The world is becoming non-western

“The world is becoming global, nonwestern, at an incredible rate.” Geert Lovink announced this at UC Irvine in Feb 2009, at the Critical Theory Emphasis (CTE) Winter Mini-Seminar. Yo, somebody tell the guy the world has been non-western, largely so, for a a very long time. But there’s Ethan Zuckerman in Africa, “he’s trying to help empower people to speak in their own languages.” These are just random quotes, but they seem no less bizarre out of context than they were in the context of this lecture. In its general form, however, it was all too familiar : several slides with statistics and maps of internet usage, predicting its worlwide expansion and calling for radically new theory to address this new object. As a graduate student pointed out, it was all delivered in corporate speak, using the language of commodities and markets.

There’s so great an investment in announcing the “end of” and calling for “the new” that it’s almost too easy to amuse ourselves shooting off one fish at a time in the barrel – as the audience at Irvine did. So, what’s one left with, other than some dead fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun?[suck.com]
Let’s back off and try again: there seems to be a pattern to this extraordinary lack of attention to any work in the field, including work specific to the topic he names as ignored (eg history of cybernetics, database theorizations, postcolonial theory and new media – all widely discussed, taught, and read in the UC system). I suspect the pattern adds up to this: the call for theory is in fact a call for metaphysics. It is the metaphysics of the internet he seeks, and believes all of us (intelligentsia, critical theorists, humanists) are in need of. This will give us critical concepts that will guide practice, show us the way forward. Otherwise, we are lost – theory cannot deal with the object, everyday the world is getting more global, more non-western [sic], and we are about to lose it. We must send out the anthropologists to the black continents [sic], to China and to Africa, and study their rituals. OK, these last few sentences are a mash-up parody of the argument ( still, really, much of it is taken verbatim from his statements, just re-ordered), but one could explore this judiciously rather than satirically. Central to the argument was the following chain of claims:
1) The announcement that the object is not only “new media” or the “internet,” it, most importantly, is a raced object – “the new media culture will be asian culture.”
2) Theory once guided practice, it no longer does so because it cannot deal with the new media object. We must restore this power of theory to guide concepts. We must generate critical concepts that can deal with this object.
3) In order to generate these critical concepts, none of the old methods are useful. We can no longer see the world as text, we cannot use history and economics as a foundation. We must align ourselves with this elusive object, we must identify with the object in order to have a critical theory of it.
– The first is an announcement that the western autonomous subject is not the universal signifier, nor the sole motor of history.
- the second is a identification of theory with metaphysics, not theory with practice.
– The third is an articulation of seduction as method, advocating alignment with the other in order to guide it. The sheer otherness of the other has one in a panic trying to keep up with it, but one has to let go, identify with it, and one will find its essence.
Examining each of these further:
First: sigh, again, the familiar announcement? It’s getting tiring to summon up the horror again and again. Yes, the non-western subject is not the autonomous subject of history – was he ever? Isn’t he over the shock of realizing not now, not ever? Why the panic, now, again, as if it has never happened before? One could recall both announcements and solutions over at least 200 years : Eric Wolf in 1982 (?) with his sage advice to historians about how to correct decades of writing Europe as the agent, Others as the people without history. A Mid20thC moment of decolonization, out of which we got Bretton Woods, a plan for globalization, birth control, export oriented growth, the disciplining of sullen ignorant subject into world producers – and later, increasingly, consumers. A 19th century moment of anthropologists searching for the perfect isolated island of natives, among whom to explore the rituals of the other, to museumize, yes, but most importantly to discover the essence of the civilized self. An 18th C moment of announcing the search for primal speech, the immediate presence of pure nature, warning against the corruptions of culture and history.

Second: Invoking a populist misconception of Derrida, in rejecting world-as-text, GL separates, as our object, action from text, in the manner of Rousseauvian speech vs writing. In opposition to Derrida’s reminder that writing serves as a dangerous supplement, it alwyas already inhabits the putatively non-written origin, we are to refuse the complex layered histories and readings we’ve developed – back to primal speech, to action in itself, to the world, the word, as it is in essence, not as perverted through history and culture. Our object, thus, is the essence of the internet itself. But this object, at its heart, is not us : it is the other. Hence the horror — the other lives at the heart of the essence we so long fondly thought was ours, birthed from our heads, technology sprung from the creative hands and hearts of the western autonomous subject. How can the other inhabit it, always already swarming inside it, taking control of it, defining it in ways mysterious to us, for we cannot even understand their tongue?

Third: There is much to sympathise with, in the figure of the theorist who intrepidly ventures into the field. It’s perhaps no coincidence that we have several more intrepid adventurers than before now that this venturing can be done from the comfort of a well-appointed armchair. But nevertheless. Nice to be in the field, we can agree on that. But what is that other one is being told to fraternize with, and why? And who is the appropriate hero to venture there? (see Daston and Galison, chapter on persona with scientific purity). Here it is also worth digressing for a bit, to consider the image of the monster in horror and fantasy.
Consider Vin Diesel in Pitch Black, wrestling with the skeleton of the huge ancient primitive monster. The horror, the panic, the terror – dispelled not only by the buff musculature of Diesel, intimately intertwined with the monster’s, but also, the ultimate revealing of the monster as thing. Not as ineffable, mysterious, bottomless horror pit, but just mechanical, bone and sinew thing. I have more sympathy with this (sort of practical, hobbyist/hacker, engineer attitude to taking things apart and figuring them out) than with a common fantasy trope, in which the monster is ineffable. You must call it by its true name in order to know it. But the name is the word, the beginning, the ineffable. You never escape from this pit of ineffability, do you? Either way, intimacy with the monstrous other is the only escape from the panic of domination, the fear of being overtaken by the other.