1 00:00:06,150 --> 00:00:14,220 My talk today or the paper that I prepared today is an attempt to think about how Chinese thought global capitalism when 2 00:00:14,220 --> 00:00:24,250 it impinged upon them and and when it became unavoidable for them to think through its various categories in terms, 3 00:00:24,250 --> 00:00:37,530 OK. And so I am appreciative of what the the two papers we just heard because I think although my my my paper is very, 4 00:00:37,530 --> 00:00:43,590 very different, I think they actually do in some weird way, speak to one another. 5 00:00:43,590 --> 00:00:54,990 OK, so my remarks are organised around the historical philosophical problem that we can name following Hegel the world historical. 6 00:00:54,990 --> 00:01:02,280 But unlike Hegel, who abstracted the philosophical historical from material historicity, I'm specifically concerned with the world. 7 00:01:02,280 --> 00:01:09,630 Historical is the way in which abstraction was incorporated into the material and ideological historicity of life. 8 00:01:09,630 --> 00:01:16,740 That is, the way in which abstraction became a particular mode of enquiry into an a way of apprehending material. 9 00:01:16,740 --> 00:01:24,690 Historical experience and the commodity form could be one of those abstractions, amongst many others. 10 00:01:24,690 --> 00:01:31,260 I begin then with the problem of the world historical as a problem that emerged at a particular moment in time, 11 00:01:31,260 --> 00:01:39,990 rather than one that existed in latent form ready, ready to become manifest to converge or diverge at any time. 12 00:01:39,990 --> 00:01:48,900 In this idiom, the World Historical cannot be taken to mean commonsensical, a latent supra historical or internalising force. 13 00:01:48,900 --> 00:01:55,620 It cannot mean purely an endurance or persistence through the empty time of history as chronology. 14 00:01:55,620 --> 00:02:06,300 It cannot be posited be a posited existence whose emergence need not be accounted for materially, historically or theoretically. 15 00:02:06,300 --> 00:02:16,700 Rather, the world historical is a particular form of temporality, a particular type of historicity, a particular production of knowledge. 16 00:02:16,700 --> 00:02:22,070 If we do not specify this clearly evoking the term and concept of the world historical 17 00:02:22,070 --> 00:02:27,200 or global capitalism could merely confirm the world as we think we know it today, 18 00:02:27,200 --> 00:02:33,710 as if all of history were inevitably leading us to converge with or diverge from the present moment. 19 00:02:33,710 --> 00:02:41,750 Again, the logic of against this logic of confirmation until theology, I want to claim that to understand the problem of the world historical, 20 00:02:41,750 --> 00:02:47,030 we need to understand the problem of the world and the historical in their conjoining. 21 00:02:47,030 --> 00:02:53,870 That is, we need to familiarise both. In this sense, the world historical is a mode, a logic. 22 00:02:53,870 --> 00:02:59,990 A temporality requires that we see that it names a conjuncture, a particular form of historicity, 23 00:02:59,990 --> 00:03:06,110 rather than the unmasking manifestation of a latent tendency present since the dawn of time. 24 00:03:06,110 --> 00:03:11,420 Naming the world historical to conduct a conjuncture as a tendentious total rising 25 00:03:11,420 --> 00:03:17,210 form requires that we see that once the world and the historical become conjoined, 26 00:03:17,210 --> 00:03:25,820 inextricably interlocked, not only by abstract logic or by contingency, but by the material lived necessity. 27 00:03:25,820 --> 00:03:30,980 We enter an extended moment of code temporality and as I see it, 28 00:03:30,980 --> 00:03:39,560 then the task of of of an enquiry into this code temporality is to understand the particularities of that conjuncture, 29 00:03:39,560 --> 00:03:49,550 which in part means to reanimate for our present conjuncture a genuine sense of possibility and urgency. 30 00:03:49,550 --> 00:03:53,750 So my discussion is shaped by how we might understand how and when the world and the 31 00:03:53,750 --> 00:03:59,120 historical became inextricably linked in Chinese thought and material practise, 32 00:03:59,120 --> 00:04:05,750 and thus how and when comparison and comparability became the inevitable mode of apprehending this question. 33 00:04:05,750 --> 00:04:09,560 One abstract answer to this question is the comparison. 34 00:04:09,560 --> 00:04:17,720 Thus, the world conjoined to the historical is an important modern ideology in that it can make present in a film. 35 00:04:17,720 --> 00:04:26,960 It makes present in a de familiarising way rather than inscribing essences as if always already known. 36 00:04:26,960 --> 00:04:34,400 But meanwhile, my short historical answer to the question about the unavailability of comparability and thus of the conjoining 37 00:04:34,400 --> 00:04:42,080 of the world and the historical in China would be that comparison is unavoidable because as Liang Chow, 38 00:04:42,080 --> 00:04:49,670 a leading Chinese intellectual of the late 19th early 20th century, observed with mordant humour and knowing resignation. 39 00:04:49,670 --> 00:04:55,550 Even if you are not interested in the world, the world is interested in you. 40 00:04:55,550 --> 00:05:03,680 Liang's observation in the opiaion opening years of the 20th century was situated at a moment when Euro American 41 00:05:03,680 --> 00:05:11,540 and increasingly Japanese capitalist imperialism was carving China up like a melon in the parlance of the day. 42 00:05:11,540 --> 00:05:19,190 Yang's insight points to an important shift in China's relation to the world, as well as the world's relation to China. 43 00:05:19,190 --> 00:05:24,770 Following Liang, my claim is that beginning from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 44 00:05:24,770 --> 00:05:30,080 China's situation in the emerging world of capitalist expansion leaves China. 45 00:05:30,080 --> 00:05:38,300 Note leaves Chinese no choice but to see and narrate themselves and continually to reconceive of China in the world. 46 00:05:38,300 --> 00:05:41,210 In the world and thus comparatively, 47 00:05:41,210 --> 00:05:49,910 China is so situated explicitly and unavoidably by virtue of the global imperialist extension of capitalist relations of production, 48 00:05:49,910 --> 00:05:55,400 semi colonisation and global circulations of knowledges and ideologies. 49 00:05:55,400 --> 00:06:02,390 It is so situated implicitly and unavoidably because the challenges keenly experienced and discussed by 50 00:06:02,390 --> 00:06:09,020 most thinking people since that time forward always were articulated through and by comparative thinking, 51 00:06:09,020 --> 00:06:15,050 including by comparison to China's newly and continually relative ized past. 52 00:06:15,050 --> 00:06:21,530 This point was constituted in the late ching and beyond through and by the necessity of rhe narrative ization, 53 00:06:21,530 --> 00:06:28,790 albeit not in the sense of Hayden White's linguistic modes or Paul Vecteurs retreat from philosophy rather here. 54 00:06:28,790 --> 00:06:34,010 Narrative indicates an insistence on what Walter Benjamin calls the now time, 55 00:06:34,010 --> 00:06:44,330 a temporality that comprises a struggle between different forms of temp realisation past present future within everyday life and experience. 56 00:06:44,330 --> 00:06:51,650 In this sense, narrative becomes the site of politics, where politics refers to a conceptual mode of and in the histories, 57 00:06:51,650 --> 00:06:59,720 historic sensation and lived experience of time on the historical and narrative question of China. 58 00:06:59,720 --> 00:07:03,860 Then, as we know, China has always been situated in a world. 59 00:07:03,860 --> 00:07:07,940 However, it has not always been situated in the world. 60 00:07:07,940 --> 00:07:13,070 What I mean in this distinction is that the nature of the world and its historical valence, 61 00:07:13,070 --> 00:07:19,220 its material and narrative logic came to signify differently by the late 19th century. 62 00:07:19,220 --> 00:07:24,410 This is because the world itself had become, as at World World Historical for China. 63 00:07:24,410 --> 00:07:33,710 As for everyone else, simply then my contention is that we must see the world or the global or global capitalism as not as some pre-existing, 64 00:07:33,710 --> 00:07:42,980 inert space or process ready to be revealed, but rather than but rather as an historical logic and constant and dynamic becoming. 65 00:07:42,980 --> 00:07:48,440 By the same token, this ever transforming historical logic is one that Chinese have had to interpret, 66 00:07:48,440 --> 00:07:54,500 cope with and help shape and reshape have had to narrate and re narrate and to practise 67 00:07:54,500 --> 00:07:59,780 from the moment when participation in the World Historical became unavoidably necessary. 68 00:07:59,780 --> 00:08:09,350 From the mid to late 19th century onwards. So for conjuncture moments, I may get to two of them. 69 00:08:09,350 --> 00:08:16,490 We'll see, but the first is then the late Cheng, the world, the historical and conjuncture. 70 00:08:16,490 --> 00:08:24,260 And so I go back to 1897, when Liang Chow, my aforementioned as a journalist philosopher, 71 00:08:24,260 --> 00:08:30,050 wrote that what is perhaps the first Chinese analysis of the relationship between the expansionism 72 00:08:30,050 --> 00:08:37,990 of Euro America and Euro American cultural production as a form of necessary narrative relation? 73 00:08:37,990 --> 00:08:45,100 In explaining the tight nexus between ideology, cultural production and conquest, violent imperialism, 74 00:08:45,100 --> 00:08:52,420 Liang wrote quote, I've read Western newspapers and their report on the disorder of the Chinese polity. 75 00:08:52,420 --> 00:08:57,710 This has been going on for the past few decades since September, October last year. 76 00:08:57,710 --> 00:09:00,730 Nineteen eighty nine, 1896. 77 00:09:00,730 --> 00:09:10,990 In other words, they have been even more openly and brazenly publicise publicising how wild and uncivilised the Chinese are, 78 00:09:10,990 --> 00:09:15,670 how ignorant and dishonest, how empty Chinese Confucianism is. 79 00:09:15,670 --> 00:09:24,520 The meaning is clear they will move to eliminate China at once and quote what Liang was pointing to was was that 80 00:09:24,520 --> 00:09:31,480 China appears in a particular light when read through imperialist ideologies of superiority and advancement, 81 00:09:31,480 --> 00:09:37,210 or through the culturally productive binary categories of civilised and uncivilised intended to valorise 82 00:09:37,210 --> 00:09:45,480 the former in its Eurocentric capitalist form and denigrate the latter in its multiple non-Western forms. 83 00:09:45,480 --> 00:09:50,010 China appears differently than when seen in the light of how the ideological production of 84 00:09:50,010 --> 00:09:54,390 backwardness by Euro-American American print media and scholarship for peoples in the world, 85 00:09:54,390 --> 00:10:02,460 whether in Asia, Africa or elsewhere, invites and results in the justifications for invasion and conquest. 86 00:10:02,460 --> 00:10:10,530 It appears differently when we see cultural backwardness as a produced ideological form rather than an existing essence. 87 00:10:10,530 --> 00:10:20,730 This produced ideological form, as Liang lamented, was was being insinuated into the quotidian lives of newspaper readers around the world, 88 00:10:20,730 --> 00:10:30,240 becoming thereby a type of common sensical knowledge. In this late 19th century moment in China, for the very first time someone is a student lounge, 89 00:10:30,240 --> 00:10:38,250 Chow could realise to his certain dismay that China was not uniquely targeted as the object of Euro-American American derision, 90 00:10:38,250 --> 00:10:47,130 colonial conquest and desire. Rather, China was one of many so targeted and indeed was merely one part of a global pattern of imperialist conquest and 91 00:10:47,130 --> 00:10:55,620 ideological denigration that imminently was to swallow an attempt to consume China and others in its messy embrace. 92 00:10:55,620 --> 00:11:00,720 This new perception that cultural production was helping to produce not just a new world, 93 00:11:00,720 --> 00:11:07,440 but the new world of capitalist imperialist colonial expansion was a shatteringly novel idea. 94 00:11:07,440 --> 00:11:15,900 By summer 19 one, just as the punitive expedition that ended the Boxer Rebellion was winding down and the final indemnity 95 00:11:15,900 --> 00:11:21,870 provisions of the and protocol were being hammered out between the chain court and the eight allied powers. 96 00:11:21,870 --> 00:11:28,440 Liang Chow organised his hitherto fragmentary new perceptions into a very into a huge 97 00:11:28,440 --> 00:11:33,880 new essay entitled Quote The New Rules for Destroying Countries Mere Gossip Inside. 98 00:11:33,880 --> 00:11:43,350 But the heart of the essay is a survey of the modern world of modern world history from the perspective of those peoples and states 99 00:11:43,350 --> 00:11:51,240 which had been or were then in the process of being destroyed by what he called the new rules the shin thought to derive the new rules. 100 00:11:51,240 --> 00:12:01,650 Liang specifically comparatively cites the recent histories of Egypt, India, Poland, South Africa and the Philippines in each case, as Liang writes. 101 00:12:01,650 --> 00:12:08,190 non-State foreign actors have used the modern methods of indebtedness, government advisers, financial manipulations, 102 00:12:08,190 --> 00:12:17,100 intervention in domestic politics and monopolisation of commercial routes and finance as ways to insinuate themselves into a country and its systems. 103 00:12:17,100 --> 00:12:25,590 Thus, to facilitate an eventual takeover, Liang warns, one does not have to be directly invaded by a military force to be wiped out. 104 00:12:25,590 --> 00:12:33,870 One can be eaten away from the inside and outside. Simultaneously, he alerts his readers that China is just then undergoing this type of what he calls 105 00:12:33,870 --> 00:12:39,240 formless dismemberment through the boxer indemnities and getting China to Britain, 106 00:12:39,240 --> 00:12:41,430 Japan and the United States. 107 00:12:41,430 --> 00:12:48,420 The excess, the acceptance into the king polity of foreign advisers, the ceding of railway and mining rights for commercial expansion, 108 00:12:48,420 --> 00:12:55,950 along with the extensions of special privileges accorded to foreigners in the treaty ports and other areas. 109 00:12:55,950 --> 00:13:01,710 This have have allowed China to continue to have in name a sovereign government. 110 00:13:01,710 --> 00:13:06,790 But the reality is that China is being wiped out. 111 00:13:06,790 --> 00:13:12,190 Now, this is a powerful interpret, the new rules for destroying countries is a powerful interpretation of the 112 00:13:12,190 --> 00:13:16,810 global modern from the perspective of those who would be it subjugated targets. 113 00:13:16,810 --> 00:13:22,440 Liang sees the world historical in a contemporary globalising form as a tendentious, 114 00:13:22,440 --> 00:13:28,330 unifying, albeit materially uneven and distinct temporality and speciality. 115 00:13:28,330 --> 00:13:32,680 This globalising form unifies the world and the historical under the incessant 116 00:13:32,680 --> 00:13:37,990 drive of capitalist expansion manifested in violent imperialism and colonialism. 117 00:13:37,990 --> 00:13:47,290 Even while it this unifies and creates global unevenness between the world's fractions and within nation states themselves as well. 118 00:13:47,290 --> 00:13:47,890 Indeed, 119 00:13:47,890 --> 00:13:56,740 Yang's final injunction in the essay is that the new rules having been executed in various ways and the locations he surveys precisely constitute 120 00:13:56,740 --> 00:14:04,960 the conditions of a world historical modernity as a global temporality defined by the new structuring structures of imperialist colonialism, 121 00:14:04,960 --> 00:14:10,300 then converging upon China as they were also converging upon others. 122 00:14:10,300 --> 00:14:12,280 As far as Liang Chow was concerned, 123 00:14:12,280 --> 00:14:20,200 it was only through the recognition of how the rules constituted the very modern historical moment in which China participated and was enmeshed. 124 00:14:20,200 --> 00:14:25,390 The Chinese intellectuals and the Chinese state could fully grasp their contemporary situation, 125 00:14:25,390 --> 00:14:32,620 as well as reconceive their history, thus to devise strategies to move beyond it. 126 00:14:32,620 --> 00:14:46,630 I'm going to skip the the my my further comments about the late ching and move to the May 4th moment 1919. 127 00:14:46,630 --> 00:14:49,930 This is the year centenary year of May 4th. 128 00:14:49,930 --> 00:15:00,700 I have been on the May 4th Centenary Circuit now for there's a Global Circuit of Centenary 1919 and I am fully in it. 129 00:15:00,700 --> 00:15:06,640 But let me just say that the coerced incorporation of capitalism into China and China 130 00:15:06,640 --> 00:15:11,560 into capitalism over the course of the 19th century produced by the late century, 131 00:15:11,560 --> 00:15:19,810 the coexistence of different and uneven forms of economic, cultural and temporal practises within China and between China and other places. 132 00:15:19,810 --> 00:15:28,450 Internally, these unevenness could include the advanced urban spaces of industrialisation, consumption leisure such as Shanghai, 133 00:15:28,450 --> 00:15:35,020 alongside the newly relative sized backward rural spaces of poverty, illiteracy and bounce footed women. 134 00:15:35,020 --> 00:15:40,210 The civilised spaces of the euro American Japanese Chinese capital is bourgeois Commodore 135 00:15:40,210 --> 00:15:46,330 order juxtaposed to the uncivilised anarchy of Chinese usurious landlord disorder, 136 00:15:46,330 --> 00:15:54,730 amongst many others. These endlessly created and reproduced unevenness produce products precisely of the global capitalist world. 137 00:15:54,730 --> 00:15:58,990 Historical conjuncture within and without were actualised in politics, 138 00:15:58,990 --> 00:16:10,890 economy and culture through a logic of polyrhythmic everyday life that is lives that only could be lived by contrapuntal comparison. 139 00:16:10,890 --> 00:16:15,120 This was a necessary condition, not a contingent one. 140 00:16:15,120 --> 00:16:23,310 By May 4th, we have the generative inauguration of the mass as a political subject and a subject of politics. 141 00:16:23,310 --> 00:16:29,850 And so the May 4th movement of 1919 created a social rupture and a new time of politics. 142 00:16:29,850 --> 00:16:36,450 That is, if historical temporality had been rethought in a predominantly statist mode in the late spring period, 143 00:16:36,450 --> 00:16:44,880 just 20 20 years before leading to an attempt to construct a new state from the detritus of the towering empire. 144 00:16:44,880 --> 00:16:53,100 The May 4th marks the moment at which historical temporality was fundamentally disagree sacrilege removed from the exclusivity of the state 145 00:16:53,100 --> 00:17:01,740 or its bureaucrat intellectual instantiation and at least potentially relocated to the everyday cultural and economic lives of the masses. 146 00:17:01,740 --> 00:17:10,500 This new struggle came to be inscribed came to inscribe politics as insistently, future oriented and mass generated, 147 00:17:10,500 --> 00:17:15,870 ushering in a host of new political and cultural possibilities and pinhead challenges. 148 00:17:15,870 --> 00:17:24,450 And many of these new possibilities and potentialities, as well as the inherent limitations of them, were framed within a new temporal spatial order. 149 00:17:24,450 --> 00:17:32,640 Named semi colonialism, a term that came to designate not merely an incompletion that is incomplete colonisation, 150 00:17:32,640 --> 00:17:40,170 but more philosophically, precisely the lived social and everyday experience of global capitalist imperialism in China. 151 00:17:40,170 --> 00:17:46,050 In the Post Versailles Treaty period, I have a lot to say about semi colonialism. 152 00:17:46,050 --> 00:17:56,000 I won't say it here. Part of it is in a book I recently published called The Magic of Concepts, published in Nineteen Ninety. 153 00:17:56,000 --> 00:18:00,900 My God, I'm still back in the 20th century in 2017. 154 00:18:00,900 --> 00:18:09,750 OK, so but one of the one of the ways in which I think about semi colonialism is that it 155 00:18:09,750 --> 00:18:19,680 names a the lived experience of modernity as a universal logic of of global capitalism, 156 00:18:19,680 --> 00:18:27,090 a universal condition that can only, however, be lived locally in local time, in local space. 157 00:18:27,090 --> 00:18:36,750 And so it forces people to live their lives comparatively by virtue of experiencing some form of colonisation and semi colonialism could, 158 00:18:36,750 --> 00:18:39,750 of course, just be another name for colonisation. 159 00:18:39,750 --> 00:18:47,760 But it calls, I think it calls particular attention to the multiple clashing levels of life lived at quotidian local, 160 00:18:47,760 --> 00:18:53,640 national and global scales simultaneously. I then move on. 161 00:18:53,640 --> 00:19:05,220 I'm wrapping up. I then move on to to the next conjunct for a moment, which is, of course, the revolutionary years of Mao, 162 00:19:05,220 --> 00:19:14,910 during which I posit that the massive occasion of life that had happened in 1919 and that had 163 00:19:14,910 --> 00:19:22,530 what had been inaugurated in 1919 and became part of a lived experience of of of of life, 164 00:19:22,530 --> 00:19:29,610 becomes part of the grand project and grand failure of Maoism in so far as its 165 00:19:29,610 --> 00:19:36,300 grand project is to reconcile the quotidian with the with the time of politics, 166 00:19:36,300 --> 00:19:47,010 which happens not in the quotidian. And this reconciliation requires a certain kind of of of politics in command, as we know, 167 00:19:47,010 --> 00:19:52,290 was one of the great slogans of the Mao years and to live your life politically, 168 00:19:52,290 --> 00:20:00,820 day in and day out, our in our out became an impossibility and so that the the and became part of the reason that Maoism collapsed. 169 00:20:00,820 --> 00:20:13,860 That's my analysis. And this this this this attempt to in socialism to try to paper over or it not 170 00:20:13,860 --> 00:20:21,250 paper over to to politicise your way out of the unevenness of global capital, 171 00:20:21,250 --> 00:20:33,120 I was had to collapse and did collapse, which yields than the the new historical turn in 1989. 172 00:20:33,120 --> 00:20:49,500 The moment, as Wang Hoi put it, where the capitalists in the socialist world become one again and where the this this past moment of Maoist attempt 173 00:20:49,500 --> 00:21:02,340 at divergence from global capitalist unevenness gets re converged with the world as a world historical logic. 174 00:21:02,340 --> 00:21:10,140 I conclude in a pessimistic mode that unless that we've reached the. 175 00:21:10,140 --> 00:21:16,080 Ecological limits of our current conjuncture, convergence of global capital, 176 00:21:16,080 --> 00:21:24,690 and that unless we grapple with that as a world historical problem, as a problem within global capitalism, we're pretty well doomed. 177 00:21:24,690 --> 00:21:30,390 But that's a little early to to be so, so pessimistic. 178 00:21:30,390 --> 00:21:36,040 But again.