Introduction: From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia, Europe and the Lineages of Difference

From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia, Europe and the Lineages of Difference aims critically to engage the ways in which notions of difference and identity have been developed over the last two centuries or more, and some of the key concepts and processes – civilization, nationality, ethnicity, culture, imagined and real territorialization, capital accumulation, class formation, and the spatialization of time – that have governed the cultural, geographic, and historical imagination since the age of classical imperialism from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. Orientalism and postcolonialism constitute, as it were, the points of departure and arrival of this volume, demonstrating the persistence of some motifs despite the tremendous dynamism that Marx identified with the capitalist mode of production, which threatens to overturn all “fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient venerable prejudices and opinions.”3 This must be because in churning up the sediments of history, the very career of capital as a social form that generalizes itself around the world can make the past into an object of desire, nostalgia, and so on but only, it would appear, when time can simultaneously be attached to certain concrete, if anachronistic, notions of space that have the potential to form the basis of what we call a geographic commonsense. Celebrating continuities and lamenting ruptures become in that context almost socially therapeutic exercises, when they don’t serve altogether more practical organizational ends. The real difference that the passage of time under capitalism imposes as an almost objective and ineluctable necessity and the social and spatial disparities, even

the extreme global polarization, may be ideologically contained and compensated via the construction and mobilization of stable categories associated with ethnicity, nationality, civilization, and the inclusions/exclusions they imply. Time and space in their complex relationality are then the axes around which a veil may be drawn over the immensely disruptive forces located in the social form of production. The ways in which people organize their understanding of the vast multi-

dimensional totality of an emerging and, later, established global capital, its colonial-imperialist manifestations, the fragments thrown up in the process and the locational politics that arise as a virtually inevitable outcome of the fissiparous tendencies that followed in their wake – their cognitive map of the world,4 so to speak – are cardinal themes in the pages that follow. Not surprisingly, then, the following chapters focus on important bodies of thought – Orientalism and political-economy – generated in the process, which in turn shaped the categorial fields that were, and still are, mobilized in localizations either across the colonial-imperialist divide, the socio-economic one, or both. If one dealt largely with the anatomy of ancient, deeply rooted, geographically significant civilizations, the other was largely about laying out the immutable laws and tendencies of a “substantive” economy.5 Coinciding temporally and spatially in their origin and subsequent elaboration, they also shared a common spirit, namely the naturalization of the socio-economic fate and destiny of peoples associated, for example, with the division of society into classes or the world into a developed metropolis and “underdeveloped” or maldeveloped periphery, leaders and followers, Asia at the beginning of history and Europe at the end, and numerous variations thereon. As this volume will argue, a surprising homology – defined as a structural similarity of form – emerges between supposedly disinterested academic thought and the capital system itself. Arguably, much modernist and postmodernist thought has developed – consciously or otherwise – in various registers a range of positions that reveal this structural similarity of form, and that this volume investigates through detailed case studies, starting with its emergent phase in the late-eighteenth-early-nineteenth century and concluding with its moribund successor in the early twenty-first century. The mapping of the physical world, rendering it into a two-dimensional

measurable and knowable reality (geography in the literal sense) and the mapping of the socio-economic world (a cognitive rendering of an altogether novel and bewildering reality of a properly global society brought about by the spread of the capital social form) not surprisingly go hand-in-hand. They reveal the systemic pressures that generate a sense of a totality spanning the globe, even as they record the inevitable unevenness of the operation of the processes that generate this demand in the first place. The familiar demarcation of the coordinates of “east” and “west” (the sun

rising in the east and setting in the west), and the still-common use of the Mercator projection by which much smaller land masses in the higher latitudes are rendered physically (and imaginatively) equal to or greater than

much larger land masses nearer the equator inform a misleading but altogether taken-for-granted geography of the world and underline the inherently incomplete interpretations that such a conceptual, or theoretical, framework presents of the physical totality of the world.6 When such interpretations, as categories of knowledge production involving spatial inscriptions or territorializations, both in actual, physical space as well as in the mind, acquire over time a stable validity, they are open to other appropriations as well. The Hegelian synthesis given in the epigraph above is perhaps one such appropriation, drawing on and elaborating, with the immense cachet attaching to philosophy as the discipline par excellence of humanist knowledge, the geographical commonplace of Asia and Europe (Orient and Occident) as absolute mutual Otherness, the foundation of a still-potent imagined difference. Its instant familiarity to modern readers signifies the various disciplinary registers – philology, Indology, Sinology, history, anthropology, economics, and so on – that have repeatedly through the nineteenth and even more so in the twentieth century developed this mutual and, in many readings, untranscendable difference.7 As the chapters that follow underscore, it is an ironic reminder of the transcendental categories and alienated essences that have come to dominate the political lexicon of our time, summarily expressing in formulaic and often misleading ways the social and global inequalities and imbalances of the near past and present, retrojecting them to the mists of time and projecting them also to an infinite future. In such readings, the historical specificities marking the construction of polarized categories and the geopolitical orderings of the present are obliterated in naturalized formulations. “West” and “East,” “Europe” and “Asia” come to be read as autonomous entities that precede and encode the political/institutional/intellectual mixes than actually follow their construction at a particular historical conjuncture. Thus, when someone like the current president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, explains that Turkey cannot possibly be part of the European Union given its situation in Asia Minor, therefore by definition not in Europe, he offers a somewhat convenient caricature of what may be meant by geographical commonsense, or rather, in this case, of how it may be cynically instrumentalized. This volume contributes to formulating a critique of this geographical

commonsense through which political relations articulated as difference, “Asia / Europe” are lived and legitimized, and thereby exert a formative influence on geopolitical realities. It tries simultaneously to move across and connect this macro-, or even the meta-, geographic level with distinct yet related spatial regimes of everyday and concrete territorialized experience. After all, it is in the culturally and legally coded space of the nation-state that the many, the crowd, the multitude become the People, and in which historically determined regimes of sociability are internalized.8 This volume thus draws attention to the ways in which macroscalar understandings of the world find their echoes on the level of individuals and groups located along familiar but constantly reinforced faultlines, variously ranged along spatial, temporal, and socioeconomic axes. The extent to which such faultlines converge and diverge, the

historical dynamics of naturalization and contestation, their articulation with the abstract yet real universal “community of money,”9 form the subject matter of the detailed studies that follow. A related concern of the collection is critically to engage post-colonial stu-

dies, broadly conceived, as part of this wider articulation of categories, knowledge production and interests – an important critique insofar as it addresses the possibility of a contemporary culturalist validation of earlier Orientalist emphases and “discoveries,” this time mobilizing “theory” and “difference” as two ideological offspring of the postmodernist 1980 and early 1990s. A frank confrontation with the ensemble of ideas and histories converging on the category “difference,” a quintessentially modern idea that now permeates the globe like the economic system itself, is long overdue. In view of the perhaps unintentionally ironic celebration of difference, of indeterminacy that generates its own grammar, so to speak, this volume none the less insists on delineating the historical forces that have constituted our world, thereby giving the word difference, and “modernity” that is its source of nourishment, their proper material coordinates.10 The transnationalization of aspects of culture is very far from producing a “flat, uniform cosmopolitanism.”11

Global capital that in its normal operations brings about the conditions for, and sustains, the transnationalization of culture also creates on-going differentiation – based on what Harvey has referred to as uneven geographical development of accumulation and capitalist development, a product not of “nature but history.”12 Culture no less than capital reproduces the logic of “differentiation” that “tends towards ever greater differentiation without any end in sight.”13 But what are the avenues through which differentiation – “the conceptual key to difference,”14 constitutively reproducing itself through the constant expansion of capital with residual and emergent continuities and discontinuities – retains a nucleus of previous parts after the “event of the mitosis”15 has taken place? Some further theoretical thinking is required to approach the problem of

the recontextualization of difference construction and its reconnections to wider temporal and spatial frames. Étienne Balibar offers a way into this issue in his discussion of the antithetical theses that are often affirmed in coming to grips with the on-going differentiations that emerge and consolidate themselves within the actually existing globalization – the first, the phenomena of “closure” of national identity and exclusion of foreign populations as a “prolonged effect of the archaic character of the state;” the second, a by-product of “the imperialism of the market” and the new economic order in which the “weakening of the national and fundamentally ‘political communities’ goes hand in hand with an exacerbation of feelings of ethnic or ethnocultural belonging,” both of which have the effect of occluding history, in this case the “colonial heritage.”16 As regards Europe, one feels in broad agreement with this emphasis on the colonial heritage, notably in accounting for the formation of a “European apartheid.” However, a further theoretical opening may be needed to think of the current global moment, specifically the spatial and

temporal contradictions between the territorial logic of the state, requiring relative permanence embedded in fixed administrative institutions and infrastructures, transport, energy, school systems, on the one hand, and on the other the fluctuating logic of capital, moving money, labour, commodities around across borders wherever profit can be made. The contradictory dynamics therein tend to generate “good” (i.e. sanctuarized) and “bad” externalities. In their guise as keywords – for example, nation, community, authenticity, cultural difference, foreigners, Islam, China, the Enlightenment, East-West – each mobilizes particular historical ideological intertexts (be they colonial, Orientalist, romantic-ecological, anti-urban) and each comes with its own geographical imagination (and subsequent logic of territorial demarcation) as the shortest route to the naturalization of the social relations obtaining under the altogether pure[r], if violently disruptive, version of capitalism known as neo-liberalism. Thus the necessary critique of post-colonial culturalism must involve descriptions of the machineries of representation that generate modes of territorialized subjectivity, a whole geographic mode of being, validating socially produced differences, and sometimes ghettoizing ethnicized hierarchies. This volume develops the argument in three sections with primary con-

tributions from the editors who co-organized an international dialogue and conference on this and related subjects in May 2006 at Duke University. The chapters draw attention to the temporal and spatial junctures of a new global order, informed by the vast extension and intensification of the capital social form, in which specific categories – referred to at the outset of this introduction and further described below – gained saliency and began to provide the vocabulary of modern knowledge production, often subsuming to a historicizing logic, but sometimes supplanting cosmological and symbolic forms encountered from ancien regimes around the world. The chapters are global and comparative in approach and take issues of space/spatiality as seriously as they do issues of time/temporality. All involve detailed understandings of the Asia-Europe dialectic as a critical element in the shaping of the foregoing concerns. The first section consists of two chapters that frame the relationship

between the history of capital, revolution and reaction, and the categories generated in this milieu that underpin a perduring history of ideas. Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, in their “Coordinates of Orientalism: Reflections on the Universal and the Particular,” discuss the “Orient” as a name of the particular, counter-posited by the order of “Europe” as the universal conceived in terms of general exchangeability and equivalence. Their discussion points to a level of analysis beyond the first two “coordinates of Orientalism” – its temporal and spatial dimensions, manifested in intellectualacademic and political-administrative forms – famously described by Edward Said, who disconnects, however, the imperialist historical-cultural imagination from the relational and immanent force-field set in motion by capital, which the authors dub the third coordinate of Orientalism. Mazumdar’s “Locating China, Positioning America: The Politics of the Civilizational Model of

World History,” elucidates the concept of “civilization,” its formative process and crystallization as a pivotal category in the counter-revolutionary conjuncture of anti-Jacobin struggles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury Europe. The chapter goes on to describe the long afterlife of the concept both in Europe and the United States and its revival in today’s postrevolutionary conjuncture in China via the popularity of Samuel Huntington’s recent resuscitation of the Toynbeean model at a moment of a marked shift in the history of global capital. This chapter examines the anxieties and uncertainties that underpin the recasting of this essentially reactionary model of history – implying some fundamental level of human identity and difference that ineluctably interposes its cultural and institutional inheritance into all human relations, a non-vanishing mediator if one likes – as new twenty-first century projects of renewal and consolidation of the world’s leading powers. A second section consisting of four chapters carries forward those general

themes in specific national contexts in which politics – including, of course, spectres of revolution and the massive reality of counter-revolution – intimately accompanied the production of academic knowledge and religious doctrine, not to mention historical hermeneutics. Roland Lardinois’ “The Domination Unthinkable: French Sociology of India in the Mirror of Max Weber” traces the history of Indology in French academic circles from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century over the issue of rendering the social morphology and historicity of India comprehensible to the wider world and to Indians themselves, a task that apparently could only be undertaken by European scholarship. In Lardinois’ account of the categorial and theoretical divides of French Indology and its failure to engage Max Weber’s sociological analysis of Hinduism and Buddhism, “India” comes across as an intellectual-academic construct in which contestation over its supposed historicity or not both obscure and underline the terms in which “science,” “ideology” and politics interact to produce not only an authoritative body of knowledge about a distant land, but serve to underline Europe’s singular universality. Cemil Aydin’s “The Question of Orientalism in Pan-Islamic Thought: The

Origins, Content and Legacy of Transnational Muslim Identities” investigates the Turkish cultural and intellectual elites’ claims of civilizational parity with Europe, their turn to pan-Islamism and articulation of a civilizing mission of their own in Muslim lands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This chapter assesses the significance as well as the limitations of carrying out this ambitious programme while remaining within the gravitational field of Orientalist categories, at a time when transnational forces accompanying the surge of capitalist development in Western Europe and the rise of Communist internationalism with its origins in the Soviet Union threatened to overturn the geopolitical ordering of the late-nineteenth century world. A similar set of challenges informs the subject of the next chapter, Afshin Matin-Asgari’s “Iranian Modernity in Global Perspective: Nationalist, Marxist, and Authenticity Discourses,” which turns to the politics and discourses of

authenticity and state formation in Iran. In the cauldron of revolution, counter-revolution, massive foreign interventions, and the great intellectual ferment that was engendered as a result, ideological formations were produced in Iran that sought to synthesize sometimes radically different forms of thought, e.g. Marxism and Islamism, in the service of nation-building and a transformed and politically energized Islam, eventuating in Khomeini’s brand of Islamist ideology. The latter was forged, the chapter argues, not prior to but during the movement to overthrow the Pahlavi regime, and owed its success more to ad hoc borrowing from Marxism and nationalism rather than to any plausible revival of “authentic” Shi’i norms and values. Pierre Rousset’s “Marxism(s), Revolution, and the Third World,” analyzes

a counter-example of renewed universalism among a generation of Marxist activists of the 1960s and 1970s in France (and, more generally, Western Europe) born out of solidarity with revolutionary movements in East and Southeast Asia. This created an opening to question the notion of a unilinear path of progression in history that was then settled opinion among a broad swathe of both Marxist and non-Marxist historians, and via the concepts of “open” and “multilinear” history to hold open the possibility of trajectories unanticipated by Eurocentric diffusionism, effectively provincializing Europe without giving in to indeterminacy or giving up the hope of transformative change. Even here, ironically, the counter-trend towards the formulation of national essentialism and civilizational difference, mirroring colonial-era distinctions of intra-Asian difference now within a post-colonial context, finally overcame the potentialities of radical universalism in the acceptance of an “us-and-them” world. The first six chapters reveal the ways in which key categories of universalism

and particularism are articulated, mobilized, challenged, reformulated, reworked and synthesized during moments of large-scale social transformations, whether these are reformist, revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, or usually some mix of the above, both at home and abroad. Debates about the future, and about modernity, identity, nations and civilizations in key political formations mobilize a full spectrum of discursive and political strategies to cope with the stresses and strains induced by a combination of autochthonously generated and exogenously induced transitions in the social order and political regimes. In this context, not surprisingly, Orientalist notions of Europe-Asia, self-Orientalization, the “metaphysics of authentic Being,” and the contradictory ideological strands represented by Islamism, Confucianism, socialism, communism, Marxism, and so on, are not mere abstractions but expressions of the actually existing contradictions of those historical times. The concluding section of the volume combines theoretical approaches and

long-range historical perspective in two chapters by Thierry Labica and Vasant Kaiwar that return to the issue of “difference,” be it rehearsed as fetishized authenticity, “civilizational” separateness or post-colonial particularism. These chapters explore how “difference,” and related categories, become autonomized from the forces of differentiation which they both veil

and reveal in return. Labica’s “The Cultural Fix? Language, Work, and the Territories of Accumulation” contrasts the optimism of the late 1980s about the global village, soft power and the “end of work” to the present dystopian moment of the revival of war, empire, and the return of work, no longer as a sub-linguistic silent order as in the age of classical European industrial capitalism but as one in which language itself has been fully subsumed to the production of surplus value. It thus brings into full view the often obscure relationships and correspondences between phases of global capital, forms of work and workplace culture, national and geopolitical orderings, and the often fantastically contorted forms of authenticity now constructed as a plausible bulwark against a perceived threat of total disintegration. In this perspective, the chapter argues that mapping the contemporary re-territorializations resulting from the new differentiations and/or confusions of capital requires one to depart from topographical assumptions and their naturalizing commonsense. Kaiwar’s concluding chapter, “Hybrid and Alternative Modernities: Critical Reflections on Postcolonial Studies and the Project of Provincialising Europe,” assesses the implications of postcolonial studies’ claim to provincialize Europe by insisting on difference and alternative/hybrid modernities that follow no pre-scripted evolutionary path. Coinciding with the end of the Cold War, neoliberal globalization, structural-adjustment policies, and the widespread demise of left politics, postcolonial studies exemplifies an ideological impasse of the present moment of history, marrying post-Cold-War pessimism about transformative possibilities to Romantic nostalgia for a world before or without the Enlightenment, postmodernist notions of indeterminacy, micronarratives of belonging and identity, all of which leave untouched the old Orientalist notion of Europe as the place of the Universal and the Orients as so many particularisms. The postcolonial project, the chapter concludes, is incapable of either provincializing Europe or addressing, for example, the complex issues of social justice faced by a dramatically polarized world. These chapters return us to the considerations that opened the volume,

namely the historicity and massive materiality of the categories of culture, rooted in the social forms of production and the differentiations and polarizations they generate. Mobilized in various registers through the two centuries or so that this volume considers those categories are integral to attempts to stabilize and contain the seemingly uncontainable dynamics of capital. It should be clear by now that the categorial and theoretical directions of

the volume are in an extended debate and dialogue with contemporary developments in cultural studies, Anglo-American Marxism, and post-Marxist French social theory. Fredric Jameson’s work on periodization, modernity/ postmodernity, and “cognitive mapping” constitutes one important reference. David Harvey’s focus on space, the theory of uneven geographical development, the condition of postmodernity; and Étienne Balibar’s historical deconstruction of Europe and its evolving relationship with the global south are other key references.17 Overall, the contributions to this volume make

historically informed interventions from multiple sites of investigation. As against the modernist tendency to privilege time over space or the postmodernist tendency to reverse the ordering by privileging space over time, the contributors to this volume hold the two in creative tension. There are a number of reasons for these emphases: at a moment when the

problem of “globalization” has itself acquired global currency, it seems intensely ironic that totalizing comprehensions have come to be regarded with suspicion, if not condemned outright. Since one of the objectives of this volume is to study the contours of the world transformed by capital – the “furious oscillations of modern times,”18 or what nowadays we often simply qualify by the shorthand term, modernity – confronting the conditions of our times so as to represent modernity in its proper historical coordinates has been an imperative. Despite periodic attempts to banish such inconvenient categories as capital, labour, revolution, the future, the sense of history, and totalization that would help organize and explain the distinctive qualities of our historic epoch, there is a recurrent, unrepressable and “persistent curiosity of a generally systemic rather than a merely anecdotal kind,” not simply to know what will happen next but as “a more general anxiety about the larger fate or destiny of our system or mode of production,”19 that reinvigorates those categories and gives them a fresh lease of life. Related to, and partially grounding, the above is a second condition, what

one might refer to as a fundamental peculiarity of human history, that individual time is “out of synch” with socio-economic time, with the “rhythms and cycles” of the larger systemic reality, and that we as individuals with a limited time horizon are poorly placed to “witness the fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing only this or that incomplete moment.”20 Social theory, we would argue, is required to theorize this socio-economic time and not collapse into individual time, or its communalized equivalents, at the risk of being stuck with the fragments that capital throws up, except that the fragments in their descriptive register as locality, identity, diversity are autonomized to the point that postmodernism’s, or postcolonial theory’s, claim to “subversion,” “subversive history,” and so on strike one as subversive precisely of that unrepressable systemic curiosity alluded to above. Jameson is surely right to note the similarity between the sense of alienation that arises when the geography of lived urban space remains obscure to residents and the sense of alienation that results when the larger socio-economic world is occluded and ungraspable to political view.21