PostWest Anxieties

Such quarry led de Certeau to an exposition of the customary network of antidisciplinary tactics whereby the ‘dominée’ already ensnared in disciplinary nets also engages in ‘free’ and ‘creative’ work. If our futures are the ‘development projects’ of predatory totality or have long since been occupied by the plutocrats who own our world, if Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) named an incipience not yet in fullest flower and therefore yet to come, the question stands: is idiosyncratic work disguised as work for the proprietors (what de Certeau termed la perruque or ‘the wig’) a tactic available to knowledge workers on the trail of a viable PostWest from within the embrace of the West and its institutions and beneath its superintendence? More, if we retain some regard for a West or fathom both the intensity and extensity of its dissemination, then we should ask with Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘is there a non-Occidentalist West?’ Is there an ‘other West’ open to ‘counterhegemonic globalisation’ and to participation in ecologies of knowledges and productions with differential, context-dependent, real-world interventions and outcomes? Is such a West, which would constitute a veritable PostWest, not only thinkable but even more urgently actionable?

An obituary of the West is untimely and as deliriously naïve as prophecy. I prefer then to engage in critical play the conditions that organize our dreams and dreads of a PostWest. Suffice it to say that an overprovision of prefixes signals a civilisation sunk knee-deep in overcoming or the desire to overcome. It is difficult to plumb the surging glamour and circulation of trans-, inter-, and the veteran post- without detecting therein a gestation and portent of categories and forms of life beyond those which stammer and miscarry without the relief of prefixing. To be sure, our prefixation is no overture to the ‘great noon’ envisioned by an imagined Zarathustra, no preamble to the reappearance of ‘wild dogs’ in the cellar, but it suggests that the categories in terms of which (at least) the denizens of English-speaking societies have articulated and lived their lives are fatigued and ever more uninhabitable. To dress out racial, normal, and now West with the prefix post- befits an interim of transit between plateaus (neither named Eden or Gehenna) and leans forward and backward in anxiety. 

About what are we anxious? Prevarication of labour markets from São Paulo to Seoul and the emergence of a new global class structure and Precariat; ballooning populations of conflict-related refugees and internally displaced persons; accelerating deadening of the biosphere beyond the reach of (even the myth of) technological remediation and national and transnational environmental policy; patent laws that secure for pharmaceutical companies monopoly control over the manufacture and sales of life-saving and life-enhancing drugs. These brutalities and indignities provoke us to anger, advocacy, and political action. They irrigate and aggravate our anxiety, but neither severally nor collectively comprise it. Western canons of knowledge follow the lead of European existentialists in reckoning anxiety to be ‘indeterminate’ or generalized, which is a country mile from holding it to be ‘about nothing’ (technically, anxiety is about more than any particular thing or set of things). Existentialists argue that the signature feature of anxiety is its insistent, inalienable, and enigmatic unclarity about its aboutness. In a formulation fathered by the tarnished Heidegger, anxiety is the extraordinary experience of rupture from the world wherein I am ordinarily, practically, and complacently absorbed. If such rupture or detachment is squired by ‘nausea,’ by a vulnerability whose sire is facing up to groundlessness, it is also attended by a fleeting (often missed or misspent) occasion for spontaneity and creativity.      

For those alive to the idea that the writing is on the wall, that they are living at the extremity of their world, anxiety seems a fitting response. What lies on the far side of the limit, the fine textures of lives and futures on the other side, is stubbornly resistant to human intelligence despite titanic efforts in foresight. In this chaotic environment wrought of accelerating change, informational ambience and superabundance, and the ‘sense of an ending’ (‘real’ or ‘recited,’ but who can tell?), there is considerable pressure to explain what’s happening in conventional terms and thus to carve out safe harbour for this storm-tossed vessel. ‘Round up the usual suspects,’ indeed. In the immediate wake of the Great War, Valéry wondered, ‘Will Europe become what it is in reality, that is to say: a tiny cape on the Asian continent? Or will it abide as what it seems, that is to say: the precious share of the terrestrial universe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body?’ In that so-called ‘age of anxiety,’ a somewhat recent interval along the arc of the tradition of writing about the health of the West, Paul Valéry and others configured the Postwest as a ‘crisis’ of disarticulation and dislocation from the centre to the periphery or from a localized universality (Europe or West as ‘brain’) to a ‘tiny cape,’ what Valéry (in delightful wordplay) terms a ‘deminutio capitis’ or, literally, a ‘decrease of the head.’ The Latin he borrowed from Roman legal discourse wherein it referred generally to a winnowing of aggregated legal attributes and most often to a reduction in status. Flight to a sanitised, idealised past from a fallen present remains a popular form of explanation (and self-collection), but time travel cannot expel the suspicion that much (perhaps far more than ever before) remains perilously unsaid, that the world is no more ‘mine oyster,’ and that this strange sense of insecurity, however individuals and communities metabolise it, might never resolve into another dominion, another ‘oyster,’ nor permit a relapse into the drowsy optimism of youth.      

In spring 2007 erstwhile educator turned neoconservative pundit Victor Davis Hanson startled up from a slumber disturbed by dreams and apparitions. As he chewed over his reveries, he attained insight into what he terms the ‘new religion’ and ‘new creed’ of a ‘surreal present,’ in a word, capitulation (he prefers the clumsier locution ‘gospel of the Path of Least Resistance,’ which ostensibly differs from that other gospel in substituting ‘gratification’ for ‘sacrifice’). Hanson published his reveries in the National Review Online, the digital face of the semi-monthly magazine founded in 1955 by the godfather of American conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr. Carrying the fertile title, ‘The Postwest,’ and headily developed by the tagline, ‘A civilization that has become just a dream’ (not so ‘merrily, merrily, merrily,’ it will turn out), Hanson’s editorial posits as a sequence of dream tableaux what is in fact a feeble litany of supercilious, starboard-listing flummeries. Among the latter, I include the following, ‘I also dreamed that … Europeans would advise their own Muslim immigrants, from London to Berlin, that the West, founded on principles of the Hellenic and European Enlightenments, and enriched by the Sermon on the Mount, had nothing to apologize for, now or in the future. Newcomers would either accept this revered culture of tolerance, assimilation, and equality of religions and the sexes — or return home to live under its antithesis of seventh-century Sharia law.’ Beneath the diaphanous surface crouches the ‘love it or leave it’ jingo, a longtime darling of flag-waving tub-thumpers and more suited to automobile bumpers than to public policy deliberation on immigration or war. ‘Equality of religions and the sexes,’ the recipe for the West, and other follies I set aside with the observation that Hanson’s memory of the West looks like ‘screen memory,’ Freud’s term for a vivid ‘mnemic image’ that memorializes (displaces) the ‘relevant experience itself’ and is thus a shield against repressed trauma and/or desire and a retroactive formulation of a subject’s wishing.   

On Hanson’s account, the passing or ongoing transit of the West into strictly oneiric realms (or, to my eyes, nostalgia for a West that never was) is visible in the North Atlantic refusal to chide an insolent Iran with an iron fist, in American hand-wringing over its ‘valid’ invasion of Iraq, and in the general flaccidity of ‘defenders of the liberal tradition of the West’ on violent extremism. It is a desperate errand to account for the role of the Sermon on the Mount in Hanson’s make-believe or in any dispassionate analytic of Western origins. Suffice it to say that Hanson’s West shares far more with the parade of empires that extracted resources from the Galilee than with the displaced Galilean who practiced the basileia of God among the poor and at risk. The terrain mapped in Hanson’s dreams is a range patrolled by the ‘picturesque’ American cowboy so ably disenchanted by Philip Ashton Rollins, a place where men (emphatically men) ‘wild up’ in order to secure preemptively the dominion to which their ‘revered culture’ entitles them: ‘When I’m hungry I bites off the noses of living grizzly bars.’ When swagger falls flat, ‘white man’s metal’ is the last line of defense. In the absence of grizzlies, Hanson develops a taste for the Democrat bosses and liberal media who make of his waking hours a nightmare. In sweet sleep, by contrast, there is no ‘retreat’ and ‘no more concessions [by North Atlantic powers] to the pre-rational primeval mind, no more backpeddling [sic] and equivocating on rioting and threats over cartoons or operas or papal statements. There would be no more apologies about how the West need make amends for a hallowed tradition that started 2,500 years ago with classical Athens, led to the Italian Republics of the Renaissance, and inspired the liberal democracies that defeated fascism, Japanese militarism, Nazism, and Communist totalitarianism, and now are likewise poised to end radical Islamic fascism.’  

This holy and puissant West has naught to answer for save its brilliance of light and liberty to an ungrateful world lately unwilling to make the sacrifices required for its maintenance. In Hanson’s frothing, the titular ‘Postwest’ appears as the strictly implicit, reverse side of an obverse text soaked with ‘castration anxiety’ and ‘masculine protest.’ The summons to rally to a sacred empire besieged by ‘primeval minds’ is a simple case of ‘nothing new under the sun’; new is the robust undertow of resignation, new is the pervading disbelief in Gibbon’s sanguine assurance that fluctuations in power and prosperity ‘cannot essentially injure our general state of happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and manners, which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies.’ The ‘Postwest’ is the incidental (and nocuous) domain wherein the gloomy Hanson and his wakeful votaries exchange bogus dreams and ‘screened’ tales of the loss of Atlantis beneath the sea. Indeed the ‘rise of the rest’ is a mere derivative of a primary theft of the phallus (which Hanson takes to have been an inside job) or the onset of its dysfunction. 

If the prospect of a PostWest excites (and it ought to arouse a quantum of passion), enthusiasm must surely be dulled and perhaps deferred by the chilling family resemblance of ‘the rest’ to Phlebas the Phoenician. What I mean is just that the PostWest is a discourse of the West and thus recycles many if not most of the very categories that define it here, replicate it there, and everywhere police its integrity with ‘recitation’ and black sites. You will have guessed some of the categories I mean: development, race, sustainability, labour, religion, democracy, STEM (not as a set of disciplines, but as a set of expulsions and exclusions), and freedom (among others). The grammatical and lexical bases of nation-state, prosperity, market, and even knowledge itself have been formulated according to the European and North American experiences of these phenomena (and/or to their advantage). Thus while boundaries and borders are instantly overflown by digital communication and information technologies and driven by information economies, presumptively broadening our aperture of understanding on the world, the networks and systems that discipline and move knowledge have coarsened knowledge and narrowed that aperture at the expense of indigenous, local, marginal, and expelled knowledges. This is what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms ‘epistemicide,’ the superordinate’s murder of the knowledge of a subordinated culture. In this ‘information phase’ of capital there is grave need for inclusive and unyielding critique of the cultural forces gelding human knowledge and for insurgency against the increasingly sadistic attenuation of ‘useless’ forms of knowledge or of sense-making not readily commoditisable.

Who lacks ears to hear how the PostWest will be? It is recited. How many have yet to learn the words to speak of a ‘shift’ in the ‘balance of power’ or of the ‘new geography of power’? Who cannot yet enumerate three to five variables that precipitated the ‘decline’ or ‘final decay’ of the United States (habitually and problematically seen as the terminus of the West)? Who cannot learnedly announce the ‘loss’ of American power and influence to ‘emerging powers’ like mighty China, India, Brazil, a resurgent Russia, and a shortlist of not-yet-mighty ‘others’? It is recited. The standardisation and wide dissemination of this script are far from fatal to its claim to truth, however crude and dubious seems the linear analytic of ‘rise’ and ‘fall.’ While that analytic invites and warrants suspicion, far more vexing are the categories and instruments used to frame and measure phenomena like ‘rise’ and ‘fall,’ which in the main exhibit negligible variation from West to PostWest. The resuscitation of classical growth and development strategies in progressive, new left, and socialist governments of the global South despite the welcome and well-publicised demise of classical Western development theory is a case in point. The global struggle for perpetual economic growth inspired Eduardo Gudynas to term development a ‘zombie category’ or a simultaneously ‘defunct’ and uniquely feasible model (precisely because the ontology of Western modernity remains largely uncontested). It must be contested because the fetish of profusion or perpetual growth violates a basic law of ecology and invites the attentions of Nemesis. The second iteration of Ecuador’s ‘The National Plan for Good Living’ defines buen vivir (literally, ‘good living’) precisely in opposition to the ‘quest for opulence or infinite economic growth.’

A Spanish translation of Quechua and Aymara expressions sumak kawsay and suma qamaña, buen vivir is a viable, working contestation. It names a family of Latin American epistemic systems and lifeways incongruent with the legitimating discourses and institutional frameworks of neoliberal capitalist and statist hegemonies. With roots in the ancestral values and practices of indigenous communities in the Americas, these diverse lifeways suffered five centuries of Hanson’s ‘hallowed tradition’ before re-emerging to source scepticism about and opposition to a developmentalist and (neo-) extractivist productivism responsible for cultural, ecological, and social destruction across Latin America. Invoked in Article 8 of the 2009 constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, suma qamaña posits ‘good living’ in terms of the cultural and ecological landscapes of the Andes, specifically in terms of the relations of complementarity and reciprocity that characterize the ayllu, the local community of animals, ancestors, persons, plants, and Pachamama (lit. ‘Mother Earth’) wherein material and spiritual well-being are collectively sought. Gustavo Soto Santiesteban explains that nature here is a ‘complex system of relations … conceived of as a living being and not as a thing of which to make other things,’ a subject then and not a factor of production or natural capital. The sticker price attached to maintaining a state while financing and executing a transition to a new economy and sociality means that the worldview implied in buen vivir has yet to decompose the worldview undergirding the old economic organization (whether in Ecuador or Bolivia). This means that contradictions are possible, likely, and even temporarily inevitable. It means that increased oil production, aggressive mining, and mega infrastructure projects measured more to global than local interests (e.g., the proposed Corredor Ferroviario Bioceánico Central or transoceanic railway from Santos, Brazil to Illo, Peru by way of Bolivia) sit cheek by jowl with constitutional and popular affirmations of buen vivir. Buen vivir nevertheless remains an available ethical, political, and communitarian logic for life and the practice of dissent in the Amazon and Andes, but not beyond these territories to which they belong and by/to which they have reference. Indeed, Gudynas argues that ‘there is no sense’ in appropriating the Aymara suma qamaña and Guaraní ñande reko outside of their local ecologies and encourages other cultures to ‘explore and build their own Buen Vivir’ that are engaged with and responsive to their unique local ecologies.  

There is something beautifully distinctive and disturbingly unfamiliar about the Latin American lifeways collected plurally and non-hierarchically under the expression buen vivir (this may be a function of perspective). In a 2009 conference presentation entitled ‘The Meaning of the Commons,’ Louis E. Wolcher offered an analysis of ‘commoning’ that may raise a window on the unsettling unfamiliarity of indigenous or mixed lifeways like suma qamaña. Wolcher argued that commoning or the unscripted social practice of autonomy and subsistence was ‘bred into the bones of [medieval] people.’ When the development of private property rights (the enclosure acts) threatened commoning, dissent and resistance were capacitated by this experiential polestar, by the memory of a ‘different form of living.’ He continues: ‘global capitalism has eclipsed the common imagination to such a degree that we have lost contact with this earlier memory if we ever had it. There is nothing for us to fall back on, or, to put it differently, for most people, ordinary people, the only solution they can think of to the failures of the market that are roiling us right now in so many different ways is the market, more market, different market. And so, unlike the medieval peasant or the medieval commoner, we do not have this cultural memory of a different way of being or at least the average person does not in the United States.’ The truth of Thatcher’s TINA lies in late capitalism’s unremitting obliteration of different ways of being not only in the global South but also from the memories and imaginations of people who were once more than merely Western. In Hanson’s ‘The Postwest,’ the titular subject matters appears as an unplayed B-side – his mind is free of alternatives. 

With no alternative in the offing, no memory of an alternative, and that unshakeable ‘sense of an ending,’ the way of life in the West is anxious. Our prefixation chafes against the constriction of the world to the terms of ontologies that are idle or defunct in some ways and inhumane in others. Like the West wherein it first draws breath, the PostWest is differentially configured and configurable precisely because there is no object to which it must or could correspond. How it is configured depends principally on the West written as lost, transformed, overcome, dispensable, usable, or redeemable in its projection. I follow Boaventura de Sousa Santos in thinking of the modern West as a sociopolitical paradigm founded on the ‘tension between social regulation and social emancipation,’ a paradigm that has lately generated vast global inequities and calcified into the intensely toxic formation described by Michel Foucault as neoliberal govermentality. Santos poses the problem of epistemicide (and thus the production and perpetuation of TINA) in terms of the ‘abyssal thinking’ that characterizes the modern West. Abyssal thinking is a system of distinctions grounded in the imposition of radical lines that hierarchically divide metropole from colony, regulation/emancipation from appropriation/violence, and existent from nonexistent. By way of example Santos cites the epistemological hegemony enjoyed by modern science over the universal distinction between true and false ‘to the detriment of two alternative bodies of knowledge: philosophy and theology.’ The visibility of tensions between science and philosophy/religion lies on this side of the abyssal line and is thus predicated on the invisibility of the ‘popular, lay, plebeian, peasant, or indigenous knowledges on the other side of the line’. The latter are unthinkable both in terms of scientific truth/falsity and in terms of the scientifically undiscoverable ‘truths’ of philosophy and theology. They belong rather to the other side of the line where dwell ‘beliefs, opinions, intuitions, and subjective understanding, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific inquiry,’ but cannot rise to the level of real or acceptable knowledge. Not only does abyssal thinking reduce ‘existential problems’ to what may be said scientifically about them, but also deterritorializes and disappears the agents and agencies of these discarded cognitive experiences. This ‘radical denial of co-presence’ or sacrifice of (sub-)humans in order to affirm the universal humanity on this side of the line means that the struggle for global social justice is indivisible from global cognitive justice (‘post-abyssal thinking’). Alternatively put, general epistemology must consent to its impossibility and to the possibility of an ecology of knowledges, a non-hierarchical plurality of heterogeneous knowledge and ignorances. Such post-abyssal thinking may be found in the Bolivian constitution’s non-hierarchical and pluralistic articulation of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous values: ‘The State adopts and promotes the following as ethical, moral principles of the plural society: ama qhilla, ama llula, ama suwa (do not be lazy, do not be a liar, or a thief), suma qamaña (live well), ñandereko (live harmoniously), teko kavi (good life), ivi maraei (land without evil) and qhapaj ñan (noble path or life).’

Just as the communitarian ecologies of the Americas inspired the first European utopians so too the political activists and rearguard intellectuals of Latin America tutor the West in alternatives which the West could not efface, recall, imagine, or disavow. By disavow I mean that buen vivir, say, is as indebted to the critiques of capitalism that originate inside modern Western thought as it is to the organic antagonism of the lifeways of a pre-Columbian antiquity. Let me be clear that the ascendancy of China is not an alternative, which is not to deny (substantive) difference between the dominion of the United States and China or India. The rules of the game do not change because the gamers do. There are more PostWests in potentia than can be tallied, but how many are credible (the scariest are the most credible), and of those how many desirable because they reflect the internal plurality of local needs and knowledges and respond to and enhance the social well-being of that distinctive ecology? It is only some kind of buen vivir that can change the rules of the game enforced by the logic of capital, but not a buen vivir that parrots the idiolects of other ecologies.

Many cultures use dreams to extend the scope and nature of their insights into the world. In the mid-nineteenth century a young Crow boy named Alaxchiiaahush (lit., Many Achievements) or ‘Plenty Coups’ had a medicine dream while questing in the wilderness. Jonathan Lear argues that the Crow used Plenty Coups’ dream to ‘struggle with the intelligibility of events that lay at the horizon of their ability to understand’ (namely, the devastation of their world by the modern West). In his medicine dream, Plenty Coups encounters a ‘Man-person’ who shows him the departure of the buffalo from the plains and the arrival of ‘spotted-buffalo’ (cattle), a vision later interpreted as the displacement of the Crow from their lands by white men. He also dreams that the Four Winds flatten a forest save for a lone tree in which sits the ‘lodge of the Chickadee.’ The Man-person explains that while weakest in body, the Chickadee is strongest in mind: ‘He is willing to work for wisdom. The Chickadee-person is a good listener. Nothing escapes his ears, which he has sharpened by constant use. Whenever others are talking together of their successes and failures, there you will find the Chickadee-person listening to their words … He never intrudes, never speaks in strange company, and yet never misses a chance to learn from others.’ Undoubtedly the object of collective revision, the dream was given its normative interpretation by the Crow elder Yellow Bear. In exposition of the Chickadee-person, Yellow Bear concluded that ‘He [Plenty Coups, who would lead the Crow into their future] was told to think for himself, to listen, to learn to avoid disaster by the experiences of others.’ In consequence of this interpreted dream and under the leadership of Plenty Coups, the Crow made common cause with the whites and were able to retain (some, but increasingly fewer acres of) their ancestral lands. Lear makes the case that Plenty Coups offered the Crow a ‘traditional way of going forward,’ using the traditional force of Crow spirituality, the Chickadee, to open up the Crow to seeing as wisdom what they needed to learn from others (including non-Crow) by listening. Thus an indigenous folk of North America models the courage required by post-abyssal thinking even as their culture confronts and suffers the abyss. As the West faces up to transformations far, far milder than the brutal devastation faced by the Crow, it can do no better amid the insecurity and anxiety of transition than to observe the rite of the Chickadee: to listen to and learn from those who sheltered their lifeways and wisdoms from the violence of its abyss.

Citations

Works Cited in this essay, include: De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of everyday life, tr. Stephen F. Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Gibbon, Edward. The History of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, 12 vols. (New York City: Fred de Fau and Co., 1906); Godin, Benoît. ‘The Information economy: the history of a concept through its measurement, 1949-2005,’ History and Technology 24, no. 3 (2008); Gudynas, Eduardo. ‘Buen vivir: Today’s tomorrow,’ Development 54, no. 4 (2011), 441–447; Lear, Jonathan. Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006); Linderman, Frank B. Plenty-Coups: Chief of the Crows (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); National Secretariat of Planning and Development (Senplades), ‘National plan for good living, 2013-2017 [summarized version],’ Quito, Ecuador: 2013); Rollins, Philip Ashton. The Cowboy; his