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Constructions of 'culture' in Asian Studies and of 'Asia' in cultural studies
Asian Studies Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 1991, pp. 80-88.
Paul Stange, Asian Studies, Murdoch University
The construction of 'Asian Studies' within Australian academic institutions can be read as an affirmative action program. Just as womens studies became necessary to rectify the failure of history, literature, philosophy or sociology departments to provide adequate gender representation, so Asian studies emerged to counterbalance the Eurocentrism enshrined within those disciplines. Though necessary this genesis has unfortunately, and not incidentally, been reflected in an apartheid styled segregation. Counterpointing affirmative action there has often been assumption that, insofar as 'Asian' subjects are treated in departments dedicated to them, they need not be within the discipline.
So philosophy departments may still construe the traditions of China or India as adjuncts to European ('real') philosophy; when presented they have token status. Beyond that, if Asian theories enter theorising they may have to be cleared through Paris first. Bahktin's works, among others, have designer label status, they are sanctioned as references and virtually obligatory if we want to be read in cultural studies. However if the Tibetan notions he was influenced by in Paris in the 1930s came in unfiltered the conventions of our universities dictate that they will be treated as object or subject, not as wellsprings of theory which could guide 'scholarly' endeavour. Academic practices thus remain embedded within an imperialism of knowledge which subordinates and disempowers Asian subjectivities.
Asymmetric separation is one aspect of our cultural relationship with Asia. Though imbalances are leveling out, as is our standard of living, Asian realities are not integrated into our world. Universities may be marginal within Australian society, but academic deployment of reference to 'Asia' nevertheless instructs us about and plays a role within wider constructs. This paper focusses on marginalisation of 'culture' within Asian Studies, contingent on instrumentalism which is itself a statement of our culture, and on the positioning of 'Asia' within 'cultural' studies. Dominant epistemologies produce conviction that no 'essence' exists apart from mental construction, positioning us as interminable tourists who access only our imaging of 'others'. 'Asia' may ironically be positioned most firmly as 'other' within the discipline which most illuminates the process of 'othering'.
If the rhetoric of Asianisation has been prominent in political discourse since the Whitlam era, it is only in the past five years that the implied commitment to intensification of Asian studies has been felt in tertiary institutions. Realisation that we could market English language instruction, technical and general education, by catering to the emergent middle classes of Malaysia and the NICs, brought the first wave of change, as it marked the point when we awoke to the wealth and dynamism of Asia. To a lesser extent, government and business now prioritise Asian studies itself, but we are cautioned by awareness that changes are driven by instrumental and economic motives, as noted often within this journal and in The Australian.
The concerns of leadership simultaneously reflect and enhance the consumer culture which predominates. Instrumentalism dominates policies partly because related capitalist and modernist values are embedded within our culture. 'Culture' is not understood here as a term for linguistic, ideological or artistic spheres, as though constituting an autonomous 'mental' realm separable from the 'realities' of social practice. Neither the thrust of policies nor the capitulation of university hierarchies to them are self evident necessities, they are cultural praxis. If preoccupation with the economy is as natural as concern with individual subsistence, even momentary reflection still informs us that deployment of income and energy is also culturally constructed, guided by a multiplicity of values, pleasures and needs, not just by maximisation of gain. So if it is now difficult to defend 'education' as bearing intrinsic value and we are compelled to validate it as 'training' for a career, then that is a statement of what our culture holds as 'real', of central rather than peripheral value.
The impact of market mentality is clear. At Murdoch University prioritisation of political-economic and marginalisation of cultural aspects of Asian studies long predated its emphatic valorisation by the ARC, through the establishment this year of the Asia Research Centre. For a decade new appointments have been influenced by market thinking. Even well subscribed cultural courses have been hard to promote due to belief that pragmatic issues are primary. Prior to the recent ARC grant, an Asia Research Centre existed in embryo. It was designed to promote Asian research, until then under the umbrella of the Asian Studies Programme in the School of Humanities. The Centre was initiated by (then) A/Prof Robison, who became its Director. It ostensibly aimed to promote all Asian focussed research within the institution.
The flier which announced the Centre (still in distribution) in the first instance listed teaching staff appointed to the Programme. However beyond those it included only political-economic researchers from other Schools and Programmes, some with only marginal claim as Asianists. Notable scholars within the School, including A/Prof George, Prof Frodsham, Dr Mishra and Dr Birch, were ommitted. Their research and publications deal with Asian theatre, literature and philosophy and each has treated contemporary issues, consistent with another emphasis the brochure signalled. Others who should have been listed, if the flier was intended to highlight the extent of expertise at Murdoch, such as the historian Bob Reece, went unremarked. When questioned about the ommissions, Dick Robison, who had written it, responsed that he had simply 'forgotten' and 'they' (implicitly both the public and those in power) wanted to know mainly about pragmatic matters.
We are all naturally most conscious of colleagues alligned to our interests, but the incident remains notable. By internalising and then embodying predominant values we ensure, however unintentionally, that they become manifest as social reality--this is cultural praxis. In this case market ideology ironically produced failure to 'capitalise' on obvious strengths. Prof(now) Robison's agenda does correspond with widely held judgements, as indeed may his related open conviction that 'culture' explains nothing of socio-political significance. His world view corresponds in this respect with that of Labour leadership, endorsing their values by not opening from the possibility of critique. Because our culture predisposes us to view pragmaticism as self-evident necessity we too often do not register our priorities as choice.
We can read the ARC's subsequent funding of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch as confirmation of both Robison's view, of what 'they want', and mine, that the incident illustrates convergence of cultural values. I neither question the quality of Murdoch's proposal nor doubt the significance of other considerations. Nevertheless success can be attributed partly to Murdoch's instrumentalist pitch. What may have been 'forgetfulness' is now enshrined in the Asia Research Centre. With Prof Goodman as Director and Prof Robison as Associate Director 'culture' and 'history' are either absent or subordinated to political-economic concerns. The prime funded project and the wider prospectus are emphatically political-economic and the Centre brochure presents an agenda flavoured by market research and orientated toward policy studies.
The implications of this emphasis are ramified due to the status of the Centre relative to the Programme, especially in view of the restructuring of university based research. Centre staff already actively inform visitors that it will house 'research' on Asia at Murdoch, that the Programme is essentially engaged with undergraduate teaching. Notable research activities of scholars such as A/Prof Warren or Dr Wright, neither involved with the Centre, slip through the crack. Previously the Programme prided itself on the range of research undertaken by teaching staff, now the 'research' profile of Murdoch's Asian studies is virtually claimed by a Centre with an exclusively political-economic agenda. The likely long term consequences are self-evident: culturally oriented researchers, among others, will be positioned by default on the teaching rung of the emergent hierarchy. The prominance of new economic and policy related institutes in many of our universities suggests that we all know this story.
I respect my colleagues' work and share conviction that they have earned support and will use it well. Prioritisation of their field is nevertheless guided by belief in market forces, not by the market itself. If direct market forces drove decisions studies of religion would generate more note, yet repeatedly courses with high enrolments have been dropped due to conviction in the priority of 'pragmatic' issues. If such beliefs do converge with wider values, we may say they are 'correct' in a relative sense, but nevertheless the underlying formation of conviction is a cultural statement. Cultural studies does provide the tools, as Dick has himself noted, to register capitalism as a religious system and such cultural reading is obviously as relevant to understanding ourselves as to our relations with Asians.
But the relation of cultural studies to Asian Studies also remains problematic. A gap is indicated in the first instance by the fact that Asianists have been relatively slow to pick up on works by continental philosophers and sociologists. In Australia there are exceptions including the 'subaltern studies' group and some of the Cornell school. These include Milner at the ANU and Reynolds and Day at Sydney, who have guided notable students, such as Vickers, Loveric and Lindsay, on this track for over a decade. Milner's new project, dealing with cultural aspects of Australian relations with Asia within the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences, will no doubt help bridge this gap. But generally in Asian studies older paradigms predominate and links with cultural studies are weak.
My awareness of this gap was sharpened at the 33rd International Congress of Asian and North African Studies in Toronto in 1990. A series of panels focussed on religion in East Asia; their brief was framed in relation to a massive project, based at the University of Chicago under Prof Martin Marty, to analyse fundamentalism worldwide. The convening group included luminaries such as Prof de Bary from Columbia and promising international panels were assembled. However the papers generally approached issues through Weberian categories, restricting themselves to thinking which seemed as narrow as the mentalities they aimed to characterise. They focussed on textually based literalisms and appeared unable to register that Maoism, the Moonies and Sokka Gakkai might compare more closely to American reborn Christians and Iranian Shi'ites than Koreans questing after and reworking early indigenous texts.
Though at times interested, speakers were unresponsive to suggestion that recent fundamentalism might be a product of electronic media, as argued in some publications, and manifest in ostensibly secular as well as conventionally religious spheres. There was no hint of recognition, as is argued by Gibbons, that fundamentalism is a post-modern rather than traditional phenomenon. On the whole these Asianists, Europeans among them, were tied to old philological and sociological models. We can find many counter examples, works such as Harootunian's Things Seen and Unseen (Chicago 1988) or Siegel's Solo in the New Order (Princeton 1986), which employ all the trademarks of recent theorising, but the gap remains. Foucauldian theory instructs us to expect such disjunctures between discursive domains, but we should probe their implications.
Scholars engaged in cultural studies are even less likely to engage Asian studies. In reviewing how 'Asia' is positioned within it I will draw from the excellent cultural studies conference held in Fremantle WA in June 1991. The conference, 'Dismantle Fremantle', was sponsored by the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication, located in the same School of Humanities which housed Murdoch's Asia Research Centre until this year. A planning document indicated that the focus would be "...on dismantling or decolonising Cultural Studies as an intellectual exercise...", on drawing on established figures in the field along with "...hitherto marginalised or emergent constituencies from Australia and elsewhere, especially SE Asia." This notice went to staff in Communications and Literature but not Asian Studies. Asianist such as Krishna Sen, located in Communications Studies, were engaged; students of culture in Asian studies were not. At the same time the organisers did get assistance from the Asia Research Centre to fund visitors. Culturalists thus mirrored Robison's ommissions from Asian studies.
In the event a few speakers explored Asian subjects. On the whole, however, the projected 'decolonising' of cultural studies was undercut by ritualised invocation of theorising via stock superheroes of European and English speaking academia. Dipesh Chakrabarty (Melbourne U) remarked on this, terming it "reading habits", in commenting on the excellent reconsideration of post-colonial 'nationalisms' by Luke Gibbons (Dublin City U). 'Othering' was pointedly maintained in relation to Aboriginality within Australia: three white males presented papers; then Aboriginals 'performed' during the conference dinner--prison poetry, Nyoongar dancing and country western singing (led by the Hon Ernie Bridge, WA Minister of Agriculture and Water Resources). The most powerful decentring statement of the conference was by Hugh Webb (Murdoch U), who sharply highlighted persistence of cultural studies focus on white popular culture, its "willfull forgetting" of ongoing colonisation. For the most part margins, if stretched, were pushed out from within the domain of Eurocentric theorising and issues.
Ken Wark's (Macquarie U) paper appeared to rationalise this, affirming that our discourse is not only reflexive, but exclusively so, that we are not priviliged to set ourselves above any 'subject' as we are simultaneously cultural producers. Though his "trajectory" claimed decentring as purpose he maintained a powerful binary 'other' in references to Iraq, Japan and China. In an interlude I naively questioned how 'cultural studies', which I had presumed focussed on 'culture' generically, could operate exclusively within Anglo-European contexts and lineages. I was instructed that it did not claim to treat 'culture in general', only to make excursions into local sites. Though commenting that Stuart Hall's West Indian origins had contributed to heterogeneous readings of culture within Great Britain, the thrust of his response was that Asia was an/other matter, one cultural studies could opt to ignore without cost. In a similar vein, Gibbons reported that Derrida and Spivak felt that deconstruction may only speak to the logocentrism of the European tradition and Webb referred to Said as saying there is no way of apprehending the world within our culture.
These lessons make sense as post hoc statements of cultural studies praxis and relate to its disavowal of grand theorising, of pretention to universal statement. They would also be consistent with Rorty's view, via Tom O'Regan (Murdoch U), that knowledge systems reproduce through social networks which establish new vocabulary conventions without necessarily implying their superiority. However if intellectual habits within cultural studies allow (glib?) bracketing of subjects I am not satisfied. Discontent with formulaic, if often artful, deployment of endorsed conceptualisations to restricted contexts need not imply adherence to universalist paradigms. It is to suggest that cultural studies may insulate itself against subversive challenges of the same globalisation and post-coloniality which it professes as a vogue. Its reading of academia, including its own corner of it, as power networks which reproduce by enforcing conventions of reference and style should be construed as critique, not deployed as rationalisation.
Generally self criticism is a strong point within cultural studies. Turner (Queensland U) ennumerated debates about agency, audiences, politics and orthodoxies, emphasising that cultural studies is multiple and fraught with double-binds, especially in conceptualisation of 'nations' and 'metropoles' in a transnational context. Chen (National Tsing Hua U) noted that internationalisation of cultural studies constituted 'colonisation'. Chua (Edith Cowan U) commented on filmic representations of Asians as 'exiles' in Australia and noted that cultural studies remained Anglo-American. In considering European and Australian contexts, as in Ein Ang's (Murdoch U) consideration of post-coloniality, cultural studies is certainly pushing outwards against the constraints of its foundations. Despite declared intent to decentre with an eye to Southeast Asia no papers touched that region and only three of twenty four treated Asian contexts: Chen's on Taiwanese media, Chakrabarty's on colonial Indian history and Mishra's (Murdoch U) on Indian cinema.
Chakrabarty's presentation treated the genesis of bourgeois domesticity within the nineteenth century Bengali elite. He began by distancing himself from suggestion that the 'subaltern' group had succeeded in representing 'Indian' subjectivities, arguing that even in his frontier endeavour meta-narratives of modernity, the universalism claimed by European theorising and constraints contingent on university practices precluded representation of 'Indian' voices. As he sees it, mediations by European capitalism, state formation and theorisation are pervasive and asymetrical. 'Europeans' are enabled to construct history and theory without entertaining Asia; 'Indians' remain obliged to address 'Europe', even to employ colonising theories. 'Europe' has the status of 'knowing' subject while 'Asia' provides 'facts'. He also stressed that notwithstanding deconstruction of 'orientalism' its problematics remain. Dipesh's call to 'provincialise' Europe is a signal we must emphatically endorse.
His comments clearly resonate with the concern I alluded to in opening, in reference to constraints on allowable 'theory', and touch at the imperialistic roots of how our culture constitutes knowledge. However I do not accept the rigidity Dipesh read as intrinsic to academia. I argue that Indian subjectivities are represented, but through practices scholars, even apparently subalterns, fail to admit as 'knowable' evidence due to constraints they have chosen to accept. Dipesh's response to questioning presumed immutable (and to me questionable) notions of pedagogy and scholarship. Though no doubt enshrined, some conventions which are entrenched at Melbourne appear more negotiable at Murdoch, suggesting that a reconstitution of academic praxis, integral to theoretical gain, is already in process and linked to the same globalisation which will provincialise Europe. I have already suggested, in relation to cultural studies and just as Dipesh did in relation to orientalism, that critique is not resolution, but an opening to new praxis which reforms existing constraints.
Only one paper deployed theory with Asian roots, breaking through the Eurocentrism bounding 'theory'. Jayamanne (Sydney U) claimed to offer a 'Srilankan reading', in commenting on three Tracey Moffatt films. But this appeared to be a reference to her origins, as it had no obvious implication for the substance of her paper. In contrast, Vijay Mishra (Murdoch U), capitalised on indigenous theory while treating Indian cinema. He alluded to the metaphysical framing of medieval Indian historical narrative, centring on a void he termed a 'black hole'. Repudiating Dumont's polarity of worldly power and ascetic withdrawal as too essentialist, he drew, admittedly through Schulman, on south Indian notions of the kingly subject as 'fragmented', as an absence of 'other' constructed by Brahmins. Then he related these notions to the delight in mixed genres and avoidance of resolution characterising recent cinema.
Notably only Dipesh and Krishna Sen felt called to comment; more notably their chorus was protest that Vijay enabled an essentialist, orientalist and exoticised 'other'. Perhaps I put the point too starkly, but this appeared like an enforcement of Dipesh's argument--that even Indians must employ sanctioned European theories. Repudiation of essentialism and the dictum that no 'other' exists, as we only 'know' through mental constructions, are deployed as items of faith. In the same breath we can note that even as cultural studies settles into orthodoxies, as is implied by such reflexive presuppositions, its proponents are geared to unsettle them. By construing their works as 'excursions', rather than as closed, comprehensive and definitive 'conclusions', the door is left open. Indeed the 'post-colonial' and 'post-modern' imply destabilising of institutionalised practices.
There were signs of a compact between cultural studies and policy studies within Dismantle. Mercer (Griffith U) reported, to mixed reception, on a project employing cultural theories toward the redesign of Brisbane's urban spaces. Bennett (Griffith U) used Foucault to argue that cultural studies could not claim neutral political space, as he held some founding assumptions of its British school implied in treating 'hegemonic culture'. Referring to Harrowsmith's argument that almost all contemporary cultures are capitalist, he maintained that implicitly nearly all are vehicles of policy. Following Cunningham he held that our project is to shift dominant metaphors toward 'access' and 'empowerment'. Similar collaboration may be implied within Asian studies in the construction of Milner's project at the ANU.
For the moment cultural studies and political-economy collude most in reading any reference to 'traditions' which might be 'different' as imaginary construction of scholarship lampooned as 'orientalism'. Both schools critique capitalism, but in this their view is moulded by the post-modern international monoculture it produces. Cultural studies may rightly turn our eye to heterogeneous and everyday practices which subvert global monoculture. But its own implicit worldview is severely constrained, producing a modernist styled conviction that the western 'post-modern popular' is the cultural space we occupy. At the same time political economists, on the rise in Asian studies, easily imagine they trade in naturalised self-evident 'reality' when making cultural statements. In excluding any genuinely 'other', both disciplines display the poverty of our cultural consciousness and threaten to make our academies inadvertent emmissaries of a new wave of cultural imperialism. The boom, both in our relations with 'Asia' and in our institutional interpretation of it, appears to be guided increasingly by monocultural vision.
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