Fluent Essays

2 PAGES double spaces MLA1 page for each parts.Do not write a summary, write what you think after you read it.Part 1Read Hall_1992_The West and the Rest for part 1 L5 Part 2Read Bernstein_2000_Colonialism Capitalism Development for Part 2 L6You Required to use these 2 reading in each part, but you can connect to 2 Recommended Reading, but its not required.You should focus on 2 main readings, use examples to explain your ideas. Guidelines for ResponsesYou are assessed on your thoughtful engagement with the material. Please do not post a summary.Your response should bring up substantive comments and questions with regard to thereading at hand and the broader themes in the class.You may choose to relate what you read to some part of your daily life, current events, orsome other situation, policy debate, etc..Responses can be speculative, propose applications, or pose critiques hall_1992_the_west_and_the_rest.pdf bernstein_2000_colonialism_capitalism_development.pdf said_1978_orientalism_intro.pdf marx_1848_engels_communist_manifesto.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview THE 6 The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power Contents -.- --_._-----------_ 1 1.1 Introduction Where and what is the West? 185 185 2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Europe Breaks Out When and how did expansion begin? Five main phases The Age of Exploration Breaking the frame The consequences of expansion for the idea of the West 189 189 190 191 195 197 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 Discourse and Power What is a discourse? Discourse and ideology Can a discourse be innocent? 201 201 202 203 4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 Representing the Other Orientalism The archive A regime of truth Idealization Sexual fantasy Mis-recognizing difference Rituals of degradation Summary: stereotypes, dualism, and splitting 205 205 206 208 209 210 211 213 215 5 5.1 5.2 5.3 In the Beginning All the World was America Are they true men? Noble vs ignoble savages The history of rude and refined nations 216 216 217 219 6 From the West and the Rest to Modem Sociology 221 7 Conclusion 224 ... _- AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 185 1 Introduction Stuart Hall References WEST 225 The first five chapters of this book examine the long historical processes through which a new type of society - advanced, developed, and industrial - emerged. They chart in broad outline the paths by which this society reached what is now called modernity. This chapter explores the role which societies outside Europe played in this process. It examines how an idea of the West and the Rest was constituted; how relations between western and non-western societies came to be represented. We refer to this as the formation of the discourse of the West and the Rest. 1.1 Where and what is the West? This question puzzled Christopher Columbus and remains puzzling today. Nowadays, many societies aspire to become western - at least in terms of achieving western standards of living. But in Columbuss day (the end of the fifteenth century), going West was important mainly because it was believed to be the quickest route to the fabulous wealth of the East. Indeed, even though it should have become clear to Columbus that the New World he had found was not the East, he never ceased to believe that it was, and even spiced his reports with outlandish claims: on his fourth voyage, he still insisted that he was close to Quinsay (the Chinese city now called Hangchow), where the Great Khan lived, and probably approaching the source of the Four Rivers of Paradise! Our ideas of East and West have never been free of myth and fantasy, and even to this day they are not primarily ideas about place and geography. We have to use short-hand generalizations, like West and western, but we need to remember that they represent very complex ideas and have no simple or single meaning. At first sight, these words may seem to be about matters of geography and location. But even this, on inspection, is not straightforward since we also use the same words to refer to a type of society, a level of development, and so on. Its true that what we call the West, in this second sense, did first emerge in Western Europe. But the West is no longer only in Europe, and not all of Europe is in the West. The historian John Roberts has remarked that Europeans have long been unsure about where Europe ends in the east. In the west and to the south, the sea provides a splendid marker ... but to the east the plains roll on and on and the horizon is awfully remote (Roberts, 1985, p. 149). Eastern Europe doesnt (doesnt yet? never did?) belong properly to the West; whereas the United States, which is not in Europe, definitely does. These days, technologically speaking, Japan is western, though on our mental map it is about as far East as you can get. By comparison, much of Latin America, which is in the western hemisphere, belongs economically to the Third World, which is struggling - not very successfully - to catch up with the West. What are these different 186 187 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER societies east and west of, exactly? Clearly, the West is as much an idea as a fact of geography. The underlying premise of this chapter is that the West is a historical, not a geographical, construct. By western we mean the type of society discussed in this book: a society that is developed, industrialized, urbanized, capitalist, secular, and modern. Such societies arose at a particular historical period - roughly, during the sixteenth century, after the Middle Ages and the break-up of feudalism. They were the result of a specific set of historical processes economic, political, social, and cultural. Nowadays, any society which shares these characteristics, wherever it exists on a geographical map, can be said to belong to the West. The meaning of this term is therefore virtually identical to that of the word modern. Its formations are what we have been tracing in the earlier chapters in this book. This chapter builds on that earlier story. The West is therefore also an idea, a concept - and this is what interests us most in this chapter. How did the idea, the language, of the West arise, and what have been its effects? What do we mean by calling it a concept? The concept or idea of the West can be seen to function in the following ways: First, it allows us to characterize and classify societies into different categories - i.e. western, non-western. It is a tool to think with. It sets a certain structure of thought and knowledge in motion. Secondly, it is an image, or set of images. It condenses a number of different characteristics into one picture. It calls up in our minds eye it represents in verbal and visual language - a composite picture of what different societies, cultures, peoples, and places are like. It functions as part of a language, a system of representation. (I say system because it doesnt stand on its own, but works in conjunction with other images and ideas with which it forms a set: for example, western = urban = developed; or non-western = non-industrial = rural = agricultural = under-developed.) Thirdly, it provides a standard or model of comparison. It allows us to compare to what extent different societies resemble, or differ from, one another. Non-western societies can accordingly be said to be close to or far away from or catching up with the West. It helps to explain difference. Fourthly, it provides criteria of evaluation against which other societies are ranked and around which powerful positive and negative feelings cluster. (For example, the West = developed = good = desirable; or the non-West = under-developed = bad = undesirable.) It produces a certain kind of knowledge about a subject and certain attitudes towards it. In short, it functions as an ideology. This chapter will discuss all these aspects of the idea of the West. We know that the West itself was produced by certain historical processes operating in a particular place in unique (and perhaps unrepeatable) historical circumstances. Clearly, we must also think of the idea of the West as having been produced in a similar way. These two aspects are in fact deeply connected, though exactly how is one of the big puzzles in sociology. We cannot attempt to resolve here the ageold sociological debate as to which came first: the idea of the West, or western societies. What we can say is that; as these societies emerged, so a concept and language of the West crystallized. And yet, we can be certain that the idea of the West did not simply reflect an already-established western society: rather, it was essential to the very formation of that society. What is more, the idea of the West, once produced, became productive in its turn. It had real effects: it enabled people to know or speak of certain things in certain ways. It produced knowledge. It became both the organizing factor in a system of global power relations and the organizing concept or term in a whole way of thinking and speaking. The central concern of this chapter is to analyze the formation of a particular pattern of thought and language, a system of representation, which has the concepts of the West and the Rest at its center. The emergence of an idea of the West was central to the Enlightenment, which was discussed at length in chapter 1. The Enlightenment was a very European affair. European society, it assumed, was the most advanced type of society on earth, European man (sic) the pinnacle of human achievement. It treated the West as the result of forces largely internal to Europes history and formation. However, in this chapter we argue that the rise of the West is also a global story. As Roberts observes, Modem history can be defined as the approach march to the age dominated by the West (Roberts, 1985, p. 41). The West and the Rest became two sides of a single coin. What each now is, and what the terms we use to describe them mean, depend on the relations which were established between them long ago. The so-called uniqueness of the West was, in part, produced by Europes contact and self-comparison with other, non-western, societies (the Rest), very different in their histories, ecologies, patterns of development, and cultures from the European model. The difference of these other societies and cultures from the West was the standard against which the Wests achievement was measured. It is within the context of these relationships that the idea of the West took on shape and meaning. The importance of such perceived difference needs itself to be understood. Some modern theorists of language have argued that meaning always depends on the relations that exist between the different terms or words within a -meaning system (see chapter 5). Accordingly, we know what night means because it is different from - in fact, opposite to - day. The French linguist who most influenced this approach to meaning, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1912), argued that the words night and day on their own cant mean anything; it is the difference between night and day which enables these words to carry meaning (to signify). Likewise, many psychologists and psychoanalysts argue that an infant first learns to think of itself as a separate and unique self by 188 OF MODERNITY recognizing its separation - its difference - from others (principally, of course, its mother). By analogy, national cultures acquire their strong sense of identity by contrasting themselves with other cultures. Thus we argue, the Wests sense of itself - its identity - was formed not o~y by the internal processes that gradually molded Western European countries into a distinct type of society, but also through Europes sense of difference from other worlds - how it came to represent itself in relation to these others. In reality, differences often shade imperceptibly into each other. (When exactly does night become day? Where exactly does being English end and being Scottish begin?) But, in order to function at all, we seem to need distinct, positive concepts, many of which are sharply polarized towards each other. As chapter 5 argues, such binary oppositions seem to be fundamental to all linguistic and symbolic systems and to the production of meaning itself. This chapter, then, is about the role which the Rest played in the formation of the idea of the West and a western sense of identity. At a certain moment, the fates of what had been, for many centuries, separate and distinct worlds became - some would say, fatally harnessed together ~n the same historical time-frame. They became related elements .in the same discourse, or way of speaking. They became different parts of one global social, economic, and cultural system, one interdependent world, one language. A word of warning must be entered here. In order to bring out the distinctiveness of this West and the Rest discourse, I have been obliged to be selective and to simplify my representation of the West, and you should bear this in mind as you read. Terms like the West and the Rest are historical and linguistic constructs whose meanings change over time. More importantly, there are many different discourses, or ways in which the West came to speak of and represent other cultures. Some, like the West and the Rest, were very westerncentered, or Eurocentric. Others, however, which I do not have space tD discuss here, were much more culturally relativistic. I have elected to focus on what I call the discourse of the West and the Rest because it became a very common and influential discoUrse, helping to shape public perceptions and attitudes down to the present. Another qualification concerns the very term the West, which makes the West appear unified and homogeneous - essentially one place, with one view about other cultures and one way of speaking about them. Of course, this is not the case. The West has always contained many internal differences - between different nations, between Eastern and Western Europe, between the Germanic Northern and the Latin Southern cultures, between the Nordic, Iberian, and Mediterranean peoples, and so on. Attitudes towards other cultures within the West varied widely, as they still do between, for example, the British, the Spanish, the French, and the German. It is also important to remember that, as well as treating nonEuropean cultures as different and inferior, the West had its own internal others. Jews, in particular, though close to western religious traditions, were frequently excluded and ostracized. West Europeans :, I i~ .;_ -,.~-::;v FORMATIONS . .. _ THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 189 often regarded Eastern Europeans as barbaric, and, throughout the West, western women were represented as inferior to western men. The same necessary simplification is true of my references to the Rest. This term also covers enormous historical, cultural, and economic distinctions - for example, between the Middle East, the Far East, Africa, Latin America, indigenous North America, and Australasia. It can equally encompass the simple societies of some North American Indians and the developed civilizations of China, Egypt, or Islam. These extensive differences must be borne in mind as you study the analysis of the discourse of the West arid the Rest in this chapter. However, we can actually use this simplification to make a point about discourse. For simplification is precisely what this discourse itself does. It represents things which are in fact very differentiated (the different European cultures) as homogeneous (the West). And it asserts that these different cultures are united by one thing: the fact that they are all different from the Rest. Similarly, the Rest, though different among themselves, are represented as the same in the sense that they are all different from the West. In short, the discourse, as a system of representation, represents the world as divided according to a simple dichotomy - the West/the Rest. That is what makes the discourse of the West and the Rest so destructive - it draws crude and simplistic distinctions and constructs an over-simplified conception of difference. 2 Europe Breaks Out In what follows, you should bear in mind the evolution of the system of European nation-states discussed in chapter 2. The voyages of discovery were the beginning of a new era, one of world-wide expansion by Europeans, leading in due course to an outright, if temporary, European ... domination of the globe (Roberts, 1985, p. 175). In this section we offer a broad sketch of the early stages of this process of expansion. When did it begin? What were its main phases? What did- it break out from? Why did it occur? 2.1 When and how did expansion begin? Long historical processes have no exact beginning or end, and are difficult to date precisely. You will remember the argument in chapter 2 that a particular historical pattern is the result of the interplay between a number of different causal processes. In order to describe them, we are forced to work within very rough-and-ready chronologies and to use historical generalizations which cover long periods and pick out the broad patterns, but leave much of the detail aside. There is nothing wrong with this - historical sociology would be impossible without it - provided we know at what level of generality our argument is working. For example, if we are answering the question, When did Western Europe first industrialize?, it may be sufficient to say, During 190 FORMATIONS OF MODERNITY THE WEST AND THE REST: DISCOURSE AND POWER 191 the second half of the eighteenth century. However, a close study of the origins of industrialization in, say, Lancashire, would require a more refined time-scale. (For further discussion of this point, see the Introduction to part I.) We can date the onset of the expansion process roughly in relation to two key events: 5 on 1 2 The early Portuguese explorations of the African coast (1430-98); and Columbuss voyages to the New World (1492-1502). Broadly speaking, European expansion coincides with the ~nd of what we call the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern age. Feudalism was already in decline in Western Europe, while trade, co~erce, and the market were expanding. The centralized monarchies of France, England, and Spain were emerging (see chapter 2). Europe was on the threshold of a long, secular boom in productivity, improving standards of living, rapid population growth, and that explosion in art, learning, science, scholarship, and knowledge known as the Renaissance. (Leonardo da Vinci had designed flying machines and submarines prior to 1519; Michelangelo started work on the Sistine Chapel in 1508; Thomas Mores Utopia appeared in 1516.) For much of the Middle Ages, the arts of civilization had been more developed in China and the Islamic world than in Europe. Many historians would agree with Michael Mann that the point at which Europe overtook Asia must have been about 1450, the period of European naval expansion and the Galilean revolution in science; though as Mann also argues, many of the processes which made this possible had earlier origins (Mann, 1988, p. 7). We will return to this question at the end of the section. 2.2 Five main phases The process of expansion phases: 1 2 3 4 -;.. i I~. can be divided, broadly, into five main The period of exploration, when Europe discovered many of the new worlds for itself for the first time (they all, of course, already existed). The period of early contact, conquest, settlement, and colonization, when large parts of these new worlds were first annexed to Europe as possessions, or harnessed through trade. The time during which the shape of permanent European settlement, colonization, or exploitation was established (e.g. plantation societies in North America and the Caribbean; mining and ranching in Latin America; the rubber and tea plantations of India, Ceylon, and the East Indies). Capitalism now emerged as a global market. The phase when the scramble for colonies, markets, and raw materials reached its climax. This was the high noon of Imperialism, and led into World War I and the twentieth century. The present, when much of the world is economically dependent the West, even when formally independent and decolonized. There are no neat divisions between these phases, which often overlapped. For example, although the main explorations of Australia occurred in our first phase, the continents shape was not finally known until after Cooks voyages in the eighteenth century. Similarly, the Portuguese first circumnavigated Africa in the fifteenth century, yet the exploration of the African interior below the Sahara and the scramble for African colonies is really a nineteenth-cent ... Purchase answer to see full attachment