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Area Studies, Globalization, and the Nation-State in Crisis

Michael Dutton contests the flattening unity imposed by the positivist narrative strategy in Asian area studies. For him, this flattening into a “homogeneous world,” extracting the “scientific rawmaterial” from a fuzzy, ungrounded “dross,” is the work of capitalism inmapping the world around the “market” and the “modern.” Dutton calls capitalism the “battering ram of reason.” Very likely it is the reverse. Still more likely, the primary battering ram of capitalism is the nation-state. The nation-state and capitalism are interdependently conjoined forms, and the global experience of modernity is the consequence of the internal expansionary dynamic of capitalism. The crisis of the nation-state is therefore a properly historical question. We must consider the logic of capitalism in the formation of nation-states, as well as the dialectic of uneven development and core/periphery. How is it, Dutton asks, that the subject of Asian area studies must invariably be reduced to a one-dimensional model of the “real,” while such thinkers as Michel Foucault can write in the most abstracted language about the “modern soul” with reference almost exclusively to French social history? His essay investigates a genealogy of Asian area studies in which a superficial positivism has reigned over the discipline, rendering it a “translator” of the other for the social-science machine. Identifying how this translating mode has kept Asian area studies in a theoretically impoverished position, Dutton calls for a regeneration of the discipline based on an “awakening” of the inherent subversive tendencies within language itself. The call is to disrupt the homogeneous world by giving proper expression to those marginalized practices that would