My talk today or the paper that I prepared today is an attempt to think about how Chinese thought global capitalism when
it impinged upon them and and when it became unavoidable for them to think through its various categories in terms,
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,
very different, I think they actually do in some weird way, speak to one another.
OK, so my remarks are organised around the historical philosophical problem that we can name following Hegel the world historical.
But unlike Hegel, who abstracted the philosophical historical from material historicity, I'm specifically concerned with the world.
Historical is the way in which abstraction was incorporated into the material and ideological historicity of life.
That is, the way in which abstraction became a particular mode of enquiry into an a way of apprehending material.
Historical experience and the commodity form could be one of those abstractions, amongst many others.
I begin then with the problem of the world historical as a problem that emerged at a particular moment in time,
rather than one that existed in latent form ready, ready to become manifest to converge or diverge at any time.
In this idiom, the World Historical cannot be taken to mean commonsensical, a latent supra historical or internalising force.
It cannot mean purely an endurance or persistence through the empty time of history as chronology.
It cannot be posited be a posited existence whose emergence need not be accounted for materially, historically or theoretically.
Rather, the world historical is a particular form of temporality, a particular type of historicity, a particular production of knowledge.
If we do not specify this clearly evoking the term and concept of the world historical
or global capitalism could merely confirm the world as we think we know it today,
as if all of history were inevitably leading us to converge with or diverge from the present moment.
Again, the logic of against this logic of confirmation until theology, I want to claim that to understand the problem of the world historical,
we need to understand the problem of the world and the historical in their conjoining.
That is, we need to familiarise both. In this sense, the world historical is a mode, a logic.
A temporality requires that we see that it names a conjuncture, a particular form of historicity,
rather than the unmasking manifestation of a latent tendency present since the dawn of time.
Naming the world historical to conduct a conjuncture as a tendentious total rising
form requires that we see that once the world and the historical become conjoined,
inextricably interlocked, not only by abstract logic or by contingency, but by the material lived necessity.
We enter an extended moment of code temporality and as I see it,
then the task of of of an enquiry into this code temporality is to understand the particularities of that conjuncture,
which in part means to reanimate for our present conjuncture a genuine sense of possibility and urgency.
So my discussion is shaped by how we might understand how and when the world and the
historical became inextricably linked in Chinese thought and material practise,
and thus how and when comparison and comparability became the inevitable mode of apprehending this question.
One abstract answer to this question is the comparison.
Thus, the world conjoined to the historical is an important modern ideology in that it can make present in a film.
It makes present in a de familiarising way rather than inscribing essences as if always already known.
But meanwhile, my short historical answer to the question about the unavailability of comparability and thus of the conjoining
of the world and the historical in China would be that comparison is unavoidable because as Liang Chow,
a leading Chinese intellectual of the late 19th early 20th century, observed with mordant humour and knowing resignation.
Even if you are not interested in the world, the world is interested in you.
Liang's observation in the opiaion opening years of the 20th century was situated at a moment when Euro American
and increasingly Japanese capitalist imperialism was carving China up like a melon in the parlance of the day.
Yang's insight points to an important shift in China's relation to the world, as well as the world's relation to China.
Following Liang, my claim is that beginning from the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
China's situation in the emerging world of capitalist expansion leaves China.
Note leaves Chinese no choice but to see and narrate themselves and continually to reconceive of China in the world.
In the world and thus comparatively,
China is so situated explicitly and unavoidably by virtue of the global imperialist extension of capitalist relations of production,
semi colonisation and global circulations of knowledges and ideologies.
It is so situated implicitly and unavoidably because the challenges keenly experienced and discussed by
most thinking people since that time forward always were articulated through and by comparative thinking,
including by comparison to China's newly and continually relative ized past.
This point was constituted in the late ching and beyond through and by the necessity of rhe narrative ization,
albeit not in the sense of Hayden White's linguistic modes or Paul Vecteurs retreat from philosophy rather here.
Narrative indicates an insistence on what Walter Benjamin calls the now time,
a temporality that comprises a struggle between different forms of temp realisation past present future within everyday life and experience.
In this sense, narrative becomes the site of politics, where politics refers to a conceptual mode of and in the histories,
historic sensation and lived experience of time on the historical and narrative question of China.
Then, as we know, China has always been situated in a world.
However, it has not always been situated in the world.
What I mean in this distinction is that the nature of the world and its historical valence,
its material and narrative logic came to signify differently by the late 19th century.
This is because the world itself had become, as at World World Historical for China.
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,
inert space or process ready to be revealed, but rather than but rather as an historical logic and constant and dynamic becoming.
By the same token, this ever transforming historical logic is one that Chinese have had to interpret,
cope with and help shape and reshape have had to narrate and re narrate and to practise
from the moment when participation in the World Historical became unavoidably necessary.
From the mid to late 19th century onwards. So for conjuncture moments, I may get to two of them.
We'll see, but the first is then the late Cheng, the world, the historical and conjuncture.
And so I go back to 1897, when Liang Chow, my aforementioned as a journalist philosopher,
wrote that what is perhaps the first Chinese analysis of the relationship between the expansionism
of Euro America and Euro American cultural production as a form of necessary narrative relation?
In explaining the tight nexus between ideology, cultural production and conquest, violent imperialism,
Liang wrote quote, I've read Western newspapers and their report on the disorder of the Chinese polity.
This has been going on for the past few decades since September, October last year.
Nineteen eighty nine, 1896.
In other words, they have been even more openly and brazenly publicise publicising how wild and uncivilised the Chinese are,
how ignorant and dishonest, how empty Chinese Confucianism is.
The meaning is clear they will move to eliminate China at once and quote what Liang was pointing to was was that
China appears in a particular light when read through imperialist ideologies of superiority and advancement,
or through the culturally productive binary categories of civilised and uncivilised intended to valorise
the former in its Eurocentric capitalist form and denigrate the latter in its multiple non-Western forms.
China appears differently than when seen in the light of how the ideological production of
backwardness by Euro-American American print media and scholarship for peoples in the world,
whether in Asia, Africa or elsewhere, invites and results in the justifications for invasion and conquest.
It appears differently when we see cultural backwardness as a produced ideological form rather than an existing essence.
This produced ideological form, as Liang lamented, was was being insinuated into the quotidian lives of newspaper readers around the world,
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,
Chow could realise to his certain dismay that China was not uniquely targeted as the object of Euro-American American derision,
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
ideological denigration that imminently was to swallow an attempt to consume China and others in its messy embrace.
This new perception that cultural production was helping to produce not just a new world,
but the new world of capitalist imperialist colonial expansion was a shatteringly novel idea.
By summer 19 one, just as the punitive expedition that ended the Boxer Rebellion was winding down and the final indemnity
provisions of the and protocol were being hammered out between the chain court and the eight allied powers.
Liang Chow organised his hitherto fragmentary new perceptions into a very into a huge
new essay entitled Quote The New Rules for Destroying Countries Mere Gossip Inside.
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
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.
Liang specifically comparatively cites the recent histories of Egypt, India, Poland, South Africa and the Philippines in each case, as Liang writes.
non-State foreign actors have used the modern methods of indebtedness, government advisers, financial manipulations,
intervention in domestic politics and monopolisation of commercial routes and finance as ways to insinuate themselves into a country and its systems.
Thus, to facilitate an eventual takeover, Liang warns, one does not have to be directly invaded by a military force to be wiped out.
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
formless dismemberment through the boxer indemnities and getting China to Britain,
Japan and the United States.
The excess, the acceptance into the king polity of foreign advisers, the ceding of railway and mining rights for commercial expansion,
along with the extensions of special privileges accorded to foreigners in the treaty ports and other areas.
This have have allowed China to continue to have in name a sovereign government.
But the reality is that China is being wiped out.
Now, this is a powerful interpret, the new rules for destroying countries is a powerful interpretation of the
global modern from the perspective of those who would be it subjugated targets.
Liang sees the world historical in a contemporary globalising form as a tendentious,
unifying, albeit materially uneven and distinct temporality and speciality.
This globalising form unifies the world and the historical under the incessant
drive of capitalist expansion manifested in violent imperialism and colonialism.
Even while it this unifies and creates global unevenness between the world's fractions and within nation states themselves as well.
Indeed,
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
the conditions of a world historical modernity as a global temporality defined by the new structuring structures of imperialist colonialism,
then converging upon China as they were also converging upon others.
As far as Liang Chow was concerned,
it was only through the recognition of how the rules constituted the very modern historical moment in which China participated and was enmeshed.
The Chinese intellectuals and the Chinese state could fully grasp their contemporary situation,
as well as reconceive their history, thus to devise strategies to move beyond it.
I'm going to skip the the my my further comments about the late ching and move to the May 4th moment 1919.
This is the year centenary year of May 4th.
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.
But let me just say that the coerced incorporation of capitalism into China and China
into capitalism over the course of the 19th century produced by the late century,
the coexistence of different and uneven forms of economic, cultural and temporal practises within China and between China and other places.
Internally, these unevenness could include the advanced urban spaces of industrialisation, consumption leisure such as Shanghai,
alongside the newly relative sized backward rural spaces of poverty, illiteracy and bounce footed women.
The civilised spaces of the euro American Japanese Chinese capital is bourgeois Commodore
order juxtaposed to the uncivilised anarchy of Chinese usurious landlord disorder,
amongst many others. These endlessly created and reproduced unevenness produce products precisely of the global capitalist world.
Historical conjuncture within and without were actualised in politics,
economy and culture through a logic of polyrhythmic everyday life that is lives that only could be lived by contrapuntal comparison.
This was a necessary condition, not a contingent one.
By May 4th, we have the generative inauguration of the mass as a political subject and a subject of politics.
And so the May 4th movement of 1919 created a social rupture and a new time of politics.
That is, if historical temporality had been rethought in a predominantly statist mode in the late spring period,
just 20 20 years before leading to an attempt to construct a new state from the detritus of the towering empire.
The May 4th marks the moment at which historical temporality was fundamentally disagree sacrilege removed from the exclusivity of the state
or its bureaucrat intellectual instantiation and at least potentially relocated to the everyday cultural and economic lives of the masses.
This new struggle came to be inscribed came to inscribe politics as insistently, future oriented and mass generated,
ushering in a host of new political and cultural possibilities and pinhead challenges.
And many of these new possibilities and potentialities, as well as the inherent limitations of them, were framed within a new temporal spatial order.
Named semi colonialism, a term that came to designate not merely an incompletion that is incomplete colonisation,
but more philosophically, precisely the lived social and everyday experience of global capitalist imperialism in China.
In the Post Versailles Treaty period, I have a lot to say about semi colonialism.
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.
My God, I'm still back in the 20th century in 2017.
OK, so but one of the one of the ways in which I think about semi colonialism is that it
names a the lived experience of modernity as a universal logic of of global capitalism,
a universal condition that can only, however, be lived locally in local time, in local space.
And so it forces people to live their lives comparatively by virtue of experiencing some form of colonisation and semi colonialism could,
of course, just be another name for colonisation.
But it calls, I think it calls particular attention to the multiple clashing levels of life lived at quotidian local,
national and global scales simultaneously. I then move on.
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,
during which I posit that the massive occasion of life that had happened in 1919 and that had
what had been inaugurated in 1919 and became part of a lived experience of of of of life,
becomes part of the grand project and grand failure of Maoism in so far as its
grand project is to reconcile the quotidian with the with the time of politics,
which happens not in the quotidian. And this reconciliation requires a certain kind of of of politics in command, as we know,
was one of the great slogans of the Mao years and to live your life politically,
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.
That's my analysis. And this this this this attempt to in socialism to try to paper over or it not
paper over to to politicise your way out of the unevenness of global capital,
I was had to collapse and did collapse, which yields than the the new historical turn in 1989.
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
at divergence from global capitalist unevenness gets re converged with the world as a world historical logic.
I conclude in a pessimistic mode that unless that we've reached the.
Ecological limits of our current conjuncture, convergence of global capital,
and that unless we grapple with that as a world historical problem, as a problem within global capitalism, we're pretty well doomed.
But that's a little early to to be so, so pessimistic.
But again.