‘Labour Processes’ Across the Indo-Pacific: Towards a Comparative Analysis of Civilisational Necessities

Abstract

This paper initiates a comparative analysis of the labour process in three different social systems in order to shed light on the singularities of East Asian social forms. The point of departure for the project highlights the place of substitution central to the labour process in the West. There time's flow entails the replacement of human ingenuity by mechanical power and so distils into Western culture a fascination with the possibilities of substitution that governs much private and public life. It suggests the problem of ‘Civilisation’ derives from this process. By contrast, social life in the South Pacific, amidst cultures historically contiguous with those in East Asia, focuses on flows from original conditions. In this context social life follows organising sequences, not substitution. There follows and features a mimetic singularity of ascribed, ranked socially appropriate and chained action and reaction. East Asia shares with the South Pacific a mimetic aesthetic of sequence, rank and singularity, but there social process transforms into a centralising mass defined by epochal discontinuities organising the flows of life: Understanding that result is the ‘problem’ of East Asian sociality.