Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity.
Nietzsche
I have to begin with a disclaimer: I have never been much interested in postcolonialism. Several reasons explain my inattention, and thus my ignorance: first, even though South Asian studies and East Asian studies are joined in scholarly communion (the Association for Asian Studies) and have in common a flagship journal (the Journal of Asian Studies), rarely do we read each other’s work—indeed I know much less about South Asia than I do about, say, Latin America, not to mention Europe or the United States. An aggravating element is that so much of “Asian studies” really connotes country studies, given linguistic hurdles that scholars need to jump over to be taken seriously. Second, attempts to reinterpret East Asian history through the lenses of postcolonial theory are few and far between, probably because its most formidable capitalist and imperial power—Japan—has been an avatar of rapid state-planned, architectonic industrialization for well over a century, and both Koreas, Taiwan, and China have followed suit. Third, when I did encounter postcolonial scholarship, it was often in a dense, jargon-ridden, impenetrable form (e.g. Homi Bhabha’s work), suggesting to me that I might need a second life to master this literature—or maybe I should just move to a different planet. (The exception would be the clarity and brilliance of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work, which I discovered by becoming friends with him.) Last, nothing they or anyone else has written has dissuaded me from a structural perspective—from what they would call “totalizing” theory—in spite of my admiration for the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and other post-structuralists.
From the perspective of the last point, India never seemed to fit the grand narratives of modernity. A locus classicus for this view would be Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which spells out three routes to modernity: the liberal, the state-led (or fascist), and the peasant revolution (or communist) route. India conforms to none of these trajectories, and so in his chapter on India, Moore homes in on the idiosyncratic to explain this exception to his rules: religion, ethnicity, caste—that is, precisely the difference that appears in Chakrabarty’s work. (A less kind take on this difference would be Immanuel Wallerstein’s essay “Does India Exist?”) Here was a clear goad to scholars of South Asia somehow to explain this aporia, of appearing to stand aside rather than astride the sweep of modern history. So they girded their loins and produced the Subaltern school and postcolonialism—throwing sand in the eyes of all the great modern theories. Their timing was excellent, because if we identify Barrington Moore with the 60s, Wallerstein with the 70s, and Marxism with the modern world from 1848 to 1989, a sudden opening came in the wake of “a period of massive defeats for the Left, all across the world.”1 Or as Ron Inden put it, “Indians are, for perhaps the first time since colonization, showing sustained signs of reappropriating the capacity to represent themselves.”2
It follows that there is much for me to like in Vivek Chibber’s important book. It rehabilitates a convincing structural perspective, whether in Marxist or liberal form, and unlike Moore, provides much evidence that India is not so idiosyncratic after all. I am not in a position to judge his empirical comments on, say, Indian labor, since I have not read Chakrabarty’s study of jute workers and therefore have little basis for assessing Chibber’s critique. But his analysis of the English and French revolutions struck me as cogent; indeed an important theme runs through the book, namely that the bourgeoisie can be progressive and even revolutionary in seeking its own political rights, but generally resists popular or mass movements by other classes to gain the same.3 He cites the important study by Stephens, Rueschemeyer, and Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy,4 to argue that the same sequence is visible is Latin American cases of democratization (147n), and I would say the same about recent democratizations in South Korea, Taiwan, and the stark case of China—presumably a communist country where an enormous middle class is a good bit more intent on its own interests and rights than on coalescing with disenfranchised workers lacking unions, let alone with a few hundred million peasants in the countryside. Chibber is right that global capital is entirely compatible with a variety of repressive regimes.
Chibber’s critique of Ranajit Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony5 strikes me as similarly persuasive, at least at the level of how one defines hegemony. Hegemony for Guha means that a ruling class relies less on coercion than on consent, and thereby is able to speak “for all of society.”6 Derived in part from Gramsci, the definition ignores Gramsci’s actual situation: sitting in prison in an Italy overtaken by fascism and heavily reliant on coercion. Gramsci meant by hegemony something like the ether that surrounds us, the air we breathe; we do not so much consent to the way in which we are governed, rather we have imbibed certain social, political, and cultural conventions more or less from birth, so that we do what we are supposed to do without having to be told, let alone coerced. This is the most formidable kind of power, and it was what Gramsci meant by “hegemony.” It could be true in Jeffersonian Virginia, or in North Korea. At a more mundane level, it seems clear that a bourgeoisie, whether Western or not, does not need “the active consent of subaltern groups”7 to maintain its power—although consent is clearly to be preferred.
Chibber is also right that neither Marx nor non-Stalinist Marxists ever assumed that there is a single or universal path toward modernity. He cites Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development,8 but he could just as easily have recalled Alexander Gerschenkron’s non-Marxist analysis of “late” development—namely, that no two industrializations are ever the same, because of idiosyncratic differences in a given country, the timing of “insertion” into competition with previously arrived industrial powers, the opportunity to copy or apply new technologies in pre-industrial settings, and so on. In other words, Gerschenkron found it appropriate to include a host of idiosyncratic differences within his structural theory of industrialization. It is surprising, however, that alongside various golden oldies like Marx, Trotsky, Gramsci, and Karl Kautsky, we do not find the names of Karl Polanyi or Immanuel Wallerstein anywhere in this book. This seems to be because Chibber is wedded to a Marxist stance that class struggle is the motive force in history, rather than the circulationist theory found in Polanyi and Wallerstein, namely that capitalism is a system of production for profit in a world market, gaining its initial momentum in the long sixteenth century.
Perhaps the nonappearance of Polanyi and Wallerstein has something to do with another absence: Chibber’s book has nary a single mention of the country known as China, yet China’s recent experience of hell-bent-for-leather capitalist development is our clearest case of the palpable recurrence of the same—a Chinese version if not of the universalities of capitalism, then at minimum a variant of the state-led industrialization operating in Northeast Asia for at least eighty years, migrating from Japan to Korea to Taiwan and thence to China. It would be very hard to transfer postcolonial arguments about culture, difference, and idiosyncrasy to any of these countries, and Chibber’s critique of the Subaltern understanding of the historical role of the bourgeoisie seems particularly compelling, because in Northeast Asia this class has been brought into being under state auspices (as has the proletariat). And, of course, it is not at all difficult to imagine Marx grinning broadly as global capitalism “batters down all Chinese walls” (from the Manifesto, of course).
The reason for China’s absence, I would guess, is that its trajectory since 1980 cannot be explained by a theory of class conflict. Chakrabarty’s judgment that “there was no class in South Asia comparable to the European bourgeoisie”9 is equally true of China. Instead the critical moment came in 1978–9, as China’s reform program and its insertion into the world economy (connoted as “opening”) coincided with the establishment of Sino-American diplomatic relations; here was the clearest possible example of the hegemonic power welcoming a pariah state back into the fold, on the assumption that the world would shake China for many decades to come, not that China would shake the world; sooner or later it would be captured by the gravity of capitalism.10
Without belaboring the point, China’s experience over the past three decades is entirely compatible with a circulationist conception. I know from many encounters that Wallerstein’s theories are considered entirely passé by many prominent social scientists (not to mention being roundly loathed by postcolonial scholars), but I recall sitting on a panel at the 1984 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association as Wallerstein confidently predicted the demise of Soviet and East European socialism, and a subsequent dependency on unified Germany as the central economic power of Europe. I don’t recall that he said anything about China, perhaps because he was also enthralled at the time with the idea that Japan would be the avatar of a twenty-first-century world system centered on the Pacific. He wasn’t alone in the latter (failed) prediction, but he was quite alone in his (prescient) projections for central and eastern Europe.
Vivek’s book has at its base a rigorous theory, one that I largely agree with, but also a kind of diabolical logic: the Subaltern scholars compare the Indian bourgeoisie to an idealized version of the European bourgeoisie; ergo they are Eurocentric in spite of themselves. If Guha’s “heroic bourgeoisie” is a bit hard to swallow, can we also say that Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe11 is similarly blinkered and uncomprehending about European history while simultaneously “relentlessly promot[ing] Eurocentrism”?12 It would never have occurred to me to say that; instead Chakrabarty’s goal is (in Chibber’s own words13) to encourage theories that are “attuned to Indian realities and freed of European assumptions,” a new set of categories appropriate to Asian settings. Chakrabarty’s sensibility is close to Nietzsche’s acerbic reference to “ancient Asia and its protruding little peninsula Europe, which wants by all means to signify as against Asia the ‘progress of man’.”14 That is, Asians not only are subjected to centuries of colonialism, they also have to sit by and listen to a “hyperreal” construct—namely endless justifications not only for European progress (and dominance), but also for their own subjugation and inferiority, with their only way out being an imitative approximation of modernity that can never quite match the European example. This dilemma could hardly be greater; one sees it in the world-historical moment of Japan’s attempt to strike directly at the West, in wartime debates that H. D. Harootunian15 confronts in his masterful book Overcome by Modernity—what would be the meaning of a modernity that has a Japanese essence, one that could overcome the West in every sense of the word? When all is said and done, this same problem animates the ruling ideology of North Korea (chuch’e)—the longest-running antagonist of American hegemony in the world.
Unfortunately, Chibber’s critique of postcolonialism partakes of a similar presumption, one like that of the colonizer: “One cannot adequately criticize a social phenomenon if one systematically misunderstands how it works.”16 In other words, the Indian bourgeoisie is not only “mediocre,” as Guha says,17 a pale reflection of the European example, but Guha and Chakrabarty don’t understand the European version either, and instead end up not only with an inadvertent Eurocentrism, but even imbibe “the Whig theory of history.”18 (After reading that, somehow I expected to read that Guha and Chakrabarty also supported the invasion of Iraq and were bosom buddies of Dick Cheney.) I don’t know Guha’s work, but this is a preposterous caricature of Chakrabarty’s scholarship.
Through a similar sleight of hand, Chakrabarty’s insistence on difference and its inherent antagonism toward European universals leads him into another dead end, according to Chibber, not to mention a paradoxical reversal: he revives orientalism—indeed, along with Partha Chatterjee he even revives “nineteenth-century colonial ideology”;19 the Subalternists “promote some of the most objectionable canards that Orientalism ever produced—all in the guise of ‘High Theory’.”20 So does orientalism connote a set of Western representations of Asia, always with a conscious or subconscious intent to measure its difference and its distance from progressive norms, or is it that orientalism rears its ugly head whenever an Asian insists that his culture, society, history, and so forth do not conform to a Western (liberal or Marxist) model? When Chakrabarty “wants the East to have a history of its own,”21 can we call that orientalism, or can we see in this a self-conscious determination to write history outside of a dominant Western paradigm? By the same logic, one could label Chibber an orientalist in his insistence that there is only one, true way to understand the development of the modern world.
In the end we return to Nietzsche’s aphorism from the essay “Schopenhauer as Educator”: “Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity.”22 Chibber’s own subjectivity is betrayed by his insistence on capitalizing “East and West,” as if we might easily draw a chalk-line, straight or crooked, between a department store in Tokyo or Paris, or a movie theater in Shanghai or New York. In this he is hardly alone: actually existing orientalism still occupies the best (Western) minds. Jürgen Habermas, a person whom you might think would know better, privileges the West as the site of the origin of his “public sphere” and its contemporary problematic, as well as its ultimate redemption. He concluded one of his books on “modernity” with this statement: “Who else but Europe could draw from its own traditions the insight, the energy, the courage of vision—everything that would be necessary to strip from the … premises of a blind compulsion to system maintenance and system expansion their power to shape our mentality.”23
This is by no means an unusual emphasis for Habermas, even if it is unusually blunt; his whole work is imbued with “the claim that the modern West—for all its problems—best embodies” the values of rationality and democracy,24 with a now-evident, now-hidden discourse about modern German history (which I think pushes him toward the privileging of norms of political interaction that emerged in postwar West Germany, but nowhere else in German history), and an apparent utter lack of concern for the non-Western experience, except as a species of occasional counter-hegemonic practice in the “Third World.” Thus he shares the same prejudices of his cherished predecessor Max Weber (Habermas is most of all a Weberian), but not Weber’s passionate and intelligent comparativist project—and in a time when Weber would certainly recognize his own provincialism, were he still talking about “only in the West …” But perhaps we better sample the original Weber, what he said then, since we don’t know what he would say now:
Only the occident knows the state in the modern sense, with a professional administration, specialized officialdom, and law based on the concept of citizenship … Only the occident knows rational law … Furthermore, only the occident possesses science … Finally, western civilization is further distinguished from every other by the presence of men with a rational ethic for the conduct of life.25
When we read this, nothing about the postcolonial turn should be surprising; no wonder they all look for the nearest carpet to gnaw. So should we.