The Age of the World Target

Theory, thresholds and beyond

“…It is this profound and unacknowledged provincialism that constitutes what Chow herself calls a 'persistent epistemic scandal'. 2 On this threshold we are able to register a hegemony whose unilateral gaze passes rapidly over the signs of its structural ignorance of the rest of the planet. To inscribe that gap into its knowledge is to wound hegemony, to deviate its self-absorbed trajectory and propose multiple paths that lead to a series of disruptive confrontations.…”

“…This is to propose a frame of judgement that worlds critical knowledge in a postcolonial environment which has multiplied the perspectives and necessarily de-stabilizes 'Europe as the grid of intelligibility'. 3 Skirting the edges of European thought leads to extending our languages of comprehension. Here the assumed transparency of reason is exposed in its positionality to be incapable of recognizing its premises.…”

“…4 It is this productive tension between a reason rigorously pursued, to the degree that it literally exceeds institutional and disciplinary bounds, and an attention to the ethical possibilities sustained by aesthetics, that renders Chow's work an exemplary instance of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. A modish and frequently abstract idea borrowed from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari here acquires all the explosive potential of an ongoing analytical practice, a continual critical becoming as the two French thinkers would have put it.…”

Hybrid disciplinarity: Rey Chow and comparative studies

“…As she argues elsewhere, the Eurocentrism of Comparative Literature isn't abolished once its boundaries are expanded to include non-Western literatures, 'minor' literatures, and minority literatures, since it can continue to exist 'in the name of the other, the local, and the culturally exceptional'; 7 and the incorporation of a multicultural agenda 'cannot ensure that we educate our students about the power structures, hierarchies, and discriminations that work as much in the ''others'' as in ''us'' '. 8 The opening pages of 'The Old/New Question of Comparison' explore the 'historically overdetermined project' of comparison: an overdetermination, that is, of literary study by the interplay of national languages as the carrier both of 'national' literatures and of nationhood. We might note that the Eurocentrism of Comparative Literature sits comfortably with and perhaps acts as a placeholder for the global dominance of the United States, of American culture, and of a globalized American English.…”

“…9 What this means can be exemplified by the study of 'the' (normatively European) novel, which works on the assumption of a kind of differentiation that is ultimately additive or cumulative in method, requiring others to name themselves as other while they retain the generic term as the grid of general intelligence, the morphology that has the power to account for additional, including divergent or deviant, information. 10 With the shift that Foucault describes in The Order of Things from a 'premodern' to a 'modern' epistemic universe, these stable grids of intelligibility dissolve, taxonomic equivalence loses its self-evidence, and comparison comes to be reconceptualized, Chow argues, 'as an act of judging the value of different things horizontally, in sheer approximation to one another*an act that, because it is inseparable from history, would have to remain speculative rather than conclusive'. 11 Foucault's model for this post-taxonomic universe of judgement is the deranged list that Borges attributes to 'a certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which the principles of what constitutes a coherent and homogeneous set with a hierarchical scale of generality are violently parodied.…”