The Best Defense

Intra-Civilizational Dynamics and the Cartoon Controversy; Or, Traveling Theory and Equilibrium in the New Politics

Despite common belief, equilibrium does not mean that two opposing forces are equal, as two sets of weights on a scale that doesn’t tip one way or the other. Rather, it means that the resultant between two forces is zero, as in a chemical reaction where the rate of exchange one way equals the rate of exchange the other way. In other words, equilibrium doesn’t denote a static set condition, but rather a set of (nondelimiting dynamic) conditions which is grounded because all directional forces have the same magnitude or strength, albeit and necessarily in opposite directions.

***

The cartoon controversy plays out in two dimensions. The primary is religious; the secondary, political and historical. Despite a distinct public emphasis on the second, it is the religious dimension of the argument which gives credence to the mass protests and global uproar so well documented all over the world. This uproar, however, should not come as a surprise. Scholars in the field know well that there are elements of a core system which do not, cannot, change over time. Religion is perhaps the ideal system in this case: a prefigured social ideology, it does not sway with public opinion, it isn’t based on polls, it remains through the comings and goings of dynasties, regimes, and presidencies. Whatever new or fashionable literary criticisms, interpretive tools, or postmodernist trends surface today or tomorrow, they will not, cannot, change the rhyme or rhythm of a religion, by definition and vocation, a rock of permanence amidst apparent change.

Thus if there is anyone who should have seen the cartoon controversy coming, it is the scholars. Politicians, press corps, and news agencies must understand things on the move, learning as they report, grasping for a mastery of the whole as they broadcast succinctly and (in most cases) sensationally the parts, the small details that can be captured in three or less words on a newspaper headline or ticker. But scholars are the long-term analysts, the global forecasters sitting in think tanks, by vocation able to produce the studies which reach to the heart of a matter, highlight its pertinent details, and deliver a conclusion which both informs in summation and enlightens in analysis. That said, no real reporting of this kind has surfaced. That the late Harvard scholar of comparative religion, William Cantwell Smith, observed more than twenty years ago, “Muslims will allow attacks on Allah; there are atheists, atheistic publications, and rationalistic societies; but to disparage Muhammad will provoke from even the most ‘liberal’ sections of the community a fanaticism of blazing vehemence,” [1] proves the long range credibility and the attention that should be paid to these types of analysis, the only real analysis worth attention. The question then becomes, why are the essential elements of this phenomenon, the religious elements, taken as peripheral explanations, while artificial information such as which embassies were set to fire or how much the Danish export industry has suffered takes center stage? A vibrant and powerful alignment of public interest with actual intellectual substance is going untapped, because, reified, we prefer the immediate and concrete bits of knowledge to the long term analysis which enables productive “multi-spherical” communication.

One good reason for the absence of penetrating analysis, as Dr. Crane has written, is that the cartoon controversy is too good an example of too many profound developments in an already complex phenomenon to rush into a release of self-inflated essays of (real) intellectual import. On the other hand, the primary dimension of this case, the religious, is not a mystery. Scholars of both East and West have written on Islam and Muhammad’s place within its ideological structure for over a century now; as Smith’s abovementioned quote testifies, these truths are textual, thus intransient; they do not change, and neither to their adherents, their believers, their efficacy. But if perhaps patience is the best policy towards the integration of an accurate global forecast with religious textuality at its core, the second dimension of the dispute is ripe for the taking, if not overexposed, as myriad articles, essays, op-eds and blogs identical in structure, transparent in method, and artificial in content have testified.

There is, however, a middle ground, a composite of the religious and the “profane.” This is not a dimension, so to speak: it is a method, a tool or orientation which makes up for its ambiguous ontological structure with its powerful forecasting strategy. That said, the following essay is a holistic look into Edward Said’s traveling theory, taken together with the cartoon controversy as its primary application; the nature of traveling theory together with our timely contingent allows for a glimpse into an impending global paradigm shift, [2] both intra-and inter-civilizationally speaking. The thesis is simple, if bold: an amalgam of cultural, political, and societal forces is producing an “Eastern” counter to the notorious Western Orientalism. However, this “Occidentalism” is by no means and in no form equivalent; further, in spawning a radically asymmetrical equilibrium of theory and rhetoric, it paves the way for an Eastern intra-civilizational reorientation which is both unprecedented in scope and ominous in implication. 

***

In the winter of 1982 the acclaimed literary scholar Edward Said wrote a comprehensive essay on cultural studies titled “Traveling Theory.” Though its philosophical framework was well-established (see Hegel, Marx, Whitehead, among others), the thesis was seminal in its transposition of epistemological metaphysics into cultural studies of the modern geopolitical world. Said posited that given a theory attributed to a certain person, school, or even time period [3], that theory will be necessarily exchanged, between people, between places, and through time. This process of exchange cannot be, Said argued, neutral or insignificant in and of itself. As time passes, a given theory can gain or lose strength, attract or repel constituents, and finally, change or reverse direction. Most important of all, arrival and subsequent survival in a new environment will often necessitate formative change, from surface (vocabulary) through method (oratory) to base (signification or implication – for instance, doctrinal conformity). The analysis of a given condition, then, must take into account its historical circumstances, while the analysis of a given theory must take into account both historical circumstances and textual trajectory, as movement to and fro or up and down is never “unimpeded.” Representation and institutionalization color any theory or idea beyond any absolute crux that that theory may offer.

In literary studies, this is a precise movement towards new historicism, where the subject is taken organically within his environment, factors such as politics, religion, and economics are not prefigured, and secondary sources are, in fact, operationally primary. But even such a careful and comprehensive approach can come short, for, applying traveling theory to a given idea, a deeper or ‘anagogical’ consciousness requires that we acknowledge that, given an idea may change state from one context to another, it is moreover and despite that possibility or translocation embedded within a circumstantial culture and context. No idea is like a slice of pie to be cut from the whole and served at will. We do not have, for example, a Buddhist understanding of nirvana, for the idea of nirvana is embedded in a religious culture of transcendence, renunciation, stoicism, and conservatism. When the idea travels from oriental China to occidental Europe, it not only loses strength because of prefigured and opposing philosophies of pragmatism, skepticism, and free enterprise, it carries baggage in the order of humility and hierarchy, alien to its new environment. For the same reason, the Hindu caste system cannot accurately be compared to the Western class system which Marx wrote on. The former must be understood within the Hindu tradition, and cannot be juxtaposed to the class system because it is not holistic or autonomous. To use a more familiar example, the transference of Sufism from the Islamic world to the European not only loses efficacy because it is illegitimately extracted from the matrix of Islam, it also loses appeal because it finds itself in the middle of a structuralist and secularist society. These are two phenomena of two different orders, but the one comes ingrained within the other, and acknowledging the one does not change the inherence of the other. 

Thus, recognition of theoretic transience leads to recognition of the impossibility of extraction simultaneous to authenticity. [4] Of course, while the first is an inherent ( i.e., textual) possibility, the second is an existential contingency, not an absolute principle: for generic purposes, it reaffirms or emphasizes actual traveling theory, serving as a proof, as it were. Concentrating on the actual travel of theories and ideas, there are recurrent and deducible patterns in traveling theory; one could say, trajectory in the movement of theory. Said schemed these as four: origin (the initial conditions of birth), distance traversed (the contextual movement from an origin to prominence in new situation or manifestation loci), conditions of acceptance/rejection (the situation at the arrived location), and finally, transformation (the synthesis of the preceding three, leading to, as Said assumes, alteration and incorporation).

In the final analysis, Said ventured that given either possibility, theories tend to lose, not gain, power and efficacy when moved to another locale, because “the first time a human experience is recorded and then given theoretical formulation, its force comes from being directly to and organically provoked by real historical circumstances. Later versions of the theory cannot replicate its original power; because the situation has quieted down and changed, the theory is degraded and subdued, made into a relatively tame academic substitute for the real thing.” It was only around fifteen years later when Said would revisit the topic, expand it and modify it. In “Traveling Theory Reconsidered:”, Said asserted positively that theory can be recharged or revivified, not necessarily by identical or cyclic patterns of history, but by specific and purposeful synthetic contradistinctive pulls; they can be moved from one sphere to another, not just one time frame or place to another. This movement fuses a theory’s power with a host environment’s potential, bringing about an entirely hybrid tool for specific interpretation and employment. The expansion began where the original left off: given a theory, movement doesn’t have to just duplicate the content theory, it can modify it, usually, as Said wrote, by emphasizing, centralizing, or prolonging certain parts of it. For Said, the prime example of this was Lukács’s theory of reification, transmitted to Goldmann; his “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” then looked to Fanon as the hybrid-making cross who did not just transfer the theory but challenged it. When Lukács laid out the tenets of reification — in short, that the absorption of capitalism by the whole Western world would lead to a reification or materialization and mechanization of not only commodities but also abstracts such as creativity, work, play, and intellection, in turn effecting (by quantifying) the quality of both our life and our knowledge, transforming the latter from a vocational enterprise to a mere and reduced fact-gathering measurement — along with this theory, Lukács presented his revolution against it, in the form of the proletariat class consciousness against the “subject-object” dichotomization. In other words, Lukács had a definite remedy to the reification problem, a Marxist consciousness and uprising. The heart of traveling theory centers around the movement of this reification theory to another locale, that of Lukács’s later European students, Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams.

What Said observed in his original “Traveling Theory” was that the reification thesis was not just picked up and moved as it were. It simultaneously gained the prestige and authority of age while losing its insurrectionary force; the essential subject-object split became “tamed and domesticated”, no longer an intellectual call to arms but an academic observation and device for philo-historical interpretation. Where “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” picks up is when Said hypothesizes that, for whatever reason, the full form of a theory such as reification is not replicated as such. Some part of it is purposefully rejected or delayed to achieve a specific goal. Using Lukács’s theory, Said presents the situation thus: “what if some of Lukács’s readers, totally influence by his reification and the subject-object impasse, did not accept the reconciliatory denouement of this theory (that is, the insurrectionary proletariat rising), and indeed deliberately, programmatically, intransigently refused it? Would this not be an alternative mode of traveling theory, one that actually developed away form this original formulation, but instead of becoming domesticated in the terms enabled by Lukács’s desire for respite and resolution, flames out, so to speak, restates and reaffirms its own inherent tensions by moving on to another site? Is this different kind of dislocation so powerful as retrospectively to undermine Lukács’s reconciliatory gesture when he settles the subject-object tensions into what he calls “the standpoint of the proletariat?"” [5] This alternative (found, as Said detailed, in both Fanon and to another degree Adorno), thus reignites the original theory in another direction and with fierce internal contradiction, fulfilling, as Said dramatizes, a sort of “redemption.”

The present study takes into account Said’s traveling theory framework and applies, ironically enough, one of Said’s own major concentrations, culture and imperialism. To correlate directly, imperialist orientalism is the theory (Lukács, “Traveling Theory"), Orientalism is its first dislocation (as covered in Goldmann and Williams, “Traveling Theory"), and Occidentalism is its second dislocation (as covered in Fanon, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered"). As Said and others rightly note, imperialism did not suddenly end or become a thing of the past once decolonization and the dismantling of hegemonic classical empires (Great Britain and France) began. And while his claim that there are deep connections which still bind together India with Britain and Algeria with France is somewhat inflated, nonetheless great patterns of power are still recurrent. The new empire is obviously America, but its true power, lasting beyond the economic, scientific, and technological, lies in its cultural dissemination and fragmentation of “places” and “people” to be neatly and discretely classified, categorized, and thus (geopolitically) defined. Orientalism, then, has not just disappeared: it has delved deeper into the consciousness, masked behind innocuous forms such as the juxtaposition of democracy with terrorism or multiculturalism with socio-religious extremism. In theory, the one is universal and self-evident; the other is parochial, provincial, and unsophisticated. More directly, the one is humanistic; the other is totalitarian.

But these are truths hidden behind steel doors and atop ivory towers, where policy-making takes place. In the public sphere, the honest and provocative work of public intellectuals such as Said, Chomsky, Crane, and others has led the Western populace to a more ideal-oriented world. In literature, as in philosophy, Orientalism has been struck a heavy blow, and while giants in the field such as a Lewis or Kramer have lost none of their weight, their field itself is steadily crumbling in the wake of a more humane and politically deft “Near Eastern Studies.” This is not simply a change of name; it is a makeover to the tune that not only are the region’s languages learned and then the region itself intellectually and analytically conquered; language, then culture, then tradition, then religion are all dealt with, and more importantly, contemporary political situations are recognized and factored in appropriately. Cultural critics, with Said at the fore, have thus largely improved and oriented Western populations towards an idealistic world built on humanistic values such as the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution. 

However, the truth of traveling theory has come full circle. Despite the central attention paid to Orientalism, there is at large today a real kind of Occidentalism [6], a projected image of the West by the East geared towards anyone anywhere who will listen (more often than not these target audiences are diametric to the audiences of Orientalism; that is, Occidentalism attracts the masses, from peasants in Morocco to farmers in Iraq). This is the East’s (and specifically, the Middle East’s) somewhat belated (though understandably belated) response to Orientalism. While obviously its forms, aims, and forum are quite radically different from those of Orientalism, its approach and philosophy are just as radically similar. During the formative span from elitist Orientalism to honest and conscious awareness and humanism (again, of the populace if not the actual policy-makers), the West has projected ideals that it feels are universal. This gives the East a tool with which to counter the West’s actions with their words. The best defense is a good offense: using the very same principles of “justice and equality for all” that are central to the philosophy of the West, Eastern Occidentalists criticize America’s imperialism and hegemony, Turkey’s religious persecution, France’s ethnic prejudices. And while it is naïve to say that Eastern states such as Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia never had codes of ethical conduct which articulate these values on their own, the case can be made that these principles were essentially religious, peripherally philosophic, and to an even lesser degree and in a more current sense, domestic. It was the American imposition of what it deemed ‘universal’ laws’ [7] onto the rest of the world which figured these laws are applicable to all. Now, they are more and more often turned against their very proponents.

At this point, the international cartoon controversy is a prime example. The strikingly Western idea of freedom of speech is philosophically turned against itself by an East which shows full understanding of the principles in question and the shortcoming inherent to these principles. Not only does the East repudiate the Western claim to freedom of speech with the idea that “with freedom of speech comes freedom of responsibility”, it can and actively defends its own actions (protests and demonstrations) as freedom of assembly. In fact, the strength, vigor, and determination of this assembly must be noted, as populations in more and more countries stage violent protests (rightly or wrongly), with no signs of abating; in fact, these protests are spreading in both scope and intensity, displaying an international Islamist resolve, a rallying point, as it were. These demonstrations make W.C. Smith’s comments, further explicated by both Eastern and Western authorities such as Huston Smith and Annemarie Schimmel, almost prophetic in nature. The quasi-intellectual justification for these demonstrations too must be noted as a watershed in defending Islamist activity, namely, with Western ideals, not the simple, monolithic, and absolutist bifurcation of East versus West, culturally and traditionally speaking. As a Muslim political science major at Rutgers University revealingly observes, “ for better or worse, the infuriated global response from the world’s Muslims is also a part of their freedoms. The world’s press outlets certainly reserve their right to the freedom of speech – but the Muslims too reserve their right to assembly and exercise their free will in the global economy.” [8]

Thus the Western idea of civic freedom and particularly the tripartite of speech, religion, and expression, is moved from a secular West to a religious, sectarian East. There, the theory, losing normative power because of its historical and geopolitical origin (the American Revolution and subsequent Constitution), nonetheless is bent and shaped, molded and conformed as an Eastern accessory to fight what it feels is another cyclic moment of Western imperialism. Fighting fire with fire, the East can accuse the West of the very same crimes it has itself been accused of time and time again. Rights to a fair and speedy trial, rights to an attorney, rights of a defendant against the state in court; coupled with policies which the West has articulated as international, such as criteria for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and myriad U.N. resolutions, all become part and parcel of the Eastern defense arsenal against the perennial bully, America, and its unambiguous place atop the Western power system.

The combination of this permeating sense of justice and equality, Western-educated Eastern students, increasingly critical intellectual independence, and growing resentment of the American self-stylization as world police makes it much easier for a renewed confidence in an Eastern or ‘Other’ agenda and a renewed belief in accountability for all. With growing parity in economic and technologic spheres and with Western principles backing their Eastern paradigms, states and powers such as Iran, Saudia Arabia, and North Korea all find no problem challenging the supposed ‘lone superpower’; further, they have no fear of self-conscious inferiority or lower ‘station’ on some sort of universal hierarchy.

While Occidentalism will never be the mirror opposite of its nemesis, we find nonetheless striking parallels. Typical Islamic populations accuse the West of spiritual inferiority, moral decay, arrogance, conceit, and vanity. Western civilizations are seen now in the East as Eastern civilizations were once viewed in the West: barbaric and corrupt, kingdoms of prey and predators where money is the bottom line, connections equal might and muscle, and the idol-worship of capitalism justifies all things. Nation-states in the East use this image of the West to fuel their Occidentalism, itself a sheer response taking many different styles, from the economic intimidation of Saudi Arabia and geopolitical muscle of Pakistan to the technological potentials for deterrence of such autonomous states as Iran or North Korea. The yoke of imperialism is not only being thrown off, it is being thrown heartily in the other direction, as China now far rises above its once colonizer, Britain, as a dangerous player who must be respected in the international arena. 

Of course, major disparities between the now masked Orientalism and the just rising Occidentalism still exist. Chief among these disparities is the form of the Middle East’s counter. In a world which likes to think itself more and more sophisticated, elegant, and cultured, acts of defiance such as mass protests lose their empathetic potential when the actual slogans being repeated are translated as “death to Denmark” or “death to Israel.” For true effect, the style or discourse of protest must also be raised to the typical Western standard. If Orientalism is a massive textual analysis of Eastern civilizations, with parenthetic suggestions of inferiority through subtle distortions of religious law or custom, its equal in the international intellectual community cannot be terrorist bombings at weddings or commercial buildings, businesses, or hotels. 

From a deeper perspective, this vast disparity of form lies in the target and means of the two parties in question. For the West, Orientalism is an ingrained and essentially intellectual enterprise. The only people who need to “be in on it” are already at the elite, Ivy League scholars, politicians and presidents. That is, there is already a definite and lopsided distribution of power; the preservation of a status quo is without fail a much easier and more stable task than its overthrow, a revolution in not only the way things are but the way people think.

The Eastern (and again, “Eastern” being a generalized, Middle Eastern “Islamic” or “Muslim") Occidentalism is taking place – necessarily or unnecessarily – at a grassroots level, for the echoes of imperialism still dwell within the ruling parties of the region. As Said noted, the deepest implications of traveling theory lie in the challenging of an orthodoxy, in the consciousness of alternatives, in the viability of transcending particular places and situations and reaching forward or backward to a different theory from a distance place and, in assessing worth, deploying that theory as a spark or starting point for re-creation, for inspiration and redefinition.

The challenge to Occidentalism, then, is in employing a foreign formula but at the same time transcending the natural character of that employment, that is, a certain passivity of the theory itself and the feeling of alienation of the new applicants. In the particular situation of the Middle East, where very few alternatives exist in the first place, the recycling, rehashing, and retooling of the Western humanistic amendments seems to both the indigenous people and the intellectuals who identify with the region a viable and potentially promising tool. As this line of thought progresses, the critical point will become the form of the retooling, or the turning of the Western ideas against the West.

***

Equilibrium in political discourse, or maneuvering, is approaching fast, but not in formally similar terms. It will become an equilibrium of threat, protest, and response, but through different approaches. Every time the West intervenes in the Middle East, a bomb may go off at a bus stop in Israel. When the West points to terrorism, the East will point to imperialism. Even if the West acknowledges that its sword cuts two ways, and that freedoms are given to all, it will accuse the East of an excess, such as the extreme position of freedom of assembly when flags are burned and embassies are razed. In response, the East will counter that the West took its own freedom of speech to extremes, neglecting responsibility, purposefully propagating hate and inciting rage in return.

The problem with this is that while to some (non-existent) internationally neutral community this may seem a stand-off, it will never amount to a stalemate due to the crude and staggering stylistic disparity. The Middle East thus faces two challenges: the further moving of their new tool from its lower forms such as violence and volume to press and publication (and the latter must not just eclipse the former, it must eradicate it); and the re-calibrating of this tool, removed from its origin (and thus having lost some of its authenticity), to match its specific culture. This re-calibration will not only help compensate for a lost passion and vigor, but, reform it and represent the theory as a unique and respectable Eastern response to the “Western Problem”, doing away with any old-fashioned and arid concerns of an Eastern Problem capable of being solved only by an enlightened West.

As this disparate equilibrium rises, the East will find itself a major player with powerful tools and able leaders. Despite the ideological divide between rulers and masses in the Middle East, for example, both are united in their Occidentalist position against the West; this unification is continually strengthened by the West’s own seemingly “humanistic” foreign policies and endeavors. And as the East finds itself fully autonomous, it will more and more assertively exert its independence and identity, forming a full and mature civilization ready and willing to do battle. Whether this is a portent of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis or the realization that “with power comes responsibility” remains to be seen. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Modern Islam in India, p. 69-70

[2] The sometimes abused term “paradigm shift” leads us to an interesting question, impossible to pursue here: does a “global paradigm shift” equal (or is another way of saying) “global revolution”? Denotatively, the one implies a theoretic framework, while the other suggests an applicative transgression and subsequent transposition of power. But these lines are blurred when the balances of power are so heavily one-sided, even or especially on an international scale. The decision to invade Iraq is of course the prime example of this Foucauldian knowledge-power duality.

[3] These three elements may and often overlap, are never simply discrete, and do not necessarily require differentiation.

[4] Of course, the principle itself is delimited to cultural studies; Einstein’s relativity rang true a hundred years ago and remains true today because the content of his theory is now and then the same: universal physics, properties of matter which are irreducibly the same. 

[5] “Traveling Theory Reconsidered”, Reflections on Exile, p. 438-439.

[6] With the suggestion for specification a note of clarification may be in order: discrete units such as “East” and “West” or “Oriental” or “Occidental” are never really discrete or monolithic; more importantly, they denote a distinct ideological geography more so than a distinct physical geography. As Said wrote, the line separating Occident from Orient is not necessarily a fact of nature but a fact of human production. Nevertheless this “imaginative geography” doesn’t change its veracity; the two units are facts produced by us, and thus must be acknowledged by us. Finally, it needn’t be reminded that such terms also denote a cultural identification or orientation more so than anything else, and in some cases, this cultural identification supersedes any prefigured or existential physical, geographical, or geopolitical correspondent. Ottoman Muslims in Atatürk’s Turkey and traditional Pakistani Muslims living in America and philosophically disagreeing with Musharaff serve as two vibrant examples. 

[7] The question of whether or not these laws are indeed universal is not an issue, for absolute theory is not a question here.

[8] Ibrahim Mansour, “Where Art Meets Ignorance.”