Asian Intellectuals & knowledge production in Academia

Inter-Asian.org - AsianAsian academia(s) is an exploratory investigation into specific dilemma(s) faced by intellectuals in Asia not only in the advancement of social theory and critical knowledge but more importantly within the confines of institutional and political regimes that define modes of knowledge production, regulate social reproduction within the system and entangle knowledge itself into webs of societal relevance. No academia in the world is an ivory tower, yet we seem to think that such an ideal exists or is possible. Intellectual histories are written as though thought can be read and understood in its own terms. 

The accumulation of knowledge is seen largely as an intellectual project, as though it is immune to the disciplinary pressures of the system, priorities of funding, the rule of bureaucracy and demands of political correctness, all of which shape the way we produce, package and disseminate our work, even as everyday routine. To the contrary, no understanding of academia can be complete without seeing how it is embedded within the institutional, political and ideological forces that regulate it. Nor can any understanding of the possibilities of critical knowledge in Asia be complete without deconstructing and reconfiguring the various power relationships that entangle academia to the larger institutional-political context. Lastly, Asian academia is not only the product of local forces but also global ones as well. However, this dialectical interplay between local and global is different in different places and is not, if anything, well understood at present.

The idea that “native” scholars (as opposed to those in the metropole) are in essence local scholars pursuing local studies is a myth perpetrated in the West and reinforced by the prejudices of a global division of labor. Most if not all academics in Asia are Western trained, directly or indirectly. The university and the standards upon which it is based may co-exist with traditional scholarship in non-Western countries, but the institutional forms that cultivate knowledge have long been modern. The postcolonial acknowledgement of the contribution of “diasporic” intellectuals in the West seems to reinforce the notion that “once an ethnic, always an ethnic”.

Scholars working in their country of indigenous origin should be even more “native”, if not nativistic. Yet one often neglects to point out that those Asians who have gone abroad to pursue advanced degrees in the West tend not to be a representative sample of all Asian students. Many of those who studied then remained in the West to teach literature, history and other fields of Asian studies tended to have backgrounds in Western literature and history prior to going abroad, thus differed from those who in their native settings studied Asian literature and history, most of whom stayed home. There have been several generations of Asians teaching in the West, yet in our postcolonial euphoria we seem to think that people like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha were the first “diasporic” intellectuals.
Their qualification as diasporic is in the first instance clearly a reflection of their association with a postcolonial frame of mind that stems from European literary-cultural studies. The epistemological embeddedness of the postcolonial imagination in European literary-cultural studies is symptomatic in turn of the way native or indigenous scholars are defined. Within the global division of labor that has seen Asians trained initially in Western disciplines eventually transform themselves into Asian studies scholars in the West, those Asians pursuing advanced degrees in English or Western literary-cultural studies who returned to their native land have likewise been seen in postcolonial terms as the vanguard of indigenous scholarship. At home, they teach courses on fields of European specialization, but in “international” conferences, they are more likely to play a different role as specialists on Asian postmodernity and other such topics.

Similarly, Asian social scientists doing research on Asia tend to be classified ipso facto in the West as Asianists instead of being associated with their discipline, whatever it may be.

Yet while the emergence of Orientalism and Asian studies in the West can be rightly seen as products of a colonialism or Cold War imperialism, there is no a priori reason to believe that the emergence of knowledge forms in Asia is the product of the same kind of politics, despite academia’s link to the global system. If anything, the frame of reference should be the situatedness of academia to its local institutional frameworks of power and the public domain, however it is locally defined and historically constituted, then the relationship of institutional power to a global arena, which appropriates the latter while being affected by it. The current crisis of academic capitalism in the U.S., like previous crises such as the closing of the American mind, is in the first instance a consequence of U.S. academia’s collusion with large corporate interests (or in the case of the closing of the American mind, the technological corruption of modernization). It is a reflection of academia’s embeddedness to local institutional forces that may not necessarily be constitutive of the norm in other polities. This collusion between academia and business has not only turned academia into a business but also produced structural ramifications that reverberate throughout the system. By polarizing research and teaching priorities, it has stratified disciplines according to their market value, in many cases producing an academic underclass of part-timers, reinforced by various assessment schemes. In contrast to the rest of the world, U.S. academia is more an exception that reflects its traditional dependent relationship to private capital. In Europe and most other countries, in contrast, the central role of the state and its bureaucracies in subsidizing, maintaining and regulating academia has been much more overwhelming and direct. In Asia, by logical extension, the local political context of institutional power that created and continues to regulate academia and academics should be a more appropriate point of departure for understanding the dilemmas of knowledge that arise from it. It should be the basis for defining the possibilities of critical knowledge and social action, not universalizing theories of colonialism and postcolonialism.

The move away from the Eurocentric tendencies of postcolonial (and critical) “theory” parallels then the focus here on recognizing the local empirical ground (as historically constituted, institutionally embedded and culturally defined) for critical debate and action. It goes without saying that these different empirical grounds can not only determine the possibility or applicability of such forms of critical discourse (such as cultural studies or postmodern theories) but can also dictate the feasibility of particular forms of political action that must be coupled with critical discourse. Transforming academia’s institutional embeddedness to its local political context of power and meaning must thus be the goal of critical knowledge and action, not just the formulation of postcolonial epistemologies.


Critical theory + Asia critical Asian studies

“Critical thinkers of the world, unite!” This would appear to be an ideal and appropriate slogan for exploited and disenfranchised intellectuals everywhere. The appropriateness of such a slogan, however, would depend on whether there is a commonality of mindset that defines such critical thinking and the extent to which that common critical mindset is predicated by the same kind of social or political ground. Modernity was the era of grand theory. In retrospect, it is easy to criticize now how certain of those theoretical traditions, such as functionalist theories of the norm, were in fact elaborate reifications of modern society that then became the basis of defining the idealtype of all societies. However, even critical theories in the tradition of Marx and Weber have contributed equally as much to the theoretical language of systems and structures. In applying theory to problems of the world, we often forget that some of our most sophisticated and value-free notions are grounded in analyses of specific institutions of the day. As we all know, Marx’s modes of productions derived from and were predicated in large part on his specific analysis of capitalism. Even the general applicability of Foucault’s notions of discourse and practice may be limited to the institutions of modernity, where symbiotic relationship between the two is particularly intense. The current controversy over postcolonial “theory” highlights the fact that what may be a form of emancipatory critical theory in a Western context can in other contexts refer to a form of tyranny, especially in those cases where nationalist independence was quite literally a struggle for postcolonial emancipation. More importantly, if colonialisms around the world all fundamentally differ, i.e. Third World colonialism differs from settler colonialisms in the U.S., South America and Australia, what common critical mindset could possibly be representative of a postcolonial theory? The very idea of a critical Asian studies that attempts to ally Asianists everywhere or even a brotherhood of scholars in/of Asia, as though unified by the same critical consciousness, should be treated with the same kind of skepticism. Critical solutions for Asia do not consist of applying critical theory (as though defined by some universal standard) to Asia. It consists in the first instance of defining the social and political ground of that society upon which any subsequent theory or critical analysis must be rest. This is an agenda which “concerned scholars” everywhere can engage in. However, the special challenge for scholars in Asia is that they must emancipate themselves from local scholarly discourses that not only have their own intellectual lineages but also are in effect products of an intertwined collusion between state and academia. Just as social scientific and historical disciplines in the West have been polluted by the social and political conditions there (colonialism, modernity, Cold War, etc.) that have given rise to them, one should expect also that Asian intellectual discourses, not to mention the development of the disciplines themselves there, are the product of their own local, historically constituted social and political conditions.

The evolution of Australian cultural studies has highlighted, among other things, the Eurocentrism of British cultural studies in which most of its scholars were trained. Like the literary criticism of certain strands of postcolonial theory, this Eurocentrism was a frame of mind whose mode of critical self-reflection could not go beyond a Eurocentered subject (or object) of study. Students doing colonial studies are trained more in the first instance to problematize European sources of imagination than indigenous sources of data. Asian students hoping to pursue cultural studies in the U.K. are also often hindered by teachers who are unwilling to supervise students on topics beyond their own scope of regional expertise. However, the Eurocentrism endemic to British cultural studies is in this case not just the product of a provincial mindset but also a limitation in the British regime of Ph.D. supervision. In the U.K. system, the tight relationship binding theoretical and empirical supervision typically discourages transcending narrow boundaries. In the U.S. system on the other hand, it is not unusual for teachers to supervise students regardless of geographic specialization. Both in the case of cultural studies and postcolonial studies in the West, knowledge (even of the critical kind) can easily be pigeonholed by narrowness of mindset as well as institutional regime. And in neither case does Western critical theory ground itself in local diversity. Seen from this perspective, Asian scholars studying their own society really share the same critical goals of social scientists and humanists everywhere and relate less to “Asian studies”. Ironically, the fact that Western colleagues view them as “Asianists” is reflective of their own solipsism.

Because indigenization movements in contemporary Asia militate against hybridity and multiculturalism, they tend to be inward-looking. Instead of being imposed from the outside, any local theory of critical knowledge must be able to directly engage nativist fundamentalisms within the same framework of cultural meanings and differences, even while embracing cosmopolitan social values. The search for cultural authenticity is thus less of a relevant concern in this regard than the need to articulate in cultural terms the values of justice and morality.

Because those local frameworks of meaning and power constitute the ground upon which any critical knowledge and action must be predicated, it is difficult to see then how there might be the possibility of a common critical consciousness except in a comparative sense. The inherent cosmopolitanism of Asian critical imaginations must mean also that critical scholars must constantly engage with the outside at the same time as a means of discovering its own local trajectories.


Recognizing the bottom line of Academia: prospects for inter-Asian dialogue

One of the admirable traits of Western humanism has been its universalism, namely its attempt to embrace all within the world into a brotherhood of humanity. Yet this universal humanism represents less an embrace of cosmopolitan values than an extension of its own values of universal enlightenment. Though admirable, the agenda of critical scholars in Asia (if not elsewhere as well) has never been one of becoming “worldly”. In embracing cosmopolitanism, they must in the first instance reject the narrow provincialism of indigenous values associated with the political and other institutional regimes that drive public discourse in different directions. Cosmopolitanism is in a local context the source of social criticism.

Asian academia is a product of unique historical, political and other factors. In South and Southeast Asia, the establishment and evolution of academia owes generally more to the direct hand of colonialism, while in East Asia the relatively less predominant role played by Western imperialism presumably combined also with the tradition of Confucian practices and institutions. However, this suffices only as a broad point of departure. In countries where the educational regime was largely established and maintained by colonial administrations, education and research can continue to have colonizing functions, even long after imperial rule per se. Even with the rise of nationalism, there has always been in each venue a distinctive mixture of global and local influences as well as contrasting political forces that have helped to shape a complex regime of institutional mindsets and practices. Pedagogues will continue to point out the diffusion of different kinds of models from different places that have led to the creation of faculties, modes of teaching and supervision, degree-granting schemes, etc., but the ties that bind the work of academics to their institutions, the priorities of funding that drive research, teaching and publication, disciplinary regimes that define the mobility of people in the system in relation to their work performance, and the role of bureaucracies in institutionalizing administrative and socializing procedures for integrating all of the above, usually get much less attention in analyses of Asian academia. These aspects of the “system” are the mechanisms that really control the production and dissemination of knowledge, thus should have much to say about the possibilities of and obstacles to critical knowledge.


Recognizing the bottom line of Academia: prospects for inter-Asian dialogue

As the Latin American scholar George Yudice once proclaimed, “we are not the world”. We would probably add to it, “we do not try to be in any case”. One of the admirable traits of Western humanism has been its universalism, namely its attempt to embrace all within the world into a brotherhood of humanity. Yet this universal humanism represents less an embrace of cosmopolitan values than an extension of its own values of universal enlightenment. Though admirable, the agenda of critical scholars in Asia (if not elsewhere as well) has never been one of becoming “worldly”. In embracing cosmopolitanism, they must in the first instance reject the narrow provincialism of indigenous values associated with the political and other institutional regimes that drive public discourse in different directions. Cosmopolitanism is in a local context the source of social criticism.

Asian academia is a product of unique historical, political and other factors. In South and Southeast Asia, the establishment and evolution of academia owes generally more to the direct hand of colonialism, while in East Asia the relatively less predominant role played by Western imperialism presumably combined also with the tradition of Confucian practices and institutions. However, this suffices only as a broad point of departure. In countries where the educational regime was largely established and maintained by colonial administrations, education and research can continue to have colonizing functions, even long after imperial rule per se. Even with the rise of nationalism, there has always been in each venue a distinctive mixture of global and local influences as well as contrasting political forces that have helped to shape a complex regime of institutional mindsets and practices. Pedagogues will continue to point out the diffusion of different kinds of models from different places that have led to the creation of faculties, modes of teaching and supervision, degree-granting schemes, etc., but the ties that bind the work of academics to their institutions, the priorities of funding that drive research, teaching and publication, disciplinary regimes that define the mobility of people in the system in relation to their work performance, and the role of bureaucracies in institutionalizing administrative and socializing procedures for integrating all of the above, usually get much less attention in analyses of Asian academia. These aspects of the “system” are the mechanisms that really control the production and dissemination of knowledge, thus should have much to say about the possibilities of and obstacles to critical knowledge.

It is difficult to see how academia is free, except in relation to its systemic constraints. In Asia, where there is a different kind of dependency relationship between state and academia, the peculiar role of academics not just as scholars but also as public figures complicates the task of critical knowledge immensely. The kind of entanglement that characterizes this relationship must also be seen in relation to how such a system produces, disseminates and orders knowledge. The role that certain disciplines play there may also be different from that in the West. Several papers in this issue have, for example, focused on the provincial introspective nature of the social sciences that distinguishes it from its Western counterpart, which can be seen as a product of both nation-building and a global division of labor that tends to privilege the role of natives in studying their own society. On the other hand, the advent of literary criticism and cultural studies has ironically made English literature and media communications departments hotbeds for local critical theories that have clashed with the traditional role of these departments, not to mention competing schools of indigenous studies. In each case, the emergence of new disciplines and thought may challenge existing boundaries, but those boundaries have not just been formed by knowledge alone but also evolved in conjunction with the system and have been maintained over time by firmly entrenched power hierarchies. The latter is different everywhere.

Uncoupling academia from such firmly entrenched institutional frameworks may prove to be difficult anywhere, but a comparative ethnography of academia would be a useful first step in developing critical strategies (not just knowledge) to provide other “routes” for cosmopolitan intervention. In recent years, scholars in various Southeast Asian universities have been actively engaged in initiating exchanges between each other’s institutions as an attempt to broaden the scope of national academia and its inherently nationalist projects. The source of other worldly knowledge has traditionally resided in the West, but regional exchanges of this sort highlight the need not only to share knowledge but also to contrast different experiences of “colonialism” and “nationalism” that have traditionally constituted an obstacle for the emergence of a critical cosmopolitanism. In other instances, these experiences of colonialism and nationalism that link the various nations of Asia can also prove to be an obstacle in the exchange of knowledge and shared consciousness. In both cases, the embeddedness of the academic to his own institution and the embeddedness of institutions to their cultural-political grounding affect the ability of academics to speak as free individuals, not only of but also against (the tyranny of) their own culture. In the final analysis, critical cosmopolitanism is not the return to an indigenous past “before” colonialism but rather the renaissance of a Mediterranean-like multiculturalism that flourished before the advent of various kinds of modern erasures. Most recently, the rise of neo-imperialist globalization in the form of international military intervention and WTO has engendered a new threat to critical cosmopolitanism by reinforcing the hegemony of monolithic state regimes. Thus, the challenges that academics must face are not just intellectual but also political, while at the same time the threats that undermine politics are not just local but inevitably global as well. Knowledge has never been so politicized. Academia has never been less free.