1
Piecework
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
—Robert Frost, from “Mending Wall”
Through Franz Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China” (Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer, 1930), a short story of an unfinished wall, I offer a “sneak preview” of several barbarian operations that will be laid out in this book and present some of its main threads:1 the relation between civilization and barbarism; the features and functions of what I call “barbarisms”; the relation of the concept of barbarism to questions of knowing; its involvement in comparative acts; and the ways in which we can imagine a creative recasting of this concept. The wall and its construction system in Kafka’s story function as a model for mapping out the structuring principles of this book as a whole.
In “The Great Wall of China,” barbarism unravels as a force that ruptures the epistemological premises of established discourses and imbues them with foreign and erratic elements. Through such interventions, barbarism overthrows the epistemological priority of civilization and promises other ways of knowing, which spring out of a constant tension with negation, ambivalence, contradictions, and possible impossibilities.
The concept of barbarism has a significant comparative aspect. The “barbarian” can be seen as a figure of comparison by definition because it is the product of a comparative act: someone receives the label “barbarian” after having been compared to, and found the opposite of, the civilized subject. The barbarian is the measure against which civilization acquires its self-validation. The comparative gesture embedded in the barbarian is part of a hierarchical comparative framework that establishes “civilization” as the referent of supremacy and the measure of excellence. It is therefore a fake comparison played out between two constructions devised by the (civilized) subject: the “civilized” and the “barbarian.” The outcome of this comparative “act” is always the same: the comparison with the barbarian makes the civilized look good. Self-proclaimed civilized subjects need to measure themselves against barbarians, and they always win this competition, since both parts of the comparison are products of their own representational system.
The figure of the barbarian, however, does not always fall prey to quasi-comparative acts to the benefit of civilizational discourse. Precisely due to its comparative nature, the barbarian can operate between worlds. Acting in the interstices of languages (in the broadest sense of the word), the barbarian can create fissures in the languages and objects involved in comparative encounters. Barbarism can be involved in a mode of comparing that demands a radical change of perspective as well as a shifting of the grounds of the comparison.
Barbarism and Civilization: An Unfinished Business
The narrator in “The Great Wall of China” is one of the Chinese builders of the wall. He aspires to put together a historical inquiry by combining the fragmented, inconclusive, and contradictory narratives and theories that surround the construction of the Great Wall of China. The project of the wall was meant to reinforce China’s ideal of national purity and keep the country isolated and protected from contamination from the barbarous outside world. Nevertheless, Kafka’s narrator informs us that the project ended up defeating its purpose because of gaps rumored to exist between several blocks of the wall. The incompleteness of the wall—the fact that pieces are missing along its perimeter—is the result of the so-called system of piecemeal construction, which takes center stage in the narrator’s exposition. “Piecemeal construction” denotes the practice of building different blocks of the wall in different places at the same time, which would be joined together at a later stage. According to the narrator, some of these blocks were possibly never joined, leaving openings in the construction. In the story, we read that the piecemeal construction “is one of the crucial problems in the whole building of the wall” (Kafka 1999, 238). Thus, his narrative sets out to shed light on this system.
His first question concerns the incongruity between the wall’s purpose and effect. If the purpose of the wall was to offer “a protection against the peoples of the north,” the narrator wonders, “How can a wall protect if it is not a continuous structure? Not only can such a wall not protect, but what there is of it is in perpetual danger” (235). The wall is porous, vulnerable to its outside. Yet the construction “probably could not have been carried out in any other way” (236). His first explanation is based on psychological and practical reasons. The piecemeal system ensured variation and change of scenery for the supervisors of the construction. By moving around to build different parts of the wall, the supervisors could see finished sections on their way, renew their belief in their work, and feel they contributed to a great project that unified the nation. “Thus,” the narrator concludes, “the system of piecemeal construction becomes comprehensible” (238).
But not quite. In the narrative there are only provisional conclusions, constantly overthrown by new ones. Thus, the psychological explanation gives way to a theological or transcendental one. The narrator brings in the “high command” (die Führerschaft) as the invisible authority behind the decision for the piecemeal construction—an authority whose decrees are not to be questioned. “And for that reason,” the narrator remarks, “the incorruptible observer must hold that the command, if it had seriously desired it, could also have overcome those difficulties that prevented a system of continuous construction” (240). Yet the narrator immediately notices a paradox: “But the piecemeal construction was only a makeshift and therefore inexpedient. Remains the conclusion that the command willed something inexpedient [unzweckmäβig]. Strange conclusion!” (240). By suggesting that the decision of the high command was improper and ineffective, the narrator corrupts his own statement of belief in the unlimited power of the command. He thereby imbues his previous statement with a “barbarism,” a trace of self-canceling doubt, which leads his reasoning to an impasse (“Strange conclusion!”). The fact that he corrupts his own statement makes his address to an “incorruptible observer” ironic and, indeed, “inexpedient.” While the narrator constructs an “incorruptible observer” who must accept the infallibility of the high command, his narrative is replete with logical errors and paradoxes, bound to corrupt any “incorruptible observer.”
The narrator continues his line of questioning: “Against whom was the Great Wall to serve as a protection? Against the people of the north.” His reply is again instantly questioned and negated: “Now, I come from the southeast of China. No northern people can menace us there” (241). Not only have they never seen those barbarian nomads but even if they existed, the land is so vast that the northern people would never reach the southern villages. Once more, the narrator employs a strategy that Bianca Theisen calls “self-referential negation,” whereby “a statement invites and seems to entail the following one, only to then be negated and cancelled by it” (2006, 3). If the barbarians posed no threat, then the question that logically follows is, again, why the wall needed to be built: “Why, then, since that is so, did we leave our homes . . . our mothers and fathers, our weeping wives, our children . . . Why?” (Kafka 1999, 241).
For an answer he resorts again to the high command, which he now believes “has existed from all eternity, and the decision to build the wall likewise” (242). According to this new explanation, the construction of the wall had neither to do with a barbarian threat nor with the Emperor’s decision. It has no origin or cause whatsoever, since it has always existed. For the narrator-historian, this sudden cancellation of all causality behind the wall’s building makes the question of why utterly impertinent—“inexpedient.” The recourse to the high command as an all-explanatory mechanism undermines the purpose of his narrative. If the decision has always existed, then why explore its causes in the first place? However, what seems to make the whole inquiry pointless may also be read as an exposure of the arbitrary structures according to which causes and effects are constructed as such. If the decision for the wall always existed, then the perceived causes for the wall’s construction—protecting the country from barbarians, safeguarding the purity of the nation, strengthening its unity—come after the decision for the wall and are produced as the wall’s effects. The Emperor’s decree for the wall’s construction, the lifelong devotion of the Chinese people to its building, and the construction of outside others as threatening barbarians, are all effects—not causes—of the wall. By suggesting that national identity and the categories of “civilized” and “barbarian” are effects of discourse, the narrative deessentializes them. This deessentialization also highlights one of this book’s main premises: Barbarians do not exist as such but are constructions of a discursive structure that produces others as threatening and inferior.
The decision for the wall’s construction has no origin but merely effects, which are expected to be enhanced with the actual construction. However, a glitch appears in this project as soon as the theoretical decision for the wall turns into an actual construct. The actualization of the wall endangers the ideological structures that demanded its construction, because the system of piecemeal construction leaves fissures in the Empire’s borders, making them vulnerable to invasions from the outside. If the purpose of a wall is to seal borders, then this wall is strategically useless. The greatest monument to China’s civilization is also the greatest proof of its inability to exclude foreignness from its territory. As Wendy Brown argues in her recent study on walled states, while walls may appear as “hyperbolic tokens” of sovereignty, in fact their presence betrays an instability at the core of the message they are trying to convey. Therefore, walls can be signs of the waning of a nation’s sovereignty (2010, 24). In Kafka, the Chinese wall becomes an ambivalent symbol of power as well as vulnerability.
Although the narrator fails to adequately account for the wall’s construction system, it is noteworthy that those who have a better grasp of the project are the barbarian nomads themselves. It is probable, the narrator informs us, that the nomad tribes against which the wall was built “kept changing their encampments with incredible rapidity, like locusts, and so perhaps had a better general view of the progress of the wall than we, the builders” (Kafka 1999, 235–36). As Stanley Corngold observes, the design of the wall is incomprehensible, “except, perhaps, to the nomads whom it exists to ostracize.” This, Corngold argues, opens up the great paradox “that the builders are dependent on the beings from whom it is their entire purpose to obtain independence” (2002, 105).
The paradoxical dependence of civilization on its barbarians is thereby underscored. Civilization aspires to establish a proper locus from which to speak, exert power, and identify others as barbarians. In practice, however, this locus is precarious and unstable: the civilized center (in Kafka’s story, the Empire of China) is never identical to itself, as it can exist only in relation to a barbarian exteriority. This reflects the paradox of a civilized society priding itself on its self-sufficiency yet needing inferior or subjugated others in order to reaffirm this self-sufficiency. Thus, although civilization appears to be the powerful, superior term in the opposition with the barbarians, its dependence on them also makes it vulnerable.
Presented as inexpedient, the system of piecemeal construction itself can be viewed as a barbarism—a foreign, inexplicable element—at the heart of China’s civilization. The barbarism that this system constitutes does not come from the outside but is internally generated: it is the decision of the high command. This fact, as we have seen, puzzles the narrator. Why would civilization (wittingly or not) produce the barbarisms that undermine the completion of its own project? This question gives rise to opposing assumptions. Does the piecemeal construction signal civilization’s self-destructive drive, which makes it plant the seeds of its own potential demise in the form of gaps in the wall? Or does this barbarism in fact protect the Empire from turning into an isolated, self-regulating system without connections to its outside? Following the latter assumption, the real threat to civilization does not come from the nomads but from the desire for national purity and the exclusion of foreignness. The piecemeal construction blurs the borders between inside/outside, civilization and barbarism, enabling their interpenetration. By allowing foreign elements to enter, this design may fail to protect civilization from its outside, but it safeguards its potential for change and renewal.
The incomplete wall in the story underscores the unsettled relation between civilization and barbarism. The relation between civilization and barbarism is an unfinished business, with different, unpredictable effects each time it is activated. Through openings in the “wall” of civilizational discourse barbarism enters as a force that foils the completion of this wall and enables alterity to affect its structures.
Possible Impossibilities and Three Incomplete Walls
In the second part of “The Great Wall of China,” the narrator focuses on the strange relation between imperial center and periphery within the wall of China. Although the opposition between the intra and extra muros is not very convincing in the story (the barbarian nomads have not even been seen), inside the wall incongruities and improbabilities thrive. Within the Chinese universe, the people and the Empire are barbarian to each other, as they live in different worlds. In the narrator’s description of the Empire’s modus operandi, especially of the way common people relate to it, a universe replete with barbarisms comes alive. These barbarisms—in the form of paradoxes, hyperboles, irregularities, incompatibilities, and strange mixtures of heterogeneous orders—pertain both to notions of time and space and to the relation between fiction, myth, and reality.
The relation between the Empire in Peking and the “common people” is marked either by miscommunication or by total lack of communication. Regarding temporality, the people in China live in a mythical past, which they perceive as the Empire’s present. Information about dead emperors and their dynasties travels so slowly that old stories reach people as “news” thousands of years after occurrence. “Battles that are old history are new to us,” writes the narrator. And while nothing is known about the present Emperor, “long-dead emperors are set on the throne in our villages.” The living Emperor, on the other hand, “they confuse among the dead” (Kafka 1999, 245). The past is kept alive as present.
At first glance, this unorthodox temporality indicates that people live out of sync with the present, trapped in a mythical past. However, their time-conception also results in a perpetual performance of the past in the present. In this “present,” “the wives of the emperors . . . vehement in their greed, incontrollable in their lust, practice their abominations ever anew” (245, emphasis added). This repetitive performance of the past as present ensures that the past is never solidified but is constantly transformed from a present perspective.
The flow of information in the country is reminiscent of the way we view stars from the earth: most visible stars have been destroyed for millions of years. In Kafka’s story, however, not only is history performed as present but the inverse is true as well: for the Chinese people, the present of the Empire is already history. The narrator recalls that when a beggar came to the village to read a revolutionary leaflet by the rebels of the neighboring village, the villagers sent him away without believing a word he said. Although the text of the leaflet gives vivid descriptions of “the gruesomeness of the living present,” the dialect in which it is written sounds archaic to them. Hence, the content of the leaflet is perceived as ancient history. “So eager are our people to obliterate the present,” writes the narrator. The gruesome present of the neighbors is a barbarism in their own present—a foreign sound dismissed as obsolete, unworthy of attention (246).
China’s parallel temporalities usually do not interfere with each other. But whenever they cross each other momentarily—as in the last example—they imbue each other with barbarisms, which unsettle people’s time-conception and the truths by which they live. By juxtaposing these temporalities in the story, the narrator unleashes barbarisms that turn the familiar into something foreign and erratic and challenge the secure contexts of people’s lives. The elements I call “barbarisms” have a relational meaning: their identification as barbarisms is dependent on the context in which they appear. Thus, when there is no contact between different temporal frameworks in the story, the same elements I here call “barbarisms” may very well reinforce rather than undermine the borders of each temporal framework.
The reality of Peking and the existing Emperor are just as foreign and inaccessible to common people as the northern barbarians they have never seen. “Peking itself is far stranger to the people in our village than the next world,” the narrator concedes (246). Yet this does not deter them from keeping the myth of the Empire alive. The sacred dragon—the symbol of Peking—is always honored in their village, because, the narrator says, no people are “more faithful to the Emperor than ours” (246). The Emperor as symbol and the Empire as myth are far more indispensable to them than “reality.” Even if they long to clasp the Empire “in all its palpable living reality,” in the end they are not willing to exchange the safety of their mythical present for a chunk of the “real” (247). This would subject their age-old beliefs to the risk of falsification from another reality. Therefore, the reality of Peking is to them a barbarism they try to exclude from their discourse.
By juxtaposing reality and fiction, history and myth, past and present, the narrative does not project these categories as irreconcilable hierarchical oppositions. Nor does it collapse them by eradicating their differences. Because they operate on an equal level in the story’s universe, they are able to interpenetrate and affect each other: fiction is no less “real” than reality, for history is shown to be replete with mythical constructions, and the past can be just as “present” as the present, if not more. The discursive priority of positive categories over their inferior opposites—the real over the fictional, history over myth, the present over the past—is overthrown in the story, without the tensions between them diminished.
Kafka’s story brings together heterogeneous genres, registers, and orders of signs: an objective and “serious” historical treatise accommodates rational inquiry, parables, digressions, (pseudo)scientific theories, myths, and autobiographical elements. All these genres and discursive orders occupy an equally legitimate position in the common symbolic space of literature. The heterogeneous orders and elements in the story are brought together according to a logic of contiguity, placed next to each other in metonymical relations. This contiguity makes it possible to accommodate contradictory, unfitting elements—barbarisms—in the story without having them cancel each other out.2 The aporias created by the clashing orders in the story appear as such only because of our indoctrination in a logic of irreconcilable oppositions: fiction versus reality, present versus past, inside versus outside, history versus literature, civilized versus barbarian. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka’s work is a writing machine “made of assemblages of nouns and effects, of heterogeneous orders of signs that cannot be reduced to a binary structure.”3 The story invites us to shift our preconceptions so that we can see these binaries not as a deadlock of irreconcilable contradictions but as a space of possible impossibilities, where elements can coexist and compete with their opposites.4
These possible impossibilities bring us back to the question of the piecemeal construction, but from another perspective. While the narrator is unable to solve the enigma of the piecemeal construction, I argue that the narrative performs the design the narrator is unable to explain through reason. The story erects several blocks—mini-narratives comprising parables, digressions, autobiographical incidents, scientific theories—of what promises to be a whole: a historical inquiry. But after erecting each block, it moves on to the next without resolving the relation between these contiguous pieces. An argument or line of thinking is pushed to an impasse, and then another one starts, so the reader almost forgets the previous “block” was left open and incomplete. The result of this “piecework” is a narrative of loose ends and contradictions, which the reader is encouraged to accept as such.
In their study on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the role of discontinuous blocks as a design in Kafka’s stories, reflected in his “broken form of writing” and his “mode of expression through fragments” (1986, 72). This discontinuity corresponds to the image of the fragmentary wall in “The Great Wall of China.” The discontinuity of the blocks, Deleuze and Guattari argue, does not prevent them from being in contact with each other. Indeed, as we see in “The Great Wall of China,” the mini-narratives and diverse orders in the story are not entirely disconnected but “touch” each other, exposing each other’s inconsistencies.5
The openings in the story’s “wall” enable disobedient elements to dismantle the normative ground from which positive categories draw their power. In the story, “reality” and “history” are not the normative standards against which “myth” and “fiction” are measured but simply other modes of knowing and understanding the world. The story’s incongruous juxtapositions confound our understanding of these categories and turn it into a “creative misunderstanding” as “a means by which to get a different hold on things” (Levine 2008, 1041).6 The story creates small ruptures in the way we understand reality, history, myth, the present, and the past.
Like the incomplete wall in the story, and Kafka’s story itself as an unfinished wall, the question of barbarism, its past and present uses, its violent history, its open future, and its creative operations constitute a long wall from which a few pieces are erected in this book according to a piecework method. Openings are deliberately (and inevitably) left between these pieces. These openings may function as gateways for new perspectives, questions, criticisms, distortions, constructions, and deconstructions, some of which may materialize in future projects. Barbarism itself is here treated as an unfinished concept, with fissures in its discursive performances. Though barbarism is a notoriously saturated concept, if we approach it through Kafka’s suggested design, we can focus on the possible openings in the wall erected by the history of the notion of barbarism, through which creative recastings may come about.
Like the coexisting impossibilities in Kafka’s story, the concept of barbarism I propose allows contradictory—positive as well as negative—meanings to coexist in the concept. Therefore, making an either/or choice between a negative and a positive or “good” barbarism represents a false dilemma. An affirmative refashioning of barbarism emerges through a constant tension between the conventional, negative aspects of this concept and its critical, productive potential.
Finally, just as the main theme in Kafka’s story—the wall’s construction system—is performatively inscribed in the story’s own construction, the object of this book is also involved in its methodological tenets. The notion of barbarism becomes a methodological tool, which may affect our ways of knowing, comparing, and theorizing.
Barbarism and Knowledge
The motivating force of the narrator’s inquiry is his desire for knowledge. He wishes to gain insight into the wall’s construction, as well as into the institution of the Empire, which is “unique” in its “obscurity.” The knowledge surrounding the Empire is nontransparent, immersed “in a fog of confusion” (Kafka 1999, 242). Although the Empire in Peking is the center of power and thus also the supposed source of knowledge dissemination, the knowledge transmitted by the center is endlessly delayed, forcing the Chinese to live by ancient knowledge and laws. “In part because of the distances,” Michael Wood writes, “Kafka’s China is a place of misinformation and wild legend, also of claims to arcane knowledge” (1996, 331). Information is scattered in the vastness of the land.
The Emperor and his subjects live in a different here and now. The Chinese “think only about the Emperor,” but “not about the present one,” because they do not know anything about him (Kafka 1999, 243). The Emperor they know is an almighty, immortal symbol, but the Emperor in Peking is a vulnerable human being with weaknesses. “The Empire is immortal, but the Emperor totters and falls from his throne,” his malicious courtiers “perpetually labor to unseat the ruler from his place,” and dynasties regularly “sink” and disappear. However, “of these struggles and sufferings the people will never know” (243). It is, in fact, their ignorance that allows them to construct the Empire as an unchanging, eternal mechanism, unaware as they are of its precariousness and instability. In the narrative, this instability is suggested through verbs that show change of position, and particularly removal from a stable locus, such as “totters,” “falls,” “unseat,” and “sink.” The people’s ignorance buys them a stable epistemological framework on which to build their lives. They are suspicious of new knowledge about Peking coming from imperial officials who visit them, because the people are unwilling to give up their own construction of the Empire as a stable and invincible institution. If present emperors are dethroned and assassinated, the people do not hear about it—nor do they wish to hear about it.
The same kind of knowledge that determines their relation to Peking also typifies the people’s relation to their purported external enemies, the northern nomads. Although the narrator and his people think they know the nomads through old books and artistic representations, this mediated knowledge has never been verified by empirical facts:
We read of them in the books of the ancients; the cruelties they commit in accordance with their nature make us sigh in our peaceful arbors. The faithful representations of the artist show us these faces of the damned, their gaping mouths, their jaws furnished with great pointed teeth their half-shut eyes that already seem to be seeking out the victim which their jaws will rend and devour. When our children are unruly we show them these pictures, and at once they fly weeping into our arms. (241)
Despite the vividness of these descriptions, they have never seen those barbarians. The word “faithful,” with which the narrator refers to the artist’s representations, can be read as another barbarism subverting the subsequent description of the barbarians. This adjective not only adds an ironic undertone to the hyperbolic tone of the description but also underscores the extent to which the people’s mediated, mythical knowledge of the other is constructed as an unbiased fact.
Even more inaccessible than knowledge about the enemies is the knowledge the Empire disseminates to its people. To illustrate the inaccessibility of this knowledge, the narrator recounts the parable of the Emperor and his messenger. From his deathbed, the Emperor “has sent a message to you alone” and has instructed his messenger to deliver it. But the messenger can never reach his destination because he has to pass through endless obstacles. He has to go through the “chambers of the innermost palace,” the stairs, the courts, the “second outer palace,” then more courts, more palaces, and “so on for thousands of years.” Even if he were to reach the outermost gate, he would never fight his way through the imperial capital, “the center of the world,” “crammed to bursting with its own sediment” (244, emphasis added). The choice of words in the latter phrase suggests the kind of sedimented knowledge that resides in the imperial center. No information can travel from the palace to the common people because the Empire is a closed, protected system. The messenger, who tries to channel knowledge to the outside, stands no chance against the imperial labyrinth and its closed epistemological framework.
So far, the kind of epistemology nurtured by the Empire and its people displays the following characteristics. The Empire produces multiply mediated knowledge, which is almost impossible to pervade and threaten. Knowledge about the Empire is constructed by the people as certain and stable, although in the narrative it is exposed as unstable and precarious. It has a symbolic center, Peking, although its production is not based on actual communication between center and periphery but on mythical narratives and misinformation. Knowledge from or about the Empire cannot tolerate openings to the outside, and hence both need to be protected against questioning. We could call this a “civilized epistemology.”
The parable of the Emperor and the messenger indicates the limits of civilized power and knowledge, presented as a solipsistic system of self-entrapment. However, if the Empire’s concentric walls prevent knowledge from moving toward the outside, the openings in the Great Wall may signal the hope of an escape toward another epistemology—a barbarian way of knowing.
Who is “in the know” in the story? The Emperor controls imperial knowledge. In the people’s perception, he is omniscient. Nonetheless, on other occasions the builders seem to know more than the ignorant Emperor and the nomads of the north: “Unwitting peoples of the north, who imagined they were the cause of it [the wall]! Honest, unwitting Emperor, who imagined he decreed it! We builders of the wall know that it was not so and hold our tongues” (242, emphasis added). The narrator and the builders know more about the wall’s construction because they know the decision for it, just as the high command, has always existed. But then again, the builders know less about the wall’s construction than the nomads do, who, as mentioned previously, “had a better general view of the progress of the wall” than the builders did (236).
This constant transference of the locus of knowledge leaves no stable position of knowing in the narrative. All agents in the story—including the reader—know and do not know, think they know but do not know (“unwitting people”), and think they do not know but know more than they think. The source of knowledge is constantly displaced. Before knowledge manages to settle in the narrative, it is on its way to another position. This is also evident in the narrator’s inquiry: every conclusion is immediately overthrown by a new question or a new contradictory element. The epistemology the narrative performs challenges China’s civilized epistemology through a constant falsification and questioning of existing knowledge.
The previous characteristics can be regarded as aspects of a barbarian mode of knowing, or a “barbarian epistemology.” In this mode, knowledge is provisional and transitional and does not get the chance to transform to hegemonic power. A barbarian mode of knowing acknowledges the contingent character of discursive categories, and thus the possibility of their disarticulation, through which new categories may be created or existing ones may be redefined.
Oscillating between knowledge and nonknowledge, a barbarian epistemology could be conceptualized as a mode of “(not) knowing.” This (not) knowing is the result of a radical self-questioning that ensures the renewal of knowledge. In the story, (not) knowing—as opposed to ignorance—seems to be the result of an active educational process: “The farther one descends among the lower schools the more, naturally enough, does one find teachers’ and pupils’ doubts of their own knowledge vanishing, and superficial culture mounting sky-high around a few precepts that have been drilled into people’s minds for centuries” (242). From the narrator’s observation, we can infer that moving higher in the educational ladder does not bring people closer to positive knowledge. On the contrary, it increases doubt and questioning. In yet another counterintuitive observation, the narrative suggests that the ultimate goal of education is the intensification of doubt—learning to “unknow” what one knows.7
Despite the manifestations of a barbarian mode of knowing in the narrative, the narrator’s inquiry ends in a surprising, if not disappointing, manner for the reader. The narrator decides to put an abrupt end to his inquiry and not push his thinking further. This decision is related to an observation just made that the lack of communication between the people and the Empire lies not only with the governmental organization but also with the people themselves:
There is also involved a certain feebleness of faith and imaginative power on the part of the people, that prevents them from raising the empire out of its stagnation in Peking and clasping it in all its palpable living reality to their own breasts, which yet desire nothing better than but once to feel that touch and then to die. (247)
Although the people long for a touch of “the real,” they are not willing to exchange their own reality for another one, because they lack “imaginative power.” It takes creative imagination—the ability to step out of one’s familiar framework—to taste another kind of knowledge of reality. Myth is for them the safe place to be, while “the real” here is “the other”: a barbarian knowledge, which threatens their ground.
Remarkably, the narrator finds that “this very weakness should seem to be one of the greatest unifying influences among our people; indeed . . . the very ground on which we live” (247). Therefore, he eventually backs down before the danger involved in his inquiry, as “to set about establishing a fundamental defect here would mean undermining not only our consciences, but, what is far worse, our feet. And for that reason I shall not proceed any further at this stage with my inquiry into these questions” (247–48). Myth safeguards civilized knowledge from barbarisms and is indispensable for the nation’s identity construction. Therefore, he decides that his narrative cannot accommodate any more questioning. Civilized knowledge does not jeopardize itself by opening up to foreign knowledge or self-interrogation. The narrator’s desire not to disrupt this established mode of knowing appears to overpower his initial desire to know more, know differently, and push the limits of knowledge. Is this a triumph of civilized knowledge over the narrative’s traces of another way of knowing? I do not think so. There is a discrepancy between what the narrator says he is doing in the end and what his narrative does: falsifying knowledge, displacing its source, inserting barbarisms into familiar frameworks. The performative aspects of his speech contradict the meaning of his final statement.
Although the narrator’s historical inquiry hits a wall, the end of his inquiry need not be seen as the end of the story. There is another short piece by Kafka, which could be read as a postscript to “The Great Wall of China,” entitled “The News of the Building of the Wall: A Fragment” (Die Nachricht vom Mauerbau: Ein Fragment).8 This fragment recounts an incident from the narrator’s childhood and contains the first news about the building of the wall, brought to the narrator’s father by a boatman passing by their village. Although the identity of the narrator is not elucidated, it is probable that the same narrative “I” in “The Great Wall of China” writes this piece too.
As the designation “fragment” suggests, it is an open piece, and its beginning and end are missing—or not (yet) written. A fragment is something broken off from a whole, and as such it can be read as another opening in the “wall” of the main story. It suggests a way out of the impasse with which the narrator’s historical inquiry in “The Great Wall of China” ends. In the English edition of Kafka’s short stories used here, this fragment is placed after “The Great Wall,” thereby inciting the reader to disregard our narrator’s final statement (i.e., that he will not “proceed any further”) and to seek further, read on.
The account in this fragment is filtered through the imagination of a child, who years later records his memories of the incident. Although he has no recollection of his father’s exact words to him, the narrator tries to reproduce his father’s reproduction of the boatman’s words. This is what he comes up with in the final sentence of the fragment:
An unknown boatman . . . has just told me that a great wall is going to be built to protect the Emperor. For it seems that infidel tribes, among them demons, often assemble before the imperial palace, and shoot their black arrows at the Emperor. (249)
In this narrative, the “truth” about the wall’s construction is filtered by no less than four levels of mediation: the boatman, the father, the child, and the adult-narrator. As this fragment suggests, reality does not exist as such, since knowledge of the world is always inevitably mediated. Unlike in the (pseudo)historical account in “The Great Wall of China,” in this fragment, perhaps because it belongs to a different genre (an autobiographical, literary account), this mediation is not a problem that needs to be overcome in order to retrieve the “historical truth.” Rather, it is a challenge. In the main story’s China, the endless reiteration of certain “facts” in the popular imagination reinforces mythical knowledge. However, these repetitions, reproductions, and mediations are inevitably also subject to alterations. The four levels of mediation in this fragment suggest that there is not only an eternal perpetuation of the same (myth) but also the possibility of a repetition with a difference that could challenge mythical structures.
The final sentence of the fragment brings the reader face-to-face with the overblown myth around the wall’s construction. This myth involves “infidel tribes,” “demons,” “black arrows,” and so on. But if the Chinese in “The Great Wall of China” are trapped within the wall that their mythical present imposes on them, for the reader a small fissure in this wall is presented through this fragment. Since this is a fragment, the reader is invited to write her own, different ending to this myth. The age-old myths of civilization might be repeated differently within the space of literature.
The fragment may function as an opening to another narrative or an indexical sign that promises another kind of knowledge. As Walter Benjamin writes in his essay “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” the doctrine Kafka’s parables interpret does not exist: “All we can say is that here and there we have an allusion to it. Kafka might have said that these are relics transmitting the doctrine, although we could regard them just as well as precursors preparing the doctrine” (1999b, 119). The doctrine of Kafka’s stories is irretrievable, not because the reader does not dig well enough behind the story but because it does not yet exist. It therefore requires the reader’s “imaginative power,” which can overcome the “feebleness of faith” the narrator ascribes to the Chinese. This is, I contend, a barbarian doctrine: it is unintelligible and foreign to the reader, but it promises a new grammar and way of knowing.
This doctrine could be described in terms of the (not) knowing of barbarism, as previously delineated. The parenthetical “not” foregrounds barbarism as a negative concept pregnant with positivity. As a mode of (not) knowing, barbarism is imbued with positivity as a potential—a promise, rather than a given, self-evident quality. (Not) knowing thus refers to a kind of knowledge that does not yet exist—just like the doctrine of Kafka’s stories, according to Benjamin.
Barbarism and Comparison: The Tower and the Wall
In “The Great Wall of China,” the narrator’s inquiries also lead him to a comparison between the Great Wall and the Tower of Babel. The comparison between the wall and the tower is presented as the theory of an unidentified scholar, who not only compared the two projects but also asserted “the Great Wall alone would provide for the first time in the history of mankind a secure foundation for a new Tower of Babel. First the wall, therefore, and then the tower” (Kafka 1999, 239). According to this scholar’s theory, the ancient Tower of Babel failed because its foundations were too weak. The wall of China was thus supposed to provide the solid foundation for the new Tower of Babel. The narrator questions the rational grounds of this theory: “How could the wall, which did not form even a circle, but only a sort of quarter- or half-circle, provide the foundation for a tower?” And if the scholar’s comparison was meant only in a spiritual, abstract sense, then, the narrator wonders, “Why build the actual wall, which after all was something concrete” (239)? The narrator finds it curious that the scholar’s book even contained architectural plans for the tower that would be built on the basis of the wall.
What I find most remarkable about this comparison is its grounds. There are several reasons—some pointed out by the narrator himself—why this comparison would be inappropriate. Discourses, genres, and even temporal frames are mixed without further justification: an ancient biblical myth belonging to the Judaic and Christian traditions is compared with an actual historical (though mythically invested) project from the Chinese tradition, within a fictional narrative in which the narrator declares to be offering a historical account of the wall. The temporal order is also reversed: “First the wall, therefore, and then the tower,” the narrator notes (239). The real wall is supposed to help reconstruct a better version of the mythical tower. The concrete and literal are confused with mythical, spiritual, and metaphorical orders of signs, as the comparison presents us with the possible impossibility of a wall providing the foundations for a (formerly mythical) tower.
Although the reader may be tempted to read the conjoining of the two projects as an allegory, the story makes sure to underscore the materiality of the project by testing its architectural feasibility. As Wood notes, one cannot forget that, most important, “we are talking about a material Wall and a material Tower, whatever their spiritual meanings or grounding might be” (1996, 334). The coexistence of the figurative and the literal in this comparison, as well as throughout Kafka’s story, calls for a simultaneously literal and allegorical reading. In this reading, “literal” and “allegorical” are not mutually exclusive categories but part of the same pluralized order.
Despite the narrator’s questions about the viability of the comparison, in the scholar’s theory, as presented in the story, this interpenetration of orders of signs does not pose a problem. In fact, it forms the very ground on which this unlikely comparative act unfolds. As Natalie Melas proposes, in comparisons there can be “a minimal form of incommensurability, which produces a generative dislocation without silencing discourse or marking the limit of knowledge. This minimal incommensurability,” Melas argues, “opens up the possibility of an intelligible relation at the limits of comparison” (2007, 31). By operating at the limits of comparison, the encounter between the two projects in the story creates its own comparative grounds instead of yielding to predetermined frameworks.
Comparisons need both similarity and difference between two objects. Since both parts in this comparison stand on unstable ground, the challenging question is what the two projects have in common. On a first level, both the wall and the tower seem to express a desire for unification and for the exclusion of alterity. The wall embodies a desire for a unified nation of China, purified from the barbarians and barbarisms of the outside world. The Tower of Babel was the project of a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, which all spoke a single language. The tower can thus be seen as a celebration of a unified humanity, devoid of foreignness. As Jacques Derrida writes in “Des tours de Babel,” just before the tower’s deconstruction, the Semitic family “was establishing its empire, which it wanted universal, and its tongue, which it also attempts to impose on the universe” (1985, 167). This ambition for universalization, accompanied by the fear of translation and dispersion, creates the momentum for the tower’s construction. The project was to build a tower that would reach heaven. This ambition captures the telos of the desire for absolute unification: unity with God through the crossing of the borders between heaven and earth. The hubris of their ambition—which was not to glorify and praise the name of God but rather to make a name for themselves—brought on God’s punishment in the form of linguistic confusion and the scattering of this unified people throughout the earth.
Both projects are incomplete. The wall, built with the method of piecemeal construction, is porous and does not offer protection from outside barbarism. Likewise, the project of Babel is not only left unfinished but has exactly the opposite outcome from its initial aspirations. In building the tower, the Semites wished to “make a name for themselves” and to “assure themselves, by themselves, a unique and universal genealogy” (Derrida 1985, 169). Instead, the project ends in linguistic confusion: The builders end up speaking different languages and thus become barbarians to each other. After Babel, language becomes a never-ending process of translation (Rickels 1987, 111). As Derrida argues, the goal of the tower’s builders—to found a universal language and a unique genealogy—brings in a colonial violence or linguistic imperialism and “a peaceful transparency of the human community,” both of which are interrupted by God’s punishment (1985, 174). When God imposes his name, “Babel,” he limits the universality of “the universal reason” he imposes by subjecting humans to “the law of translation”: transparency and univocity become impossible (174).9
Both projects fail to fulfill their purported goals—the desire for linguistic or national homogenization and the eradication of barbarism(s). “The ‘tower of Babel,’” Derrida writes, “does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system, and architectonics” (1985, 165). The incompletion of these projects suggests the failure of any project striving for total unification, homogeneity, and elimination of difference. It thereby figures the impossibility of excluding barbarism from any (seemingly) self-sufficient construct. Every ideology of national purity in the case of the wall, or linguistic imperialism in the case of the tower, will run up against barbarisms: gaps in the wall through which foreign elements may flow in and out, or confounded tongues subject to translation and thus never self-identical.
The commonality of the two projects could thus be summed up as follows: Instead of universalizing or reinforcing the system of the self and invalidating the domain of barbarism, both constructions end up in a proliferation of barbarism(s). The narrator has doubts about the scholar’s “illegitimate” comparison of the wall with the tower.10 However, the paradoxes, reversals, and “inexpedient” juxtapositions throughout his narrative incite the reader to approach this comparison through a radical change of perspective. I would thus propose the following: What if we assumed that both projects did not fail but succeeded in their objective? What if the builders of the Tower of Babel, condemned to the nightmare of a single tongue, secretly wished for the barbarism of translation and gladly gave up the tower’s construction as soon as they got that gift disguised as God’s punishment? What if the Great Wall of China was never meant to protect from barbarians but to enable the flow of barbarisms—in other words, what if the goal was not the wall but the building of the gaps between its blocks?
If we view the tower and the wall as successful constructions, their motivating force would not be national purity or (linguistic) imperialism but rather the desire for barbarism. This desire is not the Orientalist eroticized desire for the other or the colonialist attraction to barbarians and the drive to decipher their mysteries. Nor is this the self-destructive desire of a decaying civilization that awaits the arrival of barbarians. What runs through both unfinished constructions is the desire for a kind of barbarism that deterritorializes and ruptures the unifying, centripetal structures of civilization. This barbarism emerges both through the wall’s gaps and through the confounded languages of the tower’s builders, which decenter them and introduce them to foreignness and incomprehensibility.11
The desire for barbarism that permeates the tower and the wall is what keeps civilization from turning into a solipsistic construct. Paradoxically then, this kind of barbarism protects civilization from entropic decline and self-destruction and sustains the hope for renewal and transformation. This barbarism can come either from outside or from inside civilization’s wall. Thus, it is the prerogative neither of civilization’s “others” nor of civilization itself. Either way, it takes effect at points of intersection between the inside and the outside, where the borders between them become permeable—as in the gaps in the wall. The failure of the tower and the wall may then be redefined as the promise for another solution to the fear of the outside and the nightmare of a universalized tongue.
The desire for barbarism I see ingrained in these two projects does not have a stable origin in an intentional subject—the builders, the Emperor, or the architects of either the wall or the tower. It can be seen in Deleuzian terms as a process without an origin or destination. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire does not point to a lack but is positive in creating connections and assemblages (Colebrook 2002, 92). This kind of desire invites us to regard the wall’s gaps or the unfinished part of the tower in productive terms. Instead of seeing missing or incomplete parts, we could see a desire that connects people by reordering them in different constellations: The people of China are connected to their “barbarians” through the wall’s gaps, while the builders of the Tower of Babel develop different ties, based on difference and diasporic relations rather than on uniformity.
Desire is an immanent force that creates contiguous connections—not oppositions.12 In Kafka’s work, Deleuze and Guattari write, “Desire could never be on a stage where it would sometimes appear like a party opposed to another party” (1986, 50). In Kafka’s story, viewing the tower and the wall in terms of a desire for barbarism entails setting aside the oppositional parties that govern their respective narratives—human versus divine power or the Chinese nation versus barbarians—and that supposedly motivated these constructions. The desire for barbarism deterritorializes our viewing of these architectural constructions.
In order to conceptualize barbarism as a desire animating the two constructions, we have to momentarily detach ourselves from the traditional biblical narrative of Babel or the narratives around the wall of China. The shift of perspective necessary to see the constructions in terms of desire is a demand Kafka’s narrative makes on me. Something in the narrative’s unfinished wall and tower invites us to suspend the knowledge we inherit from these stories, in order to view these constructions and the narratives that surround them differently. I seek such a change of perspective in my approach to barbarism, despite, but also through, its preestablished significations and uses. This book initiates a process of unknowing barbarism, provisionally, in order to cast it otherwise.
The shift of perspective in the comparison between the tower and the wall channels the negative evaluation of these projects (unfinished, inexpedient, incomplete) into a more affirmative direction. Instead of their being failed projects of civilization or humanity, we can view them as achievements of another kind of barbarism. This would be in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to Kafka’s work as “characterized by the total absence of negation” and “a rejection of every problematic of failure.” For them, it is not Kafka’s work that fails but the attempt to reduce it to something else and make it fit external categories that leads to failure. The work itself is the bearer of “an affirmation without reserve.”13
This invites an approach to barbarism as a potentially affirmative notion rather than as the failure of civilization’s project. This recasting of barbarism is more than a play on words. Claiming that the wall in the story remains incomplete indicates a hidden unity behind the interrupted blocks—the image of a perfect wall without gaps awaiting its completion. This unity poses as a positive ideal to which the incomplete wall is destined to refer and on which it conceptually depends. Reversing this logic by making the interrupted wall—not its lost unity—the primary focus transforms its gaps and fissures into positivities instead of absences signifying something else. Thus, if we assert barbarism as an affirmative notion, we could explore its relation to its antipode (civilization) on a different ground, without having to use civilization as the necessary and primary reference point.
It takes a daring act of comparison—that of the anonymous scholar in Kafka’s story—for the reader to see the desire for barbarism as the connecting thread between two otherwise incommensurable projects. In order to grasp their commonality, one has to break out of the regular contexts of these projects and stand on a “barbarian” comparative ground, on which the vertical and the horizontal of a tower and a wall, the mythical and the historical, the literal and the allegorical, illuminate each other in unexpected ways.14
Kafka’s story, with the improbable encounters it stages, becomes a testing ground for comparison. This is how I imagine the comparative potential of the concept of barbarism. Operating between objects and languages, barbarism uses moments when comparing seems obstructed or when objects seem incommensurable as occasions that may yield surprising insights about the objects involved and may shift our perspectives. By bringing together objects from different media, genres, and languages, this book uses the question of barbarism as a connecting thread to construct its own comparative grounds and fashions a mobile context for these objects, formed by their unique constellation in these pages.
Barbarism as a Paradox-Object
In “The Great Wall of China,” the coming together of contradictory narratives, self-canceling syllogisms, clashing temporalities, and improper comparisons results in a world of possible impossibilities. In this world, paradoxes are not only allowed to exist but perform critical operations, which bring about small shifts in the ways we know and envision our past, present, and future, or the ways we read established narratives, such as those of the Tower of Babel and the Great Wall of China.
In sync with Kafka’s story, barbarism can be considered a “paradox-object.”15 As such, it simultaneously contains a destructive and creative potential: the potential to subjugate and oppress others but also to debunk authoritative discourses; to do violence and to question violence; to carry a long negative history and to point to new ways of knowing and speaking; to reinforce oppositional thinking and to promise the overcoming of binaries. The negative, Shoshana Felman remarks, “has always been understood as what is reducible, what is to be eliminated, that is, as what by definition is opposed, is referred, is subordinated to the ‘normal’ or to the ‘positive’” (2003, 101). In the face of this discursive tendency, I argue that the indisputable negativity in barbarism does not necessarily reduce the concept to the absolute opposite of the “positive”—that is, to a concept definable only by an appeal to a normative system that determines what the “positive” and “negative” consist of. The contradiction shaped by the positive and the negative in barbarism is not something that needs remedy but a constellation that can challenge conventional notions of the positive and the negative through what Felman calls “the scandal of their nonopposition” (104). Barbarism is both positive and negative, and neither positive nor negative.16
It is not easy to predetermine whether a certain use of “barbarism” will yield creative effects. The antagonism between the destructive and affirmative tendencies in the concept cannot be resolved. But the alternative of a clear-cut distinction between a “good” and a “bad” barbarism is less appealing. Such a distinction would simply mean exchanging one binary for another.
Because it is never fully independent from categories of the negative, the epistemological and methodological potential of barbarism is never fully present, realized, or complete. It points to something not-yet-realized, a not-yet-existing mode of knowing, comparing, or speaking. This does not mean that the outcome of barbarian operations cannot be envisioned beforehand and thus remains completely unconditioned. A barbarian operation can be initiated through a particular strategy, which prefigures a certain outcome and thereby partly structures the future. This structuring, however, has no guarantees: it can be launched in a certain direction, but the precise coordinates of its destination are unknown—we cannot know where it will land.
The piecework method of Kafka’s wall of China makes the critical workings of barbarism possible. But who performs barbarian operations? Are these inscribed in Kafka’s text, or do they spring from the reader’s act? Are they located in the “noise” of the other’s language or in the self that is alert to this noise and allows herself to be changed by it? Barbarian operations may unravel at the moment when both these forces intersect. The noise of barbarism is prompted both by the other’s language and by the self that is receptive to it. When two foreign objects, discourses, or subjects listen to each other’s barbarian noise, they may allow a different kind of barbarism to take effect—if only for a moment.
As a paradox-object, barbarism challenges us to open ourselves to barbarian encounters, improper comparisons, and different ways of knowing. With such operations in mind, barbarism can be “relaunched” in the cultural field as a force that challenges the logic of opposites and the discourses that capitalize on this logic and nurtures the potential for other modes of understanding our global and local realities.