The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Next Wave Provocations) [Paperback]

Rey Chow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 5, 2006 | Series: Next Wave Provocations

Martin Heidegger once wrote that the world had, in the age of modern science, become a world picture. For Rey Chow, the world has, in the age of atomic bombs, become a world target, to be attacked once it is identified, or so global geopolitics, dominated by the United States since the end of the Second World War, seems repeatedly to confirm. How to articulate the problematics of knowledge production with this aggressive targeting of the world? Chow attempts such an articulation by probing the significance of the chronological proximity of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature—fields of inquiry that have each exerted considerable influence but whose mutual implicatedness as postwar U.S. academic phenomena has seldom been theorized. Central to Chow’s discussions is a critique of the predicament of self-referentiality—the compulsive move to interiorize that, in her view, constitutes the collective frenzy of our age—in different contemporary epistemic registers, including the self-consciously avant-garde as well as the militaristic and culturally supremacist. Urging her readers to think beyond the inward-turning focus on EuroAmerica that tends to characterize even the most radical gestures of Western self-deconstruction, Chow envisions much broader intellectual premises for future transcultural work, with reading practices aimed at restoring words and things to their constitutive exteriority.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The Age of the World Target is a catalyzing tour-de-force. Rey Chow provides a poignant, persuasive staging of a topic that will shape the future of literary and cultural studies: the role of particular poststructuralist claims within the fields of area studies, identity politics, and comparative literature.”—Bill Brown, author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

“Rey Chow is one of the most learned and imaginative left critics writing today, and The Age of the World Target is possibly her finest book yet. Elegantly traversing philosophy, literature, history, and politics, Chow refracts our political times through our academic practices in a fashion that is alternately pedagogical, biting, lyrical, and profound.”—Wendy Brown, author of Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics

About the Author

Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of several books, including The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading; and Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, which won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. She is the editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, also published by Duke University Press. She is a coeditor of the Duke University Press book series Asia-Pacific.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (April 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822337444
• ISBN-13: 978-0822337447
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,073,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Provocative Work that is ultimately problematic and contradictory, May 7, 2007

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This review is from: The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Next Wave Provocations) (Paperback)

This small book by Rey Chow makes a bold attempt to apply Heidegger's notion of the "age of world picture" to the post-1945 Asia Pacific and questions the still pervasive mode of compartmentalized disciplinarity in East Asian Studies, Minority Studies, etc, in order to elucidate for us a new notion of comparative literature. While such a depiction of her project brings to mind the path already taken by Spivak in the Death of Discipline, her promise to tackle "comp lit" through Asia Pacific, the Atomic Age, and the institutionalization of theory and Asian Studies in the US are both refreshing and provocative.

However, my initial excitement was soon replaced by some disappointment and more question marks. The first chapter that "applies" Heidegger to Asia Pacific and East Asian Studies remains precisely a mere application of the famous essay by Heidegger and does not add much to what the German philosopher has already written. Heidegger in "the Age of World Picture" critiques the productionist metaphysics that leads to an endless creation of "researches" and the production & destruction at once of "world" as such. Therefore, when Chow says Asia Pacific was reduced into a target of both academic research (East Asian Studies in the US) and atomic bombing, she is largely merely retracing the thesis put forth by Heidegger approximately 50 years ago. To apply and retrace important theoretical point made by others is fine. But Rey Chow has a constant tendency to sound as if she is always "advancing" and "going beyond" the points made by others (e.g., "Supplementing Heidegger, we may say that in the age of bombing, the world has also been transformed into ... a target" (31).) But less obvious and perhaps more productive is Heidegger's mysterious claim about "technology's saving power" that makes us see the reverse side of the age of world picture, but she does not at all refer to or think about the possibility of this line of inquiry...

To go through the rest of the book more quickly, the second chapter is a partial vindication of "referentiality" or the persistence of referential meaning in literature and cultural studies. So Chow sets out to critique what she calls European "post-structural theorists." Again, that kind of project is fine. However, if someone wants to offer a credible critique of "post-structuralist theorists" still current in the US academy, one should at least provide a detailed close reading and substantial critique of people like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Levinas, de Man, Blanchot, Nancy, etc. However, what Rey Chow gives us is a very brief reading of Roland Barthes'_Mythologies_ and Barthes' perhaps naive insistence of a rural woodcutter as an exmaple of someone outside the hegemonice system...For someone as acute and well-read as Rey Chow to set up this kind of straw-person argument is rather disappointing. Can one Barthes book exemplify poststructuralist tendency to reify, essentialize, and thus implicitly denigrate the cultural Other (in the guise of celebrating such otherness)? Perhaps not. Does Chow provide a contrived argument in order to artificially make the entire post-structuralist theory eurocentric? Well, others can decide for themselves.

The last chapter retains the problem of the second chapter. That is, Chow now links what she sees as post-structuralist tendency to "incarcerate" the non-Western other and fetishize "interruptive aesthetics" to Johannes Fabian's argument that ethnography usually sustains itself by denying the "coevalness" between the ethnographer and the so-called native. Even if this argument is valid, I do not see any proof of this in the book.

After a seemingly biting "critique" of post-sturcturalism, Chow's formulation of a new comparative literature works with gestures toward theorists such as Sam Weber and Harutoonian using very Derridean notions of "ghosts," "revenat," and the disjunctive "and." In a very very reductive sense, this book starts with Heidegger and ends with Derrida, with its Chapter 2 vigilantly attacking "poststructuralist theory" as ultimately inward and euro-centric.Why?

Does Chow want to say that "post-structuralist" theory per se is apolotical ultimately but certain diaspotic appropriation of it can still be politically and ethically powerful? If so, she should say so. Overall, the lack of close reading of theorists she criticizes, Chow's own very troubled and often contracitory relationship with "theory," and her constant tendency to sound like she is going beyong others whose points she seems to repeat, make this a very troubled book. This is not to say that the problems it raises are unimportant. But one whould not too quickly disavow one's theoretical background merely because it's "passe" in the US or because its political capacity was attenuated in the literature departments in the US. Perhaps the theoretical legacy Chow incorporates in this book should be acknowledged more generously, productively, and, therefore, more critically in a fair manner.