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China in Theory: The Orientalist Production of Knowledge in the Global Economy

2010; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cul.2010.a402873

1460-2458

Daniel F. Vukovich,

Globalization and Cultural Identity

China in Theory:The Orientalist Production of Knowledge in the Global Economy Daniel Vukovich (bio) If one wanted to raise again the idea that the superstructure follows the base, then China—or more accurately, Western obsessions with the perceived threats and achievements of the Peoples Republic—would seem to be an ideal case. But the omnipresence of "China" in the media and in economic circles has only recently been matched by its place in academic, intellectual production. That is, while an empiricist China Studies has proceeded as though its cold war assumptions needed no revision, continuing to produce Sinological analyses of what is wrong with the PRC, "China" has become a rather new object of interest in Western theoretical circles. It is this latter development that will preoccupy me below—the place of "China" in humanities theories of globalization as well as in cross-cultural studies of China and the West. Although little of the work in cultural theory that speaks the country's name is explicitly about China, it assumes a certain type of knowledge about the area. It addresses a "real" China in the form of a totalitarian state it confidently knows. This received knowledge consolidates its arguments by ostensibly making them more complex and cosmopolitan as opposed to narrowly Euro-American. For all their heterodoxy in terms of "pure" theory, their outlook on China is one shared by the media and mainstream Area Studies. Just as the latter need interrogation, so too does cultural studies work to the degree that it adopts the positional superiority of the theorist over and against the possible epistemological challenges presented by the foreign "area." My attempt is to critique this particular production of truth about China and to offer another way of looking at intellectual labor and theory in the current conjuncture. Above all, it is the enlisting of [End Page 148] received images such as the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square that suggest a certain new economism of theory—if "economism" can be used for a mode of argument that resists considering (or informing oneself about) materialities on the ground and that tends toward an increasing abstraction as though abstraction alone were the proper arena of truth. These trends within knowledge production stem from the expansion of global exchange within the academy and intellectual life. At the risk of sounding vulgar (to use a word often applied to unapproved types of political analysis), it is as if the knowledge about China that is produced in the West has to be as abstract and, in short, as commodified as the other products of labor circulating between China and its business partners. The homology between what passes for knowledge about China today, on the one hand, and the workings of abstraction and the value-form in capitalist exchange, on the other hand, undergirds my comments below. My point is not simply to debunk such China references; nor is it to undo everything the theorists have to say. I seek to show that their premises regarding China are unfounded and that this falseness is symptomatic of something greater, which the second half of the essay on Alfred Sohn-Rethel and intellectual labor will explore. "China" in Theory In the concluding chapter of The Coming Community Giorgio Agamben turns to Tiananmen in 1989 to demonstrate the actuality and worldliness of the new global situation and of his chief concept in the book: "whatever singularity" (1993, 84).1 The latter refers to a community without "determinate contents," without a defining essence or identity, without "conditions of belonging" and beyond any national ascription. Agamben's project here is to find an ethics that can ground community, but one not based on ideology or, apparently, history. As with his later work, Agamben attempts to privilege ethics over politics, expressing a refusal of national belonging and the salience of the nation-state that clearly is shared somewhat later by Hardt and Negri's work. This non-identitarian community of what he calls "the Chinese May" is, in his opinion, a new development to the extent that it was [End Page 149] not a struggle for the "control or conquest of the State," but stood opposed to it...