Years of Poems and Spirits

Just re-read Edward Said’s Orientalism a couple of days ago. Wondered what would he say about what is going on in Tibet?

I am afraid his strong identification to the Palestinian cause would compell him to side with the Tibetans. But ironically, it is his argument in Orientalism that helps me to justify my identification with the Chinese cause.

Said’s work builds on Foucault’s discourse/power/knowledge concept, as Said himself acknowledges (I also flipped through some chapters in “The Archaeology of Knowledge” and “The Foucault Reader” and did see the connections). A discourse, according to Foucault, is a process of contention that solidifies a loosely developed narrative and transforms it into knowledge. Said applies this model in the Middle East study and claims that knowledge about the Orient (i.e. Orientalism) is the by-product of colonialism, as he illustrates through Belford’s speech in the Parliament. However, Said struggles to establish whether Orientalism is created out of subjective desire or objective necessity. In other words, he cannot just say Orientalism is NOT the result of a grand conspiracy of the colonialists.

This hermeneutical ambivalence makes me cringe. If anything, Foucault is very clear that the creation of prison (in Discipline and Punish), like the creation of morden military, is out of necessity rather than planning. It is precisely this author-less-ness of modern knowledge (particularly socio-political disciplines) that makes the knowledge so authoritative and so powerful. Social Darwinism was consider a true knowledge because it was NOT a creation out of the Colonial Office. Rather it was advanced by a hermit-like scholar (Hubert Spencer) who was known to be a nerdy and detached observer. Social Darwinism was de-scienced only after the collapse of the colonial system.

What really bothers me is not what actually happened in Tibet, but how it is interpreted by the West and the Chinese, and how profoundly different the interpretations are. If I apply the Said/Orientalism model in Tibet, it is apparent that each interpretation fills a need, just as Orientalism fills the need of the colonizing enterprise.

My hypothesis is that the Western interpretation is the by-product of an effort of “integrating China”. And the Chinese one fills the need of nation building, both internally and externally.

First of all, it is apparent that media on both sides tell the same story differently by selectively pick and choose facts. Once the narrative is tested on the market, so to speak, and is accepted, it becomes knowledge (e.g. as part of the education system).

Secondly, each narrative/knowledge is developed as a result of political power relations. The West is unconfortable with China’s rise to prominence and wants to co-opt China by forcing it to conform not only to the “international” economic and financial system, but also to the value system of the West by worshiping the same symbols and using the same lexicon. In other words, China can never be granted a world power status unless it speaks the same language of human rights. Yes, even the grand ideal of the liberals is in fact a means of domination: it is something “we” have but “you” don’t.

In fact, Western political science studies have shown that there are many ways to achieve political/economic order. In the short term, it is heavily path-dependent (a la Robert Putnam). Just as Foucault argues in “Archaeology”, before a dominant narrative emerges, there are many alternatives. In the West, the dominant narrative is that liberalism is a necessary condition for economic superpower status. A typical example is the myth that England modernized first because of Magna Carta. Or the U.S. becomes what she is today thanks to a priori liberalism.

However, this narrrative has failed to explain what happened in China. As a result, the Chinese rightfully question its knowledge-worthiness and seeks to establish their own “truth”, except China is not yet strong enough to transform it into knowledge. For example, the Chinese learned from their own experiences that it pays to tolerate an authoritarian government to lead economic development at all costs. It is a legitimate alternative, one may say that the history of Germany, Japan and S. Korea can back it up too. However, China is still too weak to declare it the “right way out of poverty” for other poor countries (i.e. a knowledge, see Said’s quote of Nietzsche on p203).

The West certainly doesn’t like being contested. The unorthodoxiness of the Chinese success story challenges not only the dominant narrative, but also the West’s image of itself (in Orientalism, Said points out that the Orient exists in opposition but symbiotically with a Occident). And the worst of it all is that the West can’t accept that it is the Chinese who are challenging it. Hence, I can see the spite, the outrage, and the schadenfreude from the reactions after Tibet.

Just as Said says in Orientalism, every Orientalist, consciously or not, is a racist. Every free-Tibetaner (except the Tibetans themselves) is one too for they consider the Chinese not qualified to rule peoples who don’t share the East Asian heritage. “The Tibetan culture is a world heritage and China has the responsibility to maintain it” sounds like a flawless statement until one questions why Tibetan or Uyghur is a “world heritage” but the Three-Gorge, now flooded by a giant dam, is not as deserving?

It is too late and I am too tired to continue. I know full well no one will have the appetite to read this posting. That is the position I am in and I am strangely comfortable with it. Whatelse can I do? Cling to guns and religion?

By the way, I tested this idea with Joel. He shut me down even before I could finish. “Stick with the coal.” He said succinctly.

Afterword
I just found out that Said was dismayed that Foucault was a pro-Zionist. How ironic: Said admires Foucault but has to live witht the fact that the originator of his reasoning actually doesn’t share the same belief with him. In that case, I should not feel bad that Said might have sided with the pro-Tibetan movement:)

This is not the first time I imagine a dialogue with Said. In fact, after 9.11, I wrote him an email asking how he would explain the tragedy. Little did I know he was already very ill then (he died soon after). I am sure my email, unopened and unread, may still reside somewhere on a lonely server in Columbia.

I feel mentally twisted. I think I am on to something, but can’t say it or describe it as a body of knowledge. I think I am talking to Foucault and Nietzsche, but can’t understand what they are saying. I am just not good enough. I am not worthy.

Ever since I realized, after taking Migdal’s class, the knowledge (or truth) is related to power/dominance (of course, a narrow sense of K/T, mostly social/political or unquantifiable ones), I have been bothered by the relationship. I am fascinated by it, can’t figure it all out and–the worst–can’t just let it go. Very annoying addiction-like.

It all started yesterday after reading the article in the NYKr: “True Crime” The story is about a young Polish guy, who’s fascinated by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, wrote a book as a way to manifest his brand of “truth/knowledge/illusion/perception”. The book described crimes committed by a seemingly reputable guy. Prior to the book, there was a murder–a perfect crime–that had some similarities with what’s in the book. Later an equally dogged police detective convinced a court that the author of the book was the murderer in real life.

The story is very engaging, but very dark. Some quotes:
Bala often referred to Wittgenstein as “my master.” He also seized on Friedrich Nietzsche’s notorious contention that “there are no facts, only interpretations” and that “truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”

Bala wrote a thesis about Richard Rorty, the American philosopher, who famously declared, “The guise of convincing your peers is the very face of truth itself.”

When a former girlfriend testified that Bala once went out on her balcony drunk and acted as if he were on the verge of committing suicide, he asked her if her words might have multiple interpretations. “Could we just say that this is a matter of semantics-a misuse of the word ’suicide’?” he said.
—————–
Apparently, he is talented (e.g. “graduated with highest possible marks from school”). Yet he’s not good enough to be a philosopher to his own standard so he’s not really interested in an academic life just for the sake of having a job. He went into business instead.

It seems that his appreciation of the menacing nature of K/T, contrasted with his inability to translate such an appreciation into any secular advantage, really drew the worst out of him: he became sadistic and easily paranoid. He wrote his book partly to act out his fascination, partly, I think, to vent his frustration.

After reading his book and getting to know him better, the detective decided publishing a book wasn’t enough to satisfy either of his feelings. He had to live through the experience. With that conviction, he pursued him like Javert going after Jean Valjean, and succeeded.

Now Bala, the author/convicted murderer, is behind bars for 25 years and writing his next book.

NYT introduced a couple of recent books (“Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge”)on America’s anti-intellectual tradition.

Quotes:
Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”

The article also cited Ms. Jacoby (started as a Washington Post reporter) as saying the problem was with the flawed educational system and religious foundamentalism.

I disagree. This is just another manifestation of the knowledge-power relationship. Or the ontology of knowledge: if people already feeling empowered, why do they still need knowledge?

This may seem obvious, but my contention is: this is NOT an abnormly, nor a unique phenomenon.