Okay, so let's engage with the last of the ideas chapters from the textbook. This one's non-Western ideas, which, I mean, that's something. So, you know, we have to be, part of the reason, so let's be clear, the textbook I was using in the past was, you know, this one's much, much better, even for all my criticisms last week of it.
It's much, much better. Because the last one I had was literally a Catholic textbook, for whatever reason. So this one is good in that it's dealing with non-Western ideas. So what we're going to look at is, you know, the ways in which non-Western ideas are as diverse as those of the non-Western world.
Anyways, we'll discuss Orientalism and then how we think about that. We'll provincialize. A lot of what we're doing this week is provincializing. which is basically saying, like I discussed last week, you know, was World War II an ethnic conflict?
If we frame it as an ethnic conflict, it's provincializing the ways in which their attitudes, opinions, and culture within what were otherwise claimed to be sovereign nation states, right? And so this idea of, on the one hand, kind of ethnicizing or culturally situating the experience of the West. And also de-culturing the ideas of the East, the South, whatever you want to call it. And we'll go through all the problems of this language thing. And then we'll talk about glocal, which is the interpenetration of the local and the global.
So it's kind of direct mediation of the, you know, what we call the global level and then the kind of municipal local level. And then the idea of production of critical thinking throughout this section. So.
Already, like, this is weird. First, it's that it's chapter five, so it's the last of the ideas. So we want to say that we're taking these ideas seriously, but we put them at the back.
There's also not a substantive discussion of, I think, women's ideas from the non-Western world here, which is weird. We've got Spivak, but we don't have a ton of others. And then, you know, this idea that ideas travel across times and places and shaped by other ideas, context, and power relations. Okay. I have some questions about how these ideas move across space and time, right?
So that, like, it's not always done voluntarily, right? And that this travel is often linked to imperialism, colonialism, slavery, those types of things. But, you know, sure, we want to treat those ideas in a good way, in a kind of an honest way. We'll talk about reason in a minute. And then the hybridity is really key.
This is a real key post-colonial insight from Homi Bhabha in particular is the idea that... After the encounter, neither is the same. So once you encounter something fundamentally different or a new culture, it bleeds into both and there is no going back.
And so you mix the old and the new, the near and the far. This is to continue. I have it again this weekend. I have Latour in here as well.
It's just the idea that modernity has never existed. So it's been moments of... moving forward and then moving back, translating. Even the insights of something may take, you know, decades or hundreds of years of a scientific insight to actually be propagated in a cultural way where we understand its significance, right?
So this is kind of what, when we were talking about Ling and this idea of worlding, this is a kind of fluid version of that. Now, the idea of privileging of Western ideas is due to doing the Fabian socialist move for your ideas. Because if I say like, this is a product of colonialism, racism and imperialism, it's going to shut some people down.
Particularly, there's a lot of research on this. I've written chapters on this. People in positions of hierarchy and authority don't like to recognize that their hierarchy and authority is there, right? It makes them uncomfortable, right?
Talking about race is uncomfortable. It's also emotionally draining. So sometimes it's complicated, but it would, for me, be a little more direct to just talk about the kind of colonial appropriation of experiences from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia within the white Western canon, right?
Like the British, let's do the Commonwealth. The British colonial experience impacts both Britain and contributes to how it thinks about things. There was a...
kind of terrible Tom Hardy show called Taboo. It was fun to watch, but the premise was flawed. But a central premise was that what was happening...
at the center of Britain was also tied to the settlement problems that were happening in BC. That those political, the capacity to extract resources from these new areas was of political significance to the center and the core, the core's relationship to the periphery. So the weird negation here is that like these aren't, like we're still using the referent point as the West, right? When we're talking about not the West, which I guess is a hybrid move to talk about this kind of colonial legacies without calling it colonialism because that's too political for a kind of liberal approach. And honestly, like it's a bad naming exercise.
I think the premise comes back to the idea that we want to have a single univocal way to frame all of the world that isn't the West. So we just say non-West. But this in itself produces what we'll talk about with Sayyid is a type of...
Orientalism, which is the kind of abstraction of the actual experiences of the non-Western world into something that we create as a monolithic thing. It's like how Canada talks about Indigenous communities as if they're one, and if there's not like thousands of languages and centuries of different experience, and we just say like English experience, French experience, Indigenous experience in Canada, it's not even the same. Like the Inuit are not the same as the Haudenosaunee, right? Like there's big differences built into this.
And so for me, it's like, well, why don't we start with hybridity as the starting point? Like, why don't we just talk about global ideas, right? Think about it that, or glocal ideas.
Let's do glocal. We can take very minutiae ideas or very abstract ideas. And then there's the problem of my position location.
So there's a couple of things bound up in this here. I am going to take the back seat because, I mean, we have YouTube. I have YouTube. I'm set up to do this. If rather than me tell you what to think about experts, which I feel the chapter does a bit, We can just let the experts talk to themselves about their ideas.
We have their ideas. I've got Spivak's idea. We'll just show Spivak. So we're going to do that.
Now, I'm conscious of two things here. In the Western tradition, like I did last week, in the Western rational tradition, ruthless criticism is the Aristotelian impetus, right? The West loves to revolutionize through... ruthless criticism and tearing down institutions and structures. So that itself is, to provincialize that, is a form of kind of cultural attitude.
It's not always appropriate in the context, especially when we're dealing with different experiences, for me to ruthlessly do that. Like I said, there's a lot of men this week, which itself isn't really unpacked, as if there aren't ideas coming from women this whole time as well, or let's be clear. lots of other communities. There's not a lot of indigeneity here. That's because we're kind of, this is really a post-colonial chapter.
It's looking at the relationships of kind of colonial experience and the ways in which we have listened to or not listened to those ideas over space and time. So I'll do that. So I'm going to try to get out of the way, but I also think my value added here, and this is, I think this is the point that Spivak makes, or is it here, in dealing with power and privilege, just the idea that There is a danger to, which is why I picked this textbook, there's a danger to in the Western canon, because it doesn't understand something to not engage with it, and not take it seriously, which is really, I think, dangerous for those.
positions of power and privilege, because you're saying that I'm going to replicate those positions of power and privilege and not do anything with that power and privilege, right? And so it's, you can't unlearn your privilege. It's historical.
It's larger than your personal goodwill. You know, this idea of being suspicious of those interested in ideas that they're not comfortable with or they don't know. Well, you're upper class. Well, of course, I've got all sorts of power and privilege, but you got to use it, right?
Like that's the whole impetus here is that we've got to use that power and privilege. It's not to shy away from power and privilege and not talk about things because the subject location isn't. So I'm going to take these seriously.
I'm going to let those voices speak for themselves. I will engage where I can, but I'm not going to just ruthlessly criticize it because it doesn't fit the Western canon as well. And so this is based on the idea of Euro-Centrism.
So we use Euro, but it's because of the Enlightenment traditions and the Renaissance traditions that we've talked about. all along is it's this idea that west is best and we need to civilize the rest this language is everywhere all the time um and so provincializing is just you know localize it talk about how it's not a universal uh idea it's actually comes from a very specific history and trajectory there's nothing wrong with looking at the history of ideas it's really important to look at the history of ideas um i i follow dan mcclellan on tiktok and he just looks like kind of ruthlessly takes the history of the ways in which the Bible has been interpreted over time and the historical context. And he focuses on the poly-vocality of the Bible.
It's just texts say different things. They contradict themselves. We can talk about those.
And so we need to look at the history in order to understand those. I will say the West tends to privilege written texts over experience, storytelling, literature, and narrative. This isn't really addressed in the text.
But one of the things that Said is looking at, it's a literary critical work, Orientalism. So he's saying how is the Orient and the Occident both thoroughly interpenetrated with their experiences of themselves, but the ones writing the literature is largely in the Western canon, and that's because it's easy for us to transmit Western ideas because we want to rip them out of context and send them back home. Linda Twalley-Smith talks about this when she says decolonizing methodologies. The university itself is a colonial construct because it seeks to go out in the world. Collect those ideas, bring them back here to sell to you as students, right?
And so this idea of the university being the site of saviordom, I think we can see it in the reflection of the text that we have in this chapter, is that it still largely reflects structures of patriarchy and power. And that's, I mean, that's me too. I'm going to do those, but we have to be conscious about them and we have to be critical of them.
I could just as easily, and I have in the past, because the textbook selection, we don't talk about this at all, right? So I think it's better to talk about it and perhaps do it poorly than not talk about it at all. But I'm not going to claim authority over these ways of thinking.
That doesn't make any sense for me. I will highlight this. I've got Ilan Kapoor's stuff. So this is Ilan I've worked on a couple things with.
And he's at York, and he produced this book just last year talking about the idea of... The universal politics, and I think I've mentioned this before, but if we're going to look at a universal politics in a kind of non-Western way, we have to get around the idea of having a positive content, that we can think about the idea of social antagonism, shared experiences of exploitation and marginalization, the oppressor in all of us, right? And we'll come back to that again this week. It's not about being pure or having an abstract platonic ideal that we can escape the contingency of the articulation of a claim. Everybody is articulating a claim, and those articulations of claim then require us to think about how we perpetuate exclusion and marginalization, and that exclusion and marginalization can be the universal basis of politics.
So I'll show a bit of his clip, maybe make a couple comments on it because I know this text better. Again, this is just him saying that all of, and this is a provincializing move, right? All universal claims are going to inherently be contingent. So again, this is... Our post-COVID Zoom seminar sessions.
First, because negative universality is and can only be taken up from a particular vantage point, it is always partial, partisan, contingent. So there's a paradox here, that universality can only be articulated from a specific standpoint, making it possible to avert the postmodern trap of insisting on particularity while denying truth. So this is the danger, and he's talking about this, is the idea that if we only focus on where claims have come from, we don't look at the claims. And if we only focus on the claims, we don't know where they've come from.
And so in the current moment, we're caught in this trap. We won't listen to voices if they don't reflect the community in which they come, and we won't listen to the idea of those voices. We'll look at who's articulating the claim. And he's arguing here that no, no, no, we have to get around this supposed paradox.
But this is definitional, since any claim to the particular cannot be made without recourse to the universal. As Hegel famously notes, the master needs the slave as other in order to be recognized as master. That is, the very claim to masterhood is unintelligible without a shared language.
And in the same vein, Etienne Balibar points out that even a racist anti-universalism, so the racist idea that whites are superior to blacks, for example, even that must invoke a universal benchmark, the notion of what it is to be human, to enable the comparison between white and black in the first place. So particularity needs an other and a shared language to distinguish itself as unique. Thus always proclaiming its particularity from a universal standard. And that, by the way, is our main critique of all those who advocate for a localism or a pluriversality. But partly the universal truth dimension of every particular stems from the antagonism at its very heart.
That is to say that truth is both contingent and universal. Every situation may well articulate a particular truth, but the emergence of that truth arises to the... as a result of the antagonism that besets all situations. So the real here, the antagonism, is thereby a contextualized antagonism.
So a specific human rights claim that you are violating my rights because you're kicking me out of my place because I have a pet. It couldn't be more contingent and universal to the jurisdiction, the laws, whatever, the claims that are being made. But the idea of being persecuted for something that...
is what you love or what you do, that itself is a universal experience, right? And so the idea here is that you can't do one without the other. Someone is always making a universal claim, and I'll go with Kant, for example, we'll talk about him. We tend to read Kantian theory.
So Immanuel Kant, we read his theory without reading his anthropology, which is crazy racist and geopolitical and all the rest of it. But we treat his ideas as separate from these other racist contingent claims and no we have to see them all together which is to say that those are universal claims being made are also a contingent claim of somebody who has a whole bunch of ideas that are of his time and include race and include ways to think about how he experiences those things so we have to do both at the same time the problem is is the west has always privileged just the universal claim and never looked at its contingent articulation or if they do look at its contingent articulation to just say ignore it The ideas are what matter and what the provincial move is to say no no no no you got to look at where it comes from right it can't just be universal it's got to be contingent. Someone is always making a claim and someone is in the claim is always articulating ideas of the universal.