Conditions of Comparison: Reflections on Comparative Intercultural Inquiry (review)

Comparative literature, like many other disciplines, has now been grappling for some time with the question of how to extend its purview beyond the European languages and European-derived cultures that were its original home. Calls for attention to this question have, for example, been echoed in each of the decadal reviews of the state of the discipline commissioned by the American Comparative Literature Association since the 1960s. As that half century has progressed, to be sure, the question has shifted, moving from a simple plea to regard non-European traditions as eligible for inclusion within the discipline to calls (prompted in part by postcolonial theory but also, in a comparative literature context, specifically arising from the work, for example, of Haun Saussy beginning in the 1990s) to bring intercultural issues to the heart of the discipline, and to redescribe our theoretical premises in terms that are informed by intercultural work. Comparisons beyond Europe are no longer a peripheral interest of the field but lay claim to constituting one of its principal axes of inquiry.

In the midst of this development, Ming Xie's Conditions of Comparison makes a welcome intervention. In a succinct but rich and dense volume, Xie draws on a heady mixture of theoretical influences, ranging from Foucault and Derrida to Castoriadis, Luhmann, and Donald Davidson (to name only a few), to identify what he sees as several of the major problematics of intercultural inquiry as a field and particularly its epistemological foundations. Each of his eight chapters is built around a problem in the epistemology of intercultural theory: interpretation, comparison, hermeneutics, the distinction between epistemes and paradigms, difference, relativism, universalism, and modernity. In each case, Xie guides the reader through a range of critical texts, opening those texts up to intercultural approaches and interrogating their applicability to these approaches. In many cases, the arguments he makes are fleshed out with readings, ranging from a discussion of I. A. Richards' Mencius on the Mind in the first chapter to a discussion of Yan Fu's 1898 translation of Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays in the final chapter.

Throughout, the book provides rich food for thought on a number of issues. Xie, for example, interestingly and originally juxtaposes Thomas Kuhn's notion of the paradigm with the Foucauldian episteme, in the sense of an "invisible, unconscious, and deep-running continuity," opposed to which "changeable knowledge is merely surface knowledge" (74-75). For Xie, then, the underlying understanding of the world that grounds the particular discourses of any given place and time constitutes the episteme, and the particular discourses themselves are paradigms that overlay the episteme. Through this juxtaposition, Xie is able to make an interesting argument about the Chinese absorption of Western modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (a key concern throughout the book), namely that it represents the absorption of a new paradigm into an existing episteme, but the relationship he outlines between paradigm and episteme should be useful for many other sorts of projects, including those contained within a culture. Likewise, the discussion of relativism, in which he argues for the need to relativize relativism itself (that is, to understand relativism as a position that is only intelligible if it contrasts with an already existing universalism) and in which he contrasts relativism with pluralism (which is more open to understanding different perspectives as complementary and thus able to serve as a bridge "between extreme relativism and an absolute notion of objective truth" [121-22]) will, I believe, be of considerable interest to many beyond the immediate realm of intercultural inquiry. In Xie's work, intercultural inquiry becomes something of a paradigm case (if I may be permitted the word here) for all kinds of thinking about perspective and difference and can serve as something like a thought experiment for thinking about these issues, both beyond and even within cultures. As he notes in his epilogue, his intercultural methodology could prove helpful in...