By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Searching for the West

In searching for a theory to explain the nature of the West, we discovered in P.1 that it is itself a theory. As a political and social concept, or as an ideal-type construct, the West offers an explanation for difference in the present through narratives, explicit or implied, of world­ history.

Geoffrey Barraclough complains, in articles written in the 1940s and published in 1955 as History in a Changing World, that the West is not a proper object of historicaI inquiry because it describes Europe in too limited a manner. It has caused the history of Europe to be focused only on the history of a few nations in its western part, and this has resulted in the general neglect of Eastern Europe, including Russia (10).

Barraclough especially objects to the rhetorical use of "Western civilization": During the years since 1945 the clarification of the principles upon which civilization rests has become one of the major preoccupations of thoughtful people. Scarcely a day goes by without our reading or hearing of "our inherited cultural tradition," the "typical values of western civilization," "the idea of European coherence" - or, more simply, "our western tradition," "our western values," "our western culture." No set of ideas has become more commonplace, none been more assiduously drummed into our ears, since the end of the war. (31)

That there exists a Western "inherited intellectual tradition" is a theory that originated in nineteenth century historiography; it is based upon an interpretation of history which "has been shattered by historical criticism and discarded by historical scholarship" (32). Used as a tool of contemporary political ideologies, the narrative of the Western tradition is appealing yet, any historian with a global perspective sees the standard narrative of the West as a mere reflection of a self-glorying parochialism, one that ignores facts and the discontinuities of history. The very labels of "the West" and of "tradition" lead people to "confuse words with things" (42), whether they are applied to the ancient civilizations or modern Europe (45). History does not show the development of "a specifically western European civilization, differentiating or even separating western Europe as a historic unity from the Slavonic east" (44); it shows cultural heterogeneity. The "cult" of a common Western civilization is an ideologically-charged impediment to present European unity (45). In Barraclough's judgment: "It is easy to speak of 'western civilization,' but it is extremely difficult to draw its boundaries, to maintain that this belongs to the west and that this does not. Or rather, one should perhaps say that it is extremely difficult to do 50, except on the basis of prejudice" (49).

Writing half a century later, Norman Davies is likewise an historian of Europe who feels a particular animus against the idea of the West, especially when it is used as an organizing principle by historians writing about Europe. He argues in his magisterial 1996 Europe: A History that "Western civilization" is a way of constructing an arbitrary and partial definition of Europe which ignores not only the nations in its east, but parts of its west (such as Ireland) and north as well, often from ideological motivations:

In modem times, [the idea of "The West"] has been adopted by a long succession of political interests who wished to reinforce their identity and to dissociate themselves from their neighbors. As a result, "Western civilization" has been given layer upon layer of meanings and connotations that have accrued over the centuries. (22)

Davies demonstrates the meaninglessness of the category of the West by listing its contradictory variants: those countries descended from the Western Roman Empire; Christendom as opposed to Islam; the intellectual tradition arising in Latin (as opposed to Orthodox) Christianity; Protestant Europe (as more "modem" than Catholic); the heritage of the French Enlightenment and Revolution; the industrial imperialism of the late nineteenth-century Great Powers; the Germanic ethos of Mitteleuropa; the Anglo­ -American empire; the Germanic ethos of the Nazis; the American-led alliance against Communism; and the distinctive European, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, attainment of culture (23-5). "Western civilization" "is essentially an amalgam of intellectual constructs which were designed to further the interests of their authors. It is the product of complex exercise in ideology, of countless identity trips, of sophisticated essays in cultural propaganda. It can be defined by its advocates in almost any way that they think fit" (25). The only thing all the variants have in common is that they are expression of a desire by so-called Westerners to feel superior to others, especially those of "the East" (25) through a process of identification with an idealized past: "One gets the distinct impression that everyone in the "West" was a genius, a philosopher, a pioneer, a democrat or a saint" (28-29).

The similarities between Barraclough's and Davies' criticisms are instructive, for Barraclough's forceful and convincing objections to the West, offered in his well-known History in a Changing World, had evidently no discernable effect upon its popularity.

There is something about the West, perhaps that it is a "cult" according to Barraclough, or the locus of "countless identity trips" according to Davies, that has made it almost impervious to critique.

 

The West and Philosophy

As a category used extensively in philosophical discourse, it would be natural to expect that the West has been the object of the history of philosophy. Yet this is has not generally been the case, and Michael Allen Gillespie's 1999 "Liberal Education and the Idea of the West" is a rare example of a consideration of the West as a philosophical category within an historical perspective. According to Gillespie, the West was first formulated in the late-nineteenth century, when Europeans started to compare their culture with those in the East within the intellectual contexts of historicism and the critique of modernity. The West came to replace Christendom during a time when Europeans were discerning meaning through historical rather than religious narratives, and it served to dissolve the older contrast between the ancients and modems into the unity of a total historical development (8). The advent of the West was essentially connected to the death of God: "the rise of the idea of the West is concomitant with the rise of nihilism" (11). Identifying the distinctive contributions of Nietzsche, Spengler, and Heidegger to idea's development, Gillespie claims that the West is inseparable from the anticipation of its ending.

Yet contemporary Americans should not, Gillespie argues, try to "save" the West, for as a concept it condemns us to viewing everything through the limiting prism of history.

The culture wars over West should be abandoned, because "the real problem may not be the question of our connection to Western civilization, which the great debate between postmodernism and traditionalism addresses, but the fact that both sides so readily accept that there is such a thing as the West or Western civilization" (24). Surprisingly, however, Gillespie treats the postmodern critics of the West in the same simplistic and reductive manner as did Gress. Lumping together deconstruction with race, feminist, postcolonial, and multicultural theories, all under the rubric of "deconstructionist postmodernism" (15), Gillespie equates them all to relativism, subjectivism, resentment, and ethical indifference. Although he thinks that the existence of something called the West is in doubt, Gillespie also seems to believe that those who criticize Western civilization want to replace it with, "at best," "an anarchic egalitarianism" (17), and, at worst, a tyranny camouflaging "a new form of the will to power" (18).

Even given the limits of Gillespie's hostile characterization of practitioners of contemporary theory, it is evident that criticizing the West plays a central function in their work, as Robert JC Young demonstrates in his 1990 White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. Young describes the goal of deconstruction as deconstructing '"the concept, the authority, and assumed primacy of, the category of 'The West'," and the stance of postmodernism as involving '"the loss of the sense of an absoluteness of any Western account of History" (19). Marxism, on the other hand, is merely an extension of the Western, and specifically Hegelian, project of universal domination whereby the Other is to be subsumed by the Same. Even postcolonialism reproduces this Western logic through its attraction to the simple opposition of colonizer and colonized (5).

French theory, Young suggests, might be understood as an attempt to get out of the Hegelian binary of the master/slave dialectic, which it identifies with the West as such (8).

Young however falls into the same habit of essentializing through binary oppositions that he critiques. As some commentators have noticed, he does not really challenge the concept of the West itself, but only the positive way it has been characterized within certain literatures. Alastair Bonnett, for example, argues that Young fails to deconstruct or even question the category of the West, but that he rather takes "its form and nature as pre­ given and beyond dispute" (6). Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, in their The Myth of Continents, conclude that Young, and the postmodernist theory he speaks for, misrepresent the diversity of the history of thought and portray the West as uniquely being the agent of world history, despite their claims to the contrary. While Young repudiates the totalizing drive of the West, his writing nevertheless employs a totalizing definition of it, and Lewis and Young argue that, "far from serving to deconstruct the West, rhetoric of this sort only reinscribes it as a foundational sociogeographical category" (103).

What appears to be a recent exception to this tendency in poststructuralist theory instead only confirms it. John McCumber, in his 2005 Social Identities article "Dialogue as Resistance to Western Metaphysics," observes that the West "can of course mean many things," being "an immense collection of diverse historical phenomena, ideas, and approaches to life, many of which contradict one another"; the category "has nothing to do with geography," and is therefore merely a sign of "semantic desperation" (197-98).

Despite these reservations, however, McCumber still believes that "something separated itself from the rest of the world and turned against it." That something was ''the enterprise of global domination," the "metaphysical project," we call the West. The West therefore, as it turns out, is a ''project'' and an "enterprise," not just a word. The author's initial skepticism about the West as a category is merely a skepticism about the validity of its geographical reference. The West does have an essence, according to McCumber, but it is a philosophical one, which is to think that things have a single essence. This  "hylomorphic concept of 'Being' ," first developed Aristotle, "has exercised unusual power over the West, power so great that it virtually constitutes the West" (199).

According to McCumber, as well as the West's having an essence, one imparted to it by philosophical activity, it has intentionality, and unethical intentionality at that: "So I believe that it is possible, after all to define 'The West': it is metaphysical civilization, the culture which once wrote domination and oppression into the nature of Being itself, and which has never abandoned that model of Being for the human realm" (199). Based on this confident understanding of the nature of the West, McCumber feels empowered to make sweeping historical claims, the truth of which he obviously regards as self-evident: "When the West, which I would now like to call 'ousiodic civilization,' began serious encounter [with] non-western cultures in the fifteenth century, it encountered them as cultures without form - and so without reason - and so without truth. The Europeans had nothing to learn from the barbarians, any more than the capitalist needs to learn from his workers" (206).

 

The West and Ideology

Thus even postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists in their critiques of the West assume that what Latour calls the Great Divide indeed exists, with the West alone on one side and all the Rest on the other. Although accused by Robert Young of being Eurocentric, Marxism, and its offshoots such as world-systems analysis, inform the approaches that have problematized the West more consistently. Lynn Hunt observed in 1985 that ''the only major genre of historical writing today that poses the question of the West's distinctiveness" is the "neo-Marxist" world-systems analysis (158-9). The dynamic of historical change, which others attribute to a unique element in Western culture, is attributed by Marxists to capitalism. Cultural explanations are the expressions of mere false consciousness or ideology, because capitalism is a modern global and globalizing phenomenon, not the unique product of a distinctively Western civilization.

Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks written between 1929 and 1935, and especially influential in European Marxism during the 1960s and 1970s, argues that: "every point on the earth is East and West at the same time," but "because of the historical content that has become attached to the geographical tenns the expressions East and West have finished up indicating specific relations between different cultural complexes." The two terms have become "crystallized" within contemporary thought "from the point of view of the European cultured classes who, as a result of their world­ wide hegemony, have caused them to be accepted everywhere" (447). Erk Wolf, in his 1982 Europe and the People without History, likewise contests the meaningfulness of treating the West and other such "reified categories" as distinct entities (7):

If there are connections everywhere, why do we persist in turning dynamic, interconnected phenomena into static, disconnected things? Some of this is owing, perhaps, to the way we have learned our own history. We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there are exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome,Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (5)

Thomas Patterson's 1997 Inventing Western Civilization is another developed expose of the ideological underpinnings of "Westem civilization." Patterson argues that the very concept of civilization is inherently hierarchical, being dependent upon a contrast with other uncivilized and inferior cultures, and this regard particularly critiques Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. For Patterson, the idea of Western civilization is really an ideology constructed by intellectuals to serve power, principally the interests of capitalism.

In a similar vein, Silvia Federici's 1995 Enduring Western Civilization is a collection of articles examining the politics behind the idea of the West. Many contributors describe how the West was invented out of the history of European expansion and the development of global capitalism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans became conscious that they played a unique role in bringing about economic,technological and political revolutions. Revolutionary change fostered a consciousness of history, and a search for the meaning of social transfonnation. The history of the changing world became the history of the rise of the West, and thus the West emerged as a term that both describes and explains the dynamic of history. Yet, while most of the contributors in Enduring Western Civilization agree that the idea of the West originated in the nineteenth century, none give exactly the same account of how and why it did so.

Federici's introduction begins by referring to Barraclough's critique of the West, and argues that "no more clarity presently exists concerning the meaning of this concept" than there was when he wrote in 1955 (x). Postmodemism emphasizes the constructed nature of all meaning, yet it has failed to analyze the West itself as a construction.

Educational critics show the exclusionary nature of curricula based on the Western tradition, but they have also neglected to consider that the tradition itself might be only a "fiction," mystifying the true nature of global and class conflicts (xi). The very opposition of contemporary theory to Western culture has only served to naturalize the idea of Western civilization, ",so that the concept is now increasingly used as a self­ explanatory term, a term of absolute reference, and above all a neutral term." But as a concept of cultural particularity, the West will always perform as a cover for the operations of global capitalism, Federici argues. Due to the spread of the capitalist system during the last five hundred years, it is impossible to distinguish between Western and other cultures (xii). "Western civilization" is therefore only a mask, "a recent ideological invention, dissimulating under a cultural mantle the worldwide expansion of capitalist relations" (xii). Despite its falsity, the West has continued to be used because it has always been ''retooled'' by elites, who have given it "exceptional backing" (xiv).

In her own contribution to the volume, Federici makes an important critique of the tendency to characterize Western civilization as an inheritance or a legacy. Such imagery "imparts the transmission of property as the model for historical development, and, through an act of temporal conquest, enables 'Western Civilization' to appropriate as its own all that is valuable in the past" (76). An emphasis on the culture, heritage, or tradition of the West tends to result in the neglect of the cultural contributions of others to the modern world.

While the Federici collection of essays is extremely valuable, the political analysis of its contributors is often reductionist, finding the interests of power sufficient for explanation.

There is nothing to know about the tradition of the West except its function as a mask for a system of domination. Except for Christopher GoGwilt's contribution, which we will look at later, Federici's volume treats the West as ifit had a single mythical content determined by the interests of elites.

Neil Lazarus, in his 2002 "The Fetish of the 'West' in Postcolonial Theory," argues against theorists such as Stuart Hall who write of the idea of the West as if it were an actual agent of oppression. This "fetishizes" the West, because in reality the term is merely an "ideological category," standing for nothing. It does not correspond to any real agency, such as a state, and yet it is used by postcolonial theorists as if it has causal efficacy (44). Although postcolonial writers intend to critique the West, Lazarus holds that the result of their approach is that they end up treating one particular civilization, the Western, and one small group of actors, the Europeans, as the central agents of history (47). Intended to undermine the operations of European power, such an understanding of the West only reinforces it, because it has Western Europeans uniquely "producing"modernity. The emphasis on the colonizers' will to power results in the "bracketing, displacement or euphemization of the specific agency of capitalist social relations in imperialist development" (54). And, since the West is "the super-agent of domination in the modem world," anything that is identified as Western, such as science and reason, also is considered an instrument of domination to be resisted. The anti- Westernism of postmodern theory both masks the operation of capital and serves to elevate the importance of Westerners, even if in the role of oppressors exerting hegemonic power.

 

Historicizing the West

Christopher GoGwilt is equally skeptical of the West, calling it a "rhetorical claim," but nevertheless offering an illuminating and detailed history of the idea in his 1995 book The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-mapping of Europe and Empire, and in his chapter in the Federici collection, "True West: The Changing Idea of the West from the 1880s to the 1920s," an expanded version of that history and published in the same year. GoGwilt characterizes the West as "an abbreviated rhetorical claim of coherence for a whole set of incommensurable ideas" ("True West" 1), a distortion that attempts ''to reconstitute historical discontinuity as the continuity of 'Western history'" (Invention 3), and '.an imagined identity that cannot be mapped" invented by Westerners in reaction to anti-colonial movements (9). GoGwilt wants both the conservatives and poststructuralists who invoke the West to realize how Western civilization and Western culture are not only suspect but also recent ideas ("True West" 37). He argues that they originated during the period of the well-known sense of crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, often called the fin-de-siecle, which was not a crisis of the West but a crisis that produced the West. The West came to constitute the framework for a new cultural identity for Europeans, formed through the "double-mapping" of their differences from the East of empire and the East of Europe in Russia (Invention 1). Positing a double­ mapping of Europe and empire is essential for understanding the complexity and depth of the "rhetorical invention" of the West, which incorporates cultural tradition, history, and the assertion of political power (16, 26). The assumption that the West is something that is "coherent, intelligible," closes us off from understanding history (38). GoGwilt thus states his objective in this way: "It is to enable a richer, a more diverse, and a more historically accurate conceptualization of human history, that I argue for dislodging the paradigm of ' West em Civilization'" (59).

For the purposes of this study, one of GoGwilt's most interesting arguments is that the European idea of the West originated in part through the process of "back formation," by which negative generalizations about the West by certain thinkers in Russia came to be adopted in the West, but in positive form. Europeans came to see themselves as constituting a coherent whole called the West whose rationality and progress were in contrast to Russian mysticism and backwardness. This is a suggestive but overly­ simplified version of the complex inter-relations between Russian and European thought which led to the emergence of the West, and we will explore these seperatly. GoGwilt's accounts are limited by his tendency to treat ideas as merely the effects of ideologies, or as the inventions of ruling elites meant to mask reality.

One field in which the meaning of the West has received more precise attention has been geography, both cultural and historical. At least on the face of it, the West seems to refer to a locatable place, yet, as has been observed already, it is in practice unmappable. The relation between its idea and geography is analyzed in Martin W. Lewis and Kiren E. Wigen's 1997 The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Meta geography, which poses a comprehensive challenge to the prevailing "metageographical concepts" through which the globe is mapped. As well as the East/W est axis, these concepts include continents, Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, nations, civilizations, and regions. One critique the authors make of all of them is that they confuse geographical categories with political or cultural ones - both Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, for example, assume that the landmasses called continents correspond to cultural commonalities. Another critique is that that our designations of certain landmasses as continents are Eurocentric, for they have been developed historically out of Europeans' perceptions of their relation to others. There is no reason, for example, that Europe should be considered a continent separate from Asia, or that Asian culture should name such a diversity of peoples, or that the East should be used to designate practically anything not Western, including Eastern Europe.

Lewis and Wigen do not focus their critique on the constructed nature of all names, and in this they set themselves against postmodernists, whom they fmd too willing call any labels whatsoever "essentialist." Instead, the authors believe that present metageographical concepts are confused in that they wrongly divide the world into discrete blocks, wrongly assume that these blocks can be organized into "neat hierarchies," and wrongly treat geographical space that a uniform substance that can be simply divided and ordered (11-12). In the place of current incorrect models, there need to be developed ones that are truer to the specificities being described, and Lewis and Wigen propose that ''world regions," defined by webs of human interconnection rather than geological features, are truer to human experience.

The Myth of Continents presents a compelling case for suspicion of all received metageographical concepts, showing why they were first developed and how they have been or could be contested by alternative ways of mapping. The authors thus seek to denaturalize the sense of space which reinforces mistaken notions of history and geography and which promotes Eurocentrism. They show how difficult it is to upset the East/West polarity through their telling critiques the unquestioned acceptance of the West within apparently oppositional discourses such as poststructuralism. But in their wide­ ranging survey they are not always careful in their own. use of terminology, often using "European" and "Western" interchangeably. And, while they criticize the legitimacy of the East/West division, they also criticize the tendency of "Western theorists," from the ancient Greeks onwards, to define the East negatively (73). Their historical explanation for the rise of the notion of a "supra-European West" to replace European Christendom (49), is limited to the practical need for a term that would include areas of the European diasporas such as the United States (51). And their characterizations of the arguments in philosophical works are too-often overly-simplistic. Lewis and Wigen are at their best when describing the changes that have occurred within the study of geography as a field of scholarship.

It is another geographer who has written the work the most extensive study of the history of the West to date. Alaistair Bonnett, in his 2004 The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History, argues that "from the late nineteenth century, and particularly from the first two decades of the twentieth, the West, became a central idea, a ubiquitous category in the articulation of the modem world" (25). As an idea, it was developed relatively independently in a number of different national contexts. Bonnett considers a number of these. including Britain.in the early twentieth century; the Soviet Union, Japan, Turkey, the spiritual Asia in the early twentieth century; and capitalist Asia, American neo-liberalism, and Islamicism recent times. Presenting a wide-ranging survey of the meanings of the West on a global scale, his approach is more episodic than comprehensive, as he acknowledges (11). Yet, within the limits of his considerations, Bonnett provides an impressive bibliography of the literature on the West.

One of Bonnett's goals is to demonstrate the creative ways in which the idea of the West has been employed by non-Western thinkers. He intends to combat the Eurocentric habit of believing that innovative thought always has a Western origin through his proposal that, to a large extent, the idea of the West was invented in the non-West (2). For Bonnett, the West has been a tool for the definition of national identity employable in many different circwnstances. Although as the result of his work claims of Western uniqueness will be harder to justify, Bonnett does not believe that the West is merely a myth or hypothetical construct. He thinks that there has been a real difference in how Westerners and non- Westerners experience the world, with the former enjoying a sense of agency in regards to the future and the latter feeling subjected to outside forces (166).

On the other hand, while Westerners have used the idea of the West to claim ownership over modernity and progress, and thus have remained little interested in the intellectual life of non-Westerners, intellectuals outside the West have engaged it quite closely (163).

Yet, because he is committed to establishing the creativity of non-Western intellectuals, Bonnett is reluctant to use the image of "hybridity" when describing non-Western discourses about the West. Hybridity to him seems to suggest that non-Western cultures are derivative, or that the innovations of non-Western thinkers can be subsumed by a common undertaking defined in the West (65). For example, Bonnett denies that the writings on the West by the nineteenth-century Japanese writer Fukuzawa would be an example of cultural borrowing and hence hybridity: Rather than importing or translating a ready-made idea of the West, Fukuzawa actively fashioned a certain representation of the West to suit his own (and, in large measure, his social class's) particular political ambitions. This process is best understood as a creative and original intervention in the history of the idea of the West. (70)

But Fukuzawa, writing in 1875, does not himself make this kind of claim for his work. Instead, he situates himself within a generation of scholars beholden to two traditions, one Japanese and the other Western: "We have lived two lives, as it were; we unite in ourselves two completely different patterns of experience" (3). Bonnett is so concerned to guard his subject's autonomy and creativity that he fails to acknowledge Fukuzawa's conscious participation in a wider intellectual field or his inner struggles with a sense of doubleness - or even his sense of superiority, for Fukuzawa writes that his two lives gives him an advantage over one-sided Westerners. While hybridity is a more apt image for the cultural world of the non-Western intellectual than Bonnett would allow, it need not imply a secondary position for that intellectual; perhaps describes a condition of heightened self-awareness, which Bonnett acknowledges in a different context. Instead, the point to be made here is that the Western intellectual should be thought of as culturally hybrid as well, with debts to other cultures. Perhaps the difference between the two is that, in the case of the Westerner, those debts have tended to be forgotten. But the way to combat the claims that all important thought about the West is Western in origin is not to assert that all origins are conceptually original and equivalent. 6

A briefer but more theoretically developed consideration of the meaning of the West is Jan Ifversen's 2004 conference paper "Who Are the Westerners?". Ifversen proposes that, while the West as a concept "has played a major role in forming various configurations of world order" (2-3), it seems to be now in decline in terms of frequency of use, suggesting that we are perhaps entering new conceptual terrain. To test this, Ifversen examines uses of the West in newspapers and journals at the present time. He identifies in them five "macro-semantic configurations": one "Old West," meaning the continuity of a particular cultural tradition; another "Old West," meaning a certain narrative of the stages of history; "the new West," as equivalent to modernity; "westernization," as the process of globalization; and the "political West" as the post-war alliance of We stem Europe and the US (5-7). With the decline of the political West, noted also earlier by Harries, and with the growing divisions between Europe and the United States, employment of the West in any of these ways seems to be in decline, yet the term has been recently given new life by the debate over Huntington's "clash of civilizations" and by rise of radical Islam (30). Ifversen finds that, while the concept of the West might be problematic, it is difficult to do without it, for it serves to demarcate cultural and political differences in a way that many still find useful (29).

Ifversen's rather neutral assessment of the West as a functional category is in contrast to Naoki Sakai's 2005 "The West - A Dialogic Prescription or Proscription?". Sakai understands the terminology of "the West and the Rest" to be a ''telling trope of the global reality," one which explains differences through ''the execution of a subjective technology." While some might still assume that the West exists as an autonomous entity with distinct outlines, either in space or as a tradition, the West is nothing else than a mode of self-fashioning and self-representation. It is a "mythic construct" that posits "a putative unity" despite a multiple reality (180). Sakai asks whether or not the function this myth plays in discourse is an ethical one. Can the two sides of the dichotomy ''the West and the Rest" engage in a kind of dialogical relationship, through which what is different is no longer thought to be alien? Sakai answers in the negative (179).

Although "its sense of coherence is fast evaporating," the West and its distinction from the Rest still regulate the divisions of academic knowledge. The humanities, which concern what is Western, are centered on humans as active knowers. The objects of the humanities are also subjects, engaged in continual critique and innovation; their consciousness of this engagement is revealed through narratives of historical development concerning modem "Western Man." The world-historical project of self­ overcoming, even if only undertaken by a small group, is inscribed into the Western subject as such: philosophy, and now theory, is "a distinguishing mark or even mission of the West" (182). Anthropology, on the other hand, is centered on humans as passive objects of study. The objects of anthropology remain merely objects; they possess no historical consciousness, and do not participate as knowing subjects in the unfolding of modernity. This division leads to the West's blindness about those engaged in critical  reflection outside the West and about the majority of people who are not engaged in projects of transcendence. Rational thought is by definition Western, and all those who are Western are by definition rational thinkers. The West and the Rest distinction is indeed at the bottom a racist one, because it naturalizes and essentializes differences in subject positions that, while really experienced, stem from differences in their orientation rather than biology (184).

Part of the problem with a subject's identification with the West is that there is nothing that actually given the West an identity or coherence. One individual, for example, might be considered to be Western in one context and non-Western in another.' Subject positions are adopted out of the desire for recognition and the desire to position the self in relation to an other within specific contexts; those who do identify with the West are "ahead" in historical time from those who do not (185). Given this function, the trope of the West has been employed in similar ways in different places at different times. Since, Sakai argues, "there is no single quality which is adequate to define the identity of the West," there is no single sign of membership (189). And yet, although increasingly we cannot believe in its unity, "curiously, nowhere in the world does the term 'The West' seem to have lost its universal appeal and immediate intelligibility"; and "nowhere in the world has it lost the force of an objective reality." In many places it still functions as a "master index" of cultural comparison. The question that needs to be asked is: "how can people in many places in the world continue to believe in the West despite the glaring evidence of its instability, transience, and over-determination?" (189-90) - a question Bonnett also poses. Sakai's answer is that the West speaks to people's desire to ground difference in natural properties (190). Because the West is an index of identity, the anxiety caused by the instability of its meaning results in even-greater attempts to naturalize it.

Despite the problems with the dichotomy of the West and the Rest, including the fact there are some who fit on neither side, the end of the West as a trope is not near. Although seemingly threatened by globalization, the presumed unity of the West will not be challenged any more that the sense of racial identity is challenged by facts of science and history (192). While Sakai focuses narrowly on a certain set of meanings of the West, especially within the academy, he successfully draws attention to the important role that the West as a trope has played in modem subjectivity. He, more than any other critical Occidentalist, analyzes the affective power of the West, which he links to its function in identity formation.

 

Theorizing the West Conclusion

Lewis and Wigen observe that, under the term "Asia," European thinkers have subsumed a tremendous diversity of geographies and cultures, and then have accused Asia itself of being incoherent (37). The same could be said about the West. In a passage previously cited, Serge Latouche writes that the West cannot be equated with any defined geography, religion, philosophy, race, economy, or culture, but instead: there emerges a face unlike any known to us and which must infallibly astonish or even frighten us: a very monster, half-mechanic, half-organic, which fits none of our categories for the definition of species. The West appears to us a living  machine whose components are human beings, who give it its life and strength but from whom it is autonomous: it moves through time and space at the dictates of its own fancy. (26)

But really it is not an entity called "the West" that is monstrous and protean, but rather the category. The West's mysterious reach and strength, noted by the authors discussed above, are evidence of the fundamental role the category has played in conceptualizing space and time all through the contemporary world, yet it plays this role as something indefinable. To cite Barraclough again: "It is easy to speak of 'western civilization,' but it is extremely difficult to draw its boundaries, to maintain that this belongs to the west and that this does not."

Researchers engaged in what we could call critical Occidentalism have attempted to define the notional West in order to explain its peculiar properties. They have characterized the West as: a linguistic object (a discourse, a narrative, a trope, or a name); an object of belief (an ideology, or a political myth); a construction (an invention or a fiction); a type of thought (an idea or a concept); or a type of image (a social imaginary, an imagined community, or an imaginary geography). All of these correctly describe ways in which the West has been used, but none sufficiently explains what the West is in all its aspects, either in the range of its meanings or in the complexity of its history. While some would conclude that the uses of the West are so contradictory that the term needs to be jettisoned simply, we would argue that any category that informs so much of political and historical discourse, and that functions so clearly as a major keyword in the contemporary era, is worthy of investigation despite being so "monstrous." Can such an unsystematic  entity as the West become available for systematic analysis? Is there a way to turn something so problematical into a problematic?

Bur what kind of category is the West, and when and why did it become fundamental for intellectual discourse?

It seems most comprehensive and productive to think of it is as a concept, but understood in a specific way. Because the West, in all the forms identified in the literature review, is to be distinguished from the ordinary uses of the west as a direction and relative location and the poetic imagery that traditionally has been derived from these uses.

 

Searching for the West P.1

Bibliography and Works Cited

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