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Aga Baranowska

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This panel explores how attention to specific technologies, infrastructures and materials might illuminate our multi-sited conversations on Asian Futures. Technology and infrastructure have been associated with futurity in particular ways in discourses of modernization and development, and in some sense these associations have continued in popular imaginations of Asia as the privileged site of a global future. The panel considers such associations, as well as how they might be challenged or modified through close examinations of the assemblages and imaginaries through which they have been deployed within (and not merely about) Asia.

The Developmental State and the Innovation Economy
Joseph Wong
Director, Asian Institute; Professor and Canada Research Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

The postwar Asian developmental state confounded theories of modernization. As both “planned” and “market-regarding” economies, the state-led model of economic development in Asia neither fit neatly with state-socialist theories of modernization nor with neoliberal orthodoxy. The Asian experience was at once considered the ideal type Weberian bureaucracy; a culturally bounded style of state capitalism; a temporally fixed benefit of Cold War realpolitik; a legacy of Bismarckian influences on Meiji era Japanese political economy; and/or the exemplar of strategic and “smart” economic policymaking. I frame the discussion about Asian developmental statism around the concepts of risk and uncertainty. The developmental state effectively mitigated the risks of industrial upgrading. However, confronted with the challenges of managing primary uncertainty in first-order innovation, the developmental state model has proven to be deficient. The state is no longer particularly strategic or smart, a revelation that has both prompted serious reflection about the uniqueness of Asia’s economic past and future, and raised profound concerns about Asia’s presumed success in the knowledge-intensive economy.

Questioning Technology and the Mental/Manual Labor Division: Tosaka Jun’s 1930s intervention in Marxism
Ken Kawashima
Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto

I will talk about a pre-war Japanese marxist philosopher, Tosaka Jun, his analysis of technology and intellectuals, and how Tosaka tried to break down the binary oppositions of mental and manual labor, subject and object. I’ll then ruminate on contemporary approaches to the question of production and ontology.

A Material Ethnography of the Shimshal Road, Gojal, Pakistan
David Butz
Professor, Department of Geography, Brock University
Nancy Cook
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Brock University

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, we discuss a local road-building project in northern Pakistan, and reflect on the implications of the new road for local people’s daily lives, their understandings of themselves and their community, and their hopes and prospects for the future. In examining this new “mobility platform” we hope to say something about the interface between infrastructure and everyday life in one local Asian context.

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Asian Institute