Link

Cultural Discourse Link

US cultural discourse thrives off the spectacularization of East Asian innovation – images
of rapid technological advancement are invoked in pop culture to justify nationalist policies
and competition
Lozano-Mendez 10 (Artur, Undergraduate Student Majoring in East Asian Studies, Published in 2010,
“TECHNO-ORIENTALISM IN EAST-ASIAN CONTEXTS: REITERATION, DIVERSIFICATION,
ADAPTATION”, pg. 186-187) RR Jr
During the economic miracle decades of the fifties and sixties, products manufactured in Japan were considered to
be cheap and shoddy copycats of Western technology. That image would successively be adapted and applied to
products exported by Taiwan, South Korea, China and Vietnam. Such sweeping assumption lent imaginary grounds
to the belief that the Japanese were untrustworthy and that their workshops and factories were flooding “the West” with exports that drastically cut market
prices.22 The twisted “reasoning” would follow by stating that Japanese companies had gained an “illegitimate” competitive edge
over their Western counterparts because “they” would not meet quality standards , would not respect workers' rights and would not fulfill
agreements or would resort to ambiguous statements to avoid commitment.23 In the eighties, Japanese consumer electronics products had gained a
significant presence in Western households. In their song “Industrial Disease,” Dire Straits ridiculed official
discourses that would wag the dog and supply scapegoats to a population dissatisfied with economic hardships: “There’s a protest singer, he's singing a protest song.
They wanna have a war to keep us on our knees. They wanna have a war to keep their factories. They wanna have a war to stop us
buying Japanese. They wanna have a war to stop industrial disease. They’re pointing out the enemy to keep you deaf and blind. They wanna sap your
energy, incarcerate your mind. They give you rule Britannia, gassy beer, page three. Two weeks in Espana and Sunday striptease.” During the seventies, Japan's heavy
industries gained attention as well. A few years later, in the eighties, Japan was finger pointed as the responsible for global
ecological hazards and for wrestling energetic resources from the hands of Western competitors. Again, we will reproduce a
sarcastic parody of official discourses, this time in Pink Floyd’s “Not Now John”: “Fuck all that we've got to get on with these. Gotta
compete with the wily Japanese. There's too many home fires burning and not enough trees. So fuck all that we’ve got to get on with these.” The “wily
Japanese” image also builds on a legacy from “traditional” orientalism—the “yellow peril” and the “scheming Asian
man.” The latter is a blanket archetype readily applied to both historical and fictional characters (Genghis Khan, Tokugawa Ieyasu,
Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu...)
 Nanotech Link
Nanotech link or something
Niu 8 (Greta, English Professor at University of Rochester, Published by Oxford University Press, Published in
2008, “Techno-Orientalism, Nanotechnology, Posthumans, and Post-Posthumans in Neal Stephenson's and Linda
Nagata's Science Fiction”, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20343508.pdf?refreqid=excelsior
%3Abb3793f895403cbeebcc027bb44b14a0) RR Jr
This essay investigates representations of nanotechnology and instances of techno-Orientalism , which I define as a practice of
ascribing, erasing, and/or disavowing relationships between technology and Asian peoples and subjects.7 Rather than limit my focus to a specific Asian nation or distance the concept from Asia
my version of techno-Orientalism points to the way it ignores the history and constructions of relationships
entirely,
between Asian people and technology, particularly those deemed emerging or revolutionary. My investigation of SF and cyberculture discourse suggests this
techno-Orientalism is intertwined with capitalism and consumption – from the representation of Japan and China as producers of technology, to
China as a consumer of nanotechnology, to Indonesians as victims of bionanotechnology. The plethora of Asians in cyberpunk fiction indicates a belief in their longevity into the distant future,
even as these works depict large scale globalization with corporations replacing nations and supra-nations unbounded by physical geography. Cyberpunk's reliance on digital
code or a binary system often separates mind from body, while nanopunk explores biological-machinic routes that
are less clear cut. In the texts I investigate the figure of the cyborg mutates from the imagined community of cyberspace to communities made possible through nanotechnology,
moving between Chinese and Indonesian cultures and spaces. Without a thorough interrogation of techno-Orientalism in foundational
cyberpunk texts, cybercultural studies erase the construction of a crucial relationship between Asian subjects and
technologies.8 Focusing on the connections between rebelling individuals and companies, cyberpunk purports to examine the material conditions of workers, but when those characters
appear they are discreet exemplars more akin to artists than laborers. Inhabiting the cultural geography of dominant cyberpunk and nanopunk are the white American "console
cowboys" or Anglo-American "artifexes" who may indeed be lowly workers for wealthy conglomerates, but who are still end users of the
hardware and software that make experience in cyberspace possible.9 Indeed, central conflicts of these works consist of
power struggles between the end users and engineers on the one hand and the (mostly Asian) producers and victims
on the other hand. Whether and how Asian subjects will gain the upper hand is explored in these nanopunk texts by
Stephenson and Nagata. Although The Diamond Age as a foundational nanopunk work has eclipsed The Bohr Maker, Nagata's novel challenges stereotypical
representations of Asians and Asian subjects in SF of the previous decade and troubles the tropes of techno-
Orientalism by more broadly conceiving of Asian subjects and subjectivity. Due to its pervasiveness in SF, it is
almost unfeasible to argue a cyberpunk or nanopunk text harbors no instances of techno-Orientalism; however, some
works more consistently question connections between Asians and technology and refuse the path taken by The Diamond Age to essentialize
and naturalize the relationship Early cybernetics discussions focused on Anglo-American thinkers and theories, but later aspects of cyberstudies, particularly the
focus on cyborgs and cyberspace, relied on theoretical, literary, and cinematic practices of techno-orientalizing
Asian cultures.10 While there are numerous definitions and theories of the cyborg, Donna Haraway's are foundational.11 In "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1985), Haraway introduced the
concept of the cyborg, hybrids transgressing boundaries between organisms (human and animal) and machines, into feminist theory. She urged investigating technology for the cause of socialist
feminism at a time when technology was viewed as corrupted and corrupting. In the original essay and subsequent revisions, she notes important connections that women of color, in particular,
she refers specifically to "unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia" ("Cyborg Manifesto" 154),
have with cyborgs. Among other examples,
and in three of her illustrations the cyborg is modeled on or incorporates the body of Asian or Asian Pacific
American women ("Promises" 325-27, 328; Simians cover).12 Asian subjects are implicated here in cyborgs, as these examples of
techno-Orientalism demonstrate. Although there are excellent strategic reasons to view the cyborg's relationships
with women of color, Haraway's examples deserve to be historicized as Asian and Asian Pacific Americans,
particularly as her text has influenced profoundly the work of many scholars. A related instance of techno-Orientalism involves computers. Just
before the millennium, much energy was expended around questions of cyberspace, including the viability of computer networks, program code, access to the Internet, and how gender, race, and
class factored into participation in the fields of computer science and information technology (Sterne 191-212). Commerce studies examining Internet access and use in the United States at that
racial minorities were not lagging behind the
time concluded ethnicity was not a large factor.13 Similarly, non-governmental organizations testified that
majority; the Pew Internet and American Life Project argued, "Asian-Americans who speak English are the most
wired racial or ethnic group in America" (Spooner 4). By 2007, studies reported that Asian American Internet users were
also the most experienced users online.14 According to this research, within a few decades the United States moved from inequality of access to computers and the
Internet to near equality (for some groups). This erasure of ethnic difference in the US context takes place concurrently with the
increasing importance of Asian nations as producers of computer technology and matches a growing interest in the
West in assigning Asian peoples with technological characteristics. The practice of techno-Orientalism recognizes
Asian Americans in the United States, even echoing the image of Asian Pacific Americans (APAs) as science
and math geeks of the divisive "model minority" myth; Asians elsewhere in the diaspora who are the producers of software and/or
hardware often are ignored and considered left on the disadvantaged side of the so-called "digital divide.”
 Science Link
Science is rooted in techno-orientalist assumptions of normativity. Their methodological
approaches are permeated by anti-Asian modes of thought
Samman and Al-Zo’by 8 (Khaldoun, PhD in Sociology from Binghamton University, Mazhar, PhD in
International Affairs from Qatar University, Published in 2008, Published by Paradigm Publishers, Page 204-205)
RR Jr
This explains why Edward Said, in his famed study of orientalism (1979), chose not to study the Islamic and Arab world and how they represent

themselves, since orientalism is really not about what the ruled actually is and how it represents itself , but about
how the imperial self, in this case the West and its ideological representatives in academia,
imagine and justify ruling the East. "... Orientalism has in fact been read and written about in the Arab world," Said notes, "as a systematic defense of
Islam and the Arabs, even though I say explicitly in the book that I have no interest in, much less, capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really arc" (Said, 1979: 331; for further
one may conclude that a non-orientalist attitude
critical reflections on Said's position, see Ahmad 1994 and Tamdgidi 2005). From the foregoing, then,
toward the East would involve modes of knowing the Other that allow for respect for the Other to represent itself,
and that engage with the complexities such efforts in self-representation may pose in the context of historical
marginalization and amnesia resulting from the colonial experience . It involves making conscious and intentional efforts at empathizing (if not
sympathizing) with the historical conditions and intellectual traditions shaping the Other, while recognizing and empowering the Other to develop self-determining modes of knowing,
In what way, then, may we explore whether or not the methodological, theoretical, historical,
representing, and transforming itself.
and/or practical premises informing world-systems analysis as a critical tradition in social science may have
themselves been tinged by the orientalisms which have given rise to and maintained the modem world-system ?
Paramount in detecting such an attitude, in my view, is noting the tendencies to readily dismiss the contributions
made by the Other, in this case Islam, in the intellectual or practical spheres mentioned
above by taking for granted their inferiority and instead utilizing Western approaches to
historical social scientific inquiry to interpret them.
 Technology Link
Technological discourse isn’t neutral, it’s rooted in a techno-orientalist drive which
epitomizes East Asian territories as the locus of modern innovation. The aff’s deployment
of targeted discourse in the debate space is emblematic of broader civil discourse against
East Asian bodies
Lozano-Mendez 10 (Artur, Undergraduate Student Majoring in East Asian Studies, Published in 2010,
“TECHNO-ORIENTALISM IN EAST-ASIAN CONTEXTS: REITERATION, DIVERSIFICATION,
ADAPTATION”, pg. 184) RR Jr
Techno-orientalism is an orientalist discourse that the West established hegemonically at a global scale as a power-
knowledge structure. It is a discourse in the Foucauldian sense that derives from the orientalist knowledge referring to Japan,
and also from the orientalist knowledge built around the “imaginative geography” that is usually labeled “East
Asia.” Techno-orientalism recycles and adapts objects, archival lore, and even many of the strategies from both
discursive formations on Japan and East Asia. At the same time, its rules of formation allow for novelty and the
incorporation of new words to the lexicon inherited from those two preexisting discourses. The discursive relations
enacting techno-orientalist discourse allow us to reveal what kind of statements about the discursive objects have
become central to that discourse. The knowledge generated through techno-orientalist “discursive practice”8 attempted to explain
both the role of Japan, first, and then the role of East Asia in the configuration of global economy after World War II, in a context of technological leap and acceleration of
globalization.9 Nevertheless, it is not just a matter of objects and the content of statements about them. Discourse is a practice, and so it implies the
entanglement of attitude, medium, support, opportunity, expectations (even cultural horizon), and a range of other
factors whose relevance is sorted out by the rules of formation. Techno-orientalist discourse both produces and
consists of complex and cohesive “technologies of recognition,”10 which frame the perception of everything
“Japanese”—they tell us what is to be reckoned “Japanese” to begin with. Such power-knowledge structure relies on “schema of co-figuration”
through “regimes of translation.”11 Techno-orientalism is not a substitute of “traditional” orientalism—rather, it co-exists with it coherently.12 Thus, techno-orientalism incorporates and gives a
new spin to prejudices and misjudgments that can be traced as far back as the writings by the first Jesuit missionaries that traveled to the archipelago after St. Francis Xavier arrived to Kagoshima
in 1549.
Impact
 Impact – Capitalism/Gender Oppression
Contemporary narratives of technological dominance sustain and rearticulate late modern
form of capitalism and gender based oppression – filtering innovation through Western
views leads to a furthering of those logics
Lozano-Mendez 10 (Artur, Undergraduate Student Majoring in East Asian Studies, Published in 2010,
“TECHNO-ORIENTALISM IN EAST-ASIAN CONTEXTS: REITERATION, DIVERSIFICATION,
ADAPTATION”, pg. 190-193) RR Jr
This penchant for ridiculing Japanese technology and people, especially young urban women, can be found outside
semi-specialized publications too. The way news items are selected and presented falls into a pattern that reinforces
the perception of Japan as an eccentric and techno-fetishist paradise of pointless consumerism, the land where
capitalism has gone awry (thus making capitalist excesses in Western societies look reasonable). In a moment of global history when absolutely everything is commodified, most
media fail to mention that chance of commercialization has become crucial to financing scientific research and technical progress in peacetime, either in Japan or in Western countries. The
Think of current
technologies and services described in the previous quotations can (and probably will) be used for much more relevant purposes than what the articles imply.
attempts at developing virtual university campuses that allow for actual real-time interaction; think of the traits of
the current Post-Fordist production model (how industries have had to transform themselves since Henry Ford wrote “Any customer can have a car painted any color
and how these adaptations have become instrumental in ensuring the
that he wants so long as it is black”),

continuity of capitalism. Then again, the kind of representations that we have just seen would seem perfectly
accurate according to the “schematic authority”42 accrued by multiple representations of a wacky-
sappy Japan. Since all of them are cohesive, they all lend truth and reality to each other, and thus, legitimize the “textual
attitude” that they favor. Since the late nineties, a streak of contempt has become apparent in that textual attitude. The extent to which recent techno-
orientalism implies “pouring derision” suggests that this strategy belongs to the “operational field of the enunciative
function and not just to a single one of the units or objects of discourse. The following news appeared in English
speaking and Spanish speaking mainstream media all over the world in March 2009: “Walking, Talking Female Robot to
Hit the Catwalk TSUKUBA, Japan — A new walking, talking robot from Japan has a female face that can smile and has trimmed down to 43 kilograms (95 pounds) to make a debut at
a fashion show. But it still hasn't cleared safety standards required to share the catwalk with human models. Developers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology,
a government-backed organization, said their ‘cybernetic human,’ shown Monday, wasn't ready to help with daily chores or work
side by side with people – as many hope robots will be able to do in the future.” The string of news informing about this robot (named HRP-
4C) prompts us to reflect upon the responsibility that lies on the side of the manufacturer for programming such a “product presentation.” The question refers us again to
the role of self-orientalism in easing the reproduction of techno-orientalist views . Quite probably, the managers at the National Institute of
Advanced Industrial Science and Technology anticipated and expected precisely the kind of reactions and publicity in the media that the event raised. Also, the exploitation of a techno-Japan
we must not sell short
image is backed by the State, very much in the same fashion as the institutions periodically exploit a certain image of traditional Japan.46 On the other hand,
the power that private media exert simply by selecting and reproducing some news items instead of others, even
regardless of how they are presented. For instance, another piece of news regarding a female robot appeared on March
2009. This information regarded a gynoid named Saya, developed by Professor Kobayashi Hiroshi's team at Tokyo University, where the android worked as a front
desk clerk. The robot Saya was to be tested as a teacher for primary students— “It is multilingual, can organize set tasks for pupils, call the roll and get angry when the kids misbehave.”48
Which information is more newsworthy? Probably both Saya and the HRP-4C deserved attention since both
represent breakthroughs in robotics, but most of the media opted to neglect informing about Saya while they widely
informed about the HRP-4C presentation. Such preference was probably shaped by the opportunity of delivering
hilarious headlines and remarks about a “naked” female robot “walking the catwalk,” or “strutting her stuff .”49 This brings
From the nineties onward, gender issues entangled in the
us to another important issue regarding late techno-orientalism.

core of techno-orientalist assumptions and manifestations have become apparent. Thus, the
HRP-4C was said to have trimmed down to 43 kilos—as if weighing 43 kilos was actually neat. In science-fiction anime, there are
abundant productions that revolve around mecha musume, or “mechanical girls.”50 Many of the titles re-enact the Pygmalion myth.51
There is even sci-fi “harem anime” (sic), where the main (male) character often finds himself surrounded by a
number of obliging mechanical girls.52 While it is true that Japanese entertainment industry produces such products,
it has also produced much of the most mature and thought-provoking animations in history, many of which raise
questions about the future of humankind and technology: Ghost in the Shell movies (1995, 2004) and TV series (2002-2005), Serial Experiments Lain
(1998), Gasaraki (1998), Gunslinger Girl (2003), Ergo Proxy (2006), The Sky Crawlers (2008).53 And there are many more titles that stand out. Contrapuntal methodology is
especially useful when it comes to these products since it provides us with a theoretical framework that can account
for readings and traces that seem to go in opposite directions but are nevertheless prompted by the same work.
Series like Gunslinger Girl may be filtered by dominant discourses and be presented as yet another Japanese
animation that features pubescent young cyborg girls and gory violence. Nevertheless, the work seriously resists and
sets hurdles against that kind of reading. The episodes open challenging spaces of reflection and infuse the
characters with complex psychology. Indeed, many of the narrative and aesthetic choices (like setting the action in present day Italy and using Scottish indie rock band
The Delgados themes for the soundtrack) distance the series from genre commonplaces. Whether the hermeneutic hierarchy tilts one way or the other has much to do with the individual
consumer’s background and predisposition—by acknowledging this we are not denying the fact that there are both products that willingly conform to and exploit dominant discourses and
a single reader will experience a wide range of implicit
products that doggedly seek to upset the expectations of the audience. Still, more often than not,
readings, rather than a single monolithic interpretation, thus producing hybridized readings (as Said already suggested). Expectations
are also at the core of “managed multiculturalism” and “self-culturization” issues. 55 As discourse puts forward discursive objects, the statements
about such objects are enacted with a given set of discursive relations that concur so that the objects can be named
and explained. Most importantly, the rules of formation determine what can be said about the objects—what they are and so what they can be expected to be in actuality. Instances of an
object that do not comply with the statements about that object may therefore fail to be reckoned as being that object.56 In the marketplace, in order to attach value to an
object one has to turn it into a commodity first. The distribution networks in global markets promote a certain
catalog of cultural images and perceptions, meaning that those who adapt to such catalogue have better chances of
effective distribution. As they are exported, Japanese cultural products that exploit Japan’s “national cool”57 are
assimilated into the international perception and circulation of Japan’s popular culture. Since techno-orientalism
plays a central role in the international perception of Japan, it is also intervening in the semiotic negotiation of these
products. The paradox is that, even if the act of consuming the products may disavow techno-orientalist assumptions
(that is, provided that such assumptions do not override any other possible receptions), in order to reach the consumers, the products are marketed and cataloged in compliance to an archive that
holds detrimental images of the quality and content of such products, and of the cultural practices associated to them. One must add to this picture the case of international co-productions of
animations managed by Japanese studios, and also the increasing offshoring of the material production of animation to other companies of East Asian countries by Japanese studios.
 Impact – Subject Formation
Techno-orientalism has been narrowed down to South Asian contexts furthering the divide
between the Orient and the Western liberal subject, that inherently creates exclusionary
violence
Breckenridge and van der Veer 93 (Carol, American anthropologist and Associate Professor of History at
the New School for Social Research, Peter, Dutch anthropologist, Published in 1993, Published by University of
Pennsylvania Press, “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament : Perspectives On South Asia New Cultural
Studies”) RR Jr
The orientalism debate has been sharpened in relation to South Asia by scholars who have contributed to both of the above bodies of literature. Following the path
opened by Schwab, the historian of Indian philosophy Wilhelm Halbfass has written a book entitled India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (1988), which pursues an analytical perspective that is grounded in the philosophical
concerns of India as well as Europe. And, following the more political direction taken by Malek and Said, Ronald Inden has recently published an important study entitled Imagining India (1990). Inden gives a critique of essentialist

depictions of "Hindu" India since the Enlightenment . By recasting India's precolonial political institutions, [Inden] attempts to restore agency
to its people and structures. While this is illustrated in a reconstruction of the Indian polity in the early medieval period, the bulk of Inden's book focuses on the
deconstruction of essentialist categories , such as caste, the Indian mind, village India, and divine kingship. Both Inden and Halbfass restrict themselves to an analysis of orientalist ideas about
India. The present volume goes beyond such analysis by dealing explicitly with the relation between orientalist ideas

and the colonial project to organize and rule Indian society. Theoretically, this volume runs parallel to Said's and Inden's work inasmuch as they have their roots in Foucault's
project to unravel the multiple relations of knowledge and power in the West (e.g., Bhatnagar 1986) and in Gramsci's speculations about hegemony and resistance. These perspectives on the nature

of power have more recently been connected to orientalism and concerns about the politics of representation in scholarly
writing (Clifford 1988). The present book engages Said's arguments in three ways. First, it attempts to clarify the relations between literary,

anthropological, and historical understandings of South Asia on the one hand, and colonial and nationalist
understandings on the other. Significant continuities can be seen in the disciplinary projects of both the colonial and the postcolonial periods. Attention is given to the historical development of these
projects with all the attendant shifts and ruptures. Second, the essays here show that colonized subjects are not passively produced by

hegemonic projects but are active agents whose choices and discourses are of fundamental importance in the formation of their societies. And
third, some steps are taken to show the extent to which orientalism is not only constitutive of the Orient but also of the
Occident and that these images cannot be divorced from the political arenas in which they are produced.
Alt
 Alt – Academic Interrogation
Techno-orientalist discourse is perpetuated every day, only a confrontation with
pedagogical practices centered on modernization theory can break down stereotypes
surrounding East Asian functionality
Lozano-Mendez 10 (Artur, Undergraduate Student Majoring in East Asian Studies, Published in 2010,
“TECHNO-ORIENTALISM IN EAST-ASIAN CONTEXTS: REITERATION, DIVERSIFICATION,
ADAPTATION”, pg. 184-186) RR Jr
Early in the history of exchange with Europeans, Japan was presented as the most conspicuous instance of il mondo alla riversa, “the world
upside down”. After many decades of globalization, that topos from the Renaissance clings on to the Western
imagination. The following words were written by the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, who visited the East Indies from 1574 to 1606: “They also have other rites and
customs so different from all the other nations that it would seem that they deliberately studied how to differ from
everybody (…) because honestly it can be said that Japan is a world upside down compared to the ways of the world in Europe; as it is so different and contrary, that there is almost no
issue where they adjust to us.”14 Such all-encompassing othering perceptions spread quickly and rooted deeply. Even today, after
many decades of globalization, Japan is presented sometimes as the radical other versus Euro-American cultural
horizon. Following the logics of schema of co-figuration, the identity of the West had been supported by antonymous couplings such as
civilized–uncivilized, modern–pre-modern, etc. According to Morley and Robins, the idea of the West draws legitimacy from the unequivocal and exclusive
correspondence that bound together the words “West–Modernity–Progress”. Thus, techno-orientalism started to take shape when such discursive
exclusivity was unmistakably refuted, when the other “refused” to render themselves as the docile signified to a
preset signifier. As Morley and Robins write: “Those anxieties must be seen in the context of an increasing sense of insecurity about European and American modernity.
Modernity has always been that ‘mysterious and magical word that puts a barrier between the European [and
American] ego and the rest of the world’.16 If it was the West that created modernity, it was also modernity that created the imaginary space and identity described as
‘Western’. (...) however, the very dynamism of modernity also worked to undermine its Western foundations. The
modernization project was cumulative, future-orientated, based upon the logic of technological progression and
progress. Its various elements were also designed to be exported and to transcend their European origins and exclusiveness. Modernization and modernity, with
their claims to universalism, could be transposed to other host cultures. In Japan this project found a fertile
environment. The technological and futurological imagination has now come to be centered here; the abstract and universalizing force of modernization has passed from Europe to
America to Japan.” An instrumental factor in the successful expansion and acceptance of techno-orientalist tenets lay in
their early adoption by self-orientalist discourse in Japan. Self-orientalism takes the images supplied by Western
orientalism and changes their polarization from negative to positive. The mutual feedback benefits power structures both internationally and within
Japan, where the nihonjinron—a trend of publications analyzing the “particularism” of Japanese people—already promotes conformity to specific models of citizenship.18 Thus, discourse
informally induces people to adopt certain lifestyles and values. Those perceived cultural traits are turned into
cultural assets, and merchandised as such. What the techno-orientalist deformative lens perceives as robotic, gregarious and self-emasculated way of life is presented
as a considerate, balanced and reliable behavior. Paradoxically, the culture, tourism and entertainment industries from Japan have been
exporting products that undergo symbolic negotiation in Western markets 20 and, all too often, become techno-
orientalist avatars. The result of such symbolic negotiation comes naturally since the mainboard of technologies of recognition is
already printed with techno-orientalism and the “binary structuring schemata that are constantly utilized by the
geopolitics of the modernization theory.”
 Confrontation Key
Only an academic confrontation with techno-orientalist thought can produce new free-
flowing epistemologies – the impact is furthering Western domination through the
expulsion of Otherness
Lozano-Mendez 10 (Artur, Undergraduate Student Majoring in East Asian Studies, Published in 2010,
“TECHNO-ORIENTALISM IN EAST-ASIAN CONTEXTS: REITERATION, DIVERSIFICATION,
ADAPTATION”, pg. 195) RR Jr
We have seen further proof that orientalism is persistent . The very emergence of techno-orientalism in the sixties testifies to that. And there is more evidence within the evolution
and features of techno-orientalism itself. It may resort to opposite images (from trashy transistors in the past to advanced robotics presently). It can portray
Asians as insidious, but it can portray them as extremely naïve too, according to another widespread archetype. It
can develop features of an oriental other for one country, then it can adapt them for different countries under different circumstances. It can pull back in history to the
first registered orientalist accounts— or it can start to develop a new blanket techno-orientalism covering the whole of East Asia .68
Throughout its multiple and puzzling occurrences, thought, its basic vocabulary and functions remain the same. It is always a matter of orientalizing the other. At
the same time, it shifts and adapts itself skillfully, as can be expected from discourse. Historically, antihuman discourses have proved
successful at collaborative and interdisciplinary efforts that look to the future. Thus, techno-orientalism coherently collaborates with previous
orientalist representations, but it also engages in contemporary sexism. Its role in discourses of social and national conformity deserves special
attention. Not only is it used by self-orientalism and nihonjinron, but it also builds a modular other that helps shape Western societies (identities
being a “contrapuntal ensembles” themselves) and what their citizens think is acceptable or “natural,” that is,
balanced, centered. Thus, techno-orientalism also serves regimes of translation. These currents of discourse are complementary because they
intertwine and reinforce each other. They are fractal because of their multilevel reach. Thanks to its entanglement with all sorts of socially constructed
beliefs and knowledge, techno-orientalism can intervene both in the reception of one manga and in the political division of the
world, it reaches from a funny retold in a bar to our understanding of what is civilization and what it should be After this
overview of techno-orientalism and its clockwork, it becomes clear that the Academy also needs
collaborative and interdisciplinary efforts. More contrapuntal analyses are called for. What about techno-orientalism
in all forms of art (design, architecture, sculpture, photograph, digital art...) or literature? What other discursive formations does it concur
with? What other lines of continuity are there between orientalism and techno-orientalism? How have techno-orientalist images
originally applied to Japan been adapted to other countries? What about the surging blanket fashion of techno-orientalism that subsumes all of East Asia into a single universalizing entity?
the complexity and
Fortunately, much is being done in the field of orientalism and cybernetics, and in regard with orientalist readings of specific cultural products. Nevertheless,
the intermeshing of voices within cultural manifestations and so the fractal echoes from those voices need to be met
by contrapuntal readings that aim to worldliness, wider contextualization. Contrapuntal reading supplies an
assessment of the production of knowledge, but it is also a form of knowledge itself, one that is “always in motion,”
that needs no unitary dominating principle (“no harmonizing”) and that is willing to experience itself as a “cluster of flowing currents”.
 Alt Key to Agency
Voting neg is an affirmation of agency in the face of Orientalism. Our reconception of
social relations opens up a space for the Other to be integrated peacefully
Samman and Al-Zo’by 8 (Khaldoun, PhD in Sociology from Binghamton University, Mazhar, PhD in
International Affairs from Qatar University, Published in 2008, Published by Paradigm Publishers, Page 215) RR Jr
If the self is conceived as a social relationship (of a human entity to itself), the reified notion of "the social" as comprising a
relatedness to an "Other —as presumed in a Newtonian notion of society as a system of interacting human bodies—
gives way to a notion of the social as an ensemble of diverse forms of sub-individual self-
relations and self-interactions: intrapersonal (self-relations within one's own organism), interpersonal (self-relations across organisms), and extrapersonal (self-
relations to the built or natural environments). The fact that in a society or culture, only my relation to myself is seen as a self-relation, and
the label of the "social" is reserved only to when I relate to an Other (singular or collective), this may itself signify the
presence of an alienated/ing mode of production and living in which the relatedness of members to one another and to their
natural/built environments are perceived as relations to "Others." Further inquiry, however, reveals how one's relation to an "other"
is intricately constitutive of "oneself' and how one may find a multitude of alienated/ing "Others" populating one's
own fragmented inner world-system. Once we adopt a notion of the self as a social relation, and of society as
an ensemble of intra-, inter-, and extrapersonal self-relations, it becomes clear why a liberatory strategy based on the notion of the
simultaneity of self and global transformations makes good sense. Such a strategy can only be accommodated via
adoption of a unit of analysis that simultaneously takes account of the simultaneity of macro and micro, global and inner, world-systemic
processes. "As above, so below." Grand imperial expeditions cannot take place apart from the imperial modalities of how each of us internalizes
and perpetuates imperial modes of relating to ourselves and "others." My relations to others and to my selves are
always twin-born and, as Gloria Anzaldua pointed out, the struggle is always inner and only acted out in broader society. The
institutionalized conceptions of society, and practices of sociology, are premised by the presumed singularity of the individual as a "social"
actor. The notion that individuals' lives are "determined" by their "social" relations is highly reminiscent of the Newtonian Laws of physics where the bodies, being conceived as billiard balls,
In Newtonian sociologies, bodies are
respond to external stimuli or forces, and do not possess "forces" of their own to engender alternative motions and directions.
predictable entities devoid of their own dynamics. Relationships are thereby conceived as being external to them.
Bodies act upon one another. In similar conceptions of society, the "social" is always conceived as being external to the individual, rigidly dichotomized from the self or selves
within. In what I have called quantal sociological imagination (2004, 2004b, 2006b), however, such presumed conceptions of "the social" give way to a
notion of society in terms of an ensemble of interacting sub-atomic, sub-individual, selves . That people become individuals, i.e.,
individuate into beings capable of exercising conscious awareness and will, is then treated only as a possibility subject to intentional human efforts and not taken for granted as an in-born
attribute.
Framework
 Your Epistemology Bad
Their epistemology is inherently flawed – Western discourse on Asia is rooted in the will to
know and strips regions down to violent stereotypes
Lary 6 (Diana, Academic Employer at University of British Columbia, Specialized in Chinese Studies, Published
by Erudit, “Edward Said: Orientalism and Occidentalism”,
http://www.erudit.org/revue/jcha/2006/v17/n2/016587ar.pdf) RR Jr
Even though some scholars continued to do fine work on Chinese history and culture, the field as a whole was marked by an outsider/insider feeling, where

Western scholars, especially in the social sciences, saw themselves working on a strange and alien culture. The field was
coloured by a rather toxic combination of orientalism and anti-communism. The tradition of language and cultural knowledge came under
strain. Enormous sums of money were poured into the field in the United States, and scholars who had no direct knowledge of China
came into the field. Some of these scholars relied on native Chinese “assistants” for their basic research . These “assistants”, most of them highly-
educated refugees from China, were used as language and culture specialists; they produced the raw materials from which more important scholars derived analysis and theoretical insights. Their contributions

were seldom recognized in the final product.6 This form of orientalism was based on an implicit assumption that only
Westerners had the intellectual abilities to make useful analyses , or to derive theory. It assumed that the repository of real
knowledge was in the West, and that China could only be explained by Westerners. This attitude caused a great deal of silent anguish amongst the
“assistants”, who saw how little they meant in the “real” world of scholarship, many of them men of distinction who were almost never appointed to senior positions in the field. Their anguish was not recognized in the United States,

On Taiwan, where traditional Chinese scholarship continued,

or in China, then in the grips of Marxist analysis, where there was no reaction to scholarly works that were unknown since they were never distributed in China.

the superior attitudes of Western scholars were resented; but since the
and where young American scholars went to do language training and research,

Republic of China was a client state of the US, little could be said openly.
 Serial Policy Failure
The K is a prior question – Orientalism has shaped the way we perceive Asia and form
stereotypes. Only challenging the root of the problem ensures effective representations and
policy action
Bakli 14 (Sara, Free-lance writer and blogger, Published by Jenn Incorporation, Published April 17 2014, “What is
Orientalism, and how is it also racism?”, http://reappropriate.co/2014/04/what-is-orientalism-and-how-is-it-also-
racism/) RR Jr
A quick consideration of the many anti-Asian stereotypes of today reveal their roots in the over-arching Orientalism that still
persists in the West’s conception of the East. We are the Perpetual Foreigner — never quite normal, never quite “one of us”: this
is a contemporary recapitulation of the Asian as the “Orientalized Other”. Sexually, many of the gender stereotypes that were
first invented during Marco Polo’s time — the hypersexualized lotus blossoms and dragon ladies; the barbaric and
cowardly effeminate men — still thrive today. Even the Model Minority myth has its roots in Orientalism: simultaneous awe of
exotic Asian cultural traditions that emphasize academia with fear of the intellectual Chinese Yellow Peril threat .
Orientalism is frequently mistaken as being synonymous with cultural appropriation and misappropriation because the fantasy of Orientalism has been constructed
and reinforced through the misappropriation of exaggerated Eastern cultural traits and practices to build and
maintain the East as an exotic place of beauty and terror. When Katy Perry goes all-out geisha, she is invoking and perpetuating the theatre of
Orientalism. When challenged, defenders of Orientalism will claim that this theatre is a “love declaration” (as Vincent Vidal writes above), forgetting that these “love declarations” bear
further removes the agency of the East to “represent
little resemblance to the culture from which they are appropriated, and

itself, [thereby preventing] true understanding”, as Said writes. Furthermore, Orientalism refers not just to the
cultural appropriation, but to the impact this appropriation has on our percepetion of Asia and
Asian-ness. Orientalism is more fundamentally the positioning of Asian people as the proverbial “Other”, always serving as a counter-point to the normative West, forever an orbiting
satellite, never able to define itself for itself within the Western cannon. Orientalism eternally casts the Asian person as stereotype, and never
allows the Asian body to be “normal”.
 Try or Die
We control uniqueness – Orientalism as a social construct is still perpetuated through
academic discourse, flips try or die because the debate space is one of our last fighting
grounds
Said 85 (Edward, literary theoretician, professor of English, history and comparative literature at Columbia
University, Published in 1985, Page 90-91, “Orientalism Reconsidered”,
http://courses.arch.vt.edu/courses/wdunaway/gia5524/said85.pdf) RR Jr
Now let me quickly sketch the two sets of problems I'd like to deal with here. As a department of thought and expertise, Orientalism of course refers to several
overlapping domains: firstly, the changing historical and cultural relationship between Europe and Asia, a relationship with a 4000 year old history; secondly, the scientific
discipline in the West according to which beginning in the early 19th century one specialized in the study of various
Oriental cultures and traditions; and, thirdly, the ideological suppositions, images, and fantasies about a currently
important and politically urgent region of the world called the Orient. The relatively common denominator between these
three aspects of Orientalism is the line separating Occident from Orient, and this, I have argued, is less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human production, which I
have called imaginative geography. This is, however, neither to say that the division between Orient and Occident is unchanging nor is it to say that it is simply fictional. It is to say emphatically
the Orient and the Occident are facts produced by human beings, and as such
- that as with all aspects of what Vico calls the world of nations,
must be studied as integral components of the social, and not the divine or natural, world. And because the social world includes
the person or subject doing the studying as well as the object or realm being studied, it is imperative to include them
both in any consideration of Orientalism, for, obviously enough, there could be no Orientalism without, on the one hand, the
Orientalists, and on the other, the Orientals. Far from being a crudely political apprehension of what has been called the problem of Orientalism, this is in reality a fact basic to
any theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics. Yet, and this is the first set of problems I want to consider, there is still a remarkable

unwillingness to discuss the problems of Orientalism in the political or ethical or even

epistemological contexts proper to it. This is as true of professional literary critics who have written about my book, as it is of course of the Orientalists
Since it seems to me patently impossible to dismiss the truth of Orientalism's political origin and its
themselves.
continuing political actuality, we are obliged on intellectual as well as political grounds to investigate the resistance
to the politics of Orientalism, a resistance that is richly symptomatic of precisely what is denied