The alternative is to reject the AFF in favor of an epistemic rejection of Area Studies that define knowledge production through mapping the external world as unstable, hostile and target. Only de-centering knowledge production from the self can solve inevitable conflict and orientalist violence

Among the most important elements in war, writes karl von Clausewitz, are the “moral elements.”32 From the United States’ point of view, this phrase does not seem at all ironic. Just as the bombings of Afghanistan and Iraq in the first few years of the twenty-first century were justified as benevolent acts to preserve the united States and the rest of the world against “the axis of evil,” “weapons of mass destruction,” and the like, so were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered pacific acts, acts that were meant to save lives and save civilization in a world threatened by German Nazism. (Though, by the time the bombs were dropped in Japan, Germany had already surrendered.) even today, some of the most educated, scientifically knowledgeable members of U.S. society continue to believe that the atomic bomb was the best way to terminate the hostilities.33 And, while the media in the united States are quick to join the media elsewhere in reporting the controversies over Japan’s refusal to apologize for its war crimes in Asia or over France’s belatedness in apologizing for the Vichy government’s persecution of the Jews, no U.S. head of state has ever visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or expressed regret for the nuclear holocaust.34 In this—its absolute conviction of its own moral superiority and legitimacy—lies perhaps the most deeply ingrained connection between the foundation myth of the United States as an exceptional nation and the dropping of the atomic bombs (as well as all the military and economic interventions the united States has made in nationalist struggles in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle east since the Second World War).35 even on occasions such as Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and September 11, 2001, when the united States had to recognize that it was just part of the world (and hence could be attacked like any other country), its response was typically that of reasserting U.S. exceptionalism—This cannot happen to us! We are unique, we cannot be attacked!—by ferociously attacking others. In the decades since 1945, whether in dealing with the Soviet union, the People’s republic of China, north korea, vietnam, and countries in Central America, or during the gulf Wars, the united States has been conducting war on the basis of a certain kind of knowledge production, and producing knowledge on the basis of war. War and knowledge enable and foster each other primarily through the collective fantasizing of some foreign or alien body that poses danger to the “self” and the “eye” that is the nation. once the monstrosity of this foreign body is firmly established in the national consciousness, the decision makers of the u.S. government often talk and behave as though they had no choice but war. War, then, is acted out as a moral obligation to expel an imagined dangerous alienness from the united States’ self-concept as the global custodian of freedom and democracy. Put in a different way, the “moral element,” insofar as it produces knowledge about the “self” and “other”—and hence the “eye” and its “target”—as such, justifies war by its very dichotomizing logic. Conversely, the violence of war, once begun, fixes the other in its attributed monstrosity and affirms the idealized image of the self. In this regard, the pernicious stereotyping of the Japanese during the Second World War—not only by u.S. military personnel but also by social and behavioral scientists—was simply a flagrant example of an ongoing ideological mechanism that had accompanied Western treatments of non-Western “others” for centuries. In the hands of academics such as geoffrey gorer, writes Dower, the notion that was collectively and “objectively” formed about the Japanese was that they were “a clinically compulsive and probably collectively neurotic people, whose lives were governed by ritual and ‘situational ethics,’ wracked with insecurity, and swollen with deep, dark currents of repressed resentment and aggression.”37 As Dower points out, such stereotyping was by no means accidental or unprecedented: The Japanese, so “unique” in the rhetoric of World War Two, were actually saddled with racial stereotypes that europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites for centuries: during the conquest of the new World, the slave trade, the Indian wars in the united States, the agitation against Chinese immigrants in America, the colonization of Asia and Africa, the U.S. conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. These were stereotypes, moreover, which had been strongly reinforced by nineteenthcentury Western science. In the final analysis, in fact, these favored idioms denoting superiority and inferiority transcended race and represented formulaic expressions of Self and Other in general.38 The moralistic divide between “self” and “other” constitutes the production of knowledge during the U.S. occupation of Japan after the Second World War as well. As Monica Braw writes, in the years immediately after 1945, the risk that the united States would be regarded as barbaric and inhumane was carefully monitored, in the main by cutting off Japan from the rest of the world through the ban on travel, control of private mail, and censorship of research, mass media information, and other kinds of communication. The entire occupation policy was permeated by the view that “the united States was not to be accused; guilt was only for Japan”:39 As the occupation of Japan started, the atmosphere was military. Japan was a defeated enemy that must be subdued. The Japanese should be taught their place in the world: as a defeated nation, Japan had no status and was entitled to no respect. People should be made to realize that any catastrophe that had befallen them was of their own making. until they had repented, they were suspect. If they wanted to release information about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and nagasaki, it could only be for the wrong reasons, such as accusing the united States of inhumanity. Thus this information was suppressed.40 As in the scenario of aerial bombing, the elitist and aggressive panoramic “vision” in which the other is beheld means that the sufferings of the other matters much less than the transcendent aspirations of the self. And, despite being the products of a particular culture’s technological fanaticism, such transcendent aspirations are typically expressed in the form of selfless universalisms. As Sherry puts it, “The reality of Hiroshima and nagasaki seemed less important than the bomb’s effect on ‘[hu]mankind’s destiny,’ on ‘humanity’s choice,’ on ‘what is happening to men’s minds,’ and on hopes (now often extravagantly revived) to achieve world government.” On Japan’s side, as yoneyama writes, such a “global narrative of the universal history of humanity” has helped sustain “a national victimology and phantasm of innocence throughout most of the postwar years.” going one step further, she remarks: “The idea that Hiroshima’s disaster ought to be remembered from the transcendent and anonymous position of humanity . . . might best be described as ‘nuclear universalism.’ once the relations among war, racism, and knowledge production are underlined in these terms, it is no longer possible to assume, as some still do, that the recognizable features of modern war—its impersonality, coerciveness, and deliberate cruelty—are “divergences” from the “antipathy” to violence and to conflict that characterize the modern world.43 Instead, it would be incumbent on us to realize that the pursuit of war—with its use of violence—and the pursuit of peace—with its cultivation of knowledge—are the obverse and reverse of the same coin, the coin that I have been calling “the age of the world target.” rather than being irreconcilable opposites, war and peace are coexisting, collaborative functions in the continuum of a virtualized world. More crucially still, only the privileged nations of the world can afford to wage war and preach peace at one and the same time. As Sherry writes, “The united States had different resources with which to be fanatical: resources allowing it to take the lives of others more than its own, ones whose accompanying rhetoric of technique disguised the will to destroy.”44 From this it follows that, if indeed political and military acts of cruelty are not unique to the united States—a point which is easy enough to substantiate—what is nonetheless remarkable is the manner in which such acts are, in the united States, usually cloaked in the form of enlightenment and altruism, in the form of an aspiration simultaneously toward technological perfection and the pursuit of peace. In a country in which political leaders are held accountable for their decisions by an electorate, violence simply cannot—as it can in totalitarian countries—exist in the raw. even the most violent acts must be adorned with a benign, rational story. It is in the light of such interlocking relations among war, racism, and knowledge production that I would make the following comments about area studies, the academic establishment that crystallizes the connection between the epistemic targeting of the world and the ‘‘humane’’ practices of peacetime learning. From Atomic Bombs to Area Studies As its name suggests, area studies as a mode of knowledge production is, strictly speaking, military in its origins. Even though the study of the history, languages, and literatures of, for instance, ‘‘Far Eastern’’ cultures existed well before the Second World War (in what Edward W. Said would term the old Orientalist tradition predicated on philology), the systematization of such study under the rubric of special geopolitical areas was largely a postwar and U.S. phenomenon. In H. D. Harootunian’s words, ‘‘The systematic formation of area studies, principally in major universities, was . . . a massive attempt to relocate the enemy in the new configuration of the Cold War.’ As Bruce Cumings puts it: It is now fair to say, based on the declassified evidence, that the American state and especially the intelligence elements in it shaped the entire field of postwar area studies, with the clearest and most direct impact on those regions of the world where communism was strongest: Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and East Asia.’ In the decades after 1945, when the United States competed with the Soviet Union for the power to rule and/or destroy the world, these regions were the ones that required continued, specialized super-vision; to this list we may also add Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. As areas to be studied, these regions took on the significance of target fields— fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary for the perpetuation of the United States’ political and ideological hegemony. In the final part of his classic Orientalism, Said describes area studies as a continuation of the old European Orientalism with a different pedagogical emphasis: No longer does an Orientalist try first to master the esoteric languages of the Orient; he begins instead as a trained social scientist and ‘applies’ his science to the Orient, or anywhere else. This is the specifically American contribution to the history of Orientalism, and it can be dated roughly from the period immediately following World War II, when the United States found itself in the position recently vacated by Britain and France. Whereas Said draws his examples mainly from Islamic and Middle Eastern area studies, Cumings provides this portrait of the East Asian target field: The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) was the first ‘‘area’’ organization in the U.S., founded in 1943 as the Far Eastern Association and reorganized as the AAS in 1956. Before 1945 there had been little attention to and not much funding for such things; but now the idea was to bring coe ntemporary social science theory to bear on the non-Western world, rather than continue to pursue the classic themes of Oriental studies, often examined through philology. . . . In return for their severance, the Orientalists would get vastly enhanced academic resources (positions, libraries, language studies)—and soon, a certain degree of separation which came from the social scientists inhabiting institutes of East Asian studies, whereas the Orientalists occupied departments of East Asian languages and cultures. This implicit Faustian bargain sealed the postwar academic deal. A largely administrative enterprise, closely tied to policy, the new American Orientalism took over from the old Orientalism attitudes of cultural hostility, among which is, as Said writes, the dogma that ‘the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).’Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the ‘‘scientific’’ and ‘‘objective’’ production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special ‘‘areas’’ became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target. In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits of higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war— if, for instance, the ability to translate a diffcult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes —is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to ‘‘know’’ the other cultures? Can ‘‘knowledge’’ that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare’s accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign ‘‘self ’’/‘‘eye’’—the ‘‘I’’—that is the United States, the other will have no choice but remain just that— a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber— such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter— will never receive the attention that is due to them. ‘‘Knowledge,’’ however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences. This is one reason why, as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by ‘‘the absence of a definable object’’—and by ‘‘the problem of the vanishing object.’’