<edu-factory> A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits ofCollaboration

[Jon Solomon Su Zhe-an]

I do not think that the relation between hierarchy, knowledge and
translation at the forefront of recent discussions is simply fortuitous or
accidental. 

I have several remarks to share:

1) The hierarchies at issue occur on two very different levels, the social
and the cognitive, to speak in crude terms. In other words, there are social
hierarchies (class and culture repeatedly come up here, but there have been
significant references to gender, language, ethnicity, and sexuality), and
there are hierarchies in the order of knowledge. Each has it own
specifities, yet we are still very far from understanding how the
relationship between the two may in fact determine the way we understand
each individually. Composite or quasi-objects that straddle both the social
and the cognitive are key sites of intervention into the composition and
reproduction of hierarchies. 
2) One of the reasons why the university is a crucial site of intervention
is because its very nature is to institutionalize and regulate the ratio
between the paradigmatic quasi-object of modernity: i.e., the complex models
of thought + world that we call "regions". The ratio between thought and
world-the magic bullet of modern social theory in general-is what is
generally called "rationality". It is no accident-only a catastrophe!-that
the dominant image of rationality in modernity is a quasi-object that
combines both hierarchies of knowledge and social organization in a single
geo-cultural unit called, quite notoriously, "the West". In fact, as we have
discovered, it is impossible to consider the ratio beteween thought and
world accumulating, in primitive fashion, to the "West" without encountering
the problem of ressentiment. The various postcolonial, postmodern and
feminist critiques of "western rationality" have the signal merit showing us
that ressentiment is the repressed other of this particular form of
rationality.
3) Ned's work has gone farther than anybody else I can think of to show how
the new forms of dis/organized networks are not just displacing the
quasi-objects of high modernity known as geo-cultural regions but are in
fact posing entirely novel ratios between the social and the cognitive.
Evidently, the displacement of modernity's geo-cultural regions by the
postmodern network does not mean that we have found our way out of the
quandary of quasi-objects! On the contrary, the entire problem of regions as
composite or amphibological models of transcendental and empirical,
cognitive and social, levels is only further exacerbated by the essentially
epidemic nature of postmodern sociality and knowledge. 
4) One of the challenges posed by this displacement is that it is occurring
before we have had sufficient time to fully critique in a bilateral way the
colonial and anthropological legacy of geo-cultural regions and to produce
thereby entirely new understandings of "regions" based on alternative terms
of comparison. In fact, given the new, "proactive" interventionism of U.S.
imperial-nationalism and the rise of resentment-based geo-cultural politics
of "return to the West, return to the East" today, such critique is becoming
ever more difficult to imagine. As a result, the new rationality being
promoted by the displacement of regions-as-networks bears within it an
important contradiction that blocks the passage to alternative pasts as well
as futures. 
5) The opportunity offered by "translation"-as a mode of social praxis
rather than a mode of epistemological mapping-is the chance to think in
terms of relationships, rather than discrete identities. This means that the
relationship takes priority in a temporal sense: the identities (at least as
far as we normally talk about them) are formed only after the relational
encounter. To take but one example, it would make little sense to talk
of/critique the West as a specific identity or amalgam of defining traits,
since its very formation (as a mode of translation-and certainly not the
only mode possible!) determines both what we know and who knows it. The
types of critique that assume the identity of the West at the expense of
seeing the "Western relation" will be easily recuperated into the
intrinsically-hierarchical structure (no matter what the reversals and
permutations may be) of "the West and its others".
6) We are in need of a new kind of social movement that addresses this ratio
or relationship in an integral way, producing an alternative rationality
that allows new social and cognitive relations to take place in ways that
completely redefine what "regions" mean. The fact that such massive
reorganization is currently underway is everywhere in evidence today. The
question is whether it will be guided by destructive forces of
self-immunization/overexposure that lead to catastrophe, or whether we can
together reappropriate these transformations for the better? 
7) The process of this alternative rationality produces a temporal schism
that necessitates two movements, one towards the past, the other towards the
future. On the one hand, it demands a radical rewriting of past history and
the terms of comparison that ground humanistic knowledge. The flawed Marxist
project of rewriting world history on the basis of class rather than nation
or civilization is but a caricature of the kind of project required, yet it
can serve, in spite of its fatal flaws, as an emblem of the possibility
ahead. On the other hand, the question "Who are we?" formerly central to
modernity will be replaced by the question "What are we becoming? and, What
can we become instead?". 
8) Thinking/acting in terms of relationships produces its own special kind
of resistance, some of which we have already discussed on this list. This
forum is obviously not the place to resolve these questions, but to the
extent we bear in mind that resistance corresponds to invention, we are on
the right track, I think.