Cultural Hybridity

Contradictions and Dilemmas

Kwok-Bun Chan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415697989
• eBook ISBN: 9781135758998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book brings together a group of scholars from diverse disciplines to interrogate everyday life events in various interpersonal and organizational contexts so as to answer an age-old question: what happens when (carriers of) cultures meet, or, when East meets West? The contributors to this volume argue that, rather than assume clashes of civilizations, assimilation, conversion and essentialism to be the expected outcomes of cultural encounters, we should focus our analytical attention on processes rather than outcomes; on emergence, dialectics, contradictions, ironies and paradoxes, and complexity. We should focus on attempting to learn and grow, to synthesize and integrate, to create and innovate, to change and transform, at personal, micro, macro and global levels. Or, in one word: hybridity.

Contexts of cultural encounters analyzed in this book range from business organizations, through individual travels, to personal philosophies, and from mechanical models to complex systems as social imaginaries.

This book is based on a special issue of World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution.

INTRODUCTION: THINKING FREELY, ACTING VARIOUSLY, OR THOUGHT AND HYBRIDITY AS PRACTICE OF FREEDOM

CHAN KWOK-BUN
Chan Institute of Social Studies (CISS), Hong Kong

CHAN NIN
Chan Institute of Social Studies (CISS), Hong Kong

At its most advanced stage, domination functions as administration, and in the overdeveloped areas of mass consumption, the administered life becomes the good life of the whole, in the defense of which the opposites are united.

Herbert Marcuse (1955)

What is the task of thought today? We speak of us postmoderns, we who have witnessed the collapse of every meta-narrative, the betrayal of every emancipatory project, the disappearance of the Cartesian subject. We stand before the ruins of classical philosophy, devastated by the relentless inquisitions of post-structuralism. No epitaphs have been raised, no eulogies are sung, for Western reason lies prostrate in disgrace. From Nietzsche onwards, we have been told that rationality, as the self-elected arbiter of truth, has always been an accomplice of domination. It would seem that all of us think in the midst of this epistemological horizon, one that requires, as a rite of passage, a decisive gesture of disavowal. Each of us must ring the death knell of metaphysics; each of us must accept the passing of an irretrievable legacy, one that has catalyzed a concatenation of catastrophes. Any lingering traces of this tradition must be denounced; all discourse must be purged of reactionary nostalgia.

For all of its radical negativity, this critical enterprise is profoundly Kantian in impulse—the project of philosophy has been suspended until a new basis can be found. Until the moment of its resurrection, we are condemned to gnaw on its festering flesh. We are the mourners at philosophy’s wake, an endless procession decrying the inadequacies of pure reason. Yet, perhaps, the funeral rites have gone on for long enough. Philosophy has surrendered its sovereignty at a crucial conjuncture. Having liquidated all the foundational premises of metaphysics, thought finds itself unable to formulate a consistent defense against Empire. The prospect of concerted collective resistance has been invalidated in lieu of difference, multiplicity, and micropolitics; the myth of agency has been exposed as an effect of language. Critical energies have been dispersed, and thought is no longer equipped to engage in combat with a seemingly invincible enemy. It is clear that resignation and lamentation are no longer appropriate, that alternative strategies must be devised.

The pressing need for such strategies is compounded by the fact that post-structuralism itself is no longer inimical to imperial rule. Deconstruction has become a veritable industry—the crisis of representation that it was supposed to initiate has, in fact, generated an unprecedented slew of representations, from meta-fiction to self-reflexive cinema. This irony, both tragic and droll, demonstrates the recuperative power of late capital—it manages to transform the supposed end of communication into another opportunity for mass communication. The impossibility of meaning generates endless marketing possibilities. Advertising teams have generated considerable profits from Deleuze’s notion of the “rhizome,” while the Israeli Defence Force has made extensive use of the discussions on nomadic tactics in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1999). Fredric Jameson (1991) has outlined the ways in which post-structuralism, unbeknownst to itself, has plotted the coordinates of late capitalism. In its unequivocal rejection of the modern subject and its celebration of process, post-structuralism provides a precise phenomenological portrait of contemporary experience, with its absence of historicity, discontinuity, and consummate depthlessness. Having inaugurated an iconoclastic questioning of its foundational postulates, continental philosophy finds itself in the unenviable position of having to relinquish and supersede many of its hard-won insights. Philosophy is obliged to awaken from its protracted slumber.

In this sense, revolutionary thought today is opposed to two prevalent, triumphalist tendencies:

1. The ideology of the free market and its accompanying philosophy, neoliberalism. The uncontested reign of capital is, of course, the predominant “meta-narrative” of our epoch, and the alternative of the “third way” is, to my mind, no longer a tenable solution to a system that thrives on excess and crisis.

2. The political correctness and theoretical prurience enforced by post-structuralist orthodoxy. Having devoted itself to the deconstruction of the Master Signifier, has the deconstructive method not become a Master Signifier itself? Has “difference” not become a fetish of theory, one placed at the service of a new metaphysics, that of globalized capital?

Alain Badiou (2005), in his stirring manifesto “The desire of philosophy and the contemporary world”, provides a provisional program for philosophy today. Philosophy, for Badiou, is intrinsically radical in orientation, as it “pits thought against injustice, against the defective state of the world and of life. Yet it pits thought against injustice in a movement which conserves and defends argument and reason, and which ultimately proposes a new logic” (2005, 29). This ongoing search for a “new logic” is at the heart of Badiou’s work, and this lucid formulation exemplifies the austerity and sobriety of his style. Such candor seems somewhat anachronistic following the syntactical involutions of his French predecessors, but Badiou’s intervention is a timely one, pitting philosophy against “the reign of merchandise, the reign of communication, the need for technical specialization and the necessity for realistic calculations of security” (2005, 31). Following the post-Kantian turn of Foucault and Deleuze, Badiou subordinates philosophy to the emergence of the event, the absolutely heterogeneous happening that disrupts the economy of sense. This happening breaks the closed circuit of capitalist conservation, creating a breach, an event that could precipitate any number of unforeseeable effects. In politics, Badiou identifies May 1968 as an event, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted in radical praxis; in science, quantum physics has opened an unchartered field of thought, the terrain and limits of which remain nebulous. In art, one could think of movements like Dada, Surrealism and Situationism, movements that proposed a supersession of aesthetics altogether, merging theory and practice in an uncompromising way.

In a Benjaminian sense, these events blast us out of the empty, homogeneous time of history and thrust us into a new situation, an excess that ruptures the ontological fabric of reality, initiating the possibility of an alternative way of being. It is here that Badiou draws a distinction between knowledge (that which we already know, by which we make calculations and prognostications) and truth (that which is outside any system of knowledge, which must be constituted in the present moment). In this respect, truth is an interruption:

For the process of a truth to begin something must happen. What there already is—the situation of knowledge as such—generates nothing other than repetition. For a truth to affirm its newness, there must be a supplement. This supplement is committed to chance. It is unpredictable, incalculable. It is beyond what is. I call it an event. A truth thus appears, in its newness, because an evental supplement interrupts repetition. (Badiou 2005, 46; emphasis in the original)

By maintaining a fidelity to an event, a gamble is made, the stakes of which are one’s very self, insofar as that self is constituted by received knowledge. Because the event emerges as a pure possibility, a present unrelated to any of its antecedent moments, it is irreducible to the past, and its agents must act in the face of radical uncertainty (think of Copernicus, Cubism in its infancy, the Cuban revolution). It is in the space of this pure present that freedom, agency, and subjectivity, three aspects of philosophy that post-structuralism had attempted to invalidate, are enacted. When thought is deprived of all its familiar landmarks, one is called upon to act, to make a choice without having reference to established categories: “This event has taken place, it is something which I can neither evaluate, nor demonstrate, but to which I shall be faithful” (Badiou 2005, 47). This is the Sartrean dimension of Badiou’s work.

Badiou’s work, then, is a precise response to a pressing problem. If philosophy is to maintain its critical function, it must re-evaluate its position in the administration of global affairs, it has to extract itself from the system of rule and place itself at the service of a “new logic.” Contra Foucault, Badiou refuses to cede philosophy’s place to the human sciences. He refuses to relinquish philosophy’s prophetic, universalist vocation to what Foucault would call “specific intellectuals”:

there is no chance that the human sciences will replace philosophy. The awareness of this seems to me to be fairly widespread since the human sciences have become the home of the statistical sciences. The human sciences are thereby themselves caught up in the circulation of meaning and its polyvalence, because they measure rates of circulation … At base they are in the service of polls, election predictions, demographic averages, epidemiological rates, tastes and distastes, and all that certainly makes for interesting labour. But this statistical and numerical information has nothing to do with what humanity, nor what each absolutely singular being, is about. (Badiou 2005, 39)

In this statement, we hear echoes of Heidegger’s critique of technology, but Badiou’s relation to Heidegger is similarly unequivocal, denouncing Heidegger’s preoccupation with language, an obsession that invariably leads to Heidegger’s late declaration that poetry, and not philosophy, is the sole guardian of truth in a technological epoch. Heidegger’s philosophy amounts to a sort of linguistic idealism—by positing that language is the “house of Being” and suggesting that “the authentic lies in the flesh of language” (Badiou 2005, 74), Heidegger’s late thought degenerates into a consummate dismissal of all discursive language. Because philosophy is traditionally couched in the form of axioms and propositions, Heidegger identifies it with technological rationality. By privileging the revelatory “saying” in the poem, Heidegger, in effect, sanctifies the poem as mythic object, “a singular operation of truth” (Badiou 2005, 74), at the expense of all practical action.

Badiou’s conception of truth is, like Heidegger’s, premised upon revelation: in the emergence of a truth, a new situation is revealed, the repercussions of which unfold over time. A truth is never identical to itself, nor is it an ahistorical “fact” that is revealed once and for all. To put things in a Derridean way, a truth never reaches a state of completion; it is subject to endless supplementation, bifurcation, and reinscription. Badiou also concedes that philosophy, in itself, does not produce truths; it merely identifies and distributes them. At the same time, he takes Heidegger to task for failing to realize that poetry cannot be confined to a literary practice. If poetry denotes the outside of discursive language and the experience of ekstasis, then every event, insofar as it is recognized as such and named by its agents, is necessarily poetic. When one finds oneself in the midst of an event, one is forced to act and speak in the absence of established codes:

For the nomination of an event—in the sense in which I speak of it, that is, an undecidable supplementation which must be named to occur for a being-faithful, thus for a truth—this nomination is always poetic. To name a supplement, a chance, an incalculable, one must draw from the void of sense, in default of established significations, to the peril of language. (Badiou 2005, 75; emphasis in the original)

By re-assessing the work of Heidegger, Badiou engages in a critique of the linguistic turn that would typify post-structuralist theory. By focusing exclusively on the snares and mechanics of language, philosophy (both in the post-Wittgensteinian and post-structuralist varieties) runs the risk of retreating into a purely semiotic space, one that forgoes political engagement in lieu of textual interpretation. Badiou conceives of philosophy as a mode of universal address, a search for conditions that concern a globalized world:

The principle that philosophy cannot renounce is that of its universal transmissibility, whatever the prescription of style or color, whatever its connection to such and such a language….Philosophy privileges no language, not even the one it is written in. (Badiou 2005, 38)

At the same time, philosophy must avoid closing in on itself, from becoming a hermetic, self-referential system that exhausts itself in self-deconstructive exercises:

The great linguistic turn of philosophy, or the absorption of philosophy into the mediation of language, must be reversed. In the Cratylus, which is concerned with language from beginning to end, Plato says, “We philosophers do not take as our point of departure words, but things.” (Badiou 2005, 37)

What is the purpose of this protracted detour through the work of a contemporary philosopher? In discussing the challenge that Badiou has set for philosophy, we would like to set a standard by which we can assess the accomplishments of this book’s contributors. Does this book constitute an event, or is it merely a repetition of a hackneyed logic? What pathways do they open for investigation and collective praxis? In short, what can we extract from these essays that can be of use to us?

DIFFERENCE AND DOMINATION

The factory doesn’t exclude individuals: it attaches them to a production apparatus. The school doesn’t exclude individuals, even in confining them: it fastens them to an apparatus of knowledge transmission … The factory, the school, the prison, or the hospitals have the object of binding the individual to a process of production, training, or correction of the producers. It’s a matter of guaranteeing production, or the producers, in terms of a particular norm.

Michel Foucault (2000)

Much of today’s politically correct discourse is in the service of three regulative ideas: Difference, Diversity, and Democracy. The liberal, cosmopolitan attitude requires, as a rite of passage, a formal declaration to respect otherness, to eliminate xenophobia, to institute equality and justice. Yet, it is imperative that we discern, beneath the cloying sentimentality that typifies much political discourse, the way in which this hegemonic trinity obscures antagonism and dissent. When Francis Fukuyama (1992) proclaimed the “end of history,” this claim, as inane as it may appear, must be understood dialectically. Is this not the obverse face of a parallel claim, the post-structuralist supposition that all the Marxist categories of “ideology” and “false consciousness” have to be jettisoned in lieu of a new style of hermeneutics, a neo-Nietzschean mode of reading that stays at the surface of the text? The power of Slavoj Žižek’s work (2008) derives largely from his claim that intellectuals on the Left as well as the Right have, in their premature dismissal of ideology, attested to its consummate force: the “end of ideology” is, it turns out, ideology in its ultimate historical form. Compounding matters is the emergence of the Third Way, the symptom of a consummate disenchantment with radical politics, a synthetic rapprochement between two poles. For Žižek, the “end of history” coincides with a loss of faith: gone is the Benjaminian belief that a history of violence, one that has always proceeded by its “bad side,” can be abolished and transformed by a revolutionary upheaval. On the Left, Kautsky has, it seems, scored a decisive victory against Trotsky; the reformist belief in “capitalism with a human face” has eclipsed any hope of deliverance.

The fact that such events have come to pass, that such a reconciliation can be imagined, demands contemplation. As the work of Antonio Negri and the Operaismo School has shown us, difference can be directly incorporated into the logic of the market.

Postmodernist thinking—with its emphasis on concepts such as difference and multiplicity, its celebration of fetishism and simulacra, its continual fascination with the new and with fashion—is an excellent description of the ideal capit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Thinking Freely, Acting Variously, or Thought and Hybridity as Practice of Freedom
• 2 Hybridity and its Discontents: Strategies of Adaptation of Hong Kong’s Professional Immigrants from Mainland China
• 3 Innovators, Strangers or Hybrids? The Returnees in Hong Kong
• 4 Dilemmas of Diversity: A New Paradigm of Integrating Diversity
• 5 Cultural Hybridization: A Third Way between Divergence and Convergence
• 6 Understanding Hybrid Identities: From Mechanical Models to Complex Systems
• 7 Creativity, Culture Contact, and Diversity
• 8 Autonomous Cross-Cultural Hardship Travel (ACHT) as a Medium for Growth, Learning, and a Deepened Sense of Self
• Index