This volume aims to address, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the following philosophical question: ‘How are we to understand other cultures?’ (hereafter, the question of intercultural understanding). In so doing, it brings into conversation Wittgensteinian and other cultural and philosophical traditions, stemming notably from Japan, China, the West African Yoruba people or India. The book is therefore not just about intercultural understanding; it also brings together, under the umbrella of Wittgensteinian philosophy, a plurality of cultural voices and philosophical cultures.

We set out to develop an approach to addressing the question of intercultural understanding that emphasizes the connection between its epistemological, ethical and political aspects. The Wittgensteinian tradition – spanning not only Ludwig Wittgenstein’s own corpus but also the work of other prominent and up-and-coming philosophers directly influenced by Wittgenstein – is ideally suited to this task. The contributions to this volume build on a wealth of Wittgensteinian strategies and methodologies to develop an imaginative, fresh portfolio of philosophical responses to the intercultural question, as well as strategies to address the special challenges it poses. The book is divided into two parts, each of which includes six chapters. Part I presents a series of new proposals on how best to model intercultural understanding after Wittgenstein. Part II examines a new set of challenges to intercultural understanding, stemming from relativism, the philosophy of disagreement and the problem of cultural exclusion, among others.

Constantine Sandis launches Part I with ‘Understanding Other Cultures (Without Mind-Reading)’. In this chapter, Sandis draws on the analogy with historical understanding to argue that understanding contemporary cultures that may appear alien to us involves a form of thinking with that does not require any agreement in opinion but, instead, a parallel sharing of thought processes. This idea is explored in relation to recent attempts to make sense of the ghost narratives that emerged in Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Drawing partly from Wittgenstein and Clifford Geertz, Sandis suggests that understanding the thoughts of another culture is not a question of mind-reading but rather of conceptual immersion.

Chon Tejedor, in ‘Intercultural Understanding, Epistemic Interaction and Polyphonic Cultures’, revisits three central Wittgensteinian views: philosophy understood as an activity of interactively engaging with a real or imaginary interlocutor; nonsense as self-stultification; and perspicuous representation.

This book is a unique transdisciplinary study on animals and plants in medieval Chinese religions and science, especially in today’s critical era of environmental crisis. In recent years, environment historians have written intensively on China. Yet, the study of animals and plants in medieval China was less developed, not much about the role of religions, more precisely. This book aims to bridge the gaps between religious studies and environmental studies, the history of science and religious studies, and animal studies and plant studies. It examines the biological, cultural, and spiritual encounters of animals and plants with humans in the medieval period through the analysis of changing roles and images of animals and plants in the historical, psychological, and imaginative experiences of human life, which are often overlooked in conventional scholarship.

This book can be viewed as a sibling of my recent book, In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), and its discussions move beyond animals to cover plants. This new book will look at how religious agents responded to the challenges of animals and plants as material culture in the mundane world. It will also look at how religious writers developed their various discourses about animals and plants from state ideology, and how the spiritual and natural worlds mutually enriched each other in China’s medieval world. In particular, this book aims to analyze ordering nature and supernature in medieval China. This study has benefited tremendously from many historians of Chinese science and technology, such as Joseph Needham, Ho Peng Yoke, Nathan Sivin, and others on science and religions in China, and Berthold Laufer and Edward H. Schafer on plants and animals and material culture in medieval China along the Silk Road. In the meantime, this study attempts to raise new questions with the rise of animal and plant studies in contemporary scholarship. Many other readers in the domains of history of science and technology, Chinese history, Chinese literary culture, Chinese ideas and religions, animal studies, and material culture, in general, might find some interesting themes in my discussion.

In the past few decades, what has been called “the spatial turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences has been marked by an enhanced awareness of the significance of space, place, mapping, spatial relations, and so on, in those fields. According to the research influenced by this turn, space has been revealed to maintain an active and productive presence in society and culture, as well as in various art forms, rather than functioning as mere setting, an empty container, or a backdrop in front of which the matters of “real” significance unfold. More recently, but perhaps relatedly, a planetary turn in many of these disciplinary fields has reoriented spatial critical theory and practice toward a more global frame of reference, owing much to the imperatives of the worldwide ecological crisis and the prospects of apparently inevitable climate change, as well as to the realities of multinational capitalism and globalization, along with the diffuse, specific, and often local effects of all of this. The conception of the “world,” which can be closely related to both spatiality and planetarity, profoundly influences the ways we imagine space and place. Worlds may be either vaster or more limited than other spatial frameworks, and the negotiation of worldly spaces presents challenges to traditional means of mapping or making sense of one’s place. In this chapter, I discuss the effects of worlding on spatiality studies, beginning with a discussion of the spatial and planetary turns, then focusing on the crises of representation and of lived experience connected with a global frame of reference.

The Spatial Turn

Although such spatial or geographical considerations have no doubt always been a part of literary and critical practice, the recent resurgence of spatiality and the explosion in the number of spatially oriented books and articles in literary studies follows what has been referred to as the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences. The spatial turn has no particular date of inception, but one may perceive more and more critical attention being paid to matters of space in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, Denis Cosgrove has explicitly connected the spatial turn to poststructuralist theory, and so it is not surprising that Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and other theorist of their time have been closely associated with the spatial turn.

Under the ABC Act (1983), which stipulated the corporation’s editorial and administrative independence from government, the state exercised its interests through budgetary interventions and allocative priorities. In this way, the state and its agent (the charter-enabled ABC) differentiated the sometimes-clashing requirements of international broadcasting operating in the liberal tradition: political purpose and performance. Purpose embodied the material interests of the state, given expression at the level of high strategy, public asset investment priorities and their intended deployment. The broadcaster’s performance in serving the national interest took form through its capacity to reach designated audiences, its editorial and programme decisions, and its production norms and style.

Government ministers and their departments, especially Foreign Affairs, advised the ABC as to which foreign publics should be targeted, in what languages and over which defined geographical zones. Government decisions on capital investment, especially those related to transmission capacity, substantially determined the sphere of effective audience reach that Radio Australia could achieve. This chapter examines the relationship between the ABC and government when setting international broadcasting targets and priorities, a relationship in which the broadcaster sought to reconcile state interests with the values of a liberal media model.

Prior to the re-constitution of the national public broadcaster in 1983, its then-chief executive, Keith Jennings, said Radio Australia serviced ‘primary’ targets comprising 13 Asian nations as well as Papua New Guinea and Pacific Island countries (Jennings 1983). Its ‘secondary’ targets were listed as the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North America and South America. At the time, Radio Australia broadcast in six Asian languages (including both Standard Chinese/Mandarin and Cantonese) as well as French and Tok Pisin, which meant it relied largely on English to reach most countries designated as primary or secondary targets. In the 1980s, the international service recalibrated its strategic focus as an Asia Pacific regional broadcaster, partly in acknowledgement of the ‘parlous state’ of its transmission capability (ABC 1989, p. 1). This recalibration also reflected a shift in the Australian government’s outlook in a changing geostrategic environment. It demonstrated the interplay of circumstance, political purpose and performance.

Among his other prodigious contributions to literature, a great many of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings on literary and cultural criticism were published over the course of thirty years in ten volumes, each bearing the title Situations. (We know them as Situations I–X, with individual volumes bearing different subtitles, published between 1947 and 1976.) It is telling, but not surprising, that Sartre would use this title, for his philosophy was rooted in what Fredric Jameson has referred to as “the logic of the situation,” which entails a thoroughgoing recognition of the fundamental situatedness of the individual subject in relation to others at all times and places. We find ourselves, always and already, in a certain situation, which conditions our sense of self and our comportment toward the world. This a fairly basic, existential reality, but by engaging in critical practice, we find ourselves especially attuned to the ways that the situations in which we find both ourselves and the texts under consideration affect the project in innumerable ways. The situation of criticism is, in this sense, doubly situated, for it entails a persistent consciousness of its own situation while assessing other situations. In describing his attraction to the dialectic, for example, which is also to say his sense of how a properly critical practice would work, Jameson has said that “the emphasis on the logic of the situation, the constant changeability of the situation, its primacy and the way in which it allows certain things to be possible and others not: that would lead to a kind of thinking I would call dialectical.” Whether it be explicitly characterized as dialectical or not, criticism is always practiced from and with respect to a given situation, and the awareness and consideration of the situatedness of both the critic’s subjective position and the objects of critique are essential aspects of literary and cultural criticism.

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies comprises a selection of essays that register this sense of situatedness amid various intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts. The title is, in part, a play on words, for the expression “a critical situation” is well known outside of academic literary studies to refer to matters of great urgency, often alarming and dangerous.

Eyles Irwin was born in Calcutta, India, in 1751. His father, James Irwin, was a merchant in St Helena and Java in the 1730s. In the 1740s, he ‘received direct employment by the [East India] Company’, the historian Barry Crosbie wrote, which allowed him to make fortunes that enabled him to buy the Hazeleigh estate in Essex (Crosbie 2011: 40). At an early age, Eyles Irwin’s father sent him to England to study at a private academy in Chiswick. In 1771, via his family’s connections with the director of the East India Company at the time Laurence Sullivan, Irwin was offered a position in the Madras civil service and a few years later he rose in the EIC ranks to be a ‘superintendent of the company’s grounds within the bounds of Madras’. While in Madras, Irwin succeeded to gain the trust of the governor of Madras, Lord Pigot (George Pigot [1719–1777]), who was appointed to restore the province of Tanjore to the Rajah. Irwin’s ambitions were shaken when Pigot died in his prison in St Thomas Mount in 1777shortly after the Madras Council ousted him. Immediately after Pigot passed away, Irwin was suspended because he didn’t follow the new leadership headed by George Stratton, Henry Brooke and Charles Floyer. Soon after, Irwin returned to Britain by the Red Sea route via Suez, but two years later he was reinstated to the service. In 1783, he returned to India by the Syrian-Mesopotamian routes. In the same year, Lord McCartney (George McCartney), the governor of Madras, endorsed Irwin’s talents to the East India Company. He appointed him to administer the provinces of Tinnivelly and Madurah. In 1793, Irwin was further promoted: he sat on the ‘Secret and Superintending Committee of Supra Cargos for the Company’s Affairs in China’.

Irwin’s colleagues and friends in Madras and Bengal consisted of Britons who had powerful connections and possessed huge wealth both in India and Britain. One such Briton was the rich money speculator Paul Benfield who was stationed in Bengal but was involved with commercial affairs in Madras.

In his Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that “what the history of philosophy displays to us is a series of noble spirits, the gallery of the heroes of reason’s thinking,” but that the history of philosophy would have little value if thought of as a mere collection of opinions, in themselves arbitrary: “philosophy contains no opinions; there are no philosophical opinions.” Hence, Hegel says, those who wish to understand the history of philosophy by studying the individual philosophers it comprises, rather than achieving a more universal idea of the totality of its thought, will be missing the forest for the trees. “Anyone who starts by examining the trees, and sticks simply to them, does not survey the whole wood and gets lost and bewildered in it.” For Hegel, the history of philosophy is the overarching concept, and the evolutionary realization, of philosophy itself.

Gilles Deleuze, it might be said, built a career in philosophy in which he attempted to subvert this view, and he was particularly critical of “the history of philosophy” as an enterprise. In a well-known letter, Deleuze wrote, “I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy,” adding that

In the same letter, Deleuze says, “What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics,” so perhaps it is not surprising that he would approach the history of philosophy rather differently. However, Deleuze does not abandon or reject the history of philosophy. Rather, he transforms the project into something else, a “nomadography,” which projects an alternative history of philosophy that not only allows Deleuze to “get out” of that institution, but allows us to re-imagine it in productive new ways.

The narrative of this book moves from the conceptual to the messy reality of an operational international broadcaster dealing with multiple external and internal variables that affect its functionality and performance. The analytic framework developed in Chapter 6 is used to examine the ABC/Radio Australia’s character, purposive deployment and performance. The analysis is structured as a political history in five chapters followed by one of conclusions, which considers its relevance to present circumstances. It concentrates on the two decades to 1990 – years of regional conflict, centred on the conduct of Indonesia, and intense critical scrutiny of the international broadcaster’s performance in service of foreign policy. Promulgation of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act in 1983 provided a before-and-after baseline from which to re-consider the ABC’s international broadcasting mandate.

I take as a given that the political world is in a constant state of flux (Wolfsfeld 1997, p. 30) and so too the societal context of political discourse. The result is a cycle of influence in which political and other situational variables influence the performance of news media, which then may influence the political process (Wolfsfeld 1997, p. 46). In practice, the operations and performance of an international broadcaster are subject to prevailing geostrategic and national political contexts; the formal prerogatives and constraints arising from its mandate and defined objectives; institutional relationships; the editorial outlook and production norms with which it determines information agendas and frames the coverage of issues; resource constraints and work design; and the man-agement of professional and cultural – or in-group/out-group – biases.

While direct cause-and-effect relationships cannot always be determined when evaluating the role and efficacy of Radio Australia, the political history reveals how the interplay of variables can produce ‘hidden dangers that block the route’ to purposeful fulfilment (Stanford 2007, p. 214). As in other aspects of statecraft, a first task is to identify the contending forces at work and the second is to adapt or seek equilibrium among those forces, while remaining true to a long-term vision (note Bew 2016, p. 19). In this context, a state of equilibrium would be one in which the Australian state addressed its security and economic interests while upholding its commitment to the principles and norms of a representative democracy.

Throughout much of the 1980s, a gap persisted between the lead factor of Radio Australia’s policy intent and lag elements of organisational culture; the broadcaster’s internal organisation and resources management failed to ‘adequately reflect these priorities’ (ABC 1989b, p. 2). This chapter moves from the purposive intent of government-approved priorities to discussion of how Radio Australia implemented and expressed them. In reaching out to target audiences, the broadcaster’s conduct pertained to the three key success factors proposed in Chapter 6: balancing state interests with its editorial and administrative independence; its performance in reaching and bargaining for engagement with intercultural audiences; and the impact of legislative provisions, organising principles and professional practices as performance enablers or impediments. Internal conflicts centred principally on two functional strands: news and current affairs and, more broadly, the relationship between English and foreign language work units and their production norms.

The process of bargaining with audiences for their attention and engagement comprised four principal elements as discussed in Chapter 3: establishing the sense of a shared experience or common lifeworld; the cultural affinity between broadcaster and audience; the development of parasocial relationships through the broadcaster’s style and personality; and its adopted editorial/programming outlook. The detail of editorial and programming policies, decisions about agenda-setting and the framing of news and current affairs coverage, established the symbolic meaning and political import of its regional outlook. Radio Australia boasted a recognisable and respected profile in strategically important nations of Asia and the Pacific even though its editorial outlook and performance suffered from organisational impediments.

Radio Australia’s Perceived Identity

In 1985, the chief executives or senior executive representatives of international broadcasters from 10 Asian nations compared the profiles and ‘personalities’ of radio services competing in the region (Heriot 1985). Although not founded on empirical market research, their characterisations were indicative of positioning and perceived attributes. The 10 delegates, along with observers from the German, French and Australian inter-national services, held a seminar on external broadcasting at the Asia–Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD) in Kuala Lumpur (Heriot 1985).

Love’s Shadow, by Paul A. Bové, is at once a monumental study and an enigma.1 In modeling the sort of criticism that Bové would like to see, Love’s Shadow also becomes impossible to discuss in the sort of critical terms Bové wishes us to abjure or abandon. Love’s Shadow in its entirety is an essay, but also one that is made up of essays, which makes it rather recursive (not to say repetitive). This in turn makes the experience of reading and rereading it a bit like wading into the ocean, fighting through, jumping atop, diving beneath, or bodysurfing on wave after wave, each one different, yet each partaking of the same substance and spirit. I would characterize that experience as exhilarating, as the diversity of forms and subjects proliferate—cultural theory, philosophy, drama, poetry (including lengthy, detailed discussions of individual poems), visual art (the chapter on Rembrandt is a tour de force), and so forth—while the focus on poiesis and criticism remains constant throughout. In its own form, Love’s Shadow is difficult to summarize, and even more difficult to subject to critique, since its arguments remain slightly ungraspable, like those waves at the beach. To speak of this book as if it were a treatise, for example, would be to deny its essential character, but to understand and to criticize it, a reader often falls back on old habits, which would mean eliding the poetic aspects of Love’s Shadow while highlighting its putatively philosophical ones. Love’s Shadow is not a philosophical work, but ultimately a poetic one.

This is not to say that Bové does not make an argument. Indeed, his is a provocative and at times polemical argument aimed at key figures in literary and cultural criticism, naming names and, at the same time, as speaking critically to the field of criticism tout court. Bové argues that literary criticism has been under the pervasive sway of a fundamentally life-denying melancholy, which he associates primarily with the work and influence of Walter Benjamin. From that perspective, as Bové recounts, all human history is fundamentally a ruin; its “experiential mode is allegory, reduced especially in the American academy to the redundancy of allegoresis, the reading of all materials as allegories” (ix).