On Neutrality

There is no neutrality apart from ideology. The gesture of neutrality depends upon a model of pre-constituted values, the prescription of limits upon objective conditions, to form a territory of illusory rest, beyond which neutrality cannot operate. The limits are active, recalibrating with changes in objective conditions in order to maintain the front of neutrality with the model of pre-constituted values intact. Neutrality aims at making a model of values appear objective. Neutrality is political.

The form of this writing being in an Asian American student journal on economics calls into its concerns a reader’s integrated constructions of “Asian,” “American,” “student,” “journalism,” and “economics” in order to engage with it. Writing is its reading, and is how writing participates in forming ideology. The repetition of writing based upon models of values produces “neutral” “truth.” Writing’s participation in the establishment of values is therefore linked with the projects of ideological apparatuses including the family, the school, and the media with their proffered models of engaging with objective conditions, including their material manifestations and the economic mode of production that permeates them all.

All of these forms are integrated; they are dialectical. In the anarchy of models of values each vies for domination and reproduction over the others through the changing objective conditions at every moment. A history of Asian Americans is the destabilization of a model of “American”-ness that expressed itself in attempting to keep Asian Americans in a subordinate position of labor and social standing. In destabilizing the domination, “American”-ness and Asian Americans were changed, for instance in Asian Americans’ social class, and new contradictions necessarily arose. The radical purity that enabled such liberating agency is endangered to be effaced by complacency with accepting a new modulation of dominating forces, and through aligning with dominating forces, by apathy toward other groups being dominated.

In the presence of and participation in the world of contradictions in the unit of writing, in writing and reading one is confronted with fundamental tendencies: accept models of pre-constituted values upon oneself as “truth,” including constructs of “Asian,” “American,” “student,” “journalism,” and “economics,” or recognize this ideological coercion and decline it, and in doing so, assert change upon the world. This potential for meaningfulness in an action, from publishing a student journal to taking action in the streets, and the experimentation toward finding what action might have the most meaning, is the content that makes any action matter.