asad, talal - comment on aijaz ahmad's 'in theory

7/28/2019 Asad, Talal - Comment on Aijaz Ahmad's 'in Theory'

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A Comment on Aijaz Ahmad'sIn TheoryTala1Asad

ijaz Ahmad has written a forcefully argued, erudite Marxist polemic. IA ound myself agreeing with many of the points it makes, but scepticalof its fundamental assumptions-especially those connected with the idea of his-tory as a story of progress-and-reaction. Since I n Theory invites argument, Ishall argue against some of these assumptions in the hope that we can think themthrough in a constructive spirit.I begin with a very general question. Is it ever acceptable to talk of the worldtoday being divided into the West and the non-West? Ahmad (in common withmany other literary and cultural critics) is quite certain that it is not. A majorreason given in his text for rejecting this binary opposition is that it is a productof essentializing thought, one found in all societies: "The kind of essentializingprocedure which Said associates exclusively with 'the West' is by no means atrait of the European alone; any number of M uslims routinely draw epistemologi-cal and ontological distinctions between East and West, the Islamicate and Chris-tendom. , . .And of course, it is common practice among many circles in Indiato posit Hindu spirituality against Western materialism, not to speak of M uslimbarbarity" (183-84). Like others who have written on this subject before theappearance of I n Theory and since, Ahmad argues that this kind of contrast is

Thi s essay is part of adebate about Aijaz Ahmad's book In neory: Classes,Nations, Literatures(London: Verso, 1992).Public Culture 1993, 6: 31- 390 1593 by The Universityof Chicago. All rights reserved.0899- 2363/ 94/ 0601)o3$01 oO

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Culturean ideological device for expressing xenophobia and bigotry in all human socie-ties, both European and non-European (184), and not a legitimate means ofunderstanding cultural and historical realities.

I do not accept this argument, and I will elaborate my disagreement below.But it is ironic that several binary concepts should be crucial to the overallargument of In Zheory- including the classic Marxist distinction between baseand superstructure. For the thesis of this book is that changes in literary andcultural theory since the late sixties have been determined by global political-economic shifts. I find this thesis unconvincing (as I find the too-ready applicationof the labels Right and L eft throughout the book unsatisfactory)- but notbecause there is something fundamentally dubious about making binary distinc-tions. My complaint is that the deterministic thesis proposed here cannot reallybe sustained, because it fails to explain why global political-economic shiftsshould produce a variety ofparticular literary and cultural theories. After all, mosttheories taught in universities are not poststructuralist or cultural nationalist-nor are these two supposedly linked positions accepted equally by most radicalcritics, whether they live in the metropole or in the ex-colonies. Indeed, amongtheorists of culture there is much more talk of democracy than of deconstruc-tion.The trouble is that, despite its criticism of radicals on this point, I n Zheoryitself relies on too narrow a conception of literary and cultural production.For if we recall that practices of economic and political power are articulatedthrough representations, it will be apparent that the production and manipulationof pictures, words, diagrams, numbers, and so on, take place not outside thematerial but within it. The binary separation between economic base and culturalsuperstructure is untenable- s critics of classic Marxism have long insisted-because it grows out of a misunderstanding of material effectivity, not becausea binary mode of analysis is always invalid. Thus, it is not possible to have a seriousunderstanding of modem capitalist production without systematic reference tolegislation, litigation, accountancy, insurance, advertising, and taxation- ll invarious ways signifying practices. And of course it is not only in productionnarrowly defined that representations are materially effective. However, if cul-tural representations have practical effects, they are within the material world,not reflections of it; if they are not allowed this material status, they cannot beaccused of being retrograde. And if they do not have any practical effects, ifthey merely reflect psychological states and political-economic conditions, whyon earth would a Marxist critic-a materialist critic-want to analyse them?In Zheory disapproves strongly of the binary categories West and Third


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World, and yet it employs another distinction that appears to mirror them. WhileComment on In Thhe logic of capital is now irreversible in A sia and Africa, we read, the greatmajority of these countries simply cannot make a fully fledged capitalist transitionof the European type, now or at any point in the foreseeable future. Europeantransition occurred when there were no external, imperialist, far more powerful

capitalist countries to dominate and subjugate the European ones; when the worldsresources- rom minerals to agricultural raw materials to the unpaid labour ofcountless millions- ould form the basis for Europes accumulation; when vastreservoirs of European populations could simply be exported to other continents;when the European working classes could be pressed into service for commodityexports to the markets of the world, establishing a global hegemony of Europeancapital(315). In this contrast between hegemonic European capital and the greatmajority of Asian and African countries that cannot follow the European model,a gesture is made toward the well-known Marxist story of the expansion ofWest European states and their colonization of the rest of the world-a story ofdialectical progress.The process by which the global hegemony of European capital was establishedwas, of course, far more than a political-economic one. As Marx himself indi-cated, it involved a massive transformation of laws, manners, and morals inthe countries dominated by West European states. Nevertheless, Marxists havealways held that the process as a whole was determined by the logic of capital.Y et the logic of capital has turned out to be less predictable, the mode ofproduction less monocausally determining (even in the famous last instant),than either M arx or generations of later political economists (including non-Marxist ones) have assumed. This suggests that the expansion of European powerover the last three centuries is not adequately described in terms of the binarylogicof dialecticand contradiction, that other concepts (developed nprobabil-ity theory and catastrophe theory, for example) will be needed to write thathistory.My point here is that some readers may wonder why I n Theory accepts theidea of a hegemonic structure in which European capital dominates Africanand Asian countries and yet rejects the idea of a hegemonic relationship in whichthe West dominates the Third World. It is true, as Ahmad is at pains to show,that the Third World is not a neatly bounded, homogeneous entity. But who canaffirm that African and Asian countries are-or that Europe is? It is, after all,only in modem times that political entities have acquired precise, internationallyrecognized borders, and no social entity (not even the individual person in herbiographical trajectory) is ever completely homogeneous. A re entities real only


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Cultureif they fulfill the condition of clear boundedness and homogeneity? In any case,the fact that populationsarelinked by cross-cutting economic ties and migrationflows surely does not mean that we cannot identify a major structure of globalinequality, in which industrial capitalist countries dominate others.The more important reason for thebooksrejection of the WesUThird Worlddichotomy is the claim that it really belongs to a political ideology called Thi rdWorldism, an ideology that is alien to Marxist analysis and progressive socialistpolitics. We are told that in Britain and America Third Worldist ideology (alsoknown as cultural nationalism) i s defended by middle-class immigrants fromAsia and Africa, for whom it is a way of addressing personal identity problems.Unfortunately, this kind of familiar rhetorical move will not do because it attemptsto assess the soundness of ideas by reference to their supposed psychologicalfunction.Thebook s overall reasoning is summed up in the last few pages of the conclud-ing chapter thus: First, the world is not divided into monolithic binaries; it isa hierarchically structured whole. . . . Second, if the universalist character ofthe answering dialectic namely socialism- implies an international character ofthe revolutionary project, the fundamental and irresolvable contradictionof globalcapital . . . equally implies that it is the struggles of those direct producers inthe backward formations which constitute the primary site for struggles towardsthe realization of the socialist project. . , .Third, the nation-state is neither thesite for the reproduction of capital in the zones of advanced capitalism nor theprimary site of resistance to imperialism n zones of backward capitalism; decolo-nization is now too firmly behind us, the logic of capital is now too deeplyentrenched in all our societies, for nationalisms of the kind which are centredon the existing state apparatuses tobe the answering dialectic, if they ever were(316-17; emphasis in original).I find this reasoning unsound on several counts. First, the use of binary distinc-tions does not necessarily presuppose that the things sodivided are in themselvesunified or homogeneous or permanently set (monolithic). All it implies is thatin some important sense they stand counterposed to each other. Attention to anasymmetrical relationship between two entities can be important, but to ignorecompletely other, nonbinary, relationships in which the entities are enmeshed issurely to vitiate ones conclusions. And yet, curiously, that inattention is evidentin the second and third propositions. They return us to the fundamentalcontradic-tion of global capitalism. (Ironically, the books identification of backward coun-tries as the primary sites of revolutionary struggle brings its argument close toa Maoist one and is not grounded in Marxs Capital; many European Marxists


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have therefore dismissed such arguments as symptoms of Third Worldism.) Ac-Comment on In Thording to the progressivist position adopted by I n fieory, thisperspective makesit possible to judge nationalism favourably or unfavourably depending on whetherit promotes or inhibits the revolutionary project. This flexible realism is sup-posed to be unavailable to Third Worldists since they are committed to nationalismfor reasons of class interest (at home) and of psychological predicament (abroad).Hence the third proposition, which dismisses the possibility that contemporarynation-states can have any essential importance for resistance to imperialism.The power to resist imperialism- and to further the revolutionary project- sattributed not to the nation but to the class of direct producers within it. Working-class struggle is said to be not only essentially and internationally revolutionarybut also independent of the (postcolonial) state that is always and necessarilynationalist. (In this perspective, national legislation and industrial litigation forprotecting and extending trade-union rights would have to be dismissed as insig-nificant for the struggle that matters.)

I n Theoryis profoundly committed to the familiar story of progress that worksitself out through the dialectic of class struggle between direct producers in back-ward countries (who stand for revolutionary socialism) and global capital (whichdepends on reactionary imperialism). In this struggle-so it is argued-the onlyprogressive position available to intellectuals is as allies of the working class.Third World nationalism, radical literary theory, and poststructuralism are allsaid to be linked together as reactionary because and to the extent that theyrepudiate this story of progress.But like all stories of moral and social progress, Ahmads versionof it is highlyproblematic. It does not address itself to the European project of reconstructingcolonised countries, a process that has made the discourse of progress-and-reaction plausible.The definition and managementof work and consumption-at national andregional levels- has always been part of that project. Butsotoo has the translationof particular moral-legal relations that crystallized in the course of Europeanimperial history into universal principles, principles that gave us the individualas an inviolable subject of tights, as a self-constituting person, as an autonomousagent of economic and moral choice, and as a citizen in a bodyof citizens equallyrepresentable in a representative state. And, more generally, the translation hasalso involved the creation of an expectation that it is the nation-states task toundertake-or, at least, to foster and regulate-the moral and material transforma-tion of its peoples lives in a progressive direction. (The relatively new conceptsand practices of the national economy are integral to this expectation.) If that


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36Public Culture

is what the European project has constructed-or, rather, sought to construct-it is surely significant that Ahmad does not examine its implications for debatesabout the West versus the non-West.Some readers will object, Why call this the European project and not simplymodernization?I respond, What makes this question so significant? Up to theSecond World War most people felt no need to ask it. The preferred term untilthen for the idea of progressive change throughout the world was civilizationrather than modernization, and no crucial difference was perceived between theformer and European civilization. Civilizationas word and concept emerged inthe early eighteenth century, with the beginnings of European empire buildingin Asia and Africa, and was conceived of at once as a teleological process anda state of material and moral accomplishment within universal history. Hencethe various practical versions of Europes civilizing mission in non-Europe.Civilization (as verb and noun) presupposes a story of progress-and-reaction.Particularly since the Second World War, with the political independence ofcolonial countries, the terms modernization and modernity have helped toincorporate into that story the role of the state in the planning of socioeconomicdevelopment. Even in the most recent (free market) phase, the concern is stillwith the proper role of the state in securing economic and social development.

I call this project European even though not all its agents were Europeans(on the contrary, most eventually were not) and even though it did not insist onimposing every kind of European convention throughout the non-European world.Indeed, the project has never aimed at producing homogeneous, cultural formseverywhere-not even in the West. There has always been scope for variety andinvention in matters that do not conflict with the basic premisses of the project.The European project requires not the production of a uniformculture throughoutthe world but certain shared modalities of legal-moral behaviour, forms of na-tional-political structuration, and rhythms of progressive historicity. It invites orseeks to coerce everyone to become the West- o express their particularitiesthrough the West as the measure of universality.I call this project European because Western power has been necessary toit from the beginning and because it was (and continues to be) integral to Westernpower. This does not mean that the project or its advocates are unchanging andunchangeable. Nor does it mean that it did not meet with resistance. However,to talk coherently of change one has to assume the existence of an identity thatis the subject of change. Equally, to speak of resistance is to acknowledge thepresence of an intrusive, restructuring power. The concept of the European projectseems to me necessary in order to identify and analyse the nature of just that


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power- even though (especially because) powers thatareintrusive and those thatresist are discursively as well as practically interdependent. But the intrusivenessof Western power, as I see it, consists in the first place in its reshaping of thesocial spaces in which distinctive kinds of struggle now take place, and not simplyin its being the expression of a dominant protagonist.But why- omeone may say- hould any of this matter to Ahmads argument?Because- so I reply -the self-validating premisses of the European project (andnot simply a description of the logic or capitalism) underlie I n fieory. Theyinform its moral judgments, its historical interpretations, and its political faithand yet are themselves not examined, let alone justified. Indeed, in my viewAhmad shares these taken-for-granted premisses with many of his opponents,for they too are committed to progress-stories. For while strict M arxists insistthat the imperial encounter between Europe and the Third World was historicallynecessary and-for all its painful contradictions- was on balance a step forward,non-M arxist progressivists contend that progress could have been achieved with-

out the dehumanization that imperialism has been responsible for. Both kinds ofprogressivists thus accept the legal-moral language constructed in the imperialepoch. (Incidentally, even writers who claim that they have long abandoned theprogress-story have not in fact done so to the extent that they still conceive ofpolitical activity toward an increasingly liberated world. It makes no essentialdifference to that story to say that progressive liberation is always accompanied bycruelties and interrupted by moments of reaction. These are merely complications,qualifications, in its telling.)There is, therefore, an account of global transformations to be fully written.But unlike many progressivists today, I argue that the conceptual contrast betweena West and a non-West is essential for understanding that account. Because thatbinary distinction is to be made in relation to a transformative social project, Ialso hold that there is a Western discourse on the non-West-that is to say,representations inserted into practices directed at transforming the non-West-which is massively dependent on accumulating knowledge about the non-Westernworld in order to carry out that project. I argue that as social knowledge integralto social power, these representations are not deplorable expressions of psycho-logical states (bigotry, arrogance, xenophobia) but elements essential to the re-structuration of social and moral institutions. It is for this reason that one cansay, contra Ahmad, that there is no parallel discourse in the Third World on theWest. It is not that non-Westerners cannot be prejudiced about the West (ofcourse they can be, and often are). Still less, that knowledge is vitiated merelybecause it is Western (a view so silly that it does not merit serious discussion).

Comment on /n The


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38Public Cu l tu re

But a l this is irrelevant, because the argument here is not a moral one: it is aboutdescribing a particular structure of power and a particular process of destruction/reconstruction that we identify in the non-European World as modernity.This accountof the European project is not itself a progress-story, but it helpsus to understand how such a story comes to be told and regarded as natural. Iwant to stress that the account I want Ahmad to undertake does not presupposethat either the West or the non-West is pure or monolithic-that the boundariesbetween them are permanent and always clear. It requires that he focus on thepractices by which European politicians, bankers, mil itary men, and journalistsconstruct their civilizational identity as Western and universal in relation to therest of the world. It will not do for academics to repeat that there is no suchthing as Westhon-West opposition if far-reaching actions are continuously (albeitnot invariably) undertaken precisely on the assumption that there is. Given thatopposition, however, the question to be decided is not how far Europeans havebeen guilty and Third World inhabitants innocent but, rather, how far the criteriaby which guilt and innocence are determined have been historically constituted.The problem I want Ahmad to address is not whether European capital has helpedto develop or to underdevelop the non-West but what practices have made sucharguments appear natural and urgent. The analysis I want him to carry out isneither about literatures place in the class struggle nor about the dehumanizingimages in Western high culture that have helped to legitimize European imperialrule. I t is about how particular concepts of literature, and of being truly human,come to be historically institutionalized and politically invoked in particular timesand places.

In brief, an analysis of the European project addresses the question of preciselyhow (in what times, places, ways) the Wests powers have enabled the translationof certain concepts of justice, reason, and the good life into the practices ofdominated (developing,modernizing) societies- nd how incomplete or un-successful translations have come to be seen as evidence of failure on the partof entire societies and not as indications of other kinds of history.That there have been gross accumulations of wealth, knowledge, and powerin the world (especially in the West) over the last two or three centuries isundeniable. It does not follow, however, that it is impossible to oppose the politicsof the Bharatiya Janata party in India, or the Islamist assassinations in Egypt,or the racist currents in contemporary West European states, without invokinga story of progress-and-reaction. Nor does the existence of global economicflows, and of international patterns of political interdependence, mean that onlya singular, progressive narrative linking the past to the future is now conceivable.


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To conclude:ananalysis of the European project is more than an account of 3Comment on / n Theohe expansion of capitalism, more than t he story of imperial suppression andanticolonial struggle, more even than a register of successes and failures in thefight for equal inclusion within the circle of modem civilization. It problematises,rather than taking for granted- as I n 7heorydoes- singular story of progress-

and-reaction.Tala1 Arad teaches anthropology at the New School for Social Research. He isthe author most recently of Genealogiesof Religion (Baltimore: J ohns Hopkins,1993).

asad, talal - comment on aijaz ahmad's 'in theory

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