bhabha commitment to theory

8/12/2019 Bhabha Commitment to Theory

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/)oRoutledge Classics contains the very best of Routledgepublishing over the past century or so, books that have,by popular consent, become established as classics intheir field. Drawing on a fantastic heritage of innovativewriting published by Routledge and its associatedimprints, this series makes available in attractive,affordable form some of the most important works ofmodern times.For a complete list of titles visitwww. ro utl ed gecl a s s ics.co m

Homi K.BhabhaThe Location of Culture

With a new preface bY the author

London and New York


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There is a damaging and seldefeatir.g assumPtion that theory isnecessarily the elite language of the socially and culturally privil-eged. It is said that the place of the academic critic is inevitably\rithin the Eurocentric archives of an imperialist or neo-colonialWest. The Olympian realms of what is mistakenly labelled 'puretheory' are assumed to be eternally insulated from the historicalexigencies and tragedies of the wretched of the earth. Must wealways polarize jr order to polemicize? Are we trapped in apolitics of struggle where the representation of social antagon-isms and historical contradictions can take no other form than abinaism of theory vs politics? Can the aim of freedom of know-ledge be the simple inversion of the relation of oppressor andoppressed, cenfte and periphery, negative image and positiveimage? Is our only \/ay out of such dualism the espousal of animplacable oppositionality or the invention of an originary

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TH E COM M ITM ENT TO TH EORYcounter-myth of radica-l purity? Must the project of ou liber-ationist aesthetics be forever part of a totalizing Utopian visionof Being and History that seeks to tanscend the contradictionsand ambivalences that constitute the very structure of humansubjectivity and its systems of cultural representation?Between what is represented as the 'Iarceny' and distortion ofEuropean 'metatheoriziag' and the radical, engaged, activistexperience of Third World creativity,l one can see the mirrorimage (albeit reversed ir content and iltention) of that ahistor-ical nineteenth-century polarity of Orient and Occident which,in the name of progress, urleashed the exclusionary imperialistideologies of self ard other. This time round, the term 'critica-ltheory', often untheorized and unargued, is defilitely the Other,an otherness that is insistently identified \Mith the vagaries of thedepoliticized Eurocentric critic. Is the cause of radical art orcritique best served for instance, by a fulminating professor offilm who announces, at a flashpoint in the argument, 'We are notartists, we are political activists?' By obscuring the power of hisown practice in the rhetoric of militancy, he fails to draw atten-tion to the specific va-lue of a politics of cultural production;because it makes the surfaces of ciematic signiflcation thegrouads of poiitical intervenlion, it gives depth to the laaguageof social criticism and extends the domain of 'politics' in a diec-tion that will not be entirely dominated by the forces ofeconomic or social control. Forms of popular rebellion andmobilization are often most subversive ard tralsgressive whenthey are created through oPPositional culturol practices-

Before I am accused of bourgeois voluntarism, liberal pragma-tism, academicist pluralism and all the other '-isms' that arefreely bandied about by those who take the most severe exceP-lion to'Euocentic' theoreticism (Derrideanism, Lacanianism,poststructuralism . . .), I woutd like to clarify the goals of myopening questions. I am convinced that, in the language of polit-ical economy, it is legitimate to rePresent the relations of

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30 TH E LocATroN oF cuLTUREexploitation and domination in the discursive divisionbeneen the First and Third World, the North and the South.Despite the claims to a spurious rhetoric of internationalism'on the part of the established multinationals ad the networksof the new communications technology industries, such circu-lations of signs and commodities as there are, are caught inthe vicious circuits of surplus value that link First World cap-ital to Third World Labour markets through the chains of theinternational division of labour, and national compradorclasses. Gayatri Spivak is right to conclude that it is 'in theinterest of capital to preserve the comprador theatre in a stateof relatively primitive labour legislation and environmentalregulation'.2I am equally convinced that, in the language of internationaldiplomacy, there is a sharp growth in a new Aaglo-Americannational.ism which increasingly aticulates its economic andmilitary po\Mer in political acts that express a neo-imperialistdisregard for the independence and autonomy of peoples andplaces in the Third World. Thil< of America's 'backyard' policytowards the Caribbear and Latin America, the patriotic gore andpatrician lore of Britain's Falklands Campaign or, more recently,the triumphalism of the American and British forces during theGulf Wa. I am further convinced that such economic ald polit-ical domination has a profound hegemonic influence on theiformation orders of the Western world, its popular media adits specialized institutions and academics. So much is not indoubt.What does demand further discussion is whether the 'new'.anguages of theoretical critique (semiotic, poststructuralist,deconstructionist and the rest) simply reflect those geopoliticaldivisions and their spheres of influence. Are the interests of'Western' theory necessarily collusive with the hegemonic roleof the West as a po\Mer bloc? Is the language of theory merelyanother po\/er ploy of the culturally privileged \Mestern elite

rH E coM M rrM ENr ro rH EoRy 3lto produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its ownpower-knowledge equation ?A large film festival in the West - even an alternative orcounter-cultural event such as Edinburgh's 'Third Cinema' Con-ference - never fails to reveal the disproportionate influence ofthe West as cultural forum, in a-ll thee senses of that word: asplace of public exhibition and discussion, as place of ;udgement,and as market-place. An Indian film about the plight of Bombay'spavement-dwellers wins the Newcastle Festival which thenopens up distribution facilities i India. The flrst seariag exposof the Bhopal disaster is made for Charnel Four. A major debateon the politics and theory of Third Cinema first appears in Scren,published by the British Film Institute. An archival article on theimportant history of neo-traditionalism and the 'popular' inIndian cinema sees the light of day in Framework.3 Among themajor contributors to the development of the Third Cinema asprecept arrd practice are a number of Third World 6.lm-makersand critics who are exiles or emigrs in the West and live problem-atically, often dangerously, on the 'left' margins of a Eurocentric,bourgeois liberal culrure. I don't think I need ro add individualnames or places, or detail the historical reasons why the Westcarries arrd exploits what Bourdieu would call its symbolic cap-ital. The condition is all too familia, and it is not my purposehere to make those importaat distitctions between differentnational situations ard the disparate political causes and collect-ive histories of cultural exile. I want to take my stand on theshifting margins of cultura-l displacement - that confounds arryprofound or 'authentic' sense of a 'national' culture or an'organic' intellectual - and ask what the function of a comrnittedtheoretical perspective might be, once the cultura-l and historicalhybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the paradigmaticplace ofdeparture.Committed to what? At this stage in the argument, I do notwant to identify any specific 'object' of political allegiaace - the


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32 rHE LocATroN oF cuLruREThird World, the working class, the feminist struggle. Althoughsuch an objectifrcation of political activity is crucial ald mustsignificantly irform political debate, it is not the only option forthose critics or intellectuals who are committed to progressivepolitical change in the direction of a socialist society. It s a signof political maturity to accept that there are many forms of polit-ical writing whose djfferent effects are obscured when they aredivided berween the 'theoretical' and the 'activist'. It is not as ifthe leaflet involved in the organization of a stri-ke is shot ontheory, while a speculative article on the theory of ideologyought to have more practical examples,or applications. They areboth forms of discourse and to that exrent they produce ratherthan reflect their objects of refeence. The difference betweenthem lies in their operational qualities. The leaflet has a specificexpository and organizational pr:rpose, temporally bound to theevent; the theory of ideology makes its contribution to thoseembedded political ideas and priaciples that inform the right tosnike. The latter does not justify the former; no does it necessar-ily precede it. It exists side by side with it - the one as anenabling part of the other - like the recro and verso of a sheet ofpaper, to use a common semiotic analogy in the uncommoncontext of politics.My concern here is with the process of intervening ideo-logically', as Stuart Hall describes the role of imagining' orrepresentation in the practice of politics irl his response to theBritish election of 1987.4 For Hall, rhe notion of hegemonyimplies a politics of identification of the imaginary. This occupies adiscursive space which is not exclusively delimited by the his-tory of either the right or the left. It exists somehow ir-betweenthese political polarities, and also berween the famiiiar divisionsof theory ard political practice. This approach, as I read ir, ifro-duces us to an exciting, neglected moment, or movement, in the'recognition' of the relation of politics to theory; ard confourdsthe taditional division berween them. Such a movement is

THE COMMITM ENT TO THEORYinitiated if we see that relation as determjted by the rule ofrepeatable materiality, which Foucault describes as the processby which statements from one instirution can be nanscribed. inthe discouse of aother.s Despite the schemata of use and appli-calion that constiture a eld of stabilization for the statement,any change in the statement's conditions of use and reinvest-ment, any alteration in its field of experience or verification, orindeed any difference in the problems to be solved, can lead. tothe emergence of a new statement: the difference of the same.In what hybrid forms, then, may a politics of the theoreticalstatement emerge? What tensions and ambivalences mark thisengimatic place from which theory speaks? Speaking in thename of some counrer-authority or horizon of 'the true' (inFoucault's sense of the strategic effects of any apparatus or disposi-tif , the theoetical enterpnise has to represent the advesarialauthority (of power ad,/or knowledge) which, in a doublyinscribed move, it simultaneously seeks to subvert artd replace.In thjs complicated formulation I have ried to indicate some-thing of the boundary and location of the event of theoreticalcritique which does not contsin the truth (in polar opposition tototahtarianism, 'bourgeois liberalism' or whatever is supposedto repress it). The 'true' is always marked ald informed by theambivalence of the process of emergence itself,, the producrivityof meaniags that construct counter-knowledges in medics ra, irthe very act of agonism, within the terms of a negotiation(rather than a negation) of oppositional ard antagonistic elem-ents. Political positions are not simply identifrable as progressiveor reactionary, bourgeois or radical, prior to the act of critiquengage, or outside the terms and conditions of their discusiveaddess. It is in this sense that the historical momenr of politicalaction must be thought of as part of the history of the form of itswriting. This is not to state the obvious, that there is no know-Iedge - political or otherwise - outside representation. It is tosuggest that the dynamics of writiag ad textuality require us to

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34 rH E LocATtoN oF cu LTU RErethink the logics of causality and determinacy through whichwe recognize the 'political' as a form of calculation a]ld stlategicaction dedicated to social transformatin.'What is to be done?' must acknowledge the force of writing,its metaphoricity and its rhetorical discourse, as a productivematrix which defrnes the 'social' and makes it available as an

democratic and. socialist discourse - Mill's essay 'On Liberty''

identifrcation is initiated in the textual performance that displaysa certair 'difference' within the signifi.cation of any single polit-

politicized subject and a public 'truth':[f] opponents of all important truths do not exist, it isindispensable to imagine them. . . . [He] must feel the wholeforceofthedifficultywhichthetrueviewofthesubjecthastoencounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess hmselfof the portion of truth which meets and removesthot dfficulty' ' ' 'Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anythingthey know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental

TH E COM M ITM ENT TO TH EORYposition of those who think differently from them ' ' ' and con-sequently they do not, in any ProPer sense ofthe word' knowthe docfrine which they themselves profess'6 (My emphases)

It is true that MIII's 'rationality' permits, or requires, such formsof contention and contradiction in order to enhance his vision of

truth' is produced. This is a d.ifferent dynamic from the ethic oftolerance in liberal ideology which has to imagine opposition inorder to contain it and demonstrate its enlightened relativism or

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36 THE LocATroN oF cuLTUREhumurism. Reading Mill, agailst the grain, suggests that politicscal ody become representative, a truly public discourse,through a splitting in the signiflcation'of the subject of represen-tation; uough an ambivalence at the point of the enunciation ofa politics.I have chosen to demonstrate the importance of the space ofwriting, and the problematic of addess, at the very heart of theliberal nadition because it is here that the myth of the 'trmspar-ency' of the human agent and the reasonableness of politicalaction is most forcefully asserted. Despite the more radical polit-ical alternatives of the right and the left, the popular, corrunon-sense view of the place of the individual in elation to the socialis still substartially thought and lived i ethical terms mouldedby liberal belie. What the attention to rhetoric and vwitingreveals is e discursive ambivalence that makes 'the political'possible. From such a perspective, the problematic of politicaljudgement cannot be represented as al epistemological problemof appearance and reality or theory and practice or word andthing. Nor car it be represented as a dia-lectical problem or asymptomatic contradiction constitutive of the materiality of the'real'. On the contrary, \ru'e are made excruciatingly aware of theambivalent juxtaposition, the dangerous interstitial relation ofthe facrual and the projective, and, beyond that, of the crucialfunction of the textual and the rhetorical. It is those vicissitudesof the movement of the signifrer, in the fixing of the factual andthe dosue of the real, that ensure the efficacy of stategic tlnk-ing in the discourses of Reolpolitik. it is this to-and-fro, this fortldqof the symbolic process of political negotiation, that constitutesa politics of address. Its importance goes beyond the unsettlingof the essentialism or logocentricism of a received political trad-ition, ir the nme of an abstract free pay of the signifier.A critical discourse does not yield a new political object, oraim, or knowledge, which is simply a mimetic reflection of arra priori political principle or theoretical commitment. We

TH E COMMITMENT TO THEORYshould not demand of it a pure teleology of analysis whereby theprior principle is simply augmented, its rationality smoothlydeveloped, its identity as socialist or materialist (as opposed toneo-imperialist or humanist) consistently confi.rmed in eachoppositional stage of the argument. Such identikit Political ideal-ism may be the gesture of great individual fervour, but it lacksthe deeper, if dangerous, sense of what is entailed by the posscgeof history in theoretical discourse. The language of critique iseffective not because it keeps forever seParate the terms of themaster and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to theextent to which it ovecomes the given grounds of oppositionand opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, frgura-tively speaking, where the construction of a political object thatis nevr4 neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our politicalexpectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of ourrecognition of the momnt of politics. The challenge lies inconceiving of the time of political action and understanding asopening up a space that can accept and regulate the differentialstructure of the moment of intervention without rushing toproduce a ulity of the social antagonism or contradiction. Thisis a sign that history is hoppening - within the pages of theory,within the systems and structures we construct to flgure thepassage of the historical.When I talk of negotiotion rather thal negation, it is to convey atemporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulationof antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without theemergence of a teleological or transcendent History, and beyondthe prescriptive form of symptomatic reading where the nervoustics on the surface of ideology reveal the 'real materialist contra-diction' that History embodies. In such a discursive temporality,the event of theory becomes the negotiation of contradictory andantagonistic instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives ofstruggle, arrd destroy those negative polarities between know-Iedge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political

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38 rHE LocAroN oF cuLruREreason.T If I have argued against a primordial and previsionarydivision of right or left, progressive or reactionary, it has beenonly to stress the fully historical and discursive difrronce befweenthem. I would not like my notion of negotiation to be confusedwith some slmdicalist sense of reformism because that is not thepolitical level that is being explored here. By negotiation Iattempt to daw attention to the structure of iteration whichiforms political movements that attemPt to articulateantagonistic and oppositional elements without the redemptiverationality of sublation or tra.scendence.8The temporality of negotiation or translation, as I havesketched it, has wvo main advantages. First, it acknowledges thehistoricai connectedess between the subject and object of cri-tique so that there can be no simplistic, essentialist oppositionbetween ideological mi.scognition and revolutionary truth. Theprogressive reading is crucially determined by the adversarial oragonistic situation itself; it is effective because it uses the sub-versive, messy mask of camouflage and does not come like apure avenging angel speaking the truth of a radical historicityand pure oppositionality. If one is aware of this heterogeneousemergence (not origin) of radical critique, then - and this is mysecond point - the firnction of theory within the political pro-cess becomes double-edged. It makes us aware that our politicalreferents and priorities - the people, the community, classsnuggle, anti-racism, gender difference, the assertion of an arti-imperialist, black or third perspective - are not there in someprimordial, naturalistic sense. Nor do they reflect a uaitary orhomogeneous political object. They make sense as they come tobe consucted in the discourses of feminism or Marxism or theThid Cinema or whatever, whose objects of priority - class orsexuality or 'the new ethnicity' - are always in historical adphilosophical tension, or cross-reference with other obiectives.

lndeed, the whole history of socialist throught which seeks to'make it new and better' seems to be a different process of

TH COMM ITM ENT TO TH EORYarticulating priorities whose political objects ca be recalcitrant*d corrt ictory. Within contemporary Marxism, for example'witness the continual tension between the English, humanist'labourist faction and the 'theoreticist', structuralist' new lefttendencies. Within feminism, there is again a marked differenceof emphasis beNveen the psychoanalytic/semiotic tradition andthe Marxist articulation of gender and class through a theory ofcultural and ideological interpellation' I have presented these-differences in broad brush-snokes, often using the language ofpolemic, to suggest that each position is always a process ofiranslation and transference of meaning' Each objective is con-structed on the tace of that perspective that it puts under eras-

make the question of commitment complex ard difficult' arerooted in the process of trarslation and displacement in whichthe object of politics is inscribed. The effect is not stasis oI asapping of the will. It is, on the contrary, the spur of the negoti-ation o? socialist democratic politics and policies which demandthat questions of organization are theorized and socialist theoryis ,organized becqus there is no given community or body of the peoplewhose inherent, rodical historicity mits the right signs'This emphasis on the representation of the political' o1 theconstruction of di.scourse, is the radical contribution of the

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40 THE LocATroN oF cuLruREargument against political separarism of any colour, and cutsthrough the mora-lism that usually accompanies such claims.There is literaJly, and figuratively, no space for the unitary ororganic political objective whjch would offend against rhe senseof a socialist community of interest and articulation.In Britain, in the 1980s, no political struggle was fought morepowerfully, and sustained more poignantly, on the values andtraditions of a socialist community than the miners' strike of198+-5. The battalions of monetarist 6.gures and forecasts onthe profrtability of the pits were starkly ranged against the mostillustrious stadards of the British labour movement, the mostcohesive cultural communities of the working class. The choicewas clearly between the davrniag world of the new Thatcheritecity gent arrd a long history of the working man, or so it seemedto the traditional left and the new right. In these class rerms themiaing women involved in the srrike were applauded for theheroic supporting role they played, for thei endua.ce and ini-tiative. But the revolutionary impulse, it seemed, belongedsecurely to the working-class male. Then, to commemorate thefist anniversary of the strike, Beatrix Campbell, in the Guardion,interviewed a group of women who had been involved in thestike. It was clear that their experience of the historical struggle,their understanding of the historic choice to be made, r ,'as sta.rt-lingly different and more complex. Thei restimonies would notbe contained simply or singly within the prioriries of the politicsof class or the histories of industrial struggle. Many of the'women began to question their roles within the family andthe community - the two central institutions which articulatedthe meanings and mores of the trodition of the labouring classesaround which ideological battle was enjoined. Some challengedthe symbols and authorities of the culture they fought to defend.Others disrupted the homes they had struggled to sustain. Formost of them there \Mas no return, no going back to the 'goodold days'. It would be simplistic ro suggest either that this

TH E COMMITMENT TO THEORYconsiderable social change was a spin-off from the class struggleor that it was a repudiation of the politics of class from asocialist-feminist perspective. There is no simple political orsocial truth to be learned, for there is no unitary representationof a political agency, no frxed hierarchy of political values andeffects.

My illustration attemPts to display the importance of thehybrid moment of political change. Here the transformationalvalue of change lies in the rearticulation, or trarslation, of elem-ents that are neither the One (ulitary working class) nor the Other (thepolitics of gender) but something else besida, which contests theterms arrd territories of both. There is a negotiation beftveengender and class, where each formation encounters the dis-placed, differentiated boundaries ofits group representation andenunciative sites in which the limits and limitations of socialpo\ /er are encountered in an agonistic relation. When it issuggested that the British Labour Party should seek to producea socialist alliance among progressive forces that are widelydispersed and distributed across a mnge of class, culture andoccupational forces - without a unifying sense of the class foritself - the kind of hybridity that I have attempted to identify isbeing acknowledged as a historical necessity. We need a little lesspietistic articulation of political principle (around class ardnation); a little more of the principle of political neotiotion.This seems to be the theoretical issue at the heart of StuatHall's arguments for the construction of a courter-hegemonicpower bloc through which a socialist party might construct itsmajority, its constituency; and the Labour Party might(in)conceivably improve its image. The unemployed, semi-skilled and unskilled, part-time workers, male and female, theow paid, black people, underclasses: these signs of the fragmen-tation of class and cultural consensus rePresent both the histor-icaJ. experience of contemporary social divisions, and a structtueof heterogeneity upon which to construct a theoretical and

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42 rHE LocArloN oF cuLTUREpolitical alternative. For Hall,.the imperative is to construct anew social boc of different constituencies, t}rough the produc-rion of a form of symbolic identifrcation that would result in acollective will. The Labour Party, with its desire to reinstate itsnaditionalist image - white, male, working class, trade urrionbased - is not hegemonic enough, HalI writes. He is right; whatremains unanswered is whether the rationalism and intentional-ity that propel the collective will are compatible with the lan-guage of symbolic image and fragmentary identification thatrepresents, for HaII and for'hegemony'/'counter-hegemony',the fi-rndamental political issue. Can there ever be hegemonyenough, except in the sense that a no-thjrds majority will electus a socialist government?It is by interyenir.g i Hall's argument that the necessities ofnegotiation are revealed. The interest of Hall's position lies in hisacknowledgement, remarkable for the British left, that, thoughinfluential, 'material interests on their own have no necessaryclass belongingness.'t This has rwo signifrcant effects. It enablesHalI to see the agents of political change as discontinuous, div-ided subjects caught in conflicting iaterests and identities.Equally, at the historical level of a Thatcherite population, heasserts that divisive rather than solidary forms of identificationare the rule, resulting in uldecidabilities and aporia of politica-ljudgement. What does a working woman put first? Which of heridentities is the one that determines her political choices? TheLns\ers to such questions are defined, according to HalI, in theideological defnition of materialist interests; a process of sym-bolic identification achieved through a political technology ofirnaging that hegemonically produces a social bloc of the rightor e left. Not only is the social bloc heterogeneous, but, as I seeit, the work of hegemony is itself the process of iteration anddifferentiation. It depends on the production of alternative oraatagonistic images that are always produced side by side and incompetition with each other. It is this side-by-side natue, this

TH E COMMITMENT TO THEORYpartial presence, or meton)nny of antagonism, and its effectivesignifrcations, that give meaning (quite literally) to a politics ofstruggle cs the struggle of identificqtioni and the war of positions. It istherefore problematic to think of it as sublated ilto an image ofthe collective will.Hegemony requires iteration and alterity to be effective, to beproductive of politicized populations : the (non-homogeneous)symbolic-social bloc needs to represent itself in a solidary col-lective will - a modern image of the future - if those popula-tions are to produce a progressive government. Both may benecessary but they do not easily follow from each other, for ineach case the mode of representation ald its temporality aredifferent. The conribution of negotiation is to display the 'in-between' of this crucial arguient; it is not self-contradictory butsignifrcant performs, in the process of its discussion, the prob-lems of judgement and identiflcation that inform the politicalspace of its enunciation.

For the moment, the act of negotiation will only be inter-rogatory. Can such split subjects and differentiated socialmovements, which display ambivalent ard divided forms ofidentification, be represented in a collective will that distirct-ively echoes Gramsci's enlightenment inheritance and itsrationalism?to How does the language of the will accoElodatethe vicissitudes of its representation, its construction through asymbolic majority where the have-nots identify themselves fromthe position of the haves? How do we construct a politics basedon such a displacement of affect or strategic elaboration(Foucault), where political positioning is ambivalentlygroulded in an acting-out of political fantasies that requirerepeated passages across the differential bouldaries between onesymbolic bloc ond an other, and the positions available to each? Ifsuch is the case, then how do we fix the counter-image of social-ist hegemony to refl.ect the divided will, the fragmented popula-tion? If the policy of hegemony is, quite literally, ursignifiable


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44 rHE LocArroN oF cuLruREwithout the metonymic representation of its agonistic andambi.valent structure of articulation, then how does the collect-ive will stabilize and unify its address as an agency of rEraentction,as representative of a people? How do we avoid the mixing oroverlap of images, the split screen, the failure.to synchronizesound and image? Perhaps we need to change the ocular lan-guage of the image in order to talk of the social and politicalidentifrcations or representations of a people. It is worth notingthat Laclau and Mouffe have turned to the lan-guage of textualityand discourse, to diffronce and enunciative modalities, in attempt-ing to understand the structure of hegemony.ttPaul Gilroy alsorefers to Bakhtin's theory of narrative when he describes theperformance of black expressive cultures as an attempt to trans-form the relationship between performer ald crowd 'in diologicrituals so that spectators acquire the active role of participants incollective processes which are sometimes cathartic and whichmay symbolize or even create a community' (my emphasis).'2Such negotiations between politics and theory make it impos-sible to think of the place of the theoretical as a metanarrativeclaiming a more total form of generality' Nor is it possible toclaim a certain familiar epistemological distance between thetime ad ploce of the intellectual and the activitist, as Fanon sug-gests when he observes that 'while politicians situate their actionin actual present-day events, men of culture take their stand inthe field of history. t It is precisely that popular binarismbetween theory and politics, whose foundational basis is a viewof knowledge as totalizing generality and everyday life as experi-ence, subjectivity or false consciousness, that I have tried toerase. It is a distinction that even Sartre subscribes to when hedescribes the committed intellectual as the theoretician of prac-tical knov/ledge whose defrning criterion is rationality andwhose first project is to combat the irrationality of ideology.taFrom the perspective of negotiation and translation, contro Fanonand Sartre, there can be no final discursive closure of theory. It

TH E COMMITMENT TO THEORYdoes not foreclose on the political, even though battles forpower-knowledge may be won or lost to great effect' The corol-iary is that there is no first or 6.nal act of revolutionary social (orsocialist) transformation.I hope it is clear that this erasure of the traditional boundarybeween theory/politics, and my resistance to the en-closure ofthe theoretical, whether j.t is read negativ as elitism or posi-tively as radical supra-rationaiity, do not turn on the good or badfaith of the activist agent or the intellectual agent Pr0y0coteur. I amprimarily concerne with the conceptual structuring of theterms - the theoretical/the political - that inform a range ofdebates arourd the place ad time of the committed irtellectual'I have therefore argued for a certain relation to knowledgewhich I think is crucial in srructuring our sense of what the objectof theory may be in the act of determining our specifrc politicalobjectiva.

llwhat is at stake il the naming of critical theory as 'western'? Itis, obviously, a designation of institutional po\Mer and ideo-logical Eurocentricity. Critical theory often engages with textswi-thin the familiar aditions and conditions of colonial anthro-potogy either to universalize their mealing within its own cul-i rl academic discourse, or to sharpen its internal critiqueof the Western logocentric sign, the idealist subject, or jndeedthe illusions and delusions of civil society' This is a familiarmanoeuwe of theoretical knowledge, where, having opened upthe chasm of cultural difference, a mediator or metaphor ofotherness must be fould to contain the effects of difference' Inord.er to be institutiona\ effective as a discipline, the know-ledge of cultural difference must be made to foreclose on theOtrer; difference and otherness thus become the fantasy of acertain cultura-I space or, indeed, the certainty of a form of

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46 THE LocATroN oF cuLTUREtheorerica-l knowledge that deconstructs the epistemological'edge' of the West.More significantly, the site of cultural difference can becomethe mere phantom of a dire disciplinary struggle in which it hasno space or po\Mer. Montesquieu's Turkish Despot, Barthes'sJapaa, Kristeva's China, Derrida's Nambikwara Indians, Lyo-tad's Cashiahua pagans are part of this strategy of containmentwhere the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of differ-ence, never the active agent of articulation. The Other is cited,quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shotstrategy of a serial enlightenment. Narrative and the cultural polit-ics of difference become the closed circle of interpretation. TheOther loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its historicdesire, to establish its own institutional and oppositional dis-course. However impeccably the content of an 'other' culturemay be knorn, however anti-ethlocentrically it is represented,it is its locqtion as the closure of grand theories, the demand that,in analytic terms, it be always the good object of knowledge, thedocile body of djfference, that reproduces a relation of domin-ation and is the most serious indictment of the institutionalpowers of critical theory.There is, however, a distinction to be made between the insti-tutional history of critical theory and its conceptual potential forchange and irrnovation. Althusser's critique of the temporalstucture of the Hegelian-Marxist expressive totality, despite itsfr-rnctionalist limitations, opens up the possibilities of thinlingthe relations of production in a time of differential histories.Laca's location of the signifier of desire, on the cusp of lan-guage and the law, allows the elaboration of a form of socialrepresentation that is alive to the ambiva-lent structure of subject-ivity and sociality. Foucault's archaeology of the emergence ofmodern, Western man as a problem of finitude, inextricablefrom its afterblrth, its Other, enables the linear, progressivistclaims of the social sciences - the major imperializing discourses

TH E COM M ITM ENT TO TH EORY- to be confronted by their own historicist limitations. Thesearguments and modes of aaalysis can be dismissed as internalsquabbles aound Hegelian causality, psychic representation orsociological theory. Alternatively, they can be subjected to atranslation, a tralsformation of value as part of the questioningof the project of modernity in the great, revolutionary traditionof C. L. R. James - contr Trotsky or Fanon, contrc phenomenologyand existentialist psychoanalysis. In 1952, it was Falon whosuggested that an oppositional, differential reading of Lacar'sOther might be more relevant for the colonial condition than theMarxisant reading of the master-slave dialectic.It may be possible to produce such a trarrslation or tralsform-ation if we ulderstand te tension within critical theorybetween its institutional containment and its revisionary force'The continual reference to the horizon of other cultures which Ihave mentioned earlier is ambivalent. It is a site of citation, but itis also a sign that such critical theory cannot forever sustain itsposition in the academy as the adversarial cutting edge ofWestern idealism. What is required is to demonstrate anotherterritory of translation, another testimony of analytical argu-ment, a different engagement in the politics of and around cul-tural domination. What this other site for theory might be wiIIbecome clearer if we frrst see that many poststructuralist ideasare themselves opposed to Enlightenment humarism and aes-thetics. They constitute no less than a deconstruction of themoment of the modern, its legal values, its literary tastes, itsphilosophical and political categorical imperatives. Secondly,and more importantly, w'e must rehistoricize the moment of 'theemergence of the sign', or 'the question of the subiect', or the'discursive construction of social reality' to quote a few populartopics of contemporary theory. This can only happen if werelocate the referential and institutional demands of such theor-etical work in the freld of cultural difference - not culturol diversity.Such a reorientation may be found in the historical texts of the

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48 THE LocATroN oF cuLTUREcolonial moment in the late .eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies. For at the same time as the question of cultural differ-ence emerged in the colonial text, discourses of civility weredefining the doubling moment of the emergence of Westernmodernity. Thus the political and theoretical genealogy of mod-ernity lies not only in the origins of the ideo of civility, but in thishistory of the colonial moment. It is to be found in the resistanceof the colonized populations to the Word of God arrd Man -Christianity and the English language. The trasmutations andtranslations of indigenous traditions i their opposition to colo-nial authority demonstrate how the desire of the signifrer, theindetermiacy of intertextuality, can be deeply engaged in thepostcolonial struggle against dominaLt relations of power arrdknowledge. In the following words of the missionary mastelwehear, quite distinctly, the oppositional voices of a culture ofresistace; but we also hear the uncertain ard threatening pro-cess of cu-ltual transformation. I quote from A. Duffs influentialIndia cnd Indio Missions (1839):

Come to some doctrine which you believe to be peculiar toRevelation; tell the people that they must be regenerated orborn again, else they can never 'see Cod'. Before you are aware,they may go away saying, 'Oh, there is nothing new or strangehere; our own Shastras tell us the same thing; we know andbelieve that we must be born again; it is our fate to be so.' Butwhat do they understand by the expressionl lt is that they are tobe born again and again, in some other form, agreeably to theirown system of transmigration or reiterated births. To avoid theappearance ofcountenancing so absurd and pernicious a doc-trine, you vary your language, and tell them that there must bea second birth - that they must be, twice-born. Now it sohappens that this, and all similar phraseology, is preoccupied.The sons of a Brahman have to undergo various purificatoryand initiatory ceremonial rites, before they attain to full

Brahmanhood. The last of these is the investiture with the sac-red thread; which is followed by the communication of theGayatri, or most sacred verse in the Vedas. This ceremonialconstitutes, 'religiously and metaphorically, their second birth';henceforward their distinctive and peculiar appellation is thatof the twice-born, or regenerated men. Hence it is your improvedlanguage might only convey the impression that all must becomeperfect Brahmans, ere they can 'see Cod'.'5 (My emphasis)

The groulds of evangelical certitude are opposed not by thesimple assertion of an altagonistic cultural tradition. The processof traslation is the openiag up of another contentious politicaland cultural site at the heart of colonial representation. Here theword of divine authority is deeply fl.awed by the assertion ofthe indigenous sign, ard in the very practice of domination theIanguage of the master becomes hybrid - neither the one thingnor the other. The incalculable colonized subject - half acqui-escent, half oppositional, always untrustworthy - produces anunresolvable problem of cultural difference for the very addressof colonial cultural authority. The'subtile system of Hinduism',as the missionaries in the early nineteenth century called it,generated tremendous policy implications for the institutions ofChistian conversion. The written authority of the Bible waschallenged and together with it a postenlightenment notion ofthe 'evidence of Christianity' and its historica-l priority, whichwas central to evangelical colonialism. The Word could nolonger be trusted to carry the truth when written or spoken inthe colonial world by the European missionary. Native catechiststherefore had to be for:nd, who brought with them their owncultural and political ambivalences ard contradictions, oftenunder great pressure from their families and communities.This revision of the history of critical theory rests, I have said,on the notion of cultural difference, not cu-ltural diversity. Cul-tural diversity is arr epistemological object - culture as an object

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50 TH E LocATroN oF cu LTU REof empirical knowledge - whereas cultural difference is the pro-cess of the snunciotion of culture as 'knowledgeable', authoritative,adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identifica-tion. If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics,aesthetics or ethnology, cultural diffeence.is a process of signifi-cation thJough which statements of culture or on culture differen-tiate, discriminate and authorize the production of frelds offorce, reference, applicability and capacity. Cultural diversity isthe recognition of pre-given cultural contents and customs; heldin a time-frame of relativism it gives rise to liberal notions ofmulticulturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of humanity.Cultural diversity is also the representation of a radical rhetoricof the separation of totalized cuhures that live unsullied by theintertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopial-ism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity. Culturaldiversity may even emerge as a system of the articulation adexchange of cultural signs in certain early structuralist accountsof anthropology.Through the concept of cultural diffeence I wanr to dawattention to the common ground and lost territory of con-temporay critical debates. For they all recognize that the prob-lem of cultural interaction emerges only at the significatoryboundaies of cultures, where meanings and values are (mis)-read or signs are misappropriated. Culture only emerges as aproblem, or a problematic, ar the point at which there is a loss ofmeaaing in the contestation and articulation of everyday life,between classes, genders, races, nations. Yet the reality of thelimit or limit-text of culture is rarely theorized outside of well-intentioned moralist polemics against prejudice ald stereotype,or the blan-ket assetion of individual or institutional racism -that describe the effect rather than rhe stucrure of the problem.The need to think the limit of culture as a problem of theenunciation of cultural difference is disavowed.The concept of cultural difference focuses on rhe problem of

the ambivalence of cultural authority: the attempt to dominatei the name of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced onlyin the moment of differentiation. And it is the very authority ofculture as a knowledge of referential truth which is at issue inthe concept ard moment of enunciation. The enunciative Processintroduces a split in the performative present of cultural identifl-cation; a split between the traditional culturalist demand for amodel, a tradition, a commuity, a stable system of reference,and the necessary negation of the certitude in the articulation ofnew cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the political pres-ent, as a practice of domination, or resistance. The struggle isoften between the historicist teleological or mythical time andnarrative of traditionalism - of the right or the left - and theshifting, strategically displaced time of the articulation of a his-tori.cal politics of negotiation which I suggested above. Thetime of liberation is, as Fanon powerfully evokes, a time ofcultural uncertainty, and, most crucially, of signiflcatory orrepresentational uldecidability :

But [native intellectuals] forget that the forms of thought andwhat [they] feed . . . on, together with modern techniques ofinformation, language and dress, have dialectically reorganizedthe people's intelligences and the constont principles (of nationalart) which acted as safeguards during the colonial period arenow undergoing extremely radical changes. . . . lWe] must jointhe people in that fluctuating movement which they are justgiving a shape to . . . which will be the signal for evefihing tobe called into question . . . it is to the zone of occult instabilitywhere the people dwell that we must come.'6 (My emphases)

The enunciation of culturaL difference problemazes the binarydivision of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the levelof cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is theproblem of hou in signifying the present, something comes to

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52 THE LocATroN oF cuLTUREbe repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradjtion, irthe guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign ofhistorica-l memory but a strategy of representing aurhority interms of the artifice of the archaic. That iteration negates oursense of the origins of the struggle. It undermines ou sense ofthe homogenizing effects of cultural symbols and icons, byquestioning our sense of the authority of cultural synthesis ingeneral.This demands that we rethink our perspective on the identityof culture. Here Fanon's passage - somewhat reinterpreted -may be helpful. Whar is implied by his jr:xtaposition of theconstant national principles with his view of culture-as-political-struggle, which he so enigmarically and beautifully describes as'the zone of occult instability where the people dwell'? Theseideas not only help to explain the nature of colonial struggle;they also suggest a possible critique of the positive aesthetic andpolitical values we ascribe to the ulity or totality of cultures,especially those that have knovm long and tyrannical histories ofdomination and misrecognition. Cultures are never unitary inthemselves, nor simply dualistic in the relation of Self to Other.This is not because of some humanistic nostrum that beyondindividual cultures we all belong to the human culture of man-kind; nor is it because of an ethical elativism which suggeststhat in our cultural capacity to speak of and judge others wenecessarily 'place ourselves in their position', in a kind of relativ-ism of distalce of which Bernard Williams has written atlength.tTThe eason a cultural text or system of meaning cannot besufficient unto itself is that the act of cultural enunciation - theploce ol utterdc - is crossed by the difrronce of writing. This has lessto do with whar atthopologists might describe as varying atti-tudes to symbolic systems within different cultures than withthe structure of symbolic representation itself - not the contentof the symbol or its social fi:ction, but the structure of symbol-

ization. It is this difference in the process of language that iscrucial to the production of meaning and ensures, at the sametime, that meaning is never simply mimetic and transparent.The linguistic difference that informs arry cultural perform-ance is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the dis-juncture betr,veen the subject of a proposition (nonc) and thesubject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statementbut which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embedded-ness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a pres-ent time and a specific space. The pact of interpretation is neversimply an act of communication between the I and the Youdesignated in the statement. The production of meaningrequires that these two placed be mobilized in the passagethrough a Third Space, which represents both the general condi-tions of language and the speci6.c implication of the utterance ina performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'initself be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces isan ambivalence in the act of interpretation. The pronominal I ofthe proposition cannot be made to address - in its own words -the subject of enunciation, for this is not personable, but remainsa spatial relation within the schemata and strategies of discourse.The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the onenor the other. This ambivalence is emphasized when we realizethat there is no way that the content of the proposition willreveal the structure of its positionality; no way that context canbe mimetically read off from the content.The implication of this enunciative split for cultural aaalysisthat I especially want to emphasize is its temporal dimension.The splitting of the subject of enunciation destroys the logics ofsynchronicity and evolution which traditionally authorize thesubject of cultural knowledge. It is often taken for granted inmaterialist and idealist problematics that the value of cultureas an object of study, and the value of any analytic activity thatis considered cultural, lie in a capacity to produce a

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54 THE LocATroN oF cuLTUREcross-referential, generalizable unity that signifies a progressionor evolution of ideas-in-time, as well as a critical self-reflectionon their premisses or determinants. It would not be releval.t topursue the detail of this argument'here except to demonstrate -via Marshall Sahlins's Culture ond Practicol Reoson - the validity of mygeneral characterization of the Western expectation of culture asa disciplinary practice of \ rriting. I quote Sah-lins at the point atwhich he attempts to define the difference of Western bourgeoisculture:

We have to do not so much with functional dominance as withstructural - with different structures of symbolic integration.And to this gross difference in design correspond differences insymbolic perFormance: between an open, expanding code,responsive by continuous permutation to events it has itselfstaged, and an apparently static one that seems to know notevents, but only its own preconceptions. The gross distinctionbetween 'hot' societies and 'cold', development and under-development, societies with and without history - and sobetween large societies and small, expanding and self-contained, colonizing and colonized.'t (My emphases)

The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, whichmakes the structure of meaning and reference ar ambivalentprocess, destroys this mirror of representation in which culturalknowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open,expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challengesour sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing,unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive inthe national tradition of the People. In other words, the disrup-tive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of theWestern nation which Benedict Anderson so perceptivelydescribes as being written in homogeneous, seria-l time.reit is only when we understand that all cultural statements and

TH E COMMITMENT TO THEORYsystems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalentspace of enunciation, that we begia to understand why hier-archical claims to the inherent originality or 'purity' of culturesare untenable, even before we resort to empirical historicalinstances that demonsate their hybridity. Faron's vision ofrevolutionary cultural and political change as a 'fluctuatingmovemnt' of occult instability could not be articulated as cul-tural practice without an acknowledgement of this indeterminatespace of the subject(s) of enunciation. It is that ThirdSpace, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes thediscursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the mean-ing and symbols of culture have no primordial unity orfixity; that even the same signs car be appropriated, trarslated,rehistoricized and read anew.Faron's moving metaphor - when reinterpreted for a theoryof cultural signifrcation - enables us to see not only the necessityof theory, but also the restrictive notions of cultural identitywith which we burden our visions of political change. ForFanon, the liberatory people who initiate the productive instabil-ity of revolutionary cultural change are themselves the bearers ofa hybrid identity. They are caught in the discontinuous time oftrarslation and negotiation, in the sense in which I have beenattempting to recast these words. in the moment of liberatorystruggle, the Algerian people destroy the continuities and con-stancies of the nationalist tradition which provided a safeguardagainst colonial cultural imposition. They are now free to nego-tiate and translate their cultural identities in a discontinuousintertextual temporality of cultural. difference. The native intel-Iectual who identifies the People with the true national culturewill be disappoiated. The people are now the very principle of'dialectical reorganization' and they construct their culture fromthe national text trarslated into modern Western forms ofinformation technology, language, dess. The changed politicaland historical site of enuciation transforms the meanings of the

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56 THE LocATroN oF cuLTUREcolonial ireritance into the liberatory signs of a free people ofthe future.

I have been stressing a certain void or misgiving attendingevery assimilation of contraries - I have been stressing this inorder to expose what seems to me a fantastic mythologicalcongruence of elements. . . . And if indeed therefore any realsense is to be made of material change it can only occur withan acceptance of a concurrent void and with a willingness todescend into that void wherein, as it were, one may begin tocome into confrontation with a spectre of invocation whosefreedom to participate in an alien territory and wilderness hasbecome a necessity for one's reason or salvation.'oThis meditation by the great Guyanese writer Wilson Harris onthe void of misgiving in the textuality of colonial history revealsthe cultura-l and historical dimension of that Third Space ofenunciations which I have made the precondition for the aticu-lation of cultura-l difference. He sees it as accompanying the'assinilation of contraries' and creating that occult instabiitywhich presages powerful cultural chalges. It is significart thatthe productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial orpostcolonial provenance. For a wi-llingness to descend ito thatalien territory - where I have led you - may reveal that thetheoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation mayopen the \May to concepnralizing an intemational cultue, basednot on the exoticism of multicultura-lism or the diversity of cul-tures, but on the inscription ad articulation of cultue's hybridiry.To that end we should remember that it is the 'inter' - thecutting edge of translation and negotiacion, the inbetwen space -that carries the burden of the mealing of culture. It makes itpossible to begin envisaging national, ati-nationalist historiesof the 'people'. And by exploriag this Third Space, we may eludethe politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.

I NTERROGAT NG I DENTITYFrantz Fanon and thepostcolon ial prerogatve

I

To read Fanon is to experience the sense of division that pre-figures - and fissures - the emergence of a truly radical thoughtthat never dawns without casting an uncertain d tk. B-gnjltspeaks most effectively from the uncertain interstices of histor-

subverffi turn-of a familiar term, in the silence of suddenrupture: 'The Negro is not. r\ny more thon the white man. The awkwarddivision tht ksffisfne fthousht keeps alrvTTE

bhabha commitment to theory

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