Conditions of Comparison

Comparative literature, like many other disciplines, has now been grappling for some time with the question of how to extend its purview beyond the European languages and European-derived cultures that were its original home. Calls for attention to this question have, for example, been echoed in each of the decadal reviews of the state of the discipline commissioned by the American Comparative Literature Association since the 1960s. As that half century has progressed, to be sure, the question has shifted, moving from a simple plea to regard non-European traditions as eligible for inclusion within the discipline to calls (prompted in part by postcolonial theory but also, in a comparative literature context, specifically arising from the work, for example, of Haun Saussy beginning in the 1990s) to bring intercultural issues to the heart of the discipline, and to redescribe our theoretical premises in terms that are informed by intercultural work. Comparisons beyond Europe are no longer a peripheral interest of the field but lay claim to constituting one of its principal axes of inquiry.In the midst of this development, Ming Xie's Conditions of Comparison makes a welcome intervention. In a succinct but rich and dense volume, Xie draws on a heady mixture of theoretical influences, ranging from Foucault and Derrida to Castoriadis, Luhmann, and Donald Davidson (to name only a few), to identify what he sees as several of the major problematics of intercultural inquiry as a field and particularly its epistemological foundations. Each of his eight chapters is built around a problem in the epistemology of intercultural theory: interpretation, comparison, hermeneutics, the distinction between epistemes and paradigms, difference, relativism, universalism, and modernity. In each case, Xie guides the reader through a range of critical texts, opening those texts up to intercultural approaches and interrogating their applicability to these approaches. In many cases, the arguments he makes are fleshed out with readings, ranging from a discussion of I. A. Richards' Mencius on the Mind in the first chapter to a discussion of Yan Fu's 1898 translation of Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays in the final chapter.Throughout, the book provides rich food for thought on a number of issues. Xie, for example, interestingly and originally juxtaposes Thomas Kuhn's notion of the paradigm with the Foucauldian episteme, in the sense of an “invisible, unconscious, and deep-running continuity,” opposed to which “changeable knowledge is merely surface knowledge” (74–75). For Xie, then, the underlying understanding of the world that grounds the particular discourses of any given place and time constitutes the episteme, and the particular discourses themselves are paradigms that overlay the episteme. Through this juxtaposition, Xie is able to make an interesting argument about the Chinese absorption of Western modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (a key concern throughout the book), namely that it represents the absorption of a new paradigm into an existing episteme, but the relationship he outlines between paradigm and episteme should be useful for many other sorts of projects, including those contained within a culture. Likewise, the discussion of relativism, in which he argues for the need to relativize relativism itself (that is, to understand relativism as a position that is only intelligible if it contrasts with an already existing universalism) and in which he contrasts relativism with pluralism (which is more open to understanding different perspectives as complementary and thus able to serve as a bridge “between extreme relativism and an absolute notion of objective truth” [121–22]) will, I believe, be of considerable interest to many beyond the immediate realm of intercultural inquiry. In Xie's work, intercultural inquiry becomes something of a paradigm case (if I may be permitted the word here) for all kinds of thinking about perspective and difference and can serve as something like a thought experiment for thinking about these issues, both beyond and even within cultures. As he notes in his epilogue, his intercultural methodology could prove helpful in “opening existing cultures towards new and diverse modes and possibilities of being” (166). This is both the book's great strength and, I would argue, its great weakness: the intercultural can in some sense become a figure for intracultural commitments at the risk of overlooking what is particularly “cultural” about the intercultural.Xie quotes with approval Rudi Visker on the “unthought” as that “which is ... not outside of or the outside of a thought, but as it were the inner rhythm which has allowed it to take the high flight that it has” (43). This citation invites the reader to consider what might constitute the “unthought” of Xie's own book: in my view, this would be “culture” itself, a concept on which the intercultural necessarily depends and that must in some way provide the “inner rhythm,” in Visker's terms, of Xie's thought. Xie is at considerable pains to distinguish the intercultural from the “cross-cultural” (which for him “may seem to presuppose the fixity and self-evidence of the boundaries to be crossed and traversed” [4]), from the “transcultural” (“synchronic and diachronic movements of cultural forms, interacting with and generating each other” [4]), and from the “multicultural” and the “pluricultural” (respectively, diversity within and across single cultures [5]). In this context, Xie identifies the “intercultural” as a “liminal condition” (6) between cultures, the space through which “the cultural is mediated and constituted” (7). Nowhere, however, is the concept of “culture” itself interrogated or defined.Throughout, Xie remains rightly skeptical of the notion of cultures as “autonomous and neatly separated and delimited” entities (117; in the context of a critique of relativism). And yet much of the argument of the book relies on just such a notion, at least implicitly; in particular, discussions of issues like incommensurability and misrecognition, significant themes at various points in the book, probably depend on some kind of fairly stable notion of culture within which the problematics of intercultural commensurability and/or recognition can be grounded. Missing altogether is an account (ontological or epistemological) of what a culture is.This presents complications on several levels, most immediately in terms of boundary conditions (a consideration of no small significance in this context, given that Xie has defined the “intercultural” as a liminality of sorts). Throughout, the primary case study, as it were, of intercultural inquiry is that between China and the West, each a cultural configuration presenting definitional problems in both spatial and temporal terms. Why juxtapose a “national” culture (China) against a “transnational” one (“the West”): what about cultural minorities within China, for example, or about other East Asian nations, which may (or may not) participate in the phenomena Xie ascribes to China? And who is or is not a part of the West (vexed question, that)? Moreover, what sort of diachronic persistence do we attribute to each culture (for that matter, to “culture” in general)? Is the cultural China of our time analogous to that of the late imperial period? What about earlier times? For that matter, do we infer from the term “the West” a traditional narrative that describes a narrative of progress beginning in classical Athens, and ending in (or at least leading to) the contemporary United States or Europe? Or do we assume an event of rupture coinciding with what we call modernity in China, the West, or both?These last points might remind us that what I have identified as problems of the demarcations of cultural boundaries in fact have much deeper conceptual implications. Xie is himself alert to these implications, although the terms in which he discusses them may provoke further questions in the reader. Particularly salient here are the relationships between “culture” and the Foucauldian “episteme.” Although Xie does not say so explicitly, the objects identified by his term “culture” (China, the West) in fact look much more like epistemes than like cultures in any of the senses used, for example, by anthropologists; despite occasional slippage elsewhere between “culture,” “society,” and “ethnicity,” it seems as though episteme might in fact be a close conceptual relative of Xie's unspoken definition of culture. In this context, it is particularly interesting to examine Xie's discussion of epistemic shifts in China and the West. In discussing China, Xie observes “the extent to which the basic episteme underwrites all shifts in paradigm or ideology” (79); specifically, debates about the appropriation of concepts originating in the Western episteme are deployed in China as a means of carrying on existing internal political debates without their fundamentally remaking the Chinese episteme per se. In contrast, Xie cites Ian Hacking on the differences between sixteenth-century alchemical knowledge and modern medicine as a difference of “depth knowledge” (80), which in context is an equivalent to episteme. The advent of modernity in the West, then, seems for Xie to be the result of an epistemic rupture, while in China the underlying episteme remains intact.The implications of all of this for Xie's argument are considerable. If culture is understood in terms of episteme, which by its nature can only be but imperfectly understood even (or especially) from within, and if in particular non-Western epistemes like that of China are resistant to fundamental change merely as a result of the interaction with Western modernity, then the incommensurability of different cultures is indeed profound, and the problematics of intercultural inquiry as described by Xie indeed follow. If (as I would instead argue myself but in any event for the purposes of argument) culture and episteme are in fact not the same thing, or if epistemes, especially non-Western or nonmodern ones, are more susceptible to change when they come into contact with new paradigms, then intercultural inquiry might in fact be a rather less complicated (or at any rate differently complicated) matter. What would be needed here is something like an investigation of the Chinese episteme, along the lines of Foucault's studies of the Western episteme, with a view to establishing whether or not that episteme has in fact changed over time and in particular whether it changed after its encounter with Western modernity. Xie's book provides a number of interesting glimpses into moments within that encounter and particularly, in its closing chapter, to the engagement of contemporary Chinese intellects with the (for them) linked concepts of postmodernity and globalization. As it is, however, Xie takes the durability of the Chinese episteme, along with its incommensurability with that of the West (in either modern or premodern guises), as an assumption to be deployed rather than as an assertion to be proved.This weakness notwithstanding, Conditions of Comparison makes a valuable and timely intervention in a debate of critical importance in our time, not only in comparative literature, as well as literary studies generally, but much more broadly. Xie is to be commended for his impressive command of a range of theoretical paradigms and for demonstrating throughout the book that the intercultural context (however understood) is not merely one context out of many in which theoretical constructs can be explored but constitutes in fact the critical site of evaluation for many, perhaps most, theoretical paradigms. As such, this book is of immense value and should find a home not only on the syllabuses of seminars devoted to intercultural inquiry but also in introductions to literary theory, where it could serve as a means of bringing intercultural inquiry into the central position within theoretical discussions that it should occupy by right and by necessity

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