Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. xvi, 245 pp. US$24.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8223-6160-2.
In this original and erudite book, Gavin Walker develops a wide-ranging and densely argued Marxist theoretical account of capital and its (il)logics. The heart of his inquiry is what he calls capital’s “sublime perversion”: its ability to overcome, without resolving, its own contradictions, its “constant and relentless transformation of limits into thresholds” (11). Walker’s theorization of this perversion interweaves a set of concepts and approaches derived from Marx and from Walker’s extensive reading (in, by my count, seven languages) of the works of two sets of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century thinkers. The first is a large group of mostly post-World War II European theorists, including Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Sandro Mezzadra, and Carl Schmitt. The second is comprised of Japanese Marxists writing between the 1920s and the 2010s, and gives pride of place to Uno Kōzō, the most influential and well-known of the group. Walker does not take up the “debate on Japanese capitalism” primarily for what it can tell us about Japan (though he does of course cover this), but as “a debate on the most central theoretical and historical questions of Marxist analysis itself” (6) and “a point of departure for diverse theoretical discussions” (15). He highlights three themes in the Japanese debate: the analysis of “the national question”; arguments about the impossibility (muri) of the commodification of labour made by Uno and thinkers who have followed him; and Uno’s “theory of three levels of analysis” of capitalism in terms of the pure logic of capital, stages of capitalist development, and conjunctural analysis. By bringing together these concerns with more recent analyses of primitive accumulation and other key processes, Walker seeks to uncover the “demented” process through which capital makes a world for itself.
The Sublime Perversion of Capital is far too multifaceted and complex for quick summary. Rather than try to encapsulate it, I would like to give my sense of the overarching characteristics of Walker’s approach to capital and to comment on his engagement with the Japanese Marxists. Walker presents capital as a social relation that has not just an expansionary drive but, implicitly, a kind of consciousness. Capital posits things to itself, tells itself things, acknowledges and attempts to do things; it dreams and coquets. In tracing capital’s logic and its relationship to life, labour, primitive accumulation, and the nation, Walker emphasizes necessity (words like “must,” “requires,” “never,” “always,” and “only” are common) and paradox (infinite regresses, relationships that posit themselves, capital’s unavoidable reliance on the impossible commodification of labour). While Walker is deeply interested in the relationship between capital’s perverse logic and history’s particularities (the actual development of capitalism), and gives a lucid account of the treatment of the pre-World War II Japanese experience in the Japanese Marxist debates, his own arguments proceed largely at the level of theory rather than historical investigation. Those arguments also rely heavily on numerous unexplained and/or seemingly metaphorical terms (gradient, planar surface, spectral body, torus, fold/folding, torsion, logical topology, politicality, etc.); readers who are not accustomed to this kind of language may find parts of the book difficult to parse.
It is within an overall approach of this kind that The Sublime Perversion of Capital puts the debate on Japanese capitalism into conversation with what might be called contemporary Theory. While the results are often stimulating, Walker also often attributes to the Japanese Marxists concerns, arguments, and conceptual vocabularies that he does not demonstrate were actually theirs. The most serious example is the great emphasis Walker puts on what he sees as the early and highly sophisticated contribution of the Japanese Marxists to the study of “the national question.” Walker argues that “throughout the debate on Japanese capitalism and particularly in Uno’s attempt to both critically sublate as well as transcend its limitations, the national question—that is, the question of the function of the nation as a mechanism within the social relation of capital—remained always at the debate’s center” (183). He thus seeks “a return to a specific set of thinkers in Marxism who attempted most concretely to rethink the theoretical place of the nation in Marxian analysis” (11, see also 6). Walker’s survey of this debate in chapter 2, however, provides no instance of any Japanese Marxist even using, let alone theorizing, the term “nation.” Walker’s exegesis, rather, attributes a concern with the “nation-state” or “the form of the nation” to participants in the debate despite the absence of those terms in the quoted texts. Uno is the only prewar Japanese Marxist who is shown in the book to have theorized the nation, but his thoughts are not directly engaged with until quite late (157, 159) and very little detail on them is given. I also found no instance in the book of any Japanese thinker using the phrase “the national question.” I do not mean to claim here that theorization of “the form of the nation” or “the national question” played no role in the debate on Japanese capitalism (I do not know whether it did or not); the point rather is that Walker provides virtually no textual warrant to think that it played such a role.
The engagement with Uno’s understanding of the impossibility (muri) of the commodification of labour in chapter 4 presents a related set of problems. Walker’s account of Uno’s theorization of this core problem is fascinating, and he uses it as a jumping-off point for extended connections to the work of Western theorists like Foucault and Schmitt. (Surprisingly, he does not compare Uno’s formulations with Karl Polanyi’s hugely influential conceptualization of land, labour, and money as “fictitious commodities.”) This approach may, however, be a double-edged sword. It allows Walker to develop intriguing and fruitful lines of thought, but runs the risk of submerging Uno’s own conceptual vocabulary by translating it into the contemporary lexicon. For instance, Walker frequently explicates Uno’s ideas by using the concept of “folds” or “folding” in a way that implicitly suggests that Uno himself used those concepts, but I saw no evidence that he did so. This importing of contemporary concepts back into the Japanese Marxists and reformulating of their insights in terms that (on the textual evidence) they seem not to have used occurs throughout the book, and seems to me to undermine the remarkable work of research, synthesis, and original development that Walker otherwise brings to the Japanese debates.
Derek Hall
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
pp. 158-160