discrepant modernities and their discontents

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Discrepant Modernities and Their DiscontentsLisa Rofel

positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 9, Number 3, Winter 2001,pp. 637-649 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pos/summary/v009/9.3rofel.html





Commentary

Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents

Lisa Rofel

Perhaps the most important question to ask of modernity is the following:What is it that critics and scholars want to challenge when we addressthe category “modernity”? Discussions of modernity were never meant todevolve into abstract niceties. For the stakes in confronting modernity areabout politics, in all the fullness of that term. What is it that not just scholarsbut various citizens of the world nd worth struggling over when theyinvoke modernity and all its attendant permutations? Rather than treatmodernityasa reiedcertaintyor,worse, a singularcertainty—anera arrivedat teleologically, a set of practices uniformly discerned, or a universal state

of being—I have argued that we need to trace how rhetorics, claims, andcommitments to modernity get put into play. 1 Only in this way do we havea chance of nally moving beyond the forms of domination and exclusionsenacted in the name of modernity.

positions 9:3 © 2001 by Duke University Press



positions 9:3 Winter 2001 638

Modernity may well have some kind of universalizing power, though I donot think all people are equally invested in the category or the condition. Weshould not, however, be seduced by its universalist pretensions. On the otherhand, it will not sufce to reduce the discrepancies of modernities to culturalpluralism. By discrepant modernities I mean a world of forced and violentinteractions in which emerges an imaginary space that produces deferredrelationships to modernity. Modernity is something people struggle overbecause it has life-afrming as well as life-threatening effects. This struggle

is what people share, like the oor of a boxing match (including xed betsand outcomes), rather than a universal form with its local particulars. Thelatter view is the ideology of structural adjustment programs.

Those of us intent on resisting and reworking the onslaught of imagina-tions and programs in the name of modernity have had to grapple with anumber of paradoxes. One means of handling these paradoxes, through themethod of “critical interruption,” recognizes the necessary multiplicity of political interpretations, using one position to critically interrupt or nd thelimits of the other. 2 The method of critical interruption allows us to addresstwo paradoxes in writings about modernity: One paradox is that betweentreating modernity as an overarching, universalizing force—a sui generisactor not simply in the world but the maker of the world—versus attendingto the politics of representing modernity in that manner. The second para-

dox is that of assuming modernity to be an a priori unity versus analyzingit as the outcome of diverse conjunctures. Pheng Cheah has recently arguedthat to resolve the hoary dichotomy of universality versus particularity weshould move beyond Hegel’s version of universality as the transcendence of nitude and specicity. 3 Instead, we might conceive of universality as pre-cisely the “radical openness to contamination by alterity,” thus confrontinga universality that claims it is not located anywhere. 4

These paradoxes of modernity and their critical interruptions continue tohaunt scholarly works that purport to move us far beyond modernity. Takethe recent book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Hardt andNegri paint a grandiose and oracular vision of a global order of postmodernempire in which, they claim, the modernist imaginaries of the old worldorder are no longer relevant. Thus the modern institutions of Michel Fou-

cault’s disciplinary regimes, capitalist Fordist production, center-periphery



Rofel Discrepant Modernities 639

divisions of labor and wealth, and the nation-state, along with xed bound-aries and territories and the immobility of labor, have been transcended bynew technologies of capitalism and political sovereignty. Imperialism, too,is over. Taking their inspiration from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’stheories of power and subjectivity, Hardt and Negri imagine empire as thesovereign power that unites the globe under a singular logic of rule throughnetworks of power that are exible, rhizomatic rather than vertical, andmove in nomadic fashion across decentered, deterritorialized space. This

empire, according to Hardt and Negri, is irreversible and irresistible. It isthe latest stage within the capitalist mode of production. Empire neitherarises spontaneously out of heterogeneous global forces, “as if this orderwere a harmonious concert orchestrated by the natural and neutral hid-den hand of the world market,” nor is it dictated by a single power, as if it were a conspiracy of globalization. 5 Rather, its juridical basis has beenconceptually pieced together from disparate origins, including genealogy inChristian universal ethics; elements of the U.S. Constitution, such as feder-alism (“a democratic interaction of powers linked together in networks”) 6

and a conception of sovereignty that refers to a power entirely within so-ciety; the juridical positivism of the United Nations that inscribes a notionof supranational authority; and the communications networks laid down bytransnational corporations. Empirehasfour major characteristics: (1) its rule

hasno spatial limits, encompassing thesocial totality withinitsopen, expand-ing frontiers; (2) it presents itself as a regime with no temporal boundaries,suspending history and xing the existing state of affairs for eternity; (3) itregulates not just territory but social life in its entirety; and thus its majormode of rule is biopower; and (4) though bathed in blood, empire alwayspresents itself, in the guise of the concept of a just war, as dedicated to peace.In the rhetorical tradition of prophecy, Hardt and Negri unveil empire asboth already in existence and just over the horizon of our future.

One of Hardt and Negri’s goals in describing the new world order is toimagine a counterempire, an “alternative political organization of globalows and exchanges.” 7 Indeed, they make the bold, optimistic claim thatempire has come into existence in response to workers’ struggles around theworld. They view the tactics of imperial rule as having developed out of a

need to crush theimpendingsuccessof internationalworkers’uprisings.The




politicalsubjectof theircounterempire is“the multitude,”a new, more globalversionoftheproletariatwhosepreviousinternationalismofthe1960sisonceagain “united by a common desire for liberation.” 8 Empire, they conclude, isbetter “in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better” because itprovides the necessary conditions for this potential liberation. 9 They explic-itly reject “Leftist nationalism”—the desire to resurrect the nation-state tobattle global capital—as well as various forms of what they label “localism.”By contrast, several of the last decade’s social movements they pinpoint may

appear to be local—from Beijing’s Tiananmen to the Los Angeles rebellionto the strikes in Paris and Seoul—but according to Hardt and Negri, theseirruptions presage the coming into existence of the multitude because eachstruggle leaps immediately to the global level, and they destroy conventionaldistinctions between the economic, the political, and the cultural. To reachthe unity of the multitude, however, these struggles will have to agree ona common enemy: “Clarifying the nature of the common enemy is thusan essential political task.” They must also develop a common language:“Struggles in other parts of the world and even our own struggles seem tobe written in an incomprehensible foreign language. This too points towardan important political task: to construct a new common language that facil-itates communication, as the languages of anti-imperialism and proletarianinternationalism did for the struggles of a previous era.” Only a “universal,

catholic community” will bring together all peoples “in a common jour-ney.” “Cosmopolitical liberation” is within our sight if we admit, along withSpinoza, that “prophetic desire” is irresistible. 10

There is much that is suggestive in this account. Thus we can glimpseintimations of their vision of the new imperial sovereignty in the operationof power in certain countries (though not all countries) increasingly throughdeterritorialized institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the In-ternational Monetary Fund, and the World Bank as well as the horizontallynetworked nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Echoing other recentcritiques, Hardt and Negri pinpoint the “moral instruments” of power inthe just wars that NGOs conduct without arms or violence but, rather, inan eerie echo of Christian missionaries, via denitions of human needs andrights. According to Hardt and Negri, the problem with NGOs is that

they, wittingly or unwittingly, provide moral justication for the spread of




empire. Tellingly, Hardt and Negri oppose the instrumental effects of NGOmorality butdo notseem troubled by theproblem of universality, specicallythe imposition of universal denitions of human needs and desires.

Their analysis of international military interventions is also prescient,especially incasessuch as thePersian GulfWar. Thesemilitary interventions,they argue, are increasingly based on portraying force as existing in theservice of right and peace (as opposed, for example, to democracy) and onthe juridical capacity to dene every case as an exception. The result is

a new “science of the police that is founded on a practice of just war toaddress continually arising emergencies.” 11 Finally, while their descriptionof transformations in capitalist modes of accumulation echoes numerousothers, Hardt and Negri admirably bring back a dialectic of human struggleto the development of global capitalism, in contrast to other recent scholarlywork that describes capitalism as developing globally from within its owninternal nancial or accumulation logic. Moreover, Hardt and Negri wantto emphasize the political sovereignty that ts with this stage of capitalism,though it cannot be reduced to it.

Empire speaks in a prophetic tongue. Indeed, it is written in the mannerof a progressive, monotheistic bible. Part Star Wars–inspired apocalypse forthese dark times and part genealogies of European philosophy read as worldsocial and cultural history, Empire is lled with palpable desires to arouse

the masses. Echoing Christian biblical rhetoric, Hardt and Negri portray asingular world order characterized, they claim, by its totality, irresistibility,and irreversibility.

At this point I begin to worry about the sort of prophesying that goeson in a book like Empire. For such claims resonate too closely with thoserhetorics of modernity that I and others have found most troubling. Taketheir approach to capitalism. Hardt and Negri cast capitalism as a uniformor monolithic force, pursuing the same outcomes everywhere around theworld. They assume its inuence is overpowering and, as a result, that itseffects are homogenizing. As a corollary, they treat capitalism in contrastto the local as if it were a deterritorialized force, without reference to thespecic anduneven spatial groundingof thedifferentelementsandprocessesinvolved.Itisironicthatsuchtotalizingimageshaverushedintollthespace

left empty by the critique of the totalizing narrative of modernity.




To develop a critique of capitalism, we need to nd more critical dis-tance. Analyses of capitalism from the left should not merely sound likethe underside of paeans to capitalism. Marx dedicated himself to expos-ing not just the dark side of capitalism but the partiality of the politicaleconomists’ ideology of his day. The critiques of modernity could lead usin other directions: focusing on the cultural production of capitalism andthe transformations currently taking place in this production; emphasizingthe culturally, geographically, and historically specic and uneven manifes-

tations of these processes; and treating discourses of global capitalism andglobalization themselves as elements within this cultural production thatrequire critical scrutiny notonly regarding their accuracy butalso, and moreimportantly, regarding the kinds of work to which they are being put.

ButHardt andNegri refusethese analytical directions becausethey have aparticular political project in mind: the rising up of a singular mass politicalsubject, “the multitude.” Here, too, we nd modernist predilections surfac-ing through the sturm und drang drama of their prophecies. For Hardt andNegri, the multitude’s ability to liberate itself lies in its liberation from thedualism that Hardt and Negri see as dening modernity: immanence versustranscendence. On one hand exist “the immanent forces of desire and asso-ciation, the love of the community, and on the other, the strong hand of anoverarching authority that imposes and enforces an order on the social eld.

This tension was to be resolved, orat least mediated, by the sovereignty of thestate, and yet it continually resurfaces as a question of either/or: freedom orservitude, the liberation of desire or its subjugation.” 12 They trace this mod-ern dualism through European philosophy: rst the discovery of the planeof immanence, or the singularity of being, in Duns Scotus, Dante, Pico dellaMirandola, Sir Francis Bacon, and Galileo. These thinkers reappropriatedwhat medieval notions of an overarching, transcendentauthority took away:

the foundation of authority in the immanence of universal humanity. Hardtand Negri interpret this singular universal as the multitude. It embodies theprogressive force they would like to draw from. Then follow the philosoph-ical struggles of the Renaissance, which continue the battle of immanentforces versus transcendent authority. Above all, Spinoza is the person whocontinues to speak in the name of revolutionary humanism. Finally, begin-ning with Descartes, we get the reestablishment of a transcendent order to




repress and control the multitude. Throughout European philosophy theforces of light battle the forces of darkness.

Is this the history of modernity as a European philosophical concept,or are we meant to understand this discussion as a description of worldhistory? For Hardt and Negri they are one and the same. They reveal thismodernist Hegelian approach to History—where the universal Idea is thedriving force of social life—in two contradictory assertions. First, they planto pursue empirenotas a metaphor that would require a historical discussion

but, rather, as a concept that calls for a philosophical approach. Second, theyplan to focus on Europe and Euro-America because the dominant pathalong which the concepts developed that animate empire reside in theseplaces. (For Hardt and Negri these are not hyperreal gures of a geopoliticalimaginary; they are merely real. They feel no need to explicate the makingof Europe and the continuous work required to maintain Euro-Americaas a stable subject.) Thus they try to have it both ways, ignoring the restof the world and telling a Eurocentric tale of everyone else’s histories. It isironic that Hardt and Negri, in a later section, dismiss postcolonial theory,for they reproduce the colonial modernist mode of producing knowledge aswe have come to distinguish it, with its assumptions about the unfolding of asingular master imperial logic, the universality of being, and the teleologiesof history. Their central assumption is that only the concepts of European

philosophy—and Christianity—contain the possibility for universalization.Only Europe, it appears, is theoretically knowable; all other histories arematters of empirically eshing out the European theoretical subject.

In a chapter titled “The Dialectics of Colonial Sovereignty,” Hardt andNegri acknowledge the grievous nature of European supremacy. But theirlogic does nothing to decenter that rule, which as postcolonial theory hastaught us, resides not just in political governance narrowly dened but in

governmentality that includes philosophy (i.e., the production of Eurocen-tric knowledge that justies that rule). Rather than decenter or provincializeEurope they merely conrm, though with a sympathetic gesture, that Eu-rope not only is at the center of the universe but really has given birth toitself. An alternative view, not evident in their arguments, is that Europecan only be known as such through the sets of oppositions between “Eu-rope” and the colonized world that particular colonizers constructed. Hardt




and Negri might at least have taken cognizance, for example, of the longcenturies of interaction between the Christian and Islamic worlds, rangingfrom aesthetics to mathematics to philosophy, that ultimately constructedEurope.

Thepoliticalunconsciousof this book is theEuropean subject looking out.Sighing over European dominance is not deconstruction. Worse, it is not amethod for taking seriously the experiences and worldviews of those Otherswho exist not merely to construct a European subject but have multiple re-

lationships with multiple non-European others (e.g., China with SoutheastAsia). Postcolonial theory argues that modernity operates by way of exclu-sions and by the constitution of difference that together generate the Euro-American sense of a unied subjectivity. Rather than assume that all non-European subjects merely rehearse Europe’s history of modernity, Hardtand Negri might have delineated the articulations congured in moderni-ties that do not simply replicate Eurocentric teleologies even as non-Westernnationalists struggled to make their country’s modernity stand on its ownas a metanarrative of non-Western history. Postcolonial scholarship, then,points in thedirectionof colonial histories that explore theexistence of powerthrough “agencies whose contingent patterns always admit the possibility of otherwise.” 13

Their analysis of universal sovereignty is mirrored in their discussion

of the political hero of the book: the multitude. Hardt and Negri arguethat the multitude is developing out of the novel modes of production inwhich the information economy predominates. But here one nds anotherstriking paradox at the heart of their argument. They insist that “the centralrole previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers inthe production of surplus value is today increasingly lled by intellectual,immaterial, andcommunicative laborpower.” 14 By“immaterial,”theymean

symbolic, affective,andinformationalized labor. Much later in thebooktheyacknowledge theobvious, that muchindustrial labor hasbeenmoved to non-Western countries and is performed by women. So what exactly is the role of factory labor that has been reduced? Not, I believe, its importance to a worldeconomy but, rather, its place in an economy of heroic politics. Whereas theworking-class hero of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was amasculine hero based in industrial labor, it is absolutely clear that this gure




cannot function as such any longer. We can look for this hero today, theysuggest, in information labor. The role of allegorical heroes, rather thancontributions to the economy, is at issue here. It is striking, then, that theirnotable inclusion of service and affective work in the information sectorelides gender as well, in that they locate service and affective work in thenancial and media entertainment sectors. In the old modernity, one of themain locations of affective labor was the raising of children and the laborsof sex and love. Hardt and Negri do not discuss these labors in their version

of either modernity or postmodernity; they have once again made theminvisible. 15

This modernist desire to have a singular hero of politics leads Hardtand Negri to argue that the politics of difference—by which they explicitlytarget postcolonial politics but also, by implication, politics that highlightrace, gender, and sexuality—are part of the problem, not the solution. Atbest, they argue in their chapter “Symptoms of Passage,” these politics havealready been co-opted by capitalist machinations that celebrate difference inorder to extend the reach of markets. Here they engage in the modernistconceit that a sign has one, stable meaning. It is odd that Hardt, a literarytheorist,would reducedifference to a xed meaning rather than a discursive,unstable, contested eld. Difference, in fact, is a rhetorical terrain with awide variety of meanings, including those produced by numerous scholars

who aspire to overcome the colonial production of difference and embrace acommon humanity or, alternatively, deconstruct and reverse the hierarchiesof colonial difference in order to engage with Other worlds, as well asthe idea that racial differences in the United States are often effaced andneed to be brought to the fore. Finally, difference is a problem of xedmeanings within Western metaphysics, as well as the diversity rhetoric of specically U.S. businesses interested in investment in Asia. (Companies in

China, for example, do not invoke diversity or multiculturalism as theirbusiness strategy.) If Judith Butler is correct, that melancholia (the inabilityto mourn loss) is instrumental in forming subjectivity, that it represents anotherwise unrepresentable ambivalence about loss, and that the violence of social regulation emerges in the power to regulate which losses will and willnot be grieved, then we might well argue that the dismissal or silencing of




these diverse politics by Hardt and Negri betrays an underlying melancholiafor the imagined ideal of the modern Western subject. 16

Why must we be forced into a dream of unity? Why can we not dreamof exible alliances and articulations? On one level Hardt and Negri wouldcertainly agree. Their vision of rhizomatic politics inspired by Deleuze andGuattari leaves room for a wide variety of alliances. Yet I nd their dreamof a common language frightening. Who will establish the proper grammarof this language? Who will set the communicative import of terms? What

of those who wish to speak in multiple tongues? They traipse over theissue of translation as if it were merely a pragmatic dilemma rather than,as many scholars have shown, a question of power. For those who liveon the sexual margins, for example, the dream of the multitude bringsnot hope but fear. What reassurances do Hardt and Negri offer that therecent history of degraded existence for those forced out of the multitudein the name of sexual respectability will not be repeated in their version

of unity? Can we not dream of ghting capitalism through articulationsand alliances of variously identied subjects? Can we not dream of ghtingcapitalism in the manner, for example, of those who have fought AIDS?AIDS activism hasaddressed the mutual imbrication of power in theendlessrelays betweenexpert discourseand institutionalauthority, betweenmedicaltruth and social regulation, and between popular knowledge practices andstruggles for survival. AIDS activism hasthus multiplied thesites of politicalcontestation to include immigration policy, public health policy, the practiceof epidemiology and clinical medicine, the conduct of scientic research,the operation of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the role of themedia, the decisions of rent-control boards, the legal denition of family,and ultimately the public and private administration of the body. 17 It isunsettling that Hardt and Negri do not discuss these politics. Why must

they dismiss them as merely about co-optation? Hardt and Negri havemissed the enormous body of work that has shown that we do not have topit class against other identities but, rather, can conceive of class in a mannerthat does not implicitly make the class subject a white, masculine, Euro-American subject. If bodies do matter, then Hardt and Negri still have along way to go.




This book aspires to be a Christian bible for the left. But do we need sucha bible? The biblical allegorical structure of the book turns us irresistiblytoward other popular cultural productions with which it eerily resonates.Oneprimeexampleisthe StarWars series.Herewendthemodernistdesiresthat animate one story of empire resonating in the other story of empire. Iwill briey address here only the most recent chapter, Star Wars, Episode 1.The Galactic Republic has been disrupted by turmoil over the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems. The powerful Trade Federation tries

to resolve the matter by intimidation, putting a stranglehold on the peacefulplanet of Naboo. But its ruler, Queen Amidala, refuses to comply. Two Jedi,Qui-Gon Jinn and his apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi, are sent by the republicto negotiate a diplomatic settlement. But there are darker forces at work.The Trade Federation is coming under the control of a shadowy gure,Lord Darth Sidious, who is resurrecting the Sith Lords. His minions try toassassinate the Jedi on their way to argue Naboo’s case before the Senate,

forcingthemtolandtheirshiponTatooine,anarearesemblingNorthAfrica.There they meet the young slave boy Anakin Skywalker, discern that theForce is unusually strong within him, win his freedom, and convince hismother to allow them to take him for training as a Jedi. Qui-Gon believestheboyisthechosenonewhowillbringbalancetotheForce.TheSenatefailsto cometo Naboo’s aid,and the queen and the Jedi return to Naboo and ghttheTrade Federation army, which is defeated only when AnakinSkywalkerenters the nerve center of a Trade Federation battleship and manages to turnoff their army droids. The movie ends with Obi-Wan taking up the role of mentor to Anakin after Qui-Gon’s death, despite the Jedi Council’s concernthat they sense a dark side to the boy.

The resonance of the allegories in both productions is striking. Both thebook Empire and the movie about empire stress duality. In the book the

duality is between the multitude and the new imperial sovereignty. In thelm the duality is similarly a dialectic between the forces of good and evil.The trick is to embody the Force—or in the book, the singular desire of themultitude for oneness. The lm also agrees with the book that there is a newhomogeneous world capitalism, based in free trade, though its evaluationof that capitalism is obviously distinct. Star Wars , like Empire, subsumes adiverse world into a rhizomatic oneness; all peoples must unite against the




DarkForces.Ofcourse,thefactthattheleadersarewhitemenandtheothersare various markers of difference is both the point of the lm and made toseem irrelevant.

Anthropologist Carol Delaney has argued that Christianity gives a mono-genetic meaning to paternity. 18 Paternity means begetting, while maternitymeans nurturing and bearing. Paternity means the primary, essential, andcreative role. In the lm the microorganisms that enable people to commu-nicate with the Force give birth to Anakin, but the human men make him

what he will become. His mother, the virgin birth mother, is the vessel forholding him and nourishing him until the men come to take him away andmake him a man. In this view, men have creative power within them, whichgives them a core of identity, self-motivation, and autonomy. Women lackthe power to create and therefore to project themselves. Thus, in the book Empire, affective labor gets subsumed under the new masculine labor of information technology, while the multitude—a universality that subsumes

particularity—births itself. Finally, the fact that Anakin is a cyborg, a hybridcreature composed of various human andnonhuman organisms, makes himthe central gure of Empire in that the book, too, argues that biopower is thesign of the times.

We do not need to end up in a Star Wars world. One gets there by treatingmodernity as a reied and universal state of being. Modernity persists as apowerful narrative, but there are Other stories to be told.

Notes

1 Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. (Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1999).

2 Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1987), hasmost fully explored the potential fruitfulness in the method of critical interruption. Criticalinterruption rejects the coherence of narratives while retaining what makes political sense inthose narratives.

3 Pheng Cheah, “Universal Areas: Asian Studies in a World in Motion” (paper presented at“Place, Locality, and Globalization” conference, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2000).

4 Ibid., 17.5 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

2000), 3.




6 Ibid., 161.7 Ibid., xv.

8 Ibid., 42.9 Ibid., 43.

10 Ibid., 57, 207, 64, 65.11 Ibid., 18.12 Ibid., 69.13 Marshall Johnsonand Fred YenLiangChiu,“Guest Editors’ Introduction,” positions8 (spring

2000): 2.14 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 29.15 They have one sentence on this topic: “Feminist movements that made clear the political

content of ‘personal’ relationships and refused patriarchal discipline raised the social valueof what has traditionally been considered women’s work, which involves a high content of affective or caring laborand centers on services necessary for social reproduction” (ibid., 274).That statement seguesinto theirargument that “communication, cooperation, the affective—would dene the transformation of capitalist production in the subsequent decades” (ibid.,275). This transition allows them to proceed to ignore gendered divisions of labor underempire.

16 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).17 David M. Halperin, Saint-Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1995).18 Carol Delaney, TheSeed andthe Soil: GenderandCosmology in TurkishVillage Society (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

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