By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Initially we
suggested that the' West is a concept, hypothesizing a unity of history and 'of
present culture, but that this function has been obscured by the seemingly
concrete nature of the directional or geographical term. In other words, the
West is a theoretical entity that has been naturalized.
In fact the
intellectual and cultural history of Dominick LaCapra
provides a model that explains this. In his 2004 History in Transit, LaCapra asks: "do concepts always leave ungrasped a residue of experiential remainders?" (4).
Here, he points to the unconscious processes at work in discourse, through such
mechanisms as identification and transference. (This is in contrast to the
approach of conceptual history, which focuses on what problems texts
consciously address and through what discourses.) Applying LaCapra's
method, therefore, attends to the affective dimension of the West, in that the
term functions as a site of identification and counter-identification. It also
draws attention to the role of narrative in the construction both of the social
past and of subjectivity.
Histories of Western
civilization typically are stories meant to invoke a sense of heritage and
belonging, and thus they involve a different relation to the psyche than do
works by professional historians which are directed towards readers' critical
faculties. Finally, LaCapra calls upon historians to
learn from the methods of literary theory how to treat individual texts
seriously. He argues that, while contextualization is necessary, historians
should try to avoid the trap of making context a determination. Contexts and
texts are not in a cause-and-effect relation to one another, but are mutually
influential: text respond to contexts, and contexts respond to texts. Not
merely symptoms of more basic social and political processes, "texts may
rethink contexts as well as disorient them in ways that demand responsive
understanding and may even have political and social implications"(17).
Thus we next will
bring together these two approaches by treating the West as a social and
political concept whose affective dimension needs to be taken into account. The
West often functions as a weapon in political disputes involving historical
memory, and the highly charged language that typifies this discourse, involving
metaphors of heritage, dispossession, decline, and corruption, points to the need
to address its emotive content.
Drawing upon both Koselleck and LaCapra, then, we
have chosen to characterize the West as a "concept" over other
possibilities because it allows for the complex and shifting meanings of the
term. The uses of the West in the writings we will be examining will not be
considered as mere symptoms of external structures, but will be analyzed as
arguments that contain unexamined theoretical commitments, intellectual
innovations, and modes of identification.
The principal sources
through which we will make our argument are primary texts that involve
political and/or historical theorizing. These are of two types. First, as
Melvin Richter explains, in his 1995 History of Political and Social Concepts:
An Introduction, conceptual history intends to challenge the traditional
emphasis in the history of political thought on its "great texts,"
and examine how conceptual change also reveals itself in works that do not
belong to the political theory canon. This is all the more appropriate here
because the West was not an organizing concept developed first of all by
central political theorists or philosophers, we argue, but rather by secondary
figures who would now be called "public intellectuals," beginning
with contributors to journals in nineteenth-century Russia. As well, in the
twentieth century many of the most notable considerations of the West have been
by authors, be they speculative philosophers of history such as Oswald Spengler
or commentators on educational or foreign policy such as Allan Bloom or Samuel
P. Huntington, whose audience is the educated public rather than the academy.
So even where we treat major writers such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, we will
also focus on some of their minor writings in which they engage in political
polemics instead of the novels for which they are famous. For it has been in
polemics that the concept of the West has been found useful, not in the
subtleties of art.
At the same time, I
have chosen to concentrate on the kinds of texts where the concern with the
nature of the West is explicit, elaborated deliberately through political or
historical argument, rather than to catalogue its individual uses in a broader
range of material. Our primary interest in this case study is to explicate the
assumptions that underlie the concept of the West, and these are more
accessible in articulated arguments.
To begin with,
Herodotus is believed to articulate the deep-seated opposition between East and
West intrinsic to the cultural identity of the ancient Greeks, Gibbon to
anticipate the possibility of the West's decline and fall, Hegel to identify
the West with the end of history, and Nietzsche to equate Western culture with
nihilism. We argue that, on the contrary, the West does not play a role in any
of the arguments of these major thinkers.
A related problem
involves the language of sources. Concepts common to modernity are expressed in
different languages, and conceptual history emphasizes the extent to which
their meanings are transformed in their translation. In the case of the term
the West, each language has its own history of usage. German, for example, has
three terms with which to translate the West: Westen,
Okzident and Abendland, and
all have a distinct range of significations changing over time. We thus
have attempted to compare translations into English with their originals, and
to note where the difference in language is important. The Russian texts are an
exception, because in this particular case, we cite works that are
readily available in only translated anthologies, even by scholars of Russia.
This said, the West
as a concept; started in nineteenth-century Russia. It was only
afterwards that the West became a fundamental term of contemporary discourse,
and of course its initial significations by no means exhaust the range it came
to have during the twentieth century. Important examples of later uses would be
the non-Communist West of NATO in geopolitics, the Western canon in American
universities, and Western metaphysics for Heidegger and poststructuralist
theory.
Orientalism
As we have seen,
Orientalism initially referred to the study of the Orient or Asia - themselves
terms that have had wide shifts in meaning. As used by Edward Said, however,
Orientalism has come to designate an ideology that supports a sense of Western
superiority through the construction of negative stereotypes about the Orient.
A common criticism is that Said collapses these two meanings, and accuses all
Orientalist scholarship of intending to denigrate the East. To make
distinctions between different stances towards the Orient, however defined, we
will use "anti-" or "negative" Orientalism to refer to the
negative stereotyping of the East, "pro-" or "positive"
Orientalism to the positive stereotyping, and "Orientalism" to the
academic study of Oriental thought and culture.
Occidentalism
While Occidentalism
seems to be the term corresponding directly to Orientalism, the two are not
equal and opposite, for they have been formulated at different times and in
different circumstances. While Asian scholars indeed studied European and then
Western ways, in some cases even before the nineteenth century, their studies
were not constituted into a field called Occidentalism in the way that that
European scholarship of the East was by Orientalism. Europeans determined the
fields of modem scholarship, and these
were considered
universal rather than culturally relative by both them and non
Europeans. For example, in universities all over the world there are
faculties of science, not faculties of Western science. Occidentalism,
therefore, has referred exclusively to ideologies concerning the West. It is
most often employed to describe negative stereotyping which asserts, for
example, that Western culture is uniquely oppressive, alienating, or cut off
from Being. More rarely, Occidentalism describes positive stereotyping of the
West which asserts, for example, that the West has uniquely discovered reason,
science, or freedom. For the sake of clarification, will designate the
former by "anti-" or "negative" Occidentalism, and the
latter by "pro-" or "positive" Occidentalism. Now,
occasionally, Occidentalism is also being used refer to the academic study of
the West as a category. For the sake of clarification we will call this kind of
scholarship "critical Occidentalism." When "Westernism" is
used, it will be as a synonym for positive Occidentalism.
Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Multiculturalism:
Occidentalism, in any
of its forms, must be distinguished from Eurocentrism (although positive occidentalism is almost always Eurocentric).
"Eurocentrism" refers to the belief that European history is the
history of human progress, standing for historical development as such.9 Unlike
the concept of the West, Eurocentrism is not inherently comparative, because it
assumes that only the development of European culture and its derivatives
(mainly in former settler states such as the United States) is historically
significant.
There have been
attempts to counter Eurocentrism by positing alternative outlooks, most notably
that of Afrocentrism. "Afrocentrism" is not usually a pure opposite
to Eurocentrism, however, because its proponents do not tend to claim either
that Africa is the sole center of world history or that African cultures alone
have universal meaning. They usually argue instead that accounts of world
history need to take Africa into account, and that students of African descent
should have an education that celebrates their heritage.
"Multiculturalism" also challenges Eurocentrism by proposing that the
European is but one culture among many. Eurocentric thinkers typically worry
that the universal will disappear into pure relativism if all cultures are
treated as equally important or valid, which is what they believe
multiculturalists claim. They reveal in this the Eurocentric conviction that
all thought other than the European is unable to transcend cultural
particularity. On the other side, an extreme form of anti-Eurocentrism
characterizes all universal claims as being the mere expressions of specifically
European values, and thus end up agreeing with the Eurocentric equation of the
European and the universal.
Much of the discourse
of the West also has involved articulating the dilemmas and failures of
"Western Man," and we will not be effacing the gender of this
formulation. Western subjectivity is often said to be modelled on Faustus or
Prometheus, and thus it has been figured particularly as male. Feminist
theorists, such as Luce Irigaray in her 2002 Between
East and West, have often challenged the Western philosophic tradition as
masculinist, sometimes calling it phallocentrism. The
point of that critique would be obscured if the gendered nature of the
discourse concerning the West was glossed over by contemporary standards of
inclusive language. 10
This said, as we have
seen so far, the West is a term of geography and relative position. There is
certainly a historical relation between the present usage of the West and older
designations of the Western Roman Empire, Western Christendom, and Western
Europe, all distinguishable from their Eastern counterparts. As a geographical
designation, however, the contemporary West's relative location has become
displaced: it is not now, or at least it is only rarely, used as one half of an
East/West division. Rather, the West names an imaginary geography than cannot
be depicted on a map. While the Western and Eastern Roman Empires designated
distinct realms of political allegiance, and the Western and Eastern
Christendom designated realms of religious authority, the West is more
imaginary than either of these and more open to contestation. Depending on the
writer, the West can include Europe's Western extension into the Americas, into
North America alone, or into America alone. It also can include Australia, New
Zealand, South Africa during the former regime, Israel, Japan, and in some
instances even the Soviet Union. Thus it is essentially an ideal
geography, naming those places where "Westernization" has most taken
hold. This spiritual entity, whose location is not mappable and whose policies
have no institutional source, is often treated as if it were a geopolitical
agent, one whose actions and attitudes attract praise or blame. Thus there are
claims "the West is ignoring Russia" or that "the West has betrayed
Somalia."
As a concept thus,
the West unites this unmappable geography with a particular style of history.
As the entity's location is spiritual, so is its past. The narrative of its
history is a philosophy of history, a metahistory, a
linking of past, present and future by unifying principles. The philosophy of
the history that is the story of the West embodies not merely an account of the
past, but of historical consciousness; it is not merely a description of the
present but an analysis of modernity; it is not merely an anticipation of what
is to come, but an orientation towards the future.
The historical
narrative of the process of Westernization describes it either as the outcome
of a particular tradition, or as a break with that tradition. Although the West
is a particularized civilization, culture, tradition, or heritage, its history
is the history of humanity, the story of the dynamic of historical change
resulting in modernity - it has universal meaning and global consequences.
Western culture is a project. Unlike other cultures, which are stable, it is
uniquely dynamic and restless. It is the motor of historical change. Its
dynamism is often explained as deriving from a tension between two fundamental
principles: Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation, the sacred and the
secular, papacy and empire, church and state, Hebraicism
and Hellenism. The dynamic impulse of Western history explains why the
West originates, variously: capitalism, modern technology, modern science, the
free market, democracy, critique, the disenchanted world, and History. As an
explanation for relative global positions, the West explains the historical
primacy of the achievements of a distinct civilization, and the present
dominance of a set of nations conceived as a geopolitical unity. Yet, by
ordering history according to an ideal-type construct, the story of the West
does not involve much attention to the particularity of empirically grounded
history. It is a metanarrative of the development of a particular culture
having special features when compared to all others.
The contrast between
the West and the Rest is, by nature, evaluative. It is consequently oriented to
the future: the concept of the West seems inevitably to involve the question of
its destiny, as it competes with other civilizations or with barbarism, and to
involve prognostications of its decline and fall or anticipations of its
complete triumph.
Not only does the
West have a history of world-historical significance, but Westerners are said
to be unique in their historical consciousness. Mary Anile Perkins, in her
Christendom and European Identity, analyzes with great insight the relationship
between the different levels of claims concerning Europe (which she conflates
with the West) as history, on the one hand, and as the idea of history, on the
other. Perkins cites Peter Berger as a good example of how historical
consciousness is treated as a marker of the uniqueness of Western identity:
"The discourse of history," Berger writes, "is an invention of
Western Civilization or rather, it is the condition of Western Civilization,
the fundamental concept of all Western concepts" (qtd. in Perkins 117),11
As a concept, the West
presupposes the conceptual field of modernity - it presupposes history,
culture, civilization, tradition, and modernity itself, in their modem
meanings.
Indeed, in some
cases, the term is used to represent them, as the particular agent of their
emergence. Thus, the West is a near-synonym with other concepts, and depends as
well upon counter-concepts. As observed earlier in the case of Braude I, it is often used as equivalent to Europe, and its
own history as a concept overlaps quite closely at times with the history of
the idea of Europe. Yet, however imaginary Europe's identity, in principle it
is in a space that can be mapped, and contemporary Europe has defendable
borders.
The idea of Europe
tends to be that it is a commonality of different elements, rather than a
unified totality. Its commonality, therefore, involves fundamental tensions,
and these have a more specific character than those associated with the West.
They include, for example, conflicts between North and South, France and
Germany, pope and emperor, Catholic and Protestant, England and the continent.
The history of Europe typically, therefore, employs a different kind of
narrative than does that of the West, although at many points their paths
converge.
The West can be
synonymous with the developed world, the First World, or modernity: the
proximity of these terms is the source of a contemporary debate concerning the
equivalency of modernization and Westernization. The question is, does
modernity uniquely belong to the West or not? The West also has a number of
antonyms: the East, Asia, and the Orient. As a cultural unity, Western
civilization has been opposed by pan Slavism, pan-Africanism,
and pan-Asianism. Its most common opposites today
include the Third WorId, undeveloped or developing
nations, the non- Western world, and, especially, the Rest. Most antonyms
follow the logic of the binary opposite, or Other, whose qualities derive from
its negation. But ''the Rest," who live in "the non-West," have
the particular quality of being unified by a lack, the absence of qualities
associated with the West.
The West thus serves
as a locus of questions concerning identity by referring to an entity larger
than the nation - a civilization, a culture, a tradition, a geopolitical
alliance, or a society. It especially names a specific civilization in the
context of global geography and world history. Yet, even more than the closely
related idea of Europe, it is often a vehicle for working out the meaning of
national identity as well. A nation can identify itself as the leader of the
West, the embodiment of the real West, the mediator between West and East, the
enemy of the West, or the successor to the West.
These relations of
identification and counter-identification naturally involve evaluative judgments
and subjective experiences of belonging or rejection. For those who
characterize themselves as Western, this identity can result either in
chauvinism or self critique. For those who think of
themselves as positioned outside, the West can provide a mode of critiquing
their own traditions, be a source of aspiration, or be seen as threatening
contamination and loss. It might seem as if identification through the West
obeys the obvious logic of "Othering," of constituting the self from
what is alien to it, but the mechanism does not operate so simply. In the case
of the European Jew, for example, as described by Jacob Shavit in his 1997
Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the
Modern Secular Jew, Jewish identification with or against the West has involved
processes of recognition, disavowal, splitting, and what W.E.B. Du Bois famously termed "double-consciousness."
Western culture was experienced as being both internal and externa1 to European
Jews, as they were considered to be both internal and external to Europe.
Both the Western
intellectual and the Westernized intellectual are often accused of treachery,
whether they defend or critique the status quo. The West makes available a
discourse with which to theorize the intellectual's feeling of being
in-between, just as it does in regards to the self-positioning of nations. At
various times, Russians have claimed that they are in-between the West and
Asia, Germans that they are in-between Western and Eastern Europe, Israelis
that they are in-between the Eastern and Western blocs, and the Japanese that
they are in-between Western modernity and Eastern tradition.
Even some Americans,
belonging to the extreme or uttermost West in one view, have described their
position as being in-between the old West of Europe and the far East of Asia.
For those who use the West to bolster national identity, the West endows their
nation with a higher significance by linking it to world history. The West
serves an identity politics larger than the nation as well. Philosophers
belonging to the canon of the Western tradition become ancestors, cultural but
sometimes even ethnic ancestors, of present-day Westerners who believe
themselves to be the rightful heirs of a noble Indo European ancestry. It was
such a conflation of ethnicity with culture in the history of thought that
propelled Martin Bernal to make a counter-claim about the African ancestry of
Greek culture. Outside the West, intellectuals have often been accused of being
deracinated, of having taken on an alien mentality.
Thus no intellectual
can escape the West, for even the repudiation of Western culture must
participate in its discourse: anti-Occidentalist
nativism repeats the pattern of the rejection of the Enlightenment set by German
romantics, as Anthony Appiah observes in his In My Father's House.
"Westernized intellectual" is therefore somewhat meaningless, for
there is no such thing as an intellectual not self-related to the West. At the
same time, the question of the West is inseparable from the question of the
intellectual.
The West as we shall
see, was first elaborated by Russian intellectuals; it is no coincidence that
it was in Russia that the idea of the intellectual, and debates over the
position of the intellectual, also emerged first.
Theory proposing a
larger cultural identity, be it national, cultural, civilizational, or
cosmopolitan, is the province of intellectuals. Not only are intellectuals the
ones who engage in debates over identity, but engagement in such debates is
what has produced the kind of thinker called the intellectual, rather than the
scholar. Mary Anne Perkins, in her 2004 Christendom and European Identity,
observes that the "Republic of Intellectuals" was identified by J.G.
Herder as that which gave Europe its idea of itself: "Europe has known how
to give herself an ideal form only perceived by intellectuals" (qtd. in
Perkins 13). Perkins further suggests that intellectuals discover that the
meaning of Europe resides in their own activity. That is, what makes Europe Europe is its intellectual life. In a parallel sense,
intellectuals have formulated theories about world history through the concept
of the West; this kind of theorization has been what has defined their role as
intellectuals; and they have defined the West by narratives of the development
of its distinctive intellectual tradition.
Being a Westerner, or
becoming Westernized, involves a certain kind of self, described variously as
free, autonomous, alienated, individualized, disenchanted, or split.
On one side, the
Western tradition is said to be the source of inner freedom - hence the
importance of forming the Western self through Bildung,
a liberal education. The West often has informed pedagogy: imparting the
Western tradition has been held essential in forming virtuous citizens. On the
other side, the Western tradition is seen as a source of deculturalization and
detraditionalization, and creates in the self a sense of loss, an emptying out.
Western man is alienated, and the Westernized intellectual is split between two
opposed worlds, unable to feel completely at home in either.
The discourse of the
West involves theories about that which unifies different nations into a
totality - be it a culture or a geopolitical power - and unifies different
histories into the totality of a single narrative. We would argue that where
the West does not refer to a totality, be it a spiritual (rather than merely
relational) geography, a philosophic history, a geopolitical agency, or a
certain type of subjectivity, it is not a concept. The West as a whole
functions in discourse as if it were analogous to a nation-state competing
against others. The West both has an essential nature to be explained, and
functions as an explanation for the unequal relations of power in the modem
world. The answer to the question "why is the West ahead?" is:
"Because it is Western." Given that the concept of the West
involves demonstrating a totality - of power, values, or will- that is distinct
from others, it tends to be based on the principle (often unconscious or even
disavowed) of organicism. There is said to be an essential spirit of the West
animating its history from its origins to the present.
As an ideal-type
construct therefore, the concept of the West gathers an imaginary geography, a
geopolitical being, an historical destiny, and a commitment to a unique set of
values. The West involves posing fundamental questions - who are we, how are we
different from others, what is our relation to the past, what is our future? -
in a global context which are answered in terms of a unified and distinctive
cultural entity. The discourse about the West is fundamentally discourse by
intellectuals - scholars, journalists, popular historians, policy makers, or
educators - because it provides a mode of explanation for the modem condition,
and it is intellectuals who seek for such explanations through historical
meaning. By seeking such understanding, thinkers necessarily use the West as an
ideal-type, albeit unknowingly. As an entity unmoored from any location or
institutional framework, the West is substantiated as a world-historical agent,
a living totality with its particular origin, life-story and fate. Because it
always involves making a claim, there is nothing that is Western unless someone
makes an argument for it: naming something Western thus tends to take the form,
however truncated, of a theory of history.
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