Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents

Lisa Rofel
positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 9, Number 3, Winter 2001,
pp. 637-649 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
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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 address
the category modernity? Discussions of modernity were never meant to
devolve into abstract niceties. For the stakes in confronting modernity are
about politics, in all the fullness of that term. What is it that not just scholars
but various citizens of the world nd worth struggling over when they
invoke modernity and all its attendant permutations? Rather than treat
modernityas areiedcertaintyor, worse, asingular certaintyaneraarrived
at teleologically, a set of practices uniformly discerned, or a universal state
of beingI have argued that we need to trace how rhetorics, claims, and
commitments to modernity get put into play.
1
Only in this way do we have
a chance of nally moving beyond the forms of domination and exclusions
enacted 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 do
not think all people are equally invested in the category or the condition. We
should not, however, be seduced by its universalist pretensions. On the other
hand, it will not sufce to reduce the discrepancies of modernities to cultural
pluralism. By discrepant modernities I mean a world of forced and violent
interactions in which emerges an imaginary space that produces deferred
relationships to modernity. Modernity is something people struggle over
because 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 bets
and outcomes), rather than a universal form with its local particulars. The
latter 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 a
number of paradoxes. One means of handling these paradoxes, through the
method of critical interruption, recognizes the necessary multiplicity of
political interpretations, using one position to critically interrupt or nd the
limits of the other.
2
The method of critical interruption allows us to address
two paradoxes in writings about modernity: One paradox is that between
treating modernity as an overarching, universalizing forcea sui generis
actor not simply in the world but the maker of the worldversus attending
to the politics of representing modernity in that manner. The second para-
dox is that of assuming modernity to be an a priori unity versus analyzing
it as the outcome of diverse conjunctures. Pheng Cheah has recently argued
that to resolve the hoary dichotomy of universality versus particularity we
should move beyond Hegels 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 confronting
a universality that claims it is not located anywhere.
4
These paradoxes of modernity and their critical interruptions continue to
haunt scholarly works that purport to move us far beyond modernity. Take
the recent book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Hardt and
Negri paint a grandiose and oracular vision of a global order of postmodern
empire in which, they claim, the modernist imaginaries of the old world
order are no longer relevant. Thus the modern institutions of Michel Fou-
caults 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 by
new technologies of capitalism and political sovereignty. Imperialism, too,
is over. Taking their inspiration from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris
theories of power and subjectivity, Hardt and Negri imagine empire as the
sovereign power that unites the globe under a singular logic of rule through
networks of power that are exible, rhizomatic rather than vertical, and
move in nomadic fashion across decentered, deterritorialized space. This
empire, according to Hardt and Negri, is irreversible and irresistible. It is
the latest stage within the capitalist mode of production. Empire neither
arises spontaneously out of heterogeneous global forces, as if this order
were 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 been
conceptually pieced together from disparate origins, including genealogy in
Christian 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 notion
of supranational authority; and the communications networks laid down by
transnational corporations. Empire has four major characteristics: (1) its rule
has nospatial limits, encompassingthe social totality withinits open, 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) it
regulates not just territory but social life in its entirety; and thus its major
mode of rule is biopower; and (4) though bathed in blood, empire always
presents 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 as
both already in existence and just over the horizon of our future.
One of Hardt and Negris goals in describing the new world order is to
imagine a counterempire, an alternative political organization of global
ows and exchanges.
7
Indeed, they make the bold, optimistic claim that
empire has come into existence in response to workers struggles around the
world. They view the tactics of imperial rule as having developed out of a
needtocrushthe impendingsuccess of international workers uprisings. The
positions 9:3 Winter 2001 640
political subject of their counterempire is the multitude, anew, more global
versionof the proletariat whose previous internationalismof the 1960s is once
again united by a common desire for liberation.
8
Empire, they conclude, is
better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalismis better because it
provides the necessary conditions for this potential liberation.
9
They explic-
itly reject Leftist nationalismthe desire to resurrect the nation-state to
battle global capitalas well as various forms of what they label localism.
By contrast, several of the last decades social movements they pinpoint may
appear to be localfrom Beijings Tiananmen to the Los Angeles rebellion
to the strikes in Paris and Seoulbut according to Hardt and Negri, these
irruptions presage the coming into existence of the multitude because each
struggle leaps immediately to the global level, and they destroy conventional
distinctions between the economic, the political, and the cultural. To reach
the unity of the multitude, however, these struggles will have to agree on
a common enemy: Clarifying the nature of the common enemy is thus
an essential political task. They must also develop a common language:
Struggles in other parts of the world and even our own struggles seem to
be written in an incomprehensible foreign language. This too points toward
an important political task: to construct a new common language that facil-
itates communication, as the languages of anti-imperialism and proletarian
internationalism 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 with
Spinoza, that prophetic desire is irresistible.
10
There is much that is suggestive in this account. Thus we can glimpse
intimations of their vision of the new imperial sovereignty in the operation
of power in certain countries (though not all countries) increasingly through
deterritorialized institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the In-
ternational Monetary Fund, and the World Bank as well as the horizontally
networked nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Echoing other recent
critiques, Hardt and Negri pinpoint the moral instruments of power in
the just wars that NGOs conduct without arms or violence but, rather, in
an eerie echo of Christian missionaries, via denitions of human needs and
rights. According to Hardt and Negri, the problem with NGOs is that
they, wittingly or unwittingly, provide moral justication for the spread of
Rofel Discrepant Modernities 641
empire. Tellingly, Hardt and Negri oppose the instrumental effects of NGO
morality but do not seemtroubledby the problemof universality, specically
the imposition of universal denitions of human needs and desires.
Their analysis of international military interventions is also prescient,
especiallyincases suchas the PersianGulf War. These militaryinterventions,
they argue, are increasingly based on portraying force as existing in the
service of right and peace (as opposed, for example, to democracy) and on
the 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 to
address continually arising emergencies.
11
Finally, while their description
of transformations in capitalist modes of accumulation echoes numerous
others, Hardt and Negri admirably bring back a dialectic of human struggle
to the development of global capitalism, in contrast to other recent scholarly
work that describes capitalism as developing globally from within its own
internal nancial or accumulation logic. Moreover, Hardt and Negri want
to 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 manner
of a progressive, monotheistic bible. Part Star Warsinspired apocalypse for
these dark times and part genealogies of European philosophy read as world
social and cultural history, Empire is lled with palpable desires to arouse
the masses. Echoing Christian biblical rhetoric, Hardt and Negri portray a
singular world order characterized, they claim, by its totality, irresistibility,
and irreversibility.
At this point I begin to worry about the sort of prophesying that goes
on in a book like Empire. For such claims resonate too closely with those
rhetorics of modernity that I and others have found most troubling. Take
their approach to capitalism. Hardt and Negri cast capitalism as a uniform
or monolithic force, pursuing the same outcomes everywhere around the
world. They assume its inuence is overpowering and, as a result, that its
effects are homogenizing. As a corollary, they treat capitalism in contrast
to the local as if it were a deterritorialized force, without reference to the
specic andunevenspatial groundingof the different elements andprocesses
involved. It is ironic that suchtotalizingimages have rushedintoll the space
left empty by the critique of the totalizing narrative of modernity.
positions 9:3 Winter 2001 642
To develop a critique of capitalism, we need to nd more critical dis-
tance. Analyses of capitalism from the left should not merely sound like
the underside of paeans to capitalism. Marx dedicated himself to expos-
ing not just the dark side of capitalism but the partiality of the political
economists ideology of his day. The critiques of modernity could lead us
in other directions: focusing on the cultural production of capitalism and
the transformations currently taking place in this production; emphasizing
the culturally, geographically, and historically specic and uneven manifes-
tations of these processes; and treating discourses of global capitalism and
globalization themselves as elements within this cultural production that
require critical scrutiny not only regarding their accuracy but also, and more
importantly, regarding the kinds of work to which they are being put.
But Hardt andNegri refuse these analytical directions because they have a
particular political project in mind: the rising up of a singular mass political
subject, the multitude. Here, too, we nd modernist predilections surfac-
ing through the sturm und drang drama of their prophecies. For Hardt and
Negri, the multitudes ability to liberate itself lies in its liberation from the
dualismthat Hardt and Negri see as dening modernity: immanence versus
transcendence. 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 an
overarching authority that imposes and enforces an order on the social eld.
This tensionwas to be resolved, or at least mediated, by the sovereignty of the
state, and yet it continually resurfaces as a question of either/or: freedom or
servitude, the liberation of desire or its subjugation.
12
They trace this mod-
ern dualism through European philosophy: rst the discovery of the plane
of immanence, or the singularity of being, in Duns Scotus, Dante, Pico della
Mirandola, Sir Francis Bacon, and Galileo. These thinkers reappropriated
what medieval notions of anoverarching, transcendent authority tookaway:
the foundation of authority in the immanence of universal humanity. Hardt
and Negri interpret this singular universal as the multitude. It embodies the
progressive force they would like to draw from. Then follow the philosoph-
ical struggles of the Renaissance, which continue the battle of immanent
forces versus transcendent authority. Above all, Spinoza is the person who
continues to speak in the name of revolutionary humanism. Finally, begin-
ning with Descartes, we get the reestablishment of a transcendent order to
Rofel Discrepant Modernities 643
repress and control the multitude. Throughout European philosophy the
forces 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 world
history? For Hardt and Negri they are one and the same. They reveal this
modernist Hegelian approach to Historywhere the universal Idea is the
driving force of social lifein two contradictory assertions. First, they plan
to pursue empire not as a metaphor that wouldrequire a historical discussion
but, rather, as a concept that calls for a philosophical approach. Second, they
plan to focus on Europe and Euro-America because the dominant path
along which the concepts developed that animate empire reside in these
places. (For Hardt and Negri these are not hyperreal gures of a geopolitical
imaginary; they are merely real. They feel no need to explicate the making
of Europe and the continuous work required to maintain Euro-America
as a stable subject.) Thus they try to have it both ways, ignoring the rest
of the world and telling a Eurocentric tale of everyone elses histories. It is
ironic that Hardt and Negri, in a later section, dismiss postcolonial theory,
for they reproduce the colonial modernist mode of producing knowledge as
we have come to distinguish it, with its assumptions about the unfolding of a
singular master imperial logic, the universality of being, and the teleologies
of history. Their central assumption is that only the concepts of European
philosophyand Christianitycontain the possibility for universalization.
Only Europe, it appears, is theoretically knowable; all other histories are
matters of empirically eshing out the European theoretical subject.
In a chapter titled The Dialectics of Colonial Sovereignty, Hardt and
Negri acknowledge the grievous nature of European supremacy. But their
logic does nothing to decenter that rule, which as postcolonial theory has
taught 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 provincialize
Europe 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 to
itself. An alternative view, not evident in their arguments, is that Europe
can only be known as such through the sets of oppositions between Eu-
rope and the colonized world that particular colonizers constructed. Hardt
positions 9:3 Winter 2001 644
and Negri might at least have taken cognizance, for example, of the long
centuries of interaction between the Christian and Islamic worlds, ranging
from aesthetics to mathematics to philosophy, that ultimately constructed
Europe.
The political unconscious of this bookis the Europeansubject looking out.
Sighing over European dominance is not deconstruction. Worse, it is not a
method for taking seriously the experiences and worldviews of those Others
who exist not merely to construct a European subject but have multiple re-
lationships with multiple non-European others (e.g., China with Southeast
Asia). 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 Europes history of modernity, Hardt
and Negri might have delineated the articulations congured in moderni-
ties that do not simply replicate Eurocentric teleologies even as non-Western
nationalists struggled to make their countrys modernity stand on its own
as a metanarrative of non-Western history. Postcolonial scholarship, then,
points inthe directionof colonial histories that explore the existence of power
through 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 argue
that the multitude is developing out of the novel modes of production in
which the information economy predominates. But here one nds another
striking paradox at the heart of their argument. They insist that the central
role previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers in
the production of surplus value is today increasingly lled by intellectual,
immaterial, andcommunicative labor power.
14
By immaterial, they mean
symbolic, affective, andinformationalizedlabor. Muchlater inthe bookthey
acknowledge the obvious, that muchindustrial labor has beenmovedtonon-
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 world
economy but, rather, its place in an economy of heroic politics. Whereas the
working-class hero of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a
masculine hero based in industrial labor, it is absolutely clear that this gure
Rofel Discrepant Modernities 645
cannot function as such any longer. We can look for this hero today, they
suggest, in information labor. The role of allegorical heroes, rather than
contributions to the economy, is at issue here. It is striking, then, that their
notable inclusion of service and affective work in the information sector
elides gender as well, in that they locate service and affective work in the
nancial and media entertainment sectors. In the old modernity, one of the
main locations of affective labor was the raising of children and the labors
of sex and love. Hardt and Negri do not discuss these labors in their version
of either modernity or postmodernity; they have once again made them
invisible.
15
This modernist desire to have a singular hero of politics leads Hardt
and Negri to argue that the politics of differenceby which they explicitly
target postcolonial politics but also, by implication, politics that highlight
race, gender, and sexualityare part of the problem, not the solution. At
best, they argue in their chapter Symptoms of Passage, these politics have
already been co-opted by capitalist machinations that celebrate difference in
order to extend the reach of markets. Here they engage in the modernist
conceit that a sign has one, stable meaning. It is odd that Hardt, a literary
theorist, wouldreduce difference to a xedmeaning rather thana discursive,
unstable, contested eld. Difference, in fact, is a rhetorical terrain with a
wide variety of meanings, including those produced by numerous scholars
who aspire to overcome the colonial production of difference and embrace a
common humanity or, alternatively, deconstruct and reverse the hierarchies
of colonial difference in order to engage with Other worlds, as well as
the idea that racial differences in the United States are often effaced and
need to be brought to the fore. Finally, difference is a problem of xed
meanings 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 their
business strategy.) If Judith Butler is correct, that melancholia (the inability
to mourn loss) is instrumental in forming subjectivity, that it represents an
otherwise unrepresentable ambivalence about loss, and that the violence of
social regulation emerges in the power to regulate which losses will and will
not be grieved, then we might well argue that the dismissal or silencing of
positions 9:3 Winter 2001 646
these diverse politics by Hardt and Negri betrays an underlying melancholia
for the imagined ideal of the modern Western subject.
16
Why must we be forced into a dream of unity? Why can we not dream
of exible alliances and articulations? On one level Hardt and Negri would
certainly agree. Their vision of rhizomatic politics inspired by Deleuze and
Guattari leaves room for a wide variety of alliances. Yet I nd their dream
of a common language frightening. Who will establish the proper grammar
of this language? Who will set the communicative import of terms? What
of those who wish to speak in multiple tongues? They traipse over the
issue of translation as if it were merely a pragmatic dilemma rather than,
as many scholars have shown, a question of power. For those who live
on the sexual margins, for example, the dream of the multitude brings
not hope but fear. What reassurances do Hardt and Negri offer that the
recent history of degraded existence for those forced out of the multitude
in the name of sexual respectability will not be repeated in their version
of unity? Can we not dream of ghting capitalism through articulations
and alliances of variously identied subjects? Can we not dream of ghting
capitalism in the manner, for example, of those who have fought AIDS?
AIDS activismhas addressed the mutual imbrication of power in the endless
relays betweenexpert discourse andinstitutional authority, betweenmedical
truth and social regulation, and between popular knowledge practices and
struggles for survival. AIDS activismhas thus multiplied the sites of political
contestation to include immigration policy, public health policy, the practice
of epidemiology and clinical medicine, the conduct of scientic research,
the operation of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the role of the
media, the decisions of rent-control boards, the legal denition of family,
and ultimately the public and private administration of the body.
17
It is
unsettling that Hardt and Negri do not discuss these politics. Why must
they dismiss them as merely about co-optation? Hardt and Negri have
missed the enormous body of work that has shown that we do not have to
pit class against other identities but, rather, can conceive of class in a manner
that does not implicitly make the class subject a white, masculine, Euro-
American subject. If bodies do matter, then Hardt and Negri still have a
long way to go.
Rofel Discrepant Modernities 647
This book aspires to be a Christian bible for the left. But do we need such
a bible? The biblical allegorical structure of the book turns us irresistibly
toward other popular cultural productions with which it eerily resonates.
One prime example is the Star Wars series. Here we ndthe modernist desires
that animate one story of empire resonating in the other story of empire. I
will 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 peaceful
planet 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 republic
to 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 to
assassinate the Jedi on their way to argue Naboos case before the Senate,
forcingthemtolandtheir shiponTatooine, anarearesemblingNorthAfrica.
There they meet the young slave boy Anakin Skywalker, discern that the
Force is unusually strong within him, win his freedom, and convince his
mother to allow them to take him for training as a Jedi. Qui-Gon believes
the boy is the chosenone whowill bringbalance tothe Force. The Senate fails
to come to Naboos aid, andthe queenandthe Jedi returnto Naboo andght
the Trade Federation army, which is defeated only when Anakin Skywalker
enters the nerve center of a Trade Federation battleship and manages to turn
off their army droids. The movie ends with Obi-Wan taking up the role of
mentor to Anakin after Qui-Gons death, despite the Jedi Councils concern
that they sense a dark side to the boy.
The resonance of the allegories in both productions is striking. Both the
book Empire and the movie about empire stress duality. In the book the
duality is between the multitude and the new imperial sovereignty. In the
lm the duality is similarly a dialectic between the forces of good and evil.
The trick is to embody the Forceor in the book, the singular desire of the
multitude for oneness. The lmalso agrees with the book that there is a new
homogeneous world capitalism, based in free trade, though its evaluation
of that capitalism is obviously distinct. Star Wars, like Empire, subsumes a
diverse world into a rhizomatic oneness; all peoples must unite against the
positions 9:3 Winter 2001 648
DarkForces. Of course, the fact that the leaders are white menandthe others
are various markers of difference is both the point of the lm and made to
seem irrelevant.
Anthropologist Carol Delaney has argued that Christianity gives a mono-
genetic meaning to paternity.
18
Paternity means begetting, while maternity
means nurturing and bearing. Paternity means the primary, essential, and
creative 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 for
holding him and nourishing him until the men come to take him away and
make hima man. In this view, men have creative power within them, which
gives them a core of identity, self-motivation, and autonomy. Women lack
the 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 multitudea universality that subsumes
particularitybirths itself. Finally, the fact that Anakin is a cyborg, a hybrid
creature composed of various human and nonhuman organisms, makes him
the central gure of Empire in that the book, too, argues that biopower is the
sign of the times.
We do not need to end up in a Star Wars world. One gets there by treating
modernity as a reied and universal state of being. Modernity persists as a
powerful narrative, but there are Other stories to be told.
Notes
1 Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
2 Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1987), has
most fully explored the potential fruitfulness in the method of critical interruption. Critical
interruption rejects the coherence of narratives while retaining what makes political sense in
those 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.
Rofel Discrepant Modernities 649
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 JohnsonandFredYenLiangChiu, Guest Editors Introduction,positions 8 (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 value
of what has traditionally been considered womens work, which involves a high content of
affective or caring labor and centers on services necessary for social reproduction (ibid., 274).
That statement segues into their argument 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 under
empire.
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, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology inTurkish Village Society (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).