The Commodification of Labour (De-Culturalization)
Dominant agents are not impeded by the fact they do not have, ready at hand, a rationalizing ideology. Where it does not exist, they cobble it together."-Vivek Chibber, "Catalyst" (2020)----
Bashir: I want to ask you about Iraq. Doesn't Iraq just exemplify this?
Vivek: Although you could say that's true it's too easy. I mean, Iraq was based completely on a lie, on a fiction. But what what it shows is that when Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and these guys decided that they were going to take out Saddam Hussein, they concoct this lie. But more importantly is how the opinion generating sections of the chattering classes, which is the media, and a not insubstantial section of the intelligentsia more broadly, hopped on board and helped them propagate it. And in the case of the New York Times, Judith Miller actively promoted and spread further lies. Now the reason that's important is that it shows something which is, it's a sociological rule, I think that one should look at intellectuals in the intelligentsia primarily as institutions that orbit power centers. And they function around power center,s and they serve those powers. And the reason they serve them isn't because they're immoral, or evil, or anything like that It is that, well, this is where the money comes from. The money comes from people who control the wealth of society. And what they do is, they put out the word when they need to do something. It's pretty clear to the intelligentsia they need a rationalizing ideology to justify what they're doing, and a section of the intelligentsia will say, "Hey, I'm not going to take part in this. I'm not going to lie". But that's okay, because there's 10 more to take the place of everyone that says "I'm not going to participate in this." So this is a function of think tanks today. This is the function of a big chunk of universities today, which is, people naturally gravitate towards power centers. And that was true in the early 20th century. It was true in the 19th. It was true in the 18th century as well. So the point is, for Said to think that the ideology for justifying imperial rule had to pre-exist the imperial venture itself is an analytical error. That is, even if it was true, even if it were the case that in England in the 18th century notions of British superiority existed, it has no bearing on their role in actually promoting and propelling empire. Because even if they had not existed, just like it didn't exist to justify the Iraq invasion in 2001-2002, it was invented when it was needed to do it. They would have done it in the 18th century as well.
Now there's a deeper error that Said is guilty of which i bring up in the essay which I should mention now. Said, when he says that these Orientalist notions pre-exist the advent of empire and that they can be traced all the way back to the Greeks. What he is identifying them with, what he got what he says is identifiable as 'Orientalist mindsets in the West' is a proclivity, a tendency to look at non-Western people and to essentialize them in some way. In other words generalized in some way, that there are certain properties that are always there. To put those properties on a moral hierarchy so that what is identified as typical, or essential of the East, is also considered inferior to cultural facts about the West. And then see through that, reach certain conclusions about the civilizational hierarchy in which the West comes out on top. So he says, "Look Western people believed all this, and since they believed all this, it propelled them to go and conquer the East to try to fix all these cultural deficiencies in the East. So that's how the pre-existence of orientalist tropes is seen to be the causal factor in bringing about empire.
Now this has one fundamental and irredeemable flaw. There's no way around this. Which is that if you examine the intellectual and cultural production in India in the 18th century, in China in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, and in the Middle East, Said's own range of expertise, you find the identical notions with regard to the West. All of these. You think the Chinese emperor sat around saying, "Wow, I really wish we were more like the British." You think Indians sat around saying, I mean Indian intellectuals now say it, "I wish I was white. I wish I was British." But you think they sat around back then saying? Every civilization, every ruling class in these civilizations thought it was the cat's whiskers, that it was the the apex of human achievement. So here's the problem for saying is, that if you identify the propulsive force of Western imperialism in their feelings of superiority to the East, you can't explain imperialism. Because the fact is, the East had the same notions about other countries in the East, and about the West. So it's a common feature across the ruling classes of the world, and yet only one section of the world actually engages an empire, and that's the West. So in order to explain the imperial venture, you simply cannot rely on these cultural facts, on these tropes. You have to go to other what actually differentiates East from West at that time. And what differentiates East from West at that time is, resides, in the realm of material advantages, of the interests to use those material advantages, military advantages, economic advantages, to overtake and overrun the East. And then, the success in doing so. Somewhere he understood this, I think, because he admits in Orientalism, "Hey that even in the East they had these notions of superiority, but he skips it. He elides that fact, he runs around it, and he doesn't fully appreciate how absolutely devastating it is to his argument.
So in my view therefore, the location of empire in culture. The way he does it is very popular because he writes the book at a time when the left is turning away from economic analysis, and political economy is very popular. But it simply removes any ability to explain empire at all.
Lacan would call this "cobbling of ideology together" in Anti-Orientalism, "The University Discourse" of the 1980's
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