![]()
I Threads of critique
Modern life is deeply eurocentric. In order to adequately understand how this is so, we need to overcome the very structures of how we think. If we do not, any critique of eurocentrism will remain partial: it will rely, uncritically, on ways of thinking whose eurocentricity is unrecognised and so is reproduced rather than transformed. Partial critiques of this kind are forms of âeurocentric anti-eurocentrismâ.1
Nevertheless, progress in developing an account of eurocentrism was made during the last century. Many vital conceptual and theoretical resources were produced, building on an extensive legacy left by the previous century. While the results were only partially successful, they did prepare the ground for further progress. This chapter takes a look back at these developments with a view to giving the process, and its results, a greater sense of coherence. This, though, is only possible in retrospect, from within the horizons of an achieved conception of eurocentrism.
This chapter draws attention to three aspects of this historical process of conceptual emergence, each of which is a thread woven into the presentation of the chapter. The first thread draws out a fundamental feature of eurocentrism: the contradictory forms and implication of its illicit universalism. The dominant forms of modernity appear as universals.2 This is evident in forms of thought ranging from liberalism, ideas of progress and civilisation, or political ideas such as human rights or economic ideas from homo economicus to conceptions of labour and value, to philosophical conceptions of science and anthropology. Eurocentric universalism is illicit in that it substitutes particular forms for universal ones, thereby displacing and obscuring genuine universals. Contradictions necessarily follow from this: contradictions that account for the âirrealistâ categorial structure of these âuniversalsâ and their development.
This is not just a matter of the forms that the discourses on modernity take. It is also a matter of the forms of appearance assumed by dominant social relations. Modern universalism is grounded and entangled in modern social relations, such as capital, with universalist discourses elaborating these forms of appearance. What is more, though, is that these relations themselves are âuniversalâ too. They are universal in a double sense. They are universalising, in the sense that they spread, that they tend to penetrate and transform all forms of life. Not only are they universalising, for they also possess the same contradictory categorial structures as their forms of appearance. That is to say, by disclosing the categorial structures of âuniversalâ forms of appearance we also reveal the structures of âuniversalâ social relations.
The second thread begins to explore the ways in which modern eurocentricities tend to block the possibility of coming to understand that very eurocentrism. Eurocentric political structures and the eurocentric imaginary mutually reinforce one another, instituting a eurocentric ârealityâ principle. In addition, the contradictory structure of eurocentric discourse effectively ties it to specific ways of comprehending the world whilst preventing other, more adequate ways from emerging. This theme is developed, in part, by looking at the ways in which debates over universalism and relativism have been so limited in the ways they have dealt with problems of ethnocentrism and eurocentrism. These debates reveal the systematic way in which eurocentrism denies its own reality, i.e. eurocentric thought is premised on the denial of eurocentric realities.
The third thread begins to disclose the full complexity of eurocentrism. This involves moving from relatively simple formulations towards increasingly complex ones. It also means drawing together the results of a series of critical explorations of a range of related arguments.
These threads are all elements of the critique of eurocentrism, a critique that begins from the problematic distinction between the appearances and realities of modernity. There is, of course, an ordinary sense in which there is always more to something than there appears to be; appearances are âsuperficialâ. By and large, though, under what might be called normal circumstances, it is possible to infer the deeper and broader nature of reality from the way it appears to us in the course of our active engagement with it. Our relations to such a reality, our knowledge of it and our practical engagement with it are such that we can understand it and get along with it perfectly well. Our knowledge and our practice are mutually reinforcing and efficacious. When this is the case, the normal distinction between a reality and its appearances is not problematic.
The need for critique arises when appearances are misleading: when a reality appears in such a way that it is difficult, if not impossible, to infer its true nature from the way in which it appears; when the absence of the truth about it means that our practical relations with that reality become problematic, irrational. When this is the case, the impulse to critique is a political and intellectual one, aimed towards disclosing and transforming the social order in the interests of a good life. The first moment of a critique is the demonstration that appearances are not simply incomplete, but that they are in some sense false, erroneous. It shows that a given reality cannot be properly understood at face value; that there are significant problems with the way we understand our relations with it; that we mis-identify reality and are led into dealing with it inadequately as a result. Critique shows us that our practical difficulties with a given reality are premised on the absence of the truth, of adequate knowledge, about it.
Prompted by practical and moral considerations, a critique of the way a given reality is ordinarily understood, gives rise to a number of questions. These include how the reality in question should be understood, and why does this reality appear in a misleading or erroneous way? We fully answer these questions with an explanatory critique: an account of what the reality really is, including an account of why this reality can only function if it appears to us in a misleading way; an account of why our reality must suppress the truth about itself. Explanatory critique gives us a new account of our reality. It gives us an expanded and transformed sense of our reality, one which shows why our identity entails mis-identifying ourselves and our form of life.
However, precisely because our form of life requires such mis-identifications, identifying their true extent faces considerable obstacles. As long as we are bound up in our relations with a misleading reality we will be facing opposing demands. On the one hand, our reality impels us to confront the reasons for the difficulties we encounter and to develop a new understanding of it; on the other hand, the same reality also compels us to reproduce it, which includes reproducing the way we understand it. Being enmeshed in such a problematic, self-denying reality, then, both drives us towards changing the way we understand our reality and ourselves, whilst at the same time it constrains us from doing so. The success of any critique depends on identifying and overcoming the constraints in which we are entangled.
The critique of eurocentrism is a peculiarly difficult task: it requires a demanding level of reflexive awareness of modernity; that we come to an understanding of the essential structures of modernity and of our ways of understanding them. The experience of modernity, however, generates deeply contradictory tendencies towards reflexivity. As well as instituting a persistent imperative for reflex-ivity, there are also real tendencies generating the conditions of its possibility. These positive tendencies, though, are confronted by the essential structures of modernity and modern self-understanding. Indeed, the most significant obstacles in the way of coming to an understanding of the eurocentric structures of modernity are those very eurocentric structures and their essentially misleading appearances.
The political and discursive relations of modernity, then, generate two opposing tendencies: for the ongoing reproduction and transformation of their euro-centricity; and for the emergence of anti-eurocentric modes of thought and forms of life. The peculiarity of the critique of eurocentrism is that it can succeed in the disclosure of structural eurocentricities only by working through and past them to produce new forms with new structures. That is, the work of realising anti-eurocentrism, by disclosing both eurocentric structures and forms, entails their radical transformation.
II Eurocentrism: absence, universalism and historical change
Like many such terms, âeurocentrismâ has come into use under specific conditions, for varied, though more or less related purposes. âEurocentrismâ emerged during a broad period of historical transition, and the controversies over its meaning were integral to some of the political and social struggles that occurred at the time.3 Compared to its reality, though, the term itself is relatively recent. Below is a quotation from Our Mutual Friend, in which Charles Dickens lays before us the contours of Mr Podsnap's world, a world immediately recognisable as ethnocentric and as eurocentric avant la letter.
Dickens's wonderful caricature of ethnocentrism, Podsnappery, provides a good place from which to begin. It indicates its reality and demonstrates three important features of eurocentrism as a matter of intellectual, political and social controversy: it embodies a characteristic set of absences; it indicates different senses in which a given reality is universal; it intimates something of the instability of both the reality, and the reality principle, of eurocentrism.
Mr Podsnap's world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake, and of their manners and customs would conclusively observe, âNot English!â when, PRESTO! With flourish of the arm and a flush of the face, they were swept away. Elsewise, the world got up at eight, shaved close at a quarter-past, breakfasted at nine, went to the City at ten, came home at half-past five, and dined at seven.4
The passage continues: âMr Podsnap's notions of the Arts in their integrityâ, was that they should do no more than represent this world of rising, shaving, breakfasting, the City, returning home and dining. âNothing else to be permitted ⌠on pain of excommunication. Nothing Else To Beâanywhere!â
The first feature to note about Podsnap's horizons is that they are defined by absences of various kinds, each of which renders his outlook partial and distorted. There are the absences of many concrete aspects of the world; there are also the absences of abstractions, of the forms needed for a more realistic representation of the world; and there are the absences of the really abstract qualities of this world.
Second, Podsnap expresses a sense in which a certain reality appears universal, at the same time as he inhabits a reality that is genuinely becoming universal. On the one hand, there is the striking sense that this particular culture, despite its constitutive absences, is being identified with culture in general and is held to possess universal significance. Contrasted with this insistent sense of reality is the apparently feeble reality principle of alterity, the geographical distance of which is so compounded by seeming insignificance that it cannot make its presence in the world felt in the City of London. On the other hand, Podsnap's daily round in this city is at the very centre of an historically universal culture, or at least a universalising one, the political and economic relations of which are expanding and extending far and deep into the world beyond the City's walls.
Lastly, Dickens points to the fact that the sense of a real identity and of the unreality of alterity is located in specific conditions. This opens up the theme of change in the existing differential strength of relative reality principles. Important sources of change are the processes of universalisation in which they are embedded, and the struggles over them which lend them their particular shape. Dickens's own literary realist practice is one such struggle, working on the absences embodied in this vision so as to undermine its sense of reality and its appearance of universality.
Turning first to the concrete and abstract absences of eurocentrism, all of these kinds of absences are characteristic of the eurocentric worldview: there are persistent failures to represent the concrete, such as âother countriesâ. There is inadequate representation of the relations between Europe and other countries, not to speak of the internal relations of other forms of life. Nor is there any rounded appreciation of the impact on others of the tendentially universalising relations of modern forms of life.5
Concrete reality encompasses the people, places and things of the world we inhabit: our organic and inorganic bodies. It is the sphere of existence that is amenable to our sensibilities in their full sense, with its inner as well as outer dimensions. It is our lived world, and can be more or less understood, well or poorly described, entered into with a higher or meaner sense of purpose, worked on with greater or lesser degrees of satisfaction, etc.6 To speak of the absence of the concrete, then, is just to make the straightforward point that some significant aspect of our world is not present in some depiction of it. It is to say that an author has not presented it to the reader, or that the text does not represent it. When such absences become apparent it means that important aspects of the lifeworld have not been accorded their due significance, and it can imply that some ill is being perpetuated as a result.
Concrete absences are the centre of Dickens's literary practice. When he says of Podsnap's world that âit was not a very large worldâ, he identifies a real failure of understanding: there is a need for far greater recognition; horizons should embrace wider difference and diversity and change. Nor is this simply a matter of narrow-mindedness. It is a matter of active exclusion. With a âPresto!â and a flourish, in the manner of an illusionist, Podsnap conjures up the absences of his world. Its incompleteness is deliberately generated and reproduced through particular kinds of performative speech acts. For Dickens, alternative, superior forms of representation are both necessary and possible. Literature is a moralising form of action in the public sphere, and a politicising one. It is a vital mediation of both public morality and political intervention. The activity of the author is akin to that of the journalist working for a radical press or forms of collective social protest. Inadequate representations of concrete reality are displaced as a greater sense of concrete realities gains public recognition, as part of a political process in which real concrete ills might be addressed.
This dynamic of reform is by no means confined to literature. Much the same may be said of the social sciences. More overtly political, at least in the sense that their express purpose is to mediate political, legal and institutional interventions in social life, the social sciences, with their own patterns of absences and presences, are at least as efficacious as literature in shaping the world. The social sciences, though, have some very different resources available to them. For instance, not all states of affairs or aspects of reality can be represented figuratively. Other, more abstract forms are called on to stand in to relate qualities such as scale or complexity, which might otherwise defy concrete representation. Theoretical abstractions are also needed for dealing with aspects of the world that lie beyond the realm of the sensual or the concrete. Using various kinds of abstraction, the natural, as well as some social, sciences have advanced statistical and theoretical forms of representation as the basis of various kinds of realism. Equally, abstractions are needed in order to refer to the forms assumed by the concrete, i.e. its relations, structures and forms of organisation. Indeed, the absence of these necessary abstractions from an account of the world will usually mean that the structures of modernity are either not represented or that they are misrepresented. Consequently, the internal relations of the modern lifeworld are represented in a more or less problematic way.
In representing the world, the requirements of adequacy demand the use of abstract as well as concrete references. Nevertheless, controversies over the status of abstractions, of terms that make non-empirical references, have been a persistent feature of the modern epistemological tradition. Much of the fruitful humanist dialogue between the value of literature, in a struggle with rationalism, and of science, in its struggle against romanticism, revolves around the value and status of these different forms of representation and communication of meaning.7
It is not surprising, though, that questions as to what constitutes realism remain highly contentious, for these questions are symptomatic of the defining feature of the modern: the mediation and constitution of concrete forms of life by abstract relations. What LukĂĄcs refers to as the artistic struggle for realism against âthe destruction of the completeness of the human personality and of the objective typicality of men and situationsâ to be found in forms of literature can be understood as a consequence of its practical corollary: the struggle against the destruction of concrete completeness by the forms of modern social relations. Given this context, the humanist quest for literary and/or scientific realism is indissolubly bound to political radicalism.8
The second significant aspect of Podsnap's worldview is that it has philosophical implications, i.e. ontological and epistemological implications for how both universality and realism are to be properly understood. In common with all visions of life, this one can be subjected to philosophical interrogation, as if it were implicitly making or presupposing philosophical arguments. As such, it is open to critique to the extent that its philosophical presuppositions can be shown to be false. It might also be open to explanatory critique of the structure of the absences and presence it embodies.
The most immediate consequence of Podsnap's efforts to police his own horizons is that they sustain a distorted sense of the universality of his experienced world. This wor...
