On the Will to Be Disciplined

In her challenging and ambitious article, “Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory: The Curious Thesis of ‘Chinese Origins for Western Knowledge,’ 1860–1895,” ¹ Leigh Jenco “seek[s] to demonstrate not only that, but also how, political theorists might come to be disciplined by the standards of a differently sited conversation” (660), namely, by knowledge perceived as culturally and civilizationally other. In her essay, she mobilizes two primary distinctions—between historical and cultural otherness, and between knowledge that disciplines and knowledge that is assimilated—in order to make a striking claim, namely, that by “situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our past [we will] be able to reconstitute our field of knowledge and our methods of inquiry.” The key here is “situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our [own] past.” Like nineteenth-century Chinese reformers confronted with Western science who sought to attribute misty Chinese origins for it, Jenco thinks that the way to give non-Western thought its due—that is, its status as potentially disciplinary knowledge—is to ascribe to it origins in our own “Western” intellectual genealogy.

There are three primary questions that present themselves. First, has political theory in fact deprived itself of potentially fruitful innovations and advances by refusing to take on thought from outside a Western horizon and accord it a “disciplinary” role, that is, as a potential source of innovation rather than something to be assimilated? Second, if this self-deprivation is due to a xenophobic unwillingness to treat external others the way we treat internal others (thinkers from “our own” past), is this to be rectified by claiming that foreign thought is actually not foreign after all, by “posing native origins for foreign knowledge” (677)? Third, is there a self-contradiction in seeking out “alien” knowledge to discipline you and then thinking that it is the other that is doing the disciplining?

I will not say much about the first question. Certainly there are culturally “foreign” thinkers who have played a role in guiding, shaping and inspiring our efforts to understand political life—that is, who have played a “disciplinary” role. Gandhi and Fanon have certainly played this role in the twentieth century. It has been claimed that Strauss learned to read Plato through his study of Farabi, and not the other way around. ² Schopenhauer’s turn to Indian thought in the nineteenth century is well known. Moreover, there are boundary questions: Are nineteenth-century Russian Enlightenment-skeptics “ours” or “foreign,” for example? So there is a history of being disciplined by thought that is regarded as alien or other. What can we learn from these various episodes about which kinds of doubts, anxieties and assumptions push thinkers at particular times to look outside whatever they regard as their inherited tradition? It is a discussion for another time, but I do think our present discourse about “comparative political theory” could be enriched by a more active interest in various historical episodes when thinkers have sought to import foreign knowledge.

Jenco’s article is certainly a step in this direction, but I wonder whether it universalizes the experience of the Yangwu reformers too quickly based on an exaggerated assumption about civilizational self-love and thus the ubiquity of resistance to alien ideas. For example, she writes that claims about the origins of ideas become important when “contemporary political theorists, much like the Yangwu reformers, examine ideas and traditions that their own practice of knowledge production has historically marginalized. In these engagements, tying an idea to its origin seems to constrain rather than facilitate its mobility, ultimately inhibiting the de-parochialization of existing practice” (666). Note here that Jenco does not distinguish between acknowledging an idea’s origin and “tying an idea to its origin.” I don’t see why we should accept this dim view of intellectual activity or the implication that the xenophobia of contemporary political theorists is insurmountable unless we concoct fanciful origins for attractive ideas.

I am more interested in the second and third questions, however, which are really about how we should think in general about learning from the other. Here I confess some confusion about Jenco’s proposal. What is perhaps most perplexing is the claim that situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our own past would strike a blow for decentering the West and demarginalizing marginalized traditions. Even if we could invent successful imaginary genealogies for “foreign” thought that would place them within our own past, how would this be a good thing? Isn’t this just Eurocentrism carried to unprecedented heights? That is, just when Western political theory has stopped thinking that its own canon contains everything worth studying, Western political theorists are supposed to claim that non-Western thought was actually Western all along? Who is supposed to do this, who is to be let in on the secret and who is going to be fooled by it? Even if we are not required to “manufactur[e] ‘Western’ origins for that disciplinary continuity, [but merely] to act as if such knowledge is part of our own heritage” (660), this seems to suggest that we are spending more time guarding the boundaries of “our heritage” than we are thinking about the first-order problems of political life.

But leaving this moral-political question aside, what specific kind of learning from our cultural others is Jenco calling for? Jenco resists giving an answer to this because she wants alien thought to have the chance to change the conversation. But, still, I am not sure exactly what Jenco thinks the most urgent business of political theory is. There is a lot of talk about “theory,” “conversations” and “discipline,” but one searches in vain for a specific problem, dilemma or crisis to think about, other than the very problem that certain unnamed foreign thinkers have been “marginalized.” Left unasked is whether defining the problem of non-Western thought exclusively in terms of its being marginalized from Western political theory works to reassert Western knowledge as the sole site of validation. Would a genuinely internal Chinese, Islamic or Indian conversation even know that it had been “marginalized”? Again, Jenco’s efforts to de-parochialize Western thought seem to focus on a purely Eurocentric problem.

Nonetheless, if the problem of placing non-Western thought in a disciplinary role over Western minds is so urgent, and if she has found the way out of it, it would be helpful to have an example of a thinker, thought, idea, claim, method or perspective that ought to be disciplining us but presently is not because of our deafness to all things foreign. Certainly this is where the Yangwu reformers began, and not with some abstract imperative to be disciplined the West.

However, this is a problem. For what Jenco has to do is not only show that there is some thought that ought to be placed in a disciplinary role, but that it is somehow “other” in a meaningful way. But all kinds of claims, methods and arguments might be “other.” Are they all to be given a disciplinary status or a shot at achieving it? Or just some? Jenco concedes that her “point is not that any learning from cultural others will be beneficial” (660). But what, then, are the standards by which we judge what is beneficial, and to which kind of subject is the argument to be posed that this, rather than that, thinker, tradition, method or approach ought to discipline them? Jenco seems primarily concerned about the community of academic political theorists, but we are a pretty boring lot. What is needed is an account of the self that is invoked in the claim one can be enriched through being disciplined by “foreign” thought.

A persuasive phenomenology of that self would have to describe what such a person believes, how strongly and for what reasons, and what kinds of intellectual or affective attributes she has that are to be acted upon. But then Jenco faces a dilemma: is this self to be persuaded that it is lacking some kind of knowledge or perspective that only the other can provide? But how is thisself supposed to recognize the other’s knowledge as knowledge if by definition Jenco thinks she is lacking it? Alternatively, if this self does not lack this knowledge or at least appreciation of it as knowledge, then has any radical disciplining by the other occurred?

Here is where Jenco’s idea of positing an indigenous origin for “foreign” knowledge enters and is supposed to do some work. But that only works if the sole problem in question is her interlocutor’s xenophobic blinders. However, that is unlikely to be the case. For we don’t just take on as disciplinary any and every thinker from “our own” past. At least, I have missed the Iamblichan, Filmerian and Calhounian Revivals in political theory. We need some reason to see this past—or foreign—thought as valuable for thinking through present dilemmas. And, like it or not, that can only be done in reference to our present consciousness and repertoire of ideas, values and problems—even if we are open to the transformation of that consciousness—just as it was for the Yangwu reformers.

There is a tendency in Jenco’s article to view political theory as a largely scholastic enterprise, commenting on the canon simply because it is “our tradition.” She writes, for example, that

convention holds that the historical, cultural, and idiosyncratic othernesses within the texts of the political theory “canon” do not delineate temporal, cultural, economic, or other boundaries between “us” (in the present) and “them” (in the past). Rather, they pose an invitation to theorists in the present to be disciplined by their insights—to allow a new regime of thought, and a new partition of knowledge, to emerge—as they are inspired by their examples, incensed by their arguments, or chastened by their lessons. (669)

I am unaware of any convention that encourages the study of the Greeks, medieval scholastics, Renaissance Florentines, or seventeenth-century English thinkers on the assumption that there are no boundaries between them and us. Moreover, this misses how truly valuable iterations of learning from the “Western” past have occurred. Consider how two of the great thinkers of the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams, both reached back to Greek ethical thought. They did this not simply because it is “ours” and there are no boundaries to retrieving it, but for precisely the opposite reason. They began with a concrete sense of dissatisfaction with contemporary ethical resources and looked back to various Greek sources because of the boundary between those sources and us. Greek culture, they both argued in different ways, contained resources and perspectives that were seen as lacking in our own culture.

For Jenco, the suggestion that “culturally other” thought can come to play a similar guiding or disciplining role over own thought is a radical one. (“The Chinese reform thesis and its aftermath show that taking such thought seriously does entail coming to terms with a radical possibility: that its terms may eventually come to displace existing criteria for understanding and evaluating what it is we think we are doing” [660].) I don’t find this proposal particularly radical or controversial, although I recognize that it was certainly easier for Foucault and Williams to reach back to the Greeks than it would have been for them to draw on Vedic, Sasanian, or Confucian texts. (But also Norse or Celtic texts.) There is definitely a sense in which we are primed to be open to certain specific texts from the past. We should always be open to the possibility that even these past texts have become too familiar and comfortable for us. But, as far as I can tell, Jenco seems to assume (a) that all past texts in the “Western” tradition enjoy a potentially disciplinary status and (b) that our openness to them is purely based on identification rather than any other intellectual criteria.

More interesting, I think, than Jenco’s claim that non-Western thought might be worth learning from is her call to adopt a will to be disciplined by the other. I note that her way of issuing this call is curiously formal and problem-free. That is, Jenco is not pointing to any specific deficiency in contemporary Western thought, or pointing to any substantive claim, method or knowledge from a specific non-Western tradition. The call is formal because no specific political or historical other is identified, and thus no specific political or moral relationship. Thus, Jenco’s call is very different in kind from the call to undo racial, gender, sexual, or colonial hierarchies and give such perspectives their epistemic and political due. The will in question is not to solve an intellectual or moral problem but simply to be intellectually disciplined by a cultural other for the sake of it.

Even more troubling, in my view, are Jenco’s assumptions about the actual agency involved in such disciplining. Consider the following:

Just as (what we take to be) our own past heritage of thought fundamentally constitutes, rather than merely influences, our present production of knowledge, so too will situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our past be able to reconstitute our field of knowledge and our methods of inquiry. In fact, if theorists are not to be ethnographers when engaging foreign thought, it seems they must register foreign thought as a source of learning, and that means situating it as, in a sense, indigenous source material. (675)

In addition to the repeated claim that the only way for foreign thought to “reconstitute our field of knowledge and our methods of inquiry” is to situate it as indigenous source material, we see that Jenco seems to want foreign thought to do the transforming, disciplining and reconstituting itself—that is, she ascribes agency to the other as found in textual form. But what about the mediator in the form of the (Western) theorists who are choosing which foreign thought to register as a source of learning and how to situate it as ours?

Jenco thinks that there can be a merely formal openness to the disciplinary power of the other. She would resist my calls to identify in advance the particular contemporary problem in political theory that the other is solving for us:

Because of the ways in which our thinking emerges out of conversations and histories that both enable and constrain it, choosing to engage non-Western thought on the basis of what “fits the needs and realities of our present world” cannot furnish self-evident selection criteria for inclusion of non-Western voices in new “world-historical” philosophical canons. If existing (possibly ethnocentric) criteria—including criteria for what constitutes “interesting” and “relevant” selection—are not to remain hegemonic, they cannot be inscribed as prefigured givens that act independently on the encounter without themselves being transformed by it. If the encounter is to be truly disciplinary rather than merely assimilative, the very criteria of relevance and similarity must be interrogated. (677)

Jenco is very clear, then, that the only will we ought to be adopting is the will to be open to new forms of being disciplined by the other and, by definition, we cannot know in advance what this means—which problems, methods and criteria will come to be disciplinary for us. But is such a submissive, vacated, learning self that has no other motivation than to be disciplined possible? What are the beliefs, desires and anxieties that are supposed to produce such a consciousness? It seems that we are to be interested in nothing at all except ethnocentrism, as if there is one coherent and internally consistent “ethnocentric” Western set of ideas and as if our own ethnocentrism is the most important problem in the actual world of politics.

It seems more likely that the search for things the other can teach us will be always a motivated one—a search from a specific place (our present consciousness) for something we can learn. There is likely to be a certain will to learn some things (but perhaps not other things) from some specific other. Thus, the movement is never from some stable place (“Confucianism”) to a duly modified and newly disciplined self. The source of learning (“foreign thought”) is first an object of identification and, in fact, construction. We need to know what this other body of thought is, where we find it, what its values are and how we know all this in the first place. There will always be some mediating agency between the self being transformed and the other providing the knowledge or perspective that transforms. In looking outward, however modestly, we do not lose our own self-conscious or involuntary powers of selection, filtration, interpretation and reconstruction.

The risk is not only that we will merely be identifying things as belonging to the “other” that we already possess ourselves, or already value, or want to see ourselves as already valuing (including the very desire to demarginalize the other). The second, related risk is that in order to even stage the dialogue, we have to squeeze the other into some new clothes or, more appropriately, translate from some original language into one the self-edifying and self-transforming self can speak. Jenco is quite clear about this in calling for the transposition of the other into our own genetic lineage. But she does not worry (as she does in previous work ³ ) that this translation and transposition will be more likely to impose our own existing categories on the foreign thought than to give the foreign thought a privileged, disciplinary role. It thus seems pointless to talk about the disciplinary potential of foreign thought in purely formal terms without discussing the motivations and concerns of the mediating agency—both at the point of translation and at the point of reception.

Jenco might respond that it is less important that we figure out why certain foreign thought ought to be included at a particular time than it is that we ensure that this happens. What we want is simply the production of novelty in our “criteria for understanding and evaluating what it is we think we are doing.” We want new ideas to be injected into the bloodstream but we don’t need to know what will happen after that. Our task is just to wait and see what the unintended consequences are of this injection of new material for our future standards, criteria, methods and values.

I can understand this idea and I can see how it gets away from the paradox of learning from the other. But it is still worth asking what kind of will or desire this implies on the part of the as-yet-untransformed. This question gets at nothing less than our understanding of the purpose and value of political theory. Consider a similar idea proposed in some artistic realm—say, music, literature or erotics. It is easy to see why an artist would regard staleness as the summum malum and welcome any kind of experimental injection of new material just to wait and see what comes of it. Here some master aesthetic criterion is doing the work. What we care about is not approximation of an existing standard of beauty or taste but the constant exploration of what humans are capable of creating and experiencing.

Is this how we see, or ought to see, political theory? Perhaps. But there are risks here. The risks are not only to our existing master criteria for what the purpose of political theory is—truth, justice, elucidation, contestation, critique. There are also risks for this foreign thought that we are hoping will discipline us, namely, that if the engagement with it is separated from our concern with political problems and injustices in the world it will only be treated as a solution to our own feeling of staleness. What an irony it would be if the drive to globalize political theory ended up serving only our own sense of boredom and self-involved desire for transformation.