On Progress and Anxiety: A Lacanian Reading of Chinese Technology

Efforts have been made (in this book and elsewhere) to address Joseph Needham’s question of why China did not modernize before the West. This paper takes a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to the Needham Question and suggests that the key lies in how different cultures respond to the problem of anxiety. Western Christendom feels anxious about their impotence in the face of the Almighty and so creates technology in response. Chinese society, however, draws from different fonts for its worldview, and these yield different attitudes toward control or power, with only Confucianism offering an approximation for need to create technologies. However, much of this historical genealogy is irrelevant in the context of modern China, where anxiety is tied more to the existence and prominence of “the West” itself. Ultimately, anxiety is not something to be “cured,” but China can avoid the temptation to follow the path of the West if it can adapt a free relation to its anxiety rather than seek to master it.