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Front. Lit. Stud. 2012, 6(1): 19–38 DOI 10.3868/s010-001-012-0003-8

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Viren Murthy The 1911 and the Politics of Failure: Takeuchi Yoshimi and Global Capitalist Modernity

Abstract Chinese historians have considered the 1911 Revolution an incomplete , especially in comparison to the more successful 1949 Revolution. On the other hand, in their famous tract in the early 1990s, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu claimed that a rethinking of the 1911 Revolution should lead us to reject the concept of revolution altogether. In both of these formulations, as stepping stone towards or demonstration that any revolution is futile, the 1911 Revolution is in some way connected to the legitimacy of . However, in post-war Japan, when Japanese intellectuals were debating the consequences of the American Occupation and Japan’s role in the Second World War, the 1911 Revolution had a different significance. Post-war Japanese sinologists often turned to the 1911 Revolution as a symbol of hope, despite its failure. Takeuchi Yoshimi was the pioneer of this intellectual trend and he argued that, unlike the Meiji Ishin, which was a pale imitation of Western modernity, the 1911 Revolution represented a unique affirmation of subjectivity, precisely because its initial attempts at modernization failed. Takeuchi and his disciples’ discussions of how the 1911 Revolution produced subjectivity out of failure illustrate post-war Japanese sinologists employed the 1911 Revolution in debates about subjectivity and anti-. An analysis of their writings will open the way to thinking both the 1911 Revolution and its perception in Japan as it relates to the trajectory of capitalism and its discontents in the .

Keywords 1911 Revolution, Takeuchi Yoshimi, , global capitalist modernity, politics and literature

Today China is often regarded as a major player in the global system of nation-states. China-watchers, journalists and politicians constantly discuss China’s “rising” and debate whether China will become a threat to the West. In this context, threat implies that China will become a greater power than the United

Viren Murthy ( ) Department of History, University of Ottawa, Ottawa K1N 6N5, Canada E-mail: [email protected]

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States. Such discussions suggest that the rise of China will leave the global-system basically unchanged, insofar as it will still be a market system; history will have merely replaced one hegemon with another. However, the texts of the famous Japanese literary critic, Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–1977), depict a China that at once anticipates and runs counter to this view. Takeuchi’s discourse anticipates the above view because he also stresses the importance of China in world-history. But rather than signify a rival capitalist threat, in Takeuchi’s view, China appeared as a hope for a different future, a future beyond the logic of imperialist and capitalist dominated modernity. In this context, Takeuchi attempted to reread the historical significance of both the 1911 revolution and the meaning of as embodied in the figure of Lu Xun. In post-war Japan, when Japanese intellectuals were debating the consequences of the American Occupation and Japan’s role in the World War II, Japanese sinologists often turned to the 1911 Revolution as a symbol of a different future, despite its failure or even because of its failure. Takeuchi Yoshimi was the pioneer of this intellectual trend and he argued that, unlike the Meiji Ishin, which was a pale imitation of Western modernity, the 1911 Revolution represented a vision of revolutionary subjectivity, which included subtle mediations of language and politics. Takeuchi’s post-war discussion of the 1911 Revolution builds on his inter-war text on Lu Xun, in which he describes a dialectic between Sun Yat-sen and Lu Xun. These two together symbolize eternal revolution. In his post-war works, he attempts a synthesis of Lu Xun’s and Sun Yat-sen’s thought, in terms of the global problems of modernity. An analysis of these writings will open the way to thinking both the 1911 Revolution and its perception in Japan as it relates to the trajectory of capitalism and its discontents in the 20th century. Takeuchi claims alternative temporalities and global unevenness could possibly lead to spaces of hope for a future beyond capitalism. Since Harry Harootunian has recently discussed such spaces of hope in relation to a Marxist understanding of multiple temporalities and unevenness, I end my essay with an analysis of a recent essay by Harootunian while keeping Takeuchi’s concerns in mind, in order to further examine the complex relationships between global unevenness and hope.

Takeuchi on the 1911 Revolution

Takeuchi’s interpretation of the 1911 Revolution is significant for a number of reasons. His work represents a rethinking of the significance of China in the context of anti-modernist currents in Japanese intellectual history. Moreover, this anti-modernist current could be connected to a larger global discourse of anti-modernity or anti-rationality, which emerged around the same time as the

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1911 Revolution. The 1911 Revolution, and especially the Japanese interpretations of it, coincided with anti-modern artistic trends in Europe. From this perspective, the 1911 Revolution is at once both modern, because of its aim to form a nation-state, and anti-modern. Although this essay is not about this dual nature of the 1911 Revolution, we can note here how Zou Rong and Zhang Taiyan have expressed different attitudes towards progressive history. Zou Rong, along with the Paris Anarchists, adopted a progressive vision of history and revolution. In contrast, not only did Zhang Taiyan define revolution as a return to the past, he also attempted to develop a critique of evolution based on a Buddhist theory of consciousness. In another work, I have argued that, far from expressing something uniquely Chinese, Zhang’s attack on revolution represented a larger global trend against rationalization, bureaucratization, and the idea of objective laws of history.1 This trend began perhaps in the late 19th century, but the years from 1910 to 1913 in particular have recently come to be seen as a period in which intellectuals and artists expressed a heightened sense of doubt and suspicion with respect to modernist narratives of modernity. Thomas Harrison and Jean-Michel-Rabaté refer primarily to the of art and music, but their ideas have a number of implications for politics.2 Their books stress how modernist music, literature and art extolled atonal and irrational themes in the years before World War I, suggesting that destruction must precede creation. In 1944, Takeuchi read Lu Xun and the 1911 Revolution in a way that underscored a concept of literature separate from developmental narratives, and also suggested a dialectical relationship between creation and destruction. Takeuchi highlights the implications of literature for politics in relation to a specific geographical region and event, namely China/Asia and the 1911 Revolution.3

The Politics of the 1911 Revolution in Takeuchi’s Lu Xun

Takeuchi published his book on Lu Xun in 1944, after Japan had invaded China in 1937 and after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He had already been to China and, like a number of Japanese sinologists, he had mixed feelings about

1 Murthy, 2011. 2 Harrison, 1996, Rabaté, 2007. 3 Christian Uhl has recently discussed the importance of Nishida’s work for understanding Takeuchi’s reading of Lu Xun. Nishida’s work is particularly important for us in this context, one of his most famous books, The Study of the Good, was published in precisely in 1911 and it his key concept of pure-experience, represents a critique of reification or rationalization from a standpoint before ordinary distinctions between subject and object. It is this standpoint outside of ordinary distinctions, a type of religious perspective that Takeuchi associates with Lu Xun. See Uhl, 2003.

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Japan’s involvement in the war. He had a great sentimental attachment to China, but he had perhaps an even stronger resentment towards the United States and Americanism. On the eve of the 1911 Revolution, a few years before the World War I, Europe was the center of imperialist power, but by the time of World War II, this power was shifting toward the United States. For many Japanese intellectuals, Americanism represented a continuation of the domination of Europe, and it was thus criticized by a number of scholars, including the philosophers of the Kyoto School and romantics such as Yasuda Yojūrō. Like Takeuchi, these romantics would put forth a new vision of literature as separate from politics. However, as we shall see below, Takeuchi will inflect the romantics’ vision in such a way as to produce a new form of politics, which he will associate with China. Yasuda is worth mentioning here not only because he was once a classmate of Takeuchi and one of the leaders of the Japanese romantic school but also because he was extremely active during the 1930s and 1940s, when Takeuchi wrote his book on Lu Xun. There are some who would claim that Takeuchi’s work copies that of Yasuda and there are clearly similarities.4 Like Takeuchi, Yasuda was clearly a critic of European modernity and Americanism. Perhaps more importantly, Yasuda also propounded an idea of literature as something separate from politics. He berated proletarian literature in a manner that Takeuchi echoed to some extent in his work on Lu Xun,

The danger of nationalism without feeling or emotion is that it is no different from the of Marxism. In the early years of the Shōwa period, when anarchism disappeared and Marxism entered into its best days, the Marxist group claimed to respect culture... but there is neither any atmosphere of the arts nor emotion and sentiment there.5

Yasuda is against politicized literature, regardless of the political stance of the author. He criticized ideology from both the left and the right. He believed that Marxists were not truly revolutionary, that true revolution required aesthetics and feeling.6 Marxism made aesthetics subordinate to politics; Yasuda hoped to reverse this relationship. However, Yasuda’s aestheticism eventually led him into support for Japan’s ultra-nationalism, including Japan’s invasion of China. Takeuchi’s book on Lu Xun was an attempt to rethink the Chinese experience in a way that responded to the crisis of conscience about the war and the impasse between discourses such as those of Yasuda, on the one hand, and advocates of

4 Lin, 2011. 5 Yasuda, “Cogito no Shuhen,” cited from Lin, 2011. 6 Lin, 2011.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:17:43AM via free access The 1911 Revolution and the Politics of Failure 23 proletarian literature on the other. However, Takeuchi’s interpretation of the 1911 revolution creates a different type of discourse, which attempts to reconfigure the relationship between literature and revolution. In this context, Takeuchi examined the significance of the 1911 Revolution in a way that would construct a different form of literature. Takeuchi reads Lu Xun on the 1911 Revolution and investigates the relationship between Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen. He cites the following passage from Lu Xun’s corpus:

Schopenhauer makes the following statement. “Your estimation of a man’s size will be affected by the distance at which you stand from him, but in two entirely opposite ways according as it is his physical or his mental stature that you are considering. The one will seem smaller, the farther off you move; the other, greater. In the former case, a great distance appears small, while the latter case, the opposite is true. In the case of the body, from a distance it appears small.”7 In the case of the spirit, on the contrary, distance makes it appear larger. Not only does the greatness of the spirit appear small when one approaches it, but the wounds and weak points strike the eye. In this way, the people with a great spirit are the same as us. They are not gods, demons or strange beasts. They are human beings. They are only this and because of this, they are great people. When a warrior dies in battle, the flies first find the weak points and wounds. They whizz and buzz and are satisfied as if they are braver than the warrior. But because the warrior is already dead in battle, he cannot wave them away. Here the flies also buzz and believe that they have an eternal voice. This is because they are more complete than the warrior. But in the end, the warrior with weak points is still a warrior and the flies are nothing but flies. Shoo flies. Even though you have wings and fly about, you can never surpass the warrior.8

Takeuchi notes that this text was written in 1925, shortly after Sun Yat-sen died. The warrior in the above passage was Sun Yat-sen, and Sun represented eternal revolution. The flies represent those who do not understand what revolution is. When one comes close to a great warrior, one realizes the warrior’s finitude and humanity. The warrior is finite: failings, problems and incompleteness are part of human existence. The warrior, like the revolutionary, is someone who attempts to complete this incompleteness despite the impossibility of such a task. Indeed, are complete only insofar as they as they understand their inherent incompleteness and incessantly struggle against this:

7 Cf. Schopenhauer, 2005, 76. 8 Lu Xun, “The Warrior and the Flies,” cited from Takeuchi, 2003, 147.

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Whatever anyone says, Sun Yat-sen lived his whole life seriously. Sun Yat-sen was a revolutionary from the time that he was born, and was a revolutionary even in failure. He was not satisfied even when the Chinese Republic was established. He did not revel in idleness. He still worked continuously to realize his goal of a complete revolution. Even when the revolution was close to completion, he claimed that the revolution was not successful and told his fellow revolutionaries to persevere. He was a complete person and an eternal revolutionary. Each of his actions was revolutionary. No matter how later people count his shortcomings and criticize him, in the end, he was a complete revolutionary.9

From the above passages, Takeuchi infers that Lu Xun respected Sun or that which he symbolized, that revolution is never complete or that it always ends in failure, but revolution is important precisely because it fails and causes despair. “The 1911 Revolution was no revolution. The second and third are not revolutions. This is because ‘revolution has no end.’ True revolution is eternal revolution.”10 Moreover, in Takeuchi’s view, those who say that the revolution has succeeded are like the flies that gather around the corpse of the warrior. The 1911 Revolution was part of a larger process, the beginning of a series of political transformations, from the anti-Manchu revolution to national revolution to the , all of which Lu Xun at some point supported. Takeuchi suggests that revolution has a more abstract unity that encompasses various concrete instantiations such as the anti-Manchu revolution and proletariat revolution. Takeuchi felt that Lu Xun had recognized in Sun and the 1911 Revolution a more abstract principle of politics, namely eternal revolution. Lu Xun thus brought himself into a dialectical relationship with Sun, which Takeuchi describes in the following manner:

Lu Xun sees the “eternal revolutionary” in Sun Wen. Lu probably stood in a relationship of contradictory unity (mujun teki dōitsu) to Sun through the mediation of the ‘eternal revolutionary.’ Was he not fighting for his life with a certain of image of himself reflected through Sun Wen? Perhaps one could put it this way, through his resolve to death, he constantly repeated the creation of his self and he took this contradiction in the form of crisis with him to his natural death.11

9 Lu Xun, “One Year After the Death of Sun ,” cited from Takeuchi, 2003, 149–50. 10 Takeuchi, 2003, 150. 11 Ibid., 170.

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Takeuchi identifies a contradiction between Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen, embodying the contradiction between literature and politics. He first liberates literature from being a tool to politics and then develops a model for understanding revolution. He stresses that literature is combined with a strange type of subjectivity, which involves an almost religious relation to language:

Lu Xun lived sincerely, was an enthusiastic nationalist and a patriot. However, he never supported his literature through these things. Rather, he established his literature through sweeping aside these things. The source of Lu Xun’s literature is something that we can call “nothing.” Because this fundamental awareness turned him into a writer, without this, the nationalist Lu Xun and the patriotic Lu Xun are ultimately [only] words. By claiming that Lu Xun wrote a literature of repentance, I express my resistance.12

Lu Xun was of course a nationalist and so on, but literature represents a different mode of using language than nationalist discourse does. There may be an overlap here between Yasuda and Takeuchi, since both of them separate literature from politics, but Takeuchi’s discourse is mediated neither by the aesthetic nor by any simple relation to the religious. He speaks of Lu Xun’s literature as rooted in “nothing,” which recalls the work of Nishida Kitarō. His notion of repentance calls to mind another representative Kyoto School philosopher, Tanabe Hajime, and his concept of metanoetics. Like these two philosophers, Takeuchi connects the concepts of nothingness and repentance to religion. However, according to Takeuchi, both of these concepts are further linked to being a writer and to producing literature. In other words, they must be understood in the context of a different mode of using signs. In a later chapter, Takeuchi explicitly distinguishes between religion and literature:

That which makes a writer possible is probably some type of awareness. Just as a religious person is made possible by an awareness of sin, for the writer as well some type of awareness is probably necessary. Through this awareness the religious person sees God and in the same way the writer sets words free. This person is not controlled by words, but rather controls them. In short, he creates his own God. All such awareness is not limited ultimately to individual experience and perhaps it is impossible to attain.... The path is endless. He was just a traveler (kakaku) on this unending path. However, at some time this traveler transformed the unlimited into a small point on his self and through this he became unlimited. He emerged out of the foundation of incessant self-construction, but the self that emerged was always himself. In short, this

12 Takeuchi, 2003, 78.

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was his fundamental self. I call this literature.13

Unlike the religious person whose awareness is mediated by God and sin, the writer’s awareness is mediated by the constructions of language. Takeuchi speaks of the writer as setting words free, which refers to enabling words to have a life free from so-called objective reality. This focus on linguistic mediation divorces literature from politics, unlike the advocates of proletarian literature who view the two as necessarily linked. Lu Xun keeps a certain ironic distance from the world around him, and this space is made possible through language and literature. The relationship between Takeuchi and the proponents of proletarian literature mirror Maurice Blanchot’s criticisms of Sartre’s formulation of the relationship between literature and politics, which were also written in the 1940s. Like Japanese advocates of proletarian literature, Sartre claimed that literature should aim to change the world, but Blanchot countered this by stressing the inefficacy of literature. Blanchot wrote: “Literature does not act, but what it does is plunge into this depth of existence which is neither being nor existence, where the hope of doing anything is radically suppressed.”14 We see here a concept of the loss of hope, which could also describe Takeuchi’s idea of despair. This despair emerges from the manner in which literature and literary language are related to inaction. In literature, language constructs an alternative world where it is physically impossible to act. Indeed, the literary world is premised on the negation of the real world of politics and action. Following Hegel, one could argue that this act of negation occurs with any type of conceptualization. That is, when one conceptualizes something, one negates the thing being conceptualized.15 However, literature differs from usual conceptualization in two ways. First, literary writing, as fiction, is reflexive about its negation of the actual world. Second, writers of literature often use language non-referentially. In this second mode, language turns on itself to exhibit its materiality. When writers make language turn back on its own materiality, they control words in order to create their own God or infinity. This infinity is created precisely because literary language separates itself from the world of finite subjects and objects and at its limit subverts the very signifying function of language itself. In Takeuchi’s view, Lu Xun wandered along this path of literature, which is unlimited because it requires a constant or repeated negation of the reified, finite world of objects. This constant repetition provides a temporal dimension that again separates his discourse from that of Yasuda, who eternalizes the beauty of literature.16

13 Ibid., 143. 14 Blanchot, 1949, 14–15, cited from Hammerschlag, 2010, 170. 15 Hammerschlag, 2010, 170. 16 Lin, 2011, 25.

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Towards the end of the above passage, Takeuchi suggests that the liberation of words from their function as signifiers of things in the world becomes a dialectic of self-renewal. Once language is liberated from the world of objects, the possibility emerges for the self to constantly recreate itself by constantly plunging itself into the abyss of non-signification. The self that emerges is in the end is always “himself,” and this identity is constituted by one’s own particular form of nothingness, one’s mode of creation or , which can only come to being through the mediation of language, but can never exhaustively be represented by language. In other words, the abyss of non-signification, unlike the concept, is not universal, but specific. In this way, the fundamental self, like literary language, appears to be separate from politics. However, at the same time, the ironic distance from politics that literature offers, allows Lu Xun, in Takeuchi’s view, to develop a new type of politics, namely a politics of permanent revolution. Takeuchi describes the relationship between politics and literature as follows:

This does not mean that literature has no relation to politics... Literature is powerless with respect to politics because it alienates (sogai) politics and does this through its confrontation with politics. That which leaves politics is not literature. By means of politics, literature sees its reflection and through repelling this reflection, in other words, through becoming aware of its powerlessness, literature becomes literature. Literature is action, not a concept. However, its action is action that establishes itself through alienating action. Literature is not outside of action; amidst action, like the axis of a rotating ball, it has the form of a sublime stillness that has gathered the motion of a whole body.17

The dialectic between Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen is an allegory for the dialectic between literature and politics, which in turn propels a dynamic of history as eternal revolution. Here Takeuchi alludes to the different ways in which people mobilize language in literature and politics and in the process make history. Literature is endowed with a strange type of passivity, since it is “powerless” and its action alienates action. The ultimate alienation of action is the negation of all meaning, which refers to when a writer brings language back to its own materiality, and the word, rather than representing things, inhabits the world of things in its own way. This space of non-signification or non-representation is also the infinite space where the self can constantly re-create itself. It is the point of stillness between concept and action, which becomes the source from which novel political action can emerge.

17 Takeuchi, 2003, 180–81.

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Takeuchi suggests that the fictional use of language in literature stands in a dialectical relationship to politics and can therefore rejuvenate political discourse. Political entities, such as nations, states and republics, while not fictional, are mediated by language and narrative. Moreover, narratives related to political discourse are often closer to literature than they are to science. Writers construct a world parallel to the existing world and invite readers into to it. This was why praised fiction as enabling identification with the nation. In Japan also, proletarian literature was primarily geared towards promoting this type of identification with a class or nation. The worlds and identities that political discourse constructs are not fictional; rather, they often aim to extend the boundaries of the so-called real world or expand our ideas of the possible. The political use of terms such as socialism in Marxism is precisely such an attempt to reconfigure our conception of the possible. When this quasi-referential dimension of language in politics is combined with the non-referential dimension of language in literature, namely the materiality of the sign, the latter serves to destabilize existing narrative frames and could open politics to new possibilities. This is precisely the point where politics taps into a form of revolution separate from the various concrete revolutions such as the anti-Manchu revolution. When literature becomes the axis of politics, it constantly undercuts people’s tendency to naturalize political entities and visions. In Takeuchi’s view, Lu Xun embodied this tendency. In particular, he expressed a correlation between the incessant recreation of the self and the repeated reproduction of political structures. If the recreation of politics is analogous the reinvention of the self, some type of political identity must take the place of the self, and this continuity could be bestowed by national identity. In the above passages, however, Takeuchi resists the attempt to connect Lu Xun too closely a nationalist discourse. He not only contends that Lu Xun did not support his literature through nationalism, he also describes Lu Xun as a traveler or a nomad without a specific geographical identity. Takeuchi’s image of Lu Xun here is similar to contemporary European intellectuals’ vision of Jews as wanderers. Thinkers as different as Sartre, Levinas and Blanchot all in some way associated the Jew with a “wanderer” and then identified themselves with “the Jew.” The Jew became a universal symbol of rootlessness, a basis from which to combat totalizing discourses (Blanchot) or an expression of subjective existence (Sartre).18 Takeuchi also identifies himself to some extent with the nomadic dimensions of Lu Xun, but the context of Japan-China relationship and the problem of Western causes the trope of the wanderer to be mediated in different ways. Lu Xun the wanderer who constantly recreates himself, becomes the symbol of a paradoxical that has the potential

18 Hammerschlag, 2010.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:17:43AM via free access The 1911 Revolution and the Politics of Failure 29 to liberate humanity from imperialist domination. At this point, Takeuchi’s interpretation of Lu Xun intersects with his vision of China and modernity, which are more fully developed in his essays written shortly after World War II. Takeuchi returned to the idea of the incessant recreation of self and political structures in the context of the nation after the War, when he again examined the significance of the 1911 Revolution. This time he stressed the problem of Chinese modernity in a global context.

What Is Modernity in Relation to the 1911 Revolution?

In his famous essay, “What is Modernity?” written in 1948, Takeuchi considered the 1911 Revolution in a global context and a periodization of modernity. The full title of the essay is “What is Modernity? The Cases of the Japan and China,” which indicates that Takeuchi understands China in relation to Japan in a larger spatio-temporal matrix. The context of Takeuchi’s this essay, written only three years after Japan’s defeat in the war and one year before 1949, is very different from that of his Lu Xun book, published four years earlier. By this time, there was a flood of information about China in the Japanese newspapers, and increasing interest in Mao and the communist movement. Japanese communist leaders such as Nakano Sanzō had been to Yan’an, and returned to Japan in 1946 giving extremely positive portrayals of Mao and the Chinese communists. Moreover, by 1946, the initial honeymoon between Japanese leftist intellectuals and the American Occupation was over, and Japanese intellectuals increasingly perceived the Americans’ presence in Japan as a type of colonization. In this context, eternal revolution could connect the past, the 1911 Revolution, with the present specter of political upheaval in late 1940s China, both manifestations of resistance to imperialism. The 1911 Revolution was considered in the larger global context of resistance to the West, which encompassed both Europe and America. The essay begins with a discussion of how Oriental modernity was created out of its confrontation with Western imperialism, and, in this process, developed a certain self-consciousness. This self-consciousness led to, among other things, a sense of national continuity, as scholars developed narratives of how modernity emerged out of indigenous developments. This was present in a large number of the narratives about modernity in the Song dynasty, which proliferate even today. However, “the direct moment that produced this self-consciousness was the invasion by Europe.”19 Although Europe and the Orient present themselves as reified categories,

19 Takeuchi, 2004, 54.

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Takeuchi suggests that there is a deeper process behind the empty time of static categories. We see this in his famous discussion of European modernity:

Modernity is the self-recognition of Europe as seen within history, that regarding of itself as distinct from the feudalistic.… Therefore it can be said that Europe is first possible only in this history, and that history itself is possible only in this Europe. History is not an empty form of time. It includes an infinite number of instants in which one struggles against obstacles so that the self may be itself, without which both the self and history would be lost.20

Takeuchi generalizes his analysis of the Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen as eternal revolutionaries to encompass Europe as well. He never adequately analyses the causes of the processes of self-generation and temporality, but the logic of capitalism forms a penumbra around his discourse about modernity. We see this in passages such as the following:

Once liberated, people cannot return to their originally closed shells; they can only preserve themselves through activity. This is precisely what is called the spirit of capitalism. It grasps itself in the course of its expansion through time and space.21

Takeuchi’s discussion of the spirit of capitalism is surprisingly similar to his description of Lu Xun’s and Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary spirit. Capitalism also constantly renews itself and expresses a type of history in which the self is constantly reborn. Indeed, Takeuchi’s discussion of the spirit of capitalism as constantly expanding recalls Hegel’s spirit, which constantly reconstitutes itself at different levels of self-consciousness. Takeuchi’s narrative of the development of Oriental capitalism is again something like the expansion of Hegel’s spirit, since it transforms economic, political and cultural aspects of life:

Europe’s invasion of the Orient resulted in the phenomenon of Oriental capitalism, and this signified the equivalence between European self-preservation and self-expansion.22

Note that capitalism here is considered to be synonymous with Europe, which is why Oriental capitalism is tantamount to European expansion. This has certain

20 Ibid., 54. 21 Takeuchi, 2004, 55. 22 Ibid.

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The form of invasion was first conquest, followed by demands for the opening of markets, and the transition to such things as guarantees of human rights and freedom of religious belief, loans or economic assistance, and support for educational and liberation movements. These changes symbolized the progress of the spirit of rationalism. From within this movement was born the distinctive characteristics of modernity: a spirit of advancement that aims at the infinite approach toward greater perfection; the positivism, empiricism, and idealism that supports this spirit; and quantitative science that regards everything as homogenous.23

Many of the elements of these passages, such as the development of rationalism, are connected to the culture of capitalist modernity and, in particular, reification. However, Takeuchi thinks of these characteristics in terms of regional distinctions such as the Orient and the West, and then conceives of resistance along these lines. In other words, reification and rationalism are connected to Western imperialism, and so resistance to reification and to imperialism goes hand in hand. Consequently, resistance has as its condition a type of negativity that cannot be objectified or reified, and this negativity serves as the fulcrum of possibility. It is within this theoretical and geographical context that Takeuchi rethinks the 1911 Revolution. He suggests that resistance is embodied in the image of the slave who denies all positivity. Unlike humanists who speak of the liberation of the slave in a simple manner, Takeuchi claims that Lu Xun embodies a consciousness that travels a path when there is no path to travel. The slave refuses to be a slave at the same time that it refuses to be anything else. Takeuchi emphasizes this negative moment because from the perspective of immediacy, without reflection or mediation, liberation is also dominated by the forces of rationalization associated with the West. The possibility of creating something new requires a moment in which mediation is not supplied with content. This is the form of revolution that Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen together symbolized. Takeuchi conceives of resistance in terms of a contrast between Chinese and Japanese modernity, and, in particular, between the and the 1911 Revolution. However, this distinction must be understood against the background of a wider struggle against colonialism:

Europe’s invasion of the Orient extends across time and space, and so the cutting of this extension at spatio-temporal points results in these regions

23 Ibid., 55.

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becoming determined actual things. Thus, while resistance at this point may also be understood as something individual, can such individual differences be explained as homogeneous? Indeed, various types of people emerge from this individual resistance. These types would include, roughly speaking, Lenin and Gorky, Sun Yat-sen and Lu Xun, Gandhi and Tagore, Kemal Atatürk and Ibn Saud.24

Takeuchi sees the emergence of this relational dynamic between literature and politics as made possible by larger project of anti-colonial resistance in an uneven global space-time. Resistance is able to cut the homogenous space-time of imperialist capitalism, and it is precisely through this act of cutting that regions create their individuality in relation to the above dialectic. But in this context, China has a special place in relation to Japan because there is a rupture between space and politics. That is, if the Orient represents resistance and the West represents imperialism, Japan becomes something of an Oriental West, while China, as the colonized, becomes the paragon of resistance. From this perspective, the 1911 Revolution is particularly important. In the same year as he published “What is Modernity?” Takeuchi published another essay, “Ways of Introducing Culture,” in which he adumbrated his argument about the 1911 Revolution and the politics of failure. He contends that both the Meiji and the late Qing governments attempted to reform from above. However, the Meiji reforms succeeded while the Qing reforms successively failed. The Meiji reforms and the Japanese experience represent, for Takeuchi, a “Prussian model,” in which the colonized attempts to asymptotically approach the colonizers or advanced nations. In China such hopes were constantly thwarted, and, as a result, like Lu Xun’s literary language, China was forced back upon itself and continually had to create itself out of nothing. The conditions for the emergence of such a revolutionary creation are numerous, but Takeuchi singles out two: the uneven temporality of the global capitalist world and the overlapping of conservative and progressive forces in China. We have already touched on the first point, since, in Takeuchi’s view, uneven temporality is implied in the distinction between advanced countries and late-developing countries. According to Takeuchi, China and Japan each made different use of their lateness in entering or being forced into the global capitalist system. The perception of lateness, of course, implies a certain narrative of progress and teleology, something that was gradually gaining ground in both late Qing China and Meiji Japan. In China, however, “reactionism was so strong that it prevented all reform from above… this caused revolution to arise from below.”25

24 Ibid., 78–79. 25 Takeuchi, 2004, 77.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:17:43AM via free access The 1911 Revolution and the Politics of Failure 33

Here, Takeuchi refers to the successive failures of Self-Strengthening Movement, the 100 Days Reform, and the 1911 Revolution. This view was influential in post-war Japanese sinology, and is perhaps most clearly expressed by Nishi Junzō. In his well-known essay ‘Confucianism and Chinese Thought from Now On’ Nishi wrote, “When the West invaded, as China retreated, the Chinese substance discarded its skin, flesh, and even bones. China preserved itself only as marrow.”26 From this marrow or nothingness, China then developed the power to create a different future for itself. This idea of failure as possibility became especially important in post-war Japan, since Japan had itself just encountered such a failure in 1945. It now appeared to Japanese intellectuals that the people must re-create themselves. Takeuchi’s question was whether the setback that Japan suffered in 1945 could create the conditions for a new literary and political consciousness, similar to that of Lu Xun, Sun Yat-sen, and .

Multiple Temporalities and Contemporaneity—Rethinking the Significance Takeuchi’s Discussion of the 1911 Revolution in the Context of the Logic of Capitalism

Takeuchi’s work is more theoretically significant for the questions he poses than for the answers he gives. Indeed, the question of how to assess the significance of China’s two revolutions in the context of global capitalism is one of the most complex questions in Chinese history, and contributes to understanding of the trajectory of countries on the periphery of the global capitalist system more generally. Takeuchi’s work overlaps with the discourse of certain postcolonial theorists who criticize the West or Eurocentrism as expressing an empty universality. Below, I will analyze the limits of such discourses by examining Harry Harootunian’s critique of post-colonialism in his recent essay, ‘Who Needs Postcoloniality? A Response to Linder.’27 Harootunian’s essay is relevant to the above discussion because he develops a Marxist critique of postcolonialism that attempts to account for both the homogeneity and the unevenness of the global capitalism. He understands the contradictory nature of temporality in capitalism as both homogenous and uneven. We have seen Takeuchi deal with this unevenness in his own way, without explicitly grounding it in an analysis of capitalism. Below, I ask to what extent such unevenness can be mobilized towards a new post-capitalist future. Harootunian explains the “contemporaneity of this synchronic system” of capitalism “as a system in which the expansion of capital will result in value

26 Nishi, 1995, 128. 27 Harootunian, 2010.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:17:43AM via free access 34 Viren Murthy independently valorizing itself.” 28 For Takeuchi, the expansion of capital represented the root of the imperialism but was also a spirit of rejuvenation. In order to understand the concept of contemporaneity mentioned above, we need to unpack some of the concepts implied in the valorization of value. First, the foundational concept of capitalism, the commodity, represents a contradictory unity between exchange-value and use-value. Use-value represents the concrete qualitative side of the commodity; from this perspective, a commodity is a sensuous object that is particular and satisfies a need. Exchange-value, however, is merely quantitative, and we experience it most directly in terms of prices and numbers. From this perspective, all commodities are qualitatively equal: their sensuous qualities are extinguished and their value is determined by the average socially necessary labor-time required to produce them. The valorization of value is made possible because of the prevalence of exchange-value or qualitative equivalence. The self-valorizaton of value refers to capitalists attaining surplus value, which is a quantitative increment, by buying raw materials and labor power (the one commodity that can produce value) and then selling the products of this labor power. This is, of course, the M-C-M' equation. Marx describes this valorization of value in the following manner:

The objective content of the circulation we have been discussing—the valorization of value—is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e., as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.29

Value valorizes itself independently and this process shapes the contours of people’s lives in capitalist society. The various processes associated with valorization require the participation of members of society, but it is not controlled by them. Therefore, Marx calls value in motion an automatic subject,30 which has led Moishe Postone and Chris Arthur to discuss capital as the subject of history.31 People living in capitalist society are not autonomous in any robust sense of the word, and the infinite moments of history that Takeuchi discusses are always dominated by an abstract logic of domination. Although capitalist society is dominated by the quest for quantitative gain, the logic of capital initiates a number of qualitative changes. Indeed, with the generalization of the logic of the commodity form, the exchange-value side of

28 Ibid., 40. 29 Marx, 1990, 254. 30 Ibid., 255. 31 Postone, 1993; Arthur, 2004.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:17:43AM via free access The 1911 Revolution and the Politics of Failure 35 the commodity form, the side of abstract equivalence becomes increasingly prevalent in both politics, in the form of bureaucratization, and in everyday life, with respect to the buying and selling of commodities, including one’s own labor power. Because these social transformations structure the practices that govern people’s everyday lives, the valorization of value conditions intellectual life. “[Our] commodity-owners think like Faust: ‘In the beginning was the deed (Im Anfang war die Tat).’ They have already acted before thinking.”32 People have already acted based on the way in which capitalism appears, without reflecting on the historicity of this social form. This type of fetishism, which is necessary in capitalist society, becomes the basis for intellectual activity, including much critical thought. For example, we can understand the various movements all over the world in the years around 1910, which have after-effects that continue today, as artists’ attempts to resist the colonization of everyday life by the abstractions associated with capitalism, often mediated differently by the state and market. Takeuchi read the 1911 Revolution, Lu Xun, Mao Zedong, and modern China in general as manifestations of resistance to such abstractions, including the domination of life by science and technology. However, the link between the value-form and Takeuchi’s reading of the 1911 Revolution goes deeper than merely the contradictory logic of the commodity form. It also touches on interpretations of time. The difference between M, the money invested by the capitalist and M', the money that the capitalist gets by selling the products of labor is closely connected to time. Capitalists make money based on the difference between the amount of money paid for labor (the amount paid in wages) and the amount that laborers produce. Since the workers must work a certain amount of time in order to produce the value of their own labor power, the amount of extra time that workers labor is surplus value for the capitalist. So, the first way of increasing surplus value is by increasing the amount of time that workers work. This is so-called absolute surplus-value. The amount of surplus value capitalists acquire also depends on how much labor can produce in a given time. Therefore, capitalists are constantly attempting to increase the intensity of production through the reorganization of the labor force and technological innovation. This is what Marx calls relative surplus-value. As technological innovations are generalized and various capitalists all start to use similar machines, the average socially necessary labor time required to produce a given item decreases. The value of individual commodities thus decreases, and more commodities must be made to produce the same value. This is because the labor hour is the standard for value, regardless of how much is produced in that hour. In short, when capitalist competition results in a general increase of productivity, capitalists reconstitute the labor hour, force people to

32 Ibid., 180.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:17:43AM via free access 36 Viren Murthy produce more in one hour. This accelerates the pace of everyday life. This provides us with a new framework to understand many of Takeuchi’s statements, such as those about Lu Xun constantly renewing himself while remaining the same. Takeuchi analyzes such constant self-making in terms of language, subjectivity and literature, but the structure that Takeuchi describes parallels the reconstitution of the value-form. Capital is constantly renewing itself while remaining capitalism and continuing its abstract form of compulsion and domination. Takeuchi associates something like the abstract domination of capital with Europe, and hopes to find resistance to this in the interstices of Asia or the colonized. His discourse represents a continuation of some of the arguments of writers such as Yasuda Yojūrō, and also philosophers such as Koyama Iwao, Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and others “who were not Marxists [but] had already recognized the different temporalities and histories lived by different societies and had identified the false universalism represented by the ‘European’ model.”33 Takeuchi and Harootunian both ask in different ways whether uneven temporality can lead to something new beyond the false universalism governed by the valorization of value and capital as automatic subject. Takeuchi wrote at a time when China appeared to provide such an alternative. Today, the Maoist experience remains theoretically interesting because it alludes to the possibility of socialism on the periphery of the global capitalist system. Harootunian does not discuss , but focuses instead on Marx’s letters to Vera Zasulich. The examples of Mao and Marx’s letters to Vera Zasulich and Russian progressives hinge on the same issue, whether people can mobilize uneven temporalities to subvert the dominant temporal dynamic of capitalism. Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich suggests that countries can draw on non-capitalist pasts in order to develop non-capitalist futures. Harootunian notes that Marx did not adhere to a unilinear model of development, but believed that the Russian experience showed that countries on the periphery of the global capitalist system could “utilize residues of prior modes of production to create either a new register of formal subsumption or bypass capitalism altogether.”34 Harootunian here presents two different possibilities, both of which indicate the possibility of avoiding the real subsumption of labor under capital. Marx distinguished between the real and formal subsumption of labor under capital, whereby in formal subsumption absolute surplus-value “is the sole manner of producing surplus-value.”35 In other words, formal subsumption takes over pre-existing and indeed pre-capitalist forms of labor and puts them into the

33 Harootunian, 2010, 42. 34 Ibid., 43. 35 Marx, 1990, 1021.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:17:43AM via free access The 1911 Revolution and the Politics of Failure 37 service of capital. At this stage, capital has not yet revolutionized the actual mode of labor and “the real nature of the labor process as a whole.”36 Real subsumption, on the other hand, refers to when capitalists make surplus-value through the intensification of labor productivity, that is, through cooperation and through technological innovation. Marx describes real subsumption as revolutionary:

The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively on the length of the working day, whereas the production of relative surplus-value completely revolutionizes the technical processes of labor and the groupings into which society is divided. It therefore requires a specifically capitalist mode of production, a mode of production which, along with its methods, means, and conditions, arises and develops spontaneously on the basis of the formal subsumption of labor under capital. This formal subsumption is then replaced by real subsumption.37

Because real subsumption affects the labor process as a whole, it imposes the logic of relative surplus-value on the whole of society. It is at this point that capital becomes a subject endowed with a revolutionary temporality. We can understand Takeuchi in 1944 and then during the post-war period as inhabiting a nation in which real subsumption under capital was increasingly becoming a reality. He saw early 20th century China, a place where real subsumption was increasingly thwarted. However, the 1911 Revolution and other failures were seen to lead to an alternative possibility, which culminated in the 1949 Revolution. In early post-war Japan, the 1949 Revolution clearly appeared to be a beacon of hope for the project of socialism, which was integral to creating an alternative to not only formal subsumption but also to the real subsumption of labor under capital. Part of the Maoist project was concerned with making China into a strong industrialized state, which would surpass the West, while at the same time developing something like socialism.

Conclusion: Takeuchi’s Reading of the 1911 Revolution and Imagining of a Different Future

What remains of Takeuchi’s discourse if China no longer represents an alternative to capitalism and perhaps never did? Here we should return to the subjective dimension of Takeuchi’s work and his emphasis on literature as self-creation. Although this self-creation was grasped in a fetishized form that mimicked the logic of capitalism, incessant transformation while remaining the

36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 645.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:17:43AM via free access 38 Viren Murthy same, literature could be the basis of imagining a new society, because it implied de-naturalization. Takeuchi’s idea of literature could serve to delink the goal of socialism from dominant discourses and mobilize it once again to construct a vision beyond capitalism. However, Takeuchi’s discourse of literature is primarily a negative discourse. One must rethink the second term in the dialectic between literature and politics in such a way that it would be conducive to creating a post-capitalist world out of the vicissitudes of the present crisis, by exploiting the contradictions of capital. Takeuchi’s writings show that although ideological critiques—which denaturalize tropes related to politics and reveal fetishisms of the nation and the market—are necessary to imagine a new future, they are only a first step. After such a de-naturalization, one must attempt to reimage a politics that would outline a practice which would overcome the valorization of value and create a world in which people make history for the first time.

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