Toshiya Ueno
February 2026
Historically, Asia is presented as objects, which have always been appropriated, occupied, exploited, reified, and alienated in both physical violence and intellectual efforts. Europe has existed as the subject of dominance and colonization on the one hand, and the non-West or Rest as objects (or reified matters) on the other, whose fatal binary is so much prevailing and determining in our thinking. However, essays in this book new book - Made in Nowhere by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, definitely treat both as objects. The citation of Leibniz, inspired by Graham Harman’s argument on the Dutch East India Company (VOC), works quite well already in the introduction.
The famous thesis by Okakura, “Asia is One”, which was abused by the ideology of Japanese imperial colonialism in the previous century, stressed the unity and oneness of Asia as a subjective mode of conception. What should not be dismissed in the author’s opinion is the real that the One (no matter in the West or Asia) is permanently deployed and articulated into the multiple, which does not necessarily depend on a totalitarian or holistic wholeness. Although the author seems to be throughly Hegelian in both his theory and politics, both his speculating and thinking on Asia in its oneness suppose and presume a series of infinite bifurcations in different layers in order to enable the One of Asia without a final synthesis, as if many fragmentary concepts consist and constitute together in/as a sort of constellation or archipelago in their immanent planes. The One of Asia can be infinitely posited as a fractal series of division into two in the contradiction or the superposition of myriads of One-in-One, which suggests the plurality, transversality, and superposition of plural One(s) supposed in different social, historical, geological, and cultural conjunctures. So the thesis of Asia as One sounds more complicated and challenging in this book, but it operates in a very stark way.
Why has Asia always been delayed in the development or progress of capitalism in a conventional sense? Usually, the response is simple: because capitalism has been developed and expanded in the West by dominating and marginalizing Asia (or the non-West), Asia could not properly deploy the system of capitalism or the values of modernity. But what is proper in this context? How to differentiate the proper and the irregular? This critical wondering lingers throughout this book. The world system of capitalism or colonialism leads to a marginalization or even othering of Asia. Europe (or the West) is usually said to embody the universal in a sense of paradigmatic or exemplary, perhaps since the Enlightenment, while Asia is always ascribed to the particular or even the exception. But envisioning or scrutinizing details of their intercourse or interaction comes to the fact that sometimes the latter, as such, paradoxically becomes or serves to the former, or at least both are closely entangled with each other in an indiscernible composition.
But in some cases, such as art or other genres of expression, a rule can play —or even contribute to —a series of exceptions, irregularities, and extraordinariness. To be singular or an exception, paradoxically, ushers in constituting the universal or something transversal. The exception enforces or even realizes the rule or regulation. This paradox is analyzed throughout this book through vivid accounts of various cultural phenomena and political issues across Asia. Things in Asia might look quite singular, but always hold something transversal rather than being universal, for which the West has desperately searched or claimed. That is the author’s kernel.
Each chapter is not so long or arduous for a handy reading, in fact. Despite broad issues and contexts, some chapters closely resonated with one another in an exceptionally intriguing manner. For instance, the author’s slight expectation of certain emancipative or affirmative aspects of audience or fandom of Korean pop group, BTS, affords us a potential tactics of consuming popular cultures (as the ‘political effect of amateurism’) in the system of mass industry on the one hand (chapter 5), while his cursory observation of (streets or campuses) graffiti engaged by students at Jamia Milla Islamia, an university in Delhi, India, provide us with the perspective of a kind of “tactical amateurism” which is sometimes more political than any established creator or artists can do, where a variety of technology can be used against its aim in the sense of post-media, on the other (chapter 9). If (Guattarian) post-media is seen belonging to a ‘weak technology’——which is also our author’s concept elsewhere——-, his point does not lie in an idealization or celebration of amateurism but rather consists of some failed, broken, weak, fragile, accidental, ad-hoc, minor (not necessarily micro-) experimental and tactical usage of technology in general.
If it sounds like an over-estimation of alternative, grassroots, amateur, micro, and activist initiatives, this evaluation would be immature or euphoric. Obviously, the author is trying to draw and live himself, a line of flight (leaking) or exodus from an ossified dichotomy or ideological polarity through his essays. His tightrope-like approach to thinking has culminated in a remarkable interpretation of various discourses on global mobility (chapter 2). Even some neo-liberal-oriented discourse could offer him a thrilling opportunity to think about new modes of global mobility and class conflicts beyond a banal binary. The author’s writing, by itself, suggests that he might be an expert in hanging out in various streets of this globe, never walking as a consumer tourist but as a speculative or critical traveller. His analysis of refuge ontology in arguing for Sartre in Asia echoes his careful interpretation (chapter 10). However, it is so easy and hasty to divide traveler and tourist, multitude (or proletariat) and (global) consumer, in a judgment of good or bad. It should be noted that such a dichotomy is insufficient for streetwise or translocal intelligence. The author’s reading in this context is never ascribed to a relativist or pluralist position. Instead, his analysis proceeds in a pretty sophisticated way, carefully reading and treating the views of intellectuals or writers that are even close to pro-capitalism, pro-control societies, accelerationism, anti-left cynicism, and even neoliberalism as such, by salvaging or excavating some emancipatory or critical potential in such discourses. You, readers, would be impressed by his decent fair play, which is also beyond an empty opposition between a radical activist and a cynical commentator.
This bold and elegant style can be frequently seen throughout this book, across different topics and issues. Some examples can readily be raised for careful readers. His attempt to combine the image or representation of zombies in the contemporary pop-cultures with Walter Benjamin’s concept of baroque theater, Trauerspiel, melancholia, and even accelerationism in the contemporary current—— of which he himself might be critical—— is amazing (chapter 4). All half-boiled accelerationists must be shocked by his opinion. Vulgar media or cultural studies could never think like this.
Additionally, his critical analysis of both Iran (its revolution in the late 1970s) and North Korea is beyond the conventional scope of cultural studies, as a form of critical discourse on the construction of the nation-state. Both nation-states are geographically located in Asia. But each nation has its singularity or peculiarity envisioned from the West. Our author never presents the integrative Asia or Pan-Asia perspective. Still, his view specifies the transversal universality within their immanent turmoils, weird development (in North Korea), and (spiritual) revolution or politics (in Iran). Unlike “Eurasianism” raised in some Eastern European parts these days, his interpretation gives rise to the vision of thousands of Asias. For instance, the notion of ‘political spirituality’ in the Iranian revolution, which appears much removed from the typical vision of Europeanism or Eurocentrism, could nevertheless offer an occasion for rethinking, reevaluating, and rebooting the very quintessence of the Enlightenment. Without encountering the Iranian Revolution as an Asian singularity, Foucault, as an intellectual in the West, could not grasp his very idea of the ‘ethic of the self’ (chapter 11). Whereas the state of North Korea is unbelievably weird, insane, monstrous, and perverse, paradoxically, the nation has constantly got us envisioning the ‘hidden truth of the modern state as such’ and the reason (as a ground) of the presence of a charismatic leader in our daily politics of this world (chapter 12). (Actually, I am tempted to think, or ask the author, about the notion of Juche in North Korea in some trans-local comparison in terms of subjectivity in a triad of Hegel, Foucault, and Guattari. But, of course, it is far beyond the scope of reviewing the book.)
After all, it can be said, in my view, that the book’s hidden task is defined as an attempt to articulate the Asiatic mode of production of subjectivity. As is well known, Marx’s famous letter to Vera Zasulich coined and adopted this terminology, the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, to clarify a specificity of the geological and historical condition of Asia, while this book focuses more on the singularity of production of subjectivity in/as Asia, including its variety of invention and creativity. The subjectivity here is not just a subject in opposition to objects. But instead, as in Guattari’s argument on subjectivity, it contains both subjects and objects, which are always deployed as subjectivities-objectivities, as in the issue of VOC, which Harman speculated on via Leibniz, suggesting a series of chains.
In this sense, however, we as readers might come across a fundamental cleavage in his essays, if not a fatal contradiction or inconsistency. Put simply, the notion of (Asiatic mode of) subjectivity in his view, which has unconsciously been deployed regardless of his intention, is fluctuating or alternating in radically polarized styles of thinking between Hegel in the question as a basic framework and Guattari in the temporary, pragmatic, and tactical conclusion, at least in this book. I am neither so hasty to reconcile this polarity nor to rely on a handy exit that utilizes Bataille’s typological solution through the notion of the ‘dialectics without the end’. Rather than the synthesis after divisions and conflicts, some hesitation or reluctance in our presumed arbitrary choice in algorithmically optional matters by platform media such as Netflix is more significant for him. In my view, it is the accelerated and decelerated version of the ‘cunning of reason’ in Hegel, not as an ultimate end but as a micro-endless fractal process of standing against itself in media and technology. Keeping with his understanding of Guattarian post-media, he figures out that a handful of drops of our contingent will or desire of resistance are built within the system of the net and control societies. (chapter.8)
Unlike Alexander the Great’s invasion, violence, and domination of Asia from Persia to India in the ancient age, or the ‘first’ cosmopolitan attempt, our Alexander’s cosmo-political journey is never satisfied with merely establishing unity and integration of various regional characteristics. Provocatively speaking, just as some kind of brutality could bring about a syncretic intercourse of different cultures under the rubric of Hellenism ———as an ancient creolization?——-by combining the Greek and the Orient (different) civilizations, the author’s activist speculation affords us myriads of examples of unknown cultural exchange, inter(a)-political crossing, mixture of religious or spiritual habits, ethnic melange, and hybridization of trans-local cultures along with, passing through, varied modes of domination, control, violence, and dissensus.
His storytelling begins with a critical rethinking of VOC and ends with a view of the stranger as a mother ship for the home or the land of residents. No one can deny the significance of the position of native informants in human sciences, especially after the “postcolonial turn”. As you might know, many theories after this turn have always problematized the position of the native informant by questioning how it has been constructed and how it could contribute to elevating the status of the native informant to a certain form of colonial elite, if not reduced to a mere resource or research object. But in his postscript, set against the landscape drawn by Vermeer in Delft, the author emphasizes the significance of the outsider’s view, that of a foreigner and stranger. Vermeer has the gaze of a native stranger, which is also suitable for his way of thinking and observing within the field. A kind of mutual inclusion occurs between the gaze of a stranger and that of residents in his city-adventure to search for the site depicted in Vermeer’s paintings.
It is appropriate to read this book not on the desk but somewhat outside of your room, street, cafe, park, (air)port, square, mountain site or island coast, etc. This book can be accompanied with your hand, yet attached to all affects of your ambience, in reading by a random choice of chapters, no matter what order is set. Let’s read, walk, meditate, and think along with the book! You can surely encounter something unknown in your environment and social context, and at the same time find something familiar in distant, isolated, remote, and uneasy locations. This is why this book must be read: it offers radically moving or movable essays (attempts) rather than a mere travelogue, and it is also waiting for your intervention.
REFERENCES
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Made in Nowhere (Sublation Press, 2026)