concept of class towards which Spivak was working in her subaltern essay. Hers is a concept of class that is very much like what Mario Tronti, one of the sources for Italian Operaismo (autonomist workerism), developed. In this context, class is not a descriptive definition of social segmentation; it is not a sociological concept but a political one that takes on meaning in relation to subjective formation. The subjectivity of class as used in this sense refers, Spivak stresses, to a “divided and dislocated subject whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other” (Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 276). Conceptually speaking, this is a subject whose only native language is translation—not translation as representation (i.e., not what takes place when we think of translation according to the schema of internationality), but translation as a social practice of intervention into the singular point where discontinuity is transformed into continuity, against the logic of species difference. In political terms, the idea behind this formulation is to wrest self-determination from the taxonomic logic of biopolitical aesthetics, to wrest it away from the ideological vision of “proper areas” and “balkanisation.” In conceptual terms, it also suggests tearing the concept of agency away from theories of mechanistic causality, ontological individualism, unified subjectivity, and essentialised identity. Such reckoning with Sinophone studies would simply be an expression of ressentiment, however, were one not to take into account at the same time the mechanics of academic shaming that often accompanies theoryas-dominance (Lionnet and Shih “Introduction,” 3). “[T]he criticism we often heard,” and to which I can anecdotally attest, “that ethnic studies was not ‘theoretically sophisticated’” (Shih and Lionnet “Creolization of

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Theory,” 13), is one that must be taken seriously. To address these issues properly, it would be necessary to dissect the areal construction of the “creolized theory” and “Taiwan theory” advocated by Shih and relate that to the intrinsically theoretical nature of area in general. For the time being, let me simply pose an oblique critique in terms of the following question: what is the regime under which one can claim simultaneously to oppose all political centrisms and yet implicitly call for the restitution of proper areas? Moreiras would simply say, in a facetious tone, that it is, “the dominant progressive ideology of our times” (Moreiras “Infinite Decolonization,” 587). In the final analysis, the Transpacific, like the Balkan, is not a toponym but a figure. It is a figure of the return of the repressed—the biopolitical, aesthetic, ideological configuration of area that just refuses, like romanticism, to be a period concept but is instead a volatile yet indeterminate limit both of and in modernity. As Slavoj Žižek says, “In the last hundred years, Balkan regularly has served as a kind of blank screen on which Western Europe projected its own ideological antagonisms…the topos that resuscitates a whole spleen of different forms of racism” (Žižek “The Spectre of Balkan”). Conveniently, the asymmetrical Chinese part of the Transpacific functions in a similar way. “It is a supplement in the Derridean sense,” continues Žižek, “a violent return of the repressed that must take place if the order is to reproduce itself.” Žižek’s understanding of that order calls for full citation: “insofar as the name ‘Balkan’ figures in the Western political fantasy space as the main embodiment of this inherent transgression, I am tempted to rephrase Lacan’s wellknown dictum that the Unconscious is structured like a language. In our century, at least, the European political Unconscious is definitely structured like Balkan.” If anti-centrism studies are any indication, the political unconscious of the Transpacific is structured like the Balkan, too. The psychoanalytic distinction between fear and anxiety offers an interesting way to think about the ideology of anti-centrism. For anti-centrism studies, fear (of centrism) camouflages the object that really affects the subject (in this case, that object would be the apparatus of area). Anxiety, by contrast, exposes the bordering practices that precede area (Ronen Aesthetics of Anxiety, 116). For Transpacific studies, the issue of anxiety is, politically speaking, crucial: anxiety is the affective charge associated with social practices of bordering. Today, the spectre of militarised

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accelerationism, or simply war, hanging over the Pacific highlights the necessity of confronting Transpacific anxiety in a radical way. The danger is that we will believe that anti-centrism, the latest version of infinite decolonisation, is a substitute for exiting the romantic horizon altogether. The ethos of anti-centrism allows area studies practitioners the alibi to locate themselves nowhere, suggesting that while certain populations are located in an area, those engaged in area studies are unique, post-national human beings who are not located somewhere at all, hence their ability to disavow concrete relations of power at the state level. This fantasy of being nowhere (and therefore anywhere) is the perfect example of the voice of the putative unity of the West—the template of area and the proliferation of “centrisms” that area breeds. It is instructive that Freud, when faced with the seemingly irresolvable paradox anxiety presents for subjectivity, turned instead to an analysis of the joke for an alternate possibility (Weber “Anxiety”). If the ultimate joke is the joke on representational meaning itself, this does not have to lead to a “politically unproductive anxiety” (Shih and Lionnet “Creolization of Theory,” 20), but could rather open the way to a new social and political practice of translation—not in the sense that jokes are untranslatable, but in the sense that the joke of representational language can only be shared out in the struggle to smash entirely the romantic horizon of area and anthropological difference that clouds the social practice of knowledge production today.

Lessons from the Taiwanese Underground In response to the nested forms of consensus bordering Taiwan from within and without, the underground culture that flourished in Taiwan during the first two decades following the end of martial law provides a particularly pertinent alternative to today’s new Cold War. During a period of approximately two decades, a multi-faceted counterculture motivated by ideas and tastes close in many ways to French situationism of the early 1960s flourished in Taiwan and gave birth to a seemingly endless series of happening-style events. Undoubtedly, the most emblematic of these events was the series of three festivals in Taipei initiated by the Broken Life Festival organised by Wu Chungwei in 1994–95. Too numerous and varied to catalogue fully here (see the soundtraces.tw website created by Jeph Lo, Amy Cheng, and Ho

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Tung-hung for more detail), other milestone events include the beginning of the annual music festival, Spring Scream, in 1994, the underground performance art culture around Chen Mei-mao’s Taiwan Walker theatre group and Wang Molin’s Body Phase Studio dance theatre group, and the underground rave scene that debuted in 1995. Bringing together installation art, performance art, music, and dance, these festivals—especially the early ones in the mid-1990s—put into practice the idea of the “temporary autonomous zone” (TAZ), yet without the burden of any claims of direct influence or inspiration. Typically, the venue of choice for such festivals and other events was an “open” space, such as flood control channels, abandoned factories, the undersides of major bridges, abandoned air raid shelters, private apartments, etc. Generally unauthorised, these festivals, raves, concerts, and other happenings gravitated towards “empty” or “abandoned” spaces that occupied a liminal zone between the vestiges of a martial law geography based on interdiction (which generally prevented access to shorelines, riversides, mountains, and forests) and the gathering forces of an urban bourgeoisie eager to channel freedom into the explosion of consumer culture and gentrification—a proliferation of Starbucks. Spatially speaking, they represented an attempt to realise and temporarily occupy an “outside” relative both to the authoritarian developmentalism of the past and the accelerating consumerism of the present. This opening to the “outside,” represented by the sinogram po used in the title of the Broken Life Festivals (po meaning, in its verbal sense, to break and, in its adjectival sense, cheap or broken), extends well beyond the spatial. In truth, what was really at stake in the underground culture of the 1990s was a reappropriation of the meaning of the “outside” as it was figured differently by authoritarianism and consumer capitalism. For authoritarianism, as we have seen, the outside was an ideological figure of the “free world” relative to the gulag of the communist one. For consumer capitalism, the outside is a space of commodified consensus in which the will to identity substitutes for popular sovereignty. Although politically powerless and extremely marginal, the Taiwanese underground culture of the first two decades after the end of martial law represents in a very real sense the repressed possibility of an alternate past and future, simultaneously liberated from both authoritarianism and neoliberalism. “Broken Spectre,” the title of a landmark exhibition about the underground culture of the 1990s that showed at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2017, inaugurated the beginning of official institutional recognition for the cultural achievements of the underground era and their incorporation

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into the institution of art history. Much of the discussion that accompanied the exhibition in Taipei was focused, with good reason, on the micropolitics of recognition in the institutions of art history, where recognition is invariably accompanied by the thorny problems of appropriation, funding, and artistic critique. While this debate is extremely important for the status and future of art institutions and publics in Taiwan, I would rather focus, in the context of this work, on the implications of 1990s underground culture for macropolitics in Taiwan, particularly with regard to the legacy of authoritarianism and the transition to neoliberalism. In my reading of 1990s underground culture—in which I was a direct participant throughout that decade and the following one—it provides important clues for constructing a genealogy of the present in which the elements repressed by the consensus reigning today might become visible once again. Curator Yu Wei’s thematic choice of the “broken spectre” to describe that era is a brilliant move, combining as it does the theme of the fragment, the breach, or the discard conveyed by the character po with that of the spectral and the tenebrous (conveyed by the character ying, meaning shadow, and a component of the two-character word, dianying, or movie). Yu Wei’s emphasis on the spectral in this case refers to an image from the past that continues to haunt the present in the form of a question about how to understand and represent the underground culture that flourished for approximately two decades in Taiwan? Based on Yu Wei’s insight, I would like to add a somewhat different emphasis or approach to the question of the spectral. Rather than emphasising the effect of the past upon the present, I would like to focus on the effect of the present upon both the past and the future, specifically the way the present is haunted by its own obsessive compulsion with uniformity and consensus, as opposed to dissensus and alternatives. In effect, the approach I propose consists of reversing the meaning of the outside as it is ideologically constructed in works like Detention and Loving Purely, despite the four decades of transition that separate the two. The world in which the dominant discourse in Taiwan today sees itself occupying, a free world that fancies itself external to authoritarianism, is, I submit, a spectre of authoritarianism in its neoliberal variation. Today’s anti-authoritarian consensus is the site and source of the haunting of the present. Rather than conceiving of the present as exterior to a world of shadows, ghosts, and monsters, located either in the past or in a dystopian China still tied to the past, might we not instead conceive of the present as a spectral world within which we must strive anew to recover the outside and alternative futures?

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If I turn to a work of political ontology for clues about this outside, it is not just because I share a passion for thought (philo-sophy) but rather because the ontologisation of politics is imposed on us by neoliberalism and its demands for identities forged in victimhood (Shi). In a work titled The Existential Communism of Jean-Luc Nancy, Frédéric Neyrat explains how Nancy brings a crucial supplement to the idea of dissensus famously elaborated by Jacques Rancière—an idea that has formed an essential premise of this work. Inspired by Nancy, Neyrat points out that dissensus alone is insufficient. One must always think the relationship that produces dissensus, i.e., the distance, divergence, discontinuity, or deviation that calls it forth: Democracy forces us to think the dis – distance, deviation (écart ) – in an ontological manner before thinking about it in political terms. … Democracy refers to something that is not first of all political, i.e., to something that belongs neither to a mode of government nor to the attention paid to a particular object such as the living, for example, and its ‘biopolitical’ engagements. … Politics will henceforth designate the practice that prevents that kind of identification and that kind of confusion. For Nancy, politics should not give form to a consummate politics (archi-politique) of identity but should rather assure that this communal identitarian form does not take place. … What must be produced is not a communal form of identity but a deviation (écart) that one must let be. (Neyrat Le communisme existential, 57–59)

This deviation was precisely the heart of the Taiwanese underground culture’s passionate engagement with the outside. On this point, in particular, I have to disagree with—or, better yet, deviate from—Yu Wei’s characterisation of that culture via the trope of the “rebellious body.” While a somatic form of transgression certainly could be discerned in the abundance of nudity, S&M, ecstasy, and scatological themes that permeated the Taiwanese underground culture of the 1990s, transgression is never far away, as Foucault has shown, from constituting the gesture necessary to the institution and re-instantiation of the norm. Rather, the central themes of the underground culture could be best summarised by the ideas of non-sovereignty and non-identity, where the prefix non- does not mean the “opposite of” in an exclusionary sense but suggests an inclusive alternative. This is, in brief, the spirit that was behind the idea of an “alter-native” identity named “fake Taiwanese” advocated during a brief, incandescent moment by the intellectual collective of Isle Margin on the

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cover of issue no. 8 (July 1993). The non-sovereignty of the performative practices engaged in during the happenings and festivals of that period was not so much political as ontological. The acts and performances that Yu Wei might call rebellious or transgressive were, I submit, a deviation from sovereignty based on identity, constituting an abandonment of the fantasy of sovereign control that begins with the presumption, at the core of liberalism’s philosophy of possessive individualism, of the givenness of the “individual”—a unit assumed to be identical with the physical body understood as an enclosed unity. Rejecting sovereignty at the most basic level of fantasised mastery over a fictitious self, the situationist-style culture of the Taiwanese underground was deeply political precisely in its rejection of politics understood as the politics of sovereignty based on identity and the politics of agency based on decomposition. While the Taiwanese underground shared important thematic concerns of French situationism, it was completely unburdened by the legacy of colonial extermination that haunted the situationists—particularly in reference to Algeria (Yoon, “Cinema Against the Permanent Curfew”). In fact, the legacy of imperialism was precisely what prevented the French situationists from understanding the crucial significance of the outside for capitalism’s process of self-reproduction. Today, one can only lament the spirit of blind Eurocentrism that led Attila Kotanyí and Raoul Vaneigem to self-confidently declare in the Paris of 1961 that, “[it is only in] the modern nations where the possibilities for a decisive transformation of society are concentrated” (Kotanyí and Vaneigem “Instructions,” 3). Unlike Paris, the Taipei of the immediate post-Martial Law era still had not yet established even the most rudimentary institutions necessary to the appropriation of underground and street culture, such as the art school and the museum of contemporary art. Taipei’s status as an ugly urban space stunted by decades of martial law not only protected the Taiwanese underground from precocious, life-sapping appropriation, it also helped the underground define its desires not in terms of bourgeois gentrification but in terms of the TAZ. Predictably enough, the Taiwanese underground eventually succumbed to its own inner limitations that invited appropriation by the rising tide of neoliberal consensus/ identity culture. Following a global trend described with alarming clarity by Brian Holmes, the Taiwanese underground charted a trajectory from one form of domination known as the authoritarian personality to a new form of domination that Brian Holmes terms, “the flexible personality,” made even more effective by the image of freedom it espoused and

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pretended to confer. The underground culture’s emphasis on individualism, spontaneity, refusal of work, the aleatory encounter, getting high, and the spectacle, all turned out to be elements that could be easily incorporated into the neoliberal self-branding movement and the discourse of multiculturalism. In an important review of recent intellectual history in Taiwan and its relation to the development of social movements and democratic transition, Yin-Bin Ning indeed argues that the multicultural pluralism that has often been cited as a hallmark of Taiwanese democracy since the 2010s hides deeper forms of structural exclusion. After explaining how multiculturalism emerged as a political negation and social reversal of the mono-culturalism imposed by the state during the Martial Law era, Ning draws attention to the re-composition of hegemony on new grounds: Under multiculturalism, social difference has been recognised and tolerated (subsuming difference, e.g., acknowledging that Taiwan is composed of four main ethnicities or promoting the discourse of “new Taiwanese,” etc.) In other words, in the face of those who had previously been seen [during the period of Martial Law] as deviants, [Taiwanese society] has now adopted enlightened incorporation via the procedures of risk assessment and well-ordered management. With respect to a certain kind of deviancy, however, those minority “demons” deemed to be “incorrigible” (i.e., those whose normalisation is thought to be impossible), one no longer has any tolerance for and, in fact, actively excludes this type of demon—seen, for instance, in the zero tolerance and demonisation, invisibilisation, and silencing of paedophilia, domestic violence, promiscuity, “betrayal of Taiwan in support of China,” etc. (Ning “Renmin minzhu 20 nian hou de xunsi,” 165)

Ning’s analysis of multicultural pluralism in the post-Martial Law era reveals it to be sustained by a discursive structure of “conceit” (ziman). Beginning with the conceit of history, Ning shows that even the most progressive movements in the era of democratic transition in Taiwan were essentially indebted to the fairy tale narrative of post-World War Two Pax Americana hegemony. Modelled on exactly the same sort of “end of history” narrative that was at the heart of Jacques Derrida’s analysis of spectrality, temporality, and neoliberal empire at the beginning of the 1990s in Specters of Marx (discussed at length in Part I of this work), the Taiwanese historical narrative identified by Ning twenty-five years later is an ancillary version of the US one, adapted to the postcolonial context,

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that normalises and naturalises orientalism, global white hegemony, and neoliberalism. The conceit of being on the right side of history, without deviation, effectively hides, as Ning points out in relation to Taiwan, neocolonial dependence, imperial hegemony, and structural class difference built into the professionalisation of the regime of representation. Within that context, Taiwanese multicultural plurality was constructed on the basis of the rise of the professional managerial class, typified in the cultural sphere by state feminism (see the section “Gendered zhuti” in Part I for discussion), that arrogates for itself the right to adjudicate on the line dividing normal from deviant status in the composition of the national community. In effect, Ning’s analysis brings to light the processes of decomposition that are the precondition for the constitution of a national people destined to serve the need attributed to satellite states within Pax Americana hegemony for the representation of local agency. It is precisely these processes of decomposition that are hidden by the representational regime of postcolonial agency within the novel structure of colonial governmentality under erasure developed under Pax Americana. Hence, to pose the question of local agency without demanding an account of the genealogy of that agency is tantamount to accepting a form of relationship that is ultimately colonial (and capitalist) in nature, despite appearances to the contrary sustained by the discourse of identity within multicultural pluralism. To be sure, in the underground culture of the two decades from 1990 to 2010, decomposition was celebrated—often in scatological ways (e.g., the student journal titled Dabianbao, literally “Shit News,” that ran from 1993 to 1994)—without a clear sense of the processes of re-composition underway. In retrospect, the problems of Taiwanese underground culture and its impending appropriation by the Taiwan Consensus after 2010 were precociously prefigured by the turn taken in the late 1980s by the acclaimed film director Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Beginning his career in the New Taiwan Cinema, Hou ended the 1980s with a career-defining breakthrough moment in A City of Sadness (1989), the first Taiwanese film to win the coveted Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. Contrary to the overwhelming tribute paid to that film, I would rather highlight Hou’s Daughter of the Nile from two years previous (1987)—the same year as the end of Martial Law. Unanimously panned by critics, Daughter

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was considered an “oddity” and a “disappointing step back” (Udden No Man an Island, 84), with perhaps only Christopher Lupke seeing some positive value in it. Symptomatically, Lupke recognises that Daughter is “best viewed as a transition piece” (Lupke The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 17). The “transition” to which Lupke refers is, of course, related to Hou’s career as a director, to the transition from New Taiwan Cinema with which he started to the historical epics for which he became truly famous—a different type of transition, thus, than the sort of historical transitions exemplified by the February 28th Incident narrated by A City of Sadness that came to define the mature cinema with which Hou is generally associated. Understood in a broader sense, however, the theme of transition can still function as a guiding thread for understanding the difference between the two films and their relation to the historical transition of which they were at once both an avatar and a contributing element. Precisely with respect to transition, the difference between the two films could not be greater. Despite City’s focus on a traumatically disruptive moment in modern Taiwanese history, the film’s approach to history smooths out discontinuity into continuity. The best place to see this appropriative mechanism at work is in the depiction of identities and language. The Japanese characters in the film speak a standard Japanese roughly equivalent to contemporary T¯ oky¯ o-ben while talking about stereotypical things like cherry trees and kimonos. Faced with narrating a population confronted by traumatic repatriation to a “mainland Japan” in which they would have never lived and whose standard language they would have spoken with a provincial accent that would have easily given rise to discrimination in Japan’s highly regionalised society (indeed, many of these Taiwan-born Japanese citizens were extremely reluctant to be “repatriated” as such), the film instead opts for a fictional homogenising representation. The same homogenising touch is transferred to the other ethnic groups that appear in the film, starting of course with the hoklo Taiwanese, to whom are attributed the fiction of a common language that historically never existed (Japanese was the first common language imposed by the state on all populations living on the island). It goes without saying that the film relies on the discourse of proto-national ethnicity to avoid the profound implications of formal citizenship amidst ethnicised inequality. Just like African-Americans in the US, persons of Taiwanese ethnicity enjoyed national citizenship in Imperial Japan while

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still being subjected to practices that qualified them as second-class citizens. Yet, just like African-Americans in the US, Taiwanese were Japanese and could avail themselves of institutional resources, such as military service, to seek the equality nominally guaranteed by law. The situation depicted in Daughter is, by contrast, defined by a form of hybridity so profound, the category of the identity as a whole is effectively displaced. Jack Kao’s mandarin, combining the retroflex suffix er typically associated with waishengren with the conversion of retroflex consonants into dental ones typically associated with benshengren, beautifully depicts this hybridity in the phrase, guanyu xuexiao de s(h)i-er (“concerning the stuff about school” at 10:10 in the film), in which the standard mandarin shi (retroflex) is pronounced si (dental) with the addition of a retroflex suffix (er). Whereas identity in City is canned into the continuum of discrete types, in Daughter it is diffuse and, for that reason, defused. The conflicts that occur in Daughter—quite violently at times—revolve around struggles within an urban subalternity equally shared by all, rather than distributed into homogeneous national identities implacably opposed by history. Despite the word “city” in the title, A City of Sadness has much less to do with the urban than Daughter of the Nile. It is the latter that is concerned with the city, while the former is focused exclusively on the nation. Whereas City is suffused with the sort of sympathy necessary for the establishment of national community, Daughter stands resolutely outside the discourse of national community altogether. In that sense, Daughter is very much a reflection of the zeitgeist of the anti-national Taiwanese underground of the day, while City represents an about face and total appropriation of said underground cultural scene by an emergent above ground hegemony. In that sense, the “transition” in Hou’s career identified by Lupke and others presages the sort of cultural transition that will take two decades to consummate, as democratic transition becomes a midwife for the substitution of one stultifying “consensus” for another. In that context, it is entirely germane to conclude that the difference in target market between the two films is symptomatic of a broader cultural politics that defines the sphere of civil society in neoliberal Pax Americana. Whereas Daughter of the Nile, starring the pop singer Yang Ling at the height of her career, was squarely aimed at a domestic audience, A City of Sadness was, like most art films produced in the non-West at the time, resolutely targeted at the foreign film festival circuit. In that sense, A City of Sadness was much more self-consciously produced within

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the schema of cofiguration and the modern regime of translation than Daughter of the Nile. The lesson to be learned from these stories of appropriation is that the question of the outside is not simply an ontological one but also a political and economic one, central to all capitalist transitions starting with what Marx called “primary accumulation” (Walker “The Accumulation of Difference,” 72). Until we learn that lesson, we will very likely remain, as modern Taiwanese history instructs us, trapped of our own volition in the haunted schoolyard of traumatic capitalist transitions, mistaking the nested transpacific consensus of the militarised neoliberal identity state for freedom.

The Other Struggle The historical continuities between the new Cold War and the old one are manifold and obvious. How we choose to understand that continuity may depend, ultimately, on the assumptions and presuppositions that we bring to the understanding of modern history. The Consensus advanced by the post-1989 human rights discourse proposes transcending political modernity’s vicious cycle of violence between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces. In doing so, it surreptitiously prolongs and institutionalises the counter-revolutionary discourse in a new form. Today’s Left is defined more by the identification of victims against perpetrators than the analysis of production and reproduction. While the struggle between democracy and autocracy looks like an inheritance of the older human rights discourse that had been once used by the revolutionaries to oppose state terror, in the age of crowd-sourced corporate sovereignty, that opposition itself has been appropriated and weaponised. In contrast to that view, I have proposed an orientation along a different axis. This axis is that of figuration. Arriving at this position through the critique of the modern regime of translation instigated by Naoki Sakai, I recently became aware that it shares important similarities with the trajectory described by the Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter. The point of departure for Wynter’s project lies in the autopoietic nature of the human, a term that she derives from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s work on self-organising, self-referential biological systems. Wynter constructs an historical narrative that places self-organisation, or the autopoietic nature of living organisms, at the centre of human

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history. Going beyond Varela and Maturana (who disagreed among themselves about the applicability of autopoiesis to human societies), Wynter establishes the socio-cultural in analogical relation to the biological, reinvigorating the idea of sociogenesis first elaborated by Frantz Fanon. While respecting the autonomy and specificity of each, Wynter asserts that the biological and the social are tied together by an analogical vector at the centre of which stands the human. More properly speaking, “the human” would be the name for this vector, an analogon that can be defined or activated in variable ways. Historically speaking, Wynter asserts that the human analogon has been dominated by two successive versions of the human that arose in Europe, then extended themselves globally, fatally shrouding or mystifying knowledge of this autopoietic analogical relationship that is the human. The first, the Christian version, saw the human in terms of an axial split between transcendence and immanence, mystified by the terms of moral self-perfection; the second saw the human in terms of will to power and objective mastery, mystified in terms of scientific truth. These two mis/understandings of the human have come together in a particularly modern construction, called “Man,” that combines the supposed objectivity of truth with the supposed superiority of certain kinds of being. Extrapolated from an ideal type that combines racial (white), class (middle), gender (male), and sexual (hetero) hierarchies in a universal projection, the Figure of “Man” prevents humans from realising their essence as the analogon—an essence that consists in being the species that intervenes in its own speciation via the analogical feedback circuit between biology and language, zoe and mythos. To remedy that situation, Wynter proposes a new sort of knowledge, one that from today’s standards dominated by the “science” of “Man,” would appear heretical. This heretical, new knowledge, unburdened by the Eurocentrism of the Figure of Man, would cultivate the self-aware, “self-troping” nature of the autopoietic species, putting a definitive end to coloniality, slavery, and the quest for mastery. Somewhat like Wynter, I have attempted to critique the human sciences; unlike Wynter, I approach this problem from the marginal perspective of the area studies—a perspective that I trust shows the extent to which the area studies occupy a central position despite (or because of) marginality. This critique reveals the necessity of a dual approach that links social formations “in the world” to objects of study “in the institutions of knowledge production.” One of the main arguments running throughout this work is that the geocultural region known as “Taiwan” cannot be

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dissociated from the production of knowledge in area studies, even if the field of “Taiwan studies” is relatively new. Questioning the legitimacy of an area studies’ methodology that takes anthropologically coded objects as the basis for disciplinary knowledge, I have pleaded instead for a shift from objects to subjects. In the course of this critique, we are given to see that whatever “Figure of Man” is dominant at a certain point is always a coproduction or “cofiguration” that occurs via an implicit representation of translation. This co-figured representational framework gives birth to a world schema of internationality that naturalises social speciation by the transposition of logical categories (individual-genre-species) taken from biological speciation. This procedure happens to be useful to the capital relation as it seeks to resolve the conundrum of reproduction, or how to produce the one thing that it cannot make on its own—living labour. Precisely because living labour is the one thing that capital cannot make, or again, the one thing that is not internal to the abstraction of social relationships that is capital, it requires a supplement, something that can provide the basis for setting in motion the circulation of commodities and make the capital-labour relation look both perfectly natural and fully free and equal for all parties involved. As the Japanese Marxist theoretician Nagahara Yutaka has observed: “‘capital’ is extraneous to the social” (Nagahara “A Sketch,” 147). This irreparable exteriority places “capital” in an extremely tenuous situation. “[I]n order for ‘capital’ to be able to come to terms with the social on which ‘capital’ lives, ‘capital’ has the task of incessantly inventing or fabricating something that seems to be at once coexistent and simultaneous with the social, something that allows ‘capital’ to remain inside the social ” (ibid.) The gyrations needed to make what is exterior and posterior appear interior and anterior result in a peculiar, if not perverse, appropriation of exteriority, on the one hand, and an equally peculiar, if not perverse, projection of interiority, on the other. “You may well suspect,” as Nagahara writes, “that to say that is very tautological or circular,” before reminding readers in section subtitled “Where to start?” that this circularity is “the very point at issue” (ibid.). The circular movement described by Nagahara leads to forms of subjective temporality that emphasise remembrance of that which one was supposed to have been in the past but which are really just a posteriori projections upon the past motivated by the anticipation or desire for what one would like to become in the future. This form of retroactive temporality, essential to capitalist reproduction, is precisely the form of transitional justice favoured by the

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contemporary human rights discourse reflected in the Taiwanese movie Detention. Privileging the sort of retrospective temporality that sustains the modern regime of translation, transitional justice becomes a form of complicity with the injustice of capitalist accumulation in the present. Nagahara’s discovery of the torsional movement of capital is crucial for our understanding of figuration. Wynter would object to calling it a supplement. Instead, as Sara-Maria Sorentino has helpfully explained, Wynter would have us put the plantation economy, not the wage relation, at the heart of the colonial–imperial capitalist modernity. To do so is to recognise that the struggles over the Figure of Man are central. Allow me to rephrase this requirement—which I accept without reserve— in the light of Nagahara’s discovery: if capitalism is a component of the Figure of Man, then the Figure of Man is the ruse by means of which the capital relation pretends to be something innate to the social, as if exchange were the anthropological foundation of homo sapiens. (Hence, a great deal of anthropological knowledge since the nineteenth century has been devoted precisely to that bourgeois project—a situation that led Nietzsche to propose indebtedness, rather than exchange, as the origin of human society.) Area studies intervenes in this configuration as the place where the conditions for the reproduction of the Figure of Man propitious to capitalist accumulation are secured. Sharing essential qualities in common with both deconstruction and communism, area studies are nevertheless infused by the spirit of neoliberal financialisation and Dullesist double standards, making them into the institutional site where an anticommunist, antiblack ethos is “naturally” reproduced—most often in the guise of humanitarian rescue. Area studies and anti-centrism studies share with neoliberal financial markets a basis in self-referentiality, the core component of an Ur-fascism that engulfs geopolitics today, as Rada Ivekovi´c has suggested (Ivekovi´c Migration, 15 passim). To observe the common ground among the three is not to suggest that economics can be explained by metaphysics but rather to attempt to understand how knowledge production is connected to innovative new forms of colonial governmentality and value extraction. Taking a cue from the asymmetric duality of the border, I propose that one way to understand the new, not-so Cold War is to look at the series of oppositions it organises. Beneath the opposition between liberalism and authoritarianism lies the long term, primary struggle over the “Cofigurations of Man,” divided, according to the logic of species or specific

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difference, into anthropological difference (i.e., the difference between the human species and other species) and colonial difference (i.e., the differences within the human species that are understood as social forms of specific, or species, difference). The new Cold War, like the previous Cold War, is an attempt to channel the “other struggle” into temporalities that serve capitalist accumulation, effectively preserving global white hegemony and preventing alternative translations/transitions of justice. “The Other Struggle,” as I have called it, is essentially an anticolonial and anticapitalist struggle, provided that we understand: 1) the former term in a sense that is much broader than, or even fundamentally different from, national liberation; and 2) the latter term in the sense of a “socialist” transition that goes beyond an appropriation of the productive and technical forces of state and society to encompass a series of metonymic transitions, such as the ecological transition, the gender transition, the species transition, etc., that demand nothing less than a rupture with the extractive model of capitalist civilisation that has brought us to anthropocenic catastrophe. Addressing the war in Ukraine, Boris Buden suggests updating the old motto attributed to Leon Trotsky: “Only a revolution can end the war” (Buden “The West at War”). If war is the only way in which Pax Americana can imagine transition, the only way to transition out of that belligerent default transitology would be through revolution. Revolution here does not necessarily mean the violent appropriation of the state and the means of production by the proletariat. Even a redefinition of the proletariat beyond the confines of the national working class, beginning instead with the figure of the migrant, is not sufficient to renew the concept of revolution today. For Buden, the only way to measure the revolution is to see the extent to which it can create alternatives that otherwise look politically impossible. In the context of Ukraine, this would be a polity that is neither “Russian” nor “Western.” For those outside of Ukraine, the question is not whether to send weapons, but rather how to transform one’s own politics in a way that will assist those in Ukraine to realise the invention of this impossible alternative. If Eastern Europe forms an important subtext that runs throughout this book, the reason for this congruence is not just because of Eastern Europe’s profound experience with transitions (both capitalist and socialist) but also because of its investment in philological nationalism in the face of universalism and imperialism. The historical experience of Eastern Europe

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provides a rich archive for understanding the way that capitalism manages the outside via the apparatus of area and anthropological difference. Climate science journalists like Gaia Vince argue that the massive migrations unleashed by catastrophic climate change will only increase in size. In no time, the geopolitical geography of the world inherited from the colonial–imperial modernity stands to be completely transformed by these climate-imposed migrations in much the same way that a tsunami washes over the land (Vince “Where We’ll End Up Living as the Planet Burns”). Vince’s prognostications are a startling reminder of the fact that the only transformation of global social geography that we can imagine in the age of climate change is the catastrophic one. In the geopolitical imaginary of Pax Americana, the catastrophe of war is the only way to imagine transition. In truth, catastrophe is easier to imagine than even something as apparently simple as “Eurasia.” Hence, the impending disfiguration of global socio-political geography by the catastrophic forces of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene serves as a pertinent reminder of the revolutionary change in the mechanisms of cofiguration of which we are capable. Seen from this perspective, the significance of China’s Belt and Road Initiative consists precisely in the figural meaning of “Eurasia”—yet another figure, like “black communism,” that is constitutionally impossible within the horizon of Pax Americana. Only “revolution” can end the “transition-by-war” baked into Pax Americana. Taking a stand to put an end to that war-transition does not mean giving oneself the alibi of anti-centrist equidistance any more than it means that revolution is just a futile exercise in cathartic violence. The very threat that revolution poses to financial stability—seen in the everpresent potential for capital flight were Taiwan to embrace a revolutionary socialist alternative—can arguably become a new path towards transcendence with justice. As Robert Meister writes, “by showing how political struggle can raise the present value of the revolutionary option without a revolution, Marx often illustrates what it would mean to move beyond the binary alternatives of contagion or defeat” (Meister Justice Is an Option, 191). The source of this intriguing citation, Justice Is an Option, constitutes a fascinating extension of Meister’s previous work on transitional justice that has served as an inspiration for many of my reflections on the practice of transitional justice in Taiwan in Part I. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Meister’s more recent work for my purposes here consists

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in the potentially analogous relation between financialisation and translation. Two paragraphs near the conclusion of the work are emblematic of the connection: My pragmatic innovation here has been to set the present value of greater justice in society at par with the market price of a macroeconomic liquidity premium. Optionality of the kind that finance illustrates is more broadly about synchronizing heterogeneous temporalities, indexing heterogeneous cultural discourses, tokenizing the relative rates of change within and among heterogenous systems of valuing and ranking—the list could go on. Such forms of heterogeneity no longer need to be reduced to a general equivalent if liquidity can be added through options that can index their changes to those in other, disparate value realms. I thus imagine a highly financialized political activism that is both materially subversive of the liquidity of major financial markets when it chooses to be, and symbolically (democratically) more legitimate than those markets at those very moments. But although much of the foregoing argument has been about the valuation and source of funding of historical justice in the present, its underlying purpose has been to find a new voice in which a justice-seeking subject can speak, calling other such subjects into being. (Meister Justice Is an Option, 198)

While I will not pretend to have fully understood Meister’s idea of financialised political activism (once again, time constraints have conspired to prevent me from fully digesting that work before the delivery deadline for this manuscript), I think that it is not difficult to recognise that what Meister is talking about essentially amounts to seeing financialisation as a social practice in much the same way that I have described translation. My suggestion at the end of an earlier section that a “translational practice of non-knowledge could become an alternative way to socialise the surplus that the regime of translation otherwise diverts into sustaining the reproduction of social relations necessary for capitalist accumulation” was written before I became aware of Meister’s work in Justice Is an Option. If I understand Meister’s argument, optionality provides a framework for reconceptualising the phenomenon of arbitrage discussed in chapter six as an essential part of institutional area studies. Hopefully, I will have a chance in the future to revise and flesh out this idea in the light of Meister’s recent writings on the subject. Looking ahead to that project, it is clear that the rhetoric of voice, speech, and calling used

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by Meister in the passage cited above is neither incidental nor coincidental. The fact that Meister envisions this social practice as one that is capable of calling unprecedented, formerly impossible-to-imagine subjects of transitional justice into being brings it into harmony with the way that I understand the social practice of translation. In the struggle to invent an “impossible” alternative to the opposition/cofiguration between China and the West—to invent, in other words, the singular site at which transitional justice can “take place” in/ out/for/with/from/towards Taiwan—the first step is to recognise that the two entities of China and the West are not commensurate in any sense despite their mutual cofiguration. The West is not an area like any other but is rather the template for a relationship that structures area in general. There is no Pax Sinica coming to replace Pax Americana in the way that the US Empire extended the British one. If the border is always asymmetrical, this means that we need to develop asymmetrical understandings of imperial hegemony. Where many fall back on the alibi of equidistance to characterise the new Cold War as a conflict between two powers that are equally imperialist and capitalist, I see instead the asymmetries of bordering practices that demand an alternate analysis— one that begins with the possibility of the end of the modern regime of translation and the apparatus of area and anthropological difference. For that reason, Boris Buden’s formula of “neither Western nor Russian” for a revolutionary Ukraine does not seem applicable to Taiwan (and probably Ukraine, as well) without modification. Mark McConaghy’s recent intervention, “Can Taiwanese Nationalists Think Zhonghua Once Again? Reflections on an Impossible Confederation Amid the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis,” calls for a re-engagement with the category of the “Sino,” or Zhonghua, while stressing national multiplicity and criticizing PRC imperial ambitions. Despite problems in many of the details of McConaghy’s argument, it could still be a necessary and constructive corollary to the principle of taking the asymmetry of the border as a starting point in lieu of the fantasy of equidistance. Just as China’s problems are not exclusively Chinese problems, Taiwanese Independence can only be realised in relation to a form of transitional justice that does not exclude China or put it on the other side of a militarised border but begins “in the middle” of a relationship with it. Posted to the Positions Politics website, McConaghy’s proposition incited a vitriolic response from Brian Hioe that was initially published on Hioe’s New Bloom Magazine website and to which Positions Politics subsequently provided a link.

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Both Hioe’s criticisms and the preamble provided by the editorial group of Positions Politics reveal issues related to the libidinal economy of the Taiwan Consensus that have concerned us throughout this work, hence a quick discussion of these writings might be useful to illustrate the affective politics of the Consensus. Calling attention to this affective aspect, the preamble written by editors of Positions Politics states, “Brian takes issue with Mark’s piece and we recognise these critiques as important substantive discussion points. We powerfully object, however, to Brian’s tone, which we read as contemptuous and condescending” (Positions Politics “Brian Hioe, Can Chinese Nationalists (or Their Apologists) Please Shut Up about Zhonghua?”). Since the Positions Politics editorial group draws attention to the “substantive” aspects of Hioe’s article that allegedly merit discussion beyond the objectionable “tone” employed, it would be fair and apposite to begin with the substance of Hioe’s argument. The concluding sentence of Hioe’s article provides an appropriate place to begin: “As an internationalist,” Hioe writes, “it seems rather basic that one must criticise all nationalisms whatsoever, rather than try and replace the nationalisms of comparatively small states with the nationalisms of infinitely larger, expansionist imperial states, but apparently this is too much to ask for” (Hioe “Can Chinese Nationalists Shut Up?”; emphasis in the original). Hioe’s claim to criticise “all nationalisms whatsoever” does not stand up to evaluation. If one were indeed serious about undertaking such criticism, it would be impossible to sustain the distinction between migrants and nationals that Hioe defends when he writes earlier in the article, “One greatly wonders why Positions Politics did not seek any Taiwanese perspectives on the issue, though at the very least the author is a resident of Taiwan” (ibid.). Any criticism of nationalisms that aspires to universal application would begin from a critique of the norms that constitute membership in the national community, yet this is manifestly not what Hioe does. In addition to brandishing an ethno-nationalist norm that distinguishes McConaghy, a resident white collar migrant worker (who has expressed, in written correspondence with the author, his intention to apply for permanent residency and citizenship in Taiwan), from nationals (those to whom Hioe refers as “Taiwanese”), Hioe further implies that membership in the national community is equally determined by the norm of political correctness: “somehow despite being located in Taiwan, McConaghy’s perception seems to more accord with perceptions from outside Taiwan than within” (ibid.). Dissensus, or simply disagreement, is identified here as an anomaly, expressed in the interrogative

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“somehow,” as if disagreement pertains to the realm of the unthinkable. Furthermore, the putative anomaly of the unthinkable is immediately identified with exteriority figured as the spatial border between different national peoples. It is hard to think of any gesture more typical of modern nationalism than this. At the conclusion to his article, Hioe’s characterisation of McConaghy’s position as, “some white man’s Orientalist imaginings,” adds an element of racialising essentialism to the politics of ethno-nationalist normativity. It goes without saying that Hioe’s racialised ethnonationalism contradicts his stated goal of undertaking a critique of nationalisms in general, yet this is invariably what happens when the pretence of equidistance (and hence the irrelevance of borders, bordering, and mediation) is adopted. Seen in this light, the “tone” of Hioe’s article, from which the editors of Positions Politics felt compelled to mark their distance and rejection, is integral to Hioe’s “substantive” position that Positions Politics considers “important.” The two simply cannot be separated. Hioe’s approach basically amounts to the Twitterized version of the Taiwan Consensus, i.e., the libidinal economy of the Consensus that is constructed via digital communities of shareveillance, sanctioned conspiracy theories, privatisation, transparency, decompositional agency, state-corporate disinformation, and grassroots mobilisation for the corporate security state that we discussed in Part One. Within that libidinal economy, any view that does not conform to the norm could only mean that such ideas are outlandish and simply not “Taiwanese,” an exteriority that then becomes not just the pretext for an aggressive, insulting “tone” but also the moral obligation to apply such ostracising “tone” against those who challenge the Consensus. Hence, it is not surprising that Hioe’s reading of McConaghy’s argument depends on misreading. Whereas McConaghy makes it abundantly clear that he sees certain actions by the PRC as colonial, Hioe takes him to task for not recognising the PRC’s imperial ambitions. Whereas McConaghy makes it clear that Zhonghua includes many different nations, Hioe tries to fudge an explanation to argue that Zhonghua multiplicity is “slippery” and ultimately just a front for Han chauvinistic nationalism. In short, Hioe’s racialised ethnonationalism compels him to deliberately misread McConaghy’s positions to make McConaghy fulfil the role of the other that Hioe’s own nationalism anticipates. One could develop a similar argument about the role that Hioe’s postcolonial nationalism plays in relation to US imperial nationalism. That might explain why some North American-based intellectuals, heavily invested in the modern regime of translation and the

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cofiguration between imperial nationalism and minor postcolonial nationalism on which Pax Americana and the discourse of the alibi rely, actively require someone like Hioe to play the role of the representative of local voice and local agency. To claim that Hioe’s “tone” can be dissociated from his “substantive points” is to indirectly admit one’s own implication in the Taiwan Consensus, revealing its essentially international nature in the process. By contrast, McConaghy’s proposal to seek mutual accommodation on both sides of the Taiwan Strait through the multiplicity of Zhonghua is decidedly more progressive in the sense that McConaghy does not use the pretence of aerial equidistance to dissimulate a nationalist agenda complicit with US imperial nationalism, hence is much more likely to succeed in creating the conditions for de-escalation in the Taiwan Strait. Unfortunately, the covert sphere inscribed in the humanities and the social sciences since the Cold War—nowhere more so than in the area studies—means that just when the sort of analyses that we have been proposing are most needed, the area studies are once again being lined up, or rather lining themselves up, to provide intellectual justifications for the coming war-transition. Instead of critiquing the new Cold War system, instead of pursuing epistemic decolonisation across the humanities and especially in the area studies, progressive scholars congregate in “safe spaces” adjacent to the corporate state covert sphere where they give themselves the alibi of opposing US imperialism, as if epistemic decolonisation had already taken place, while supporting the same sort of minor philological nationalism necessary to Pax Americana hegemony. The less critical ones agitate even for the “decolonisation” that will serve as a pretext for the dismemberment and incorporation of US “peer competitors.” What is missing from both approaches are the critical, decolonial analyses of the area studies’ crucial place within the financialisation and militarisation of the university and the ways in which these forms of knowledge production are an essential part of the governmental techniques that aid and abet capitalist transitions in Taiwan and elsewhere. Rather than defend an indefensible, international disciplinary formation, let us look instead for alternatives to the areal/aerial structure of knowledge production on which capital relies to resolve the conundrum of its innate exteriority to social relations. Otherwise, the militaristic neoliberal appropriation of social cooperation will continue sowing destruction and discord until it is simply too late. In the face of the wartransition currently programmed for China/Taiwan by Pax Americana,

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a reorganisation of the university that begins by breaking the modern regime of translation (and with it the areal presuppositions of the disciplinary divisions that constitute the human sciences) may not instantly bring peace and justice to the region but is certainly more important than ever. Sadly, the disavowal and complicity with the covert sphere that permeates the area studies gravely complicates this task. Indeed, one wonders whether epistemic decolonisation is even a concern at all for scholars working in the area studies today? By the same token, those who imagine themselves to occupy a position that is external to the area studies inadvertently provide the pretext necessary to the appropriation of exteriority via the modern regime of translation that capital uses to resolve the conundrum of reproduction. To change this situation requires not just disbanding the area studies but engaging collectively in a reorganisation of the human and social sciences as a whole. The “place” to begin this transition starts right in the middle, so to speak, at the singular site of the bordering practices such as translation that create the disciplinary divisions of the human sciences where the spectral temporality of the present is most evident. This is a site of intervention that is not anarchist but strictly communist—provided we redefine communist transition to mean the site of a constant, shared translation that creates “us” as “we” translate in common. While communism has been discredited largely by a narrative of betrayal constructed by its critics, I feel that there is still a chance to salvage the promise of communism from both messianism (the fulfilment of a promise) and neo-evangelical redemption (the promise of rebirth that defers justice in the present). To dissociate communism from such an infernal choice, it might be necessary, as Frédéric Neyrat suggests, to rethink the promise of the figure (Neyrat Le communisme existentiel, 69). Neyrat’s explanations on the nature of this promise and the figure with which it is associated are somewhat incomplete, hence worth expanding upon. Beginning with a refusal of the Rousseauian solution that we discussed in Part I whereby Rousseau envisions freedom as a compulsory obligation sustained by communal force when necessary, Neyrat instead proposes revising Rousseau’s political anthropology by beginning with the presupposition of what Neyrat calls the “no/us” (ibid., 64). A translingual neologism, “no/us,” is to be read simultaneously in English and French as both “no us” and “nous,” or the first-person plural, “we.” This paradoxical formulation, which Neyrat says cannot be the object of figuration, is amplified by the distinction between two types of splits or forms

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of separation that constitute the non-figural “we,” incommensurability and antagonism (ibid., 67). Always a cautious, profound thinker, Neyrat is quick to alert his readers to the dangers of conflating the two in a move that would culminate in reactionary political myths. This is somewhat like the reserve that I have expressed earlier with regard to Sylvia Wynter’s project of “heretical knowledge.” Not content to leave to the future the promise of a form of communism so profound and thorough that it would begin in the present at the ontological or existential level, Neyrat somewhat enigmatically calls for the “promise of a figure.” But what is a configuration without a figure? That the “no/us” would be without a figure is something that I can understand; what I understand less would be how a politics could, to launch itself, exist precisely without figuration. If “configuration” were an administrative, neutral technique, it would no longer directly be configuration and would lose that which [existentially] constitutes it as [communist] “being-with.” And it could even, as an apparently neutral gesture, mask the presence of an active Figure that would no longer have any need to declare its name —the Figure of an aesthetic capitalism expressing itself via a world remade in its own image. It seems to me, thus, that the proposition, the promise, and the fiction are all necessary [to construct “existential communism”]… (Neyrat 69)

To understand Neyrat’s reasoning requires a certain work of translation on the part of the reader who must fill in for herself some of the blanks. Clearly, a nonaggregate community (“no/us”) cannot be construed as a unitary figure, yet the exigency of politics (social antagonism and incommensurability) unleashes a conflict among different figures. Implicitly, Neyrat poses the question of whether it would not be possible to conceive of this conflictual work of the political as a type of plural “configuration”? Neyrat’s response is negative. In the delicate balance between collective “con-figuration” and the “nonaggregate community,” capitalism threatens to appropriate social cooperation (i.e., the sociality to which capital is external) via an aesthetics of the world schema of internationality. In other words, plurality is not the solution to the problems of figuration. The aesthetics of plurality easily becomes a logistics of capitalist transition, as the administration of cultural difference becomes in effect the ideology of capitalism. Against this aesthetic ideology, Neyrat implicitly suggests— at least this is how I would translate him—that the link between figuration and promise should rather be seen in terms of a decolonial co-temporality distributed by the fracture or the non-unity of the present. This present

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is not the “promise of identity” arrived at through translational “cofiguration,” but the promise of singularity contained in the ordinary event of translation. As a social practice, translation does not promise “communication” of either a messianic or redemptive type so much as potential transitions to new forms of sociality via new configurations that are singular in each instance. In the context of Pax Americana, that promise is tentatively contained in the singular figure of “black communism.” Not only is blackness itself, as Calvin Warren argues, an ontological impossibility, the very nature of the concept of blackness as an ontological form of exclusion means that it could never be existentially shared by all as communism would demand. (Here, it may be necessary to revisit the question of the ontological status of blackness beyond Warren by relating it to the continuum of difference. Inasmuch as whiteness is both a position within the continuum and a positionality that surveys the continuum, blackness is precisely the foreclosure of the continuum to the possibility of its outside in the form of the non-racial, i.e., that which has no relation to “race” and cannot be mapped within the continuum. Blackness would be an ontological impossibility to the extent that it is trapped in positions, unable to accede to the level of positionality without becoming white in the process. Neither reversal nor restitution can transform positionality, which is where the displacement would also have to occur in order for Blackness as such to become ontologically possible.) That is why the translation of anthropological difference into “black communism” necessarily implies not the “dictatorship of black essentialism,” as white nationalists may fear, but the sharing of new figures not determined by the modern regime of translation and the apparatus of area and anthropological difference. Just as translation is a political act, it is always linked to transition, while transition in turn is always linked to knowledge production. Whereas capitalism, or the capital relation, instantiates translation as a means of managing the outside for the benefit of accumulation (this is what capitalism knows as transitions), we can imagine how translation could be used instead to reinscribe the transition to justice. The transitions currently underway incessantly call upon us to identify with national, ethnic, gender, and racial identities as so many forms of protection against the violence and dislocations unleashed by the latest capitalist transition. Yet, the notion of transition is not something that is exclusively ordained by capitalism. The task of the political today is the task of reappropriating

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the notion of transition via a politics and a biopolitics of translation. Transitions are not just events that affect us but are also events that we can create and in which we can participate. For that reason, our discussions in the course of this book have always come back to a practical dimension, one in which we are committed to analysing, writing, criticising, arguing, and translating in the midst of transitions and translations that we ourselves instigate.

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Index

A Addison, Craig, 242 Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 74, 251 Agency, 2, 14, 53, 54, 58, 78, 139, 148, 233, 235, 237, 268, 269, 362, 363, 366, 371, 372, 387, 397, 399 agent, 362, 363 Alpert, Avram, 378, 388 Althusser, Louis, 43, 111 Anghie, Antony, 11, 235 Arbitrage, 324, 325, 331, 335, 408 Asymmetric warfare, 131, 133, 135, 136, 144 Authoritarianism, 13, 32, 38, 42, 44, 49, 56–60, 62, 63, 66, 97, 117, 121, 125, 128, 129, 211, 245, 247, 284, 394, 395, 405

B Bandung, 363–365 Barlow, Tani, 318, 320, 321 Beautiful Duckling, 201

Bell, Daniel, 282–287, 296, 304, 317, 320 Bennett, Eric, 346, 353, 354 Benton, Lauren, 11, 235, 275, 276 Bernards, Brian, 339, 340, 342 Bevins, Vincent, 363, 364 Beyes, Timon, 153, 158–163, 168–172 Black box, 153, 166–168, 302, 303, 314, 320 Border, bordering, l, 4, 5, 12, 27–29, 33, 37, 38, 44, 49, 55, 67, 68, 83, 98, 99, 101–103, 117, 124, 128, 129, 137, 138, 140, 141, 146, 150, 161, 168, 171–173, 176, 177, 180, 185, 208, 221–224, 228, 240, 249, 252, 255, 260–263, 266, 270, 273, 275, 278–281, 284, 289, 294–299, 303, 314, 315, 318, 319, 323, 325, 326, 333–335, 355–357, 360, 375–377, 383–385, 387, 392, 393, 405, 409, 413

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. D. Solomon, The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3322-8

449

450

INDEX

Broken Life Festival, 393, 394 Brossat, Alain, l, 62, 104–106, 111, 125, 126 Buden, Boris, 138, 378, 379, 406, 409 Burden-Stelly, Charisse, 288–292, 294 Button, Peter, xlviii, 53, 69, 73, 289, 292, 334, 347, 365 C Caldwell, Ernest, 187, 188, 194 Calichman, Richard, 293, 296 Cannibal Holocaust, 57 Carroll, Lewis, 355–357 Caruth, Cathy, 102–104 Casado, Juan Alberto Ruiz, 141, 146 Chandler, Nahum, 292, 293, 376 Chang, Bi-yu, 123, 145 Chang, Hsing-wen, 83 Chao, Yuan Ren (Zhao Yuanren), 355–357, 360 Chen, Chieh-jen, 19, 57–59, 63 Chen-Dedman, Adam, 79–82, 84–86, 297 Cheng, Amy Hui-hua, 393 Cheng, Fan-ting, 200 Chen, Shui-bian, 120, 226 Chen, Yuchen, 366 Chiang, Kai-shek, xlviii, 31, 33–38, 56, 62, 73, 193, 194, 209, 234, 370 Chomsky, Noam, 191 Chou, Wan-yao, 189–192, 218 Chow, Rey, 303–305, 307–309, 312, 316, 322 Civil society, 26, 27, 29, 42, 59, 77, 97, 144, 146, 152, 161, 175, 244–246, 249, 252, 368, 369, 401 Cofiguration, 36, 46, 80, 83, 138, 185, 228, 262, 263, 289, 290, 295, 296, 298, 328, 338, 346,

347, 350, 358–361, 373, 402, 404, 409, 415 Cold War, 5, 36, 37, 55, 65, 66, 77–79, 85, 87, 104, 107, 117, 121, 122, 125, 129, 146, 153, 154, 160–163, 166, 169, 171, 173, 175, 188, 190, 194, 196, 199, 200, 205, 207, 209, 211, 213, 216, 217, 233, 241, 244, 246, 247, 265, 269, 274, 276–278, 281, 282, 289–292, 295, 300, 302, 307, 312, 314, 315, 318–321, 324, 328, 331, 333, 337, 346, 347, 349, 350, 353, 354, 362–364, 369, 370, 374, 380–383, 393, 402, 405, 406, 409, 412 Commodification, 49, 186, 250, 251, 253–255, 257, 258, 260, 262, 307, 316, 330 Communism, 5, 26, 35, 37, 54–56, 64, 67, 189, 205, 208, 210, 243, 253, 271, 276, 277, 297, 298, 310, 311, 322, 331, 364, 365, 381, 384, 405, 413–415 Consensus, 24, 28, 42, 58–60, 95, 104, 105, 119–123, 125, 128–130, 148, 149, 153, 162, 168–170, 179, 187, 192, 193, 195–199, 204, 205, 213, 214, 218–220, 227, 238, 239, 269, 283, 284, 287, 288, 290, 330, 345, 365, 372, 393–395, 397, 401, 402 Conspiracy, 128, 140, 148–153, 157, 163, 164, 171, 175–177, 179, 191–193, 238, 281, 284–287, 295, 304, 318 Corcuff, Stéphane, 8, 9 Critical China Scholars (CCS), 216, 299 Cui, Zhiyuan, 110

INDEX

D David, Lea, 229, 230 Dawley, Evan, 34, 98, 99 Debord, Guy, 330 DeHaven-Smith, Lance, 315, 316 Deng, Ben Lian, 370 Derivatives, 323, 327 Derrida, Jacques, l, 22–27, 71, 74, 75, 77, 81, 84–86, 89–93, 96, 112, 127, 184, 207, 223, 235, 267–269, 297, 367, 375, 388, 389, 398 Difference, 4, 30, 34, 35, 38, 43, 51, 53, 55, 59, 70, 75, 77, 84, 89, 91, 92, 96, 99, 109, 110, 112, 114, 117, 123, 124, 185, 191, 192, 199, 202, 203, 208, 213, 222–224, 256, 259, 262, 266, 268–270, 278, 281, 286, 297, 304–309, 320, 324, 325, 330, 332, 334, 335, 340, 342, 345, 348, 350, 352, 355, 366, 372, 379, 388, 399–401, 406, 414 anthropological difference, xlix, 2, 5, 12–14, 26, 27, 30, 33, 34, 36, 41, 53, 54, 57, 99, 101, 142, 173, 182, 227, 244, 249, 278, 293, 295, 298, 306, 312–314, 326, 329, 330, 344, 346, 347, 393, 406, 407, 409, 415 specific or species difference, 30, 75, 84, 259, 298, 406 Disinformation, 129, 145, 146, 148, 177, 178 Dissensus, 24, 28, 62, 105, 129, 169, 177, 372, 395, 396 Driscoll, Mark, 247 Dulles, Allen and John Foster, 78, 271–273, 276, 278

451

E Education, 46, 50, 121, 130, 131, 191, 192, 252, 322, 323, 326 Ellsberg, Daniel, 216 Ellul, Jacques, 45, 46, 154–157, 180, 181, 187 Engle, Paul, 346–348, 350, 351, 360 Eribon, Didier, 237, 238 F Fairbank, John, 233, 234, 318 Farred, Grant, 245 Fascism, 13, 32, 165, 248, 272, 276, 296, 365, 382 Ferguson, Roderick, 288 Figure, Figuration, xx, xxi, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxv, xl, xli, xlv, 6, 12, 13, 26, 32, 36, 41, 45–48, 52, 54, 62–64, 67, 75, 99, 105, 107, 109, 112, 121, 151, 172, 187, 229, 244, 255, 256, 259–263, 271, 272, 286, 296, 300, 302, 303, 308, 314, 318, 323, 328, 332, 348, 355, 357–360, 376, 392, 394, 402, 403, 405–407, 413–415 Financialisation, 48, 124, 236, 241, 253, 298, 312, 313, 321–324, 326–328, 331, 333, 335, 336, 405, 408, 412 Five Eyes, 163–165, 169 Foucault, Michel, l, li, 2, 5, 75, 80, 111–115, 256, 396 Franke, Anselm, 184, 185, 187 Frank, Thomas, 287 Frederick, Howard, 349 Freedom, 14, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 32–34, 36, 37, 41, 48, 49, 55, 56, 58, 62, 70, 78, 96, 103, 104, 112, 114, 117, 125, 128, 151, 174, 203, 204, 223, 234, 239, 246, 276, 288, 293, 294, 320,

452

INDEX

333, 366, 370, 376, 394, 397, 402, 413 Freud, Sigmund, 22–24, 102, 103, 354, 376, 377, 393 Fuller, Matthew, 176–182, 185, 186

Human rights, 40, 80, 84, 105, 140, 151, 187–189, 199–202, 208, 212–217, 219–223, 227, 229, 237, 238, 246, 402, 405

G Gender, 32, 74, 78–80, 84, 85, 112, 133, 136, 219, 229, 255, 287, 309, 387, 403, 406, 415 Gerstle, Gary, 128, 129, 301 Gerth, Jeff, 178 Goldstein, Lyle, 216, 217 Golumbia, David, 379 Good, Aaron, 169, 170 Gourevitch, Alex, 246 The Grayzone, 176, 302

I Identity, xlviii, l, 22–25, 28–32, 36, 38, 41, 45, 46, 48–50, 55, 56, 59–62, 70, 75, 83, 85, 89–91, 93, 95–101, 103, 107, 108, 121–125, 129, 133, 134, 145–147, 153, 158, 184, 186–188, 194, 196, 200, 204, 205, 218, 220, 225, 226, 228, 236, 239, 245, 248, 250–253, 256, 263, 267, 268, 280, 288, 289, 293–296, 300, 303, 310, 337–339, 342–347, 361, 370–372, 376, 379, 385, 394, 396, 397, 399, 401, 402 Ideology, 1, 3, 6, 43–48, 58, 60–62, 70, 73, 107, 110, 121, 123–125, 129, 132, 137, 138, 150, 154, 172, 174, 178, 185, 189, 206, 209, 210, 219, 228, 235, 236, 240, 245, 247, 251, 273, 276, 278, 281, 285, 287, 302, 305, 315, 319, 321, 322, 326, 337, 344, 346–354, 359, 361, 367, 377, 382, 385, 392, 414 Indigenous tribes of Taiwan, 225, 226 Infiltration, 49, 133, 140, 145, 147, 158, 192, 350 International Writing Program (IWP), 346–348, 351 Iowa Writer’s Workshop (IWW), 338, 346, 349 Ishchenko, Volodymyr, 137 Israel, 136 Ivekovi´c, Rada, 222, 405

H Haiven, Max, 310, 323 Hardin, Carolyn, 324, 325 Hardt, Michael, 183, 244, 252, 256 Hegemony, 5, 14, 39, 67, 97, 122, 124, 145–148, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160–164, 169, 170, 173, 205, 206, 223, 238, 243, 247, 276, 280, 283, 300, 305, 314, 317, 331, 332, 334, 371, 398, 399, 401, 406, 409, 412 Heidegger, Martin, 113, 389 Hioe, Brian, 32, 409–412 Honesty, 42, 77, 85, 86, 100, 295–298, 304, 306 Hou, Hsiao-hsien, 399, 400 Hsia. C.T., 338, 352, 354 Hsien-yung, Pai (Kenneth), 337, 340, 342, 345–347, 352–354, 360, 361 Hsu, He-ch’ien, 144 Hsu, John Han-chiang, 20, 51 Hugar, Wayne Robert, 209, 210

INDEX

J Jameson, Fredric, 150, 245

K Kao, Jack, 401 Kawashima, Ken, 253–259 Kim, Jodi, 386, 387 Kotanyí, Attila, 397

L Laclau, Ernesto, 264 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 112, 113 Lasswell, Harold, 66, 67, 115 Lau, Joseph, 338, 352, 353, 355 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 256, 257, 277, 278 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 58, 59, 171 Lee, Hsing, 201, 204 Liang, Qichao, 37, 53 Lim, Jie-hyun, 40, 246 Lim, Jye-Hyun, 206 Lin, Hsiao-ting, 38 Lionnet, Françoise, 378, 379, 388, 391, 393 Liu, Lydia, 8, 9, 73, 78 Liu, Wen, 142, 143, 375 Liu, Yi-hung, 246, 332, 346, 347, 350, 351, 374 Lloyd, David, 94–97 Logistics, 239, 298, 302, 414 Lo, Jeph, 393 Lu, Alex Jiahong, 166 Luki´c, Atila, 264–270 Lupke, Christopher, 342, 343, 345, 352, 353, 360, 361, 400, 401

M Macleod, Alan, 152, 177 MacPherson. C.B., 112 Madanni, 126, 127, 268

453

Marazzi, Christian, 316, 321, 322, 326 Martial Law, 188, 190, 194–196, 201, 203, 211, 394, 397, 398 Martin, Randy, 309–311, 327 Marx, Karl, 53, 58, 147, 150, 151, 154, 256, 260, 330, 354, 402 Maslov, Gordan, 264–270 Massumi, Brian, 315, 328 McCarthyism, 281–283, 285, 287 McConaghy, Mark, 409–412 Meister, Robert, 199, 201, 206, 219, 326, 407–409 Melman, Seymour, 241, 283, 371 Mezzadra, Sandro, 12, 28, 98, 150, 151, 261, 279, 375, 388 Mills, C. Wright, 278, 279, 281, 284 Mirowski, Philip, 174, 175, 177, 303, 313, 314, 317, 318, 320 Monster, 21, 22, 54, 71, 74–76, 85, 87–90, 93, 95, 105, 184, 269, 395 Moran, Marie, 29, 122, 123, 236 Moreiras, Alberto, 259, 377, 385, 392 Mouffe, Chantal, 109, 110 Moulier Boutang, Yann, 98 Moyn, Samuel, 135 Murthy, Viren, 304 Myer Temin, David, 248 Myrdal, Gunnar, 248, 286

N Nagahara, Yutaka, 253, 404 Nancy, Jean-Luc, l, li, 112, 113, 279, 310, 396 Nationalism, li, 12, 32, 33, 36, 40, 46, 59, 68, 74, 77, 79, 80, 89, 100, 125, 138, 155, 181, 220, 227, 228, 248, 252, 273, 279, 285, 287, 288, 295, 309, 315,

454

INDEX

371, 377, 378, 381–383, 387, 406, 412 ethnonationalism, 136 internationalism, 291 plurinationalism, 136 transnationalism, 37, 378, 379 Neilson, Brett, 12, 98, 150, 151, 261, 279, 375, 388 Neoliberalism, 4, 5, 14, 29, 128, 129, 159, 174, 175, 177, 218, 219, 263, 269, 277, 301, 313, 314, 332, 334, 367, 384, 394–396, 399 New Criticism, 347, 348, 352–354, 360 New Public Management (NPM), 320, 322 Neyrat, Frédéric, 124, 125, 396, 413, 414 Nida, Eugene, 332 Nieh, Hualing, 346, 347, 350, 351, 360 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53 Ning, Yin-Bin, 85, 398 1992 Consensus, 119, 189 O Oldenziel, Ruth, 275, 386 Ontology, 61, 92, 114, 259, 276, 286, 314, 328, 354, 375, 396 P Pai, Hsien-yung (Kenneth), 338 Pax Americana, 1, 5, 6, 29, 33, 36, 37, 47, 49, 67, 79, 83, 96, 103, 121, 141, 160, 162, 169, 173, 181, 185, 206, 211, 214, 234, 238, 253, 272, 274–276, 278–286, 289, 293, 294, 303–305, 312, 313, 315, 317, 319, 331, 332, 335, 337, 338,

344, 346, 347, 350–352, 364, 376, 385, 387, 398, 399, 401, 406, 407, 409, 412, 415 Petro, Nicolai, 137–139 Pias, Claus, 158, 162, 170 Populism, 153, 281, 283, 285, 286 Power, Samantha, 213 Promise, 23, 32, 151, 176, 239, 261, 267, 286, 293, 330, 347, 362, 366, 367, 413–415 Propaganda, 45–48, 65, 124, 145, 154–158, 164, 176, 177, 189, 370, 384 Pye, Lucian, 66, 115, 287, 364

R Racism, xlviii, 2, 33, 37, 72, 76, 77, 87, 112, 125, 202, 204, 215, 278, 282, 290, 293, 333, 341, 342, 362, 367 Rana, Aziz, 248, 286, 290–292, 367 Rancière, Jacques, 129, 130, 190, 218, 297, 396 Redfield, Marc, 377, 389 Responsibility to Protect (R2P), 208, 213, 214, 237, 238, 300, 373 Roberts, Neil, 222 Romanticism, 41, 112, 244, 335, 377, 379, 392 Rostow, Walt Whitman, 210, 233, 285 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 25–27, 41, 59, 130, 413 Rowen, Ian and Jamie, 207, 208, 212, 221 Rummel, Rudolph, 65–71, 75, 94 Russiagate, 178 Rustow, Dankwart, 265

INDEX

S Sakai, Naoki, xlviii, xlix, 5, 60, 76, 82, 83, 100, 115, 117, 171, 172, 222, 224, 228, 234, 235, 251, 252, 262, 263, 278, 280, 289, 296, 303, 306, 307, 311, 315, 317, 327, 332, 338, 344, 346–348, 351, 356–361, 372, 388, 402 Schmitt, Carl, lii, 25, 27, 59, 104, 107, 108 Schneider, Axel, 304 School, 3, 19, 30, 33, 41, 42, 44–48, 50, 51, 54–56, 60–62, 90, 96, 97, 102, 108, 109, 113, 117, 126, 172, 238, 244, 265, 283, 290, 321, 397 Schramm, Wilbur, 142, 349 Self-referentiality, 267, 296, 297, 311, 312, 314, 315, 321, 322, 328, 334, 405 Shannon, Claude, 304, 332 Sharp, Dustin, 206, 207, 214 Shen, Puma, 132, 148 Shih, Chih-yu, 207, 208, 212, 213, 221, 319 Shih, Shu-mei, 45, 119, 339, 362–366, 378–380, 385, 387–389, 391–393 Sinophobia, 215 Sinophone studies, 344, 378, 380, 388 Slavery, 29, 35–37, 67, 82, 165, 223, 256–258, 294, 307, 376, 403 Snowden, Edward, 160, 163, 178 Sovereignty, xlviii, 1, 3, 4, 7, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 46, 66, 78, 79, 81, 84, 85, 109, 116, 120, 121, 124, 128, 132, 141, 153, 211, 218, 224–227, 229, 234–240, 248, 269, 271, 272, 274–276, 278, 281, 284, 286–289, 292, 293,

455

303, 305, 319, 321, 331, 362, 368, 374, 376, 378, 382, 384, 385, 388, 394, 397, 402 Speciation, xlviii, 26, 27, 33, 34, 47, 48, 84, 85, 114, 226, 227, 244, 261, 299, 334, 403, 404 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 1, 26, 389 Strauss, Leo, 315, 317 Subjectivity, 2, 6, 15, 48, 50, 81–84, 96, 100, 108, 123, 147, 156, 183, 265, 267, 268, 274, 284, 287, 294, 298, 304, 385, 388, 393 Su, Yen-tu, 188

T Tagore, Rabindranath, 52–54, 89 Taibbi, Matt, 152, 178 Talbot, David, 284 Tang, Audrey, 159, 166, 168 Tansman, Alan, 173, 295–297, 304, 306 Temporality, 2, 13, 14, 50, 71, 88–91, 127, 159, 160, 169, 195, 200, 219, 222, 223, 236, 238, 239, 261, 262, 268, 276, 297, 299, 301, 329, 330, 398, 404, 405, 413 The Center for Strategic Translation (CST), 167, 168 Theology, 72 theological, 72, 73, 79, 167 Toscano, Alberto, 32, 116, 117 Transnational. See Nationalism Transpacific studies, 376–378, 392 Transparency, 76, 150, 151, 153, 159, 161, 163, 165, 166, 169–172, 174, 185, 304, 305 Trauma, 31, 47, 90, 93–99, 101–104, 162, 217, 220, 221, 239, 376

456

INDEX

Tsai, Ing-wen, 38, 119, 120, 124, 152, 159, 188, 189, 193, 195, 204

U Udden, James, 400 Ukraine, 136–138, 140, 141, 406, 409 Uno, K¯ oz¯ o, 6, 253–255, 259

V Valéry, Paul, 70 Vaneigem, Raoul, 397 Veg, Sebastian, 106–111, 116 Viltard, Yves, 281, 282 Vodopivec, Maja, 68 Von Hayek, Friedrich, 325

W Waishengren, 31, 98, 188, 194, 202–205, 338, 339, 344–346, 401 Wales, Jimmy, 174, 177 Walker, Gavin, 39, 40, 70, 101, 124, 125, 145, 249, 251, 253, 254, 258, 259, 261–264, 267, 326, 330, 332, 388, 394, 402 Wall, Illan rua, 222 Wang, Andy Chih-ming, 339, 342, 361 Wang, David Der-wei, 63–66, 68–77, 87, 88, 91–94, 185, 192, 193 Wang, Horng-luen, 188, 192, 193, 196, 213, 214 Wang, Matt, 132, 148 Wark, McKenzie, 327 Warren, Calvin, 258, 259, 415

Washington Consensus, 49, 121, 124, 173, 199, 205–207, 214, 246, 247, 312, 369, 370 Watson, Tom, 287 Weber, Max, 261 Weber, Samuel, 24, 91, 95, 96, 116, 376, 377, 393 Weizman, Eyal, 175–182, 185, 186 Weng, Jeffrey, 354, 355 Westad, Odd Arne, 274, 276, 285 Whiteness, 141, 142, 163, 164, 253, 293, 294, 337, 338, 341–346, 352, 361 Wikipedia, 20, 138, 149, 174–177, 179 World Anti-Communist League (WACL), 65, 362, 363 Wu, Angela Xiao, 166 Wu, Chia-rong, 63, 81, 91–94, 96 Wu, Chung-wei, 393 Wu, Enoch Yi-nong, 131 Wu, Hao-jen, 224–229 Wu, Rwei-ren, 81, 82, 198, 228 Wu, Yong Yi, 144 Wynter, Sylvia, 255–258, 261–263, 334, 402, 403, 405, 414 X Xun, Lu, 52, 69, 72, 73, 76 Y Yang, Dominic, 54, 97, 98, 101, 136 Yan, Qin, 60–62, 338 Yellow Peril, 333, 334 Yu, Wei, 395–397 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 392 Zupanˇciˇc, Alenka, 148–150, 158, 238