"Memories of Underdevelopment" after Area Studies

The Desire Called Area Studies

In this essay, I examine how the "desire" called "area studies"¹ was founded on the privilege attached to fixed spatial containers, such as geographic area, culture region, or directional locality (East Asia, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia). The model for these spatial regularities has undoubtedly been the nation-state—itself a spatial figure—and its capacity for modernizing makeovers. These have led to the formation of rationalities such as the liberal-democratic state, capital accumulation, and the primacy of the "self-regulating market," which have come to collectively signify an unchanging modern structure.

Even the transmutation of area studies into its most recent avatar—identity studies, which presumes permanent ethnocultural determinations—persists in privileging the spatial over the force and forms of time. This "end of temporality" excludes time's agency (although not chronology) and spatializes certain world regions, transubstantiating multiple temporalities (with their different histories and modes of production) into a singular temporality that marks the distance between developed and undeveloped. This spatial privileging converts a purely quantitative measure of time—chronology—into a qualitative yardstick, whereby a different temporality becomes a symptom of backwardness. What was misrepresented as "modernity" with the concentration on the new is in fact a misrecognition of capitalist accumulation, whose repetitive functions seek to mask, if not eliminate, the regular cycles of existential time in everyday life.² Capitalism's immense conceptualization of time accountancy produced the temporal coordinates of the modern nation-state, which then became the placeholder of capitalist accumulation.³

I offer instead a containment strategy that seeks to identify specific space/ time relationships, recalling M. M. Bakhtin's chronotope, which aims to restore time to any consideration of space and opens up the possibility for conjunctural analysis of multiple and distinct forms of temporality, drawn from social formations and modes of production, despite the dominance of capitalism. Louis Althusser associated this idea of conjuncture with the "material philosophy of the encounter," an optic through which to understand the historical reality of those moments when diverse circumstances confront each other and create a "world, torn between powers in collusion and the 'crises' which unite them in a circle." Althusser was convinced that while historical periods have their laws, "they can also change at the drop of a hat revealing the aleatory basis that sustains . . . without reason . . . without intelligible end."⁴ This is the history of capitalism: a series of contingent encounters that produce practices, subsequently recoded as categories, into a logic of relationships that becomes the mature form of capitalism. By uncover ing heterological temporalities and histories—recognizing uneven flows and the never-ending prospect of untimeliness—"progress" is released from its unilinear mooring and rethought as a relative term that considers missed opportunities and defeated possibilities.

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, scholars have nervously scrambled to rethink the university's longstanding commitment to the study of societies geographically and psychologically consigned to the outside of Euro-America. This frenzied search for new pedagogical purpose was prompted by the recognition that the circumstances that had authorized area studies programs had virtually disappeared, and the need to justify the rather large investment in an institutional infrastructure that appeared to have no place to go. Dazzled by the prospect of unlimited market access, private corporations momentarily seized the opportunity to make sure that universities, especially business schools, were prepared to train people to meet the challenges of a globalized environment. Area studies faced the problem of reacquainting a new generation of students with the task of changing the received image of a peripheral world filled with known enemies, potential foes, and societies seen as incapable of vocalizing their own interests. If area studies ignored the historical experience of colonialism, it dismissed the destinies of decolonization by affirming the Cold War strategy of sandwiching new nations between the monologic discourse of two superpowers. For a brief moment in the 1950s, countries recently released from colonial bondage sought to find their own way in the world, by appealing to an autonomous form of regionalism...