The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales

By Sean Meighoo

Most historical accounts take it for granted that the guiding principles of the Western traditionreason, progress, and freedomhave been passed down directly from ancient Greece to modern Western society. Today, many commentators maintain that the Western tradition is fast approaching its end as it becomes more and more integrated with non-Western cultures. But what if we are witnessing something else entirelynot the end of the West but rather another historical mutation of the idea of the West?

This groundbreaking critique shows that whether the West is hailed as the source of all historical progress or scorned as the root of all cultural imperialism, it remains a deeply problematic concept that is intrinsically connected to an ethnocentric view of the world. Reading the work of the continental philosophers Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, as well as the postcolonial thinkers Said, Mohanty, Bhabha, and Trinh, Sean Meighoo strikes at the intellectual foundations of Western exceptionalism until its ideological supports show through. Deconstructing the concept of the West in his provocative interpretations of Martin Bernal’s controversial work Black Athena and the Beatles’ second film, Help!, Meighoo poses a formidable question to philosophers, writers, political scientists, and cultural critics alike: Can we mount an effective critique of Western ethnocentrism without reinforcing the idea of the West itself?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: May 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231541404

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The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales

The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales

Sean Meighoo

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Meighoo, Sean, author.

Title: The end of the West and other cautionary tales / Sean Meighoo.

Description: 1 [edition]. | New York, NY : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041593 | ISBN 9780231176729 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780231541404 (e-book) | Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Western. | Civilization, Western—Philosophy. | Ethnocentrism. | Postcolonialism—Philosophy. | Continental philosophy. | Culture—Study and teaching. | Philosophy—History. | Intellectual life—History. | Teleology. | East and West.

Classification: LCC CB245 .M434 2016 | DDC 909/.09821—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041593

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover Design: Heads of State

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To my parents, Cynthia and Peter Meighoo, for all the times that they have asked me when my book would be published

and to my partner, Deboleena Roy, and our children, Kheyal and Koan Roy-Meighoo, for all the times that they have made me stop to celebrate the slow and fitful progress of my manuscript with them—the celebrations, I hope, are not over yet.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: The End of the West

1. The Black Athena Debate

Bernal and His Critics

Deconstructing Roots

Part II: From Teleology to Negative Teleology

2. The Phenomenological Turn

Husserl and the Spiritual Shape of Europe

Heidegger and the Opening

3. The Ethical Turn

Levinas and Orientation

Derrida and Globalatinization

Part III: From Continental Philosophy to Postcolonial Theory

4. The Critique of Representation

Said and Orientalism

Mohanty and Western Feminism

5. The Defense of Difference

Bhabha and the Third Space

Trinh and the Third World Woman

Part IV: The Limits of Antiethnocentrism

6. The Beatles in India

Help!

Hyperbolic Representation

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my colleagues at both Emory University and San Diego State University who have supported my work in one way or another during the past ten years, even if they have since come to regret it: Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, Peter Atterton, Deepika Bahri, Steven Barbone, Geoffrey Bennington, the late Rudolph P. Byrd, Kevin Corrigan, Jonathan K. Crane, Anne Donadey, C. Aiden Downey, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Sander L. Gilman, Jonathan Goldberg, Elizabeth Goodstein, Naama Harel, Lynne Huffer, John Johnston, Howard Kushner, Irene Lara, John Lysaker, Elissa Marder, Noëlle McAfee, Andrew J. Mitchell, Michael Moon, William A. Nericcio, Walter Reed, Benjamin Reiss, Pamela Scully, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Chris Werry, Deborah Elise White, Cynthia Willett, Elizabeth Wilson, and Yanna Yannakakis.

Thanks also to Cecelia Cancellaro at Idea Architects for helping me with my book proposal, to Wendy Lochner and Christine Dunbar at Columbia University Press for walking me through the publishing process, and to both anonymous readers for their generous comments on my initial manuscript draft. And finally, thanks to the Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Laney Graduate School for providing subvention funds to cover the indexing costs of this book.

Introduction

A new ethnocentrism has recently become prevalent in certain intellectual quarters. But what is most striking about this new ethnocentrism is that it is presented as a critique of ethnocentrism. Over the course of the past century, the entire Western tradition has been subjected to a radical interrogation within continental philosophy. It has been claimed that underlying the search for truth that occupies all Western thought, from the ancient Greeks to modern European thinkers, is a profound ethnocentrism, an essentially Western ethnocentrism by which the culturally specific problem of truth is given universal significance. The end of an era—or to use both Martin Heidegger’s and Jacques Derrida’s term of preference, the end of an epoch—has thus been declared. What is really at stake in the end of philosophy, the end of history, and even the end of man is the end of the West itself. Twentieth-century continental philosophy has been marked, then, by the turn from a historical teleology of the West to what I would call a negative teleology—that is, by the turn from a discourse that celebrates the historical and technological progress of the West to a counterdiscourse that laments its cultural and spiritual decline. More recently still, over the past few decades, this negative teleology has been reappropriated within postcolonial theory. Insofar as postcolonial theory endorses the radical critique of Western ethnocentrism that has been formulated within continental philosophy, it continues to rely on a teleological concept of the West, even if this concept now operates in a negative mode. The end of the West has thus become a fundamental precept of continental philosophy and postcolonial theory alike.

In this book, I want to argue that this radical critique of Western ethnocentrism presumes another form of ethnocentrism—more subtle, perhaps, but all the more persistent. For what this critique presumes is that there is a West to begin with. This Western tradition is ostensibly constituted by a continuous line of thought extending from the ancient Greeks to modern European thinkers, a tradition that has remained impervious to all non-Western traditions. What I would suggest instead is that this Western tradition has been punctured by innumerable points of contact with other intellectual traditions as well as by innumerable points of rupture within. In other words, there is no West, at least not in the sense in which it has been conceived as an altogether unique and distinctly privileged event or course of events within world history. Of course, this is also to say that there is no East or any other tradition in which we might situate ourselves completely outside the West, as it were. Neither East nor West can furnish the theoretical precepts for the critique of ethnocentrism that so many continental philosophers and postcolonial theorists have recently attempted to offer. It is in a double sense, then, that I have titled this book The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales. In one sense, I want to extend the radical critique of Western ethnocentrism that has been so forcefully articulated within twentieth-century continental philosophy and postcolonial theory. But in another sense, I also want to question the intrinsically teleological concept of the West on which this very critique is premised. For if this declaration on the end of the West is to provide an effective critique of ethnocentrism, then it can no longer serve the purpose of establishing a new beginning for the concept of the West itself.

This book is divided into four parts, containing a total of six chapters in addition to this introduction and a short conclusion. In part I, I present my own declaration of sorts on the end of the West. Rather than simply announcing the end of Western ethnocentrism, I argue that the very concept of the West must be dismantled. In chapter 1, I attend critically to what has become known as "the Black Athena debate," an intellectual controversy that was initially sparked by the publication of the first volume of Martin Bernal’s multivolume work Black Athena. Bernal proposes not only that ancient Greek civilization was profoundly indebted to ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization but also that the modern theory of the Hellenic origins of Western civilization was itself an invention of nineteenth-century European scholarship—a theory, moreover, to which even the ancient Greeks did not subscribe. Following the appearance of the second volume of Black Athena, the collected volume Black Athena Revisited was published, comprising twenty essays in which Bernal’s work was sharply criticized for its allegedly poor scholarship and ideological agenda. A number of related publications have since appeared, including Bernal’s response to his critics, Black Athena Writes Back, as well as the third and last volume of Black Athena. In this chapter of my book, however, I do not attempt to contribute any historical evidence to Bernal’s case but instead to discern what is at stake in this ongoing debate. I argue that the significance of Bernal’s Black Athena lies not so much in its stated aim to locate the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization as in its deconstructive effects on the very idea of historical or cultural origins or roots. I suggest that the Black Athena debate concerns not only the concept of the West but also the concept of the origin. It is only by dismantling the origin of the West, then, that my own argument on the end of the West averts the establishment of yet another beginning.

In part II, I introduce my argument on the turn from teleology to negative teleology in twentieth-century continental philosophy. I suggest that the discourses of teleology and negative teleology are fully complicit with each other insofar as they both rely on the intrinsically teleological concept of the West even if the Western tradition is generally denigrated in the discourse of negative teleology. In chapter 2, I trace the turn from teleology to negative teleology in a close reading of some key texts by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, marking what I consider the first articulation of negative teleology in continental philosophy. In chapter 3, I trace this turn again in a close reading of some key texts by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, marking what I consider the most powerful reiteration of negative teleology in continental philosophy. Read together, these two chapters thus call into question not only the radical inversion of teleology into negative teleology but also the intellectual progress that is widely assumed to have been made in continental philosophy from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological investigations to Levinas’s and Derrida’s ethical interventions. Recalling Levinas’s dictum that ethics precedes ontology, I suggest instead that ethics repeats phenomenology. The ethnocentric teleology that informs Husserl’s phenomenology is the same ethnocentric teleology that informs Levinas’s ethics of alterity, just as the negative teleology that is articulated in its prototypical form in Heidegger’s destruction of ontology is, to some extent surely, the same negative teleology that is articulated in Derrida’s deconstruction. There is, then, a profoundly unethical opening to ethics as such. For the ethical subject of continental philosophy is none other than the historical subject of the West.

In part III, I continue my argument on the turn from teleology to negative teleology in twentieth-century continental philosophy by addressing the reappropriation of negative teleology within postcolonial theory. I suggest that the very emergence of postcolonial theory has been made possible by what is admittedly the strongly compelling discourse of negative teleology. However, rather than setting my focus on the concept of the West itself, I attend to the critique of representation and the accompanying defense of difference that have been extended from continental philosophy to postcolonial theory. In chapter 4, I consider the postcolonial critique of representation in a close reading of some key texts by Edward W. Said and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Both Said and Mohanty claim that representation constitutes a form of power that is unique to the Western tradition, thus reiterating the discourse of negative teleology. In chapter 5, I further consider the postcolonial defense of difference in a close reading of some key texts by Homi K. Bhabha and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Presuming the claim that representation is indeed unique to the Western tradition, both Bhabha and Trinh maintain that difference in its most radical sense presents a form of resistance to this tradition. Read together, these two chapters thus pose the challenge of dismantling the negative teleology of the West on which postcolonial theory has in large part been based. Of course, I pose this challenge only from within the intellectual space that these postcolonial thinkers themselves have cleared. These two chapters also call into question the extension of negative teleology from continental philosophy to postcolonial feminist theory more specifically. As both Mohanty’s and Trinh’s work demonstrates, the negative teleology of the West has been reappropriated within postcolonial feminist theory in order to indict Western feminist discourse. The postcolonial woman is thus cast as the exemplary non-Western subject who resists all representation and bears true difference in herself. Within postcolonial feminist theory, then, the reappropriation of negative teleology signals the end of Western man as well as the end of Western woman.

In part IV, I attempt to address some of the implications of my argument on the end of the West. Rather than merely endorsing the strategy of antiethnocentrism that guides both twentieth-century continental philosophy and postcolonial theory, I advocate a performative politics of representation that not only would call attention to the illocutionary or iterative force that generates the concept of the West itself but might also provide us with some tactics for displacing it. In chapter 6, I shift my focus from academic discourse to popular music and film culture, a field in which this performative politics of representation seems to have been put into play somewhat more effectively. I attend particularly to the much celebrated collaboration between Eastern and Western artists that impacted popular music so greatly in the second half of the twentieth century, a collaboration that has often been glossed by the phrase the Beatles in India. I am especially interested, however, in the Beatles’ initial encounter with Indian music and religion during the making of their second film, Help!, a comical spoof of the spy-thriller film genre that deals freely in racial and cultural stereotypes of the East—an encounter that took place before any of the Beatles had ever set foot in India. Although these stereotypes of Eastern worshippers, thugs, and villains in Help! certainly seem to lend themselves to the charge of ethnocentrism if not outright racism, I suggest that a more careful viewing of this film reveals a process of subversion at work in which stereotypical Western representations of the East are themselves parodied. Moving beyond the strategy of antiethnocentrism, a strategy that entirely avoids the representation of different cultures, as it were, the sort of transcultural engagement that is staged by the director and screenwriters of Help! instead confronts the unavoidable perils of representation, both within and between these supposedly different cultures. Rather than reject representation altogether, then, I make the appeal for what I would like to call a hyperbolic practice of representation—a representation of representation, a practice of representation in which the concept of the West is displaced by its own excessive repetition. Undermining the discourse of cultural purity wherever it might be found, my argument on the end of the West thus insists on the irreducibly hybrid composition of all cultural forms, the Western intellectual tradition included.

Needless to say, I do not attempt to offer an exhaustive survey or sweeping account of the concept of the West in all its historical and cultural determinations—a very daunting if not impossible task in any case, it seems to me, at least within the parameters of a book like this. Rather, I am concerned more precisely with the discourse or counterdiscourse on the end of the West as such, focusing on a purposefully delimited range of discursive sites within which the teleological concept of the West has been reaffirmed, repudiated, or otherwise reiterated—none of which, of course, necessarily precludes the others. Spanning continental philosophy and postcolonial theory, classical studies and cultural studies, my argument is not confined to any disciplinary subject area or regulated by any disciplinary method but guided instead by what I am calling the negative teleology of the West itself, traversing these various sites across academic discourse and popular culture alike. Far from setting academic discourse above and apart from popular culture or the other way around, for that matter, my argument draws attention to the mutually generative relations between all of these discursive sites through which the teleological concept of the West is produced and circulated, reproduced and consumed.

What I hope to accomplish in this book at the very least, then, is to problematize the concept of the West that is so readily dispatched in even the most progressive contemporary scholarly discourses. This concept makes what is perhaps its most familiar appearance today in the ubiquitous tag phrase in the West that is used to qualify various critical projects in philosophy, history, literary criticism, and cultural theory—the history of truth in the West, the regime of representation in the West, the deployment of sexuality in the West—critical projects, moreover, to which I am quite sympathetic. Faithfully adhering to the strategy of antiethnocentrism, this tag phrase is intended, without any doubt on my part, both to assign some cultural specificity to these various critical projects themselves and to revoke any claim to intellectual authority over different cultural traditions. In other words, contemporary scholars use the phrase in the West not only to acknowledge their own cultural location but also to protect themselves against any possible accusations of ethnocentrism or cultural imperialism. Yet the effect of this qualifying tag phrase, whether intentional or not, is both to reassert the cultural integrity of the West itself and to dismiss the intellectual complexity of cultural formations that arise outside of this selfsame West. To put it in other words again, contemporary scholars who use the phrase in the West not only reinforce the cultural borders of the Western tradition but also excuse themselves from critically engaging with non-Western traditions in their own projects. What I want to offer in this book is thus a deconstructive critique of ethnocentrism as well as antiethnocentrism, of teleology as well as negative teleology, of continental philosophy as well as postcolonial theory. Even if this book only gives its readers pause to think twice before going on to dispatch the concept of the West once more, perhaps in a seemingly innocuous tag phrase, I would be greatly pleased nonetheless to have made some contribution toward this particular end.

Part I

The End of the West

The end of the West has been in the air for quite some time now, and yet the meaning of this phrase, this idea, or this event—whatever it is—has still not been decided. The meaning of the West itself remains very ambiguous. It is, of course, the name of one of the four cardinal directions, a basic concept of geographical knowledge, a fundamental experience of the world bearing a presumably global validity. It indicates the path of the sun’s daily journey across the sky and the place of its nightly setting on the horizon. The West is thus associated with the end of the day, the final goal or destination point of the sun, the last ray of light. Even in its most common sense, then, the West is an end in itself.¹ The cardinal directions are not symmetrical, nor are they neutral. The geographical inscription of the earth as such is the foundational act of all geopolitics.

The West is also a name given to more properly defined geopolitical formations, although these formations, too, betray an underlying asymmetry. There is the geographical region of West Africa as distinguished from the regions of East Africa, North Africa, and South Africa, the last of which, however, is also the name of a political state—a name, moreover, that became practically synonymous with apartheid during the latter part of the twentieth century and that has perhaps still not freed itself from this association. There is the geographical region of West Asia as distinguished from the regions of East Asia and South Asia, notwithstanding the effective absence of any comparable region bearing the name North Asia, a name that remains much less widely used even than West Asia itself, which seems to have been rather deliberately coined in order to replace—as if things were not already complicated enough—the Near or Middle East. There is also—or rather there was—the state of West Germany, as the Federal Republic of Germany was commonly called, distinguished from East Germany, as the German Democratic Republic was similarly called, along with the city of West Berlin as distinguished from East Berlin, until the spontaneous destruction of the Berlin Wall and the formal reunification of Germany toward the end of the twentieth century—a reunification, however, that was much less an integration between West and East Germany than an absorption of East Germany into West Germany, which is now simply called Germany. And within the United States, there is the state of West Virginia as distinguished from Virginia, from which it seceded during the Civil War after the state of Virginia had already seceded from the Union, which was also called the North—to further complicate matters once again—and joined the Confederacy, which was also called the South.

The West has also long stood on its own as a name for large historical and cultural blocs, detaching itself, as it were, from any more substantive geographical place-names. Since the end of World War II and its political aftermath, the West has stood for the alliance struck between the United States and the largely western European states represented by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in direct opposition to the East, which stood for the alliance struck between the Soviet Union and the eastern European states represented by the Warsaw Pact. The West has thus become synonymous with capitalism, individualism, and democracy, and the East with communism, totalitarianism, and bureaucracy. Following the nearly simultaneous dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself toward the end of the twentieth century, it seems that the West and its ideological associations have not only survived the collapse of the East but indeed been vindicated by it. But the West has long stood alone, more or less apart from any such Eastern counterpart, since well before the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain. The West also stands for the American and Canadian frontier lands that were settled after the colonies on the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the St. Lawrence River had achieved political independence. While the territorial expansion of both states required the subjugation and forced relocation of the indigenous populations who already lived on these lands, it promised the beginning of a new life for the American and Canadian settlers who made the westward pilgrimage, as though they had been guided there by the sun itself. Even today, this promise of the West continues to lure Old World citizens to the New World and New World citizens ever farther westward.

The meaning of the West that interests me in this book, however, refers to an even longer historical and cultural tradition, a tradition beginning in ancient Greece, transmitted through ancient Rome and medieval Europe, and ending in modern Europe and its civilizational outposts in North America and Australia—a civilization that provides the very measure of civilization. This tradition of the West is marked by its historical continuity and cultural coherence, having been united by an indissoluble bond that was originally forged by the ancient Greeks with the invention of philosophy, science, and democracy all at once, a truly singular event that has come to be known, commonly enough, as the Greek miracle. The West as European tradition, then, is inevitably implicated with all the other meanings of the West that we have just teased apart—the West as capitalist bloc, the West as American frontier, even the West as cardinal direction. The West binds together reason, progress, and freedom in a way that remains absolutely unique to itself. The West is thus clearly distinguished from the East, although, again, this distinction attests to their decidedly asymmetrical formation. The East is marked precisely by its lack of historical continuity and cultural coherence or, indeed, by the absence of history and culture altogether—at least in the proper sense of these terms—by its essentially barbaric traditions, by its merely rudimentary forms of civilization at best. This distinction between the East and the West, between the Orient and the Occident, between Asia and Europe endures in spite of their frequently shifting geographical boundaries, for, once again, the distinction is geopolitical through and through. After all, there is no strictly geographical or geological basis for the division between the continents of Asia and Europe, a distinction that might seem to be the least politically charged of all. By all accounts, Asia and Europe are formed from a common tectonic plate, the Eurasian Plate, which itself excludes, however, the Arabian and Indian Peninsulas, both of which are formed from separate plates and yet considered subcontinents rather than continents themselves. Europe is not, then, a purely geographical concept—whatever that might mean—but an intrinsically geopolitical concept that denies any historical trace or cultural hybridity between the European tradition and non-European traditions, on one hand, and conceals all the historical discontinuities and cultural incoherencies that undermine this ostensibly singular European tradition, on the other. The geographical concept of Europe has perhaps outlived the philological concept of the Aryan and the anthropological concept of the Caucasian, but it thrives on their remains.

The end of the West thus alludes to many things at once, without simply meaning any one of these things. Yet some of these allusions are obviously more salient than others. There seems to be little sense in declaring the end of a cardinal direction inasmuch as all four cardinal directions remain rather instrumental for any long-distance navigation, whether by land, by sea, or by air, and inasmuch as the sun still continues to travel across the sky along its westward path. And there seems to be only little more sense in contemplating the end of a geographical place-name insofar as nomenclature is an essentially arbitrary procedure even if a change in name is itself related to more significant geopolitical shifts. But some of the recent declarations on the end of the West do indeed concern such momentous geopolitical transformations. The transatlantic alliance between western Europe and the United States does appear to have been seriously compromised not only by the ongoing incorporation of both western and eastern European states into the European Union since its establishment in the last decade of the twentieth century but also by the consistently unilateral actions of the United States during the first decade of the twenty-first century, actions that flagrantly disregarded the international mandates of both NATO and the United Nations. And the mythical freedom of the western frontier is hardly tenable any longer, if it ever was in the first place, with the increasing corporate accumulation of agricultural lands in the West itself over the past few decades as the latest turn in globalization brings the dubious benefits of the Green Revolution back home.

However, the meaning of the end of the West that especially interests me concerns what appears in many ways to be the imminent loss of European as well as American economic, political, and cultural hegemony throughout the world. Certainly, the Western colonial and later neocolonial social order was continually upset over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by popular movements for political independence in the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa; by massive waves of migration from these same regions to Europe and North America themselves; and by the gradual emergence of many non-Western nations as important economic and political forces in the global arena. All these events seem to have culminated by the beginning of the twenty-first century to threaten, if not to have actually produced, the very end of Western civilization. The end of the West has become something of a rallying cry, then, both a cry of distress and a cry to action, a cry that is often heard not only from the defenders of Western civilization but also from its detractors. For whether it is declared in the name of colonialism or anticolonialism, globalization or antiglobalization, what the end of the West announces is that there has already occurred or else will soon occur a decisive rupture or break from the Western tradition, entailing, for better or worse, the dissolution of this great tradition itself. The end of the West in this sense constitutes nothing less than the end of reason, progress, and freedom, whether it comes as boon or bane.

And yet does this rallying cry not simply reaffirm the geopolitical concept of the West itself? Is the end of the West not just another way of declaring the absolutely unique origin of the West? Has the concept of the West not always contained within itself, from its very beginning, its own end? For what the end of the West presumes is that there has indeed existed a historically continuous and culturally coherent Western tradition, beginning in ancient Greece and ending in modern Europe, a long and broad tradition that has nonetheless been bound together by the singular invention of philosophy, science, and democracy—the Greek miracle—and set apart from all other historical and cultural traditions by this same event. The end of the West would have thus been preordained at the very origin of the West, the final goal of a tradition