The Invisible Armada

15/02/2023 

I can't see in the future, so I can't tell you if there will be a war between China and the US plus their followers. Besides, it's a too serious matter for playing guessing game. For this reason, the only thing I can do, in my position as a philosopher focused on the ontology of the present, is to draw your attention on a few methodological and analytical issues related to the subject. But there is one big thing I'm sure of: when we think about that kind of matter of life or death (will there be a war, probably of global scale, or not?), both in terms of ethics and rationality, the most realistic position consists in rejecting wishful thinking and being resolutely pessimistic – yes, there are very serious reasons, and more and more reasons for thinking that a war might happen, that it is an option for the next future; and then to do one's best to imagine the inevitable consequences. This is what some of my predecessors, in the field of European philosophy, have called pessimism of reason.

Now, when one "feels" that a war is shaping up on the horizon, when one has serious reasons to think that a war is looming, one feels invested with a particular responsibility and an irresistible need to address one's contemporaries: "How can you continue to go about your business as if nothing is happening, how can you be so indifferent to the threats that are accumulating right before your eyes?". But this desire to do good and all the agitation that goes with it are generally in vain - it is because there is such a manifest lack of proportion between the number of those who see clearly in these circumstances and, on the one hand, the power of the warmongers and the apathy of the masses.

When one thinks about the reason behind the assumption that a war is brewing, that it is being prepared, that it is more or less imminent, one is led to distinguish between two different sets of factors: on the one hand, what, in the probability of this war, is due to projects, calculations, tactics or strategies, concerted maneuvers; and on the other hand, combination of circumstances, interactions, objective factors of conflicts that escape any human intention or will. Wars that really break out generally result from the combination of these two types of factors – a classic example is WWI.

The war that may come in the South China Sea and East Asia (and would have very little chance of being confined to the Taiwan Strait) must also be considered from this perspective. However, upon closer examination, the line between voluntary and involuntary factors is constantly becoming blurred: the first evidence is that all parties involved are preparing for war, with military budgets soaring, both from the regional protagonists of a potential conflict, starting with Taiwan, and from distant actors who are also close, such as the US, now the NATO, Australia, Japan, etc. - all of them involved in the tensions around this crisis. Military budgets are rising, and weapons are accumulating, including the latest military technology (e.g. drones). But the nature of such a situation in which each party is preparing for conflict rests on a fundamental ambiguity: each side is arming itself by attributing hostile, aggressive intentions to the other – an almost irrefutable accusation inasmuch as the other side is also arming itself... 

So we can see here that what is most important is not necessarily the declared or hidden intentions of one group or another, but rather the configuration of the conflict and the interactions that make it up. What is most important are the loops, spirals that make up the potentially explosive dynamics of the conflict - the dynamic interactions between the parties involved that lead to an increase in the intensity of threats: increasingly loud war rhetoric and increasingly dangerous hostile actions. From an analytical, methodological point of view, the first question is not about the origins of the conflict, or about who started it, or about isolating the quintessential supposed cause of the ongoing tensions.

The first thing to understand is the figure under which this crisis subsumes, in its own dynamics, that is, in its potential or probable outcomes. However, this figure is less that of a confrontation between two static camps facing each other (the camp of democracy against that of authoritarianism or totalitarianism, in the terms of the poor Manichaean approach to conflict that is popular in the West and Taiwan) than that of the loop, the noose: the more the conflict's protagonists are entrenched, the more the loop tightens around their necks, and around those of their opponents, making it increasingly difficult to go back. The war that is coming or may come in the region is primarily a process, not reducible to the intentions of one or all of the parties involved. The key factor in the engaged dynamics is the interaction of powers and forces driven to oppose each other, not only by conflicting interests, but, I would say, more generally, by adverse destinies. What is important to understand first is what this antagonism is made of, not what its origin is that would explain everything, but what is involved in its becoming, provenance - Herkunft in German...

A last word on the key question of rationality – what makes things complicated in terms of analysis of the configuration of the conflict and its perspectives, is of course that we cannot take for granted that its main actors think and act in a rational way – that is, in this context, that their respective moves are based, first of all, on rational calculations of interest. If it were so, the future of this conflict would be in some regard predictable. But what makes it unpredictable is that the capacity of these actors to think and act in rational way, that is, in this context, by basing their moves on solid calculations of interest, is very limited. There are a few things that we can know for sure: for example, that  Chinese leaders, for innumerable reasons, are not willing to go to war with the US and the global West, in the present conditions; but what we have to add immediately is that, in spite of all that, they might be compelled to go to war by decisions and moves by/from the other side – things like a declaration of independence by Taiwanese rulers or, which amounts to the same, the recognition of Taiwan as an independent state by the US and the main powers of the global West.

Now, if we look at the other side, the Western coalition led by the US, things look much worse: they have progressively lost the ability to base their initiatives and moves on rational calculations of interest; they have become the sleepwalkers of global hegemony, total-democracy, that is a neo-imperialism with universalist pretense. They move forward like automatons, war robots in autopilot. This is what makes them so dangerous and irresponsible, by contrast with their opponents who, despite all, have kept the ability to anticipate the consequences of their moves in a more or less rational way.

2- I would like to deliver some thoughts on the concept of occupation, as it seems to me to be a solid element of continuity in discourse practices arranged around the signifier "Taiwan", that is where, generally, more or less radical discontinuities prevail. I mean that the specter of occupation haunts the discourse and representations that are arranged around the name of Taiwan itself, in the same sense that Marx and Engels say, at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, that a specter haunts Europe, that of communism... or we could say that an immemorial specter haunts the life of the people of/on this island, that of subalternity...

The property of a specter, however, as Jacques Derrida forcefully reminded us in Specters of Marx, is to maintain complicated relationships with reality: it is at once an image, a fantasy and therefore, in that sense, what opposes the "really real", the present objects or the living, but it is not nonexistent and inoperative either - it is the presence of an absence, in its effectiveness and its efficiency itself - in this capacity, it produces effects that can be considerable, decisive on reality in its dynamic structure - the specter of communism has overturned the course of European and global history throughout the second half of the 19th century and the long 20th century – and the Chinese revolution, among others, without the "specter of communism".

The spectral power of the word "occupation" is easily identified in all sorts of accounts about the island's past, very popular today and more or less clearly placed under the sign of the doxa of  independence: the idea, obviously simplifying, that is the transformation into a tale, a « story » of the island's history, as a succession of "occupations": the Manchus, the Japanese, the Kuomintang, and today, the famous "threat", always more oppressive and imminent, weighing on the island – that of a Chinese, communist and totalitarian occupation...

Here we see what the spectral is made of: elements of the present, borrowed from the real crisis that is raging in the region, due to the rising tensions between mainland China and the United States, reinforced by their local allies and others, intertwined with images and phantasmagorias borrowed, in turn, from that immemorial victimhood with indistinct contours -the unfortunate islander constantly subjected to the appetites and the violence of successive and uninterrupted occupations. This is what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls bricolage, but it works: the discourse bubble about the « Chinese threat » that never stops inflating today has this fantasmatic or phantasmagorical coloring – the nightmare of the occupation of occupations, the most terrible of all, the mother of occupations, compared to which the half century of Japanese colonization of the island would be a harmless parenthesis. I would like to limit myself to drawing two lines for that analysis of this spectral image of occupation. The first would be that, in reality, what is commonly referred to as an occupation is often much more complicated than the simple violence exerted by an external force on a submitted population. The second is that often, too, an occupation can hide another.

The plot of the current condition of the island by the pro-independence narrative, increasingly noisy and uninhibited, is arranged around this figure: for a long time, if not forever, we have been occupied or exposed to the threat of occupation – so, let's finally be ourselves, free, independent, returned to our own original identity, which endlessly revolves around this pure tautology: Taiwan is Taiwan - and nothing else. But this narrative is of course a fable, and entirely sewn with white threads: what the island is made of, of course, in its finest grain, both in terms of its population and its territories, its landscapes even, is inextricably linked to the succession and stratification of the supposed "occupations". Occupiers or those designated as such are generally not simple barbarian invaders who, like the Huns, flood the country, loot it, leave it to fire and blood and then go back home on their little horses...

Even colonization, defined here as systematic and lasting occupation, combines looting and development - this is particularly true here with the Japanese occupation. Occupation, in this sense, contributes to shaping what the identity of the occupied is made of, and the succession of occupations (or supposed ones) is a factory of composite identities - especially when accompanied by migrations and population transfers - which was massively the case on this island, in different phases of its history. And then, all occupations have differential features: the occupation/colonization of Taiwan by the Japanese does not present the same face at all for the indigenous populations who resisted with the energy of despair and for the Han elites whose children went to study in Japan and returned as doctors, engineers, writers writing in Japanese, etc.

This means, in simple terms, that an occupation is never only physical, it is also mental. It does not only take the form of physical, military, administrative, police violence, exercised by force, generally a state, on the collective body of a population; it also proceeds by investment and transformation of mentalities, behaviors, collective habits and subjectivities, it induces a new way of life, it shapes populations and their ways of thinking and acting - the more it is lasting and the more the occupation presents itself as a crucible and a mold, it produces acculturation and hybridization - this is very obvious if one sees the Japanese sequence of Taiwan from this angle, and just as much, the establishment on the island of the administration and army of the so-called defeated Nationalist party during the Chinese civil war on the mainland.

In continuation of these observations, the theme that I would like to encourage you to reflect on is that of an occupation that would not follow a military conquest, the presence of a foreign administration, or a forced submission to a foreign power, but would essentially result from a seizure, a mental and ideological grip, and would manifest itself not in the form of violent domination, but in a subservience that is all the more tenacious because it is insidious and subliminal, unconscious - what I would call, in a somewhat provocative expression, a mental occupation. To put things abruptly, the more I stay in Taiwan and observe both the political mores of the ruling elites and the mentalities of the intellectual elites, or even the way in which people generally see the world and act accordingly, the more I am inclined to assert this: the more Taiwan "dreams" or fantasizes around the theme of independence, the more it is under the grip of a mental occupation. Taiwan is not under occupation like Okinawa, there are no US military personnel in uniform in the streets, but the desire for such an occupation aimed at protecting the island from the "Chinese threat" is increasingly being heard. This is what I call a mental occupation. Without this context, the haunting motif of the “Chinese threat”, that is the nightmare of a Chinese occupation, is first and foremost the fantasy of the mentally occupied before anything else. Taiwan is already under occupation and what makes this occupation so efficient is that it is surreptitious – most of the people living on the island are unaware of it. But in this configuration, mental occupation might just be an anticipation of a physical one: in case of a major armed confrontation or crisis between China and the US, Taiwan would very probably become an Okinawa to the power of ten...

A fantasy is an image that interposes itself between a human subject and reality and produces a variably distorted perception of that reality. If you look at the present situation of Taiwan from this angle, lots of things that appear meaningless or even preposterous become crystal clear – the endless fuss about bilingualism, how English should become the second language of every Taiwanese in a few years, for example, that kind of daydreaming as a blatant symptom of the mental occupation, that is of the ascendancy, the hold exerted by the invisible hand of the hegemon on the local daydreamers...

To understand the current situation, it is necessary to start by identifying where the divide between reality and fantasy occurs; in this case, reality is shaped and fashioned by the mental occupation of Taiwan, and conversely. If you are interested in knowing the name, the face and the address of the occupier, please read Taipei Times and its Chinese-language equivalents and you will be informed. However, fantasy is not just an inconsequential daydream; it is constantly working to transform reality to align with its visions and obsessions, it is an automaton that manufactures self-fulfilling prophecies. This is exactly what all those who are haunted by the nightmare of China's occupation of the island are doing today - multiplying irresponsible actions, provocations and fait accomplis intended to make the Chinese leaders lose patience. The fantasy, in this sense, is always driven by a death wish - an obscure wish for war, in this case.