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October 29, 2006
Crossing the Borders of Orient
Back in Europe, with my specialisation in Japanese studies, I am, reluctantly, an "Orientalist". So it was with a sense of indulging a deliberately produced self-irony that I found myself, on an early autumn day last year, crossing the Bosphorus straits on a cheap 1-Lire Istanbul ferry with a copy of Edward Said's notorious title at hand. For passing through no checkpoint and remaining within the jurisdiction of the same country, I was yet just moving across one of the most formidable and influential borderlines in mankind's history: there behind me, with the silhouettes of Topkapi palace and the great Suleymania Mosque, were receding the banks of Occident, while ahead, with an indispensable palm tree by the battered moorings, lay the Orient.
To sum it up very roughly, in his long-serving classic Said describes an ideological complex called "Orientalism" which involves Western scholarship, political and economic science, poetic imagination and fiction, linguistics etc., to a major extent in a project of "Orient's" domination by the "West". Behind what many Westerners said and fancied on the topic of the "Orientals", Said perceives a consistent hidden agenda of patronising condescension, dominion, robbing of individuality and construction of essentialist collective identities. He points out a line of cultural dominion fabricated and recreated in works of scholars and artists which runs conspicuously parallel to the line of actual colonial dominion of Orient (here largely Middle East extending to India) by Western empires.
About ever since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt at the end of the 18th century, "Orientalists" – Western experts studying about the area and its peoples – occupied themselves within frameworks of their respective fields of study with, in fact, "inventing" the Orient and its "typical" identity. What Said subjects to critique is not so much an overt condescending racism with regard to "the Oriental" (the Arab, the Muslim…), but rather the subtle forms of allegedly neutral and unbiased scholarship and, later, literary fiction which in turn fabricate, justify, and reinforce images of the Orient suited, ultimately, to political expediency and the justification of colonial empire.
As a lifetime reader of European and American literature (Said taught comparative literature at Columbia University) with the background of a Palestinian émigré, the author was uniquely situated to detect the marks of Orientalist attitudes latent in the works of Nerval or Flaubert or Conrad or Kipling. The very crude version would be the following: Orientals are essentially such as they are (lazy, passionate, irrational, fanatical, incapable of restraint and self-control, etc.) and thus destined to remain in disorderly and backward misery unless saved by the mercy of White Man's dominion with its values of humanity, civilisation, hygiene, and economic progress. But Orientalism, particularly in its modern forms (we are made aware as we follow Said through his book) is rarely all that crude.
I was intrigued to discover, with a shiver, a very recent example of impossibility of innocent Orientalist scholarship when I came across Bernard Lewis's conclusions on the character of Islamic culture and society featuring prominently in a training manual for U.S. troops destined for deployment on the ground in Iraq. An admittedly brief but all the more authoritative set of statements – by this supreme expert in contemporary Oriental studies – providing the gist of "what an Islamic society is" was here supposed directly to inform how soldiers with loaded guns should perceive the country and its people and how they might interact with both.
It is interesting to note that the same Bernard Lewis (who actually appears in Said's book several times), with his weight of disinterested scholar with unsurpassed knowledge of the "culture of Islam", apparently had a real impact on forming the decision leading to the U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2002.
The breadth of reading and scope of critical evaluation is impressive, but Said's is not careful and meticulously documented scholarship. (This has brought on criticism pointing out factual mistakes, misinterpretation and alleged libel in Said's treatment of many texts and authors: recently, for example, Robert Irwin's "For the Lust of Knowing – The Orientalists and their enemies".) Even to a reader who does not backtrack the author's footsteps to verify all the quotations and check for possible inaccuracy, Said does not sound neutral, calm and disinterested, and he is probably not even trying to. It is clear, though, that the book does not go down in history as a major achievement in scholarly analysis of an academic field, but perhaps precisely as a manifesto pronounced by an identifiably human voice, if sometimes prejudiced, sometimes angry, and sometimes probably wrong.
But Said's main issue remains very pressing subject for consideration: in what ways and to what extent do the seemingly innocent pursuits of meek and endearingly distracted scholars or imaginative story-tellers inform the running of empires in their hard or light forms?
There is more than a touch of Orientalism in much current discourse on "Islamism" and "Muslim threat", notions which evoke images of threatening and eerily incomprehensible culture defined by an essence of fanatism, extremism, irrational backwardness and scary unpredictability. Such Orientalism is no intellectual exercise. It is obvious that such notions inform actual policies and through those affect actual human lives (and deaths). As long as that remains true, it will remain our duty to try and understand the "Orientalist" elements latent in our worldviews and considerations. And Said's book remains a useful handle in that.
Japan, to conclude, has an ambiguous position in all this: the Japanese have been subject to a lot of Orientalist perception on the part of the West (from early on but recognizably still in the post-war era with all the essentialist definition-making in Ruth Benedict's style) and participated quite eagerly in academically reproducing some of that Orientalism in volunteering various all-encompassing definitions of "what the Japanese were" (in all the varieties of the so-called "Nihonjin-ron"). Yet at the same time, from early on in Meiji, Japan found itself in its turn fabricating a lot of discourse recognizably "Orientalist" in its function (of justifying dominion and empire) with regard to other less developed Asian nations. Whatever the case, I do find Said's treatment of Orientalism unobtrusively suggestive for thinking Japan.
Posted by david at 03:35 AM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2006
Doing Things with Verbs
What kind of word – what kind of logos in the Greek original – was presumed to be there at the beginning of all things? John's Gospel was probably not trying to pose or solve such problem, but it forces itself on the reviewer's mind anyway, doubly so when considering the theme of present issue. Was the First Word perhaps something else than a noun, say, an adverb, a pronoun, even a numeral? Or was it a verb? And if so, was it in the imperative, the mode of the rule and power, of providing the initial kick? (Or could it have been something more friendly, like "So, there we go…"?)
It seems to be a reasonable conjecture that when asked to "say a word, any word", an average human being in control of randomly chosen language will most likely come up with… a noun. Nouns are mentally easy and readily available to the extent that many of them serve as names for what appears to be reliable and well established objects of our world. Consequently, a word like "house" or "dog" may seem somehow more real and fuller example of a word than, say, "behind", or "frankly", or "emphasize". As long as we think of nouns as representative language phenomena, we can get by with some theory of language as a set of code-signals referring to objectively existing outside reality. The word "dog" means what it means, because it designates a class of real entities an example of which we can touch and point at and say "this is a dog" when teaching the language to foreigners and children. Unfortunately for any such neat theory, things begin to complicate immediately when we take other examples than nouns into consideration. What do we point at to explain the meaning of "behind", or "frankly", or "emphasize"?
It was grappling with questions like that what led Ludwig Wittgenstein to his later days reflections on verbs, words, languages, and meanings, as recorded mainly in his Philosophical Investigations. This is not a book anyone will confidently claim to entirely understand. Wittgenstein never made that much effort to be particularly lucid either, but even more than that, this text is a good example of form closely reflecting the subject matter: pursuing his thinking about language to places which no one had ever trod before him forced Wittgenstein, as it were, to abandon any idea of classical organization of argument, its systematic gradual build-up in the course of flowing paragraphs connecting up to chapters. We do not find any structure of that sort in Philosophical Investigations. As if thinking too far and too deep about language and about how come something means something for us, disrupted a delicate uncertain balance on which the possibility of language and understanding had heretofore so innocently rested. What awaits a reader of Investigations instead are loosely related short statements – even aphorisms – standing on their own in their lonely independence and stubbornly resisting editors' attempts to impose on them a unity of a single purpose, heading or chapter. This has the fascinating effect that almost no two readers of Investigations will agree on what it is that Wittgenstein is saying here, but all will agree that he is saying something really important.
It is perhaps not necessary for a reader to attempt an all out frontal attack at Philosophical Investigations as a whole. Most of the aphoristic propositions in it provide plenty of food for thought on their own and many of the problems sketched out here in a few lines have become notorious starting points of extensive treatments and controversies. The theory of language games or the argument of impossibility of private rule-following – both taking their origin from Philosophical Investigations – certainly deeply influenced all subsequent thinking on the subject of reference and meaning. After Investigations, language will never be sufficiently accounted for as a representation of some objectively existing outside world.
In the first volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer was not working on a mirror-theory of language confined to the "reflection-of-objective-reality" either. But his neo-Kantian project is obviously very much distinct from anything Wittgenstein aims at. Far from being a mere reflection of an outside world, the "symbolic forms" of language and symbols/signs in general, are the foremost medium which to an important extent actively creates and awards meaning. So far so good. But although careful of his phrasing, Cassirer appears to be presenting a basically evolutionary scheme of development of languages worldwide. He seeks to uphold a Kantian notion of universally valid categories of judgement by showing how those correspond to forms empirically manifest in grammar; and how language expression evolves from the stage of particular depiction of concrete spatial and temporary distinctions toward the stage of designating pure syntactic and logical relations. Man's body in space and in its relation to things close and distant provides the fundamental reference point from which the dichotomies of "here-there", "this-that" refine into the categories of personal pronouns "I-you" and ultimately into the grammatical and logical concepts of "subject-object", while awareness of the flow of time provides an impetus for developing the tense structure of verbs and the "subject-predicate" formula.
Although he relies on secondary treatments regarding non-Indo-European languages, drawing particularly heavily on Wilhelm von Humboldt, Cassirer's point here is clearly meant to be a philosophical analysis of generic linguistic forms as types of forms of "knowing" and "having meaning", and not a comparative analysis of respective language groups. In spite of that a reader seems to be left with impression that although all language forms inherently contain the tendency to express pure epistemological relations in their various grammatical forms, still, for Cassirer, the grammatical constructions of developed modern Indo-European languages (Cassirer's synonymous term actually is "Indo-Germanic") are the ones most advanced on the journey toward expressing pure relations not facts (and therefore epistemologically most promising): the moment the verb "to be" in a language ceases to denote only the particular occurrence in time and space (like "be at home") or existence (like "to be or not to be"), and makes possible a pure expression of predicative relation in its function as copula in nominal phrases (like "A is B"), philosophy of judgement first becomes logically and grammatically possible with the expression of "pure being" this linguistic development brings. Such development is more or less explicitly contrasted with the absence of such pure grammatical forms in languages of primitive tribes and nations or those of other language groups (Japanese gets little mention, although Uralo-Altaic languages or Chinese are dealt with a bit more extensively). Although it was not Cassirer's aim, his argument seems to imply the conclusion that particular grammatical forms of modern European languages are at the same time the forms best suited to universally valid categorial cognition.
Let us bring in Wittgenstein for just one more brief turn to venture a response: "Over again we hear repeated that philosophy is not making any progress, that we are still dealing with the same problems ancient Greeks were already engaged with. Those who say that, however, do not know the reason why this must be so. It is so because our language has remained the same and tempts us ever to ask the same questions. As long as there is the verb "to be", which appears to us to function in the same way as the verbs "to eat" and "to drink" …, as long as there is talk of the flow of time and expanse of space etc., people will always run into and fixedly stare at the same mysterious obstacles which no account can probably explain away."
Posted by david at 06:59 PM | Comments (0)