Cultural Analysis in an Age of Globalization by Benjamin Lee

Author:Benjamin Lee
Language: zho
Format: epub
Tags: 文化-研究
ISBN: 9787544702195
Publisher: 译林出版社
Published: 2008-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

I Authorize and give up my Right of Governing my self, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorize all Actions in like Manner.

In the case of both Descartes and Hobbes, the ideal for certainty is mathematics and its requisite modes of objectification and formalization. The drive for such certainty intersects with explicit performativity to create new forms of subjectivity that break with previous models that located the ‘sources of the self’ outside of the individual or collective, in God, tradition, transcendent authorities, or Platonic forms. Yet the two accounts, written within twenty years of one another in the sixteenth century, also set up an interaction between individual and social subjectivity that will come to dominate modern Western thought. The objectification of performativity produces a subject whose subjectivity is increasingly seen as the result of an objectification of internal mental processes; yet this subject is also presupposed as the agent who exchanges promises and produces the social contract that creates civil society and the state. Taylor argues that it is in Locke's philosophy that these two strands of individual and collective subjectivity explicitly meet: individualistic, objectified selves confront their counterparts and performatively create a similarly objectified model of society.

In tracing the origins of modern Western models of collective and individual subjectivity to Descartes and Hobbes, we can also see that one of the main poles of the intergenric tension field that defines Western representations of subjectivity presupposes an epistemology that is heavily influenced by mathematics and logic. The view that the mind has to be structured so as to be able to understand the laws of mathematics and science drives almost all subsequent Western philosophical approaches, reaching its apotheosis in Kant's epistemology and presupposed by the Fregean model we described earlier. In the Chinese case, there has been no such corresponding emphasis on logic-driven epistemologies; ethics and aesthetics have played a much larger philosophical role and poetry was the preferred ‘literary’ form as opposed to the novel. These priorities are echoed in the passages from Hong Lou Meng analyzed earlier. The chapter opens in third person omniscient narration, and then proceeds through the different genres of representing subjectivity, marked by increasing poetic alliteration, concluding in the ascension from narrated monologue to psychonarration and then finally poetry.

In Sources of the Self, Taylor argues that Locke combines Hobbes's performative basis for collective agency with a reification of the mind that prepares the way for a procedural conception of reason in which we ‘construct a picture of things following the canons of rational thinking’ (1989, 168), a view whose clearest articulation is in contemporary rational choice theory. Acting as rational agents, people performatively create society because it is in their interests to do so. Society is created through the performative objectification of rationality itself. The crucial role of the novel in the Western construction of subjectivity (pointed out by both Habermas and Anderson) is that the various forms of

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