If, as Sacvan Bercovitch observed, the defining American genre has been the jeremiad, simultaneously “lamenting a declension and celebrating a national dream,” some notion of “Asia” and its aesthetics plays a critical role in the modern uses of that form.Footnote 2 So argues R. John Williams in The Buddha in the Machine, a richly ambitious study of the power with which an imagination of the “East” enters into the attempt to redeem modern Western culture—specifically, a technoculture predicated on the will to rationalize human labor, extend human being, and extend domination over and via the machine. The claim that American culture has grown up around anxieties about technology is hardly a new one.Footnote 3 Williams reanimates it by arguing for the emergence of what he calls “Asia-as-technê”: the notion, or fantasy, that Eastern aesthetics is both the apotheosis of Western machine culture and its antidote. Ranging boldly across American literary, visual, and theoretical contexts, Williams traces a mode of engagement with the “East” that has shaped not just modernist cultural expression, but our broader habits of accommodation to the machine culture we produce, and that increasingly produces us.
As Williams's keyword or even mantra—”Asia-as-technê”—suggests, Heidegger is a major conceptual resource. The objects of Buddha's attention all share with that thinker an attempt to counter modernity's metaphysics of the machine with movement toward some originary technê, a “bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful” that once was both handicraft and art (Heidegger, cited on p. 6). Crucially, Williams argues, their efforts to mobilize the opposition between the affordances of modern technology and an ontological aesthetic was inevitably ethnographic, sustained by identification with an Asian Other untouched by Anglo-European disenchantment. But this is not, he asserts, the familiar Orientalism that presumes a pretechnological, merely mimetic Asia. Framed as harmonious yet technologically complex, holistic yet mechanistic, this Asia, Asia-as-technê, embodies a civilizational alterity that holds out hope for an ever more fleeting possibility: a way of life at once organic and fully modern. For Williams, Asia-as-technê offers not an escape just in time but a mode of engagement in real time, salvation not from technology but within it.
A real pleasure of this work, as well as one of its key challenges, is the range of contexts it engages, from the movement of Japanese goods into the U.S. department store, training consumers in a world of things with enchanted power; to a transformation of American book design that aimed to redeem the book as a technology of organic experience from its own mass production; to the invention of the Chinese typewriter, predicated on challenging the inscriptive authority of Western modernity and promoting the ideograph as a key resource for an alternative global modernity; through the post-WWII evolution of a new Zen, shaping the self-understanding of multinational and network capitalism under the sign of cybernetics. Along the way, Williams revisits canonical figures of literary modernism, including Jack London and Ezra Pound, whose work he makes new in context if not always in effects. Focusing on London's notoriously labile writings on the Asian Pacific, Williams shows us that his development of an “authorial technê” is inseparable from his racialized attempt to overcome the power of the machine—a dynamic Williams makes starkly visible by attending to London's own photographic practices, rarely treated in accounts of his fiction. Revisiting the Buddhist framework of Ernest Fenollosa's work, Williams argues for Ezra Pound's willful misreading of Fenollosa's notion of the Chinese ideogram as a corrective to Western mechanization. Framing the ideogram instead as a philosophical correlative of machine art, Pound commanded it as a generative resource for an imagism determined to combat Western decadence and its baneful “Kulchur.”
Most compelling are Williams's readings of less familiar objects. In an extended meditation on Chinese American writer Lin Yutang's Chinese typewriter, with its “perfect cultural balance” between art and technics, Williams argues that it helps mark the limits of canonical Western discourse on modernity by suggesting what a genuinely radical challenge to the authoritarian, patriarchal assumptions of modern Western technics could look like (p. 141). With similar verve, he traces the rise of a new film type, the Oriental detective, through the golden age of Hollywood and the studio system, arguing that this figure embodies the uses of Asianness as a cultural asset for confronting the problems created by modern technology. In their self-conscious (and Orientalized) mimicry of genre conventions across studio contexts, Williams argues, Oriental detective films constitute a running commentary on the mechanical reproducibility of film itself, reframing its energies not as an effect of industrial mass production but as an organic and exotic mode of pop culture. In this unlikely context, in the degraded, racially problematic products of the Hollywood machine, Williams finds a provocative meditation, enabled by Asia-as-technê, on the hard fact that the very dangers of mechanical reproducibility coincide with the mimetic faculties that make us human.
At large, Williams makes a striking argument for the tenacity of a modernism whose imprint—in conventions of visual and textual production, in foundational accounts of human making and being—continues to animate contemporary experience of machine culture, now digital, and its new modes of connectivity. His objects of interest often exceed conventional historical (or even historicist) accounting; his notion of technê itself—by turns art, practice, ritual, materialized thought, and an abstract ontological mode—is so capacious as to court the kind of oceanic engulfment that defined the earlier Orientalism of Americans closer to their Puritan origins.Footnote 4 That effect is notable with respect to the extraordinary array of visual objects illustrating the argument, from David Hockney collages and Japanese ukiyo-e prints to graphic flowcharts and digital screenshots; their resonance suggests how much Williams might offer in a more sustained engagement with their properties as aesthetic objects. Nonetheless, the commanding sweep of the volume is sustained by the brio of Williams's readings. His ability to trace patterns of thought, engagement, and influence across a vast range of contexts, like so many entrancing mandalas, gives his accounts distinctive synergy and power. The Buddha in the Machine will be a welcome provocation for scholars in many fields, affording a rare, much-needed view of the convergence of transatlantic and transpacific histories.
