Orient, Orientation, and the Western Referent

From Comparative to World Thought

Andrea Mura

A number of contributions have appeared over the last two decades which have framed the scope and limits of comparative political theory, highlighting its specificity in terms of both methods and substantive ideas. Andrew March, for one, has offered a systematic depiction of what, from different angles, has appeared to him as a generalized "project" calling for the constitution of a disciplinary sub-field of political theorizing.

While problematizing the moniker "comparative" attached to this project, March has identified several motivations which, in his view, sustain existing calls for expanding the canon of Western thinkers and traditions. Explanatory-interpretative justifications have, for instance, highlighted new interpretative possibilities that non-Western texts are said to bring to common problems of both political theory and comparative politics. In a parallel direction, rehabilitative claims have challenged the rigid divide between contemporary Western standards and non-Western traditions, while epistemic reasons seek to overcome the spurious "universality" of the Western canon in favor of a more authentic universalism which includes non-Western perspectives. Finally, with a stronger political focus, global-democratic evaluations have taken cross-cultural efforts to be "imperative in a globalized world," while critical-transformative claims assume that "existing liberal or Western concepts, categories, and truth-claims" are not just "insufficient for global theorizing, but part (or more) of the problem to be solved."

While all these aspects often implicate one another, this taxonomy should help delineate conceptual and historic determinants behind which debates on comparative political theory have developed. These are likely to evolve further in the face of present challenges. In one of the most passionate defenses of cross-cultural theorizing at the beginning of the new millennium, Fred Dallmayr has linked his quest for a comparative turn to the cultural challenges that September 11 had produced on a global scale. His work has thus instantiated what March defined in terms of a global-democratic claim.

For Dallmayr, on the eve of 9/11, the congresses and studies falling under the category of "political theory" in Western academia evidenced little familiarity with non-Western authors and debates. They inadvertently illustrated "what Samuel Huntington termed the West's exclusion of, or predominance over, the rest." In line with the then zeitgeist, cross-cultural comparison was thought to be a preferable tool to engage, under the conditions of globalization, with the emergence of a "global civil society" while moderating conflict and polarization between cultures. From this perspective, comparative political theory was qualified by a synthetic function. It was able to resist and moderate the conflictual nature of the civilizational clash that the war on terror appeared to instantiate, a clash challenging the image of the peaceful global village that many had celebrated in the post-Cold War era.

From a broad perspective, the irruption of global jihadism on the stage of world politics embodied a morphological negation. It cracked the logic of consensus and political adjustment that neoliberalism had endorsed in its advocacy of a post-ideological and post-conflictual world. At the same time, the very appearance of al-Qaeda on the international scene represented a threat to the illusion of full mastery that new economic forces, mainly under American and European influence, were said to uphold. This shift took place behind the image of the "new world order," a term widely used by all sides of the political spectrum at that time, including neoliberal institutions, anti-globalization movements and even Osama bin Laden. Trapped by the tension between an idealized picture of a post-conflict multicultural society and emerging narratives of the clash of civilizations, the "Western" opening to "non-Western" thought was mainly driven by a de-centralizing force. It aimed to "remedy the Eurocentrism of the field of political theory," thus enlarging conventional scholarly horizons of political thought.

The context in which this broad endeavor took place was one in which public debates reflected the perception that Western cultural and political hegemony endured. Although some had begun to interpret Islamism as a sign of the increasing "erosion of eurocentrism" on a geopolitical level, the latter was still deemed to provide a dominant framework, infusing globalization with its pervasive force. But is this still the case? What if, our contemporary scene no longer presupposes the operational function of the West as the analytical 'centre' from which reflections on non-Western thought emerge as modes of de-centralization of the Western canon and discourse? What scenarios would be disclosed if we were to interrogate the unitary and necessary status of this referent? To address this set of questions may prove important, not simply to detect key changing conditions and motives behind comparative projects. Resolving these questions may serve better to reframe debates on cross-cultural dialogue and commensurability, pointing to new possibilities of thought and action beyond the "cross-cultural" and the "comparative."

Our working hypothesis is that a full acknowledgment of the critical conditions currently traversed by the West as a historical-discursive formation enables us better to apprehend the contingent roots of the "Western" referent. Such a move would permit us to denaturalize the West, subtracting necessity and force from its discursive apparatus and thereby trace new horizons for the future of world thought. Hence, the structural relation between the West and the non-West should first be addressed, unpacking some of the tensions that continue to haunt the current debates on cross-cultural engagement. The Orientalist link between the two terms of the comparative approach, Western and non-Western thought, has amply been debated. Recently, Megan Thomas has emphasized how comparative political theory has come to repeat the projects of 18th and 19th century Orientalism. In their attempt to expand European intellectual horizons, both early Orientalist scholarship and comparative political theory essentially share a similar scope, using difference and commonality to compare traditions. In early Orientalism, two main tendencies have clearly emerged as modes of comparative methods, which would not be too dissimilar from the approach currently informing comparative projects. On the one hand stands the tendency to valorize equivalence through difference, recognizing an equivalent status for the structures, morals and values between the West and the "Orient." On the other hand, there is a propensity to find value in commonality, therefore looking for some inner, pristine kinship between the two terms. Ancient India, for instance, was recognized by Schlegel as a relative of Europe, part of "one vast family." An originary proximity between the East and the West was thus "rediscovered," with the Hellenic tradition now assuming a transitional status, and losing its ancestral position as the mythical foundation of the European discourse: "the Greeks were not rightly seen as the origin of European intellectual traditions: instead their value lay in their being 'an indispensable connecting link between the European imagination and Oriental tradition'."

According to Thomas, in striving to harmonize or tie Europe to the Asian world, these approaches would diverge sharply from Said's canonical account of Orientalism. Said's portrayal of Orientalist scholarship failed to appreciate the emphatic attitude of these early tendencies, mostly exposing imperial forms of domination of the West and pervasive processes of epistemological othering. This approach has ended up emphasizing and radicalizing differences between the East and the West. For Thomas, comparative political theory embraces Said's negative characterization of Orientalism. It uses his critical approach to contrast essentializing and stereotypical accounts of Islamic civilization, which have become increasingly "significant after 9/11 and the intensified nationalism and Islamophobia that followed in the United States." Yet, comparative projects would temper the more extreme effects of Said's critique, addressing "difference while actively avoiding conclusions of utter incommensurability or irreducible difference." Hence some sort of paradoxical position seems to affect comparative political theory, conditioned as it is between Said's vision and its inability to "fully recognize that it shares qualities and questions with earlier Orientalist scholars."

We would agree with Thomas's inspirational critique that early Orientalist approaches have genuinely attempted to broaden the scholarly horizons of Europe and promote some intimate link with the Asian world. Yet we wonder whether such an early opening concealed some subtle form of exoticization and discrimination, ultimately in line with Said's censure. In one of his passing references to Schlegel, for instance, Said highlights the negative complexity of Schlegel's portrayal, whose Orientalist style would evidence a multifaceted and hierarchical combination of enchantment and bias. Despite Schlegel's "lifelong fascination" with the ancient Orient, nowhere did the German poet and philologist "talk about the living, contemporary Orient. When he said in 1800, 'It is in the Orient that we must search for the highest Romanticism,' he meant the Orient of the Sakuntala, the Zend-Avesta, and the Upanishads. As for the Semites, whose language was agglutinative, unaesthetic, and mechanical, they were different, inferior, backward." Through Schlegel, an internal subdivision of the Orient is thus realized. It is one that counterposes the enchanted, romantic position of a familiar, ancient Orient — the locus of origin and mythical foundation — to the negative form of contemporary (Arab-Islamic) Oriental societies.

Thomas also acknowledges that "the relationship of commonality that Schlegel drew" was not "one of parity." Yet, her emphasis on early Orientalist attempts to valorize the non-West risks obscuring the structural link between enchanted and more discriminatory forms of Orientalism. It might be useful to highlight here the very function of Orientalism as a device of paranoid capture as well as a means of ensuring the self-representation of the West. At first glance, this requires exposing the position of the Orient as an object of modern knowledge through which "the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West." This is certainly functional to the process of domination and control that imperialism and colonial rule have enacted, one that concerns more conventional approaches to the Orientalist debate. In this sense, the risk for comparative projects associated with early Orientalism is precisely the reinstatement of forms of knowledge production. Such projects might end up assuming the Orient to be an "object of modern inquiry, but not a source through which to construct legitimate knowledge of modern subjecthood." In early Orientalist scholarship, particularly in German Orientalism, the tendency was to mobilize a modernist framework. The traditional, context-situated extreme of the modernist continuum was enlarged to include a complex hierarchy of geo-cultural others, each one displaying greater or lesser proximity to the modern-universalist position of the West.

In relation to comparative political theory then, the risk is to reinstate the image of non-Western thought as an open and plain archive to be "discovered," via comparison or commensurability. In taking this direction, Robbie Shilliam has insightfully warned against the tendency of Western academia to project and document "the fruits of its own (idealized) intellectual labours." This approach would hence obscure the processual and transformative process that has allowed non-Western traditions to be constituted, betrayed, modified or reinvented in a critical engagement with colonial modernity. To be aware of this risk would permit comparative projects to invalidate "simplistic and universal" reductions of the non-West to either seeking resistance or assimilation to the West.

An anti- or post-colonial engagement by the Western Academy with non-Western thought requires the cultivation of a set of linked sensitivities. First, we must recognize the determining history of colonial/quasi-colonial cultural and political impingement/domination in modern thought. That is to say, quite simply, that if knowledge is always produced within particular contexts, then (the threat of) colonialism is a meta-context in which knowledge of modernity has been produced. But, second, we must nevertheless be sensitive to the differentiated nature of experiences of imperialism and colonialism.

The array of individual contexts needs to be acknowledged in which experiences of coloniality and modernity are produced. As Shilliam notes, such recognition should guide any possible "reorientation towards the non-West." Nonetheless, what still needs to be emphasized is the retroactive moment constituting the Orientalist imaginary in the distorting and essentializing projections of the West. The force of the Orientalist gesture rests not just in the violent transformation of the Western "outside" into the non-Western landscape of Oriental otherings. When moving from a plane of domination and accompanying structures of power to the production and distribution of subjectivities, it is the returned image of the self that should also be given emphasis, being that it plays a crucial role in sustaining the Orientalist representation. Here Orientalism works as a privileged mode of construction of the West's (and Europe's) self-image, allowing a phantasmatic relation with the Orient to hijack the "ex-centric" condition of the West (an inclination to be constituted in an ever-elusive relation with alterity). The phantasmatic character of this relation is given by the paranoid logic of reversion that Orientalism enacts at an embryonic level. This logic requires that the ontological constitution of the Western self – one containing all those inassimilable elements that, in different historical and geopolitical contexts, have challenged its self-representation – be ejected in the abyssal alterity of the Orient. While instantiating the construction of an Oriental excessive other, this phantasmatic relation permits, retroactively, the restitution of a unitary and integral image of the self. It is here that the Orient expresses what could be defined in terms of an orienting function of the Orient, enabling the West to orient itself at the level of its imaginary constitution along a principle of moral and cultural integrity. Hence, there remains a certain duplicity in the endless Orientalist production of discourses on ancient Asia, contemporary Asia, Asiatic despotism, Asiatic capitalism, Islamic culture. On each occasion, they reproduce in various ways the excessive character of the Oriental other, whether as a locus of sensual deprivation, historical obsolescence, cultural anomie, or rather bodily pleasure, sensuality, refined aesthetics and, in the Orientalist vision of Schlegel, pristine culture. It is here that those positive, passionate and fascinated portrayals of the Orient that Thomas identifies at the core of early Orientalism mark less of a rupture than a structural contiguity, involving more negative and biased Orientalist projections. Drawing on Bonnie Honig's reflection on the interplay between xenophobia and xenophilia, Orientalism can be said here to function as both Islamophobia and Islamophilia. In each case, it mobilizes the Orienting function of an Orient assumed to be the imaginary point of origin and the location of Western discourse. As Foucault put it: "In the universality of Western Reason [ratio], there is a split [partage] which is the Orient: the Orient thought of as origin, dreamt of as the vertiginous point from which are born nostalgias and promises of a return." It is this very phantasmatic aspect and the incommensurable distance from the oriental point of origin that retroactively allows the West to assert its ontological consistency, positivity, and necessity.