Written by Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism
For some time I’ve been musing about a particular semantic, conceptual, and political matter: the persistent and frequently unreflexive use of the concept of “the West”—and the not-quite-as-frequent use of its correlate, “the non-West”—by cultural critics and theorists as well as just about everyone else. This usage is so omnipresent I don’t think it’s even necessary to cite an example—in recent reading I’ve encountered it in Derrida’s critique of “Western Metaphysics,” in Spivak’s critique of “Western intellectuals” in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” and in the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s work on “cultural trauma and collective identity” in both “Western” and “non-Western” contexts. What is surprising about this persistence of “the West” as a category of critical analysis is that we all know better—precisely because we’ve spent the last three decades deconstructing just such abstractions, whether they be “the Orient,” “race,” or what have you. But of all these terms “the West” seems to have a special staying power. When it comes to the West, we’re all fetishists: We know very well the West doesn’t exit, but all the same…
What is “the West” and why would we want to evoke this highly ideological and Eurocentric concept? I mean this question quite seriously. I should say that I’m less concerned by the celebratory use of the concept—usually a conservative platitude about the superiority of “our” way of life—than I am by its deployment among critical, Left intellectuals who are generally “against the West.” Shouldn’t we be worried that we’re reproducing the very terms of conservative hegemony even as we attempt to deconstruct it? Not only is the referent of “the West” highly elusive, I would argue, but use of the concept ends up confirming the racialized framework it seeks to mark and displace. As Naoki Sakai puts it in his essay “The West—A Dialogic Prescription or a Proscription?,” “the West is [n]either a geographic territory with an affiliated population, [n]or a unified cultural and social formation. It remains always a putative unity; its unity is preordained regardless of its inherent fragmentation and dispersal. It is in fact a mythic unity” (Social Identities 11.3 (2005): 180). My argument here is not with all generalizations (as I will make clear in a moment), but with the usefulness of this particular one. I would guess that many critical intellectuals and activists see “the West” as a practical shorthand for real-world, unequal power relations. Such inequalities most certainly exist, but are they best described by the West/non-West binary? I believe we should resist using this particular set of generalizations and seek other terms, for, as Sakai continues, “the West-and-the-Rest distinction can never be free of the aura of racism” (191).
I see this phenomenon—excessive reliance on an ideological, geo-cultural shorthand I’m tempted to call a “geologeme”—as the flip side of a problem diagnosed by our colleague in the Unit for Criticism, Matti Bunzl. In an essay that was first given as a Unit colloquium in fall 2005, Bunzl provides a provocative critique of the “postmodern turn” in anthropology. Scheduled to be published this month (March 2008) in the journal American Anthropologist, Bunzl’s essay targets the hyperbolic particularism of contemporary anthropology—its refusal of all generalizations and its valorization instead of the local, the complex, and the heterogeneous. In a move that clearly distresses Bunzl, anthropologists have turned against the category that once defined their discipline: culture. In recent anthropology, “culture” stands accused of essentialism, over-abstraction, and reification of difference. In one of his most striking examples, Bunzl cites a well-known essay called “Writing against Culture” by the celebrated anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod. As Bunzl writes, citing Abu-Lughod, “When Abu-Lughod urged anthropologists to ‘write against culture,’ she suggested a particular specification of discourse, namely to replace ‘the term “Bedouin culture”’ with attention to ‘what life is like for one old Bedouin matriarch’” (Bunzl 5). Bunzl describes this turn toward hyper-specificity as an ironic resurgence of positivism in an otherwise thoroughly postmodern and postcolonial field, and he likens it to Borges’s famous story about cartographers who created “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it” (Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” qtd. in Bunzl 5). Such a drive for exactitude, as evidenced by Abu-Lughod and as satirized by Borges, strikes Bunzl as intellectually and politically dubious. Borgesian cartography can neither supply useful knowledge nor orient political practice; it is precisely too particular, too . . . precise. In place of the particular, Bunzl ends with a call for a “middle ground” of generalization that he thinks will be epistemologically and politically more powerful than the refusal of culture he sees everywhere in his discipline.
I am not in a position to know how “precise” Bunzl’s cartography of contemporary anthropology is—surely it is going to provoke much controversy and it has already attracted a response from two of its targets, Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, which will accompany the publication of Bunzl’s essay in American Anthropologist. I do believe, however, that Bunzl has identified an important tendency that cuts across fields in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Such localism can be found just as readily in literary and interdisciplinary cultural studies as in anthropology, and I’m happy to join Bunzl in the call for a “strategic generalization.” (I’m less certain about another central aspect of Bunzl’s argument—his assertion that the turn toward complexity and the particular helps explain anthropology’s absence from the public sphere and public debate—but I’ll leave that issue aside for the moment.)
What Bunzl doesn’t say, however, is that the kind of positivist drive he finds among his colleagues pertains most dramatically to accounts of the “non-Western” world, while “the West” tends to retain its terminologically monolithic aura, even among many of the same scholars. There may well be good reasons for this differential. Imperialism, after all, did extensive “epistemic violence” (to use Spivak’s apt term) to much of the globe, and a good part of that violence came in the form of imposed categories of thought and naming that erased or wrote over local conditions. There is a need to reclaim that overwritten terrain—in discourse as well as in national political sovereignty. That need helps, at least in part, to explain the turn to the local that Bunzl laments, and suggests that it has been a necessary step within anthropology and cultural criticism.
But that context doesn’t necessarily explain the persistence of generalization on the other, “Western” side of the divide—or not, at least, to my satisfaction. For if imperialism is the problem that led to an asymmetrical overgeneralization on one side and particularistic nominalism on the other, why don’t we say as much? The “West” often seems to stand for just this—the imperialist powers. Before 1989 it also played a plausible metaphorical role in the geo-political opposition between the capitalist democracies and the Soviet bloc. But the problem is that it can just as easily stand for other, more dubious abstractions of the kind many of us have been committed to questioning—the “Judeo-Christian tradition” or the supposedly homogenous cultural and philosophical legacy that traces itself back to the Greeks. Or for Europe and America. Or Europe and America and Australia—in other words, for countries whose dominant political classes and (for the moment at least) majority populations identify their heritage in (some notion of) Europe. There are legitimate reasons for referring to these different entities in particular discursive or political contexts. But if they can be described more substantively than with the geologeme “the West,” why not do so?
Ultimately, that is my main terminological challenge to the purveyors of “the West.” If the term has any consistent meaning, such as imperialism or Christianity or whiteness or European-derived culture, why not just say so? And if the term doesn’t have such a meaning, why not put it to rest, once and for all? I’m curious to hear where people come down on this question; I’m open to persuasion that I’m going in the wrong direction.
For some time I’ve been musing about a particular semantic, conceptual, and political matter: the persistent and frequently unreflexive use of the concept of “the West”—and the not-quite-as-frequent use of its correlate, “the non-West”—by cultural critics and theorists as well as just about everyone else. This usage is so omnipresent I don’t think it’s even necessary to cite an example—in recent reading I’ve encountered it in Derrida’s critique of “Western Metaphysics,” in Spivak’s critique of “Western intellectuals” in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” and in the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s work on “cultural trauma and collective identity” in both “Western” and “non-Western” contexts. What is surprising about this persistence of “the West” as a category of critical analysis is that we all know better—precisely because we’ve spent the last three decades deconstructing just such abstractions, whether they be “the Orient,” “race,” or what have you. But of all these terms “the West” seems to have a special staying power. When it comes to the West, we’re all fetishists: We know very well the West doesn’t exit, but all the same…
What is “the West” and why would we want to evoke this highly ideological and Eurocentric concept? I mean this question quite seriously. I should say that I’m less concerned by the celebratory use of the concept—usually a conservative platitude about the superiority of “our” way of life—than I am by its deployment among critical, Left intellectuals who are generally “against the West.” Shouldn’t we be worried that we’re reproducing the very terms of conservative hegemony even as we attempt to deconstruct it? Not only is the referent of “the West” highly elusive, I would argue, but use of the concept ends up confirming the racialized framework it seeks to mark and displace. As Naoki Sakai puts it in his essay “The West—A Dialogic Prescription or a Proscription?,” “the West is [n]either a geographic territory with an affiliated population, [n]or a unified cultural and social formation. It remains always a putative unity; its unity is preordained regardless of its inherent fragmentation and dispersal. It is in fact a mythic unity” (Social Identities 11.3 (2005): 180). My argument here is not with all generalizations (as I will make clear in a moment), but with the usefulness of this particular one. I would guess that many critical intellectuals and activists see “the West” as a practical shorthand for real-world, unequal power relations. Such inequalities most certainly exist, but are they best described by the West/non-West binary? I believe we should resist using this particular set of generalizations and seek other terms, for, as Sakai continues, “the West-and-the-Rest distinction can never be free of the aura of racism” (191).
I see this phenomenon—excessive reliance on an ideological, geo-cultural shorthand I’m tempted to call a “geologeme”—as the flip side of a problem diagnosed by our colleague in the Unit for Criticism, Matti Bunzl. In an essay that was first given as a Unit colloquium in fall 2005, Bunzl provides a provocative critique of the “postmodern turn” in anthropology. Scheduled to be published this month (March 2008) in the journal American Anthropologist, Bunzl’s essay targets the hyperbolic particularism of contemporary anthropology—its refusal of all generalizations and its valorization instead of the local, the complex, and the heterogeneous. In a move that clearly distresses Bunzl, anthropologists have turned against the category that once defined their discipline: culture. In recent anthropology, “culture” stands accused of essentialism, over-abstraction, and reification of difference. In one of his most striking examples, Bunzl cites a well-known essay called “Writing against Culture” by the celebrated anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod. As Bunzl writes, citing Abu-Lughod, “When Abu-Lughod urged anthropologists to ‘write against culture,’ she suggested a particular specification of discourse, namely to replace ‘the term “Bedouin culture”’ with attention to ‘what life is like for one old Bedouin matriarch’” (Bunzl 5). Bunzl describes this turn toward hyper-specificity as an ironic resurgence of positivism in an otherwise thoroughly postmodern and postcolonial field, and he likens it to Borges’s famous story about cartographers who created “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it” (Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” qtd. in Bunzl 5). Such a drive for exactitude, as evidenced by Abu-Lughod and as satirized by Borges, strikes Bunzl as intellectually and politically dubious. Borgesian cartography can neither supply useful knowledge nor orient political practice; it is precisely too particular, too . . . precise. In place of the particular, Bunzl ends with a call for a “middle ground” of generalization that he thinks will be epistemologically and politically more powerful than the refusal of culture he sees everywhere in his discipline.
I am not in a position to know how “precise” Bunzl’s cartography of contemporary anthropology is—surely it is going to provoke much controversy and it has already attracted a response from two of its targets, Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, which will accompany the publication of Bunzl’s essay in American Anthropologist. I do believe, however, that Bunzl has identified an important tendency that cuts across fields in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Such localism can be found just as readily in literary and interdisciplinary cultural studies as in anthropology, and I’m happy to join Bunzl in the call for a “strategic generalization.” (I’m less certain about another central aspect of Bunzl’s argument—his assertion that the turn toward complexity and the particular helps explain anthropology’s absence from the public sphere and public debate—but I’ll leave that issue aside for the moment.)
What Bunzl doesn’t say, however, is that the kind of positivist drive he finds among his colleagues pertains most dramatically to accounts of the “non-Western” world, while “the West” tends to retain its terminologically monolithic aura, even among many of the same scholars. There may well be good reasons for this differential. Imperialism, after all, did extensive “epistemic violence” (to use Spivak’s apt term) to much of the globe, and a good part of that violence came in the form of imposed categories of thought and naming that erased or wrote over local conditions. There is a need to reclaim that overwritten terrain—in discourse as well as in national political sovereignty. That need helps, at least in part, to explain the turn to the local that Bunzl laments, and suggests that it has been a necessary step within anthropology and cultural criticism.
But that context doesn’t necessarily explain the persistence of generalization on the other, “Western” side of the divide—or not, at least, to my satisfaction. For if imperialism is the problem that led to an asymmetrical overgeneralization on one side and particularistic nominalism on the other, why don’t we say as much? The “West” often seems to stand for just this—the imperialist powers. Before 1989 it also played a plausible metaphorical role in the geo-political opposition between the capitalist democracies and the Soviet bloc. But the problem is that it can just as easily stand for other, more dubious abstractions of the kind many of us have been committed to questioning—the “Judeo-Christian tradition” or the supposedly homogenous cultural and philosophical legacy that traces itself back to the Greeks. Or for Europe and America. Or Europe and America and Australia—in other words, for countries whose dominant political classes and (for the moment at least) majority populations identify their heritage in (some notion of) Europe. There are legitimate reasons for referring to these different entities in particular discursive or political contexts. But if they can be described more substantively than with the geologeme “the West,” why not do so?
Ultimately, that is my main terminological challenge to the purveyors of “the West.” If the term has any consistent meaning, such as imperialism or Christianity or whiteness or European-derived culture, why not just say so? And if the term doesn’t have such a meaning, why not put it to rest, once and for all? I’m curious to hear where people come down on this question; I’m open to persuasion that I’m going in the wrong direction.