Written by Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism
My primary hope for Kritik has been that it would provoke a new forum for discussion among people in and beyond Illinois about the important theoretical, political, and cultural issues that we face. With that goal in mind, I’m very pleased about the thoughtful and substantive responses we received after my last post on the persistence of a discourse of “the West” among critical intellectuals. I’d like to try to continue the discussion by engaging with those remarks from the comments section. (Incidentally, the easiest way for those of you who, like me, are not registered with Blogger to contribute comments is to click on the button that says “Name/URL” and simply enter your own name before writing up your comment.)
The starting point for my piece “Against the West?” was the observation that a discourse of “the West” is ubiquitous despite decades of poststructuralist-fueled skepticism about such abstractions and despite a marked tendency toward localism and particularism in many fields in the humanities and social sciences. There seems to be agreement among the respondents that a discourse of “the West” is widespread—at least in certain contexts. As Keguro writes, the notion of the West “is everywhere,” especially in contemporary “mainstream” journalism. Although coming at things from a different angle, Emanuel seems to second this point about the mainstream; he writes that “the use of the ‘west’ under critique in Michael's post is the one prevalent in American newspapers and tv news, perhaps a reflection of American political theory . . . rather than a persistent philosophical term.” As Emanuel also points out, however, the “West” in Derrida’s “Western metaphysics” (one of the examples I gave last time) is really the “Occident”—as in, “la métaphysique occidentale”—a term with a different etymology, genealogy, and contemporary significance. Emanuel’s comment is an important reminder that the discourse under discussion here works differently in non-English-language contexts—though my hunch is that “l’Occident,” “das Abendland,” and other linguistic variants play similar roles to “the West” in Europe today despite their different genealogies. Observers of other “Western” contexts should feel free to check in on this.
I agree with Keguro and Manuel that “the West” pervades, among other things, the language of the US media. I don’t think, however, that this is simply a media discourse; rather, it is also omnipresent among English-language critical thinkers and theorists. As I mentioned in my original post, it is particularly that persistence that troubles me. For me, at least, the question remains how to address that omnipresence. Like Keguro, I also think it’s urgent that we figure this out—but I don’t take it for granted that the wide circulation of a popular discourse requires that we remain within its terms. Perhaps, as Bruce joins Keguro in implying, and as Derrida dedicated many words to demonstrating, it isn’t so easy to get away from “the West” after all. I’d admit that, but still urge us to think twice before repeating the terms of mainstream discourses. Indeed, here I think Derrida can be methodologically helpful in prompting us to try to pry the discourse free from its dominant terms, while also remaining aware of our inevitable complicity in dominant structures. To clarify: I’m not against all generalizations, but I’m still not convinced that the East/West binary provides our best purchase on the urgent matters that we confront—even if those matters appear dressed up in that geo-ideological guise.
What are other possibilities for mapping the contemporary or historical terrain? Both Martha and Sharif bring up an alternative figure of the contemporary critical imagination; the North/South divide. Martha is right that in the post-Cold War world, this way of dividing the globe has started to appear alongside the more familiar Occident/Orient coding. As Martha guesses, I’m ambivalent about this turn. Let me register a couple of observations about this matter. First, it seems to me that the North/South opposition appears almost uniquely in the discourse of what I’d still like to call the Left—while West/East is strikingly promiscuous in terms of political orientation. (The relevance of “orientation” to this discussion reminds me of the important work of Sara Ahmed, the University of London theorist and author of Queer Phenomenology with whom we were lucky enough to have a seminar last week.) To me, the political clarity of North/South is a plus—that is, it has a polemical bite that is less ambiguous than West/East. Why? Because—and this is the second point—North/South describes material inequities first and foremost rather than inevitably invoking cultural and religious differences. (I suspect there will be some disagreement about this last point from those working on “the South,” but I would maintain at least tentatively that North/South is relatively less overdetermined by pernicious discourses of cultural difference and more “oriented” toward the uneven, capitalist world-system.)
Nevertheless, I’d say once again that even this revised geo-imaginary starts to break down once we consider Sharif’s pertinent point that “immigration and displacement” have created an undeniable “proximity” of the West and non-West as of the North and South. It is key that we emphasize, as Sharif does, that displacement joins migration in fostering this proximity, since that former term better captures both the ever-powerful legacies of slavery and the ongoing colonization of indigenous peoples than does the also-crucial focus on migration (in the US as in many other places). (I also like Sharif’s citation of Bhabha’s “yes-but” logic—I do feel close to that way of thinking, even as I’d want to submit Bhabha’s own thought to such a dialectical critique!)
Here we may seem to be heading back to the very problem that stimulated this line of thought for me in the first place: Matti Bunzl’s critique of anthropologists’ propensity toward “Borgesian maps” and over-particularization. In short, I agree with Matti that we need maps and that maps require generalization, abstraction, and even a degree of reification. Such a requirement entails that the vision of proximity, overlap, and non-segregation that Sharif points us toward still has to be mappable. To pick up on Joe’s comments, and shift from a spatial metaphor toward a simultaneously spatial and temporal one, I’d say that we need narrativity even if we remain skeptical towards meta- or grand-narrativity. Joe asks us to consider that, despite our “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv), we may still rely on their negative example to ground our own alternatives, and he asks what our theories would look like if we broke from these metanarratives. I think this is exactly the right question and provides a description of the difficult but necessary task that I’m proposing we consider. The problem with the “meta-“ or “grand” narrative is not its narrativity—the way it helps give spatio-temporal order to our thought (something I don’t think we can do without)—but with the “supplement” that the prefix or qualifier (meta-, grand) supplies. The West (and also the Occident) is a grand narrative that seeks to orient all stories around a single axis—it is “heliocentric,” to use one of Derrida’s terms from “White Mythologies,” a text brought to mind by Bruce’s and Emanuel’s comments.
At the opposite pole from metanarratives would be something we might call “stories,” by which I mean the kind of small scale, local tale recommended by Lila Abu-Lughod: “what life is like for one old Bedouin matriarch” (qtd. in Bunzl 5). But stories are still written in the shadows of the master narratives, it seems to me. Abu-Lughod’s recommendation, for instance, comes in response to the metanarrative of “culture” that she sees as grounding anthropology in its phase of complicity with colonialism. What I’m wondering is whether we can imagine maps and narratives that succumb neither to the hubris of the “meta-“ nor to the potentially reactionary domain of the local. (Why equate the local with the potentially reactionary? Just think of states’ rights discourse in the US.) Neither meta nor local, this would be—to respond to Bruce’s equation of “the West” with historicity itself—“another” historicity.
But here my discussion is getting more abstract than I’d want it to. So I’ll conclude by rephrasing what I still think are the key questions: Do we really lose anything by avoiding the geologeme, “the West”? If so, what? Does our focus on the West ultimately reference anything other than the self-referential discourse of the West itself? Are there other such terms in critical theory that we might want to learn to do without?
My primary hope for Kritik has been that it would provoke a new forum for discussion among people in and beyond Illinois about the important theoretical, political, and cultural issues that we face. With that goal in mind, I’m very pleased about the thoughtful and substantive responses we received after my last post on the persistence of a discourse of “the West” among critical intellectuals. I’d like to try to continue the discussion by engaging with those remarks from the comments section. (Incidentally, the easiest way for those of you who, like me, are not registered with Blogger to contribute comments is to click on the button that says “Name/URL” and simply enter your own name before writing up your comment.)
The starting point for my piece “Against the West?” was the observation that a discourse of “the West” is ubiquitous despite decades of poststructuralist-fueled skepticism about such abstractions and despite a marked tendency toward localism and particularism in many fields in the humanities and social sciences. There seems to be agreement among the respondents that a discourse of “the West” is widespread—at least in certain contexts. As Keguro writes, the notion of the West “is everywhere,” especially in contemporary “mainstream” journalism. Although coming at things from a different angle, Emanuel seems to second this point about the mainstream; he writes that “the use of the ‘west’ under critique in Michael's post is the one prevalent in American newspapers and tv news, perhaps a reflection of American political theory . . . rather than a persistent philosophical term.” As Emanuel also points out, however, the “West” in Derrida’s “Western metaphysics” (one of the examples I gave last time) is really the “Occident”—as in, “la métaphysique occidentale”—a term with a different etymology, genealogy, and contemporary significance. Emanuel’s comment is an important reminder that the discourse under discussion here works differently in non-English-language contexts—though my hunch is that “l’Occident,” “das Abendland,” and other linguistic variants play similar roles to “the West” in Europe today despite their different genealogies. Observers of other “Western” contexts should feel free to check in on this.
I agree with Keguro and Manuel that “the West” pervades, among other things, the language of the US media. I don’t think, however, that this is simply a media discourse; rather, it is also omnipresent among English-language critical thinkers and theorists. As I mentioned in my original post, it is particularly that persistence that troubles me. For me, at least, the question remains how to address that omnipresence. Like Keguro, I also think it’s urgent that we figure this out—but I don’t take it for granted that the wide circulation of a popular discourse requires that we remain within its terms. Perhaps, as Bruce joins Keguro in implying, and as Derrida dedicated many words to demonstrating, it isn’t so easy to get away from “the West” after all. I’d admit that, but still urge us to think twice before repeating the terms of mainstream discourses. Indeed, here I think Derrida can be methodologically helpful in prompting us to try to pry the discourse free from its dominant terms, while also remaining aware of our inevitable complicity in dominant structures. To clarify: I’m not against all generalizations, but I’m still not convinced that the East/West binary provides our best purchase on the urgent matters that we confront—even if those matters appear dressed up in that geo-ideological guise.
What are other possibilities for mapping the contemporary or historical terrain? Both Martha and Sharif bring up an alternative figure of the contemporary critical imagination; the North/South divide. Martha is right that in the post-Cold War world, this way of dividing the globe has started to appear alongside the more familiar Occident/Orient coding. As Martha guesses, I’m ambivalent about this turn. Let me register a couple of observations about this matter. First, it seems to me that the North/South opposition appears almost uniquely in the discourse of what I’d still like to call the Left—while West/East is strikingly promiscuous in terms of political orientation. (The relevance of “orientation” to this discussion reminds me of the important work of Sara Ahmed, the University of London theorist and author of Queer Phenomenology with whom we were lucky enough to have a seminar last week.) To me, the political clarity of North/South is a plus—that is, it has a polemical bite that is less ambiguous than West/East. Why? Because—and this is the second point—North/South describes material inequities first and foremost rather than inevitably invoking cultural and religious differences. (I suspect there will be some disagreement about this last point from those working on “the South,” but I would maintain at least tentatively that North/South is relatively less overdetermined by pernicious discourses of cultural difference and more “oriented” toward the uneven, capitalist world-system.)
Nevertheless, I’d say once again that even this revised geo-imaginary starts to break down once we consider Sharif’s pertinent point that “immigration and displacement” have created an undeniable “proximity” of the West and non-West as of the North and South. It is key that we emphasize, as Sharif does, that displacement joins migration in fostering this proximity, since that former term better captures both the ever-powerful legacies of slavery and the ongoing colonization of indigenous peoples than does the also-crucial focus on migration (in the US as in many other places). (I also like Sharif’s citation of Bhabha’s “yes-but” logic—I do feel close to that way of thinking, even as I’d want to submit Bhabha’s own thought to such a dialectical critique!)
Here we may seem to be heading back to the very problem that stimulated this line of thought for me in the first place: Matti Bunzl’s critique of anthropologists’ propensity toward “Borgesian maps” and over-particularization. In short, I agree with Matti that we need maps and that maps require generalization, abstraction, and even a degree of reification. Such a requirement entails that the vision of proximity, overlap, and non-segregation that Sharif points us toward still has to be mappable. To pick up on Joe’s comments, and shift from a spatial metaphor toward a simultaneously spatial and temporal one, I’d say that we need narrativity even if we remain skeptical towards meta- or grand-narrativity. Joe asks us to consider that, despite our “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv), we may still rely on their negative example to ground our own alternatives, and he asks what our theories would look like if we broke from these metanarratives. I think this is exactly the right question and provides a description of the difficult but necessary task that I’m proposing we consider. The problem with the “meta-“ or “grand” narrative is not its narrativity—the way it helps give spatio-temporal order to our thought (something I don’t think we can do without)—but with the “supplement” that the prefix or qualifier (meta-, grand) supplies. The West (and also the Occident) is a grand narrative that seeks to orient all stories around a single axis—it is “heliocentric,” to use one of Derrida’s terms from “White Mythologies,” a text brought to mind by Bruce’s and Emanuel’s comments.
At the opposite pole from metanarratives would be something we might call “stories,” by which I mean the kind of small scale, local tale recommended by Lila Abu-Lughod: “what life is like for one old Bedouin matriarch” (qtd. in Bunzl 5). But stories are still written in the shadows of the master narratives, it seems to me. Abu-Lughod’s recommendation, for instance, comes in response to the metanarrative of “culture” that she sees as grounding anthropology in its phase of complicity with colonialism. What I’m wondering is whether we can imagine maps and narratives that succumb neither to the hubris of the “meta-“ nor to the potentially reactionary domain of the local. (Why equate the local with the potentially reactionary? Just think of states’ rights discourse in the US.) Neither meta nor local, this would be—to respond to Bruce’s equation of “the West” with historicity itself—“another” historicity.
But here my discussion is getting more abstract than I’d want it to. So I’ll conclude by rephrasing what I still think are the key questions: Do we really lose anything by avoiding the geologeme, “the West”? If so, what? Does our focus on the West ultimately reference anything other than the self-referential discourse of the West itself? Are there other such terms in critical theory that we might want to learn to do without?