The reemergence of civilizational thinking in the last two decades of the twentieth century and at the heart of capitalist modernity is a defense mechanism, a futile attempt to salvage an outdated mutation of capital and culture at the commencement of the project early in the eighteenth century. At a time when the rapid globalization of capital has dismantled the very viability of national economies, at a time when postmodernism destroyed the cultural production of national cultures, and at a time when poststructuralism has deconstructed the very metaphysics of presence at the heart of the Enlightenment and all its categorical (e.g., civilizational) constructs, retrograde forces like Samuel Huntington, Allan Bloom, or Francis Fukuyama have put up feeble resistance to moral and material forces beyond their, or anybody else’s, control. More than anything else these feckless attempts make for rather pathetic scenes to observe, when outdated good and evil no longer recognize that the changing world has turned them into museum pieces. The phenomenon is not limited to malicious voices like Huntington’s, outdated pieties like Bloom’s, or vested political interests like Fukuyama’s. Far more superior intellects like Richard Rorty and Jacques Barzun are missing the point, too. We are in the midst of massive subterranean changes in the material composition of the world and the moral correspondence to it is yet to come.
As Northrop Frye observed about a quarter of a century ago, the success of the Spenglerian conception of history and the very constitution of the West has been so thorough and so successful that it is now apparently very difficult not just for those who have a vested interest in the ideological construct but even for fairer and more liberal minds to see its historical fabrication.6 But to us at the receiving end of the project in its colonial territories, there is no magic in seeing how the idea emerged and how it celebrated itself. To us it is quite evident that the very categorical constitution of “civilization” is an Enlightenment invention for very specific reasons and objectives, including its beneficiaries, excluding its victims.
The invention of civilizational thinking occurred at a very specific historical juncture in the rise of Enlightenment modernity. Neither the aristocratic nor the ecclesiastical orders of feudalism and scholasticism thought or practiced in civilizational terms. From Hegel’s philosophy of history to Goethe’s conception of Weltliteratur to Johann Gottfried Herder’s idea of world history to Kant’s groundbreaking metaphysics of morals, the very conceptual categories of civilizational thinking were coined and set in motion at the commencement of capitalist modernity. From the dawn of civilizational thinking in Hegel and Herder, to the wake of instrumental rationalism in Max Weber, the collapse of the polyvocality of what had not yet given birth to the very idea of “Europe” as a cultural contingency announced the supratribal formation of the “Western civilization.”
Because of its anxiety related to class legitimacy, and because it could not genealogically compete with either the aristocratic or the ecclesiastical orders, the rising European new class was intuitively drawn to such universal and universalizing abstractions as national cultures and universal civilizations. Formation of national cultures and the civilizational contexts of those cultures was the ideological byproduct of a specific period in the operation of capital. In that nascent configuration of forces and relations of production, the aggressive formation of national economies was the optimal unitary basis for the working of capital and its colonial consequences. National economies and national cultures were first concocted at the metropolitan centers of capital and then gradually extended into the colonial consequences of the project.
Civilizational thinking was therefore a European Enlightenment project to give its rising bourgeoisie a universal frame of collective identity. Western civilization gave universal identity to European national cultures. German, French, and British cultures were thought of as particular manifestations of, so the story unfolded, the Western civilization. While national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, and African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism, as the intelligence arm of colonialism, in order to match, balance, and thus authenticate Western civilization. All non-Western civilizations were therefore invented exactly as such, as negational formulations of the Western, thus authenticating the Western. But there was much more to these non-Western civilizations than simply to authenticate the Western negationally. Hegel subjected all his preceding human history into civilizational stages leading to the Western civilization, thus in effect infantilizing, Orientalizing, exoticizing, and abnormalizing the entire human history as preparatory stages toward their implicated spiritual goal. As colonial nationalism aped and replicated the nationalism of the capital at the European centers of the project, so did Islamic or Indian civilizations mirror, though in a contorted image, the inaugurating principality of Western civilization.
There thus developed a division of labor in the nature and function of national cultures and their civilizational context. While national cultures corresponded to national economies as the analytical unit of the economic working of capital, their constructed civilizational context targeted the colonial consequences of the capital. European national cultures were the domestic expressions of the national economic units of the working capital, while the simultaneous construction of Western civilization identified and distinguished the constellation of these national capitals and cultures from their colonial consequences. Islam, like Africa, China, or India, were simultaneous abstractions invented and animated by the project of Orientalism in the speculum of “The West” as the Civilizational Self of all its colonial Others.
The European national cultures thus emerged as the ideological insignia separating the European national economies as the currencies of cultural exchange value, while the very idea of Western civilization was to distinguish the accrued totality of those cultures and economies from their colonial consequences. It is thus not accidental that practically the entire scholarly apparatus at the service of civilizational studies of non-Western civilizations was the handiwork of Orientalism as the intelligence arm of colonialism. Islamic, Indian, and Chinese civilizations were concocted, crafted, documented, and textualized from scattered bodies of alternating evidence by successive armies of European Orientalists negationally authenticating the simultaneous construction of Western civilization. As from Hegel to Herder, the idea of Western civilization was being crafted; far less illustrious but far more numerous an army of Orientalists was mirroring its civilizational others as Eastern civilizations in general and Islamic, Indian, and so on in particular. As the colonial territories are mined to extract the raw material of a massive productive machinery switchboard in European capitals, the same exploitations are at work on the historical memories and evidence of colonized societies to serve the ideological foregrounding of Western civilization. Oriental texts were exploited by Orientalists to concoct Oriental civilization with the same tenacity and dexterity as the colonial territories were exploited for minerals by colonial officers. Practically all these civilizational mirrors are on the site of the colonial territories of European capital. They were all constructed to raise Western civilization as the normative achievement of world history and lower all others as its abnormal antecedents.
By the sheer force of European capital, conceptions of national cultures and civilizational constructs became the world picture of reality and were hegemonically adapted in colonial territories with the same force as their economies were being incorporated into the global order of capital. Very soon in the colonies too, dynastic, regional, and tribal histories were carved and renarrated into national cultures and placed within the civilizational constructs—Islamic, Indian, and Chinese. Iranian, Egyptian, and Turkish cultures were carved out of scattered memories and evidence and placed within the general rubric of the Islamic civilization, to match and contest, and thus to authenticate and superordinate, Western civilization. Thus, on the colonial territories, fabricated national cultures and civilizational contexts became the sites of hegemonic incorporation into the project of capitalist modernity, though from its colonial end. The more political nationalism functioned as a site of resistance to colonialism, the more cultural nationalism incorporated vast bodies of extraterritorial resistances to the project of capitalist modernity. We have launched nationalist movements against colonialism just to entrap ourselves ever so thoroughly in the project, having been modernized from the colonial end of the capital.
The people plotted into Islamic civilization (or Indian, Chinese, or African civilization) did not of course roll over and play dead to authenticate Western civilization. These colonial fabrications in turn became the sites of sustained ideological resistance to colonialism. In the case of Islamic civilization, as in others, the colonially constructed site began to mutate into a site of resistance to colonialism and called itself “Islamic ideology.” The result was the production of a knowledge industry, a journalistic offshoot of Orientalism, that began to brand moral and material resistance to imperialism “Islamic fundamentalism” and use it as a ploy to authenticate the civilizational superiority of the West and the barbaric inferiority of the rest. Barnard Lewis became the doyen of this journalistic extension of old-fashioned Orientalism, and in a massive narrative output continued to authenticate Islamic civilization as the supreme civilizational other of Western civilization. Meanwhile native informers as varied as Fouad Ajami, Bassam Tibi, Fatima Mernissi, and Daryush Shayegan doubly authenticated the passivity of Islamic civilization by having it take, as Shayegan put it, a “vacation from history.”
A quick look at the United States, which is by far the most aggressively mutated national economy and national culture, reveals that we can no longer think of this country as having a claim over either side of the same coin. The influx of migratory labor into the United States has initially created a so-called “multicultural” society to which conservative thinkers like Huntington, Fukuyama, Bloom, Barzun, and others have violently reacted. Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilizations is a disturbed reaction to this phase of cultural confusion at the heart of the globalizing capital. What he and his cohorts do not understand is that they are quite late in responding, and that they are responding to something already on its way to change. Their real heartbreak is yet to come. This so-called multicultural phase to which Huntington and co. have responded so violently is only a transitory period in the modular reconfiguration of capital and labor. The real fireworks are yet to come. This transitory multiculturalism we witness today in the United States and in Western Europe will soon give way to the logic of the globalizing capital that has already entered its electronic phase. “Asians and Latinos in the United States, South Asians in England, Turks in Germany, Indians and Koreans in the Persian Gulf—samples of a far more massive migratory pattern of labor and capital—are now the prime examples of a spiral movement that will utterly shatter not only the unit of national economy but also its constituent conception of national cultures. From the new configuration of global capital and labor, the material basis of a new culture, which is neither nationally cultural nor recognizably multicultural, is already evident. That material reconfiguration of capital and labor is generating its own culture, which is at once postnational and as a result postcivilizational.
–Hamid Dabashi, On Edward Said - Remembrance of Things Past, 2020, pp. 16-22
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