If, as Sacvan Bercovitch observed, the defining American genre has been the jeremiad, simultaneously “lamenting a declension and celebrating a national dream,” some notion of “Asia” and its aesthetics plays a critical role in the modern uses of that form.2 So argues R. John Williams in The Buddha in the Machine, a richly ambitious study of the power with which an imagination of the “East” enters into the attempt to redeem modern Western culture—specifically, a technoculture predicated on the will to rationalize human labor, extend human being, and extend domination over and via the machine. The claim that American culture has grown up around anxieties about technology is hardly a new one.3 Williams reanimates it by arguing for the emergence of what he calls “Asia-as-technê”: the notion, or fantasy, that Eastern aesthetics is both the apotheosis of Western machine culture and its antidote. Ranging boldly...
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